Depeche Mode singer issues a Pro-Tooled set of dark rock grooves and electronic buzzing that, although lacking any element of surprise, finds his songwriting assured and competent.

Hourglass

This has presumably been a strange and exciting decade to be a member of Depeche Mode: Seven years during which dark, blustery electro-pop has come back as a mainstream force, especially in their native UK, and sometimes in exactly the terms they were supplying it 15 or 20 years ago. They've noticed this, surely. Perhaps it's why, after sidetracking into a minimal, techy sound on 2001's Exciter, they ran right back to blaring, grainy bombast on 2005's Playing the Angel. And perhaps it's why, after a solo debut that differentiated itself from DM by putting a guitar up front, singer Dave Gahan has veered back toward the drama you expect of him.
The problem is that while Hourglass has Gahan sounding a lot more assured and competent as a songwriter, it's also too much what you'd expect of him. Holed up in a New York studio with Depeche Mode's touring drummer and guitar player, he's constructed a Pro-Tooled set of dark rock grooves and electronic buzzing that won't shock anyone who's heard him or his band since, say, Songs of Faith and Devotion-- it's tasteful, professional, and as sophisticated as you'd expect from veterans. But it's also the kind of rote music that has very little purpose on its own. It's the kind that needs a very good singer-- and a very good songwriter-- to give it a reason to exist.
Gahan isn't that guy right now, and his presence here seems as rote as the music. He's addicted to the grand, prophetic register he's been singing in for years now, but he's not so good these days at making it seem like there's a reason for him to stay in that place. Lyrics about religion and self-doubt may be Depeche Mode's stock in trade, but none of them necessarily support the sinister breathing and chest-beating drama Gahan goes for-- drama that seems awfully routine here, like a product he's manufacturing.
It's a feeling that infects a lot of the tracks here, among which even the better ones can be too transparently professional, faultless but inessential. "Endless" looks to recapture the 00s with a minimized glam beat, the same T Rex shuffle that's put acts like Goldfrapp on the charts-- but Gahan seems to be copping his hook from Depeche Mode's "I Feel You", and all the sensual atmosphere he's pumping out feels more like branding than substance. The single, "Kingdom", sounds limp and listless, a big melody in a song that feels like it came out of a box. The tracks here that actually surprise-- the ones that take risks, jump out of the realm of expectations, or at least push Gahan's usual persona to the point of self-parody-- just wind up underlining the lack of spark in the songs around them. "Deeper and Deeper" is great precisely because it's so potentially embarrassing: Gahan is growling, play-acting a little monster, anteing up and putting something in the game. It's too rare of an occurrence here, and a little more of it would have provided much better context for the tracks-- "Down", "Miracles", "Saw Something"-- where Gahan does what Gahan does perfectly well.
It's possible to give albums like this a sense of risk and vigor, as proven just a couple months back by another 80s-alternative mainstay, someone Gahan has surely sat next to in a whole lot of record collections: Siouxsie Sioux burst out with exactly the same kind of deep, dark, guitars-and-electro solo pop record, and it was packed with all the verve this one's missing. I don't doubt that those who have followed Gahan and Depeche Mode for years will find things to like in Hourglass and enjoy hearing him continue to struggle with the topics he and his lyrics always do; he's eloquent and interesting, and I have no doubt that he's feeling every word and note here. But I'm guessing that for most, on this record, hearing Gahan feel it will be as exciting as watching any other professional perform the task he's a pro at, whether it's chopping down trees or rebuilding car engines.


Sunn O))), an incidental history:
1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for ...

