The Japanese quartet devote their second album to enthusiastic, maximalist pop with a bluntly feminist message.

PUNK

Consider the following lyrics, as translated from Japanese: “Pink butt cheeks are my charm/Twinkle, jewels, pearls, princess, twilight!” Now throw some glitter into the mix: Distort those vocals ever so slightly, jam in multiple competing synth lines, and add a jolt of four-on-the-floor drums just for the hell of it. You now have “I’m Me,” a sugar-rush of bubblegum pop from Chai, the four-piece disco-punk band who aspire to destabilize the way beauty and cuteness function in Japan even as they embrace stylized camp and matching outfits.
The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top. The current landscape of indie rock produces songs with heavy notes of loss and longing. But Chai is a band who screams yes to joy, and PUNK is a record written in earnest about being yourself, loving your friends, and not caring about what anyone else thinks about the way you live your life. “I don’t know about the world but I know me/I don’t hide my weight,” vocalist Mana sings elsewhere in “I’m Me.” PUNK is full of that kind of bluntly feminist songwriting. If empowerment is uncool, the women of Chai would choose to be uncool every single time.
Chai call equally upon blog house’s halcyon days as they do the ecstatic joy of Downtown new wavers like Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Tom Tom Club. The album’s gleefully overstuffed 30 minutes leave little room to come up for air. Take “GREAT JOB,” which resembles a “Dance Dance Revolution” song as heard from the most brightly lit of suburban arcades. Winning combinations on casino slot machines light up, synths mimic the sound of honking car horns, and vocals buzz around the innards of the track like a swarm of bees pollinating a greenhouse. “Fashionista” jackhammers its way through neon-lit guitar overdubs while getting serious about the capitalistic impulses of industrial cuteness. “Too much makeup/Just lips and eyebrows all set/Glossy yellow skin/Have nothing more than this,” goes one particularly emblematic line. On “THIS IS CHAI,” a post-punk track built around a 15-second loop of what sounds like marching band brass, the quartet explores the effects of decay and distortion on the human voice. Listening to the all of the song’s noisy layers come together evokes the sight of a highly pressurized can of whipped cream exploding.
The closest Chai come to slowing down is “Wintime,” a starry pop song about ringing in the New Year with the people you love, set to synthesizers coated in disco goopiness. As the band shift gears into their most subdued setting, their lyrics travel to deep space: “In a cold sky the eclipse will laugh/To the point that it’s so bright,” the quartet sings. More than just a song about friendship, “Wintime” paints a future where happiness is powerful enough to pull the planets in the night sky out of retrograde.


Decked out in wind synths and fretless bass, the L.A. trio’s debut album lovingly invokes new age and ambient jazz at their most opulent. It’s a heartfelt argument that smoothness is not a crime.

Total Blue

Los Angeles’ Nicky Benedek and Alex Talan may not live in the past, but you can bet they have summer houses there. Benedek—who in 2011 cited Zapp and Roger Troutman as influences, making him one of the most clued-in college juniors in the history of higher education—got his start making sleek, ’80s-inspired boogie that sounded like it had been swiped from the cassette deck of a vintage lowrider (another major influence: West Coast G-funk). When he graduated to a broader amalgam of R&B, new age, freestyle, and deep house, Benedek’s music remained steeped in analog warmth and tape hiss. Talan, aka Coolwater, has shown similar crate-digging instincts on his NTS show Cool World West, favoring artists like Joe Zawinul, Bill Laswell, Haruomi Hosono, and also Talan’s late father, a filmmaker and bedroom synth player. Coolwater’s eponymous 2020 debut EP sounds like a distillation of all those influences, a kind of L.A. jazz noir with a Blade Runner soul. In the new trio Total Blue, which includes their friend Anthony Calonico, they dim the lights and deliver an even more enchanting simulacrum of outernational jazz and big-budget new age.
The three musicians previously worked together on Coolwater’s EP, which in retrospect looks like a trial run for Total Blue. Their debut album takes similar sounds and influences—fretless bass, muted trumpet, racks of outboard effects—and distills them into a dreamier, more ethereal fusion. “The Path” opens the record on an aquatic scene: A liquid electric bass melody glistens like oily water beneath the docks; a gentle marimba rhythm clinks like rigging against sailboat masts. It’s chromatically lush, a feast of augmented chords and burnished accidentals; halfway through, a keening wind-synthesizer melody carries the song to its logical smooth-jazz conclusion. “Corsair” picks up both the maritime metaphor and the retro sensibility: Everything, from the flanged guitar to the LinnDrum thwacks, seems designed to evoke a specific era and spirit of digitally abetted jazz production. Back in its heyday, this was an expensive sound to create; Total Blue pay tribute to those studio bills of yore with sumptuous chords and arrangements that sound like a million bucks.
If you didn’t know the backstory, it would be easy to assume from the album’s glistening sheen that it was a reissue of an ’80s new-age relic. Even the evocative, globe-trotting titles sound like something from a Windham Hill or Private Music laserdisc: “Heart of the World,” “Chaparral,” “Jaguarundi.” It’s not just the sound design that feels opulent; so do the songs themselves, which stretch out with an almost extravagant sense of leisure, bass glissando and ersatz reeds mirroring each other in slow, sensuous motions. No matter how many times I’ve listened, every time the trio pivots to a particularly juicy chord, it feels like triple cherries coming up on the slot machine.
Their references are easy to identify. The taut, dubbed-out guitar plucks at the center of “Heart of the World” flash back to the cosmic expanses of Manuel Göttsching; “Jaguarundi” is rooted in the rainforest rhythms of Jon Hassell records like Vernal Equinox; the electroacoustic shimmer that ripples across the album recalls new-age jazz composers like Mark Isham and Patrick O’Hearn. Unlike some record collectors, these three never sound like they’re trying to score cool points; to the contrary, many of their inspirations are artists and sounds that have long been written off by gatekeepers. “Bone Chalk,” one of the album’s highlights, is a dead ringer for the billowing filter sweeps and misty-eyed chord changes of Seal’s “Violet,” the meditative closing song on the adult-contemporary singer’s Trevor Horn-produced debut. Intentional homage or accidental kin? Whatever the case, Total Blue’s bewitching take on ambient jazz is a compelling argument that there’s no such thing as too smooth.


Atrocity Exhibition can be seen as the third work in a trilogy that began with XXX. Here, Danny Brown's songs of pain and release are accompanied by dense sonics from all over the musical map.

Atrocity Exhibition

Danny Brown is an auteur. Hip-hop has a tradition of collaboration, but the Detroit rapper is a one-man show who, while he reps his own Bruiser Brigade and works frequently with a handful of producers, has a voice and vision completely his own. You can think of his progression over the last five years in filmic terms. If 2011’s XXX was the brilliant independent foreign film that was critically acclaimed and wildly successful and put him on the map, Old was the solid but safer domestic version, with higher production costs, a prettier cast, and many of the edges sanded off. Atrocity Exhibition, then, is the movie someone makes after they come back down to earth from making that tentpole project, a work predicated on the “one for me, one for them” mentality.
Brown’s individual releases need to be understood as part of a whole, and in each of them, he has an obsession with form. On Old, he took a throwaway line about getting jumped on the way to the grocery store to buy Wonder Bread from XXX and built a whole song around the incident, and he snakes references to his older work throughout Atrocity Exhibition. Take the title of the first song, “Downward Spiral.” It’s a direct nod to XXX’s opening track, where Brown prominently (and memorably) rapped: “it’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal/But too scared to do it.” By reaching back five years, Brown makes Atrocity Exhibition a brick in a larger edifice, perhaps a bookend to an implied trilogy that starts with XXX and ends here.
Structurally, Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown doubling down on familiar tropes from his last two records: once again he starts with a gripping opener, the mise-en-scène; following that are some shorter songs in rapid succession that do the dirty work of exposition; a back-half run that reckons with the hedonism that comes before it (that section here starts with the Kelela-anointed “From the Ground”); and then, finally, a stomach-churning closing track that is never triumphantly resolute but feels like an ending just the same.
But the references extend well beyond Brown’s own work, and well beyond hip-hop. “Downward Spiral” is of course an oblique Nine Inch Nails nod, and Brown, who sampled This Heat and Hawkwind on the same song on XXX, drags Atrocity Exhibition through an industrial, electronic, post-punk sludge, borrowing a title from Joy Division while releasing the album on Warp. The bass on “Rolling Stone,” a duet with South African singer Petite Noir, is pure New Order. “Ain’t It Funny,” with its bold horns, recalls the Stooges’ flirtations with free jazz and Bauhaus at their most bombastic.
The thirty-five-year-old Brown has an old-head mentality as a rapper: play a song and he’ll rap on it. Make any beat and he’ll rap on it. It’s about rhymes, wordplay, and (for lack of a better term), bars. This approach isn’t currently fashionable, but there’s a pleasure in hearing someone else’s joy at putting words together—Brown’s old-school bent intermittently hits some delirious highs, from “Slice your tomato if you owe us for the lettuce/Running through the sack of D sorta like Jerome Bettis,” to “Rocks about the size as the teeth in Chris Rock’s mouth.”
The potential pitfall to this word-drunk approach is sometimes his songs just aren’t easy on the ears. The production here sounds wonderful—frequent collaborator Paul White is credited with 10 songs, and the two have an easy chemistry, because both indulge in coloring outside traditional genre lines (White’s collaborative album with Open Mike Eagle from earlier this year, Hella Personal Film Festival, is kind of like the quieter, gentler, non-evil version of this album, pulling from a different set of rock influences). But Brown sometimes lapses into his Old flows, that idiosyncratic style where he falls off beat, gets in front of it, or simply yells above it. He avoids the frat-baiting EDM songs like “Dip” and “Smokin & Drinkin” that pocked Old here, even though singles like “When It Rain” (more vintage Brown than anything from the past five years) and “Pneumonia” flirt with that sound. But fortunately they’re too rough around the edges, too jumpy, too dark to soundtrack a scene like this. To its credit, Atrocity Exhibition balances its sonic elements and never slips into the mush of guitars and bad ideas that threatened to infiltrate rap at the dawn of this century. White, Brown’s most gifted and consistent collaborator, keeps things at an even keel.
No matter what's going on with the music, Brown’s acute emotional writing is once again on full display. Where XXX seemed to promise a way out, Old reflected (and sometimes reveled in) the lifestyle afforded him through his breakout success. This record, as dark, dingy, and uncomfortable as it is, continues to suggest something deeper is haunting Brown. “Everybody say, you got a lot to be proud of/Been high this whole time, don’t realize what I done/‘Cause when I’m all alone, feels like no one care/Isolate myself and don’t go nowhere,” he offers. He so internalizes all of his demons that, for the third record in this implied trilogy, you start to worry—is he irredeemably lost? Is his pain a response to his upbringing in Detroit, ground zero for armchair sociologists looking for a symbol of American decay? How long before the dam finally breaks? The great “Lost” here brings all these concerns to a head.
And then there’s “Really Doe,” produced by Detroit compatriot Black Milk, which juts out on the geography of the album because it features guest rappers (B-Real merely shows up for the hook on “Get Hi”) and also because it’s the only song not directly about Brown’s demons. It’s a fun track, and Earl Sweatshirt does that thing where he acts like he’s not rapping but ends up murdering everyone anyway while expending as little energy as possible. “I was a liar as a kid, so now I’m honest as fuck,” Earl offers, his unwavering delivery always imbuing what he raps with a startling amount of intimacy. You sometimes wish Brown could hit these more casually real notes more frequently, like he did on the origin story “EWNESW” from XXX or the blackout bars of “Greatest Rapper Ever” and “White Stripes” from 2010’s The Hybrid. But Brown is too good a writer and too focused on the whole not to carry heavy feelings into all his songs, like “some people say I think too much/I don’t think they think enough,” from “Rolling Stone,” and “your work killing fiends/‘cause you cut it with Fentanyl,” from “Ain’t It Funny.”  These reflective lines are the work of a smart writer with an eye for hard-earned detail, and Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.


