The third installment of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s solo jazz project is a powerfully resonant and spiritual record, a call-and-response between herself and a history of Black music.

Mama, You Can Bet!

During a radio interview in 1961, James Baldwin famously said that to be Black living in America, “and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” Nearly six decades later, that “rage” has yet to be quelled, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter. From Birmingham to Minneapolis to Kenosha. From Emmett Till to George Floyd to Breonna Taylor, and a countless list of black and brown names, eulogized and immortalized only by the senseless violence waged against them, not by the promise of their lives fulfilled. Thankfully, the ineradicable ache of Odetta and Nina Simone’s powerful and resonant calls has given rise to a newer generation of artists like Georgia Anne Muldrow, whose ever-expanding canvas of soul and jazz continues to reimagine, and even reproach the many winding bends of Black life.
With Mama, You Can Bet!, the West Coast-based singer-producer-multi-instrumentalist navigates these unprecedented times, utilizing a keen yet multidirectional lens. The third “Jyoti” installment of her solo jazz series draws from several different sources for inspiration, including the late Alice Coltrane, who gave Muldrow her chosen name, Jyoti, employed as a pseudonym for the series. Set against the backdrop of rampant vilifying and killings of unarmed Black people, her latest album plays as an impassioned, welcoming love letter to the countless musical forebears who crossed her path in her artistic development. As she now summons these predecessors for guidance, Muldrow renders a cosmic hybrid of soul, hip-hop, and call-and-response between herself and her jazz lineage, finding solace, beauty, and deliverance from utter confusion and turmoil.
On the title track, Muldrow sets a sanguine tone for the album’s opening. Layered with looping West African drums, double bass, and choral backing vocals—all courtesy of Muldrow—the arrangement evokes a live hush harbor meeting, where enslaved Blacks once gathered in secret to vent and worship. While this is largely a joyful tribute to her mother, spiritual and jazz singer-songwriter Rickie Byars, who often contributed lead vocals to Pharoah Sanders and the late pianist Roland Hanna, a few sparse, dissonant chord strikes on the piano denotes Muldrow acknowledging the many sacrifices Byars likely had to endure in her lifetime. As praise shouts of “Hey, Mama” reverberate, it soon transitions from personal homage to a declarative mantra, imploring all women to still “believe” that requited love is possible: “Mama, you can bet, there’s many a man, who’d love your hand.”.
Countervailing the title track, as the album’s focus shifts more inward, the mood becomes stark and deeply personal. On the pulsating “This Walk,” Muldrow offers a harrowing glimpse of how violence can both “ignite and snuff out” one’s voice. She does the same on the foreboding “Orgone,” which opens with a few ominous chords that soon are repeated in tandem with a refrain of displacement: “Maladjusted in this land/The powers just can’t end the plan.” Though the most stripped-down of all the tracks, the heft of “Orgone” grows searing and resonant with every listen. Evocative of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s “River of My Fathers,” with just a few simple words and scant piano accompaniment, Muldrow elicits vulnerability and introspection, and in turn finds commonality in her own abandonment, a flagrant exclusion from her country’s promise and potential. Much like earlier releases, notably 2019’s Black Love & War, she outstretches both arms, crying out for refuge from an “Africa” that appears within reach. The silence is deafening.
Muldrow also explores the planetary realms of Sun Ra and Charles Mingus, reinterpreting their works in a modern-day context. On “Bemoanable Lady Geemix” and “Fabus Foo Geemix”—remixes of Mingus’ “Bemoanable Lady” and “Fables of Faubus” respectively—Muldrow places greater emphasis on the melodic lines. Serving mainly as interludes for the album’s socially-charged throughline, the addition of these two tracks not only demonstrates the deep roots of racism but also acknowledges how jazz artists led the charge in addressing it—whether they wanted to or not. “Ra’s Noise (Thukumbado)” invites the only other guest musician on the entire album, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, Muldrow’s longtime friend and collaborator. Together, they envision a genderless and raceless dominion, one that is perhaps only reachable among Sun Ra’s many orbits, just not here on Earth.
“If you believe the ‘Negro’ has a soul,” as borrowed from Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” speech, then why are we continuously refused the rights we have earned, fought for, even bled for. Why burden us with insurmountable odds and disproportionate circumstances, a gross disparity made only more apparent by the ravages of a global pandemic, widespread poverty, and an unending open season on Black people. Mama, You Can Bet! is a splendidly audacious attempt at not only elucidating these societal ills, but also finding resolve in assuming a Pan-Africanist identity, firmly grounded in jazz and spirituality. From the driving blues line in “The Cowrie Waltz,” the lush soundscapes heard on “Ancestral Duckets” and “Bop for Aneho,” and the celestial soul claps that emanate from “Zane, The Scribe,” Georgia Anne Muldrow, once again, engenders her own Afrofuturistic realm, one that is heard, seen, and felt in the here and now.

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Backed by a 23-person guest list that includes Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, Pavement's Spiral Stairs, and countless members of Broken Social Scene, the debut solo album from BSS leader/co-founder Kevin Drew could pass for a low-key follow-up to his band's 2005 self-titled record.

Broken Social Scene / Kevin Drew: Spirit If...

Spirit If...

"Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew". The phrasing is clunky and opportunistic, with BSS co-founder and leader Drew cashing in on a beloved brand while also putting his name on the album cover in big letters. But, as exhaustive as it may seem, it's accurate. With its shaggy grace, love-is-life proclamations, and lengthy guest list (23 people, mostly BSS regulars, play or sing on the record), Spirit If… could pass for a relatively low-key follow-up to 2005's blown-out Broken Social Scene. But with Drew taking sole songwriting credit for half of the album's toned-down tracks and covering lead vocal duties on nearly every song, there's also a strong solo vibe. So, in essence, we get Kevin Drew's break-up record, as played by Broken Social Scene; it's a savvy compromise only a collective as familial as BSS could pull off.
While the popularity of Broken Social Scene skyrocketed over the past four years, Drew remained something of an unknown thanks to the group's all-for-one nature and its more magazine-friendly female talents, Leslie Feist and Metric's Emily Haines. But to know Spirit If… is to know Kevin Drew: One-time teenage burn-out, current 31-year-old master of scruff, and lifelong romantic. He hugs audience members during shows, and once described his band's objective to the New York Times Magazine with all the quixotic wonder of a wide-eyed Bono: "We want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty." He's not afraid to include "the kiss in Winnipeg" and "the man who taught me love is free" in his album's laundry list of thank you's. He's a modern hippie, though instead of growing up listening to the Grateful Dead and the Doors, Drew worshiped idols that fall squarely within the classic-rock-subverting indie canon: Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Dinosaur Jr. Consequently, Spirit If… offers jams that don't really jam, acoustic ballads about fights and lies, and lushly orchestrated songs that come together effortlessly while cracking up hopelessly.
Toying with the idea of stops and starts, the record begins with a send-off and ends with a beginning. Alarm-clock opener "Farewell to the Pressure Kids" is a red herring: At first, its blasting intro (stuffed with vibes, avalanche drum fills, stacked guitars, and unintelligible vocals), seems to pick up right where Broken Social Scene's epic closer "It's All Gonna Break" left off. But, after two minutes of organized chaos, the song-- a cryptic exorcism decrying those who "love to hate"-- settles into a homely, quiet groove more indicative of the record's unplugged ambiance. It's the sound of Drew deflating his own bombast in favor of a style that's more personal and direct.
The singer once said 2002's You Forgot It In People "was made with hope" while Broken Social Scene "was made with fear." Spirit If… was seemingly made with pained desperation. On the album, when Drew isn't pining over a "fucked up kid" amidst images of violence and death, he's confessing his sins while lamenting someone who's "too beautiful to fuck." His words can be frustratingly obtuse: "Cats and Christ put you in a tiny box that's filled with all victims," goes one especially head-scratching line. But Drew's random imagery is often translated through straightforward hooks that wisely cut through the dense murk. So while the enlightenment-themed stand-out "Bodhi Sappy Weekend" includes boggling lyrics like, "With our clothes on fire/ I guess we both can wait/ I built an ark for sure," the pleading refrain ("please don't scratch me out") is crushing in its bluntness as it ties the tune together.
The lucidity of Drew's musical influences also lend Spirit If… an understood universality (within indie rock circles, at least): Much of the album could double as an early 90s our-band-could-be-your-life cassette mix. But there's a key difference to, say, Spirit If...'s Dinosaur Jr. tribute "Backed Out on the…" compared to every other Dino-aping rip-off out there: Drew actually recruited J Mascis to spew scalding distortion all over the track. The same first-hand method is employed on the album's only other out-and-out rocker, "Lucky Ones", which boasts some twisting Spiral Stairs-style guitar work from (yep) Spiral Stairs. The indie-star guests are just another example of Drew making the anything-goes BSS collective philosophy work for him-- and a great way to beat name-that-influence critics at their own game.
"The whole idea of starting or finishing something is one of the scariest things in the world to me," Drew told Pitchfork in 2005. Recorded in a hotel room in Norway, the country-style ditty "When It Begins" is a fitting, clear-headed capper to the album that finds Drew facing his fears head-on. "It's gonna be really hard when we get to the end/ Well, you love the start but really it's just to begin," he sings, accompanied by a little strumming and just a few singing Scene-sters. The song's circlular logic is an apt summation of it all-- the album, relationships, bands, tours, etc.-- at once almost naively common and, within the context of the record, disarmingly personal. Then there's the tattooed-heart kicker: "But don't forget what you felt." Confounding yet emotionally bare, derivative yet singular, profane yet child-like, solo yet not so solo, Kevin Drew doesn't shy away from his contradictions on Spirit If…. He revels in them.


