John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate inspired Brooklyn rapper/producer Ka and producer Preservation on their powerful new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The record doesn't retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it, but instead engages with its themes, playing off of soundbytes interspersed between songs.

Days With Dr. Yen Lo

In the opening scene in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra’s character, Major Bennett Marco, dreams that he and his former squadron are attending a ladies’ garden party in New Jersey. Soon, we realize the scene is a dream within a dream: The garden party is a shared hallucination by the soldiers, sitting catatonic in a medical theater in China, where they have been made guinea pigs for a Communist brainwashing program. The soldiers’ false tea party and the sordid conference become intertwined—the Communists show up in New Jersey, and the hydrangea-obsessed matron stands at the podium in Manchuria. The film loses itself in the enslaved squadron’s nightmare. Presiding over the pitch-black comedy is the mysterious Chinese doctor and hypnotist Yen Lo, who ultimately brings the garden party to a close by ordering the Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey), to kill two of his own comrades.
The scene introduces the brutal, hopelessly entangled systems of control and indoctrination that dominate The Manchurian Candidate, the elements of the story that interest Brooklyn rapper and producer Ka and producer Preservation on their new album, Days With Dr. Yen Lo. The album does not in any way retrace the plot of the film or the book that inspired it (a page, half-obscured, is the cover of the album), but instead engages with its themes, playing off of soundbytes interspersed between songs. The album and the twist-filled noir share a paranoiac atmosphere: Tension is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Nothing turns out right; no one breaks the shackles that held them without a scar or much worse. "Yen Lo," in both, is the unrepentant arbiter of fate, both the cold facts and entropy of life, concentrated into one force.
The primary conflict in Ka’s verses is the same as that of Shaw’s and Marco’s: attempting to self-actualize, after realizing you’ve been under the thrall of a deception that has contorted your entire sense of reality for so long. In most of these songs, the lies Ka unravels relate to crime: the insidious desire to commit it, and the systemic filing-down of one’s moral fabric that allows one to do so. In just a few lines, Ka can evoke simultaneously the fear, desperation, and poisonous ennui of his particular troubled upbringing, though he speaks for more than himself: "Crime is how mind rewarded doubt/ Time’s a drought, climb that waterspout/ Itsy bitsy, slung to get crispy/ Almost choked in the web spun to fix me." Ka positions music itself as part of the process of reclaiming himself, and rapping as a way to access thoughts and emotions that might otherwise seem out of reach to him, or those who can relate to his stories.
To communicate all this most transparently, Ka lets his words phrase themselves, recalling NYC-area forbearers like Guru and Rakim. The dizzying inner consonances in his lines jump out of their own accord, as if Ka, with his hushed, unwavering monotone, is simply a vessel for them to move through; all of the action and consternation has already occurred on the notepad. His great skill is his almost inconceivable level of control and precision. Just the honeyed sounds of his words are hypnotizing in themselves; his expertly matched vowel sounds melt into one uninterrupted stream in some phrases, registering almost like one low whistle. His pace is continuous, sometimes dizzying. Processing both form and content at once requires a specific type of meditative listening: the kind that can only happen once one has lost track of themselves in the sound, and let distractions and interference gradually fall away, rather than pushing them off. Trying too hard to latch onto anything here means automatically falling behind.
But reaching this type of deep-listening nirvana is not a necessity; this is music that sounds great any way you come at it. Preservation’s production is a psychedelic, sometimes seasick symphony of fragments from LPs, often cut out in large swatches and dovetailed into one another expertly. At times, a shag-carpet studio orchestra sweeps toward climaxes without really reaching them; more often, a simple, plaintive guitar lick drones, or a warbling organ peals unexpectedly, recalling either a gospel coda or a spy thriller soundtrack. There are also some of the small, locked-groove loops Ka gravitated towards on his previous two LPs—more pulsations than kernels of melody or licks, flickering like candles on the verge of burning out.
One of the most notable aspects of the album is its near-complete lack of percussion. Few of these songs include kick and snare drums, and none are anchored by them. His voice—in the middle of the mix, bolstered by eerie, repitched overdubs—is the only consistent rhythm instrument. Ka has phased out elements of the typical East Coast-indigenous rap beat architecture over his past several releases (most dramatically on the ascetic The Night’s Gambit, with its charcoal-shaded minimalism) and here, we’ve reached a new type of freefall.
Ka’s sound is so specific that it is easy to hear a new release, register it as more of the same, and coast through it. But you’d miss the most stunning element of his work: the way in which the rapper seems to cut a little bit more of something away with each new project, something which unnecessarily complicates his ideal mode of direct and razor-sharp communication. Here, he allows more negative space in, creates pictures more economically, peels away some vestigial density. The old releases hold the same power, but every time you grab a new Ka release, it feels as if you are holding a more refined product.


Malian musicians Tinariwen's new Emmaar showcases their ever-swirling guitars while also displaying an increasingly refined approach to album-making.

Emmaar

Tinariwen’s identity as a band is tightly bound up in the Sahara. They are named for the vast empty spaces traversed by the Kel Tamashek (aka Tuareg), traditional nomads for whom modern borders have been problematic. The band formed in Libya while in exile from Mali, and has always made music that passionately evokes its home; their last album was recorded in the open air of that desert. Such an arrangement was not possible this time. The political situation in Mali made returning to the northern desert untenable, and though they’ve been driven from power in most places, the specter of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—an organization ideologically opposed to music—still looms across a large swath of the Sahara.
The band instead set up a studio at a house in California’s Mojave desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Time in the Mojave hasn’t removed the Sahara from them, though—this music still moves like a sandstorm. Even at slow tempos it swirls with motion, and nearly all of its forward drive comes from the guitars and bass, with percussionist Said Ag Ayad able to frame the beat rather than having to provide all of it. The group trades off lead vocals and sings in unison, and the four guitarists seem more capable and versatile than ever. There are phrases and rhythms here that wouldn’t have been heard in their music previously.
That growth extends to their album-making craft as well. They’ve become excellent at balancing feels and flow. “Toumast Tincha” opens the album with this sort of hovering feel that only this band can really do, guitars scattering like dust devils while Saul Williams provides a strange, understated spoken word intro. The album then kicks into a higher gear for “Chaghaybou,” and it’s just the first example of how well-paced it is. A few other Americans drop in. Chavez’ Matt Sweeney and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Josh Klinghoffer melt right into the guitarscape, but Nashville session fiddler Fats Kaplin lights up “Imdiwanin ahi Tifhamam” with a fiery performance that brings hints of his hometown to melodies from Al-Andaluse.
It is in some respects hard to be a band like Tinariwen, releasing albums in a Western marketplace where the initial attention you received had a great deal to do with the novelty of your sound. Remaining true to your identity while also evolving and keeping an audience that’s always a moving target interested in you is a tough gig. On Emmaar, Tinariwen are up to the task.


Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. At 50, Nick Cave's hairline is receding, but he's turned that setback into a "look," growing out his locks and cultivating the coolest mustache in the industry. Over 30 years, first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, he has refined his lurid growl and lascivious subject matter-- the usuals: sex, death, God, murder, redemption, all in the most brutal and salaciously poetical terms possible-- without losing any of his charisma or menace. During the past decade alone, despite sounding hoarse on No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, he has transformed his swagger into a potent brand of musical and amoral authority, honing his persona in tandem with the Bad Seeds, who a few years ago were one of the tightest and most versatile backing bands around and have only gotten better with each release.
Prior to the recording of Cave's latest album, longtime guitarist/piano player Blixa Bargeld left the Bad Seeds and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three, assumed a more prominent role. So maybe it's the line-up changes, or even the thrown-down gauntlet of Cave's side project Grinderman, or perhaps some other unnamed stimulus, but the Bad Seeds sound even edgier and more sophisticated on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, providing a fitting pulpit for their bandleader's ravings. With the emphasis on acoustic guitars with occasional blasts of electric static, there's little of the distortion that colored Grinderman's album, but plenty of odd noises and lewd organs that suggest some sort of twisted take on 1960s psych and garage rock. Cave and the Seeds kick out the jams, kick in the Doors. "Today's Lesson" and "Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)" are fierce, yet lean, while ballads like "Moonland" and "Hold On to Yourself" offset that energy with eerie nocturnal ambience.
Just as surely as the 2004 double-decker Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus was Cave's England album-- steeped in imagery that's equal parts urban-miserable Dickens and pagan-pastoral Wicker Man-- Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is his Americanized follow-up. He has always been interested in the darker corners of Americana, especially the Southern mythologies that informed early albums like From Her to Eternity and The Firstborn Is Dead, and Cave makes this collection an old-fashioned picaresque through exurban shopping malls, shuttered factories, and dilapidated ranches-- complete with Biblical overtones (and what's a Nick Cave album without those?). The opening title track, with its fierce strut and taunting floor-tom tattoo, opens on Lazarus newly resurrected, a fame junkie traipsing westward before ending up "back in the streets of New York, in a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave." Cave spins the yarn not as a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but more like a sardonic Sunday school lesson-- and pretty funny to boot.
Even the writers Cave namedrops are almost exclusively Americans: Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and John Berryman, whom Cave, like the Hold Steady and Okkervil River, extols beyond all others. To his considerable credit, Cave may be the only rock musician who convincingly doubles as a literary critic. Such pretensions are built into his persona and tempered with his awareness that rock and roll is ultimately low-brow and therefore a subversive vessel for high-bow concerns. In other words, he has a lot more to say about Lolita than Sting ever did. As on "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" on Abattoir Blues, Cave assails all things bookish on "We Call Upon the Author", a rip-roaring metafictional rocker that questions not only the need for suffering on Earth, but Cave's own fascination with it. Mingling lines like "myxamatoid kids spraddle the streets" with base puns like "I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker," Cave implies the author in question might be himself or it might be God, which makes the song-ending shout all the ballsier: "Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"
When Cave isn't editing the Bible, he's moving Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! westward-- the trajectory of so many American stories-- through the heartland and into the Southwest, through the hilariously iniquitous "Today's Lesson" and into "Albert Goes West", set in the "vast, indifferent deserts of Arizona." As always, it's a strange road trip, with Cave keeping the car between the lines while Ellis messes with the radio. Their collaboration has intensified over the fourteen years since the violinist joined the band for Henry's Dream, and Ellis has obviously called shotgun on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! His strange noises color every track: the sinister wind-up music box sounds on "Today's Lesson", the gentle flute solo on the surprisingly tender "Jesus of the Moon", the delicate violin wheeze behind "Night of the Lotus Eaters". All of Cave's albums aim to unsettle, but rarely have he and the Bad Seeds managed to do it so efficiently, so gracefully, or so forcefully. It all culminates in the haunted closer "More News from Nowhere", on which Cave does Homer doing Dylan to sum up what sounds like his whole career. Ellis fiddles while America burns, and Cave sings, almost sweetly, "It's strange in here. Yeah, it gets stranger every year." Amen to that.