This riveting DVD/CD set captures the energy and sensory overload of a Chemical Brothers show. It also showcases many of the finest moments from their catalogue.

Don't Think

Something happened during the initial theatrical screenings of the Chemical Brothers' concert documentary Don't Think that, while spontaneous, also felt like a foregone conclusion: audiences got up and danced. Sharing a darkened room with a flashy, quick-cutting, psychedelic sensory overload blasted out in Dolby Surround can do that to people. Especially when it's based around a set from arguably the most enduringly successful rave-gone-pop act of all time. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have built a 20-year canon that can effortlessly fill 90 minutes with wave after wave of euphoric, body-shaking classics. And at a time when their occasionally-bumpy transition from next-big-thing 1990s icons to Hanna-scoring cool older brothers has positioned them as elder statesmen of a resurgent moment for electronic dance music, the role of a generation-bridging legacy act has fit them well. So while Gondry and Jonze did them plenty of justice in the MTV era, an actual audiovisual document of their mind-bending live show feels a bit overdue.
If you're wondering how Don't Think overcomes the skepticism people might still harbor towards live EDM shows, it's actually a bit misleading to focus on the music itself as a performative act. It's more of a catalyst for something bigger, an approximation of the kind of mixed-media freakout that provokes synesthesia. Not that Tom and Ed aren't up there working the dials and controlling the levels and amping up the crowd-- every time they're shown on film, they're twiddling switches to some end or another, messing with levels and dropping in cues and, crucially, being just as propelled by the music as the people in the crowd. (One key shot -- a single finger hitting a key on a synthesizer that lets loose with that sharp opening hornet-buzz of "Hey Boy Hey Girl"-- almost feels like a jolt on the order of a Pete Townshend windmill.) The Chems have earned a rep for avoiding canned setlists and predictable sequencing, and even if some moments lean on long-used ideas-- Bernard Sumner's voice on "Out of Control" is chopped up and folded in on itself in much the same way as it was on the live Glastonbury 2000 version that appeared on the Music: Response EP-- there's no contempt in their familiarity.
Expecting the gold standard that Daft Punk's Alive 2007 set for re-defining career-spanning overviews shouldn't be necessary; there aren't as many transformative mash-up tricks or back-and-forth intra-song dialogues on that level. But there's still no shortage of the kinds of fan-geekout juxtapositions that give new meaning to tracks new and old. The bombastic Boss 302-gone-Roland 303 of "Horse Power" sounds a bit more at home cut out of the more subtly refined surroundings of Further and dropped in the midst of an early peak, but it also makes for a perfect stage-setter for the vintage acid of "Chemical Beats". And the b-boy lineage of a set-closing run that conflates "Leave Home", Q-Tip's vocals from "Galvanize" and the deathless "Block Rockin' Beats" is a fine way to go out, especially when that latter track's familiar bass gets pushed into super-fast-forward until it's just a blurred, stammering climax.
And the newer stuff stands just as well on its own. The crowd goes nuts at the woozy, vertiginous opening of "Swoon" for a good reason, and the title cut's hyperventilating bridge between Surrender favorites "Hey Boy Hey Girl" and "Out of Control"-- think Dig Your Own Hole deep cut "It Doesn't Matter," but simultaneously more melodic and more suspenseful-- is perfectly placed to make it sound like the they-still-got-it highlight it is. It all flows so smoothly so immediately that tracks which felt like late-career missteps on album-- like overstuffed pigeon-toed funk oddities like "Do It Again" and "Get Yourself High", which show up in succession in the set's first 10 minutes-- come across as all-hook monsters, fused in a way that splits the difference and shaves off all the fat.
It's a good CD, but a staggering film. Shot at the 2011 Fuji Rock Festival by longtime visual partner Adam Smith, it's a rhythmically edited spectacle that builds off the strobing pulse of basslines and lights alike. But even under the engaging light-show antics and all the allusions to 60s acidsploitation LSD-freakout sequences (faces covered in swirling colors, dancing silhouettes, scary clowns), the real engrossing thing is the focus on the crowd as the performative focal point. And not just the massive faceless festival-size throng, either, though there isn't a lack of wide shots and pans showing just how many people are going berserk at pivotal moments.
The field of vision is often geared to make a theatergoer feel like they're on the same scale as the people on the screen, a microcosm of thousands-strong energy strewn across a dozen faces. And there's an emphasis on capturing individual people as certain moments break-- abrupt drops startling an unsuspecting fan out of his reverie, buildups sending people into head-back ecstasy, people losing it as they shout along to lyrics. Sometimes it pulls back to the outer edges of the crowd by the concession stands, occasionally following one woman in particular and capturing moments where she's frightened or amused or disorientated by all the things going on around her; other moments we see vendors nodding along to the music or bewildered concertgoers suddenly finding out that the same projections that flood the main stage's screen also sneak in little cameos amongst the trees and the mud.
It's an angle that might seem derived from performative social-media awareness; when everyone has a video camera, crowds are so easily distilled into individuals. But its real effect is an on-the-field, you-are-there immediacy that pulls you in more than any concert documentary recorded in recent memory, capturing not just what you see when you're riveted to the stage, but what you see when you turn to your friend, when you glance over your shoulder, when you wander the grounds, when you completely lose control. The crowd at Naeba Ski Resort could say they were there, sure, but you could probably count anyone who saw it in a London theater or a Montreal living room or a Chicago train ride as claiming an honest attendance, too.


Big Thief’s sophomore album beautifully excavates family history and trauma into a delicate, intricately built folk rock record, showcasing the gorgeous style of singer Adrianne Lenker.

Capacity

The Brooklyn quartet Big Thief did not name their debut Masterpiece because they felt it was flawless. Rather, Masterpiece painted the complex experience of being young and uncertain with a rare sense of humility: the highway becomes home, a romance between two reckless moonshiners ends for the fear of pain, a slap in the face is real love. But when a band enters the world with such a bold declaration of accomplishment, what do they title the work that surpasses their opus? Big Thief call it Capacity.
Though Big Thief—singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and bassist Max Oleartchik—began recording Capacity just seven months after they finished work on Masterpiece, the unflinching accounts of death, domestic abuse, and primal romances that filled their debut have settled on their sophomore record. Stories pour out of Lenker’s mouth like an endless ribbon, bold and without friction. While the process of excavating such intense memories was challenging and painful, Capacity finds Big Thief firmly nestled in the catharsis. As Lenker sings, “For in the dark there is release.”
This idea that we contain opposing yet complementary forces is central to Capacity: We are mother and daughter, rearing and growing at once. Look to the record’s cover, which shows Lenker’s uncle holding her as an infant, dark hair slick on her soft skull. The adult Lenker so closely resembles her relative that at first glance she appears to be cradling a baby version of herself. “There is a child inside you who is trying/To raise the child in me,” she sings on “Mythological Beauty,” the record’s emotional centerpiece. The track adapts a horrific and bloody accident that befell her as a child as a means of empathizing with her young mother’s vast responsibility. “You held me in the backseat with a dishrag/Soaking up blood with your eye/I was just 5 and you were 27 praying don't let my baby die,” she screams, her voice and the guitars both tightening to their breaking points.
On the sweeping title track which thumps with crashing drums and wiry guitars, Big Thief intertwine the ideas of consonance, captivity, and capacity. “I am a beautiful bird/Fluttered and floating/Swollen and hollowed/For heaven,” Lenker declares in a manner that is both life-affirming and crushing. Earlier on the finger-picked acoustic opener “Pretty Things,” the narrator whispers to a lover, “There’s a woman inside of me/There’s one inside of you too,” an idea that is meant to suggest that the maternal urge inside each of us grants our survival.
There are times on Capacity where the intimacy becomes almost unbearable. When these moments occur, the band’s melodies serve as buoys to cling to for comfort. “Watering” and “Coma” tell of a traumatic assault and the character’s eventual awakening from the ensuing haze. There’s so much darkness contained in the former’s illustration of a poisonous, carnal relation, but Krivchenia’s drumbeat is there to offer the reminder of a heartbeat and sharp guitars jolt the subject out of dissociation. Though Lenker, Meek, and Oleartchik each attended a lauded Berklee College of Music program at some point in their life, Big Thief’s blend of intricate folk rock pulls more from ecstatic expression than academic practice. They are each technical musicians, but their songs are foregrounded with melody and emotion rather than fussy prowess. The first half of “Coma” is as isolated as the title suggests, just Lenker’s murmur and a guitar. As soon as the narrator builds the strength to wade into her new, changed world, the band arrives as her docent.
Of note is Big Thief’s use of names. Matthew, Evelyn, and Haley become a community of people through which Lenker invites us into the past and present of her life. Most movingly, there’s “Mary” dedicated to Lenker’s best friend, a love song straight out of the detailed schools of Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom. Over a gentle piano, Lenker pays tribute with a vivid catalogue of images. It’s so easy to find the wrong words for life, we do it every day, but here, Lenker’s verbal waterfall is a perfect abstraction:

