The Turkish sound artist balances technical precision, emotional potency, and trenchant cultural critique on an album whose individual sounds are as compelling as their widescreen narratives.

Ecce Homo

In the work of Ipek Gorgun, small moves and grand gestures are equally important. Before she molds her instrumental electronic music into massive shapes, the Turkish sound artist infuses it with precise detail. “I work with milliseconds in the beginning, then I switch to seconds, then to minutes,” she once explained. “At the end, I think about the whole arrangement of the structure... So I zoom in, zoom out, and try to find a way to fit everything in place.” As a result, her compositions connect on the micro level of individual sounds as well as on the macro level of widescreen narrative.
On first listen, Ecce Homo, her second solo album, seems more about the micro. It opens with the tactile chimes of “Neroli,” a track that gets progressively denser but never loses sight of the sonic molecules that comprise it. Gorgun has a talent for spinning fine-tuned sounds that stay resistant to blur no matter how thick her mix becomes. It’s easy to get lost in those textures, the shiny whirrs and low rumbles and drilling noise. But as the album moves forward, Gorgun’s ever-deepening forests prove to be just as compelling as the trees they encompass.
As technical as all of this may sound, Ecce Homo can be quite moving. On pieces like the creeping, piano-echoed “Reverance” and the expansive, atmospheric “To Cross Great Rivers,” Gorgun uses both natural sounds and utterances that feel alien to create habitable worlds. She can sustain these attention-commanding arcs over long stretches, too; on the consecutive tracks “Le Sacre I” and “Le Sacre II,” extended tones and pointillist stabs seem to echo the cycle of calm and nerves that so often characterizes the mood of a momentous occasion. The emotion in Gorgun’s music is sneaky, though. Her technique is so fascinating that you might not notice, at first, that the music is working on your mood as much as on your intellect.
What makes Ecce Homo even more compelling is that, though her music is generally pretty abstract, Gorgun doesn’t shy away from pointed statements. This is most apparent in her use of vocal samples, which ground her open-ended sounds. The most stunning example is “Bohemian Grove” (a reference to the California campground that hosts an annual retreat for an all-male cabal of political elites and the ultra-wealthy), which blends quotes from fearmonger Alex Jones into a hellscape of metallic horror sounds. It’s a risky move; trying to make meaningful art out of cartoonish grandstanding could easily result in a simplistic critique. But by applying the same techniques she uses throughout Ecce Homo, Gorgun creates a work complex enough that it can take multiple listens to fully appreciate.
Most of Ecce Homo is not that literal, however, as Gorgun proves adept at making music that feels universal while retaining her very specific signature. This talent helped make Perfect Lung, the collaborative album she released with Toronto producer Ceramic TL last year, sound unique without throwing out any compositional rulebooks. But it’s when she’s patiently stitching together whole sonic universes on her own that Gorgun’s musical identity is at its most potent. On Ecce Homo, each tiny step reveals the will to run a marathon.


Three years after his 2017 opus Drunk, Stephen Bruner returns with more fleet-fingered jams and abstracted musings, this time a little more unpolished.

It Is What It Is

Thundercat the bassist and Thundercat the lyricist arise from separate sides of Stephen Bruner’s brain. The former is a fleet-fingered virtuoso, plucking out lines as dazzling and complex as a star system. The words on top of those basslines, meanwhile, are far less methodical, fraught with hazy existential questions, references to getting so smashed he can’t find his shoes, and shout-outs to his cat. Together, they form songs that sound equally enchanting and unfinished, frivolous and deep. Drunk, his 2017 opus, effortlessly toed the line between Bruner as mighty bandleader and introverted doodler, with immense funk grooves slotted next to sonnets about feeling strange.
It Is What It Is could serve as a companion piece to Drunk, even though it arrives more than three years later. Bruner is still getting tipsy and pondering what waits for us in the beyond. There’s growth and acceptance in that wonder—the title suggests as much— but not necessarily in the songwriting. The album lacks the anchoring power of a full-bodied jam like “Them Changes,” “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” or even his 2011 George Duke cover “For Love I Come,” leaving us lost inside Bruner’s mind.
That isn’t always a bad place to be. “I Love Louis Cole” (featuring—who else?—Brainfeeder artist Louis Cole) could score the Willy Wonka Tunnel Of Terror with its ominous strings and increasingly wild-sounding drums. It ends abruptly, just as Wonka’s boat trip does, on an orchestral flourish. On the other end of the spectrum, “King Of The Hill” is the most pared-down we’ve heard Bruner in a while, as he hums over a refreshingly simple and spooky beat made with the help of Flying Lotus and BADBADNOTGOOD.
His bass playing remains captivating. “Unrequited Love” opens with a swirl of strums and intricate jazz fills before giving way to a reverberant instrumental accentuated by heavy snares. “Funny Thing” highlights his trademark low-pass Moog tone, which he’s honed to imitate the croak of the oldest and nastiest-looking toad you could imagine. And “How Sway” is a masterclass in lightspeed chord changes.
But “How Sway” also features two words total—“ayy” and “yo”—which indicates how unpolished some of these compositions feel. “How I Feel” starts off promising, with a subtle bass melody, lovely bell plinks, and a magnetic synth line, but it stays in place for the rest of its brief runtime. On “Overseas,” dippy lyrics about meeting up with a woman in Russia and joining the “mile-high club” on the plane ride stumble into a clip of comedian Zach Fox imitating an airline captain—funny, but not necessarily compelling.
Singer Michael McDonald, who collaborated with Bruner and Kenny Loggins on 2017’s gleaming “Show You The Way,” recently told the New York Times that Bruner reminds him of Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who were “Top 40 radio darlings” but also had songs that were “so strange, and so sophisticated.” Here, Bruner has the attitude and the aptitude, but he’s mostly missing the songs.
“Fair Chance” comes close, with its weightless keyboards, gentle drums, and heartbroken hook about loving someone even though they’re not around—a reference to the late rapper Mac Miller, with whom Bruner was extremely close. But despite its sincerity and strong guest spot from Ty Dolla $ign, the song slides off the rails when a well-intentioned (but struggling) Lil B warbles out a shaky final verse. “Black Qualls” cooks along with a groove featuring ’80s boogie figurehead Steve Arrington, but loses its momentum midway through.
Then there’s “Dragonball Durag,” the most effortless song here. Over a breezy beat featuring a billowing saxophone provided by longtime friend and collaborator Kamasi Washington, Bruner sings playfully to a girl about his silky headscarf. It’s undeniably silly (“I may be covered in cat hair, but I still smell good,” he purrs) but also feels complete, one of those moments where Bruner’s goofiness complements his musical prowess. There’s evidence to suggest he can do this when he wants; there’s also plenty to suggest the contrary.


As he closes the books on PC Music, label founder A. G. Cook unspools a rangy triple album full of shiny synths, inside jokes, and gently sentimental vocal pop.

Britpop

The logic of today’s pop culture is lore, and the keepers of the lore are the fandoms. As recently observed in the Swiftieverse, the stans cannot live on songs alone—they demand worldbuilding. They shall have Easter eggs. They will make video essays about whether or not Harry Styles wears a wig. These are ideal conditions for A. G. Cook, the producer and persona at the heart of the PC Music universe. His third solo full-length is a dizzying concept album that spills over into animated videos, bespoke websites, and several millennia’s worth of made-up lore. Appearing in the midst of the megawatt rollout for Brat, the Charli XCX album on which Cook returns as a lead producer, Britpop was never going to be the biggest pop album of the year as measured by social clout—but it just might be the biggest by volume.
As his first album since the end of PC Music, the era-defining experimental pop label that ceased releasing new music last year after a decade, Britpop follows 2020’s seven-disc solo sprawl 7G and its rapid sequel, the dense and ambitious Apple. This time around he’s kept a lid on things—it’s a comparatively tight triple album, eight tracks per disc, arranged along the themes of past, present, and future (a classic tarot spread, not coincidentally). It’s also a sprawling multimedia project complete with characters, timelines, online games, videos, and bonus downloads accessed via three familiar-looking websites: Wandcamp, Wheatport, and Witchfork. (All three were recently “acquired by an undisclosed multidimensional conglomerate,” according to a pop-up.)
In a way, the PC Music enterprise was always about making websites, as Cook—a computer nerd before he became a musician—explained to DIY back in 2014. While a complete hermeneutics of the Cookverse is beyond the scope of an album review (and would spoil the quest) the video for “Soulbreaker” might be the place to start: a time-traveling animation by Gustaf Holtenäs that’s stuffed with lore to be decoded by the faithful of the PC Music subreddit.
Britpop begins in the Past, with the first disc a kind of epitaph to PC Music’s now-classic sound, a shiny playground of boing-splat colors and neon noise. It sounds like Cook is tying up loose ends, perhaps emptying the archives. There are mallow-soft synths and stinging trance supersaws, hairsprayed ’80s syndrums and speedy riffs recalling the “impossible music” of early influence Conlon Nancarrow. Hyper-chopped helium vocals appear in various states of disarray, from Charli XCX trilling “Brit-brit-brit like Britpop” on the title track to the shattered verbiage of “Prismatic.” The third disc is on similar ground musically but with a few more solidly structured songs and, on “Butterfly Craft,” a very un-PC excursion into cable-tangled radiophonic noise.
The Past and Future discs will appeal directly to PC heads, with few big surprises. Even at peak intensity—the speedrun finish of “Prismatic,” the restless mechanics of “Luddite Factory Operator”—Cook’s surfaces are varnished, his structures both effortless and complex. There’s none of the naivety or pleasingly “wrong” tilt of those remarkable early productions, like GFOTY’s “Bobby” or Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and Blue.” This is the work of an accomplished, L.A.-facing pop producer. When Charli enters the room—as she also does on “Lucifer,” a catchy, moody-girl highlight also featuring Addison Rae—the scene comes alive, while the tracks that rest on ultra-processed, unintelligible vocals, like the Balearic “Crescent Sun,” take on the weightless quality of a hologram.
Which is why the Present disc, where Cook takes the mic, is the surprise standout of the three. Picking up where Apple left off, these eight songs also take their cue from Thy Slaughter’s Soft Rock—Cook’s witty collaboration with PC Music oldtimer easyFun—to drive deeper into digitally enhanced fuzz rock. Infused with the wistful melancholy that British comedian Bill Bailey once identified in his countryfolk (because “52 percent of our days are overcast”) the Present disc falls somewhere between cultish bedroom-punk (The Durutti Column, Felt) and scratchy ’90s indie (Teenage Fanclub, the Breeders, late ’90s Blur)—and delivers some sweet, sweet guitar tones to boot. Our troubadour gets close to the mic, using telephone effects and Auto-Tune to boost the grain of his far-from-powerful voice, while the guitars do quiet-quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics (“Green Man,” “Greatly”) and wailing mini-solos (“Nice to Meet You”). Most addictive is “Bewitched,” an egg punk anthem for the children of Weezer and Ash, iced with a perfect hook (“I heard her say, Abra-abracadabra”) that echoes an oldie by Ian Dury.
Buried inside the lyrics is a sense of distance and loss, from the awkwardly British (“I’ll miss you greatly”) to the open wound of “Without,” a tribute to his creative twin flame SOPHIE, who died in 2021: “An emptiness, a silhouette/I never guessed the loudest sounds are hollow.” Cook has spent the past few years living in America, including a lockdown in rural Montana, home to his girlfriend, the singer Alaska Reid. Feeling like a foreigner inevitably made him more aware of his Britishness, and seemingly more eager to play it up—hence the enduring Beatles mop-top. In place of the playful meta-ironies and commercial sheen of the PC Music world, Cook aligns himself with myth and magic (“Green Man,” “Crone,” “Bewitched”), stocking his lyrics with an apothecary’s worth of amulets, manuscripts, gargoyles, “skulls on the shelf” and “membranes stacked in the catacombs.”
It’s an anachronistic pivot, and with it, Cook joins a long tradition of British artists who have looked to the country’s distant past for a sense of identity unspoiled by rubbish modern life, from the Pre-Raphaelites’ obsession with King Arthur and William Blake’s vision of Albion to the reactionary nostalgia of the Kinks, Smiths, and Libertines. A longing for the notional good old days is hammered out again in Timothy Luke’s design for the album campaign, with A. G. Cook written in cod-heraldic lettering straight out of merrie olde England, while Britpop appears in the zippily optimistic curves of Mexico Olympic, the logotype designed for the ’68 Games and adapted by Pulp in the mid ’90s—notably, the last two moments when Britain was seen to be swinging.
Cook’s embrace of the mythic past mirrors a wider turn towards the wyrd in British culture, but also puts some distance between him and the PC Music experiment. By the time it wound down last year, the label had permeated the entire fabric of pop, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance (Cook has a credit on “All Up in Your Mind”) to Danny L Harle’s work for Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipa, and even Camila Cabello’s recent hyperpop pivot, “I LUV IT.” Mission accomplished? Perhaps, but we can assume that Cook gets his kicks from subverting the pop hierarchy, not being absorbed into it. Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic.