The first solo album from Will Butler, Arcade Fire member and younger brother of Win, Policy feels very much like an attempt to recapture some of the happy-accidental spontaneity that defined that band’s early years.

Policy

Though it can be hard recall amid the black tie arena shows, papier-mâché puppetry, and red carpet appearances that comprise their universe today, Arcade Fire were once a highly volatile, sometimes violent band. In their pre-Funeral genesis, the group projected a startling intensity that often left their hands bloodied and bodies bruised; those motorcycle helmets you see in old concert photos weren’t so much costume props as necessary protective gear for a band prone to using their own heads as auxiliary drum kits. And in the middle of the melee you’d often find Will Butler, younger brother of lead singer Win, bearing the mischievous grin of a corrupted choir boy. As a utility-player multi-instrumentalist, Will’s musical presence isn’t always easy to parse from Arcade Fire’s orchestro-rock onslaught. But onstage, he’s the physical embodiment of the band’s music—deceptively mild-mannered, yet capable of going off without warning. Not surprisingly, his debut solo album makes a virtue of that instability.
Given that Arcade Fire’s last album, 2013’s Reflektor, boasted a rollout strategy more carefully plotted than most military operations, Policy feels very much like an attempt to recapture some of the happy-accidental spontaneity that defined the band’s early years. Where most of Arcade Fire’s extracurricular pursuits—be it Richard Reed Parry’s Bell Orchestre, Sarah Neufeld’s releases on Constellation Records, or the Oscar-nominated score for Spike Jonze’s Her—have served as avant-garde antidotes to the band’s anthemic grandeur, Policy revels in the early rock'n'roll and punk influences that have become an increasingly obscured cornerstone of the band’s sound (think: "(Antichrist Television Blues)", "Month of May", or the sock-hop denouement of "Wake Up"). Recorded at New York’s hallowed Electric Lady Studios, this determinedly off-the-cuff album is nostalgic in sound, but endearingly off-kilter in spirit.
As a lead vocalist, Will sounds exactly as you would expect—i.e., like Win Butler’s wiseacre little brother—and though he’s recently shown an interest in current events, his lovelorn lyrical concerns here are several pounds less weighty than Arcade Fire’s conceptual statements about God and country. (When Jesus does enter the picture—via the folky, Westerbergian power-pop of "Son of God"—it’s merely to be gently blasphemed.) At its most inspired, Policy resembles a screwball musical adaptation of John Lennon’s lost weekend. Rave-ups like "Take My Side", "What I Want", and "Witness" tumble out with infectiously inebriated energy, their charging choruses teetering on the brink like runaway trains. The bacchanalia is compounded by sloppy piano stabs and knowingly cornball come-ons that would make Harry Nilsson flash a thumbs up while face down in puke. (To wit: "If you come and take my hand/ I will buy you a pony/ We can cook it for supper/ I know a great recipe for pony macaroni.")
As Butler recently explained to Pitchfork’s Evan Minsker, Policy is intended to reflect his omnivorous musical taste, but, as the album rolls on, the difference between cunning eclecticism and undercooked experimentalism grows stark. Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction: the dirgey boombox disco of "Something’s Coming" and the cheap-sunglasses new wave of "Anna" suggest an alternate universe where Arcade Fire couldn’t afford James Murphy’s producer fee, while "Sing to Me" and "Finish What I Started" are sullen piano ballads that Butler's restrained vocals can't invest with the necessary gravitas. "Someone please, finish what I started," he sings on the latter song, "I tried my best, but my best was half-hearted." It doubles as an uncomfortably on-the-nose diagnosis of the album itself.


The enigmatic singer-songwriter returns with a dark set of songs backed by spare instrumentation and crafts what might be his best LP yet.

WIT'S END

Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs named his fifth album WIT'S END, not WITS' END. The distinction is slight, but telling. Because "wits" usually refers to an overall sense of sanity while "wit" is more commonly associated with one's cleverness or humor. And this record does not mark the end of McCombs' good judgment. Quite the contrary. However, it is not funny or quick or especially nimble-minded. Over the course of his previous four albums, McCombs fashioned himself an enigmatic vagabond in the classic Dylan mold, yet it wasn't until 2009's Catacombs that his enigma started to feel more like a complement than a crutch. While he may have let his wit get the better of him before through knowingly obtuse lyrics and showy arrangements, WIT'S END fittingly leaves those days behind. This is a gorgeous album of despair, the most believable evidence yet that McCombs is living up to his own legend.
Catacombs had McCombs stripping away the instrumentation he had built up around his songs, ending with a bare naturalism that suited him well. And WIT'S END goes even further, its empty spaces and deliberate tempos matching the album's immense loneliness. To get an idea of how desolate, exactly, consider that opening track "County Line"-- an inching ballad about severe unrequited love with its own frighteningly real, syringe-filled junkie video-- is the jauntiest thing here. Catacombs highlight "You Saved My Life" saw McCombs voicing startling sincere and direct affection; if someone played it at a wedding, grandparents might not blink. The direness of WIT'S END suggests the California-born singer may need some more saving; if someone played these songs at a funeral, sons and daughters would bow their heads solemnly.
So yeah, this record is a downer. But there's rare beauty in such darkness, too-- just look at forebears like Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith, and Nick Drake. Or even Edgar Allan Poe. Because, along with its mopiness, WIT'S END is creepy as hell. Its gothic eeriness embodies not Poe's famous tales as much as his more ethereal and lovelorn poems. In the author's 1827 verse "Spirits of the Dead", he characterizes the titular ghosts as comforting-- "a mystery of mysteries!" And that same infatuation with wispy denouements is all over WIT'S END, but much like Poe's spirits, McCombs' songs bring life to their withering characters over and over again.
Take the seven-and-a-half-minute elegy "Memory's Stain", in which a shared thrift-store sweater leads to ruminations on the unwashable blots that reside in our subconscious only to pop up without warning. "Boozing is the highest aim when spittle won't get out Memory's stain," he sings, before a breathy bass clarinet takes over for the back half, its unique low tones planting many new memories of its own. And closer "A Knock Upon the Door" tells what could be a centuries-old tale of the tumultuous relationship between a minstrel and his creative muse. The song's repetitive verse-upon-verse structure stretches out to nearly ten minutes, but more oddball sounds-- the baroque, recorder-like chalumeau, a metallic dink in place of a snare drum, and the ominous door tap itself-- keep things intriguingly askew. "The Lonely Doll", meanwhile, holds its story of a drunken louse and weeping woman aloft over a pillow-y Hammond B3 and brushed drums, the woozy lilt a convincing callback to Leonard Cohen's 1967 debut LP.
In a handwritten note to Stereogum, McCombs recently wrote, "I know people get lonely because I do, so that's what I end up writing songs about, how you get lonely sometimes and come up with these big ideas that give you meaning for a second but then leave you like everything else leaves you." The statement is economical and accurate, if overly modest. Because while there are lots of musicians trading in loneliness out there, most of them often veer into a self-pity that can leave listeners even more far gone. But the intangibility of WIT'S END makes it a more realistic and reliable companion, its elusive secrets offering a queer comfort. At the start of his first album, A, Cass McCombs posed the question, "Is it dying that terrifies you, or just being dead?" On WIT'S END, he's come up with an answer; on "Buried Alive" he sings, "If I'm alive or dead I don't really care, as long as my Soul's intact." He's got soul to spare.


Drummer John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) taps Laurie Anderson, Yo La Tengo, and more for the group’s most accessible album yet—confounding melody and rhythm into something clear and grandiose.

