Former members of L.A. dub-punkers Future Pigeon pay tribute to the music of the Middle East with a brief EP filled with danceable rhythms and region-appropriate ululations.

Basta EP

The opening seconds of Rainbow Arabia's debut EP are more knuckleball than curve: "Omar K" begins with chanted call-and-response vocals, and what at first seems like it might be a well-timed study of traditional West African music quickly veers a good distance eastward, and makes clear which global destination the duo have actually mined for so much inspiration. With a name like theirs, of course, you should have little trouble figuring out where to look to get some sense of what informs not just their keffiyeh-fied aesthetic but their Cairo-via-Echo Park primitivist dance hybrid as well. Big hint.
Rainbow Arabia are married couple Danny and Tiffany Preston, formerly of L.A. dub-punkers Future Pigeon. As with their earlier band, Rainbow Arabia are out for your hips, and this first effort is strangely propulsive. While press materials state that the two combine Middle Eastern flavors with American experimental dance music, I'm not sure there's anything especially "American" about their project aside from its mailing address. On the other hand, because their music is so attached to the region and its rumble, I can't help but wonder what kind of reaction the Basta EP might elicit from ears that grew up with those sounds. Fairly or not, questions of authenticity are destined to haunt this band.
Musically, Rainbow Arabia work a pretty minimal setup. While the overall vibe stays in place, their means of execution requires many parts. The synth and drum machine workouts are certainly house-meets-tribal, but the menacing beats realized in "Let Them Dance" and "Hear No See No" aren't what lend those particular cuts their bones. What really sticks out are the serpentine guitar lines that slither their way through the EP, sometimes taking on the shape of post-punk spikes, garage crunch, and Edge-like delay effects. That sort of guitar eclecticism is mirrored in turn by Tiffany Preston, whose yips, yaps, and prairie crows work well in the Rainbow Arabia's efforts to transport as much as immerse. An easy reference point would be Ponytail's whirling frontwoman Molly Siegel. While her vocal turns aren't nearly so easy to place stylistically, the two both hit high registers some might call distracting more than complimentary.
The fifth and final track on this 20-minute EP, "The Basta", opens by sampling video game effects that, according to the eternal geek in me, can be traced to 80s SEGA quarter-vacuum Altered Beast. That's one way to kick off an off-kilter dance track punctuated most memorably by Tiffany Preston's last few yelps, I guess; but it also points to a possible way forward. You could easily argue that, given their commitment to their influences, Rainbow Arabia don't have many options when it comes to their next move. Could be, but this closer shows that that they've still managed to find a few interesting keepsakes in this bazaar they've gotten lost in.


Noah Lennox’s vinyl-only EP is a curious world apart, smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor.

A Day With the Homies

Even in 2018, when streaming’s juggernaut is thought to have steamrolled every alternative path to our ears, to release a record on vinyl and vinyl alone is no big thing. There’s no accurate count of how many such discs appear every year, but in electronic music alone, it’s likely to be thousands of titles. Still, to be an artist of a certain stature and to put out a record only on wax is a kind of statement. It might be to invoke simpler times; it might be to separate the true fans from the passive ones and reward the former for their faithfulness. (It might also simply be a way of saying, “I’m not crazy about the streaming companies’ payouts.”)
In Panda Bear’s case, A Day With the Homies—a muggy, delirious five-track EP available only on vinyl—feels almost like a note scribbled on a scrap of paper and meant to be burned, buried, or swallowed. It sounds like he’s singing things that he needs to get off his chest yet doesn’t necessarily want finding their way into the digital slipstream. (In this sense, the 12” is strangely reminiscent, ironically enough, of Snapchat’s original utility as a repository of self-destructing messages.) There’s always been a dark side even to Noah Lennox’s sunniest work, but A Day With the Homies hides an especially toxic twinge beneath its sugar-coated crust.
You might not notice at first because the music is typically ebullient: smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor. “Took a sock to the socket/We got a black eye/Sucks and everything,” he chirps early in the opening “Flight,” mimicking a petulant teenager’s slouch and sly grin. Bursting with swollen bass frequencies and overdriven drum machines, it’s the Beach Boys for a world in which the rising seas have turned coastal real estate into an oil-slicked hellscape.
The background is forever threatening to swallow up the foreground: “Nod to the Folks” is framed with siren wails; “Shepard Tone,” named after a mind-bending auditory illusion, opens with what might be slowed-down helicopter rotors, sounding as disorienting and grandiose as Apocalypse Now’s Wagner-from-above as Lennox sings of deep throats, stinking bogs, and sucker punches. You wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the racing pulse, but it’s a song about endings: “Folks quit/when there’s nothing to quit on,” he intones, voicing one of the record’s major themes. “Fingers everyone,” runs the song’s endless chorus, as feedback wriggles and squirms.
The opener, too, turns out to be a conflicted sort of farewell, if not a kiss-off, with cryptic messages to his “good crew” (“Can’t be goodbye/Goodbye good crew/So I won’t say goodbye/Goodbye to you”) encoded in sticky-sweet barbershop harmony. Track two, “Part of the Math,” starts off even darker, with a serrated guitar chord slicing ominously away for what seems like forever. When Lennox finally opens his mouth, it’s to sing, “It comes out of nowhere/Like a rope/Wrapping tighter and tighter/Round the throat.” The shuffling beat is a throwback to 1990s rock/electronic fusions, like Screamadelica-era Primal Scream; Lennox’s lyrical lapses into ironic hemming and hawing suggest a character that’s part George-Michael Bluth, part Donnie Darko.
It can be hard to square the bleakness of the lyrics with the verdant excess of the sound, though its lo-fi sonics certainly match the rawness of the emotions contained within. And you might even occasionally wish Lennox would give free rein to his somber side. Is “Stop making it about your shit” a reproachful command, or a self-help mantra? Lennox has a way of making even the gloomiest pronouncements—“We’re all gonna be/Six feet in the coldest ground”—sound as giddy as a kid’s birthday party. He’s never shied from singing frankly of familial tragedy and personal travails, which will no doubt tempt some fans to parse Homies for biographical clues.
The crickets on “Flight” sound like a callback to both Animal Collective’s campfire era and the group’s Meeting of the Waters EP, from last year, which Avey Tare and Geologist wrote on their own, holed up in some Amazonian backwater. That group has always been an elastic enterprise; is Homies about stretching wings, or breaking points? No one but Lennox knows, of course. The EP opens with the sound of keys being scooped up off the table, and to join him here is to follow him on a singular flight of fancy, to enter into his own hermetic world, where dejection meets exhilaration and jumbled thoughts run free. It exists only on wax because it’s a refuge; its purposeful clutter the antithesis of everything that’s streamlined, optimized, and accessible at the click of a button. “We don’t share at all/Why are we telling them to share it all,” he sings at the close of “Flight,” and it might as well be the raison d’etre for the whole record.


This new quartet, which features the sax playing of Colin Stetson and drumming of Greg Fox, turns the crossroads of metal and jazz into a righteous, ecstatic fusion.

Ex Eye

Wherever heavy metal meets with jazz, some caveat emptor is almost sure to follow. “It’s not swing for the faint of heart,” a typical critical warning may read, like a semi-serious disclaimer on a bottle of high-grade hot sauce. “Only for fans of the EXTREME!” The custom isn’t without warrant, of course. This particular musical crossroads has long been one of outsized intensity, from Bill Laswell’s decades of outlandish experiments to the jazz-laced intricacy of prog metal and breakneck thrash. Then there’s a recent cadre, like France’s Aluk Todolo and the Netherlands’ Dead Neanderthals, that likes to dress its jazz in black, so the knotty complexity comes shrouded in steely menace. Independently, jazz and metal can be hyper-codified forms, each very selective about what gets through the gates of credibility; together, they are almost wickedly so, with a sense of self-selection as intimidating as the sounds themselves.
But Ex Eye, a new quartet featuring some very familiar names, seems determined to upend that off-putting expectation. On its radiant and righteous self-titled debut, Ex Eye—drummer Greg Fox, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Toby Summerfield—gathers like a thunderstorm around the baritone saxophone of Colin Stetson, whose high volume and versatility are both anchor and catapult. His tightly spiraling melody during “Opposition/Perihelion; The Coil,” a long-playing fever dream of relentless drums and ascendant guitar, is the snake charmer’s ruse, the trick that tantalizes this beast of a band. On the other hand, his ability to hold and stretch a note like a bionic foghorn during “Anaitis Hymnal; The Arkose Disc” provides a canvas, gradually covered with a wash of accreting, overwhelming sound. Ex Eye slices exciting elements from a dozen extreme forms—black metal and doom metal, free jazz, hard bop, harsh noise, EDM, even 20th-century symphonies—and shapes them into seamless chimeras. These five pieces are as urgent as they are magnetic. Against incredible odds, Ex Eye is practically uplifting.
Make no mistake: The sounds here are certainly foreboding. Stetson’s bulbous saxophone tone often suggests the dying rites of some safari animal, while Ismaily’s electronics conjure insectoid swarms of Pentecostal intensity. Summerfield prefers high-treble riffs that flicker like lightning, and the hyperkinetic drumming familiar from Fox’s time in Liturgy or leading his own band Guardian Alien is omnipresent and exaggerated here.
But all four members of Ex Eye also boast pedigrees at the accessible fringes of the avant-garde. Stetson is the unlikely solo saxophone star who makes punishing records with Mats Gustafsson and pleasing ones with Bon Iver. Fox records esoteric pieces using biorhythm sensors, but he also plays with rock bands, tinkers with dance tracks, and drums for experimental music’s favorite recent gateway, Ben Frost. Summerfield hopscotches among genres and scenes, while Ismaily has backed the likes of Tom Waits and Laura Veirs.
With that in mind, these five songs never feel laborious, overindulgent, or repetitive. “Xenolith; The Anvil” even sounds like an outlier instrumental hit or, better yet, the obliterative answer to TNGHT’s “Higher Ground” and Anna Meredith’s “Nautilus”—a piece of mutated fanfare meant to soundtrack some grand conquest. Even when these songs stretch beyond the 10-minute mark, they’re busy enough to earn and maintain attention, dense enough to reward it repeatedly. “Tten Crowns; The Corruptor,” for instance, seems as drunk on Dixieland as it is high on the neoclassical metal of Yngwie Malmsteen. As the band zigs and zags, these 12 minutes fly past.
Sure, jazz and metal can have tedious rules, with minutiae-minded debates about what does or does not fit beneath each umbrella filling message boards and books alike. But at their best, both forms conjure a feeling of liberation, with sounds and ideas too immense for rock or pop strictures. The overwhelming volume of metal and the imaginative improvisation of jazz are parallel musical avenues for getting free. That’s often been lost in combinations of the two. As Ex Eye make high-volume symphonies of whatever they want, those are the values that they splice together so well. This is incredibly heavy music made light (joyful, even) by the zeal and power of its players. By plowing into, through, and ultimately out of the dark, Ex Eye is an ecstatic fusion—an exhilarating exclamation of defiance, no warning required.


