With the joy and wit all but absent from his songwriting, Jack White’s third solo album becomes a long, bewildering slog.

Boarding House Reach

I remember when I first suspected Jack White was ridiculous. It was the trailer for the 2009 rock documentary It Might Get Loud.
Yes, a guy in peppermint-striped clothes covering Marlene Dietrich alongside a drummer pretending to be his sister had always been a bit ridiculous. But it was good ridiculous, inspiring and even instructive. Play-acting, dress-up, making up fake blues songs: These were ingenious, even courageous ways of engaging with the big, terrifying world on your own terms. But then I watched White gaze out a limo, en route to a summit with fellow guitarist millionaires The Edge and Jimmy Page, and gravely prophesy a “fist fight.” This, I thought, was bad ridiculous— pointless, embarrassing, self-serving.
I revisit this moment of doubt now because I have heard Jack White rap. If you listen to his third solo album Boarding House Reach, you will have crossed this Rubicon with me. It happens on a song called “Ice Station Zebra.” After pounding a saloon piano for a minute, he turns his fedora backwards, stoops to the camera, and offers this:

If Joe Blow says, ‘Yo, you paint like Caravaggio’
You respond, ‘No, that’s an insult, Joe
I live in a vacuum, I ain’t copping no one’
Listen up, son: Everyone creating is a member of the family
Passin’ down genes and ideas in harmony
The players and the cynics probably thinking it’s odd
But if you rewind the tape, we’re all copying God

Now, quoting someone’s lyrics to make them look silly probably isn’t nice. It might even be disingenuous: Plenty of sharp-sounding couplets wither in the harsh light of the printed page. But White’s delivery, if possible, is even worse than the words; the painful “yo” and “Joe Blow,” the coup de grace of “we’re all copying God”—which White repeats, eager to rub it in—is a thumb in the eye. What does he think he’s doing? What does he want us to think he’s doing? All is mystery, except your overwhelming desire to turn away.
Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you. Deep in the eccentric-hermit stage of his career, with his own successful label and a devoted clutch of fans who will come to see his concerts until their children are in college, White is now free to record and release whatever he pleases. And judging by Boarding House Reach, he wants to noodle to himself in the studio, record spoken-word reminiscences about the first time he played piano in a song titled “Get in the Mind Shaft,” and make the kind of Cheeto-dusted funk instrumentals that the Beastie Boys would have left off of The In Sound From Way Out! What he doesn’t want to do: write any songs at all.
The worst part is that he doesn’t even sound like he’s having fun. The few rock songs here, like the lead-off “Connected by Love,” are blowsy, water-logged things, devoid of wit or snap or fire. Usually a good guitar solo will rouse White’s blood, but he doesn’t have many of those up his sleeve here either. Instead, he swamps himself with gospel choirs and organ and even more bongos, and boy, does he ever sound miserable. “Why Walk a Dog” would be a hilarious parody of a mawkish blues ballad—“Are you their master?/Did you buy them at the store?/Did they know they were a cure for you to stop being bored?”—if the sob in White’s voice didn’t convince me he believes every word. What I wouldn’t give for a flash of bright red, something with the verve or conviction of even his slightest Stripes material.
On the last two tracks, White finally tips his hand. “What’s Done Is Done” is a goofy country tune that he sings with the right amount of hambone. And “Humoresque” sets to words a scrappy old tune by the 19th-century Czech composer Dvořák, one that generations of little children studying Suzuki violin have scratched out in front of the forced grins of their parents. It’s the only hint of White’s lively mind at work.
Sadly, the years have steadily whittled the playfulness from White’s material. His work is now too lumbering and unmoored for anyone to take much pleasure in it. After the Stripes broke up, and as he began to dress more and more like Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton film, he started to carry himself like Depp too: A former boy-genius soured into a man, an iconoclast trapped in an icon’s body. His brief reminiscence on Boarding House Reach about learning to play piano (“I sat there for hours, trying to understand how to construct a melody”) is swathed in fluttering-curtain synths, almost as if the moment is too painfully unreal for White to recall clearly. Listening to Boarding House Reach, it is hard not to feel a pang for what he might have lost: alone in his little room, working on something good.


After a shaky debut project, the 18-year-old Atlanta rapper gives her punk spirit more space to breathe on her latest mixtape.

Nirvana

Bktherula’s 2019 breakout single “Tweakin’ Together” is like a fairy tale made to backdrop a day in the life of the most Instagrammable couples you can imagine. (Maybe the ones who film each other doing tricks at the skatepark. Maybe the ones where both are so fashionable, it physically makes you sick. Or the ones who seem so inseparable that they must have never had a disagreement.) Her music can range from fluttery and lovestruck to songs delivered with the angst of someone who would stomp on the human body that fell to the ground during a mosh pit. “Tweakin’ Together” is so good because it’s a mix of both. “I know these niggas mad as fuck,” she raps on the opening line, so softly it’s like she’s flipping off her critics with a smile on her face. Yes, it’s an unrealistically cool love song. There's no tears, indecisiveness, or paranoia. This mythical perfection is the track’s flaw, but also part of the appeal.
Though the absence of more subtle emotions didn’t affect “Tweakin’ Together,” it is a glaring issue on the 18-year-old’s debut mixtape, Love Santana. The project feels like unfinished and shallow scatterbrained sketches were rushed out to help extend the life of her breakthrough single. Admirably, though, the record has plenty of ideas; she attempts to package her punk spirit with an endless bag of Atlanta-rooted melodies, the loose improvisation of punched-in PG County, Maryland rap, and the whimsy of SoundCloud’s melodic crooners. A couple more months of allowing the concepts to bake would have helped, as it does on her newest mixtape, Nirvana.
Prior to Nirvana, the most memorable Bktherula songs were the ones where her vocals were as light and airy as hotel pillows. That’s not true anymore; on the tape, Bk is most captivating when she sounds ready to stuff trifling dudes in lockers for not reciprocating her feelings. “All these fuck niggas is fake!/Say they love you to your face!/Really they just playing games!/Bitch, I hope you say your grace!” she screams on “Mind Fuck,” prepared to headbang, and maybe even set a car on fire like Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale. “Welcome” is just as good, too. Bk chants as if she’s leading a seance, and the noisy Digital Nas beat will resonate with anyone who has spent too much time listening to the Pro Skater soundtrack.
When Bk slightly reels in the JNCO jeans energy, it’s still successful but less striking. On “Admit It,” the spacey instrumental is reminiscent of the far-out C4 and Dun Deal beats you could find on early Young Thug mixtapes, and Bk’s soft-served melody makes the words sound sweet leaving her mouth—despite how aggressive they are: “Yo’ nigga wanna fight, better tell him, ‘Come with it,’” she raps.
Similar to Carti and Uzi, Bk is a rapper who always chooses swag over substance. To pull that off across an entire project, the production has to be so tight and imaginative that you hardly notice or care about punchlines that are duds. Nirvana’s defects are because the executive producer Digital Nas—best known for his early work with Lil Yachty—can’t quite build worlds like more fantastical beatmakers such as Pi’erre Bourne, Richie Souf, and Oogie Mane. Sometimes Digital Nas’ celestial sounds leave Bk out to dry, specifically on “More” and “okok/depressing,” both of which feel like off-brand versions of the beats on recent Carti leaks.
When it’s all clicking, Bktherula and Digital Nas make fun records together. Notably, “ILoveUBack<3,” is a dreamy love song with a gentle flow and feathery Bk vocals. Unlike the great but unrelatable “Tweakin’ Together,” Bk’s emotions are complex here. She goes through unease and a fear of commitment, as well as joy and euphoria at seemingly inconsequential moments like a late-night back rub. It’s vulnerable in a way that seemed to be hard for her just 10 months ago. But Bktherula is blooming fast, and her music is coming along with it.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Badass instrumental rock group follow 2006's outstanding Surface to Air, a record that matched looming dread with body-rocking thunder.

Spirit Animal

Zombi(e)s? Badass. One peeved-looking elephant brandishing its tusks towards your fleshy bits as it stampedes through the space-fog? Mega badass. Monolithic, lazer-show ready instrumental prog rawk? Well, that can pass or play, but in combination with the aforementioned twofer, you'd probably go with "badass" again, huh? You'd think!
When the mood strikes, few bands do bong-rips-in-your-Dodge-Dart badass quite like Pittsburgh's Zombi. The sound Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra make-- equal parts Italo-funkers Goblin, Can's lockstep whirl, intro music to educational filmstrips of the 1970s, and Edgar Winter's undead "Frankenstein"-- can be almost impossibly epic. When it works, as it did over and over again on 2006's Surface to Air, it feels like a vision quest through the bowels of hell. But whereas Surface found myriad ways to match looming dread with body-rocking thunder (they are on Relapse, after all), Spirit Animal plays the extremes. The heights can be towering, the lows crushing, but the relative lack of middle ground keeps Spirit Animal off balance and a few shades shy of truly badass.
Instrumental rock of this sort requires a certain ratio of tension and release; the tunes range in length from a lean six minutes and change to the comfortably numbing 17-plus minutes of closer "Through Time", and too much time spent at either end of the spectrum can be stultifying when you get into the lengthier numbers. Often Spirit Animal gets so caught up in its own grooves it almost seems to forget there's anybody listening; where a constant dynamism bubbled under the comparably hefty Surface to Air, Spirit Anim**al too often finds Zombi settling into one mode or the other-- spacey, or spooky, but mostly skull-smashing-- and letting it ride just a touch too long. Individual moments can crush or creep, but far too many riffs get turned every which way but out, and far too few of those are quite badass enough to justify the time they spend with 'em.
Spirit Animal is almost certainly the band's loudest effort; half-Zombi Steve Moore even sneaks a little electric guitar in there, a first for the band on wax. If you'd told me either of those things before I heard the record, I would've pegged it as their best based on that alone; it's not that Zombi really needed to get louder or introduce new elements into the mix, but that'd certainly be a direction you'd think they'd revel in. They do, but as a listener, it's hard not to feel bludgeoned by the oft-endless riffage that characterizes much of Spirit Animal. Given their relatively small arsenal of instruments and an apparent unwillingness to shed the ghosts of their influences, I suppose there's only so many things they can do without going way way out, and Spirit Animal finds them doing just that. But unlike Surface to Air-- or even the terrific "Infinity" from their recent split with Maserati-- the sprawl becomes a crawl, and the rift between the parts that kick your butt and the parts that get you primed for said butt kicking is just a bit too great for Spirit Animal to achieve the kind of balance Zombi have been so adept at in the past. In the end, Spirit Animal becomes less like the badass elephant on its front and more like just another pachyderm; heavy, yes, but lumbering.


