A new boxed set documents Iggy Pop’s formative years working alongside David Bowie in Berlin, the moment Pop left the sound of the Stooges behind and came into his own as a lone icon.

The Bowie Years

In the mid-1960s, after years of listening to the British Invasion, a teenage Iggy Pop got sick of rock’n’roll. He had unearthed the blues originators of popular bands like the Beatles and the Kinks, and started listening to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and John Lee Hooker instead. In these groundbreaking artists he heard a vitality and backbone that hadn’t translated to their diluted white mimics. At age 19, in 1966, Pop—then known as Jim Osterberg, Jr.—left his native Michigan for Chicago and arrived at the West Side doorstep of blues drummer Sam Lay, hoping to be taken under his wing.
Lay let Pop shadow him, and eventually Pop started sitting in on gigs. He slept on Lay’s floor and absorbed the music around him. “I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it,” he said decades later in an interview for Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. “I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...So that’s what I did.” He called his high school friend Ron Asheton to come take him back to Detroit, and with Ron’s brother Scott Asheton and their friend Dave Alexander, they rounded up the Stooges.
Across three studio albums, the Stooges channeled their violent white ennui into an abject, unraveled rendition of the blues Pop had studied so fervently. Where British Invasion bands moved in friendly lockstep, the Stooges played with an almost confrontational looseness, as if at any moment they could quit their instruments and go at each other’s throats. As the band’s frontman, Pop earned a reputation for his outrageous stage presence. Offstage, Jim Osterberg was small and shy. In performance, as Iggy Pop, he swallowed up the room with his physical contortions, his drag getups, and his deranged, wounded howl.
The band’s inflammatory shows caught the attention of musicians like David Bowie, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and the future Ramones, who latched onto the wildness and self-degradation of Pop’s act. By 1974, five years after releasing their debut LP, the Stooges had imploded. They played a final show at Detroit’s Michigan Palace, where Pop viciously taunted his audience and his audience threw beer bottles onstage.
Deep into several varieties of hard drugs, Pop spent the next two years adrift in Los Angeles, getting arrested for everything from unpaid parking tickets to wearing full drag in public at a time when “female impersonation” was still a bookable offense. The LAPD got sick of him, and pressured him into a stay at the city’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he worked to kick his addictions. He reconciled with Bowie, who had disavowed their friendship amid the mess of latter-day Stooges, and the two agreed to collaborate. Pop tagged along on Bowie’s Station to Station tour in 1976, and then the two relocated to Berlin, where they’d produce some of the most singular work of their respective careers. During this fertile period, Bowie recorded the legendary streak of albums Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger. Pop, with Bowie serving as co-writer and co-producer, issued The Idiot and Lust for Life, both now compiled on the 7-disc boxed set Iggy Pop: The Bowie Years.
The Idiot, Pop’s solo debut, decisively shut the gates on his time with the Stooges. Where once he was infernal and freewheeling, he now became cool and restrained by Bowie’s careful, calculated producer’s hand. He still sang in a tone of abjection, still retained his sense of being a debased and decrepit subject, but where he once showed a grimace he now wore a smirk. His Cold War surroundings provoked icy, glib reflections; taking cues from Kraftwerk over in Düsseldorf, Bowie and Pop adopted cool detachment as a primary artistic mode.
Predictably, The Idiot enraged those who championed the Stooges for their unhindered squalls; the legendary music critic Lester Bangs called it “phony bullshit.” And it’s easy to see how a voice beloved for its fire would turn fans cold after dimming its spark. But by reining in Pop, Bowie and his effete European sensibilities drew out a new range of nuance in the singer. The Idiot may lack fury, but it compensates with sardonic humor and perfectly tuned melodrama—both tools that would become wildly popular across all artistic media in the 1980s.
Against clipped percussion, whining guitars, and thin synthesizer tones, Pop’s voice turns barbed and sour on The Idiot. The closest he comes to unfiltered emotion is “Dum Dum Boys,” an elegy of sorts for the Stooges, and even there his keening is ringed with a sneer. Mostly, he sounds distant; the sleazy, hilarious “Nightclubbing” is less an ode to Berlin’s vibrant nightlife than it is a monument to alienation—the numbness of being among people in their moments of joy and sharing none of it. Pop’s circular lyrics reveal the song’s emptiness: “We see people/Brand new people/They’re something to see.”
Also released in 1977, The Idiot’s follow-up Lust for Life breathes some punk grit back into Pop’s performance. Its title track, driven by Hunt Sales’ animated and playful live drumming, could be a marginally tidied-up Stooges song; rather than sounding dwarfed by the instrumentation surrounding it, Pop’s voice resumes its fevered snarl at the front of the mix. He sounds alert, embodied, no longer a Bowie-animated cadaver but an enlivening force in his own right.
Pop’s performance shocks itself awake on Lust for Life, but the album’s most enduring track clings to alienation as its principal subject. “The Passenger” makes a saga of passivity. Written alternately in the first and third person, it watches a man riding a car, or a train, or a bus, seeing a city slip past his window, feeling the seal around himself. He is not of the city, just in it, gliding through. The city has “ripped backsides,” a vaguely homoerotic anthropomorphization; the passenger, who both is and isn’t Pop, stays “under glass,” sees “the bright and hollow sky,” as if for all he devours with his hungry eyes there were nothing of substance inside it. Four guitar chords, briskly strummed and punctuated by rests, roll onward, never budging from a single progression. There’s no chorus, save for a wordless repeat of the verse melody with Bowie chiming in on backing vocals. Pop moves but someone else is driving. “All of it was made for you and me,” he asserts towards the end, as his voice breaks composure, and threatens to “take a ride and see what’s mine.” So he arrives at a paradox: He’s an inert body rolling through space, and also the rightful owner of all he sees. He does nothing but owns everything, the whole empty world and all the nothing inside of it.
More than his chirpier singles from the era—the boisterous “Lust for Life,” the Orientalist fantasy “China Girl” (written about an unrequited affection for a Vietnamese woman, and later done better by Bowie alone)—“The Passenger” intoxicates with its refusal to yield what is hidden. It is an emblematic high point of Pop’s career, an example of how his quiet perception held as much power as his wildness. With the Stooges, Pop screamed across the space that separated him from other people, desperate to hear something in return besides his echo. With the albums he made with Bowie, he scrutinized the space itself.
In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. These live offerings, whose recording quality varies, show Pop and his band playfully mussing up The Idiot’s slick tracks, but do little to lend them dimension. Mostly, they vivisect the musician at a moment of transition, performing both Stooges and solo tracks, leaving the sound of his band behind and coming into his own as a lone icon.
Working with Pop allowed Bowie to get darker in his songwriting and production than he dared in his solo work; working with Bowie allowed Pop to focus his flailing instincts into refined, careful songcraft. For two albums, they served as each other’s perfect foils, and their work together would inflect music made on both sides of the Atlantic, from Joy Division and Depeche Mode to Grace Jones and Nine Inch Nails. Their stoic cynicism presaged the austerity measures of the ’80s and their continuing ramifications; amid the dregs of capitalism, these lonely melodies and their battered delivery keep resonating. “Can you hear me at all?” Pop asks on The Idiot’s “Sister Midnight.” The answer is “no,” and he keeps singing.

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Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and ...

Transformer

Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and most influential bands in rock history, he found himself a penniless, strung-out wreck, with a career suddenly and seriously on the wane. To make matters worse, his self-titled solo debut, released earlier that year, was a monumental flop, a hastily thrown together collection of second rate re-recordings of Velvet Underground outtakes that lacked the intensity and focus of his earlier music. Reed was at a crossroads, unsure of which direction to take his newfound independence.
At the same time, a new trend was emerging across the pond. Glam rock began to flower in 1971, and by the following year had swept up countless British kids, turning them from restless, discontended youths to consummate, androgynous hipsters decked out in platforms, sequins and imposing hair. It was the first mainstream rock movement to openly acknowledge the Velvets' influence, and in Marc Bolan, Ian Hunter and Bryan Ferry, Reed began to see his protégés: the coarse, primal rock 'n' roll he pioneered had found its audience.
One of his progeny, a young David Bowie, was hot off the success of his chart-topping The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and was perhaps the most vociferous in his love of the Velvets and the incalculable influence they'd had on his music. When given the chance, Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson offered to produce Reed's solo follow-up: what followed was undeniably one of both glam rock's and Reed's finest moments, one that gave him a left-field radio hit and a blueprint for much of his solo work to follow.
Thirty years on, Transformer still sounds startlingly fresh, free from many of the clichés that taint other similarly minded records of the period. It also works as an interesting diversion from most of VU's work: where they clearly had a full-band aesthetic, and often leaned toward the avant-garde, Transformer took the strong pop undercurrent that ran throughout their records and indulged. It's still fascinating to hear Reed outside the messy underproduction of the Velvets, yet even with Bowie and Ronson broadening the arrangements, Transformer feels remarkably natural. Their production work was so loaded that, were it not for the incredibly focused songs beneath, it might have been overbearing. But with a solid base, the ornate arrangements help bring these songs to life, lending Reed's music a broader palette. Lou himself, by contrast, sounds as intimate as ever on the record's more sedate tracks, crooning in a sensitive lilt that maintains his blissful, effortless cool.
Transformer kicks off with the aptly titled "Vicious", a stiff, snot-nosed Godzilla of a rock song, decked out in leather and eye shadow, and drenched in the kind of punchy power chords intimately familiar to anyone owning VU's odds-and-sods compilations. Its gleefully tongue-in-cheek lyrics are among the album's highlights, with Reed's impetuous condescension beating down his subject's ego: "When I see you walking down the street/ I step on your hands and I mangle your feet/ You're not the kind of person that I even want to meet."
Elsewhere, "Perfect Day" earns the distinction of being among the least characteristic songs Reed ever wrote; while its power ballad production and melody are enjoyable on their own terms, the song feels trapped under his dry vocal delivery, and falls somewhat flat as a result. "Satellite of Love" is still the bizarrely affecting centerpiece, serving as a poignant reminder of Reed's underrated gift for melody, which often eclipsed the signature, visceral abrasiveness he's more often recognized for. And of course, there's "Walk on the Wild Side", the classic tale of NYC gender-bending that garnered Reed the only real commercial airplay of his career.
This new edition adds acoustic demos of "Hangin' Round" and "Perfect Day", the latter notable for a newfound emotional push in its minimalism. The remastering is nicely executed, clarifying the sound without bastardizing the occasionally dated production. This, along with the incredibly thorough liner notes and beautiful packaging make the reissue worthwhile for those who already own the record, and a must for first-timers just delving into Reed's solo work.