Briana Marela's new album, All Around Us, gets its name from a children’s book, an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way she talks about emotions. She recorded it in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, and strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits.

All Around Us

All Around Us gets its name from a children’s book. It's an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way Briana Marela talks about emotions. "It’s cool to care! Chill is boring," she recently tweeted, and she means it; she titled her 2012 album Speak from Your Heart.
Marela recorded All Around Us, her first for Jagjaguwar, in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers. Strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits. Not surprisingly, some of this record’s instrumental sections—particularly the intros of "Dani", "Surrender", and "Further"—feel like place settings for a soaring Jónsi vocal. Instead, Marela enters with crystalline sweetness, not unlike Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry, but breathier, more deliberate, and precise. Just as she does in her intimate live performances, Marela loops and layers pitched exhalations (usually "oh" or "ah-oh") to create choral collages that could just as easily evoke Iceland or her Pacific Northwest homeland. It’s her best, most affecting asset.
Her emotional forthrightness can be refreshing, too. On "Friend Tonight", she forces herself out of the house and pleads for an old flame to help her face the darkness, but only in a platonic way. "Don’t come back to my bed tonight/ I just need a friend tonight," she repeats. Just as often, though, her only mildly poetic candor disrupts the songs. Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter. On "Take Care of Me", a bouncy tale of a relationship going right, a line like "Now you know me so well, it’s special that I can be myself" stands out not for its honesty but its jarring "Sesame Street" tone.
"I Don’t Belong to You" suffers from the same clunkiness: "Dream of all the possibilities/ We can do anything/ It’s not a competition/ Everyone has music within them." And "Follow It" is meant to be similarly inspirational, but even amid the gorgeous waves of Marela’s vocals and the well-placed, unpredictable percussion, the words sound like the platitudes of an out-of-work motivational speaker.
She's at her best when she’s lyrically and instrumentally ethereal. "Everything Is New" reworks a song from an earlier live album, and Marela wisely lets it breathe and slowly build, accompanying only with subtle drones at first. "What matters when everything is new?" she asks. It’s a worthwhile question, and she uses it to get at the concept of carpe diem. "All we have is now," she says. "All we have is here, and I don’t have the time/ Want to keep you always near, but I don’t have the time." That is honest simplicity. Sometimes—perhaps most often—relationships end not with fits of rage and screaming and crying. They end for multiple mundane reasons. Two people are right in front of each other, yet they don’t have time to figure it out. Life gets in the way. As Marela sings on the title track, "Time is love, and love is the time it takes to know someone so well." Love takes time, and that takes work—that’s the stuff that belongs in both children’s books and Marela’s music.


Following 2016’s iiiDrops, the Chicago rapper returns with another album that defies expectations. There is a greater range of flows explored, a greater range of tones discovered, and a sharper focus throughout.

QUARTERTHING

Toward the end of QUARTERTHING, a distinction is made: “There are two types of people in this world: the type of people that look and the type of people that see.” Joey Purp has long been in the latter camp, possessing both a steely awareness and the ability to detail the nuances of the world before him. He is proudly a dope dealer’s son but wants a different future for his own. He’s so attuned to his own contradictions and the ways they reflect the communities that made him, that he often sees all the angles—a byproduct of a life spent straddling binaries. QUARTERTHING is where everything he’s seen starts to bleed together. It’s an expansive album that casually balances his puffed-up swaggering and his conscience-stricken morality.
He’s been vocal about his commitment to defying the expectations of what it means to be a Chicago rapper, something he’s been building toward since 2012’s The Purple Tape. QUARTERTHING is his most daring progression, rewrites the laws that previously governed his songs and takes a sledgehammer to any sonic barriers left. It’s a transformation similar to the one Vince Staples underwent from Summertime ’06 to Big Fish Theory, shifting from clear-eyed documentarian to composition-concentrated aestheticist without compromising the integrity of the powerful, personal stories captured inside. Some raps stumble upon episodes from his dealer past, others are all about securing the bag, but his actions speak louder than his words.
Many rappers contain multitudes, but Purp is among the most effortlessly pliable. He can be two different things in the same breath. On QUARTERTHING, he is a survivalist who is only a few steps removed from his days as a co-conspirator in a family drug enterprise and from making it out of a crime-adjacent life for good. He spends a lot of time dreaming, and reconciling those dreams with crushing realities: “Dreaming about the problems money bring/When you used to not having shit young niggas brag about everything,” on “Look at My Wrist.” You get the sense that he’s speaking directly to QUARTERTHING’s thesis: that Purp has entered the stage of his rap career where he’s seeing more money than he’s ever seen before, and this is him making a big show of that big payoff.
It’d be easy to hear this record as broader than its predecessor, a turn away from the finely spun tales that felt pragmatically lyrical. The writing is undoubtedly less mindful and scene-driven here, less determined to one-up talented local friends like Chance, Saba, Vic Mensa, and Mick Jenkins. But the rapping on QUARTERTHING is even more loose-jointed and pleasing to the ear, slashing in and out of beats so precisely it’s almost surgical. There is a greater range of flows explored, a greater range of tones discovered, and a sharper focus throughout.
His raps are less wordy and less committed to description, but they aren’t without plotting. They maintain the same vigilance, the same cautious optimism, and the same shrewdness. He’s still liable to rip off a perfectly measured meter, like this one on “24k Gold/Sanctified”: “Thinking ’bout the game and all the ways it should be redesigned/Thinking ’bout the pain and all the days my brother spent confined/Thinking about the stages and the ways they infiltrate the mind.” If the observations are framed more simply, the constructions are just as complex, if not more.
And there’s nothing simple about the ambitious and wide-ranging songcraft, which veers from reverential soul to Chicago house to barking trap without ever feeling unfocused or cursory. Each style feels lived in; Purp masters everything from fleet-footed club rap to expressive, cinematic Just Blaze-like chipmunk chops. The sounds are more dynamic, too; bigger, as on “Godbody Pt. 2,” or more far-out, as on “Paint Thinner,” or more remote, as on “2012.” iiiDrops was all maximalist brass and skipping Neptunes-ish funk. The songs honked and wheezed and skittered, a controlled cacophony Purp commanded with force. These songs are more finely tuned without any jarring transitions. His raps vary to fit the textures of each production, which sample a great breadth of sounds.
If there’s any pathos lacking in QUARTERTHING, Purp fills it in with thrilling performances and exquisite arrangements from Knox Fortune, Thelonious Martin, Nez & Rio, RZA, and more. Even for a rapper who has made a point of showing us his versatility before, this feels radical and exploratory. These are songs that refuse to be beholden to what came before, songs that understand and even cherish their connections to music of the past but have entirely different destinations in mind. That unwillingness to retrace any steps is a true mark of vision.


On her debut album, the Chattanooga rapper balances raunchy sex talk with reflections on trauma. It’s a deliriously entertaining, ambitious project from an artist operating at her peak.

Muthaland

Bbymutha believes in the power of reclamation. Originally performing under the name Cindyy Kushh, the Chattanooga rapper has flipped her current name, usually a pejorative, into a term of endearment. “It’s not an insult to me,” she told The Fader in 2018. Women in rap—particularly Black women—face constant pressure to repress their sexuality, but Bbymutha is having none of that. Her previous projects balance her outward sexual bravado with the public and private turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. On Muthaland, her debut (and apparently final) album, she expands her ideas to feature-length.
The double album’s framing device involves skits depicting a game show, live “from the fiery depths of hell,” where a contestant named Bootyholeisha spends 24 hours with Bbymutha. It’s a loose concept that telegraphs the levity sprinkled throughout the album. Opening song “Roaches Don’t Die” showcases her knack for balancing laughs with confessions. She’s dressing men down for trying too hard one minute (“Niggas tuck they tees/Tryna sell a fantasy/That buckle bigger than your dick, huh?”) and reliving memories of being jumped in her high school gym the next. By its end, the song’s title becomes a battle cry; she’s clawed her way out of the pits.
The hallmarks of Bbymutha’s lyrics are fairly straightforward: kiss-offs to ain’t-shit dudes, flexing on other women, reflecting on trauma, and a plethora of sex talk. Her style borrows from the blueprint laid by fellow raunchy Tennessee rap titan Gangsta Boo, but Bbymutha is no carbon copy. Her rhyme schemes are elastic, her thick Chattanooga drawl stretching rhymes like taffy across entire songs. The run of songs from “Holographic” to “Cocaine Catwalk,” in particular, is deliriously entertaining, with Bbymutha constantly topping her own braggadocio (“Rock a nigga’s semen like a ski mask” from “Either Way” is a personal favorite). Her unrestrained freedom is a tonic in a world where conservative pundit Ben Shapiro can go viral for asking his “doctor wife” about the scientific accuracy of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.”
The narrative focus allows her room to experiment with flows and music. Rock Floyd, who co–executive produced Muthaland alongside Bbymutha, is responsible for more than half of the album’s beats. Some songs crunch menacingly (“Spooky Mutha Mansion,” “Cocaine Catwalk”) while others sail by on jagged house rhythms (“Nice Guy,” “Heavy Metal”), but all are united by a booming low end, affording Bbymutha’s words considerable heft. The handful of songs produced by others, including Detroit sound masher Black Noi$e—who recently featured Bbymutha on his electric new record Oblivion—mesh nicely with Floyd and Bbymutha’s vision. She sounds just as comfortable keeping pace with Yung Baby Tate over the metallic clangs of “Nice Guy” as she does singing over the plucky synths on “Dream Sequence.” Her versatility is even more impressive considering the album’s length. At 25 tracks—20 songs and five skits—there’s remarkably little fat on Muthaland. It’s the second album of the year, following Blu & Exile’s excellent comeback project, Miles: From an Interlude Called Life, to justify such a loaded tracklist.
Across Muthaland, Bbymutha reclaims several words used to jab at her pride: “baby mama,” “slut,” “hoodrat.” She says them with her chest and siphons the negative energy in order to lift herself above the competition. It’s exhilarating, which makes the prospect of her early retirement all the sadder. Rap could use several more voices like hers. If Muthaland really is the last album Bbymutha plans on releasing to the public, she’s brought us into her twisted world at its creative peak.