Produced using analog synths, drum machines, and four-track tape, these ambient sketches and beat experiments reveal the foundations of the Japanese producer’s later, more elaborate work.

Kuniyuki Takahashi: Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol.1

Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol.1

Delving into the early efforts of a well-known musician can be like undertaking an archeological dig. Sometimes all that comes out of the ground are little fragments; other times, you get the whole foundation. The latter is what the Dutch label Music From Memory unearths with Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol. 1, the first of two volumes collecting the earliest known recordings from the Japanese electronic musician Kuniyuki Takahashi. Originally released on a series of short-run, self-released cassettes, the six marvellous tracks compiled here lay the groundwork for nearly all his subsequent recordings, from the harsh EBM he created as part of the duo DRP to the lush deep house he’s best known for.
The threads connecting these tracks with his later music are easy to follow. The looping synth lines and bulbous basslines that wrap like infinity scarves around a cooing bit of Kozue Fukuma’s spoken word on “You Should Believe” have been mirrored in tracks as recent as “Between Shadow and Lights,” a song recorded with Anne Clark for Takahashi’s 2013 album Feather World. And with just a small shift in BPM, a track like “Zero to One,” which throbs with the cool sensuality of Depeche Mode’s late-1980s work, could fit comfortably on DRP’s 1990 album Electro Brain 586. The final three tracks on this short collection are generally indebted to club sounds of the time. “Signifie” comes across as an homage to Front 242, complete with barking samples of film dialogue and what sounds like sheet pans being abused.
Side A of this vinyl edition particularly reveals how essential these primal synth-and-drum-machine experiments were to Takahashi’s future work. (The collection’s title, Early Tape Works, is a nod to the four-track cassette deck he recorded on.) The first three tracks feel like remixes of his deep-house singles that have stripped away the pulsing beats and bass, leaving behind only a colorful haze of drones and flowering melodies. “Night at the Seaside” lives up to its title in long, intertwining chords evoking a moonlit stroll on the sand. In “Day Dreams,” a plucked guitar replicates the sound of traditional Japanese instruments like the koto and shamisen, while a honking synth imitates the timbre of the horagai, or conch shell. The closest Takahashi gets to his deep-house future is “Drawing Seeds,” a winsome, Eno-esque tune with fluttering stabs of melody girding a clattering yet barely-there rhythm.
The most remarkable takeaway from Early Tape Works is how fully formed Takahashi’s ideas were from the jump. For someone who was working with relatively inexpensive equipment and learning on the go, he produced some assured, complex music. The only aspect of Takahashi’s recent music that isn’t present on Early Tape Music is the interest in jazz that guides 2007’s All These Things. Perhaps we’ll have that  to look forward to when Volume 2 arrives later this year.


The J-pop icon and hyperpop predecessor returns with an album that looks forward even as it longs for an imagined past.

Candy Racer

Try, if you can, to describe Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s earliest singles—like 2011’s “PONPONPON” or 2012’s “Tsukematsukeru”—without using the word “hyperpop.” These songs predated PC Music yet presented a similar vision: pop songs so abrasively kinetic and uncannily saccharine that they begin to feel sinister. Kyary (aka Kiriko Takemura), one of Japan’s biggest pop stars, has rarely been placed in the largely Western hyperpop lineage. But her influence on the genre is hard to deny: When she first played London, Charli XCX was in attendance, and Kyary also worked with SOPHIE on a track that has yet to see the light of day. Having rewired J-pop's genre conventions and inspired many of hyperpop’s foundational artists, Kyary has reinvention on her mind as she enters the second decade of her career.
Candy Racer, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s first album in three years, proposes two very different paths forward for the star. She continues to work with her longtime writer and producer Yasutaka Nakata (CAPSULE, Perfume), though there’s a clear mandate to explore new sounds. In the album’s first half, Kyary dials up the tempo until her slippery pop sound feels optimized for the dancefloor. The title track pairs manic marimba runs with a sped-up disco beat, while “Dondonpa” is nothing short of a galloping house track. If you encountered the latter song in a club, you might mistake Kyary’s repeated chirps of “Dondonpa!” (an onomatopoeic portmanteau that evokes rapid-fire drums) for a sample—her vocals on the song are limited to that single line, plus some percussive scatting.
If the first half of Candy Racer decenters Kyary in her own songs, the second half recasts her image in a manner that feels even more radical. Tracks like “Perfect Oneisan'' are built from the glossy synth presets and plastic horns common in vintage Japanese “city pop,” and she does her best to approximate the yearning of a 1980s balladeer. Given the futuristic sheen that Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s music has always had, this might feel like a surprising pivot—though this is the same woman who named her beauty brand Nostalgia Syndrome. What’s more curious is that the resurgence of city pop (and vaporwave, which often samples city pop) is a largely Western phenomenon, and Kyary is a massive star only in her home country. Both city pop and vaporwave satisfy a Western nostalgia for a past that feels slightly askew, having been filtered through pre-millennial Japanese sensibilities. Kyary is now selling that same aesthetic back to a domestic audience, alongside bottles of her signature shampoo.
If this all feels a bit meta, it’s perfectly in keeping with the ethos of hyperpop, which walks a tightrope between skewering the language of commerce and outright embracing it. As with many things, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu seems to have gotten here first, by dint of working within Japan’s more nakedly consumerist music industry; like many J-pop artists, she’s no stranger to commercial tie-ins. But unlike most Japanese stars, she’s been able to find a significant audience in the West through ambitious music videos (you could argue that she helped usher in pop’s embrace of the grotesque) and her savvy use of platforms like YouTube. And so we get a song like “Natsuiro Flower,” which sounds like it was pulled from the 2011 internet curio Floral Shoppe but was in fact recorded in 2021 by one of Japan’s biggest stars, and which feels targeted at an audience of Western listeners hungry for Japanese retro-futurism. Not all of Candy Racer sounds like a break from the past: The album’s midsection is littered with archetypical Kyary Pamyu Pamyu songs like “Kamaitachi,” “Kimigaiinekuretara,” and “Gum Gum Girl,” which adorn bright melodies with unmistakably Japanese flourishes like shamisen. But even as it revels in new ideas, Candy Racer finds Kyary Pamyu Pamyu as we’ve always known her: just a bit more outre than her peers in the world of chart pop.

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With stark, introspective lyrics and fuller production, Meg Duffy’s latest is a bold foray into poppier sounds. It feels like a fresh start.