Play What They Want

For all of ten seconds, Man Forever’s Play What They Want seems like it could be a nightmare. Led by drummer John Colpitts, the album’s first syncopated clonks briefly suggest an oncoming Santana-style superjam. But the panic subsides quickly with a rising drone, the arrival of an upright bass, and the familiar voices of Yo La Tengo in full dreamy splendor. Known as Kid Millions when he’s the propulsive force behind Brooklyn noise-rock heroes Oneida, Play What They Want is his richest and most accessible endeavor yet. Over just five songs, he works with percussion ensemble TIGUE and a full cast of avant-collaborators including Laurie Anderson to build vocal pieces that often land between dry DIY cool and the sung narratives of art music.
A frequent participant in the Boredoms’ multi-drummer extravaganzas, Colpitts’s earliest Man Forever incarnations explored Metal Machine Music-inspired overtones with four or more drummers on tuned kits. Another early voice-discovering iteration was an experiment in rigorous and monastic percussion drone—literally two drummers, one drum—as Colpitts and a partner faced off across a single snare. Since then, Colpitts has expanded the project’s vocabulary, including the simple-but-not-simple ensemble piece “Surface Patterns” and an album-length collaboration with So Percussion. But none approach the clarity and fullness of Play What They Want. While rhythm remains central, it’s rarely obvious that the music’s creator is mainly a drummer.
Sometimes recalling the more art-rock tendencies of Oneida’s earlier studio albums, the brightest and catchiest vocal moment of Play What You Want is positively Eno-esque. Written with Phil Manley of Trans Am, “Debt and Greed” pairs soaring multi-tracked vocals with Manley’s best Frippertronic guitar flourishes. The album-closing “Caternary Smile,” also made with Manley, is likewise a drummerly fantasia dotted with a few verses of proper song and—throughout the rest of the track—a drifting melody that seems to pull the drums along below it. Unlike Oneida, who thrive in a live setting, Play What They Want’s most thrilling moments are nearly pure studio creations.
Laurie Anderson, with whom Colpitts drums in the Symptoms, appears on the nearly ten-minute “Twin Torches.” Beginning with layers of celestial overdubbed vocals, the drums come crashing in, and it becomes the album’s only extended moment of Colpitts in his natural habitat, wailing and dancing behind a drum kit. As Anderson’s voice intones about the mysteries of “two handed stars,” the force at the center remains Colpitts, whose playing stays purposeful even when he’s drumming on the edge of tom-tom thunder.
”It’s more about melting into the whole and not ripping into solos,” Colpitts says in a 2012 instructional video for the Man Forever piece “Surface Patterns” designed for the pick-up crew of musicians accompanying him at various tour stops. Besides breaking down a heady piece of music, the video is also an evocation of a musical ideology of instrumental rigor informed by cosmic seriousness, music that might be meditative for musician and listener alike. Where that rigor has often been expressed in harsher and sometimes physically challenging forms (such as Oneida’s seven-hour sets), it is here accompanied more often by gentle vocals than cleansing blasts of guitar drone.
The album-opening “You Were Never Here” fades in on a bed of vocals from all three members of Yo La Tengo, sounding like a close neighbor to the far-out percussion spaces of the Hoboken band’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But just as quickly, the song exits through a side door. Colpitts’ steady beats remain the only constant in a picaresque sequence of free piano, wordless vocals, and Mary Lattimore’s concert harp flourishes. Seeming as if it could leap off into an album-length suite of its own, it comes to a close after nearly nine minutes.
For many, it would qualify as a set-piece. For Colpitts, it is a fully realized part of a whole, both the album at large, but also a vast, rewarding, and still-evolving discography. Recording and performing for nearly 20 years with Oneida and spin-offs like People of the North, Colpitts’ drums have sometimes provided an almost melodic key to understanding the full-bore noise-blasts surrounding them. On *Play What They Want, *those melodies can be heard more directly than ever.


Utilizing space recordings and scraps of poetry, the minimalist titan and his long-time collaborators grapple with humanity’s place in the universe.

Sun Rings

To call Terry Riley a minimalist is to ignore a large part of his history. Yes, the iconic American composer and his seismic 1964 signature composition In C all but codified the modern classical genre, but Riley has been adding teeming elements to his music ever since, most ambitiously with his writing for Kronos Quartet. Beginning with the string quartets of 1985’s Cadenza on the Night Plain, Riley and the members of Kronos have enjoyed a decades-long dialogue. Along the way Riley’s music has absorbed many other timbres and rhythms, including jazz, rock, waltz, electronic polyrhythms, and Latin music (and that’s not counting the many sounds contained within their epic Salome Dances For Peace), in a way that’s decidedly maximal yet still feels streamlined.
The scope of Riley’s Sun Rings transcends terrestrial music altogether, turning an ear to the sounds beyond Earth and utilizing recordings sent back home by Voyager I and II. The cosmic is inherent in Riley’s most exquisite works, but in making it explicit on Sun Rings, that theme becomes pedestrian. When they played the piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2004, the musicians waved their hands to set off motion sensor-triggered whooshing sounds; it was cringingly archaic. The performance was set against a backdrop of space visuals, but the multimedia piece would have seemed outdated even on a 1980s episode of Nova. Numerous performances have followed in the subsequent decade, giving them opportunities to refine some aspects of the piece. The presentation of Sun Rings in full here—one movement from a studio recording previously appeared in Kronos’ 2015 Terry Riley box set—feels decidedly more mellow, if still a little underwhelming.
A sampled voice discussing “whistlers” (or very low frequency or VLF electromagnetic waves) introduces the piece as sounds swirl. NASA transmissions and outer-space noise have been a part of electronic music since the 1990s, but hearing them folded into Riley’s work in the 21st century feels stiff and a little cheesy. The subtle, thrumming rhythms and hovering melodies of the quartet make early movements like “Hero Danger” a pleasant, albeit mild, listen; the warbling electronics approximate what a Kronos Quartet remix from the Orb might sound like. The murky metallic humming that courses beneath the elegant melodic lines of “Planet Elf Sindoori” almost tip it into the nebulous realm of dub.
But the zigzagging, overwrought theme of “Beebopterismo” wholly disrupts the spacey ambience that precedes it. The quartet saws away in a bizarrely intrusive, busybody fashion, as if trying to simply make their presence known. For all of that showiness, the strings are soon drowned in a wash of garbled electronics. “The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour” similarly toggles between refined, elongated passages that swim amid the sonic detritus of the Voyager recordings and a more frantic and dramatic theme that lashes against it. That’s not to suggest that some balance isn’t struck, as the noisy, clanging charge of “Venus Upstream” fares far better.
Reveling in the strange, otherworldly textures of outer space may have made Sun Rings a placid enough home listen, but it’s as Riley turns his gaze back to Earth and strives to make grand, overarching platitudes that the piece sputters and buckles under its own weight. Luminous choirs emerge on centerpiece “Prayer Central,” but as voices recite lines from “A Child’s Bedtime Prayer,” the atmosphere turns cluttered. Riley’s desire to “represent the voice of humanity in its struggle to understand the meaning of our place in this unfathomable universe” becomes too much for the piece to bear across its 16 minutes.
The finale, “One Earth, One People, One Love,” drives that point home like a spaceship crashing into earth. “Do you really know where you are at this point in time and space and in reality and existence?” asks a voice, as Alice Walker recites the titular phrase and bits of percussion flutter around in the mix. Such samples would be a virtual godsend were you making an ambient house track in the 1990s, setting up a big, profound, guilty pleasure of a break. But Riley and Kronos oddly tiptoe around such a payoff. Instead of delivering a maximal release, they give us minimalism at its least effective.

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The prolific Atlanta producer enlists 17 women for an all-female mixtape that is well-intentioned and occasionally delightful, but doesn't have enough highlights to sustain its momentum.

Zaytoven: Zaytown Sorority Class of 2017

Zaytown Sorority Class of 2017

Women rappers so rarely get their due. The barrier to entry has always been much higher, expectations have been unreasonably harsh, and even at the top level, there is intolerance: Rarely have two women have ever been able to dominate hip-hop culture at the same time. There can only be one, if any, and there’s even less room for queer and trans women. The last few years have shown promise, providing glimpses of what the future could hold: Cardi B topped the charts with her strutting single “Bodak Yellow,” becoming the first woman in rap to do so since Lauryn Hill in 1998, longtime indie rap workhorse Rapsody was nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys, and upstarts like Kamaiyah, Dreezy, and Kodie Shane continue to rise. The obvious goal is for women rappers not to be judged solely by their female peers but as rappers period. The obstacles to that are clear: patriarchy, resource imbalances, fewer signings, misconceptions about a talent gap between women rappers and their male counterparts, and constant suspicion from skeptics who believe even the best women MCs have their rap's written for them by men.
Prolific Atlanta pianist and beat guru Zaytoven is aware of these discrepancies, and in 2014 he released his Zaytown Sorority mixtape, which spotlit unheralded women in rap. The 17-track second installment focuses on his Class of 2017, returning some old guests, introducing a few new ones, and adding some more star power into the mix. Zaytown Sorority 2 features seasoned charmers of yesteryear Trina and Khia, buzzing would-be stars like Dej Loaf and Kash Doll, “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta” cast members Joseline Hernandez, Tiffany Foxx, PreMadonna, and Jessica Dime, and a cadre of lesser-known rappers like Ms. GoHam and Chella H. While the tape is well-intentioned and occasionally delightful, there aren’t enough highlights to sustain momentum.
Rapper showcases like this one rarely produce more than mixed results. Even the all-star lineups tend to suffer from a free-for-all aimlessness, as any DJ Khaled album proves. The primary objective is exposure, not curation. On Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2, these fluctuations in quality are compounded by the varying caliber of the MCs enlisted, who range from savvy veterans with commanding presences to amateurs just finding their bearings. Some rappers deliver one-off outtakes, others submit resumes. Accomplished artists clash with MCs in the developmental stages. There is a disparity between talented rappers who understand the lack of stakes and mail it in and enthusiastic underachievers. Form should follow function, particularly on a release like this that lays its intent out so plainly; yet, the product presented doesn’t honor the ambitions.
The mixtape opens with a bang, with its most charismatic personalities and most forceful rappers, before quickly tapering off in its middle section. Zay front loads the heavy hitters, with Trina and Khia doing decent impressions of their past work. Dej, who is among the most clever writers in rap today, shines brightest on “How It Feel,” her bubbly singsong raps carrying on their own buoyancy, each gummy pronunciation betraying her hard-nosed stunt raps. She can’t be bothered in her songs, which plays especially well under these circumstances. “I thank god, I’m in my right mind now/Money in the stash/Put them hundreds on timeout,” she raps casually, creating unusual imagery. On “Supersize,” Kash Doll doesn’t so much rap as swagger through, repeating lines until they fade before suddenly delivering a combo like, “Put a fuckboi on the bench if he got sidelines/Nigga tried to kill the cat but it got nine lives” with an unnerving sense of ease.
Outside of these highlights delivered by clearcut standouts, Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2 does feature some solid showings for a few of the lesser known artists showcased, like Ms. GoHam on “Never Have I Ever” and Tiffany Bleu on “Smile,” but many of these are followed or preceded by a clunker. The melodies on Shanell and Princess’ “Get It Up,” a song about erectile dysfunction, fall flat. Qu Da Queen and Robyn Fly’s “Automatic” is repetitive and grating. Jessica Dime is just one of a few guests who mimic Gucci Mane cadences, but the punches are less effective. When Gucci uses his drawl to lurch through schemes he builds up steam into a big, unforgettable one-liner, and there’s none of that impact on “Shrimp.” Though the mixtape’s quality shifts wildly from song to song, Zaytoven’s icy, keyboard-driven production holds the project together at the seams. He is consistently great, giving the ladies of his sorority class with some of his finest compositions. Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2 isn’t the superb, woman-focused compilation rap needs, but the tape continues the long, unavoidable conversation rap gatekeepers and fans must have about representation.


