Mirage nixed any suggestion that intra-band drama was their sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top.

Mirage

After two records about cheating on each other, it was inevitable that Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine and John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood would begin to cheat on Fleetwood Mac. They were traveling in separate limos by the end of the bad-tempered Tusk tour, where Buckingham had kicked Nicks onstage, and they’d circled Europe on Hitler’s old train. “Looks like the end of the line,” the New York Post warned in March 1981, as solo careers started to proliferate. Fleetwood released The Visitor in June. Where Tusk had taken a year to record, Nicks’ debut album, Bella Donna, was nailed in a few days, released in July, and certified Platinum by October—just as Buckingham’s Law and Order limped to No. 32. Her blousy mystique was the antithesis of his uptight theme, and to dent his fragile ego further, it had been validated by serious men: collaborators Tom Petty, Don Henley, and producer Jimmy Iovine, who she was now dating. According to Buckingham’s then-girlfriend, Carol Ann Harris, he liked to refer to “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” as “Stop Draggin’ My Career Around.”
Having accepted that the band weren’t interested in “shaking people’s preconceptions of pop,” as he sniffed to any reporter who would listen, Buckingham resolved that Fleetwood Mac’s next album should be a proper group effort. Mostly minus Nicks, they mingled their ghosts with those of the haunted Château d’Hérouville, just outside Paris, a destination chosen to accommodate Monaco resident Fleetwood’s tax affairs. Harris observed communal meals eaten in silence. The drug intake exceeded even that of Tusk, according to co-producer Ken Caillat. It’s hard to find any comment about why they chose to name their thirteenth record (and fifth under this lineup) Mirage, though the resonance is obvious in hindsight: It’s the illusion of the band, rather than the full-blooded beast. Buckingham tossed off his songs in under two months. “What can I say this time/Which card shall I play?” Nicks sings on “Straight Back,” sounding like a woman in search of an idea. She pulls out her well-worn tarot deck—wolf, dream, wind, sun—and whips up an unconvincing sandstorm about how “the dream was never over, the dream has just begun,” while Fleetwood Mac increasingly resembled an inescapable nightmare.
Fleetwood Mac’s internecine relationships and betrayals outdid any soap opera, though by 1982, they had plotted almost every conceivable love triangle and finally found partners outside the group. Mirage nixed any suggestion that drama and vicious recriminations were the band’s sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top. “Every hour filled with an emptiness I can’t hide,” Christine McVie sings on “Wish You Were Here,” referencing her split from the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Love and happiness become an illusion, an unattainable idyll only accessible to the gods: “Knowledge not meant for mortal fools,” Buckingham sings on “Book of Love,” though that doesn’t stop him and his cohort from clinging to the belief that someone, something out there can save them. “Never take your love away, begging you, baby,” McVie pleads on “Love in Store,” turning a trope into a frantic plea.
Yet Mirage has a sunny desperation. Rumours’ harmonies return, the rhythms shuffle, xylophones tinkle, and acoustic guitars add innocent flourishes to every refrain. There’s a similarly nostalgic optimism to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, also released in ’82: Where Vietnam and Korea cast an ominous pall over Fagen’s paradise, Fleetwood Mac’s collective mania makes Mirage feel like fiddling while Rome burns. Buckingham in particular is hell-bent on leaping back several decades to escape all this mess: “Standing in the shadows, the man I used to be/I want to go back,” he growls on the peppy “Can’t Go Back.”
Some of Buckingham’s perception-shaking DNA remained intact: “Empire State” is the opposite of “Oh Diane,” a daring pop song indicating that Tusk was the result of calculated genius, not just megalomania and madness. Buckingham praises the Big Apple and denigrates his native LA with a wild, removed lust that looks right through the object of his affection; when he sings about “flying high on the Empire State,” the lurching keys and harmonies make him sound like he’s being spun on his axis. (Fleetwood’s drums also sound fantastic, recalling Dennis Davis’ work on Low—also recorded at the Chateau.)
Nicks also mainlines nostalgia, though hers is motivated more by loss than bitterness. “That’s Alright” harkens back to the country music of her childhood, and the precise mix is as rich as a watercolor where every color blurs and accentuates the next one. There’s a grace to her lyrics that’s absent on Tusk, conceding to a partner who just can’t work it out: “I can’t define love like it should be,” she sighs. “That’s alright, it’s alright.” And you can only imagine how mad Buckingham was when she swept in and stole the show with “Gypsy,” its chrome glint distilling her loss of self and the death of a childhood friend, and the optimism the couple felt as young bohemians in San Francisco. Buckingham is always attempting to harness his overheated energy to open up some kind of tear in the fabric of time and space, to step through and rediscover innocence. Nicks, though, conveys the sad wisdom of someone who knows you can never go home again.
As ever, it’s McVie who maintains the most poise on Mirage, even as she languishes over Dennis Wilson. She’s just as lachrymose as on Tusk, but her songs rediscover the body she lost there. There’s adult acceptance in her voice on the Carole King-indebted “Wish You Were Here,” though the lyrics convey an adolescent morbid streak: “I can’t help feeling lonely/There’s no way, no way that I could stop.” “Hold Me” is one of the few moments on the record where McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham sing together. It’s the polar opposite of Tusk’s title track, where the three singers hissed their spurned collective demands. (“Don’t say that you love me! Just tell me that you want me!”) Instead, even as McVie is singing about Wilson, it plays as a plea for understanding and reconciliation between the estranged five-piece: “I don’t want no damage/But how am I going to manage with you?”
They barely did. They fought on the video shoots for “Gypsy” and “Hold Me,” and the Mirage tour was short. Unsurprisingly, given the perfunctory nature of the sessions, there are few whole songs from the cutting room floor on this reissue: Nicks’ “If You Were My Love” is solid, and a more aggressive version of “Empire State” shows what might have transpired had Buckingham been allowed to make Tusk II. Warner Bros. were relieved that he didn’t: Mirage took the band back to No. 1 for the first time since Rumours, and spent five weeks there. The public preferred Fleetwood Mac as soft-rockin' comfort food. In a state of exhaustion and addiction, the five-piece papered over the cracks with an apple pie lattice, and saw other people for five years.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the soaring 2004 album from the first American Idol winner, whose earnest charm and everywoman appeal charted a brand new course for pop stars.