Monastery monochrome boom balloon machine and oh
Diamond rings and gutter bones marching up the mountain with our
Aching planning high and smiling cheap drink dark and violent full of butterflies the violent
Tenderness the sweet asylum the clay you find is fortified we felt unfocused fade the line

The ease with which Lenker’s honeysuckle voice tumbles out, I could keep typing the lyrics forever.
Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus. It is a complete journey, from the early collective cacophony of “Shark Smile” to the hypnotizing conclusion of “Black Diamonds.” There are bands with stories to share, wounds to rub salt into, loves to relive, but few address every moment with such adroit care as Big Thief. You can hear it as they revel in the darkest moments, rejoices in the later lightness, and fumble around for a sense of closure. Capacity is human, which seems to be all Big Thief desire.


On their eighth album, the married duo spout off defiant one-liners over prickly basslines and noise spirals, sounding as dry and self-aware as ever.

Perception is/as/of Deception

For over two decades, the married duo of multi-disciplinary artists Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller have used the guise of electro as an outlet for asking the big questions: Why do I feel so bad? What the hell is your problem? What’s wrong with our society? Now on their eighth studio album as ADULT., Perception is/as/of Deception, Kuperus and Miller turn that focus inward. Over prickly basslines and harsh noise spirals, they shoot off defiant one-liners that sound deep, but their assertions often boil down to that oft-memed adage, “Real eyes realize real lies.”
Kuperus and Miller made a name for themselves during New York’s electroclash heyday, but the Detroit band have always sought to distance themselves from the term. (Miller said he felt “hate” for the signifier as early as 2002.) Still, one of the genre’s defining characteristics was a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and the duo have retained some of that. On its face, lead single “Why Always Why” is a coarse interrogation of thoughtless participation in late-stage capitalism (“Don’t you know consuming doesn’t make you exist?”). But then you watch the music video, where the pair don ostentatious sunglasses and leather jackets in a shopping mall and Kuperus pushes a shopping cart through the toilet aisle at Home Depot, and you notice the smirk.
As a whole, Perception is more brash than 2018’s This Behavior. Save for the odd drone blast (“Controlled By”) or gliding lead synth (“Reconstruct the Construct”), drum machines and uneasily arpeggiating bass make up the bulk of each song, hearkening back to the early industrial minimalism of DAF or Front 242. The tools haven’t changed, but what they achieve with them has, if ever so slightly. “Second Nature” evokes the neon-drenched synthwave of Kavinsky and Carpenter Brut; the bruising saw wave undulations on “Untroubled Mind (Bring Me Back)” allow Kuperus the room to tap into her inner Ian Curtis.
Kuperus is the human anchor that grounds the machine-driven madness, her melodramatic sneers and off-kilter affectations piercing through layers of oppressive atmosphere. “Truth in speech, in gesture, delivery, they persuade you,” she chants on “Total Total Damage,” delivering a miniature summary of Manufacturing Consent. Distrust of authority and the reality-warping tendencies of those who hold it make up some of the central themes of the album; you can just picture Kuperus baring her teeth to spit on the powerful, flanked by grinding textures and shuddering hi-hats.
ADULT. have said they set out to create more of a philosophical record than an explicitly political declaration. In the artist statement for an accompanying exhibition, Kuperus and Miller namedrop Goethe, French existentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-fueled journal The Doors of Perception among the album’s esoteric influences. The result can be lyrics that rarely delve deeper than espousals of generalized wariness, like on “Have I Started At the End” where Kuperus intones, “We… we only see… we only see what we know.” She has a knack for telling stories just by looping memorable phrases. If you stop to notice, she’s just spouting slogans. But as long as the synths are clanging and the lighting is just right, ADULT. sound as dry and self-aware as ever.

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


Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper: A Star Is Born Soundtrack

A Star Is Born Soundtrack

A Star Is Born has no right to be as good as it is. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the third remake of David O. Selznick’s 1937 film has been in development for most of the decade and at one point counted Clint Eastwood as its director with, impossibly, Beyoncé in the lead role that Lady Gaga now occupies. The immersive and romantic narrative of singer-songwriter Ally (Gaga) and her relationship with veteran rocker Jackson Maine (Cooper) as the latter watches the former rocket to pop stardom is imbued with the sort of rockism that typically triggers derision in the current cultural climate. But alongside powerful turns from Cooper and Sam Elliott, Gaga shines brightest with an empathetic performance that presents a summation-in-reverse of the last several years of her career.
Since the aggressive blare of 2013’s Artpop, Gaga has moved further away with every career turn from the brand of pop that put her on the map circa her 2008 debut, The Fame; she took up crooning alongside Tony Bennett for 2014’s Cheek to Cheek and hopped in the studio with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Father John Misty for 2016’s Joanne. When the curtain rises on A Star Is Born, she’s covering Edith Piaf with fake eyebrows taped on her face; two hours later, she’s a full-blown pop star, complete with backup dancers and split-second costume changes. With a wholly organic and real-feeling performance, Gaga again engages in the blur between person and persona that she’s toyed with for much of her iconographic career thus far.
Even though Gaga’s performance caps a decade-long run of shapeshifting pop stardom, there’s nothing in the apparently modern-day A Star Is Born that really reflects the actual 2010s pop landscape. For starters, it’s a bit difficult to imagine Maine’s dyed-in-the-wool country-rock playing to such a huge audience at Coachella, as it does in the film’s opening scene; elsewhere, some modern relevance is achieved through a Halsey cameo and a pivotal scene centered around the type of all-star Grammys tribute that typically turns social media into a unanimous airing of grievances. This disconnect from our reality is totally fine: A Star Is Born reaches for and ultimately achieves a timeless vibe that doesn’t require current pop-cultural relevance.
The film’s official soundtrack is similarly old-fashioned in its approach, even as its credits include a host of modern songwriters from the pop, country, and rock spheres. Along with Gaga and Cooper, there’s contributions from Jason Isbell, Willie Nelson’s son Lukas, Mark Ronson, Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt, behind-the-scenes pop wizards Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, the list goes on. The songs fall into a few distinct silos—blaring blues-rockers, tender acoustic ballads, anthemic torch songs, and robotic electro-pop—and save for a digital flourish or two on the pop songs that make up much of the film’s back half, there’s very little here that would’ve sounded out of place on blockbuster film soundtracks of decades past.
At its peaks, the album delivers on the promise of its star-wattage with some of the most affecting and emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the year. If you’ve spent half a day on the internet over the past several weeks, you’ve likely encountered the explosive Gaga-Cooper duet “Shallow,” and deservedly so; it’s a stormy ballad so instantly iconic that its place in Oscar montages for decades to come is practically guaranteed. At the risk of heresy, though, it might not even count as the strongest song on the album—at the least, it reaches a three-way tie with the swaying, unabashedly sentimental “Always Remember Us This Way” and the film’s stunning, heart-wrenching closer, “I’ll Never Love Again.”
Those three standouts heavily feature Gaga—the latter two as solo performances—which speaks to the somewhat uneven nature of the Cooper-led cuts. The simple, sincere, Isbell-penned “Maybe It’s Time” possesses a quiet radiance, but otherwise Cooper’s songs as Maine take on a somewhat anonymous blues-rock shape alongside the soundtrack’s more dynamic moments. Despite the strength of Gaga’s performances captured on this soundtrack—all live takes recorded during filming, an approach that she insisted on—she isn’t totally off the hook when it comes to the lowlights either; the more explicitly pop songs that make up Ally’s ascent as a solo artist range from forgettable (“Heal Me”) to ridiculous (“Why Did You Do That?”).
The mere act of engaging with A Star Is Born’s songs in a home-listening setting presents a very modern issue: dialogue or no dialogue? Streaming services currently offer both dialogue-free and dialogue-heavy versions of the soundtrack, the latter functioning as a somewhat spoiler-y but surprisingly immersive experience of the film itself. Choosing which version to stream is a peculiar conundrum to face (imagine, for instance, buying two separate copies of the Bodyguard soundtrack), but even though “I’ll Never Love Again” is plenty effective on its own, the dialogue-included version of the song dramatically cuts out in its final seconds the same way the film does: jumping back in time from Gaga’s time-stopping performance to a pivotal and heartbreaking scene that only enhances the song's emotional quotient.
The switch-up is a nice trick as a listening experience, but it also unintentionally highlights the incidental flaw of A Star Is Born’s soundtrack: It just can’t pack the emotional punch of watching the songs performed within the film. The live recording of “Always Remember Us This Way” doesn’t capture Gaga’s impassioned physical delivery behind the piano, her face emblazoned on a jumbotron behind her as Cooper goes moony-eyed at her blown-up visage. And as powerful as “Shallow” is, nothing matches the look of genuine surprise on Gaga’s face as Ally, when she hits her higher register for the first time and effectively launches the song into the emotional cosmos and beyond. These moments speak to her obvious strengths as a performer, as well as how impressively the music works in congress with the film’s imagery; you can recreate them in your head while listening, or go for your best Gaga while belting these songs out in the shower, but it’s just not as effective as the real thing.