The Japanese quartet returns louder, faster, and fiercer, tearing through 18 hilarious and ferocious songs in 20 minutes.

Super Champon

In John Waters’ 1994 domestic satire Serial Mom, a perfectly coiffed Kathleen Turner murders criminals of etiquette with household objects—a telephone, a leg of lamb. One of her victims has an unfortunate encounter with a plummeting AC unit; another is run through with a fire poker. On their new album Super Champon, Japanese rock quartet Otoboke Beaver make similar munitions of the mundane, weaponizing petty jealousy, maternal conventions, and feminine duties to blistering effect. Louder, faster, fiercer than their 2019 LP Itekoma Hits, the 20-minute, 18-track Super Champon goes down like a tart smattering of face-scrunching, neon candy.
The word “champon” is a Japanese noun that suggests a hodgepodge or jumble. It is also apparently a soup—a Nagasaki-born ramen made with hunks of seafood, pork, and veggies. Otoboke Beaver interpret the word through their maximalist songs, which change direction as abruptly as a thwacked pinball. The band—comprising lead vocalist and guitarist Accorinrin, guitarist Yoyoyoshie, bassist Hirochan, and drummer Kahokiss—have said that “champon” also relates to their “genreless” music. There are components of speed metal, butt rock, riot grrrl, and even pop, but to classify this record as anything other than punk seems like a reach. Still, with titles like “You’re No Hero Shut the Fuck Up You Man-Whore” and “Dirty Old Man Fart Is Waiting for My Reaction,” these ferocious blasts—some under 20 seconds long—are rousing contortions of the style.
Super Champon is crammed with noise: Hirochan sprints up and down her fretboard, Kahokiss punishes her drum kit, and Yoyoyoshie discharges endless rounds of screeching riffs. The lyrics, fired off in quick, sharp bursts, are both menacing and hilarious. On the two-part “Do You Want Me to Send a DM,” Otoboke Beaver turn a familiar action into a ticking time bomb. “Do you want me to send a DM to your girlfriend who knows nothing?” the band warns in unison. “Direct mail direct trouble… Screenshot I make it visible.” Their omission of what exactly is in these messages makes the threat all the more sinister. Could it be nudes? An active dating profile? A particularly incriminating Google search history? Otoboke Beaver know that when it comes to both punk songwriting and blackmail, less is often more.
The turbocharged couplet of “Leave Me Alone! No, Stay With Me!” and “I Checked Your Cellphone” are similar spoofs on toxic affairs. The former is frantic and cyclical; Accorinrin shouts the title over and over, her repetition mimicking the emotional volleying of a codependent relationship. “I Checked Your Cellphone” presents this behavior in overdrive. Propelled by Kahokiss’ machine gun drumming and Yoyoyoshie’s sawtooth guitar, Accorinrin flails through her compulsions. “I don’t know why!” she shrieks. “I couldn’t help looking into/And he found a match on a dating app!” It’s at once a condemnation and endorsement of paranoia: Should you really punish yourself for peeking if your instincts were spot-on? Otoboke Beaver think not: Accorinrin would rather hurl a “full lineup of household goods” at her shady boyfriend instead.
On the hopped-up “I Am Not Maternal,” Otoboke Beaver skewer reproductive obligations, proclaiming their preference for dogs over babies. The song is a celebration: so bouncy it’s carnivalesque—something the Six Flags guy might listen to if he was a street punk. “I Won’t Dish Out Salads” is another refusal of societal norms. In Japan, the serving of salad—in social or professional dining scenarios—is a gesture often handled by a female subordinate. Here, Otoboke Beaver reject the chore, lampooning it as paltry and tedious. “What are you good at?/Wow great! You can dish out salads!” the band teases. “Distribute the dishes for salads to dish out salads!” The song decelerates and then ramps up like a pull-back plastic race car. Otoboke Beaver have called this album their “masterpiece of chaos music,” and they thrive in this high-octane tangle of notes. For them, every social nicety is teetering on a ledge, looking down into mayhem. Super Champon is the sound of Otoboke Beaver shoving them over, one by one.


The work of noise musician Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes, exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. His new album strikes a balance between dread and curiosity.

The Gag File

There’s always been something fascinatingly off about Aaron Dilloway. While his bandmates in Wolf Eyes, with whom he played during their quintessential early-2000s run, screamed and thrashed around with maces, Dilloway could be spotted side stage—appearing oddly forlorn and entranced, jaw slightly slack with a contact mic secured to the inside of his cheek. A wire would dangle out from his mouth and hang in front of his guitar. After he split from the group, Dilloway took an unexpected left turn and moved to Kathmandu, Nepal to record the Nath family, a group of snake charmers he met while “roaming the streets and villages… in search of sounds and music.” But it’s in his solo work that things get really weird.
Noise music often explores themes of catharsis, using blistering volumes and shredded textures to transport artists and listeners into states outside music’s generally agreed upon borders. The abrasiveness both weeds out unwilling audience members and shields the artists. After all, if you don’t like it, you probably just don’t get it. Not so with Dilloway, whose music exudes a raw vulnerability and needling playfulness. On 2012’s Modern Jester, this approach reached its most definitive form, painstakingly stretching grimy tape loops into a rich tapestry of grotty discomfort.
The Gag File is his follow-up to Modern Jester and is every bit as rewarding and unnerving as its predecessor, though at almost half the length, it’s easier to digest. Opener “Ghost” grabs on immediately with a simple, warbling synth drone and a lurching rhythm. On paper it doesn’t sound like much, but Dilloway strikes just the right balance between dread and curiosity. (It feels sticky and unclean, but what exactly is it?) Later, murmured vocals slide into the mix, evoking the dead-eyed whisperings of a B-movie serial killer. “Karaoke With Cal” inverts the dynamic, foregrounding a man’s voice, now choked and gasping in a field of light tape hiss and nothing else, before introducing a heaving, lonely piano figure.
The rest of the record moves this way, stumbling and crawling through sonic debris. “Inhuman Form Reflected” blends crowd noises—maybe from a rollercoaster, maybe from something more disastrous—around lethargic synth progressions. It ends with a sole figure groaning, screaming in panic, and eventually collapsing. Later, “No Eye Sockets (For Otto & Sindy)” contorts a field-recording of a bar; the convivial chuckles and throwback alt-rock bubbling up in the midst of the album’s descent leaves you on edge.
Dilloway has recently collaborated live with Genesis P-Orridge, and the pairing makes complete sense. You can trace a direct line between the slippery, sing-song horror of “Hamburger Lady” and The Gag File—the album’s terror, weirdness, and ambiguity feel just as resonant. Listening at the gym in the middle of the day, with an array of TVs tuned to Trump, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and infomercials for “revolutionary cleaning products,” I couldn’t think of a better soundtrack.
Almost all of these songs hinge on some kind of rhythm, but never the sort that typically drives music forward. These are the rhythms of wheezing, broken down washer-dryers in decrepit basements, the sound of motorik after all the motors are rusted through. Dilloway skips climactic narrative arcs for an unblinking emotional purity, and unlike his compatriots’ work in Wolf Eyes, The Gag File is never guarded, nor overtly dystopian. As rugged as the album can get, Dilloway maintains a diaristic tone—honest, to-the-point, and open to interpretation. One can’t help but imagine him wandering around his old stomping grounds of Detroit, a sly observer taking notes on the city’s eerie mixture of blight, renewal, danger, and possibility. There’s a clear affection for detritus here, an internal logic that reckons both with rot and the damp, fungal growth that follows. Haunted by the ghosts of its own industries, the Midwest has bred a noise underground that feels uniquely disinterested in the hope, warmth, and empathy music can offer. After all, what good would it do?


On his debut album, the alternately waggish and sincere Lil Peep is bona fide rocker warping the edges of rap.

Lil Peep: Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One)

Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One)