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Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives-- covering 1963-72-- finally arrives as a 10-disc multimedia set available on DVD or Blu-ray.

Neil Young: The Archives Vol. 1: 1963-1972

The Archives Vol. 1: 1963-1972

In the wake of Bob Dylan's successful 1985 expanded anthology Biograph, it seemed like every rock artist of note was lining up for CD box-set canonization. And true to his reputation as a futurist, David Bowie tried to outdo them all with 1989's Sound + Vision, which supplemented the usual greatest-hits-plus-rarities format with a bonus disc of visual content that would showcase the glorious new CD-Video format. There was only one problem with his attempt to revolutionize the box set: no one knew what the hell a CD-Video disc was, let alone owned any kind of device that would allow one to view it.
It was around this same time that Neil Young started talking up an ambitious career-retrospective project called Archives, and given the amount of unreleased songs Young routinely dusted off in his concerts, fans had come to expect nothing less than a parallel-universe repertoire every bit as rich and deep as his official one-- a Decade to last for decades. But as gleaned by anyone who's gone to a Neil Young show expecting to hear the hits but treated to an hour of Greendale instead, being a Neil fan requires a certain amount of patience. Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives has gone on to usurp even Chinese Democracy as the ultimate lost-album punchline. But the long-delayed arrival of this first volume seems less a matter of archeology as technology. And like the Bowie box, there's some confusion about how exactly you're supposed to use the thing.
Neil Young is an odd sort of perfectionist, favoring a raw immediacy in his recordings that often means leaving the mistakes in for purity's sake, but he's obsessed with making sure those mistakes are mixed and mastered to sometimes unattainable standards of fidelity. (He refused to release arguably his finest album, 1974's On the Beach, on CD until 2003 for this reason.) So it appears that the advent of Blu-ray HD audio technology was the missing piece that has allowed Neil to realize his multimedia masterplan for Archives. What little public comment he's made about Archives' release has taken the form of evangelical praise for the medium, urging fans to adopt the new technology like a Best Buy salesman working on commission.
The first volume of Archives arrives as a 10-disc set, spanning the first 10 years of Young's career and, somewhat confusingly, three different formats. For the most ardent audiophiles, there's the $300 multimedia-enhanced Blu-ray edition that includes six compilation discs; the previously released Live at the Fillmore East and Live at Massey Hall; an additional solo concert recorded in 1969 at the Riverboat coffeehouse in Toronto (though it boasts a tracklist similar to last year's Live at Canterbury House set, also included here as an unlisted bonus throw-in); the first DVD release of Young's infamous tour-documentary-cum-existential-road-flick, Journey Through the Past; plus online-update capabilities through which users will have access to more material.
For equally fervent fans (and Pitchfork reviewers) with inferior home-entertainment set-ups, there's a $200 version boasting all of the above musical and multimedia content in a DVD format. And for those who just want some Neil on-hand in the car to soundtrack future road trips forevermore, there's a basic eight-disc $100 CD box with all the tunes but none of the extras. (All versions come with mp3 download codes, though we all know how Neil feels about iPods.)
Regardless of the format, each version of Archives makes the same convincing case: For Neil Young, the years of 1963 to 1972 were marked by a rapid maturation and a series of successful stylistic reinventions that rivaled the Beatles. Starting out as the surf-rockin' frontman for Winnipeg garage combo the Squires, he quickly transitioned into the folkie busker cutting early demos of "Sugar Mountain" for Elektra Records in 1965; the wide-screened psychedelic visionary in Buffalo Springfield; the savage electric warrior of 1969's Crazy Horse debut, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; the heroic hippie wingman for Crosby, Stills and Nash; and then the country-rock traditionalist of 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest. On top of summarizing a tidy 10-year span, Archives Vol. 1 ends symbolically with Neil at his commercial peak, before a growing disillusionment with rock stardom and the death of close friends would usher in a more darkly compelling phase of his career.
But while they're paying the least amount of money, the CD-box purchasers may feel the most short-changed, as Archives is not quite the vault-clearing revelation that fans may have been hoping for. Of the advertised 43 unreleased tracks, most take the form of alternate mixes or live versions of familiar material, ranging from the subtle (a cavernous mix of "Helpless" that enhances the song's hymnal qualities) to the substantial (early stripped-down versions of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and future On the Beach track "See the Sky About to Rain"). But as Archives attests, the lack of true, unheard rarities can be explained by the fact that Neil's been pulling from his mythical stash of lost songs since the mid-60s, padding his 70s and 80s releases with songs ("Winterlong", "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown", "Wonderin'") written during this early era.
So in a purely musical sense, Archives' real selling point isn't so much the tracklist as the remastering. And make no doubt about it: Next to the budget-line CD issues that Reprise rushed to the market in the late 80s, the new versions sound spectacular, breathing new life into these old warhorses. (The swirling symphonics of Harvest's "A Man Needs a Maid", in particular, beg for a big pair of headphones and an easy chair.) However, one can't help but question why these remasters can only be accessed via an expensive box set rather than through individual album reissues. With so many songs here already familiar to even the most casual classic-rock radio listener, the most illuminating moments on Archives come from the less celebrated tracts of his career. For one, the Squires tracks provide not just a time-capsule snapshot of Neil's first recording forays; rather, songs like the wonderful "I'll Love You Forever" provide glimpses of an unrealized future as a Beatlesque balladeer. (Alternately, the twangy instrumental "Mustangs" could pass for vintage Meat Puppets.) And if the turn-of-the-70s triumvirate of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest became the go-to soundtracks for America's post-hippie hangover, Neil's comparatively overlooked 1969 self-titled debut feels all the more contemporary for being excluded from that classic-rock holy trinity, boasting a soft-rock lushness that-- in light of psychedelic successors like the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Sparklehorse-- has proven as influential as any album in his canon.
But as Archives' multitude of newspaper clippings and radio interview excerpts explain, it was Neil's dissatisfaction with that first album's textured production and mastering that made him go folk/rock (not to be confused with folk-rock), and though they're already been released, the Massey Hall and Fillmore sets still represent this era's purest manifestations of those acoustic/electric extremes. The 1969 Riverboat disc, however, is less about what Neil does during the songs (acoustic readings of his first-album and Springfield catalogues) as between them: he talks. A lot. So much so that the these between-song "raps" constitute their own bonus feature on the Riverboat disc-- perhaps inspired by one-time tour-mate Thurston Moore's similar verbal deconstruction of a Venom live album-- with a stream of amusing anecdotes about groupies, drugs and the Guess Who. In the same sense, Archives is ultimately less interesting when seen as a compilation of music than as a digital storehouse of a man's complete life and work.
Taken individually, the reams of extras that accompany every track on the DVD/Blu-ray editions-- candid photos, original handwritten lyric sheets, radio-promo spots, newspaper clippings, tape-box doodles, and so on-- may not seem like a compelling reason to pony up for Archives' enhanced options. But cumulatively, they chart an evolution as intriguing as that heard in the songs. Given that Neil's become rather media-shy in his old age, Archives provides an opportunity to track his transformation as a public figure through the many newspaper articles and radio-interview clips gathered here, from the wide-eyed teenager promoting his club night in the Winnipeg daily to the disgruntled Buffalo Springfield exile trashing Jimmy Messina's mixing job on that band's last record (early evidence of Neil's notorious audiophilia) to the self-described "rich hippie" contemplating the peculiarities of fame just as Harvest is about to make him a superstar.
And the (mostly hidden) video teases sprinkled throughout the set-- like CSNY performing "Down By the River" on a David Steinberg-hosted teen dance show, or rare glimpses of the long-gone Riverboat-- culminate with a treasure trove of footage on Archives' final disc. Here we get a series of intimate interviews conducted during Harvest's farmhouse recording sessions, as well as Archives' most amusing easter egg find: a 15-minute sequence where Neil discovers CSNY bootlegs during a record-shopping trip circa 1971, sparking a heated argument with the store employee that culminates in Neil walking out of the shop, bootlegs in hand, without paying for them. (The sequence is especially resonant in light of Neil's recent endorsement of Warner Music Group pulling all their artists' videos off YouTube.)
Taken together, Archives' musical and visual material form as complete a picture of Neil Young's early years as the most die-hard fan could hope for. But therein lies the fundamental flaw of Archives on DVD-- you can't take them together. Each track is housed in a virtual file folder that allows you to play the audio track or scour the bonus content; there is no way to do them simultaneously. So your options are either to let the music play uninterrupted (while your screen displays serene film loops of spinning record players and reel-to-reel machines), or exit "play" mode and silently sift through the extras-- without being able to actually listen to the song those extras are meant to contextualize. It's like being told that your computer can run iTunes, or your web browser, but you have to shut down one to use the other. It means you end up spending as much time fiddling with your DVD menu controls as enjoying the material you're trying to access. You have to spring for the Blu-ray to access different pieces of media simultaneously.
Brian Eno was recently quoted as saying that if the practice of selling music in physical form is to continue, the emphasis will have to shift from the content to the form, to enable a unique user experience that can't be replicated with the click of a mouse. Archives constitutes a bold step towards this new paradigm, where the delivery system is as much in service to the supplemental materials as the music that ephemera serves to canonize. And for all its multimedia chicanery, Archives ultimately seeks to reassert an old-fashioned mode of attentive listening and engagement that's been mostly lost as music becomes a WiFi-streamed soundtrack to some other activity. But if Neil expects his fans to retain their enthusiasm for future volumes (particularly when the focus shifts to his erratic 80s output), he'll need to make that immersion process more fluid, less disruptive. Certainly Archives' first volume contains enough audio and visual stimuli to keep a Neil Young fan busy till the next edition arrives (presumably) in 2029. But that's as much a comment on the impractical, time-consuming interface as the content itself.


The UK musician offers a revealing look at the making of her acclaimed 2011 album Let England Shake—just the latest in a growing series of behind-the-scenes demo collections.