Where this Austin outfit's debut album unfurled like a drop of ink in a glass of water, its follow-up has a plan, and was meticulously constructed in the wake of a tough time for the band. They did away with the reverb, lending the album a crystalline clarity, and allowing the wild vocal performances to shine through.

Crawling Up the Stairs

This time last year was a trying time for Pure X: Nate Grace busted his knee skateboarding but didn't have insurance, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Jenkins was going through a breakup, and drummer Austin Youngblood moved to be with his girlfriend in Los Angeles. While all that was going on, they were also working on Crawling Up the Stairs, the follow-up to their splendidly hazy debut LP, Pleasure. Instead of recording everything live as they did before, Pure X took an arduous year-and-a-half to record C.U.T.S., as they call it, sparing no attention to detail.
Where Pleasure unfurls like a drop of ink in a glass of water, Crawling Up the Stairs has a plan. "There's kind of a hard descent," Jenkins explained, "and the rest of the record is a slow ascent back up to reality." Pure X also made a studied departure from the feedback and reverb that occasionally muffled Pleasure's finer textures. On Crawling Up the Stairs, they looked for guitar sounds "like glass knives slicing through your eardrums," influenced by Nashville's golden era of high-polish production, and honed in producer Larry Seyer's studio, Electric Larryland. The diamond-cut dulcimer that opens "Thousand Year Old Child" sounds more at home on a sunlit Brooklyn rooftop than the dark, dusty Texas basements in which it originated, and the bowed piano splintering the end of "Never Alone" feels almost three-dimensional. When the guitars do squall, they radiantly explode into being instead of burning low and dirty, as they did on Pure X's earlier releases.
Sometimes this clarity comes at the expense of the smoldering noise that made their last album so sensual, but Pure X make up for lost immediacy by giving a lot more attention to Crawling's vocals. Rustling whispers and conspiratorial voices on "Shadows and Lies" are the perfect companions to Grace's rangy, paranoid wails. In fact, it's almost a relief to hear him totally lose it for once, howling himself ragged on "How Did You Find Me" instead of keeping his voice at a safely reverbed distance from the listener. After Grace rips his throat apart, Jenkins-- who, for the first time, shares singing duties-- is there to pick up the pieces with his sweet and haunting falsetto. Despite Grace's injuries, it's Jenkins who sings, "The pain in my body is so great" on "I Fear What I Feel", reaching high octaves of pain repeated across several lines like a dull, throbbing ache.
Jenkins has said Pure X won't make their next record the same way they made Crawling Up the Stairs, which makes sense-- how many times can a band have a collective nervous breakdown?-- but hopefully they'll find a few takeaways from the creative process behind their second album. It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware.


This 2xCD, 50-track collection celebrates the golden anniversary of the iconic Memphis label and features tracks by Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MGs, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, and many more.

Various Artists: Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration

Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration

It's telling that Stax Records was located in an old theatre. The music made at 926 E. McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, emphasized soulful performance above pop poise, with the sweaty spontaneity of the moment always underscoring the intensity of romantic, social, sexual, or musical needs. On the new, 2xCD Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, you can hear this unscripted quality in Isaac Hayes punctuating a verse of Bacharach and David's "Walk on By" with "you socked it to me, mama!" or for Mavis Staples singing along with the guitar solo on "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)". It's impossible to imagine Rufus Thomas writing down any lyrics to "Walking the Dog" and "Do the Funky Chicken", two of his best novelty dance songs. Linda Lyndell even made up the verses to "What a Man" on the spot, improvising lyrics almost as she sang them.
Nearly all of the label's early songs were recorded live in that converted theatre studio, a practice born out of necessity rather than aesthetic principle but which nevertheless emphasized the latter. In fact, the label, which was founded in 1957 by former country musician Jim Stewart (ST) and his sister Estelle Axton (AX), kept things in-house, so Stax refers not just to the label and its snapping-fingers logo, but also the studio itself and the musicians who congregated there. Booker T. & the MG's, the house band, typically played on most early tracks, occasionally with Isaac Hayes on organ or piano and the Mar-Keys providing those readily identifiable Memphis horns (the group's key players would later become known as the Memphis Horns). Hayes, from nearby Covington, Tennesse, and Memphian David Porter teamed up to write many of the label's best-known songs, like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" and "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby" (the latter criminally omitted from this set). Together, all the musicians kept the songs preternaturally tight and targeted, with no fills or showboating, just pure, chugging r&b momentum that is almost businesslike in its precision. As the label developed its sound and its studio, bringing in professional composers and arrangers during the early 1970s, this dynamic all but disappeared, but songs like Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff", Mel & Tim's "Starting All Over Again", and Hayes' decade-defining "Theme from Shaft" prove that the label's musical standard remained high.
The practice of recording live in the studio, often with all the musicians gathered around only one mic, captured the performers' group dynamic along with wrong notes, missed cues, and other enlivening mistakes that reveal the studio's technical primitiveness. This might explain the absence from Stax 50th of Otis Redding's iconic "Try a Little Tenderness", whose big finale falls away as the horns fail to complete their crescendo-- surely a production error. Also missing is Albert King's "Crosscut Saw", a rumbling blues number with vocals buried low in the mix. However, these imperfections make those songs sound even more raw and urgent forty years later, the creations of real musicians in a real studio. Furthermore, the four-minute single version of Isaac Hayes' stellar "Walk on By" included here is a mere trophy compared to the towering monument of the twelve-minute version, and anyone familiar with Hayes' breakthrough 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul will be able to pick out the splices. The list of noticeable omissions is long: Hayes' "Do Your Thing", Sam & Dave's "Wrap It Up" or "I Thank You", Redding's "Hard to Handle", and on and on and on.
Happily, Stax 50th gets more things right than wrong. The tracklist is commendable, with choice cuts from Sam & Dave, the Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd, the Staple Singers, Soul Children, and Jean Knight, showcasing the label's range as well as its musical and technological development over the years. Johnnie Taylor's "Jody's Got Your Girl and Gone", with its inverted call-and-response chorus, may be channeling Curtis Mayfield, but that doesn't dilute its double indictment of men who don't take care of their women and men who take others' women. Likewise, the Staple Singers' "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)" may be a rewrite of their hit "I'll Take You There", but that doesn't make it any less transcendent. Too bad it's followed by Taylor's "Cheaper to Keep Her", a gimmick track that sounds the comp's only sour note. But bad transitions are a consequence of chronological sequencing; ultimately, this set contains one incredible song after another: the Bar-Kays' effervescent "Soulfinger", Albert King's doom-boogie "Born Under a Bad Sign", Booker T. & the MG's percolating "Time Is Tight", Soul Children's heartbreakingly resigned "I'll Be the Other Woman", and forty-six more.
Overextended even considering its string of hits, Stax closed in 1976 under the weight of accumulating debt, and the historic building on McLemore Avenue was eventually demolished, an act long considered indicative of the city's misplaced cultural priorities. Despite this tragic end, Stax 50th sounds utterly triumphant-- and why shouldn't it? A few years after the founding of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music on the studio's original site, the label has been revived in conjunction with the Concord Music Group, and has already signed Angie Stone, Soulive, and, best of all, Isaac Hayes. They'll have a large legacy to live up to: The 50 tracks on Stax 50th are merely a fraction of the label's amazing output, making this a fine introduction and hopefully a gateway for many listeners into its massive catalog.


Five years after indie-rock underdogs the Sidekicks dropped their fifth and final album, Steve Ciolek returns with a new project that recalibrates his ambitions while radiating emotional warmth.

