The cult director’s third standalone collection of electronic music isn’t necessarily innovative, but it’s comforting, like a chilling movie you’ve seen a million times.

John Carpenter: Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

For years, John Carpenter was thought of more like a session musician than a serious artist—a slick and sturdy genre craftsman, more of a cult icon than a name brand. That’s all changed in the last decade as he’s become thoroughly deified as the untouchable and exalted Master of Horror, and without even returning to the director’s chair. Carpenter’s shadow falls over much contemporary American genre cinema and extends internationally too, from the recent Brazilian political thriller Bacurau to the über-stylish movies of Bertrand Bonello, who composes the electronic soundtracks for his elegant French riffs on American genre formulas just like his idol.
After his prolific run in the 1980s and 1990s, Carpenter’s filmography tapered off in the 21st century, leading him into de facto retirement. Then, sensing renewed interest in his work, Carpenter brought his brand back from the dead by focusing on music. The 2015 album Lost Themes, his first non-soundtrack recording, kicked off a comeback that has encompassed live gigs and new scores for the Blumhouse-produced remakes of his most iconic films. Carpenter had almost always dismissed his musical efforts as the product of necessity, but their utilitarian qualities, like his filmmaking itself, found accolades for their stern and chilling minimalism. While his soundtracks may have begun simply as a cheaper alternative to orchestral arrangements, they have effectively spawned their own genre. The Lost Themes franchise has culminated in this year’s third installment, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, giving the series more sequels than Carpenter has ever directed himself.
Carpenter’s style—distinguished by his formal precision and almost architectural sense of composition, as well as his bare-bones scores—has become easy shorthand for filmmakers looking to channel or reference that long cultural decade known as the ’80s. The revival and influence of the now commodified Carpenter aesthetic is owed in part to Netflix series like Stranger Things, as well as YouTube algorithm-driven nostalgic microgenres like synthwave. Carpenter's new music fittingly feels meant to be streamed as background music, a sort of gothic electronic equivalent to lo-fi hip-hop beats: not ambient exactly, but spooky furniture music, like Erik Satie with eyeliner. These would-be music cues feel like the familiar beats of a horror movie—not exceptional or innovative, but comforting in the eerie way a chilling movie you’ve seen a million times can be on a gloomy day.
Carpenter has long had a canny eye for branding himself as an artist, consistently using the Albertus font to render his name in opening credits sequences, and even stylizing his film titles as John Carpenter’s The Thing or John Carpenter’s Vampires. On the cover of Lost Themes III, Carpenter’s own face overlaps with those of his bandmates, son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, acknowledging the work released under his own name as a family affair. John Carpenter has become a true enterprise, a full-fledged band, not just an auteurist solo effort. Though his scores are often thought of as the product of a solitary synthesizer wizard, they were, just as often, jam music—the soundtrack for Ghosts of Mars is the result of Carpenter riffing and ripping it up in the studio with Anthrax, Steve Vai, and future Saw composer Buckethead. Alive After Death has the same quality, tight and precise but still somewhat loose and improvised in its construction.
Ghosts of Mars might be Carpenter’s most overtly hard-rock score, but his soundtracks consistently shared as much with Van Halen as they did with Tangerine Dream. That’s never changed, even when the movies are imaginary; “Cemetery” is driven as much by a chugging guitar as it is a Kraftwerk-like techno beat and drum machine, and solos blaze across tracks like “Vampire’s Touch” and “Dead Eyes.” But unlike Carpenter’s nu-metal collaborators on the unfairly derided Ghosts of Mars, Carpenter’s bandmates mostly help him resurrect an old sound instead of crafting a newer, fresher one, yielding distinctly diminished returns—a little like how the David Gordon Green remake of Halloween looks toothless and bland when held against Rob Zombie’s surreal, psychedelic, and misunderstood interpretation of the same material. At times, like on “The Dead Walk,” the organ presets and synthesized voices start to sound a little like the autumnal version of Mannheim Steamroller.
The proliferation of Carpenter copycats has become so rampant that it’s only fair the master cashed in himself, like Juicy J and DJ Paul’s revival of the Three 6 Mafia brand after their early underground work was plundered by so many rappers. (In fact, Paul and the Juiceman owe something of a debt to Carpenter—they’ve returned to the well of his soundtracks time and again for samples from which to construct their own horrorcore universe.) But while it’s wonderful that such a singular artist is getting regular work, it’s hard not to feel like Carpenter is simply data-mining his past life for new material—unlike, say, David Lynch, who does polarizing and uncomfortable things with both his albums and his resurrections of past intellectual property. It’s almost impossible to distinguish “Weeping Ghost” from moments from various Halloween movies. Sometimes the “lost” in Lost Themes feels less like a Satanic tome written in blood and more like a folder of unfinished GarageBand projects Carpenter stumbled upon while organizing his desktop.
But Carpenter is, for the most part, an artist whose work has not been fully understood in its own moment. It took time for audiences to find value in his later, lower-budget efforts: The Hollywood-spoofing Snake Plissken sequel Escape from LA, the mind-melding theory-fiction of In the Mouth of Madness, the virulently anti-church horror-western Vampires, and the Ice Cube-starring Ghosts of Mars have all been reclaimed in certain critical corners, their once-decried nu-metal flourishes and early CGI experiments now embraced with affection. The only third part of a trilogy he has ever been involved with before now is Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which was hated in 1982 for playing fast and loose with the canonical narrative, but is now beloved by many because it dared to try something different. Perhaps Lost Themes III should, ideally, be forgotten for a few decades, so that it can be found again by future generations looking for art to reevaluate, reconsider, and reclaim.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The 20-year-old TikTok personality turned punk rocker’s debut album won’t stop announcing how punk it is.

Tell Me About Tomorrow

Before Travis Barker drummed behind a fist-pumping Willow Smith, before he and Machine Gun Kelly released an album of catchy, thrashing rock songs, before Rolling Stone crowned him “Gen-Z’s Pop Punk Whisperer,” he became convinced Jaden Hossler was the future. One of Barker’s teenage children told him about Hossler, a TikTok star who came to fame as part of the fratty content collective Sway House; many of his videos feature him shirtless and lip-syncing, scowling on a skateboard with a cigarette or dancing in a pool. In 2020, Hossler self-released a single, “Comatose,” a blown-out, guitar-heavy lament about not caring enough to miss his ex. Barker called him the next day, and soon signed Hossler as the first artist on his DTA label. Tell Me About Tomorrow is Hossler’s debut as Jxdn, but it’s Barker who looms over every track. Despite Hossler’s outsized online persona, the record tells us nothing about who he is, only who he wants to emulate.
The result is an album that won’t stop announcing how punk it is. There are incessant power chords and pounding drums, howls and moans and shouted choruses. If Hossler sounds like he’s discovering the genre for the first time, it’s because he is. He’s open about only starting to listen to punk two years ago, after wearing a Descendents T-shirt in a music video; now, he proudly tells interviewers they’re his favorite band. Hossler has a sweet, melodic voice that he strains into a grunt or a rasp, or contorts into a whine in the grand tradition of 2000s-era pop-punk bands like Boys Like Girls or All Time Low or Mayday Parade. Most of the time, though, he’s just doing his best Machine Gun Kelly impression.
The difference is that Machine Gun Kelly often sounds like he’s in on the joke, basking in his own schtick or writing with scene-setting specificity. Hossler treats “rock star” as a stand-in for identity or taste, repeating the phrase over and over like he’s trying to convince himself. He’s “fucked up like a rock star”; he begs a lover to “fuck me like a rock star”; he claims a girl called him a rock star “so I gotta rock it.” “I’m still a fucking rock star!” he wails on “Angels & Demons Pt. 2,” “and I can still dance when I want to!” “Haha, siiiick,” he sneers at the end of “So What!,” verbalizing the self-serious satisfaction that permeates the record.
Hossler’s two goals with the album were “helping mental health awareness” and “making real, authentic music,” he said last December, but clunky writing makes legitimate struggles sound hokey and synthetic. “I think I’m addicted to the feeling of depression,” he yowls on “No Vanity.” “It’s been cloudy with a chance of anxiety,” he trills on “Better Off Dead,” a twinkly track co-written with the mopey pop singer Lauv. For all of Barker’s obvious fingerprints, Tell Me About Tomorrow’s credits also include a curated lineup of sadbois. The garishly too-online singer blackbear helped produce; SoundCloud-adjacent rapper Iann Dior stops by for a sludgy verse; MGK himself screams along over thwacking drums on “Wanna Be.” The soundscape blurs together until every sincere-seeming confession—“I wanna be alright,” “Some days I wish I could disappear,” “I wish I didn’t waste so much time bein’ anxious”—gets sanitized and sanded down.
Hossler’s music sounds more like a collision of trend and opportunity than anything birthed out of his skillset. It’s hard not to imagine how drastically different this album would be if he’d become famous five years ago, or five years in the future, when the current resurgence in Hot Topic stylings will have inevitably faded. Until then, there will likely be a glut of albums that sound like this, some produced by Barker and some glibly mimicking him: pop-punk fueled by all the same angst, misogyny, and interpersonal toxicity as the mid-aughts, just with more influencer clout and fewer side parts.

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On his third studio album, Rocky is more experimental and personal. But for music that relies on the New York rapper’s artful intuitions, it’s unfortunate his intuitions are often very basic.