Breakaway

The most interesting thing about Kelly Clarkson seemed to be that she was not interesting at all. Even as she became the inaugural winner of American Idol and released Breakaway—one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century—journalists regularly marveled at the unpretentiousness of the former cocktail waitress from Texas. She was the quintessential girl-next-door, “warm-as-a-popover” and “safe-as-milk.” Sure, she had a protean, phenomenal voice—one that made you happy she covered Aretha or Whitney, instead of feeling mortified that she had tried—but she was not overtly sexy, ostentatious, or hip. “It is hard to spend time with Clarkson without wondering if she even realizes she has moved to Los Angeles,” a writer remarked in a 2005 profile of the singer, quipping that the only place you’d spot her in US Weekly was in a “Got Milk?” ad. She went to Chili’s, not wild bashes thrown by Justin Timberlake. Her personal assistant was her brother. She still very earnestly said “cool beans.”
In other words, she was not Britney or Christina—stars whose promiscuous image and mass-market gloss in the public’s perception had made them the subject of a ceaseless media swarm in the early 2000s. A few years earlier, teen pop had replaced grunge in the monoculture: “It’s as if a legion of music fans and bizzers, stunned by the grim finality of [Kurt] Cobain’s act, collectively decided… give us artifice and showbiz,” an Entertainment Weekly writer remarked. The result was boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, bubbly ingenues trained in Disney’s sunshine factory. Like Avril Lavigne, Clarkson was seen as a corrective to the “midriff-baring aristocracy”—because of her wholesomeness and relatability, not any mutinous attitude. Pushing against the sanctimony, Clarkson told a reporter, “I love Britney Spears… People always say, ‘Oh, I’m sick because it’s not about voices, it’s about body and everything.’ Well, that’s what people are buying.” Still, by 2004, Clarkson had charted a very different path for women in pop.
Raised by a schoolteacher and a contractor in Burleson, Texas, Clarkson was a devout Christian who performed in the choir, played sports, and starred in theater productions. After high school, she recorded a demo, eventually saving enough money through odd jobs to move to L.A. with a woman she met performing at Six Flags. Very little happened there. Carole King’s longtime songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, was maybe interested in using her as a backup singer, but it didn’t pan out. Other producers dismissed her as too heavy, “too Black”-sounding, too whatever. Then, in the ultimate stroke of misfortune, her apartment burned down in a fire—right after she had earned enough money to afford a bigger place. Drained of hope, she returned to Texas and took a day job distributing Red Bull samples. A friend told her about what was then just a novelty singing show. “I just auditioned for this thing that said they’d pay you, and it happened to be American Idol,” she recalled. “I went into it thinking it might pay my electric bill.”
Clarkson showed up to Idol auditions in muted make-up and a kitschy denim dress that she’d made by stitching together old blue jeans. Whatever she lacked in glamor, she made up with her poised, masterful renditions of Etta James’ “At Last” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and her easygoing humor. Quipping with the judges, she switched places with Randy Jackson, who for his “audition” got onto one knee and sang R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” To Idol’s resident British hardass, Simon Cowell, this stunt was the only memorable thing about her; he initially wrote Clarkson off as “just a girl with a good voice.” But she kept progressing, round after round, and by the time 10,000 hopefuls had winnowed down to one, Cowell had come to appreciate her “normality.”
Over the course of Idol’s debut season, tens of millions of people called in to the show’s toll-free number, including Natalie Maines of the Chicks, who ultimately voted for Clarkson five times and later declared, “I knew from the first episode that Kelly was the best one there.” Inaugurating a reality television explosion, the competition program presaged the social media era, in which millions of fans can propel a nobody to viral stardom through the click of their phones. By the second season, it had partnered with AT&T to launch a new voting format, precipitating the rise of text messaging.
But winning a popular election doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be consequential or compelling. From the get-go, critics identified the tendency for shows like Idol to produce technically skilled but insipid winners, those who’d “never hesitate to warble seven notes where one would suffice,” as a New York Times writer described. Clarkson’s finale song and debut single was “A Moment Like This,” one of those treacly, awe-inducing ballads in the vein of “I Will Always Love You” that treats love as a kind of transcendent bliss. (It hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts and was featured in gauzy, libidinal advertisements for Sandals Resorts.) Her debut, Thankful, didn’t challenge expectations. With the exception of tracks like “Miss Independent”—a boinging R&B-pop single originally written for Christina Aguilera—it was a fairly uninspired attempt at pop-gospel. Clarkson didn’t want to be boxed into her Idol reputation though: “I want to record an album with personality… I love ballads, but I also want my albums to rock out.”
So for her follow-up, she mussed her hair, smudged her eyeliner, and practiced her withering glare. Breakaway taps into the kind of lacerating pop-rock established by Alanis Morissette in the ’90s and Avril Lavigne in the early 2000s. Lavigne’s debut, 2002’s Let Go, helped steer pop into a spiker, more sour direction and she lent Clarkson Breakaway’s title track. Clarkson is brassy and embittered, incinerating men who’ve wronged her, striding over the scorched earth. “Your eyes they sparkle/That’s all changed, into lies that drop like acid rain,” she seethes on “Gone,” whose abrupt, punched-in guitars are like heel stomps. On the funky, irresistible “Walk Away,” she roasts a dude for being so tremblingly incompetent that he relies on his mother, his brother, everyone else to tell him what he wants. “I’m looking for attention, not another question,” Clarkson snaps. In other words: shut up and stop wasting my time.
With her tremendous voice, Clarkson didn’t have to just pirouette and soar; she could be gritty, affected, full of rage. Its visceral power imbued Breakaway’s radio-friendly pop with gusto; when she confessed to being “torn into pieces” on “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” hurtling into the feeling, she sold you with the force of her conviction. Clarkson may have grown up belting Mariah Carey in her closet, but her favorite band of all time was the Texas post-grunge group the Toadies, whose singer Vaden Todd Lewis’s voice she adored for its primality: “sexy, dirty, drunk, broken.” To give the album a darker, more gnarled edge, she enlisted help from Evanescence’s David Hodges and Ben Moody, whose presence is most felt on the ghostly “Addicted.” Clarkson sounds tortured and histrionic; her gothic wails are swaddled in noise, while violins screech in the background. And then there’s “Hear Me,” which was actually co-written by former writers for Ashlee Simpson and Avril Lavigne, but sounds like a repeat of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.”
“The problem was I wanted to write a lot of my own songs on Breakaway,” Clarkson told TIME, “Nobody else wanted me to.” After sparring with RCA’s Clive Davis, she eventually co-wrote six Breakaway tracks, including one she penned when she was 16 that had been rejected from her debut. “Because of You” is the saddest and most personal song on the record, a piano ballad about the trauma of her parent’s separation. (Clarkson’s father had walked out on their family when she was six, never to be heard from again.) The song is an outcry from one’s “inner child,” rendered in schoolyard metaphors (“Because of you/I never stray too far from the sidewalk”). And while the ubiquity of divorce now may make the song seem both overblown and quaint, “Because of You” summons the very real betrayal of discovering that adults don’t know what they’re doing, and as a child you’ll have to compensate for their mistakes. The cost of self-preservation is becoming hardened and on-edge: “My heart can’t possibly break/When it wasn’t even whole to start with,” Clarkson bellows.
The most indelible song of Clarkson’s career, though, has always been “Since U Been Gone,” a perfect storm of indie-rock nerve and pop ecstasy. It was Swedish producer Max Martin’s rebrand from the Backstreet Boys, whose squeaky-clean formula had fallen out of fashion, and the breakout smash for Dr. Luke—although Clarkson found working with Luke so demeaning that the next time they’d collaborate, for 2009's All I Ever Wanted, she’d deny a co-writing credit just to avoid the association. The original demo of the song was “very contrived, very pop,” as Clarkson recalled, so she demanded something harder: louder drums, more guitars. Then one day, Martin and Luke heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s “Maps” on the radio and thought it’d be perfect if it just had a massive chorus. So they wrote one, and boy did they: “Since U Been Gone” is deliciously screamable and anthemic, with a cleverly sad sleight-of-hand in the lyrics that suggests one of the worst casualties of a break up is the pity you receive from other people: “Thanks to you, now I get what I want.”
Karen O was a raucous art school iconoclast who’d written “Maps” as a vulnerable plea to her boyfriend, shedding real tears in the music video—and she would notably describe the experience of hearing “Since U Been Gone” as like “being bitten by a poisonous varmint,” her life cannibalized by the machine. In response, a Rolling Stone reporter pushed back, proposing that she should feel “honored to share Clarkson’s mall cred.” “Since U Been Gone” was released the year that then-New York Times music critic Kelefah Sanneh wrote his landmark essay about “rockism,” and for better or worse the borders between pop and indie, mainstream and underground had been starting to crumble, accelerated by the rise of the internet. Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos proudly told SPIN at the time, “We’re non-elitist music.”
“Since U Been Gone” was at the center of it all. Thanks to the Yeahs’ cribbed riff—and verses that sounded like Interpol’s “Obstacle 1”—the single was covered by Tokyo Police Club, A Day to Remember, and alt-rock artist Ted Leo, whose acoustic mash-up of “Since U Been Gone” and “Maps” became an internet sensation. Seeking to discover how Clarkson had become so cool, MTV conducted an “informal survey of hipsters and rockers,” which revealed that people saw the Idol winner as just a regular girl with good songs, who’d succeeded through a combination of down-to-earth amiability, feverish ambition, and indisputable talent. "At the end of the day, she’s an amazing singer,” Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump said. Ted Leo described her charm simply, “She’s not some heiress with a Chihuahua.” Blender Magazine crowned Clarkson their Woman of the Year in 2005, running the headline “Everybody Loves Kelly,” including in her list of fans “teenage girls, housewives, gay men… Oprah, Dave Grohl, the cast of Laguna Beach, your mom.”
After Clarkson won American Idol, her friend Ashley told the Dallas Morning News in 2002, ”I don't think she’ll forget us or forget where she came from.” That sentiment is echoed directly on Breakaway’s title track, a sweet, Goo Goo Dolls-style acoustic ballad about being a small town girl pursuing better things, grateful for those who helped her along her journey and eager to move on. “I'll make a wish, take a chance, make a change/And breakaway,” Clarkson sings, with the innocence of a child tossing pennies into a fountain. In the autobiographical music video, which was also promo for Princess Diaries 2, she goes from a restless 8-year-old staring out a car window to a teenager working at a movie theater to, finally, a pop singer crooning on stage.
None of the studio albums she’s released in the 18 years since Breakaway has soared quite the same, whether due to repeated clashes with RCA that compromised her vision or an ill-advised return to the cliched sentimentality of her Idol days. Her combination of goofy excitability, candidness, and humility now shines on her daytime television show, which has become so successful it's set to take over Ellen DeGeneres’s coveted slot. On a cozy set that looks like a suburban living room, she riffs with celebrities from Tom Hanks to stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race, regarding them as if she’s simply mindblown to be in the same room; she also covers about 180 songs a season on her much-beloved segment “Kellyoke,” where she proves that there’s nothing—Radiohead, Ariana Grande, Toni Braxton—that she can’t sing. When Simon Cowell dismissed her as “just a girl with a good voice,” he was right—he just didn’t anticipate how far that could get you.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


The latest project from the Sacramento by way of Mobile rapper is a rich portrait of loneliness, suspicion, and weariness, showcasing his eye for observation and a knack for self-examination.

Loyalty Over Love

So far, the story of OMB Peezy has been a tale of fusion. Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, then transported to Sacramento, California as a pre-teen, the young rapper has established himself as a human bridge between NoCal funk and Gulf Coast bounce. With his springy, unmistakably Southern lilt, and close connections to West Coast artists and producers like Nef the Pharaoh and Cardo, Peezy’s open ties to his two homes scan as tradition, not trend-chasing, culture, not curation. Loyalty Over Love, however, shifts focus away from his dual regional heritage and onto the artist himself. A rich portrait of loneliness, suspicion, and weariness, the mixtape showcases his eye for observation and a knack for self-examination. It’s a proper introduction.
Forgoing an origin story or even a central narrative, Peezy begins the tape by blowing off steam. “Venting Session,” consisting of a single verse over a snappy, smoldering DrumDummie beat, epitomizes Peezy’s writing style. Peezy often structures his verses like rants, swinging between thoughts while simultaneously reacting to them; it’s like he’s both recollecting and reliving his past. In most hands, rants feel directionless, but for Peezy there’s a palpable sense of orchestration to his zig-zagging. In one slick sequence, he shifts from being on the run to skewering the carceral state: “Paid informants closing in on me, gotta beat the case/Undercovers plotting on a nigga, tryna make a way/Capitalize, capitalism done upped the murder rate/Capital murder, they’ll lock your stupid ass behind the gates.” On paper, “capitalize” looks like filler, but the way it bleeds into “capitalism” and “capital murder” feels like a moment of realization. By confronting his past, Peezy plots his future.
“Deeper Than You Think” is more structured, and just as intense. At times Peezy’s squeaky yowl has a slight husk to it that gives his words a sense of history. “A couple niggas went left but I don’t need ‘em,” he raps with disgust, compressing old relationships into lasting imprints of pain. At a glance, this habit of cutting stories short can read as vagueness, but his voice is so modular and shifty that the betrayal, whatever it was, feels lived through. As he sings the crabby chorus—“this shit deeper than you think, it is, nigga/Think, think, think, think it is, nigga”—it feels almost invasive to pry further. He seems to live in torment.
This isolation—from former friends, from strangers, from the world—is a running theme in Peezy’s music. He often uses distance to characterize relationships and justify his trust or suspicion of the people around him. “Rain” is a roll call of past abandonments. Recalling police raids, times without money, and leeches, he divides his life into rainy days and sunny days, noting how the metaphorical weather determined who was by his side. Jail and street life are often his sharpest dividers. On “Been Through” he recounts being locked up and feeling aggrieved during phone calls but knowing he had to save face in front of fellow inmates. “Little boy this street shit ain’t for you, you better go to prom,” he huffs with worn exhaustion. Standout “Mind of Overkill” is a tempest of angst and loneliness that gives way to defiant self-reliance. “I can’t remember one time I let a fuck nigga faze me/I taught myself shit, I feel like a real nigga raised me,” Peezy declares.
Loyalty Over Love isn’t all storm clouds and dark skies. “Yeah Yeah,” a collaboration with former Disturbing Tha Peace artist T.K. Kravitz, is a breezy bopper that celebrates tacit loyalty. On the Dubba-AA-produced “It’s Whatever,” streaks of electric guitar and stabs of bright synths supercharge Peezy and Atlanta rapper’s Paper Lovee’s zooted flows. “Rain,” too, has some lift. DrumDummie’s tiptoeing keys and groovy bass licks create neat pockets for Peezy’s winding flows to slither in and out of. Still, it feels like Peezy has made a conscious decision to steer his music toward candid self-expression, his life as lived rather than mapped. Loyalty Over Love can be a bit hazy if you’re seeking strict autobiography, but there’s a constant and gripping emotional honesty that makes even his omissions feel resonant. Sometimes a story doesn’t have to be told when it can be felt.