Flight of the Behemoth

Sunn O))), an incidental history:
1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for R&B; outfit Richard Berry and the Dreamers.
1963: "Louie Louie," as interpreted by Portland, Oregon garage-band the Kingsmen, causes a sensation, due in no small part to the unintelligible lyrical rendition by lead singer Jack Ely. While on the road, bassist Norm Sundholm, appalled by the lack of volume available from his bass cabinet, contacts brother Conrad Sundholm to help him with a solution.
1964: While the state of Indiana bans the Kingsmens' hit "Louie Louie" from the radio, citing suspected obscenities in the aforementioned "unintelligible lyrical rendition" (a case which FBI head J. Edgar Hoover himself would take up and not drop until 1965), Conrad Sundholm creates the world's first high-powered concert bass amplifier.
1965: An increased interest in the amplifiers leads to increased orders from guitarists and bassists alike, prompting Conrad to move the operation out of his Father's garage. The Sunn amplifier company is born.
1969: Sunn amplifiers are used for the famed monstrous sound system at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in upstate New York.
"The SUNNO))) mission is to create trance like soundscapes with the ultimate low end/bottom frequencies intended to massage the listeners intestines into an act of defecation."
Before forming this band in honor of Earth, the powerful drone/doom outfit who somehow released four albums on Sub Pop while maintaining a higher doom:drone ration than any other band from the Northwest, Steve O'Malley and Greg Anderson did time in Burning Witch and Goatsnake, respectively. But SUNNO))) is a different beast entirely, a dual homage to the two things that count: bravado and volume.
Flight of the Behemoth is fifty minutes of well-calculated doomdrone that, in one swift take, manages to sound slower than Sleep, more hypnotic than Sabbath, and ten times more powerful than any early 60s NYC drone music (John Cale, Tony Conrad, etc.), and for one simple reason: it's based on metal.
The opening track, "Death Becomes You," does not fade in. It kicks the fucking door open and does not stop riffing every so slightly until the end of its thirteen minutes when it crackles out with the sound of a chorus of crackling, speakerkilling malfunctions. "Mocking Solemnity" follows, employing similar tactics, save for some extra feedback and a bit more high-end.
"SunnO)))BOW 1" and "SunnO)))BOW 2" are extremely well-fortified remixes of SUNN O))) tracks by Masami Akita, who you might know better by his alias, Merzbow. Merzbow steps in on top of these tracks, and, his match met the by low-end sludgemasters present in the mix, decides to liven the tracks up with some plunking piano in the left channel, accompanied by signature high-end noise bursts in the right. The second remix ends in a terrifying swirl of noise and bass which comes pretty close to the SUNNO))) mission referenced above. Needless to say, the addition of Merzbow to these tracks is very welcome.
The final track, entitled "FWTBT: (I dream of Lars Ulrich being thrown the bus window instead of my master Mystikall Kliff Burton)," starts out with what sounds like a detuned 808 kickdrum hit, before it melts savagely into a furious and panting repetition of the previous track's nicely executed M.O. Add some faint drumming and some overtly breathy "singing" and you have what sounds like a Sabbath song with all the tricks focused in one place, stretched out over ten minutes, without the imagery necessary to propel you straight downward.
When I first heard Sleep's "Jerusalem," I thought that the ultimate in slowness and deliberation had been reached, that it would not be possible to transcend the completely stoned realm of Nazareth that the hour-long concept album champions. Obviously, I wasn't looking hard enough.
This album sounds like it could have been recorded ten miles away from Woodstock while it was happening, with special microphones buried ten miles below the surface of the earth to only catch the vibrations of the bass on stage and the pounding of all those hippies doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. The trajectory that begins with Richard Berry and ends with Merzbow leaves me wondering what J. Edgar Hoover would have thought of this album. And then I remember that he was a crossdresser.


The Baltimore ambient musician uses sitar and synthesizers to investigate folkloric narratives from around the world.

