On her latest EP, the Kenyan composer explores concepts of home and memory through a series of melodic sound collages.

Nyokabi Kariũki: peace places: kenyan memories

peace places: kenyan memories

When Nyokabi Kariũki couldn’t go home, she listened for it. In 2020, while studying composition abroad, the Kenyan composer and multi-instrumentalist got stuck in her secondary abodes of New York and Maryland. With Kenya’s borders locked during the pandemic, she had no way to know when she’d be able to return to her hometown of Nairobi. But in her music, she retreated to the familiar haunts of her memory, constructing a likeness of home that began to distort into something tangled and dreamlike. Closeness to the place you call home brings comfort; distance can transform those feelings, magnifying the things you miss most. On her new EP, peace places: kenyan memories, Kariũki invites us to explore a selection of visions that grew larger than life during her time away.
Kariũki’s most cherished spots in and around Nairobi—which she affectionately calls her “peace places”—became the seeds from which each track on the EP would grow. She had started collecting videos of these locales on her phone years ago, and they now felt like a sanctuary when she felt the ache of homesickness. “I need to absorb everything, and sound is a way of preserving the memories,” she said in an interview with Spitfire Audio. Kariũki used the audio from these recordings as a base to build melodic sound collages, filling out each piece with relevant sketches of Kenya.
On “Galu,” the sound of waves swirling along the shoreline of the titular Kenyan coastal town is the compositional nucleus. “I go down at 6 AM to swim,” Kariũki repeats in a half-spoken refrain, as a cymbal softly skitters. The lapping waves intensify, and the percussion along with it—a thumping beat and the rapid plucking of a kalimba break in, like cutting a breaststroke against the tide. Kariũki uses the chirping of birds as the central germ of “Equator Song,” singing sweet harmonies over the discordant squawking. She sings here partially in Kiswahili, the national language of Kenya, and partially in Maa, as an homage to her Maasai heritage. The decline in use of Indigenous languages due to British colonial rule is a fact of life in Kenya, and Kariũki acknowledges her lack of fluency in each as an uncomfortable element of life in her homeland.
Time away from home can change the way you see things when you eventually return. When Kariũki was finally able to visit her grandparents for Christmas in 2020, she stored the occasion for safekeeping in the recordings heard on “A Walk Through My Cũcũ’s Farm.” The moment feels lighthearted as Kariũki’s grandmother shouts in her family’s native language of Kikuyu about the difficulty of plucking an onion from the ground. But an anxious electronic haze swirls underneath, slowly rising to the foreground. The contrast holds a mirror to Kariũki’s own conflicted feelings in the moment; there’s a sense of togetherness, but she knows it can’t last. “Peace maybe always does come with disconnect and dissonance,” Kariũki told Bandcamp Daily, “and maybe there’s a bit of home in that as well.” In her embrace of both the joy and the heartache, Kariũki paints a messy—and honest—picture of the places most familiar to us.


Meg Remy’s most free-ranging and least narrative-minded album draws on retro funk and ’80s R&B as it infuses her biting social critique and wry humor with fresh optimism.

Bless This Mess

Rare is the mess Meg Remy won’t chronicle. Abusive relationships, government surveillance, ecological disasters, capitalist exploitation—clunky when you spell it out so plainly, but these are the forces Remy’s characters are up against in her music as U.S. Girls. On past records, she rendered these narratives with solemn resignation or snarling intensity, her edicts of hard-earned hope never reaching a neat resolution. On her new album, Bless This Mess, she softens, searching for silver linings where there shouldn’t be any. Even when her optimism gets mangled through banal middle-aged and artistic angst—FaceTime is weird, but maybe serves a purpose? Music is healing, sort of like a rainbow?—Remy’s quest to find beauty amid a circus of suffering feels purposeful, like a weathered activist reflecting on how they’ve staved off cynicism after so many years.
Considering Remy’s roots as an experimental musician, it’s tempting to sticker each new U.S. Girls release as the “most accessible yet,” but Bless This Mess certainly makes a case. After beginning her solo career as a fuzz-crazed, lo-fi noise rocker—a DIY approach Remy later clarified was less an aesthetic choice than a result of limited resources—she transitioned to making art-pop that felt tame by comparison. Her projects pulled from ’60s soul, ’70s funk, gauzy psychedelia, post-punk, and synth-rock, her gestalt wandering between David Bowie and Broadcast, Animal Collective and Robyn. Her work was often difficult, littered with spoken-word skits and ambiguous narrative arcs, grainy mixes that eschewed clean arrangements, songs that detailed sexual violence and castigated Barack Obama.
Bless This Mess doesn’t shy away from such complexities—there’s plenty of anticapitalist critique and interpersonal distress—but it’s a decidedly forward-looking album. Glossier and more hi-fi than anything in Remy’s catalog, it draws from ’80s R&B, synth-pop, disco-house, and ’90s shoegaze to create a cascade of bright colors and gorgeous grooves, music that matches her aggressively optimistic demeanor. Opener “Only Daedalus” is a gold-streaked fusion of R&B and funk that uses the ancient Greek myth to comment on the hubris of our overbearing technocrats, Remy asking, “Where is your soul?” before chiding that “the world is not your wheel.” You don’t need to unlock the writing to have a ball, though; “Only Daedalus” begs you to lose yourself in the rhythm, to dance before wondering what it all means.
Although Bless This Mess favors retro funk and honeyed R&B, Remy recruits a diverse community of collaborators to help her explore different styles. On the smoldering synth-pop cut “Futures Bet,” co-produced by her husband, Slim Twig, she suggests that we can alleviate existential anxiety by “breathing in, breathing out.” Halt your eye roll—unlike self-help books and profit-seeking CEOs, Remy’s evocation of mindfulness reads not as a flimsy bromide but as a way to attain stability through the most freely available self-care practice. She follows this up with the Ryland Blackinton (Cobra Starship) and Alex Frankel (Holy Ghost!)-produced “So Typically Now,” an electro-house screed against urban flight and combustible real estate markets. Its criticisms are biting, but Remy also seems to be winking at former city dwellers who have discovered freedom beyond fast-paced, work-obsessed lives.
Written and recorded while pregnant, and then while tending to her newborn twins, Bless This Mess is Remy’s most free-ranging and least narrative-minded record. She evokes the disorientation of childbirth on “Pump,” a song that grapples with the sudden bodily and emotional demands of being a mother. But the most striking line arrives when she observes that “what I do tonight, it makes our tomorrow,” a seemingly obvious observation that illuminates how the habits of attention she advocates for throughout the album—meditation, humility, a life without screens—feel more urgent now that she’s modeling them for children. Her less direct contemplations on motherhood tend to be more insightful, like on “St. James Way,” in which a woman takes a taxi down the Camino de Santiago and thinks, “I don’t want a castle, just a door to shut.” The plea for privacy recalls Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as does Remy’s wrestling with the incongruities of maternity and art-making, socially prescribed gender roles and personal freedom. Bless This Mess isn’t the exacting political statement that 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited and 2020’s Heavy Light were, but it expounds the belief that acknowledging our inherited hardships can help us carve a path to fulfillment.
On “Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo),” a song narrated from the perspective of a tuxedo buried in a closet, Remy sings, “I was your passport to so many rooms, your mask of pure exclusivity/Now you treat me like a long-gone novelty, a costume—is that how you see me?” It’s a cheeky conceit deployed to consider how gendered wardrobes construct and confine our identities, how these items infuse us with confidence, insecurity, vanity. It’s also a disco-funk explosion, ecstatic from every direction. Even when the satire wanes, the potency of the music remains. Like the rest of the album, Remy shakes free her sorrows and stretches loose her limbs, sanguine as she moves across the dancefloor.


This raucous Austin band's second album dials back some of the garage rock intensity in favor of introspective songs with a more emotional tug.

Be Brave

Austin's the Strange Boys debuted last year with The Strange Boys and Girls Club, a play-it-loose collection of twangy garage tunes suited for pool hall scuffles. It was an album content to play well within a defined set of parameters and found them tinkering with rockabilly, 1960s R&B, and British Invasion rock. It's easy to imagine the Strange Boys could churn out sets of these half-drunk shakers forever, and considering how well they did pull it off, that seemed like something to look forward to.
But follow-up album Be Brave isn't Girls Club II. It's far less boisterous, unafraid to slow things down and let the band stretch out a little. Though still alive with rambling charm, loneliness hangs over much of album, nurturing a more introspective feel. "Life changed on you again," frontman Ryan Sambol mentions at the beginning of "A Walk on the Bleach", in his unmistakable early Dylan yowl. And indeed, something seems to have changed for the Strange Boys, as they no longer have a need to get their Ya-Yas out on every track. Be Brave is a cleaner, more mature look, peppered with feelings of unease and imparting a greater focus on country, blues, and a little balladeering.
Most of Be Brave is marked by mid-tempo numbers that give the band a little space to play around with rootsier incarnations that favor bits of organ, piano, and plenty of twangy guitar. The jauntier songs tend to have a woozy, communal appeal, like opener "I See" or the saloon-piano accented "Da Da". Fans of Girls Club will find joy in the title track, a thrilling little slice of twist-inducing primal R&B (augmented by a warped sax break, courtesy of the now-disbanded Mika Miko's Jenna Thornhill). But the majority of the album takes on a different shape, taking great care to show some restraint even when it seems unnatural.
The Strange Boys have proved to be great attention-grabbers but seem a little lost when things get too quiet. The three acoustic ballads that round out the album are a little dull, and the Boys' cautious pacing doesn't always hold up to close listening. A lot of these moments leave you feeling antsy, with hope that another one of their deranged sock-hop jams might be lurking somewhere around the corner. But the key to Be Brave is allowing the band to dig around, and the rewards-- while occasionally a little slow in coming-- reveal that the Strange Boys can offer more than just a quick fix. For a band formerly so brash and unhinged, it's a bold look in its own way.


Raphaelle Standell and Alexander Kerby’s third album draws upon classic house and disco in its examination of the pitfalls of love in the digital era.