Testing

In late May, A$AP Rocky confined himself to a glass cell fitted with cameras, microphones, and harsh industrial lights. He wandered through a swarm of balloons, nibbled on raw peppers, teased new music, and dunked his face in ice water—real art stuff. Hosted at the New York City headquarters of auction house Sotheby’s, this live multimedia installation, titled Lab Rat, functioned more as a signal than an experience: A$AP Rocky was no longer just a rapper; he was high art. His wardrobe change during the event, from a slick tux to a traffic-cone-orange jumpsuit, hinted at this new, vague direction. “I don’t completely know what I’m doing, I just know what I like and what I don’t like,” he told The New York Times earlier that day.
Testing, Rocky’s third studio album and first outing without the direct oversight of his late friend and counsel A$AP Yams, uses intuition as its guiding force, broadening Rocky’s palette by simply trusting what he likes and what he doesn’t. If curation is the union of taste and restraint, intuition is the union of taste and curiosity. Rocky’s intuitions are basic. Like the crash dummies from which Testing and Lab Rat crib their aesthetics, Rocky is enamored with collision. His approach to songcraft on Testing is to mash sounds together and capture the friction. The results are often dismal.
On “Gunz N Butter” Rocky’s distorted vocals are stacked atop a chunky, pitched-down sample of Project Pat’s “Still Ridin Clean” that’s accented by ad-libs from Juicy J (who is also a guest on the Project Pat song). Rocky’s flow slides in and out of sync with Pat’s signature staccato, generating a counter-rhythm that gets played up by choice record scratches. The sum of all this layering is a leaning Jenga tower of sounds that hisses and warbles like a shaky radio signal. “Calldrops” works similarly, heaping a blissful sample of Dave Bixby’s “Morning Sun” onto muted, nonsensical croons from Rocky and Dean Blunt, who then cede space to an incarcerated Kodak Black. Kodak’s bluesy vocals are garbled and gnashed, a sonic ugly cry. All this density makes these songs dynamic, but it doesn’t mask their aimlessness. Rocky’s Kodak support comes off as an empty flex; his long-running infatuation with Memphis rap feels like muscle memory. Rocky constantly conflates method with insight, process with vision.
And his vision is often literal. For the opener “Distorted Records” Rocky chants the song title over...distorted bass. “OG Beeper” tells the story of a young Rocky wishing to be a rapper by offering the beginning and the end. “My whole life I just wanted to be a rapper/Then I grew’d up and the boy became a rapper,” he summarizes as if nothing happened in between.
When Rocky’s intuitions aren’t painfully straightforward, they’re outsourced. Testing is in many ways Rocky’s attempt to remake Frank Ocean’s insular 2016 album Blonde. From the seagulls and surf-rock flourishes of “Kids Turned Out Fine,” to the verbatim citation of Blonde on “A$AP Forever,” to the constant pitch-shifts and nonlinear storytelling, Blonde serves as a direct and indirect template for Rocky’s sprawling interests. Ocean’s actual appearances on “Purity” and “Brotha Man” ground his muse by showing a genuine aesthetic overlap—Rocky and Ocean are fond of murky, immersive soundscapes and sharp pivots between longing and lucidity—but Rocky’s Blonde retreads are a lack of direction at best and yet more taste-signaling at worst. Both scenarios are damning; Blonde’s fluidity and depth are the product of a specific and pained artistic vision; its style and experimentation are means, not ends.
Rocky’s instincts aren’t always unreliable. On “Buck Shots,” alongside A$AP affiliates Playboi Carti and Smooky Margielaa, Rocky moves nimbly, letting the beat breathe. It feels like a cypher hosted inside a lava lamp. Lead single “A$AP Forever” captures the charisma that often eludes Rocky’s music. “I put New York on the map,” he raps, a claim so preposterous it’s infectious. A gratuitous sample of Moby’s “Porcelain” lends the song a flickering warmth, but Rocky remains the centerpiece. When Kid Cudi and T.I. chime in to praise Rocky’s progress, their admiration feels neither staged nor bought.
Likewise, the sterling Frank Ocean cameo on closer “Purity” feels born of real collaboration. “Got they hands out like acknowledging the Führer,” Ocean raps, evoking the creepiness of being publicly adored. “Lose someone every release/It feels like the curse is in me,” Rocky sighs following a sample of Lauryn Hill’s “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a cut from the reclusive artist’s final record after a brief but potent overexposure to fame. “Purity” deftly collapses and isolates their three voices, turning Hill’s anxiety, Ocean’s reservation, and Rocky’s grief into a triptych of black anguish. In moments like these, Rocky’s intuition feels rooted in practice and experience rather than mere curiosity.
The bright side to Rocky’s arthouse pretensions and free-wheeling songwriting is that he sounds free. The rap world’s infatuation with high art, from Jay-Z, to Kilo Kish, to Kanye, has largely been corny and naive. But tucked between the pomp and the self-importance is a real sense of conviction, that rap is a worthwhile investment of time and effort, for the culture, and for artists themselves. Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


Matador's all-star power poppers return with a record that's mellow mood and baritone guitar obsession mark it more as a sequel to frontman Carl Newman's solo record The Slow Wonder than the band's own Twin Cinema.

Challengers

In interviews, the New Pornographers have made known that they don't want to be called a supergroup. Sorry, bros, no dice. Putting aside that "supergroup" is a much easier term than "band made up of people from other notable bands," it also has certain connotations about the way a band operates that fits the New Porns snugly, from how they tour in various iterations depending on the schedules of the primary figures to how the albums have allotted space for each songwriter or singer (i.e. the Bejar-Triad Rule). Whether due to evil, lazy media folk like me or their own early press kits, the New Pornographers will never be seen as just a regular group, especially as the profile of Neko Case, Destroyer, and Carl Newman grows concurrent with the band's success.
But maybe the reluctance to accept the term is wise; after all, supergroups aren't known for their longevity. That's especially been a worry for the New Pornographers, whose first record, Mass Romantic, sounded like the giddy, breathless product of a few collaborative weekends snuck between other commitments, a brilliantly spontaneous all-star one-off. Those kinds of records are the hardest to replicate, and the band struggled to find its legs through the inconsistent and tentative Electric Version. It took 2005's Twin Cinema to confirm them as more than a side project, in part by successfully establishing a group identity beyond the three stars-- Kurt Dahle's drumming was as crucial as any vocal turn on the record.
You'd expect Challengers to build on that momentum, as the New Pornographers get used to touring without Case or Bejar and members like Dahle and Kathryn Calder continue to step up their game. But at the same time, the increasing "guest-star" status of Case/Bejar has made the Pornographers even more firmly Newman's show to run. Of course, Newman's always had his hands on the steering wheel, but Challengers asserts his dominance; with its mellow mood and baritone guitar obsession, it's more a sequel to his solo record The Slow Wonder than Twin Cinema.
That's not entirely a bad thing, as The Slow Wonder is like the great lost New Pornographers record. But the determination of Challengers to sound mature and not get too crazy is frustrating in the context of the Pornographers catalog. With its string sections and French horns and four different vocalists, it's on a larger scope than the intimate Wonder, and thus is less pleasant evening pop than widescreen midtempo power ballad territory. The Pornographers have dallied with this sound-- "The Bones of an Idol," for instance-- but only as contrast betwixt the power-pop sugar-highs. Now those up-beat moments are themselves the contrast, rather than the focus, and Challengers sags because of it.
Those first three songs set this agenda: "My Rights Versus Yours" resembling a Slow Wonder outtake with its chugging Pet Sounds baritone foundation and awkward refrain, the repetitive, teasingly flat "All the Old Showstoppers", and the title track, which squanders Case's pipes on a meandering ballad with no peaks. Even Bejar appears to have gotten the memo, as his "Myriad Harbour" contains plenty of characteristic vocal jokes-- intrusive, impatient backing singers, lyrics directed at fellow Pornographers-- but doesn't even touch the sprawl of his anthemic Rubies work.
Finally, 15 minutes in, the Pornographers deign to give us the throwback of "All of the Things that Go to Make Heaven and Earth", the first spike of genuine pop enthusiasm to cut through the ruminative fog. Yet it's only a brief flash, its energy quickly absorbed by Calder's uninspiring vocal debut "Failsafe," and the lumbering six-and-a-half minutes of "Unguided," as schmaltzy as the usually nonsensical Newman has ever gotten. Sadly, the album never recovers: there's another Neko-wasting tune ("Go Places"), two forgettable Bejar C-sides, and only one more track that attempts to recapture the old pep ("Mutiny, I Promise You").
But the problem isn't so much the pace of the record as the topography; Twin Cinema ballads like "Bleeding Heart Show" and "These Are the Fables" built to euphoric payoffs, while Challengers tracks end with uncharacteristic whimpers instead of bangs. Newman, as the undisputed leader at this point, has to take most of the blame, but it's possible to cite the other primaries as well, as Neko and Bejar show up just to go through the motions. Perhaps it's just impossible for a supergroup-- sorry, band made up of people in other notable bands-- to properly mature, but Challengers is the first to suggest that the spark of creative collaboration may be gone from the New Pornographers, and that settling into being just a regular band is more challenging than they might have thought.


A sequel of sorts to the pair's 2001 First Album shows how much has changed since electroclash's heyday.

Two

Though she was working prior to this, it's safe to say Miss Kittin's career truly began with 2000's "Frank Sinatra". As career highlights go, never mind first bows, it's a pretty enviable one-- over the Hacker's brilliantly stupid rinky-dink ur-techno backdrop, Caroline Hervé speak-sings self-absorbed bon mots like "To be famous is so nice/ Suck my dick/ Kiss my ass," over and over with a dispassionate cadence. Miss Kittin's aloof sex-on-ice charisma, paired with synthesized tunes that exploited that detachment ("Stripper" and "Life on MTV" proving you can judge a book by its cover), made First Album a trailblazer for that like-it-or-lump-it music movement known as electroclash. So now, nearly a decade later, in a year that sees electroclash standard-bearers Fischerspooner and Peaches also release new albums, Miss Kittin & the Hacker reconvene for their purported follow-up to that debut, conveniently titled Two.
Of course, there are some things to keep in mind when trying to paint this "reunion" as just that-- this isn't the first time Kittin & the Hacker have worked together since First Album (with the Hacker contributing beats to I Com and Batbox), and the Miss Kittin from the turn of the century isn't the same as the turn-of-the-decade version. Just look at some of the song titles from Two-- "The Womb", "Emotional Interlude", "Inutile Éternité" (French for "useless eternity"), "Suspicious Minds". And, yes, that's Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" that the duo is tackling, and they're doing it in a straight-faced manner. Now given the ways and means of Kittin & the Hacker, "straight-faced" might not be the best description for this cover, but if it's possible to do a techno'd version of "Suspicious Minds" straight, then by gum they're doing it as well as they can. Which is to say, not very well at all, unless you're partial to Eurodisco karaoke. Accouterments aside, the distance between Sinatra and Presley-- as heartthrob icons, pop music iconoclasts, or Vegas showmen-- is probably minuscule. But the distance between the cultured self-aware cool of "Frank Sinatra" (or First Album as a whole) and the oblivious earnestness of "Suspicious Minds" could be measured in light years.
It's a distance that's only accentuated by this record's superficial attempt to hearken back to the duo's glory days. But folks that kept up with Kittin's post-First output already know about the conflict between what she does best (the cooler-than-you kiss-off) and what she seemingly wants to be. On Two, only "PPPO" sidesteps that tar pit, mostly because Kittin's vocal input is limited to shouting four words-- "people," "pleasure," "objects," and "power"-- every so often. That the tune also features the Hacker's best block-rocking beat of the album doesn't hurt. But the Hacker's workmanlike production here can't save Kittin from herself. When she's given room to speak her mind, as on "The Womb" ("I am strong, and I'm climbing the social ladder on my own") or "Party in My Head" ("I'm so small, I'm so not individual"), she sounds like she's trying to convince herself that she's one of the little people she once enjoyed stepping on. In tracks like "Ray Ban" and "Indulgence", she makes a vain attempts to reconnect to the glitz and gaudiness of First Album-era Kittin, and sounds even more out-of-step as a result. And only die-hard Kittin fans (or folks with a severe allergy to melisma and other diva signifiers) will find anything of substance to enjoy in "1000 Dreams" or "Electronic City". As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.