Emo rap alchemist Lil Peep spends his energy only to kill time. His music mines the contradictions between being young and free and being pessimistic and tortured; how having a future doesn’t make the sheer tedium of existing any easier. It's all fun until he sinks back into dysthymia: “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself/My life is going nowhere/I want everyone to know that I don’t care.” For Peep, depression is a fog that covers the entirety of his lonely and mundane life.
But there’s a certain waggishness to the Lil Peep persona, suggesting he’s at least kind of putting us all on. “It’s like professional wrestling—everyone has to be a character,” he has said. The guy has a huge “daddy” tattoo gothic-scripted on his chest. Peep constantly wants you to wonder what’s going on under that neon mane. His debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One), is a 24-minute bender informally dedicated to destroying relationships and idling around in what he sees as this vain and absurd existence. Peep’s philosophies are no more profound than a great Instagram caption, and he can come off as a bit of an indignant kid, but it’s easy to see why a new class of spitfires are using him as a talisman for their anxieties.
Born Gustav Åhr, Lil Peep emerged as a suburban degenerate from Long Island recording in his bedroom, high on benzos. He has described his drug-addled pop-punk musings as Makonnen meets Fall Out Boy, originally stylizing his name like RiFF RAFF, whom he called “a role model.” The unique lineage from which Peep descends aligned him with like-minded genre-breakers. In early 2016, he fell in with the Gothboiclique, a collective of melodic trappers straddling the emo and rap worlds—among their members: Lil Tracy, the son of rap innovator Ishmael Butler, and Wicca Phase, former lead singer for the emo band Tigers Jaw.
Peep’s rabid and mostly teenage supporters are enthralled by his juvenile dread and mallcore aesthetic, along with his knack for retrofitting 808 kits onto samples of Underoath, Pierce the Veil, Flyleaf, and The Story So Far. His skeptics argue that he isn’t actually emo, merely a poser trafficking in Warped Tour nostalgia to piss people off; or that he isn’t really a rapper, mostly on the optics of emo whiteness invading hip-hop. But a closer consideration of Peep’s catalog and running mates suggests a genuine marriage of the two sounds, orchestrated by an earnest, budding whiz. Putting songs called “Cobain” and “Gucci Mane” back-to-back on a tape wasn’t so much an act of subversion as an actual sonic template: the tormented punk burying his sorrows in lethargic and absurdist flows. He finds the seams between genres and he mixes signifiers, too. He is the middle distance between Brand New and Future. If one must endure being, Peep suggests, then why not be fucked up?
His writing on Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) often stars two broken people wounding each other and finding comfort in their failings. “Better Off (Dying)” resigns itself to a romance in decline. On “Awful Things,” Peep treats trivial texts from a lover like a lifeline when separated; “Bother me,” he implores. The discombobulated timeline of “Problems” mimics the dissociation of a blackout, as Peep sighs into each syllable, piecing together memory fragments and weighing their baggage. Even more poignant than his fleeting thoughts on self-harm and self-sabotage are his dazed reflections on intimacy in the age of read receipts and ghosting. He’s as standoffish on “Save That Shit” as he is guilt-ridden on “U Said,” a cycle of alienation that perpetually leaves him alone.
There’s a bit of poetry to these cutting interactions: “‘What have you been through?’ she asked me/Every fucking kind of abuse,” he all but screams on “U Said.” “The Brightside” ups the ante: “Help me find a way to pass the time/Everybody’s telling me life’s short, but I wanna die.” “Burn me down ‘till I’m nothing but memories,” he snaps on “Awful Things.” Each lyric is born with a bawl or a hiss. Sometimes he belts out like he’s trying to purge his body of impurities. Others, he slumps into a dejected whine. The sole exception is “Benz Truck (гелик),” on which he sounds nearly comatose. In any of these states, he’s intriguing, the deliverer of raw grief or rage or joy or shame.
Peep’s overall effect is measured by the degree of skepticism with which you pick up what he’s laying down. His real impact is in his simplicity: He reduces ideas to their root feelings for force, and very little changes once songs are in motion. This can make Peep seem vapid, which he is when his verse becomes too lazy, but he usually connects on utter intensity. Peep isn’t a far cry from Lil Uzi Vert, who channels pop-punk in a shrewder way, but is just as hook-focused and zealous; or Dashboard Confessional, the way nostalgia feels already baked into Peep’s music. They're like singalongs you already know. Some don’t have verses. Most are just the same few repeated phrases. “Save That Shit” waddles through one hook, almost demanding space in the brain, and the repetition, pushed by his dragging phrases, is hypnotizing.
Unlike past Peep projects, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) is sample-free, comprised entirely of original arrangements and live guitar. Part of the fun in Peep’s early work was identifying angsty songs of yesteryear, the emo-stained 808s gaining several layers of context. That is missed here, but more crucial are the contrasts still at work, amping emotive riffs with the slap of rap drums. Peep isn’t as expressive as his emo ancestors, and he isn’t as eloquent as his rap idols, but he does effectively bring their stylings together in a provocative new way that riles up the purists in both genres. Turning stray footnotes from modern teenage life into music that claims it’s the most meaningful thing ever is just about the only traditional rock‘n’roll thing about this rapper.


The 2018 Nicolas Cage vehicle Mandy featured a bargain-brand messiah figure named Jeremiah Sand. Now, Sacred Bones is releasing an “unearthed album,” supposedly recorded in the  mid-’70s by the fictional cult leader.

Lift It Down

“There's a great spiritual awakening in America,” opined Ronald Reagan in 1983, during an address to the National Association of Evangelicals. “A renewal of the traditional values that have been the bedrock of America’s goodness and greatness.” Among the first shots in the 2018 film Mandy, a psychedelic revenge thriller set in 1983, is a slow pan over Nicolas Cage—a hardened lumberjack, in plaid—listening to a radio broadcast of Reagan’s speech on a dusky drive home from work. Cage lets him prattle on for a few more seconds before switching it off—a gesture that’s quick and measured, but that absolutely screams “shut the fuck up.”
That impulse is deeply embedded in Mandy, which pits Cage’s righteous chainsaw-swinger, Red Miller, against a traveling cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Their leader is Jeremiah Sand: a grotesque hybrid of Charles Manson and Bodhi from Point Break, and Miller’s opposite in nearly every respect. His philosophy is a kind of bargain-brand messianism, which he couches in clumsy pronouncements about universal love, though the act is painfully transparent; he’s essentially bad at what he does. He’s also, as it turns out, a musician—in one crucial scene, Sand kidnaps and drugs Miller’s wife, the titular Mandy, and forces her to listen to his terrible single, “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” which Lakeshore Records actually sold as a promotional tie-in.
Now, a full two years after Mandy’s theatrical run, Sacred Bones have taken it a step further and released what they’re calling a newly “unearthed” album from the Jeremiah Sand character, complete with 1600 words of liner notes and fictional backstory from the late experimental musician Genesis P-Orridge. The label is fully playing the part: they haven’t said who really wrote and performed these songs (though the singer sounds a lot like Linus Roache, the actor who plays Sand in the movie), and they’ve neglected to mention that Sand isn’t a real person. Lift It Down blends cheesy psych-folk and chant-like spoken word into music that’s at once grating and platitudinous, silly and sinister. It’s profoundly annoying, which is to say it’s an extremely effective gag, and an implicit commentary on how we engage with our idiot preachers, our snake oil peddlers.
The idea, writes P-Orridge, is that Sand recorded this album in a state of “divine mania” during the mid-70s, at a recording studio turned religious outpost in Northern California, and that the tapes were hidden away in a lockbox for the next 40 years. According to a description on Sacred Bones’ website, the record’s “negative psychic energies” had even pioneering reissue label Light in the Attic running scared. It’s intentionally unpleasant stuff: the last utopian dreams of the ’60s curdling into self-parody.
The menacing title track sums up Sand’s m.o.: “In the void that surrounds you, you scream like a child/No one can hear you/No one can see you,” he incants, before pointing to a way out: “I’ll love and caress you, and force you to reckon with all that’s impure in your soul.” This is more or less how these songs operate—over garish, sun-soaked instrumentals, Sand plays God in an attempt to get laid. “Golden Desert” is cluttered with pseudo-spiritual bromides and half-baked aphorisms (“Fly with me through the dawning sky,” “Escape the maze”), none of which distract from the obvious charade. And while there are some interesting musical ideas smuggled in throughout (strained, mounting yelps on “Love Is,” the bad-trip Prince pastiche of “Taste the Whip”), the sound of the record is as ridiculous as the concept.
When Mandy hears “Amulet of the Weeping Maze,” in the movie, she bursts out laughing. The filmmakers are practically begging you to hate this music. And listening to Lift It Down for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to stem the flow of awkward sex metaphors and chaotic Sgt. Pepper homage. But there’s an unmistakable appeal in how the album straddles the real, involving you in its own psychology, and exposing a particularly American hypocrisy. The ruse is surface-level; it’s honest, in a way, about its lies.
If Jeremiah Sand is a gloss on self-interest masquerading as truth, then Lift It Down fully commits to the bit. This album isn’t a call to action, or to reexamine our own relationships with spirituality—it’s just a reminder to tune out the noise. Without a chainsaw, the album suggests, it’s maybe the best you can do.

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Despite its grand scope and good intentions, the latest album from M.C. Taylor is the sound of an artist beginning to repeat himself: lite music for dark times.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Quietly Blowing It

Quietly Blowing It

The crickets come in early on Quietly Blowing It, between the second and third songs. As the rustic, two-step rhythm of “The Great Mystifier” winds down, the guitars are replaced by the quiet burble of insects, a lonesome nighttime ambience interrupted by a lurch into the stumbling, country-funk dirge “Mighty Dollar.” It’s an odd bit of sequencing: a solitary sound bridging two songs that are the opposite of solitary. It’s also a familiar bit of sequencing: M.C. Taylor used a similar backdrop on Hiss Golden Messenger’s 2011 album Poor Moon and again on 2014’s Lateness of Dancers. Those were daring arrangements, especially the latter, which found the North Carolina countryside to be a lively collaborator. By contrast, the crickets on Quietly Blowing It sound more like shorthand, a nod to what worked before. This attempt to transport you to some stretch of woods or to a front porch at sunset instead only reminds you that this is an artist beginning to repeat himself.
It’s not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger’s ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve heard all of this before. “Sanctuary,” for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who’d come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. The title track recalls “Devotion” from 2013’s Haw and so many other airy ballads he’s written in the past. Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow.
Except for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and  Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs  alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of “Way Back in the Way Back” and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner).” On “Angels in the Headlights,” Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault.
Taylor writes about big issues—income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges—but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned. On previous albums, he fashioned songs into question marks, interrogating God and himself, all with the understanding that faith has more to do with struggle than resolution. His songs were so relatable for being so vividly private: a still, small voice amplified through vintage speakers. The songs on Quietly Blowing It, however, are more explanatory than exploratory, treating pat pronouncements as pop profundities because he already knows where he stands in relation to these issues. They’re already settled in his head and in his heart, and he wants you to know it. “Feeling bad, feeling blue, can’t get out of my own head,” he sings on “Sanctuary,” a would-be anthem of perseverance. “But I know how to sing about it.” And yet, the verses sound clipped, the call-and-response on the chorus nowhere near as rousing as you expect from the man who wrote “Heart Like a Levee” and “Saturday’s Song.” The payoff never comes. Good intentions don’t guarantee good art.
In this case, writing such big songs erases much of the nuance in Taylor’s lyrics, reducing those thorny questions to bumper-sticker declarations. “Up with the mountains, down with the system… that keeps us in chains,” he sings on opener “Way Back in the Way Back.” He sends John Prine into the great beyond with the cringeworthy farewell: “Handsome Johnny had to go, child.” There’s a clunker line in every song, and “Mighty Dollar” is nothing but. This is art that strives and strains so hard for meaning and weight that it threatens to become meaningless and weightless: lite music for dark times. Taylor includes in the liner notes a quote from U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo: “Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.” Those are wise words and for any artist a noble calling, but Taylor is so concerned about lighting the way for others that he’s stumbling over his own feet.