America is both Dan Deacon's most expansive album and his most inward-looking. The first half's an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond human freak-out. The second half's four linked pieces add up to his most intricate, involving piece to date.

America

A title like America promises an ambition-- a sweeping take on life in these United States, or at least one man's personal panoramic view of same-- that people may not be expecting from Dan Deacon. And yeah, that's unfair. As carefully constructed as the work of any highbrow electronic savant you'd care to name, Deacon's music alone should clearly paint him as a smart dude, a thinker, and a craftsman.
Then again, the music's immediate, bracing surface blare, and the joyful communal whomp of Deacon's live shows, offer something more visceral. It certainly feels, while it's happening, less head-scratch and more belly-laugh. Which gets confusing for swathes of his audience. Apparently certain folks still can't reconcile the "contradictions" of an egghead dance-party maniac with an affinity for both systems music and the get-stoopidest jams in history, a guy who'd lovingly deface the memory of Bobby Darin one minute and jump on the furrow-browed krautrock express the next.
True, writers always mention Deacon's serious schooling in art music, as if it weren't obviously the structure holding up his love of noise and bubblegum from every era, even though Deacon's whole career is a testament to swirling highbrow and lowbrow together until it sounds the way a neon spin-art painting looks. If you never bothered to listen, America would seem to be him asserting his composer's chops, what with the thematic scope implied by that damn title, and the tracklist with its four-part closing suite, making it look like a prog-era concept album. And so people have been grumbling, worriedly, that this is where Deacon defangs his art by trying for Art.
Well true, America probably won't appease the short-attention span crowd, but then Deacon's 2009 album, Bromst, was already drifting toward longer durations, more intricate structures, and immersion rather than pop's immediate gratification. But a full-on contemporary experimental composition-type album is not quite what we get here, as if that's inherently a bad thing anyway: America is both Deacon's most expansive album so far, and his most inward-looking.
The first half is an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond jam-master or human freak-out. The second half is his most intricate and involving piece yet, though it's trying hard to be a lot more than a song suite, even a 20-minute one. That first half proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded. For all its jittery and hyper-percussive excess, with cartoon-tribal drums the lead voice on "Guilford Avenue Bridge" (the breaks of which sound a little like Don Caballero playing a hoedown) and static all but drowning out Deacon's own voice on "Lots" (gleeful yelping in search of transcendence), this stuff flows, which is increasingly one of Deacon's great virtues as an album programmer. If his earliest records could feel like various intensities slammed at you until you staggered away dizzy or elated or both, he's grown much more assured at dynamics, bringing you in and taking you along for the ride.
And that opening run's got "True Thrush" stuck in the middle, Deacon's most affecting song so far. Deacon's singing is clear and sad-eyed, though he still can't resist digitally scrunching his voice into computer pixie noises at various points, and he even throws in some angelic back-up harmonies, which make an unselfconsciously beautiful counterpoint to the information-overload of the music. It's the middle of the album that fizzles slightly after the bracing crunch and buzz of the first three songs, which bring new emotional dimensions to Deacon's music without totally skimping on the energy that was his earlier stuff's reason for being. "Prettyboy" is gorgeous, undoubtedly, but it's still on the level of really top-shelf video game music.
It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon. Where he really shoots off for parts unknown is on "U.S.A.", the album's finale of four linked pieces. This is not the portrait of America you're probably expecting from the portentous, inclusive sweep of the album's title, one of those Wilson/Parks style attempts to thread many strands of American music, from the conservatory to the vernacular, into a cohesive pop whole. Instead it's more like a musical self-portrait, albeit one on the scale of a Chuck Close painting. It's still recognizably Deacon's work; the ultra-bright buzzsaw textures would probably tip you off even if you were listening blind. It's just his biggest canvas yet.
Way before Spiderman of the Rings hit in 2007, Deacon undertook a half-crazed tour of the whole country via a commercial bus line, just himself and his gear, crisscrossing the Fifty Nifty. That's what I hear on "U.S.A.": the sound of someone trying to recreate the awe of watching the vastness of the country unfold from the seat of a steadily moving vehicle. So the whole piece moves along to a steady motorik-style pulse, even when the drums drop out. He tosses in some Copland/Ives strings as a kind of emotional thickening agent, but the most prominent influence from the Serious Composers pantheon would be Terry Riley's all-night pieces, where acid rock, early synthesizer blare, and orchestral minimalism fused into one hypnotic feeling of moving forward and standing in place at the same time. Deacon's still got too much pop and rock in him to go the full-on endlessly unfurling route. He's still got climaxes here, in other words, but at the same time the trip's as much about admiring the scenery as taking in the "wow" moments.
What America most reminds me of, at least during the second half, is Arthur Russell's orchestral music. Reminds me in spirit, of course, hardly in sound. Because even when Russell was operating in Serious Composer mode himself, there were often strong links to his idiosyncratic-unto-inscrutable takes on disco, folk, pop, etc. But those pieces were still about immersion, oblique narratives that build slowly from the tiniest details, the evocation of distance via duration. So is America, at least in that final stretch. This is still an album of big gestures and arresting noises, but it's also a mistake to come to it expecting the fizzy thrills of Spiderman or even the dark communal playfulness of Bromst. Loosen up on your need for three or four minutes of bottled catharsis, though, and there are some gorgeous vistas to get lost in here, even if, yeah, that means meandering as much as charging forward with frontier spirit.


Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin reintroduces his solo project’s backing band as an amorphous collective; their largely instrumental album pairs psychedelic instincts with cinematic aims.

Film Noir

Seventeen years separated the end of Swervedriver’s first run and their 2015 comeback effort, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, but it’s not as if fans of the Oxford shoegaze pioneers were lacking for cosmic-pop thrills in the interim. After the group disbanded at the end of 1998, singer-guitarist Adam Franklin barely give his amps a chance to cool down before resurfacing with Toshack Highway, which represented both a more experimental and chilled-out antidote to his former band’s sense-obliterating squall. Once that project dissolved, he returned to his comfort zone on his 2007 solo debut, Bolts of Melody, which effectively reimagined Swervedriver with less flange and more jangle. That album title then became the name of his backing band: from 2010 onward, he released albums as Adam Franklin & the Bolts of Melody. Now, with Swervedriver’s second act seemingly on pause after 2019’s Future Ruins, Franklin is embracing the Bolts branding once again—but in this case, he’s reviving an old name to signal a new direction.
On Film Noir, the Bolts of Melody moniker stands on its own. If Franklin’s name is no longer at the top of the marquee, it might be because he’s not really playing the role of frontman here. While Film Noir features several recurring players (including Locksley Taylor of Southern Ontario shoegaze faves Sianspheric, Swervedriver drummer Mikey Jones, and the late Josh Stoddard, who contributed to the record prior to his death in 2021), the album reintroduces Bolts of Melody as an amorphous recording collective. Its ranks have expanded to include Franklin’s heroes (J Mascis), his spiritual progeny (Montreal space-rockers the Besnard Lakes), and even a former EastEnders cast member (UK actor/singer Sukie Smith), among others. While the aesthetic is still plenty psychedelic, this iteration of Bolts pulls from a broader palette of sounds and instrumentation—from vibraphones to electronics—to achieve the desired otherworldly effect.
Across his many bands and projects, Franklin’s cool, melodious voice has always been the focal point, but on Film Noir, he greets us more or less to say goodbye. The opening “555” marks one of the few times you hear him sing on the album, and even here his minimal, mantric vocal is but another texture in a lushly layered cosmic fantasia that more readily conjures the magisterial psych rock of Dungen and Lonerism-era Tame Impala than Franklin’s fuzz-pedaled past. As the Film Noir title strongly suggests, these 12 (mostly) instrumental vignettes were envisioned more as cinematic scores than proper rock songs. But if the songs are meant to conjure soundtracks to ’70s Euro sci-fi flicks and spaghetti westerns that don’t exist, listening to the album feels a lot like channel-surfing through B-movies at 3 a.m., stopping just long enough to get a snapshot of a film’s vibe before flipping over to the next one: “The Village Sleeps” summons all the pomp and circumstance of a royal parade in 38 seconds flat; “Harpsiglass” takes little more to show you what Pet Sounds might have sounded like if were made for a Sergio Leone film.
Film Noir throws so much at you in such short spurts—kosmische trap beats one moment (“Vibratune”), Air-like prog-lounge with spoken-word the next (“Suzuki’s Dream”)—that the album can feel less like a unified statement than an audition reel for a music-supervision company. But when they give themselves more than 90 seconds to breathe, Bolts of Melody can offer more than mere bursts of moods. Dub vignette “Cops Raid Easy’s” deftly balances jazzy elegance with suffocating intensity, while “Black Flower” showcases the group’s collaborative frisson at peak strength: its Floydian synths trigger a dramatic, castle-storming march, guided by Smith’s wordless vocals and Mascis’ shredding. Yet even when his mic is switched off, Franklin’s melodic instincts are ever present. The Neu! Order motorik cruiser “Hi-Rise Decade” is so pretty and precise, you might wonder why Franklin didn’t just top it off with a proper vocal hook. But like true cineastes, Bolts of Melody understand that when a scene is so carefully set, adding anything more would just clutter up the shot.