Tenderness

Art in the 2010s is rife with stories that start in a chat box. From “Catfish” to Yo Gotti’s “Down in the DM,” the concept of love and courtship bubbling and blooming remotely, over the internet, is increasingly commonplace. Tenderness, the third album by the experimental pop duo Blue Hawaii, situates itself in this new sub-genre of romantic art. Musically and lyrically, it attempts to recreate the headspace and “challenges of handling relationships online”—the isolation, the miscommunication, and lack of physical presence.
The album is the duo’s first in roughly four years, and it picks up where their last album, 2013’s Untogether, left off. A self-described breakup record, Untogether was written while Raphaelle Standell and her creative partner Alexander Kerby were separated: She was touring with her rock band Braids and he was off living in Europe, soaking in club culture. The sound that separation produced was cold and spectral and filled with echoes. After completing that album’s tour cycle, the two split yet again, putting Blue Hawaii on hiatus while Standell returned to Braids and Kerby split his time between L.A. and Berlin, learning how to DJ and produce dance music. They started working together on Tenderness last year during a period when Standell was in an “intimate relationship” that was being conducted mostly over instant messaging.
The pieces on Tenderness are all love songs about the digital age, and in order to tell these stories, sonically speaking, the two set out to create a whole new sound. Where Untogether was frigid and ghostly, the Blue Hawaii of Tenderness were remade for the dancefloor in mind. Perhaps half-jokingly, they’ve taken to describing their new direction as “Björk meets the xx and DJ Koze.” While there is some credence to their description—the combination of instrumental colorfulness and diaristic intimacy on Tenderness speaks to this—they’ve pulled a lot more from the golden age of house and disco.
This is especially clear on songs like “No One Like You,” which is constructed around an instrumental sampled from Kenix’s 1980 disco classic “There’s Never Been (No One Like You).” The two have added even more light and color to Kenix’s boogying bass and drum line with horns and wiggly synths. Standell, who is the group’s main vocalist, channels the house divas of yore with brassy, sweet, and bellowing delivery. The song establishes many of the album’s main instrumental themes—horns synths, flutes, and four-to-the-floor beats—which creates a breezy feeling throughout. On the opener, “Free at Last,” techno kick drums and blasts of saxophone make for a well-sculpted club beat. Elsewhere, as on “Versus Game,” they reinterpret fluttering ’80s synth pop, and Standell’s protean voice handles the shifts seamlessly. Overall, the production is excellent, and the sound design of each of the album’s songs is thoughtful and tightly constructed. Instrumentally, the two know how to set the mood just right, striking a balance between joy and ennui.
Lyrically, Tenderness can be pretty shallow. If these are songs about disconnection and misunderstanding, the lyrics don’t do a great job of fleshing out the concept. Most of the songs are built on platitudes (“I wanna be dancing in the moonlight/I wanna be dancing by your side”; “Searching for you/You had me waiting”) that don’t particularly evoke text-message flirtations or digital loneliness. In between the songs, a handful of skits and field recordings attempts to create a sense of manufactured intimacy. The best of these is “Big News,” a voicemail set to sleazy nightclub beat. But for the most part, these little interludes are forgettable, and Blue Hawaii struggle to give Tenderness a narrative that would makes their concepts feel more substantial. Still the warm, well-wrought pop of Tenderness is by far the group’s most enjoyable collection of songs.


"Mwa-AAAA-aaaaa-Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yeahhhh!"

That's how Marc Bolan kicks off *The Slider*, T. Rex's follow-up to the career-making *Electric Warrior*, which brought the band out of the folk circuit and onto the rock stage. That lead track, "Metal Guru", belongs in the pantheon of great rock album openers: It's a rapturous two-and-a-half minutes, a joyous celebration of itself. Amazingly, *The Slider* doesn't let up after that, but sustains its high across 13 boogie-bound tracks, each punctuated by Bolan's enthusiastic "yeah!"'s and "woo!"'s. He even starts "Baby Strange" with what might be the silliest count-off ever.

At the peak of his rock superstardom, Bolan was

T. Rex: The Slider / Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow / Dandy in the Underworld / The T. Rex Wax Co. Singles: A's and B's 1972-77

"Mwa-AAAA-aaaaa-Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yeahhhh!"
That's how Marc Bolan kicks off The Slider, T. Rex's follow-up to the career-making Electric Warrior, which brought the band out of the folk circuit and onto the rock stage. That lead track, "Metal Guru", belongs in the pantheon of great rock album openers: It's a rapturous two-and-a-half minutes, a joyous celebration of itself. Amazingly, The Slider doesn't let up after that, but sustains its high across 13 boogie-bound tracks, each punctuated by Bolan's enthusiastic "yeah!"'s and "woo!"'s. He even starts "Baby Strange" with what might be the silliest count-off ever.
At the peak of his rock superstardom, Bolan was also at the top of his game, and The Slider is his ecstatic ode both to himself and to music in general. The 50s rock rhythms that threatened to burst the seams of Electric Warrior here explode mightily and repeatedly. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Elvis Presley loom large, but Bolan throws some glitter and make-up into the mix and comes up with something both familiar and new. Meanwhile, the band-- percussionist Mickey Finn, Steve Currie on bass, and Bill Legend on drums, plus producer Tony Visconti-- lock in on the grooves that propel "Buick McKane", "Baby Strange", and "Chariot Choogle". In a glam-jive code that combines Dylanesque wordplay with psychedelic imagery, Bolan writes about himself and his coterie, filling songs with shout-outs to hangers-on he nicknames Telegram Sam (allegedly his supplier during the recording sessions), Golden Nose Slim, Jo Jo, and Buick McKane, as well as to Dylan, Alan Freed, and Max's Kansas City. As such, The Slider reveals a lot about the man behind the glitter-- not through outright confessional songwriting, but via personal peccadilloes like, "And when I'm sad... I slide!" It's Bolan locating the perfect stance from which he can say nothing and everything at once.
Of course, neither the celebrity nor the music lasted. For one thing, Bolan was quickly outdone by the pomp of David Bowie and other glam androgynes, and left behind when his cultural moment passed. For another, his gift for excess, while previously a boon to his songwriting, was a bane when it came to drugs. When his star began to fade, so did his music. These four reissues from Rhino, which are essentially identical to the Edsel reissues from a few years ago, track T. Rex's downward trajectory but attempt to redeem the band's later, lesser releases by packaging each album with a bonus disc that re-creates the tracklist using alternate takes, live tracks, and B-sides. On Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, the second disc actually outshines the original album, presenting looser, funkier, less worked-over versions of those clunky songs.
Released after Tanx (which will be reissued later this month, alongside two other albums and a collection of unfinished songs), Zinc Alloy flails desperately as Bolan tries to incorporate his new fascination with American funk into the T. Rex sound. Unfortunately, these elements only make the songs sound as leaden as their titles suggest. On "Galaxy" and "Sound Pit" he alludes to past hits "Bang a Gong (Get It On)", "Metal Guru", and "Telegram Sam", but here his self-mythologizing sounds jaded, as if he needs to remind listeners of past glories to justify his current excesses. "Carsmile Smith and the Old One", "Painless Persuasion v. the Meathawk Immaculate", and "The Leopards Featuring Gardenia and the Mighty Slug" all sink under the weight of bulky concepts and awkward grooves, and the prominent backing vocals by Bolan's American girlfriend, soul singer Gloria Jones, ratchet up the theatrical bombast to gaudy heights. Change, as the bonus disc is retitled, strips away most of the orchestral overkill, but the songs still sound empty, their joy curdling into bitterness.
Originally released three years later (with two other albums in between), Dandy in the Underworld recaptures Bolan's former spiritedness, as he imagines himself cast out from the realm of stardom. On the title track, he's Orpheus traveling through a hell of popular indifference. "When will he come up for air? Will anybody ever care?" Bolan asks on the chorus, but instead of whining, he seems genuinely hurt by the betrayal of his errant muse. Oddly enough, the album finds a reinvigorated Bolan crafting some of his best hooks and calibrating his catchiest grooves in years. The cosmic "Crimson Moon", the infectious "I'm a Fool for You Girl", and the album's centerpiece, "Jason B. Sad", alternate between carefree and cautious, conjuring a gravity that counterbalances the upbeat, stripped-down rhythms. The album trails off near the end-- especially with Bolan's hammy Elvis impersonation on "Pain and Love"-- but "Teenage Riot Structure" picks up the Orpheus thread again, with lyrics that intimate his fears, doubts, and hopes. The album's most noteworthy flaw, perhaps, is that it sounds best in context with the other albums; only to a degree does Dandy stand on its own, but it accrues additional force as the final chapter in Bolan's ongoing story of Marc Bolan.
That mythology further unfolds on The T. Rex Wax Co. Singles: A's and B's 1972-1977, which collects the singles Bolan released between albums. He often released songs as singles long after they'd already appeared on albums, and as a result, there's no strict chronology to the tracklist. "Baby Boomerang", for example, appeared as an A-side nearly five years after it was originally released on The Slider. Plus, all of these songs appear either as regular or bonus tracks (some in multiple versions) on the Rhino album reissues, so this 2xCD set sounds like an abridged edition of the series rather than an career overview. Still, it's amazing that singles like "Children of the Revolution", the mighty "20th Century Boy", and the giddy "Celebrate Summer" never made it onto any of the band's original albums-- omissions that reveal the depth of T. Rex's catalog as well as its sturdiness 30 years on.


Cleveland rapper Kid Cudi's new Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon represents his catalog in miniature: A vast, serene, often-beautiful vista of sounds—and then this guy, standing right in front of them.