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With Underachievers Please Try Harder deservedly gaining attention, Merge reissues the debut LP Scottish indie popsters (and Stuart Murdoch proteges) Camera Obscura.

Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi

A few years before Underachievers Please Try Harder whispered its greeting to bookish girls and the boys who write sestinas about them, there was another Camera Obscura record. In those days, the wispy Glaswegian septet numbered merely six, and local boy-with--arab-strap-made-good Stuart Murdoch produced an early single ("Eighties Fan") and arranged strings for them but wasn't yet shooting their album covers.
Upon its release, U.S. listeners could only find this fine indie pop outing while exchanging shy glances in particularly well-stocked imports aisle. Thankfully, Merge has finally dusted off the group's UK breakthrough for American release, and although the record is narrower in scope than its follow-up-- which hopscotches from Leonard Cohen to The Supremes-- it still sparkles.
On their charmingly understated first date, Camera Obscura hew more closely to their contemporaries than their 1960s influences. Winsome, acoustic-driven songs such as "Swimming Pool" and "The Sun on His Back" fit comfortably alongside fellow bedsit pop acts like The Guild League, The Fairways, and of course, Belle & Sebastian. Tracyanne Campbell's stiff-lipped vocals even evoke those of The Softies' Rose Melberg, particularly on "Let's Go Bowling" (one of the reissue's two bonus tracks, along with "Shine Like a New Pin").
Here, Camera Obscura play their teen-romance cards close to their hope chests; the line between earnestness and artfulness is indeed thin. Like B&S;'s best (there I go again!), the sprightly "I Don't Do Crowds" could be an anthem for Victorian Lit majors-- or an ironic pleasure for disaffected hipsters just finding "I'm a Cuckoo" via its Avalanches remix. But more likely, it's both. Campbell, who shares vocal duties with John Henderson, adds to those delicious double layers on opener "Happy New Year", offering this one-of-a-kind couplet: "Did you know I could be a lot of fun?/ I'm aware that friendship can die young."
Elsewhere, "Double Feature" waxes precious about Catherine Deneuve and winter, and "Houseboat" takes an outsider's look at the fun lovin' found in Christine McVie-penned Fleetwood Mac. A dispute over Nancy Sinatra provides the chorus to "Anti-Western" ("I'm taking your boots off," Campbell retorts), and "Pen and Notebook" works in a winning Johnny Marr namedrop over halting piano, which is later joined by swirling orchestration that runs the risk of boring any chamber-pop Philistines still in the audience (their loss).
"Eighties Fan"-- the single that brought Camera Obscura to the notice of John Peel-- has a drum opening that could have played over the Lost in Translation credits. Because of its connection to Murdoch, it's the best-known of these early tracks but there are a half-dozen songs on Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi that are just as good. Very few of them, however, capture the band's songwriting strengths-- placing a modern lyrical twist on the 1960s arrangements of Bacharach, Webb, and Hazlewood-- as well as "Eighties Fan" does. Come to think of it, very few tracks on Underachievers do either.


The unifying thread for Lucinda Williams’ circuitous career might be her own resilience. As if to spite an industry with which she’s forever wrestled, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and the new The Ghosts of Highway 20 rank among the best works of her career.

Lucinda Williams: The Ghosts of Highway 20

The Ghosts of Highway 20

Lucinda Williams is known best for the crags of her voice, an idiosyncratic instrument capable of curling, souring, or (in its own peculiar way) soaring as the song demands. She, too, is an inarguable pioneer of what has become Americana, with her sophisticated songwriting bound to composite foundations of blues and honky-tonk, gospel and soul, folk and rock since the start of her career nearly 40 years ago. But the single unifying thread for Williams’ very circuitous career might be her own resilience.
Indeed, Williams’ doggedness pushed her from a blues-and-country cover artist in the '70s to an aspiring songwriter with a string of broken record deals in the '80s to, in the '90s, a 45-year-old singer who suddenly began to win Grammys, appear on "Saturday Night Live," and be mentioned alongside forebears and contemporaries named Dylan, Young, and Springsteen. Several years ago, the dissolution of her longtime home, Lost Highway Records, empowered Williams to launch her own imprint and audaciously issue consecutive double-albums. As if to spite an industry with which she’s forever wrestled, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and the new The Ghosts of Highway 20 rank among the best works of her career.
Williams recorded much of the material on The Ghosts of Highway 20 during the same prolific sessions and with the same sterling band that yielded the 20-track Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. Surrounded by understated guitar god Bill Frisell, pedal steel master Greg Leisz, and a rotating rhythm section, Williams focuses largely on the nuances of her singing. She aces the challenge, switching between roles with the precision and skill of a method actor. During the soft and sweet "Place in My Heart," where she offers a friend consolation even when it’s a burden to bear, she conjures Patsy Cline, had the country singer survived past the age of 30. But for "Dust," her second update of a poem written by her father, Williams’ voice indicts someone she’s grown tired of tending to. "Even your thoughts are dust," she seethes in the refrain, extending the simple syllables until her voice collapses in exasperation. Still, she seems to smile and wink her way through "Can’t Close the Door on Love," the sharpest ode to romantic devotion she’s ever made.
As she did on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, Williams plays stylistic hopscotch here, jumping between brooding rock and bouncing gospel, swaying balladry and drifting folk. But these 14 songs hold together as a set because they offer a dozen different perspectives on perseverance. She’s an honest survivor, as capable of empathizing with friends tempted by the dark side of the partying life (the slinky "I Know All About It") as she is condemning her own miseries and shortcomings (the flinty "If My Love Could Kill"). During "Bitter Memory," a spirited throwback to the acoustic barnstormers of her youth, she shouts down nostalgia completely, her voice cracking as she demands that the past just let her be.
Even death seems incapable of daunting Williams: At one point, she smirks at suicide, subverting a gospel-blues mold to dare heaven to try and take her. And both "Death Came," a stunning reflection on mortality that rivals some of Nick Cave’s best work, and "If There’s a Heaven" wrestle with the itinerant loneliness of those who outlast the ones they love. She’s not scared of death; she’s scared of more misery. "I’ve seen the face of hell/ I know the place pretty damn well," she sings, delivering the words with conversational conviction. "But when you go, will you let me know if there’s a heaven out there?"
In the past, Williams aspired to make a double album, but she says now that record label executives typically dissuaded her, citing sales figures and shortened attention spans. Now that she’s issued two of them in less than two years, it’s clear that she can manage such long stretches just fine; even listening to the 34 songs of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and The Ghosts of Highway 20 in sequence feels less like a chore than a long trip led by an expert navigator with good stories to share. (She and the boys do settle into the occasional rut, so there are five or so tracks that do feel redundant.) By and large, though, the ups and downs, successes and failures, loves and losses of Williams’ six decades have allowed her to embody and express a range of characters with candor, honesty, and faithfulness. She’s a singing testament to sticking around and, at 63, she is more versatile than she’s ever been.


By 2007's In Our Nature, José González was mentioned alongside whispery and haunted projects like Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and Sun Kil Moon. The Swedish singer-songwriter's first solo album since finds him picking up where he left off.

Vestiges & Claws

You’d never describe José González’s music as "confrontational," but Vestiges & Claws, his first solo album since 2007, offers an odd kind of ultimatum. After eight years of extreme cultural, political and artistic upheaval, it's likely that you're in a much different place than you were when In Our Nature was released. Meanwhile, the music of José González has not changed at all. Are you in or are you out?
Whether it’s his greatest asset or biggest sticking point, González endures while the context around him changes. Veneer had the benefit of timing, as Garden State and "The O.C." were redefining "alt-rock" as "indie." González evoked the spare beauty of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon but not the crippling emotional baggage, and he had a good ear for crowd-pleasing covers, easing fans into Kylie Minogue, Joy Division, and the Knife (prior to their Silent Shout about-face) when walls between genres seemed more solid. By 2007's In Our Nature, his name was mentioned alongside whispery and haunted projects like Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and Sun Kil Moon; González is the only one that can still be described as whispery and haunted in 2015.
González self-produces on Vestiges & Claws and there’s an unvarnished, prickly edge to the recording. Even when others are in the room, the album feels solitary—the cello and flute on "The Forest" might as well be weaving in and out of González’s head. His best songs don’t unfold, exactly; instead, the cyclical guitar and vocal patterns sound like they’re adding invisible but perceptible layers. Though his vocals are as soft and supple as a down comforter, there’s an eerie quality to González’s restraint and levity. He reaches for high notes and hooks, but he never raises his voice—he’s post-anger, post-verse-and-chorus. His fingerpicking lends a percussive, rhythmic drive that can obscure the actual drums. The percussion on "Leaf Off / The Cave" is almost imperceptible under off-kilter, low-register riffs that sound like Trail of Dead arranged for a campfire singalong.
Though González’s music is pastoral in timbre and placid in pace, his songs ask big questions. How do you situate yourself in the world? What makes a person take dominion over another? How much time should a laborer set aside for leisure? How can you make your voice heard without crowding out those who feel less inclined to speak? His approach to songwriting has appeal in light of the stridency and self-righteousness of modern discourse. But González’s metaphors can also feel unnecessarily feathery or too general: "Every Age" buckles under the assumed weight of its introductory lyric ("Every age has its turn/ Every branch of the tree has to learn/ Learn to grow, find its way"), and while "Leaf Off / The Cave" boasts the record’s loveliest arrangement, the connection between the Garden of Eden and Plato’s Cave is specious and tenuous in a charming, AP English sort of way.
Even when Vestiges & Claws exudes strain, González never gives the impression of truly challenging himself. When he draws on the canons of both ancient philosophy and post-punk, he sounds like José González. Whether covering Massive Attack, Bruce Springsteen, or Low, he sounds like José González. Even when fronting a legitimate, kraut-influenced rock band in Junip, it just sounds like José González with the rhythmic tracework of his solo albums filled in. But as a record that so frequently meditates on unchanging human nature, that could just mean Vestiges & Claws achieved exactly what it set out to do.