Infinite Spring

On Superviolet’s introductory single, “Overrater,” Steve Ciolek hatches a plan: “Surprise release the sixth album as the greatest rock’n’roll band.” It’s safe to assume that Ciolek was addressing fans of his former group, the Sidekicks, and that they got the joke. By the time the Columbus indie rockers dropped their fifth and final album, the distance between their standing and their actual success was self-evident. They were criminally underrated and your favorite band’s favorite band, deserving yet forever denied their rightful mainstream acclaim. At first glance, Infinite Spring treats the December 2022 confirmation of the Sidekicks’ long-assumed breakup as scene trauma, easing Ciolek back in with a more muted singer-songwriter format and lowered stakes. Maybe the latter is what Ciolek needed all along, allowing Superviolet’s debut to be judged solely for its craft rather than a set of unmet commercial expectations.
On Infinite Spring, Ciolek—accompanied by some of his old bandmates and Zac Little of fellow Columbusites Saintseneca—takes a familiar off-ramp from the outlying zones of pop punk and emo. Just like Slaughter Beach, Dog, solo David Bazan, the Weakerthans, and Jets to Brazil, the post-Sidekicks project downsizes and domesticates while keeping the voice at the center—still clearly the work of That Guy From That Band without sounding all that much like That Band. Acoustic guitars are a lead instrument rather than fringe or a tool for writing demos. Synthesizers have been replaced with real horns and flutes. Songs that once found solace in basements and busted tour vans now do so on front porches and modest midsize sedans. Maybe you just shrug your shoulders and admit to liking Wilco, or maybe “heartland rock” and “dad rock” are no longer genre signifiers, just where you end up while writing lyrics that imagine what it might be like to raise a family in the Midwest.
“Life isn’t a highway/It’s a pattern where if I stare long enough/There’s your love,” Ciolek cracks on the opening “Angels on the Ground,” a song whose keening, AM gold arrangement may not be overtly influenced by Tom Cochran, but at least is open to taking his populist wisdom seriously. But as much as Infinite Spring is in dialogue with the pop-rock canon—Spotify’s “Beer and Wings” sports-bar playlist and possibly, based on the appearance of a shithead named Trevor in “Big Songbirds Don’t Cry,” Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better”—it also establishes continuity with Ciolek’s past work. Consider how the chorus of “Angels on the Ground” inverts that of the Sidekicks’ beloved “1940’s Fighter Jet,” as though he were learning to appreciate what’s right in front of him rather than looking to the sky, pining for what might never come.
That shift in perspective isn’t to be confused with complacency. Infinite Spring is driven by sonic ambitions more in line with its message of gratitude and acceptance. The spiffy production, and the presence of indie hitmakers Phil Ek and John Agnello, only reinforced the Sidekicks’ underdog status on “Jesus Christ Supermalls” or “Medium in the Middle”—they sounded every bit as big as their fans thought they could be, yet also marooned in the 2010s, a band that might’ve earned adulation and plum opening gigs for Band of Horses or the Shins rather than Joyce Manor or Oso Oso.
While Infinite Spring might initially register as modest for avoiding big swings, Ciolek’s confidence comes across in less conventional ways—layering surrealist poetry atop a gentle fingerpicking pattern on “Big Songbirds Don’t Cry,” owning up to his own goofy wordplay on the title track, not just baring his soul but making actual soul music on “Long Drive.” The album’s core takes its title to heart: The melodies of “Dream Dating” and “Good Ghost” emanate warmth rather than trying to create heat, their touch as light and satisfying as a breeze on the first day of unseasonably nice weather. (Coincidentally, it was 74 degrees in Columbus on Infinite Spring’s release day.)
Superviolet might actually be the most emo project Ciolek has ever made, inspired by guileless crushes, romantic fatalism, and the kind of googly-eyed star-watching associated with the circles in which the Sidekicks ran. Yet the songs are all rendered with a patience and perspective that can’t be faked or rushed. Bad dates, flubbed jokes, and stupid gifts might have once been torture devices, but now they’re merely props in the tragicomedy that got Ciolek to the place he was always meant to be.


While it's unfair to saddle Bob Mould with the same ol' "best album since..." cross, Life and Times does manage to reflect each facet of his career.

Life and Times

Bob Mould made his name laying his emotions bare, and it's a trait that's not only stayed with him throughout his 30-year career, but one that perhaps has become even more pronounced. The same holds true for alt-legend Mould's level of self-awareness, which, too, has grown more and more pronounced as his influence continues to seep through every level of the indie strata.
"There's sort of a traditional sound I have," he admitted to me a year ago. "It's singer/songwriter playing mostly electric guitar, writing linear songs that are fairly catchy, and fairly emotionally introspective. Anything that goes too far off of that is a challenge for some fans. Then there are the fans that unconditionally listen to what I do. Having said that, one of the things I've been curious about is that there seems to be this other group of people for whom I'm damned if I do anything, that if I'm not doing free jazz, I'm not progressing."
Needless to say, Life and Times, Mould's ninth solo album, does not mark a free jazz transformation, nor does the disc represent much musical progress at all, per se. Maybe that's for the best, since the closest Mould has come to anything close to "progress," as such, is his divisive foray into dance/rock fusion, Modulate. Yet time marches on, and no matter what the songs themselves may sound like, Mould in 2009 is a much different person from the Mould who helped merge hardcore intensity with pop.
That's a different sort of progress, but one worth acknowledging all the same, as never before has Mould seemed this comfortable with his status as one of the progenitors of a sound adopted and adapted by everyone from Pixies and the Foo Fighters to the Hold Steady and No Age. While it would be unfair to saddle Mould with the same ol' "best album since..." cross, Life and Times does manage to reflect each facet of Mould's career, from his punk roots through his current electronic leanings. In fact, from its melodies to its sheen, the album represent Mould at his most Sugar-y, the disc's easily digestible power-pop fueled by overdriven guitars and break-up regrets yet tempered by Mould's ruminative vocals.
Most importantly, Life and Times offers hook after giant hook. Not that Mould seems particularly settled on the opener and title track-- in the song, the conflict isn't just romantic rejection but the more complex challenge of embracing love at the risk of inviting future hurt. Uncertainty similarly simmers beneath the surface of "The Breach" or the illustratively titled ballad "I'm Sorry, Baby, But You Can't Stand in My Light Any More", but even with the latter, there's an implied light at the end of the tunnel.
"I always find the broken ones/what does this say about me?" Mould sings, the realization offering the possibility of rehabilitation and, ultimately, reconciliation in the midst of an album scented with love gone sour. You root for Mould to pull through, too. Earlier in his life, Mould often responded to inner conflict by lashing out, but here he instead reaches out, with the inviting jangle of "City Lights (Days Go By)" and even on the bitter "Bad Blood Better", pulling us closer than ever into his subconscious. The guy still needs a hug, but more than ever before he sounds like a guy open to giving one back in return.
Yet accessibility never overshadows Mould's innate qualities. Indeed, dozens of acts could pull off a pop-punk squall like "Argos", "Spiraling Down", or "MM 17", but only Bob Mould sounds like Bob Mould when he contemplates "the taste of last night's sex in my mouth." Later, when he peels off a blitzkrieg solo on "Wasted World" it's like hearing decades of punk history come washing out of the speakers like a wave. In the past that racket would have pushed you away. The Mould of Life and Times, on the other hand, has arms outstretched. It's a contemplative work setting the stage for Mould's upcoming memoir, whose hooks will for once have to connect without the almost comforting bark of his vocals or buzz of his guitar behind them.


The post-punk rebel incorporates elements of house and hip-hop while retaining the swagger and rawness of her early work.

Happy Birthday

If you don’t like a Sneaks song, just wait 60 seconds. A new one will rev up, mesmerize you with its barebones precision, and lurch to an abrupt stop in less time than it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. Eva Moolchan, the punk-adjacent Washington, D.C. musician who has been recording under the Sneaks moniker since 2014 (and for Merge since 2017), has made concision a kind of religion. You could comfortably fit her first three albums onto one CD-R, the kind of DIY treasure trove that might have been passed among friends at a campus radio station in an earlier era.
With 2019’s Highway Hypnosis, Moolchan tried, with varying results, to expand beyond the spiky bass-and-drum-machine minimalism that defined her earlier work. Her latest not-so-long-player, Happy Birthday, more effectively incorporates house and hip-hop textures, while retaining the enigmatic swagger that first brought her an audience in the punk community. Choruses are of no use to Sneaks, and lyrics remain fragmented snatches of mood and attitude. But lengthier, more robust compositions are no longer off-limits.
At its best, Happy Birthday showcases the fullest, most sophisticated grooves of Moolchan’s career. “Faith” is a marvel, with a four-on-the-floor thump and clanging-kitchenware percussion worthy of early LCD Soundsystem; Moolchan is sly and detached, reciting her vocals two syllables at a time, elusive with meaning until she’s not. “Faith in love, my friend/It’s the only thing we’ve got,” she repeats at the song’s close, capping a barrage of puzzles with an unambiguous statement of intent. “Sanity,” a skittering six-minute workout, is her first attempt to ride a beat for more than a couple minutes at a time, swapping out the chintzy drum machines for a heavier, club-ready boom-clap.
Moolchan talks more than she sings, often in an understated murmur. Like a rapper raised on Kraftwerk over Run-D.M.C., she achieves a counterintuitive sort of charisma through quiet force of repetition rather than volume. On “Mars in Virgo,” she repeats the titular phrase 16 times in less than two minutes, accompanied by Depeche Mode-style sequencers. She gives an enthusiastic testimonial of Virgo qualities—“We get things done! We get things done!”—as though narrating a quirky infomercial for the astrological sign. “Scorpio on Your Side” is similarly effusive and astrological: A sputtering synth melody cuts in and out as Moolchan (a known astrology obsessive) celebrates the perks of friendship with a particularly loyal Zodiac sign.
Even with Sneaks’ expanded palette, Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion, heightened by Moolchan’s status as a Black woman blurring the boundaries of a post-punk scene that’s still predominantly white. (“Why can’t a Black girl create?” she asks in “This World.”)
But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation. “Winter Weather” searches for a groove as Moolchan delivers an uncharacteristically wordy rap about her least favorite season. “Slightly Sophisticated” also lacks the cryptic simplicity of Sneaks’ best work, dabbling in glitchy maximalism that never quite gels. Toggle from that track to It’s a Myth’s spare, hypnotic “Look Like That” and it’s like feeling a lock slide into place.
This is a familiar conundrum: How do you expand or refine a sound that subverts the very ideas of expansion and refinement? On Happy Birthday, the jagged electro-funk of “Faith” and “Scorpio on Your Side” cracks the code: bolder grooves, a few more hooks, but still the same Sneaks.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The garage-rock institution rolls on with a loosely conceptual album that is equally inconsistent and ingenious, containing some of Robert Pollard’s most direct lyricism.