For her debut album, now reissued on vinyl by Ninja Tune, Abra draws on the cynicism of darkwave and its brooding hues, while making room for brighter beats, quicker tempos, and lyrical vulnerability.

Rose

As the angst and disillusionment of punk’s advent exploded towards the end of the 1970s, its vanguard began looking elsewhere for inspiration. Post-punk drew on the cadences of electronica, glam rock, reggae, and even pop—an era just as nebulous and splintered as its predecessor. Abra, the self-styled “Darkwave Duchess” of Atlanta, Ga.’s Awful Records collective, derives her secondary moniker from one of post-punk’s offshoot movements—and some of her sound, too. For her 2015 debut album Rose, recently reissued on vinyl via Ninja Tune, she embraces the cynicism of darkwave and its brooding hues, while making room for brighter beats and quicker tempos.
From the melancholy, synth-heavy opener “Feel” through to the heart-on-sleeve vulnerability and upbeat house syncopation of “No Chill,” the first eight tracks of Rose are a triumph of good sequencing. Abra is the album’s sole producer, and she experiments deftly with vocal sampling and effects, distilling electronic, pop, and R&B sensibilities into varied but equally compelling beats. The lyrical content on Rose veers between earnest and despairing, but it’s always honest. On the standout track “Roses,” a metaphor-heavy composition about a complex love affair, the nihilist thread that runs along the album’s seams is most apparent: “Everything dies and everything changes.”
“Pride” and “Atoms” best capture the essence of dark 1980s synthpop, while “$hot” recalls “My Superman,” a cut from Santigold’s genre-melding debut album that in turn interpolates “Red Light” by post-punk icons Siouxsie and the Banshees. The homage is never ham-handed, but while “$hot” adds an element of interest to the moody atmosphere that Rose otherwise creates, a somber energy is hard to abide for long. On an album that runs for just shy of an hour, “$hot” also marks the point at which Rose starts losing steam, burying a colorless guest verse from Stalin Majesty after four of nearly seven allotted minutes.
The unvarnished, lo-fi qualities of Abra’s music are often its distinguishing features; some of her best known work was recorded in a bedroom closet using basic equipment. But on Rose, they are occasionally a distraction, usually where the vocal performance is concerned. Abra knows how to use her voice well; on “U Kno,” she serves as both lead and background vocalist, without over-reliance on corrective effects. Yet, especially for the ad-libs peppered across the album, she uses the thinnest part of her range for what ultimately comes across as discordant singing. (That this technique resurfaces on Princess, her follow up EP from 2016, is confirmation of a curious stylistic decision rather than something to improve upon.) It seems like a shame that Rose closers “Human” and “Game,” two sparse piano-led versions of “Feel” and “No Chill” respectively, wind up highlighting the scattered vocal quality and inflate the album’s running time unnecessarily.
Nonetheless, Rose isn’t entirely undone in the final quarter. It’s a strong debut that lets listeners into Abra’s universe while she retains the intrigue surrounding her persona (she chooses to keep her real name and age secret). Instead, she bets that her lyrical vulnerability and the evident autonomy over her creative domain will keep listeners coming back, and they do.


The 14-piece ensemble Tredici Bacci pays loving and exacting tribute to the lush spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone without getting musty or dull: This is reverent, goofy, and fun music.

Amore Per Tutti

Tredici Bacci bandleader Simon Hanes really loves the work of Italian film composer Ennio Morricone. Hanes’ love isn't subtle. Even if he didn't discuss Morricone so much in the press, the Morricone influence literally screams out at you from the music on Tredici Bacci’s debut full-length, Amore Per Tutti. Deriving its title from Fellini’s Nino Rota-scored classic Juliet of the Spirits, Amore Per Tutti is nothing if not defined by Hanes’ college-age immersion into 1950s and ’60s Italian cinema as his attraction to Morricone grew into an obsession.
It’s always a risky proposition when an artist references a specific influence with such laser focus. Listeners who lack the artist’s passion for the source material are likely to shrug, while fellow aficionados are bound to nitpick the music as not authentic enough on the one hand or too authentic on the other. Likeminded acts such as Antibalas, Debo Band, and Secret Chiefs 3 face a similar conundrum—and even inspire culture-vulture debates—with their respective modernizations of Afrobeat, Ethiopian, and Persian forms.
To his credit, even as Hanes pilots the 14-piece Tredici Bacci through narrow stylistic straits, his enthusiasm burns through in the band’s exuberance. He also injects the music with a persistent sense of levity that the band sustains even during the album’s most soaring moments. Additionally, Hanes wrote these tunes as an attempt to extract the poppiest aspects of Morricone’s scores, which gives Amore Per Tutti a concise feel in spite of its grand orchestral sweep.
On album opener “Columbo,” a grainy electric guitar figure blends seamlessly with horns that echo and harmonize against the same root notes while also heralding a grand arrival—the type of thing you might hear in an old Hollywood epic to invoke a sense of ancient Roman glory. Those horns do announce a grand arrival, but it comes in the form of a snakelike central hook with heavy traces of Greek/Turkish modality. The band maneuvers through such sequences with an impeccable agility that's easy to miss behind the music's melodramatic exterior.
Meanwhile, the album doesn’t attempt to recreate the musty ambience of old film. Instead of making you feel like an archivist poring over film footage and academic texts written by grad students, the music's crisp production feels very much anchored in the moment, which only accentuates the music’s springy good-time bounce, and very nearly passes Morricone off as party music. (It would have to be a certain type of party, of course, but one imagines Hanes wants us to crank the music up and have fun rather than sit there namedropping cinematic references for sport.)
On “Avante,” for instance, the band cranks-up the melodrama, as playful operatic vocals accompany a guitar line and galloping rhythm that are obviously fashioned in “spaghetti western” style. It’s funny, even goofy; in fact, it's hard to listen to a song like “Avante” without breaking into laughter, as you picture clip-clopping horses and the strangely distorted Italian conception of the American west. Hanes probably wouldn't have it any other way.


The South Florida rapper internalizes his skeptical gaze, yielding music that’s more deliberately self-reflective, with few ragers or bangers.

Denzel Curry: Melt My Eyez See Your Future

Melt My Eyez See Your Future

Denzel Curry likes to power up. His delivery—half war cry, half panic attack—tends to intensify over the course of a verse, his flows gaining speed, his voice hardening like a hand becoming a fist. That aggressive style, and the frenetic, bass-boosted beats that accompanied it, helped define the South Florida scene that birthed SoundCloud rap, but Curry’s most memorable music often departs from that template. Building on 2018’s melancholic TA13OO, *ZUU—his rich 2019 ode to multiple generations of South Florida rap—showcased his knack for melody, storytelling, and the underappreciated art of rapping slow, which requires finesse and presence rather than sheer intensity.
On Melt My Eyez See Your Future, Curry again retools his sound, trading livewire energy for introspection and vulnerability. The album lacks the vividness of his past releases, but its concept offers a glimpse into Curry’s roving mind. In interviews, he’s described the project as more intimate, saying “this album is about me, Denzel Curry. No alter egos, no nothing. Just Denzel Curry.” The comment overstates the distinctness of his personas, none of which were fully formed identities, but it illustrates his approach to writing. Throughout Melt My Eyez, he focuses on himself, internalizing the skeptical gaze he usually applies to larger political issues. That pivot yields music that’s more self-reflective, with few ragers or bangers.

Curry presents the world behind his eyes as a hushed, penitent space. The beats are largely soft and uncluttered, full of neat drums, gossamer piano, and spectral vocals. Instead of sprinting through these mellow instrumentals, Curry ambles, his words measured and deliberate. The first verse of “Walkin,” a highlight, unfurls like a house cat in sunlight as Curry floats over a yawning vocal sample. “Walking with my back to the sun/Keep my head to the sky/Me against the world/It’s me, myself and I/Like De La,” Curry raps in a loose, lolling cadence. When the Kal Banx beat flips into a trap number midway, Curry slips into his signature double-time—but he trots rather than gallops. Even when he’s animated, he’s unrushed and loose.