Let England Shake - Demos

In 2015, Londoners were invited to watch PJ Harvey at work on her ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Artist and band took up residence in a studio in the city’s historic Somerset House that was open to the public in 45-minute slots. The reaction to this experiment was a mixture of fascination and frustration: Some audiences caught the band in full inspirational flight; others witnessed 45 minutes of drum tinkering. Seven years on, PJ Harvey continues to pull back the curtain on the recording process: Let England Shake - Demos is the seventh in a series of demo albums accompanying the vinyl reissues of her work, mixing artistic revelation with superfluity in a way that would resonate with Harvey’s Somerset House audience.
Harvey has a long history of fleshing out her official releases with supplementary materials. In 1993, she followed Rid of Me with the incendiary 4-Track Demos just five months later. Many of the recent collections feel less than essential, except perhaps to superfans; Harvey tends not to tinker too much with the structure of her songs during the recording process, which means the listener is left with what are often, essentially, crudely recorded versions of already familiar songs. But Let England Shake - Demos is by far the most enlightening of the bunch. Like an uneven block of stone, it allows us to witness how she chipped away at the album’s singular shape, abandoning ideas that might have lessened the songs’ impact.
Let England Shake, PJ Harvey’s eighth studio LP, is one of her strongest and most experimental works, thanks in part to her clever use of sampling to support her songwriting—like a two-line extract from Niney the Observer’s incandescent reggae classic “Blood and Fire” that winds around “Written on the Forehead” like a scaffold, its stiff reinforcement vital to the song’s emotional load. At the time, Harvey said that lines from songs she was listening to would somehow work their way into her music. But Let England Shake - Demos shows that these lines could also work their way out. The album’s title track initially featured a sample from Canadian vocal quartet the Four Lads’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which Harvey scrapped after realizing it was “drawing the song back rather than letting it become its own living entity.” Listening to the demo version, this was undoubtedly the right decision: The Four Lads’ overly cheery melody clouds out the pitiless blue-sky clarity of the song’s studio take.
Similarly, the demo version of “Bitter Branches” is shot through with a crackling, wobbling siren sound, like an alien invasion witnessed through a 1930s radio, that gums up the song’s gears. If you listen to the two “Bitter Branches” side by side, expunging this effect seems like an obvious decision. At the time, it was probably anything but, just one among thousands of agonizing individual choices an artist confronts when making a record. These nuances suggest that Let England Shake - Demos is a record destined primarily for PJ Harvey obsessives and audio freaks keen to pore over subtle tweaks in songwriting and production. “Hanging In The Wire - Demo,” for example, reveals that the protagonist of the song was originally called “Davy,” while on “The Glorious Land - Demo,” Harvey experiments with an oddly warbling accent that gets toned down considerably in the album version.
Yet there are a handful of early takes that rival (and perhaps even eclipse) the polished Let England Shake studio creations. “The Words That Maketh Murder - Demo” features a generous sample of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” that is reduced to a brief interpolation in the song’s studio version; the clip’s carefree rock swing adds a moment of shocking levity to this most intensely overwrought of albums. Elsewhere, the scratchy guitar of “The Last Living Rose - Demo” bares its teeth in a way that sits well with the song’s exhausted contemplation of England, while the distorted, stripped-back air of “In the Dark Places - Demo” allows Harvey’s savage vocal to hit even harder, a gaping laceration to the studio version’s sutured wound.
Let England Shake - Demos may be a supporting act, feeding off the original LP’s emotional spark like suckerfishes on a shark. But as an insight into the creative process of one of England’s greatest musicians, the record has shades of The Beatles: Get Back: It depicts artistry as not merely a lightning bolt of inspiration, but the sum total of the innumerable choices, bold and mundane alike, that surround it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With warbly melodies and cozy instrumentation, the songwriter and producer’s first solo album in 16 years finds an intimate sanctuary. The messiness is a feature, not a flaw.

High Reality

If the name Rusty Santos rings a bell, there’s a good chance that at some point in your life you were the kind of devout Animal Collective fan who traded live bootlegs in forum threads and defended Danse Manatee’s honor to the death. Though never an official member of the group, he played a pivotal role as producer during the mid-aughts, piecing together Sung Tongs’ collage of acoustic guitars, spooky samples, and barbershop harmonies. He’s continued to work with Panda Bear on solo projects like the plunderphonic Person Pitch and 2019’s Buoys, as well as a few alumni from AnCo’s boutique Paw Tracks label, but simply lumping Santos in with the storied psych-rock outfit does him a disservice.
During footwork’s breakthrough period from 2011 to 2014, he worked behind the boards on some of the genre’s most pivotal releases, including DJ Rashad’s Welcome to the Chi and Traxman’s The Architek. This brief stint in Chicago’s underground club scene had a marked effect on Santos, inspiring his own band the Present to migrate from psychedelic noise rock to vaguely Lynchian club music. While his recent production credits with Jackie Mendoza and Panda Bear have been more grounded in indie-pop tradition, Santos’ fascination with the Auto-Tuned glossolalia and 808 thump of contemporary trap has steered his clients into intriguing territory.
High Reality, Santos’ first solo album in 16 years, revisits the skeletal brand of folktronica he and Panda Bear explored on Buoys. Strummy campfire chords lay a foundation for much of the record, a familiar groundwork that gives Santos ample room to expressively contort his digitally altered vocals. But he ditches the echoing samples and aquatic sound effects that tethered Buoys to the AnCo oeuvre, opting for a drier, more economical mix that allows for greater intimacy between artist and audience.
Each instrument that appears on “Kick Out the Spirit,” for example, feels so clean that it’s slightly unsettling. Plasticky synth strings undergird acoustic fingerpicking, punctuated by the occasional dash of drum machine that sounds like it came packaged with Santos’ recording software. Though far from lo-fi, his chosen sound palette is back-to-basics in a contemporary sense, sharing a sense of post-digital authenticity with the clever use of Logic’s stock percussion on recent Porches releases, or Kanye West’s ability to make generic organ presets sound regal in the right context. These smooth textures place emphasis on Santos’ voice, which is, in contrast, closely mic’d and subtly distorted, following warbly off-the-cuff melodies that are more concerned with immediate expression than catchiness. “I will disown this dystopian nightmare,” he sings with defiant optimism: His major-key battle cries wield hope in a present that seeks to stamp it out at each turn.
Santos’ will to manufacture hope isn’t merely meant to be a salve for These Uncertain Times. High Reality was written after he was placed under an involuntary psychiatric hold due to a psychotic break, and he has said that the record and its title describe his mindstate while “detached from day-to-day reality during [his] crisis.” Opener “Dream in Stereo” sets the tone immediately, tucking internal frustration beneath a surface layer of jangly psychedelic pop. “I know how it feels to never quite belong,” he coos, extending both empathy to the listener and assurance to himself before illustrating this struggle to connect in surreal detail. Santos conjures elements of the album’s new-age mythos—angels, stardust, auras—with the intense concentration of a spellcaster, injecting mysticism into the song’s standard indie-rock trappings.
“Symbolic” and “Apocalypses” take the juxtaposition between cozy instrumentation and cataclysmic imagery a step further. Occupying High Reality’s middle section, both tracks are rather spare, consisting of little more than light strumming, handclaps, and a few keyboard flourishes, supplying a tranquil backdrop for scenes that would feel at home in the Book of Revelation. On the latter track, Santos describes feeling the laws of physics distort as his soul is assumed into heaven: a morbid, ambiguously triumphant vision wrapped in a chorus that goes down like warm Sleepytime tea.
High Reality’s medium and message may be mismatched, but this messiness is a feature, not a flaw. Through gentle restraint, Santos has fashioned his own source of comfort in a vast, sometimes confounding narrative that feels beyond his control. Oddly enough, it’s when the record’s sound mirrors its subject matter, like on the serpentine “Master Zodiac,” that it misses the mark, embarking on lengthy math-rock tangents that draw attention away from Santos’ vocals and leave you without space to properly take in the tumult. For the most part, though, the record does provide this sanctuary, like watching a raging storm through the window from the safety of your own bed. There’s something soothing about a little chaos when it’s seen from a distance.


The Inglewood artist’s first album as Kendrick and SZA’s labelmate is a neo-soul-tinged space odyssey about love.

November

On the first proper song of SiR’s latest LP, he sings, “All her lil friends can’t stand me/Because they know I would trade her love for a Grammy.” The arrogant posture is surprising, coming from someone whose breakthrough EPs were overflowing with sweet nothings, and it stands in contrast with the romantic security he sings about on the album’s closing track (“You don’t care about my name/If I didn’t have a dime, you would care for me the same”). That conflict—between pride and heart, loving and leaving—provides the dramatic tension at the album’s core.
November arrives exactly one year after TDE announced SiR as its newest signee. The label’s roster doesn’t seem to believe in creating run-of-the-mill anything, and it follows that the 31-year-old Inglewood singer-songwriter and producer R&B isn’t just R&B. There’s a neo-soul silkiness to many of his songs, with an atmospheric, jazzy vibe in the production—November is an album for lighting incense, not candles. In this sense, he’s TDE’s answer to a moment that has seen acts like Daniel Caesar subtly returning to the genre’s more tender roots with great success. Even so, throughout the album, SiR deftly bridges his old-school sounds with new-school references (“hit the DM”).
This is especially notable in the case of “K,” a female robotic travel companion who interacts with SiR throughout the album. She runs a systems check, alerts him of his progress on an unspecified interstellar journey (“33 trillion kilometers to go,” she says at the album’s midway mark), and provides him with emotional comfort. To listeners, she’s a plot device that offers narrative cohesion and a context to invest in beyond the music. And much like “Jane,” the computerized sidekick who accompanied Kanye West into outer space on his Glow in the Dark tour a decade ago, “K” is a way to signal SiR’s growing artistic ambitions.
Throughout, SiR (who’s married in real life) sings like a selfish man reliving past transgressions. On the slow-burning and Schoolboy Q-assisted “Something Foreign,” he’s nonchalant and focused on his status. “Tryna keep it humble in a world full of egos, gangsters, and evils,” he sings over a fluttering piano melody. Yet ego seems to get the best of him over and over again. “Something New,” a horn-laden duet with British singer-songwriter Etta Bond, captures a summer’s forbidden love. “Tell me what would you do if she was me/Tell me how would you move if we were free,” Bond delicately sings. Elsewhere, on “I Know,” an Auto-Tuned SiR taunts somebody’s babyfather over a lowrider bassline; “Never Home” finds him doing a spoken-word interlude about how the lifestyle of an up-and-coming musician has pulled him away. He remains unapologetic as a woman demands answers over voicemail for their relationship (or lack thereof).
By the time the fuzzy kick of “War” and the reverb- and regret-tinged “Better” come around, SiR is finally ready to admit fault. “I know I’m right where I needed to be all along, so/Until I have your love, there’s no surrender, no retreat,” he sings on the former, his satin voice making the words effortlessly believable. Songs of romance—present and lost—are what he does best, and he peels back the layers of passion with exceptional potency. “She just wanted to love me, I wouldn’t let her/Now she don’t know me,” he bemoans on “Better,” before dejectedly asking “K” to delete the transmission and initiate sleep, as they’re still 12 trillion kilometers away from their destination.
It’s never made clear where, exactly, he and “K” are headed. Perhaps they’re on a journey towards acceptance of one’s flaws, or nodding to the feeling that one has forever left to go, no matter how much progress is made. Or maybe the trip represents SiR’s potential as his career starts to take off. Whatever the case, November makes it easy to lose yourself in the ride.