Earth Man Blues

Is it better to be a long-running band making pretty good music, or is it preferable to craft several classic albums and burn out into the night? Oddly enough, Guided By Voices has managed to do both. They have obvious classics (Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes), and they’ve managed to produce at least one good song every year they’ve existed. This is why for their adoring and long-loving fanbase, it’s easy to call oneself an “eternal GBV fan,” as Jay Carney, Amazon’s PR flack and former Obama press secretary, does; Beto O’Rourke is obviously a fan as well.
Even with the approval of these Gen Xers-turned-politicians, Guided By Voices still feels outside the mainstream. This might come from the fact that the formula (echoey vocals, tin-can guitar riffs, and bizarre lyrics) just hasn’t changed, making the band feel as if it’s permanently sealed in the past. Pollard has called Earth Man Blues, their latest album and the band’s 33rd release, both a “collage of rejected songs” and a loose concept musical “focused on the growth of young Harold Admore Harold through a coming of age and a reckoning with darkness.” This all sounds very ambitious, but “collage of rejected songs” could also describe most Guided By Voices albums, and since the band has often generated escapes into childlike reverie peppered with darkness, the concept-album-focused-on-childhood idea seems like a repetitive, tacked-on frame. If you ignore that framing, you’re left with a GBV album, equally inconsistent and ingenious, containing some of Pollard’s most direct lyricism.
On “Trust Them Now,” Pollard exhorts Harold to embrace life: “Let filthy toxic visions be destroyed/With every expectation for a boy/To find happiness but not joy.” The swaying ballad “The Disconnected Citizen,” is a rare thing: the (vaguely) topical GBV song that reflects on growing political malaise. It’s as if the growing absurdities of life have begun to plague Pollard to the point where sheer abstraction doesn’t cut it anymore.
Like all GBV albums, it’s slipshod and freewheeling. The acoustic opening of “Lights Out In Memphis Egypt” drifts into a rocker that never seems to know where to begin or where to end; a synth progression is added at one moment, only for all the instruments to drop out in the next. It feels like a sketch of something grander. “The Batman Sees the Ball” sounds like something from the GBV song generator, and it resembles hundreds of similar surreal jams of the band’s past. Pollard’s skewed portrait of a pinch-hitter who can send a ball into space is funny in a deflating way, like hearing a once-funny joke told for the eighth time.
Also like GBV albums, there are bright spots, and they make dismissing the band harder than it should be. “Sunshine Girl Hello” has a glowing ’60s guitar lick that animates its darkly intimate lyrics about unrequited love, while album closer “Child’s Play” elevates the simplicity of its doubled guitar noodling with a buzzing harmony that mirrors the boundless energy of its lyrics: “Child’s play is wanton.” Intentionally or not, that phrase hits at the modus operandi of the band: There’s always the belief that by throwing it all out there, you’ll land on something like “How Can a Plumb Be Perfected.” On the song, Pollard finds wonder in the everyday—in a typical bit of Pollardian obfuscation, it’s unclear whether he’s contemplating a piece of fruit or an arcane land-surveying tool, but the awe in his voice is palpable: “How can a plumb be for all time still completely perfect?/I sit around always thinking about how?” It’s an odd image, but by noting every little moment, he inadvertently captures beauty. Being a fan of this band means actively waiting for these moments to happen. Behind the aimlessness, Pollard projects a grand ambition that can’t be summarized in a single story: To create a body of work so sprawling that fans spend their entire lives listening to find hits as great as the song that hooked them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Houston rapper Fat Tony teams with Los Angeles producer Kyle Mabson for a noisy, synth-funk, outré record that often gels together and pushes at the boundaries of experimental rap.

Charge It to the Game: House With a Pool

House With a Pool

Fat Tony’s feature on A$AP Rocky’s “Get Lit,” off Rocky’s star-making 2011 mixtape, LIVELOVEASAP, remains the closest Tony has made it to the center of the rap universe. But the man from Houston’s Third Ward has grown into a reliably funny, incisive, trend-dodging alt-rapper, something like a Southern answer to Open Mike Eagle. He excelled in that role on projects like 2013’s Smart Ass Black Boy (highlighted by “Hood Party,” named one of the 50 best Texas rap songs by the Dallas Observer in 2015) and last year’s MacGregor Park. It’s been a fringy, decade-long career that’s also intersected with other genres, whether it’s Tony releasing music on Ghost Ramp (the rock-oriented label of Wavves’ Nathan Williams) or opening for Russian punks Pussy Riot this past March.
There’s also Charge It to the Game, Tony’s duo with Los Angeles producer Kyle Mabson. From the beginning, their music together has come from an experimental place. “I love industrial and hard electronic stuff, but the genre hasn’t had many changes in the last 30 years, just angsty white people over some sequenced synths,” Mabson explained to Noisey. Mabson hit up Tony to try rapping over those outré sounds and in the spring of 2016, they released the clanging, jittery Urban Hall of Fame EP (whose one guest MC was Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, rapping under his moniker Hemlock Ernst). Now, Tony and Mabson are back with the first Charge It to the Game LP, House with a Pool.
Released on Ghost Ramp and engineered by Jonathan Snipes of the experimental rap group clipping., House with a Pool is a DIY curio on the rap radar. Tony and Mabson relish each other’s company while also gelling stronger than they did on Urban Hall of Fame. And across its 13 songs, Mabson’s production is more varied than it was on the EP, adding elements of synth-funk and trance to the industrial foundation.
Tony is in a supremely assured mode on the album, finding validation in his accomplishments despite (or because of) his commitment to independence, whether that means making money from touring or being able to pick beats without pressure from an A&R. This even results in some shit talk directed at less savvy MCs on “Don’t Wanna Miss”: “You niggas are needy and your manager’s greedy/Your hairline is receding.” On the quirkier side of things, there’s the goofy lead single and goth-girl tribute “Dark Girl” (”You need one in your life!”), but it’s Tony’s general confidence, not conceptual moments, that dominates House with a Pool.
As fun of a presence as Tony can be on his own, House with a Pool’s highlights come when his own animated style meet with Mabson’s production. There’s one of the album’s catchiest songs, “My Way,” where Tony nails an Auto-Tune hook and some of his trickiest flows. Houston’s no-fucks-giving B L A C K I E is one of three guests to show up on the album, bellowing on the aggro “Y.B.N.” The album only underwhelms when that kind of energy is starkly absent, as on parts of “Been a Minute,” “Dive In,” and “Running to the Bag.” But mostly, House with a Pool is the sound of Tony and Mabson clicking and complementing each other, dutifully pushing out the edges of experimental rap.


Under his oddball alter ego, Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple presents himself as an Auto-Tune balladeer, Afrobeat enthusiast, and skilled craftsman of moody synth pop.

Half Price at 3:30

Who the hell is Art Feynman? Judging by his babushka, bucket hat, side pony, and sherbet-colored clothing, he might be a psychedelic bee keeper—or maybe a stoned ceramicist with his own public access TV show. The reality is not quite as silly: Feynman is Luke Temple’s oddball alter ego (the ponytail, alas, is a wig). As Feynman, Temple seems to detach slightly from reality, resulting in music that’s more impish than his prior solo work or his output with Here We Go Magic. His peculiar character looks as though he’s tumbled through a number of decades to wander ours as an observant stranger. On Half Price at 3:30—Temple’s second album as Feynman—the narrator roams around at a safe distance from secondary characters. He parcels his reflections into subtle but unexpected pop songs that bridge contemporary production with compositional nods to Paul Simon, Arthur Russell, and Harry Nilsson.
If Temple’s prior release as Feynman—2017’s Blast Off Through the Wicker—marked his most consistent work, Half Price at 3:30 straddles a taut line between cohesion and the urge to flaunt a few styles. Across the album’s tidy 45 minutes, Temple presents himself as an Auto-Tune balladeer, Afrobeat enthusiast, and skilled craftsman of moody synth pop. The brooding duo of “Taking on Hollywood” and “The Physical Life of Marilyn” exemplify the latter genre, sending Temple’s alias stalking the ghosts of Sunset Strip.
In “Taking on Hollywood,” Temple croons through a vocoder while Tron arpeggios and plastic clicks scurry beneath. He sings with the delusions of a fresh L.A. transplant, laying out plans for his “future mausoleum” like an upwardly mobile actor/waiter. (In truth, he sounds more like a robot navigating empty streets.) “The Physical Life of Marilyn,” meanwhile, is a Hollywood noir that evokes the Cars’ darkest hits. Temple reaches into his lower register, coasting on stretched-out synths like he’s driving past the iconic star’s glass house on the hill. Temple is so adept at crafting atmosphere within his songs, it’s easy to see into her home—a box of incandescent light perched on a shadowy slope.
Half Price at 3:30 has no shortage of dark and seedy moments, but Temple keeps bouncy pop numbers in steady rotation. “China Be Better” (which Temple assures is about a friend, not the country) is an early highlight. Temple’s clean alto, dry percussion, and buoyant synth rhythms recall Arthur Russell’s “Arm Around You.” But even smiling Art Feynman’s sweetest melodies contain bitter pith: “You filled up my life with madness,” he sings, before admitting: “Now I can see there’s madness in me.”
“I’m Gonna Miss Your World” and “Not My Guy” are additional displays of Temple’s pop acumen, both bobbing over bubbly Afrobeat arrangements. In the former, Temple repeats a simple refrain of longing, tossing melancholy with rubbery bass and tart horn patches—perhaps a wink at Hearts and Bones-era Paul Simon. “Not My Guy” provides the LP’s goofiest and most delightful moment, taking cues from the bizarro-pop school of Nilsson and Warren Zevon. That it was written in the wake of Trump’s election is its least interesting quality; what is more amusing is Temple’s percussive use of breath, nimble guitar work, and cartoonish summoning of swamp monsters. It’s a prime example of Temple’s range as Art Feynman: a catchy, compact track that’s as fun and approachable as it is musically dexterous.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Australian punk musician continues his prolific streak on a fun and occasionally melancholic tribute to mid-’60s garage-pop.