Fun House

The music video for “Clean Air,” a single from Hand Habits’ new album Fun House, unfolds like a magic trick. Meg Duffy, a guitarist and singer who made their name as an accompanist for Weyes Blood and the War on Drugs, ambles moodily on stage, clutching a microphone as if about to deliver a sermon. Then, as the strum of an acoustic guitar picks up, breezy and gentle, the audience explodes with energy. Sweat drips, bodies sway, a pit opens up; at one point, Duffy starts crowd surfing. The joke is obvious, though it clarifies something deeper about the disconnect between what’s felt and what’s spoken aloud.
This particular tension—understated indie rock with the emotional force of a scream—has informed all of Duffy’s music over the past few years. Their last full-length project as Hand Habits, 2019’s placeholder, felt knotty and interior; Duffy has described the record as being “impulsive”—the product of writing while on tour. The lyrics were anxious but also aimless, running up against impossible questions. “What’s the use if you’re not trying to forgive?” they asked, lingering on the feeling of frustration.
On Fun House, Duffy approaches a sense of resolution. “I could never hear her, no matter how loud/Screaming, ‘I’ll always be the anchor you drag around,’” Duffy sings on “No Difference.” While the song courses with doubt, the persistent emotional block stalling a relationship, it never curdles into bitterness or anger. Near the end of the song, Duffy is joined by background vocals from several collaborators, including Perfume Genius and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, helping disperse some of that unease, relying on community for reassurance.
Many of these songs twist feelings of anxiety into comforting new shapes. Late-album highlight “The Answer” is a triptych survey of a relationship; what starts as a resigned, whispery swell is interrupted by a different time signature that works like a counter-argument. When the initial cadence returns after a moment of near-silence, it’s as if Duffy has finally come around to their own side. Even amid this psychic back-and-forth, they sound assured. “Drink the mist/My body, a question that hangs on her lips/I know the answer/The answer, it’s always mine,” they sing, backed by a silvery tableau of plucked guitar and tambourine. The meaning of each section pivots on that phrase: “I know the answer.” The answer isn’t always the same, and it isn’t always what you’re looking for, but it always is.
After the folky seriousness of placeholder, produced by indie rock stalwart Brad Cook, the relatively varied sounds of Fun House represent a fresh start for Duffy. With production from Sasami Ashworth, Duffy adds woodwinds and digital pulses to the guitar-forward sounds of their earlier work. “Aquamarine” is drunk and dizzy, a head-out-the-window, hair-in-the-wind jam, and a bold foray into poppier sounds. It’s also among the darkest moments on the album—a stark confrontation with the facts of their mother’s suicide. “I didn’t know she played guitar ’til I turned 27,” they sing, reflecting on details kept hidden from them as a child and how the truth ends up surfacing anyway.
There’s a similar ethos of unlikely celebration in the opener, “More Than Love,” which begins with a quote from a Bruce Springsteen classic and peaks in a halo of sun-streaked guitar. Duffy has nailed this sort of wild climax before, but mostly for other artists. Here, their guitar playing introduces a uniquely personal catharsis, a creative breakthrough you can feel in real time. Coming to terms with their own past, Duffy arrives at a cohesive survey of the formula they’ve been refining throughout their discography. Fun House embodies all Duffy’s gifts at once, bringing their virtuosic talent into their own wheelhouse, on their own terms.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel blows away the cobwebs from Sam Shackleton’s often shadowy psychedelia, adding a celebratory force to the English electronic musician’s hypnotic minimalism.

Primal Forms

The maverick composer and instrument builder Harry Partch once described his creative lodestar as “the actions and activities of primitive man as I imagine him.” Whether this impulse to flee modernity takes form in Constantin Brâncuși’s sculptures, Hilma af Klimt’s paintings, or Partch’s instruments, there will always be artists who seek inspiration on the shores of ancient custom and spiritual communion. Primal Forms, the new album by Sam Shackleton and Wacław Zimpel, is awash in this sensibility. The album’s folkish minimalism often recalls the so-called Fourth World of Jon Hassell, whose music David Toop called “almost psychotropic in its capacity to activate alien worlds in the imagination.” Shackleton casts a similarly hallucinogenic spell. Though the English artist was once associated with dubstep through his and Appleblim’s old Skull Disco label, his “ultimate destination” as an artist, as he told The Wire in 2010, was actually toward Partch—in short, a musical language he could call his own. On Primal Forms, Shackleton and Zimpel walk the path as though they’ve always known the way.
Though Shackleton and Zimpel are serial collaborators, they both sound notably renewed on Primal Forms, their first recording together. Zimpel, a Polish jazz composer and clarinetist whose past work includes an EP with Border Community’s James Holden and two albums of Carnatic fusion, has brought a refreshing lightness to Shackleton’s music. Since 2016’s Devotional Songs, the pagan arcana of Shackleton’s music has often been given shape by singers and poets. But, whatever the quality of their contributions, the music’s atmosphere had grown thick with “gothic” imagery that felt, in Susan Sontag’s phrasing, constructed rather than secreted. Shackleton’s last album, 2017’s Anika-featuring Behind the Glass, could sometimes feel like what one Discogs commenter described as the soundtrack for a Victorian funeral, but here, Zimpel’s use of the Ukrainian lira, harmonium, violin, and other instruments suggestive of folk traditions add a celebratory force to the English artist's Escher-corridor minimalism.
This all leads to an improbable thought: Zimpel has made the often dour Shackleton sound lovely. Once you’re past the title track’s chilly intro—its crime-noir strum might remind you of Portishead’s “Sour Times”—Zimpel’s alto clarinet and digi-choral swells add a penetrating warmth, as though the shade that Shackleton’s music usually inhabits has vanished beneath a second sun. The clarinet’s presence elsewhere sets in motion a passage of disembodying awe. Within a simple monochord loop four minutes through “Primal Drones,” Zimpel’s reed undulates with a conversational sonority—as though, if only you could tune to the proper frequency, it might be possible to make out a centuries-old haiku.
Though Primal Forms has lots of trance-inducing intensity—see the Terry Riley-esque organ spirals towards the back of “Primal Forms”—the transitory moments are a pleasure, too. The midsection of the final track, “Ruined Future,” is a longish changeover from Zimpel’s thinning clarinet to rolling marimba triplets. In taking its time to get from A to B, Shackleton and Zimpel show the confidence to let nothing much happen for a while. Perhaps by this point the duo’s destination, a prelapsarian place of mystical sound and ritual beauty akin to the one Partch longed to discover, is already in sight. If so, the duo found it not by following a map but by awakening neglected instincts in each other.

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Skrillex is a festival-circuit megastar who’s already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but Recess is his first proper album. It's a mix of big-drop dubstep tunes and whatever-works eclecticism, including spots from Chance the Rapper, Diplo, and Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit.

Recess

He’s a festival-circuit megastar who’s already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but it still feels like Sonny Moore got a raw deal. Sure, the fact Skrillex became the face of dubstep did plenty to rile the “purists,” but the Tempa–12“-hoarder set wasn’t responsible for reducing an unsubtle but genuinely adventurous and accessibly weird artist to a living meme. Outlets that eyerolled at first-wave dubstep as too niche belatedly rushed to hail Skrillex as the person who could—hallelujah!—finally make electronic music that you could mosh to and glibly compare to punk-fuckin’-rawk. By the beginning of this year, it was starting to feel like the reduction of his music’s endorphin-explosion dynamics to a ”wait for the drop" punchline would drain all the giddiness out of Skrillex’s catalogue before he even got around to a full-length debut.
But at the end of the day, all the thinkpieces about corporate rave and pop crossover and subgenre snobbery weren’t enough to obscure just how open Skrillex has been to switching his game up. You could call it from the word go: 2010’s My Name Is Skrillex delivered sugar-high jolts of French Touch that integrated Todd Edwards-style chopped-vocal fusillades into Justice-style snarl-house. And while the trademark mechano-industrial shivers and alarms in his subsequent work sound like chaotic ADD noise on the surface, it’s also frenetically unpredictable and musically fun in a way not commonly heard since the crab-scratch heyday of super-advanced turntablism. (Listen to Mix Master Mike’s Napalm Rockets—released a few months before My Name Is Skrillex—for a great if probably unexpected precedent.) No matter that he learned about IDM when Korn gave Aphex Twin props on TRL; the point is that Skrillex decided he wouldn’t stop learning. And yet that’s why Recess is confounding: it hints at places Skrillex could take his sound, but doesn’t feel ready to commit to any of them.
What expectation-meeting wub-wub stuff there is on this album is diverting and enjoyable, even if it feels obligatory in the context of this album's attempt at breadth. I mean, the leadoff cut is called “All Is Fair in Love and Brostep”—the man clearly knows the joke and is savvy enough to turn it into a “yes, and” improv sketch. That he gives the opening-track spotlight to a guest spot by the Ragga Twins—the MCs whose early 1990s singles made them connoisseur go-tos and pivotal figures in the early UK rave and jungle scene—points to a lineage that his detractors rarely gave him credit for. And the track is fittingly rugged—nothing that’ll have dubstep aficionados forgetting the Bug anytime soon, but it’s easy to hear the fundamental strength of his basslines and the nuanced timing of percussion. Between “All Is Fair”, the more explicitly dancehall-informed Ragga Twins teamup “Ragga Bomb”, and the crowdpleasing “Try It Out” (built alongside Owsla signee Alvin Risk), Skrillex proves adept at going beyond the build-drop-build-drop Pavlov response to something a bit more dynamic and playful.
But the broader sound is also pretty familiar at this point, an issue that he’s aimed to confront with the album’s forays into whatever-works eclecticism. Sometimes the results are at least fascinatingly off-kilter. “Doompy Poomp” is the biggest wait-what? moment on the album, a galumphing kind of schaffel/wonky/IDM hydra that’s all candy-colored grotesque. “Fuck That” dials back the bass a bit to something more in line with the distant swells of circa-02 Horsepower Productions sides, wraps his sensibilities around a beat more befitting of contemporary bass music, and builds the big ramp-up moment towards a switched-up version of the rhythm that bristles with negative space. And “Fire Away” returns to the shallow-Burial shot at spacious UK garage that he tried out on "Leaving", a tolerable effort that’s upended by jarringly twee melodic accents and the grating wail of singer Kid Harpoon.
What’s worrying is the stuff that seems to sidestep his oddball ADD energy completely. Even if brostep is pop these days, it’s at least pop in a polarizingly abrasive sense; his maneuvers towards other more accessible sounds not only sound less bracing but feel pulled out of his hands. Teaming up with Diplo and getting K-pop superstars G-Dragon (Big Bang) and CL (2NE1) is an inspired move in theory, but “Dirty Vibe” sounds so dominated by familiar Southern bounce and trap tropes that it feels like Skrillex is taking a smoke break and letting Mad Decent take over for a bit. The title track is even more confused—Fatman Scoop and Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos together at… last?—with pseudo-Sleigh Bells pep rally bluster and bang-on-a-PVC-pipe moombahton that plays like decline-era big beat. And “Coast Is Clear” is jazzed-up d’n’b that keeps tripping over its own snares, with Chance the Rapper’s voice the closest there is to an element of wavering chaos; shame his appearance is little more than a repeated if extended hook. (At least the machine-gun “doyouwannafuck, doyouwannafuck, doyouwannafuck” refrain has staying power.)
The progression from early singles to first album isn’t nearly the same arc as it was just 10 years ago, but it’s still weird that the first full-length showcase for Skrillex as self-contained album artist feels more like a transitional record than a debut that plays to his strengths. It’s tempting to suggest he’s ahead of the curve when it comes to the eventuality of the sound he popularized getting stale, but he probably has his own reasons for tweaking, sanding down, subduing, or otherwise retooling the parameters for what could be considered his signature aesthetic. If it points his fanbase towards another set of sounds to appreciate, it could be at least somewhat worth it. But more of these half measures, and they might just wind up deciding to listening to someone else entirely.