Forward momentum and acceptance are constant themes. “Watching people dying got me being honest,” he says on “The Last,” one of many moments of pandemic-induced lucidity. “It’s all in mind/But I’mma feel fine once I’m melting my eyes,” he chants on “Mental,” singer Bridget Perez’s sweet coos reassuring him. Curry invokes that image a few times, casting it as clarifying in all senses of the word: warm, liquefying, cleansing. The metaphor cleverly flips crying—a messy, mucusy, and literally blurring physiological reflex—into an orienting experience.
But Curry never fully realizes the conceit. Despite the album’s emphasis on candor and self-examination, many of Curry’s takeaways are vague and distant. “Bullshit” is a frequent descriptor, appearing in two choruses (“Worst Comes to Worst” and “Angelz”), and the album is short on storytelling and melody, the pillars of his best work. “Troubles,” a bubbly but empty collaboration with T-Pain, is all cliché. “Got some troubles that these drugs can’t fix/We might struggle because life’s a bitch,” Curry sings. The writing on the otherwise thrilling drum ‘n’ bass track “Zatoichi” is just as lazy. “Life is short/Like a dwarf,” slowthai and Curry declare on the chorus. Sure, dudes. These elisions might be more engaging if they were clearly intentional. When Kendrick bleeps out names in his songs or Vince Staples raps like the booth is wiretapped, the omissions underscore the gravity of the information being withheld. Curry’s glosses don’t feel as loaded.
The best moments on Melt My Eyez embrace free association. “The Smell of Death” is pure flow, Curry bouncing rhymes off a misty Thundercat beat. On “X-Wing,” the album’s best track, Curry swings between urgent thoughts about the life expectancy of rappers, references to professional wrestling and Star Wars, and slick wordplay. “Am I killing it or am I losing it?” he asks amid the stream-of-consciousness. The question, and the song, show a mind intent on processing the world rather than escaping it.


The Dublin group has spent a decade making folk music sound foreign and transfixing. Its spellbinding new album uncovers eerie new depths in centuries-old forms.

False Lankum

“Go Dig My Grave” has been known by many names and sung by many voices. It derives from a folk song typically known as “The Butcher Boy,” though in the American tradition it has reappeared as “The Railroad Boy.” “The Butcher Boy” developed within a family of songs whose verses were rearranged and harvested from older ballads, some dating as far back as the early 17th century, but the story typically goes like this: A young woman is abandoned by her lover (the titular butcher boy), hangs herself, and is found by her father, along with a suicide note with instructions on her burial. The Clancy Brothers sang a version with Tommy Makem in the 1960s; Kirsty MacColl, Elvis Costello, Sinéad O’Connor, and Lambchop all have their own “Butcher Boy.” There are many ways in which you may be familiar with pieces of “Go Dig My Grave,” but none of them will adequately prepare you for what Irish folk experimentalists Lankum present as the opener to the new album False Lankum.
The Dublin group renders this classic folk song of love and death as a gaping wound that aches across generations. Radie Peat’s vocals are unnerving, cutting; she sounds decades older than she is, an aged woman recalling a seismic trauma. Disembodied notes bend and bleed around her, until the song lurches into a foreboding outro straight out of a horror movie. The long life of “Go Dig My Grave” is exactly how folk music works. But over the last decade, Lankum have gone from musicians somewhat faithfully playing within tradition—having cut their teeth the old-school way, learning songs at sessions in pubs around Dublin—to musicians who understand the history enough to warp it into something foreign and transfixing. They take songs that trace back to lost worlds and make them sound instead like a future built on the ruins of today.
This approach coalesced on Lankum’s last album, 2019’s The Livelong Day. Previously, they’d garnered some respect in folk circles for earlier albums, 2014’s Cold Old Fire and 2017’s Between the Earth and Sky. Each had just a hint of something different afoot—like the natural, psychedelic drones of the uilleann pipes drawn out into something resembling slowcore. But with The Livelong Day, the quartet teamed with producer John “Spud” Murphy—now their unofficial fifth member, also producer for Black Midi and caroline of late—and their sound blossomed into a gorgeous, dark reimagining that managed to break new ground in various folk traditions. It won them Ireland’s Choice Music Prize for the album of the year, and marked the potential for a crossover into more mainstream notoriety.
After that success, False Lankum was conceived in uncertain circumstances. During Dublin’s recurring pandemic lockdowns, the quartet—Peat, brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, and Cormac Mac Diarmada—gathered in an old fort on the sea to write the followup to their acclaimed breakthrough. In isolation, they looked out over Dublin and the water, and they returned with a successor that takes what worked on their previous album and pushes further in every direction. False Lankum sprawls, dense with ideas.
By their own admission, the band is chasing greater extremes this time around. False Lankum alternates between moments of calm, fragile beauty—“Clear Away in the Morning,” “Newcastle,” and “On a Monday Morning” are all straightforward acoustic numbers—and further abstracting and fragmenting the traditions they’re pulling from. “Master Crowley’s” follows Livelong Day standout “The Pride of Petravore” in turning a lively reel into something that wheezes and heaves as if constantly in threat of collapsing in on itself. It eventually drops out into scratching strings and ominous clangs; a similar trick happens in one of Daragh Lynch’s originals, “Netta Perseus,” built on rippling guitar until the song ruptures with synths and tumbling percussion. “The New York Trader” is a rare moment hinting at the Lynch brothers’ punk youth, displaying a frothing intensity and aggression atypical for Lankum.
At times False Lankum plays less like discrete songs and more as one long fever dream composed of scenes from across centuries, familiar forms made unrecognizable once filtered through the band’s idiosyncratic vision. That ever-durable metaphor of the sea became a foundation for the album—Lankum swimming through histories, later realizing that every song is somehow related to the water and the horizon, whether in violence or serenity. “The Turn,” another original, ends the album with a ship sailing off into the distance, and a long refrain ceding to a final drone. It feels like False Lankum fading out into the mythology that birthed it, continuing to forge ahead into unknown waters in search of something as eternal and human as it is alien.


Kode9 delivers a very sad, very compelling stare into the void with Nothing. Perhaps his most compelling work, it starts from scratch, sometimes building to footwork but often bleeding into something spare and serene. Fully crafted in the wake of his music partner Spaceape's death, there are moments of memory and beauty woven into this varied, unique album.

Nothing

Kode9, also known as Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman, always creates multilayered tracks that sound built from another era or planet entirely. From his work driving the early dubstep scene to the formidable rise and influence of Hyperdub, Goodman’s vision is one that is singular in its devotion to the connective tissues of electronic and dance music genres. In Kode9’s music (and littered throughout the Hyperdub roster) is a harmonious bridge between styles. His music is not without history and ideas, and Goodman openly embraces it.
The most complicated forms of techno and footwork are built simply, from the ground up, and on Nothing, we hear the simplicity of each component and how it all comes together to make the music that we love. "I’ve always tried to be open to the idea of music as transversal, as impersonal – like a cloud, or a virus that passes through populations," Goodman told The Guardian. "It might start with an individual producer, but once it’s out in the world – as an entity that’s inhabiting, parasiting, using human bodies as hosts – somehow it attains a collective intelligence all of its own."
Consider the unnerving pull of a synth that sounds like a dying insect working in tandem with piano on "Vacuum Packed". The track builds into footwork-light with hyper-paced rhythms and a cutting beat that is maybe the record’s most danceable moment. "Void" is a slow-burning and dubby wonder that contains empty moments where his former musical partner Spaceape, who died in 2014, was originally intended to vocalize. "Holo" is the record's brightest and most enjoyable moment, built on airy samples and a spastic beat that is difficult to forget. Nothing leaves you awash in the sounds of the everyday: The static of the television not turned entirely turned off, the lull of old appliances stumbling to stay on after years of wear and tear.
There is a precision and effort laced in his two previous albums, 2006’s Memories of the Future and 2011’s Black Sun, that clearly mark a singular producer’s craftsmanship. But on his latest work, this point feels more eloquent from start to finish. Goodman described this record as one about zeroes and about "nothing." In that same interview with the Guardian, Goodman said, “If replication and distribution costs are tending towards zero, this is one of the most important engines in the transformation of the music industry. We don’t know where it’s heading. ‘Nothing’ was like a little encryption key that enabled me to finish the album."
A quick glance at song titles confirms this trend, at least stylistically. There is "Zero Point Energy" and "Notel". There is "Void" and "Zero Work". And there is the album closer, "Nothing Lasts Forever", a nearly 11-minute journey through the noise of silence, a kind of John Cage tribute for the new millennium. Awash in static and the sporadic, indescribable clanging of the day-to-day, the track helps define the work as a whole in a clearer way than the songs before it. If, as Goodman notes, things are tending toward "zero," then this track is the literal manifestation of this idea. Still, there is value in the zero and value in "Nothing Lasts Forever". In the absence of music, in the zero, there is still presence, still sound, still something to hear (and even enjoy).


On an intimate collaborative album, Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz push beyond their common ground toward moments of grand catharsis and melancholy ambience.

Orbweaving

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz make music at the intersection of beauty and sorrow. In Johnston’s pensive, minimalist work as Midwife, she finds moments of soul-stirring radiance amid thick clouds of synth and guitar. As the leader of Louisville’s Vyva Melinkolya, Diaz plumbs emotional depths in a somewhat more conventional interpretation of classic shoegaze. Both Johnston and Diaz are adept at conjuring heaviness without reaching for metal’s typical volume. (Johnston characterizes her music with the amusing and accurate descriptor “heaven metal.”) On their first collaborative album, Orbweaving, the two songwriters tap into an easy compatibility when exploring their common ground, and they touch the transcendent when they push beyond it.
Orbweaving is the result of a recording residency that Diaz undertook at Johnston’s New Mexico studio in August 2021, but the two didn’t enter the sessions as strangers. Diaz had recently contributed guest vocals to a song on Midwife’s Luminol, and a friendship that began in music soon transcended it. Diaz and Johnston became confidants during a tumultuous period in each of their personal lives. Orbweaving, recorded between nighttime hikes spent looking for snakes and spiders, feels accordingly intimate. It’s the sound of two kindred spirits in harmony, reaching for catharsis in unison.
The first four of Orbweaving’s five songs sound like what you might expect from their team-up. The Johnston-penned “Miss America” opens with a plaintive clean guitar part, which repeats for the song’s duration while both singers layer gauzy, reverb-heavy vocals on top of it. “Hounds of Heaven,” Johnston’s other songwriting contribution, offers a little more crunch and a more elaborately detailed arrangement, with pitch-shifted vocals and glitchy, programmed drums augmenting all the guitar fuzz. Both tracks are built on repetition, with a scant handful of mantra-like lyrics and melodies. It’s an approach similar to Johnston’s on Luminol, gaining power from the insistent recurrence of small ideas.
The Diaz compositions “NMP” and “Plague X” are similar to Johnston’s songs at first blush, but they signal Orbweaving’s grander ambitions. “NMP” blooms from the same kind of guitar line as “Miss America,” even introducing its diaphanous vocal part in an almost identical way. Over the course of its nearly eight-minute runtime, the song builds to the album’s showiest crescendo, swelling and crashing before resolving in a muted denouement. “NMP” makes the most explicit use of Diaz’s shoegaze background, but it also introduces the album’s strangest sounds—twisting synths, gnarled feedback, hissing drums. The quieter “Plague X” puts synthesizers on equal footing with guitar, letting them fuse into a single gloomy alloy. (Diaz and Johnston’s vocals melt together in a similar manner throughout the album.)
Orbweaving saves its biggest swing for last. The 12-minute title track closes the album in a fog of blurry, crumbling synths. There’s no percussion, no vocals, and only the faintest hint of melody. It’s by far the most challenging song on Orbweaving, but it’s also the most rewarding. By abandoning the familiar textures of rock music and stripping the core of their sound, Johnston and Diaz created a piece that’s at once more impressionistic than their usual work while every bit as emotionally vivid. Orbweaving is the product of two musicians with similar sensibilities, but just as instructively, it’s the sound of two friends sharing a glimpse of their bond with the world.