Kid Cudi: Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon

Take a look at the album title: Kid Cudi's heading back to the moon. The timing makes sense. His first two albums took place there, both of which went gold. Now that he's drifted away permanently from the G.O.O.D. Music axis, a return voyage probably seems appealling. The first track, "Destination: Mother Moon" sets the course—it opens on a horizon-blotting synth panning overhead, and it conjures some genuine fear and awe (Cudi's always been good with synthesizers). But the instrumental bleeds quickly into the first full track, "Going to the Ceremony", and, inevitably, Cudi shows up. On the chorus, he intones "I"m going ... It's. All. Happening,", suggesting that your only companion on this lunar vessel is a hyped-up mid-level marketing associate.
The moment is the Kid CuDi catalog in miniature: A vast, serene, often-beautiful vista of sounds —and then this guy, standing right in front of them. Kid Cudi has been standing in front of his own music ever since his 2009 debut, doing whatever he can to distract you from his genuine talents: a composer's ear for atmosphere, a professional producer's taste in tone colors. His lyrics, however, remain darts thrown at a barn door. "You're such an adult, pay all your bills, yet you are a zombie," he sings on "Going to the Ceremony". His singing is ruthlessly flat, and his melodies doodle noncommitally around the same three-note melody he's been humming ever since "Day N Nite". His go-to cadence as a rapper is more "Adam Sandler imitating a rapper" than "rapper." These traits were hard to ignore when he showed up, and he's done absolutely nothing to minimize them in the interim.
Of all these issues, his lack of melodic imagination as a singer is the most damning and difficult to get around. He sabotages almost any track he breathes on. The synths on "Too Bad I Have To Destroy You" sparkle  like light on water, little off-beat accents coursing beneath and piano notes providing the bass line. It's a smooth, exhilarating piece of music, but Cudi defaces it, stuttering and tum-de-tum-tumming all over it, like an eighth-grader who wondered into the unattended studio and left his own vocal track just for laughs. Pick any track: on "Internal Bleeding", he assumes a mush-mouth delivery that might be a stab at dramatizing the condition in the song title. Maybe we're supposed to imagine this guy singing on the floor with a mouth full of broken teeth? At any rate, the music tumbles down around him like a drunk grabbing onto a curtain rod.
To navigate successfully around a Kid Cudi album, then, is to get really good at squinting at the periphery. A lovely little piano figure here, a sonar blip traveling through the mix there. Mercifully, SATELLITE FLIGHT ups the ratio on instrumentals to Cudi tracks, and they are, to a degree that is near-comical, the best and most listenable pieces of music CuDi's ever released as a solo artist. "Return of the Moon Man" blends a chugging string quartet figure with mournful reverb'ed guitar, while Imperial March horns—notably similar to Yeezus's "Blood on the Leaves" —blare overhead. It could almost have snuck onto the last Fuck Buttons album and gone unspotted. "Copernicus Landing" is a calm, glowing maze of New Age synths, the sound of machines chattering quietly to each other. Crucially, Cudi never utter a word.
Something surprising happens at the eleventh hour of SATELLITE FLIGHT, however, and it bears mentioning. The sci-fi synths drop away, as does the dead-eyed chest-puffing. Cudi sings—sweetly, modestly, and in tune—over nothing but some guitar, finger-picked with athe level of skill that suggests a deep study of Green Day's "All By Myself". The song is just two chords, but the voicing is haunting, and as Cudi hums to himself a sweet little melody, he instantly transforms into another possible version of himself: an indie-pop sad-sack troubador, recording on a bed strewn with K Records 7-inches. It's an unlikely sight, but it's a glimpse of the guy that's never quite made it onto a Kid Cudi record before. May his next record consist entirely of sci-fi instrumentals, or anti-folk ditties, or both.


Backed by Blockhead’s spare production, the Long Island-bred rapper continues his creative evolution, writing more incisively about himself than ever before.

Garbology

A little less than halfway through Aesop Rock’s new album, Garbology, he places himself in a scene: He’s imagining himself casing his own house when a neighbor catches him; the two share a mundane exchange (“You OK, dude?” “Yeah—you OK?”). It’s Beckettian: The banality, as always, is the point.
Fourteen years ago, the Long Island-bred rapper famous for his labyrinthine flows put out his last LP for El-P’s landmark indie rap label Def Jux. Though he had self-released an excellent EP, Appleseed, and put out a similarly inspired album, Float, on Mush, it was with Def Jux that he became an icon to early 2000s underground fans and other rappers. (Labor Days, his treatise on work released a week after the September 11 attacks, is perhaps the defining record of its kind from that era.) But after 2007’s well-received None Shall Pass, Aesop disappeared from the public eye and did not release a solo recording for five years.
In that time, Def Jux went on a hiatus that turned permanent. Aesop’s best friend, the rapper Camu Tao, died of lung cancer. The CD-sales economy that buoyed small labels mostly collapsed. When Aesop returned, he did so on Rhymesayers, the Minneapolis indie label co-founded by Slug and Ant of Atmosphere. Over the course of seven years, he released three solo albums. Where he previously split production duties with his longtime collaborator Blockhead and a smattering of outside contributors, these were entirely self-produced. While they are certainly recognizable as works by the same artist who made Bazooka Tooth, the stylistic breaks from the Def Jux era to the Rhymesayers one are notable: Even when Aesop’s current mixes are busy, they are seldom cacophonous; even when the pronouns suggest his gaze has turned to the outside world, he is now writing more incisively about himself. By last year’s Spirit World Field Guide, Aesop was making his best—most provocative, most personal, most rhythmically daring—music since 2001, much of it about casing one’s own proverbial house under a proverbial neighbor’s indifferent nose.
Garbology blows up that change in the liner notes but continues that creative evolution. Though the two have been working together since 1997, this is the first LP of Aesop’s that is entirely produced by Blockhead. It is also his most musically spare. A perfect case in point is lead single “Jazz Hands,” which is lush but initially minimal, making space for bemused riffs on seldom-seen relatives and his own hypertechnique (“I step into the room, split an arrow with an arrow/The first trick shot is just to show ’em that I dabble/...I will not be aiming for the apple”). When Aesop is done rapping, Blockhead’s drums finally, forcefully kick in for a 70-second coda. The song’s structure would be audacious in a vacuum; that it’s the second track on the album suggests supreme confidence in the record’s shape.
This abundance of negative space makes room for the subtle vocal variations Aesop has been deepening since 2012’s Skelethon. His flows are increasingly complex, though he leads the listener through them with changes in tone and timbre. On one of the record’s best songs, “More Cycles,” Aesop spends a lot of time a hair behind the beat, irresistibly syncopated. (It also features some of his most imagistic writing: “I could hold a wheelie for a decade/Circle any borough like a bird around a headache/Mercury in retrograde, mercenary working through the Jengascape/Body and the spirit going separate ways.”) “Wolf Piss” could be read as a song-length demonstration of how his knotty, turn-of-the-century flows were refitted for commercial rappers in the 2010s; when, on “Fizz,” he stretches out the last syllable of “I can feel my life force leaving meeeeee,” you’re left to wonder if he’s borrowing from stylistic successors like Open Mike Eagle, or whether all these tics lead back to Aes.
Despite its tight construction, Garbology is at its best when it succumbs to a certain irresolution. The closer, “Abandoned Malls,” is so grim as to be genuinely upsetting—Blockhead’s beat has some B-movie gloom, but its relentless forward pulse taps into something darker. Most telling is the conclusion of “All the Smartest People,” the short sketch that begins with the scene of Aesop and his neighbor outside the house. “I don’t use shortcuts/I don’t use pace cars/Cut through a graveyard, just to cut through another graveyard,” he raps, and then the song fades out, the deaths and monuments to them blurring into one another.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The California producer and New York rapper collaborate on a contemplative and captivating lo-fi rap record about moving through this life and into the next.

Lived and Born

California producer klwn cat and New York rapper Sunmundi each inhabit the intersection where the experimental reflection of Ka and Navy Blue collide with the minimal charm of Roc Marciano and Preservation. cat cites Navy and J Dilla as influences on his style, but the beats he’s been making since 2022’s sphynx, vol. 1 have matured beyond homage, becoming liquid and enveloping. Meanwhile, Sunmundi’s flow, which started out with a strictly metered delivery, has slowly loosened to match his melancholic prose, earning shoutouts from billy woods. After a handful of collaborations, they both emerge with energy and talent to burn on Lived and Born, their first full-length together. Here, they produce and rap like they’re digging themselves out of shallow graves with their teeth.
Lived and Born flirts with ideas of reincarnation and digs through Sunmundi’s past, present, and future to grasp at the tether between them. But even when the ruminations feel inescapable, he blazes through them with the precision—and triple the urgency—of Long Island rapper-producer Lungs. When, near the end of early standout “Capitulation,” he says “Happiness nowadays just don’t hit the same,” the thought is stacked with playground memories, the healing qualities of brown butter pierogies, and a bottomless appetite for each new chapter of life. “Late-stage capitulation is a motherfuckin’ sonuvabitch!” he says in one echoing gulp of breath, channeling the time-conscious frenzy of Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. klwn cat’s flutes and soft drum rolls trill in the background, giving Sunmundi’s words the weight of biblical edicts.
That’s the core of the pair’s chemistry: cat’s mournful loops split the difference between the gothic horror of Ingmar Bergman and the smoky ambience of film noir, while Sunmundi’s bars scurry through them, frantic but determined. Over the rumbling bass and violins of “New Pavement,” he’s piecing together head-busting aphorisms (“The only way to make sense of this world was to fabricate it”) while struggling to find the strength to breathe. On the sparkling “Answering the Call,” he’s swinging his feet from the spaceship and taking comfort in how much he doesn’t know. Sunmundi’s level of certainty in the world and in himself shifts from song to song—on the bittersweet “Everything Is Everything,” he switches from hopeful to despondent on a dime—but cat’s soundscapes ground him in the present.
As often as Lived and Born trudges knowingly through existential crisis, the songs retain a youthful fervency that keeps them out of shadow. Depression is never too far away, but cat and Sunmundi refuse to be defeatists. Closing tracks “I Lived” and “Harbingers” explicitly make this case, their gleaming instrumentals unfurling like sunrises as Sunmundi keeps pace. “Lick the wound if you bleeding, but don’t develop a taste for your own trauma,” he says on the latter. Many in the indie rap lane are sorting through trauma in search of a more edifying tomorrow; for cat and Sunmundi, reincarnation means sculpting new lives from the ashes of their old ones.


The long-running Baltimore folk-rock band has never sounded so at ease, or so electrifying.