Focusing more on songcraft than synth textures, inc. no world's sophomore album is a more grounded, elemental look at 21st-century R&B.

As Light as Light

On their 2013 debut no world, the L.A. duo inc. no world (formerly inc., also formerly Teen Inc.) were more comfortable in the shadows than in the light. Directors of mood first and foremost, brothers Andrew and Daniel Aged crafted a consistent set of earnest if at times anonymous blue-eyed R&B. no world was the product of two studio rats who had spent years honing their craft, reverent to plush ’80s R&B but with a foot in the ’00s. Their vibes-above-all approach played to their strengths: They were not deconstructionists but faithful recreators and Andrew’s gentle vocals were treated more like a texture blended into the mood.
As Light As Light, their first album in three years, plays it straighter. Andrew’s voice is pushed closer to the front of the mix and the production carves out a deeper pocket for his vocals. Whereas no world featured repeated mantras that unfurled at their own pace, As Light As Light places an emphasis on more traditional verse-chorus-verse songwriting. On “The Wheel,” everything revolves around and builds up to its chorus, where all the heft comes from Andrew’s vocals, injected here with a heat previously only hinted at. When he latches onto a chorus that’s got legs (“Waters of You”), the brothers instinctively milk it for all its worth. But moving away from the chant-like repetition that worked so well on no world exposes some pedestrian songwriting: Andrew fails to breathe life into the love-as-water metaphor on “Without Water,” and when the Ageds don’t peel back the layers, Andrew’s verses tend to get lost in the shuffle (“In Your Beauty”), a song that should have taken off at least one if not two accessories before leaving the house.
Andrew’s devotionals, given extra weight now that he demonstrates his range as a vocalist, are forever in a state of adoration. “I have fears, I have fallen, and I’ve lost my way back home/But I’ve never had to wonder about the love you’ve shown,” he sings about a long-time lover on “Without Water.” These are songs of connection, not conquest; they celebrate emotional support, not emotional drain. “We’ll stay up laughing [about] what we thought was true,” he imagines on “In This Dream,” a late-album slow-burner with a hollowed-out warmth. Andrew sings with a generous optimism that feels hard-earned, the kind that emerges after a realization that all other approaches hold intimacy at arm’s length.
Near the end, its songs become sparse and less adorned—even rootsier. There’s an honest-to-god slide guitar on “In Love,” which shimmers with a lightness characteristic of inc. no world’s former sound but with a stronger focus on songcraft. Much like the rest of As Light As Light, even though the song contains fewer elements, the production feels thicker and less prone to being carried off by the slightest breeze. What remains, however, is an overriding sense of anonymity that blunts the impact of Andrew’s sentiments. While Andrew has a knack for sticky hooks, his vocals rely on nuance more than natural charm—in a crowd of whispery R&B vocalists, he just doesn’t have the range to stick out. But his ability to spin on the same line and draw out different meanings works for inc. no world, who are smart to cast off some of their ambient textures in favor of something more elemental. They remain immaculate R&B players who understand the pleasure of patience and the power of delicacy.


A fundamental EP from the Detroit techno titan gets reissued 18 years after its release; aimed squarely at the dancefloor, its three cuts are by turns gooey, steely, and strange.

Riding the Thin Line EP

The recent flurry of attention around Detroit’s DJ Bone has a better-late-than-never quality. Active since at least the mid 1990s, he has been a tireless presence in the techno underground, pushing his purist vision regardless of critical accolades (or lack thereof). A Motor City loyalist, Bone has always affirmed and expanded upon the core values and aesthetics pioneered by his hometown’s more visible trailblazers, particularly Underground Resistance. Tough percussion and lean, linear structures are the critical support beams for jarring facades. Over two decades after his debut, and with Bone riding a career high, Anotherday Records revisits 1999’s brutal, definitive Riding the Thin Line EP.
Originally released on Juan Atkins’ Metroplex, Riding is a perfect introduction to his world: It’s a hit-and-run haiku, deftly articulating the scope of his work across three cuts. Urgent and concise, the EP establishes the sweaty claustrophobia that Bone would make his trademark and applies it to tracks that are by turns gooey, steely, and strange.
“Shut the Lites Off” wastes no time getting started. Over a barreling groove, a stern, unvarnished vocal sample repeats the title phrase. Halfway between a boot-camp command and a mantra, it builds intensity by doing nothing at all. It’s the kind of tension-escalating power move that creates indelible dancefloor moments. The strings that rise up two minutes in provide a hint of relief, softening the mood with romantic brushstrokes, but overall the track feels like a game of chicken played with the listeners.
“The Funk” builds on the year-zero electro of Atkins’ Cybotron project with a snappy snare and hi-hat pattern fizzing across sludgy 808 bass bombs. The vocals maintain the incantatory style of “Shut the Lites Off,” repeating, “This is what we call the funk,” but the track is littered with quick asides, acidic squiggles, and dissonant sound effects. Closing track “The Haunting” is the best of the bunch: a pounding maelstrom that’s somehow more aggressive yet more restrained than its counterparts. A breathy vocal, glassy strings, and unrelenting percussion submerge listeners in a delirious atmosphere of anxious sensuality. It oozes sex yet seems unconcerned with reaching any kind of climax. Instead it just flickers, shimmers, and roils for a much-too-short four-and-a-half minutes.
In the fabric of Riding you can hear echoes of the past and hints of the future: the Berlin school’s concurrent early experiments in dub, Chicago’s legacy of slimy seduction, and industrial’s clanging techno-primitivism. Meanwhile, the syrupy flanging on “The Funk” and the magenta drip of “The Haunting” directly prefigure the psychedelic house explorations of New Jersey’s DJ Qu and Nicuri. What ties it together is functionality—not to make DJ’s lives easier but to make dancers’ nights crazier. Bone’s concerns lie squarely with the body, using weird twists and heady textures to drive the audience. In this sense, Riding the Thin Line is aptly titled: The EP skates delicately between body and soul, hallucinatory visions and subsuming rhythms, and heaving physicality and heavenly moments of ethereal reprieve.


Filtering the sound of ’80s freestyle through a buoyant, time-warped haze, the debut album from singer/producer Marcus Brown is both captivating and elusive.

Erotic Probiotic 2

With their inquisitive pop music under the name Nourished by Time, singer and producer Marcus Brown rummages through the past like an archaeologist. Since 2019, the Baltimore-raised, London-based crooner has released a series of singles exploring a wide range of 1980s touchstones including new wave, electro-funk, and R&B. On his brief 2022 release Erotic Probiotic, he condensed these influences to two tracks of brooding and fluid synth-pop that recalled Depeche Mode and the Blue Nile. A year later, they’ve taken to another ’80s staple: freestyle. The genre of roller rinks,  impassioned belting, and uptempo 808 beats invigorates Brown’s once-muted approach. It’s his debut album, but he sounds reborn.

Erotic Probiotic 2 plays like a sampler of a time-warped ’80s that took place entirely in Brown’s head—and maybe extends into the present day. In these apparitional songs, Jodeci harmonies float over Paul Hardcastle synth drizzles; Larry Blackmon screams spring off of RZA drums; warped samples of podcast-era Joe Budden and ESPN’s Jay Williams melt into a shoegaze thicket. Brown likely has some personal connections to these disparate sources, but he completely sublimates those attachments into the songwriting. The result is music that is studied but uncouth, familiar but unbidden.

The freestyle credo is that anything goes—rapping, piping, scatting—as long as the rhythm doesn’t let up, and this ethos emboldens Brown to freefall through time. Single “Daddy” begins with pulsing drum programming,  ascendant harmonies, and a cheery rap verse that initially evokes hip-house. But then nocturnal synths and a sour guitar melody descend, and Brown’s vocals turn forlorn for the second verse. “The dot connector/The spot corrector/I say I love you/You say whatever,” they chant on the jubilant but fretting chorus. “Dot connector” is a fitting phrase for their approach, reflecting both the vaporous subject matter and Brown’s expert weaving of styles.

This vision stands out on “The Fields.” The skittering hi-hats, snappy snares, and buoyant bassline suggest Miami bass, while the questioning vocals root the performance in freestyle. “Once or twice I prayed to Jesus/Never heard a word back in plain English/More like signs or advertisements/Telling me to keep consumerizing,” Brown sings on the bouncy hook, lost in the mixed messages of the modern world.  They don’t sink into despair though; voicing his confusion pushes him to keep seeking answers.
The singing on Erotic Probiotic 2 is as homespun as the production. Brown has a liquid baritone that can percolate with ache or froth with joy, and here it does both and more. Opener “Quantum Suicide” features expressive whispers, shouts, coos, and moans that inject intimacy into the bleak subject matter. “Have you ever prayed/For your invention?” they ask. On “Soap Party,” his voice recedes into misty key melodies and propulsive drums as he confesses to being scared to make a move in a relationship. “The truth is in the sun/But there’s comfort in rain,” they sing. It’s one of many moments on the album where the exuberance of the songwriting belies feelings of inertia and indecision.

Despite the retro sounds, Brown studiously avoids nostalgia in his work, an approach that’s refreshing but comes at the expense of vulnerability. Other pop syncretists, like Sudan Archives, Moodymann, and Yves Tumor bring out the appetite and longing in their songs, each acquired curio divulging something about the collector’s urges or facilitating a grand aesthetic. Not so much with Erotic Probiotic 2. Freestyle could be Nourished by Time’s artistic roadmap, or just a passing interest. It’s a testament to these engrossing performances that, wherever they go next, they will probably sound right at home.