The 90s electronic totems have seen their classic work age extremely well, yet oddly struggled to sort out a clear identity in the here and now.

Barking

It's a little ironic that, while Underworld's mid-to-late-1990s albums have aged extraordinarily well, the band itself hasn't. They lost Darren Emerson to globetrotting, Ibiza-rocking DJ glory at the beginning of the decade and they haven't quite found their stride in the two (now three) albums since. This was perhaps inevitable: Karl Hyde's wild-eyed, front-of-the-mix personality always ensured that Underworld would age more like a rock band than an electronic act. (Witness how a touch of gray has bolstered the wisdom of folks like Carl Craig and the Chemical Brothers.)
My favorite song on Barking, "Diamond Jigsaw", talks about a white stretch limo and features "pre-mi-um te-qui-la" prominently in its chorus. It sounds cheesy, but it's fantastic: the world absolutely needs more songs about those nights when you're flush with cash and having a really good time. Moreover, Underworld is exactly the type of band to write these songs, because aside from aging like rock stars, they also got rich like rock stars. There are worse places to end up than "thoughtfully content headliners," and a recent, leaked live set/mix from the Privilege club in Ibiza proves that they can still transform their mid-level angst into thumping party-starters.
Barking doesn't contain nearly enough of these moments, but the ones it does contain feature the kind of backlit, uplifting anthem-making that Underworld have only occasionally dabbled in (think: "Rez" or, more recently, "Two Months Off"). It's a really good fit for the band. On "Scribble", Hyde sounds reconciled: "And it's okay/ You give me everything I need." The arrangement is bright and lithe. It features the same rush-rush-rush drum programming of heyday Underworld, but it doesn't feel like the song is trying slap you in the face; it feels like it's trying to make you drive your car a little faster. It's refreshing to listen to Underworld embrace small, personal thrills.
Hyde may well be the same drug-addled crazyman he was during the 1990s, but he doesn't sound like it anymore. "Grace" is a classic "the club...is dark and confusing"-track, but Hyde sounds like he's envious of Interpol's pathos, which, Jesus. "Louisiana", a slothful, album-ending ballad, immediately enters the competition for "worst ever Underworld song," so pale is Hyde's slurring. At different points on the album he talks about being "violently in love" and "quietly violent," but these sort of ominous dictums seem sapped of any real strength. It's weird to say, but Hyde just sounds so much better now when he's celebrating.
Barking inhabits an odd place: half-dolorous electro-pop, half-affirming sunnyside jams. You can attribute this to some of the help they had: Underworld farmed Barking's tracks out to various producers, and it shows. "Hamburg Hotel" contains hints of Appleblim's tense nighttime wandering, and Paul van Dyk is all over "Diamond Jigsaw". These "collaborations" seem like a better marketing tool than a musical one, however, as Barking's sonic variance is truthfully no greater than that of most Underworld albums.
Underworld receive a lot of credit for being a great albums band in a singles genre, but the lukewarm reception their last two albums received glossed over the fact that each has housed one or two great tracks. So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time.


The Italian-born pop artist Mauro Remiddi has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. On his bleary, atmospheric Porcelain Raft debut LP, he sounds like he no longer exists on this planet.

Strange Weekend

Mauro Remiddi, who currently records as Porcelain Raft, has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. Italian-born Remiddi's wanderings have led him to playing indie pop in London, gypsy klezmer music with the traveling Berlin Youth Circus, piano in off-Broadway productions, and even to performing in North Korea.
Considering how much globetrotting Remiddi has under his belt, it's no surprise that his music might start to evoke a sense of rootlessness and impermanence. However, as Porcelain Raft, he's taken it to the logical extreme of sounding like he no longer exists on this planet. On Strange Weekend, Porcelain Raft's debut full-length effort, Remiddi sounds like nothing if not a weary sojourner resigned to endlessly floating through the interstellar or spiritual cosmos. His forerunners in this respect are Marc Bolan, John Lennon, and David Bowie, performers who consistently sought some kind of transcendence of the corporeal, struggling to achieve earthly connections and understanding while chafing against the bounds of time and space.
Song titles like "Drifting in and Out", "Shapeless & Gone", and "Put Me to Sleep" give an excellent idea of what Remiddi has in store. Porcelain Raft borrows liberally from both the shoegaze and dream-pop playbooks, and so we get layers of sonic gauze shot through with delicately strummed acoustic guitar patterns and Remiddi's reedy, rather androgynous voice. In the spacey somnolence applied to venerable classic rock sounds and structures-- Lennon's most obviously on  "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", Bolan's on "Picture"-- Remiddi very much shares a kinship with Beach House. There's some of Porcelain Raft touring partner M83's elegant sweep here too, while the woozy, hypnotic beatscapes of "Is It Deep Enough For You" and "If You Have a Wish" aren't far removed at all from chillwavers like Neon Indian. Many of the melodies feel familiar but can't easily be precisely placed, which not only makes them good earworm candidates but also enhances the album's dreamlike, half-remembered feel.
The record's pervading sense of wistfulness and resignation extends to the lyrics-- they're often buried or abstracted, but occasionally something nakedly direct emerges, like the ingenuous sentiment conveyed in the title of "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", or, perhaps a bit more artfully, Remiddi's assertion in "Backwords" that "I hope you're in a nice hotel/ Playing cards in your room/ With someone who cares over you."
As you'd expect from such a bleary, atmospheric album, Strange Weekend hangs together well as a whole-cloth statement, though that doesn't mean there aren't standouts, particularly "Backwords", with its exhausted grandeur reminiscent of Pink Floyd, as well as the gorgeous "Put Me to Sleep", which seems tailor-made to soundtrack a scene where Carey Mulligan is sad in some major metropolitan city. Which is presumably a situation to which a well-traveled melancholic like Remiddi can readily relate.


Ode to the Ghetto

At the risk of sounding thick, I'll admit I needed a second to get the joke of Guilty Simpson's name, so you can imagine what kind of endorsement it is to say that's what passes for "clever" on Ode to the Ghetto. Just as Lupe Fiasco diverts interviews to boast about his gully Chicago upbringing, Stones Throw interrupts its wise exploration of alternative hip-hop and puts its goodwill on the line in order to release a thoroughly mediocre gangsta rap album.
Not that Ode to the Ghetto was likely to be any better in the event it was inspired by cartoons and video games instead of more traditional muses, since like his namesake, Simpson creates a document of violent crime that's hard to take seriously even if it's based in reality. Detroit's reputation obviously precedes itself, and yet Motor City native Simpson robs the city of its menace by presenting it in the most generic terms possible here, rendering it as replicable as a Levittown. Dope boys have the block on lock ("Footwork") and are more admirable than the cops trying to stop them ("Pigs"). Guns pop off and mouthy bitches won't shut the fuck up ("She Won't Stay at Home"). Perhaps it's meant as some sort of commentary on the universality of ghetto hardship, but I think that's giving Simpson far too much credit after suffering though the pointedly low ambitions of "The Real Me" and "Getting Bitches" (rhymes with "getting riches"), or hearing Sean P show him how this C-list rap shit is done ("Run").
At the very least, Simpson finds more inspiration in popular undie rap's leading beatsmiths; Madlib, Oh No, Black Milk, and J Dilla (oddly responsible for championing this dude) gamely give "A" efforts while Simpson ramrods everything with a bullish flow reminiscent of a blue-collar hardhead like Obie Trice. At times, he'll wisely refrain from any sort of attempt at a hook, but the times he goes in-- the off-key ramble of "Robbery", for one-- are painful. And his attempted slang-slinging on "Footwork" makes Juelz Santana's awkward "Clockwork" sound Webster's-bound.
If you're feeling generous, you might call "I Must Love You" Simpson's Mike Skinner moment; potentially penetrating in its detail, an already faltering relationship is upset by a perceived flirtation in a Red Lobster. But Simpson's boredom with the actual argument with his girlfriend spills over to him sounding bored relating the story, at which point you want to be involved in this about as much as he did. He eventually closes it with "why you actin' like a bitch again," a question that really can never be answered, but it's appropriately honest for a record that's mostly incapable of inspiring any sort of meaningful reaction.


The anonymous artist’s rustling, swirling ambient techno is as immediate and enveloping as anything leftfield electronic music has produced this year.