The pieces on this reissued 2006 album blend techno’s forward motion with the swirl of ambient.

Move D / Benjamin Brunn: Let’s Call It a Day

Let’s Call It a Day

One afternoon in 2007, the electronic musicians David Moufang (aka Move D) and Benjamin Brunn walked into the Smallville Records shop in Hamburg and heard their own music playing over the speakers. The record in question was Let’s Call It a Day, a one-off set of dubby ambient-techno improvisations that had been released the year before and then disappeared without much trace. In town for a rare duo performance together, they told the shop attendants that there was a bounty of unreleased material from the same sessions sitting on their hard drives, at which point the storekeepers pricked up their ears. The following year, some of those tracks would be released as Songs From the Beehive, the inaugural album on the fledgling Smallville label.
Specializing in moody, minimalist house, Smallville was inspired by Dial Records, a Hamburg dance-music institution, even tapping Dial co-founder Peter Kersten for one of Smallville’s early singles. But after its early run of singles, Songs From the Beehive marked a turning point for the label. Instead of the crisp beats and clean lines of the minimal scene, these recordings were shrouded in gaseous abstraction, like architectural photographs shot on fogged film. The dancefloor tracks invoked heady dub-techno pioneers like Porter Ricks; the rest of the album slowed the tempos or eliminated beats altogether, sinking into a state of weightless bliss. There was nothing else like it around at the time, and it established Smallville’s reputation as an electronic music hub of uncommon depth.
This reissue of Let’s Call It a Day marks the first time the 2006 album has ever appeared on vinyl or streaming services. It’s opportune timing; ambient music is enjoying a renaissance right now, and Move D and Brunn’s album, with its careful mix of pulse and atmosphere, still sounds unique. Even more than Songs From the Beehive, Let’s Call It a Day achieves an unusual balance between techno’s forward motion and ambient’s amniotic swirl.
The album begins with its most sharply defined track. A listener hearing “On the Magic Bus” in 2006 wouldn’t have been completely befuddled; its steady kick drum and answering bursts of white noise approximate dance music’s familiar boom-tick rhythm, while rounded bass tones invoke deep-house pioneer Mr. Fingers. But the whole thing seems suspended in liquid, like the flakes of a snow globe. From there the duo leaves all semblance of the club behind. “Grains” is stirred by a buried dub-techno pulse and a hint of a ticking clock; the rest of the track is just a shimmering field of randomized rattle and squeal, as though a transistor radio had suddenly developed a keen interest in free jazz while the two musicians went on their lunch break. “A” and “Ω” are variations upon a single theme, hypnotically drawing out murky, burbling chords over rustling rhythms.
Like Songs From the Beehive, all seven tracks were improvised across four days in Moufang’s studio, but the album’s two highlights show what different forms those freeform sessions could take. “Let’s Call It a Day” is the album’s most ethereal cut, with faint synth chords slowly morphing atop a soft bed of clicks, purrs, and sighs. Trying to trace its creators’ movements is like looking for a guiding hand behind the movements of a lava lamp; it feels like it could bubble along like that for eternity, generating infinite permutations of the same basic pattern. “Magnetically Levitated Train,” on the other hand, constitutes the record’s big emotional payoff: a patient series of jazz-indebted chord changes drawn out across 17 soothing minutes, played with unusual delicacy and imbued with an unmistakably human touch. At the end of a record that feels almost a self-regulating system—some fantastical Rube Goldberg contraption made from an aquarium pump, marbles, and Q-tips—this sweet, sentimental song finally reveals a glimpse of the two men behind the curtain, gently pulling strings.


Purgatory/Paradise, Throwing Muses’ first album in 10 years, is an ambitious collection that was also devised as a book with essays by Kristin Hersh and art by drummer Dave Narcizo. Half of the 31 tracks barely make it over two minutes: some are reprises, sometimes the reprises come first, and some tracks are lopped-off bridges or choruses.

Purgatory/Paradise

There’s a moment during the commentary packaged with Throwing Muses new album Purgatory/Paradise, after drummer Dave Narcizo offers up a particularly ribald interpretation of “Slippershell”, where Kristin Hersh stops and laughs away the credit: “Sure. God wrote it.” From almost anyone else, that would come off ridiculous, a megalomaniac’s humblebrag, but from Hersh it’s part of the origin story, the one that’s been repeated in everything written about Throwing Muses from the 80s onward. Hersh has always held that she’s not a songwriter so much as a woman accosted by songs; her role, she says, is more like a transcriptionist, or a vessel. Anything an outside audience might hear in them, the story goes, is coincidental. But Throwing Muses’ music never sounded like it sprung from any outside source so much as one that’s deeply personal. The chords lurch like feelings would; and the lyrics make internal sense. A track like “Fish” becomes far less surreal when you know that it’s referring to an actual fish nailed to an actual cross on Hersh’s actual apartment wall, but even then it’s like listening in on a few minutes of monologue, raw and untranslated, where the bits of dialogue, snippets of images, and the rest of the stuff of someone else’s inner life may well be a foreign language. There are plenty of Throwing Muses tracks that are oblique—and a lot more than the band gets credit for that are needle-direct—but few that explain themselves.
If this sounds at odds with finding a large audience, it’s because it is. Throwing Muses’ time on Warner in the 90s was neither pleasant nor lucrative. Hersh gave the label the rights to Hips and Makers to get out of her contract before releasing 1996’s Limbo, a title that now seems either prescient or biting. The Muses went on hiatus—or “disbanded,” which is both farther from the truth and closer to the practical reality. Hersh released solo albums on a fairly steady schedule, but Throwing Muses released only one more record: the triumphant Throwing Muses. That was in 2003. Hersh formed another project, 50 Foot Wave, around this time, but their last two EPs were released for free and quietly—as quietly, that is, as is possible for a band whose founding principle was “Throwing Muses, if they were faster, meaner and also swore a lot.” Hersh’s last solo album, Crooked, was self-released in 2009 nearly as quietly, supported mostly by house shows and smallish acoustic concerts. And though demos of Purgatory/Paradise existed online as early as 2007 (a few were meant for Crooked), the audience they found was largely the same fans who crowdfunded the record. (Hersh was among the first to adopt the pay-what-you-want and subscription models Kickstarter and its ilk would later make inescapable.) While Throwing Muses did tour behind 2011’s Anthology compilation, it would have taken close attention to think new material was forthcoming.
Purgatory/Paradise, as it turns out, is the Muses’ first album in 10 years, and “the work [the band] can die after releasing,” as Hersh jokes early in the commentary. (“We’re really looking forward to death. We work so hard to be allowed to die!”) But while 2003’s Throwing Muses was a comeback album in the familiar sense, roaring and tearing at all expectations from the first count-off, Purgatory/Paradise is more reserved. Of the Muses’ albums, it most resembles Red Heaven or Limbo, the forcefully aloof deep cuts of the Muses’ discography—but a shattered version, “like someone reached over our heads with a Looney Tunes mallet and slammed it into our record before we could stop him,” Hersh wrote. (Like Crooked, Purgatory/Paradise was devised both as a record and as a book, with essays by Hersh and art by Narcizo. It’s both a gorgeous standalone object—particularly the writing, considering 2010’s Rat Girl proved Hersh one of the best music writers around—and a sort of decoder for the album’s tracks.) Half of the album’s 32 tracks barely make it over two minutes. Some of them are reprises; sometimes the reprises come first. Some tracks are lopped-off bridges or choruses, or thoughts beginning with “and.” It’s even more disorienting for cuts like “Static” whose uncut versions have been around long enough to memorize. This doesn’t necessarily seem odd for a band whose songs tend to skitter into loping girl-group choruses halfway or careen through dozens of chords that wouldn’t normally touch or scare-quote the entirety of some kid’s anarchy pamphlet as an intro, but Purgatory/Paradise really is unlike anything I’ve heard this year; it’s a little like someone read an old Muses review that talked about their songs switching gears, recorded what they thought that sounded like, then lost half the data to a defragmenting snafu.
Not that Purgatory/Paradise is difficult or inaccessible. The beginning fakes you out with the almost stately folk of “Smoky Hands”, but it’s just scene-setting before a song accosts you: a crash, then “Morning Birds”, an onslaught of shredding then pathos that’s as wrenching as anything on the first Muses record. “Sunray Venus”, the single, comes shortly after, and it’s as joyous as “Morning Birds” is visceral. Like Wild Flag’s “Romance”, it’s an exuberant ode to band chemistry that plays out like the Muses rediscovering all their hits (“leaving, that is limbo—hey, I remember you!”) and comes with a splashy video full of wordplay and intertextual Easter eggs. Later on is “Sleepwalking”, a college-rock throwback where everything from the guitar lines to the glaze of the vocal processing seems imported from 1992. It’d be shameless if it weren’t so huge (and self-aware; the band calls it their “RC Cola song”), and it’s easy to imagine it on Doolittle or Last Splash—or for that matter Throwing Muses again; you can even trace out where Tanya Donelly’s harmonies would go.
But that’s the second version of “Sleepwalking” you hear: the first version is what would ordinarily be end of the song, a one-minute acoustic hangover. Songs come and go like this, or more specifically moments: bassist Bernard Georges’ sly lead on “Cherry Candy”, the spy riff and ballroom pirouette of a drum fill that introduces “Film” or the piano waltz it becomes halfway, the panflutes of “Folding Fire” (if any instrument’s unexpected on a Throwing Muses album, that would be it), certain melodies that recur or slip into the wrong tracks. The album, to its credit, rarely feels indulgent—only the two aimless “Curtains” stand out as possible edits—and the more you listen, the more a method emerges from the muddle.
Purgatory/Paradise, more than any of Hersh’s records to date, is an album about loss, which might account for its fracturing. The closest thing to a traditionally built song is the bitterly determined “Milan”, about a neighborhood in New Orleans where Hersh's house was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina. Everything else is tentative: memories listed in order of disapperance. Sometimes the loss is literal, as in “Static”, written for a close friend who died; the arrangement tiptoes at first, then plunges straight into denial. Sometimes it’s almost funny: “Terra Nova”, about the Muses’ first breakup, is aimless and resigned, melodies delivered like shrugs, until it breaks out the “Bittersweet Symphony” strings. Sometimes it’s not funny at all, as on “Quick,” a song built uneasily atop a cello dirge, or “Bluff,” which is a curious lilting minute at first until its essay turns hazy into heartbreaking: “If you watch your friends carefully, sometimes you'll notice their features beginning to change: curling up into themselves, looking within rather than without, their senses dulled.” (The more I listen, the more it seems like a direct companion to “Flooding”, the saddest song Hersh has ever recorded.)
Purgatory/Paradise isn’t an easy listen—expected enough from a band that’s repeatedly referred to the recording process as being “on a [desert] island". If Throwing Muses didn’t explain themselves before, they’re certainly not doing so now, and for a comeback album, it’s so willfully at odds with any music consumption trend in 2013. Even as you imagine what these songs used to sound like, it’s hard to imagine actually listening to them that way, let alone shuffled in with anything else; its pieces are simply too small and elusive to listen to individually. They’d sound out of place on playlists, maybe bewildered in setlists. But as Hersh wrote to accompany “Swollen,” an album offcut (though the essay did become the introduction to the book), “It is not un-beautiful to be in pieces, as long as those pieces are fully realized.” It may be impossible for Throwing Muses to write anything that isn’t.