Alien Nosejob: The Derivative Sounds Of... or... A Dog Always Returns to Its Vomit

Jake Robertson has been in some bands: School Damage, Hierophants, Leather Towel, Modal Melodies, SWAB, to name a few. He is perhaps best known for his time in the insouciant Ausmuteants, a group from the early 2010s who garnered fans worldwide for their no-frills take on synth-punk. But the restless punk stalwart seems to have hit a particularly rich creative vein with his solo project, Alien Nosejob. Since 2017, Robertson has issued records at a breakneck pace, from the raw yet hooky classic punk of 2020’s Suddenly Everything Is Twice as Loud to the new-wave-inspired 2021’s Paint It Clear to the glam rippers on 2022’s Stained Glass. He’s got the songwriting chops to draw out what makes these vintage sounds so special, bringing vibrancy to musical ground that has been mined to near-depletion. In an interview with Still in Rock, he describes his style-hopping thusly: “Sometimes I wish I had the focus to concentrate on one sound at a time, but I don’t. I’m part of the microwave generation. I want three meals in three minutes, or I’m not eating.”
Robertson’s latest, The Derivative Sounds Of... or... A Dog Always Returns to Its Vomit, plays specifically with the garage-pop sound of the mid ’60s. As is typical for him, it’s incredibly self-aware but doesn’t take itself too seriously. He may be looking backwards for inspiration, but it’s clear that the album’s title is pushing against the on-the-nose nostalgia of the ’90s and ’00s retro garage boom, which often didn’t question the regressive sexism and racism of the sound’s “trash” tropes. Instead of recreating the past, he carefully teases out the sonic details from the style that hit for maximum satisfaction, and weaves them together tightly in his own signature manner.
Robertson is excellent at self-editing, and these songs are brash and bright and economical. They’re fun, with an underpinning of melancholy both teens and teens-at-heart will recognize as key to growing up in a chaotic world—which has been pop’s primary concern ever since the invention of the teenager as a discrete category. On “Act Different,” a rickety but catchy tune with a warbling, chorus-heavy guitar line, Robertson describes the simple feeling of alienation from one’s peers and how comforting it can be to retreat: “When you’re alone/You can be yourself.”
Beneath the easy approachability of his music, there’s clearly careful craft at work. Opener “I’m Lost,” which rails against people caught up in their own hype, has a thrilling percussive breakdown to highlight the impact of its simple minor-key chord progression. “Ariel View” has a groovy little organ part to rival the Standells, and the lovelorn “There Was a Time I Called Her Name” features delightful psychedelic guitar flourishes. Rather than feeling like studied mimicry, these tracks have a charming lack of professionalism—Robertson’s falsetto on “There Was a Time I Called Her Name” sounds constantly on the verge of cracking—and the genuine enthusiasm of the original wave of garage rockers, kids who were simply excited to be able to pick up newly accessible electric instruments and make a racket together. Consider it home-cooked, with love.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the English duo’s 1981 debut, a daring landmark of synth pop that went unexpectedly mainstream.

Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

From the beginning, Soft Cell never looked quite right together. When the British duo made its debut on Top of the Pops in 1981, as its strutting, stripped-down cover of “Tainted Love” was climbing the charts, 24-year-old singer Marc Almond introduced himself in heavy black eyeliner, a studded neckband, and gold bangles, pouting and gyrating around the stage. Standing at a keyboard behind him was 22-year-old producer Dave Ball, the buttoned-up game-show host to Almond’s outré clubgoer. As Soft Cell, they created electronic pop tempered with Northern soul, the strain of American blues and soul music then being pumped through raucous UK clubs that rivaled New York City’s most debauched discos. The pair would leave a transgressive mark on the early 1980s and beyond, to their dismay.
Almond grew up in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool where he felt out of place from an early age. Using pirate radio and movies as an escape from an abusive home life, he fostered an early love of camp and performance as someone “sexually confused, academically disadvantaged, and physically challenged,” as he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, Tainted Life. By the time he left for school in Leeds, Almond found delight in the bedsit he rented beneath a brothel, the only space he could afford. He festooned it with posters and red neon lights, planting the seeds for the delightfully sordid settings that would populate his lyrics.
Ball was raised farther up the coast, adopted into a working-class family in Blackpool. He spent his youth attending parties at clubs like the Highland Room, the town’s premier Northern soul spot, and obsessively collecting Tamla and Stax singles after he heard them on the tartan-carpeted dancefloor. It was at one of those clubs that the 16-year-old Ball heard Gloria Jones’ voice for the first time, when her original rendition of “Tainted Love” sent his head spinning.
By 1977, both were enrolled at Leeds Polytechnic; Almond, who had already earned a reputation as a scandalous performance artist (cat food and bloodletting were common elements), happened to be the first person Ball saw on campus, unmissable in gold lamé jeans and a leopard-print T-shirt. They were fast friends, kindred spirits in their obsessive love of punk and electronic music, cult films, and kitsch. Once Ball started to work seriously with a Korg synthesizer, he brought his experiments to Almond, pushing Soft Cell—a play on words that summed up their favorite themes of “consumerist nightmares and suburban insanity”—into its early stages.
Synth pop was just beginning to find popular audiences in 1980, as the advent of cheaper equipment helped pave the way for a more democratic, far-flung scene. Ball and Almond’s music grew directly out of Kraftwerk’s pleasantly menacing electro pop, plus Suicide’s desiccated punk and the cabaret operatics of French chanson. Soft Cell debuted at a college Christmas show two short months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs against a backdrop of Super 8 films of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes. The art-punk spark was lit. They would go on to perform more than 20 roughly sketched songs at subsequent shows, many of which formed the basis of their debut album (a spare, stuttering version of opener “Frustration” appeared on their four-track debut EP, Mutant Moments). Even early on, Almond’s lyrics were projected through a filmic lens smeared with grime: the duo’s tinny, galloping single “Girl With the Patent Leather Face,” inspired by J.G. Ballard’s Crash, memorably merges plastic surgery and S&M imagery into one twisted union.
After a haywire performance at Leeds’ Futurama Festival in 1980 that generated some press buzz, the band’s demo found its way to Stephen “Stevo” Pearce, a teenage London DJ who was on the cusp of founding the eccentric label Some Bizzare. His roster would grow more avant-garde, including acts like Psychic TV and Einstürzende Neubauten, but Soft Cell’s moody, diffuse electronic music—now outfitted with the occasional clarinet and saxophone—fit the bill. With Stevo as their manager, the band found its first breakout hit in 1981’s kitschy acid-house cut “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, which gained a cult following in clubs across the UK. With their second single, they hit an unrepeatable stride.
Written in the 1960s by Ed Cobb, a vocalist in the pop quartet the Four Preps, “Tainted Love” was first recorded by Gloria Jones, the Motown singer-songwriter and eventual T. Rex member (and romantic partner of Marc Bolan, from whom Almond took his stage name). Her original crackles with gritty energy, using an agitated tempo to convey its tormented urgency. Yet Soft Cell’s narcotized version is immortal, a darkly glamorous blend of betrayal and lust. (“I loved the emotion in his voice,” Jones remarked of Almond later. “Their version was far better than mine.”) Rakish and dirtied up, Soft Cell’s recording builds its tension around the sparse interplay between Ball’s secondhand synths and drum machines and the distinctive, glossy pulse of producer Mike Thorne’s expensive Synclavier. Then there’s Almond’s icy voice, which injects a brittle, sexual desperation. For the B-side, they recorded a second cover—a similarly eroded, slow-burning version of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go”—and bloomed into a sensation.
“All we thought was that this weird little record could be a minor hit,” Almond wrote afterward, “then disappear to leave us to get on with being the dark, disturbing alternative band we really were.” But “Tainted Love,” with its metallic, levitational pleasure, became inescapable during the summer of 1981, turning them into stars. Depeche Mode had recently made way for deadpan synth pop to climb the charts, but Soft Cell took it to new heights. Though they were eventually lumped in with groups like Spandau Ballet, Almond and Ball insisted that they were doing something different with the formula: slipping genuine, gimlet-eyed emotion into their rhythmic electronic music, rather than making stuff “to pose against the Berlin Wall to,” as Almond put it. The song brought about swift and unprecedented success, culminating in that iconic Top of the Pops performance. Just watch Almond slink around the stage, totally off the wall and yet unbelievably committed.
It caused a media row. Suddenly Soft Cell were ushering in a new age of indecency: Teenagers began to dress like Almond, sporting his bangles and thick eyeliner at school. The homophobic music press couldn’t grasp the general ambiguity of the song nor Almond’s effete performance of it. “They said there seems to be a lot of homosexuality creeping into our charts, and for example the number one record is obviously about a gay relationship gone wrong,” Almond snickered to The Face. “I wonder if Gloria Jones realized it!” Almond evaded questions about his sexuality in interviews at the time, despite constant, ignominious snooping from gay and straight journalists alike. The silence was enforced by Soft Cell’s record company, Phonogram, who perpetually told him to change outfits, invent girlfriends, and use less makeup. The pressure got to Almond; eager for his art to stand on its own and in denial himself, he felt “wary of all the baggage and consequences that would accompany an admission,” he wrote in Tainted Life. “But in many ways I always thought the question was a bit redundant. If they wanted a sworn affidavit about my sexuality they were never going to get it, yet my sexuality was undeniably obvious to all.”
To escape the growing hype and scrutiny, Almond and Ball fled to New York with Stevo and Thorne for a month to record their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, titled after a neon sign over a revue bar they frequented in London’s Soho district. In the U.S., culture shock gave way to decadence: After recording by day at the famed Media Sound studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Almond and Ball would jet to clubs like Paradise Garage and Danceteria by night, experimenting with party drugs and encountering characters that gave further shape to the band’s seamy songs about the misunderstood. “It’s like a peep show,” Almond explained about the record before it came out. “I like to write about real-life situations, under-the-carpet situations.”
On Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Soft Cell brought those situations to life with lurid, theatrical depravity. “Bedsitter” is a gleaming exercise in urban isolation that pays homage to Almond’s cramped, squalid apartment back in Leeds. Over a bending synth that mimics twangy guitar, they capture a vampiric morning after a night out: “The memories of the night before/Out in club land having fun/And now I’m hiding from the sun,” he moans. The cartoonishly jaunty, upbeat keys on “Secret Life,” meanwhile, punctuate lyrics about a blackmail scheme, with a narrator admonishing someone who has “the favorite persuasions of the people in the headlines” in their little black book, including his own.
That dark, serrated humor is pivotal to Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “Frustration” cuts down heternormative oppression over saxophone and a synth stretched to oblivion. “I have life/Ordinary wife/I have car/A favorite bar,” Almond begins robotically, before the song quickly turns hedonistic: “I wish I could reach right out for the untouchable…/ Experiment with cocaine, LSD, and set a bad, bad example.” The tongue-in-cheek single “Sex Dwarf,” a warped headtrip about “luring disco dollies to a life of vice,” was inspired by a News of the World headline that caught Almond’s eye; the song repackages exploitative tabloid fodder into something approximating John Waters’ gleeful concept of filth. (Its notorious video, another exercise in outright bad taste that provoked a London vice squad to raid the Some Bizzare offices, remains banned from television in the UK.)
The warmer, body-heated music on the album is a snapshot of pre-AIDS queer life at its heady peak. Over a winding funk beat on “Seedy Films,” Almond croons about flickering blue movies and the hands of a stranger, evoking a seductive vision of the era’s anything-goes spirit. “Tainted Love,” which became the best-selling single in England in 1981, also assumed a different light as the epidemic became a pressing concern. The duo first heard of the then-unnamed disease the very day they arrived in New York to record. “It wasn’t an intentional tie-in, but as the record hit the American charts, it took on this other meaning, coming off this hedonistic time of the late ’70s and into this very dark period,” Almond said in 2000.
“Tainted Love” is the album’s most timeless, alluring song, but the most striking is its desperate closer, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.” The melodrama places its narrator at the Pink Flamingo club on a rainy night, attempting and failing to maintain distance from an affair with a sex worker. Its histrionic refrain—“I never knew you/You never knew me/Say hello/Goodbye”—is unmistakably direct, but the words grow complicated with longing in Almond’s crooning, barroom delivery, even when he can’t exactly carry its final notes. The ballad is the record’s perfect, atmospheric nightcap, a pleadingly lovesick exhale that showcased their writing and performance skill at its peak.
Soft Cell would go on to make two more albums, selling 10 million records in the process. The wild flush of success proved destructive: Almond bristled under the intense spotlight, and he and Ball both struggled with substance abuse as they recorded their emotive, genre-blurring follow-ups, The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom. “We lived a 10-year band life in three years,” Almond said in 2019. “It was always us against the record company… More ‘Tainted Love’s. More this, that, and the other.” Ball echoed that notion in his autobiography, 2020’s Electronic Boy: “We’d been so successful very quickly, in constant demand and therefore always together—living out of each other’s pockets,” he wrote. “I don’t think any relationship could have endured that pressure.”
Soft Cell disbanded in 1984, and both artists pursued other projects. In his solo career, Almond has released more than 10 albums, sliding from Jacques Brel covers to bruised torch songs. Ball, an electronic-music pioneer in his own right, put out records as part of rave duo the Grid in the ’90s and has produced and written for artists including Kylie Minogue. He and Almond reconciled in 2002 and have continued to tour and release new music since, but Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is still the band’s cocktail-soaked classic, a winking dispatch from the gutter that provided a template for countless synth-based acts to come. It inspired Nine Inch Nails’ scuzzy industrial rock as much as the throbbing electroclash of Fischerspooner and Scissor Sisters, providing sanctuary for artists who shared the duo’s love of battered synths and sinister glamor.
That Soft Cell’s hypnotic music made such an impact isn’t a surprise in hindsight, but it certainly was to them. “We were punks and we just wanted to cause a little bit of trouble. We didn’t want to toe the line,” Ball said in 2020. “It was a weird dichotomy, to be an art school thing that became a pop phenomenon.” Those first blinking, lustrous notes that kick off “Tainted Love” are now stitched into the fabric of the ’80s, in all the decade’s beguiling artificiality. But the proto-electro sound and tawdry sense of humor on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret has endured, a singular style that gave the pop landscape a campy, needed jolt.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


On their third collaborative project, the duo makes minor but strong tweaks to a reliable system.

Continuance

New Orleans rapper Curren$y and producer the Alchemist have been so prolific on their own that it’s easy to forget the impact of their 2010 debut Covert Coup. Even before they joined forces, they were distinct figures within the moody landscape of underground rap. But together, their music never sounded so dark; their songs were foreboding yet relaxed, like a cloud of purple haze wafting through an abandoned alley. The duo recorded most of Covert Coup the day they met, and Alchemist credits Curren$y, aka Spitta, with inspiring the subsequent rapper collaborations that have become his calling card.
As their styles have mutated over the years, the partnership has remained strong, and Continuance doesn’t hide that excitement: “I pictured the listening session for it while I was still in here rhyming,” Spitta raps, barely a minute into opener “Half Moon Mornings.” The duo works because they coax themselves just far enough outside of their comfort zones to put outre spins on their laidback capo aspirations. These minor tweaks to a reliable system define Continuance, the next chapter in one of rap’s most fruitful pairings.
On paper, Spitta’s writing and delivery seem at odds. His Nawlins drawl is laidback, but his writing is often hyperfocused, turning the smallest details of any verse into marquee attractions. The chocolate Range Rover with tan seats he describes on “Reese’s Cup” and the coral-colored Air Maxes on “Corvette Rally Stripes” elevate the sense of personality and place in each scene. When he opens “Whale Watching” with the line, “This shit sound like a Saab,” you hear the engine purring precisely. Whether he’s describing an outfit or aspiring to be as fly as the gangsters in Scarface, Spitta knows how to hold your attention.
This descriptive flair extends to his wordplay and the surprises he encounters in everyday life. On “Obsession,” he pulls the occasional gut-busting one-liner out of thin air (“He tried to hide that bitch in him, it came out/Gender reveal” from “No Yeast”) and marvels at other’s come-ups through legal weed and cryptocurrency. The smooth jazz-lounge atmosphere Alchemist conjures on closing track “Kool & the Gang” complements Spitta’s verse about providing for his son. “My son too young to know that he a prince,” he raps, sounding settled and thoughtful.
The beat selection across Continuance reflects how far Alchemist has stretched himself musically. There are reminders of the moody boom-bap of the past (“Obsession,” “Signature Move”), but the production builds on the slight expansion of 2016’s The Carrollton Heist and 2018’s Freddie Gibbs collab Fetti by further embracing the psychedelic and minimal sounds Alchemist has favored for a while. The drums and vocal sample on “No Yeast” are paper-thin, homing in on the intricacies of Spitta and Boldy James’s verses. On standout “Louis Baggage,” Alchemist places a winding guitar lick over light drums, which bring the best out of guest Babyface Ray, who could stand to snag a full-length rapper-producer collab of his own.
Both Spitta and Alchemist have been active for over 20 years, and they’ve proven how far the slightest bit of fine-tuning and experimentation can take you. “Sound like your shit a motherfucking façade/Sound like you ain’t really comfortable with who you are,” Spitta growls on “Whale Watching.” Continuance isn’t an overhaul of the blueprint established on Covert and Carrollton, nor is it straight-faced fan service. It’s a space for two rap veterans who are comfortable enough with their chemistry to continue prodding at their margins.