A sort of biography in mixtape form, Tribal Rites offers the chance to hear dance-music history through the ears of one of the culture’s most discerning listeners.

Bill Brewster: Bill Brewster Presents Tribal Rites

Bill Brewster Presents Tribal Rites

In 1999, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton published Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, a seismic book that elevated the club DJ from mere nightlife accessory to unsung hero. Two of the music’s most influential DJs, Larry Levan in New York and Ron Hardy in Chicago, had died in 1992, having received little media exposure in their lifetimes. Brewster and Broughton’s work sought to correct that oversight by exalting the DJ and lovingly excavating the underground culture’s rich history. Brewster’s argument on behalf of dance music’s cultural validity has resonated widely. It’s difficult to imagine the current dance-music landscape—with even energy-drink manufacturers and liquor companies dedicated to documenting the culture—without Brewster’s example.
As a DJ, Brewster has proven himself a tireless compiler of dance music’s hidden corners, and he spells out his life’s narrative arc as a DJ, writer, and music fiend on Tribal Rites, a fascinating 3xCD (or 4xLP) compilation. Across 41 tracks, Tribal Rites traces Brewster’s biography as a listener, from psychedelic rock to snotty punk to ecstatic house music, finding through lines across a bewildering number of sounds and—like the greatest DJs he’s interviewed—crafting a story with these seemingly disparate songs. In an era lousy with compilations, DJ mixes, and streaming playlists, the compilation not only unearths some elusive, bewildering gems; it offers the chance to hear through the ears of one of dance music’s most discerning listeners.
A number of themes arise over the nearly four-hour runtime of Tribal Rites, but the first thing that jumps out is not so much its party-time atmosphere as its apocalyptic undertones, as evidenced by two tracks dating from 1971. There’s the sulfuric crunch of Agape’s “Rejoice,” a Christian rock curio that sets ominous Biblical lines (from Matthew 24:7 and Acts 2:20) into psychedelic rock; General Crook flips a line from the Sermon on the Mount for the stomping sting of “What Time It Is.” Which seems heavy, until you consider that dance music culture as we know it today originated in the pressure cooker of 1970s New York, serving as an antidote to the brutality its participants—primarily African-Americans, Latinos, and gays, lesbians, and trans people—faced in their daily lives. Early parties like David Mancuso’s Loft and Nicky Siano’s the Gallery were safe havens for their audience.
In that light, when Brewster gets to Floyd Beck’s slinky groover “Party Is the Solution,” from 1980, it hits less like an escapist trifle and more like the revelatory and all-inclusive conceit that a proper dance party actually is. But Brewster is also enough of a British punk at heart to find a similar revelation in the snarky piss-take of Gaffa’s “Attitude Dancing (Land Of a 1000 Dunces).”
The frisson of different genres coupling with one another on the dancefloor gives Tribal Rites its spark. There’s the dubbed-out disco frolic of the Raincoats’ “Animal Rhapsody (Version)” and Ruts DC doing spindly dance grooves; reggae’s massive influence creeps into a cavernous take on Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” as well as the early Afrobeat classic (and Loft staple) “Soul Makossa” (recast as the syrupy “Reggae Makossa”). But Brewster also finds illumination in quieter moments, like the synth-laced country chimes of the Bobbie Gentry rarity “Thunder in the Afternoon.” It says something about Brewster’s counterintuitive tastes that the comp’s most gobsmacking moment is an acoustic take—made with banjo, mandolin, and pedal steel—on Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That.”
The last portion of the set focuses on streamlined house and techno, ranging from the dub-techno masterclass of Maurizio’s “M4” to Swayzak’s microhouse splicing of Larry Heard’s “Night Images” to the flute-laced tech-house remix of Chicken Lips’ “Is That You or Me.” But when the anthemic piano and gospel vocals of Clifton King’s “Family Prayer” come on, the energy is singular. A staple on stations like KISS-FM and WBMX back in the early ‘90s and the epitome of that era’s garage house sound, the song finds ecstatic uplift in lines like “And while we party/We all get closer/Dance to the family prayer.” Clifton King cites Ecclesiastes 1:9: “It is written there’s nothing new under the sun.” He then finds ample reason to keep dancing.


Where the Sacramento band's previous work often showed off their chops for chops' sake, their fourth album seems to have more serendipitous origins, and sees them bring their carnival rock vibe to skate punk, dream pop, and proto-emo.

X'ed Out

Sacramento trio Tera Melos traffic in genres that are often viewed as the opposite of punk, i.e., prog, math-rock, *post-*hardcore. But when done properly, these styles generate all of the enthusiasm of punk while turning its traditional logic about formal training on its head: What if your love of music inspires you to train to the point where you can accomplish anything you want? That’s what Tera Melos get at on their fourth album, X’ed Out, a super-collider of genres, riffs and mad rhythms that is often thrilling, occasionally exhausting, and, unlike most chops-based music, never dull.
It wasn’t always this way. Their previous work was often chops for chops'-sake, impressive on a theoretical level, manifesting in songs as spazzed-out and inscrutable as their titles-- “Guy vs D.C. Sniper,” “A Spoonful Of Slurry (is Good for What Ails You),” to name a few. While their instrumental capacities are still plenty baffling, Tera Melos appear to be relishing the opportunity to encounter new difficulties; whereas jamming a 7/4 riff against a 12/8 backbeat is a puzzle that can be solved with enough effort, the stuff X'ed Out goes for is sparked by the metaphysical-- ingenuity and serendipity.
Fortunately, Tera Melos sound exhilarated by the potential of not having an idea of where these songs might end up. X’ed Out begins on a monotone, palm-muted riff that could’ve found itself on a Phoenix or Strokes record; in fact, when Nick Reinhart’s vaporous falsetto first enters, it sounds a great deal like “Tap Out” from Comedown Machine. A couple of clean guitar runs nestle their way into the mix, and all of a sudden, it’s more in the style of looping enthusiasts like Dustin Wong. And then... a circle-pit ready chorus in Sufjan Stevens’ favorite time signature?
The name of that song is “Weird Circles”, which becomes a prophetic statement. X’ed Out is full of loops that don’t quite close, song structures that aren’t verses and choruses so much as geometric patterns jutting against each other at strange angles, genres ricocheting in a game of pinball. Siphon out the hooks of “Weird Circles”, “Sunburn”, and “Tropic Lame”, and you have the basis for 2013’s most excellent skate punk EP. Isolate the beatless and beatific drift of “Snake Lake” and “No Phase”, and Tera Melos make a case for themselves as a covert dream pop act. Come across “New Chlorine” or “Until Lufthansa” in the wild and Tera Melos is a fine reminder of a time when Jawbox and Jawbreaker were getting major-label deals.
Which is to say that while X’ed Out is Tera Melos’ most accessible work by a large margin, it’s still all relative. There are hooks all over the place and just as many ways to deliver them-- guitars that sound more like steel drums, phonetic cooing, ridiculous drum fills. But Tera Melos aren’t pop craftsmen working in ornate arrangements; they’re playing with such frantic speed and precision, it’s more like they’re trying to defuse live bombs. This makes Tera Melos a cozy fit on Sargent House, a label which has cornered the market on carnival rock with the likes of Fang Island, And So I Watch You From Afar and Bosnian Rainbows. It’s not divisive so much as deep niche-- this stuff isn’t for everyone, largely because the accompanying up-with-people delivery that can be somewhat grating. But X’ed Out offers the same thrill rides without the sugary stodge. Granted, Reinhart’s vocals are so airy that they often sound indecipherable in isolation, to say nothing of when they’re placed amidst Tera Melos’ whirligig arrangements. That said, there’s substance and protein here-- the music is always given muscle to counteract the finger-tapping treble and you can suss out lyrics about punk rock bills, street names, and other clues to the emotional and physical geography of X’ed Out.
They're still subject to incomprehensibility; besides being the longest track on X’ed Out, “Slimed” relies too much on overeager skronk to fill the time, as if to give listeners an idea of what they previously missed out on. On the opposite end, while “X’ed Out and Tired” is sensible as a closing sigh of relief, as a straight-up acoustic strummer, it doesn’t make much of a case for Tera Melos to unplug just yet. Those both come later on, when the listener is likely to be more exhausted than the people actually playing the music. While it’s exciting to hear a veteran band sharply change course on the fly, Tera Melos doesn’t always have a grasp on the mundane things like pacing or sequencing that make for a smoother LP experience. Still, even if it’s a fourth album delivered with the enthusiasm and conviction of a debut, Tera Melos sound too damn geeked about where they are now to let X’ed Out be a definitive document.


Norwegian house producer Bjørn Torske builds enveloping shapes from the merest scraps of musical information and in recent years has been making loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. His new Kok EP feels like a concise alternate version of 2010's excellent Kokning mixed with headphones in mind.

Kok EP

Hardly anyone starts out as a minimalist—at least, not a good one. Whether working in music, painting, or poetry, perhaps you can only effectively leave out as much as you've previously put in. Norwegian house music producer Bjørn Torske has been at it since the late 1990s, and it shows in his advanced level of idiosyncratic understatement. He builds enveloping, vividly fluttering shapes from the merest scraps of musical information—a plucked string, a smear of organ, a dollop of bass—which are deeply syncopated around contoured absences, where the more overt gestures of house music should be. Torske's constructions sound at once impossible and effortless, as if lightly carried along by their own oddball physics, and he treats 4/4 time like a curio cabinet that hides infinite compartments of different shapes and sizes.
In recent years, Torske has been making what are essentially loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. Organically shambling but mechanically repetitive, the style sounds more like deceptively simple psychedelic pop (Moondog is frequently invoked by way of comparison) than dance music. 2010's Kokning was soft and shaggy, with a warm acoustic glow, and seemed much more concerned with gently nudging around time and space than moving bodies. Some quirky programmed rhythms cast thin tethers to the dance floor, but even those fall away on the Kok EP, which was recorded during the same studio sessions as Kokning. You can certainly hear the tonal and instrumental continuity, with lots of ultra-minimal funk guitar slowed down to a canter and lush, sharply glinting organ tones*. Kok* winds up like a concise alternate version of Kokning mixed purely with headphones in mind.
Kok seems at first like it might shape up as little more than Kokning outtakes, a pleasant if not exactly thrilling proposition. The opening prelude is a just brief cinema theme for walking bass, organ, chimes, and scatted claps. The following "Assistenten" has a nice taut build around an off-center pulse, expanding the established sound palette with slapping percussion and what sounds like a tiny elephant trumpeting. But Torske is still just warming up, and the final three pieces feel like more than practiced vamps. "Setter" braids together stuck string figures, shivery drones, and jittery percussion into one striated mass. On "Totem Expose", wowing frequencies bore urgent rhythms through a metallic noise cloud that gradually turns inside out, ending as an organist's hymn. And mesmerizing finale "Nestor" sends a filtered curlicue slowly arcing through a cold cosmos of rangy, oblique counterpoint. Though less fleshed-out and essential than Kokning or its predecessor, the delightful Feil Knapp, this final entry in Torske's "to boil" trilogy (counting last year's Oppkok remix 12") has more than enough simmer to warrant the concept.