Australia’s King Gizzard have become one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories of late. Their second album of 2017 pushes towards new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Murder of the Universe

Murder of the Universe

“Nonagon infinity, open the door!” When King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ringleader Stu MacKenzie uttered those words to kick off the band’s eighth album, 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, it sounded like precisely the sort of fantastical, D&D-addled gibberish you’d expect to hear on a sci-fi psych concept album made by a band with a silly name and two drummers. But in hindsight, it now sounds like he was reciting a magic spell—because since that album’s release, a lot of doors have blown open for the Aussie armada. Where the prolific group previously hovered in the shadow of one-time label benefactors Thee Oh Sees, with Nonagon Infinity’s audacious album-long suite, they became international club headliners in their own right. And with this year’s more measured but still wiggy Flying Microtonal Banana, they rose to the ranks of talk-show appearances and sold-out theaters, cementing their status as one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories.
Given that the band slugged it out for six years and seven albums before finding wider success, they’re taking the concept of “strike while the iron is hot” to absurd extremes. King Gizzard have promised five new albums in 2017, of which Murder of the Universe is the second. Right now, with just six months left in the year and three more records to go, it will take a Herculean effort to meet that goal. But as Murder of the Universe proves, you can never count them out—because not only have they come up with an album that matches Nonagon Infinity’s breakneck pace, intricate interconnectivity, and conceptual scope, they’ve managed to push themselves to new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness.
If you think of Nonagon Infinity as King Gizzard’s Tommy, and Flying Microtonal Banana as the pared-down Who’s Next-style reprieve, then Murder of the Universe is their Quadrophenia moment, the album that makes its immediate predecessors feel like mere warm-up exercises. Structurally, it bears surface similarities to Nonagon Infinity—including overt callbacks to that and other Gizzard records—though it breaks up the flow into three discrete sections. Like Nonagon, Murder of the Universe’s motorik-punk momentum whisks the band through interlocking sections as if they were levels in a video game. It veers into stylistic netherworlds (prog-jazz contortions, bluesy harmonica blowouts, synth-funk breakdowns) like secret bonus coin zones en route toward explosive, boss-match-style climaxes that serve as resets for the album’s recurring melodic motifs. And King Gizzard do it so often and seamlessly that even a colossal nine-section piece like “Chapter 1: The Tale of the Altered Beast” eventually acquires the instant familiarity of a three-minute pop song.
But thematically speaking, Murder of the Universe is a sequel of sorts to the doomsday prognostications of Flying Microtonal Banana. Where that record’s nature-focused lyrics ruminated on imminent environmental disaster, Murder of the Universe explores a different agent of the apocalypse—A.I. technology—through cheeky B-movie-worthy storylines involving Frankensteined monsters and vomit-spewing cyborgs. And this time, you don’t have to parse and paste together the narrative from MacKenzie’s staccato phrasing: here, the band take the guesswork out of the equation altogether and thread ominous, “Thriller”-style spoken-word exposition throughout the album’s three movements.
The voiceovers can verge on excessive—like a porno, you’re here more for the action than the plot. As MacKenzie and steely-voiced narrator Leah Senior jostle for mic time on the “Altered Beast” suite, it can sound like he’s having a shouting match with a Poe-spouting Siri. But on the closing six-part piece, “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe,” the band’s most heavy-metal movement to date is given extra heft by its elderly orator. Sounding not unlike Sir Alec Guinness doing the intro to “Iron Man,” he manages to make a first-person narrative about a barfing, self-destructing robot both oddly affecting and genuinely horrifying, his eventual physical meltdown soundtracked by the band’s musical one. In true madcap Gizzard fashion, the band’s proggiest album turns out to also be their most visceral and vital. Murder of the Universe may be built from the band’s now-familiar krautpunk battle plan, but their ability to execute outsized architectural complexity at manic, warp-speed velocity is no less astonishing.


Kill Rock Stars debut from this promising songwriter and remarkably distinctive and technically skilled guitar player also features Hella's Zach Hill on drums.

Marnie Stern: In Advance of the Broken Arm

In Advance of the Broken Arm

A couple of weeks ago, while discussing Marnie Stern's In Advance of the Broken Arm, a friend asked who played that breathless, finger-tapping, Energizer guitar. It was a telling moment, a weird backhanded compliment: For some reason, folks still don't expect a woman to shred. Well, dudes, Marnie Stern does-- and how.
She does just about everything here, handling guitars, vocals, synths, songwriting, and production. But no one's an island: Hella's Zach Hill plays drums, an addition that brings more muster to Stern's debut. Hill also chips in a pair of keys, bass, and production. Extra bass and even more organ/key duties go to John-Reed Thompson, who engineered and mixed much of In Advance. But despite the extra hands, it's Stern's fingerprints that matter.
Beyond pure technical skill-- almost more impressively, really-- Stern sounds like nobody else. She told The New Yorker that she ostensibly didn't listen to "good music" (as she calls it) until she was 23. At that time, Sleater-Kinney were her watershed; she eventually found Hella, Boredoms, Melt-Banana. Don Caballero reportedly inspired her finger-tap technique (as well, perhaps, as her lengthy song titles). You'll hear bits of those bands across the 13 tracks-- that S-K guitar interplay and lilt revved with caffeine and turned into a 60-string molotov. The biggest unspoken presence for my buck, though, is Mick Barr, who wields a similar I-am-a-rock feel in Orthrelm, Ocrilim, Octis, other "O"'s, and his Shred Earthship collaboration with Hill. Beyond the ubiquitous Hella drummer, Barr and Stern also share a propulsive buoyancy, affixing emotion to flat-out, jaw-dropping chops.
Unlike Barr, Stern's seeking pop concision. I caught him rattling out a long solo guitar piece at the Whitney at Altria a month or two ago-- if it'd been Stern, she would've subdivided the real-time loop 10 times and added a vocal chirp. That's another thing: Her voice is a major component to her practice, layered as many times as her guitar. She can sound a bit like Deerhoof's Satomi-- the way she rides atop the guitars, a stone skipping across water. But the chants are more next-room distant, gauzy. Structurally, she sets up her own call-and-response (musically and lyrically), her sing-talk style cutting across the strings like a rogue auctioneer or cheerleader.
But talk about front-loading: In Advance roars out of the gate with "Vibrational Match", "Grapefruit", and "Every Single Line Means Something", each showing Stern at her best. At those moments, her playing and dynamics are complimented wonderfully by Hill's horse-racing drums, as she strums over her own amplification and tripped "adjust your perceptions" lyrics (in one spot, someone crawls to a gutter with broken knees). In that sense, if "Every Single Line Means Something" is taken as a commentary on every vocal bit and modulating Van Halen guitar line, Stern's work becomes a true-blue head fuck.
Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark. Let's use another song title as an instruction: "Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!" Yeah, perhaps the palette could be a tad more various; the addition of some breaks or other dynamics would help. As is, by the end of the record, the insouciance has faded a bit, the shredding lost some of its stream. For example, take a look at "This American Life"-- ingredients that sounded brilliant elsewhere, dodder a bit and yearn for variation. Oddly, as the song titles get more intriguing-- "Letters From Rimbaud", "Plato's Fucked-Up Cave"-- the songs themselves are less interesting.
An album needs pacing. For instance, Grindstone, the recent Shining outing scatters weirdness into various baskets, creating a super slow, imploded central shift and ultimately, well, a diamond. Here Stern keeps stabbing, and so the steam lessens. Strange then that Barr can do something like OV, looping endlessly, without it getting a snore. So, maybe she needs to extend some of the riffs? Perhaps there's too much going on-- the glass is empty, the glass is half full...
There's a stand-out section where Stern nails this sorta next-big-thing. Check the link/transition between "Logical Volume", a feedbacking chant that stands in place a bit before moving into an almost elegiac realm, and the up-tempo "Absorb Those Numbers". Hear how it soars? It's a delicate balance, and she pulls it off remarkably well. On the latter she intones, "As your breath catches up from where you began": The present catching up to its past and circling back to a shared beginning. Here, too, she showcases different textures of her voice, turning the guitar into an almost jazz sax behind her catchy, modulated hooks. At these moments, regardless of the late-period bomb, you know for fucking sure Stern has it-- a charisma and technique that already distinguishes her as pure Technicolor in a glutted, black-and-white scene.


The Rio de Janeiro MC deftly uses a grime framework to explore a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships.