The French psych rockers’ send-up of mythic American road trip fantasies is undeniably fun, even if the humor and hooks don’t approach anything like real insight.

Paradigmes

Europeans, specifically members of the French intelligentsia, have long had a thing for the unknowability of the American interior. Just look to Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, cultural theorist, and, among other things, author of a book called Amérique. Published in 1986, it describes a cross-country trip through white-hot stretches of desert and Midwestern megaplexes. “Seedy bar in Santa Barbara,” Baudrillard writes. “Sex, beach, and mountains. Sex and beach, beach and mountains. Mountains and sex. A few concepts. Sex and concepts. ‘Just a life.’” His book is arguably unreadable, but it’s important—if only because it perfectly encapsulates the mystic, misty-eyed view certain French intellectuals take of the ordinary American road trip. On Paradigmes, the third record by the Paris-via-Biarritz band La Femme, Marlon Magnée and Sacha Got take that view of America and deviously turn it on its ear.
La Femme is perhaps the biggest rock band in France right now. They’ve soundtracked a Céline runway show and appeared in black-and-white photos on Hedi Slimane’s personal blog. They’ve been on the cover of Les Inrockuptibles, the country’s most influential culture publication, twice. They are inescapable in Paris. You could go to any record store in the city and easily find their previous releases: 2016’s Mystère, with its yonic cover art and coldwave-indebted songs about getting wasted near Strasbourg Saint Denis, and Psycho Tropical Berlin, 2013’s dystopian acid trip of a debut. In Paris, prior to the pandemic, La Femme—a band that at times sounds a bit like ye olde prog rock warlocks Amon Düül—could pack an arena.
Far less krauty than its predecessors, Paradigmes is a trip through America in the same way that an old Italian spaghetti western is. But there’s no solid narrative structure—only hours spent behind the wheel, traversing mountains and deserts, quixotic geographic markers that appear like characters in a story. The brassy surf-pop of “Cool Colorado” slithers through “Denver City” and eventually lands in “la Cité des Anges,” where “la vie est so cool.” On the glitchy “Nouvelle-Orléans,” New Orleans is a state of mind, a place to dream about when everything else is uncertain. “Pasadena” recounts teenage romance with drugged-out drum machines and synthesizers that light up like a Catherine wheel. The song has the cool sensibility of a Spike Jonze skater flick, the lyrics so effortless they’re almost lazy. “Toi avec tes copines/Moi avec mes potes/Direction: le skate park” (“You with your friends/Me with my mates/Heading to the skate park”), Magnée mutters, his voice a sinuous wave of distortion.
Not every song is so explicitly about America, if it’s about America at all. Like Kraftwerk before them, La Femme’s rendering is often textural, a byproduct of international pop-cultural backwash. “Disconnexion,” the record’s most ambitious track, moves from armchair philosophizing about Pascal and Descartes to breakneck banjo to a huge, baroque Moog solo à la Wendy Carlos. “Lâcher de chevaux” feels like a reference to Ennio Morricone’s theme music for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, complete with samples of a horse’s neigh and a cracking whip. “Foreigner” evokes Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity with synthesizers that chirp like animatronic birds. It also features some of the record’s wryest—and most obnoxious—lyrics. “You fuck this guy without a condom/A DJ or whatever/And I’m sick of that,” sings Magnée in English, with a visible smirk.
Paradigmes is fun, tight, and never boring, though there are lackluster moments, like “Foutre le bordel,” a derivative of Plastic Bertrand’s hugely popular “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” and several instances when songs like “Paradigme” and “Le sang de mon prochain” skirt close to the nefarious genre of electro swing. The whole album is so unserious that it can seem like an hour-long inside joke; at times I felt convinced I was being trolled, as if it would all soon turn out to be a stunt. If someone like Baudrillard approached the American travelogue in the most humorless way imaginable, then La Femme fall at the opposite extreme. Paradigmes is a good time, but its intellectual merit is entirely surface level. It’s like watching the funniest person in a college philosophy seminar give a presentation they failed to prepare in advance: you laugh, but not because you learned anything.

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Over field recordings sourced from the Mexico of Antonin Artaud’s travels, the New York singer gives voice to the French poet’s hallucinogenic visions.

Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith: The Peyote Dance

The Peyote Dance

In 1936, the celebrated French poet, playwright, and theorist Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara to escape the confines of insular bourgeois society, seek out mystical ways of being, and kick an opioid addiction. He found the key to all three quests in peyote. The result of his hallucinogenic journey to the mountains was a 1945 collection of writing called The Peyote Dance, which today reads uncomfortably as a dated account of a European engaging in some drug tourism. It is as snooze-inducing as listening to someone you don’t like very much telling you about their experience with doing edibles on study abroad. It is also the source text of the second album from Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith.
Like the group’s last effort, The Peyote Dance features Smith interpreting another poet’s work over a series of field recordings processed through electronics and delay. Tracing Artaud’s footsteps, Soundwalk Collective went to Mexico to capture the sounds on the album (gusts of wind, crackling fire, a breeze flowing through leaves); one member actually took peyote while he was there. Following a Spanish-language introduction set to ritual drumming and read by Gael García Bernal in which Artaud describes experiencing “the two or three happiest days of my life,” the darkness sets in. Artaud’s writing offers a panoply of grotesque imagery (“urinary camphor from the bulge of the dead vagina which smacks us when we spread it out”) designed to shock. The poet was deeply influenced by Surrealism, which looked to dreams as a source of hidden truths.  And what better way to access dream states than through drugs?
Reeling off line after line (“What does it mean? It means that Daddy-Mommy no longer buggers the innate pederast, the filthy tusk holes of the Christian fuckfests”) of Artaud’s psychoanalytical soul-dredging, Smith brings an undeniable urgency to the task, her voice a gravelly hiss. It’s too bad that her tenacious and tactile approach to these words is largely dwarfed by such monotonous backing tracks. You can only listen to thunderclaps in the distance for so long, and whatever Soundwalk Collective traveled to Mexico to capture—the spirit of the Rarámuri people, the echo of Artaud’s presence there—it doesn’t translate to tape. The music is hypnotic only in that it never seems to end.
Artaud’s writing hasn’t aged well. Today, it smacks of exoticizing a persecuted group of people for the benefit of a privileged European traveler’s self-discovery. Smith’s interest in the subject matter makes sense, particularly given the prevalence of addiction among her friends and peers in New York’s underground. Still, hearing a piece like “Tutuguri: The Rite of Black Night” treat the Mexican landscape as one big drug-fueled apparition doesn’t feel great. The static-filled “Alienation and Black Magic” is more compelling, attacking “insane asylums [as] conscious and premeditated receptacles of black magic.” “There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death,” Smith intones, offering a bleak premonition of the final years of the poet’s life, as he cycled through one institution after another.
Fortunately, one song on the album is unhindered by Artaud’s ramblings: the only track that Smith wrote, “Ivry.” On this nearly seven-minute lullaby, the proto-punk icon sings of vines, mothers, and lovely mornings. The fingerpicked guitar sparkles like a celestial body painted on a bedroom ceiling. It is a moment of clarity on an otherwise foggy and disappointing record, and it leaves you feeling full of light and ease, at least for a moment.


Layering reverberating guitar melodies with subtle electronic sound design and foggy atmospheres, the ambient musician formerly known as Ulla Straus has a way of making the vaporous feel intimate.

Limitless Frame

Brian Eno was wrong when he declared that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” In reality, there’s little in music that’s as powerful as ambient; its effects on the mood of any given space take hold immediately upon pressing play. The genre’s most astute artists understand how easily listeners succumb to such stimuli, and they utilize ambient’s discreet demeanor to build constantly unignorable atmospheres. The past 30 years have seen that play out in various forms: stuttering glitches, caustic noise, cinematic grandiosity. More unexpectedly gratifying are those who opt for gentler modes, doubling down on quietude to subvert expectations. Ulla (fka Ulla Straus) is one of contemporary ambient’s best practitioners of this style. Her songs are inviting in their softness, providing meditative sound worlds, but they also provoke endless curiosity through subtle fluctuations. Her pieces feel alive.
With Limitless Frame, Ulla builds on the emotional, sensitive canvases of 2020’s Tumbling Towards a Wall and inside means inside me. Partway through the latter, someone asks, “How do we fall in love with ourselves?” This notion of self-love also animates this album, which is accompanied by a poem: “Being somewhere, while being somewhere else/A place I look for in other places/A moment on repeat/I made this music as a way to hug myself.” Ulla’s intention on Limitless Frame, it seems, is to create music that transports you to instant and enveloping comfort. Opener “Aware of Something” captures that well. It’s a dubby ambient piece, but instead of the bleary afterparty comedowns of Echospace or mu tate, Ulla’s track feels like a heartfelt embrace. When its gliding bassline appears, it’s like someone running their hand across your back during a long, deep hug: a tender reminder of another’s warmth.
Ulla’s greatest feat with Limitless Frame is making the vaporous feel intimate. On “Look or Look Away,” reverberating guitar melodies flutter and twirl. Fingers slide along the fretboard, creating a rhythm that cradles the listener. “Somewhere Else” is compositionally similar but even sparser, and it drifts at a slower tempo, too. Here, there’s beauty found within every crevice; moments without the gauzy sounds of guitar are as cozy and evocative as those with them. Ulla goes to a further extreme with “Both Feelings,” a spectral and lonely song that’s little more than processed field recordings and piano. Much like “Clearly the Memory”—which marries Ulla’s guitar with emotive microsound electronics akin to soft tissue—it’s wistful and nostalgic, like nights spent searching for contentment in long-held memories.
The two longest tracks on Limitless Frame, however, allow for luxuriating in the here and now. “Something Inside My Body” features a gossamer layer of wind, piano chords, and what might be someone in a bathtub, while “Far Away” is defined by restrained yet exuberant saxophone playing. Despite their differences, these spacious tracks emanate serenity, and like all of Ulla’s best works, they seem like they’re doing nothing but simply existing. This effect recalls that special feeling of being so close to someone that their mere presence is enough to provide solace. Ulla’s brand of ambient music elegantly embodies that sense of calm, so much so that its nourishment can be taken for granted. But when Limitless Frame ends, its absence—like that of a loved one—is suddenly, even painfully noticeable. And that’s not something you can really ignore.