Manchester Orchestra’s new album is their most confounding and thrilling work yet, with the most grandiose narrative concepts, production, and arrangements of their career.

Manchester Orchestra: A Black Mile to the Surface

A Black Mile to the Surface

Manchester Orchestra frontman Andy Hull promised a scaled down version of his band on A Black Mile to the Surface, a course correction after the overproduced thud of their previous album. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he promised pretty much the same thing three years ago on Cope. The guy can’t not overdo it. As a prolific, teenaged old soul in the gilded age of MySpace emo, he wanted to be Conor Oberst, Sufjan Stevens, and Jeff Mangum at the same time, finding no personal, religious, sexual, or societal crisis too melodramatic to face head on. But while his extreme emoting has remained in the new decade, Simple Math and Cope dulled its impact with plodding, nuance-free nu-grunge, lowering the bar to something closer to, say, a more meaningful Silversun Pickups. So, no surprise that the narrative concepts, the production, and arrangements of A Black Mile to the Surface are the most grandiose of his career. The result is Manchester Orchestra’s most confounding, thrilling, and unintentionally loopy album yet.
Hull’s been given some serious source material, namely the birth of his daughter and co-writing the mostly a cappella soundtrack for the farcical body comedy Swiss Army Man. One might think exposure to that much real and cinematic flatulence might lighten Hull’s mood a little. He has a Coloring Book moment with “The Maze”, a gospel-powered tribute to his daughter Mayzie that would be unbearably cloying were it about literally anything else. But this is Andy Hull. If anything, reaching 30 as a healthy and happily married father with an increasingly influential band has made him even more skeptical as to whether he deserves any of it. “Little girl you are cursed by my ancestry/There is nothing but darkness and agony,” he sings on closer “The Silence,” and any gift has a curse on the receipt: “You lift that burden off of me” and “Let me hold you above all the misery” are from the relatively happy songs that bookend A Black Mile.
The more overtly personal material sits awkwardly among the familial drama that served as the original concept of A Black Mile to the Surface. “Lead, SD” sets up Hull’s scuttled story—that of a pair of brothers feuding over a mining empire. Or something. Hull is extra like that: lines like “Buried with metonymy, decide for me” and “I want to reach above the paradox where nobody can see/Want to hold a light to paradigm and strip it to its feet” are used for choruses. There’s also a lyric that goes, “There are parts of me just stuck inside the grocery/In the produce aisle with the dead beats/Rustling trying to look busy but they’re high like me,” but it’s not in the song called “The Grocery.”
Even if his Hollywood experience didn’t give Hull the ability to pen a coherent screenplay, the soundtrack mostly kicks ass. Hull’s mantra for A Black Mile to the Surface was, “intensity without the volume,” a wise decision after Cope, a record produced with such concussive loudness that they had to do an acoustic remake months later. Yet A Black Mile to the Surface still has the appearance of a big-budget blockbuster and should absolutely plaster its production and guest vocal credits right on the front of the CD like it was a hip-hop record: Nate Ruess from fun. and Grouplove’s Christian Zucconi keep the band rooted in their Clear Channel ambitions. As for producers, getting either Catherine Marks, John Congleton, or Jonathan Wilson involved is a big deal; Manchester Orchestra have all three.
They work best in that fertile terrain between commercial emo and adult contemporary indie:  “The Moth” is their self-actualization, throwing ca. 2006 Band of Horses and Brand New in a The Fly-type teleportation machine, coming out 11 years later with dazzling arena-ready emo with biblical overtones and a southern accent but zero twang. Even with its rock-em, sock-em percussion, “The Wolf” is not all that far off from the Mumford & Sons song of the same name.
But there is so much production here—more vocal processing and overdubs than just about any chart pop album you can name. And for the most part, it’s awesome to behold; lord knows how they’ll perform the Pixies-gone-Megatron arrangement of “Lead, SD,” or the 12-sided harmonies that lunge out of “The Moth.” But when A Black Mile should be intimate, the same CGI leaves Hull as an overmatched lead in a Marvel Universe flick, drowned out by the sound effects and saddled with dialogue that’s too mordantly literal or subject to unconscious humor. There’s no way of proving Hull actually cribbed the melody from “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” almost verbatim in “The Mistake”, but there’s also no way to unhear it.
Younger acts like Sorority Noise and Julien Baker have been vocal about Hull’s influence on their work, but this new record reveals something more. There’s a hole in the “rock is dead” argument that can’t be filled by merely rattling off the buzziest indie bands of the moment, or reclassifying pop acts like One Direction or Twenty One Pilots. The dream of the ’90s lives when Manchester Orchestra is on—a time when the Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam lorded over MTV and radio with emotionally conflicted, undeniably hooky, and loud rock. If Manchester Orchestra haven’t quite reached that level after A Black Mile to the Surface, it’s not for lack of trying.


Prefuse 73's latest diverges from the glitch-hop pattern of One Word Extinguisher to incorporate vocals from Zola Jesus and the late Trish Keenan.

The Only She Chapters

Considering Guillermo Scott Herren may have about five side projects at any given time, perhaps the most surprising thing about The Only She Chapters is that it comes under the Prefuse 73 brand. Previous Prefuse records highlighted the glitch-hop production style that Herren pretty much perfected on 2003's One Word Extinguisher; here though, Herren hews closer to the psychedelia of his recent collaborations with Zola Jesus.
Prefuse's works are often inward-focused and clipped, with melodic ideas constantly shooting off in different directions-- usually in the same song. Vocals and guest raps are cut up too, with Herren employing them as rhythmic elements within his productions. The guest vocals on The Only She Chapters are all female, and instead of being chopped-up, Herren allows them to stretch and play out, obscuring them with layers rather than edits.
"The Only Trial of 9000 Suns" features the late Broadcast singer Trish Keenan, a wonderfully distinctive vocalist, but Herren's production buries her voice in a psychedelic swirl, moving in and out of focus. Minor-key textures clash against each other, and with no space for anything to rise out of the haze and anchor the movement, the song ends up feeling aimless.
"The Only Hand to Hold" has more clarity, with My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden contributing a gorgeous vocal over restrained bursts of hiss and faraway guitars. It sounds a little esoteric, but Worden spins sweet harmonies and offers the record's most accessible and haunting few minutes. The track is one of the only moments that works in isolation on a record that otherwise seamlessly folds into itself, as Herren rings out any empty spaces. It's an approach that can make for an exhausting, sometimes daunting listen.
Zola Jesus contributes on "The Only Direction in Concrete", and while she is heavily clipped, her vocal character shines through, as her lurching, bellow-y tone punctures layers of digital swarm. Her usual darkly gothic guise is transformed into something earthier, which works well within Herren's framework. Late album highlight "The Only Serenidad" feels like a welcome relief from the scale of Herren's labyrinthine production, inserting glitchy rhythms into a morphing vocal sample above waves of gliding static. It's one of the few moments where Herren's strong ear for melody filters through unobstructed and easily captures a sense of melancholy.
The Only She Chapters feels more expansive than Herren's often miniature-scale productions, meditating on small ideas for long periods, recalling motifs and melodies throughout. Too often, though, these ideas aren't strong enough to sustain the stretching, and the melodic elements aren't as involving as previous Prefuse 73 material. It's dense and impressive production work, but not as listenable as Herren at his best.


