The rising Brooklyn rapper’s new mixtape gets over on sheer maximalism just like its predecessor, with enough deft touches to keep things exciting.

Meet the Woo Vol. 2

You couldn’t get far in Brooklyn last summer without hearing Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party.” The Canarsie MC’s window-quaking single gave the borough a bonafide hit and signified the arrival of its burgeoning drill scene on the charts. Much of the excitement stemmed from Pop’s alpha-dog charisma, manifested in a voice that sounds like he gargles gravel every morning. His swagger has only grown since then; he’s already proclaimed himself the king of New York on record despite being a total unknown before last year.
The 20-year-old has managed to back it all up thus far; he dropped a thrilling debut in July and its follow-up, Meet the Woo 2, provides more gritty drill music you can clench your jaw to. It all sort of sounds like “Party,” but it gets over on sheer maximalism like its predecessor did, with just enough deft touches to keep things exciting.
A perfect example of this is the opener “Invincible,” a fierce slab of bravado over a teetering violin beat. With his gruff bark, Pop paints himself as a warrior à la 300, except he’s marching through a room full of unfamiliar dudes somewhere deep in Brooklyn. As with most of his work, the song contains a few shaky lines (“I’m feeling horny, and I shoot like Robert Horry” stands out here), but Pop’s lyrics aren’t built for close inspection; they work best hurling out of a big speaker system.
He says as much himself on the following track, a collaboration with Migos frontman Quavo, when he threatens on the chorus, “How about I shake the room?” The song’s heavy beat, supplied by “Party” producer 808Melo, demonstrates the UK beatmaker’s sonic growth; a soft vocal sample and a swerving bass line fill space more subtly than the brazen bass hits of their breakthrough. The energy is more haunting and meditative than the the white-knuckle ride of Vol. 1.
But it’s all centered around aggression, of course. On his verses, Pop usually can be heard asking some poor soul to take things outside or threatening more sinister acts of violence, like on “Christopher Walking,” when he declares that he’s going to “tie that boy up like a cowboy.” His grim boasts are usually delivered without wit, but Pop’s bluntness occasionally leads to slivers of humor, as on “Get Back,” where a judge snaps, “Why you actin’ like a dick?” at him.
Meet the Woo 2 starts to slow on the back half, which is made up of more bare-bone instrumentals, as well as material that’s already been released, including, inexplicably, “Dior,” a single off Vol. 1. Pop’s voice holds more than enough weight to carry a track, but he operates at one breakneck speed, never adding much variance to his flow. Thus his songs typically need something—a melodic layer, a unique bassline—or they start to bleed together. That’s the case with songs like “Mannequin,” which is fabricated around a paper-thin sample and runs out of momentum midway through, and “Dreaming,” a song that’s almost entirely low end with no hint of a melody.
Pop’s detractors on social media often point out how his songs sound too sparse or similar. But if they were to step outside in NYC, chances are they’d encounter a car nearly rattling its rims off with his music. That means the drums and bass will continue to sit high in the mix, his flow will remain militant. For the most part, the recipe still works brilliantly.


The comedian-turned-musician’s concept album about his adolescence tunnels toward a series of deeper truths about how we end up as the adults we are.

High School

Over the past decade, in his musical side-career away from comedy, Tim Heidecker has amassed a deep catalog of soft-rock songs about mortality and heartbreak, political dystopia and everyday existentialism. And yet, one of the most poignant tracks on his latest album, High School, is mostly about a Neil Young video—more specifically, Young’s 1993’s Unplugged performance of “Harvest Moon.” The story goes like this: Heidecker is a teenager in Allentown, Pennsylvania, watching MTV on a Saturday night. Transfixed by Young’s performance, he learns the song on guitar and plays it for his parents. They say he sounds great, but then again, that’s what they say about everything he does. He goes out and buys the album and feels disappointed by the more elaborate studio rendition. Eventually, he learns to appreciate that version, too, and includes it on a mix CD for a crush, who breaks up with him not long after.
As far as autobiographical songwriting goes, this is not the most riveting source material. And as Heidecker sings it—one humdrum detail at a time, with little poetic embellishment—he seems to amplify just how ordinary the whole thing is. But there is something profound and true about Heidecker’s journey through the past on High School, a home-recorded concept album about his adolescence. Co-produced with a backing band of Drew Erickson, Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats, and Mac DeMarco, the music glides with the reflective sheen of 1980s singer-songwriter statements like Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love and Randy Newman’s Trouble in Paradise. With a buoyant, lived-in sound and some of Heidecker’s warmest and most empathetic writing, each song feels like a spiral toward some deeper truth about how we end up as the adults we are.

Take, for example, the central character in “Buddy,” a local stoner whose devolution into a cautionary tale happens so subtly that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it takes place. It’s a eulogy delivered like a campfire singalong, as Heidecker’s perspective shifts from a character study to a moment of self-interrogation: “Do you think I let you down? We lost touch the minute I moved out of town,” he sings, sadly. Many of the songs take similar leaps, never offering a sense of resolution or a moral to their stories. Instead, Heidecker focuses on why these open-ended childhood memories tend to stick with us, why we revisit them decades later, still turning them over and retracing our steps.
As with everything Heidecker does, from his spot-on parody of Joe Rogan to his multi-part celebrity courtroom spoof The Trial, there is a lightness that allows him to tackle big issues without ever seeming preachy or self-serious. He favors conversational language and intuitive rhymes paired with breezy, major-keys melodies that mask just how sharp his songwriting has become. Even when he’s recounting specific memories, his characters can seem like archetypes, while his more zoomed-out observations (“I’m thinkin’ every day/Hopin’ I can stay this young”) gain real-life resonance from repetition: You may start singing along before you recognize the darker message below the surface.
After collaborating with Weyes Blood on 2020’s ambitious Fear of Death, Heidecker tightens his scope with a smaller group of collaborators: Jonathan Rado adds some “Night Moves”-style piano drama to “Stupid Kid,” and Kurt Vile offers his distinctive electric guitar and speak-sing throughout “Sirens of Titan,” a groovy highlight that could have been a novelty hit in the late ’80s. Otherwise, the record is performed by a core group of musicians, carrying lo-fi textural threads from song to song. The cohesive approach helps unite the material, making less narrative-based tracks like “Future Is Uncertain” sound like moody dream sequences between the larger breakthroughs, circling Heidecker’s adult anxieties before diving into the formative experiences that led him there.
Which brings us back to “Harvest Moon” and Heidecker’s initial fascination in “Stupid Kid.” Dreaming of his own future as a musician, he wasn’t drawn to the open-hearted romance of the lyrics, the crisp, early-autumn harmonies from Linda Ronstadt, or the realization that a song this good could arrive during the fourth decade of an artist’s career. Instead, Heidecker keeps returning to the fact that Young was able to express himself with such a basic set-up—“Didn’t have a band,” he notices, “Just some dude sweepin’ a broom”—and how it made him realize a regular guy like him might stand a chance. Heidecker’s song, of course, ends with a break-up—a reminder that not everybody will always see that potential in him. But that’s not the point: High School glows with the hard-earned belief that someone, somewhere could hear his story and reach the same epiphany about their own future.


The Irish musician’s spacious, shapeshifting synth pop submerges acoustic strums and babbling streams into a tender exploration of life’s inherent chaos.

Dream River

An amalgamation of uncontrollable structures—weather, time, traffic, vibes—shapes our path in life. Often we may feel like agentless vessels floating down the waterway of universal causality. Dream River, a poly-genre journey into serenity and chaos by shapeshifting synth-pop musician Henry Earnest, explores the ways in which we are pulled and pushed by life’s current. Earnest, a Dubliner and a Pisces, recorded much of the album in 2020, while living in a house with artist friends in Lisbon. The production sounds like a collective effort, weaving together acoustic banjo and bodhrán (Irish drum) with spacey sound design, trap snares, and bright synthesizers. It’s a departure from the lo-fi drum loops and fuzzy samples of Earnest’s 2018 debut, When You Get Caught Between the Moon & Dublin City; with Dream River, Earnest attempts to find his own lane in a crowded field of music fusing indie rock and electronic.
Guided by the sounds of streams babbling beneath a narrator’s spoken-word recitations, the album shifts from ethereal ambient to maximalist hyperpop to folk rock. Opener “Water” establishes an experimental electronic motif as the album’s narrator asks, “Who knows where the water will take you?” The hazy ballad “‘Free’” folds banjo strums and a saxophone solo into gossamer synths. Dream River shines in this mellow, sinuous mode, but misfires when Earnest heads down a poppier path: “Wings” begins with what sounds like a gun being cocked and drops into a cloud-rap beat, a dissatisfying diversion from the previous tracks’ promise.
Singing with pitch-shifted vocals, Earnest’s voice sounds like an innocent coo embodied with a sense of nervous hope. At its best, the vocal manipulation invites comparisons to Frank Ocean or Alex G. “‘Free’” closes with a moment that feels almost explicitly Blonde-like: lo-fi, Auto-Tuned lines warbled over tremolo guitar. Yet at times Earnest’s transposed twangs have a hard time shining through weak lyrics. The hook on “Wings” starts with the line, “Words so cold make a snowman brrr,” which would be cringey even for a braggadocious SoundCloud rapper. When Earnest’s lyrics follow the established theme of surrendering to life’s chaos, his anxious delivery works perfectly. On “Hymn,” when the narrator tenderly asks you to give in to the direction of the river, Earnest sings a response: “That’s the way that everyday goes/Everyday I have no control.”
While the lyrics sometimes miss, the care and detail in Earnest’s production make the album shine. The best parts of the record are the most understated: Water whispering through tense strings on “Hymn,” a saxophone howling over drones on “‘Free,’” distant synths whirring under gentle poems on “Stand.” Even the out-of-place “Wings” finds a moment of respite as the sound of the river re-emerges over a bass synth before the song reaches its saw-toothed climax. The restraint of the instrumental breaks makes Earnest’s approaches toward maximalism hit harder.
“Stand” is a perfect example of Dream River’s ability to weave together quiet ambient moments and louder, faster-paced pop. Singing a simple but energizing melody, Earnest acknowledges his limits and his desire to push past them: “I gotta speak with my small mouth and my weak lungs.” The beat builds into a relentless chase, then greets us with dreamy filtered synths and the familiar voice of the narrator. From this underwater bliss, the song resurfaces and jumps back into a hard-hitting beat. In standout moments like these, Earnest reveals the guiding ethos of his work—carving a free-flowing path from his wide-ranging influences.