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Embracing the spirit of simplicity that has long characterized the best house music, the Manchester producer’s album knows the transformative power of a lean groove and a catchy sample.

Everything Is Alright

One of the many reasons that house music has endured and expanded beyond its Chicago roots is that it can be so incredibly simple. The young Manchester producer Finn’s new album Everything Is Alright is a perfect example. Take album opener “Everything Is Alright”: There’s little more to it than a bluesy vocal sample, organ riff, and shuffling drum pattern. But in putting together these elements with heart, soul, and a sense of musical relativity, it feels as if Finn is tapping into the very essence of house music, where a single groove and a modest idea can go a long way.
Everything Is Alright is, more than anything, an exercise in taste and restraint—in choosing exactly the right elements for your song, then leaving well alone. So “A.Y.O.Y.O.” may highlight a sledgehammer-basic, four-note piano riff, which plays off against a chopped vocal sample and deep bass cushion. But it is striking how the riff adds just the right touch of measured melancholy, while the dub-inflected bass line skillfully lifts the bottom of the mix without dominating. Much like his friend and collaborator India Jordan, Finn is an especially dexterous sampler. On “I Don’t Know,” he uses a brief snatch of female vocal that he stretches like children’s putty into an angelic drone; on “Ere U R,” three snippets of a longer vocal line are pulled apart and put back together to create a brilliantly nagging hook.
In doing so, Finn calls back to American filter-house innovators Todd Terry and DJ Sneak and micro-sampling pioneers Marc Kinchen and Todd Edwards, producers who have long known the transformative power of the right sample. Being British, it is perhaps inevitable that Finn allows elements of UK garage and rave to sneak in, from the 2-step skip of “Everything Is Alright” to the touch of hardcore breaks and offbeat donk on the excellent “Things, Things, Things!” In its fresh-faced stylistic lunges, the record often summons the spirit of old-school British house music (think early Leftfield and pre-progressive Spooky), where hardcore was just starting to splinter off into its own sound but future techno god Carl Cox and jungle figurehead Grooverider could still share a DJ bill.
Far from being throwback, though, Finn’s music feels alive and eternal; its verve and imaginative spark make Everything Is Alright a record for house grandads and new ravers alike. There’s real personality to these beats. “Things, Things, Things!” and “Big Raver” are just that little bit stupid in their embrace of galloping-horse hardcore sonics, while “Never Leave” and “Forever Blue” show the mournful side of house, the wet Wednesday to “Big Raver”’s endless Saturday night. In the end, there is something rather charming in Finn’s ability to throw all of house history into the pot—here’s the classic Robin S. Korg organ sound, there’s the hands-in-the-air Italo-house piano riff—with no regard for self-consciousness or historical inhibition.
Would an older, more dyed-in-the-wool producer have been daring enough to pillage so obviously, albeit affectionately? Perhaps not. But doing so feels very much in the liberating spirit of house music in which Everything Is Alright was created. Finn made the nine tracks in an attempt to get back in touch with what he loved and cherished about dance music. With an open mind and lubricated hips, the album could work wonders for you too.


Bruce Springsteen returns with elegiac and wise songwriting conjuring the golden expanse of the American West; it’s his best studio album in years.

Western Stars

The voices in Western Stars are old and restless, lost and wandering. On the title track, Bruce Springsteen sings from the perspective of an actor who once worked with John Wayne but now mostly does commercials—credit cards, Viagra. Elsewhere, we meet a stuntman whose body has been destroyed by the job, a lonely widower idling in his old parking spot, and a failed country songwriter wondering if any of the sacrifices he made in his youth were worth it. Sung in a defeated growl, this latter track is among the shortest, starkest things that Springsteen has ever recorded: an acknowledgment of how quickly a song—and life—can pass by.
That song is called “Somewhere North of Nashville,” and it’s an outlier on Springsteen’s 19th studio album, both geographically and musically. On the rest of the record, Springsteen, with producer Ron Aniello, aims to conjure the golden expanse of the American West, with sweeping orchestral accompaniments unlike anything in his catalog. Springsteen albums are usually grand affairs but he’s never made one that sounds so vast and luxurious throughout. Paired with the down-and-out characters who haunt its mountains and canyons, the purposefully anachronistic arrangements—recalling jukeboxes, FM radios, sepia-toned montages, faded memories—carry an elegiac tone. It’s been a long time since popular music sounded like this, and it ties these characters to an era as much as a place.
Neither is where you expect to find Springsteen, who turns 70 this fall. He has spent the last few years drawing attention to the most beloved corners of his career, from lovingly curated box sets and live releases to an anniversary tour behind 1980’s commercial breakthrough The River. His nostalgic bent culminated in two presentations of his life story: a 500-page memoir and a one-man Broadway show. Both begin with a wink toward his self-described fraudulence—an “absurdly successful” entertainer who made his fortune by telling stories of blue-collar workers—and end with solemn prayers and reflections on mortality. In the book, Springsteen discusses the struggles with depression that have threatened to derail him over the past 10 years. “Mentally, just when I thought I was in the part of my life where I’m supposed to be cruising,” he writes, “My sixties were a rough, rough ride.”
All this looking back plays into the music of Western Stars. “Hell, these days there ain’t no ‘more,’” he sighs in the title track, “Now there’s just ‘again.’” Repetition and waiting course through the record as constants—sunrise, sunset. There’s a song called “Chasin’ Wild Horses” that prescribes its title as a means of counterbalancing pain; the arrangement grows more romantic as the chorus hardens into a routine. Springsteen’s narrative writing has always served to reflect his host of anxieties outward. A darkening mindset and feelings of isolation in his early 30s inspired him to summon the hellbound outsiders and dark highways of Nebraska; navigating his first marriage resulted in the doubt-plagued domestic portraits on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. During his exhaustive live shows, he is known to venture into the crowd to be swarmed by the community that’s united by his work. In the studio, he has to invent it himself: a sea of faces where he can find his own reflection. Western Stars transports him to a ghost town of broken male narrators, alone with their never-ending work and shortening timelines. He sings to us from somewhere among them, looking wearily beyond.
Following 2012’s Wrecking Ball and 2014’s High Hopes—records that responded to current political issues and sought to modernize the E Street Band’s rock’n’roll exorcisms with loops and samples and Tom Morello—this music is a left turn. The stories, however, remain archetypically Springsteen. Occasionally, he sounds like he’s checking in with characters from his songbook, furthering them along or bidding them farewell. For those wild spirits who worked 9 to 5 and somehow survived till the night, there’s “Sundown,” a tour through a bittersweet twilight where you long for companionship. After all his promises of escape—these two lanes that could take us anywhere—there’s the hardened narrator of “Hello Sunshine,” cautioning that “miles to go is miles away.”
And while nearly every one of Springsteen’s road songs is sung from the driver's seat, this record opens with “Hitch Hikin’,” a folk song propelled by a gentle windmill of strings, sung by a drifter with nowhere to go. He invites us into the backseats of three cars, whose drivers stand in for the pillars of Springsteen’s career. There’s a father, a trucker headed toward a big open highway, and a solitary racer in a vintage model from 1972, which also happens to be the year that Springsteen scored his record deal with Columbia. These avatars introduce a record that favors new sounds and perspectives—he often sings as a shadow or a visitor, giving credence to a recently revealed habit for crashing strangers’ funerals—but remains carefully rooted in his history. David Sancious, an early collaborator who played the virtuosic piano solo in 1973’s “New York City Serenade,” returns here to guide “The Wayfarer” to its tragic-triumphant conclusion. His jazzy touch on the keys offsets the thump of Springsteen’s acoustic guitar and the earthy twang of his baritone, as open-hearted and desperate as it has ever sounded.
In this song, Springsteen reframes his wanderlust in a series of confessions. He acknowledges that put in his position most people would be happy with what they have. He knows his worries are nothing new. The title of Western Stars is a phrase that also appears in “Ulysses,” a 19th-century Tennyson poem that Springsteen has drawn from before. (Another, more ubiquitous, Tennyson quote is invoked at the end of this record: “It’s better to have loved,” he sings in “Moonlight Motel,” his voice trailing off.) It’s easy to see why Springsteen finds resonance in these particular texts: defining works by a grief-stricken poet wondering if our brief, complicated lives are worth the legacy we leave behind. “Ulysses” is narrated by a hero approaching old age, returning from a long journey only to realize he felt more fulfilled on the road. So he heads out again, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And stay alive, if he can.


Known for her dark production and striking vocals, singer/songwriter Nina Nastasia offers this prequel to her two Touch & Go full-lengths.