Godspeed You! Black Emperor/Thee Silver Mt. Zionist's solo debut recalls John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Efrim Manuel Menuck: Plays "High Gospel"

Plays "High Gospel"

There were a lot of peculiar things about the recent Godspeed You! Black Emperor reunion: the unexpected, out-of-nowhere timing of it; the uncannily ageless, I-can't-believe-it's-not-2000 quality of the band's performances; the inclusion of "Weird" Al Yankovic on their curated All Tomorrow's Parties bill. But perhaps the strangest thing was seeing Efrim Menuck recede back into the role of silent, anonymous, ensemble player. More than any other member associated with the Montreal orchestro-rock collective, Menuck has spent much of the past decade deconstructing the mythology and challenging the assumptions surrounding Godspeed (take your pick: they're anarchists; anti-social; humorless; Luddites; squat-dwellers; etc.). Not only has Menuck's offshoot band Thee Silver Mt. Zion emerged over the past decade as a lyrically direct, increasingly aggressive rock band, Menuck has both made himself more readily available to the press and, in concert, become a rather hilarious stage banterist.
So perhaps it's no mere coincidence that Menuck's re-immersion into the Godspeed regimen coincides with the appearance of his first solo album, Plays "High Gospel", a record that, in spirit if not sound, recalls another solo album released in the shadow of a monolith: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Both albums are consumed by matters of love, loss, abandonment by maternal figures, and spirituality; both showcase the respective artists at their somberly tender and uncompromisingly abrasive extremes; and both are emotionally raw, deeply personal works greatly distinguished from the bands that earned their makers renown. (And, come to think of it, Menuck's wiry wail of a voice is pitched about halfway between Lennon's elocution and Yoko's anarchic shriek.)
If Plastic Ono Band's psychic terrain was mapped out by the death of Lennon's mother and his blossoming romance with Yoko, on "High Gospel", the emotional goal posts are set by the birth of Menuck's son and the 2009 suicide of his friend/collaborator Vic Chesnutt. And as to be expected from a record recorded over two years in (according to Menuck) "scraps and hiccups," the song-to-song shifts in mood can be disarmingly severe, moving from the churchly organ tones, defiantly celebratory choral vocal, and synth starbursts of opener "Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows" to the frosty, electronic chill of "A 12 Pt. Program For Keep on Keepin' On", which sounds like a séance conducted via shortwave radio, with a cacophonous, click-tracked surge of percussion intensifying the feel of impending doom.
However, as "High Gospel" plays out, such jarring transitions seem to be less the result of random, grab-bag sequencing and more a manifestation of the album's central theme: that moments of joy and sorrow often come without warning and, in some cases, are triggered by one another. The beautifully desolate piano ballad "Heavy Calls & Hospital Blues" presents a peaceful portrait of a sleeping child that's shattered by an ominous late-night call from the infirmary, while the mantric, ecstatic closer "I Am No Longer a Motherless Child" works the other way, as Menuck comes to terms with the pain of losing a parent by becoming one himself.
But it's the seven-minute centerpiece "Kaddish for Chesnutt" that best exemplifies "High Gospel"'s attempt to reconcile happiness and sadness, confusion and comfort, living and dying. Menuck has obliquely referenced his Jewish roots in the past, from the "Mt. Zion" in his band's name to the Hebrew script that graced the cover of Godspeed's Slow Riot for Zero Kanada EP. But here, his invocation of the Kaddish-- a prayer chanted during Jewish funeral services-- proves quite literal, as a mournful electric-guitar soundscape yields to a solemn, repeated group vocal (courtesy of Menuck and some Silver Mt. Zion mates), not unlike that of a temple congregation praying in unison. Though traditionally recited to commemorate those who have passed, the Kaddish makes no explicit mention of death, and likewise, "Kaddish for Chesnutt" makes no direct allusion to Vic Chesnutt. Rather, its repeated, increasingly impassioned invocation of the Old Testament's "tree of life" is Menuck's means of elevating the late singer to the realm of the eternal, lifting his skinny fists like antennas to heaven.


Featuring former Jay Reatard collaborator Ryan Rousseau, Arizona's Destruction Unit create an uneasy haze of dark psychedelics with Void's sprawling kraut rock and muscular punk.

Void

The mythology behind Destruction Unit is that they were born from the deserts of Arizona. But that hasn't always been the case: They began in the early 2000s when frontman (and former Reatard) Ryan Rousseau joined forces with two Memphis residents and members of the Lost Sounds: Alicja Trout and Jay Reatard. Since then, the band's lineup has completely changed. On Void, it's Rousseau on guitar and vocals, his brother Rusty on bass, N. Nappa on guitar, J. Aurelius on guitar, and J. Keefer on drums. (Count 'em: three guitars.) They're affiliated with Arizona's Ascetic House collective, and if the sound they offer on Void is any indication, they've planted some deep, firm roots in the desert.
Here's an album where the guitar sound merits descriptors like "expansive, swirling, echoing," and maybe most notably, "chaotic." Their krautrock grooves are given menace with Rousseau's screams and the overpowering low-end of Rusty's bass. Each song is laced with sonic tinges that invoke an uneasy, dark haze of psychedelics (see titles "Druglore", "Smoke Dreams"). In their delivery, there's an undercurrent of hostility and snarling anger (see titles "Evil Man", "Exterminate", Void). Nearly every song offers the aural equivalent of walking into a bar full of stereotypical biker toughs-- everything's muscular, intimidating, mean. Now might be a good time for a reminder: This band's name is "Destruction Unit."
Void's strengths are in the band's song structuring. On "Evil Man", the formula of "simmering lead-in" to "drum crash" to "simmering verse" to "wall of sound," all backed by a melody marked by catchiness, is foolproof. In general, they've got "the drop" pretty well figured out. For a track that's eight minutes long, "Smoke Dreams" is consistently riveting. Their well-established sprawling kraut echo hangs above their more muscular leanings, continuously morphing over Flores' drum attack. And when a track features vocals, Rousseau's darkwave-tinted voice is perfectly suited to this sort of material. The strongest song by a mile, though, is "Exterminate"-- three minutes of punk rock bite washed in synths and the band's signature kraut sonics.
But in its six tracks, the title Void proves to be an unfortunate one-- there's an unmistakable emptiness to the album. There are interesting guitar flourishes in the almost eight minutes of "Druglore", but mostly, it just sits there simmering while not really going anywhere. Even a song like "Blame", which benefits from bellowing vocals and crashing percussion at the midpoint, is made less interesting by its too-long simmer and overly repetitive elements.
With the complementary sounds they implement-- the ones that brings to mind the desert-- it's understandable that there's some desolation here. But that doesn't mean the album itself has to sag. Structurally speaking, Void is fairly similar to a recent LP from the other end of the United States: Deep Thuds by the Philadelphia band Spacin'. Both feature lengthier atmospheric songs punctuated by tracks with firmer melodies. Here, the spaciness is just too spacey and the hooks aren't quite there. Even when you disregard "hooks" or "catchiness" and stack this album next to the recent work of Moon Duo/Wooden Shjips mastermind Ripley Johnson, Void feels thin by comparison. There are strong songs and moments, absolutely-- just not enough.


King Buzzo and Dale Crover team with the members of bass/drums duo Big Business and return to the Melvins' classic stoner metal sound.

(A) Senile Animal

For the last decade, the Melvins have absolutely shat on their seminal status. Their antics have ranged from gimmicky (releasing a single for every month in 1996) to kitschy (kicking off 1999's Crybaby with Leif Garrett belting out a cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit") to just plain wimpy (2005's limp-wristed live recording of Houdini in its entirety). Due to these bloopers, there was much head-shaking and sighing to be had when the band, now reduced to a putative duo consisting of King Buzzo and drummer Dale Crover, announced their merger with L.A. drums/bass metal band Big Business earlier this year. That's right, as if the band's recent tomfoolery hadn't marred their first proper release in four years, they now sport two drummers, the pinnacle of rock absurdity.
What a pleasant surprise then that (A) Senile Animal stands as the band's most no-frills, accessible, and flat-out best album since Stoner Witch. Hostile Ambient Takeover from 2002 didn't testify to it, but you can find the Melvins's legendary sound speckled all over today's metal bands. Animal reclaims the stoner rock the Melvins ruled before Kyuss and Queens of the Stone age co-opted it, and Boris owes much of their recent hipster metal success (not to mention moniker) to the band's early sound, reincarnated here on tracks like "Rat-Faced" and "You've Never Been Right".
That said, Animal is less a blast from the past than a retooling of the Melvins' strongest albums following a more conservative mindset. The opening of "Civilized Worm" doffs its cap to catchy 70s arena rock, pounding out the chords to Cheap Trick's "Need Your Love" over a bare bones blues beat straight off of Machine Head. "A History of Drunks" follows suit, propping up King Buzzo's singsong melody with multi-tracked vocals and a middle section replete with handclaps and a surprisingly tender new wave guitar line.
These nuanced exceptions aside, the Melvins churn out their signature straightforward metal sludge by the barrelful on Animal, and no one's complaining about that. Three six-plus minute tracks grind the album to a close, each harkening back to classic slow burners like "Night Goat" and "Hag Me". Even the twin assault on drums comes together nicely as Crover and Big Business mercenary Coady Willis place their intersecting fills at loggerheads for our amusement on "A History of Bad Men". For all their recent boners and elbow-rubbing with Ipecac's weirdest, this newfangled Melvins outfit has sobered up to concoct a return-to-roots album, one that simultaneously cements their monolithic mark on metal while promising there's more gas left in the tank to keep on thrashin'.


Prolific drone act follows last year’s What Happened with a zoned-out epic in the vein of ’70s space-rock giants Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel.

Does It Look Like I’m Here?

Describing Emeralds’ music feels a little like capping that underwater oil spill must: How do you get your hands around this stuff? The Cleveland trio may favor methodical cadences in their music, but their releases come fast and furious. According to Discogs.com, they’ve put out around 40 releases in just four years, most of them CDRs and cassettes. There are variations of mood and intensity, and each major release has its own particular signature, owing in part to changes in gear and technique, and in part to being a band that improvises and records non-stop. Any given album feels like a snapshot of the band in time.
But Does It Look Like I’m Here? is the first Emeralds record you might be able to call “pretty.” Listeners accustomed to the multi-vectored force of last year’s What Happened, with its crush of competing swells, might initially be taken aback by the linear progressions here. Emeralds also finally seem to be playing actual notes, not just dialing in frequencies.
The songs are shorter—aside from one seven-minute jam and a 12-minute blur, everything is around three or four minutes long. That’s partly because they're dividing their music into smaller grids and speeding up the changes. On What Happened, tones rolled out in languid fashion. That’s still true here, but most of the album’s tracks are built around arpeggiated backbones, bubbling sequences in 8th-, 12th-, or 16th-note formations that focus the music’s energy in a directed stream.
If what set Emeralds apart before was the fact that they sounded unlike almost anything else, here you can hear distinct echoes of other artists, whether it’s the burbling synthesizer music of ’70s musicians like Edgar Froese and Klaus Schulze, or arpeggio-prone contemporaries like Oneohtrix Point Never, Jonas Reinhardt, or Gavin Russom. “Double Helix” finds a halfway ground between the gritty shuffle of early Kompakt and the Balearic drift of Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas. And “Now You See Me” is an honest-to-God waltz led by folky strummed guitar.
But there's something about Emeralds’ sound that really is theirs alone. (Timbrally, the band has never sounded richer—thanks in part to James Plotkin’s mastering job—and that’s especially true of the luscious heavyweight vinyl pressing, cut at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering.) The way they set loops against loops, with super-fast pinwheeling oscillations buzzing out of control on top, turns their tracks into perpetual motion machines, gathering incredible force as layers accrue. It’s a big part of the magic of this band, and what distinguishes even their most new age–flavored compositions: the overload of information, the spray of frequencies, the thrilling, viscous rush.