The New York band’s debut is a dreamy, druggy pop album that finds a provocative sweet spot between being chintzy and being sincere.

Your Day Will Come

Chanel Beads is what you might call a scene band, the project of producer Shane Lavers who’s associated with the much-maligned lower Manhattan micro-neighborhood of Dimes Square. They play packed shows in lofts and bars full of kids born in 2004 taking pics on a point-and-shoot digital camera while wearing absolutely enormous pants. If you go to a bar called The River and hang out with dripped-out downtown people, someone will ask you: Hey, have you listened to the new Chanel Beads singles?
This is essentially how I was initiated to Chanel Beads: because they suddenly became inescapable, at least in the much-maligned lower Manhattan micro-neighborhood of Dimes Square. It started with “Ef,” a one-off single from last year, which somehow sounded like the Microphones but also kind of like Enya and Gang Gang Dance? I quickly abandoned any prejudices I had about a band that I began to become convinced was a sort of Drain Gang for the art school set. “Ef” felt totally fresh, a sexy bricolage of completely zonked synths where singer-songwriter Maya McGrory’s vocals burst and bloom in a dreamy, sort of druggy way.
The band’s debut album, Your Day Will Come, expands on those dreams and drugs, and delights in more uncommon juxtapositions. It is both Lil Peep and Massive Attack; Prefab Sprout and Yung Lean; a record made by people who really freak out about music, who know every twist and turn on Steely Dan’s Aja and are crazy enough to say, but what if we kind of rapped over this? It is a risky proposition, difficult to avoid seeming winky or gimmicky, but more often than not, the results are supremely lovely. On “Unifying Thought,” Lavers sounds like he’s singing through a waterfall inside a mall. “I don’t do molly anymore,” he sings at the song’s outset, before it gets beatific, with crescendoing strings crashing into a wash of guitars. He continues: “If you love me, I love you more.”
The general approach of Your Day Will Come is to find that provocative sweet spot between being chintzy and being sincere. To fuck around, but with discipline. In practice, this usually means doing something like cutting elevator music with open chords on an acoustic guitar. It means adding some Seinfeld slap bass on the velvety downtempo track “Embarrassed Dog” and having it somehow feel completely intuitive. Or on “Police Scanner,” where the hand-clap drum machine loops and shoegaze guitars get all freaked out by Lavers’ vocals, the repetition of little “yeahs,” which are performed with the same sort of energy of watching Ren & Stimpy reruns in your parents’ basement—paranoia pop, you might call it.
For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty. It’s tied together by the ambient outlier, “Coffee Culture,” a gentle drone of strings, synthetic choirs, dulcimers, and some sort of digitally-treated wind instrument. It’s a welcome break, a comfortable silence. This is the kind of New York cool the band traffics in, not one born of disaffection but of sincerity. More than anything else, Your Day Will Come is cool because it’s a good hang. Like you’re sitting shotgun in the car of someone you have a crush on and you’re taking turns being DJ. Like: you are riding your bike and you are a little bit drunk and it is 90 degrees so you’re wearing a rash guard because baby, you burn easily. It seems to say: to give one shit, to care about your art, to maybe even be a little funny about it, is it so uncool?


In 2012, El-P released Cancer for Cure and Killer Mike the El-P-produced R.A.P. Music. These excellent albums shared the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe. The MCs’ new collaborative record, Run the Jewels, is a distilled take on everything that made last year’s records such an event, with all the chrome ripped off and upholstery pulled out so it’ll run faster, louder, nastier.

Run the Jewels

Even for those of us who go all the way back to “8 Steps to Perfection” and “The Whole World,” it’s starting to feel like El-P and Killer Mike have always been talked about in the same breath. The connection makes a kind of retroactive sense going back to their early 2000s solo debuts, Fantastic Damage and Monster. Both albums seethed with the anxious funk of retrofuture 808s-and-synths production that rattled trunks and cages with unrestrained intensity. And both portrayed the artists as out-of-control forces trying their damnedest to stay true to friends, family, and hip-hop while confronting disenfranchisement, abuse, and cynicism. That their creators would gravitate towards collaboration makes even more sense now than it does with hindsight in mind, as the 1-2 hooks to the head of Cancer for Cure and R.A.P. Music shared not just a producer and a timeframe, but the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe.
Thankfully, El-P and Killer Mike made a point to keep working together, and by all accounts their two-MCs/one-producer team-up Run the Jewels was meant to be some kind of “cool-down” record—just something they could brainstorm up and record as a sort of fun, no-stress victory lap in celebration of a triumphant 2012. But if that kind of session reads as a low-stakes slack-off, especially in the form of a free 33-minute download, keep in mind just what constitutes “fun” for these guys. At the top of the list, it’s the process—workshopping ideas, putting things together, delivering them with conviction, and bringing it out to a rampant fanbase prone to drawing irreverent fan-art and ordering special-edition herb grinders. No excuse to relax here.
The only significant sign that El-P and Killer Mike are taking things “easier” on this album is the focus on shit-talk: Aside from the confessional coming-of-age self-pep talk of closer “A Christmas Fucking Miracle,” there’s little-to-no high-concept storytelling and a minimum of “Reagan”/“Drones Over Bklyn”–style political science. They haven't gotten complacent—that latter song gets fleetingly referenced in a Mike line on “DDFH,” one of the few verses that catches the same police-state anger that R.A.P. Music did. And El still raps like somebody who’s not sure if he’s the last sane man or the craziest man on Earth, carrying his refined maniacal diatribes over from Cancer for Cure. But the majority of Run the Jewels is a succession of throw-shit-out-a-window anthems which take the early-LL knuckles-first bragging that inspired the name, running their own psilocybin-tinged mean streak through it.
The deepest messages of Run the Jewels are the ones dedicated to figuring out just how many ways there are to threaten bodily trauma in the most over-the-top language possible while not actually coming across like some screwfaced shock-value manchild. It feels as though the options of either catching a bad one or riding with them are easier to decide between because the latter sounds like it’d be a hell of a time anyways. And there’s this sense of friendly, unspoken one-upsmanship between the two MCs that keeps upping the stakes. Mike on the title track: “I’ll pull this pistol, put it on your poodle or your fuckin’ baby.” El on “Sea Legs”: “Try to pet my fuckin’ head again and I’ma put a tooth through the flesh of the palm that you jack with.” Mike on “Get It”: “Stupid goofy stoolie, the gooch in Gucci will slap you/And that go for the cop-kissing cats that’s in the back of you.” El on “Twin Hype Back”: “Me and Mike’ll go Twin Hype and do a dance on your windpipe/Put your fuckin’ jazz hands back in your pants or get them shits sliced.” It’s a game of the dozens where the barbs are aimed outwards and funny-looking moms are swapped for an all-encompassing People Who Fuck With Us category.
In the process, both MCs have both started to meet each other halfway personality-wise, though that wasn’t a long trip to begin with. El’s panic-attack rasp has grown into this fluid delivery that’s become as immersive as his older hitched-timing flow was, spitting slick bars and doubletimes that make the acidic comedy roll out like his own take on vintage Ludacris. And Mike maintains his wrecking-ball mode, but twists it into moments of psychedelic delirium and over-the-top throat tearing, a man incapable of sounding nonchalant about anything getting the chance to turn that elbow-throwing flow into the narrator for a story about getting a lapdance on mushrooms (“No Come Down”) or turning it up to the breaking point on the grimy Tyson-isms of “Job Well Done.” When they get into verse-swapping back-and-forths on “Twin Hype Back,” “Get It,” and “Banana Clipper” (where an otherwise excellent Big Boi verse bizarrely feels like an afterthought in comparison), or throw around conversational line-finishing asides elsewhere, the rapport’s enough to raise questions as to why this teamup was supposed to be unusual in the first place.
This is hardhead music, but it’s also supposed to be a good time—shit, they even brought in Prince Paul to do his oily weirdo pick-up artist Chest Rockwell routine on “Twin Hype Back.” (“I got your glass of Beefeater, I got a brand new deck of Uno cards... how ’bout I come over tonight and pick you up in my brand new Segway?”) So El-P pulls out the stops in making the abrasive, heavy aspects of his production sound boombox-ready. If this stuff’s “dystopian,” you might as well book a party bus to Airstrip One: Growling synthesized basslines do the heavy lifting as percussion skitters beneath like warped distortions of the ’84, ’96, and ’02 versions of analog hip-hop, a cohesive sound that serves as a reminder that Georgia and New York are both technically East Coast. El’s signature production touches—minor-key chord drones, ligament-snapping guitar squalls, highwire arpeggios, twitchy drum patterns that are as restless as a rock-solid beat can get—are put to pretty straightforward use this time around.
The beats fit the blueprint of R.A.P. Music’s tendency to let the voices supply most of the brute force; it still bumps like a bastard, but not in the kind of way that had Yeezus casualties scrambling for punk rock name drops. It’s just a distilled take on everything that made last year’s albums such an event, with all the chrome ripped off and upholstery pulled out so it’ll run faster, louder, nastier. Yeah, it’s a fun album, and it’s probably the most affable thing they’ve done so far together. But don’t take that for a weakness. They don’t yank chains—they snatch them.


The Sub Pop debut from the New Jersey indie rock band arrives refreshingly well-formed. Their music has an urbane sensibility, one that feels not just older in age, but in sound.

