Swedish prog-metal greats unexpectedly fly their freak flag on their ninth full-length.

Watershed

Not all prog is created equal. Take prog metal, for instance. In one corner are Mastodon, who are prog to the core: long songs, lots of noodling, worship of 1970s Genesis (at least on the part of drummer Brann Dailor, an avowed Phil Collins acolyte). In the other corner are Dream Theater, who are equally prog: long songs, lots of noodling, worship of 1970s Rush (at least on the part of drummer Mike Portnoy, an avowed Neil Peart acolyte). Hipsters love Mastodon, but they won't go near Dream Theater. Dream Theater fans are equally unlikely to sport Mastodon t-shirts.
Perhaps this split is due to friction (in the musical sense). Mastodon are closer to prog as it was in the 70s-- self-indulgent, yes, but also earthy and analog. Dream Theater are the apex of prog's, um, progression since then. They're digitally clean and hyper-precise, poster boys for Pro Tools. For whatever reason, the white belt set gravitates towards prog's older aesthetic (see also the Mars Volta), while men with ponytails discuss kick drum pedals in Dream Theater forums. If "indie" is an aesthetic, it stops at certain thresholds of precision and heaviness.
Opeth, interestingly, have straddled both prog aesthetics. The Swedish band's first record, 1995's Orchid, was wonderfully raw. It was half death metal and half "other stuff"-- folk, prog, blues, jazz. The rawness came from a low budget and nascent songwriting, but it conveyed an atmosphere that Opeth never regained. Their records afterwards decreased in friction as their chops improved. In 2002, the band became practically frictionless. It split its heavy and light sides into two records, Deliverance and Damnation; the latter was gorgeously intimate. 2005's Ghost Reveries likewise went down smoothly, like a rich hot chocolate.
Watershed is an intriguing exercise in discontinuity. Unlike Orchid, which was jagged because the band didn't know how to do otherwise, Watershed finds Opeth willfully flying their freak flag. An acoustic intro with pleasant male/female singing leads straight into barreling death metal. A piano wanders into "Hessian Peel" apropos of nothing. "Burden" has an acoustic outro in which one guitarist detunes the other's pegs. It's delightfully horrible-sounding; such goofiness is refreshing for a band that's almost offensively virtuosic.
"The Lotus Eater" offers the greatest jolts. An intro of quiet humming drops into what seems like the middle of a death metal song-- but with disarmingly sunny vocal harmonies. Three minutes in, dissonant guitar lines spiral downwards like DNA strands. Later, a downright funky vamp appears, complete with chattering clavinet, as if Stevie Wonder had dropped by the studio. Aiding such absurdity are Opeth's two new members. Fredrik Åkesson brings lead guitar flash to a band that's prided itself on restraint, while drummer Martin Axenrot swings with verve. (Near "Hessian Peel"'s end is a monstrous groove that's like Meshuggah dancing a jig.)
Despite these hijinks, Watershed won't convert Mastodon fans en masse. It still has too many renaissance faire moments; its death metal is as aggressive as ever. After 18 years, Opeth's trademarks are well-established-- sinuous riffs, retro 70s keyboards, Mikael Åkerfeldt's Jekyll/Hyde act of death growls and mellifluous singing. (He sounds like your lovable Swedish uncle who once recorded a folk album.) But Watershed has friction, and friction brings heat. Those left cold by metal's po-faced tendencies might well warm up to it.


Silver Spring, Md.'s Two Inch Astronaut is a deft, bristling post-punk act whose energy stems from the uneasy suturing of uplifting, persistent melodies to an overactive rhythm section that threatens to dismantle it—and the lopsided pop hooks that result.

Personal Life

Dischord Records may not be slinging post-punk upstarts with the frequency of its heyday, but from an influence standpoint, Ian MacKaye’s accomplishing more than ever, particularly in his home turf: Washington, D.C. Even now, if you attend a local show within a 30-mile radius of the city, you’re bound to hear a band who've memorized Dischord's knotty, clever post-punk paradigms, usually the work of Fugazi or Rites of Spring. Silver Spring, Md.'s Two Inch Astronaut certainly fit the bill: a deft, bristling act whose energy stems from the uneasy suturing of uplifting, persistent melodies to an overactive rhythm section that threatens to dismantle it—and the lopsided pop hooks that result. The band’s first two albums, 2013’s Bad Brother and 2014’s Foulbrood, belie a curious magnetism, not unlike that of their heroes, Jawbox. Perhaps that’s why that band’s mastermind, J. Robbins, signed on to man the boards for Two Inch Astronaut’s latest and best record, Personal Life.
Up until recently, Two Inch Astronaut have operated as a duo: Sam Rosenberg did triple duty as a bassist, guitarist, and vocalist, recording the melodic parts individually and later tethering them to Matt Gatwood’s oscillating tempos. Between Foulbrood and Personal Life, the band became a trio, adding former Grass Is Green bassist Andy Chervenak to their ranks: an adept, aggressive arpeggiator with grooves that refuse to be ignored, not to mention a capable background vocalist, armed with a full-throated tenor. Suddenly, the cramped, crunchy sound has expanded to include more melodic counterpoints across all fronts (vocals, guitars, etc.), not to mention some much-needed embellishment. Accordingly, tracks like "At Risk Student" and "Woodstock ’99" offer a welcome respite from their peers' murky chug, as well as a departure from the preceding albums’ occasionally rote arrangements.
They may be a fuller unit than ever before, but compared to their previous works, Personal Life is the band’s most restrained album to date. The trio depends on beats, breaks, and pauses as much as any riff, and Rosenberg’s vocals rarely careen off-track like that of, say, Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles. What’s more, Robbins frequently submerges them in the mix—on the ballad-ish "Andy’s Progress Report" and "Good Companion," natch—so as to render them smooth textural complements to the jagged acoustic strums and burbling basslines. Despite their frequent reticence, the band entertain their rambunctious past on more than a few occasions: Gatwood and Chervenak throw a syncopated temper tantrum on the sardonic "Sexual Prince of the Universe," while the title track nips the jam sessions in the bud in favor some straightforward screaming.
Every song on Personal Life has its unique quirks, usually lyrical: Consider the endearing resignation of the opening track, where Rosenberg mumbles "I did good/ But it weren’t good enough," his self-aware grammar-botching the equivalent of a smug shrug. Equally clever is "A Happy Song," where the frontman manages to turn an unflattering comparison to a dog getting scratched behind the ears into a couplet that sounds strangely sweet. But from a musical perspective, the band’s more formulaic than they let on: by the time "Andy’s Progress Report" rolls around, the rhythmic games of Red Light, Green Light grows wearisome, as do the jumpy, post-coda digressions, ripped from the pages of the first Pinback record. "Topper Shutt," meanwhile, traces over Weezer’s "Undone (The Sweater Song)," right down to the serpentine central riff and reliance on two-syllable phrases. Nevertheless, Personal Life legitimizes Two Inch Astronaut as a respectable alternative to the regurgitated grunge that threatens to define rock’s '90s revival.


The Berlin duo’s debut album balances club music’s repetitive cadences with all-out chaos—an end-of-the-world soundtrack shot through with fierce, defiant rage.

Another Life

The Berlin experimental duo Amnesia Scanner renders club music as pure chaos, but producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala are just as interested in equilibrium. It’s a quality best captured in the “AS Crust” video, from their 2016 EP AS, and its looping visual of a robot dog stumbling to regain balance after receiving a swift kick. The robot saves itself with eerily human flails, movements straight from the uncanny valley, just in time to catch another boot once the loop cruelly resets. Amnesia Scanner’s music follows a similarly Sisyphean loop, knocking you askew and letting you adjust to the fractured groove before delivering the next blow. Their early records blurred the line between human and machine, mincing up human voices with hyperreal and grotesque sound design as synths wheeze, screech, and slam. On their first full-length release, Another Life, Amnesia Scanner now carry the steely confidence of a replicant as they assimilate into popular club-music forms.
Even in its most ecstatic moments, a tragic quality runs through Another Life. It’s the duo’s tradition to preface every track with “AS,” which can be read as either an abbreviation or a word, but the album title also offers its own double meaning. The phrase “another life” can be taken as an optimistic delusion or the desensitized tick of the death toll in a world where pain and suffering seem increasingly overwhelming. By colliding those two ideas, Another Life stands as Amnesia Scanner’s most accessible and impactful release to date, a fitting soundtrack to a time when reality is constantly at risk of being reframed and distorted. Much of the album’s power lies in their use of vocals, both human and non-human, which flesh out their dystopian soundscapes, both thematically and texturally, into thrilling and terrifying new shapes.
Another Life doesn’t feel apocalyptic so much as it suggests the end is already happening. After the introductory “AS Symmetriba,” Pan Daijing looks back at the wreckage on “AS Unlinear,” one of two collaborations with the noise artist that make up Another Life’s highest peaks. She echoes the wry cynicism of This Heat’s doomsday classic Deceit, delivering the line “Last year was a public change of character” like a press statement, but making every syllable strike as hard as the blunt percussion thudding around her. Reaching the concluding line, “Last year was not linear/Not linear,” she repeats the last phrase, dissecting it in a digitally treated scream as the song crashes into its chorus.
The album’s other key vocalist, credited as Oracle, is described as “a disembodied voice... which represents the sentience that has emerged from Amnesia Scanner.” Whatever that is supposed to mean, it takes a highly fluid synthetic form that slides effortlessly between ghoulish lows and chipmunk highs, delivering lyrics far more compelling than its sci-fi backstory. “AS A.W.O.L.” is a simultaneously hellish and luxurious club track where deeply pitch-shifted vocals express pain and paranoia before spiking into the sharp, ecstatic call, “I’m going A.W.O.L”. A delicately twinkling melody, practically a lullaby, dances over the rattling, blasted-out beat like a Xanax dissolving over a tongue. It numbs the track into a shell-shocked banger, framing the titular phrase as much as a mental state as a physical one.
While previous EP releases like AS and AS Truth found Amnesia Scanner working in short, brutally effective bursts, Another Life paces its wider range with softer moments. “AS Daemon” offers a brief respite, showing a rare tenderness without sacrificing any abstraction. The album doesn’t master this flow until its final stretch as the somber, spacious “AS Chain” clears the smog for the methodically building “AS Securitaz,” which is all controlled explosions, aching synths, and spindly strings. Those tracks and the tense closing comedown of “AS Rewild” all serve to lift up the penultimate song, “AS Chaos,” the second Pan Daijing track. Here lies the key to Another Life’s doomed ecstasy and possibly all of Amnesia Scanner’s music. Melting between Mandarin and English, the lyrics’ message is universal (“All around you it’s just chaos, chaos, chaos”) and so is Daijing’s fierce, defiant rage, never letting up even as the song slows and crumbles. The world might be an unrelentingly bleak place right now, but Amnesia Scanner find new strengths under pressure on Another Life. In more ways than one, they’re only just finding their voice.