The Michigan indie rocker’s final album in a trilogy is a despairing look at the world and the life of a songwriter told with great wit, melodies, and self-deprecation.

Aftering

On “Good Times Are Gone Again,” the first single from Fred Thomas’ new album, nobody’s talking about how incredible their summer’s been. Maybe they had an incredible summer, but they’re sure not gonna talk about it—what an insult that would be to everyone else suffering from this pervasive American malaise that makes enjoying a tall glass of lemonade seem like a willful act of ignorance. Because it’s 2018, we have to assume it’s probably about Donald Trump. Because it’s a Fred Thomas song, he sings “bad things are happening now,” because bad things are always happening to anxious, depressed people in his music, often himself. The song certainly could’ve appeared on All Are Saved and Changer, two albums written before the election that, with Aftering, form a kind of thematic trilogy. You know that famous Isaac Bashevis Singer quote about how if you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of becoming a prophet? By that metric, Thomas is a modern-day Nostradamus who’d quit the job if he wasn’t so damn good at it.
The press release claims Aftering is loosely modeled after Neil Young’s bummer classic On the Beach, split between an emotional burnout’s last flares and long, desolate stretches of watching the smoke clear. Thomas teased it as, “Basically all of my deleted tweets and drafts I was too fearful to publish, just in song form” I’d say he’s got a better grasp of his music’s appeal. The word “aftering” is an apt coinage for the process Thomas has undergone over the past five years—reliving past mistakes with no intent to learn from them, breathing life into stale grudges and resentments, hitting “send tweet,” picking whatever poison that provides some modicum of immediate relief before dealing with how it made things much worse, just like it always does.
Aftering is naturally the most hungover record of the trilogy, even more so than the one where Thomas threatened to hunker down in his apartment and drink a whole case of beer out of spite. And so much of it takes place on the most hungover day of the year: “January 1st, no one’s waiting for a shift in eras/No one’s waiting for the anxiety to dissipate because we all feel it daily,” Thomas sings halfway through the queasy eight-minute drunkalog, “House Show, Late December.” The narrator on “Alcohol Poisoning” flips the calendar with a three-day hangover while clinging to the saddest lie an addict can tell you: “I’m never doing this again.” “When you tried to make yourself puke/Well, it was no use/It was already in your bloodstream,” he taunts on the very next song, helpfully titled “Hopeless Ocean Drinker.” In the progression of addiction, we’re past the “fun with problems” stage and right into “problems.”
The tuneful first half of Aftering could blur this distinction, but Thomas’ chipper melodies add insult to injury, a mocking reminder of what it felt like to get your hopes up in the first place. They can also inspire a feeling of actual injustice—how is it fair that a principled, respected indie rock lifer spends the most celebrated stretch of his career going into brutal, granular detail about playing another half-empty show and living check-to-check? Then again, this is the unique power source of Thomas’ music, accessing raw nerves to transmit these paralyzingly visceral feelings of bitterness, envy, and self-negation that most artists can’t bring themselves to admit and most listeners would rather turn a “shut up and play” deaf ear.
On “Slow Waves,” a sleep-deprived Thomas speaks with grim resignation about “two shows outside of Philly that will pay my rent completely,” grateful for the opportunity but also not finding himself all that far removed from the hand-to-mouth existence of his first real tour with Aloha in 2000. “28 shows in 31 days/three hundred $1 bills in the band fund/U-Haul trailer dragging uphill,” Thomas recalls on “House Show” with a glimmer of nostalgia before fast-forwarding through nearly two decades of the “high fructose corn syrup corner stores,” “blunt wrap bodegas” and now, the depanneurs of his new home in Montreal: “17 years later, I’m still in the same jail/I’m still sending out these cassette tapes in the mail.”
As a final chapter, Aftering promises some kind of resolution, maybe something approaching hope. But the closing “What the Sermon Said” offers no big reveal: Thomas recalls his parents taking him to a new church when he was 8 in a desperate and futile attempt to introduce him to new friends. Afterward, the family eats in awkward silence and Aftering becomes the most heartbreaking album to end in an Arby’s.
Aftering’s second half of ambient tone poems puts Thomas in direct comparison with guys he’s been tangentially evoking over the span of the trilogy: Mark Kozelek and Phil Elverum, mercurial, prolific songwriters who made sharp pivots to pure logorrhea and somehow vaulted to higher levels of critical and popular acclaim than ever before. The irony here is after years of being perhaps too stubborn, too scattered, or too cynical for the aughts indie stardom that he deserved, Thomas might be too accessible, idiosyncratic and relatable in this mode to have his Benji or A Crow Looked At Me. The trilogy began with Thomas’ dog dying and ended up with him eating curly fries; in between, he vented about famous friends, old girlfriends, Olympia street punks, watching Sonic Youth videos, and working at American Apparel. None of it was meant to generate bigger points about the way we live or the way we die, it’s just the way we get by.


The 30th-anniversary edition of Kick affirms its status as a jewel of ’80s pop-rock. It’s a showcase of the band’s opulent production, slithery grooves, and the allure of Michael Hutchence’s simplicity.

Kick

INXS recorded albums made for communal euphoria. With thick bottoms and light funk filigrees, their songs fit all the needs of 1980s pop radio, but it was singer Michael Hutchence who distinguished the Australian sextet from Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon could sing about unions of the snake but not shout, “I’ll take you where you really need to be” as INXS’ hit “What You Need” did. The lead single from 1985’s Listen Like Thieves inaugurated a five-year period during which they were as inescapable on radio and MTV as Whitney Houston, George Michael, and U2. Hutchence’s suicide in 1997 has lent this era a beguiling glow: for a while, INXS earned the right to act as if they were a new sensation, a shimmering novelty instead of vets six albums into a career.
If time has proven Listen Like Thieves a superior album, the 30th-anniversary edition of Kick makes clear why the six-times platinum release is better remembered. Thanks to Chris Thomas’ sumptuous production, miraculously free of the ’80s’ production stereotypes that scolds like to claim are “dated,” Kick fulfills the title’s promise. Besides, Listen Like Thieves didn’t have “Need You Tonight” and a trio of follow-up singles that kept Kick in the Top 30 for close to a year. By the time the album/tour cycle expired, INXS were one of the world’s most popular concert draws, competing with U2, especially in South America (where they remain, according to conversations with my students, as beloved and canonical as U2).
Meanwhile, one thing hasn’t changed: Kick sounds fucking great blasting from the car. This edition makes the point rather too sumptuously: a three-CD/one Blu-ray set, including a Dolby surround-sound version of the original release and a welter of previously available demos and 7” and 12” mixes. In case you don’t need the Kookaburra Mix of “Guns in the Sky” as much as I do, starting with “Need You Tonight” is a good idea. Before it hit No. 1 in January 1988, INXS’ biggest American hit sounded like a classic upon its release, and like many such miracles, its simplicity was the key. Guitarist-keyboardist Andrew Farriss, co-writer of many of the band’s hits, claimed that “Need You Tonight” came to him while waiting for a cab to pick him up at the airport; when he got to Hong Kong, he and Hutchence finished the lyrics.
What you hear is a beefed up demo: Farriss’ drum part recorded on a Roland 707 drum machine, keyboard bass, and that riff—maybe the most recognizable opening three notes of the late ’80s. Huffing, whispering, leaping into falsetto, and squealing, Hutchence turned in a performance that was a karaoke version of itself. When Bonnie Raitt covered it in 2016, she didn’t even try to compete; she didn’t have to. All “Need You Tonight” requires is a performer who understands the folly of outsinging the groove. In video form, “Need You Tonight” segued into the nonsensical “Mediate,” during which Hutchence and an obviously hungover band, imitating Bob Dylan in the iconic clip of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” but fabulous in leather, dropped title cards.
The other three singles aren’t so much advancements as refinements. Over a rippling guitar line that showed how much INXS had heard from their former producer Nile Rodgers, “New Sensation” shows Hutchence in the declamatory mode that best suited him, with Thomas isolating instrumental elements every time the chorus swings around: a sax bleat, a terse guitar interjection, synth horns; it’s “Original Sin” recast as a plea for world domination. “Devil Inside” is even better: Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” with bull’s blood in its veins. The fourth single, released as Kick’s promotional cycle wound down, was the first to peak outside the American top five, but ask anyone born after 1985 and “Never Tear Us Apart” will be the INXS song they know. This ballad, anchored by keyboard strings, is rather blowzy—Hutchence can do the grand manner, but he’s too intense, as if still in that declamatory “Need You Tonight” mode. But millions of fans of Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut disagree, and so did the band: “Never Tear Us Apart” blasted as Hutchence’s coffin was carried out of St. Andrews Cathedral in 1997.
If no one has tried reclaiming Kick as classic, blame the album tracks, which are vestigial at best. “The Loved One” is the band embarrassing themselves with Steve Winwood yuppie blooze. “Calling All Nations” and “Wild Life” boast identical dueling guitar parts, one of which is tuned to “shred.” For a while, though, INXS had enough concentration to cough up a reasonable facsimile like 1990’s X; the top ten single “Disappear” boasts Hutchence’s most convincing show of soul. As they entered the 90s, the band’s steady commercial decline mirrored Hutchence’s personal decline: drugs and a taste for violence led to desultory albums like 1993’s Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, in which Farriss can’t hide his distaste for the pseudo-grunge material he forced himself to write. Hutchence’s death forestalled an ignominious fade.
Enough of that. Releasing a collection as overstuffed as Kick: 30th Deluxe Edition in 2017 hearkens back to the opulence of the INXS era itself; to ask whether the album deserves the incense is beside the point. I’m sure U2, obsessed with significance, will get similar treatment. But Kick’s slithery grooves are at least a match for The Joshua Tree’s hymns, and, as the live versions of “Mediate” and “Never Tear Us Apart” included therein attest, INXS at their peak summoned a grandeur no less numinous for being sex-drenched. At this stage in their careers, INXS were more authentic about their lightness than U2 were about their meaningfulness. After all, Bono, a chum of Hutchence’s, also wrote about the devil inside; Michael Hutchence sang as if he’d confronted him—and liked the cut of his jib. The devil was himself.