Parted Plains

Near the end of her life, the great Jungian analyst and folklorist Marie-Louise von Franz declared that civilization requires myth in order to survive. She believed that the Christian myth on which Western civilization is founded had degenerated; in its place, she repped for alchemy, a pet obsession of her former mentor, which has yet to catch on. But her larger point resonates. We need stories to make sense of our lives and to propel us into the future; if the myths we live by have brought us to the brink of global collapse, might a change be in order?
Baltimore’s Ami Dang doesn’t attempt anything quite so bold as a global consciousness reset on Parted Plains, her new album for Leaving Records. But she does dive into the shadowy, archetypal waters of the fairy tale, weaving impressions of ancient stories with modern sounds. The album purports to sketch a fresh take on something as old as language, soundtracking “a yet-to-be written folktale that is neither Eastern nor Western, not traditional or contemporary—but somewhere in between.” She does this by blending sitar explorations with thick ambient synth backdrops, often bypassing new age’s cheap fusion cliches for something uneasy and darkly moody.
Parted Plains is a mixed bag, but it’s also a grower. The stories Dang uses as a jump-off point can be pored over as coded maps of the psyche, their every detail and twist passed down through the generations precisely because of a deep spiritual resonance. Her compositions feel more like cues for a movie we don’t get to see. Still, they have a vibe. The sound design can be compelling, with synths gurgling and writhing, haunting reverb trailing her sitar, and paranoid sub bass keeping the hippies at bay. “Make Enquiry” uses slurry metallic noises reminiscent of early grime, while “Stockholm Syndrome” recreates the psychological shift observed in victims of its 1973 hostage situation namesake (which has itself ascended to the rank of modern folklore): The first minute basks in clammy subterranean dread before abruptly pivoting to a serenely bucolic chill.
But the pieces rarely get off the ground, and then too often wrap up by dispersing into nothing, like a dandelion blown into the summer breeze. “Bopoluchi,” named after a Little Red Riding Hood-type character from India, coasts for a bit, abruptly changes course, and then stops dead in its tracks. The source text tells of a young woman’s journey far from home and deep into the woods, where animals speak a secret language and a battle of the wits must be fought with a bandit and his witch co-conspirator. How the music relates to this tale of danger and redemption is anyone’s guess.
Dang spends a lot of the LP soloing, but the best moments are when her instruments gel. On “Sohni,” she layers her sitar in delay to build a shower of plucky cries over a mournful synth harmony. It’s a poignant exhale which skips the noodling that pervades many of her other tracks. The closing “Souterrain” goes the opposite route, opening with an unaccompanied solo which is answered, one minute in, by urgent arpeggiations and spacious groans. In those suspended moments, you feel Dang’s conviction coming through. At its strongest, Parted Plains feels intimate; at its weakest it seems private to the point of opacity. One wishes Dang had committed more to the timelessness of her folklore inspirations, and less to the East-meets-West mashup. After all, something that’s neither Eastern, Western, new, or old might be something just diffuse enough to be nothing much at all.

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Drawing on the archives of Radio Mogadishu, Analog Africa’s latest archival compilation tells a story of openness that is at stark odds with the past few decades of Somalia’s history.

Various Artists: Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972–1991)