After 10 years and an aborted Dr. Dre collaboration, the legendary MC releases his comeback album.

The Seventh Seal

A new Rakim album should be a big deal-- or at least a bigger deal than this. Talking about the man's career, it's hard not to lapse into hyperbole, to talk like he invented rap, because in some ways he kind of did. The things that make rap what it is in 2009 existed in various forms back in 1986, when Rakim's career launched, but Rakim isolated, elevated, streamlined, and developed them. The seen-it-all thousand-yard stare, the twisty internal rhyme schemes, the innate sense of the meter of speech and its possibilities, the mystic codes that intrigued just as they alienated, the emphasis on sheer weight of presence-- these are all Rakim's legacies, and without them, rap would look very, very different.
Rappers and old-head fans talk about Rakim the way they talk about retired legends; but Rakim's out there, hungry, ready to work, making occasional guest appearances. He hasn't recorded an album in 10 years, but he's only one year older than Jay-Z or Diddy. For a while, he was signed to Dr. Dre's Aftermath imprint, at work on a record that seemed so titanic (arguably the greatest rapper ever united with arguably the greatest rap producer) that it almost had to disappoint. But that didn't happen, and here he is, on an album full of budget beats and nobody guest singers, radiating rinky-dink half-hearted comeback attempt. He deserves much, much better.
On "Won't Be Long", Rakim states his current aim: "Complete my legacy/ Without compromising my artistic integrity." In interviews, he's implied that he and Dre parted ways because Dre wanted him to record the sort of accessible gangsta music that's always been Dre's stock-in-trade, something Rakim wasn't interested in doing. And lyrically at least, The Seventh Seal sounds very much like the album Rakim wanted to make. There are a lot of love songs on the album, a lot of educating-the-youth songs, a lot of Obama namechecks. There's one song about God, another about the redemptive power of music. I'm pretty sure he doesn't curse once on the whole LP, and there's not a single crass commercial cash-grab here.
That's great, admirable even, but you also hear what Rakim's missing without a Dre-level executive producer on board. The beats are generally flat, lifeless thumpers from unknown producers. And even the few decent beats from decent producers like Jake One or Nottz have to contend with the guest singers, who show up over and over and who feel like total dead-weight voids. No rapper would be able to maintain a consistent level of force or intensity in settings like these. Understandably, Rakim sounds exhausted more often than not, his laconic basso growl never quite as effortless as it once was. A Dre-type figure could also tell Rakim that it might not be such a good idea to rhyme "euthanasia" with "youth in Asia" or to point out that "love backwards is evil," simply because it's near-impossible to make moves like these without coming off corny.
But this is still a Rakim album, and that goes a long way. Some of the man's greatest strengths, like his technical rigor and fluidity, are the sorts of things that naturally wear away with age. But others-- principally the rush that comes just from hearing the unrushed weight in his voice-- have stuck around. Some of the songs here also make great use of the boundless goodwill that Rakim's built up over the years. Rakim's always taken his love songs seriously, committing to them as intensely as he does to his dropping-knowledge tracks; 1990's "Mahogany" is my favorite example. He pulls that off a few times here, talking about everyday struggles between couples without sounding like he's pandering or doing token for-the-ladies songs. And on "Dedicated", he brings enormous pathos to a song about his recently dead mother, making even the terrible-idea No Doubt sample on the chorus sound acceptable.
But this album still falls way short of what it could be, and I have to wonder how this even happened. Rappers should be lining up to work with this guy, but the only guest rapper on the whole album is perennial C-lister Maino. A second-generation Rakim disciple like Cormega can score DJ Premier and Large Professor beats for his new album, but Rakim himself gets stuck with pale imitations of those guys' best work. I can't say enough bad things about these hook singers. It's not a new thing for rap veterans to make limp, uninspired new albums that only barely hint at past glories. But it is a new thing for this rap veteran.


Charli XCX’s latest mixtape is a vision of what pop music could be, the sound of an eclectic, hyperreal future where romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge.

Pop 2

Maybe some people look at Sophia, the world’s first robotic citizen, and feel optimistic about the endless horizon of potential, both technological and human; I look at Sophia and feel an unsettling sadness. There is something profoundly tragic in her existence, a sense of uncanny anti-natalism that triggers a strange empathy for those who also did not ask to be born. Sophia has sharp cheekbones and golden eyes, molded in the likeness of Audrey Hepburn. Her bald head opens at the back to unveil a disturbing metal cap that hides the whirring mechanics within her skull. Through knee-jerk millennial instinct, that vulnerable bald skull always flashes me back to those unforgettable photos of Britney Spears at the gas station in 2007—head freshly shaved, eyes blank and wild, umbrella wielded as a machete. It is the image of a woman who has decided to finish the job the world started: complete disassembly.
Charli XCX knows this trope—the glitched-out femmebot, programmed for love—all too well. She grew up on Britney and the Spice Girls, then joined Myspace and catapulted into the brash, neon-tinted world of bloghouse and Hype Machine electro. After spending her early teens performing in big sunglasses and blonde wigs at DIY London raves, she signed to Asylum Records at 18 to live her pop star dreams. With the massive success of Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (both co-written by Charli) alongside her first solo hit, “Boom Clap,” her mainstream crossover seemed like a given, ready whenever she was. Instead, she doubled down on the weirdo Tumblr-core mixtapes she used to release for free, linking with post-post-modern bubblegum bass crew PC Music to try and figure out exactly what kind of artist she wanted to be. “Go fuck your prototype/I’m an upgrade of your stereotype,” Charli purrs on “Femmebot,” a cut off her latest tape, Pop 2, before her humanoid vocals stutter and short-circuit. Or as Robyn put it seven years prior: “Fembots have feelings, too.”
Pop 2—the best full-length work of both Charli and PC Music’s respective careers—is the antidote to the overwhelming monotony of the 2017 pop charts. It’s Charli’s second mixtape of 2017, which, calling your project a “mixtape” is a pretty negligible move these days, especially if you’re putting it up for sale. But for Charli, who’s been expressing herself in the format since before it was cool, there’s a meaningful distinction: albums mean compromise; mixtapes mean total creative freedom. As streaming services render organic music discovery obsolete, and as major label A&R decisions feel increasingly like a demented cross-promotional Mad-Lib of someone who has heard approximately four rap songs, Pop 2’s sprawling, thoughtful mass of guests—from Brazilian drag queen/vocalist Pabllo Vittar, to Estonian emcee Tommy Cash, to Hollyweird-via-Cologne pop conceptualist Kim Petras—put me on to no less than five artists I’d never heard of before. Because Pop 2’s not really about Charli XCX, Pop Star Extraordinaire; it’s an uninhibited, anti-algorithm vision of what pop music could be.
It’s not just the guest roster that sets Pop 2 so apart from the mainstream pop landscape, it’s the way these voices are integrated, making its 10 tracks feel less like a cool-kid curation project and more like a popping afterparty you’ve stumbled into. On “Out of My Head”—the kind of song that makes you want to slam a Strawberita and dance all night—Charli doesn’t show up in the mix until the second verse, giving the spotlight to Swedish bloghouse revivalist Tove Lo and Finnish trop-goth ALMA. By the bridge, the three voices have braided together almost imperceptibly. And on “Backseat,” an instant night-drive classic (and a fever-dream collab for anyone who replies to celebrity tweets with “mom”), Charli and synth-pop sweetheart Carly Rae Jepsen exchange verse and hook duty before coming together as one voice, howling “All alone, all alone, all alone” in unison. These are huge, emotionally climactic songs, with soaring melodies and bass that sounds like the shifting of skyscraper scaffolding. But there’s something doomed and loveless in the air, too; on Pop 2, romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge.
It’s Pop 2’s production, more than anything, that places it on the vanguard of a complete stylistic breakthrough, thanks largely to PC Music’s A.G. Cook, whose credit appears on every song. I was skeptical of the label’s high-concept art school antics when they first emerged; but the further they’ve gotten from the Web 1.0 shtick, the more vital the collective’s impeccable, poignant pop futurism has become. And though Pop 2 sounds like the future, even more delightful is the way it hybridizes sounds from the past two decades of weirdo electronics: the synthetic maximalism of Rustie and HudMo, heartfelt late ’90s Eurodance a la Aqua or DJ Sammy, Crystal Castles’ goth electro-scuzz, J-pop super-producer Yasutaka Nakata’s wistful Shibuya-kei, Cher’s “Believe,” and of course, Britney, from Blackout to Britney Jean. And though it’s by now common practice for pop stars to flirt with hip-hop production, the results often reveal a cynically low level of engagement with the genre—tacking on “Metro Boomin-Type Beat,” some 808s, and calling it a day. Here, Charli and A.G. Cook know exactly what they’re going for: the “Versace”-style repetition on alien posse cut “I Got It”; the pristine, sultry chords, reminiscent of Late Nights With Jeremih on “Out of My Head”; the slurry, decayed cadences on “Delicious,” calling to mind Travis Scott or Swae Lee.
The strangest and most uncannily similar stylistic comparison to Pop 2, though, is former “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham’s outsider opus, My Teenage Dream Ended. Sweepingly ridiculed as one of 2012’s worst albums, that judgment, five years later, feels wildly narrow-minded. It is a baffling work, to be sure: frantic layers of dubstep, EDM, witch-house, and breakbeats seem to run in the opposite direction as Abraham’s absurdly AutoTuned narratives about surviving the death of her husband. (In a recent interview, the album’s producer, Frederick M. Cuevas, admits that Abraham recorded her diaristic lyrics before ever hearing the music.) After my first full spin of Pop 2, I couldn’t shake the thought: “This sounds like Farrah, but good.” The album’s vocal processing is unlike anything I’ve heard in pop; Cook’s aggressive, evocative filtering has the paradoxical effect of heightening the humanity of it all. On “Lucky,” the tape’s saddest, wildest song (whose title cannot be understood without an implicit nod to Britney, whose own “Lucky” was her first of many explorations of the soul-sucking side-effects of stardom), Charli’s voice warps from anthropomorphic pan flute to rogue AOL dial-up tone to primal scream from the soul. When she sings, “You got no reception, you’re breaking up,” her voice gently stutters like it’s just out of service range, a subtle but brilliant touch.
But the tape’s best moment is saved for last. Unceremoniously titled “Track 10,” the song glitches into focus as if beamed in from interstellar broadband. Charli’s hyper-filtered melodies float over a celestial synth choir, building into a densely-layered collage of her own voice, howling at the moon until their vocal chords go ragged. Halfway through, the track explodes into ecstatic drums and vocal effects from Lil Data, a PC Music artist who uses a program called TidalCycles to compose via code. Far from the pristine perfection of PC Music’s early releases, there’s something a bit messy about the whole thing—a sense of humanity, beaming plainly from its hyper-synthetic surroundings, that feels like a revelation.