The experimental musician’s sweeping, ambient album works in small, fascinating ways from moment to moment but has a cumulative force that is unlike anything he’s done in years.

Agora

Among the wave of experimental electronic music artists who came to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, Christian Fennesz was the scene’s great romantic. His laptop compositions were as formally rigorous as those of his peers, but his music always carried with it an element of grandeur and a touch of the sublime. Unlike many of the producers who were once gathered together under the umbrella of IDM, Fennesz’s work never had a strong connection to dance music. There were beats on early tracks like 1997’s “Blok M,” but these were the exception. Fennesz’s musical heart lay somewhere far from the dance floor.
Even in the exploratory world of electronic music, Fennesz was different. If Autechre’s music could be traced to the metallic thwack of early American electro, Aphex Twin to the machine-heart pulse techno proper, Tim Hecker to shoegaze and the high art world, Fennesz’s strongest aesthetic antecedent was the new romantic ’80s pop that followed in the wake of Roxy Music. This music flourished in an era in which productions were heavy with reverb and effects, where you weren’t sure when the synths ended and the guitars began. Fennesz’s link to the sound of this period was further affirmed by work he did with David Sylvian, the singer, songwriter, and former frontman of the ’80s band Japan, both on the latter’s album Blemish and via Sylvian’s guest spot on Fennesz’s album Venice. And then there was Fennesz’s version of A-Ha’s “Hunting High and Low,” put together for a covers comp in 2008, which showed how the lush twang of his processed guitar fits perfectly into a new wave context, its naked emotionalism worlds away from what first comes to mind when thinking of “computer music.”
This vision of the ’80s provides the thematic context for Fennesz’s new full-length, Agora, his first solo album in almost five years. These pieces are thick with luscious texture and assembled with a symphonic sweep, building from barely audible scrapes and clicks to epic climaxes large enough to blot out the sun. Each of the four tracks has its own dramatic arc, some subtle and some utterly titanic, and the record as a whole has a cumulative force only possible when those are stacked one atop the other.
The title of album opener “In My Room” brings to mind not only private communion with sound, but also, of course, the Beach Boys, another artist that Fennesz covered early and referenced, in part, with the title of his 2001 breakthrough Endless Summer. But this track doesn’t try for the liquid warmth of that album, and instead zeroes in on a thick, piercing, multi-layered drone. After an opening bass throb so low it’s on the threshold of audibility (and if you listen on cheap earbuds you might miss it entirely), “In My Room” gathers new sonic elements one-by-one, like a great ball of sound rolling down a hill. By its final minutes, the tension it builds begins to leak out, as everything comes together and it moves from anticipatory to blissful.
The 10-12 minute range, in which each of these tracks falls, is just the right amount of time for Fennesz to introduce his ideas, develop them, and then twist them into a gut punch. Both “Rainfall” and the closing “We Trigger the Sun” feature blends of synthesizer and processed guitar that bring to mind, however obliquely, the darkly beautiful chords found on the Cure’s Disintegration. The former moves forward in fits and starts, a clanging rattle of sonic energy, and deep in the mix are wisps of buried vocals, more of a suggestion than a statement. The title track, with cavernous echo that evokes grand expanses, not unlike the virtual desert-scapes of ambient composer Steve Roach, is the one stretch of relative calm, but an underlying ripple of anxiety remains. These tracks have the immediacy of pop, but stretched out and blown up.
Fennesz is a consistent album artist, someone who knows what he’s good at, and he’s never made an album that’s less than good. But there’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works. Listening to it, I kept going back to that A-Ha cover, those ’80s guitars, and what they meant to someone who came of age during the time. This was music about big feelings and human connection that took on a new resonance when heard alone. The blurry sonics framed by those guitars, and then channeled by Fennesz into an entirely different kind of music, recall teen pop fans who were in thrall to the glamour of MTV, but who also appreciated the music in the comfort of their bedrooms, where it gave them space to dream.


The trio’s collaborative debut stumbles into lovely stretches, coasting on the beauty of the singers’ voices. But it leaves you wondering why such an obviously winning combination falls short.

dvsn / Ty Dolla $ign: Cheers to the Best Memories

Cheers to the Best Memories

Dvsn and Ty Dolla $ign could inject grace, pain, or meaning into the “Kars4Kids” jingle. Individually, the three are a force in contemporary R&B, sculpting gooey ballads and tingling hits about doomed relationships and humid, haunting nights from their respective silos. Dvsn—the union of singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85—have made elegant, expansive albums about sex and security on Drake’s label OVO; Ty Dolla $ign, for his part, has made his presence known everywhere, slathering gravelly vocals on pop songs and rap tracks and his latest triumphant solo album. Together, the trio forms a steamy supergroup. But the experience of listening to their collaborative debut becomes less about basking in the glimmering harmonies and more about wondering why such an obviously winning combination falls short.
Ty and Dvsn should be natural partners on all things carnal. Ty’s last joint album, a buoyant, deeply horny record with Jeremih, kept a fluorescent focus on the playfulness of hooking up, while Dvsn’s albums can feel like meditations for the bedroom. The latter duo’s ability to treat sex as both a drama and a language has shone in their previous work. On Cheers to the Best Memories, its absence is glaring. Instead of splitting the difference on the record, they go for the clumsy and obvious. “Sexing” gets crooned as a verb. Ty rhymes “ass and breast” with “more than sex;” later, he fumbles at a quarantine reference in his incessant quest to get laid: “We’ve been inside for too long/For me to be outside of you,” he hums. These songs drift through flirtations, sometimes with a captivating silkiness. You can get lost in the layered coos about private rooms and bedspreads until a particularly cringe-inducing lyric comes along.
The lazy writing often defaults to misogyny. “God made bad bitches rude,” Ty grumbles on his designated interlude, complaining about an ex’s “pussy power.” “Can’t Tell” has some of the record’s most fun production, with shimmering synths and a catchy YG verse, but the chorus’s menacing line—“Hope that you’re not a tease”—pierces the song’s sheen. The group casually embeds entitlement into their depictions of seduction: “I came all this way/Now it’s time for you to show me what it do-ooh-oooh-ooh,” Ty warbles on “Outside.”
There are moments where the album does sink into reverie, where Nineteen85’s production becomes sparse and airy and thrumming, and the trio’s voices braid into a kind of elegy. “Don’t Say a Word” unspools over steady, plumbing bass as Daley sings about navigating a secret romance. Ty’s croaking vibrato is in full force here. “Don’t compare me to your ex,” he sings with a palpable sting. “I deserve way more respect.” The track swells into an interlude, layers of women’s background vocals building into a Greek chorus: “Can you take it?” Ty and Daley ask over and over, sometimes in gleaming harmonies and sometimes in whips and whimpers of falsetto. The double entendre is clear: the song offers a literal sexual play-by-play, but there are pleas for clarity and connection seeped into all the sweat. On “Fight Club,” their harmonies swirl past sputters of trumpets as they admit their lover is right, and that needing can be a stronger urge than arguing.
Still, too many of the choices here are confusing, glaring commercial bait, or both. “Somebody That You Don’t Know” is a radio play that sounds jarring and out of place with the rest of the album’s tracklist, with smeared guitars, a vaguely Latin-inspired beat, and a banal storyline about lusting after an anonymous woman. Nineteen85 crafted Dvsn’s earlier records with intricate, intimate minimalism; he trades that in for campy handclaps that underpin “Wedding Cake” and overpowering, glitchy AutoTune on “Memories,” a track Drake’s longtime collaborator 40 also produced. The album seems to stumble into lovely stretches, coasting on the sheer beauty of the singers’ voices. “Better Yet,” Dvsn’s interlude, surges, and searches. Nineteen85 dribbles a smeared synth here, a pulsing drum pattern there. There is no grand message or takeaway, just obvious, aching craft. You’re left wishing that could be enough.

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The Montreal synth-pop duo explore an alternate ’80s where ethereal, post-goth dream pop sounds almost indistinguishable from lush, adult-contemporary soft rock.

Deborah

On their 2016 self-released debut EP, Awesome Secrets, Montreal duo Sorry Girls sounded like they were putting together an audition tape for the Bang Bang Bar. Heather Foster Kirkpatrick’s glowing voice conjured the ghosts of bygone ’60s girl-group singers, while partner Dylan Konrad Obront doused her torch-song serenades in ripples of country-noir guitar and a Badalamentian synth mist as thick as mountain fog. Their first full-length for Arbutus, Deborah, is likewise a fusion of luminous, eerily familiar melodies and obfuscating ambience. But here, Sorry Girls are less interested in capturing a specific nocturnal mood than in exploring the Rorschach-test ambiguity inherent to much synth-based pop music: that is, what some might consider ethereal, post-goth dream pop, others hear as lush, adult-contemporary soft rock.
Just as the passage of time has obliterated the rigid aesthetic divisions that once governed pop music and replaced them with genre-agnostic, era-specific radio formats, Deborah imagines an alternate ’80s where 4AD went MOR, and Cocteau Twins shared Top 40 chart space with the Thompson Twins. The album’s directorial analog is more John Hughes than David Lynch, displacing Awesome Secrets’ earthier elements and uncanny atmosphere with soft-focus pleasures and heart-on-sleeve poignancy. Pretty much every song begins in ambient haze before fortifying into the sort of passionate, heartstring-tugging address that could soundtrack a pivotal scene in a seriocomic teen flick. And in true cineaste fashion, Sorry Girls construct their musical mise-en-scènes with an auteur’s eye for detail: Anyone can program a synth to sound like a hit single from 35 years ago, but a true connoisseur of the era recognizes that glassy acoustic guitars (“Something’s Gotta Give”) and breezy harmonica solos (“Under Cover”) were equally crucial components of the ’80s pop palette.
And yet, for all of Sorry Girls’ unapologetic invocations of the past, Deborah rarely feels like an exercise in nostalgia—because all its shimmering surfaces can’t gloss over the distress stewing underneath. Kirkpatrick’s voice is both highly expressive and enigmatic: It veers in and out definition like a camera that just won’t auto-focus, echoing the feelings of indecision at the core of these shapeshifting songs. For all its sunrise-summoning optimism, “Waking Up” is really a plea for escape from an unfulfilling relationship (“Maybe I’m waking up to see the ways that I’ve been blinded/By the love that’s in my eyes/I want to send it all crashing down”), while the tropical chillwave of “Easier” sails into the sunset of a tryst as the parties involved lie to each other that “it never meant anything” to soothe their pain. But Deborah counters these portraits of disaffection with vigorous statements of self-determination, like the vogueing piano-house bop “H.O.N.E.S.T.Y.” And with “Give You Love,” Sorry Girls deliver a synth-sparkled affirmation that plays like a spiritual sequel to Robyn’s “Show Me Love,” with Kirkpatrick declaring her intentions in no uncertain terms. “I’m ready to be the one you need, I’m ready to be someone,” she sings to her potential partner—though the bold pop leaps taken on Deborah suggests she’s courting a potentially larger audience, too.