In one of his final recorded appearances, the late dub visionary trades the mixing desk for the mic on an album fusing parallel strains of heavy, psychedelic music.

New Age Doom / Lee “Scratch” Perry: Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe

You’d be forgiven for not yet being aware of New Age Doom: The pet project of a bunch of Vancouver doom-metal hippies and mainstays of the city’s indie scene (Limblifter fans of the world, unite!) generated some buzz with last year’s Himalayan Dream Techno, but they only really turned heads recently, upon revealing that they’d somehow convinced Lee “Scratch” Perry to record a prog-jazz-dub album with them; the Jamaican icon died just weeks after the announcement. The band thankfully takes full advantage of this serendipitous last act of generosity on Scratch’s part, pulling on a far broader palette of local and prestige talent than Himalayan Dream Techno did, notably including key players from David Bowie’s Blackstar band, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and drummer/synth player Tim Lefebvre, whose presence lends a haunted quality to the performances. Together, on Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, New Age Doom use the dub founder’s commanding presence as a lightning rod for channeling a syncretic new type of heavy music, one that draws equally on the jagged, glacial chords of distorted guitars, the viscous, amniotic fluidity of dub, and the churning orbital dynamics of Afrofuturist jazz.
Even compared to Perry’s most far-out dub productions, Guide to the Universe instantly stands apart. The familiar one-two rhythm of reggae has been almost entirely jettisoned, replaced by a lumbering rhythmic skeleton recognizable from sky-scraping post-rock; Mono drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla contributes both drums and gong. The group instead conjures the deep, sensual motion of Perry’s dubwork around doom metal’s throbbing low-end riffs, while the whole structure is shot through with dissonant horn solos reminiscent of classic jazz fusion and contemporary post-Dilla movements. At its best, the album constitutes a ’70s synthesis 50 years in the making—Sabbath meets electric Miles meets, well, Perry himself, who is able here to simultaneously revisit his most fertile period while breaking heretofore unexplored musical ground.
On Guide to the Universe, the famed Upsetter assumes the role of Gandalf at the court of Rohan, casting off his beige robes and emerging to reveal the cosmic depth of his soul and life purpose. Perry serves as intermittent agitator and conduit for the spirit, his characteristically impenetrable argot pared down to its barest essentials: “Be patient, be perfect, and be pure.” “If you don’t ask, you won’t get it, so ask for it.” “Brush your teeth with a toothbrush.” Any My Bloody Valentine fan will be familiar with music that reaches that kind of visceral place with the fewest chords possible, but Perry applies this logic to his poetic impulses as well.
“Fulfillment, armageddon,” Perry intones thrice on “Holy Dub,” as drum fills loop intermittently with gyroscopic Leslie speaker effects. Meanwhile, acoustic bass is layered with electric, and a trumpet solo meanders through scales in the corner of one audio channel just as a synthesized pattern does the same in the other. By matching Perry’s studio machinations with their own real-time instrumental echoes, the band members play on Perry’s oft-quoted description of the Black Ark: “The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.” Perry always understood the value of treating machines like human beings, but on Guide to the Universe, he pairs those cybernetic aspirations with a simpler observation about society: “Life is an experiment,” he says. “The more you experiment, you make the world better for each other.” Experimentalists like Perry break down barriers over the course of their lives, creating new technological and aesthetic space; for New Age Doom to have fashioned their own style of shape-shifting experimental music to serve as a vessel for that philosophy makes for a fitting tribute to the late dub visionary.

Buy: Rough Trade
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An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap. This isn't it.

8Ball / MJG: We Are the South: Greatest Hits

We Are the South: Greatest Hits

An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap. On 1993's Comin Out Hard, their national debut, they kicked exaggerated crime-life tall-tales for six or seven minutes at a time over homemade car-trunk beats, never bothering much with hooks or structure. But the highlights from their last two albums, for Diddy's Bad Boy label, were exemplary streamlined head-knock club-rap. (Those last two albums, in particular, are the reason best-of albums were invented: a few undeniable snarls surrounded by seas of halfhearted radio-targeted filler.) Their outlaw-duo chemistry was there from the beginning, but over the years since Comin Out Hard, the two cultivated a fascinatingly schizo approach, swinging haphazardly from visceral bone-chilling pimp-talk to warm, openhearted up-from-nothing inspirational tales. And iPods being what they are, it's not hard to construct that narrative for yourself, to watch these guys develop over the years. But that's not what We Are the South does.
Ball & G recorded too much material for too many record labels for a real best-of to ever happen, and We Are the South is more quickie cash-in than anything else. The bulk of the album comes from On Top of the World and In Our Lifetime, Vol. 1, two albums that the duo recorded for Tony Draper's Suave House label in the mid-1990s. The good news: Those albums are both classics, arguably the two high-water marks of these guys' aesthetic. Over woozily patient soul beats, the two spent these albums shading and developing their personas, adding depth and resonance by opening up and getting emotional without ever sacrificing the ripping impact of their hardest stuff. If you were going to assemble an 8Ball & MJG best-of from two albums, these would probably be the ones. On "Pimp in My Own Rhyme", 8Ball spits urgent mushmouthed threats over unforgivingly trebly G-funk synths. On "What Can I Do", an uncommonly candid MJG gives a harsh clarity to his memory of getting arrested for dealing drugs in front of his whole family. On "Throw Your Hands Up", the two play granite-heavy foils to the stuttery speed-rapping of guests Outkast.
But this stuff is great enough that I can't conjure any real reason not to hunt down the complete albums instead of wasting time with a compilation that rips the songs out of their contexts and haphazardly shuffles them up. We Are the South comes padded with a few relative rarities from the two's not-as-good solo albums and from random mid-90s Suave House compilations. Of those, the only one that really demands to be heard is the sinuous banger "Lay It Down", with its surprisingly on-fire guest-appearances from Ice Cube and Diddy, of all people. The other tracks are mostly solid, but it's not like 8Ball & MJG were ever the type of group to save their best material for odds-and-ends comps.
The only song here I'd actually call bad is the mediocre plastic-funk 8Ball solo track "Starships and Rockets". Other than that, it's a perfectly decent listen, especially if you're driving around on a lazy summer afternoon. But the essential stuff is easy to come by in more flattering contexts, and the inessential stuff is completely inessential. You're better off making your own best-of at home.


Snoop Dogg's dalliance with reggae was documented in the film Reincarnated and this is the companion album. Snoop's leaden vocalizing and dreadful fake patois are occasionally saved by the strong production from Major Lazer, Vybz Kartel collaborator Dre Skull, and producer/songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid.

Reincarnated

Snoop Dogg has spent the last decade of his career building a persona based on intrinsic and intentional humor. So when he announced his metamorphosis into the reggae singer Snoop Lion last year while casually referred to himself as the reincarnation of Bob Marley, it was hard not to have a chuckle. The transformation seemed likely to blow over the same way Snoop’s stints as talk show host, sketch comedy actor and porn director did-- another half-remembered bit of listless bond diversification from a rap luminary grown bored of rapping. But Snoop really seemed invested in this Lion thing: his plan to hang out in Jamaica to record a reggae album quickly became a full-fledged Rastafarian spirit journey with guidance from Marley bandmate and roots reggae legend Bunny Wailer and the Rastafari Millennium Council. All of which was ultimately documented in the film Reincarnated and consummated in the album of the same name. Upon release, though, the film immediately infuriated Bunny, who issued a withering polemic castigating Snoop for what he felt was a cavalier and opportunistic misappropriation of Rastafarian culture.
Many of the complaints about the film could be made against the album: Reincarnated is constantly on the hunt for a sense of communion with a world just out of its reach. Snoop’s hardly a natural as a reggae singer, and his performances here are riddled with leaden vocalizing, fortune cookie-grade lyrical mundanities (“Take care of Mother Earth cause-ah she be the planet”) and dreadful fake patois. He wisely buttresses himself with a coalition of singers and actual reggae artists tasked with lending this project the hooks and credibility that he can’t muster. The result is something akin to his short-lived career hosting and directing adult film: you sense Snoop milling around in the background while professionals do the heavy lifting. Singer-songwriter Angela Hunte’s extensive co-writing and backing vocals provide the understated beating heart of the record, and guests like Mavado and Popcaan shine for knowing their way around a reggae fusion record. But the guests can’t always carry the weight: dancehall stalwart Mr. Vegas can’t save “Fruit Juice” from its clunky concept, and the Akon cover “Tired of Running” aims for profundity but lands on karaoke, even with vocals from the man himself to guide the way.
Reincarnated’s strong suit is its production, which was handled in large part by Diplo’s Major Lazer braintrust with help from Vybz Kartel collaborator Dre Skull and producer/songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid. The album’s sonic architects ease off their trademark futuristic dance floor bedlam here, opting instead for what sounds like a lovingly cultivated genre-bending mixtape. Reincarnated flits from the rock-reggae fusion of “Rebel Way” to the old school dancehall of “Here Comes the King” to the lumbering boom bap of “Lighters Up” early on. And then it makes stops at roots reggae for “So Long” and spectral dub on “No Guns Allowed”, which cleverly lays a mellotron line reminiscent of Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood” over a loop of Beirut’s “Nantes”. Things get hairy with “Get Away”, which rehashes elements of “Pon de Floor” in spots, and “The Good Good”, a drab acoustic jingle better suited to pad out the back end of a Matisyahu album, but missteps on the production front are mercifully scant.
Snoop Lion’s sage choice of collaborators saves Reincarnated from his limited vision of reggae songwriting and Rasta culture, and the album gets its biggest payoff from its most unlikely contributor. Album closer “Ashtrays & Heartbreaks” parlays Snoop’s partying in memory of lost loved ones into a devastating bridge from Miley Cyrus about pulling it together when your buzz wears off and a chorus both wracked with grief and brimming with determination. “Ashtrays & Heartbreaks” flips Snoop’s pat Hallmark musings and crutch-like over-reliance on more nimble singers into assets to deliver the album’s one true stunner. Reincarnated is spotted with little moments like these, where you begin to see how a batshit late career gear shift might make just a dash of sense executed correctly. Reincarnated doesn't make a case for Snoop as a singer of any stripe. He should honestly stick to rap. And it doesn’t offer much evidence that this Rastafarian conversion isn’t the marketing ploy Bunny Wailer is convinced it is. Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat.