Dogs

On Dogs, Nina Nastasia sings about dogs, as a symbol of the pursuit of love, or a metaphor for the easy life, but also as a colloquialism-- "your dogs are tired," on "The Long Walk"-- or to set up, by way of the cat/dog dichotomy, a clever pun, when Nastasia admits that "curiosity kills me." She also makes a musical pun when the cello quotes the "give a dog a bone" line of "This Old Man". Nastasia doesn't fixate on the animal as a formal concept for the record-- it's more like a recurring gag. Dogs pass through as easily as the fleeting smokes, or the beers that she and her friends half-heartedly throw back outside the high school, or an unsurprising string of bad relationships.
With its snarky cover shot and the salutation ("Thank you, comrades") on the back sleeve, Dogs seems more light-hearted and somehow "younger" than Nastasia's other records, and for good reason: She recorded it five years ago, and is now re-releasing it for the fans she gained with The Blackened Air and Run to Ruin. In her work since, she's honed an elusively grim atmosphere, and her albums are stronger for it-- not because they need moodiness to prop them up, but because the moods draw out the nuances of her frank but graceful songs. On Dogs, she sounds more like a standard singer/songwriter, and it's hard not to treat this as a prelude to her better albums.
Nastasia has an understated voice with a limited range, and on several of these ballads, you can hear her drift into its limits, accepting a whispering tone as the cost of expressiveness; on her later albums, she sings more confidently, or lowers her voice to a warning. The arrangements on Dogs are also a simpler precursor of The Blackened Air, where the strings and saws drift in on an autumnal gust, or the striking textures of Run to Ruin.
Steve Albini, who has engineered all of her albums, plays the part of creating an objective as-is document, but he and Nastasia have a good idea as to where to put the focus. The recording makes impressive use of vintage instruments, whose birthdates and makers are detailed in the liner notes. (Who knew that Nastasia was a socialist and a gearhead?) The strings augment Nastasia's ballads without sweetening them, and Stephen Day's cello smoothly complements her voice. But the delicate arrangements hold back louder songs like "Nobody Knew Her", on which a surprisingly powerful guitar deserves more room.
Nastasia has said she practices in the bathroom of her apartment, and Dogs has the ease of a performance that you're catching as you sit in the shower stall. The songs here include some of the best she's written, but they're also some of the most unexpected. Without this reissue, we could have forgotten that she has an ear for big guitar riffs, or that she sounds beautiful just playing straight on an acoustic guitar. And who would have remembered that she has a sense of humor?


Six years since her last studio album, the veteran singer-songwriter and slide guitarist returnswith a collection of robust professional rock that may inspire deep dives into her back catalog.

Just Like That...

If the young feel hard and forget fast, adults feel hard and remember long. To her credit, Bonnie Raitt has never courted the youth market. Avoiding disco strings and guest raps, the slide-guitar legend has amassed a body of work immersed in the blues and fully committed to the Well-Written Song; both her chosen repertoire and the material she’s penned herself adduce a belief in adulthood as a well-earned grace. Her sunny, wide-open voice and the sparkling correctness of her playing have kept bathos at bay ever since she invested Eric Kaz’s “Love Has No Pride,” one of her chestnuts, with an aw-shucks sensual abandonment: She’s in love, yet damn straight she keeps her pride.
Thirty-three years after Nick of Time, which yielded perhaps the most career-changing Grammy coronation in history, and six years since her last studio album, Dig in Deep, Raitt returns with Just Like That…, a self-produced effort boasting most of her strengths: a fidelity to the material that borders on the idolatrous, a penchant for leading mostly male pros through unfamiliar paces, and the exquisite precision of her guitar. As for weaknesses—well, she could have ventured further afield with the covers, as she did with Dig in Deep’s sly take on INXS’ “Need You Tonight.” Still, she sounds good, she plays better, and her band, co-led by longtime foil George Marinelli, simmers. A fine career summation should she choose to stop, Just Like That… is robust professional rock, a demonstration of Raitt’s vitality, like, say, Catherine Deneuve’s recent film work.
Her 18th album cedes a few of the solos she and Marinelli might have played to Glenn Patscha, a first-rate organist whose fills have the lightness of Charles Hodges. On her own “Waitin’ for You to Blow,” she lays down the guitar so Kenny Greenberg and Patscha can exchange solos over Ricky Fataar’s hi-hats. “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart” gets a lift from Patscha’s Fender Rhodes colors, given a mixing boost by Raitt and Ryan Freeland (the funereal “Blame It on Me” is the only lapse into heavy-handedness). A chugging little thing familiar to fans of her 1973 cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “You’ve Been in Love Too Long,” her band’s take on the Bros. Landreth’s “Made Up Mind” greases up a melody “like a rainstorm tin-roof symphony.” But they falter with a static reggae-lite version of Toots and the Maytals’ “Love So Strong”; it has a skank but not much else.
When Raitt keeps things fresh with narrative writing, the cleanness of her melodies and lyrics deepens her empathy. With the help of an acoustic lick that’s the stepchild of the Beatles’ “Blackbird ” and Patscha’s shimmering organ, “Down the Hall” examines a man’s stint in a prison infirmary; he observes Tyrone, “cancer eatin’ him inside out,” takes time to shave Julio’s head and, “crackin’ him up,” wash his feet. The Springsteen of Nebraska might have smiled with recognition, but Raitt’s contralto repels attempts to imbue “Down the Hall” with existential portent. Its just-the-facts approach is closer to Springsteen influences like Bobbie Ann Mason than Nebraska.
Just Like That… may inspire catalog deep dives. Many fans’ relationship with Raitt began with 1991’s Luck of the Draw, the septuple-platinum follow-up to Nick of Time that remains a landmark of boomer pop outreach—as much a generational touchstone as Paul Simon’s Graceland, the sort of album Mom and Dad played on vacation road trips because here was a woman Mom’s age having fun making her most powerful music at middle age. In a summer when Bryan Adams strangled the top 40 with a mousy ballad sprung from Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, “Something to Talk About” was a well-deserved hit, sexy in a mature, fully cognizant way; you’d have to go back to Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” to find as worldly a Top Five hit sung by a fortysomething white woman. And her take on Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is the kind of recording that comes along just once in an artist’s career, though it’s echoed in the pungent aphorisms of Just Like That…’s “Down the Hall”: “I don’t know about religion/I only know what I see.”
It’s okay if few performances on Just Like That… match that highlight. Most of her albums contain time bombs; even records like 1986’s Nine Lives, regarded as misbegotten, have miracles of grace like “Crime of Passion” that reward the digging. But Just Like That… will do—ostensible hand-me-downs like the Stones-y “Livin’ for the Ones” shame that band’s recent output, for example. The album title is the giveaway. Pros know their shit.


Director Jim Jarmusch has been increasingly hung up on music since shooting his last feature, The Limits of Control. After releasing two albums with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, his new band SQÜRL comprises Carter Logan and Vampire Weekend engineer Shane Stoneback, and draws on feedback, drone, and song-based disciplines.

Sqürl EP

Director Jim Jarmusch has been increasingly hung up on music since shooting his last feature The Limits of Control, a beautiful slow-crawl through the mind of an assassin. He's produced two albums with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, worked as a curator at the New York incarnation of ATP, and recorded a series of EPs with his new band, a trio named SQÜRL. This project began life under the name Bad Rabbit, assembled by Jarmusch, drummer Carter Logan, and Vampire Weekend/Sleigh Bells engineer Shane Stoneback. The initial aim was to flesh out the Limits soundtrack with thoughtful, instrumental rock passages. This EP, apparently the first in a series, is an advance on that music. The setting is firmly fixed to "desert," with each of the four tracks touching on Josh Homme's approach to psychedelic rock.
It's not hard to imagine an alternate universe where Jarmusch pursued music harder than film. At a recent show at the Mercury Lounge in New York, staged to showcase SQÜRL and his work with Van Wissem, he cut an imposing figure on stage. Whether stepping up to the mic or stooping down by his amp to pull out a wail of feedback, it felt like these were the predominant moments Jarmusch played out in his teenage dreams. Of course, he's played on stage many times before, notably with no wave outfit the Del-Byzanteens, but at this stage in his career, where he's comfortably established in a different medium, the show at the Mercury was pleasing for the full-blooded commitment it showed. It's indicative of the way Jarmusch works, finding weight in moments both big and small, never ascribing more importance to one over the other.
That wilfull artistic blindness is fundamental to Jarmusch's stradling of the avant garde and the mainstream. It's what allows him to put Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes in a movie with Robert Mitchum and Johnny Depp. Similarly, SQÜRL draws from a number of different disciplines. One track on this EP is simply drawn from layers of feedback. Another matches crunchy, distorted guitar lines to Jarmusch singing about being surrounded by piles of dead hippies. Yes, he's singing here, on two out of four tracks, only one of which deviates into the forlorn rock & roll crooner trap you might expect him to fall into. That track-- a cover of Elvis Presley's "Little Sister" forcibly shoved through a meat grinder-- is the weakest work here, the only song that feels like an afterthought, and currently outpaced in the gutter-neon stakes by Jarmusch acolyte Dirty Beaches.
Where SQÜRL works best, perhaps unsurprisingly, is through the planes of repetitive sound that make up "Pink Dust". It’s the most soundtrack-y thing here, the closest this EP gets to forming a link to the material this band specifically composed for film under their Bad Rabbit guise. The guitar tone isn’t far from Boris's "Farewell"-- itself a part of the Limits of Control soundtrack-- but with a far nastier undercurrent crudely stamped all the way through it. It's a decent approximation of the kind of stuff Jarmusch has clearly been listening to in recent times, judging from his soundtrack work and handpicked ATP lineup. It's part drone-rock, part metal, part blissful stoner fatigue. There's a power to it that the rest of the material can't get back to, a sense of magic unfolding in those gigantic riffs. For now, SQÜRL describe themselves as "enthusiastically marginal," but there's enough going on here to suggest that's a placeholder rather than an epitaph.


The Chicago drummer and producer transforms Gil-Scott Heron's final album into a masterpiece of dirty blues, spiritual jazz, and deep yearning.

Gil Scott-Heron / Makaya McCraven: We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven

Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, was a moving but unfinished statement from an important but overlooked artist. By the mid-’00s, the writer, poet, and singer had a long and storied career behind him, with more than a dozen albums of word-dense soul and R&B, two novels, and one phrase, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taken from his song of the same name, that echoed through culture and became more famous than he would ever be. He was a crucial voice of protest who deeply influenced black music across genres—hip-hop especially—but he hadn’t done much in a while. His last LP had been released more than a decade earlier. In the years between, he’d had drug problems, which led to health problems and legal problems, including an extended stretch incarcerated at Riker’s Island. A lot of people had forgotten about Scott-Heron, but Richard Russell, who founded the label XL, remembered, and he got in touch.
Scott-Heron wasn’t in a place where he could offer much creative input, but Russell persuaded him to make a record, a little at a time, and he built I’m New Here from fragments. In a New Yorker profile of Scott-Heron that ran six months after the album’s release, the writer and singer, then 61, said that he didn’t think of the album as his creation. “This is Richard’s CD,” he told Alec Wilkinson. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
A decade later, the songs, poems, and conversational snippets Scott-Heron recorded with Russell are showing up in another dream, this one imagined by Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. It’s the second album-length reworking of the I’m New Here material, following Jamie xx’s 2011 collection We’re New Here, but this one feels definitive. Though Jamie xx assembled a fantastic record, one thick with hypnotic samples and irresistible beats, We’re New Again brings us closer to Scott-Heron’s world.