Let It All In

Even when they were a young Baltimore band, Arbouretum felt proudly old. They emerged in the ’00s amidst a scene charged with youthful possibility —the electronic fantasias of Dan Deacon, the aptly named projections of Ecstatic Sunshine, the dream-pop diaries of Beach House. Arbouretum, meanwhile, mined Richard Thompson’s intricate British folk revivalism, Will Oldham’s stately country psychedelia, and the gnarled roots of both. The anachronism was alluring, a mysterious shade of gray lurking inside a kaleidoscopic city.
In the years since, Arbouretum have methodically adjusted that formula, tweaking familiar elements like a baker adjusting the ratios of a sourdough starter. In the process, they have alternately seemed listless or impatient. Maybe they’ve finally found their perfect balance, because they have never sounded more settled—or more quietly electrifying—than they do on Let It All In, their seventh and most assured album. After nearly two decades, Arbouretum have grown into their age.
Whether weaving intricate leads or exploding into Pentecostal solos, founder Dave Heumann has long been a rousing guitarist. But after 15 years, he helms a band that knows when to press him forward or let him roam. The gentle harmonies and surging chorus of “How Deep It Goes” lead to a bluesy and triumphant Heumann solo, while “Buffeted by Wind” channels the sublime warmth of the Byrds in their prime for a meditation about finding redemption in being deserted.
As a songwriter, Heumann has sometimes been burdened by tradition, attempting to shoehorn his experiences into antiquated inspirations. But Let It All In feels lived-in and newly cut from his core. He finds meaning in the high peaks and deep ravines of the American West and forces himself to stay awake through the night just to remember we can be remade with the morning. His images are subtly evocative: “Shifting grids in dreamsight’s fracture-written key” he intones on “A Prism In Reverse,” while on “Headwaters II,” he howls “The river’s born high/Where the sky breaks to meet the divide.”
The band, now in perfect lockstep, seems to understand him. They are as fragile as his gently crackling voice during the beautiful “Prism in Reverse,” as committed to overcoming doom as he is during “Headwaters II.” They crackle with the intensity of Television and the insistence of Endless Boogie throughout the title track, a 12-minute tirade about being overwhelmed by the world but trying to remain open to its wonder. For the second half, Heumann rabidly twists and turns through variations on a note or two, damning expectations of a guitar solo like Neil Young a half-century ago. The band cheers him on wordlessly.
Arbouretum have never been concerned with being fashionable, but our times have changed to match their baseline anxiety. Heumann writes from the perspective of the perennially dispossessed, whether as the refugee of flooded coastal plains during the boogie-woogie thriller “High Water Song” or as ordinary folks seeking communion for the hypnotic “A Prism in Reverse.” Even when these songs are about fleeing some tough fix, Heumann documents the solidarity of our struggle for validation.
“No Sanctuary Blues” captures the curse and hope many of us face daily—waking each morning to find a world so crowded with the noise of the news that madness seems a turn away. Heumann gets lost in his guitar, its notes like a tangle of briars, but reemerges to flee his “mounting sense of lack.” The band soon arrives to join him, repeating a simple little riff for two minutes like it’s a communal mantra. In that moment, everything else falls away.

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


The Ohio party animals scale back the turnt-up thrash of their past in favor of nuanced black metal—without losing their feral edge—on their first full-length with vocalist Adam Clemans.

Devouring Radiant Light

The past five years have seen major changes for the Ohio metal band Skeletonwitch. During the New England leg of their October 2014 tour, firebrand frontman Chance Garnette suddenly left the band. Several days later, Massachusetts authorities charged him with assault and battery of a family/household member. Reflecting on the situation months later, Garnette cited his drinking problem as the primary reason for his exit—a framing one of the band’s guitarists, Scott Hedrick, refuted in an interview, telling Vancouver Weekly, “A bunch of beers didn’t make this change happen.”
In time, “this change” would entail not only a new frontman, but a sobering reorientation of Skeletonwitch’s entire sound. 2016’s inaugural release with vocalist Adam Clemans (also of the blackened-sludge outfit Wolvhammer, and a former member of the metalcore group Veil of Maya), an EP titled The Apothic Gloom, found the band members exercising extreme self-discipline, scaling back the turnt-up thrash of their past in favor of nuanced black metal. It was a smart pivot, for several reasons: It mitigated any tonal discrepancy between Clemans’ militant vocals and the giddy thrash of his predecessor; it provided Hedrick and his axeman-in-arms Nate Garnette with a platform for showing off top-notch fretwork that had long been overshadowed by their ex-vocalist’s Tasmanian-Devil charisma; and—most vitally—it allowed Skeletonwitch to venture outside their comfort zone while retaining the feral energy that propelled them to infamy.
The band’s latest album, Devouring Radiant Light, doubles down on this stark approach, effectively recasting the Midwestern party animals as cold-hearted Vikings who deploy their instruments of war strategically as well as sadistically. Here, they strive for dynamic evolution and stylistic growth, as opposed to sinister, Dionysian excess. That the first minute of opening track “Fen of Shadows” comprises a unaccompanied, chiming guitar lead, rather than the chug-athons that kick-started past albums, is telling of the record as a whole. For the first time in their decade-plus career, nuance is just as important as nastiness, and it pays off in spades.
Devouring Radiant Light doesn’t abandon Skeletonwitch’s uncouth thrash antics altogether, of course. The skittering riffs and cascading hooks that populate rippers like “When Paradise Fades” and “Carnarium Eternal” evoke the genre’s ’80s heyday, as do the haggard, Megadeth-esque verses driving “The Luminous Sky.” The distinguishing factor here is a matter of overarching construction. Whereas the band’s past full-lengths accented Big Four worship with black-metal flourishes (weeping riffs, tempestuous backbeats), Devouring Radiant Light inverts that ratio with an extended blast of subzero Nordic fury informed by, but by no means indebted to, thrash metal.
Sure, fans who swear by Skeletonwitch’s early work might take a while to warm up to anthems like “Temple of the Sun,” a tightly constructed barnstormer in which the band dares to toss clean-sung vocal harmonies into the mix, or “The Vault,” a Pallbearer-esque doom experiment that grows more blackened with each wailing note until its entire soundscape is torched to a crisp. And yet, even when their creative lodestar shifts its orbit, the Ohioans’ cornerstones remain intact: their virtuosic riffs, their robust production (once again courtesy of Converge guitarist and board wizard Kurt Ballou), their endearingly adversarial presence on-record—and, most of all, their diabolical joie de vivre.


Richard Melville Hall is back to doing what he does best: making soaring electronic music for billboard-sized emotions. Introspection? Not so much.

All Visible Objects

All Visible Objects is the first we’ve heard from Moby since the publication of Then It Fell Apart, his second memoir, in 2019. An extension of his first, 2016’s Porcelain, which recounted his rise to fame in New York’s rave scene in the 1990s, Then It Fell Apart walks us through the debauched decade after Play, providing all the dirty details: mind-blowing amounts of vodka, ecstasy, and cocaine; threesomes, foursomes, and failed relationships; dinner with Bowie and beef with Eminem; penthouse palaces and suicidal ideation. Through flashbacks to his childhood, Moby also considers the roots of his malaise in his poverty-stricken upbringing as a compulsive masturbator and sanctimonious Christian prone to colossal panic attacks.
In one chapter, Moby recounts dating a young Natalie Portman after meeting her backstage in 1999; then 33, he visited her at Harvard and stayed over in her dorm. Portman’s recollection, however, was of “a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school,” as she told Harper’s Bazaar last May. She wasn’t 20 at the time, as Moby had claimed, but had only just turned 18. At first, Moby doubled down, sharing what he called “photo evidence” of their “brief, innocent, and consensual romantic involvement.” A few days later he apologized, canceled his UK book tour, and announced, “I’m going to go away for a while.”
That sentence, “I’m going to go away for a while,” should probably have finished with the words, “to think about what I’ve done.” Yet on All Visible Objects, rather than take the opportunity to reflect, Moby seems to elide his own existence, choosing instead to wrap himself in the flags of his chosen causes and habitual musical modes. Nine of the 11 tracks are variations on a theme of rave euphoria, including several anthemic techno cuts aimed squarely at the dancefloor, and the remaining two are slow-moving instrumentals. As with all his recent albums, Moby has said that the profits from All Visible Objects will go to 11 charities for animal and human rights, which is commendable. His sobriety, spirituality, and emotional stability may have wavered over the years, but he remains militant about animal rights—the phrase is now tattooed down his arms, with “VEGAN FOR LIFE” on his neck for good measure.
But Moby the man is practically absent from this project. His voice, usually delivered as a barked monotone or barely-there whisper, appears on only two songs. One is “Forever,” a dreamy spin on laser-show EDM, where it’s processed beyond recognition, saying: “This is the way we’ll stay, forever.” The other is a mournful deep-house yarn called “One Last Time.” The lyrics are vague but plaintive: “This was how we have cried in the darkness/This is where you will save us all.” For a man who’s already pried open his broken spirit for public inspection, all this seems like a missed opportunity. Give us the gory details?
Instead, Moby pushes his guest vocalists to the front. Dead Kennedys drummer DH Peligro takes the podium on “Power Is Taken,” a ’90s throwback modelled on the rave poetics of Faithless. “We who hate oppression must fight against the oppressors,” goes his generic command. “Power is not shared, power is taken.” In contrast, hearing Linton Kwesi Johnson on “Refuge” is a literary jolt—and, given LKJ’s stature and gravitas, quite the coup for Moby, even with his back catalogue of celebrity collaborators. The Jamaican dub poet’s single sentence, repeated over stabbing techno, isn’t a call to arms but a tight knot to unravel: “To us who were of necessary birth, for the earth’s hard and thankless toil, silence has no meaning.”
L.A. singer Apollo Jane and Moby’s live collaborator Mindy Jones take the rest, including a windswept cover of Roxy Music’s “My Only Love,” which swaps the original’s fleeting grooves for a heavy drenching of pads, strings, and piano. Does he lay it on thick? Absolutely. But it’s too late to begrudge Moby for doing what he does best: soaring electronic music for billboard-sized emotions. The longest track of all is “Too Much Change,” a highly strung epic which winds between jazzy ambient and dusty tribal house for almost 10 minutes.
These songs tend towards fuzzy sentiments—the words “love,” “life,” “light,” and “feel” are staples. Many of the musical ideas—tinkling pianos, plasticky strings and emotion-squeezing chord progression—have been part of Moby’s toolkit since the word “Go.” These are his trademarks, and he’s entitled to them. There are none of the misfires that tainted his mid-’10s records, like the syrupy collaborations on 2013’s Innocents. He’s on home turf. The problem is that All Visible Objects sounds like just another Moby album, as if nothing of interest has happened recently, as if his music has nothing really to do with Moby the man—the awkward, panic-stricken, validation-seeking, binge-drinking superstar DJ we now know almost everything about. He’s published 900 pages about his struggles and ostensible redemption, and the punchiest lyric on his new album is about “oppressors”? You’ve got 99 problems, Moby—but as a rich, white home-flipping L.A. restaurant owner, “the Man” ain’t one.

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


The 21-year-old Harlem rapper's new mixtape is an often thrilling document of a phenomenally gifted performer in a state of flux: between rapper and singer, between dance and hip-hop, between building on last winter's raunchily transcendent single "212" and trying out new approaches.