Icelandic lore tells of the Hidden People who live in the crags and lava of jagged mountains.\n\ Descended from ...

Agaetis Byrjun

Icelandic lore tells of the Hidden People who live in the crags and lava of jagged mountains. Descended from the ancient guardian spirit, the Hidden People come in many forms. The tiny blómaálfar dwell in flower blossoms while the common búaálfar reside on farms. Even in this modern age of cellphones and helicopters, Icelanders continue to believe that the Hidden People are still out there somewhere. Construction workers even curve roads around rumored dwellings of the Hidden People. How can a modern people find faith in such fantasy? A heavy cloud of Norse mythology and a breathtaking raw landscape explains much of it. The indigenous music of Sigur Rós can only perpetuate such a religion.
The album begins submerged. Sonar pings echo from liquid feedback, invisible in a handful, but crushing you like an ocean in its volume. A cathedral organ moans. Wire brushes drum in a sinking pace. A violin bow saws open the maw of massive guitar, spreading noise in clouds of blood. Siren Jón Thór Birgisson sings through every orifice-- including gills, perhaps-- creating the most inhuman vocals ever heard in rock (though Skywalker Sound could attempt a Chewbacca-esque approximation by blending whales, Jeremy Enigk, cherubs, Björk, and the blue alien from The Fifth Element). The song ends in an accelerating heartbeat that breaks into palpitations. Sound fizzles out. You've died.
A string section waxes as the album moves from "Svefn-G-Englar" to "Starálfur". The chamber instruments flutter around skeletal drums and sepulchral bass. This music tethers to touchstones in classical as much as Radiohead, like Orff composing "Carmina Burana" for e-bow at absolute zero. The song breaks into brittle acoustic interludes where Birgisson's vocals frost through your speaker. Yet like Icarus triumphant, the album keeps taking you higher (or deeper, depending on your perspective).
"N\xFD Batterí" opens with a disjointed band of muted horns. They deliquesce into chrome swirls of tinnitus and massaging bass. Eventually, the song erupts in flaking layers of hissing drums. Subtle bebop drums and Kjarten Sveinsson's fatty rhodes pianos kick up dust on "Hjartað Hamast" while Birgisson rubs the sleep from his eyes. "Olson Olson" is simply the most soul-crushingly beautiful piece. This elfin masterpiece unveils Mogwai's troll-rock for its soulless academics.
To term this music "post-rock" would be an insult; Sigur Rós are pre-whatever comes this century. Piano, flutes, tremolo, horns, feedback, and that godly amazing voice scrubs souls pure with the black volcanic sands from the beaches of Vík. Birgisson's invented lyrical language of Hopelandish may be crying in tongues or even plain gibberish, but sheer emotions like this cleanse as universally as sodium laureth sulfate.
Sigur Rós make this bombastic claim on their website: "We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music. And don't think we can't do it, we will." The fact that they've scored hits in Iceland with this spectacular orchestrated soul speaks of both their power and the credibility of the natives. The alien angel fetus pressed in blue ink on the cover serves as the perfect logo. Sigur Rós effortlessly make music that is massive, glacial, and sparse. They are Hidden People. Children will be conceived, wrists will be slashed, scars will be healed, and tears will be wrenched by this group. They are the first vital band of the 21st Century.


The indie pop band's reissue of loosies and cover songs captures their story in thoughtful strokes and further cements Katy Davidson’s role as an influential songwriter.

Dear Nora: Three States: Rarities 1997-2007

Three States: Rarities 1997-2007

Katy Davidson was in a rut. It was 2008, and after releasing three full-lengths and several EPs under the name Dear Nora, Davidson had retired the indie pop project and grown disenchanted with music. As they recall, their then-label, Portland’s Magic Marker, encouraged them to gather all their stray one-offs, covers, and song drafts into one collection, which was to be named Three States: Rarities 1997-2007. As Dear Nora waited in hibernation, the anthology of 60-ish simple and heartfelt songs became a fan favorite.
Twelve years after its original release, Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 is now receiving the reissue treatment from Orindal. Featuring a slightly expanded tracklist, the triple LP box set essentially tells the story of Dear Nora, which Davidson began in 1999 while studying at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College. As they write in the reissue’s liner notes, the project was initially less inspired by their K Records peers than by hook-heavy, kinda dweeby indie rockers like Weezer, Guided by Voices, and They Might Be Giants. Full of bouncy melodies and scrappy energy, Dear Nora’s first efforts channel the pure exhilaration of making music with your friends. But even these early sketches reveal the thoughtfulness that would define Dear Nora. On “Second Hand,” Davidson expresses astonishment at the neverending passage of time and uses the double meaning of the title to convey uncertainty. “Make You Smile” struggles with confrontation while “Up on the Roof” announces a plan to escape to a better life.
While Dear Nora features an evolving troupe of players, Davidson has always been the primary songwriter and sole permanent member, so their location and general state of being guides the project. In mid-1999, Davidson moved into a house alongside some Magic Marker labelmates. From an upstairs bedroom overlooking a cherry tree and a public park filled with squirrels, Davidson wrote and recorded eight short songs that would become 2000’s Dreaming Out Loud 7-inch. Featuring just Davidson, an acoustic guitar, and overdubs, these songs may be elementary, but they capture Dear Nora’s capacity to let a thought unravel into a miniature dissertation about their place in the world. Take “My Guitar,” which begins as an index of material objects and transforms into a philosophical mission statement: “’Cause how I want to live is effortless/And all I want to feel is not distressed/’Cause all I ever need is less and less every day.” And much like the Beach Boys song of the same name, “In My Room” pays tribute to solitude. As Davidson describes how the moonlight pouring in through a window pulls them into dreamland, “In My Room” feels comforting like a well-loved stuffed animal.
Beyond the bedroom were ample opportunities for inspiration, and as Davidson toured more, the scope of their observations expanded. The barely-there “Fargo” (written during a 2002 tour with Mates of State) envisions the titular city as a beacon of warmth amidst Midwestern sprawl and desolation. “Cheap liquor and cigarettes/Neon signs and off-track bets/Old Grand-Dad in the supermarket aisle/And all the kids in old Cadillacs,” Davidson sings, pulling a page from Springsteen. Meanwhile, a cover of “Girl From the North Country” transforms Dylan’s classic into a queer anthem of longing and nostalgia. But even as songs stretched their legs and experimented with lusher compositions, the themes remained familiar: transience, an appreciation for the natural world, and sincere awe at the world around them.
In 2004, Dear Nora released their opus, Mountain Rock. For that record, Davidson decamped to a geodesic dome in their home state of Arizona and recorded a series of windswept songs about the pleasures and pains of the sublime. Around the same time, Davidson, Jake Longstreth and Marianna Ritchey convened in a San Francisco basement to work on a series of songs that came to be part of what they referred to as “The Lost Album.” Several moments are siblings to songs that appeared on Mountain Rock, like “The Lonesome Border, Pt. 2.” In the Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 liner notes, Longstreth describes this as “a very Abbey Road kind of jam,” which is spot-on, from the familiar piano intro to the multi-tracked vocal harmonies. Though it features the same coyotes and jackrabbits as the understated version that made it onto the album, “The Original Mountain Rock” goes further in its search for meaning in the desert. “Down under clouds of thunder/My mind begins to wonder/If this night/Is a symbol or an end,” Davidson asks.
In 2017, after making music under other names, Davidson resurrected Dear Nora for a reissue of Mountain Rock. The reception to the record and tour was so positive that Davidson was inspired to release an album of new Dear Nora material, 2018’s Skulls Example. Though Davidson’s influence on a new generation has been well-documented, the reissue of Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 further cements Davidson’s role as a prolific and profound songwriter.

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With adventurous production and revealing writing, Charli XCX’s third studio album reflects an artist ready to commit to self-examination.