Topdown Dialectic

The Topdown Dialectic project lies at the intersection of clarity and obscurity. The clarity part is self-evident: Most of their rustling, swirling ambient techno has come out on clear cassettes packaged in clear, plastic freezer bags—packaging so minimalist that it doesn’t include titles, credits, or any information beyond the artist name and catalog number.
That’s where the obscurity kicks in, because Topdown Dialectic’s identity is a mystery. The only confirmable fact is that they are part of Aught, a label collective whose members—Elizabethan Collar, De Leon, Xth Réflexion—are also anonymous (if they are even different people at all). This kind of mystique is hardly new in electronic music; it is part of a hallowed tradition that runs from Basic Channel through Burial. But Topdown Dialectic’s facelessness feels specific to the current moment. Trying to trace their trail back to the source, there’s a strong sense of being haunted by the internet’s recent past. They have not tweeted in more than three years. The Facebook page linked from their SoundCloud no longer exists; neither does their Tumblr. A Blogspot account associated with the label behind their debut cassette has gone inactive. It’s a trail of digital breadcrumbs ground down to dust.
That also makes for a pretty good description of Topdown Dialectic’s music. Since at least the release of a 2014 self-titled EP for Seattle’s Further label (it’s hard to know what their 2013 debut cassette sounds like, since it has disappeared from the internet without much trace), they’ve hitched their horse to the grainy, dub-techno aesthetic popularized in the mid-1990s by Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and other artists affiliated with Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction label. Topdown Dialectic’s sound is a graphite smear of static, clatter, and hints of whispers: textures of gravel and elastic, shoe polish and sand, all arrayed over a submerged techno rhythm. A loose weave of murmurs and wormholes, the music itself is bathed in mystery, its contours foggy and its provenance uncertain. Dub techno, with its emphasis on circuitry and spring reverbs, is a resolutely analog genre, but here it gets spun through a dizzying digital echo chamber of post-internet obfuscation.
Topdown Dialectic’s first album for Los Angeles label Peak Oil bears many similarities to its predecessors. It is also self-titled, and it does without track titles. These tweaks to industry convention seem designed to disorient and unbalance, to leave the listener bobbing in a grayscale interzone without reference points or compass. The music’s means of production have historically been another point of obscurity. Streaks of drum and delay pile up in an onionskin palimpsest of fakeouts and false endings; voices bob through the murk, and the occasional sharp-edged synth bass cuts through, but there’s no telling how any of it was made. With this release, we finally learn something about the artist’s methods, which the label claims entail unspecified “software strategies” and “captures and edits of various nonlinear sound-systems.” Whatever that means, it sounds like a kind of digital alchemy—a figurative black box that translates unknown inputs into a fountain of pulse and shimmer.
But the new album immediately feels more developed than previous work. The sound is fuller, the structures more composed. What once seemed incidental now feels more intentional, even expressive. In opening track “A1,” a blurry railroad chug of fractured breakbeats gives way to moments of crystalline definition, like a taut electric-bass note or the rosy chords of classic Detroit techno. In the Pole-influenced “A3,” fluttering chords and a hint of voice flash out over rolling sub-bass; “B3” takes after the chiffon-textured deep house of Vladislav Delay’s Luomo alias, with a beat as brittle as kindling offset by the occasional yelp, soulful and grounding.
Throughout it all, the music is governed by the tension between difficulty and ease. The sense of some hidden code at work is reinforced by the fact that all eight tracks are exactly five minutes long, with each song ending in medias res, in a simple fadeout—which surely is not a coincidence. (This isn’t the first time Topdown Dialectic has deployed such a tactic.) Ultimately, though, any subtextual riddles are secondary to the tracks themselves, which are as immediate and enveloping as anything that leftfield electronic music has given us this year, with sumptuous textures reminiscent of Skee Mask’s Compro—they’re just less melodic and less overtly melancholy, marked instead by a seductive kind of stone-faced cool.
On the album’s closing cut, having crumpled dub techno’s blueprint in any number of ways, Topdown Dialectic smooths out the wrinkles and sinks into a deep, bassy approximation of the style at its most quintessential. There’s no discernible percussion at all, just rolling waves of rumble and hiss. It’s the perfect capstone to the project: “B4” could have been made at any point in the past 25 years, and with a surface worn down like limestone, it luxuriates in its anonymity. Yet once you become accustomed to the quirks of Topdown Dialectic’s sound, the track couldn’t be mistaken for the work of anyone else.


The first posthumous album from Lil Peep stands as an act of tribute and preservation for an artist whose legacy is still very fragile.

Lil Peep: Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2

Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2

When Gustav Åhr died, his career was hovering just above the ground. He was 21 years old with four tapes and a few EPs under his stage name Lil Peep—just enough work to carve out an aesthetic and build a corner of the world. He had just released his album Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 1, which was generating more attention than anything he’d done before. At shows, fans were starting to chant back every word of his songs. He seemed bemused by the shudders of national attention around him. “I’m here, doing my thing,” he shrugged in an interview with Montreality in April 2017, a few months before his sudden death from an overdose of Fentanyl and Xanax. Later in the interview, he was asked where he’d be at age 86. He laughed at the idea, hard.
Lil Peep lived close to death and seemed comfortable with his proximity to it, which is not the same as wanting to die. He accepted the idea that he veered closer to the edge than some and that he might, at some point, cross the line, a clarity that came through simply and consistently in his lyrics. He never minced words about his depression or his struggles with addiction, nor did he make them seem bigger than they were. He spoke of his pain clearly, and for this, he comforted legions of young fans who felt safer in their own sorrow when blanketed by his.
This plainspoken depiction of deep depression was the emotional center of Peep’s work. It radiated out from everything he did, and reverberates through Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2. The project has gestated for over a year, as Peep’s close friend and producer Smokeasac pored over the unfinished album and Peep’s vocal takes alongside his mother, Liza Womack. Womack isn’t just a bereaved mother but a steward of Lil Peep’s work, and she has spoken of her investment in Come Over Pt. 2 on an emotional level as well as an aesthetic one. “If you care enough to pay for an artist’s work, then trust the artist’s work,” she said.
You can feel that devotion poured into the result, evinced as much by what’s here as by what’s not. There are no tagged-on features, no maudlin tributes, no voices pushing from the margins to share the spotlight with Peep. There is nothing but his downcast music, as he would have made it. It is an act of tribute and preservation for an artist whose legacy is still very fragile.
“My All & Broken Smile,” the first track, opens with one of the only unusual flourishes, a programmed steel drum hit that sounds like a children’s music box. It is a cinematic touch that fades soon into the classic Peep Sound: alt-rock guitar and moaning heard through a fishbowl, viscous melodies that drizzle and pool in your brain crevices. His music sounds like it’s drowning—in dysphoria, in self-awareness, in reverb and low-pass filters. It is pickled in sadness. This wasn’t the only music Peep made—he also rapped over harsh, abrasive goth-trap beats—but this is undoubtedly the sound that he was most famous, and beloved, for.
At the center of the mix, placed where it deserves to be, is Peep’s voice. He was a canny stylist. Like a rapper who lags behind the beat on purpose, he assumed a drowsy delivery, suggesting someone singing for the first time, or someone making fun of their own singing voice. But he was, in fact, a real singer. His voice sounded like Chester Bennington’s yowl caught in a laptop and smoothed over for irregularities. This was evident seeing him live, as well—his voice emerged from his scraggly throat sounding already Auto-Tuned.
His ear for melodies was similarly astonishing. His songs are simple, so simple that they come right up to maddening. But you can look at a Casio keyboard and try to plink out memorable melodies from three or four keys, and you will not stumble across the ones that Peep has picked out. They have a drain-circling, centrifugal force, only enhanced by his bored tone. They pull and pull and pull until you ask yourself why you are resisting and you tumble down with them.
His lyrics were alternately deadpan, wry, bone-chilling, and empathetic, and he wrote as often about intimacy and codependency as he did about cocaine. On “Sex With My Ex,” he pairs the harsh “Fuck me like we’re lying on our death bed” with the tender “Hear the sadness in your laughter.” He would put banalities right beside piercing observations, mimicking the texture of actual conversation. On “Hate Me,” he takes “the long way home,” but balances it with the freeze-frame image, “Got a couple hundred missed calls in my phone.” He will often keep a song in place with one line: “Break my bones but act as my spine/Wonder who you’ll fuck when I die,” he wonders on “16 Lines.” On “Life Is Beautiful,” as he muses, “When I die, I’ll pack my bags, move somewhere more affordable,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else writing a lyric quite that devastating or sly.
Some of his lines are so vivid they could serve as screenwriting prompts. “Life Is Beautiful” offers something like an inverse reading of Modest Mouse’s “Float On”—horrible things happen every day, most times life is not okay. Each lyric cuts a little deeper in the same spot: “Tryna keep it cool at your grandfather’s funeral,” or, “You think you’re adorable, she thinks that you’re intolerable.” In real life, you might tell someone you want to die in one breath and complain about a pair of pants in the next; Peep’s lyrics ably seesaw between these poles.
Meanwhile, the guitar lines offer a million minor rewrites on the four-note opener to Metallica’s “One” and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” little stick-and-poke tattoo riffs that an eighth-grader plays at a Guitar Center. It is an era as much as a sound, evoked powerfully: Printed tablatures, water-damaged Linkin Park CD booklets, middle school Weezer cover bands, Alternative Press back issues moldering in an old childhood bedroom.
Despite that—all that—Come Over Pt. 2 lacks a single, a glittering pop-punk exclamation point like “Awful Things” or “The Brightside” to break up the album’s long drift. But that’s OK, really. The album is a valentine offered to Peep and to his fans, and it is built for immersion, not for persuasion. It adds some indelible entries into Peep’s now-truncated canon—“Life Is Beautiful,” “16 Lines,” “Hate Me,” “IDGAF.” And it honors his clear-eyed gaze, even beneath the fog he suffered.
Now that Gustav Åhr is dead, of course, there are lines that hurt to hear. But they are no different than dozens of macabre lines over the course of his career, and if he didn’t flinch at them, perhaps we should take his cue. None of this should overshadow Peep’s winsome positivity; he had a sweetness that was impossible to miss. “He was not as sad as people thought he was,” mused Åhr’s brother, Oskar in an interview after Gustav’s death. “It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.” In the same Montreality interview, Åhr parts his dirty hair to show something to the interviewer. “On my face, I got a humongous tattoo that says Cry Baby … to keep me grateful,” he says, smiling a little. “To remind me that I’m blessed.”


Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka are among participants in a remix LP that's more like a comp of excellent experimental music.

Chicken Switch

Lots of Melvins releases in the past decade could be called either conceptual or gimmicky, depending on your perspective. There were the collaborations on The Crybaby with everyone from David Yow to Leif Garrett; full-album partnerships with Jello Biafra, Lustmord, and Fantômas; a staged "live" version of Houdini; and whatever the intermittently awesome Hostile Ambient Takeover was supposed to be. Interesting music at every stop, but overall an uneven track record, one that encourages doubts about any new Melvins diversion.
Still, the idea behind Chicken Switch is promising. The band gave entire albums (and sometimes more) to noisy experimental artists, letting each melt, slice, and demolish the music into five-minute-or-so chunks. And the concept works, mostly because the band chose interesting remixers rather than famous ones. The only well-known names here are Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka, and even Melvins fans may not recognize the other participants. But everyone involved attacks their work with vigor, precision, and an insatiable desire to test limits. And they all bring their A-games to Chicken Switch, making it less a Melvins remix record than a compilation of excellent experimental music.
In other words, these aren't Melvins riffs set to dance beats. Occasionally the diehard fan might recognize the odd chord or familiar rhythm-- take Eye's loop of chugging riffs, or Ranaldo's busy multi-song edit, one of the few tracks with recognizable vocals. But more typical is the entry from Germany's Christoph Heemann. "Emperor Twaddle (Remix)" opens with three minutes of ringing drone-- stretching and thickening the intro of Honky's "They All Must Be Slaughtered" well past its original length-- followed by 30 seconds of riffs and beats blurred into cacophony.
Most of Chicken Switch employs that kind of scorched-earth approach. Rather than rearranging the Melvins' basic atoms, the remixers split them apart, creating unpredictable bursts of noise and texture with completely new DNA. In that sense, "remix" is too narrow a term for what's going on here. Better to call these reincarnations, with the participants basically murdering the original music and pumping new breath and blood into its hollowed-out remains.
This process produces impressive diversity. German artist RLW (who himself crafted a similar guest-remix project called Tulpas in the late 1990s) makes what sounds like a minimalist string quartet dragging their bows across metal objects. Viennese electronic group Farmers Manual compose a symphony of blips and growls, like a farther-out version of Black Dice. Japanese noise king Merzbow offers a soothing din chopped up by a clanging beat. And former Melvin David Scott Stone stretches King Buzzo's vocals into a wordless choir of gurgling drones.
The highlight of Chicken Switch comes from Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple. "4th Floor Hellcopter" opens with a slow, crunchy beat, slides into forbidding feedback, then ascends into burning metal guitar and stereo-spanning dissonance. Kawabata bridges the gap between recognizable riffs and all-out abstraction, pointing out the rich diversity inside the Melvins' music. As a whole, Chicken Switch does the same. Its wide sonic range is testament to how much lurks beneath the surface of every Melvins album. Whatever faults one can find in their experiments, their work is clearly deep enough to be worthy of such off-center explorations.


I'm tired of attending funerals for David Bowie's career. I mean, they're always pleasant, catered affairs, and ...

Heathen

I'm tired of attending funerals for David Bowie's career. I mean, they're always pleasant, catered affairs, and the chance to hobnob with a star-studded crowd of washed-up mourners like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop is undeniably great, but David never actually shows up. Critics have tried to write him off for more than a decade, and his work has been mostly sub-par even longer. But somehow, some way, he's managed to scrape together enough of the old Bowie charm on every release to keep alive the hope that he might just have one final hurrah left in him. Unlike some of his contemporaries (I'm looking at you, Iggy), he might, conceivably, still have a fighting chance. But while everyone's busy measuring his latest work against the towering legacy of Ziggy and the Spiders and looking ahead to his next last gasp, it would be easy to overlook that Heathen is the best Bowie release in years.
But so what? Bowie committed the unpardonable sin of being too good, too soon. For an artist to produce an album as exquisitely relevant and inventive as Hunky Dory is rare, but to follow it with the colossus of Ziggy Stardust, and even Aladdin Sane, Low, and Scary Monsters-- he made genius sound so easy. With those first few groundbreaking albums, though, he utterly screwed himself. The shadow of his early work will follow him forever, and having hit the twilight of his career after tripping and falling over that 1987 snot-rocket, Never Let Me Down, it has loomed larger than ever. Heathen will surely be condemned by those who cannot forgive him for his past greatness, and will likely be loved by a few who still imagine strains of "Space Oddity" beneath its refrains. It's hard to shake the thought that even thirty years later, some people still seem to be expecting another Ziggy.
Yet Heathen doesn't herald a second coming for David Bowie-- not by a longshot. The youthful urgency of his early work is long gone. But that hasn't stopped him from making an album that is easily his best work since the halcyon days of faux-cockney accents and gender bending theatrics a la Scary Monsters, and that's good news. Bowie seems to have finally realized that he's just been trying too damn hard. Where 2000's Hours was a brooding, wrist-slitting account of Bowie's laments about growing old and irrelevant, Heathen is the sound of acceptance. He's relaxed, even serene, and the songs clearly reflect this with a nonchalant charm reminiscent of the Bowie of old.
This is not a particularly cheery record: "Sunday" is a somber, almost sinister chant that builds into an ascending chorus of warm synths and percussion-- a tense, minimal remix of the best moments of Earthling, if you will. In what will surely be the song most often quoted by record critics, "Slip Away," Bowie muses: "Some of us will always stay behind/ Down in space it's always 1982/ The joke we always knew," a brief moment of smiling recognition at the state of his career, fans, and detractors in the wake of his past glory days. Gorgeous and sad, it evokes the simplicity of the past as Bowie sings of "sailing over Coney Island" to a lone piano melody and a compelling Moog-y electronic refrain.
"Slow Burn" is the strongest of Bowie's original material on Heathen-- a moody, bouncy piece with a bass/sax combo that vaguely elicits a 60s pop undercurrent with guitar work from Pete Townshend (yeah, that Pete Townshend!). Townshend's help here is appreciated, mostly because it means the guitar isn't being played by Reeves Gabrels. If Bowie had considered bringing him in earlier, he could have avoided the horror of a car crash like Hours' "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell." Fortunately, Townshend's guitar noodling never steps into the realm of being entirely gratuitous, and as with all the best songs on Heathen, Bowie's vocals are wisely left to dominate.
But oddly, it's the covers that are truly the highlight of the album. Bowie tries his hand at the Pixies' "Cactus" (a move which might make the album's title sound ironically appropriate)-- but take a deep breath. Everything's going to be okay. Mercifully, he handles the song very faithfully, and actually does it justice. He's a far cry from Black Francis, but Bowie's voice is so amazingly distinctive that it almost sounds like a different song. He then moves on to Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You." I don't know what's caused the current rash of Neil Young covers lately, but at least Bowie's old enough to make this sound a little more natural than most might. Bowie hasn't touched rock 'n' roll like this in years, and that he can still carry it off this well is a pleasant surprise.
Heathen's piece de resistance, though, is the phenomenal cover of "I Took a Trip In a Gemini Spaceship" by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Name-based alter ego issues aside, this song is smooth. It's got a fast-paced electronic rhythm to quicken the pulse, and dulcet tones to soothe the ear-- nothing but laid-back electropop fun from start to finish. It's the kind of thing they'll be playing in the lounge of the International Space Station in about ten years or so, assuming the capsule doesn't get pimped out as an orbiting bachelor pad for N*SYNC or something stupid like that.
Bowie is obviously never going to recapture his trend-setting finesse of yesteryear, but at least he seems okay with that. And that's this record's greatest strength. Back when he was busy reminding everyone how out of it he really was by touring with Trent Reznor, he started to play "The Man Who Sold the World" and I actually heard a kid, maybe only two years younger than me, say, "Oh, cool. He's covering a Nirvana song." If that's not a warning sign, I don't know what is. Yes, David, the music world is moving on without you, but you can't end things with Heathen-- some of us, myself included, are still waiting for that final blaze of glory. Before you go, you've got to let the kids know what they missed out on.


Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ impressive debut album as Huerco S follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes. Filtering his work through yesterday’s technology, he makes techno folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future.