Fantasea

Here's a partial list of what Azealia Banks has been up to since the digital release of her debut 1991 EP less than two months ago: She said in a Tumblr post she would be quitting "the 'rap game'... or whatever the fuck that means." She split with her manager, who also represents Lady Gaga. She pushed back the release date of her mixtape, Fantasea-- previously titled Fantastic-- by a week. She performed live at what she billed as a Mermaid Ball, first in New York, and then in Los Angeles, being joined for the latter by Charli XCX, Rye Rye, and unannounced guest Robyn. A New York tabloid even published gossip about her love life.
The 21-year-old Harlem native's use of mermaid imagery for this release is a revealing choice, and not just for its connection to the self-consciously ridiculous #seapunk subculture (which, hilariously, disavows mermaids anyway). Like Ariel with her thingamabobs, Banks is caught between worlds, a figure in transition. Her 19-track, 52-minute mixtape is an often thrilling document of a phenomenally gifted performer in a state of flux: between rapper and singer, between dance and hip-hop, between consolidating the gains built on last winter's raunchily transcendent single "212" and trying out new approaches. If, as she put it, Fantasea is a "test run," then Banks passes with aquamarine colors. Speaking of blue streaks, she's on one.
The past several weeks also saw Banks rapping foul-mouthed circles around Missy Elliott on a remix of M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls". It's the nearest she's come to the conventional hip-hop path of showing up on a better-known rapper's track, although she has appeared on music by non-rappers Major Lazer, Scissor Sisters, and, inevitably, Lana Del Rey. And whether or not Banks wants to be known as an MC, many of Fantasea's best moments showcase her slang-wise verbal dexterity. "Jumanji", produced by TNGHT's Hudson Mohawke and fellow UK producer Nick Hook, is the closest thing to another "212", with rapidfire verses and an instantly quotable "real bitch, all day/ Uptown, Broadway" hook over what sounds like elephants escaping from an urban zoo. Diplo's marching "Fuck Up the Fun" lets Banks swerve between casual, non-rapped chatter and ratatat shit talk.
In fact, Banks' sharp ear for Caribbean-inflected, rave-reminiscent electronic backing tracks is another major factor in Fantasea's considerable appeal. From the opening rework of Prodigy's jungle-crazed, Max Romeo-sampling 1992 single "Out of Space", the mood evokes nothing so much as Zomby's modernization of vintage electronic dance music on 2008's Where Were U in '92?. An early peak is the chipmunk-pitched house diva cries and disembodied Michael J. Fox anti-drug PSA of the title track, where Banks shifts between virtuosic fast rap and a flirtatiously sung refrain over Machinedrum's neon-blippy "Fantastix". Just as Banks has taken a non-traditional hip-hop path, she's avoiding lazy Calvin Harris-David Guetta club-pop trendfucking, too.
Of course, vintage house also has loads of connotations when it comes to sexual politics. For all the bravery of Frank Ocean's unforgettable story of his unrequited love for a man, it's worth remembering that Banks-- like her fellow LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts alumna Nicki Minaj-- previously went on the record as bixexual. Fantasea is notably fluid in its highly explicit sexual voraciousness; guys get a taste of that, erm, cake on other TNGHT half Lunice's cloud-rap snake charmer "Runnin'", while on O/W/W/W/L/S' cash-register-accented production "Us", Banks chuckles: "I know niggas who probably dicked a nigga." Less successful is Banks' on-the-nose vogue-rap over Zebra Katz' minimal "Ima Read", previously cattily perfected by Njena Reddd Foxxx. "Fierce", the mixtape's most overt gay-culture ode, endearingly samples a former drag queen and suggests that financial success is better than acclaim.
All that said, Fantasea is weakest when it comes to its aquatic theme. The mermaid references on "Aquababe" feel forced, despite riding a Machinedrum remix of Portland producer EProm's "Regis Chillbin" that brings to mind an air raid at a cantina for singing humpback whales. The guest rappers, too-- Yonkers hardass Styles P on acid-squiggling earworm "Nathan", London grime vet Shystie over an otherworldly Ikonika track on "Neptune"-- lend credibility, but can't quite enter Banks' self-contained world; her lack of non-producer collaborators more generally appears to be a wise choice. The brassily sung come-ons of "Chips" are forgettable, a rarity for Banks. And her pre-"212" no-holds-barred rhymes on "L8R" lack a bit of the artist's later fire, though they do offer a provocative reminder that her talk of bisexuality isn't just for interviews.
That last song, "L8R", ends with in-studio banter about slang-term du jour "ratchet," a phrase that for many people might be destined for association with Banks-- once she decides who and what she wants to be. With her debut album, tentatively titled Broke With Expensive Taste, still slated for this fall, that moment of truth is coming soon. Maybe "Bambi", a trance-inducing track overseen by Adele producer Paul Epworth that premiered early this year at a fashion show in Paris, will finally get an official release on the LP.
In the meantime, the best and penultimate cut on Fantasea, "Esta Noche", points in a promising new direction: conversational, cheater-luring pickup lines over a warmly inviting sample from Montell Jordan's 1999 R&B hit "Get It on Tonite", interjected with screeching nu-rave paroxysms courtesy of Dutch producer Munchi. The comparisons to Minaj, whose own recent singles tend to break out in strobe-lit beach-rave sections, might persist. But that wouldn't be such a bad thing. "Head of the class/ But I got principles, too," Banks purrs.
The biggest surprise from the rapper who made "cunt" safe for the New York Times' Style section might be if she discovers a square, sensitive side. Still, I wouldn't bet on it. "I've been out for three years," she told the paper in February, reassuring those who fear her rise to fame has been too fast. "I've been around." Or whatever the fuck that means. This much has been officially confirmed by scientists since Banks' previous EP: Mermaids don't exist. The seapunks were right.


Ben Watt's third solo album finds the Everything But the Girl co-founder continuing to explore his reignited love for live instrumentation.

Fever Dream

It's easy to forget how crucial guitars were to the music of Everything But the Girl. They were not merely embellishment of production, but rather an anchor to the style that gave credence to both Tracey Thorn and her husband Ben Watt at the start of their respective careers. While she got her start in such post-punk outfits as Stern Bops and Marine Girls, it was her hushed 1982 solo debut, A Distant Shore, that helped the NME set recognize Thorn. Watt’s trajectory, meanwhile, saw him being taken under the wings of such prominent English rock icons as Kevin Coyne, who produced his first single "Cant" upon signing to Cherry Red in 1981, and Robert Wyatt, prominently featured on his 1982 debut EP Summer Into Winter, before forging his own unique fusion of British folk and bossa nova on 1983’s North Marine Drive.
It was once thought that a full-on return to those organic roots was a bridge too far for Watt, who continued to travel further and further into London’s deep house and techno culture as the curator of both the influential late '90s/early '00s Sunday club Lazy Dog and the independent record label Buzzin’ Fly, which he launched in 2003 and ran until 2013. However, the Marylebone native surprised both fans and critics alike in 2014 with Hendra, a leftfield return to the intimate songcraft he explored on North Marine Drive 31 years prior as if the whole time burning up dancefloors in Miami, Berlin and Ibiza was all just something of a fever dream.
And so goes the name of his third proper solo full-length, an album that continues to find Watt moving his DJ rig further into the storage unit of his creative mind in order to continue to explore his reignited love for live instrumentation. He recorded at the renowned RAK Studios in London, with the intention of melding the fineness of Pentangle to the fury of Crazy Horse. And in its way, Fever Dream picks up where Hendra left off, as songs like "Women’s Company" and "Never Goes Away" retain the delicacy of its predecessor's finest moments. But the cranked-amp grit of the record's more combustible cuts, like "Winter's Eve" and "Bricks and Wood," sets the scene.
This is the very first time we are really hearing Ben Watt in full guitar rock mode. You can certainly hear the influence of solo David Gilmour, whose appearance on "The Levels" was one of the highlights of Hendra. Yet by largely keeping the electric currents of Fever Dream so well mannered, however, songs like "Gradually" and "Between Two Fires" fail to muster up much excitement. The strongest material, in fact, constitutes some of Ben Watt's finest work in years. The closest he does come to integrating his Buzzin' Fly past happens on "Running With the Front Runners", when that whistling Moog you might have heard on some of your favorite Everything But the Girl tunes turns up. Elsewhere, an appearance by MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger shines on the title cut. By the closing number, the pastoral "New Year of Grace", Watt lets his British folk roots show, with Marissa Nadler playing Jacqui McShee to his Bert Jansch.
From his four decades in music to his valiant coping with the rare inflammatory disease Churg-Strauss Syndrome (chronicled in his excellent 1996 book Patient), Watt's career is a quietly inspiring survival story. At one point, it didn't look like Watt was going to live to see 50, considering that his illness has the potential to attack both the heart and lungs, let alone continue to release solo albums. So in that regard, Fever Dream is an absolute triumph. It would have been a lot more of an interesting listen, however, had he decided to really get his hands dirty in feedback and digital fuzz.


On Do to the Beast, the Afghan Whigs’ first album in 16 years, Greg Dulli seems less interested in rehashing the raw rock-quartet attack the Whigs mastered in the 1990s than he is in building on it. Do to the Beast may not always sound like an Afghan Whigs album, but it operates like one, scavenging the darker corners of pop history to create something personal, vital, and urgent.