40˚.40

SD9 is acutely aware of the fantasies projected on his hometown. For outsiders, the city conjures images of golden beaches and chilled caipirinhas, maybe the gentle hum of a João Gilberto tune echoing in the distance. To accompany the release of his debut album 40°.40, the Bonsucesso-raised artist wrote a poem about this romanticized vision of Rio, alongside a short visual. In the clip, he renders a fantasy of the city in rich detail, celebrating its gorgeous women and sunny boulevards. He quotes Gilberto Gil’s 1969 song “Aquele Abraço,” in which the Tropicália icon ensures that “Rio de Janeiro is still beautiful.”
And then, within 30 seconds, SD9 shatters the utopia. Scenes of young kids carrying submachine guns flash across the screen as he reveals a more fatalistic picture of Rio—one plagued with police surveillance and brutality, burning cars, and infinite cycles of drug addiction and violence. “Sorry Gilberto Gil, but for me, Rio de Janeiro was never beautiful,” SD9 says. Across the album, he explores a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships. 40°.40 captures a side of the city most people refuse to see.
SD9 and his producers excel when they reimagine their Rio roots within the framework of UK grime. Standout “Poze do Rodo,” featuring fellow Brazilian grime upstarts D r o p e and LEALL, layers an aluminum tamborzão beat over a frosty eskibeat click, a brilliantly metallic synthesis that evokes classic Wiley instrumentals and baile funk parties in equal measure. SD9 and his co-conspirators trade bars about garnering status and respect in the slums while alluding to MC Poze, a funk carioca MC who is regularly targeted by law enforcement for his alleged connections to drug trafficking. Similarly, SD9 drops vocalized tamborzão patterns on songs like “Consequencias” and “B.O.,” using funk carioca’s playful “bum-cha-cha, cha cha” to punctuate his tales of crime and street life.
The centerpiece of these stories is SD9’s guttural timbre, which lends itself well to the curvatures of Portuguese. The macabre church choir stabs on “ODP & Sangue” are coarse enough to get under your skin, and SD9’s staccato, horror-movie flow cloaks the typewriter-like snare drums in a villainous shroud. On the title track, SD9 shares memories of friends gone too soon, lost to police or gang violence. For those who reside in the neighborhoods in the North Zone, past Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue, death is omnipresent. SD9 isn’t afraid to confront this haunting reality in his flow, to make you feel the specter of death in your chest.
His vocals hit the hardest when fortified by the beats of his producers, many of whom are faithful students of grime and its hybrid influences. On the wonderfully ballistic “Astra 1.8,” another meditation on death, beatmaker Chediak combines the overblown bass of 8-bar, the revving of an engine, and jittery jungle breaks; the result feels like two grade-school kids smashing action figures together. DIIGO’s instrumental on “Oi” threads together a breathy sex moan, the blaring horn of a WhatsApp push notification, and 2-step garage textures into a song about a girl at the club with a Ganesha tattoo and Nike VaporMaxes. Meanwhile, frigid piano flourishes appear on the title track and the aforementioned “Poze do Rodo.” These productions are as reverent of grime as they are prescient, illustrating the genre’s capacity for reinvention.
40°.40 traces a blueprint of how to evolve a genre steeped in the history of local communities. It transcends mere tribute and instead functions as an initiation into the underworld of Brazilian grime. It’s no wonder that SD9 and his fellow MCs in the local grime collective TBC Mob selected this genre as their weapon of choice; government officials have racially profiled and criminalized practitioners of funk carioca, Rio’s claim to global music fame, as much as the UK-bred artists from which SD9 draws inspiration. 40°.40 excels when the MC draws sonic and cultural parallels between these sounds. And at the same time that 40°.40 communicates a strong sense of place, it asks us to make sense of the way hyperlocal music movements evolve in the context of globalization. When a genre like grime goes mainstream, traveling across social media networks and streaming platforms, what happens to its context? More than reinscribing stale tropes about music’s capacity to transcend borders and languages, 40°.40 is a testament to the fact that music born out of struggle can transform itself, appealing to people living in similar situations elsewhere—especially those who need it for survival.

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Recorded in Oakland with a heavy presence of Bay Area producers and rappers, the Das Racist member's highly listenable second mixtape of 2012 is a testament to his heretofore untested malleability.

51

Kool A.D. grew up in San Francisco-- while this is a well-known fact, it's not one that's acknowledged particularly often. It's understandable considering Das Racist have become entrenched in N.Y.'s cultural milieu in so many different ways that their music has been embraced as something like a metaphor for a certain kind of lifestyle in the city. You can ascertain Victor Vazquez's Cali roots as a matter of relativity, being that Queens native Heems is more assertive as both a rapper and as a media presence. But otherwise, outside of calling himself the "second-best rapper with glasses after E-40," it's tough to pinpoint much influence even when you know it's there. All of which makes Kool A.D.'s second mixtape of 2012, 51, a surprise and a long time coming: Recorded entirely in Oakland with a heavy presence of Bay Area producers and rappers, it's a testament to his heretofore untested malleability, a new way to hear the old Kool A.D.-- something which the admirable, if loopy outré R&B of The Palm Wine Drinkard got only half right.
He takes every opportunity to enthusiastically serve as a tour guide ("Couple blocks from the sun dial/ Candlestick Park, south one mile/ Alameda, Walnut, St. Anthony"), drop slang, and rhyme over out-the-trunk 808s ("Ticky Ticky") and near-hyphy rhythms ("Manny Pacquiao") to let you know he's making himself at home again. Overall, though, 51 feels more like a comprehensive California thing, specifically mid-2000s Stones Throw in both sound and structure with the "for the love" generosity of recent E-40 tossed in. There's an intelligent stream-of-consciousness here, something along the lines of Madlib's work as Quasimoto or Guilty Simpson's overlooked OJ Simpson. To isolate a particular five-minute run, the typically dense "Donda" ("I'm so emotional like Thursday/ Cherchez anything/ So Diddy with it/ Looking for a check with like 50 digits") abruptly cuts to a Dylan sample ("Biz vs. Nudge") and then 15 seconds later, a screwed Young L production named after British art maven and media provocateur Damien Hirst where Kool A.D., Dope G, and MondreM.A.N. are outfitted with aluminum voiceboxes.
It all fits into the "goin' back to Cali strictly for the weather, women, and the weed" vibe, too genial and stoned to come off as chaotic as it reads, and even the tracks that initially feel like one-and-done listens-- Kool A.D.'s instrumentals in particularly tend to be longer on ideas than technique-- rarely end up triggering the fast-forward impulse. While a two-minute Huey Newton speech might sound like it clashes completely with the high spirits described thus far, it serves as a reminder of just how deeply felt the experience of recording back in Oakland was for Kool A.D., as well as a bridge between the Boots Riley feature "Leverage" and the paranoid "TV Eye".
To a certain extent, the presence of Main Attrakionz is surely something of a selling point-- if not the fact that Kool A.D. is actually rapping for the most part on this one rather than further pursuing the robo-tripping path of Palm Wine Drinkard. It's the outermost he's gone to interact with hip-hop as a whole, both stylistically and geographically, and it's not two worlds colliding so much as comfortably nestling. Neither changes their delivery in the slightest, and it doesn't do much to really put Kool A.D. within the current Bay Area conversation of "cloud rap" or #based. In those realms, the actual content takes on a secondary, if not subliminal, effect and even if Victor is mostly in pop-culture-acrostic mode here and occasionally repeats himself ("What the fuck is up, chico man?/ I'm Rico Suave, ya tu sabe/ Jewish Eddie Murphy in your barbershop/ Jewish Mel Gibson/ Black Tintin" is an example of his doing both), failing to listen closely is a disservice to yourself. Kool A.D. is rarely off-point during these 21 tracks, and I'll leave it to listeners to pick out their own personal gems-- the initial recognizing of the connections made is really where a lot of the thrill is with 51.
It's certainly good to hear Kool A.D. in his zone for an extended period of time again, but the revelation of 51 is producer Amaze 88, who's featured on eight tracks. He's definitely a revivalist and his grooves aren't particularly rare-- even beyond the easily ID'd Supremes samples, I imagine he spent a good deal of 2004 listening to The Pretty Toney Album and Madvillainy. But these are beats that Kool A.D. sounds fantastic over, and he's far more amenable to the warm and fleshy soul here than the metal-on-metal abrasiveness of Relax. No matter how dusty his fingers got searching for his material, Amaze lets everything sound alive and airy, with jumpy drum fills and falsetto cooing adding color to A.D.'s lackadaisical monotone.  There's an impressive roster here-- Trackademics, Mike Finito, and Young L in particular-- but any time you hear something that stands out for its enthusiastic take on pre-Donuts undie-soul, you can accurately guess Amaze 88 was on the beat. While his five-minute instrumental intro initially comes off like an unnecessary hurdle to hearing Kool A.D. drop one quotable after another on "Electrum" and "La Pinata", after a full listen, you see why he earned it in the first place.
It's the most consistently listenable thing out of the Greedhead camp since Sit Down, Man probably because it's the most effortlessly fun since Shut Up, Dude. More and more, it seems easy to isolate the combative Relax as Das Racist using their highest-profile release to play against their strengths and prove some sort of point-- you notice immediately just how much laughter and camaraderie there is on this thing. Lest you think their divergent mixtapes are indicative of an interpersonal schism, they've sounded as good as ever on the same track as of late, and that holds true on "A Different World". Like Heems' grittier and grimmer Nehru Jackets tape from earlier this year, 51 gets deeper into its creator's hometown roots as something of a fact-finding mission-- Kool A.D. sums up his bicoastal credentials over the slow-coasting "Oooh", shrugging, "My bad I slept through the session yesterday/ But yo you gotta admit, tho-- that's hella Bay/ Moved to New York cause sometimes you gotta get away."  Reverse the itinerary, and that about describes 51.


Houston rapper Maxo Kream borrows heavily from outsider visions of his own city, blending the local Houston and the more panoramic, now global idea of Houston and seeking a middle ground between the city’s perception and its reality.