Charli

Long before she had firsthand experience with pop music’s star-making assembly line, songwriting camps, and royalty splits, 14-year-old Charli XCX thought that people made music because they were brainwashed by robots. “Who writes the songs/The machines do,” she sings with bug-eyed terror on her unreleased 2008 debut, 14. The lyrics are a little ridiculous, but Charli wasn’t exactly wrong in the assumption that there are complex mechanisms lurking behind most chart-topping songs. She witnessed them in the 2010s, after she signed to a major label and began penning hits for Icona Pop and Iggy Azalea, content to give her most straightforward pop songs to others. On her own albums, whether the gothic True Romance, the punky Sucker, or the avant-garde Pop 2, she subverted mainstream pop conventions, projecting the image of a rave-happy club kid. Always at Charli’s core was the contradiction of loving pop music, yet needing to rebel against the pop machine.
Her third studio album, Charli, invites back many of Pop 2’s contributors, as if hoping to recapture its predecessor’s magic. But the record feels conflicted about its intentions. Take Lizzo-featuring “Blame It On Your Love,” a reworking of Pop 2’s transcendent “Track 10” that loses its impact by trading dial-up screeches for a widely appealing, Stargate-produced EDM drop and a dembow-inflected groove. This and the frivolous yet fun chart-pop song “1999” (featuring Troye Sivan) don’t jell with the rest of Charli’s warped club tracks and intimate ballads. Like many self-titled albums, it’s a reflection of the artist: in Charli’s case, one who wants to veer down experimental, transgressive, and queer pathways but constantly contemplates what it would be like to fully enter the mainstream.
Much of Charli’s sound is an extension of the corrosive electronics on Pop 2, with producer A. G. Cook at the helm of both. He and his PC Music cohorts (Planet 1999, umru) embrace the synthetic and shiny: Glossy, arena-sized ’80s rock drums, rippling power synths, squeaky J-pop arrangements, and the relentlessly positive sound of Swedish Eurodance are repurposed and exaggerated, evoking the eerie sheen of a hyper-realistic 3D render. On “Shake It,” Charli’s voice is manipulated to sound like bubbling water, before the track is infiltrated by a small army of collaborators including Big Freedia, CupcakKe, Pabllo Vittar, and Brooke Candy, like a futuristic remake of Busta Rhymes’ infamous posse cut “Touch It (Remix).” The beat sounds like someone furiously clanging on boiler room pipes, transforming a nasty strip club track into a soundtrack for mutiny. The credits for “Click,” which ends with a montage of jagged and distorted SOPHIE-like sounds not dissimilar to farts, name 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady as responsible for “harsh noise.” Compared to the bouncy electro-pop of “1999” or the trop-pop production of “Warm” (featuring Haim), these moments provide a thrilling adrenaline rush.
Charli’s crisp writing mirrors the vivid production. On “Click,” she turns herself into an onomatopoeic sound effect. The sensory details of “Next Level Charli” establish a scene in seconds: “I go speeding on the highway/Flame burning/Tire screech.” Charli credits Max Martin with teaching her the technique, commonly used by Swedish songwriters, of using words’ natural melody to create catchiness, instead of intentionally rhyming. Lifting the most effective ideas from different schools of production, she’s able to construct her own mutant strain of pop.
The album’s most potent song is the synth-pop anthem “Gone,” which blends vulnerability with outré sound. Through gritted teeth, Charli describes a party full of people who make her feel alone: “I feel so unstable/Fucking hate these people,” she sings, using the image of ice melting in her fist to illustrate her sense of panic-inducing isolation. In response, Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens poses questions that are somehow relatable in their absurdity: “Am I a smoke?/Am I the sun?/Who decides?” Letissier’s abstractions are the foil to Charli’s concrete lyrics: The former evokes the spiraling crisis of the mind, the latter the blood-boiling anger that rises in the body.
Together, Charli and Letissier reach a cathartic breaking point, a rattling breakdown filled with frosty percussion, dramatic synth stabs, and stuttering vocal chops. In a recent i-D interview, Letissier asserts that Charli’s musical aesthetic, which she describes as a “hybrid” of club experimentation and earworm pop, is “deeply queer.” But in “Gone,” Charli invites another hypothesis for why her music has become so beloved by the LGBTQ+ community: Her ability to evocate a profound sense of unbelonging. When “Gone” explodes, it sounds like two people shattering the box that confined them.
Charli’s goal is self-examination—a new step for Charli, who’s better known for her up-tempo hedonistic bangers than her emotional deep cuts. Throughout the album, she pinpoints the source of her anxieties, investigating her relationships with substances, with her romantic partner, and with herself. She does this with heart-wrenching specificity on the ballad “Thoughts,” when, in a drugged-out stupor, she wonders if her friends are genuine. And on the electro-bop “February 2017,” featuring Clairo and Yaeji, she recaptures “Track 10”’s candor. “Sorry ’bout Grammy night/Was lying on my mind/Was in a different place/Tortured and drifting by,” she sings to her partner. So when “Official” arrives, it feels breathtakingly hopeful, as Charli sings of the little details (breakfast in bed, a magical kiss) that make her love real. Charli uncovers a singer-songwriter unafraid to display the cracks in her facade, crafting a striking portrait of what happens when a robot glitches.

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The London band’s thrillingly seedy 2002 debut receives a reissue, accompanied by a stack of demos and studio outtakes that illuminate its sprawling, chaotic romance.

The Libertines: Up the Bracket (20th Anniversary Edition)

Up the Bracket [20th Anniversary Edition]

The Libertines were one of the most divisive bands of their generation. For some the murky London four-piece was the guitar group of the early 2000s; for others, a shambling imitation of the Strokes whose guttersnipe rock demonstrated how far British guitar music had fallen post Britpop. The Libertines never exactly shied away from the Strokes comparisons, deliberately styling themselves on New York’s finest in an early bid for attention. But a couple of important differences separated the two bands. Most obviously, the Libertines were steeped in the Anglophile tradition of the Jam and the Smiths to the Strokes’ New York punk-isms; just as importantly, the Libertines knew how to jam, letting their musical hair hang loose in a way the Strokes never did.
Both traits are evident on the Libertines’ thrillingly seedy debut, Up the Bracket, which is receiving the 20th-anniversary box set treatment. Alternately hailed as the future of rock and an overly sloppy cut-and-paste of influences upon its 2002 release, Up the Bracket today sounds like a fine record at the intersection of British rock tradition and dark romanticism, from “I Get Along”’s rollicking Clash-scrabble sound to “Tell the King”’s wistful take on Kinks-style ’60s Britpop. “Radio America” resembles the less frenetic, more tender work of the early Beatles (think: “If I Fell” or “And I Love Her”), all acoustic shuffle and girl-band harmonies. The album sounds slightly cleaned up in its remastered form but there remains something endearingly shaggy about Up the Bracket, as if the Libertines were too excited about being in the studio with the actual Mick Jones to bother with finesse.
On a psychological level, too, Up the Bracket is fascinating, with the early Libertines coming as close as any band has ever got to representing the id and the superego in music. Dual frontmen and songwriters Carl Barât and Peter Doherty were so close, musically and physically, that they felt like two parts of one troubled soul, their voices like those of a disjoined personality violently at war with itself (see the “So baby please kill me/Oh baby don’t kill me” couplet from “Death on the Stairs”). For all its garage swagger, Up the Bracket played like a musical psychodrama, driven by buzzsaw guitars and Gary Powell’s muscular drum lines.
The box set’s extra tracks—the super-deluxe edition has 65 previously unreleased recordings, including demos, radio sessions, and live recordings, as well as contemporary B-sides—prove intermittently fascinating. The live tracks, nine songs recorded at London’s 100 Club, plus recordings from the ICA, Nottingham Rock City, and Paris’ Divan du Monde, are fun but inessential, given that Up the Bracket largely succeeded in capturing the band’s live energy. It is great to have “What a Waster,” the band’s splendidly snarky debut single, included alongside Up the Bracket, albeit in studio outtake and live form; and the demo “All at Sea (Misty)” has a wobbly legged swoon that could have soothed some of the album’s jittery edges. On the other hand, no one really needs two early takes of a song as basic as “Horrorshow.”
The real interest lies in the studio outtakes, many of which have never seen the light of day—or never officially, given Libertines fans’ predilections during the early days of file-sharing. “7 Deadly Sins” (which appears twice on the box set, once as a demo released as the B-side of “Time for Heroes” and once as a studio outtake) and “Sweets - Take 4” show a dreamy, jazzy, and surprisingly lovable side to the band, one that owes more to Django Reinhardt than the Jam. The demo version of “Plan A” has the mesmeric, rather sinister feel of a film score, with prominent bass and skeletal guitar situating it somewhere between the Clash’s dub excursions and a Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album track. “Mockingbird - Take 6” doubles down on the band’s folky ways, with brushed drums, flying acoustic guitar flourishes, and what sounds like a double bass; it could easily date from the British skiffle boom of the 1950s.
Like London itself, the Libertines of Up the Bracket are sprawling, dirty, romantic, somewhat indiscriminate, and full of chaotic life. This impression is reinforced by “Don’t Talk to Me,” a song freshly unearthed for this box set, which they appear to basically make up on the spot, probing their way through two minutes of endearingly shambling lo-fi pop à la early Pavement. Those accustomed to seeing Doherty through the prism of tabloid fame, drugs, and reliably terrible Babyshambles singles may be surprised by the fresh-faced balladeer who sings on “Breck Road Lover,” a winsome and sweetly nostalgic song said to be one of the band’s earliest. The Libertines themselves—and Doherty in particular—are hardly blameless in the band’s descent into rock’n’roll caricature, becoming better known for misbehavior than musical ability before their troubled (but occasionally inspired) second album in 2004. Up the Bracket remains their high-water mark, and this box set gives enough context to understand the original album’s motley musical inspiration, bohemian spirit, and anarchic ethos.


Originally released as a murky collection on Bandcamp last year, Exile's newly mixed and mastered take on Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them imbues the kinetic, syllable-twisting rapper Blu's LP with a sweet, contemplative sound.