Colonial Patterns

Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away. Read it one way and it's an allusion to the arrogance that nations are doomed to repeat. Glance again and it conjures up the lines that such behavior razes, replaces, and retraces on the land. Both readings reverberate throughout Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ debut album as Huerco S. It follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes on exemplary small labels from both sides of the Atlantic-- including Opal Tapes and Future Times-- and sounds like the work of an artist hitting his stride, rather than one making his first big statement.
Leeds’ focus is the hidden histories of his homeland in the American midwest. He signposts as much with titles like “Quivira” named for a mythical place “discovered” by a Spanish explorer in the 16th century, “Canticoy”, a word of Native American origin that means a lively social gathering, and “Monks Mound (Arcology)”, which is an ancient earthwork in Illinois. References aside, his music is heavy with layers, symbols, and signals. Form wise, he takes futurism’s theme tune-- techno-- and filters it through yesterday’s technology: cassettes, synths, and cheap software. The ensuing collision of temporal zones creates a bewildering, all-encompassing present, which might be why Colonial Patterns presents a soundtrack for both blunting jet lag and long road trips in which the landscape is continuously cut and framed by the windshield window.
“Plucked from the Ground, Toward the Sun” moves like cloud formations, calling to mind school science classes and the water cycle chart that detailed water’s cyclic shapeshifting from evaporation to precipitation. “Skug Commune” sounds like a forgotten quiet storm song trying to break through a broken transistor radio, or a conversation half lost down a faulty line, while the raw metallic percussion of “Quivira” evokes an image of acid rain falling on aluminum cutlery.
There are a number of contrasts and conflicts between the natural and manmade world. “'Iińzhiid” laps and rolls like water, its rhythms reflecting and refracting into an infinite horizon. On “Struck with Deer Lungs”, the circling sub-bass turns with the exhausted pallor of an ancient ceiling fan. Lead single “Prinzif” is weighted with a creeping anxiety that smacks of Twin Peaks, a not-so unusual relationship when you consider the cult TV show is probably the most successful illustration of contemporary culture’s fear of the ancient/(super)natural and modern/manmade worlds colliding.
Of course, Colonial Patterns does not exist in a vacuum. There is dialogue with Actress and Laurel Halo’s handling of techno as a form not immune to time, one that can disintegrate just like the vast metropolises that inspired it, leaving fragments that distill into something new once again. Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica and Forest Swords’ Engravings are also relatives, for their exploration of the nature of memory and excavation of history respectively. Like his contemporaries, Huerco S. seeks to unearth new languages-- trace new patterns-- within established musical world orders. In his hands, techno is a folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. The final track “Angel (Phase)” is both culmination and affirmation of his archaeological digs: a vision of an ancient ambient techno gathering bathed in campfire light and dreaming into the night.


The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. She's such a singular artist, there's an easy temptation to contrast her excellent new album, Reality Show, with everything else.

Reality Show

The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows. For example: No one will look to this album's sonic signatures to discover the texture of R&B's future. But if it's more difficult to speak to what Sullivan does, that's our failure, an inability to recognize R&B as a discrete, heterogeneous genre. Because more than any artist, Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. Every maneuver can appeal to about as wide a range of R&B fans as exist, in 2015—aside from those looking exclusively for something "different." They'll have to deal with something exceptional instead.
"It's almost impossible to break as an African-American woman right now without TV," R&B singer and reality TV star K. Michelle said about the harsh economic realities of being a performer to Fader magazine late last year. "Reality TV put eyes on me—but it makes it difficult when it comes to Grammy nominations." Sullivan has built a strong fanbase without a show and despite this catch-22. Of course its hard to imagine a performer of her talent wouldn't be more widely celebrated in any other era. But though R&B's commercial fortunes dropped precipitously over the past decade, Sullivan's creative success and consistency over the course of three albums (she released the equally accomplished Fearless in 2008 and Love Me Back in 2010) defy gravity. Though the title of her album can be read as coy commentary on R&B's dependence on television for star-making, it can also be read simply as truth in advertising. Like many of the stories she tells, Sullivan works in layered meanings for a more convincing realism, leaving a definitive interpretation in doubt.
The strand running through Reality Show is Sullivan's performance itself, rather than any particular approach to production. Every character she inhabits is one of hard-earned principle: You may judge their choices, but they are performances of unblinking honesty and an acceptance of consequence that makes our judgement beyond the point. This often means a certain fatalism: "#HoodLove" is cinematic in its portrayal of a relationship's loyalty down to the .45 its protagonist packs in her purse, but the couple are poised at the precipice. "I'ma rock this bitch till the wheels fall off," she sings with the conviction that they'll both be around to see exactly that happen, until finally at the end: "And he ain't always right, but he's just right for me." Doomed though they may be, she finds meaning in conviction.
Sullivan's earlier albums had a more distinct sonic approach: '90s R&B in sensibility (2010's "Holding You Down (Goin In Circles)" used Nas' "Affirmative Action" beat, a familiar maneuver for many Clinton-era R&B acts), Sullivan's performance was still at center stage, locating joy in demonstrative vocal runs. Here, melisma is dimmed to a purposeful shadow; when she does explore the range of her powerful voice, it's as if to indicate the loss of self-control. On "Veins", her voice arcs with searing, yearning electricity. Like many moments on the album, it feels like several songs at once: Its slinky rhythm and backgrounds suggest an external world of physical seduction, while the intensity of her main vocal implies the burning internal passions of anxious obsession.
Though the production is unobtrusive, it seldom holds on to a single style (opener "Dumb" is a march, "Stanley" is a disco record, and "Stupid Girl" is an incredible song with Winehouse-lite production that may be the album's only real misstep). It's still Sullivan who gives the record its shape and tone. Her voice is one of R&B's best instruments. There's a slight grain to one frequency, like a stripe of prematurely grey hair, which gives her vocals an immediately recognizable character and resonates with her stories of hard-won wisdom. Men are eyed with suspicion; "Stupid Girl" is a cautionary tale, but like every song it suggests multiple interpretations—"Run after the boys, or take over the world," Sullivan suggests, but how sincere is she? "When you love 'em like I do, you'll be a fool." Even on "Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)", about the realization of self-love, her voice suggests the dimension of pain into which it was born.
Inevitably we have to make a comparison between Reality Show and R&B more broadly, but it's as easily expanded to popular music as a whole. Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect. "Mascara" is complicated in its construction—the character portrait is sympathetic, damning, or neither, depending on how you hold it up to the light. Her songs work so well because they allow the listener to experience them at face value or more holistically, shifting perspectives as rapidly as in life itself. Despite this, Sullivan does not equivocate. Her point of view is not muddled. The album's closer, the rushing, cathartic "If You Dare", makes its argument for moral courage explicit.


Electronic musican Laurel Halo's releases since 2012's Quarantine can be read as a reaction to that album and its reception, as she has steadily retreated from that album's vocally oriented post-pop into the harsh instrumental strictures of techno. Her second album, the dynamic, bracing Chance of Rain, continues this transition.

Chance of Rain

The chief talking point that emerged from Laurel Halo's excellent debut album, Quarantine, was Halo's decision to emphasize her vocals. It seemed a hard left turn for an artist who, through a spate of EPs, had practiced obfuscation, both in her music and in her public persona. Halo's releases since Quarantine can be read as a reaction to that album and its reception, as she has steadily retreated from that album's vocally oriented post-pop—and the transparent artistic agency that it implied—into the harsh instrumental strictures of techno. Her second album, the dynamic, bracing Chance of Rain, continues this transition, further mussing her artistic motives via industrial rhythms and corrosive synth textures.
The music on Chance of Rain defies easy placement—probably on purpose. It flickers between 90s-era IDM fussiness, warped hypnagogic sentimentality, and actual club music meant to inspire dancing. Sometimes it stops, mid-song—as on the title track—to wade through a pretty, jazzy piano melody, only to later return to its choppy, crunching kick drum attacks. This sense of placelessness, its ability to obscure its purpose and cloak its creator, defines Chance of Rain. It's a Laurel Halo album in name; when it plays you don't spend much time thinking about its creator or her motives.
Two pretty, jazzy piano pieces bookend Chance of Rain, reminding us of the oft-repeated fact that Halo is a formally trained musician. In between, Chance of Rain is a near constant churn of effects and shifting rhythms, frequently interrupting itself to wander in new directions. The longer tracks—"Oneiroi" and "Thrax" in particular—are stop-and-start affairs whose tough beats resist momentum. There's a crankiness to Chance of Rain, as noxious, cloudy chords hover above even the most motive tracks ("Ainnome", "Serendip"). Tonally, Chance of Rain is peers with the hoary machine music being churned out by the L.I.E.S. label, but there's an odd iridescence to Halo's work not found in other noisy, underground dance music.
When Chance of Rain slows down, as on the perplexing "Still/Dromos" or "Melt", it feels industrial, chemical in its potency. There's an undiluted quality to the sounds Halo conjures, and its 44 minute runtime requires some endurance. Frequently ugly, Chance of Rain doesn't court affection, and it's hard to nestle up to something that's continually slew-footing you. Quarantine was a difficult listen because it sounded as if Halo was right in your ear; on Chance of Rain she only appears to chop at your knees before dashing back into the shadows.
Halo spoke to Wire magazine about becoming more comfortable as a producer; Chance of Rain sees her place her gnarly sounds front and center, the way Quarantine did with her voice. The result is still unnerving, though in a more subtle way (no one is likely to tell Halo her synthesizers are too loud, or not tuneful enough). When the album finds a moment of peace—like when the title track dissolves into a simple, noir-ish outro—it feels forged. Craggy and hard as hell, you'll wish Chance of Rain forged a few more such moments, but its consistent, nagging ability to knock you off balance is worth wrestling with.


On their second album, the buzzy UK group only sometimes overcomes their style-over-substance sound that coats their glossy songs.