A few years ago, estimable hip-hop producer Peanut Butter Wolf did his part in \n\ heralding the new breed of ...

The Unseen

A few years ago, estimable hip-hop producer Peanut Butter Wolf did his part in heralding the new breed of old-school with My Vinyl Weighs a Ton. The album, his solo debut, featured an impressive number of MCs from the thriving San Francisco hip-hop scene. One of its first tracks, "Styles Crew Flows Beats," features the Lootpack crew. The group passes the mic dexterously, each doing his part to heighten the flava until the groove suddenly shifts and an eerily high- pitched voice strolls into the proceedings. Quasimoto, he calls himself, and the remainder of the track is little over a minute of the finest underground hip-hop on record. He seems hyperactive and ready to burst, yet his rhymes are laid-back and his tone remains almost resolutely monotone with limited inflections.
Let it be known, then, that Quasimoto is no mere mortal. He is the brainchild/ alter ego of Lootpack member and producer Madlib, a sped-up manipulation of his own twisted rhymes. But injecting a little self-reflexive post-modernism into music never hurt anybody. Just ask David Bowie what it can do for a career.
Instead of recording a proper solo album for Peanut Butter Wolf's Stones Throw imprint, Madlib decided to give his other persona top billing, and he pulls it off to a degree. His production generally mixes sparse loops of spoken samples with obscure funk and R&B; overtones, grounded by tight, snappy beats. "Return of the Loop Digga" is an engagingly funny paean to his mad production skills. Here, Madlib steps up to document his rise from stealing records from his auntie to laying down tracks for his man Quas.
The 'Moto, for his part, starts strong as the "bad character" of the project: \x93I smoke a nigga with a brick/ Talking out of place/ Like I was sniffing paint/ Laced/ Lining up outta space." Damn! The delivery of lines like "dropping shit like some horses/ Irritate your mindstate/ Have you split like divorces/ Of course this is the new breed/ Fuckin' up the mainstream" are pure gold, but by the middle of the album, it becomes clear that Madlib decided to cheat his alter-ego out of ontological priority rather than simply let him be. As the man behind the boards and the squeaky little man up front, Madlib accords himself too many shout-outs, too many poorly disguised pats on the back, and makes too many appearances as himself for a character album. And while by no means fatal, this is the primary fault of the project.
The Unseen is an above-average contribution to the resurgence of the old- school aesthetic, but it could have been better. The record is littered with great moments-- such as the sci-fi manifesto of "Astro Black" and the moving musical backing of "Come on Feet"-- that make me hope this isn't the last we'll hear from Quasimoto. But for Quasimoto to convince, Madlib has to chill. Let him record his own album.


When music from the twisted pop project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. Those early singles, gathered here with some newer material, still sparkle, but the problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format.

PRODUCT

When music from the project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. It was the work of a producer who had rarely been photographed and who never gave interviews, which seemed appropriate if also tiresome. Such mystery had long become a cliché by this point, but uncertain authorship suited these bulbous, sparkly audio objects, which seemed to float down out of the sky like a cluster of neon-colored balloons ready to pop. "Bipp" and "Elle"—the former impossibly buoyant with an earworm vocal line, the latter featuring deep bass and chasms of space, a bright and twinkly counterpoint to the grim tone common to dubstep—promised that future music was going to be weirder and more disorienting than we imagined but that it would also function as a bent version of popular song.
Two years and several singles later, SOPHIE is now understood mostly in the context of PC Music, a loose UK collective centered on producer A. G. Cook that recasts brazen commercialism as a kind of winking postmodern art project. PRODUCT, which collects the SOPHIE singles to date and adds some new songs, was released in limited-edition versions that packaged it with a jacket, sunglasses, and platform shoes, as well as a version sold with an object that looked like a sex toy. When you take into account that bounty of merch, and add the fact that SOPHIE’s "Lemonade" has in the last year been used to soundtrack a McDonald’s commercial, of all things, it’s clear that the act of buying and selling is deeply embedded within this project.
You might look at all this as a Warholian transformation of commerce into art or you might just see a run-of-the-mill cash-in, but neither of these perspectives adds much to the enduring brilliance of SOPHIE’s first pair of singles. Following on "Bipp" and "Elle", "Lemonade" intensifies the sound, like switching from a freshly squeezed glass of the titular drink to drinking Minute Maid concentrate right out of the cardboard can. Befitting music constructed at least in part as a critique of consumerism, SOPHIE’s tracks are gleaming and immaculate on the surface and hollow to the core beneath it. "Hard"’s chiming synths and rippling bass are again set against wide spaces of unnerving silence, a void where a deeper sense of meaning might be.
These tracks argue, often convincingly, that the surface is everything. It’s Turing Test pop: if its exterior catches your ear and makes you feel things, that communication is proof enough that some kind of soul resides inside the machine. The closing track here, "Just Like We Never Said Goodbye", shows this contrast in widescreen. It’s a melodic construction worthy of Max Martin, but the pitched-up voice, drum-free production, and generally half-finished feel highlight all the immediate pleasures of pop music while completely erasing the idea of a point of view. It’s so "almost there" you can’t help but play it over and over.
But SOPHIE is not, alas, an album-length proposition. Even at 26 minutes, the record drags, and the three song stretch of "MSMSMSM", "Vyzee", and "L.O.V.E."—that’s 38 cents of your album dollar—is depressingly skippable. These tracks either recycle bits from the earlier singles (chirpy vocals, squeaky percussion) or fold in new elements that sound mundane (trap percussion, doomy synths), leading to tracks that sound like they could have come from anybody. That these are the newer songs doesn’t help matters or bode particularly well for what might come next. And then there’s the fact that music this compressed and this syrupy is best heard in small doses, before your ear gets tired listening to it.
So the main problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. Every industrialist wanting to get his or her goods to the world knows that you have to package them properly. Heard individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container.


Open Mike Eagle's solo career pushed him from Project Blowed cog to a spotlight that gave him space to ruminate over his fights against orthodoxy. His latest album overlaps between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths, making for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far.

Dark Comedy

Somewhere between Richard Pryor going platinum and the latest episode of Louie, the establishment of comedy as a filter between the outside world and an individual's churning-brain anxiety took a deep hold in the mainstream pop-culture consciousness. The more that once-uncommon voices are allowed to speak as themselves, the likelier it is that they'll slip their grievances and worries in under the cover of slyly built jokes.
Open Mike Eagle's solo career pushed him from Project Blowed cog to a spotlight that gave him space to ruminate over his fights against orthodoxy, starting with hip-hop's (his first two album titles: Unapologetic Art Rap and Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes) and working his way outwards from there. In the process, he's found a strong lane as an MC who cracks wise in both senses of the term. For each handful of fans that came to him through a connection with the Los Angeles underground hip-hop community, there's at least one who heard about him through stand-up stars like Hannibal Buress or Paul F. Tompkins.
So his latest album, Dark Comedy, pipes in a laugh track on its semi-titular opening track, "Dark Comedy Morning Show," and Mike Eagle makes sure it comes in clear after the more raw-nerved lines—"I flew off the handle, and boy are my arms tired"; "If another dude calls me a racist, I'm'a snap"; "There's mad shootings on the news/ Unless it's in the Chi, cause blacks and Mexicans can die". The song sums up the whole album's "on that laugh to keep from crying tip" operating mode in just three verses, but there are new angles and transformative concepts that keep the balance unpredictably gallows-humored throughout.
"Informations" sets up some *Tetsuo the Iron Man-*meets-Videodrome body horror that plays to smartphone-addiction fears, then leavens it with scatological humor ("When I pass gas it sounds like a fax machine") and a sense that he's actually thrilled with the man-machine fusion. The line in "Doug Stamper (Advice Raps)" where he admonishes white rappers to "Quit rappin' in your hood voice/ Sound like a clown 100-pounder that took 'roids" both cuts closer and leans goofier when he actually imitates it as a dopey "HARR RAAR RAAR RAAR RAAAGH". Even when he threatens to lean towards unadulterated stress-rap, he undercuts it by titling his most severe bout of venting "Sadface Penance Raps" and cutting it off after less than a minute and a half under the pretext that the beat malfunctioned. The sung hook, lifted from They Might Be Giants' "Don't Let's Start", that falls victim to this truncated ending: "No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful."
Mike is an artist who thrives on working through some potentially inaccessible or confrontational thoughts and feelings using a very upfront and deceptively easygoing way with jokes and wordplay. That's not just in the references he throws around ("Thirsty Ego Raps" gives not-entirely-non sequitur nods to Dave Gahan and Michel'le in consecutive lines), or his knack for internal rhymes and verse construction that actually scan like well-timed improv asides; it's also in how he builds up a self-portrait that establishes his own agency while still opening himself up to the possibilities of camaraderie and community.
"Qualifiers," which he recorded a live version of in a laundromat, should stand as his newest signature song for that reason. He pits party-rocking impulses alongside unglamorous but important fatherhood work by rhyming "get up and dance" with "I wipe my son's ass and get shit on my hands," jabs at hood-pass-hungry vultures questioning his cred ("Fuck you if you're a white man that assumes I speak for black folks/ Fuck you if you're a white man who thinks I can't speak for black folks"), and builds a hook that upends ego-tripping with weasel words: "we the best, mostly/ Sometimes the freshest rhymers/ We the tightest kinda/ Respect my qualifiers". It's frank modesty in terms that any independent artist ever prone to self-second-guessing should recognize.
That nervous energy radiates through everyone in Mike's orbit, whether it's a characteristically mellow/jittery Kool A.D. feigning ignorance and riffing absurdist logic on "Informations" or Buress turning basic common courtesy into snarky older-brother wisdom on "Doug Stamper (Advice Raps)" with a Biz-caliber rap verse. (Sample line: "Wash your hands when you touch your l'il dirty dick/ And dry 'em off before you come tryin' to shake my shit".) Even the beats—Ultra Combo's Cloud Rap for Airports-esque "Very Much Money (Ice King Dream)", Dibia$e's chunky synths bouncily ambling in low-g on the dream gig with a catch story "Jon Lovitz (Fantasy Booking Yarn)", Jeremiah Jae laying down treated strings that sound like aluminum being table sawed on "A History of Modern Dance"—hang on a precipice between whimsical irreverence and real to-the-gut emotional immediacy.
It all builds off a feeling that this anxiety touches everyone, that even if Mike's a singular kind of weirdo, his worries are our worries. So he's feeling out the process of coming to happy terms with the weirdness he and his friends inhabit, while still wishing it came with easy communication or self-sufficient success. Whether it's through casual observation or the to-the-bone identity struggles, Open Mike Eagle's overlap between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths makes for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far.