Forth Wanderers

At a Montclair, New Jersey high school, guitarist Ben Guterl had a crush on a girl. So he sent a demo of instrumental sketches to that girl, vocalist Ava Trilling, who in kind returned them adorned with her own lyrics. Soon after, she became the frontwoman for his band of childhood friends.
If this charming prologue sounds like a spec script for an indie teen movie, believe that Forth Wanderers are kind of like the feel-good movie version of a suburban rock band. In 2014, before they even released an album of music, Lorde tweeted about their songs. While Trilling finished up high school, Guterl and the rest of the band packed up for college. In between homework and keggers, they emailed each other more song fragments, patching them together during breaks. In that time, Forth Wanderers’ handful of records garnered praise from both college newspapers and The New Yorker, (who deemed them “confident and untainted” young stars, naturally). So Forth Wanderers, their Sub Pop debut, feels like the end of the montage and the beginning of something real.
Of course, the reason Forth Wanderers attracted so much attention when they were teens was that their music did sound prodigious. Even as high schoolers, Guterl’s spry and smoky guitar lines and Trilling’s blunt, diaristic lyrics gave the band an urbane sensibility, one that feels not just older in age, but in sound. One of their early songs, “Slop,” had the lazily intricate feel of Built to Spill and the concise, emotional punch of the Breeders. Indeed, the heroes of ’90s indie rock haunt their music, but Forth Wanderers don’t seem interested in pure emulation: Their style feels unmannered; their tales of young-adult frustration would feel cutting and relatable in any decade.
The driving force behind this timelessness is Trilling. Like a natural movie star, she doesn’t just light up a scene, she creates the very circumstances for a scene to feel special. Her first words on the album: “I am the one you think of when you’re with her.” On the page, the line is already acidic, but under the direction of Trilling’s cool, unperturbed delivery, it becomes more than just a clever comeback at a disappointing partner: With her steely voice, she conjures up the entire arc of a doomed relationship. Her bandmates, meanwhile, coax every ounce of emotion and energy from this story, their rhythms taut and athletic. Guterel, in particular, has an audible chemistry with Trilling. His scuzzy chords hone in on whatever mood she’s in, as if they’re boxers moving around each other in shadow play.
The stories she tells—of the many beds she wakes up in, the faces that obsessed her, the bodies she’s tangled up with—capture a kind of grappling adolescence that’s hard to speak, write, or even make art about in a way that’s truthful or interesting. She relishes in unpleasant details, like the blood she draws from a lover’s tongue in the middle of a makeout on “Taste,” a track that in its entirety, with its sour guitars and forceful drums, feels just as cutting as that kiss.
Yet, as visceral as the writing can get, and as tight as the band’s sound is, Forth Wanderers’ songs can melt into each other—both lyrically and sonically. Aside from the acoustic outing on “Be My Baby,” every track is built on the same sturdy arrangement of fuzzy guitar licks and shuffling bass and drums. And since Trilling’s lyrics are, at the moment, confined to a limited range of experience, it can make the album, as a whole, feel like one long run on sentence about the intricacies young love.
Still, there is a vigor to their music that’s not just accomplished, but deeper than they might know. The band inhabits a space that can feel bigger than the sprawling tree-lined streets and byzantine freeways of their local inspiration. Instead, the place Trilling and her bandmates create is more personal, messier, and chaotic. They give musical cues to the growing pains of young adulthood that are relatable but never trite—their songs, like any you might’ve been obsessed with in high school, feel like a mirror held up to the all-consuming triumphs and heartbreaks of your own youth.


Nine albums in and Dave Grohl knows how to keep the machine running. Concrete and Gold is reliable, relatable, and powerful with just barely enough new ideas to keep things interesting.

Concrete and Gold

The best Foo Fighters songs always work exactly like Dave Grohl wants them to: Joy-buzzer power-pop hooks, thickly packaged guitars, a couple of throat-shredding screams—since he started the project in 1994, he has never shown much interest in doing something trickier. In this steady, somewhat plodding way, he’s built catalog deep enough for a greatest hits album and earned the mantle of World’s Most Okay Rock Band. What the Foos don’t offer in inspiration, they make up for it with durability and dependability. Hot dog, squirt of relish, daub of mustard, squishy bun—you make it the same way every time for a reason.
But over the last ten years, listening to Foo Fighters has begun to feel more like watching the Food Network than eating: You mostly yearn for what you’re not getting. As Grohl embraced his Ambassador of Rock role, joining awards show lineups and one-offs by the handful, his own music grew mushier and grainer. By 2014’s Sonic Highways, recorded as part of a documentary series traversing the country’s regional rock scenes, the transformation was complete: Foo Fighters albums were Dave Grohl’s enthusiastic PSAs about the life-changing power of other people’s rock music.
Concrete and Gold is their ninth album, and like Sonic Highways, it comes with an outsized goodwill gesture accompanying it: Grohl announced its release date along with the launch of a huge festival, a modern-rock update to the 1974 Cal Jam. He also recently revealed that he was planning to record the album in front of a live audience, before PJ Harvey’s similar Hope Six Demolition Project discouraged him. Nearly all new Foos albums come with one of these PR flourishes now, a near-tacit admission that a new album of Foo Fighters songs might not be news enough for anybody, even Grohl. But maybe having one of his campaigns derailed helped Grohl focus a bit: Concrete and Gold feels more interested in the granular details of rock songwriting and craft of rock album-making than anything the Foos have made in years.
The album begins with a faux-humble, aw-shucks bit of Grohllery: Over a few finger-picked acoustic guitar notes, he croons: “I don’t wanna be king/I just wanna sing a love song/Pretend there’s nothing wrong/You can sing along with me.” Seconds later comes the chandelier-shattering full band entrance, with a stack of vocal harmonies tall enough to demolish the Paradise Theatre. The flourish announces the polishing touch of Greg Kurstin, member of The Bird and the Bee and a pop producer flexible and collaborative enough for both Adele’s “Hello” and Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE.”
Kurstin’s touch helps inject some flavor into the empty carbs larding Grohl’s songwriting, which remains a series of enthusiastic gestures that sometimes trip over each other. First single “Run” has one of Grohl’s biggest choruses in years, the kind of thing I would gladly holler along to in a stadium, and Kurstin sweetens it nicely with synth and piano. But the song lurches like a three-legged chair between that chorus and a gut-churning two-note riff paired with Grohl’s post-hardcore screaming, a battle between Snow Patrol and Chavez that no one wins.
No one could question Grohl’s grasp of rock history, but moments like this remind you that there is a slightly weightless, Lego Movie feel to his use of it. On the goofy and invigorating Farfisa organ-greased boogie rock “Make It Right,” this works to his advantage: It makes me think of Kid Rock, until it makes me think of Aerosmith’s “Last Child,” until it makes me think of KISS. “Hop on the train to nowhere, baby!” Grohl exhorts, forever unafraid of a t-shirt slogan, and Kurstin boosts the hi-hat until it sounds like it’s made from ten tons of iron. “The Sky Is a Neighborhood,” meanwhile, lands in some alt-rock uncanny valley between Eve 6’s “Inside Out” and “Where Is My Mind?”, a territory as nonsensical as the song title. But Grohl builds a big old rafter-raising chorus there anyway, and as it often does, his enthusiasm makes it go over. It’s all rock‘n’roll to him.
There are all kinds of guests floating by as usual: Alison Mosshart of the Kills guests on “The Sky Is a Neighborhood” and “La Dee Da.” Shawn Stockman, of Boyz II Men, harmonizes on “Concrete & Gold.” Hell, Paul McCartney pops in to play drums on “Sunday Rain.” Grohl told Rolling Stone that Justin Timberlake dropped by the studio one day, but Timberlake remains uncredited, leaving us in the dark, since everyone on a Foo Fighters album sounds like Foo Fighters. That holds as true for Bob Mould, who appeared on 2011’s Wasting Light, as it does here for smooth jazz saxophonist Dave Koz, who turns up somewhere, entirely inaudibly, on “La Dee Da.”
Grohl having fun is usually preferable to him flipping the chair around and getting serious, but there are some affecting moments on C&G. Years of belting and screaming have finally put a few notes of grain in his eternally boyish tenor. “Happy Ever After (Hour Zero),” the album’s best song, is a real ballad, not the foot-dragging, somber face he usually pulls when he goes quiet. “There ain’t no superheroes now/They’re underground” he sings jauntily, over a little dancehall bounce. The song is wry, winsome, acidic; unlike most Foo Fighters songs, it sounds like one person wrote it to express a single, legible emotion, parceling out feeling in a beaker instead of from a bucket. Most miraculously, it fades out before any windmilling power chords can wreck the mood.
Rock music has had few ambassadors as affable and tireless as Grohl, and over twenty years on, it remains impossible to dislike the Foo Fighters. Enjoying them, is a spottier proposition, and loving them seems to be out of the question. There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another. Grohl has spent his entire career arguing for rock music’s ability to transcend and change lives, but his own music sends a different, sadder message: Rock doesn’t have to be transcendent or life-changing at all, and all your fantasies can be rendered just as dull and workaday as the rest of your life.


The trio of drummer Valentina Magaletti and Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead subtly reinvent post-hardcore by plundering the past and making familiar tropes sound fresh again.