Maxo 187

Houston’s rap scene—or more specifically, its aesthetic—has been ravaged by outsiders. The biggest appropriators, like Harlem’s A$AP Mob and Miami’s Raider Klan, have repurposed the sounds of DJ Screw and the lingo of UGK into a sort of chopped-and-screwed noir. It’s a haunting take on trill culture that sucks out most of the funk, leaving only distorted vocals and waves of ambience. Houston up-and-comer Maxo Kream is taking heed of the poachers and embracing their renditions of Houston rap and culture. He isn’t interested in reclaiming the city from squatters; in fact, he’s more than willing to play by their rules, and on Maxo 187 he seeks a middle ground between the city’s perception and its reality.
The record is a sinister and visceral portrait of Houston street life that binges heavily on the A$AP brand of trill, even enlisting one of its producers (A$AP P on the Boards). The music is a binary of local Houston and the more panoramic, now global idea of Houston, which spawned the #BEENTRILL movement and the widespread abuse of lean. Kream's sound is far more derivative of the A$AP crew than Z-Ro, but his music is still deeply indebted to Houston gang culture. The music is most menacing when Kream drapes his gangland tales over creeping synth progressions and pulsating bass lines reminiscent of Spaceghostpurrp’s "Pheel tha Phonk 1990".
Kream has been completely indoctrinated by gang culture, and on songs like "Thirteen" and "KKK" his raps are imbued with the rhetoric. At times, it’s borderline propaganda: On "Paranoia", which is produced by A$AP P on the Boards, he raps remorselessly about killing civilians and decapitating grandmothers for some sort of greater good ("Fuck your opinion I’m just trying to make a living"). It's chilling, in part because he doesn't even sound like he's trying to convince anyone that what he’s doing is worth it. Maxo 187 doesn’t portray cripping as an escape from the hood but a liberation from ordinary life.
The lyrics are peppered with occasionally complex ideas exposing the corrosive nature of gangs, and Kream softens these ideas with accessible metaphors. When he finds the right balance between the two, his wordplay clicks. "My boys goin' pop I ain’t talkin' Backstreet/ My guns goin' pop and the bullets in sync," he raps on "1998", laying the groundwork for a personal flashback to the year in question. Most of his more engaging rapping takes place when he avoids talk of homicide altogether. The Father-assisted "Cell Boomin" and dual-sided "Trap Mami / Flippin", both produced by Houston beatsmith Wxlf Gxd, are drug peddler anthems with bouncing flows that explore static thump and a syrupy codeine haze.
A year ago, Maxo Kream told Noisey that he felt the candy-coated Houston sound was dated and that it was time to welcome the city’s new image. His message was clear: The city has changed, so its sound should change with it. However, Kream has tethered himself to the A$AP interpretation of Houston rap and the music he’s making now is heavily shaped by the outside perception of his city, the reappropriation of Screw into something even more ominous. Though Kream maintains his ties to Houston street life, he continues to find himself in the reflection of those that have been pantomiming H-Town rappers for years now instead of those within the city limits.


The pop polymaths closed 2010 with this Christmas Eve gift: A mixtape in every sense of the word, with the group laying vocals over other people's music.

Kills

In the parade of 2010 holiday releases, jj's was among the most anticipated. In late November, the pop polymaths gave away single "Let Them" and promised to leave a free, new mixtape beneath the tree on Christmas Eve. And there it was, glistening on the Sincerely Yours website when the 24th came: A download link, well worth the wait. Kills is a true mixtape in both senses of the word. First, like the American rap tapes they seem to love (they've toyed with a lot of non-mixtape material as well as R&B covers in the past), much of this outing finds Elin Kastlander laying her vaporous vocals over other people's samples. It's all very tongue-in-cheek but at its core, Kills, which features a version of the "Let Them" single re-titled "Kill Them", also plays like the kind of tape one fan/nerd might give as a gift, but with a twist. These are songs and samples and scraps of melody they clearly loved enough to share.
jj boast a peerless melodic sensibility, and on this tape they're at once disorienting and exhilarating. You may even LOL every now and then. Because there's a lot of fun to be found in hearing, say, the hydraulicized pluck of Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E." slice through Kastlander's goofy, weed-heavy, Weezy-saluting whispers on opener "Still". Or in "Die Tonight", a Frankenstein of a track that opens with Kastlander lifting lines from Robyn's "Hang With Me" before vaulting into a dance-pop floor banger sewn together with a sample from Taio Cruz's "Dynamite". Though underrated, stretches of n° 3 did sound as though they had been left incomplete or drained of all the color that made its predecessor so vibrant. Even when smoked out or slowed down, Kills still teems with energy and both Kastlander and Joakim Benon, chameleons that they are, blend into snippets of song just as well as they shift gears between genres.
A lot of that is due to how well they can identify the potential for a new song in someone else's. "Kill [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| You" for example, takes M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" and transforms it into a torch-wielding break-up hymn. Kastlander riffs on the chorus, Benon adds a cushion of synths that sound like they could part clouds, and wham, you hear a new interpretation of a song (and its raised gun sample) that could go over fine in the quiet of a church. On "New Work", the duo takes the piano melody from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" and makes it the chassis for a song about being young and starry-eyed elsewhere. And then there's "Angels", which clips a Biggie Smalls vocal from a Diddy-Dirty Money track and bookends it with 2Pac's "Changes". Thankfully, this sort of conceptual relief saves the whole affair from being a slew of stonerizations and Auto-Tuned faux-swagger, which, by the way, still somehow ends up wreaking of swagger.
But in the end, as energizing as it tends to be, Kills feels more like a one-off stopgap between original jj full-lengths, an illuminating detour for creativity's sake. The album's climax, "Boom", stitches together three distinct pieces of Kanye's latest opus and then boldly tacks on blasts from Hans Zimmer's Inception score for even more gusto. When that "can we get much higher?" sampling from "Dark Fantasy", drifts in, it's not clear whether jj are referencing weed again or simply commenting on some music they love. But when Kastlander hums over the last few bars of "Runaway", the two seem one in the same. This is how they sing along.


Zomby's third album (and second for 4AD) is a two-disc set of short, nimble tracks loosely divided by attitude: "tough" on disc one, "contemplative" on disc two. With Love veers sharply from rhythmic duress to stoned calm, proving a reckless and inattentive immersive experience.

With Love

Zomby burst onto the scene in 2008 with a series of inventive singles and a mixtape/album that sampled Gucci Mane and Aaliyah into earworm rave. He seemed at the time capable of expanding the borders of bass music, a maverick in a scene where progress is still regarded as hugely important. Things haven't quite turned out that way. As peers like Burial, Rustie, and Pearson Sound have added their styles to an impressive history of U.K. electronic music (referred to as the "hardcore continuum" by journalist Simon Reynolds) Zomby has retreated into the canon, dragging up the bits-- grime's arcane melodic sense, U.K. Garage's shifty rhythms, dubstep's disorientation-- that best promote a perverse, personal history. Put more simply, Zomby likes to play progressive, but he's a synthesist at heart.
Never has this been more apparent than on Zomby's third album (and second for 4AD), With Love. A two-disc set of short, nimble tracks loosely divided by attitude ("tough" on disc one, "contemplative" on disc two), With Love is an abundance, an unabashed display of affection for that continuum. The execution is still very much Zomby: With Love veers sharply from rhythmic duress to stoned calm. For an immersion experience, it's reckless and inattentive.
Complicating matters, the album offers few signposts. Zomby still works with vocals, but they're less intrusive than on past albums. Even the requisite 90s R&B sample-- this from Brandy & Monica's 1998 hit, "The Boy Is Mine"-- is played with more subtlety than in the past. On "The Things You Do" and "If I Will", mangled vocal snippets are masterfully woven into the track's tapestry. There's no Panda Bear collaboration or Gucci Mane remix to peg, and the result is a long, even run of tracks that allows Zomby to hide beautiful, idiosyncratic moments in his thickets of rhythm. "Isis"' gentle, walking bassline and "I Saw Golden Light"'s brassy malevolence pass quickly and without pretense, offering their wares and then bowing to the next track.
Zomby continues to show no interest in fleshing out his ideas, but there's a pleasing efficiency to the way With Love's tracks move in and out of melodic phrases. His particular combination of dulcet synth tones and creeping leads tattoo these tracks, and his sense of rhythm stirs those ideas into hypnotic vignettes. With Love is less expansive than Zomby's early work; he's traded invention for the opportunity to explore every nook and cranny of his humid rhythm mazes. Like simple puzzles, the process and order of With Love transfix long after novelty has worn off.
Just as Where Were U in '92 played like a more vibrant and modern version of early 90s rave and hardcore, With Love offers a necessary sonic update on its inspirations. Drum & bass plays an increased role (Zomby also wonders where you were in 95), allowing Zomby to run stormy drum attacks like "It's Time" full-stop into creeping symphonic pieces. The album snaps on a good system, its depth charge bass anchoring hopscotch leads and tittering hi-hats. Considering that so much of what Zomby draws on was made on cheap computers with limited software, the comparative sonic richness of With Love's music is key. At times the album plays like an extended attempt to upgrade the haphazard majesty of white label grime tracks like DJ XTC's "Functions on the Low". Replacing a bleating, synthesized horn with a more harmonically complex tone separates Zomby from his source material, spiritually-- those shitty sounds were part of the appeal-- but also offers a crucial twist. With Love is reverent displacement: U.K. street music re-imagined as luxury.
With Love's short, baroque tracks balance its overall largesse, leaving a purpled, blunted ambience. Zomby's sense of melody and tone is distinct enough that, intentional or not, it feels like motifs and phrases are repeated and expanded upon throughout. Zomby accomplishes this despite his abrasive sequencing, cramming discordant pieces next to one another. With Love is like a pocket book of poetry, a series of short thoughts only tangentially related. Zomby is the elegant menace, capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit. The tension between Zomby's adoration for his heroes and his aberrant creativity fuels With Love, less a homage to the past than an intensification of it.


Pitched between heat-seeking acid house and ambient bliss, the techno auteur’s first album since 2013 is a beat-music odyssey that thrums with spiritual resonance.