Do to the Beast

The most satisfying moments on the Afghan Whigs’ first album in 16 years aren’t the soaring choruses, or the runaway guitar solos, or the thinly veiled R&B references—not even Van Hunt doing a truly killer Bobby Womack impersonation on “It Kills”. Rather, Do to the Beast is best right before all hell breaks loose. On “Royal Cream”, Greg Dulli and the band draw out the verse for an extra beat or two, ratcheting up the suspense before surging into the swaggering chorus. You brace yourself for the impact, as you would in a car crash. Occasionally, Dulli veers away from that brick wall at the last second; rather than burst into the expected minor-key chorus, “Lost in the Woods” upshifts into a major key, making the song sound like a pivotal and distinctive plot point in the album’s larger narrative of sinners redeemed, saints brought low, and Dulli just barely surviving.
It's a sensation similar to watching a Hitchcock film, and perhaps Dulli picked up the trick as a film student at the University of Cincinnati in his pre-Afghan days. (When the band signed with Elektra in the early 1990s, the label agreed to fund his feature-length directorial debut, which he sadly never found the time to make.) He deployed the suspense-building technique during his tenure with that band, but didn’t really master it until well into the Twilight Singers’ catalog. That latter outfit never had a set lineup, so it could expand or contract in accordance with Dulli’s creative whims, often giving him a larger orchestral palette to work with. In that regard, it’s tempting to call Beast a Singers record rather than an Afghan joint: It’s carefully and richly arranged, less a rock album than a rock soundtrack.
On Do to the Beast, Dulli seems less interested in rehashing the raw rock-quartet attack the Afghan Whigs mastered in the 90s than he is in building on it. The pummeling math-rock riff of “Matamoros” and the impossible breakneck pace of “The Lottery” recall the band in spirit if not precisely in sound, and opener “Parked Outside” may be the heaviest thing he’s ever committed to tape. These songs are orchestrated grandly to draw out the dark drama of Dulli’s lyrics, which continue to plumb the deteriorating effects of drugs, crime, and love, but overall there’s less groove than you might expect from an Afghan Whigs album.
The shift in aesthetic is owed to the logistics of this reunion. In addition to Dulli, only one of the founding Whigs members, bassist John Curley, shows up. Guitarist Rick McCollum is MIA, and the Afghan Whigs never even had a semi-permanent drummer to reunite with, so there's fewer charter members playing on this album than there were on the two new songs from their 2007 retrospective, Unbreakable. Dulli and Curley filled out the roster with Joseph Arthur, Mark McGuire, and Johnny “Natural” Najera (Usher’s musical director), along with members of the Italian indie-rock group Afterhours, Queens of the Stone Age, Chavez, and others.
In other words, no one involved this album seems terribly concerned with picking up where the Afghan Whigs left off more than a decade and a half ago, and nor should they be: the last thing we need from the Afghan Whigs is 90s nostalgia. Dulli has always been unapologetic about his influences, which have famously leaned toward classic R&B, soul, and funk. That made him something of an outsider in the 90s alt-rock scene—he was dismissed almost as passionately as he was embraced—but it also means that Afghan Whigs albums were motivated by personal vision rather than scene aesthetics and therefore have aged remarkably well.
If 1965 drew from mid-to-late-60s soul and Black Love was about early-70s Blaxploitation soundtracks, then Beast might be set just a few years before, when the rhythm and blues industry was housed in a few independent labels on Broadway and acts like Solomon Burke, the Drifters, and the Shirelles sang out-in-the-street pop epics with ambitious arrangements and insoluble heartbreak. Dulli knows his history, so when he opens “Algiers” opens with a drumbeat practically quoted from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, he’s using that girl-group staple as a slight-of-hand trick: Instead of bursting into a towering wall of sound, the song settles into a bleak acoustic strum accentuated with castanets and handclaps. Rather than declaring love or promising commitment, “Algiers” evokes a bereft loneliness, his only company “the heavenly demons waiting outside my window.”
Throughout the album, Dulli seems to be treating the band’s own career in the same way he treats an old R&B record: as raw material for his current obsessions. As he nears 50, he’s able not only to play up the rough grain in his voice as he grasps for high notes on “Lost in the Woods”, but also to take in the breadth of his career to date. If his catalog is a car, he’s stripping it of its parts and refashioning something newer, more streetworthy. So Do to the Beast may not always sound like an Afghan Whigs album, but it operates like one, scavenging the darker corners of pop history to create something personal, vital, and urgent.


Vermont trio builds on its blog buzz with an album of old-timey music highlighted by the group's lovely bell-toned voices.

Made the Harbor

Conversations that circulate around artists and albums and songs have always been a crucial part of the music experience. That said, the extent to which online chatter and claims-jumping have become more important than actually listening to the new album by, say, M.I.A. or Wavves, is kind of disheartening. So it's a relief to hear a record that's more fun to listen to than it could ever be to talk about. Mountain Man's got its small share of blog buzz, but Made the Harbor evokes, and even seems to encourage, private appreciation.
I guess if you really wanted to incite a message board snipe-fest among authenticity hardliners, you could point out that the three women who record old-timey-souding folk as Mountain Man would never fool an actual mountain man. Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath met as students at Bennington, and there's a direct line to be drawn from their exquisitely arranged three-part harmonies to the a cappella group sounds that waft through Eastern seaboard college quads. Instead of Depression-era Americana, Fleet Foxes are Mountain Man's best RIYL, and they're sure to appeal to anyone who misses the Be Good Tanyas. The trio, however, appear to have a greater investment in mood and milieu than in crafting a traditionally structured album or even fully fleshed-out songs.
Harbor is their second, but first widely available, release and it collects songs that loosely riff on Appalachian folk in ways similar to those of fellow Vermonter Sam Amidon. Nothing on Harbor is a reverent reading of an open-source song, but a track like "Sewee Sewee" sounds like it was unearthed in a Carolina Confederate graveyard. Elsewhere, Mountain Man refer to "the mighty Mississippi" and "fair young maidens" and ask a lover to "draw me still," a balmy archaism that would sound contrived in everyday conversation, but is pretty fantastic in context. Modern sensibilities aren't out of place, though. "Dog Song" is a provocative three-minute roll in the hay, and "Soft Skin" is frankly sensual both in words and come-hither inflection.
But you don't love a record like this for its lyrics-- or for instrumentation that rarely gets more complicated than plucking out basic chords. It's Mountain Man's bell-toned voices volleying off the walls of an abandoned ice cream parlor where the album was recorded that sells it. If you find yourself indifferent to "Babylon", an electrifying a cappella arrangement of Psalm 137, you may want to check your pulse. Then there are the spaces and silences-- between tracks, verses, even notes-- that the trio occasionally fills with false starts, deep breaths, and laughter, but mostly let be. At its best, Harbor feels like a private performance of friends only out to please themselves. But if you promise to sit quietly and listen, you're more than welcome to stay.


No stranger to singing other people’s songs, Chan Marshall attempts her most ambitious cover project yet: an album-length recreation of a Dylan concert that changed the course of rock history.

Cat Power: Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

On May 17, 1966, Bob Dylan gave a performance that would go down among the most significant of his career. In the four years since his debut album, he’d reached a level of reverence usually reserved for religious icons, with listeners approaching his folk songs as if they were commandments for navigating the turmoil of their era. But he was enamored with the possibilities of rock’n’roll, whose live-wire rhythms pulled his songs away from oratorical gravitas and toward a stranger sensibility—one full of surreal asides, inside jokes, and social critiques from an artist who had begun to see himself and his cohort as participants in the world’s hypocrisy, rather than innocent observers. On this night in May, the tension between Dylan’s inspiration and his audience’s expectations was particularly raw, with band and crowd egging each other toward a frenzy that culminated with the most famous heckle in rock history: “Judas!” Fans came to know the show by the name on a bootleg recording, which circulated widely and soon became another pillar of the Dylan legend: Royal Albert Hall.
Except it didn’t happen at London’s Royal Albert Hall; it happened at Manchester Free Trade Hall, all the way on the other side of England, 200 miles northwest. The historical mix-up prompted by the mislabeled bootleg was only sorted out for good in 1995—the same year, incidentally, that Chan Marshall released her first album as Cat Power. Her latest, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, is a song-by-song recreation of his set list that night. Marshall has a good bit in common with Dylan: an elliptical approach to subject matter, a sometimes fraught relationship with her audience, a willingness to follow her muse far afield from the sounds that made her famous, and tone and phrasing that can channel something deep about her sources when they’re divergent on the surface. Her decision to record her rendition not at the actual location of Dylan’s famous concert but at Royal Albert Hall itself reveals another kindred aspect between his trickster spirit and her own: the understanding that myth can be just as powerful—in its way, just as truthful—as fact.
At first approach, Cat Power Sings Dylan is as straightforward as covers albums come. Marshall performed the music live, following every contour of Dylan’s set, down to his switch halfway through from solo acoustic performance to rollicking full-band rock. She didn’t tinker much with his arrangements: If a given song, in Dylan’s rendition, begins with an instrumental vamp or ends with a harmonica solo, it probably does in Marshall’s version as well. But after a while, the meticulous literalism of her interpretation comes to seem like its own conceptual gambit. When the similarities are so pronounced, the differences, when they inevitably occur, capture your attention. In the decades since 1966, Dylan’s performance has been enshrined as a pivotal moment not just in his own career but in pop music’s history, proving that rock stars were artists who could challenge their audiences, not just satisfy or entertain them—a single unruly evening standing in for a generational shift. Marshall’s treatment of the concept, from the title and location on down, comes across as both an earnest tribute to the “Royal Albert Hall” show and a probing investigation of its legend.
The postmodern presentation of Sings Dylan does not interfere with the power of the music: Marshall, like her hero, understands that irony and sincerity can coexist without contradiction. The acoustic portion is often breathtaking, Marshall’s multivalent intimacy with her material restoring chestnuts like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” whose luster may have dimmed from overexposure. (That song, the last of the acoustic set, featuring ghostly keyboard accompaniment to Marshall’s lovely fingerpicking, is among the most pronounced in its difference from Dylan’s original.) In the small but significant departures of Marshall’s interpretations—differences of emphasis, timing, and occasionally melody—we hear the songs anew, through not just her voice but also her ears. In her take, a line from Dylan that always struck you as incidental may emerge as the most important part.
The electric set is similarly gorgeous, though less revelatory. Historical context aside, the “Royal Albert Hall” tape is one of the most exciting live rock recordings ever made, in large part due to the ferocity of Dylan and his band in this latter portion of the show. Their locomotive energy, the story goes, was fueled by the audience’s escalating discontent, a dynamic embodied by Dylan’s audible instructions to the band to “play it fucking loud” as they roar into the show-closing “Like a Rolling Stone.” Perhaps because Marshall’s audience is receptive and reverent, her band doesn’t nearly approach the unhinged vehemence of Dylan’s, which is a shame. She knows a thing or two about bewildering a crowd; it would have been thrilling to hear her howl at those who were expecting a sober and respectable show.
Rather than in volume and intensity, Sings Dylan finds subversion in its very form, as a covers album that celebrates and estranges its source material at once. Of course, someone shouts “Judas” near the end of the show, as if following the evening’s script; instead of Dylan’s famous “I don’t believe you,” Marshall retorts with “Jesus.” It’s the most uncanny moment on an uncanny album, made more so by the fact that the mock heckler pipes up a little earlier than he’s supposed to: before “Ballad of a Thin Man” instead of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is fitting enough. The chorus of “Thin Man,” a sort of mission statement for Dylan at the time, might also describe the aptness of Marshall’s tribute, whose sly ambiguity is essential to the truths it conveys about both parties. Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.


Afraid of Heights is the proper full-length follow-up to Wavves' 2010 breakthrough King of the Beach*.* Working with producer John Hill, it's Nathan Williams' best-sounding album to date, with touches of strings and background vocals from Jenny Lewis.