Paste

Moin are subtly but brilliantly reinventing rock music. Indebted to 1980s and ’90s post-hardcore, the London-based trio toys with specific formulas and makes them sound like uncanny updates of a bygone era. The tracks on their debut album, Moot!, began with improvised sessions by chameleonic drummer Valentina Magaletti. From there, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead—the duo who made cratering post-industrial music as Raime—chose passages to build songs around. The result was post-hardcore approached with a dance-music framework—vocal samples included. In a time when Numero Group is hosting a festival celebrating seminal rock bands from yesteryear, Moin are a welcome reminder that there’s still room to build on old foundations.
If Moot! was a successful proof of concept, then Moin’s second album, Paste, is a confident assertion of their style. The songs are tighter and groovier, and feature creative flourishes that elevate every mood. “Forgetting Is Like Syrup,” for example, stands out for its pitch-shifted vocal sample. Recalling DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed technique, its warped spoken word is surprisingly desolate, and slots nicely alongside the song’s crumbling electronics and worming guitar melodies. On the other end of the spectrum is “In a Tizzy,” which uses sparse guitar scrapes, tape effects, and a synth choir to conjure an intimate atmosphere that feels like watching home movies. Much like slowcore band Forty Nine Hudson’s “A Certain Code,” it incorporates field recordings to reveal the communal joys bubbling underneath the dreariness and angst.
That Moin are so reminiscent of other artists is part of their appeal. They encourage revisiting their forebears—not because they’re hopelessly mired in nostalgia, but because their songs illuminate aspects of classic bands that may go unappreciated. A track like “Hung Up” is a callback to Slint, but its lockstep instrumentation highlights the way Spiderland’s comparatively loose arrangements bolster that album’s prosaic, contemplative nature; Moin, in contrast, want something more direct and bracing. (The vocals on “Hung Up,” meanwhile, come from a decades-old recording by novelist Lynne Tillman.) Elsewhere on Paste, tracks lift from ’80s spoken word compilations of Californian poets. In sampling a different kind of underground artist, they ask for a deeper consideration of talk-singing in rock and punk, as though to demonstrate that it’s not just something that appears in No Trend or Moss Icon tracks—it has roots that are intertwined with other mediums too.
Alongside their original material, Moin have released mixtapes that juxtapose punk tracks from the past 40 years. These cassettes give insight into why the genre excites them. The piercing guitar tones in Lifetime’s “It’s Not Funny Anymore”—one of many songs on Flush—are triumphant, and “Life Choices” sounds like Moin’s attempt at capturing that same electrifying thrill. Paste is delightfully procedural in this way: Moin study the history of punk music—the hypnotic Ramones-like riff on Friction’s “Pistol,” the texture of the Hated’s “Hey Mister,” the sneering vocal delivery of Gordons’ “Spik and Span”—and build songs from their favorite elements. “Melon,” one of the album’s most exhilarating tracks, is all melodic guitar fuzz and a sample that cuts through the noise. “You don’t know me, but I know you/I sure as fuck know you,” goes its most caustic line. It only hits so hard because Moin’s songwriting is so skeletal.
The small tweaks that Moin make to the post-hardcore tradition consistently impress. “Yep Yep” features brooding guitar and what sounds like a pneumatic drill, but the real highlight is the intersection of the instrumentation and the vocal samples, one of which sounds like terrified shrieks from a low-budget horror film. Every component of the song takes on a percussive aspect, and it’s all held together by Magaletti’s unwavering beat. Crucially, Magaletti is the only member credited on a specific instrument. This indicates the broader role that Andrews and Halstead assume, and the way their songs are approached with a dance producer’s mindset. It’s why “Sink” is such a mesmerizing closer: Its sludgy guitar riffs repeat as if looping, and are self-sufficient enough to keep you in their grip—no cathartic quiet-loud dynamics or dramatic tempo changes needed. Miraculously, Moin sound like every band they have been influenced by while remaining completely inimitable.


On their third full-length in 10 years, Swedish grindcore outfit Gadget sustain a blistering pace, while their lyrics implicitly critique the sociopolitical mores of their home country.

The Great Destroyer

On T**he Great Destroyer, grindcore outfit Gadget's first full-length in 10 years (and only its third since forming in the late ’90s), the band sustains a blistering pace, but peppers the songs with just enough groove to give the music an anthemic quality in spite of its uncompromising attack. Drum fills appear suddenly, as if drummer and in-house engineer William Blackmon is about to send the song in a new direction, only to dissipate into the static cloud they briefly popped out from. A blast beat abruptly swallows the snaking introductory riff to "From Graduation to Devastation" before the listener has time to settle in. A tiny portion of the riff persists even as Blackmon's drums pound away, the rhythmic equivalent of rain pelting the windshield when you're driving through an angry storm while incongruously steady music plays on the radio.
Unlike many of their peers, Gadget's political leanings don't immediately hit you over the head, even though the music's sociopolitical undertone is always apparent. Bassist Fredrik Nygren's lyrics on "Choice of a Lost Generation," for example, don't explicitly reference refugees. But the song—with its cries of "false propaganda/ denial of facts/ blind man's hysteria" and "idiots on parade / half a generation led astray"—implicitly denounces European xenophobia at a time when the right-wing party won nearly 13 percent of Sweden's 2014 election. Much like Reaganomics set the stage for early ’80s hardcore and Thatcherism planted the seeds for the anarcho-crustpunk movement that gave us Napalm Death, Gadget's lyrics (which all four bandmembers contribute to varying degrees) seem more profound the more you root them in Swedish culture.
There is a pointed intellectual fury animating their music. Blackmon's lyrics on "Lost on a Straight Path" hint at the conflict between socialist values and widespread conformity through oblique angles. Musically speaking, the variety on The Great Destroyer is somewhat more submerged than on The Funeral March and 2010's split LP with Phobia. But the new material's discreet hints of less obvious influences like Deathspell Omega and even Sonic Youth suggest a muted sophistication. But the real coup here is how The Great Destroyer avoids the youthful righteousness of staunchly left-wing pioneers like D.R.I. and Extreme Noise Terror. Preachy lyrics worked like a charm for those bands, but heavy music's outlook needs to evolve in order to avoid sinking into camp. On The Great Destroyer, Gadget proves you can be cutting without being trite.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly quoted the lyrics of "Choice of a Lost Generation."


On their second album, the French-Cuban twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz make gorgeous, genre-agnostic meditations on resilience and mindful resistance.

Ash

To hear “Deathless,” from Ibeyi’s second album, Ash, is to be thrust headlong into the fearful memory of a young woman of color and feel that cold grip as instantly as she did six years ago. “He said, he said/You’re not clean/You might deal/All the same with that skin,” sings Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, one half of Ibeyi’s sister act, of the police officer who arrested her in France when she was 16. He had assumed she was a dealer or drug addict; he handled her harshly, shouted obscenities in her face, and took her purse.
There are creases in Díaz’s high jazz trill here, well-worn trails of dismay; other songs on Ash suggest the past year has deepened them. Yet she and her twin, Naomi, respond to this physical and psychic violation with generosity, echoing Solange, Dev Hynes, and other artists who have met today’s emboldened hate with meditations on resilience and mindful resistance. The French-Cuban sisters offer worldly, skyward rallying cries to the distressed that belie their youth. Their genre-agnostic musicality widens the aura of inclusion, twining downtempo electro-soul, hip-hop, jazz, and fervently slapped cajón percussion that nods to West African Yoruba culture. These are sage, heady dialogues, clearly years in the making; the hushed intimidation that opens “Deathless” sprouts into an elated mantra for civil rights warriors past and present (“Whatever happens, whatever happened/We are deathless!”), rippling over plangent sax tones from Kamasi Washington that underscore the sisters’ bedrock spirituality. (In Yoruba, “Ibeyi” is the divine spirit shared between twins.)
In Ibeyi’s parsing of grief, packed with irreducible spirit, Ash shares a through line with the pair’s self-titled debut. (XL Records owner Richard Russell produced both.) But while 2015’s Ibeyi mourned the deaths of the twins’ older sister, Yanira, and their father, the Buena Vista Social Club conguero Miguel “Angá” Díaz—praying in Yoruba and English for sanctity and peace, taking a pop-soul plunge in “River”—its successor sticks to a broader repose of idealism. At first, Ibeyi’s bright rhythms can feel deceptively stable, their harmonies uninhibited as they dip into dissonance, but they are deliberate in revealing the depth of their sadness. On “Away, Away,” a young girl looks out her window at a world collapsing, frozen with terror at her looming “fate of flames,” then finds strength as she begins to sing; the Díaz sisters’ voices here have an inverse, aerial power, gloriously fluid as they inch, then glide, along with their hero. In the opening track, “I Carried This for Years,” an eerie sample of a Bulgarian choir cedes to the sisters’ electronically rasped chanting, each repetition of the title landing like a heavier stone.
The album’s emotional core, the seven-minute “Transmission/Michaelion,” pads Lisa-Kaindé’s throaty vocals—a soliloquy so stark, so unadorned, it blurs between cathartic and interrogative—with soft, fuzzy synthetic bleats and brisk funk bass from Meshell Ndegeocello; it also features a reading in Spanish from The Diary of Frida Kahlo, partially intoned by the Díaz twins’ mother. Their first song in that language, “Me Voy,” is the album’s most chipper pop moment, riding Naomi’s breezy batà drumming, electronically distilled harmonies, and a silver-tongued spot from the Spanish rapper Mala Rodríguez, who chants, “Cualquiera que sufre ama fuerte” (“Whoever suffers loves hard”).
There’s another spoken-word interlude on Ash, a more poignant cameo of sorts: “No Man Is Big Enough for My Arms,” which remixes together lines of speeches by Michelle Obama. Her key quote, rapturously looped several times, was delivered at the New Hampshire 2016 primaries, after footage leaked of a candidate antithetical to her husband bragging about sexual assault: “The measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls.” It stirs a deep ache to hear today, and Ibeyi make no pretense otherwise in their somber, glacial vocals, longing audibly for that lost leadership and decency as they sing the title (a phrase from Jennifer Clément’s poetic biography Widow Basquiat). Ibeyi’s bittersweet discourse with the former First Lady, a vicious year removed, is the duo at their finest: weighted by their politicized existence yet protecting the glint of a better world.
Listening to Ash, I have been reminded of another French artist who took a bird’s-eye view of a divided world, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Best known as the author of The Little Prince, he was an early mail pilot across Africa and South America, adventures he captured elegantly in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars. Lifting off from Toulouse, an early voyager in empty skies, he wrote, “The most wondrous thing was that there on the planet’s curved back, between that magnetic sheet and those stars, stood a human consciousness in which that rain could find reflection as in a mirror. On a pure mineral stratum, a dream is a miracle.” De Saint-Exupéry once crashed in the Sahara, and almost succumbed to the sand; Ibeyi could have laid down, many times over, in the ashes of their idealism. Instead, with the same ascendant spirit, with soaring harmonies and conviction, they continue to smile, and they defy. They rise.


In keeping with the film’s surreal take on nostalgia, a crew of leftfield pop and indie musicians—Caroline Polachek, Bartees Strange, Jay Som, yeule—pay knowing tribute to the ’90s.