RCA / Vice / Mad Decent / Berhane Sound System


oddCouple, a Chicago producer who has worked with Jamila Woods, Joey Purp, Saba, Kweku Collins, and others, gathers his most talented friends for a warm, relaxed affair full of pleasantly hazed beats.

Liberation

Over the last few years Chicago has been one of hip-hop’s most conspicuous artistic incubators. This year alone, the hip-hop and R&B artists Jamila Woods, Joey Purp, Saba, and Kweku Collins have enjoyed breakout attention as indie auteurs with respective solo projects. All of them have worked with Chance the Rapper and others in the same scene, and two are signed to the same label, Closed Sessions. Now, that label’s house producer, oddCouple, is getting his turn with a new record called Liberation, which gathers up a bunch of this familiar Chicago talent for a showcase compilation.
Born in Milwaukee but long based in Chicago, Zach Henderson adopted oddCouple as a solo act several years ago after initially sharing the name as half a duo. Henderson played bass and cello earlier in his life, and he now folds live instruments into his beats, which are warm and muffled and frequently meander towards breakdowns instead of looping back on themselves.
Liberation follows 2015’s Chatterbox, which oscillated between a soulful instrumental beat tape and a rappers' roll call. This new one is more fleshed-out and timely, and finds oddCouple doubling down on the recent success of his counterparts and elevating his own craft at once. There isn’t an outright misstep, but since many of the featured artists on Liberation have recently released their own singular statements, a few performances feel second-rate or less than vital. Still, nothing here screens like a called-in favor, and Henderson is a smart matchmaker.
Joey Purp stands out on “Visions,” a twinkling chipmunk soul loop that gets the producer’s characteristic build-it-up-to-break-it-down treatment. Purp is a casual, confident rapper with the rare knack to boil things down to palatability while avoiding cliche. “It’s the places we live in that they refuse to go/So when we speak about struggles they can refuse to know,” he raps. The woozy and feverish “Love Above” is set compellingly against a chorus that is upbeat and whimsical. The song switches up several times, back and forth between Kweku Collins and Jamila Woods, but its Woods’ wonky chorus that sticks.
Several songs on Liberation feature strings, but none feel as big as those near the end of the album. On “Hereditary” oddCouple rolls out the red carpet for GLC, a veteran Chicago rapper who quietly helped pave the way for the city’s current relentless indie bent. (“Why you ain’t signed?/Wasn’t my time,” he rapped triumphantly on Kanye West’s first album.) The emcee hasn’t lost a step or the slur in his voice, never a flashy rapper but always a commanding presence. The Cleveland artist and Closed Session signee Kipp Stone gets a deserved look here too, making the best of a thoughtful hook with his raspy baritone, shouting “Just listen at me" and "Hands up, don’t shoot!” before the elder statesman launches into a gorgeous pair of verses.
Musically, the most interesting moments on the album come at the end of songs, when Henderson redirects and then turns away from the vocalist he’s holding up, usually stripping back elements from the beat. He has a nimble way with transitions within a song, and is never abrupt about switching gears into sparse, live-played trail-offs; these moments feel like carefully placed and immediately recognizable fingerprints. Some of that effect is missing on the lone instrumental, a sleepy track that swells towards the dance floor but never commits fully. Still, a solitary send-off is a smart maneuver on a wider scale as well, and Henderson has done more than enough to stamp out his identity as a producer throughout.


Canadian artist Lydia Ainsworth is a studied classicist with distinctly modern curiosities. Her debut album, Right from Real, doesn't attempt to resolve those differences in ideologies, but rather culls vitality from the meditative space between their opposing forces.

Right from Real

Lydia Ainsworth flourishes amidst contradiction. A Canadian artist raised in a "household soundtracked by Björk, The Beatles, Nirvana, and Arvo Pärt," she taught herself the cello from the age of 10, while insisting that she's terrible at the instrument. Ainsworth nonetheless went on to study film scoring at McGill University and NYU, and landed her first feature-length credit in 2011 for Matthew Lessner's painfully self-aware escapist satire, The Woods, which claimed to "build upon the...contradictions of young modern day Americans." Yet it was during these cinematic pursuits that she found a love for pop composition and vocals, and quietly began to write songs from the perspective of her diverse and disparate musical backgrounds. As such, Ainsworth is now a studied classicist with distinctly modern curiosities; her debut album, Right from Real, doesn't attempt to resolve its differences, but rather culls vitality from the meditative space between its opposing forces.
Because of their ties to Montreal's Arbutus Records, comparing Lydia Ainsworth with label mate Grimes may come quick and easy, but the two have little in common outside of a taste for electronics. Right from Real is orchestral pop in the vein of Kate Bush and Bat for Lashes, albeit from an artist who would cite a love for Meredith Monk and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem in the same breath. Ainsworth isn't as experimental with regards to her songwriting approach, though, nor is she so spiritually cathartic. Much like the Knife's Silent Shout, Right from Real exists in a dusky, cobalt-hued twilight, after the real world has drawn its curtains closed and before the mystical realm starts to come alive. The music illustrates those enchanted hours in detail with soft-sweeping strings, modest electronic tinkering, pointed spates of percussion, and Ainsworth's confident, versatile self-harmonizing.
The eight-song album was released in two parts, and though each standalone EP is strong enough on its own merits, Right from Real only gains more impact as a full package. Early singles "White Shadows" and "Malachite" sketch out the basics of Ainsworth's musical etymology—the first of which exhibits her knack for spectral moods and string arrangements, while the latter song is darkly affecting synth-pop with an eye on the Visions playbook. (Even the gloving and waacking dance moves in "Malachite"'s bizarre video invoke the Grimes aesthetic more than something Lydia could call her own.) But the record's bottom section is where Ainsworth speaks to her true potential in a unique yet vaguely recognizable voice.
"Moonstone" opens the second half with an incandescent waltz, a more magnetic and creative entry point than the light, orchestral patter of early album track "Candle"; in a way, it offers a portal into the deepest levels of Right from Real. The slow-swaying balladry in "Hologram" seems directed at the idea of desire, which Ainsworth ponders through cooed stanzas and stately piano phrases. "PSI" synthesizes Right from Real's overarching thematic and musical elements into a gush of ardent chamber pop. For the most part, the song feels down-to-earth, and yet is unafraid to soar on the wings of powerful emotions without name or purpose, as Ainsworth sends each updraft through impressionist lyrics that zoom in on the divide which separates dreams from reality.
That said, it's still difficult to discern Ainsworth's concrete artistic identity. She's a formally trained singer, musician, and composer with an interest in Baroque art, who also refers to contemporary dance choreographers as "genius"; she's an artist who performs her music flanked by a violinist and a cellist, but has no problem adding a live snake into her onstage arrangement; her songs rely as much on the delicate '80s pop of Peter Gabriel's So as they do 19th century choral music and Bulgarian folk singing. Throughout Right from Real, Ainsworth refuses to ever be only one thing, so by the end of her debut, it's clear she's an artist capable of most anything.


These recently unearthed sessions find Betty Davis working with members of Jimi Hendrix's band, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and others, honing the sound she'd bring to her incendiary solo albums.