Blu & Exile: Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them

Blu's No York! was one of the most slept-on rap records of last year, a collection of songs so forward-thinking they helped listeners soothe the retromanic paranoia that abounded in 2011. Provided with difficult beats by a group of futuristic producers that included Flying Lotus, Diaba$e, and Daedelus, Blu dissected the most complicated sounds, seamlessly slicing through cuts on which most rappers would stumble to land a bar. It was an exciting, esoteric collection. And, for those of us who took Simon Reynolds' fear of future-past seriously, it helped to remind us that there will always be something brand new coming around the corner.
Now it's 2012, and if I weren't over my fear of NOTHING NEW HAPPENING IN MUSIC EVER AGAIN, Blu's Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them would be a cause for concern. The album was originally put out on bandcamp in December of last year and was marred, as many of Blu's promising records are, by a murk of fuzz and bad mixing so complete that it was basically unlistenable. Now it's back, being released officially by Dirty Science and Fat Beats and while it's newly intelligible, thanks to mastering and mixing, the songs also sound a whole lot like five years ago.
That's partly due to Blu's re-teaming with Exile, who produced the entirety of his classic underground debut Below the Heavens. By reuniting with Exile (who we can thank for the mixing, mastering, and some scratching), Blu makes a return of the sound of his ground floor, to the sweet, contemplative organic soul that had fans embracing him before he started to get really and truly strange in all of the best ways*.* And though it's tough to criticize a rhymer as fluid as Blu, I can't help but to be disappointed in a release that sounds so much like what came before.
The third track, "Maybe One Day", is an example of what's wrong. It's, as always, a showcase for immaculate rapping, as Blu unwinds lines deftly, internal rhymes building and switching on each other with extreme sophistication. But the message of the song is pedantic and reductive as Blu plays the scold, "I pity them fools, zipping through the city in jewels…/ In it for the Benjamins too, and so am I/ But why would I use it on fool's gold, when you know your true soul shines." This sentiment, the kneejerk scorn for the heavy flaunting of wealth, is straight out of the mid-naughts backpack rapper's cliché list of complaints. What's more, Blu already flipped the idea on its head a year ago with the half-satirical track "Everything OK", on which he both mocks materialism and wishes for more. And he did so over a crazy beat.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Blu's step backwards is the way it jars against his newly evolved style. The contemplative beauty of Exile's beats fits Blu's soul-searching perfectly on Below the Heavens. But the rapper has become more versatile and more jagged, stringing individually crafted phrases together so fast that their edges sometimes feel like they're cutting through the headphones. On the devout "More Out of Life", what could be a wrathful rant against a squad following false fathers, and looking to "Malcoms, Martins, Pacs, Chris Wallaces" is dulled by the elegance of Exile's beat. Blu's anger tamed, the song doesn't have the impact it should and he comes off like a jaded, weary teacher, rolling his eyes at pupils who refuse to absorb a lesson. He even gets lazy at the end, just listing off the things we're dealing with, "censorship, sponsorship, friendships, relationships, slave ships, minimum wages," which is nearly as bad as moaning random words, "relations, creation, incarceration, determination," à la Citizen Cope.
With a rapper like Blu, though, there are always going to be songs that demand repeat listens.  One of the best on the album is "Growing Pains", and it's here that Exile unleashes with something a little more dangerous, a heavy beat with a steady melody for cruising downtown avenues. Blu comes through with a minute left and just goes, torrents of syllables coming forward in service of rapid-fire storytelling about pursuing girls, hanging out with his pops, wanting a Casio and riding around in Cadillacs. On "The Great Escape" the rapper sounds rejuvenated by the presence of Adad and Homeboy Sandman, the latter of whom is perhaps the only person in independent rap who can twist syllables with the same precision as Blu.
Or take "The Only One", on which the man himself relaxes and, still rapping fast as hell, relays explorations of his ancestors and past lives, in between insights into his everyday life. It's his gift for these details, for storytelling and poetry at Wachowski speed that makes Blu such a great rapper. But when you remove bullet time, though he's still formidable, Blu can't hold on to the kinetic excitement that animated No York!.
I've always been conflicted about the critical instinct to ask our favorite artists for constant evolution, and it seems particularly unfair to pull out one of Blu's three 2011 releases, point to it as being representative of "the future," and beg for more. But Blu has a loyal legion of fans who will stick up for him, and he could stand to be called out. Making albums like Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them is child's play for two guys as talented as he and Exile are. And though this album is a beautiful, well-executed listen, Blu will only really be fulfilling his potential when he starts looking toward the future again.


Atlanta band seems to have found the ideal context for their brash, loud, and sloppy garage rock: live onstage in Tijuana, recorded by John Reis of Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu.

Black Lips: Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo

Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo

Somewhere in the 1930s, guitarist Les Paul began taking a 4x4 plank of wood with stings and a pickup to his club performances to get the volume he desired. When he attached the wings of another guitar to each side of "the log," as he called it, he solved his feedback problem and the funny looks from the audience dissipated. In 1957, Sam Cooke made the difficult decision to move away from gospel and record a secular song, "You Send Me", under his own name. In 1964, Eric Burdon took the oft-covered standard "House of the Rising Sun"-- cut by Bob Dylan just two years earlier-- and recorded a more dramatic version with his own band, the Animals, resulting in what was arguably the first folk-rock hit. Sometimes, there's a watershed "Eureka!" moment in an artists' career where they find their ideal context, as if it had been waiting for them all along. For the Black Lips, the live Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo is it: they should always be recorded by John Reis (Hot Snakes, Drive Like Jehu), always be drunk, and always be in Tijuana.
"This is gonna be the best live record of all time!" assures singer Cole Alexander, like a hopeful dad taking his family on a shithole vacation. And then the band launches into a particularly flame-footed version of "Not A Problem" in front of a roomful of noisy and likely inebriated Tijuana visitors. From the very first track, "M.I.A.", the songs here are sped up to their breaking point, with woozy, haphazard guitar-string bends that flail desperately to catch up with the rhythm section's pace. The jagged, vaguely Eastern riff on "Hippy Hippy Hurrah" is particularly singeing, as the song flips between mumbled French and Alexander's wails. This and the anxious drum fills and windmill chords of "Boone" are some of the finest garage-bred surf-punk the band has to offer.
John Reis' recording of the show doesn't sacrifice an ounce of their energy or tone, nor does he clean up any warts, retaining the awkward banter, out-of-tune vocals, and frazzled connections. Los Valientes always sounds on the verge of breaking down-- not surprising to those who have seen the band's shambolic early shows-- but it never does. Fans will recognize eight of the twelve tracks from Let it Bloom, and the low fidelity and raucous nature of that record makes this rough recording sound familiar. But Bloom doesn't have a roomful of maniacs egging the band on, nor full-band sing-alongs on every possible note; these touches underline both the punk spirit of Black Lips and their unpolished performance style. Whether it's creative editing or just catching the band on a lucky night, it's only on the closing "Juvenile" that the band goes completely off the rails, as they ditch the song's manic two-chord riff for a finale of piercing, rhythmless noise.
I don't buy into it, but for some the romance of decadence and the fascination of the Behind-the-Music lifestyle makes this kind of music more authentic. Black Lips, or at least whoever is writing their press, sure as hell see things that way. They believe that you bleed and sweat and abuse yourself for rock and roll, and the most fucked-up band wins the prize. It's not important whether or not they actually live the myth offstage, just that they channel the spirit into their music with an intensity few bands could try for, much less attain. This quality is what makes Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo that rare live album that's not just different enough from the studio records to justify its release, but possibly all that beginners and dilettantes need from the band. The Black Lips nearly destroy their songs here, but out of an earnest, palpable love for the material.


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 story around the ’90s boom of Contemporary Christian Music and one of its biggest records.