The New York City-based conceptual and visual artist’s experimental club tracks channel the legacies of black women icons into visions of utopias.

NEVAEH

When it comes to reinterpreting songs, how you sing matters just as much as what you’re singing. Louis Armstrong turned an apocalyptic dirge into a celebration of new life and a New Orleans jazz funeral standard with his recording of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Whitney Houston transformed a limping nationalist anthem into a tear-jerking ballad of resilience with her 1991 performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at that year’s Super Bowl. Excavating new meanings from old work and stirring new emotions: This is the talent electronic artist Mhysa brings to her latest album, Nevaeh, as she plants seeds of R&B, pop, and spiritual hits and allows them to bloom over crashing beats, twinkling chimes, and playful synths.
Mhysa is the musical alter ego of New York City-based conceptual and visual artist E. Jane. In her experimental club tracks, she channels the legacies of black women icons into visions of utopias. As she did on her 2017 debut fantasii, on Nevaeh Mhysa borrows sentiments from cultural greats like Lucille Clifton and Janet Jackson, translating and interpolating them with an ear for industrial sounds and unorthodox compositions. On the minimalist “breaker of chains,” Mhysa repurposes Lauryn Hill’s smoldering hooks from Nas’ 1996 track “If I Ruled the World,” her crisp, airy soprano infusing the declarations of world change with delicate hope. Accompanied by a quiet tambourine and a cavern of reverb, she replaces any suggestion of Nas—who allegedly abused singer Kelis, one of Mhysa’s inspirations, during their four-year marriage—with an expansive silence. She accomplishes a similar transformation in her own repeated renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” breathing passion into every line. Throughout Nevaeh, Mhysa offers up the lone black woman’s voice as a conduit for an age-old dream of heaven, or the album’s title spelled backwards.
For many, there’s no greater utopia than the crush and ecstasy of a dancefloor. And since Mhysa’s beginning in 2015, she’s proven she knows the way around a club banger. Despite that track record, Nevaeh includes just one all-out dance track, “Sanaa Lathan.” The song’s braided textures link it to the rest of the album, which is more ethereal. Instrumental track “Float” alternates sped-up and slowed-down samples that evoke the solemnity and resonance of a cathedral organ. Meanwhile, “sad slutty baby wants more for the world” features an R&B vocal sample that delays and dissolves on loop into a ghostly chorus approaching white noise.
When Mhysa appears as a vocalist and lyricist, it’s with all rough edges exposed. Rather than masking vocal aberrations, Nevaeh’s lo-fi production and embrace of background sounds—like a door slam or a sharp inhale before speaking—highlight occasions when Mhysa’s gospel-rooted melismas go flat or stray from buttoned-up convention. Her unguarded presentation, along with the embrace of sexual desire in her lyrics, presents an unvarnished vulnerability often left out of the current bedroom pop umbrella. Softness and vulnerability, Mhysa reminds us, is not without its jolts, snags, and base desires. Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”
Similar to the gospel pioneers who channeled heavenly praise through devil’s music, Mhysa offers promises of peace and salvation via seemingly opposed aesthetics like manipulated found sounds and striking production. Though Nevaeh centers on the idea of an ideal destination, its focus on journey and transportation is what makes it captivating. By its closing songs, dreamy contentment gives way to urgency, as if heaven is drifting away. “I want to fucking believe, I want you to make it better,” Mhysa sings repeatedly on “BELIEVE Interlude,” gradually curling the plea into a challenge. On Nevaeh, Mhysa draws strength from creeping change, where most others would only find dread.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In what is essentially a radical remix project, the artist formerly known as Dirty Beaches refines his own imperfect saxophone recordings into something radiant and pure.

Divine Weight

When Alex Zhang Hungtai made his live debut at the “Twin Peaks” Roadhouse last year, it felt like an appropriate grand prize for years of dedicated service in the realm of avant-garde noir. After all, when we first encountered Zhang, a decade ago, in his greased-up Dirty Beaches guise, he looked and sounded like the sort of enigmatic outlaw who would step off a David Lynch set—familiarly ’50s-retro yet eerily freakish. Now, he was getting to inhabit the role for real, even if it was with a fake band. But because it marked the first time in many years that we’d heard Zhang play anything resembling rock‘n’roll, the “Twin Peaks” cameo also underscored just how far he’d drifted since Dirty Beaches’ 2011 breakthrough, Badlands—and how the music he’s made since then has been too eclectic and audacious to conform to a pat descriptor like “Lynchian.”
Since retiring the Dirty Beaches moniker in 2014, having completed the transition from songs to soundscaping, Zhang has fully indulged his newfound aesthetic freedom. Whether he’s releasing meditative piano instrumentals, forming violent free-jazz trios, or constructing dark, dissonant sound collages with Love Theme, Zhang is never afraid to expose his work’s jagged edges. He’s long favored a raw field-recording ambience that amplifies the overarching sense of improvised experiments being caught on tape in real time. But on his first proper release under his own name, Zhang refines past imperfections into something radiant and pure.
Divine Weight is, in essence, a radical remix project. Dissatisfied with a recent cache of saxophone recordings, Zhang fed them through his laptop, manipulating the sounds into entirely new forms, like rusted copper piping stripped out of an abandoned building and melted down into shiny, interwoven wiring. Structurally, the album evokes the immersive, carefully orchestrated ambient set pieces of Dirty Beaches’ 2014 swan song, Stateless, but on a more cosmic scale. Philosophically speaking, he’s moved beyond Lynch toward Jodorowsky: Zhang has cited the Chilean auteur’s psychomagic teachings as a guiding influence on these recordings, and the music here mirrors their therapeutic mission to transform deep-seated, subconscious trauma into rapturous spiritual release.
Even at its most abstract, Zhang’s music has historically drawn attention to its tactility: The instrumentation was readily identifiable, the mise-en-scène vivid, and you could practically feel his tape loops disintegrate before your ears. But Divine Weight revels in disorientation, blurring the line between sound and source, perception and reality, weaving an atmosphere that’s as oppressive as it is weightless. Sounding like Tim Hecker remixing Colin Stetson, “Pierrot” and “Matrimony” mutate their constituent parts into unrecognizable shapes; the former remolds its sax scraps to emulate the haunting hum of flutes, while the latter layers on frosty synth drones until they approximate the sound of a church choir frozen in a moment of ecstatic harmony. On “This Is Not My Country,” the debased brass serves as the raw material for a trembling, dissonant symphony that conjures our unsettled world today. Famously nomadic, Zhang lived in Los Angeles until the 2016 election influenced his permanent departure from the United States, and this track feels like a visit to the scorched-earth site of a home he no longer recognizes.
Some emotional respite arrives in the form of “Yaumatei.” Though it bears no obvious resemblance to the Love Theme piece of the same name, it’s the track that feels most spiritually connected to Zhang’s past work. Honoring his penchants for geographic title references and raw field-recording ambience, “Yaumatei” feels both more grounded and less refined than anything else on the album. But following that impressionistic interstitial, Divine Weight climaxes with its colossal 20-minute title track, which answers all the hazy-headed music that preceded it with the clearest, most epically scaled statement of Zhang’s career.
“Divine Weight” is indeed a perfect title for this ecclesiastic orgy of church-organ drones that rain down like sunbeams piercing 100-foot-high stained-glass windows. It’s a magnum opus that conveys both the solemnity of a funeral service and the everlasting joy of a soul crossing over to the other side in a blaze of white light. It’s a mountain of crescendoing chords piled one atop the other in perpetuity, grasping for a sky that’s always just out of reach. It’s that THX warm-up fanfare looped for all eternity at jet-engine volume. It is both gorgeous and grotesque. Throughout his career, Zhang has invited us to see the beauty in grit. But here, he presents us with a new challenge: to bear the crushing burden of relentless splendor.


This Heat perfected a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude. You can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica.