For Ever

The British soul collective Jungle wear their second-hand influences with pride. They come about disco by way of Disclosure, Marvin Gaye by way of Pharrell, and Sly and the Family Stone by way of Portugal. The Man. With less industry savvy they might just be a wedding band that does a mean “Get Lucky,” but thanks to their viral videos and a supportive British music press, they’re one of the UK’s buzziest acts, and a magnet for royalties and licensing fees. It was prescient that they titled their biggest track “Busy Earnin’,” because it sure has been.
Despite its superficiality, Jungle’s 2014 debut was an effective jam-delivery vehicle that doled out one agreeably brainless funk track after another. On their follow-up, For Ever, they strive for something a little more substantial. While writing the album, band principals Josh “J” Lloyd-Watson and Tom “T” McFarland both ended long relationships, and many of these songs find the two nursing wounded hearts. Whether the For Ever of its title is a deliberate nod to Bon Iver’s For Emma is unclear, but there’s a good dose of Justin Vernon’s tortured falsetto in the guys’ voices on the yearning “House in LA” and the funereal “Pray.” Or maybe they borrowed that from James Blake (again, their musical influences usually boil down to whatever’s newest).
Los Angeles looms over the record, not as a symbol of sunshine and opportunity, but as a failure, the city they couldn’t make work. After Lloyd-Watson moved there for a relationship, the band began recording the album there—and, truly, if there’s anywhere a band this plugged into to the musical zeitgeist belongs, it’s LA—but they returned to London after the sessions (and the relationship) didn’t pan out. “Truly you care if I’m getting on that plane,” they sing on “House in LA,” “So ask me to stay/Oh God, in the hope that you can heal my pain.”
So there’s an emotional arc here, which, on paper, is a welcome change from the style-over-substance approach of the band’s debut. “We’re using the music to put our thoughts and feelings and fears into, rather than just thinking, ‘This has got to be a song that people like,’” Lloyd-Watson told the Evening Standard. “We weren’t really doing that before.” Unfortunately, heartbreak isn’t this band’s strong suit, and neither singer has the type of voice that make listeners invest in their pain. Their reedy, one-note falsettos barely have the range for dance tracks that ask almost nothing of them, and For Ever’s mopier material is at odds with the very specific, frivolous itch that listeners come to this band to scratch.
Jungle fare best when they stick to the grooves. “Heavy, California” splits the difference between Off the Wall and Junior Senior, while “Beat 54 (All Good Now)” rides an airy disco loop. But this band lacks the songwriting prowess or basic self-awareness to make their tracks anything more than mildly pleasurable pastiches. Their critique of consumer culture on “Happy Man” (“Buy yourself a dream/How’s it looking?/Buy yourself a car and a house to live in”) would sound a lot more convincing coming from a band whose best-known song wasn’t literally used as a car commercial. It’s ironic, given Jungle’s success in marketing themselves, that just about the only thing this band can’t seem to sell is their emotions.


On his feature-heavy new album, the Oakland rapper takes stock of his achievements so far while looking toward a new stratum of success with clear-eyed gratitude.

TY4FWM

Seeing your name in lights is an emotional experience for any artist, equal parts ego-inflating and awe-inspiring. The cover of ALLBLACK’s 2020 album No Shame 3 featured his rap moniker in big, bold letters on the marquee of Oakland’s historic Fox Theater. But despite the confidence boost that comes with recognition, the self-proclaimed “Hardest out the O since Keak da Sneak” has made humility a defining feature of his work, often thanking the producers who supplied his beats on the record and crafting a trademark ad-lib out of his gratitude toward listeners and collaborators: “Thank you for fucking with me,” which supplies the fitting title for his new album TY4FWM.
Featuring production from the likes of DJ Fresh—the Bay Area legend behind The Tonite Show mixtape series—No Shame 3 synthesized three decades of Bay Area rap history and saw new-generation acts like DaBoii and Guapdad 4000 mingling with legends like Too $hort. TY4FWM builds similar connections with headliners and takes stock of ALLBLACK’s achievements so far, but it also plots future plays and looks toward a different stratum of success. Though he released the album through his independent label Play Runners Association, he’s clearly eyeing a path beyond regional stardom.
TY4FWM is feature-heavy, but as the gracious title implies, it seems like everyone genuinely fucks with ALLBLACK. There’s a hang-out vibe, a feeling of mutual respect and camaraderie amongst an All-Star roster of current West Coast rap, from mainstream artists like G-Eazy and Vince Staples to acclaimed cult favorites like Drakeo the Ruler and ShooterGang Kony. It’s easy to see why ALLBLACK has made connections with rappers from the Golden State: he’s hard-working and humble, serious when he needs to be, and casually funny when the time is right. On “10 Toes,” he comes off as more of a straight man alongside clown prince E-40—G-Eazy is void of charisma when put up against the other two and one of the album’s few moments of dead air. “War Stories” recruits Sacramento’s Mozzy and Peezy for a shit-talking session among street veterans, swapping tales of danger and paranoia from the frontlines like Robert Shaw showing off his sailor tats and shark bites in Jaws. The three rappers reflect as much as they flex.
There’s a constant interplay between the fast and furious rap flows popular right now in Michigan and California, so Sada Baby is a natural addition on “Do or Die,” driven by a sultry pop vocal from singer Carrie. The omnipresent Kenny Beats rears his head on the Drakeo-featuring “Ego,” which feels like the cut most likely to blast from car speakers—Drakeo and ALLBLACK are similarly dry in their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wit, though ALLBLACK lacks Drakeo’s distinct weirdness.
ALLBLACK might thrive as a tag team partner, but he’s equally adept as a solo performer, and he does some of his most impressive rapping on feature-less tracks like “Cobra Kai'” and “Anejo.” His flow is straightforward and focused, with precision and just a little grit in his throat, and the lyrics are relatively reserved in their pop culture references. When he does name-drop a movie or athlete, it packs a more brutal punch, comically and emotionally: “When I mob, I really mob, it look like City of God.”
With production handled mainly by DTB, these are the kinds of beats that will be familiar to listeners of recent Cali and Detroit rap, heavy on wet and bouncy synth lines that feel as much like acid house as G-funk. It’s hardly hip-house, but many of ALLBLACK’s tracks are at a higher, almost danceable BPM, and album opener “Life of a P” builds from the same Mr. Fingers rhythm Kanye West pilfered for “Fade,” with goth-funk crooner Kossisko on hook duty. TY4FWM occasionally features soulful vocal samples, stripped down and buried under layers of watery filters, most noticeably the oft-flipped “Saturday Love” on “Anejo.” Just when you feel like you’ve settled into a groove, ALLBLACK flips the script. On “Cobra Kai,” the drums and beat disappear halfway through the song, replaced by a frantic series of piano lines that are eventually joined by thumping percussion.
ALLBLACK might have reached a level where his name can stand alone on a marquee, but he doesn’t seem comfortable in the solitary spotlight; the cover for TY4FWM shows him surrounded by his association of play runners. Many artists might sever connections or leave loved ones behind to get ahead. ALLBLACK makes it clear he’s not going anywhere unless he can bring his family, his team, and his hometown with him.

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Perhaps familiar from being sampled by the Avalanches, this New York tween was an inspiring underground star in the early 1980s, a reputation confirmed by this archival collection.

Transportation EPs

When the Avalanches returned in 2016 after an absence of nearly two decades, a sampled koan lurked at the heart of “Subways,” their swooning comeback: “You walk on the subway/It moves around.” The voice belongs to Chandra Oppenheim, a veteran of the New York downtown scene who attended New York Dolls shows, rubbed elbows with Madonna, opened for Laurie Anderson, played the Mudd Club, staged performance art pieces at the Kitchen, and performed with her band on “Captain Kangaroo.” Not bad for a tween: Chandra was just 12 when she and her band of the same name cut “Subways” and three other songs for a now-coveted 1980 EP.
That EP, an unreleased second one, and two four-track demos form this fidgety new reissue, a welcome resurrection since the band hasn’t gotten much notice in the decades of New York comps that have followed. After splintering from late 1970s punk band Model Citizens, Eugenie Diserio and Steve Alexander formed kinetic no wave group The Dance with future Material and Scritti Politti drummer Fred Maher. They also found themselves taken with the young Oppenheim, becoming her backing band and fostering her nascent songwriting. “Chandra would blow us away with her lyrics,” Alexander remembered in an interview with The Guardian. “We were always like, ‘Don’t change a thing.’”
The four songs Chandra actually released in 1980 recall fellow nervy New Yorkers ESG and Y Pants, plus the vim of the Slits and LiLiPUT. Oppenheim adds touches of organ and even post-punk melodica to the mix. After that first EP, Diserio and Alexander put together a band of peers to back-up Chandra, all closer to her own age. Despite that youthfulness, the resultant six songs are slightly less rambunctious, hewing closer to the polished synth-led sound of new wave. Jittery bass and guitar deliver bounce to “Get It Out of Your System,” while hand claps and more melodica add a post-punk edge to “Stranger,” which anticipates Le Tigre. During the spiky “Tish Le Dire,” Chandra rails against teachers and her elders before taking a dark turn at the song’s end: “What about suicide?/Don’t you think we tried?/It was a lie!”
While the Avalanches’ own “Subways” has a sunny (yes, even childlike) disposition, Chandra’s original feels like real New York, bristling with everyday observations and a slowly encroaching paranoia. After that sampled opening line, Oppenheim lets her mind wander, imagining all manner of fears that are fitting for an adolescent girl riding public transit alone: falling on the tracks, missing her stop, hearing anonymous screams, not being able to stand clear of the closing doors.
“Kate” is as beguiling, and a seemingly pat opening line again reveals myriad conflicting emotions. “There’s a girl named Kate, and she thinks she’s really great/But she’s not!” Oppenheim yips at the start, seemingly disgruntled by a particularly magnetic classmate. The springy rhythm suggests Talking Heads, though a queasy melodica burrs against the groove like John Cale’s viola in the Velvet Underground. With each successive line, Oppenheim reveals another emotional fold, her scorn giving way to sympathy and the urge to shield Kate from the male gaze.
Turns out, Kate was not her competition, but rather her friend, evidenced by the two playfully posing on the original’s back cover. In the Snapchat age, when many parents and adults seem newly mystified by what transpires in the minds of middle-schoolers, hearing Chandra’s brief musical outburst almost 40 years later feels fitting. It’s a reminder that the interiority of adolescents remains complex, self-aware, defiant, and disarming.