Jesus Freak

At the Caffè Greco in downtown San Francisco, three young men sit around a table with a stranger. The trio mention that they’re musicians, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s in the biz himself. Helped master All Things Must Pass, in fact—did some arrangements on the first couple Police records, working on a tour for Dick Clark’s people. The young men start to squirm. Then, a reprieve: a couple enters the café, camera crew in orbit. It’s March 1994, and MTV is shooting the third season of The Real World.
The musicians are amused, and—if they can be honest—a little annoyed. They too are being followed by a camera crew, gathering material for a documentary that they hope to show in theaters. The film is intended to do that which MTV, to this point, has declined: introduce the trio to a secular audience. They are DC Talk: the biggest thing in Christian rap, the hottest thing in Christian music, and that is not enough.
Four years earlier, the head of their label had to beg festivals to give DC Talk 15 minutes out of his band’s own set. Now they were filling arenas on their first headlining tour. Their resources were commensurate with their ambition: to put on their hyperkinetic set, they employed a crack band and a team of hip-hop dancers. They performed on The Tonight Show and got a video in rotation on BET. They sang something called “Two Honks and a Negro” for Arsenio Hall and got invited back. Watching MTV attempt to make stars out of nobodies was frustrating, especially when they were just a couple tables away. In the mid-’90s, the record industry was a boom town, and DC Talk felt that they were claimants with a strong case.
In buses and hotels and dressing rooms, the three young men hashed out how to make a record that would succeed on their terms, as well as the terms of the culture they felt was excluding them. The result was Jesus Freak: an album that sold more in its first week than any Contemporary Christian Music release in history. It was the high water mark for a particular kind of evangelical pop, and DC Talk’s success accelerated the transformation of CCM from a commercial backwater to an essential corporate asset. But for the trio’s Christian fanbase, the most astounding thing about Jesus Freak was that it wasn’t a rap album.
Back in the mid-’80s, when the three young men of DC Talk—Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait, and Kevin Max—were students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Christian rap was barely a concept. While minister MCs like Stephen Wiley and Michael Peace were beginning to wed hip-hop to a message of salvation through Jesus Christ, McKeehan aspired to be a golfer. He’d been a hip-hop head since the Sugarhill Gang: In 1986, he even helped the Beastie Boys find a decent ice cream shop after a soundcheck at the 9:30 Club. He was a yappy private-school jock from suburban Virginia whose early raps mainly dissed his ex-girlfriend, but no matter: at Liberty, he was DC Talk.
His trajectory changed when he met Michael Tait, a native Washingtonian. Tait was a glee-clubber in high school; at Liberty, he landed a regular spot on Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour radio show. (On a 2012 return to campus, Tait visited Jerry’s grave. “I always would joke with him,” he told the student paper, “calling him my white daddy.”) In those early days, Tait and McKeehan ran a bait-and-switch. Tait booked a string of church gigs. He’d lead everyone in the old-time favorites, then he’d pause. I have a friend here in the audience who’s running my sound. His name is Toby. He and I do something different together that probably wouldn’t be right for the service... unless you guys think it would be? As McKeehan remembered it, the pastor would usually agree. “Then we’d turn that into a DC Talk concert.”
In 1987, the duo recorded a two-song demo titled Christian Rhymes to a Rhythm. Tait was singing from his sinuses; the beats sounded like breaking-news library music; the tapes sold out. To expand their sound, they recruited a second singer: Kevin Max. On campus, Max—a native Michigander—claimed his stepfather was Rod Stewart. He had a malleable tenor and something akin to professional experience: He’d once fronted a band that played at Jim Bakker’s waterpark. Max had been a rock guy ever since a neighbor kid played him Queen’s The Game, but he was down with DC Talk. The trio’s early press kit contained a ringing endorsement from Falwell (“God has great plans for these three young men and their powerful program”), designed to open up the church performance circuit. But DC Talk was dreaming of bigger venues.
After college, the three—billed as ”DC Talk and the One Way Crew”—signed with the Christian indie label ForeFront. They were the only label to show interest in DC Talk, but they considered the signing a coup. Hip-hop’s golden age was underway, and a host of new Christian rappers were sampling its fruits: End Time Warriors, D-Boy, Soldiers for Christ, JC & the Boyz, P.I.D., Dynamic Twins. Within this brotherhood of gospel rap, DC Talk was a double anomaly: a rap group with only one MC, and a white MC at that. In no time, they were labeled CCM’s New Kids on the Block. “Maybe as far as the way people look at us from an image standpoint,” McKeehan conceded, “but the New Kids don’t rap on one song, and our songs are 50 percent rap.”
But that other 50 percent unlocked McKeehan’s—and ForeFront’s—pop ambitions. While Toby hammered his pipsqueak delivery into something resembling the tough bark of his New York rap heroes, Michael and Kevin were adapting their talents to any number of Top 40 styles: hip-house, New Jack Swing, Rick Rubinesque rock/rap hybrids. Their first record was marred by nursery-school rhymes and rhythmic malpractice, but quickly sold 100,000 copies. The second went gold. By 1992’s Free at Last, they were a force. The songs were tighter, fuller—dare I say sensual: no small feat for an album featuring a pro-chastity response to George Michael. Even the ballads strutted. For the first time, Tait and Max sounded like full partners. The former’s Southern gospel intonations were gone; the latter had figured out how to approach R&B hooks like a rocker. They were doing fluid work in complex emotional registers. And they wanted a bigger role in songwriting.
Despite their group’s success, neither singer had developed any loyalty to hip-hop. Tait was getting deeper into rock. And Max—who was now being referred to as a “bad boy” for venialities like wearing eyeliner and being photographed holding a beer—had long been ready for DC Talk’s artistic ambition to match his. But McKeehan was keeping the powder dry. During the Free at Last sessions, he and programmer/backing vocalist Todd Collins would geek out over buzzy mainstream rap acts. One day, Collins started pushing him about updating DC Talk’s sound. As Collins recalled in a Jesus Freak retrospective, McKeehan set him straight. “We have to earn the right from our audience to make whatever records we want down the road.”
During the Free at Last tour, at a show in South Africa, he debuted a rap-rock song he’d just put together. It got a massive pop, and in August 1995, the “Jesus Freak” single hit stores. The riff, the loud/quiet dynamic, the bass that drops out during the breath-catching bridge: there was no mistaking the song’s provenance. “[A] radical change for the boys,” mused CCM Magazine at the time, “but it sounded an awful lot like... teen spirit.” Unusually, the song was pitched up a half-step, as if reaching for bubblegrunge higher ground. McKeehan’s bars—hollering about tattooed street preachers and John the Baptist’s nappy hair—took on a goonish glint. Tait and Max dove with him into the sour sea of the chorus: “What will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus freak?/What will people do when they find that it’s true?”
God’s people went bonkers. For untold numbers of mainline Protestant and evangelical teens, the song was inescapable. ForeFront mailed promotional CD singles to 4,000 youth pastors, who dutifully employed it as a sort of jock jam, propelling kids from Sunday-night youth gatherings into the hostile territory of Monday homerooms. The day after wrapping the album, DC Talk flew to Los Angeles to film the “Jesus Freak” video; McKeehan had tabbed Simon Maxwell after catching his work for Nine Inch Nails. The director cooked up a voguish mash of vintage newsreels, overexposing strobe flashes, and blurry foregrounds. MTV accepted the clip, which was fortunate for the group because their documentary was, by that point, dead in the water. Christian bookstore sales pushed the single to No. 10 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under chart, but without more secular support, that would be its peak.
“We have not gone down the road to alternative grunge as much as they think we have,” Max assured CCM, a month before the album dropped. His warning went unheeded. The popularity of “Jesus Freak” cast the album that followed as a late jump on grunge’s long tail: the redeemed version of Live or Bush. It certainly didn’t help that the album itself was cloaked in self-serious esoterica. For the first time, the group wasn’t on the cover. In their place was a brand-new logo that recalled the Eye of Providence, embossed on a sepia background lifted from a toxicology text in Max’s antique book collection. Even their typography changed: from here on, they were “dc Talk.” But Max was right. DC Talk was a vocal trio—by the letter of the law, a boy band—and thus disqualified from grunge.
In truth, Jesus Freak was a Nashville pop-rock record: impeccably performed and results-oriented. As with so many Music City productions, the collective CV of its players is boggling: Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, Jerry Jeff Walker, Scritti Politti. They employed the drummer from “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and the teenage guitarist from Johnny Q. Public. Everyone from CCM lifers to one-time apostates popped in for a spell.
Overseeing it all was Mark Heimermann, McKeehan’s writing and production partner since DC Talk’s second album. Heimermann had no lead guitarist to please, no bassist angling to cut through the mix. He was free to stack the pieces as they suited him. As on Free at Last, he went for density. Opener “So Help Me God” was the step-down converter from New Jack to adult alternative: between two dust-dry funk-rock riffs, Tait receives the pre-chorus from a host of Kevins—harmonizing, overlapping—like an anchor leg breaking from a crowded backstretch. Wanting to record the definitive version of Charlie Peacock’s 1991 CCM smash “In the Light,” DC Talk swapped Peacock’s synthpop hook—an homage to a multi-racial crossover pop act—for a full complement of strings and a crisp, palm-muted rhythm guitar. (Peacock, bearing witness, cameos on the outro.)
McKeehan had one more change: He excised Peacock’s bridge devoted to the greatest love and inserted his own Ecclesiastical lyric: “Pride has no position/As riches have no worth/The fame that once did cover me/Has been sentenced to this earth.” It wasn’t the only time on this album he’d touch on the temptations of stardom. It wasn’t even the only time he did it on a cover. He and Max retrofit the Godspell number “Day by Day” (itself a crossover pop hit) with new verses, turning the placid hippie artifact into a bleary shuffle that alternates professions of faith with gripes at Satan’s tactics. “Blinded by distractions,” Tait groans, “lost in matterless affairs.” On the glumly paddling ballad “What If I Stumble,” Tait doubts his very motivation to create. “Is this one for the people?/Is this one for the Lord?” he muses, circled by a slow-exhaling accordion. “Or do I simply serenade for things I must afford?”
Each of these songs, to some degree, resolves into trust or triumph. Even so, it was startling for a mainstream Christian pop act—especially one gunning to cross over—to be this frank about the pitfalls of success. (In CCM, as in wrestling, you’d often have to go underground to catch the real grappling.) A typical CCM album was programmatic: a couple praise songs, a few genial pep talks, a lament about America’s moral decline vis-à-vis abortion or the teaching of evolution. For that last one, DC Talk substituted “Colored People,” a jangle-pop anti-racism anthem that botched the diagnosis and the cure (“Ignorance has wronged some races/And vengeance is the Lord’s”). Jesus Freak didn’t skimp on the condemnation, but its makers shared in the malaise. For a generation of evangelical listeners, hearing Christian music’s biggest stars acknowledge their struggle to live a holy life was, paradoxically, profound encouragement.
On some level, of course, this is the evangelist’s tack: descending to your perceived spiritual depth. But in reaching the pinnacle of CCM, DC Talk was both ministry and moneymaker. They’d tear up an ecstatic arena, then take turns playing video baseball with the kids hanging outside the tour bus. In the spring of 1996, at a Christian-music symposium, McKeehan detailed his unease with fame: “[A] gentleman came up to me and said, ‘Can I have your signature for my son? He totally idolizes you, Toby.’ That’s scary. I don’t mind telling you, that makes me want to run from this industry. Wealth makes me want to run from this industry. I shake when I think about those things because wealth does not draw you to God—it doesn’t.” That year, DC Talk would gross $4.7 million on tour.
The industry couldn’t ignore that kind of number. The year before Jesus Freak dropped, CCM and gospel accounted for half a billion dollars in sales. The vast majority of these purchases, though, were rung up at Christian retailers, making them ineligible for Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, and keeping them from DC Talk’s dream audience. The big-box retailers weren’t stocking CCM, and the smaller Christian labels either lacked the personnel or didn’t see the need to get their artists onto secular shelves. But multinational labels had both the staff and the vision. Majors and massive indies started snapping up CCM labels: Sparrow, Reunion, Brentwood, Star Song. By the end of the 1990s, acts as disparate as Jars of Clay, MxPx, and Sixpence None the Richer were notching hit singles and albums. For ardent enthusiasts of Christian rock, it felt like overdue recognition.
In September 1995, point-of-sale purchases from the Christian Booksellers Association began counting toward the Billboard 200. Two months later, Jesus Freak debuted at No. 16, selling 85,000 copies, 90 percent from Christian retailers. Not even Amy Grant—CCM’s original crossover queen—had matched those first-week numbers. Four years after Billboard’s switch to SoundScan, DC Talk’s feat was less revelatory, perhaps, than Garth Brooks or N.W.A. topping the chart. But it emphasized how big Christian pop had become. In July 1996, EMI announced their purchase of ForeFront, whose ownership recognized they had taken DC Talk as far as they could on their own. In the fall, the trio signed a deal with Virgin to market Jesus Freak to mainstream North American audiences. Virgin had the perfect single in mind.
”Between You and Me” was gorgeous adult alternative in Seal’s mode: a downcast ballad urged onward by funky sixteenths and chunky wah. The radio edit removed the song’s explicitly Christian bridge. To some, the single clearly depicted a spiritual rapprochement: an application of the apostle Paul’s directive about anger. To others, it was a love song between friends, the kind of homosocial pledge (“We’ve got a love that’s worth preserving/And a bond I will defend”) rare in pop. Wunderkind director Ramaa Mosley shot the enigmatic video. which entered rotation at MTV and VH1. The song—likely the only hit single to use the word recompense—cracked Billboard’s Top 30. It would be DC Talk’s only appearance on the Hot 100.
Just for a moment, the band had reached the audience they had always sought. It took a ton of money, three labels, and an overhaul of their sound, but they did it. Jesus Freak would go on to sell two million copies. CCM journalists had already taken to calling DC Talk the Christian Beatles. Now they called Jesus Freak the group’s Sgt. Pepper’s: a generational work that suggested new possibilities for the genre. But, like the Beatles, DC Talk would cease to be a functional group within five years. 1998’s Supernatural was their next and final album, a turgid effort (there was a five-minute pop-punk song, which shouldn’t be possible) delivered with the assurance of stars. It debuted at No. 4 on the Top 200, moved a million units, and lodged itself as a footnote in CCM’s attempted pop takeover.
There would be no repeat of Jesus Freak’s achievement: not from DC Talk, nor anyone else. They were ambitious men who leveraged their claim on a particular patch of rap to reach a mass audience. Convinced that they possessed the needed gifts—spiritual, sure, but also compositional—they translated the distractions of stardom into testimony. They were aided by an industry anxious to preserve the alt-rock bubble, and to drive early returns on its investments in Christian music. At the dawn of the new century, though, CCM was looking inward and upward. Rather than take risky bets on aspiring crossover stars, it focused on praise and worship music: easier to produce and readymade for licensing to churches. Having built such a peculiar path to stardom, the members of DC Talk would have to find new lanes.
It’s October 1996. DC Talk is filming again. This time, it’s the European leg of the Welcome to the Freak Show tour. Tait and McKeehan stroll the streets of London, taking in the sights. A girl approaches Tait. “Are you a pop star?” The camera apprehends her, and she retreats. The camera pans back to him. He laughs, and shrugs.