The Toronto duo follows up an eight-year-old debut EP with an album that gestures toward various eras of dancehall and traverses a range of emotion.

Lush Life

It has taken nearly eight years for Bonjay to release the follow-up to their 2010 debut EP, Broughtupsy. The Toronto duo apparently mastered their first proper album, Lush Life, years ago, but kept revisiting and revising it, absorbed by the process. You can sense that from the album, which is both more tightly arranged and more expansive than anything else they’ve made. Elaborating on the sparse, looped riddims of their early music, they traverse a skidding range of emotion, gesturing toward various eras of dancehall while keeping their genre allegiances loose.
Bonjay frontwoman Alanna Stuart began singing in the Pentecostal church, and her voice never flinches beneath the weight of heavy drama. Lush Life’s first track, “Ingenue,” segues from chanted toasting to high notes worthy of Kate Bush. “My love,” Stuart cries, as she draws out that last syllable for ten anguished seconds, then collapses: “It’s you.” Instrumentals co-written by Stuart’s bandmate, Ian Swain, play over her vocals like stage lights. “How Come” pairs its drum machine, all throb and ache, with a delicate synth melody; everywhere the beat pulses in counterpoint to her. “Brick & High Beam” begins with a whispery refrain that lands someplace between mantra and lullaby, then, before the final chorus, gets shrouded by echoing effects. It’s the air twitching at a séance, an aria wrapped in gauze.
Lush Life was engineered by several of Canada’s best electronic musicians, including Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys and Arthur Russell superfan Sandro Perri—people who know enough about weird old disco records to bring their magic to new releases. “Devil’s Night,” a duet between Stuart and longtime Owen Pallett collaborator Thom Gill, further expands the ensemble. Gill’s low, sultry vocal inspires her most theatrical performance, her high notes tapping against the percussion, hushed yet poised. The rhythm slows to a hypnotic flicker. Lyrics yearn abstractly. At one sublime moment, a saxophone drops into the mix, its notes distending through space as Stuart sings phrases without words. You may distantly remember the Grenadian slang translation of Bonjay’s name: Good God.
“Night Bus Blue,” the closing track on Lush Life, takes its name and mood from the buses that knit Toronto together after 2 a.m., carrying shift workers, travelers, immigrants, and drunks—vehicles that represent both relief and regret. It’s by far the longest song on the album, yet it’s also the most intense, driven by clattering drums and ethereal overdubs that merge in a climax of feedback. Stuart sings like she’s narrating a dream, her soothing languor growing insistent with the music: “Nighttime fades to morning, all the while they sleep/Skyline is adorning the glow of city streets.” This is just what it’s like to watch streets race by from one of those buses, bewitched by their sapphire headlights, fingers making the frosted windows sweat.


Deafheaven’s second album is an epic mix of intense black metal and chiming post-rock, the sort of sound that inspires the wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Sunbather

Deafheaven weren’t always this good. The San Francisco band’s early shows found a scrappy, ambitious bunch of punk kids trying to warp black metal with shoegaze in a way that, for all its advances, felt familiar. In late 2010, they signed to Deathwish, the label run by Converge’s Jacob Bannon, and there were expectations in the underground. (Though, at that time, people seemed to focus more on the fact that they didn’t look like a metal band than what they were creating.) When vocalist George Clarke and songwriter/guitarist Kerry McCoy released their debut LP, Roads to Judah, in 2011, they added wrinkles to that live sound, especially on the opening track, “Violet.” The collection didn’t always match those standards. It sometimes felt muddled, like they were trying to squeeze too much into the frame.
But that gorgeous 12-minute set-piece established the template and scope for the band’s excellent sophomore album, Sunbather, a record that finds Deafheaven living up to and then surpassing expectations. Basically, they’ve learned how to take the sounds they’ve dreamed up out of their heads so we can hear them, too. If you go back and listen to Roads, you’ll find the elements that appear on Sunbather with 10 times the intensity. So while the approach here isn’t a surprise, the force with which Deafheaven pulls it off is a revelation.
Sunbather’s a seven-song collection that fuses into a massive 60-minute piece. The sequencing, moving from brightness to darkness and back, is brilliant. Throughout, McCoy gives in to his inner Johnny Marr, offering deeper, prettier, more eclectic guitar tones. His lines are smeary with tremolo and delay, and the band seamlessly incorporates melancholic piano, harsh Godflesh-style noise bursts, spoken word, lush acoustic strums, and eerie samples. That, and new drummer Daniel Tracy plays big, adding a wallop they’ve missed in the past. (Deafheaven have always been Clarke and McCoy with a shifting lineup around them; let’s hope this one lasts.)
This is music that inspires the kind of wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai (who Deafheaven have covered), or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Words of anger and frustration collide with the sheer beauty of the music. The power of that blend—raw black metal and hardcore basking in pastel-colored post-rock guitars—is something you don’t experience in those other groups. There are plaintive moments here, but this is largely music about romantic lust, anger, and disappointment delivered by a band who know their punk and hardcore as well as their metal. They know their Cure and the Smiths, too. Remember the ecstatic closing moments of Fuck Buttons’ “Sweet Love for Planet Earth”? Loop that and ask Explosions in the Sky to play the accompanying music and you're tapping into this sound.
While Deafheaven push this epic music as far as it can go, they retain a central emotional core, and are always in control compositionally. The opening song, “Dream House,” is over nine minutes long; the closer, “The Pecan Tree,” which moves from dire black metal to triumphant post-rock without any stitches showing, is closer to 12. The four longer songs don’t repeat themselves; each is stunning in its constant motion and variation. “Sunbather” is bleaker than “Dream House,” for instance, and on “Vertigo,” they downshift from gossamer prettiness to full-on heavy with a warped My Bloody Valentine transition followed by their most power metal guitar soloing to date. At the five-minute mark of that song, blast beats enter and it goes black metal. Two minutes later, though, it’s soaring again with hook-laden guitars and floor-punching dynamics.
Even the interstitial parts inspire. “Dream House”’s delicate closing arpeggios blend with “Irresistible,” a three-minute swatch of melancholic guitar and piano that works as a gentle pause before the massive “Sunbather,” but is in of itself a gorgeous composition. The grinding industrial noise at the end of “Sunbather” dissolves into “Please Remember,” a relatively brief piece that features Alcest’s Neige speaking lines from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Clarke explained its inclusion in a recent Show No Mercy: “That passage is really important to me. It just screams insecurity, which I have huge faults with.”)
Clarke’s voice mixed with the mountains of cascading guitars and drum crescendos is so strong that you don’t need to know what he’s saying to feel the effect of the music. But if you do decide to read the lyrics, you won’t be disappointed: Sunbather was in part inspired by the singer growing up with his mother and brother without any money and wondering what it’d be like to have it. There’s also his realization that, like his largely absent father, he’s able to be cold emotionally, and not necessary able to love. The album’s central image is of a girl sunbathing outside of her upscale house. Clarke spotted her after moving back home for a bit and while stuck in an existential crisis. He wondered what he’d end up doing himself and, more so, what it would be like to have that girl’s existence. And, of course, what it would be like to have that girl. “Dream House” ends with a dialogue Clarke says he pieced together from drunken texts between him and a woman he was crazy about: “‘I’m dying.’/‘Is it blissful?’/‘It’s like a dream.’/‘I want to dream.’”
With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale, the way Swans’ The Seer did last year. Like M. Gira’s masterpiece, it has the ability to capture the attention of people who don’t normally listen to heavy music. It’s also one of the most successful examples of a band using black metal as a starting point and ending up somewhere else entirely. People cite the short-lived San Francisco band Weakling’s seminal 2000 album Dead as Dreams as the pinnacle of American black metal; Sunbather is another. Like Weakling, Deafheaven have changed things with this record—black metal won’t be the same now that it’s been released. Of course, folks will argue over just how black metal—or even metal—Sunbather is, and will discuss the “un-metal” pink cover art and the fact that Clarke could probably be a J. Crew model. These kinds of arguments are irrelevant. Instead, try focusing on how much better Sunbather is than any other black metal album released this year, and how it’s, by far, one of the best in any genre. Or, maybe, just talk to your friends about what it feels like to listen to a modern classic.


Wild Nothing's third full-length is their cheeriest and most fleshed out recording to date. Jack Tatum let his love of soul music and even some disco seep into his dream-pop project, and the best moments are the most PG-13 Wild Nothing has been on record yet.