The Columbia Years 1968-69

In February 1968, Durham, North Carolina’s Betty Mabry released a 7”—“Live, Love, Learn” b/w “It’s My Life”—that received limited distribution and even more limited airplay despite a pop-friendly arrangement by Hugh Masekela. Five years later, she re-emerged on record as Betty Davis and released a string of LPs more renowned for their outrageousness and rawness than their commercial success, a swing apparently too far in the other direction for the general public. Tina Turner and Alice Cooper were both big in ’73, but imagine the former howling and sneering like the latter and it’s easy to understand both why Davis startled both sides of the funk/rock line she stood astride, and why later enthusiasts of underdog artists took to her like a great lost icon.
Betty’s relationship with and eventual marriage to Miles is renowned for the effect she had on him: At 22, she got the pop-detached Miles into the giants of psychedelic rock, including Jimi Hendrix, that would revitalize his inspiration and lead to his revolutionary electric period. Betty wasn’t just a scenester or a hanger-on; she was a tuned-in tastemaker with deep charisma and the kind of attitude that could’ve made her a superstar in a less-anxious world, and she was both quick to learn and driven to direct. It’s one thing that Betty got Miles into Hendrix, but another thing entirely that she got a couple of Hendrix’s fellow band members to record with her—and had them join a group that included some of the key players on Bitches Brew, the album whose name was suggested by Betty herself.  Still, Betty Davis’ story isn't quite as cut-and-dry between her Mabry years and her emergence as the woman touted as too wild for Miles—especially when you explore the actual recorded results of her and Miles’ mutual influence, as the newly unearthed sessions on The Columbia Years 1968-1969 prove.
The inspiration might have radiated both ways; John Ballon’s liner notes point out as much, with Betty vividly recalling Miles as a catalyst and a mentor who’d inspire her later solo run. But her full potential wasn't realized until years after these recordings, which primarily work as a sometimes exciting, sometimes half-sketched prelude to the more iconoclastic things that’d follow in the ’70s. For a set of recordings that feature the Billy Cox/Mitch Mitchell rhythm section of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's final incarnation and some of the most revolutionary players of Miles’ electric period—Harvey Brooks, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Larry Young, and Wayne Shorter—just about everyone here, Betty Davis included, sounds like they’re just getting warmed up. This hybridized Hendrix/Miles vision of the band hadn't rehearsed prior to the recording session, and it shows: You can actually hear them start to click mid-song as early-take vamping starts to tighten up.
Over the course of two sessions in May 1969, less than a week apart, the band was directed by Miles and co-signed by Betty to charge through Sly-esque funk-rock (the dizzy carousel rides of “Hangin’ Out” and “I’m Ready, Willing & Able”), a Southern-soul Ike & Tina Revue rave-up (“Down Home Girl”), and covers of Cream (“Politician,” retitled as “Politician Man”) and Creedence (“Born on the Bayou”). They’re game enough, of course, and with further time they all could’ve cut a record so undeniable that Miles’ attempts to shop the record around could’ve overcome Columbia's stated reluctance to push R&B albums. (At the very least, a little seasoning could've made them strong crossover-potential labelmates of the Chambers Brothers.) But “I’m Ready, Willing & Able”—or the ninth take of it included here—is the closest we get to evidence that it could really measure up to everybody's reputations, with Betty’s subdued-but-sharp vocals and the tight, nervy guitar/organ interplay driving things home. (The specific musicians aren’t credited from track to track, but it’s not hard to pick up the distinctly heated tones of Young’s B-3 and McLaughlin’s sharp-edged riffing.)
The other tracks’ more freewheeling feel can provide a certain kick. The sweetly sung “Politician Man” is just loose enough to feel scuzzy without sounding sloppy. And the fourth-take “Down Home Girl” captures the point where the quality of the band’s jazz-guys-do-Southern-soul routine started approaching the other-way-around version that Booker T. & the M.G.’s would do two years later on Melting Pot. But you can still feel the tension of the musicians trying to make sure everything falls into place, whether it does or not, and even the Teo Macero production credit can’t hide that these songs feel like they could’ve used just a little more polish.
Just not, you know, *too much *polish—the three tracks she cut with Hugh Masekela in 1968 attest to that. Betty’s interviewed in the liner notes here, and she lets slip a funny-if-awkward anecdote about leaving Hugh for Miles in both a musical and relationship sense. (As she recalls Hugh lamenting during a chance encounter at an airport: “How could you marry my idol, Betty?”) It feels like, especially through retrospective looks back from both parties, that the musical side of the relationship was rewarding but just a bit ‘off,’ with Masekela’s impending pop breakthrough via “Grazing in the Grass” foreshadowed in these tracks more than the fusion-edged township soul-jazz hybrids of his later ’60s and early ’70s were. Davis didn’t entirely fit, either: she sounds fiercely independent and iconoclastic belting out “It’s My Life” and fiercely seething on “My Soul Is Tired,” but the fact that the saccharine, string-drenched, light-headed ballad “Live, Love, Learn” was what Columbia chose for the A-side of her only single for the label points square at why Betty needed a clean break and a new start in the first place.
But above all else, whether it's during the sessions with Masekela or with Miles, it’s illuminating to hear Betty Davis’ voice when she's still in the process of figuring out how to let it off the chain. She’s not the ‘nasty gal’ yet, with “Politician Man” as close as she gets to the provocateur cool she’d cultivate starting with her solo debut. That particular impression lingered, at least; an ad-libbed purr of ‘get in the back seat’ was enough to inspire Miles to title a *The Man With the Horn *cut “Back Seat Betty” more than ten years later. But it’s the studio banter included at the end of that track that hints at the deeper stuff: Miles comes in with gravelly authority to state “That’s good, ah, you can overdub that,” only for Betty to exclaim “*Overdub *that?” with all the disbelief of someone who knew exactly what she wanted. A false-start take of “I’m Ready, Willing & Able” is thrown in later, not just to pad the release to just barely over the 30-minute mark, but to show Betty in command of her vision, getting the feel for arranging and rearranging a track to work for her. These ’69 sessions were a solid start, but the real thing would come sooner—and wilder—than even anyone who’d heard this session was prepared for.


Ascendant outré-dance imprint Tri Angle pays tribute to jailed starlet Lindsay Lohan with a mixtape covering her pop songs (remember those?).

Let Me Shine for You

Sometime between Mean Girls and the point when her life began to spiral so publicly out of control, Lindsay Lohan recorded a few pop records. They weren't good, necessarily-- the sort of spit-shined radio rock and dance-pop expected from an actress-cum-singer-- but cute enough in their own way. The albums sold well, but at this point she was still a valuable Hollywood commodity and people still bought records. Not long after, as we all know, shit started to go bad for Lohan. Substance abuse, an exploitative family, freaking Herbie: Fully Loaded-- they all took their toll on her, and now homegirl's in jail.
This all-too-common Hollywood tale is the subject matter for Let Me Shine for You, a strange little mixtape from the ascendant outré-dance imprint Tri Angle. The basic idea is that Tri Angle artists and friends of the label, who share a dark and twisted take on pop music, deconstruct Lohan's tracks and build new, eerie songs out of their pieces. Sounds like a potential disaster, but it actually works. These producers-- like the sample-minded oOoOO and beat-smearing Stalker-- thrive in a cut-and-paste style, and thematically the notion of a fallen starlet, tragic yet trashy, pretty much fits their aesthetic perfectly.
For the most part, these tracks sound nothing like Lohan's. Sometimes an artist will hang her vocals in the background as a kind of ghostly presence, but usually the originals are mutilated beyond recognition. Screwed, chopped, sped up or slowed to a crawl, and often fleshed out with new instrumentation. Warp's Babe Rainbow turns "Stuck", a pretty basic dance-pop number, into lurching trip-hop; newcomer Autre Ne Veut runs with the club feel of "Bossy" but makes it sound like something fit for a bondage party. The tracks all share a threatening and somber vibe, but there's a lot of stylistic diversity: Laurel Halo's contribution skews dubstep, while Oneohtrix Point Never plays with noise and drone.
This variety is one of the nice things about the album and part of what makes Tri Angle such a promising label. These are all ostensibly "witch-house" tracks, but that they each sound so different makes a strong case against the idea of the label as a one-trick pony. But as an individual release, Let Me Shine for You is simply a really cool experiment in how leftfield musicians interpret relatively bland radio music. That it's Lindsay Lohan's music just provides another level of intrigue. The revamps are so foreboding and so much about decay that they do on some level feel like a suitable soundtrack for her decline. You just wouldn't expect celebrity downfall to sound so good.


The Chicago rapper and singer makes a name for herself with an airy, flexible voice that flows effortlessly between the sensuous and the sorrowful.

Empathy EP

Almost a decade ago, Jean Deaux met Saba and his brother Joseph Chilliams at a youth open-mic event. Since then, the rapper/singer born Zoi Harris has become one of the most versatile features in and beyond Chicago hip-hop. Early in her career, she landed collaborations with UK psych-pop band Glass Animals and London electro-soul singer Sampha. And though she’s regularly self-released projects on SoundCloud, Deaux is perhaps best known by association with her impressive list of collaborators: Saba, Mykki Blanco, Kehlani. With last October’s Krash EP, she began working to make a name for herself—building an identity around her airy, flexible voice and affinity for weightless house-hop beats. On her new EP, Empathy, she raps with restraint, revealing a glimpse into a wide inner landscape.
Throughout Empathy, Deaux’s soft vocals emulate sweet-toned greats like Janet Jackson and Brandy. On the Kehlani-featuring standout “Anytime,” her voice smolders as she outlines her plans for a certain someone: “Call me anytime you wanna get it/I could have it crackin’ for you,” she sings, before jumping into a high-pitched falsetto that aligns her with funk-inspired vocalists like Childish Gambino or Smino. Though her voice rarely rises above a whisper, she flows effortlessly between the sensuous and the sorrowful. On the EP’s final track, “Speakerphone (Trust Issues),” she raps vaguely about someone who’s left, her scattered language suggesting an emotional stand-off. “I know you planning to tell a lie/I wear my power, you see it on,” she raps, her tenderness now evoking dejection and betrayal.
She shares the talent for emotional pivots with fellow Chicago rapper Tink, who writes about relationships with gripping melodrama. But Deaux’s spoken-word poetry background shines through with songs that decline to follow a concrete storyline. “Henny straight, wanna taste mine?/Lil’ baby gon call me up, he wanna FaceTime/I tippy toe’d out the party, mami gon’ make time,” she raps on “Break Time,” flashing a staccato string of images rather than methodically setting a scene. This impressionistic songwriting can feel slippery; it’s hard to know exactly what she’s rapping about or why she feels a certain way. At the same time, the open-endedness creates intrigue. “Life Lines” conjures a scene so arresting it doesn’t need a backstory: “I can’t read your damn mind/But when I hold your hand/I can see your... life lines,” she sings, dragging out the notes.
“Life Lines” ends with a recording of Deaux discussing the concept of empathy with Bari, another Chicago rapper and close collaborator. “Instead of reacting or taking something personal,” she explains, “be like, ‘Damn, you probably going through some shit.’” Perhaps it’s only natural for a skilled and evocative performer to be fascinated by emotional awareness. Yet Deaux’s reluctance to spell out the details of a situation creates distance within her songs, a slight fog that protects her from full transparency. Ultimately, empathy is what she asks of her audience. When you listen to her words closely and begin to recognize their subtleties, Empathy is her most layered and sumptuous project yet.


Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her ...