The Albany emo band takes a big swing with a concept album about the meaning of death, reimagining mall-emo, alt-rock, and pop-punk with a theatrical flourish that all works surprisingly well.

Prince Daddy & the Hyena: Prince Daddy & the Hyena

Prince Daddy & the Hyena

In the span of three years, Albany emo band Prince Daddy & the Hyena went from writing songs about grilled cheese and weed to concept albums about the meaning of life (and also weed). And now, with another three years passing since 2019’s Cosmic Thrill Seekers, Kory Gregory’s next logical step is another massive leap—a concept album about the meaning of death. The narrative of Prince Daddy and the Hyena stars The Collector and The Passenger, two personifications of existential angst vying for Gregory’s soul; he also assumes you remember these characters from Cosmic Thrill Seekers. The plot is inspired equally by the band’s catastrophic van accident in 2018, Gregory’s month-long stay in a psychiatric hospital and, again, drugs. The only thing that’s missing is a libretto, either to keep track of the dialogue or use to roll a blunt.
But this time around, Gregory does not feel obligated to prime listeners with comparisons to The Monitor, American Idiot, or Welcome to the Black Parade. Reimagining mall-emo, alt-rock, and pop-punk with a theatrical flourish is just what Prince Daddy & the Hyena does now. If it lacks Cosmic Thrill Seekers’ shock value of seeing a couple of DIY pop-punk knuckleheads realizing their loopiest ambitions, Prince Daddy and the Hyena is even more impressive as proof of their dedication to craft, building on established strengths and wisely troubleshooting elsewhere. This is most apparent in the evolution of Gregory’s vocals, which in the past demanded either unshakeable devotion or instantaneous revulsion; even those with a tolerance for pop-punk tantrums would likely admit that Prince Daddy songs were catchy like rusty fish hooks, Gregory’s antagonistic register having as much in common with experimental noise as the Get Up Kids.
The lead single “Curly Q” imagines a heretofore inconceivable middle path—Gregory sings about his nephew the way he might sing to him, and it’s the most tender, overtly pretty Prince Daddy song to date. That is, at least until it swells into a lighter-waving finale, the first time Prince Daddy have exploded like a choreographed firework display rather than a bottle rocket set off in a cramped basement. If this approach happens to convince skeptics who steered clear because of the band name even before they ever heard a note, that doesn’t appear to be Prince Daddy’s primary focus. Rather, Gregory appears driven to develop an instrument versatile enough to keep pace with Prince Daddy’s ever-expanding sonic curiosity.
The album initially hints at an Abbey Road-style suite, a handful of brief songs conceived and resolved as completed experiments: Prince Daddy do Beach Boys, they do jangle-pop, they do strutting power-pop, they can still do a throwback rager to satisfy the fans who’ve kept the same P. Daddy hoodie since 2016. This appears to continue on “El Dorado”—Prince Daddy do Madchester—before the walloping chorus reorients the album to Prince Daddy’s true north, an upended mid-’90s hierarchy where Third Eye Blind, Veruca Salt, and Weezer are the most credible and influential bands of their era; yeah, there’s also some Radiohead in here, but it’s fittingly a couple of “Creep”-like chunks before the nine-minute “Black Mold” goes into Guitar Hero mode.
This on its own doesn’t distinguish any band on its own in 2022, particularly in a DIY diaspora oversaturated by alt-rock revivalism. But Gregory voice’s—both figurative and literal, even in a more palatable form—ensures that the album is always animated by an overwhelming emotional tumult rather than nostalgia. Gregory had been incapacitated by his obsession with mortality long before the pandemic forcibly made it a part of the daily discourse. Even the pithiest quotables—“Jesus Christ ate shit, now he thinks this life is his,” or, “Well I found my god, he’s as hollow as you figured”—serve as mile markers on his quests towards a spiritual epiphany that eludes Gregory every single time.
Yet for music that’s so rarely subtle, Gregory never sensationalizes; “I think I’ll send my own ass away to smooth out the wrinkles in my brain,” he shouts during “A Random Exercise in Impermanence (The Collector),” a typically self-deprecating way to describe being admitted to a mental health facility. Without any prior knowledge of the album’s backstory, it works just as well as a cry for freedom after another grueling, pointless day at the office—feel free to yell “enough, enough, I’ve had e-fucking-nough!” on the commute home. Or, to put it more bluntly, this music has zero chill—and why would it, when death doesn’t either?


At the age of 71, the British singer who helped define rock-star redemption shares gorgeous and vulnerable self-portraits, shaped by an ace backing band that sometimes includes Nick Cave.

Negative Capability

Near the start of Marianne Faithfull’s 21st studio album, Negative Capability, the legendary singer beckons the audience toward her. “Gather ’round closely/Take in my words,” she seems to say above gentle acoustic guitar and sumptuous piano. Applying classic literature to song with her poet’s pen, this 11-track record illuminates her most personal fears and desires with an intimacy she’s never before offered. From teenage British pop star to half of a rock’n’roll power couple, from junkie tragedy to elder stateswoman, Faithfull reopens old wounds and offers poignant meditations on loneliness, love, death, and regret here. “Everything passes/Everything changes/There’s no way to stay the same,” she concedes on “No Moon in Paris.” There’s been little sense to this life of Faithfull’s, but it’s been one hell of a ride, as documented on these unapologetically vulnerable, contemplative songs. In centralizing universal trauma, Faithfull illuminates our interconnectedness.
Musicians all too familiar with these themes animate her stirring confessions. Nick Cave co-wrote “The Gypsy Faerie Queen,” and his piano strokes, rhythmic phrasing, and sonorous backing vocals anchor Faithfull’s cragged singing. Through the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Faithfull describes a life lived in pursuit of a mystical faerie queen. Once a wandering force who healed the earth and its creatures, she’s now a wise and creaky figure who walks with a staff, an image that echoes Faithfull’s cover portrait here. Faithfull subverts the endless youth cliché, though, examining how silence and invisibility cloak even the most sovereign in their agedness, and how the muse endures even in a feeble form. “I only listen to her sing/But I never hear her talking anymore/Though once she did,” she sings of this spirit and, by extension, herself.
Veteran PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis and Bad Seed Warren Ellis produced Negative Capability, shaping the living-room quality of these performances with help from a sterling crew of British songwriters and instrumentalists. Their acoustic guitar, organ, strings, and percussion feel so close, you’ll want to reach out and touch them. In the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis adds a meditative water energy to Cave’s fire; that relationship extends here in the subtle tenderness he adds to Faithfull’s wishes and laments. On “Born to Live,” a tribute to her late friend, the actress Anita Pallenberg, his alto flute is a gorgeous bridge between despair and hope, mirroring the path of mourning. His signature viola ebbs and flows beneath “No Moon in Paris,” and it’s the graceful kite on which this re-imagining of her 1964 hit, “As Tears Go By,” flies.
That interpretation is one of three such covers here, and it’s a poignant full-circle reflection. There’s palpable truth in the 71-year-old Faithfull memorializing a lonely moment in a woman’s life, sitting alone watching children play, knowing those carefree days are numbered. It rang false when she was 17, at the edge of adulthood. She likewise tempers the ragged guitar and caterwauling tone of Bob Dylan during “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with glacial chanting and symphonic accoutrements. Meanwhile, this version of “Witches’ Song,” recast from her 1979 comeback, Broken English, softens the original’s edges with warm viola and twinkling Rhodes. It becomes a familial standard, sung around a fire with loved ones. “Remember, death is far away, and life is sweet” feels less like an aspiration now, more a matter of course. Where much of the album is cloaked in these hushed tones, Faithfull’s anger is unmistakable for the blazing “They Come at Night,” an indictment of the international turmoil that produces terrorism. “Their sins come home to haunt us/From the wrong side of the gun,” she snarls.
Examining your life without fear of judgement by those less gnarled by wrong turns, self-doubt, and loneliness is a colossal task; doing so through the physical pains of advanced age, broken bones, botched surgeries, and nagging arthritis is rare. Faithfull channels her body and mind’s ache into an album that’s her best and most honest work since Broken English. With Negative Capability, she reinforces our links by exposing her own broken places.


On her disco-inspired new album, Ware sounds bolder, looser — and frankly, more fun — than she has in a near-decade.

What’s Your Pleasure?