Life of Pause

On the occasion of Wild Nothing's third full-length, Life of Pause, it feels appropriate to circle back to the record that thrust Jack Tatum's college project into the spotlight. 2010 saw hugely successful shoegaze/dream pop revival records like Beach House's Teen Dream, Beach Fossils' self-titled debut, No Joy's Ghost Blonde, and the Radio Dept.'s Clinging to a Scheme. The year before, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart loudly tore into the C86 revival, declaring "This Love Is Fucking Right!" Emotions were strong, guitars were soft and fuzzy, and synths were sugary. But no record embraced romantic grandeur like Wild Nothing's Gemini. The then-21-year-old's debut communicated through instrumental atmosphere and texture, jumping between dreamy pessimism and sleepy introspection, eliciting comparisons to the big influential UK bands of the late '80s and early '90s: Cocteau Twins, the Cure, the Smiths, the Jesus and Mary Chain, etc.
Perhaps most appealingly, Gemini's innocence and purity are heavily rooted in nostalgia. "Do you remember the lightning storm?/ It was the first time that I really felt you," Tatum sang on "Live in Dreams," with the detached desire of a crush who is too afraid to say "I love you" but will write and perform a song for you. However, the thing about nostalgia is that it maintains the ability to quietly exist in the back of your brain, which is exactly why Gemini always threatens to become background music. Listening to Gemini today, six years after its release, it is easy to get swept away by the softness and sentiment, only to use the record as a soundtrack for one's own memories; perhaps this is why it was so loved in the first place.
Tatum capped off 2010 with the Golden Haze EP and eventually released his second full-length, Nocturne, in 2012. Unlike Gemini, which was recorded in Tatum's Blacksburg dorm room, Nocturne received the full studio treatment. Given the appropriate tools for growth, Wild Nothing's sophomore effort is cleaner, with a more diverse array of sounds and a considerably brighter tone. Nocturne made clear that Tatum intended to develop his sound from his bedroom pop debut. A year later, Wild Nothing released the Empty Estate EP, which attempted to zero in on the scattered electro-pop shimmer of Nocturne but ultimately came across as distant due to a deficit of textural variations and engaging lyrics. Wild Nothing's third full-length offered a chance for reinvention, and while Tatum has clearly evolved as a musician, the limitations of his past releases are still with him.
From the opening, carbonated, notes of marimba on "Reichpop," Life of Pause presents itself as Wild Nothing's cheeriest record. Tatum has said that he wanted his third full-length to sound more "organic" or "gelled," and to give his audience a sense of physical space. To strengthen this idea, Tatum created an actual room to represent the album's world for the cover shoot. Tatum's fabricated atmosphere is a warm and groovy 1970s pad, with dashes of curiosities like a checkered teapot and a mysterious bouquet of flowers. But unlike this room, which existed only temporarily in a warehouse in Long Island City, Tatum recorded Life of Pause in Los Angeles and Stockholm, at a studio once owned by ABBA.
Tatum admitted that he was listening to "a lot of Philly soul, sweet soul music" while working on the record. When these moments, particularly the notes of funk and disco, are pushed, it feels like a move in the right direction. This is the most PG-13 Wild Nothing has been on record yet: The steamy sax on "Whenever I" paired with Tatum's silky drawl could be a track in a David Lynch nightclub; his voice on "A Woman's Wisdom" is a husky plea for intimate insight. "Reichpop" is stunning, with the aforementioned marimba played by Peter Bjorn and John drummer John Eriksson.
It's a high-bar statement of an opener, but the album rarely reaches that energy level again. "Japanese Alice" brings new life to the middle of the record with psych-pop guitars reminiscent of Deerhunter, and the title track's synth throbs have a hint of Neon Indian to them. Following these two, the stoned "Alien" feels like a setback, but the brief, noisy breakdowns save it from being a completely absurd outlier.
So why does Life of Pause not completely succeed? To begin with, the record is not emotionally accessible or relatable, which isn't a huge surprise considering Tatum favors sound over lyrics. The trouble is that it's unclear exactly what Life of Pause's mood is intended to be. Tonally and instrumentally, the album is a change in style, but there is no moment of surprise; it still feels very predictable. There is nothing wrong with being formulaic; it worked for…well, pretty much everyone. But there is no moment that truly grabs you, no emotional climax, no reason to truly care. Life of Pause is a straight, albeit funky, line.
Life of Pause's monotony is only heightened by its monochromatic songwriting. In a majority of the songs, Tatum asks some sort of question ("Can I learn to wait for my life?," "Will I find a way to make sense of/ The way that you love me?," "How can we want love?," etc etc) only to conclude during "To Know You" that "There is no answer to the question." All this amorous, existential pondering seems to prevent him from doing anything, from taking a risk, from making a statement that sticks. It doesn't help that these questions are delivered in such an aloof manner that even if they pique interest for a second, they will melt away quickly. It seems like Tatum is living a lyric from "Reichpop:" "The less you say the less that you get wrong."


"One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we ...

Discovery

"One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, you know I'm just feelin' celebration, tonight, celebrate, don't wait, too late, we don't stop, you can't stop, we're gonna celebrate, one more time, one more time, one more time, a celebration, you know we're gonna do it right, tonight, just feeling, music's got me feeling the need, we're gonna celebrate, one more time, celebrate and dance so free, music's got me feeling so free, celebrate and dance so free, one more time, music's got me feeling so free, we're gonna celebrate, celebrate and dance so free, one more time."
It's practically brainwashing, isn't it? Daft Punk seem to be operating under the premise that if you hear something enough times, you'll start to believe it. But after more than 15 listens to Discovery's first single and opening track, "One More Time," vocodered vocalist Romanthony doesn't have me "feeling the need," much less not waiting, celebrating, and dancing so free. This could just be me, of course. Maybe I just haven't taken enough ecstasy and horse tranquilizers to appreciate the tinny, sampled brass ensemble, the too-sincere "chill out" midsection, or the fat drum machine beats that throb in time with my headache.
Few things are more incriminating than Daft Punk's own lyrics, which, while generally deeper than "don't stop the dancing," rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry and "could this be love" Whitesnake-isms. But music like this wasn't meant to be judged on its lyrics. And since Discovery relies heavily on the French neo-disco stylings established by 1997's Homework, the duo would probably suggest we shut up and dance.
In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B; beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock. Of the six tracks that feature vocals, four are smothered with the synthesized pitch corrector. On tracks like "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," the duo make it work by pushing the instrument to its breaking point, squeezing out subhuman glips and merging the vocals into a Vai-style synth-guitar solo. But when the band relies on the tool merely as a gimmick, as on "Digital Love" and "Something about Us," the sentimental love songs come off with all the heart-melting earnestness of Kid Rock's "Only God Knows Why."
Daft Punk typically succeed in an instrumental environment, though. Discovery's first big score comes with the rousing "Crescendolls." The obscure Imperials sample makes the song with spirited "hey's" and "everybody y'all's" yelled out from a crowd. "Superheroes," which draws its repeated refrain from a late 70's Barry Manilow track called "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed," sates with a massive, fist-pumping kickdrum, complex chord changes, and light-speed keyboard bleeps. The snapping percussion and Phantasy Star II phaser synths of "Verdis Quo" recall a somber Flashdance-era Giorgio Moroder. And the 16-bit pitch-bent tones and Klymaxx electro-bass of "Short Circuit" would have felt at home on Trans Am's Surrender to the Night.
Prog and disco have never openly begged for their own hybrid, but the genres' newborn Frankenbaby is alive, whether we like it or not. Still, this beast, however grotesque, is relatively harmless-- rather than running amok in the village and snapping the necks of civilians, it only wants to "celebrate and dance so free, one more time." Just don't let it sing.


Twenty-six years after its release, the R&B stalwart’s occasionally tedious sophomore effort remains a lovable album whose flaws only deepen its charms.