Afraid of Heights

The chatter surrounding Nathan Williams' activities has occasionally overshadowed the music itself. It's been five years since Williams' self-titled debut long-player as Wavves, so it's a fine time to step back and re-direct the conversation. Wavves and 2009's triple-v'd follow-up featured monochromatic garage grinders buried under blown-out production-- not exactly the work you'd expect from someone who'd later write a Christmas song for Target with his girlfriend. It's possible that many present-day Wavves fans are unaware that those albums and his sound has changed accordingly. The beery, brawny King of the Beach from 2010 featured improved production and sharp, sticky hooks that were perfectly suited to soundtrack shows on MTV (which they eventually did.)
Following some label drama that almost derailed that album's creation, Williams took the DIY approach by self-releasing 2011's guest-laden Life Sux EP; two years later, he and current musical co-conspirator Stephen Pope have returned with the proper follow-up to Beach, Afraid of Heights. The record is Williams' first for Warner Bros. and Sony-affiliated imprint Mom + Pop, but Williams self-financed the album's recording over the course of a year. It's a big-ticket record made with indie-minded ethos, and the album's tangle of contradictions befits a guy with such a history of contrarianism.
King of the Beach had real-deal rock guy Dennis Herring (Elvis Costello, Modest Mouse) behind the boards; Afraid of Heights features John Hill, a producer with modern pop bonafides from Rihanna to M.I.A. You can hear his touch in the pretty-sounding keyboard-mellotron loop that's interrupted by a low, persistent inner-ear thud in the opening of the typically bratty "Sail to the Sun", and Afraid of Heights as a whole is truly a headphones album, a luxuriously produced record tempered with a few moments of noisy studio trickery (notably, the scuzzy rumble of "Mystic") for contrast. Five songs feature strings; one features slide guitar.
As for the songwriting, Afraid of Heights finds Williams taking these new elements-- including guest vocalist Jenny Lewis' contributions, only barely heard on the album's melodically winding title track-- and rolling them up tightly in his familiar forward churn. K**ing of the Beach's self-loathing-as-swag anthem "Idiot"-- one of the most straightforwardly ear-catching songs on that album-- is a jumping-off point. This means that there's less of the formless, small-scale exercises that largely made up Beach's back half; some will miss the eccentricity, but Afraid of Heights' energizing consistency makes for a fair trade.
Williams' lyrics are still dripping with self-loathing. Life Sux's "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl" drew sneers based on the title alone, but the sentiment never seemed explicitly careerist; at some point, you'd have to assume that this guy would rather do anything else rather than continue to address his own personal insufficiencies. Here, "Dog" and "Beat Me Up" deal with subservience in relationships, while the sprightly "Lunge Forward" ends with a wish for the end of humanity. There's talk of graves, death, bruises, and the eventuality of being alone. The negativity is sometimes so pronounced it's almost funny: "Gimme a Knife" closes with, "I loved you, Jesus/ You raped the world/ I feel defeated/ Guess I'll go surf."
The album's most enjoyably surprising moment arrives when he turns his attention outward. "Cop" is a love song, albeit a strange one: it's written from the perspective of the gay lover of protagonist John, who's just killed a policeman. "Sit back and relax, John, just go home and quickly wash your hair/ Lay back in my arms," Williams sweetly sings, backed by a distant acoustic shuffle reminiscent of Jay Reatard's cover of Chris Knox's "Turn Down the Shades". Some strings and stray whistling enter, and the song swells into a big, beatific wash of light before the hook comes in again. It is, without doubt, the most lovely and affecting piece of music Williams has written.
Afraid of Heights is the first Wavves album longer than 40-minutes and sometimes it drags. Williams is an avowed Weezer disciple, and accordingly his more dirge-y creations have always reminded me of the sluggishness found on mid-period Weezer albums like Maladroit. Although he mostly does the the more low-key material right here, "Everything Is My Fault" is a real momentum-killer, especially when you realize there's still 10 minutes of album material to get through. Still, Afraid of Heights provides plenty of bummed-out pleasures and Williams' obvious talent is easy to take for granted. At "Lunge Forward"'s chaotic peak, he cries, "None of you will ever understand me" and that may be true, but his music continues to make perfect sense.


CD/DVD captures Robert Forster and Grant McLennan on their recent Oceans Apart tour and features selections from throughout their nearly 30-year career.

The Go-Betweens: That Striped Sunlight Sound

That Striped Sunlight Sound

After nearly 30 years of creating intelligent pop, Go-Betweens co-leaders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan are alive and very much kicking-- obscene levels of long-cultivated cultdom still intact. "We're about the last band in the world that has not shot a DVD," Robert Forster announces between songs on DVD/CD combo That Striped Sunlight Sound, "So we're doing one tonight, right here"-- which he of course pronounces "hee-ya," in reference to the Tivoli Theatre in the band's hometown of Brisbane, Australia-- before diving appropriately into "Streets of Your Town."
Reenacting here both the times they first immortalized looping entreaties to "shi-i-i-iine," and complaints that, "I still don't know what I'm here for," it's still clear what they're here for: 2005's Oceans Apart improved greatly on the Go-Betweens' previous comeback effort, and provides That Striped Sunlight Sound with its peppiest tracks: "Here Comes a City", "Boundary Rider", "Born to a Family", and "Finding You" are all extra-robust Red Bull anthems.
But if pop's longtime sunshine-companionship is warranted, it makes tons of sense to call these vets the arbitrators of some striped sunlight sound. This live album comes like midday sun filtering through mini-blinds: barely-there slits, perfectly understated kind of cool (temperature-wise) sunny days alongside major chances of rain. And it comes with proof of what the Go-Betweens do best: the opposite of cloying-- perfectly aware, grown-up, and bittersweet. The low-key "Black Mule" and "Clouds" wouldn't otherwise resemble sold-out show material, but here-- spouted not from the mouths of babes but full-grown old dudes-- they're perfect, somehow. Sure we could gripe about the lack of favorites (where's "Dive for Your Memory"?), but let's be grateful for what this is: After a long dry spell, "Spring Rain" has been a long time coming: "Don't know where I'm going/ Don't know where it's blowing/ But I know it's finding you."
"You" meaning us, of course. Hand-clapped, whistled interims are proof that no band is an island, and the Go-Betweens are no exception to the rule: On That Striped Sunlight Sound, fans and cheesy concert-cheers are as indispensable as the guitars themselves. While those who accuse the band of overcultishness might cite the record's idiosyncratic and nerdy overload-- the Go-Bees, after all, perform debut 1978 single "Karen", call "James Joyce" the "right choice," and namedrop great Russians in that dead-on line from Oceans Apart ("Why do people who read Dostoyevsky look like Dostoyevsky?")-- there's something bigger and farther-reaching than geek rock at work here. Here's what potential and happiness sounds like in the face of rain, and God knows what else.


What exactly was the Darkness? A 20th-anniversary reissue of their meteoric debut album reaffirms their pop-metal bona fides.

The Darkness: Permission to Land… Again (20th Anniversary Edition)

The Darkness pursued rock stardom in the same way that people nowadays strive to be pro running backs or music journalists: headlong, and without care for how the position is currently valued. As East Anglian teenagers in the early ’90s—with alt-rock and baggy Madchester in commercial ascendance—brothers Dan and Justin Hawkins were obsessed with the heavy acts of their childhoods. They pored over Brian May’s guitar tone, Aerosmith’s album sequencing (always close with a power ballad), and the proper design of catsuits. Dan cut his teeth playing outmoded styles like thrash metal and prog, moving from drums to bass when he joined Justin’s covers band. It was a part-time gig for Justin; in 1997 he had started a business composing soundalikes for commercials: tunes that would suggest their sources without being legally actionable. It was this work that bankrolled the recording of the Darkness’ 2003 debut, Permission to Land: a defiantly unfashionable set of glammy, cheeky hard rock that briefly made the band the toast of UK pop.
At the turn of the 21st century, there was no shortage of acts mining musical comedy from the same rocks as the Darkness. In England, the band was preceded by the self-mythologizing Wildhearts, who mixed an omnivorous ‘60s pop sensibility with buzzsaw rock‘n’roll. Scandinavia boasted punked-up glam from the likes of the Hives, Backyard Babies, and Turbonegro. America had Satanicide (a scraggly-wigged, live hair-metal act for NY hipsters), Tenacious D (the absurdist pomp-rock duo of Kyle Gass and Jack Black), and Steel Panther (an international festival draw that rendered the cock-rock deathstyle with grim fidelity). But the Darkness were distinguished by their ambition. In sound and bearing, they presented as chart royalty; they were committed to the bit on a cellular level. They took rock-as-form very seriously, which freed them to be frivolous everywhere else.
Roughly timed to the 20th anniversary of the album’s US release, Permission to Land… Again doesn’t complicate the legacy of the Darkness. Instead, it honors it by providing more: more twin-guitar flash, more careening falsetto, more high-concept rockers. From the beginning, The Darkness walked a tightrope between the dual skyscrapers of Queen and AC/DC. At one end, haughty yet humane grandeur; at the other, snarling, cranked-up minimalism. Difficult enough work, but the real highwire act were the faces the band pulled along the line. The Darkness never fully embraced the comedy-rock label; being wiseasses just came naturally. Like a Kerrang!-approved Sparks, they spliced surging glam rock and power ballads with lyrics about jerking off and the existential unfairness of contracting an STI. Even if the texts weren’t especially clever, their deployment often was.
And when the Darkness did play it straight, the result could be incandescent. The deathless single “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”—which debuted at No. 2 in the UK—pairs a crunchy AOR riff with a half-yodeled chorus straight out of “Focus.” There are two couplets masquerading as verses; everything’s a race to the giddy nonsense of the refrain. When the trash can ending hits, it’s as if the song is taking its own bow. The nostalgic late-Kinks power-pop of “Friday Night” was an academic exercise—“Lyrically, I realized people liked songs with lists in,” Justin Hawkins recalled in 2013—contrasting the titular dance night with a list of extracurriculars (“I got ping-pong on Wednesday/Needlework on Thursday”) that would exhaust Max Fischer. The final result is touching rather than rote, even when, right before the solo, Hawkins purrs like a tiger.
Then as now, one’s enjoyment of the Darkness hinges on their lead singer. If Freddie Mercury’s voice was a Ferrari 250 GTO (exquisitely rare, with remarkable handling and impeccable style) then Hawkins’ was a Dodge Viper: brutishly powerful but prone to spinning right off the track. Hawkins had always fancied himself a classic-rock vocalist in the Steven Tyler mode; it was only after recording wrapped for Permission to Land that he realized he was, in fact, channeling Kate Bush. At the angrier edge of the Darkness’s sound, the seams would show. In a vacuum, Hawkins repeatedly hollering “get your hands off of my woman, motherfucker” is funny. In practice, he sounds like an exotic bird screeching at rivals. Still, that instinct toward bad taste was just one more way in which the Darkness were heirs to hard-rock tradition.
That instinct crops up frequently within Permission to Land… Again’s collection of B-sides and non-album tracks. Sometimes the result is merely goofy. The backseat-sex celebration of “Makin Out” doubles as an AC/DC tribute, right down to the introductory legato. The anti-cyber screed “Physical Sex” was dated the minute they laid it down: “'Cause a fuck should be multisensory/And you just can’t smell an email.” Sometimes, as on “How Dare You Call This Love?”—a swaying Thin Lizzy-style ballad about anticipating the age of consent—it’s rancid. Other cuts find the band nudging into new territories: “Curse of the Tollund Man” is a proggish alternate history with a spaghetti-western intro and the brothers’ uncanniest imitation of Brian May’s Red Special. The synth-spangled “Planning Permission” draws on Justin’s brief career in construction to craft a sort of subcontractor’s love song: “Fittings to choose, color charts to peruse/I've got a trowel and I ain't afraid to use it.”
The box also includes three live sets from 2003 and 2004, the first two of which—a slot at Knebworth Festival in support of Robbie Williams and a triumphant London homecoming at The Astoria—are included on DVD. More than anything, they reveal just how on the Darkness were. Their eagerness to entertain was only exceeded by their confidence. The banter is minimal; the showcase is the tunes. By the time of the 2004 Wembley set, the band had even more of them. They close with “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End),” their entry in the 2003 UK Christmas No. 1 sweepstakes. It was a shameless power ballad that crammed Slade, Queen and a children’s choir into the same stocking; it was kept from the top spot by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World.” The Darkness never told a funnier joke.
The Wembley concert also features several cuts from the Darkness’ in-process second LP, released in 2005. The circumstances of One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back were so fraught as to border on parodic. Bassist Frankie Poullain quit the band in the early stages of recording, only to be replaced by Richie Edwards, the Darkness’ guitar tech. The sessions were overseen by the legendary producer Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, The Cars, Journey), who indulged the band’s every whim: hundreds of guitar overdubs for Dan, a pan flute custom-made (and recorded!) in Peru for Justin. The album spawned two No. 8 hits but didn’t match Permission’s sales; within a year, Justin would leave the Darkness to enter rehab, resulting in Atlantic dropping the band, which split up soon afterward.
The original Darkness lineup reunited in 2011, immediately scoring a gig opening for Lady Gaga, who was going through a bit of a hard-rock phase herself. Though the endlessly quotable Poullain remains, the workmanlike (and decidedly non-glam) drummer Ed Graham left in 2014. In yet another testament to the Darkness’ successful insinuation into rock history, their current drummer is Rufus Tiger Taylor, son of Queen’s Roger Taylor. The Darkness had emulated their heroes in all ways except one: the slow build to success. Permission to Land arrived as a fully formulated antidote to nu-rock stodge, making the quartet the biggest act out of Lowestoft since Benjamin Britten. The band’s image was irresistible but neatly pegged, and though their ensuing career has been a catsuited compendium of all things heavy, pop culture only has so much room on the rack.