Working with his regular circle of collaborators, many of whom have made highly regarded albums of their own in recent years (Jeff Parker on guitar, Brandee Younger on harp, Junius Paul on bass, Ben Lamar Gay on instruments and percussion), McCraven brings Scott-Heron’s work down to earth and situates it in a milieu the elder artist would have recognized. With arrangements that move between dirty blues, angelic spiritual jazz, and free-form drumming, McCraven has created a kind of survey of 20th-century black music that doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, one in which every piece fits together.
McCraven is both a player and a collagist, splicing together long jams and improvisations into structured pieces. Everything on his records feels close—you hear the instruments more than the rooms they’re recorded in, which can make individual parts sound simultaneously machine-like and deeply funky. He likes compression and uses it artfully, and his beats radiate force and muscle. They’re like a layer of armor behind which his more subtle and delicate musical ideas can develop and grow.
On We’re New Again, McCraven takes Scott-Heron’s primary themes from his sessions with Russell—what it means to live in fear, the idea of home, how we confront our mortality, the mysterious and transformative power of familial love—and channels them into a concept record. His sources speak to his big-picture ambitions. Via samples, he incorporates music played by both of his parents—his father Stephen McCraven, a drummer, worked with Archie Shepp, the Last Poets, and many others, and his mother, Ágnes Zsigmondi, is a singer—to connect this music to his own history, reinforcing the album’s central concerns of place and lineage.
The work Scott-Heron recorded for I’m New Here was connected to his memoir, The Last Holiday, which he’d been tinkering with for years and was published the year after his death. The book finds Scott-Heron making history—he was one of the first black students to integrate white schools in Tennessee, and its final sections focus on his desire, alongside Stevie Wonder, to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday—but many of its most moving passages are simpler scenes drawn from his childhood. And many of these detail his relationships with his mother and grandmother.
Even if they didn’t read the memoir, fans of I’m New Here know his grandmother’s name, Lily Scott, because Scott-Heron mentions her in the track “On Coming From a Broken Home.” It’s a piece about not just her love but also the ways a seemingly dysfunctional family can provide all the emotional nourishment a kid might need. McCraven splits “On Coming From a Broken Home” into four parts, ensuring that its words are never far from our minds. “But Lily Scott was absolutely not your mail-order, room-service, typecast, black grandmother,” Scott-Heron speaks, adding later, “I loved her from the absolute marrow of my bones/And we was holdin’ on.”
McCraven finds a different setting for each section of the poem—the album-opening part one is floating and spacey, part two is a throbbing acoustic blues drone, part three emits the glow of ’70s AM radio, and part four has percussive textures from West Africa—and that eclecticism carries through the rest of the record. “Running,” a powerful incantation about the desire to keep moving even when you know nothing will change, is driven by a propulsive drum break. McCraven turns “New York Is Killing Me” into a dense piano arrangement that sounds like an early-’60s Blue Note recording, with a layer of voices from the Harlem Gospel Choir on the “Lord Have Mercy on Me” refrain that underscores its connection to soul-jazz.
The record’s cover songs are, in their own way, just as autobiographical. Bill Callahan’s “I’m New Here” suggests scenes from Scott-Heron’s itinerant life. Its narrator is both confident and vulnerable, taking in his surroundings and feeling reborn but also aware that he’ll need human communication to make it through. McCraven gives it his most relaxed and gentle arrangement, as if the hopeful chorus, “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around,” might actually be true. The exceedingly spare rendition of “I’ll Take Care of You,” by R&B singer Brook Benton, could be an expression of a desire that Scott-Heron could never quite manifest, to be someone else’s place of safety. And Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” featuring a horn sample from one of McCraven’s father’s recordings, is a dark anthem for a man whose demons were never far behind.
Early on, Scott-Heron wrote songs about alcoholism (“The Bottle”) and drugs (“Home Is Where the Hatred Is”), but “The Crutch,” which McCraven backs with a filthy electrified blues vamp, feels especially autobiographical. The song is about heroin (“His eyes half-closed revealed his world of nod/A world of lonely men and no love, no god”) but as the harrowing New Yorker profile made clear, by the time Scott-Heron recorded it, he was addicted to crack cocaine. His words and songs showed compassion for addicts and framed chemicals as a way to cope with pain and loneliness. They also turned the concept of “home” found elsewhere on the album inside-out—sometimes, a place of salvation becomes one of torment. The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact. It’s odd to draw lessons about survival from someone in trouble who is facing the end, but that’s another paradox the album negotiates. McCraven helps us feel it: For a little longer, anyway, Gil Scott-Heron was still here, and he was holding on.

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Open Your Eyes, the first set of new tracks released on Teklife's eponymous label, features collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never and a host of footwork veterans.

Open Your Eyes

If you listen closely, you can hear footwork undergoing a transition that house and techno made before it: from a functional music created for dancers to a music made, at least in part, for personal expression. As with house and techno, this has resulted in tighter and more precise compositions, as producers—who have also gotten better at using their gear/software—are no longer rushing beats to the dance floors. If you compare DJ Rashad’s Double Cup or Jlin’s Dark Energy with the types of tracks—full of eerie ambiance and seams-showing production values—featured on the seminal Bangs & Works compilation, there is an uptick in both fidelity and personality.
The shift is apparent, too, in the work of DJ Earl, New York-based, Chicago-born member of the Teklife crew. The first set of new tracks released on Teklife’s eponymous label (the first release was a cull of Rashad’s archive), Open Your Eyes is eight tracks of knocking-but-composed footwork. Featuring several collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never (as well as a host of footwork veterans) and artwork by OBEY founder Shepard Fairey, Open Your Eyes feels leagues away from the harsh digital productions on earlier Earl EPs like Teklife Or Nolife or Afrika Tek.
Earl is still working well within the purview of footwork, offering up the kind of tempos and chopped vocal refrains you’ve come to know and love. There are vocal samples about weed, and about ass, and one about fucking shit up. Little summer storms of snare drums come in fast and hard. But Open Your Eyes is an orderly and uncluttered album, even when working at higher tempos. The vocal bits never clash or confuse; there’s space in the arrangements for synthesizers to float in and out of the mix.
If you are the type of listener who generally finds footwork too manic and roughshod, Open Your Eyes may be for you. “Let’s Work,” a collaboration with Oneohtrix and MoonDoctoR, is almost elegant: a house vocal—“C’mon let’s work!”—deployed economically over electric piano and horn. (As with many collaborations in the co-operation friendly footwork world, it can be difficult to discern who is doing what, exactly.) “RacheTt” (with MoonDoctoR and OPN) threatens to whip itself into a noisy froth but stops just short. Even the more aggressive “Smoking Reggie” (again with MoondoctoR and OPN) has a kind of call-and-response logic to it, and a whinnying synth melody to anchor it.
It’s hard not to notice, though, that Open Your Eyes is also somewhat conservative. It features none of the wild juxtapositions or mayhem of, say, RP Boo. It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music. DJ Earl is traveling a different road than footwork’s pioneers, and he may yet find that magic on it.


YYYs make the dreaded "mature album" work by taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected.

It's Blitz!

The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut LP, 2003's Fever to Tell, set an early-decade benchmark for sheer ugliness, a deliberately heinous splatter of webbed blood, stabbed snakes, and flaming heads. The music was also confrontational, with lead singer Karen O following in the footsteps of countless riot grrls and righteous rock queens in crafting a persona of raw defiance and sexual menace.
Fast-forward six years, and a glance at the instantly iconic cover of the band's third full-length, It's Blitz!, tells you all you need to know about how far the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have come, from Fever to Tell through the middle-ground growing pains of 2006's Show Your Bones and up to today. A clean, simple image of a woman's hand bursting an egg-- it's no less powerful an indication of feminine strength and defiance than Fever's abrasive scrawl, yet it's miles and miles more subversive. It's also a fitting symbol for its music, taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected.
It's Blitz! is constructed from parts that by themselves aren't extraordinary-- in fact, many of them are quite banal, like the generic Franz-Bloc-Killers modern rock riff that propels "Dull Life" or the doomy one that drives "Shame and Fortune", sounding ripped straight off a late-period Smashing Pumpkins record. Much has been made of the album's heavy reliance on rock's eternal bugaboo, the synth, but often the synths are doing rock things rather than dance things, like on the buzzing, road-burning opener "Zero". Only two songs, "Heads Will Roll" and "Dragon Queen", deliver real disco backbeats.
With these unremarkable tools, however, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims. Take the lovely, insinuating "Soft Shock", for instance-- it starts with tinkly keyboards and an Far East-sounding melody that builds to a refrain utilizing the words in the song's title, but it isn't the song's emotional climax, which is hidden until later, when Karen worriedly intones "what's the time, what's the day, gonna leave me?" Even more compositionally jarring are the slow, stretched-out set showcases "Skeletons" and "Runaway", the former taking a blippy little electro-ballad and then plopping martial drums and a melody that sounds taken from some Scottish battle hymn smack dab in the middle. In keeping with the arty tendencies that have blossomed within the band from the beginning, these songs often feel portioned out into passages or movements as opposed to flowing organically throughout.
With such an absence of easy signposts, we're especially apt to follow Karen wherever she goes, since she's our only hope for a guide. Yet she refuses to be a locus of explanation or control, keeping her lyrics generally vague and frequently losing herself in bursts of incomprehensible excitement or fervor. These fits and embellishments account for most of the best moments on the album-- the way she breathlessly pants "crying, crying, crying" on "Zero", or giddily draws out the last syllable of the line "a hundred years old" on "Dull Life", or how "Heads Will Roll" and "Dragon Queen" periodically dissipate into an inchoate softness.
The ninth song on Fever to Tell was "Maps", a fleeting glimpse of vulnerability on an album of gleeful scorn. On It's Blitz! that slot is occupied by "Hysteric", a song every bit as emotionally naked and immediately indelible as "Maps". Here though, it represents an island of piercing clarity and happy convention in a sea of bewilderment, impulse, and ecstasy.