My Life

In 1994, the self-styled Queen of Hip-Hop Soul understood she had competition. TLC melded their bubblegum instincts to post-New Jack Swing beats. En Vogue flirted with rock guitar workouts. Whitney Houston was already a statue in the park admired for her architecture but taken for granted. Yet thanks to persistence and flexibility, Blige remains influential because she never assumed the masochism that became her lodestar requires sad, airless albums. Her work is morose, not numb. No matter how intensely she abases herself before lovers who don’t tire of leaving or underestimating her, Blige’s flinty egoism triumphs. No multi-platinum R&B singer has used the language of self-help as sword and shield better.
Sandwiched between the buoyant debut What’s the 411? (1992) and the austere, inevitable divadom of Share My World (1997), My Life positions Blige as heiress to an R&B fortune, thanks in large part to the sampling acumen of Bad Boy’s Hitmen team members Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs. There's Isaac Hayes and Barry White, Roy Ayres and Slick Rick—history as group therapy. These ancestral voices reassure but offer subtle contrasts, too. The title track interpolates the hook and ascending three-note keyboard from Ayers’ 1976 “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” creating a healthy tension between Blige’s blue mood and the sample’s shafts of light. On the other hand, “Mary Jane (All Night Long)” finds her and the source material in harmony: by brightening Rick James’ original synth-flute line, Thompson and Combs give Blige the chance for some old school scatting over the outro. A ’90s fly girl hearkening back to Ella Fitzgerald over a Reagan-era jam, Blige had learned how to contextualize her melancholy.
The anniversary edition confirms the novelty if not radicalism of the Hitmen’s approach: R&B as tradition and living history. Hayes and White, after all, had long stopped scoring pop crossovers; here was a Black woman artist modernizing them as part of glistening triple-platinum product. The presence of Smif-N-Wessun and LL Cool J on the second disc’s remixes attest to her dialogue with hip-hop; Blige had no interest in settling for Anita Baker’s market share. And who knows how many young listeners gave rap a try after Combs and Thompson wove Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man’s “The What” into a transformed “I’m Goin’ Down”?
While pairing artists for the sake of consolidating streams is the way the business works in the 21st century, the guest spots expose My Life’s often ho-hum songwriting. Belters like Blige rely on audience submission: Admire the voice, ignore the material. Tensile, brassy, and confident, her mezzo-soprano has little warmth. She’s stingy with shows of compassion. Less gifted predecessors compressed Blige’s whole career into five minutes, as Karyn White did with “Superwoman.” When Blige out-sings on tracks like “Don’t Go,” her technique strands her. Indeed, she has less in common with her soul forebears than with Annie Lennox, also blessed with pipes so formidable that she sings like a lead guitar, bending and stretching notes on material that, fortunately, didn’t stint on tackiness and depended on shows of vocal derring-do. Blige isn’t tacky; she’s incapable of bad taste, which sometimes cuts into her sense of fun. To listen to “I’m Goin’ Down” in sequence after the torpid “I Never Wanna Live Without You” is to wonder how a covers album of classic-R&B deep cuts recast as manifestos of self-reliance might’ve played. On the plus side, Combs hadn’t yet turned sampling into the mechanical Puff-ery of the late-’90 No Way Out era; he lets Blige tiptoe over the vocal melody of “You Bring Me Joy” without the rhythm track from White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me” overcoming her.
After My Life strengthened her commercial appeal, Blige embraced traditional feminine roles on duets. Male artists acted as foils. On the remix of “You’re All I Need to Get By,” she plays Tammi Terrell to Method Man’s Marvin Gaye. She then scored her biggest solo pop hit to date, the Babyface-composed “Not Gon’ Cry” from the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack; while no different from other performances of survivor-hood, the specificity of the songwriting suggested Blige’s capabilities when paired with the right collaborator. Ghostface Killah called her up for “All That I Got Is You,” a grim remembrance of things past. Energized, Blige recorded two of her best albums back-to-back. Mary (1999) perfects My Life’s old-is-new ethos, with Lauryn Hill, Aretha Franklin, and Elton John as collaborators and inspiration. She may have lied when titling its follow-up No More Drama (2001), but, oh, what drama—after 9-11, Blige’s dismissing hateration and holleration on “Family Affair” worked like aspirin. If she could survive, hey, there was hope for the rest of us.
My Life, though occasionally tedious, remains a lovable album; its flaws deepen its charms. The album points toward the late 2000s when Blige found simpatico partners in Bryan-Michael Cox for 2005’s The Breakthrough (its megahit “Be Without You” is a sleeker, shattering variant on “I Never Wanna...” ) and Stargate for 2007’s Growing Pains. For her last trick on My Life, she anchors “Be Happy” to Curtis Mayfield’s “You’re So Good to Me,” its slap-bass front and center. “All I really want is to be happy,” she repeats over its seven-minute groove—a prayer, promise, and earned affirmation.

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.


Following the lead of Royce da 5'9" and Elzhi, this rising Detroit rapper proves he's also one of underground rap's brightest young talents on his new LP.

The Hybrid

Dilapidated and chronically underemployed, Detroit operates as the archetype for urban decay. The automotive industry and population have withered while the murder rate remains among the highest nationally. Musically, Jack White-- once one of Detroit's most famous musicians-- moved to Nashville, and three of the biggest pillars of Detroit's hip-hop scene, J Dilla, Proof, and Baatin of Slum Village, all passed away within the last four years. Yet the talent pool of Detroit's rap scene remains deep, with the survivors flourishing amidst the rust and discontent.
The new big three include Royce da 5'9"-- an elder statesman once plagued by label woes now enjoying a late-career renaissance as one of the best underground rappers in America-- and Elzhi, whose precision with words is so advanced that he could have his own rhyming dictionary. And now on The Hybrid, Danny Brown drops his name in the hat as one of Detroit's elite.
Brown comes swinging out the gate, copy of Dilla's Donuts clutched in his hands. On opening salvo "Greatest Rapper Ever", he unleashes a torrent of savage punchlines, highlighting both his vivid imagination and the most peculiarly infectious voice since Dizzee Rascal. In less than three minutes, he compares himself to video game dinosaur Yoshi when talking about oral sex, turns a Phil Collins single into a death threat, and reminisces about skipping school while taking "the same pills that had Carlton dancing fast." Brown maintains that wide reference base throughout the record, as George Costanza, Elvis Presley, and Alanis Morrissette are all used as tools to help the rapper bolster rhymes about "bitches," blunts, bricks of cocaine, and being broke. At times, he relies too heavily on garden-variety street talk, which doesn't help the limp beats and grating choruses of songs like "New Era", "Exotic", and "Need Another Drink".
Thankfully, Brown's restless creative spirit heavily outweighs his tendency to lean on gangsta-rap tropes. The Hybrid seems an appropriate album title due to his ability to toe the line between excitable ignorance and shrewd high concept. His Linwood upbringing inspires him to cast his eye on the desolate streets of one of the most downtrodden cities in America: While most rappers brag about their newly acquired wealth, Brown goes on a shopping spree with his food-stamp card on "Thank God". Over the woozy, hallucinogenic synth line on "Generation Rx", he runs down the list of over-the-counter drugs and the prescription drug culture that keeps America's health care system going. Best of all is "Juno", which flips the script on the Ellen Page movie and the romanticism of teen pregnancy.
Back on "Greatest Rapper Ever", Brown raps, "I rap like I bet my life/ 'Cause in all actuality, nigga? I DID." While the conviction in his voice is startling, Danny Brown is still a ways away from seeing the fruition of the title of his debut album's opening track. The Hybrid, however, is a peek inside the mind of one of Detroit's brightest young talents, and shows that he is definitely on the right track.


Debut album from the Chicago MC and Kanye West protégé is proudly out of step with contemporary hip-hop-- despite contributions from his mentor, Jay-Z, and the Neptunes.

Food & Liquor

Lupe Fiasco is not the artist you think he is: Though he's been touted as everything from deck-wielding hip-hop savior to carpetbagging poseur, Fiasco is actually more of a dilettante. Which is not to say he's untalented-- he is, extraordinarily so. The Chicago MC sports one of the slipperiest flows I've heard in a long time-- he's dexterous but never technical, sly but not arrogant. He rarely hangs on syllables too long and never wastes a word. And words are plentiful on his debut album, the long-delayed Food & Liquor. Fiasco's a self-proclaimed entrepreneur wading against a current he can't seem to condone: Hip-hop circa 2006. His first album's the work of an MC in love with rap's freedom of expression but at odds with its current landscape.
Where Fiasco misses classic status is his sonic approach. The album's sound-- produced in large part by the 1st and 15th Productions duo Soundtrakk and Prolyfic-- is clearly influenced by the bombastic derring-do of Kanye West's Late Registration, the record on which Fiasco was famously introduced. Much of Food & Liquor is draped in stuttering, chopped strings and blaring guitar. Tracks like "He Say She Say" and "Sunshine", with their sweeping violas, sound like manipulative film music, undermining an MC bursting with enthusiasm by portraying him as some sort of epic figure, here to erase and rewrite rap lore. Call it Score-Hop-- only the sentiment doesn't match the performer, particularly for a rapper blowing up because he wrote a deft song about skateboarding. He also blogs, loves anime, and collects toys. Not exactly the stuff of Tolstoy.
Where West mined humor and pathos out of his delusional grandiosity, Lupe too often falls back on smug in-fighting. On the closing verse of the mostly sublime Jill Scott-assisted jazz joint "Daydreamin'", Fiasco-- with the wily tone of a nasally Chi-Ali-- mocks his peers. "Now come on everybody, let's make cocaine cool/ We need a few more half-naked women up in the pool," he raps. Only seconds later he swallows the shit and stops grinning, opting for introspection: "I'd like to thank the streets that drove me crazy/ And all the televisions out there that raised me." Why the ridicule before the contemplation? Maybe it lies in Fiasco's faith, which dictates some of his preachier verses. The influence is clear on "Intro", which echoes the opening track of Mos Def's debut, and the brilliant screed "American Terrorist".
More troubling is Fiasco's apparent inability to write fly hooks. While his verses are packed with wit and double meaning, his hooks are mostly blandly-sung, unmemorable couplets. This highlights what may be Food & Liquor's biggest flaw: It's just not that fun. This is not to say there isn't a place for grand, thoughtful hip-hop-- there isn't nearly enough. But on the strength of his 1st and 15th mixtapes, the joyful "Kick, Push", and effervescent "I Gotcha"-- one the best Neptunes tracks in years-- Fiasco's at his best when he's a bit livelier. This is to say nothing of "Outro", another grandiloquent production, minus the intelligence. It's 12 minutes (!) of Lupe shouting out people like MTV, his nieces, nephews, and his "big homie Shondell." It's barely listenable once, let alone repeatable. There is also a track on here produced by Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda featuring onelinedrawing's Jonah Matranga of which we will say no more.
Of course, this sounds negative, but it's more the notes of a slightly disappointed fan. I never fell in love with the highly regarded leak of this album months ago, but this is an improvement, with futuro-funk tracks like "The Cool" (from Kanye West) and "I Gotcha" added to the mix. The album's best song, "Hurt Me Soul", is as ostentatiously conceived as much of the album, brimming with lush strings and a single plinking piano courtesy of Needlz-- his only solo production.
Lyrically, Fiasco is vivid and nimble and appealingly contradictory. He opens with the accusatory, "I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because of the women degraded" and then explains he was swayed by Too $hort's humor. He later questions Jay-Z (a noted supporter of Fiasco's) and his "never prayed to God, I pray to Gotti" credo from "D'Evils", only to become a convert after his 30th viewing of "Streets Is Watching" which has him "back to givin' props again." All essential battles for any serious hip-hop fan. But this is a tough tightrope for any MC to walk and Lupe is let down by what is supposed to be this album's selling point: the music.
Reportedly Fiasco modeled Food & Liquor after Nas' adventurous if overblown follow-up to Illmatic, It Was Written. This illuminates everything. Fiasco's putting the Phantom before the horse, so to speak. He hasn't released a classic, gritty album yet. Instead he's attempted to ascend to a status he hasn't earned, and frankly, shouldn't want. This is no call for Lupe to tone down his aggressively thoughtful themes, merely to reframe them. He doesn't have to be a savior. There's no one to save.