Title TK

Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her first original music in six years, not to mention following up on Last Splash, the radio and retail-friendly juggernaut from nine years ago?
"I haven't found the right drum sound," she'd say to engineer after engineer. "I'm going to take some time off and learn how to play the drums myself" (she's been working that one since 1995, when Tammy and the Amps-- Deal's basement solo project-- eventually became The Amps, with ex-Breeders drummer Jim Macpherson). "I can't do this without Kelley," she'd tell interviewers, despite having toured as the Breeders in 1997 with a Kelley-less lineup that included Macpherson, the Amps' Nate Farley, and violinist/vocalist Carrie Bradley. As engineers, studios and musicians were discarded as casually as cigarettes, and potential release dates came and went, the vultures-- and VH-1's Behind the Music-- started circling. Legend even has it that Kim Deal, having spent the Breeders' royalties and advance money long ago, has been living on fees generated by the Prodigy's "Firestarter," a song that, fortunately for Deal, sampled Last Splash's "S.O.S."
After years of being just around the corner like that Hopi Indian freak in Mulholland Drive, at last Title TK is upon us. And it's not bad. Far from being the chilly product of Deal's reputed perfectionism and production overkill, Title TK is a loose, spontaneous, even messy affair, and a blast to listen to once Deal's pop curiousities begin to take shape in the listener's imagination. Steve Albini should get a stipend from Nike for finally corralling Deal in his Chicago studio, convincing her to can the excuses and just do it.
"Round up, holler girl," are the first words from Kim Deal's mouth in six years, on opener "Little Fury," a rough-edged call-and-response with divebombing guitars, driving bass, and sister Kelley's dissonant harmonies. "Hold what you've got," Deal rasps on the chorus as hired guns Richard Presley and Mondo Lopez (of Los Angeles punk band Fear) and drummer Jose Medeles pound out a labored groove. Forget Last Splash and The Amps-- Title TK picks up where Pod left off in 1989, with a jagged sound nowhere near as tight as the Pixies' but a heartfelt enthusiasm for creating music. "Yeah, I'm leaking pure white noise," Deal sings on "London Song." It's not the most accurate statement, as this ain't exactly Merzbow, but it's an accurate reflection of what the Breeders are shooting for with Title TK: something uncomplicated, as pure and unaffected as static.
While the Thom Yorke school of songwriters, bored with conventional pop structures, slice their music apart and reconstruct it digitally like a Burroughs novel, Deal's latest compositions are disjointed by design-- trying on and chucking lyrical ideas and musical motifs with abandon, almost elevating ADD to a kind of art form. "Dumb as a fuckin'... and missing from the party," Deal sings in "Little Fury." Dumb as a fuckin' what? Attempting to decode Title TK's musical Mad Libs can be maddening-- it's easier to let Deal slur her words and catch the occasional fragments of brilliance that only weed-fueled midnight recording sessions and happy accidents can produce.
Title TK also finds Deal dabbling with new sounds, with hit-and-miss results. "The She" is built around a Stereolab-ish keyboard vamp, and while you shouldn't expect grooves as tight as Le Tigre's, the Breeders' rough-and-tumble brand of funk is convincingly nasty. But the silly slap-back percussion of "Sinister Foxx" and Record Engineering 101 channel-swapping guitars on "Huffer" aren't exactly cutting edge. Still, when the Breeders set out to rock-- and the chugging guitars and stomping drums of standout "Son of Three" will bring a knowing smile to Pixies afficianados-- they get the job done.
Title TK also contains two unexpectedly beautiful songs-- the disarmingly spare "Off You," with its lonesome guitar and gorgeous bass solo, is some of the creepiest headphone listening since The Wall. "I've never seen a starlet, or a riot, or the violence of you," Deal sings in a weary, muted voice. "I am the autumn in the scarlet, I am the makeup on your eyes." "Forced to Drive," a woozy travelogue bouyed by shimmering arpeggios and effects-pedal-to-the-metal choruses, merges Last Splash's summery hangover with the Velvets' "Ride into the Sun."
"Title TK" is journalistic shorthand for "title to come," and Title TK does feel incomplete in many ways-- from the hand-scribbled song titles on the back sleeve to the sometimes tuneless (and always somewhat haphazard) delivery of the vocals. Keyboards buzz from out of nowhere, guitars hit bum notes intentionally, basslines amble up and down the scale, sometimes two at a time. When Title TK loses people-- and I suspect it'll lose many-- it'll be with the langorous, abstract half-songs like "Put on a Side" (a listless anti-song built around a fretless bass groove, spare guitar and a single piano note) or "Sinister Foxx" (largely a meditation on the repeated phrase "Has anyone seen the iguana?").
And for an album so highly anticipated for so long, Title TK feels awfully skimpy, at just over 38 minutes, and pretty shamelessly padded. Did we really need the two false endings and an extended jam that stretches "London" past the three-minute mark? Or the rockabilly remake of The Amps' "Full on Idle," which barely deviates from the original? Isn't the two-minute "T and T" essentially just an extended instrumental intro to the short, sharp "Huffer"? Deal has been flogging many of these songs since that 1997 Breeders outing, including "Forced to Drive" (released on a fanclub single way back when), "Too Alive," and "Huffer." And what about Kelley's "Fire the Maid," a live favorite discarded from Title TK at the eleventh hour?
Still, it's a hell of a lot of fun to hear these fortysomething twins still singing about whippets and the quality of Jersey weed, and when the Breeders are on, they're still on. Just don't come to Title TK expecting the note-perfect pop confections of "Cannonball" or "Divine Hammer," because it's not that kind of record. And let's hope nobody samples Title TK on their big hit single, or it might be another ten years before the next one.


The Maryland sludge-doom band's latest album (and first for Relapse Records) is a downright lethal—and impressively inclusive—listen.

Corpse Fortress

In 2006, a cadre of crusties, metalheads, and other misfits started raising hell in a shabby brick house in the D.C. suburbs. The Corpse Fortress, as they called this Silver Spring, Maryland, arts space, went on to supply the DMV underbelly with a thriving heavy-music hub and party spot for over five years, until county officials forced its close in fall 2011. Dispatches from the Corpse Fortress’ last stand that September 24 set an anarchic scene: sketchy kids passing around laced joints and throwing bottles, teenagers fucking in the bushes with abandon, and down in the dungeon-like basement, the Maryland sludge-doom band Ilsa bringing the devil-worshippers to their knees.
Ten years and four albums in, Ilsa’s sphere of influence extends well outside their capital region stomping grounds, thanks to a slew of split releases with ascendent metal bands from across the globe (Finland’s Hooded Menace, SoCal’s Seven Sisters of Sleep, and Japan’s Coffins), as well as their signing with metal bastion Relapse Records in 2015. Irate neighbors and civil servants might have been able to shutter the Corpse Fortress’ physical location, but just like a crust-punk zombie uprising, its spirit will never be quashed so long as Ilsa are on the hunt. Their fifth album and full-length Relapse debut, named for the bygone venue, makes for a downright lethal listen, even by their genre’s crushing standards.
For all their primordial madness, Ilsa have always favored cold, mechanical discipline. Frontman Orion Peter recently declared to Noisey that “If metal is a machine, then we are that blood-encrusted, hair-matted machinery after it’s ground up every worker in the factory, sputtering and rumbling on.” He’s not exaggerating: to experience Ilsa’s latest is to hole up in said deathtrap for 48 minutes on end, throwing up the horns even as the gears grind your bones to dust. “Nasty, Brutish” fashions driving rhythms and chugging riffs into the sonic equivalent of a rusted chainsaw, effortlessly soldering grimy hardcore to factory-grade steel, while “Prosector” mines black metal’s coffers for weeping riffs and double-bass percussion.
Contemporary sludge-spewers frequently approach their arrangements from a binary standpoint: Black Sabbath’s heavy-lidded wars of attrition on one end, Eyehategod’s deep, quick clobberings on the other, with no room for a band that draws on both. Here, that false dichotomy falls to the wayside. Whereas Corpse Fortress’ funeral marches (“Hikikomori,” “Drums of the Dark Gods,” “Long Lost Friend”) position Ilsa closer to the former camp, the Integrity-esque rippers rounding out its first half (“Nasty, Brutish,” “Old Maid”) stir up the punkish fugue associated with the latter. This dual strategy, with both sounds juxtaposed throughout the track sequence, provides a much-needed dynamic escape hatch for the times when Corpse Fortress’ agonizing churn devolves into a mucky slog, like on lesser-spirited siblings “Cosmos Antimonos” and “Long Lost Friend.” By giving their bubbling cauldron a furious stir now and then, the group render its potion more potent.
Ilsa are the filthiest of modern doom’s foul misanthropes—they named themselves after a Nazi-themed sexploitation film, for Satan’s sake. Beyond the surface, though, they’re much more interested in building bridges and fostering community than torching everything to the ground. As a partially-queer, multi-racial, and ardently anti-fascist band signed to one of the biggest metal labels, the posse has already made significant strides in that direction. Between the feats of genre-juggling and the all-consuming roar, Corpse Fortress has a similarly inclusive effect. This album is well more than the sum of its mangled parts. Just don’t expect to make it out alive.


On their debut, the Montreal art-rockers come off like a cootie shot against self-seriousness and boredom.

Welcome to Bobby’s Motel

What does “new wave” even mean, really, besides too weird for spin class and weird enough for college radio? Montreal-based five-piece Pottery fit squarely within these parameters, wide as they are. Welcome to Bobby’s Motel, their full-length debut and follow-up to last year’s No. 1 EP, evokes the jubilant freakiness of the genre’s progenitors—Devo and The B-52s, chiefly—with a yawp like Parquet Courts (with whom they toured in 2019), so eager to ride the groove that they often scale up into shouts. Along this yardstick, the record teases the far-out, the riotous, and the anthemic, and in its efforts to push art-rock boundaries, it comes close to a novel sound, if not an entirely new wave.
Album standout “Texas Drums Pt. I & II” demonstrates this reach and ambition, a cowbell-laced, guitar-powered earworm that could play at a soda fountain on Mars. Around three minutes, the pings that signal “go” in a Mario Kart race kick off a raucous second half where the drums build to near-masturbatory excess, like an art-rock version of edging. It feels more like a late house-show finale than self-indulgence, locking into a rhythm that crests on energy rather than depleting it.
This bombast flavors most of the tracks on Bobby’s Motel, but “Reflection,” which one could mistake for an homage to Peter Gabriel’s So, cools the frenzy right on time, so the sweat can dry and Pottery can lament a culture of superficiality without tenderness. “Old receipts and body cream, where’s your passion?” they ask, and halfway through the song, they harmonize about the weight of empathy, a departure from the preceding raucousness. They are adept at finessing the soft alongside the hard, the goofy alongside the baleful.
It’s only due to this sharpness and surprise that other moments on the album feel dull. “Hot Heater” might be a standout track on a lesser record, but it’s less zesty than counterparts like “Under the Wires” or “Take Your Time” and more tepid than its name implies. Closer “Hot Like Jungle,” with its jingle bells and Rick Astley croon, stagnates at mid-tempo and comes closer to reaching for the ashtray than the stars.
This band is at its best operating at the edge of kitsch and excess, as with the “Monster Mash” voice inexplicably mumbling over “Bobby’s Forecast.” Groups like Pottery are a cootie shot against self-seriousness and boredom, and on subsequent albums, one can only hope they further indulge these freakier impulses, as jet-powered and stratospheric as the weirdos who made waves before them.