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This is, without a doubt, Kevin Barnes' most fragmented record since the tail end of the project's Elephant 6 days.

Paralytic Stalks

of Montreal are not a band. Or, at least, they haven't been for quite some time: Since 2004's breakthrough sixth full-length, Satanic Panic in the Attic, Kevin Barnes has largely written, recorded, and performed every album on his own, occasionally calling on outside collaborators (Janelle Monaé, Solange Knowles, Jon Brion) to add flourishes. He made the decision to shift toward creative solitude nearly eight years into a career that has now spanned 16, and the decision made sense. Since Satanic Panic, Barnes has treated the LP form as a highly personal forum exploration, a place to indulge his every whim without regard for his audience.
In that sense, of Montreal's latest, Paralytic Stalks, is more of the same: Barnes recorded it in his own Sunlandic Studios with the assistance of strings arranger/performer Kishi Bashi and a smattering of session musicians, and has stated that the album is meant to be taken whole. But even for a songwriter as sonically adventurous as Barnes, something feels different this time around. He's always been fond of concepts (2008's alter-ego-happy Skeletal Lamping, the funk freakouts of 2010's False Priest), but on Paralytic Stalks, he sounds completely adrift, as if his thousand-synapses-firing-all-at-once approach finally blew a massive fuse.
When I spoke with Barnes this past fall about the influences driving the creation of Paralytic Stalks, he cited difficult 20th-century composers such as Charles Ives and Krzysztof Penderecki, predicting it'd be a hard sell for most listeners before doubling back and referring to it as a "colorful pop record." The truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is, without a doubt, his most fragmented album since the tail end of the project's Elephant 6 days, which is saying a lot considering the tiny stitched-together segments made Skeletal Lamping such a challenging, divisive album. To me, that record sounded like a pleasurably jumbled mess of endless possibilities; Paralytic Stalks just sounds like a mess.
The seam in Paralytic Stalks' patchwork comes at the midpoint of "Ye, Renew the Plaintiff", which delineates the album's two halves. The front half plays to strengths Barnes' has honed over the last eight years-- stuffed production on the brink of exploding, melodies that constantly change direction, and unhinged vocal performances. The hooks just aren't there, though, and that's a big problem, considering that even Barnes' most esoteric records have had their share of memorable take-aways (Skeletal Lamping's "An Eluardian Instance", False Priest's "Our Riotous Defects"). With the possible exception of "Malefic Dowery", which is surprisingly lush, little here sticks.
The "20th-century classical music" influence comes during the album's second half: Its songs run longer, and they're packed with dissonant drones, screeching noise, and, in the case of "Exorcismic Breeding Knife", a surging orchestral cacophony. It's challenging stuff, a distant cousin to the kind of abstractions that Barnes flirted with on last year's thecontrollersphere EP. Barnes doesn't go all-in, but rather, pastes bits of psychedelia, stuttering synth-funk, and hushed piano balladry on the ends of "Wintered Debts" and "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission", which all feels utterly wasted given the shapeless and indistinct surroundings.
The most disappointing aspect of Paralytic Stalks is that lack of personality behind the music. Barnes has treated songwriting as a personal therapy session, and the recording studio as a psychologist's couch under mirrored ceilings. On 2007's brilliant Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, he faced off with his super-ego amidst infidelity, depression, and self-destruction; the following year's Skeletal Lamping contained so much him that he needed an alter-ego, the glammy sexpot Georgie Fruit, to get it all out there.
The words "personal" and "dark" have been referenced in Paralytic's promotional lead-up, but without a lyric sheet, it's nearly impossible to tell that Barnes is singing about anything, save for the surprisingly straightforward "Malefic Dowery", which goes back to the the subject of infidelity. I don't doubt that this is a personal album for Barnes, but on Hissing Fauna, that was obvious-- all you had to do was listen. Here, we're left sorting through lyrics like, "True love never mattered/ The two donkey jaws that were removed from our hearing."
It's hard to blame Barnes for being tired. Since the project's 1997 debut, Cherry Peel, of Montreal haven't gone a year without issuing some sort of new material. By now, he's akin to a Steven Soderbergh, an artist so driven to follow his muse that, even in the face of exhaustion, the thought of retirement only spurs him to work more. The thoroughly unenjoyable Paralytic Stalks might be a sign that Barnes should take some time off and let the inspiration come to him.


The Swedish producer in charge of bringing capital-F Fun back to the dance floor succeeds in a multitude flying colors across his ebullient and wildly dynamic debut album.

The Bells

In techno, few records are more iconic than “The Bells,” a 1996 track by Jeff Mills. Relentless and reduced, it exemplifies the building-block nature of Mills’ art as something meant to be layered across three or four turntables. Thanks to its queasy, carnivalesque melody, it also stands easily and proudly on its own. Kornél Kovács’ “The Bells,” the title track of his debut album, doesn’t sound anything like Mills’ version: Where the minimalist classic is stern and hard-angled, Kovács’ is cheerful and easygoing, flecked with chimes, warm strings, and peppy vocal samples. But I would be surprised if the precedent for his choice of title didn't at least cross Kovács’ mind. Given his fondness for sampling vintage disco, he’s cleary a guy who knows his music history. Someone coming from underground dance music, like he does, can’t title a record “The Bells” and *not *be reminded of the original. Which makes it something of a cheeky maneuver—a shot across the bow that leaves a rainbow tracer in its wake.
Kovács likes to have fun with references: His 2015 track “Space Jam” was a tribute to Quad City DJs’ theme to the 1996 Michael Jordan/Bugs Bunny film, for crying out loud. He likes to have fun, period. As a co-founder of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus label, he’s spent the past six years developing a quirky aesthetic that draws freely from disco, Italo, freestyle, and easy listening. But his idea of fun is different from the kind of “fun” that you tend to find in dance music. In fact, there isn’t a lot of fun in dance music right now. Stone-faced cool rules the underground, while the antics prevalent in commercial EDM—marshmallow masks, cakes to the face, garish pyrotechnics—are too cynical, too calculated, to qualify as innocent or carefree. But once upon a time, when disco ruled, a single could reasonably be expected to elicit smiles on the dance floor, and that’s the impulse driving Kovács’ debut album.
The record opens with a beatless, 98-second snippet of Kovács’ 2014 single “Szikra” that glows like a cotton-candy lamp, but after that it’s all about dizzy rug-cutting, darting through loopy disco bass lines, spongy funk keys, and oohing-and-ahhing choral pads. “Gex” is conga-line mayhem on a heaving cruise ship, all flushed cheeks, flailing arms, and lifejackets lodged in chandeliers. “Dance… While the Record Spins” stacks staccato harmonies into brittle configurations, yielding something like Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” on laughing gas. And “Pop” evokes childlike innocence from pastel squiggles over a skipping, jacking drum groove, like an Akufen track smeared in color crayons.
Not everything is so chipper. “BB,” one of the album's highlights, exemplifies one of The Bells’ key contradictions. The beat is a cracking disco break broadcasting basement-party vibes at their most unhinged. But a more sorrowful undercurrent flows beneath its cathartic rush. “Szív Utca”—Hungarian for “Heart Street”—is equally bittersweet, and the slinky “Dollar Club,” tugged between crisp drums and weepy keys, balances a playful spirit with more melancholy vibes. You could imagine any of these tunes getting played by DJs like DJ Koze, Michael Mayer, Superpitcher, or any other selector with a winking sense of humor and a bleeding heart. But while it is music made first and foremost for club play, there’s enough variety here to make The Bells a satisfying listen on the headphones. The loping, dem-bow-patterned “Josey’s Tune” sounds like Kovács’ take on DJ Mujava’s “Township Funk.” Not only is his rhythmic sensibility is far more nuanced than most of his peers’, he is a master of both texture and empty space. His sound breathes even as it giggles.
Even the saddest, slowest song here, the closing “Urszusz,” comes off like something from a children’s cartoon, rendering a watery, Harold Budd-like piano melody with wide-eyed wonder. It’s followed by a moment of silence and a bizarre hidden track that sounds like a voicemail message chanted in sing-songy, heavily accented English. “What’s his name, Kornél Kovács!” sings his exuberant and quite possibly inebriated caller, over and over, with great gusto. It’s the kind of thing you might wake up to on your phone after a long, blurry, and indescribably fun night, and it’s the coup de grace for an album that brings good times back to dance music.


Sexwitch is a project from Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes. With her producer Dan Carey and the UK-based psychedelic group TOY, she reinterprets old Moroccan and Iranian songs. She seizes on the material, allowing her voice to leap into a wail and break free. Each song was recorded in one take, and the album is the product of one daylong session.