Seven albums in, the Portland prog-poppers have tidied up their act on Evil Friends, with help from producer Danger Mouse. Portugal. The Man take a surefooted approach here, confidently blasting through their pan-genre Frankensongs.

Evil Friends

The latest album by Portland's Portugal. The Man, Evil Friends, is rarely the same from one minute to the next, careening between alt-rock bombast, punk snot, Lumineersy campfire singalongs, pixelated MGMT headbandcore, dawdling George Harrison solos; you name it, Evil Friends has probably stuck it somewhere. All that might sound like more than one album can bear, but funnily enough, Evil Friends is just about the least convoluted Portugal LP so far. With Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton behind the boards, Evil Friends finds Portugal sharpening their poppier instincts while still leaving room for the proggy ambitions that got them there.
At least as far back as 2009's The Satanic Satanist, Portugal's hooks sharpened, their restless compositions cut with flyaway choruses. With Burton's help, Portugal continue to clear a path through the fracas; he hasn't done much to tamp down their taste for maximalism, but he's certainly helped them sculpt the melee into something a little less unwieldy, making sure these songs have enough hook to carry the weight of all the instrumental bedlam swirling around them.
It's not a perfect fit; every surface glistens, and Burton certainly helps Portugal keep a lot of balls in the air while staying mindful of information overload, but his mix has that bright-as-the-sun quality of most modern major label rock that leads to fatigue after too long. And he seems to have talked John Gourley into sticking to the upper ranges of his acrobatic pipes, a move that won't likely sit well with every Portugal fan. Still, Burton helps Portugal keep some control of what could easily turn to chaos, taking great care with their elaborate embellishments.
With Burton at their backs, Portugal take a surefooted approach on Evil Friends, confidently blasting through these pan-genre Frankensongs. But, just as the music seems to reposition itself every few seconds, so do John Gourley's lyrics, albeit with a lower success rate. He makes a couple of things clear on Friends: he's anti-apathy (the presumably ironic "Creep in a T-Shirt"), pro-ecstasy ("Purple Yellow Red and Blue", featuring two-thirds of Haim), and more than a little conflicted about religion. "We don't need no modern Jesus to roll with us," he notes. "Who cares if hell awaits," he wonders a bit later, "we're having drinks at heaven's gate."
But then there's "Hip Hop Kids". What starts out as a stroll with his young daughter takes a sudden turn into bile-spewing rebuke: "You hip-hop kids think we give a shit when we don't," he spits, apropos of... your guess is as good as mine. Gourley seems like a pleasant enough dude, so this "get off my lawn" thing has to be an act; either way, it doesn't work, the song's tart melody spiked with this untoward bitterness. Several songs on Evil Friends sport choruses that seem at odds with their verses, or stabs at profundity that don't hold up under scrutiny. With everything else floating around these songs, they could occasionally use an anchor, a task Gourley's flimsier lyrics aren't always up for.
It took me maybe four or five good listens before Evil Friends stopped setting off my claustrophobia. Even with prolonged exposure, Evil Friends' ever-present busyness can be overwhelming; there's a lot-- and sometimes too much-- going on here. Still, even when their ambitions outpace their execution, Portugal deserve their props for continuing to overshoot the mark. Seven albums in, with a seemingly permanent mid-day slot at almost every decent-sized festival on either side of the pond and a big-name producer on their side, Portugal. The Man could've easily spent Evil Friends shedding complexities and doubling down on catchiness. The frequently overstuffed, occasionally scatterbrained album is far from perfect. But even when going for broke gets them into trouble, Portugal seem happy to get up there and overshoot the mark.


The international jazz-rap project Sélébéyone is a rare case of the two genres mixing at their most far-out, abstract corners.

Sélébéyone

Jazz-rap collaborations mostly happen at the spot where both genre's mainstreams overlap. Guru's Jazzmatazz series tapped the talents of one-time Billboard-charting trumpeter Donald Byrd. Herbie Hancock approached Grandmixer.DST for the scratches on “Rockit” well after the keyboardist had settled into his populist, funk-fusion period. The same tends to hold true today, as when Kendrick Lamar chooses improvisers who have already proved their expertise with incorporating R&B flourishes.
Much less familiar is the sight of left-field rappers experimenting with artists from jazz's avant-garde scene. One artist who's been an exception to this rule is HPrizm—the rapper formerly known as High Priest, from Antipop Consortium. In 2003, Antipop recorded with the blazingly talented pianist Matthew Shipp. Their partnership was notable for its boldness, though the album is more a curiosity than a highlight (in both catalogues).
HPrizm’s latest foray into hybrid-genre adventurism easily stands with the most successful jazz-rap crossover efforts of years and decades past. Part of what makes this new project work is the fact that it’s not merely a meeting between one rapper and one jazz artist. Going by the name Sélébéyone—a word for “intersection” in Senegal’s Wolof language—this ensemble contains two different emcees who hail from different continents, as well as two composer-saxophonists, and three other valuable supporting players with strong pedigrees in jazz. What they come up with feels both legitimately new and surprisingly approachable.
The two saxophonists who share composition duties on this group’s self-titled debut are altoist Steve Lehman (the nominal session leader) and his onetime student Maciek Lasserre (who plays soprano saxophone). Lehman is already celebrated in jazz circles for his complex rhythm switches and a taste for experimental harmonies. And while his tunes on Sélébéyone occasionally showcase these attributes, those characteristics have been mixed so well into the collective’s sound that they don’t call too much attention to themselves.
Despite all the wild change-ups on a track like “Are You In Peace?,” the air of abandon and possibility is due to its fresh take on the posse cut: one in which the jazz solos are positioned as equal to the verses, and in which electronic sampling bolsters instrumental bridges. It’s possible to pick it all apart and figure out who’s doing what, but the surfeit of talent is just as easily enjoyed on its own.
On this and several other cuts, Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic shares vocal duties. He’s a revelation: When he isn't raising the entire group's energy level during hype-man verses, Bandimic’s lyrics often orbit around topics of social-humanist concern, as well as the emcee’s Sufi practice of Islam. His lines from the album (as well as HPrizm’s) are presented in English on Lehman’s site, though a listener won’t need a line by line accounting of the bars spit in Wolof to appreciate the way that Bandimic throttles between a staccato flow and more fluid passages. As he’s demonstrated in his solo music, Bandimic can also carry a tune—a skill he shows off on the slinky minor-mode conclusion of “Dualism,” where he duets with Lasserre’s soprano horn. The rapper’s sensitivity to pitch is also in evidence during more uptempo moments, as with the exciting closing minutes of frenetic album finale “Bamba.”
Amid Bandimic’s onslaught of approaches, HPrizm more than holds his own. He threads fast passages through “Hybrid” (“No imagination, only my real life / Pulse over drums, hope to show what it feels like”). He offers a thrilling, predominantly a cappella introduction to “Dualism.” And during “Laamb,” the album’s slowly evolving opening track, HPrizm stretches his line breaks, creating unpredictable syllable stresses in a verse about the psychological tolls exacted by political inequality. (“Jewels I find/Under three-fourths water/From flooded streets I was brought up/Now in this era facing the ramifications/Of blocks to the occupation/As bars over propaganda/They criminalize the victim/Then the truth sets in.”) The rhythmic structure that Lehman uses for “Laamb” matches the lyrics—as a steadily marching piano ostinato gradually makes room for polyrhythms, and eventually some graceful accompaniment from his saxophone.
Though its members don’t have much solo space, the rhythm section is critical to Sélébéyone’s excellence. As a veteran of keyboardist Robert Glasper’s earliest explorations of Dilla’s legacy, drummer Damion Reid knows how to drive rap-influenced jazz performance—and he’s never sounded more excited than he does here. The varied qualities of tracks like “Origine” and “Cognition” show his ability to move from energetic swing to subtler support. And he fosters joyous head-nod vibes during more consistently burning tracks like “Akap” and “Hybrid.”
Perhaps the most convincing mark of this group’s confidence is their understanding that, collectively, they have more skills than can be put to use in every single song. On some tracks, the celebrated saxophonists appear not at all with their main axes (instead focusing on composing or sampling). Bandimic rhymes alone on select cuts. This wise restraint makes the full-ensemble performances hit with the force they deserve. And the variance also helps pace an album that might otherwise have become overstuffed. Over its 41 minutes, Sélébéyone walks the fine line stretched between fusion’s twin perils—too much accommodation of preexisting tastes the one side, too much invention on the other—and makes the unusual triumph look easy.


Having traded city life for the Catskills, the New York artist explores a more relaxed sound on the follow-up to 2018’s Old Ghost, finding new purpose in her soft-focus optimism.

Picnic in the Dark

After years of being stretched thin by the pressures of the city, every New York artist inevitably confronts the urge to resettle, speaking in hushed tones about the semi-mythical network of small cities and sleepy towns upstate, or greener pastures even further afield. Life in lockdown was the breaking point for many in the city’s fragmented underground, but long before COVID, Brooklynite songwriter Renata Zeiguer was nurturing an obsession with nature and plotting her escape.

Old Ghost, her 2018 debut album, raced through a bright cacophony of zig-zagging guitars and tumbling percussion, presenting a mirror image of the heady, sprawling indie rock of Ava Luna and Landlady, underground heroes that Zeiguer collaborated with before striking out on her own. Pulsing at the heart of every song was a yearning to break free. “Enough is enough,” she cooed on anthemic opener “Wayside,” planting her feet in surf-friendly jazz chords before erupting into jagged, revelatory howls; “I know it’s not true,” she cried at the song’s closing chorus, fleeing from a faded mirage into an album teeming with hopeful visions of wild animals meeting beneath the moonlight and seedlings pushing through winter ice. Old Ghost unspooled into a series of affirmations, promising that the paranoid visions of today—the insects “burrowing in filthy mounds” on “Bug” and nightmares of a flood “drowning a space that will never fill” on “Dreambone”—would ultimately be nothing more than a rearview distraction. “I’ll be surfacing in no time,” she sang on “Below,” determined that self-actualization could be lurking right around the next chorus.
Zeiguer has since traded the crush of city life for softer living in the Catskills, and though she hasn’t let Old Ghost’s fever dreams cool entirely, on Picnic in the Dark she is comfortably settled into a quieter place, banishing old fears with hard-won grace. Gone are the frayed transitions and explosive drums that once poured fuel on her fiery songwriting. Instead, Zeiguer anchors her dreamy melodies to a steady pulse, counting herself into opener “Sunset Boulevard” with an airy two-bar drum-machine pattern before the familiar crunch of her guitar creeps in. On five of the album’s songs, she redeploys the same introductory beat until it evolves into a mantra-like motif. Cooling off from Old Ghost’s raging urgency, she allows musical ideas to dovetail naturally, each gently pulling the next into being instead of clambering over each other.