Singularity

Jon Hopkins is playing God. That much is clear as soon as “Singularity,” the lead and title song on his first album since 2013’s Mercury Prize-nominated Immunity, shivers into being. A ferrous wasteland of synthesizer overhung by evaporated strings and guitar merge into a remarkably complete sonic landscape — the land and sky of a new world, with its own alien physics, its own genesis and apocalypse. Hopkins keeps hanging these strange planets in wobbly orbits throughout Singularity, forming a universe that pulses with deep consciousness and a sense of endless discovery.
Hopkins was known as a hired hand for Coldplay, Brian Eno, and Imogen Heap, with a sideline in tasteful IDM records until Immunity promoted him to noted techno auteur. Like that breakthrough, Singularity is a beat-music odyssey pitched between acid house and introspective ambient bliss, constant change and eternal return, sublunary and sublime. It also combines many other opposites into thrillingly unstable wholes. The producer’s distinctive techno is coarse and granular, as if electricity were a solid you could grind in a mill, yet it flows in a graceful stream. It squelches like muck and shines like crystal. It beats like a body, but it moves like a mind.
Singularity begins with a three-song voyage through a realm that’s recognizable from Immunity epic “Open Eye Signal,” one where much of the rhythm occurs in negative space. For a techno producer, Hopkins has a counterintuitive way of treating sound as something huge and immobile, then scything crop circles into those heavy frequencies to create a sense of motion. His beats are blanks, and his tracks feel unbound from the metronome. “Emerald Rush” climbs a ladder of Laraaji-like arpeggios and mountainous chord changes to some hidden summit of consciousness. The track features additional drum programming by Clark, another tailor of the fabric of spacetime—something Hopkins turns inside out at the drop on “Neon Pattern Drum.”
This is the kind of album that could only be realized by an expert technician and holistic composer, but Hopkins’ taste for popular music is also apparent. Even his most arcane compositions, like the sideways wobble of “C O S M,” are generous with melody. He taps into something distinctly spiritual and medicinal on Singularity, an urge to transform and heal through a trancelike ritual fusing techno with pop. That quality goes deeper than some meditation-tape song titles (”Everything Connected,” “Feel First Life,” “Luminous Beings”) and a couple of new age piano pieces.
Hopkins recently told The New Yorker that Singularity capped a period of seeking in his life, a time when he devoted himself to “desert treks, controlled breathing, [and] freezing baths.” He bottled that intensity in grooves that heave themselves into being, discovering their forms moment by moment. The songs here are about 75 percent build and 25 percent release, which is gripping, faintly exhausting, and, if you’re ready to go there, transcendent. Hopkins seems to model his music on the infinite cycles of destruction and rebirth that power the universe—but we, too, are part of the scheme. Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich.


The Portland experimental metal outfit have made their simplest record yet, one that is less sprawling than their earlier releases and scarier for its concision.

No One Deserves Happiness

With No One Deserves Happiness, Portland metal experimentalists The Body don’t add any new elements to their sound or introduce any new collaborators. Instead, they reconfigure their core elements — Chip King’s self-waged war between his shrieks and thick sheets of riff-noise, Lee Buford’s man-machine hammer, frequent collaborator Chrissy Wolpert’s vocals and chorus arrangements —and conscript them into their widening vision of the spot where metal intersects with other dark genres.  The result is less sprawling than All The Waters of Earth Turn to Blood and scarier for its concision.
Wolpert’s contributions over the years makes her almost a third member, and on Happiness she fights against the usual notion of women metal vocalists as pretty voices in the background or magnets for male gaze by becoming the confrontational center. The Body have often lashed out at the world through envisioning its end, and Wolpert turns that anxiety inward, proving that, yes, they can get more uncomfortable. The songs in which she has the heaviest hand are Happiness’ most powerful. Her chants of "go it alone" throughout leadoff track "Wanderings" feel like a visceral reminder of unremitting horror, and her chamber-pop instincts take on an alien tinge next to King’s shrill wail. She can also play off herself, as she does by combining a more brooding croon with brief soaring highs in "The Fall and The Guilt," the album’s most devastating track.
"Adamah" sees guest vocalist Maralie Armstrong channelling Kate Bush over Buford’s clipping thuds, not too far off from Rabit’s bullets-as-percussion approach.  Combined with King’s clipped rhythm, which recalls Blood’s "A Curse," it's the closest to pop that The Body have ever come. This isn’t a huge leap for them: They’ve covered Sinéad O’Connor’s "Black Boys in Mopeds," Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie," (with Thou) and Fleetwood Mac’s "The Chain" (also with Thou); never before has it seeped into their composition like this.
Pop and metal have more in common than diehards of both would prefer to admit, and one is both rely heavily on structure and tight performance. The Body aren’t improvisatory live, but they don’t play it straight like most metal bands do either, putting it all into an endurance test that’s made them both the heaviest live metal act and guaranteed death for punk houses’ electrical systems. King leans on noise on Happiness more than ever before, from subtle squeals in "Shelter is Illusory" and the undercurrent of "Hallow / Hollow" to the complete absence of chord structure in "For You" and "Guilt." When "The Myth Arc," the final song, kicks in, King blurs the line between doom metal and total noise abstraction. Buford is also a freer player than before, incorporating the punch of harsh techno beats but without an interest in keeping listeners in line with a steady, comfortable tempo. In a way, The Body has always been obsessed with feelings of consuming futility, and in kicking free of conventional structures and following Wolpert's lead, they've come closer than ever to their truest selves on record.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the vocalist on "Adamah" as Chrissy Wolpert. It is Maralie Armstrong.


The Queens-based songwriter offers nervy lo-fi synth pop that buzzes with everyday anxiety.

2nd

Most contemporary synthesizer music flows down one of two channels: There's dance music, which aims to set the body in motion, and then there's the now-ubiquitous scourge of “chill,” ambient music’s corporate descendant that guides the body to a state of rest and/or productive concentration. Queens-based songwriter Grace Ives maps her music to a third coordinate. Her new album 2nd is restless, seeking neither catharsis or sedation but instead exploring the gradations of thrumming anxiety.
This is a little like what James Murphy does with LCD Soundsystem, and a few of Ives’ new songs, like “Icing on the Cake,” recall his work. But where Murphy will stretch songs about self pity well past the seven-minute mark, Ives prefers to work in miniature. The tracks on 2nd are two minutes long, give or take; some run closer to one, and none goes longer than three. Her concision is a mark of her songwriting aptitude. She doesn't need to be verbose because she’s already said everything she needs to.
Ives’ vocal style—hushed, plaintive, and clear—evokes bedroom pop, but she is not interested in its purposefully scuffed-up sound. She produced 2nd herself, buffing the record to a gloss that flatters her simple but crystalline vocal melodies. Songs like “Butterfly” make do with just a handful of lead notes, sung first in an earthy low tone and then vaulted up an octave, Cocteau Twins-style, to a breathless head voice.
Ives wears plenty of different masks across 2nd. She's a giddy “sucker for love” on “Butterfly,” a skulking menace while speak-singing on “Something in the Water,” an eager pugilist “looking for a fight” on “Mansion.” Her synth work shifts to accompany each character, landing low percussive throbs like jabs or sending laser-gun pew-pews streaking across the high end. One mood she never entertains is boredom, a relief given how many of her peers overindulge their ennui. Ives is always curious, always hunting for the next spark. She’s not content to complain lightly over a four-on-the-floor trot.
The smallness of these songs lends them an accessibility, even when her lyrics approach existential dread. “I had a dream/That the earth was flooded,” she sings on “Nightmare.” “It must have been because of something I was watching on TV.” How can anyone go on living when the television says the end is nigh, and yet what choice does anyone have but to go on living? Ives grapples with the sheer mundanity of our era's atmospheric doom. She has no answers, but she's keeping a level head. She’s dealing.


After a car accident derailed her life, the pop singer returns with her second album, compacting emotional and romantic upheaval into tactile electro-pop packed with splashy synths and soaring melodies.

Crave

Kiesza’s house-pop hit “Hideaway” arrived alongside a rush of mid-2010s dance-pop crossovers, distinguishing the Calgary singer through an ecstatic blast of energy and a viral one-take video. Kiesza’s debut didn’t deviate far from that song’s formula, yet it also led to platinum sales in Europe, three Juno Awards, and a big-tent collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex’s Jack Ü. Then, while writing her follow-up in Toronto, a car accident derailed her life, leaving her with memory loss, fatigue, and balance issues on the left side of her body. Faced with the possibility of never performing again, Kiesza worked with a chiropractor and various alternative health approaches to will herself back into physical and mental shape within a remarkably fast two years.
The trauma led to more than just a bodily transformation. Kiesza parted ways with her major label to start her own; performed a brief, stripped-back acoustic tour; and released a pair of downtempo synth-pop songs that reflected a new sense of resolve. That reinvigorated spirit persists on Crave, Kiesza’s independently released second album, where she compacts emotional and romantic upheaval into tactile electro-pop packed with splashy synths and soaring melodies.
Crave is obsessed with overstimulation, both in its gale-force choruses and Kiesza’s plain-faced lyrics. Each touch is electric or addictive, as in the energetic “All of the Feelings” which, down to its title, unabashedly recalls Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION era. The festival-primed single rides a jaunty chorus (“I’m getting all the feelings back/You make me believe in love again!”), with verses punctuated with gasps of air and vocal runs that instantly evoke glee. “Run Renegade” pulls off the same feat, dolloping on the nostalgia with delightfully chintzy drum pads and lyrics that urge on the album’s themes of reclamation: “I’m not giving an excuse,” she sings, “because I’m not changing for you.”
Crave’s detours from euphoria feel sleekly designed in their own right. Kiesza slips into a more restrained vocal mode on the lithe “Love Me With Your Lie” and finger-snapped “When Boys Cry,” singing in a breathy mid-range that especially suits the former’s disco throb. Yet the maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer.
Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure. The title track is an ideal example of the album’s insistence on lifting you out of your bad mood, using Prince-inspired guitar licks and a rubbery synth line to express unfettered longing. Kiesza sounds free and untroubled over stacks of her own backup vocals, ready to give in to an emotional free-fall. It’s impossible not to feel the same exaggerated sense of bliss.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Clinic compile odds and ends from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of their albums, covering the period from their breakout Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations.