Sexwitch

She knows it "sounds ridiculous," but when Natasha Khan (aka Bat for Lashes) began reinterpreting old Moroccan and Iranian songs with her producer Dan Carey and the UK-based psychedelic outfit TOY, she felt like she was "channeling some sort of ancestral feelings about witches." She's not fully clear on what came over her; in interviews, she makes the process sound like an exorcism. Each song was captured in one take, and the whole album recorded in a daylong session. Her lyrics are collaged-together English translations of the songs' source material, which mostly concern seduction and infatuation. After a certain point, her singing becomes wailing. Her screams are pained and, to borrow Khan's word, "orgasmic." When it came time to name the project, she shrugged and told Carey, "It’s Sexwitch, innit?"
The material for the album was unearthed during a fruitful crate-digging trip, when Khan and Carey obsessed over some rare psychedelic tracks from other countries. They found two songs from Iran: "Ghoroobaa Ghashangan" (on the Light in the Attic comp Zendooni) and "Helelyos" (a song by Iranian singer Zia that's appeared on several Iranian pre-revolutionary pop compilations). Two songs are featured on the Raw 45s of Morocco comp: "Ha Howa Ha Howa" and "Kassidat El Hakka". The original version of "Lam Plearn Kiew Bao" is from Thailand and can be found on a Soundway comp. These songs' messages of liberation and passion are well suited to Khan's voice, especially at its most intense.
Compared to The Haunted Man, Khan's untethered presence on Sexwitch is a departure. Her Bat for Lashes work foregrounds structure and melody, but here she takes key phrases and molds them, repeating and inverting them. When necessary, she makes her voice percussive, especially when she emphasizes the repeated words "my dark girls" on "Helelyos". Khan's performances are equal parts wild and controlled, and TOY have no trouble nailing these songs. They're funky on "Ghoroobaa Ghashangan" and their percussion work on "Kassidat El Hakka" is satisfyingly heavy. To Carey's credit, this album sounds great, too.
But since every song on Sexwitch is a cover, it begs the question: What do Sexwitch's versions add? Occasionally, they feel overlong. Repetition is key to this music, but after several cycles, tracks begin to plod, broken up only by Khan's vocal work. The Sexwitch interpretations lose vital elements from the originals like horns, organs, and bells.
The most successful cover is arguably the closer: Skip Spence's "War in Peace". It's an excellent choice, and it offers Sexwitch the opportunity to simmer, jam, and gradually ramp back up. "War in peace," Khan sings, adding, "What a funny combination." The song is proof that they can thrive in the sweet spot between unchained freewheeling psychedelia and something more regimented and precise like "All Your Gold". But then again, why tame a band that's hell-bent on staying untamed?


The Gen Z philosopher’s hard-rock era continues with an album about love and hurt, pain and healing, done with great nuance but not quite enough originality.

CopingMechanism

Last year on Mother’s Day, Willow surprised her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, with a reunion performance by Jada’s 2000s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom, starring Willow in her mother’s place as frontwoman. Clad in a Mastodon T-shirt, she foreshadowed her rocker era belting uncharacteristically dark lyrics—“I love your pain and how it opens you so wide/And I love the way you bleed all over me”—while the band shredded electric guitars to “Bleed All Over Me.” Though she officially shed her R&B indie-folk skin on 2021’s pop-punk Lately I Feel Everything, <COPINGMECHANISM> gets even grittier. The Gen Z philosopher’s efforts to evocatively communicate complex generational angst are hindered by her impersonal writing and delivery that doesn’t quite push past vocal imitation of her predecessors.
Willow’s early albums, her 2015 neo-soul debut Ardipithecus and subsequent psychedelic-folk record Willow, sought spiritual enlightenment. Here, she follows the example of artists like Rico Nasty and Kelis by reclaiming cathartic rage in a genre where Black women are woefully absent. Willow grew up watching audience members hurl racial slurs at her mother during her Wicked Wisdom days and came out of that experience determined to end the exclusionary nature of heavy metal. On <COPINGMECHANISM>, she’s not afraid to sound feral and vindictive. Through frenzied guitar breaks, guttural screeches, and screamo vocals on tracks like “ur a ˂stranger˃” and the Yves Tumor collab “Perfectly Not Close to Me,” she purges her grief over the dissolution of a relationship. Though she has noted bands like Lamb of God, Deftones, and Crowbar amongst her inspirations, here her style more closely mimics the celestial croons of Evanescence (“Split”) and the “rock-voice” of early Paramore’s Hayley Williams (“<Coping Mechanism>”).
Even for the self-assured performer who commanded attention on the Oprah show at 5, scored a breakout hit at 9, and put herself first by pausing her career as an adolescent, navigating life in the spotlight as a Black girl can be a horror. In a 2021 interview with Genius, she spoke about her anxiety surrounding betrayal: “I can’t tell you how much I’ve had fear that if I opened up about this to this person or if I say this or whatever, they’re gonna tell TMZ.” As she’s come of age, a deep sense of paranoia runs through Willow’s pop-punk and rock discography. She preemptively plays offense on “BATSHIT?” “If I were you, I would watch out/Whatever you do, it better be true/I’m coming for you,” she hisses, throwing “fucks” like grenades as howling guitars and propulsive drums heighten the potency of her venom. Her lulled laments peak through the adrenaline-filled finale and sum up the album’s tension between intellectualizing her pain and surrendering to its visceral messiness.
Chris Greatti’s stadium-ready production is often diluted by lyrics that attempt to abstractly embody and assuage the disaffection of an entire generation. <COPINGMECHANISM> is a break-up album for Gen Z—a generation that exchanges mental health advice on TikTok and isn’t afraid to publicize their innermost thoughts and pathologies. Sometimes painfully reminiscent of an episode of Red Table Talk—the healing-driven multigenerational talk show and pop culture forum hosted by Willow’s family on Facebook—the album is peppered with therapeutic mantras like “I try to stick to the facts/I try to learn from the past” and buzz phrases like “fight-or-flight... freeze.” “Never wear a frown/Because life doesn’t choose either side/Win or lose, right or wrong/It’s a battle that’s all in your mind,” Willow continues on “curious/furious.” She does counteract cheesy lines with ethereal melismatic breaks and yearning falsettos on tracks like the sapphic love song “hover like a GODDESS” and on the Evanescence-inspired “Split” she makes a case for a spot as one of her generation’s most versatile vocalists.
Despite the pop-therapy mad-libs, Willow takes a nuanced approach to heartbreak. Even while jilted, she retains compassion for her former lovers and doesn’t view herself as blameless. She starts the album with “How I can forgive you?” and evolves into a I’m starting with the man in the mirror moment: “I don’t know if I’m worth forgiving,” she wails. Love can inspire vengeful feelings but on this album the final wound is self-inflicted: “Murdering my ego with a hatchet.” <COPINGMECHANISM> asks us to accept a grungier and more mature Willow, but this maturity feels formulaic and the intimacy feels manufactured, relying on universal tropes of angst instead of her own. Even if the album is generic at times, Willow’s limber vocals surely enchant as she trapezes across pop, punk, metal, and screamo never fully landing on a signature sound.


The new LP from Toronto’s Weaves features more refined production than their 2016 debut. It highlights frontwoman Jasmyn Burke’s lyrics about personal experiences that parlay into universal struggle.

Wide Open

When Weaves wrote their debut self-titled album, released last year, the Toronto quartet were in the business of rattling fixed formulas. They peeled apart the classic roles of an indie rock band—a singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer—so that each member ricocheted off the other, using Weaves as a space to deconstruct and then rebuild songs, like an espresso-laced jazz troupe set loose in a bounce house. As much as their first album was about living in the musical moment, their follow-up, Wide Open, is about reflecting on moments at large. Weaves shed their improvisational tendencies in favor of more polished pop, and this swap pushes frontwoman Jasmyn Burke’s songwriting to the foreground. It’s a welcome change that sees what Weaves can do inside a box instead of operating outside one.
After the band toured through the U.S. and UK mid-elections last year, Burke realized her personal experiences feed into universal struggles and wrote the meat of Wide Open. “In a way, I was thinking about it like Bruce Springsteen,” she said, “but my experience of the world couldn’t be less like Bruce Springsteen’s.” The similarities are easy to draw when Burke sings about issues like wealth inequality and racial tensions in suburban plots. The real Springsteen analog, however, is in how the bulk of Wide Open hits: there’s clean, hummable guitar lines; liberating, wordless bridges; and this overarching feeling that perseverance is both possible and worthy of pride. That’s why it opens with “#53,” a song about feeling compressed by financial and social limitations that Weaves pepper with glockenspiel while Burke nails falsettos with full lungs. There’s no wild guitar solo or unstructured drum fills. It’s saturated with vocal emotion that captures a relatable yearning instead.
The production makes Wide Open sound like the work of a rising pop star. But since Weaves tinker with it to bring out their art-school flair, it doesn’t feel like they nixed their old style. Morgan Waters’ wiry guitar on “Slicked” builds to an enormous chorus of noise. “Law and Panda,” one of the album’s punchiest songs, forgoes the unpredictable breakdowns of their past in favor of handclaps and charging fury from bassist Zach Bines and drummer Spencer Cole. The arty peculiarities that oversaturated their debut are repurposed into a controlled format. At times, they loosen their grip too much, like when the formulaic side of pop takes the reigns on “La La” and “Walkaway,” going on autopilot. But this is bent pop, and they pull off its highs with enough cool-headed confidence to veil its lows.
Their refinements work best when Burke stands front and center. The title track swims in reverb, a prom slow ballad of melancholic longing across all instruments, while she waxes self-reflective lines about creating amid rubble. She balances personal emotions and overarching observations over the whole of Wide Open, and it’s the strongest evidence that Burke is channeling her inner Springsteen after all. With Canadian throat singer Tanya Tagaq by her side, Burke turns “Scream” into a deranged anthem about loving yourself in the face of racial violence. Fuzzed guitars, drum crashes, and Tagaq’s guttural howls act as pins nailing Burke’s declarations against a wall: “We are living in a time when misery is just common circumstance” hangs beside “My thighs are too big, my head isn’t small, my brain is on fire, I’m feeling this fall.”
Individualistic sighs become communal armour—“Get up on the table and scream your name,” goes “Scream”—and Burke hands them out to anyone who’s in need. With their musical recklessness out of the way, Weaves prioritize lyrical strengths like these on Wide Open while still accenting their musical eccentricities. Weaves’ ambitious song structures used to be too large to wrangle. With Wide Open, they realize the straightforward tentpoles of pop may suit them after all.


On their third studio album, Bombay Bicycle Club follow in the tradition of Snow Patrol's Final Straw and Travis' The Man Who: Band links with a hotshot producer (here, Ben Allen), ditches traditional indie sound, churns out soft-serve sweetness.