Zeiguer revels in the wide-open spaces that she’s carved out, filling them with the most compelling vocals she’s ever tracked. “Sunset Boulevard” slowly winds upwards through a spellbinding pre-chorus, bass and drums plodding dutifully along as her voice slides higher and higher. On the jaunty folk verses of “Child,” she flirts with the slightest country twang before the arrangement hollows out and leaves her multi-tracked voice soaring into ambient richness. Even on the album’s shortest track, the lounge-pop interlude “Mark the Date,” Zeiguer matches the song’s lilting surrealism with a playful deadpan: “Do you know what day it is?” Hearing her seize these songs so completely, unencumbered by a band roaring at her back, is a delight.

This spare, unhurried approach also helps illuminate the soft-focus optimism at the core of Zeiguer’s lyrics. On Old Ghost’s closer, “Gravity,” she luxuriated in her own power, singing, “I have this feeling that I’m never gonna lose.” On Picnic in the Dark, she finds new purpose in beaming that wisdom outwards. “Heaven and hell are a place in your mind,” she sighs on “Avalanche,” waving away fears of damnation and encouraging a leap of faith. “Eloise,” another character sketch, takes a sterner approach, extending a hand but acknowledging, “I know you’re not gonna try unless you want,” with the knowing tone of someone who’s grudgingly come to accept the necessity of showing up for yourself, no matter how unappealing the task may be.
Picnic in the Dark threatens to leave some of Zeiguer’s long-time followers out in the cold. Those searching for the crashing, tropical dream pop of her past won’t find it here—her focus on documenting the uneasy transformations that have taken hold since taking her permanent sabbatical from New York City has yielded nothing with the bracing anthemics of “Wayside” or the guttural soloing and full-band histrionics of “Neck of the Moon.” The only contender, “Whack-a-Mole,” never quite finds its footing; the shaky metaphor for an elusive lover falls flat amid an arrangement that neither lifts off or settles down. It’s understandable to yearn for a touch of the old chaos. But in downshifting from the always-on New York grind, Zeiguer triumphs on Picnic in the Dark by seeking a different kind of thrill, unburdening herself for a shot at true inner peace.


On his Fabriclive mix, UK producer Skream struggles to settle on a vibe.

Fabriclive 96

In dance music, genre is often woven into an artist’s DNA. It’s not uncommon for a DJ/producer to pick a lane and stick with it for the next 10 or 20 years. Skream, on the other hand, is proof of just how far you can travel from your origins. The UK producer, born Oliver Jones, is part of dubstep’s original generation; he came up back when the bass-heavy style was strictly a niche concern, and his foundational single “Midnight Request Line” is virtually synonymous with its subterranean origins. As a member of transatlantic crossover behemoths Magnetic Man, he’s also representative of that moment in the early 2010s when dubstep went overground. (It’s almost mind-boggling to think that an artist with roots in dingy South London basements would also figure on compilations like this one alongside Skrillex, Calvin Harris, and Kaskade.)
By the time dubstep’s popularity cratered, though, Skream had moved on. By 2013—the year of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories—he, too, had gotten the disco bug. His single “Rollercoaster” was a cheesy whiff of falsetto-led funk; his contribution to Pete Tong’s All Gone Miami 2013 2CD was a mix of middle-of-the-road house. It was a 180 so sharp that it looked a little mercenary at the time. Five years later, a regular fixture in places like Space Ibiza, Skream has settled into a comfortable kind of second adolescence, banging out reliable and rather faceless crowdpleasers, full of Pavlovian filter sweeps and chunky tech-house shuffle, as well as moodier excursions with more character and purpose. He is, frankly, a maddeningly inconsistent DJ.
His Fabriclive suffers from the same lack of focus. It can’t decide quite what it wants to be—a history lesson, a showcase of state-of-the-art house, or a boisterous Friday night stocked with sugary low-hanging fruit. It gets off to a promising start. The chirping saxophone of Hieroglyphic Being’s “Ashrams” makes for a wonderfully unexpected opener; the Salon des Amateurs resident Bufiman’s “Peace Moves,” with its echo of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “B-2 Unit,” is a strange and captivating blend of vapor and solid, of then and now. And James Burton’s newly released “Sounds of a Different Colour (Kincaid & Sinàl Remix)” merits the full six and a half minutes he devotes to it: It’s funky and atmospheric, full of odd sounds and unusual fireworks.
But things quickly get confused. By track five, the rolling bass of Rundell’s “Jack the Bass” goes down like a Jäger bomb on a too-crowded dancefloor. A conga-hammering Latin house two-fer from Skream and his Magnetic Man cohort Artwork (the latter in a 1999 outing as Santos Rodriguez) comes on as excitable as a gaggle of clubbers bursting from a bathroom stall. In this context, Floorplan’s gospel-sampling “Made Up in My Mind” feels almost sacrilegious.
If you’re only including 14 tracks in a 75-minute mix, they need to fit together like puzzle pieces, and each one needs to be essential. That is not the case here. Radio Slave’s “Screaming Hands (Krautdrums Mix),” all nine minutes of it, lands like a boulder from the sky between the Floorplan track and Sascha Funke’s key-clashing “MZ.” Skream regains his footing for the final stretch: Greg Venezia’s thrilling, Detroit-inspired “Lies” is big-room done right; two tracks later, Skream dusts off a 24-year-old slice of bleepy intelligent techno from LA Synthesis, a tune so revelatory that including it here feels like a public service. But Steve Murphy’s chilly electro tune that joins them constitutes such a change in energy and air temperature that it’s almost like wandering from the main floor to the side room and back again. Here, just a few tracks from the end, Skream still can’t quite settle on a vibe.


Ambient musician KMRU and experimental producer Aho Ssan balance tectonic rumbling and grinding steel against whispering white noise and synthetic choirs.

Limen

Growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, Joseph Kamaru was accustomed to noise. Then, as a teenager, he moved outside the city, and the din eased; the sounds of traffic and souped-up matatus gave way to birdsong, and he began carrying a handheld recorder, learning to navigate the world with his ears. His eureka moment as a young artist was discovering that he could channel the sounds of a rickety old passenger train into looping rhythms; that was the birth of the musical style that he has developed under his KMRU alias on recordings like his 2020 breakout album Peel, where field recordings and synthesized sounds come together in a porous weave. A prolific producer, KMRU has continued to explore the use of field recordings across a number of mostly self-released recordings, sometimes emphasizing tonal elements and elsewhere pushing deeper into the swirl of found sounds; what has held constant is his music’s meditative quality.
Where stillness reigns in KMRU’s music, Niamké Désiré courts chaos. Better known as Aho Ssan, the Parisian electronic musician builds his own virtual instruments in the visual programming language Max/MSP; whatever numbers are being crunched under the digital hood, his music often feels like a snapshot of something being torn at the molecular level. His debut album, 2020’s Simulacrum, recalls the church-on-fire drama of Ben Frost, but pay close attention to his swells of distortion and what at first appears to be a solid wall of sound disintegrates into waves of granular detail, every bass hit a boulder crumbling to dust.
Even so, Désiré’s music is not without its more contemplative register, so you might assume that a meeting of the two musicians would entail finding a halfway point between their respective styles. But when they sat down together, they surprised even themselves: “I never made something so extreme,” said Désiré of their first recording. Featuring three tracks composed and recorded on three separate occasions, Limen documents the duo’s ongoing dialogue.
“Resurgence,” based on an installation they created for Berlin Atonal’s 2021 edition, opens Limen with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up in a burning theater, static crackling at the edges of thickening drones; it’s somehow harsh yet lulling. Three and a half minutes in, the first real motif appears: a mournful lead melody somewhere between a trumpet and a table saw that sounds more dramatic and more regal than anything in either artist’s catalog. The bass rumbles volcanically; the edges of the soundscape are a sustained paroxysm of sharpening knives and sandblasting guns. Roughly halfway through the 12-minute piece, there’s a brief decrescendo, only for the assault to resume with renewed force before something even more surprising happens: The quaking bass briefly smooths into a syncopated pattern reminiscent of techno. And then, the shards having momentarily assembled themselves into relative order, the whole thing dissipates, bowed strings and whispers of white noise dissolving back into nothingness.
“Rebirth” pursues similar ideas. Again, the space of the track is a broad field of sourceless shimmer; there are alien hints of symphonic timbres, as if an AI had been trained to replicate frequencies vacuumed up from the orchestra pit. Crusted in distortion, the low notes throb, while the high end throws off a steady spray of sparks, like a slab saw cutting through stone. But the tonalities are more consonant, and the track’s relatively compact form, just five and a half minutes long, yields a swifter climax and neater denouement than “Resurgence.” Manageably bracing, it’s a thimbleful of whisky compared to its predecessor’s tumbler of bleach and broken glass.
The closing track is the album’s longest: “Ruined Abstractions,” the duo’s first recorded collaboration, runs more than 20 minutes. It was originally released as part of a lockdown-era compilation series in December 2020, but its inclusion here makes for an interesting contrast. In one sense, it’s noisier than either “Resurgence” or “Rebirth,” particularly in its opening movement, where the squealing and grinding suggests a riot of shortwave radios and dental drills. But even here, its noise feels relatively refined, never quite reaching the forcefulness of its predecessors. And in its second half, glowing tones modeled after strings, organs, and wordless choirs predominate. In its grace, the music isn’t a world away from the liturgical compositions of Arvo Pärt—just scorched and serrated, sliced by knives and baptized by fire, a mirror image of beauty and destruction. It remains considerably different from either artist’s solo work, yet in its introspective depths, you can glimpse the fingerprints of both.