On her new album, Jessie Ware sounds like the host of the kind of party you heard about in ‘70s Manhattan—velvet banquettes and powdery surfaces, mink coats and cigarette holders, and club names that were enigmatic numbers, or—post-gay liberation and pre-AIDS—sincerely promised sanctuary, paradise. You can imagine Ware taking a scene newcomer under her wing, detailing the venue’s clandestine corners, advising which watered-down liquor to avoid—and anyway, don’t you deserve champagne?
Disco has been a shared obsession of late for both chart juggernauts and Ware’s own peers, but her reverence for the era may be the most literal, down to her flash-lit portrait on the album cover, the spitting image of Warhol’s iconic polaroid of Bianca Jagger. Here, Ware is a lycanthropic party girl, coming alive under the mirrorball with breathy flirtations over disco-funk and vibrant Hi-NRG, recreated deftly by chief producer James Ford. Her wonderland is, to quote Fran Leibowitz’s one-time description of Studio 54, made for “sex and dancing.” (Ware says as much of the record herself.)
Over the Italo disco daydream of a title track, Ware presents a dessert trolley of options for, ahem, “dancing sideways.” “Come on now push/Press/More/Less,” she sighs over neon-streaked synths.“Step Into My Life,” co-produced by Ford and Kindness, is a masterclass of orchestral funk, with Ware insisting “I don’t wanna talk, no conversation.” “Save A Kiss,” an outlier, extends the album’s palette to kinetic electropop, which Ware’s voice floods with romantic yearning.
In a recent interview, Ware described What’s Your Pleasure? as a celebration of her flourishing confidence. It has less of the soul-searching of Ware’s previous album Glasshouse, yet zooms in on a lighter facet of her personality, and is threaded with a camp sense of humor that reflects disco’s frivolity as well as the cheekiness that is all over Ware’s Table Manners podcast but has been largely missing from her recorded music. Her airy vocals feel like secrets whispered, confidences offered, recalling Diana Ross’s supple quiver over Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards’ beats and, in “Mirage (Don’t Stop),” coming close to Donna Summer’s orgasmic rapture. The strutting chorus of “Read My Lips” doubles down on the song’s oral innuendo with kissy sound effects, bringing to mind Anita Ward’s disco classic “Ring My Bell.” The rubberized bass jam “Ooh La La” is a riot of saucy ad libs and tooting car horns, and the frothy, Jellybean-esque “Soul Control” centers on the delightful frippery “We touch and it feels like: Woo!” It is a joy to hear Ware sounding so relaxed.
Disco music never liked to consider what happens when the music stops, but Ware allows a little of her signature psychodrama to creep into the nocturnal escapades she describes, and the flecks of ennui make the highs even higher. Over the darkly pulsing synths of “In Your Eyes,” Ware is racked with insecurities. “Would you follow me, with no guarantee?” she asks, before allowing herself a rare belting vocal. “Adore You,” produced by Metronomy’s Joseph Mount, commits what on paper might seem like a cardinal sin: it Auto-Tunes Ware’s pristine voice to a robotic murmur, the kind that could soundtrack a lonely android searching the cosmos. But her intonations (“Lean in...move slow”; “don’t go”) reshape the song’s mood with every syllable, in a nuance that makes the smallest shifts feel seismic.
The critic Douglas Crimp had a name—“boogie intimacy”—for the particular frisson you have while dancing with a stranger. “It’s usually limited to dancing together for a while before you each dissolve back into the crowd,” he wrote. That attitude seems to have galvanized Ware, too, on an album where she sounds bolder, looser — and frankly, more fun — than she has in a near-decade. “Last night we danced/And I thought you were saving my life,” she sings in “Mirage (Don’t Stop),” an evocation of communal movement as well as a mantra for the artistic rejuvenation that Ware finds in the groove. Her delivery is exquisite and carefree, suggesting an earned wisdom that a kiss is just a kiss, a touch is just a touch, and next Saturday night probably has more of both in store.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Mutilator Defeated at Last is Thee Oh Sees' first LP to be recorded with the band’s post-hiatus touring lineup, and it sounds a bit different from the old version of the group. The fuzz and grime have been peeled back a little, leaving room for more density and detail.

Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last

Mutilator Defeated at Last

At times, Thee Oh Sees may have sounded scrappy and scuzzy on record, but by the time the San Francisco-based garage rock quartet released 2013's Floating Coffin—their seventh album, give or take—they had become one of the finest live acts around. On stage, they were just straight up better than their peers—faster, tighter, and weirder than the competition.  And then they were gone. Sort of.
Later in 2013, singer/guitarist John Dwyer announced that the band would go on hiatus and would cease to perform live for the foreseeable future. Not long after that, though, he announced that a new Oh Sees album, Drop, would see release early the following year. It was all a little confusing, and when the band finally did rematerialize for some tour dates, drummer Mike Shoun, guitarist Petey Dammit, and singer/keyboardist Brigid Dawson were gone from the picture. Instead, Dwyer—who'd relocated to Los Angeles—was backed by bassist Timothy Hellman and drummer Nick Murray.
Arguably, Thee Oh Sees have always had a fluid membership, especially when it came to the band’s LPs, which Dwyer sometimes assembled entirely on his own (see 2011’s Castlemania). But when the guitarist stepped out from his bandmates, he tended to explore more tuneful territory, reserving the band’s heavier rock'n'roll output for the whole crew.
Mutilator Defeated at Last is Thee Oh Sees' first post-hiatus LP to be recorded using the band’s re-staffed touring lineup. It sounds different from the old version of the band, but not that different. In the past, Oh Sees records were made more or less live, the band bashing out the songs in single takes with no or minimal overdubs. Since reformatting the group, Dwyer has become a bit more interested in the studio. As with Drop, this extra polish and attention benefits Mutilator. There are tasteful psychedelic embellishments—synth wooshes, delay trails—and new instrumentation, like electric organ and acoustic guitar. The fuzz and grime have been peeled back a little, leaving room for more density and detail.
By the time Floating Coffin came out, the old version of Thee Oh Sees were at the peak of their ability on stage, but the records were starting to become slightly predictable. Each would contain a handful of fast rock songs, a few slow zone-outs, and one or two detours that broke character. In a way, swapping out his personnel has allowed Dwyer to change the band without altering that formula at all. Mutilator is distinctive in Thee Oh Sees' catalog because different musicians perform it—the drums are slightly swingier, there’s bass guitar rather than a Telecaster covering the low end. Everything else is pretty much the same as usual, down to the lyrics about death and decaying flesh.
Thee Oh Sees have one type of song that is consistently great. It’s the fast and heavy track that combines the creepy and ugly sensibility of the Cramps with krautrock's streamlined sense of repetition—"The Dream" or "No Spell", for instance. On any given Oh Sees record, these are the songs that count the most. And Mutilator delivers plenty of these songs. "Withered Hand", "Lupine Ossuary", and "Rogue Planet" each strikes that perfect balance of druggy alienation and soothing forward motion, of sublime rhythmic focus and freaked-out guitar violence.


Featuring Josh Homme on drums, this ZZ/Stones pastiche is proof that cock rock can seem innocent and ferocious at the same time, and that music doesn't have to be ironic to have a sense of humor.

Death by Sexy

Since hearing Queens of the Stone Age's "First It Giveth..." from Songs for the Deaf, I must confess that I've been secretly pining for them to pour more coy falsetto over their churning riffs. It's a sound that could easily sustain an entire record. While QOTSA's follow-up to Songs was consistent enough, it's becoming more apparent that ringleader Josh Homme is getting some of his best work done away from the weight of expectation, from the Desert Sessions to Eagles of Death Metal, whose first record was much more consistent and satisfying than most had expected. Now, EoDM return with Death by Sexy, further proving that this high-octane novelty has more than just joke appeal, and granting my QOTSA wishes in the process.
Singer Jesse "The Devil" Hughes (or Boots Electric, or whatever sassy moniker they've slapped on him today) is the perfect manifestation of QOSTA's lighter side, slipping between a manic Mick Jagger caricature and a Cramps-like amphetamine Elvis. For a record that revels in the clichés of rock, his attempts are terribly cute. Where Queens of the Stone Age have always explored the dark and dirty, the excess and the evil, the nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, and ecstasy, the Eagles of Death Metal crank up a cock-rock sound that's free of any danger or seriousness. This isn't subversion, this is good clean fun.
One would think innocence and cock-rock would be like fire and holy water, or that a record that just skims through familiar modes couldn't sustain itself for an entire album, but here, all bets are off. The cuddlification is kind of the appeal: Despite lyrics like "I touch you there because I know the spot," they rock "I Gotta Feeling (Just Nineteen)" with the absurdity it deserves-- sleazy, but in the same way as a Tijuana Bible comic. There are tracks a bit too campy to hold up for repeat listening, like "Shasta Beast" or the bizarre swamp lullaby "The Ballad of Queen Bee and Baby Duck", but mostly it's the camp that makes it work; they get away with "I Gotta Feeling", as well as the pregnant pauses on "Don't Speak (I Came to Make a Bang!)", the faux-Delta blues of "Bag O' Miracles", and, in "I Like to Move in the Night", being the umpteen-millionth band to quote "Brown Sugar". EoDM may nearly cross into Ween territory, but rather than roaming all over the stylistic map, they consistently stick to a rubbery ZZ/Stones pastiche.
The other main reason it works: Homme probably doesn't want the puppet master tag, but the drums are perfect. Totally ham-fisted but still incredibly intuitive and propulsive, they're the bedrock of this album's goofy appeal. Death by Sexy rubs out the line between novelty and earnestness, reminding us that music doesn't have to be ironic to have a sense of humor.


Following 2016’s breakout debut Cardinal, the New Jersey band Pinegrove have collected some of their best songs on a lovable new live album, with proceeds going to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Elsewhere

It’s hard not to root for Pinegrove. Even before they raised more than $21,000 for Planned Parenthood and released Elsewhere—a lovable new live album whose proceeds are being donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center—the band seemed to be propelled entirely by positivity and goodwill. For a certain kind of listener, Pinegrove’s music will feel like a warm hug, cozy without being cloying, eliciting a rush of memories of drinking in furnished basements and driving aimlessly through quiet streets. Frontman Evan Stephens Hall’s voice is a strained, twangy yowl that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on ’90s alternative rock radio, and it’s a perfect vessel for communicating his vulnerable thoughts. “We were laughing and crying in awe at the size of the moon,” he recalls in one of the band’s most impassioned anthems. It’s a simple, near-precious thought that’s immediately elevated with a more sobering question: “Do you want to die?”
“Size of the Moon” is the penultimate track on Elsewhere, a 30-minute offering following a banner year of touring in support of their breakout debut, Cardinal. The eight songs on the collection are not reinventions: there’s no extended jamming, no gratuitous stage banter. But like the already-legendary video of Pinegrove’s AudioTree set last year, Elsewhere seems tailor-made for introducing new fans to the band. The recordings on *Elsewhere *are, in fact, a good deal more polished than the intentionally-messy Cardinal. Nandi Rose Plunkett, who also performs as Half Waif, glides through the album with a graceful shimmer, using her keyboard to fill in gaps that might have otherwise been accentuated with feedback squalls or background noise; it’s a crucial element in their toughening sound. On Elsewhere, all of Pinegrove’s songs feel bigger, tighter, and more controlled, without losing the edge that made them stand out in the first place.
More than anything, Elsewhere is a testament to just how good a live band Pinegrove has become. These are mostly flawless renditions of not-so-easy-to-replicate songs. Hall’s voice is weathered and raw, but it’s not careless: he knows exactly which lines to shout, which to whisper, which to leave out entirely and let the audience sing. The rest of the band is similarly proficient, evolving in subtle ways that build on on their various touchstones, from the American Football layered guitars in “Visiting” through rootsier territory in “Angelina” and “Aphasia.” In “Aphasia,” a lonesome slide guitar—a sound that hid in the background of Cardinal, suggesting its presence without asserting itself—comes to the forefront, highlighting the band’s ability to evolve into a modern, alt-country act.
In a closing rendition of “New Friends,” Hall’s voice even resembles a young Ryan Adams, before his days of breaking hearts, when he drank like a river. What the band does next will reveal where Elsewhere stands in their discography—a spirited appendix to a strong debut or a Wide Awake in America before a Joshua Tree. For now, it’s just another dose of good karma for a band who feels like an increasingly noble cause to support.