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Dotted with cool surprises and intricately plotted melodies, the veteran indie band’s Sub Pop debut shakes things up without breaking their pattern of low-key, late-period releases.

Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name

When the Wind Forgets Your Name

Doug Martsch remains committed to deflating his own myth. For decades the Built to Spill frontman has shot down any suggestion that he’s a particularly notable songwriter or a great musician. “I’m not very good at guitar playing,” he insisted in a recent interview, his latest effort to downplay the achievement of architecting three of the defining indie rock albums of the 1990s. Whatever greatness fans hear in his music, Martsch contends he doesn’t.
Perhaps that posture began as humility, but at some point Martsch started to internalize the notion of his own unremarkableness. Since Built to Spill’s hot streak ended with 2001’s uneven Ancient Melodies of the Future, Martsch has carried on the group as the very good-not-great entity they’ve always existed as in his head. They’ve continued releasing new albums every five years or so, all of them worthwhile—most of them better than you remember, but never as transcendent as you long for them to be. The woozy charm of the band’s heyday is still there, but the consistency isn’t. Their later albums just don’t stick like the classics.
Built to Spill’s latest, When the Wind Forgets Your Name, shakes things up without breaking the pattern. It’s the project’s first release for Sub Pop, and it was recorded with a new (and already retired) lineup featuring Le Almeida and João Casaes of the Brazilian jazz-rock band Oruã. Those temporary bandmates also assisted Martsch with mixing the album, and the record’s reedy tones, conspicuous overdubs, and psychedelic patina give it a very different feel than the band’s hallmark records with Phil Ek.
This is the first Built to Spill record in a while with new ideas. The whole album is dotted with cool surprises, from the Carnival of Souls-esque organ that waltzes between Martsch’s solos on “Elements” to the patchouli-scented guitars that underscore the bewildered mysticism of “Understood.” The Lifes Rich Pageant chime of “Spiderweb” gives way to one spirited twist after another; it’s the rare recent Built to Spill track with a generosity of intricately plotted melodies that rivals Keep It Like a Secret. And with its jerky guitar fits, “Never Alright” begins as the most overt Dinosaur Jr. homage Martsch has ever attempted. Then it sheds its skin so many times it finishes as something completely antithetical to Dinosaur Jr., a tangle of classic rock, dub, and glockenspiel.
On that song, Martsch returns to his most frequent muse: the difficulty of reconciling the inevitable defeats the world doles out, one after another. “No one can ever help no one not get their heart broken,” he sings. “Never Alright” is immediately followed by a more hopeful counterpart, “Alright,” but hope is always relative on a Built to Spill record: “Life goes on and on year after year,” Martsch sings. “Don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I’m still here.”
If When the Wind Forgets Your Name doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its many gratifying parts, it’s mostly because of the choppy pacing. Especially in its opening half, too many tracks get bogged down by dreary tempos that stop the record whenever it locks into a stride. Martsch may be incapable of writing a bad song, but the snoozy “Fool’s Gold” is as close as he gets, and he preemptively sucks a lot of steam out of the album by positioning it right after the ripping opener “Gonna Lose.”
Unforced errors like that really drag down an album, but that’s the story of late-period Built to Spill: No matter how solid their records are, they always seem to tease an even-better one that’s just out of reach, taunting fans with what could have been. Nonetheless, When the Wind Forgets Your Name shows that in generous spurts this band can still sound as driven and disarmingly sincere as they did a quarter century ago. If it’s a lesser Built to Spill album that’s because they all are now. But as their lesser albums go, it’s one of the better ones.


The debut studio album from singer-songwriter Aly Spaltro is filled with bloody, body-focused epics that call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three.

Ripely Pine

Aly Spaltro’s stage name and backstory may at first seem awfully whimsical; the name Lady Lamb the Beekeeper came to her in a dream, and she first started playing and practicing in the basement of the video rental store where she worked near her hometown of Portland, Maine. So far, so Fox Searchlight. But forget fey; that basement gave her license to get loud, and the songs on Ripely Pine are true to their original forms, bolstered with rugged, hefty arrangements largely written by Spaltro. Her bodily, biblical epics call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three.
The lyrics of Ripely Pine are hungry for love and experience and bone-picked honesty. She explains the title as a kind of openhearted longing, though it's gorier than that: “Let’s crawl all over one another like crows on a carcass,” she sings like Sharon Van Etten leading a gospel choir on opener “Hair to the Ferris Wheel”. “Like ants on a crumb starving only for the taste of tongues.” It leaps and pivots through soft woolen strums to freewheeling 1990s alt.rock-- that structural skittishness is a constant throughout-- and establishes Spaltro’s palpable experience of love as a messy, fetid thing, perhaps more remarkable for the fact that she wrote these songs when she was 18, 19. “Love is selfish/ Love goes tick-tock-tick/ Love knows Jesus/ Apples and oranges,” she sighs of its many coexisting contradictions.
“You with the nape that holds my gaze/ You with the tongue that speaks my name,” she glowers on “Aubergine”, slyly sizing up her intended like prey on a plain. The brooding interlude comes amid truly joyous New Orleans-style carnival blasts, and the song’s broiling-over stream of consciousness approach makes it feel like an incredible street party. The best songs on Ripely Pine are unpredictable in a way that’s refreshing because of their sloppy energy, not in spite of it. Some of them have been worked on for five years, but they’re executed with unaffected confidence rather than niggled perfection; there are pitchy vocals here and there, and with only three songs under four minutes and almost everything playing out like the closing number of a headline festival set, it’s much too long. While her gentler solo songs are pretty enough, they can also be samey, making the hour length even less necessary. But what Ripely Pine has that much comparable rousing-but-empty country-tinged trad rock doesn’t have is raw, credulous fire.
The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another. Spaltro wields ferocity and timidity equally well, to the extent that it’s hard to tell which is her more frightening mode. The incensed “Bird Balloons”, an unresolved tale of betrayal, regret, and acceptance, has an excellent, spat pay-off: “My hair grew long so I fucking cut it/ And when you looked away I stuck those trimmings in your locket, ha ha ha ha.” “You Are the Apple” eases into a bluesy lope and twang, and then a swashbuckling burst of timpani and strings, Spaltro screaming, “I still need your teeth around my organs.” What should be the payoff to the Alabama Shakes-loose “Crane Your Neck” is Spaltro howling “I’m as blue as blood before the blood goes red,” in a cadence borrowed from the hilt of “Fake Plastic Trees”; its “twist yo’ hips” shimmy-to-fade epilogue is unnecessary and a bit rote.
The “blue blood” line crops up a few times on Ripely Pine, notably on “Aubergine”, where Spaltro comitragically sings about how someone makes her “into an egg without yolk,” making it clear that she means the lifeless shade of blood, not the regal kind. Conversely, Ripely Pine is one of the most nourishing, deeply alive records of this young year. On closer “Taxidermist, Taxidermist”, she reconciles with herself: “‘How do you do?’ I say/ ‘I’ve heard such lovely things about who you are and where you’ve been/ But be in me again.’” These songs are about Spaltro five years ago; hopefully reassembling the parts doesn’t mean locking up these messy song banquets for a neater record next time around. The taste is too addictive.


On 2010’s Triumverate, the New York metal band Black Anvil's balance of progressivism and putridity led to their inclusion in the canon of overachieving area extremists. Their J. Robbins-produced new album, Hail Death, finds the group boosting both melodics and concepts.

Hail Death

Black Anvil may have been forged in the mercurial fires of the New York hardcore scene, but don’t call them punks. When Raeph Glicken, Gary Bennett, and Paul Delaney of esteemed outfit Kill Your Idols branched off to form their blackened band in 2007, they abandoned the rigidity of their former craft almost immediately, focusing instead on long, winding assemblages of weeping guitars, thrashy tempos, and hard rock hooks. For every pound of black and roll gristle the band packed on to their most recent effort, 2010’s Triumverate, there was ample brain power to match—a labyrinthine riff here, a blast-beat there. Black Anvil's impressive balance of progressivism and putridity led to their prompt inclusion in the canon of overachieving area extremists, such as Liturgy or Krallice.
If their new album Hail Death serves as any indication, the New Yorkers have no intention of going back to basics. To buttress their fanged jams and fill in some holes in their current live setup, they’ve added a second guitarist, named Sos, to their ranks, granting a boost to both melodics and critical mass. They’re amping up the concepts as well: Hail Death centers around around the inevitable end, as well as the varying degrees of madness which emerge as its approach hastens. The band treats their theme with wicked reverence, expanding the song lengths to accommodate more swells and swathes of feedback. At the same time, they’re the most batshit band of conductors, ceaslessly toggling between turbo and turbid. There’s “Seven Stars Unseen”, a harrowing ride through the void that straddles the threshold between dirge and d-beat, and opener “Still Reborn”, whose rich Spanish guitar provides a haunting contrast to the electrics that scream in their stead.
Barring the 12-minute “Next Level Black”’, which never seems to muster up enough magnitude, the metamorphic approach bodes well for Black Anvil. This is due largely to their appointment of engineer J. Robbins (Modern Life is War, Government Issue), whose conservative approach to mixing ensures that Hail Death’s many guitars don’t collapse into one low-res mess. By putting Bennett and Sos further back, he creates a pocket of space for the vocalists’ lilting harmonies to seep in, lending straightforward headbangers like “ Until the End” morbid beauty. Distinguishing between individual riffs proves trickier, as their already-reduced presence is placed constantly under threat by the throttle of the blast-beats. The only fretwork left to gawk at are the solos, which follow in the slithering style of Marduk and, while far from revolutionary, serve an invaluable role in maintaining momentum when things slow to a stoned sprawl.
“To us, it’s the next level,” Glicken said in a recent Decibel documentary chronicling the making of Hail Death, "Something to aim for, something to shoot for, something to take me out of this mundane existence.” His vague phrasing begs the question: is Black Anvil’s death drive fueled by their art, or is it the other way around? On Hail Death, the relationship is symbiotic; the album's darkness fuels its shifting sounds, which in turn amplfies the dread. Hopefully, as the outfit continues this march of mayhem, the hellish balance will remain intact, securing the band’s reputation for mongrel metaphysics.