This Heat: This Heat/Health and Efficiency/Deceit

This Heat/Health and Efficiency/Deceit

Before it was a recording studio, Cold Storage was a meat locker, its floors slicked with blood. But under This Heat's occupancy, between 1977 and 1981, the South London space became a laboratory for a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude—that didn't quite square with anything else that was happening at the time. Their motto was simple: "All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert."
Two members of the band, drummer Charles Hayward and multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen, had been playing in various progressive rock bands for more than a dozen years; Gareth Williams, the group's third member, had no musical training at all. That tension guided them as they established an exploratory practice based on extended collective improvisation that incorporated not just guitar and drums, but also viola, melodica, organ, household objects, and broken toys. They used tape machines to stretch the fabric of time and creative mic placement to warp space. They were fueled not just by formal restlessness but also by rage at consumer society—"Sleep," the opening song on 1981's Deceit, juxtaposes advertising copy with references to Pavlovian experiments in conditioning—and their certainty that humanity was on a nuclear collision course with itself. "That's why our music wasn't psychedelic and drifty, why it was so hard-edged and angular," Hayward told Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. "We had no interest in making people stoned with our sounds."
This Heat released only two albums and one EP during their brief run, and those barely registered amid the competing din of the period. But you can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica. This Heat did not yield a single signature sound so much as a zone of possibilities.
And that very range is part of what makes their music so bracing. Listening to their self-titled 1979 debut album, one moment you are lulled into a meditative state by the incidental bells and airy sax skronk of "Not Waving"; the next you're given whiplash by churning dissonance and muscular rhythms that anticipate early Swans, along with Shellac,  Black Dice, and Lightning Bolt. "Music Like Escaping Gas," with its trembling organ, dissonant acoustic guitar, and chanted sing-speaking, could be mistaken for a rough Gastr del Sol demo, while "The Fall of Saigon" reroutes Brian Eno's wispy art rock through the Velvet Underground's funereal drones. The narcotic texture of that song, gloopy and atonal, stands in stark contrast to the lyrics' sly sense of humor: It begins by making a meal of a cat, and, by the end, the narrator has eaten everything that's not bolted to the floor, right down to the TV and the armchair. The fall of an empire has never been rendered in bleaker, more bitterly humorous terms.
The whole sweep of This Heat's project can be heard on the uncharacteristically optimistic "Health and Efficiency," the A-side of a 1980 12". "Here's a song about the sunshine," they sing over a major-key melody that prefigures Stereolab songs like "Nihilist Assault Group"; soon, they spiral into a locked groove of violently yanked guitar strings and hypnotically looped drums. The clatter of woodblocks and milk bottles adds to the din; they even mix in the sounds of a nearby playground before the eight-minute side dissolves into a detuned and deconstructed reprise of the main theme. On the flip, the tape composition "Graphic / Varispeed" is 11 and a half minutes of held organ tones that rise and fall like the sound of a single-engine propeller plane circling the neighborhood. Stylistically, its musical minimalism is at odds with This Heat's twitchy muscularity, but the intensity of its focus is absolutely in keeping with the group's unflinching approach.
Their second and final album, 1981's Deceit, doesn't entirely do away with the extreme sonic abstraction. "Radio Prague" is an experiment in mechanical pulses and cut-up radio broadcasts, and "Hi Baku Shyo (Suffer Bomb Disease)" is a kind of expressionist sound painting of a post-nuclear landscape: wails, church bells, buzzing flies. For the most part, though, the album marks a significant leap forward in songwriting. (Mixed by the reggae engineer Martin Frederick, it also marks a significant improvement in fidelity.) Deceit's lyrics encompass both acid critique and post-structuralist philosophy while finding poetry in the everyday, and its grooves are both catchy and strangely inscrutable. This band could also flat-out jam: "S.P.Q.R.," with its chiming guitars and close-harmonized chants, goes head to head with Mission of Burma's "Academy Fight Song" as one of the most triumphant-sounding protest songs of the era. The album's anthemic scale helps explain how This Heat ended up opening for U2 at London's Hammersmith Palais that year.
Thirty-five years later, the depth and breadth of their creativity remain both astonishing and incredibly prescient. On the tribal cut-and-paste piece "Shrinkwrap," their vocal multi-tracking sounds like the Beastie Boys via Monty Python. And on "A New Kind of Water," Deceit's climactic penultimate song, their sturm and clang presents a model for the haunted cabling of Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising. The song's title is a sendup of marketing, but it ultimately concerns nothing less than the survival of the species: "Fly away Peter, hide away Paul/ Who can watch as the Earth burns, shatters, and dies?"
For many years, This Heat records were hard to come by, though sporadic reissues and compilation features helped keep their legacy alive. Thanks to the new vinyl reissues and streaming, their catalog is now more widely available than ever. And yet, This Heat also feel further from the zeitgeist than ever. The sort of noisy, difficult rock that they helped pioneer has gone out of favor, and their electronic experiments have become second nature. But that resistance to faddishess helps make their music an exhilarating experience to this day, whether it's a first encounter or the continuation of a years-long relationship. What you hear in a song like "A New Kind of Water" isn't just intelligence; it's urgency. We've become far too accustomed to the 24-hour alert; today, This Heat's work is a reminder that we could use more possible processes, more open channels.


I've been waiting anxiously in the foothills for Corin Tucker's voice to come down off the mountain. At ...

Sleater-Kinney: All Hands on the Bad One

All Hands on the Bad One

I've been waiting anxiously in the foothills for Corin Tucker's voice to come down off the mountain. At night the villagers used to hear her baying at the moon. Alas, the impassioned Sleater-Kinney frontwoman has left her banshee goat of a wail up to pasture on the craggy cliffs. All Hands on the Bad One finds the Northwest power-trio at their most melodic, playful, sarcastic, and punchy. Occasionally the spirit of the goat god still springs from Tucker's belly, but these screams follow baiting pop harmonies. Besides, when Rolling Stone uses the words "brilliant" and "fury" in the latest glowing Britney Spears review, Corin's outbursts feel positively baptismal.
Sleater-Kinney and Fugazi reside alone in the top echelon of American punk rock. They make darling twins. Both bands continue to grow in talent, despite the jaded whines of old schoolers. Both feature dueling guitars that bobble complex, inventive lines like ping-pong paddles. (And Sleater-Kinney don't even need a bassist to lock the groove.) Both can raise the hair on the back of your neck, the ass out your seat, and the volume on your stereo. Most importantly, both hold a mirror up to the face of themselves, their scene, and society in general. You better believe that "And for all the ladies out there I wish/ We could write more than the next/ Marketing bid/ Culture is what we make it/ Now is the time to invent!" is the "We owe you nothing/ You have no control!" of 2000. Now that the smoke has blown away after the media exploitation of the riot grrl scene, the true believers remain behind-- not working PR for emo bands.
But preaching has its limits. After all, a band can't write a song called "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun," and load it with lyrics such as, "Like a piece of art/ That no one can touch/ Your head is always up/ In the clouds/ Writing your songs/ Won't you ever come down," without actually having some fun. The album opens with the proposition of "Eye cream and thigh cream/ How 'bout a get-high cream" before shouting "but I gotta rock!" and bursting into oo-waah's and handclaps. "Milkshake n' Honey" spits wit at expatriates in Paris as Corin rolls her eyes at the type of denizens in The Sun Also Rises. Acting the roll of the insolent daughter, Tucker exclaims, "Daddy says I got my mama's mouth/ I'm all about a forked tongue and a dirty house."
But this isn't poetry! More than ever, S-K put four to the floor and hammer away on infectious riffs. A brash return to vigor after the mellower The Hot Rock, All Hands will win over new ears who previously found the sound too sky high, loose, and angular. Like a David Mamet character rewrite over a Joel Schumacher script, Corin reveals greater character depth than ever before. All Hands on the Bad One finds Sleater-Kinney at their most fist-pumping (on the title track), lovely ("Leave You Behind"), longing ("The Swimmer"), and bratty ("The Professional"). Janet Weiss hammers harder, Carrie Brownstein smothers with perfect harmonies while digging deeper on the E string, and Corin grabs your aorta and strokes. When Sleater-Kinney, the band with the busiest guitar lines and boldest voice, turn in their best effort yet, it demands your attention.


Daniel Lanois' third solo album Shine-- the first since his decade-old For The Beauty Of Wynona-- is difficult to swallow ...

Shine

Daniel Lanois' third solo album Shine-- the first since his decade-old For The Beauty Of Wynona-- is difficult to swallow, and not because of any challenging experimentation, politics, or off-kilter production. None of that, nah.
What got me nervous about this album is that, for his reputation, it's the most drab, adult-oriented product to make it to my stereo since some Starbucks-sipping visitor got sentimental about the Magnolia soundtrack. "Those frogs were symbolic!" he cried, and asked me to bow with him before his shrine to Aimee Mann.
It's here we enter the world of the tame, a land where Sting is king and Phil Collins is raucous. It's the bottled atmosphere of Borders, the safety a slightly left-wing baby boomer craves as they sip tea and read bestsellers about other baby boomers. It's Jeff Healey. Lanois writes somewhat catchy, almost moody stuff, but when I say "moody" I mean like a CEO gets moody when there isn't enough whole milk in his latte.
My dad's a nice man. I imagine him not only liking Shine, but also finding it soothing; he could downright chill to this. If pops and I were resting on his overstuffed couch, the few things on Shine I enjoyed-- faint bells during the first minute of "I Love You", off-key guitar, chimes, a pedal steel-- wouldn't make an impression on him, while the many things he'd love-- "This reminds me of a less crazy Astral Weeks!"-- would have me flashing back to the summer I interned at Musician Magazine, brewing weak coffee for Rush fans with fake tans and male-pattern-baldness ponytails.
The production on Shine is beyond clean: slide guitar winds in like a coma, tumbleweeds bounce into the sky, a creepy voice exhales and makes me jump. Layers and distances are detailed, but nothing overlaps or crowds, always shiny. Anesthetic, like a commercial.
Lanois produced the record himself, and if you don't know his name, he also produced Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, Peter Gabriel's So and Us, and U2's The Joshua Tree and All That You Can't Leave Behind, to list but a few of his credits. So no, I'm not talking DIY: his microphones probably cost more than my apartment. Maybe you're a better person than I am, maybe you can hurdle the squeaky-clean production. Answer me this: do you find the Counting Crows moving? If so, you're halfway there.
Aside from the overproduction, the songwriting is pat: none of the tracks deviate from what's laid out in the first stanza: "No need to worry about surprises, sir/ Just sit back and relax, sir." Three of the four instrumentals are decent, clean versions of Will Oldham's Odes, while "Space Key" takes the ghostly atmospherics of "Transmitter" and "JJ Leaves L.A.", including a drum machine so crisp, it's as if you're forever riding into the sunset, leaving town on 70mm stock.
What Lanois always has, no matter what he brings to the table personally, is star power. Emmylou Harris offers backup on the album opener, "I Love You", and Bono chimes in with a mellow vocal turn on the second track, "Pretty Falling At Your Feet". The sunglassed one wrote the track with Lanois during the All That You Can't Leave Behind sessions; for all his shallow pomposity, Bono can be tolerable-- even pretty-- when he isn't trying to pretend he's smarter than he is.
What does Lanois himself sound like? He sounds like everyman-- he's French Canadian. No accent; he could be a newscaster in the Heartland. There's no doubt he's an accomplished producer, but he drops the ball trying to communicate anything other than light-weight, overextended metaphors: "My tremolo, you're my fire...what keeps me walking is your shine." His odd musings are especially grating because he mixes the vocals so high.
Final litmus test: in the liner notes Lanois writes, "What a privilege to be able to make music.Here is a small portion of what's cooking in the kitchen. I hope that some piece of it will elevate your spirit. May we all touch a heart somewhere, sometime." Your gut reaction to his best wishes is a solid indication of how palatable you'll find Shine.