Bombay Bicycle Club: A Different Kind of Fix

A Different Kind of Fix

It's incredibly easy to say "forget everything you know about Bombay Bicycle Club," when they really haven't established much of an identity to begin with. But I'll try to sum it up: If you've ever wondered what might happen if Editors were fronted by a freak-folk singer, by all means pick up their debut. Meanwhile, on last year's mostly acoustic soft parade Flaws, they sounded like they'd get their lunch money stolen by Kings of Convenience. I suppose their sales inspired more patience from Island than their art, but on A Different Kind of Fix, they follow in the proud tradition of Snow Patrol's Final Straw and Travis' The Man Who, wherein a band links up with a hotshot producer, ditches a trad-indie sound that just wasn't working, and discovers its destiny churning out soft-serve sweetness that completely neutralizes your critical reasoning skills. I'm fairly certain the same impulse that triggers my desire for an Oreo McFlurry makes me want to listen to A Different Kind of Fix.
It's more likely that Bombay Bicycle Club sought out producer Ben H. Allen than the other way around-- after all, BBC have dutifully namedropped Allen clients Animal Collective and Deerhunter as big influences leading up to the release of Fix. Yeah, it's 2011 and just discovering those bands is just another aspect of BBC that seems so easy to make fun of before they totally disarm you: While nothing here will make you say, "yeah, total 'Summertime Clothes' moment," they've opted out of "quiet is the new loud" by investing themselves in the elemental songwriting aspects of America's indie elite: repetition is the new chorus, texture is the new volume.
And indeed, Apple might need to take a long look at Allen as a product designer if they haven't found a worthy successor for Steve Jobs-- as with Merriweather Post Pavilion, Halcyon Digest, and especially Washed Out's Within and Without, Allen gets a sound that's sleek, bold, and covetable, yet within the price range of the young and upwardly mobile. The easy lilt of Jack Steadman's vocals (thankfully shorn of his prior melismatic fringe) gives Fix enough humanity and extroverted charm to keep it from being a mere showcase for Allen's production tricks, but the depth of the low-end and a prudent amount of abrasive grit imparts a three-dimensionality that saves BBC from getting pushed around like any band that could reasonably be compared to early Coldplay.
Sure, the guitars on "Bad Timing" are thickly distorted, and the drums get a digital makeover into machinery, but it doesn't exactly rock-- it just asserts itself the right amount where a Steadman solo performance would be content to play the wall. The point of "Lights Out, Words Gone" isn't to praise BBC for apparently owning a Talking Heads record, or writing the catchiest Foals song Foals didn't actually write-- it's to lose yourself in the luxurious gulf between the band's vaporous harmonies and the glassy, yacht-funk riffs. The title of "Shuffle" might just be an indication of whose ad dollars Fix has in its crosshairs, and it could very well get there. BBC make full use of a stammering piano loop for both melodic and percussive purposes, and Steadman's vocals tumble over handclaps and layered harmonies in a manner that becomes subtly unstoppable instead of mawkish.
And Fix is all about accumulative properties, little bits and pieces that add up to way more than it should. "How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep" seems genial enough in its first minute-- a blindingly clean guitar riff providing an acoustic sunrise while Steadman somnolently delivers the same line the same way ("Can I wake you up/ Is it late enough") for nearly the song's entirety before an EQ-tweaked drum break sets things in motion. Frankly, you wonder what something this sparkly and chipper was doing on a Twilight soundtrack, but the sonic color is secondary to BBC and Allen playing off each other's skills in service of a certain kind of emotional "click" that's certainly in that franchise's demographic. I can't speak much for the actual biochemical workings, but at its best, Fix strikes that point where, "oh, they're cute" hits a groove in your mind and gets looped into total infatuation. After its three and a half minutes run out, not much has changed about "How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep" except maybe your way of looking at it.
But there's something faintly troubling about A Different Kind of Fix even in light of its success: While the songs are wildly improved, I still can't say there's much of a discernible identity. How much of Bombay Bicycle Club are you actually getting here? Steadman's lyrics and the band's tasteful playing convey, above all else, a kind of utilitarian earnestness endemic to young Brits with acoustics writing about girls and feelings. And you might find some of these hooks creeping up on you when you least expect it-- whistling the melody to "Lights Out, Words Gone" while buying groceries, realizing how deeply the riff of "Your Eyes" burrowed into your consciousness. But just as easily, it can pass right by you as you're actually listening to it, and the closing piano howler "Still" serves notice that they've still got an awkward sweet tooth or two left to extract. And maybe this stands out on account of filling a real void. Prior to the Strokes and the Libertines, this is often what UK guitar bands sounded like-- unabashedly cuddly, a little cloying, and in thrall with even the most rudimentary facets of electronic music. But hell, this is called A Different Kind of Fix and not The Shape of British Rock to Come for a reason: whether you're totally nostalgic for a time when Turin Brakes loomed large or just hoping that the Maccabees and the Vaccines might have a decent album in them at some point, BBC are your pushers.


The Norwegian producer's latest EP remixes a handful of strange tunes, from Vangelis to Boney M.  to Yellow Magic Orchestra, that have entered the disco canon.

Todd Terje / The Olsens: The Big Cover-Up

The Big Cover-Up

In the late ’50s, pianist-turned-Tiki-titan Martin Denny began to mimic the sound of bullfrogs and tropical birds that could be heard from the bandstand at his Oahu cocktail bar. From that simple decision, the genre “exotica” was born, in which Denny grabbed whatever instruments outside the continental U.S. that caught his eye to weave them into leisurely living-room listening.  One of his tunes, a cheeky approximation of Japanese court music called “Firecracker,” struck Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra two decades later when they covered it. YMO's version subsequently got spun by the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and J-Lo.
And now comes another layer of interpretation as Norwegian producer Todd Terje and a live band present their version of “Firecracker,” making for a Scandinavian nu-disco take on an electro-Japanese version of a lounge simulacrum of Japanese music. Terje’s itchy, perky six-and-a-half minute spin frets little about technocracy and orientalism, instead finding a groove to dilate and zag around in. Terje built his career as a master of the disco edit, that practice (revived in the early 21st century) of taking a song and chopping it up so as to accentuate and heighten the dancefloor euphoria of it. But before there was “disco music” in the early ’70s, astute DJs took from music of all stripes, genres and countries.
It’s that open-eared approach that informs The Big Cover-Up, as Terje and pals cover “Firecracker” as well as a handful of strange tunes that—thanks to some venturesome DJs and producers—somehow cohered as part of the disco canon, from Greek composer Vangelis’ “La Féte Sauvage” to “Baby Do You Wanna Bump,” performed by Boney M. Take “Disco Circus,” a sidelong track from the late ’70s from Martin Circus, a now-forgotten French prog rock band. Recorded as a cash-in on the “disco” trend, its rubbery groove and pillow-soft “ahhhh” might have never escaped the decade had pioneering disc jockey François Kervorkian not stripped out all the rock elements, toughened up the rhythm, and pumped up the stomps and chants into a swirling classic (one that Todd Terry soon updated as a house track). Terje and cohorts audibly relish the vocal gibberish and the spiraling rhythms of François K.’s remix, though with the addition of the ARP and extra percussion, it ranges into LCD Soundsystem territory.
If only these homages were matched by the remixes in terms of energy, as a fun-enough maxi-single bogs down as a double-pack. While something like “Disco Circus” was invigorated as a remix, these additional mixes add little. Mexico’s Daniel Maloso adds drunken brass and some McCartney II strummed guitar to “Bump” but not much more. The Idjut Boys’ Dan Tyler accentuates the silly metallophone melody and then plops spacey FX atop of “Firecracker,” while I’d be hard pressed to differentiate between Terje’s take on Vangelis and Prins Thomas’ own remix.
These songs were primarily studio creations and in covering them, there’s the sense that whereas Terje would have previously just tinkered with them as edits in his studio, now they’re just goofy numbers to jam out with real live players. At least for the first half of The Big Cover-Up, Terje and band have fun paying tribute to that era, where under the flashing lights of the discotheque, borders and nationalities began to bump and blur as one wild party.


On the band’s sixth album, frontman Stephan Jenkins Peter Pans his way through an improbably infectious set of would-be hits.

Screamer

If he had less ambition and a lower tolerance for failure, Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins could be sipping Mai Tais with Mark McGrath on the deck of a ’90s rock cruise right now, enjoying a life of royalty checks and low expectations. Instead, he’s carried on as if any year might be the one where his group finally reclaims its former glory. Everything he does is a long-shot bid for relevance: He covers Bon Iver, records bold political statements, and generally does the last thing we ask from the second-tier figures of alt-rock’s yesteryear: He tries.
Third Eye Blind’s closest corollary is probably Weezer, another band with an extremely online frontman who never lost his thirst for the charts. They haven’t experienced anything like Weezer’s continued success, but they share a refusal to accept middle age as a commercial expiration date.
In pop-punk and emo circles, Third Eye Blind’s 1997 self-titled debut is treated with an affection reserved for Weezer’s Blue Album and the Violent Femmes’ debut—nervy, warts-and-all depictions of adolescent alienation. Jenkins is in his mid-50s now, but he hasn’t outgrown that angst, and he still sings in a raw, post-pubescent yelp. His perennial youthfulness remains his most endearing quality, and on the band’s sixth album Screamer, Jenkins Peter Pans his way through a record so improbably infectious that you almost begin to wonder if he might score that late-career radio hit after all.
He brings along some younger recruits to boost his chances. Sleigh Bells’ Alexis Krauss injects homecoming-rally pep into the record’s shouty title track, while Poliça’s Ryan Olson punches up the piano-flushed “Got So High” and the lighter-waving “Who Am I.” Billy Corgan is also credited as the album’s “musical consigliere,” though it’s unclear what precisely he contributed to the record beyond some pre-release buzz. The album’s open-door policy helps keep things fresh, and the band sounds more comfortable in their skin than they have since the ’90s. “Turn Me On” and “Tropic Scorpio” are buoyant and bombastic, tinged with EDM-adjacent production that plays off of contemporary Top 40 without pandering to it.
Although he’s laying it on less thick than usual, Jenkins’ swaggering vocals remain an acquired taste. He can still be an unrepentantly clumsy lyricist, especially when he breaks out his old sing-rap on “Walk Like Kings.” But overall, Screamer is better than a sixth Third Eye Blind album ever needed to be. It’s unlikely to be the full comeback Jenkins is gunning for, but if Third Eye Blind never score another hit, it won’t be for lack of scratching and clawing.

Buy: Rough Trade
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