The Korean electronic duo’s music is a curious world of bright colors, aqueous burbles, and even one otherworldly pop song.

In Parallel

Salamanda’s colorful, luminous electronic music started as a fantasy. Korean producers Sala (aka Uman Therma) and Manda (aka Yetsuby) told Crack magazine in early 2022 that they hoped, through making songs, to retreat from the drudgery of modern life to the imaginary worlds they dreamed up when they were kids. It’s a feeling that their records over the last few years—playfully impressionistic, full of sunny synth melodies and an unrelenting spirit of curiosity—vividly evoke.
Their latest, In Parallel, is a vibrant expansion of these themes. The title of the first track, “Nostalgia,” might feel obvious for a duo whose music has mined the feeling so thoroughly. But it fits this foggy composition, which opens with the distant chatter of children playing, eventually fading into lapping synthesizer melodies and featherlight percussion. Its familiar, golden-hour emotionality makes for the sort of song that feels like a warm memory the first time you hear it.
Salamanda are most comfortable inhabiting this mode—In Parallel is bright and elaborate but unfolds at a contemplative pace. Their approach recalls the ornate records Jon Hassell was making toward the latter part of his career, or the intricate emotionality found on labels like West Mineral Ltd.; there is movement and momentum on In Parallel, but Salamanda always find space for stillness. Even on tracks that foreground percussion and rhythm, like the sleepwalking balearic murmurs of “Sun Tickles” or the aqueous burbles of “Purple Punch,” In Parallel’s movement is patient. It oozes slowly, shimmering like motor oil in rainwater.
On 2022’s Ashbalkum, the duo found a lot of power in the playful potential of the human voice, splashing wordless coos across the record. They use vocals in similarly abstract ways on In Parallel, including the gasping title track, which smears ghostly syllables across gently pooling electronics—underscoring the yearning that pulses beneath the record’s more abstract moments. But In Parallel’s most striking moment takes a different approach. While still oozy, otherworldly, and surreal in its own right, “Homemade Jam” pushes the limits of Salamanda’s sound by offering up what’s effectively a pop song. The lyrics are simple, little more than a nursery rhyme—“Make a jam/By myself”—but the track is sticky and sweet. There’s nothing else like it among In Parallel’s pensive pieces, but roughly hewn as it is, it’s genuinely memorable—part schoolyard chant, part radio hit beamed in from Candy Land.
Salamanda’s music is often broadly understood as ambient, but they’ve never been circumscribed by such borders. Peaceful moments abound in their catalog, but whenever things get too tranquil, a slithering rhythm or a surreal vocal melody stands ready to add a mischievous slipperiness. The freedom and genuine curiosity of their approach is what has made the group so exciting to follow across their recent productive years. Call them ambient if you must, but Salamanda aren’t drifting—they’re exploring, like wide-eyed wanderers turned loose on a brand new realm.


Stockholm Syndrome-- that peculiar condition in which a captive grows to love and respect his captor-- is real, and if ...

Each One Teach One

Stockholm Syndrome-- that peculiar condition in which a captive grows to love and respect his captor-- is real, and if you're skeptical, you can experience it yourself with Oneida's Each One Teach One. A band with one the greatest, hokiest stage names in rock ties you up, stares you down, and works you over like Lennox Lewis pounding the heavy bag. After thirty minutes of tunneling, psychedelic 70s sludge (only the first of two discs), Oneida spits in your face, daring you to love them.
Each One Teach One goes right for the throat: the numbing, rusty buzz of "Sheets of Easter" is one of the least enticing ways I can imagine opening a record, yet somehow, after absorbing the full impact of this 14-minute onslaught, I realized I'd enjoyed myself. It's hard to recommend a relentlessly hypnotic slab of skull-crushing repetition, but "Sheets of Easter" is exactly the sort of ballsy move that makes so many love and respect Oneida. Churning guitars cycle a heart-stopping riff ad nauseam, but the effect is so mesmerizing, it's hard to fault the band for stealing a quarter-hour of my life away.
During "Antibiotics", the second and final track on disc one, Oneida sets the brain-blender from frappe to puree. It begins with a slick organ line courtesy of Fat Bobby, and seems to tout another sixteen minutes of intoxicating drone, but that catchy melody gives way, mutating in fractal order and deviating further and further from its set course. Guitars flare up, slightly off-cue, effects kick in unexpectedly, and the keyboard riff itself slithers into a different skin. From deep within the ever-changing swirl-- and just past the ten-minute mark-- an actual song emerges, but naturally, the shit hits the fan. What became solid for a moment soon collapses. There are no survivors.
The first disc is startlingly entertaining, given its repetitive nature, but its only real purpose is preparation-- an overblown effort to numb the listener's senses-- as without its tirades as contrast, disc two is terribly dull. Oneida has until now thrived on full-tilt sonic pandemonium, songs like "All Arounder", "Pure Light Invasion", and the hilarious, brilliant "Fat Bobby's Black Thumb", but somewhere between Anthem of the Moon and their latest, their signature aural riot has dispersed. Guitarist Papa Crazy and bassist Hanoi Jane have improved considerably, but that hurts more than it helps: they seem content to reproduce the pummeling assault of disc one, yet in their increased technical assurance, they lose the primal fury of old.
Disc two does hide a pair of choice cuts-- "Black Chamber" and "No Label"-- which benefit from Fat Bobby's swank organ and a killer bass roll. On the downside, they're stranded at the end of an otherwise monotonous set, and neither plays to the band's frantic strength. A handful of similarly decent tracks would have eliminated the need for a first disc of will-snapping indoctrination; Each One Teach One leads with a sucker-punch, and Oneida spend the rest of the album praying the superintendent breaks things up before everyone realizes they've forgotten how to fight.


This handsomely appointed Deutsche Grammophon release of recordings by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for the National, and Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, is a sign of shifting cultural tides regarding orchestral works by rock stars.

Jonny Greenwood / Bryce Dessner: St. Carolyn by the Sea / Suite From There Will Be Blood

Orchestral works by rock stars were once accorded the same level of basic dignity as Baby Mozart compilations or "Classical Relaxation" checkout counter CDs: They were the classical-music industry's green-mile walks, grist for the mill. This handsomely appointed Deutsche Grammophon release of recordings by Bryce Dessner, guitarist for the National, and Jonny Greenwood, guitarist for Radiohead, is one sign, among many, of shifting cultural tides. "Rock star" is an altogether more genteel occupation in this century than it was in the last—Dessner and Greenwood in particular enjoy a middlebrow cultural cachet somewhere between "TED Fellow" and "HBO show runner." And the classical music industry is relieved to have modern cultural ambassadors that won't make them feel foolish or craven.
Dessner and Greenwood have thus built up enviable composing careers for themselves. Their works are programmed by tony, first-class institutions, and positioned next to other contemporary composers, not consigned to the Friday-night concert that serves drinks. Greenwood has a head start on Dessner—his suite for There Will Be Blood, from 2007, enjoys a robust performance life and Popcorn Superhet Receiver, from which portions of this work were taken has been recorded already. Dessner, however, is catching up; last year, none other than the Kronos Quartet devoted a full album to his compositions. Now, whenever a prominent contemporary music festival is scheduled—such as this spring's Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, which also features Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche—Dessner and Greenwood are included.
It helps that their compositions do as much work as their names. Greenwood's There Will Be Blood suite is foreboding and inky-black, a work whose extended quotes of Penderecki and Ligeti do nothing to obscure the thumbprint of Greenwood's sensibility. The leaping, fiendish, cello line will forever be associated with Daniel Plainview, and the glinting blue eyes in Daniel Day-Lewis's soot-covered face as he proclaims his disgust for  "these...people." The slow-fall-in-free-space glissandi that punctuate the "Henry Plainview" movement, the most obvious Ligeti touch, break open into plangent, lovely string writing, a push-pull between furtive remorse and throbbing evil keeps the piece from curdling.
Dessner's surprisingly mordant sensibility is a match for Greenwood's. On his "St. Carolyn By the Sea", moaning tremolos pass like a fever chill through the orchestra and show up in the guitars a few minutes later, goose flesh prickling the music's surface. There are guitars in the work,  but they are twinkling and demure, and often feel like they are murmuring to quiet the upheaval of the shuddering beast that is the full orchestra. The work builds to a martial tattoo of an ending and cuts off, leaving its sharp outline visible in our minds.
Dessner's ear for string writing is particularly rich. The chords that move through the beginning of "Lachrimae" carry some Barber in their DNA, an impression that gets upset later when a cello bows out hoarse-voiced harmonics high up near the bridge. "Raphael", builds from wispy tendrils of sound into a super-saturated moment of full orchestral color, a blazing sunrise burning fog off of a river. The work stretches majestically over 17 minutes, maintaining a slow build that might feel familiar to the muscle-memories of post-rock fans. It is glacial, patiently ecstatic, and further evidence that Dessner's vision could support some large-scale works. Whoever wants to commission his first symphony would probably be rewarded with something fantastic.


Andrew Bird composed and performed the soundtrack to the independent film Norman. In addition to his tracks-- including 10 new instrumentals-- this collection includes Wolf Parade, Chad VanGaalen, and the Blow's Khaela Maricich.