The Scottish band’s eleventh album feels uniquely pensive, even tentative. Nearly every song will have you humming along, though few seem designed to grab your attention.

Endless Arcade

New music from Teenage Fanclub settles into the world like the first days of spring—subtly, quietly, with a sigh of relief. For fans of the long-running Scottish power-pop band, the defining qualities of their music—chiming three-part harmonies, breezy major-key melodies, and dreamy, lovesick lyrics—have come to feel so pleasant and familiar that measuring their current work against their past can seem a little beside the point: Could it be sunnier? Did it feel more exciting when you were younger? These concerns melt away within a few notes: Just open your windows and let it in.
In a career defined by consistency, Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh album, Endless Arcade, is their first preceded by a sense of rupture. In summer 2018, after much of their catalog was reissued on vinyl, Gerard Love, one of three primary songwriters and vocalists, announced his departure from the band. It was slightly troubling news: Love penned fan favorites like “Star Sign” and “Sparky’s Dream,” as well as many highlights from more recent albums. During the 21st century, his reedy voice and soaring choruses have inspired Teenage Fanclub’s most energetic moments, reminders that this band once caused a frenzy at their shows.
Without Love’s contributions, Endless Arcade feels uniquely pensive, even tentative, among their releases. The moments that stand out initially do so for their novelty: the extended guitar solo that closes “Home,” the uncharacteristically dissonant chord changes in the title track, the presence of newest member, keyboardist Euros Childs, on British Invasion throwbacks like “Warm Embrace.” Songwriters Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley can still write melodies culled from a heavenly jukebox alongside all the lost hits of the ’60s, but while nearly all of them will have you humming along, few seem designed to grab your attention.
Like all of Teenage Fanclub’s albums, Endless Arcade reveals itself slowly, and much of the action takes place below the surface. My favorite song is Blake’s “The Sun Won’t Shine on Me,” with a harpsichord accompaniment that tiptoes around its amiable, waltz-time guitar riff. It is the kind of song that could play on endless loop, and when the dual guitar solo segues into a final singalong round of the chorus, you get the sense they feel the same way. “Back in the Day” has a similar effect: Its airtight, gently aching verse and chorus melodies create the effect of a constant cycle of hooks. “I just can’t seem to find the peace of mind that I knew back in the day,” Blake sings as his bandmates try to replicate that sense of comfort.
This thematic territory—self-doubt, aging, nostalgia—spans the record and can sometimes make Endless Arcade feel like a gloomy concept album. While the title and cozy pace of the opening track “Home” suggest a band settling into their comfort zone, the lyrics tell a different story: “I sometimes wonder If I’ll ever be home again,” Blake sings in the chorus, paraphrasing a Carole King classic about a relationship broken by distance. His words suggest a moment of uncertainty from a band that often plays the role of uplifters, offering their music as a beacon of stability. When the last chorus ends, a long guitar solo takes the spotlight, fuzzy and bittersweet, sprawling out and doubling the length of the song. Winding through just two chords, it neither builds the tension nor resolves it. Slowly, the entire band falls under its spell, swaying back and forth, lapping along. It’s like they don’t want to leave us.

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On his 25th album, the Chilean-British techno maverick indulges his nostalgia for the dancefloor without sacrificing his habitually mind-bending sounds and textures.

Rebirth of Wonky

Though few others than middle-aged alumni of the IDM listserv may realize it, from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, Cristian Vogel had one of the greatest runs in experimental techno. Club avant-gardists rarely maintain their lofty standards for more than a quarter century; Surgeon and Jeff Mills come to mind, but not many more. But Vogel makes a strong case for entry to that pantheon with his 25th album, Rebirth of Wonky.
“Wonky” was a fleeting musical trend around the turn of the last decade, one that Simon Reynolds described in Retromania as “strands of glitchy electronic, experimental hip hop and spacey seventies jazz fusion” whose “off-kilter beat structures and mutant funk grooves” were embellished with “day-glo synth tones and snazzy riffs that hark back to eighties electro-funk and video-game music.” Although Vogel certainly has created his share of “off-kilter beat structures,” he never really belonged to the wonky movement. He’s too headstrong to jump on any bandwagons.
Vogel, who grew up in Chile and England, seems to have drawn inspiration across his career from both Spike Jones’ jazz hijinks and Iannis Xenakis’ abstruse electro-acoustic compositions, with their caustic and scrupulous timbral attack. Those qualities surfaced early on in Vogel’s productions, but within a techno framework, which made him a maverick’s maverick. On 1999’s Busca Invisibles, he perfected a strain of slapstick techno, as evidenced by the jarring sproings, clangs, and pitch-shifted kazoo stabs that pepper its best tracks. Then, with 2002’s Dungeon Master, Vogel flaunted the purest expression of his ruthless techno-brut instincts.
Given Vogel’s long history of unconventional sound design, Wonky’s first three tracks may trick you into thinking the title’s a red herring, as they’re some of his most accessible works to date. “When You Can’t Go Clubbing Anymore and Have to Dance with Oaks” begins with a woman speaking in hushed tones that are swirled into pebbled sibilance; the only words I can discern are “Return to the source.” Gradually, a subaquatic techno throb emerges, followed by a suspenseful ambient interlude and then one of Vogel’s most melodramatic melodies. It reeks of nostalgia for ’90s clubbing, and who can blame him during a pandemic? “The All Clear” reaffirms that Vogel is much more interested in melody now than at the height of his weird period. This track has the tessellated grandeur of pioneering IDM duo B12, but its rhythm is uncharacteristically stodgy. Toward its end, the piece reverts to vintage Vogel ruggedness and abrasiveness. “Pendula” serves as a palate-cleanser for Wonky’s stranger second half, with its Thomas Köner-like frigid ambience conjuring the sound of icebergs colliding.
“Peace La Roche” bridges the gap between Vogel’s abstract, chiming compositions for Gilles Jobin’s choreography (e.g., his 2010 album Black Swan) and the pugilistic, disorienting techno of albums such as Body Mapping and Specific Momentific. The scattershot beats, rudimentary organ stabs, and tumble of disturbing body and mouth noises of “Thuja” have no utility except to mess with your mind and equilibrium—noble aims that IDM’s vanguard artists were also fostering a quarter century ago. If the martial techno-funk of “Ice Le Fantôme C’est Moi” is not exactly geared to get hands in the air and asses shaking, it may thrill fans of cutting-edge horror-film soundtracks. Most intriguingly, to grok where Vogel may be headed next, check out “Acido Amigo,” an enigmatic abstraction of old-school electro that sounds at once like a nod to Detroit legends Drexciya and a harbinger of future decades’ destabilized quasi-dance music.
Rather than a rejuvenation of the genre that the title may imply, Rebirth of Wonky finds Vogel reasserting his mastery of music that goes awry—in the dictionary sense of “wonky”—in unique ways. The album is a welcome reminder of Vogel’s mad-scientific past while also pointing toward novel odysseys of oddity.

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The Catalan producer Sau Poler puts an elegantly Iberian slant on house music. His euphoric new EP may be inspired by soccer, but it’s made for dancing on beaches in summertime.

Dribble EP

For the last decade or so, one Spanish beer company has used the term “Mediterráneamente” as part of its summer marketing plans, where it accompanies films of young people cavorting around on beaches in beer-based delight, driving home the message that you can’t get more Mediterranean than this particular brew. For all its origins in the cold world of marketing speak, the term—a made-up word that translates to something like “Mediterranean-ly”—could equally apply to Dribble, the new EP from Catalan producer Sau Poler. Alongside the likes of Pional and Pedro Vian, Poler is part of a new wave of Spanish electronic music acts who are putting an elegantly Iberian slant on house music.
This is an EP that reeks of the salt-up-your-nostrils, sunscreen-and-sunglasses appeal of the Mediterranean Sea. Bathed in sunlight and shaded by palm trees, it’s made for dancing on beaches and overheating at summer festivals. Dribble may be inspired by soccer—the three track names, “Etrusco,” “Questra,” and “Mitre,” all refer to soccer ball brands. But this EP evokes the divine skill of Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho in the Barcelona stadium Camp Nou on a sweltering August night, rather than the grinding attrition of the English Premier League.
The key track is “Questra,” a song intended to summon the “evolution and euphoria” of soccer (it has reportedly been championed by house don John Talabot). “Questra” begins with the distant chiming of church bells, which bend and sway while a pulsating disco beat taps its foot impatiently in the foreground. Poler adds in a Balearic-style synth melody and the gentle burble of a 303, used more for its rhythmic qualities than as a lead instrument. As “Questra” evolves, the different synth lines drift in and out of focus, each as delicate and welcoming as a cool Mediterranean breeze. Poler artfully manipulates the tone of the 303, building to a brilliantly jazzy piano break at the three-minute mark, whose filtered chords never quite fall where you expect them to. The effect is of an understated euphoria that is all the more emotive for its subtlety.
“Etrusco,” which opens the EP, has a similar makeup, although this time the synth melodies evoke the nervous hooting of owls at night. The 303, meanwhile, is harsher, dribbled throughout the song in evocative acidic bursts. This nervous tension finds its relief when a throbbing bassline enters three and a half minutes in, its physicality filling the bottom half of the mix like an injection of heavy metals. “Mitre,” the closing track, is about the harshest that Dribble gets. Intended to reflect “the magic and unique spirit of English football,” there is a Parliament-style hard funk edge to the song’s synth bass, with a 303 line that alternates between needling and relaxing. Even then, the song’s end section fills with sun-drenched Balearic delight, spotted with dabs of melody that glow like stars over the ocean.
In soccer, to dribble means to take the ball past your opponent by small, skillful kicks. The Dribble EP is well named then: Poler displays a mastery of the kind of deft production touches that are too often overlooked in electronic music in favor of sledgehammer riffing. He employs a subtle tweak here, or a dab of synth there, to build a wonderfully evocative Mediterranean whole. Come the cold winter months, Dribble may sound out of place, wistfully nostalgic like a sand-encrusted bottle of suntan lotion in November. Right now, though, the EP personifies the joyful release of dancing with friends on a hot summer night.