The emo band's second album is a step forward, increasing the intensity with more careful arrangements. If anything, it has more going on than the debut, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Harmlessness

Harmlessness

Emo is a genre built on divisive vocals, and the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die represented the entire spectrum of such voices on their debut Whenever, If Ever. Between the screamy guy, the yelpy guy, the nervous guy who sang as if sweating through his pocket protector, and the open invitation for anybody else in the band to pipe in whenever they felt it might lend an extra energy to a song, it was a love-it-or-dismiss-it affair, even by the standards of an emo revival that favors messy, overstuffed statements. The eight-piece band may have filtered their updated emo through the sensibilities of some of the most broadly popular indie rock of the '00s, but they were fundamentally a niche act.
On their sophomore album Harmlessness, they become less of one. In an effort to smooth out their rough edges after some lineup changes, TWIABP start with the roughest of them all: those voices. The screamy guy is gone, and the singer who emerges as the de facto pack leader, David Bello, has ironed most of the jitters out of his delivery. Those more approachable vocals set the tone for a record that's more orderly than its predecessor but no less sweeping. These songs still build, crash, weep, and rejoice, often all within the span of a few minutes, and the band still has no interest in moderation. If anything, Harmlessness actually has more going on than Whenever, If Ever, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are—without all those voices crowded on top of each other, for instance, you can hear every violin stroke. TWIABP have succeeded where past generations of emo bands have often stumbled: tidying up their sound without losing any of the exuberance and immediacy that made that sound so striking in the first place.
TWIABP tuck their most audacious song toward the front of the record. Condensing a subject loaded enough for a full concept album into five-and-a-half minutes, "January 10th, 2014" tells of Diana, the Hunter of Bus Drivers, the anonymous avenger from Juárez, Mexico, who shot and killed two factory bus drivers in retaliation for the rampant, unprosecuted sexual assaults committed by drivers on late-night routes. She became a folk hero, honored with statues in two cities. The song lifts some lyrics directly from a "This American Life" episode about her myth, including an exchange that’s acted out between Bello and singer/keyboardist Katie Shanholtzer-Dvorak. He voices a driver weary of a passenger who might be Diana; she speaks as every woman relieved to finally have some power over potential predators. "Are you afraid of me now?" she sings. "Well yeah," he responds, "Shouldn’t I be?"
The moment is so on-the-nose, so borderline musical theater, that it’s bound to make some listeners wince, but even those put off by it have got to admire the band’s temerity. Though Harmlessness’s primary fascinations lie with familiar subjects—overcoming depression, navigating changing relationships, finding a place in the world—the band detours from that safe territory to confront listeners with an uncomfortable moral quandary about whether taking a life is ever justified. The song sympathizes with Diana’s crusade while acknowledging the gruesome irony of celebrating a murderer.
Of course, Harmlessness does the safer subjects well, too. One of Bello’s many songs about wrestling himself from depression’s grip, "Rage Against the Dying of the Light" builds to a hooky alt-rock riff, then pivots right into the album’s celebratory highlight, "Ra Patera Dance", which channels the grizzled cheer of Good News-era Modest Mouse. Harmlessness is loaded with these kinds of seamless transitions, and the band’s smart sequencing keeps the record moving with brisk efficiency. "Haircuts for Everybody" takes just a minute and a half to build to its brutally pretty climax.
Where TWIABP’s last album ended with an epic seven-minute closing statement, "Getting Sodas", Harmlessness doubles down with two of them (actually, two and a half, if you count the lovely little hidden track tacked on to the end of "Mount Hum"). Stacking so many moments of grandiosity on top of each other should be overkill, but it isn’t; each suite pays off triumphantly. With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one.


Nodding to Bowie and the Beatles on songs about climate change and capitalism, the 21-year-old songwriter roots his political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock.

Zeros

“What do you think about the rocket I built?” howls Declan McKenna on the first track of Zeros. It’s a cheeky nod at the gap between his uneven 2017 debut album, What Do You Think About the Car?, and this one: not a natural progression, but a staggering improvement. McKenna, a 21-year-old British singer-songwriter once hailed as a teen prodigy, has shed his boy-wonder baby fat. Zeros is an ambitious attempt at his own Tommy, a sprawling concept album about scrappy survivors spiraling through space and searching for meaning at the end of the world. Its characters war with one another across a musical palette that spans Sgt. Pepper to “Space Oddity.”
The record’s standout track, “Daniel, You’re Still a Child,” is its Rosetta Stone—not to mention the best U2 song in about 15 years. The character of Daniel recurs throughout the album, but McKenna leaves his role ambiguous, a narrative Rorschach test. He seems to me a boozing absentee father, but he could also be a lousy boyfriend or a troublemaking prodigal son. The video for “The Key to Life on Earth” suggests a spookier storyline: Daniel as sinister doppelganger, played by actor Alex Lawther, invading McKenna’s home and eating his food before bludgeoning him to death.
The video could easily double as an episode of Black Mirror; fans will recognize Lawther as the blackmailed sex criminal of Season 3’s “Shut Up and Dance.” But McKenna relegates science fiction to the album’s opening tracks. The elaborate musical nods to Bowie and the Beatles on “You Better Believe!!!” and “Be an Astronaut” place space exploration squarely in the 1960s, when it was still a democratic pursuit, not a hobby for union-busting billionaires. “You were born to be an astronaut,” McKenna sings of Daniel, “and you’ll do it or die trying.” Daniel settles, sadly, for the latter. The Space Age comes to an end. A chilly Bono-in-Berlin vibe sweeps through the album as Daniel degenerates, giving way to Blurry Britrock as modern forms of villainy—online radicalization (“Twice Your Size”), climate change (“Sagittarius A*”), surveillance capitalism (“Beautiful Faces”)—rear their ugly heads.
This approach occasionally makes the album feel like a collage of 40 years’ worth of MOJO covers. But McKenna isn’t in the business of imitation or idolatry. He deploys these references carefully, in chronological order, drawing a clean arc through history to root his own political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock. Take “Rapture,” where, with absolute confidence, he mispronounces “the laws of nature” to force a rhyme with “Mrs. Thatcher.” At first, it may seem a bit retrograde—a Margaret Thatcher takedown in 2020? But the song makes an elegant argument: The witch isn’t dead at all, but risen again; the stench of her corpse lingers in modern Britain. There is a straight line from the Sex Pistols’ grievances to McKenna’s own.
McKenna’s strongest work, prior to Zeros, was the blunt FIFA protest anthem “Brazil,” written when he was just 15 and stunning in its maturity and moral clarity. Those qualities return in the defiant eco-feminist arc of Zeros. He begins the album on a rocket in outer space, screaming, “We’re going to get ourselves killed!”, and ends on a “marvelous beach,” accepting the impermanence of life on Earth: “Everybody leaves eventually, darling.” By making peace with his own mortality, McKenna underscores the urgency of ensuring our planet outlives us. “Sagittarius A*” condemns industrialists for their delusions of escaping climate emergency by colonizing Mars: “You think your money’s gonna stop you getting wet? … Noah, you best start building.” There is a subtly Luddite bent to the political demands of Zeros, which are threefold: Disconnect your phone, burn your money, and commence your walk eastward into the rising sun.
With Zeros, McKenna expands his conceptual scope and introduces more shades of grey in his storytelling. Not all of his creative risks pay off, though. The best concept albums carefully offset their arena-rock assaults with moments for the mosh pit to catch its breath. Zeros would benefit from another down-tempo “Emily” or two, as well as more connective tissue and clarity in its narrative. But despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Sweden's Little Dragon have a distinct and immediately alluring style, and on their third album, they double down on their futuristic pop sound.

Ritual Union

Sweden's Little Dragon are a band blessed with a distinct and immediately alluring style. Their rhythms are dry and metronomic; their synthesizers either provide a distant ambiance or seem to glow like neon lights that flicker in time with the beat. Frontwoman Yukimi Nagano's phrasing touches on conventions of modern-- particularly British-- iterations of R&B, but errs on the side of aloof understatement. They are essentially an R&B band, but the major elements of their style are skewed enough that while the music seems vaguely familiar, it doesn't sound quite like anyone else.
A lot of listeners had their first exposure to Nagano and Little Dragon last year when the group guest starred on two tracks from the Gorillaz's excellent album Plastic Beach. Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn was very clever in his deployment of the band on those cuts, making the shift into a sequence in "Empire Ants" highlighting Nagano's smoky, serene voice and Håkan Wirenstrand's stunning keyboard textures seem like a sudden cut from muddy, dimly lit footage to vibrant, super-saturated color. If one of Albarn's goals in collaborating with the band was to showcase their best qualities, he did an amazing job of it.
Ritual Union, the band's third album, does not stray from the sexy, futuristic sound of their previous record, Machine Dreams, or their team-up with Albarn. If anything, they've doubled down on their aesthetic by leaning harder than ever on moody synths, nearly subliminal bass lines and impossibly crisp snare hits. A few of the songs, like the sleek title track and the brisk, funky "Nightlight", rank among the group's finest work. All through the record, Little Dragon are extremely effective in delivering the most attractive elements of their style, resulting in a set of songs that come across like the ideal soundtrack to a night on the town in some exotic sci-fi city.
The problem with Ritual Union is that even though every song on the album is built on the foundation of some very good musical ideas and at least one engaging hook, the material nevertheless seems rather under-written. "When I Go Out", "Please Turn", and "Crystalfilm" all get stuck in groovy ruts, while cuts like "Little Man", "Summertearz", and "Brush the Heat" seem like they are one extra hook, middle eight, rhythmic shift, or chord change away from becoming truly outstanding pieces of music. This doesn't diminish the charm of the music, per se, but it can be very frustrating to hear songs right on the precipice of greatness. Little Dragon have clearly mastered their style on this album; hopefully next time around they will deliver more songs worthy of their sound.