Norman OST

It's been four years since Juno and seven since Garden State, which means we're due for another carefully soundtracked independent film celebrating young white folks' ability to find love despite crippling quirkiness. Right on schedule, here comes Norman, a 2010 festival-circuit selection rolling into theaters across the country with all the proper credentials: the square-peg protagonist (here, the titular Norman), the sweetly bumbling dalliance with an equally off-kilter would-be soulmate (Emily, "a girl who likes Monty Python"), the heavy-hanging bleakness of some unfortunately timed personal tragedy (the death and illness of Norman's parents).
Then, of course, there's the music, a soundtrack released a few weeks before the movie's super-limited national opening. But while the names on the tracklist read with the same indie-ish panache as those of Garden State and Juno, the two best-selling sophomore-year mix tapes in history, Norman takes a more focused approach. The film's score was composed and performed by Andrew Bird, a move that should shock no one faintly familiar with the classically trained multi-instrumentalist: Over the course of five solo albums, his swooping melodies and carefully built arrangements have all but pleaded to be overlaid on celluloid. Ten of his Norman tracks are original instrumental pieces that, even when taken out of their intended context (as we experienced them, unable to catch one of the movie's limited screenings before press time), fit nicely among his existing catalog.
"3:36" is perhaps the most readily-identifiable as a Bird song, its nervous, gnawing waves pocked with violin pizzicato and eerie whistling, his dual touchstones that he's almost always better off ditching. Here, though, they're used sparingly, maximizing their effect. When the dreadful pulse that opens first track "Scotch and Milk" repeats three tracks later on "Hospital", the ominous thrum glowers, grows heavy, then finally gives way to mournful violin pulls and plucks. That textural push-and-pull defines the score, Bird's strings caustic against the smooth, near-perpetual hum of the organ (or maybe it's a hurdy-gurdy, or deeply distorted violin loop-- whatever it is, its pitiless drone is so reminiscent of Wendy Carlos' analog-synth soundtrack to The Shining that Bird seems bound to one day score a horror flick). Here, if not for the gentle, almost mischievous lope of "The Kiss/Time and Space/Waterfall", the title of which tells its own little story, the tension would be nearly unbearable.
Bird has promised a new record out early next year, and if this collection can be considered any kind of preview, the arrangements will be darker, bolder, weirder-- but his songwriting, perhaps, more direct. On recent albums, especially 2009's Noble Beast, he has seemed nearly incapable of anything but lyrical abstruseness, throwing out mentions of aubergines and Cypriots like decoys, as if his cleverness would distract from his avoidance of grappling with anything more frighteningly real.
Instrumentally, while "Arcs and Coulombs", the first of Bird's three proper songs on Norman, holds tight to brushed drums and glockenspiel (his third- and fourth-most-often-deployed tricks), but its talk of candy-apple lips and "your serum in my veins" are new, their borderline corniness forgivable for their offering of proof that Bird is capable of feeling, or at least transmitting, such a pedestrian sentiment as romantic infatuation. It seems to be the most straightforward love song he's ever turned out, at least until "Night Sky" comes along a bit later: "What if we hadn't been born at the same time?/ What if you were 75 and I were nine?" he wonders, supported only by a feverishly stroked acoustic guitar carried over from the preceding track. Nary a whistle, a pluck, nor an obscure scientific metaphor-- just straight-up wonder at two people somehow managing to find each other amidst the whole mess of space and time. It's a new Andrew Bird, followed shortly by the old one: "Darkmatter", from 2007's Armchair Apocrypha, is the only Bird song not original to the soundtrack, but here it blazes in with a cinematic bravado that all but destroys its former self.
Contributions from three other artists are nestled among Bird's tracks. The Blow's Khaela Maricich lends the compilation its only female voice with "S.O.S.", a dreamy, heavy-lidded cry for help: "If you get a minute, would you come and look for me?" "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son", the crunching, stilted opener of Wolf Parade's 2005 LP Apologies to the Queen Mary, is reworked here into a darkly pulsing near-dirge, its electric guitars pushed down, Spencer Krug's yawp subdued and accented with slinky percussion and accordion wheezes. And Chad VanGaalen's "Rabid Bits of Time" is carried over directly from his Soft Airplane, its mournful cello slub and lonely guitar fitting it in neatly among Bird's instrumentals, VanGaalen's ragged, exhausted bleating no doubt laid over some key moment onscreen, pushing the movie and soundtrack into its cathartic final third.
A soundtrack taken apart from its movie is a funny thing, especially one working in such familiar territory as Norman. It's not hard to imagine the scenes these songs must play over on screen: here's when he walks through the halls and the other kids stare, here's when he wonders how her hair smells, here's where he wonders about the vagaries of human existence and what's the point of it all, here's where they kiss, here's where they cry. Maybe it's that easy; maybe it's not. At the very least, it's beautiful.


Continuing in the vein of 2007's BOSS, Magik Markers here channel their noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy.

Balf Quarry

If a band makes two records that move their sound in the same direction, is it fair to call the first a step forward and the second a retread? No, it's not. So please don't call Balf Quarry a repeat of BOSS, Magik Markers' excellent 2007 album*.* I understand the temptation-- like its predecessor, Balf Quarry channels this duo's noisy leanings into simpler songs without sacrificing the band's fiery energy. There are even some direct parallels-- the best song here, the chugging "Don't Talk in Your Sleep", bears echoes of BOSS' single "Taste", while the raging "Jerks" recalls BOSS' "Body Rot". And when heard in light of a 20-plus release discography (including at least seven since BOSS), Balf Quarry certainly sounds more like BOSS than anything else the band has done.
But it takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date. A friend called it "a road trip into the basement," and that pretty well captures the album's America-in-the-rear-view-mirror vibe. As the smoky grooves roll by, it's easy to picture singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio and drummer Pete Nolan camped out in a cellar, dreaming that their loose, swaying songs are treks down a hazy, endless highway.
"Smash out the glass of the dashboard clocks/ Drive straight into the West," Ambrogio sings in opener "Risperdal", a diary of a country where "America's past pays America's rent" and "High schoolers and Haggard know what I know." (At song's end, Ambrogio changes that line to "High schoolers and Hagerty"-- perhaps a nod to Neil Hagerty and Royal Trux, a band who could also sound like they were concocting alternate Easy Rider soundtracks from the comfort of dank underground dwellings).
Elsewhere, Ambrogio drops numerous references to road-drenched Americana. Her songs are littered with gamblers, lawmen, whiskey, and losing lottery tickets. This makes Balf Quarry something like a 1970s indie film shot through a modern-day lens, similar to the way Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny felt like a simultaneously faded and updated road-movie replica. So you probably need some penchant for American nostalgia and noisy stoner-rock to dig very far into Balf Quarry. But if you can hack it, there are pots of gold along the album's wayward avenues.
On "Psychosomatic", clipped guitar and cutting drums embolden Ambrogio's screed against thinking too hard ("If you start looking, do you know what you'll find?") Later, a crunchy electronic beat buttresses Ambrogio and Nolan's vocal duo on the love-song-ish "7/23". That's followed by the even more surprising "State Numbers", a ballad about the dangers of gambling featuring Nolan on piano and producer Scott Colburn on "wizard wind." "Luck never gives, it only lends," Ambrogio warns over the music's haunting tones.
Her most pointed rant, "The Lighter Side of...Hippies", is an indictment of something bigger: 60s idealism. "You had a revolution in your head/ Too bad you couldn't make it out of bed," she snarls, telling the boomers that "your heroes lied." In fact, here she wholly rejects the road fantasies that Balf Quarry had hinted at before: "No more forever young on the turnpike/ The sunshine visions were not what they seemed." But even Easy Rider itself ended with Peter Fonda deciding that "we blew it," and the dreams and disappointments Ambrogio sings about are often intertwined. Balf Quarry is the kind of record that can handle such rich, entertaining contradictions.


Plucking influences from 90s indie rock isn't new, but Cymbals Eat Guitars perfectly embody that casually ambitious slack-rock sound. Sometimes you just want the basics.

Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains

Why There Are Mountains

Plenty of bands want to take you higher and even more are looking to get you down, but it's increasingly rare to find a record that sounds good with a AAA guidebook and a few hours to get to god knows where, as long as it's somewhere else. Despite the unabated use of adjectives like "sprawling" or "sweeping" or "epic," the indie road trip album has become something of a lost art, with bands mostly forgoing dense, pent-up instrumentation that slowly unfurls and releases-- you know, that lonesome crowded sound. You could blame it on so many bands being from autophobic NYC, or that the Pacific Northwest gods of indie are still going too strong to already be a primary influence, but neither would explain New York's Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why There Are Mountains. While there's plenty of geographical signifiers on their debut, it's almost topographic in its approach, without hooks and choruses so much as map-like layouts of mountains and sloping valleys.
Six-minute opener "...And the Hazy Sea" has Why They Are Mountains sounding like it could immediately implode, kicking off with the kind of cataclysmic blowout Built to Spill used to get to in a few minutes' less time. Occasionally adding reverbed guitar and electric piano to give an eye-of-the-storm calm, the band reaches about six different crescendos; it's less showy theatrics than Cymbals Eat Guitars just packing a lot of ideas into their songs. It's tough to consider structures this unpredictable to be templates, but upon hearing the subtle instrumental shifts of "Indiana" evolving from noise-rock interlude to a horn-led piano waltz, you locate a certain pretzel logic in these songs-within-songs. Yelpy and adenoidal, bombastic and yet unkempt, you could pretty much slap a sticker on this thing saying "RIYL: indie rock."
"Some Trees (Merritt Moon)" emerges from the feedback exhaust of "...And the Hazy Sea" into two minutes of tightly coiled post-punk dance and strangulated, sugary hooks. At first an environmentalist's lament of suburban sprawl, a much more sinister effect of deforestation is revealed-- "I was thankful for the mystery/ But by the time the girl had hanged herself/ I could have looked out my back window and watched her neck just snap." CEG are rarely as dark as they are on "Some Trees", but besides a sound engineer, the group also shares with Modest Mouse a tendency to turn supremely stoned observations into startling lucidity.
Why There Are Mountains gains as much impact from its quieter moments, especially "Share", which parlays queasy, whammy-bar shoegaze atmosphere into a defeated, yet regal procession of horns. As its followed by "What Dogs See", four minutes of echoing rubble and near spoken-word mumbles, it initially seems like a pokey bit of sequencing, but the song evolves into a prelude to the deceptively bouncy "Wind Phoenix", which turns personal devastation into a sing-along. The scattered lyrics could pass for a whimsical recollection of an Indiana youth spent watching Notre Dame football and listening to Sub Pop until you focus on the song's macabre laments.
What's most admirable about this sophisticated self-released debut is Cymbals Eat Guitars' willingness to think big with gestures that shouldn't fly in the hands of a young band, instrumentally or thematically. Occasionally, albeit rarely, it leads them astray, as in the closer "Like Blood Does", where the group dawdles a bit too long before reaching its arresting conclusion. But that's a minor quibble considering how Why There Are Mountains ends up being like any great result of wanderlust-- here, the journey is the end not the means; fortunately, that gives Why There Are Mountains astounding replay value.