Funf

It's hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for Clinic. When they hit the ground running in the late 1990s, they were greeted with such an intense blizzard of critical acclaim that they were damned never to live up to the expectations set for them. Their fingerprint, first established on a series of excellent early EPs and solidified on their unremittingly brilliant debut album Internal Wrangler, is unmistakable: Drawing from dub, surf-rock, doo-wop, psych, British jazz, girl groups, the Velvet Underground, and everything in between, it's a sound that stimulates countless record-collector pleasure centers. And yet, for whatever reason, their successive albums have all felt relatively lacking, failing to fully recapture the diversity of their debut.
Now comes Funf, a collection of odds and ends pulled from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of Clinic's albums, covering the period from Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations. Funny enough, the random, fractured flow of the disc is the closest the band has come to recreating the aesthetic their fans have pined for since Walking With Thee changed the script with its consistent, icy sound. Unfortunately, the quality of the material widely varies.
The disc opens with "The Majestic", from the "Return of Evil Bill" single, an instrumental track that might have served as an alternate Internal Wrangler opener if "Voodoo Wop" hadn't bettered it. Radiating the haunted surf vibe Clinic have often explored, it packs enough material for a whole suite into just two minutes. The alpha, however, is quickly followed by the omega: "The Magician" B-side "Nicht" is just horrible, an overdistorted punk rant that transforms familiar Clinic territory into a dense, impenetrable mess. Nothing else on Funf approaches this nadir, but much of it comes off as subpar variations on sounds they've delivered more capably elsewhere. The "Second Line" single's "Magic Boots" is like a less memorable, vocal version of "Hippie Death Suite", for instance, while "Christmas" (off "Come Into Our Room") falls somewhere between "Earth Angel" and "Goodnight Georgie". With its jazz-inflected, smoothly flowing guitar part and well-placed hook, "Christmas" is something of a rarity on Funf: a well-executed run that actually earns its inclusion.
There are a couple of others here that deserve another look. "The Castle" (from the flip of "The Return of Evil Bill") is one of the record's best tracks, employing the overdriven organ sound of "2nd Foot Stomp" and spotlighting a classic, clenched-teeth vocal from frontman Ade Blackburn. "Lee Shan", originally a B-side to "Harvest (Within You)", rides a repeated piano phrase through a cavern of Spector-esque reverb, but instead of a Carole Kaye bassline and a soaring vocal, we get Blackburn's paranoia and nail-biting surf guitar with a bit of spooky reed organ. It's a good example of Clinic doing their best to subvert the expectations set up by the obviousness of the influences at work in their music.
Apart from these, there are a couple of surf-style tracks that sound kind of cool but don't feature much in the way of melody, some other tracks that were obviously left aside in favor of better ones, and a handful of go-nowhere experiments like "Dissolution; The Dream of Bartholomew", which aimlessly meanders between passages of stinging fuzz guitar and twinkly noises. Clinic completists aren't likely to find much of note here, as they'll already own all of these tracks and more (the collection is far from definitive, leaving off several b-sides, including "Stardust", "The Sphinx", "Saxon Road", "Cutting Grass", and "Mechanical Madrigal"), but those open to traversing the band's more haphazard experiments may find a few fleeting moments of worth.


Harpist Mary Lattimore traveled across the country with her harp; At the Dam, the album she made on the journey, bursts with ambition and ideas.

At the Dam

The only car that can even begin to fit Mary Lattimore’s 47-string Lyon and Healy harp is a vintage Volvo Station Wagon, with the the back seats folded all the way down. It’s a snug fit, the harp hogging all of the car’s square footage, leaving space for only one other passenger. Before she was collaborating with a legendary laundry list of artists (Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, and Arcade Fire to name a few) she ferried the instrument to and from the odd gig, usually weddings, playing by herself, and leaving by herself. The experience of  travelling, practicing, and performing with the harp is an undeniably solitary one. And intimate doesn't feel like it does a good enough job of describing this relationship. Lattimore’s harp is more than just the wellspring for her art and her livelihood, but a life companion.
In 2014 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship, so she and the harp decided to hitch up the station wagon and head out west. At the Dam is the travel journal of that meandering journey across the country, spread over 44 minutes and five songs. The album’s title was lifted from an essay in Joan Didion’s The White Album about the Hoover Dam. Lattimore tries her best to draw power from the staccato rhythms of Didion's sentences and the probing sensuality of her prose. While Lattimore never fully engenders that narcotic feeling of total surrender Didion felt on the 405, she comes close, rendering a landscape that is rich in memory and allusion.
The album was recorded mostly up and down the coast of Southern California from Santa Monica to Joshua Tree and also in Marfa, TX. All of the music was improvised, written in fragments, sculpted as the trip itself took shape. The opener, "Otis Walks Into the Woods" started in Marfa, after Lattimore learned that her family’s blind and elderly black labrador Otis wandered into the wilderness outside their home in North Carolina to pass away. His body was never recovered, and the song recreates the scene of Otis’s final walk through a daisy chain of slyly processed sounds.
"Otis" sets the table for the album’s first half, which is a meditation on mourning and lingering memories. With her harp as the sole interlocutor,  it’s quite a feat that Lattimore draws out such specific and poignant themes.  "Jimmy V," the track that follows "Otis" is dedicated to the late Jimmy Valvano, a charismatic basketball coach, famous for a life-affirming and courageous speech he gave at the 1993 ESPYs two months before his death. Somehow the tone of of these two songs is never wistful, the cloud of sizzles and pops that surround the harp are as familiar and therapeutic as an Alka-Seltzer pill being dropped into water. The grayness of mourning is colored in with the harp's dulcet sonic splatter.
At the Dam’s latter half is more concerned with explicit archiving—it’s obsessed with freezing transient or chance moments. "The Quiet at Night," "Jaxine Drive," and "Ferris Wheel, January" are environmental and diaristic, gentle accretions of sounds that bounce into each other, trail off into nooks and crannies, and bubble up towards unknown directions. Lattimore uses stray harp-string plucks to suggest the blips of a submarine’s radar throughout, a recurring touch that grounds the environment of these songs, giving shape to the world outside of the echo chamber Lattimore builds. Her sneaky ability to morph sounds and playfully off-kilter sensibility keeps the album from ever seeming fussy or needlessly ornate, always a risk with the harp.
The music plods at times, but that somehow doesn't feel like a problem. The slowness can feel like a blessing.  As music critic Ben Ratliff has said, this kind of slowness "invites reciprocity: it makes the listener want to fill the spaces with his own content." The disjunctions and hiccups in the sound, a result of the dialogue between the harp and the digital effects, reminds me of converting old family VHS tapes to DVD, and how the degradation of analog technology coupled with the imperfection of digitization unexpectedly shifts how you remember those records. In some ways, Lattimore borrows from the same decaying spirit that defined William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops. On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.


Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's fourth full-length was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, and includes contributions from the National's Matt Berninger and Kid Koala. The album has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time.

Only Run

Depending on your disposition, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are either a band to pity or one to envy. Their much-adored 2005 self-titled debut continues to tower over their entire subsequent discography, but then ringleader Alec Ounsworth seems more comfortable lurking in the shadows than basking in the spotlight. A glance at the band’s current touring itinerary reveals venues half the size of the ones they were headlining nine years ago, but Ounsworth is the sort of artist who’d rather play your living room than an arena. It seems like Ounsworth is exactly where he wants to be, having earned enough clout to, say, assemble Philadelphia indie-rock dream teams for his solo albums or live out his Tom Waits fantasies in New Orleans with some veteran funk session players in tow, while putting enough aesthetic distance between himself and that first Clap Your Hands album to ease the burden of expectation and follow whatever whim strikes his fancy. At this point, the ever-resourceful Ounsworth is beholden to no entity, save for the Bandcamp terms and conditions page.
But as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s fourth full-length Only Run illustrates, there’s a difference between feeling boundless and sounding rudderless. The album’s conception was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, leaving just the core of Ounsworth and drummer Sean Greenhalgh. Accordingly, in sharp contrast to the streamlined sound of 2011’s Hysterical, Only Run has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time, with an increased reliance on synthesizers, manipulated voice effects, sampled dialogue, and song fragments pieced together like unevenly aligned Lego blocks. The one constant through the CYHSY canon, of course, is Ounsworth’s excitable tremble of a voice, and, on an album-by-album basis (both within the band and without), he’s been eager to recast it in as many different contexts as possible. But Only Run often compacts this catholic approach into the span of a single song, with frustrating results.
While the circular drum pattern, synth-smeared ambience, and New Order-esque guitar lines of the opening “As Always” lend the track an ascendent grandeur that sounds more like a proper Dave Fridmann production than anything on the last album CYHSY recorded with him, in the final minute, the arrangement drops out to leave Ounsworth singing the verse melody on his acoustic guitar. It’s a classic songwriter ploy—to prove a tune is sturdy enough to stand on its own in the absence of studio embellishment—and, in this case, an effective one. But when the same trick is repeated on “Blameless” and the title track, wherein Ounsworth’s voice left to float in a desolate haze for extended stretches, the sense of structural randomness starts to feel like a crutch in and of itself.
And like a child playing dress-up with their parents’ wardrobe, Only Run’s impulsive change-ups can result in some ill-fitting looks: “Your Advice” aims for a Kid A-style deconstruction of a standard rock song, but the separation between Ounsworth’s clear-eyed, straight-forward melody and the ambient swirls floating behind it is so pronounced, it comes off like an unfinished remix with mismatched console levels. But even that seems complete compared to “Coming Down”, a trainwreck of a song that smashes together an overdriven fuzz-bass riff, melody-averse muttering, and a door-crashing cameo from Matt Berninger that feels less like a triumphant class-of-2005 reunion than him getting his decade-in-the-waiting revenge against CYHSY for upstaging the National on the latter's 2005 tour behind Alligator.
Fortunately, Only Run finally hits its stride in its more focussed second half, with Ounsworth and Greenhalgh strategically building upon simple ideas rather than trying to cram them together and see what happens. “Beyond Illusion” is essentially Only Run’s “Idioteque”, a drum-machined strut that retains its twitchy tension even as the mid-song appearance of Greenhalgh’s booming drums offer some levity. And if the unlikely collaboration with Kid Koala on the slow-motion sci-fi lullaby “Cover Up” proves anti-climactic, the shimmering “Impossible Request” yields the fully realized fruits of Only Run’s grab-bag experimentation, transmitting the band’s inherent ramshackle charm through an expanded palette of space-age sonics. But, of course, this being Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, bliss and balance can only ever be temporary states, as Ounsworth closes out “Impossible Request” with a promise-cum-threat worthy of being chiseled on his tombstone: “Please don’t ask me where I’m going… I’ll tell you again, I never know.” Though, at this point in Clap Your Hands’ perpettually zig-zagging career course, he need not ask us not to ask.