The Los Angeles folk-punk singer-songwriter steps into a more expansive, considered sound, blending various strains of American roots music into a quietly idiosyncratic style.

Anarchist Gospel

Is Anarchist Gospel—whose title hints at political consciousness—Sunny War’s call to action? It’s not an inconceivable notion. The Los Angeles singer/songwriter has hovered on the fringe of polite Americana circles since the early 2010s, parlaying her early years as a folk-punk busker into handsome, modest records often released on her own independent imprints.
A trace of those beginnings is discernible in Anarchist Gospel, a record that culminates with War paraphrasing the legendary anarcho-punk band Crass on the closing “Whole,” but this is by no measure a punk record. The album marks a step into the big leagues as War joins New West, a prominent Americana imprint whose roster includes acts like Pernice Brothers and Drive-By Truckers, and her choice of collaborator here is as striking as her label. Andrija Tokic, who made his reputation working with Alabama Shakes, sits behind the boards, performing a task similar to the one he did on his records with Hurray for the Riff Raff, both streamlining and opening up War’s music without sacrificing her eccentricities.
The expansion is apparent from the opening “Love’s Death Bed,” which unfolds with swirling ease before settling into a relaxed gospel-blues groove. The song introduces a wash of color far more intense than anything on Simple Syrup, War’s deliberately restrained—and quite effective—2021 album. The shift only seems bracing to those familiar with War’s past work: without that knowledge, the music merely seems casually assured, blending a few strains of American roots music into a quietly idiosyncratic style.
War receives assistance from the harmonies of singer-songwriters Allison Russell and Chris Pierce on “Love’s Death Bed,” two of the many cameos that help shape the album’s contours. They resurface on a folky cover of R&B singer Van Hunt’s “Hopeless,” and guitarist Dave Rawlings—best known for his work with Gillian Welch—plays on three tracks, while My Morning Jacket’s Jim James appears on “Earth,” a song that sighs and cascades with the grace of a waterfall. None of the guests overshadow War; like Tokic’s production, their contributions merely illuminate the layered emotions lying at the core of her music.
Tokic’s warm, painterly production helps disguise the fact that much of Anarchist Gospel chronicles the intensely painful dissolution of a relationship. If the title of “Love’s Death Bed” didn’t give away the game, a cover of Ween’s “Baby Bitch” is War’s tell. She attends to both its gorgeous psychedelic melody and its vulgarity—accentuated by what sounds, incongruously, like a children’s chorus—while teasing out the pain lurking in the heart of Ween’s nasty kiss-off.
While this flash of humor is welcome, it’s the warmth of War’s delivery that lingers, not just on “Baby Bitch” but throughout. Always an empathetic vocalist, War sometimes seemed a shade too earnest on her earlier records, hitting each emotion squarely on the nose. Here, she alternates between wry reticence and bruised confession, qualities that are enhanced by Tokic’s subtly shifting, textured production. The wider canvas and broadened palette reveal the complex human emotions within War’s music, resulting in a breakup record that’s emotionally resonant and curiously hopeful.


With influences ranging from Afrobeat to choral symphonies, the Brooklyn-based group’s debut is bright and bursting with detail.

Mommy Issues EP

When they were in high school, best friends Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas could be found goofing off in yet another chorus class. Their instructor was an overzealous Corky St. Clair type who took his job a little too seriously. He “spent a lot of energy trying to make us the choir of his dreams,” Foinchas said in a 2018 interview. The curriculum included old Gaelic hymns and arrangements from the 1700s, which Foinchas jokingly referred to as “catholic, castrated boys music.” Despite the pair’s teenage skepticism, those lessons had a lasting impact. Now at the helm of Brooklyn-based group the Narcotix, Foinchas and Quansah flex a deep understanding of melody, and the group’s debut EP, Mommy Issues, spotlights their honed, dynamic voices.
Mommy Issues is sonically grand and expansive, taking inspiration from Foinchas and Quansah’s African heritage. (Their parents are from Cameroon and Cote D’Ivoire, respectively.) The Narcotix cite African wedding music, choral symphonies, and Afrobeat as major influences on their style, which they describe as “West African art-folk.” Sierra Leonean guitarist Adam Turay is a distinct presence on the record; his bright, sharpened riffs pierce through denser compositions like “Lilith” and the sweeping “Adonai.” The latter track is built on Foinchas and Quansah’s interwoven vocal melodies, which range from sweet and theatrical to gruff and guttural. With a spirited outro that echoes call-and-response music in the West African tradition, it is one of the EP’s finest moments.
These six tracks are packed with mythological imagery and allusions to the Old Testament. Often, the religious references work as a vessel for storytelling, the way fables use familiar imagery to convey universal truths. Titles like “Rebecca,” “Esther,” and “Adam” all have biblical origins—but they are also names of band members. “John/Joseph,” whose title aligns with drummer Jonathan Joseph, is the tale of a daughter struggling to find her lost mother. Foinchas and Quansah pepper in images of Mars, the Ancient Ones, and impending darkness that suspend the narrative above reality. The missing “mama” at the song’s center could be a matriarch, a maternal deity, or even Mother Earth.
The Narcotix build worlds from this kind of loose symbolism while managing to escape the mystically inclined tropes of New Age music. Foinchas and Quansah craft gorgeous melodies, but they’re not afraid to scuff up their voices, a technique that keeps their work grounded. The sun-dappled arpeggios of “Rebecca,” the EP’s tamest track, are disrupted by a dry croak near the end of the song. On “Esther,” they interrupt their braided melodies with harsh bursts of breath, trailing off into a screeching wail and wicked laughter. Joseph’s crisp percussion, meanwhile, slaps against the reverb-heavy vocals, maximizing surface texture. These rough edges and imperfections help bring the EP to life. Early in their career, the Narcotix have a knack for subverting expectations. Their songs are bright and bursting with detail, fueled by an affection for the music they’ve inherited and the myths they’ve built from it.

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These Systems Are Failing is Moby’s most furious album in twenty years, a return to his hardcore days, but it's still oddly cold and routine.

Moby & the Void Pacific Choir: These Systems Are Failing

These Systems Are Failing

Moby’s thirteenth album comes packaged with a 28-page booklet, which might lead you to expect Richard Melville-Hall’s most long-winded liner-notes broadside to date. But instead of railing against the sort of hot-button issues he has addressed in releases past—Christian hypocrisy, say, or mass incarceration or factory farming—we get page after page of the man’s photography and the lowercase statement “these systems are failing” every so often atop images of graveyards, airplanes, a family with golden skin, and what might be a “Bojack Horseman”-themed pool party at Moby’s old castle in the Hollywood Hills (though he’s since downsized).
These Systems Are Failing is Moby’s most furious album in twenty years, since he neatly derailed his electronic career with the righteous punk spurt of Animal Rights back in 1996. Mission of Burma covers might have befuddled ravers ready for the E rushes of “Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)” and “Go,” but it hearkened back to Moby’s own heritage, growing up a punk in New York City in the early ’80s. In circling back to shout-along raucous punk two decades and many real estate deals later though, there’s not much grist for Moby’s mill.
It’s an angry album, which in this case means Moby is running drum machines through banks of distortion and sullying up every synth line with fuzz, tempered by the kind of pressurizing rhythm guitar lines redolent of Joy Division and post-punk. A drum beat not unlike “Take on Me” opens “Hey! Hey!” paired to a hornet’s nest of guitar and synth. It’s a promising enough start, if only it didn’t just nosedive into a chintzy melody that even a fist pump-along chorus of “Hey! Hey!/Look how they hang us out to dry” can’t resuscitate. Feverish guitar noise and club-loud toms give urgency to “Break.Doubt,” with Moby doing his best Ian Curtis deadpan, but he can’t help but fall back on facile production choices, like simply making everything louder and layering his voice so that you hear an imaginary mosh pit of fake sweaty Mobys pogoing.
As long as you don’t cringe at the overused “Los Angeles” vocal sample and gospel turn by the Void Pacific Choir, the best balance Moby strikes is between the ’90s breakbeat and throwback acid line on bonus track “Almost Loved.” But no matter the song and level of outrage, Moby can’t seem to get beyond the presets that Trent Reznor outgrew around Pretty Hate Machine nor the new romantic/ goth vocal delivery that –regardless of the levels of distortion on his voice—always makes him sound like a dour Count Chocula.
Moby’s lyrics lash out at planetary polluters and capitalist greed, but he saves his most acute anger not for these faceless systems of power, but for those who personally embody love lost for him. He lashes out at the girl who lied to him on “And It Hurts,” the one who walked away on “Don’t Leave Me,” not to mention the one who he accuses of giving him an insufficient love that “was old and looking back” on “A Simple Love.”
It may be too far along to inform Moby that the conceit of a simple love is delusional and misplaced, that any romantic break-up requires a long gaze in the mirror and not just yelling about perceived slights. Maybe this sense of hurt and mistrust would be more palatable if it were distinguishable from his rage against the machine. It’s hard to sit through lines about “Selling off heaven for a perfect hell” and corporate greed when he himself opened the floodgates. Selling every last second of an album to multiple advertising campaigns (Play), peddling bottle service-style club music as nostalgia,not to mention partnering with the same luxury hotels that now litter the city. Moby’s own rising economic fortunes mirrored that of Manhattan, so his bald embrace of “the city’s absurd cult of money” is what he now blames for ruining New York’s creative culture, exculpating himself in the process. Moby’s indignation just sounds like Walrus and Carpenter-level tears of rage. Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote.


After two exceptional black metal records, Wolves in the Throne Room return this year with a new EP and LP.