Various Artists: I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack)

I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack)

Art and youth form unshakeable bonds in I Saw the TV Glow, director Jane Schoenbrun’s melancholy and claustrophobic document of suburban outsiderdom. Schoenbrun has spoken in interviews about how, as a child, they opted to process their identity through fiction rather than “actually look in the mirror and figure out who I was.” With I Saw the TV Glow, they put a surreal spin on the way beloved cultural objects give us an outlet for hard-to-express feelings. At the heart of the film—the director’s first since their acclaimed loner internet horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—are two teenage characters obsessed with the mysteries and mythos of The Pink Opaque, a weekly half-hour monster-of-the-week TV show in the campily terrifying vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files. Watching the show, the characters find an outlet for their feelings of isolation—and as the borders between their physical existence and the world of The Pink Opaque melt, they eventually come to wonder if their memories of the series might be more real than reality.
The soundtrack seems designed to provoke similarly intense reactions among its listeners. In addition to a ghostly score from Alex G—who returns after his work on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair—the film features a robust collection of original songs from artists that inspire feverish fandom not unlike the characters’ obsession with The Pink Opaque. Collecting tracks from hushed singer-songwriters (Florist, Maria BC), fuzz-scuffed indie-rock artists (Bartees Strange, Jay Som), and off-kilter pop acts (Caroline Polachek, yeule), it feels moody and homespun, a sure recipe for cultish devotion—like a CD-R with a tracklist written in Sharpie, passed around a group of friends amid reverent whispers.
The film is firmly rooted in the imagery and cultural touchstones of the 1990s—characters muse about the looks of Evan Dando and Michael Stipe, and posters for Sarah Records are pinned to their walls. And though the soundtrack is full of artists from the 2020s, most of them reach for sounds that evoke the end of the 20th century. Jay Som’s “If I Could” is lit by a gleaming guitar riff that chimes as brightly as Bandwagonesque. Sadurn’s slide-guitar-smeared “How Can I Get Out?” plays like a hazy memory of the mellower songwriters on Drag City in the ’90s. Even Polachek sidelines her sleek synth-pop contortions in favor of anthemic shoegaze on “Starburned and Unkissed.” Though the reference points are clear, the songs never feel too reverential—they’re often loose and deliberately otherworldly, as if heard in the depths of a dream.
That approach is clearest on yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” On its surface, it’s a gloomy trailercore rendition of a song that’s long been an unofficial hymn for teenaged outcasts—an especially on-the-nose choice to kick off a film about adolescent alienation. But underneath the track’s heavy-lidded surface is something stranger: a distant memory of the original, scoured by glitches, with vocals that slip and swirl around the meditative backing track. Where Broken Social Scene’s recording is rhythmically locked in and mantra-like, yeule’s version is distant and dissociative, a bedridden memory of adolescence long since passed. The soundtrack’s most sweeping emotional gesture, yeule’s song also offers the most vivid illustration of the film’s delight in bending linear time. Both I Saw the TV Glow and its soundtrack begin in ways that feel familiar and nostalgic before diving back into the shadows, rendering beloved youthful memories unrecognizably strange.


The Seoul duo taps into devotional music’s focused intensity in trance-inducing pieces that draw on new age, krautrock, and folk.

Spiritual 2

A fascination with devotional sound-making is at the heart of TENGGER’s music. In a list of inspirations for their new album, Spiritual 2, the South Korea-based duo of itta (harmonium and voice) and Marqido (analog synth) includes a video of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki speaking about sound in Zen practice, as well as recordings of medieval organ music and shamanistic rites. Their Minishiko cassette collects sounds from a pilgrimage to the Japanese island of Shikoku, layering the ambience of 88 Buddhist temples. What joins all of these things is sound’s ability to point the mind toward the unseen—to express what lies beyond the reach of everyday human perception.
The duo’s music, largely indebted to new age, krautrock, and various strains of Asian folk, is built around immersive drones and trance-inducing repetition. These are characteristics common throughout many different devotional styles, from Hindustani classical music’s use of tamboura to the ecstatic call and response of gospel. Though synthesizer is their primary tool, there is a naturalistic feel to the pieces on Spiritual 2, which unfold slowly and deliberately. Even when the tempo is fast, as on opener “High,” which is underpinned by an incessant motorik beat, elements enter and recede at a defiantly gradual pace.
Spiritual 2 is best at its most nebulous, when the music focuses predominantly on texture and immersion. “Kyrie,” named for a Popul Vuh song, from Hossiana Mantra, that features Korean singer Djong Yun, is a remarkable slow build, with gossamer, high-pitched synthesizer pads cyclically ceding to waves of bass-heavy harmonium. Each successive crescendo becomes more harmonically complex, tones stacking incrementally, joined in the final swells by itta’s wordless intonations. The album’s centerpiece, the 16-minute “Wasserwellen” (or “Water Wave”), has a similar structure of recession and expansion, with overlapping drones building almost imperceptibly to an arpeggiated crescendo that slowly decays throughout the last half of the piece.
TENGGER's evocation of ecstatic states is less effective when they draw more explicitly from krautrock's rhythmic template. The repetitive motorik beat is inherently minimalistic, but it can become tedious. “High” and “Ajari” feature virtually identical drum-machine patterns and bouncing synth lines that share more than a passing resemblance. In Shunryu Suzuki’s seminal text Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (which itta and Marqido reference as an influence and guide), he describes repetition as the basis of enlightenment: “Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you become bread.” But here repetition feels less like the path to enlightenment and more like a lack of substantive development beyond a few basic musical building blocks.
There is a renaissance happening in the wider Asian psychedelic music scene right now, building on the legacies of bands like Les Rallizes Denudes, Ghost, and Far East Family band, with labels like Guruguru Brain, which released TENGGER’s 2017 album Segye, leading the charge. TENGGER have the potential to be a major force here: Their music is conceptually  rich and frequently rewarding, and on Spiritual 2 they come close to fully integrating the lessons from the devotional styles they admire. The further they drift towards formlessness, the more effective they become.


With their first album in six years, New York City indie-pop duo the Ballet question the complexities of modern queer life but offer no easy answers.

Matchy Matchy

Matchy Matchy opens up like a stranger on a gay hookup app: “Wanna play?” Identities are floated, compliments proffered. “Do you want to call me son or Daddy?/You’re so pretty, my femme, my fatty.” The electro-pop pulse twinkles with promise; it might bloom like a Troye Sivan anthem. But the curious lurker won’t be pinned down. “I’m just checking things out,” he sighs. And the song wanders off.
This amiable embrace of ambivalence distinguishes Greg Goldberg and Craig Willse’s output as the Ballet from the work of their funny musical uncles, like the Magnetic Fields’ implacably ironic Stephin Merritt, the Hidden Cameras’ riot auteur Joel Gibb, even fairy godfathers Pet Shop Boys. It might be the healthiest way to cope with a community that, 50 years after the Stonewall riots, encompasses both pink-cape-wearing Tony winner Billy Porter and Trump-approved Republican ambassador Richard Grenell, public intellectuals like Alaska Thunderfuck and concern trolls like Andrew Sullivan. At this point, some gay men want to diversify society just enough to squeeze in but otherwise resemble the bigots who hate them. It’s an ugly look, but then, some people like ugly. Don’t let it spoil your day.
Matchy Matchy dons its titular wink at over-coordination with a limited sonic palette of bubbling synths, carefully strummed guitar, and featherlight drums. Lyrically, it’s much more promiscuous, depicting the diversity of 2019 gays if not always embracing them. One might successfully navigate his “First Time in a Gay Bar,” but the smalltown boy in “Jersey” stalls for almost five minutes, barely gathering the courage to finally say “I just wanted to hide away with you and never come back,” as a Motorik rhythm never quite shifts into gear. “Messing Around” sounds like an update of Belle and Sebastian’s “Seeing Other People” for the masc-for-masc crowd, in which the guys are old enough to fuck but not mature enough to admit they’d like more. “It’s just a couple hours/Every week or two,” Goldberg sings. “We’re just a couple of guys/But you’ve got that look in your eyes.” It sours, though, the way these things do, into a slight anthem for a city where men leave each other for strangers on a plane, or spend boozy nights deconstructing monogamy under awnings in the rain, or set up joint hookup accounts they don’t always check together.
But then men come and go. The narrator of “Your Boyfriend” negs a potential partner before giving away the game: “I don’t want to watch your student film/I don’t want to take your student drugs…/I just want to be your boyfriend.” And yet, the music is so lovely, all dewy guitars and dripping synth bells, that it makes you understand the appeal of intertwining with someone who doesn’t necessarily respect you. “Love Letter,” with its deliberate worldess space between verse and chorus, is a perfect replication of the exquisite torture of just watching and wishing and hoping for someone to go ahead and finally break your heart.
More chaotic is the plight of the narrator of the album’s first single, “But I’m a Top”: “Outside I look like a girl/Inside I feel like a girl/Why?/Doesn’t anyone?/Believe me?/When I say/I’m a top?” Essentialist compounds of identity—What does a girl look and feel like? Can’t a girl be a top? Are such position-based personas even, like, a thing?—steep until a very queer tea is brewed. At its, well, bottom, “But I’m a Top” is a lovely declaration of self-determination.
Other meandering inquisitions lead to wilder places. The lonely lover in “I’ve Been Wondering” starts off curious, in a casual finger-snapping kind of way, about where their beloved goes after dark, before the track’s gentle exotica perks up into a Northern Soul floor-filler and the destination is revealed: “There’s a little park/At the edge of town/It’s a petting zoo/When the sun goes down.” Cruising has never sounded merrier, and whether the protagonist wants their lover home or longs to join in the fun remains a secret.
In a weird synergy, the album arrives as a current leading contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president is a white cis Christian veteran who happens to be gay and recently covered Time magazine with his husband in a remarkable pose of aspirational assimilation. With their unthreatening visages and similar brown belts, Pete and Chasten Buttigieg appear to be the ne plus ultra of matchy-matchy-ness; they seem like the kind of guys who’d only ever fall for themselves, even as they valiantly fight to serve their country. The Ballet should play Pete’s inauguration, but they’re probably too... much. The state of the nation is strange.