Brace the Wave, Lou Barlow's first new collection of songs since Sebadoh's comeback 2013 LP Defend Yourself, is music for late-night self-reflection, if not quite self-loathing. While the elephant in the room throughout Defend Yourself was the dissolution of Barlow's marriage, Brace the Wave is somehow even more personal, delving into the minutiae of his collapse.

Brace the Wave

Thurston Moore once told me in a magazine interview while discussing the pivotal figures of '90s indie rock that "Lou Barlow essentially invented lo-fi." His comment might not be literally true (Guided by Voices, Daniel Johnston, and countless others toyed with a similar level of fidelity), but there was something about the way Barlow made hiss and mistakes synonymous with his personality that made him special. It was part and parcel with the beautiful-loser tag he cultivated throughout his solo work. He wasn't espousing any discernible ideology, except maybe an inclination to find beauty in rough edges, and if to not self-consciously fuck up his work, at very least to accentuate its ugliness at moments. Barlow's work, in other words, has rarely been feel-good, and Brace the Wave, his first new collection of songs since Sebadoh's comeback 2013 LP Defend Yourself, is no exception.
This is music for late-night self-reflection, if not quite the self-loathing of the younger Barlow. While the elephant in the room throughout Defend Yourself was the dissolution of Barlow's marriage, Brace the Wave is somehow even more personal, delving into the minutiae of his collapse. On the opener "Redeemed", Barlow reveals to a newfound love, "I need a place to hide/ Somewhere I can bring my thoughts to you/ And be redeemed." The track builds slowly, hitting its emotional peak as he laments, "Memories are made of razor blades", and the gentle acoustic strum turns brittle and forceful.
Redemption is a recurring theme throughout Brace the Wave, as Barlow's loves, past and present, collide in dreamlike succession. There is almost a sense that Barlow is watching his life flash before his  eyes: The twitchy "Nerve" pines for idyllic times as Barlow mischievously recounts, "I remember we were hipsters sleeping with our cats/ Young and thin and fucking crazy/ Fine 'til something cracked." On the stomp and stammer of "Boundaries", he disarmingly concedes, "You made yourself available/ I crawled into your arms."
One of the first songs Barlow ever released, on Sebadoh's Weed Forestin', was "Ride the Darker Wave". On the track, rife with wanton aggression, Barlow implores flippantly, "Hello tomorrow today/ Ride the darker wave." Contrast this with "Wave", the semi-titular track of Brace the Wave, which reads like an ambivalent breakup note, as Barlow enumerates his own defects ("When I'm not home for ages/ I look for ways to fade") while abjectly entreating "I leave you alone but don't go", before accepting the inevitable ("I don't heed the warning signs/ It's our time"). It's a devastating recognition of a relationship long past its expiration date, and like the rest of Brace the Wave, echoes the complexity of ending an adult relationship with dignified resignation.
Barlow isn't the yearning aesthete any longer, and he doesn't act like one. But what's most remarkable about this album is, despite the high gravitas of the subject manner, it still manages to capture the yearning and imagination of youth, and never loses touch with the redemptive qualities of interpersonal connectedness. Life and relationships rarely offer easy answers, and Brace the Wave doesn't either.


The latest from the Manchester cult favorites lacks the overwhelming chaos of their best music, but it’s their most thoughtful work yet.

Re-Animator

As their peers in Foals and alt-J found international success, Manchester eccentrics Everything Everything kept refining and distilling their paranoid, hyperactive pop. Lead singer Jonathan Higgs became a British Cassandra, observing rising anti-immigrant sentiments and worldwide tension on Get to Heaven well before the Brexit referendum and the 2016 American election. The band became a cult favorite instead of a crossover success story, disguising anthems about ISIS recruitment and suicide bombers in glossy pop production.
On Re-Animator, Higgs has found inspiration in the idea of the bicameral mind, an esoteric (give or take a mention on Westworld) psychological theory positning that before the emergence of consciousness, humans interpreted their own thoughts as auditory hallucinations. If this wasn’t a band who made a soaring anthem out of the line “It’s alright to feel like a fat child in a pushchair...old enough to fire a gun,” this would be too heady, and as is, it’s out-there, even for this band. As if to mitigate the dense subject matter, they knocked the record out in two weeks with John Congleton, focusing on simplicity. As a result, Re-Animator lacks the overwhelming chaos of their best music, but it’s their most thoughtful work yet.
As a consequence of the quick recording, they’ve never sounded less like their name. There are fewer genres hopped than usual—there’s some dub on “Lost Powers,” some decadent No Shape vibes on “In Birdsong,” but the turn towards conventional indie rock is a canny move for a band heading into their second decade. The surprise is the lack of surprise, the focus on craft and mood over stimulating detail. There are no vocal chops like early single “Kemosabe,” no freeform tangents like those on A Fever Dream’s centerpiece “Put Me Together.” There are occasional quirks, like when Higgs amusingly alludes to Jay-Z’s infamous “Monster” verse on “It Was a Monstering,” but even that’s tacked on to an otherwise straightforward Radiohead homage. This sparseness leads to some uncharacteristically weak studio recordings: “Planets” features all the components of captivating prog-pop, but the insistence on space flattens the song, and a groove change winds up anticlimactic instead of invigorating. The motorik beat of “Violent Sun” veers too close to alternative radio stalwarts like Blue October and the Killers for comfort, and there’s something intrinsically underwhelming about the way the pre-chorus and the chorus hinge on the same chord, like magnets repelling one another.
Higgs nearly makes up for the album’s deficiencies with his lyrics, which are more direct than ever. “Sun” is an urgent “last chance before the night ends”-type song, and their most romantic ever. It’s thrilling to hear Higgs apply his odd-but-visceral writing style to a love song: “You can barely make a silhouette out/And you open your ventriloquist mouth/And the words are wrong but in the right order.” The bicameral-mind concept pops up in several songs, most notably in “The Actor,” where Higgs’ narrator comes to terms with the other voice in their head (“if we look the same/then I don’t mind”). There’s the typical fascination with the grotesque—“Arch Enemy” follows a protagonist associating the other voice in their head with a sentient fatberg, the latter hilariously depicted in the song’s music video. When it stumbles, like the flimsy verses of “Black Hyena,” it’s less a matter of underwriting than a stylistic risk that doesn’t always pay off.
The album hits hardest when Higgs’ lyrics collide with the band’s penchant for bombast. “Big Climb” is a furious screed against a world failing to properly deal with its crises until the inhabitants are “dancing on the ocean floor.” It features some of Higgs’ best imagery—the “curved glass in a desert full of sun,” the “gas crawling like the ghost of the sea.” All this is set to outright stadium rock, a genre so fitting to Everything Everything’s extroversion that it’s a wonder they don’t go for broke like that more often.
“Big Climb” is so exciting that it’s a shame most of the album is so reserved. Re-Animator still holds its own against their other music; at their most traditional, they remain smart songwriters, and even their weaker lyrical moments are more thought-provoking than their peers. They’re likely not going back to the doomsaying of Man Alive any time soon—Higgs acknowledges he’s “too old to be crying out” on “Violent Sun.” But even at this slower pace, in this quieter register, one of the world’s most restless bands finds more uncharted territory.

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