Wolves in the Throne Room: Black Cascade / Malevolent Grain EP

Black Cascade / Malevolent Grain EP

As much as one can call anything associated with black metal a crossover record, Two Hunters-- the sprawling second album from Wolves in the Throne Room-- was just that. Extolled by critics, embraced by indie rock kids, appreciated by metal legions, Wolves' overwhelming crescendos and glowing decrescendos, beautiful and brutal, spoke as much to worshippers of Emperor's Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk as acolytes of Radiohead's Kid A. The band offered an enigmatic allure, too, speaking of its communal farm outside of Olympia, Wash. And Wolves' espousal of a pagan approach to black metal-- a genre long bound to an upside-down cross-- was refreshing. So purists be damned: Two years ago, Wolves in the Throne Room offered a rendezvous for two very unlikely demographics by aiming extreme in several directions.
Whatever bridges Wolves might have built in 2007 are mostly a memory this year, though: The EP Malevolent Grain and the LP Black Cascade disassemble the integrated power of Two Hunters and its predecessor, Diadem of 12 Stars, by plucking the black-metal sections from their former surrounding swells and stretching their ends until what's left feels mostly like a flatline. Imagine cutting cheap wine with water and trying to get drunk: It's unnecessary work for little payoff.
Excepting the first side of Malevolent Grain, each of the six Wolves cuts is a smear, smoothing black metal's disruptive bursts into 10-14 minute trances that slowly, sparingly shift in meter and volume. The idea-- to create a stable atmosphere from music that traditionally gnashes any space it fills-- is more interesting than its execution. For instance, "Hate Crystal", Malevolent Grain's B-side, is an 11-minute march that opens at full blast and ends mostly at the same clip. The guitars move in orthodox progressions, and the drums steadily chew from beneath, adding variety with the occasional extra cymbal splash or snare drop. Only the song's understated coda-- where the parts fall out of lockstep and apart from one another without fading out-- offers intrigue. Like William Basinski's The Disintegration Loop I-IV, the object's corrosion is more interesting than the object itself. Also, that's not a compliment.
All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone. Separated from its once-intriguing surroundings, Wolves' music feels listless and dull-- music doing its best to get by on size, not strength or sound. It's not compelling. At least it's listenable.
Side A of Malevolent Grain isn't: Released in America as a limited run of black vinyl and in Europe as a set of 700 12" picture discs that sold out almost immediately, Malevolent Grain is barely worth the Google search it takes to find free, high-quality rips. The EP splits the band's powers between the record's halves, so that the heavy stuff comes on the B-side. The A-side, then, is a workshop for Jamie Meyers, this effort's token female. She possesses less nuance than Jessica Kinney, the Two Hunters vocalist who seemed so well suited for those tunes. The three-piece rock rumble suggests an eventual eruption, but the band simply varies its speed, volume, and density, lashing repeatedly against a few notes and themes. Maybe that sounds nice, but-- left alone above it all, minus a structural or sonic foil-- Meyers sounds like Evanescence leading a tribute to Enya. It's a 13-minute cringefest.
Perhaps these releases are concessions to the difficulty of climbing from a tour van nightly and recreating such complex music onstage. Then, of course, there's the frustration of disappointed fans who expect it all and get only the band's heavier tendencies with the price of admission. That's fair enough, I suppose. But must a live show meet a record's standards? And should a performance dictate a record by a band that once took such risks? Indeed, the live experience is an extemporaneous one-- here tonight, restarted tomorrow. But a great record, one hopes, can be its own statement, something that lives forever in a world of its own design. With its deity talk and complete grandeur, Two Hunters worked like that. It was adventurous, engaged, imaginative. At their best, though, Malevolent Grain and Black Cascade, are just sort of there, kicking up a thin cloud of dust they're hoping you'll perceive as pitch black.


Though longer and mellower, Cloakroom’s second album still has an anxious, open-ended feel. They take the appealing parts of a masculine pose without being wholly trapped by them.

Time Well

Northwest Indiana trio Cloakroom take a muscular approach to shoegaze by adding a wallop of fundamental metal crunch, and while that’s a well-worn fusion at this point, they don’t quite sound like other bands who attempt this. They draw on conventional ’90s rock, and especially its affinity for chunky riffs. Despite moving to the metal-oriented label Relapse for their second album Time Well, they cut back on overt heaviness and lean more on bittersweet dream-rock. In doing so, they strike a better balance of the two and reveal themselves to be slyer than they appear at first glance.
Their debut Further Out was defined by a dour air, and even though it’s longer and mellower, Time is riddled with the anxiety that comes from feeling more open-ended. It doesn’t come roaring out of the gate with hard rock nostalgia like Further Out did with “Paperweight,” as “Gone But Not Entirely” is more simmering doom. A good deal of the album’s second half—“Sickle Moon Blues” and “The Sun Won’t Let Us Go” in particular—are driven by ambient currents carrying somber guitars. Guitarist and vocalist Doyle Martin sings in a slightly lower register on Time, removing the stereotypical “emo” whine and delivering in a more full-throated Justin Broadrick fashion, elongating his drawl to fit the spaciness of the music. It’s a contrast to the mid-’00s Midwestern emo yell of bassist Bobby Markos’ previous band, Native, where he was the vocalist despite never being entirely comfortable with the role. Such an approach wouldn’t work here, and his comfort in holding back shows. Softening their approach works in their favor in other ways: “Concrete Gallery” takes a noise-rock jangle that’s been beaten to death and washes it in cleans that strip the menace out and feels approachable. It slouches in instead of snarls forth, leaving the energy to where it’s needed.
When Cloakroom do rip into big riffs, it’s more than satisfying. “Seedless Star” takes the “Paperweight” role as the most charging song of the record. They understand the appeal of the riff and how a simple driving line can go a long way. “Seedless Star” would work as an up-tempo doom song without the shoegaze elements, and with them, the sorrow neck-and-neck with the righteous guitar is amplified. While it appeals to a more base sense, it’s also a smarter take than loudness for the sake of loudness.
Time replicates a half-awake state: it’s not so dreamy that it gets unmoored in endless seas of effects, and yet the heavy guitars, appealing as they are, aren’t exactly a dominating gravitational force. “52hz Whale’s” drone is as light as any of the less heavy moments here, and “Gone” and “Big World” both recall the trudge of Earth’s Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. Martin’s voice also plays into this vibe; it’s soothing but cryptic, not exactly a lullaby. (He’s a professed black metal fan, so it makes sense that his voice isn’t always forthcoming.) These dynamics reveal a tenderness that’s often lost by going on either extreme. Time will make as much sense in a loud rock club as it will alone in a room lit only by faint lights. Cloakroom inhabit the space of artists who take the appealing parts of a masculine pose without being wholly trapped by them. There’s a power that comes from not having to choose between being tough and being vulnerable.


The heavy Bay Area band’s eleventh and latest full-length is also their briefest by a sizable margin. It sags often, but Fires With Fires ends with a staggering exhibition of quiet power.

Fires Within Fires

Ambition has long been Neurosis’ hallmark. When the Bay Area band, which started out playing crust-caked hardcore in the ’80s, turned toward longer songs and stranger textures on 1990’s The Word As Law, there was no blueprint to follow. Instead, they spent the next decade forging one barrier-obliterating album after the next. By 1999’s Time of Grace—released with an ambient companion album by Neurosis’ alter ego, Tribes of Neurot, which was meant to be played on top of Times of Grace—the group had morphed into an entity of ritualism, dark spectacle, and metaphysical sprawl. Since then, they’ve gradually whittled down their vision to a more manageable size, but even then, their prodigious albums never fell below the hour-long mark. Yet their eleventh and latest full-length—the 41-minute-long Fires Within Fires—is, by a sizable margin, their briefest album since The Word As Law came out 26 years ago.
Granted, there are more ways to gauge ambition than album length. But for Neurosis, the mystique of milestones like Souls at Zero and Enemy of the Sun went hand in hand with how far they were willing to push themselves. Neurosis’ music is meant to be immersive, a labyrinth, something to be wandered into warily and only eventually escaped from. That gravity is largely lacking in Fires. Sure, the tracks are heavy as ever, from the vein-bursting riff-mongery of “Bending Light” to the more corrosive future-psychedelia of “A Shadow Memory” and “Fire Is the End Lesson.” The last features some tried-and-true, staccato-vocal interplay between guitarists Scott Kelly and Steven Von Till, but it doesn’t add up to much more than an exercise in the familiar. “Bending Light” doesn’t even properly feature Neurosis’ main strength—the layering of instruments to an inhuman degree of atmospheric density. Instead, everyone is just kind of playing at the same time. When the inevitable soft part lurches clumsily into the inevitable hard part, the loudest sound is a checklist being checked.
Fires sags in both the beginning and the middle, but it ends, however lopsidedly, with a staggering exhibition of quiet power. “Broken Ground” and “Reach” are cut from whole cloth, concluding the album with a combined 20 minutes of hushed, chanted, circular folk-metal. That said, “Broken Ground” works so well because it sounds like one of Von Till’s solo songs that just so happens to be fleshed out by Neurosis. This is where the band’s heart seems to reside circa 2016—in a convocation of towering, cosmos-scraping arpeggios and eschatological warnings about “psychic waves” and “the end of all we’ve seen” that’s more Swans and Lungfish than the old sludge-and-doom routine. Why Neurosis hasn’t committed to this subtle, skeletal approach more fully on Fires is anyone’s guess, but the album suffers for that indecision. As good as these final two songs are, they’re not enough. At only 40 minutes total, Fires feels like it’s over just as it should be hitting its climax.
If one of the album’s weaker tracks, like “Bending Light,” were to be removed, this would be a solid, four-song EP of the same duration and scope as 2000’s respectable Sovereign. Instead, it’s neither fish nor fowl: Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP. There’s no shame in this, but at this point in their career Neurosis are being vastly outperformed by a legion of younger bands they’ve influenced, from Pallbearer to Inter Arma to Dead to a Dying World. That doesn’t in any way diminish what Neurosis has accomplished over the decades; these younger bands have yet to touch the horrific magnificence of Neurosis’ 1996 masterpiece Through Silver in Blood. But as that album celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it’s becoming clearer that these days Neurosis are fueled less by ambition and more by reiteration.