The Amsterdam-based electronic musician trades his habitual house and ambient productions for blissful bedroom pop influenced by the shoegaze music of his youth.

About You

On his latest album as Suzanne Kraft, Los Angeles native Diego Herrera, now based in Amsterdam, takes the pulse of a heart in flux. Written during a period when a flourishing romance was abruptly transformed by enforced distance, About You drifts through emotional highs and lows in search of a stable foothold. Musically, too, Herrera continues his history of self-reinvention, trading the peaceful stillness of ambient music—which was itself a departure from the punchy, disco-infused house of the earliest part of his career—for blissful bedroom pop influenced by the shoegaze music of his youth.
“And then I was gone,” Herrera faintly sings in opener “On Our Hands,” pausing to ask: “Did it feel the same for you as me?” The synth chimes are jaunty and the drums laid-back, but there’s an underpinning of doubt to remind you it’s not so simple—when there’s a physical rift between you and the person you love, do they miss you as much as you miss them? Should you even ask, or do you already know the answer? “Waiting” ratchets up the paranoia even further, crashing in with a tidal wave of fuzzed-out guitar as Herrera ponders the anxiety of separation: “You can know somebody for ages,” he murmurs, “but it doesn't change the game” of guessing where things stand. The most striking moment of the album comes when the wall of sound drops out for the briefest moment, mimicking the feel of your heart skipping a beat as the text notification you’ve been on edge waiting for finally pops up.
Herrera also explores the joy of a heart spinning out of control. On “Blush,” he expresses the simple desire to be around his crush while sharing in a moment of wordless tenderness, imploring his sweetheart, “Sigh another sigh for me.” Guitar stretches out into long trails as synth washes like a gentle tide over a lazy bassline, creating an atmosphere fit for cuddling. “Attenuate” leans most heavily into the indie-pop sound Herrera is channeling, prominently showing off a more melodic side of his voice as he bounces over jangly guitar and crisp, snappy percussion. He embraces his shift in direction just as he welcomes the excitement of a new love affair, singing, “Jumping the gun sometimes can be the best.”
Closing track “Going Down” brings it all together, celebrating the pleasure and pain of deep yearning in equal measure. Once again, Herrera displays his mastery of mood-setting, but rather than the airy textures of his ambient music, he swirls together sharper, more vivid elements—breezy guitar and a slithering synth line are joined by a low crackle and smooth saxophone, all jostling for position in the foreground. Herrera sings for the first time on this album, but his voice remains hushed, his words held close to his chest; it sounds almost as if he’s singing through half-parted lips. “Going Down” marks a moment of delicate intimacy not only for the artist, but for his confidant, the listener. About You finally puts the man behind Suzanne Kraft front and center as he offers up more of himself—his voice, his memories, and, most importantly, his heavy heart.

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On his most cohesive album in more than a decade, the re-energized songwriter imparts life lessons to the child he may never have.

Ma

At the start of the century, Devendra Banhart emerged as the ecstatic pied piper of an esoteric folk resurgence, a magnetic singer-songwriter who mingled childlike wonder and guru-level insight over glittering fingerpicked guitar. Unapologetically inquisitive and ardent, Banhart’s early works seemed to provide a sort of instruction manual for life.
But Banhart soon seemed lost himself, or at least distracted in the search for something more. Since 2005’s discursive Cripple Crow, his records have veered wildly into magpie obsessiveness, recombining genres and criss-crossing borders in search of revelations that didn’t come. In the process, he’s made messes of records, though they’ve always included a few stunning moments, songs like “I Remember” or “Never Seen Such Good Things” that insisted the singular spark of those early works remained. The beguiling Ma—his tenth album and best and most cohesive statement in more than a decade—starts to rekindle it.
Approaching 40 and dealing with the death of parents and mentors, Banhart realized in recent years that he may never become a father. Ma, he has said, is his attempt to gather the insight he might pass along to his hypothetical child, lessons he wished he’d learned as an adolescent. The broad prompt gives Banhart a necessary sense of direction but ample leeway to roam, a space to pull together the messy threads of his life. There is jubilation and mourning, existential unease and everyday amusement. He sings in four languages, gliding among English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he shifts smoothly during one three-song stretch from electric country-funk to string-buoyed piano balladry to elegiac finger-picking. This time, the moves make Banhart’s messages feel ecumenical rather than disjointed, hard-won wisdom he’s ready to dole out in any way he can.
Banhart steps fully into these songs with a vitality that recalls his beginnings. The songs are arranged and rendered with nuance by a veteran band, as comfortable with synthesizer squall as they are saxophone fantasies. Puckish and tender, Banhart seems again delighted to be here, too. From the opening notes of the smart little “Is This Nice,” where pizzicato strings and loping bass ingeniously invoke the sway of a baby being rocked, he is a singer with renewed purpose. “Is this real? Do I mean it?” he coos in the second verse, in the tone of a nursery rhyme. “I really wanna be here with you.”
The lessons flow freely from there. Banhart handles death with gravity and grace, with “Memorial” honoring the complicated feelings that remain after a person is gone. The irrepressible “Kantori Ongaku” reads like a user’s guide for reckoning with a world more complex than the one you might have imagined. During “Carolina,” wrestling with a bout of unrequited love, he is funny and self-effacing, crooning in Portuguese over dreamlike strings that he’d stand a better chance if he actually learned the language of his would-be lover. He touches on the peril of global warming and the paradoxes of globalism, and he admits that it’s OK to have mixed emotions about living in this world at all. “The older I get, the less I fear anyone I see/And yet all the more, I fear humanity,” he sings, condensing the album’s vast emotional topography into a striking couplet.
In the last decade-plus, Banhart has seemed so busy searching for a new way to say something old that he’s not managed to say much at all. But Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.” “I love you the way I want everyone to know/How very much I love them but never told them so,” he sings during “Will I See You Tonight?,” a wrecking ball of a duet with Vashti Bunyan. It is a complicated confession of failure—a fitting end for an album guided, for the first time in years, by Banhart’s probing vulnerability.

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As though channeling supernatural energies, the Colombian experimental musician uses eerie electronics and vocal treatments to imbue unsettling world-building with a mystical sort of grace.

No era sólida

Creative practice is a form of mediumship. Artists pull from the ether, from the great cultural unconscious, pawing at the veiled ideas found there until they begin to reveal form and structure. Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt’s new album No era sólida (She Wasn’t Solid) is set in this liminal space, using arrhythmic loops of electronic sound to conjure a mysterious, ruminative atmosphere. The album’s protagonist is a character named Lia who is stretching her metaphysical legs for the first time, speaking through Dalt largely in strings of nonsensical syllables as she cycles through initial reactions to different emotions and sensations. An uneasy album of twisted innocence, it centers on the discomforting process of moving between a space of pure imagination and the reality shared by conscious human beings.
This type of ponderous, character-driven concept is increasingly common in experimental-leaning electronic music (Oneohtrix Point Never’s imaginary alien Ezra, or Oracle, the disembodied voice on Amnesia Scanner’s Another Life), but Dalt’s rendering of Lia resists cliché by letting the caricature frame, rather than dominate, the sounds themselves. Dalt’s use of glossolalia, the invented quasi-language in which she gives voice to Lia, points to religious adherents speaking in tongues, but does so with great subtlety. Her vocals are largely enmeshed with eerie synthesized sounds and further abstracted by delay. The pleasures of No era sólida come not so much from following Lia’s perspective as she goes through the process of becoming as from experiencing the complicated feelings the music evokes as Dalt explores this persona: her tender curiosity, her tentative antagonism, the delicious nausea of high-pitched tones swinging back and forth.
Spacious and quiet, No era sólida’s songs sometimes lock into a kind of stilted groove, but more often they forward with two left feet. Dalt uses loops in a similar way as her collaborator Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes; both apply repetition as a way to build tension rather than hypnotize, employing a minimal palette that mimics incidental sounds from everyday life and blending them with alien electronics to make the familiar seem inscrutable. The effect is thoroughly psychedelic, and can be experienced as a kind of disorienting naiveté, recasting the commonplace as the unknown. The uneven gait of the electronics, like the perpetually surprising pop of synthesizer on “Di” and the mismatched gulping and clattering sounds on “Espesa,” divorces her sounds from any obviously mechanical process. It isn’t a leap to imagine these soundworlds as representations of a mind just beginning to bring its surroundings into focus, reveling in both glory and grit.
The title track, the album’s final song, acts as a mission statement. It is the only track with words, which are spoken in Spanish, and it surveys the world from the point of view of Dalt’s muse as she emerges into full consciousness. Though the text is at times searching and uncertain (“I can only hear myself in the repeated echo because my voice initially gets confused with myself”), Dalt’s delivery is pointed and confident. It offers a peculiar climax, a moment of certainty following the ambiguity of what came before. It is as if the music, as an entity, is speaking directly to us, its observer.
Dalt is a storyteller, but unlike traditional storytellers, she leaves her character where it came from, in that undulating space between abstraction and realization. Despite its heavy conceptual burden, No era sólida never crumples under its own weight. It shows rather than tells, guiding you through its prickly, unstable moods with a mystical sort of grace.

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