For years, Samy Ben Redjeb has been traveling across Africa and Latin America in search of forgotten sounds: vintage funk and myriad hybrids, offshoots, and variants that proliferated in the post-colonial era. Since 2006, his label, Analog Africa, has turned up dusty recordings from Benin, Togo, Ghana, Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Senegal, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Brazil—many of them rarely, if ever, heard outside of the communities that produced them. But it’s likely that Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972-1991) represents his most ambitious project to date, given Somalia’s woes. A former colony of the UK and Italy, Somalia endured a 22-year military dictatorship throughout the 1970s and ’80s, followed, in 1991, by a civil war that continues today. Though civil life in Mogadishu has rebounded since a new government was formed in 2012, the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Al Shabab remains a threat: In late December, terrorists plowed a truck laden with explosives into a busy intersection in the capital, killing at least 79.
Amid such persistent security threats, a city once described as “the pearl of the Indian Ocean” is widely considered a danger zone for travelers—Ben Redjef was accompanied by armed security escorts—which only makes his archival efforts there that much more valuable. Analog Africa previously explored Somali music via a reissued pair of LPs by the Dur-Dur Band, a legendary Mogadishu group and long-time house band at the city’s Jubba Hotel, who blended funk, soul, and disco with styles like daantho, a northern Somali rhythm resembling reggae’s relaxed cadence, and saar, a trance-inducing ritual style, into a rich, intoxicating fusion at once familiar and strange. But Mogadisco represents a far more extensive look at the country’s recent musical past.
In 2016, equipped with little more than the names of a few Somali acts gleaned from diggers’ lore and dubbed cassettes, Ben Redjeb turned up in the port city and finagled an introduction at Radio Mogadishu, whose archives house decades’ worth of the country’s musical history. He spent weeks going through stacks of aging reel-to-reel tapes and digitizing the most enticing finds; he spent years more tracking down surviving musicians, many now living in exile, and interviewing them. As is typical for Analog Africa’s releases, the liner notes here constitute a vital complement to the music, illuminating the stories both personal and societal—a young shepherd who found fame thanks to a singing contest in the big city; a beloved bandleader electrocuted on stage by faulty wiring—that lend meaning and emotional resonance to unfamiliar sounds and opaque cultural cues.
Ben Redjeb’s tastes run toward the heavy and mind-bending—as one might guess from a release like African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds from Benin & Togo 70s—and Mogadisco follows suit. (The liner notes document an amusing exchange with Omar Shooli, who is displeased that Ben Redjeb has chosen the echo-soaked, reggae-inspired “Hab Isii,” never a hit in its day, over one of Shooli’s “nice” songs, the ones he performed at weddings and important ceremonial occasions.) The best material here sounds unlike anything else. Shimaali & Killer’s “Hoobeya” runs lilting call-and-response vocals through tinny reverb and wraps them up in reggae guitar and slinky drum machine; Iftin Band’s “Sirmaqabe” pairs spacey synthesizers with spaghetti-western twang and horse-clop drumming. Both songs make a strong argument that dividing lines, whether geographical or musical, are purely notional. It is a sad irony that musicians so opposed to the fixity of borders would have their fates determined by the whims of mapmakers: All three Dur-Dur songs here were recorded abroad, while the band was exiled in Ethiopia and Djibouti; Shimaali and Killer fled to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where Killer died in 2008.
On some songs, a kind of uncanny-valley effect takes hold: Omar Shooli’s “Hab Isii” sounds almost like 1960s ska—at least, until the organs and singing come in, twining around each other in a strange modal embrace. Fans of Ethiopian jazz will find plenty to love, particularly in the lilting sax and organ riffing of Dur-Dur Band’s “Daradaa Muxibo”; throughout the album, pentatonic scales and keening vocal performances lend an eerie, melancholy undertone to up-tempo funk jams—a bewitching contrast. The musicianship, too, is stellar. From their three songs included here, it’s easy to see why Dur-Dur Band became legendary: Their intuitive grasp of funk’s elastic pocket, combined with the way they play with empty space and sonic textures, would stand out in any context. But the backstories of these songs make some of them even more remarkable. The title of Bakaka Band’s “Geeisyada Halgamayow,” a side-winding, Hammond-led funk burner marked by all manner of twists and turns, translates as “Brave Fighters”: The government-sponsored group was tasked with inspiring troops on the front lines of Somalia’s war with Ethiopia.
There’s a narrative implicit in the histories being told, one familiar from other Analog Africa compilations, and much of it comes down to the importance of radio. Radio Mogadishu, a government station, played a unifying role, helping draw people to the capital from remote corners of the nation. They brought with them the musical styles of their towns and villages and, in the city, blended those with cosmopolitan styles—rock, disco, reggae—carried on the airwaves from even farther away. It is a story of openness that is at stark odds with the past few decades of Somalia’s history.
The booklet includes an interview with Abshir Hashi Ali, the aging caretaker of Radio Mogadishu. A former police colonel, he was tasked with protecting its archives—an estimated 100,000 songs—when violence broke out in the early ’90s and Mogadishu was divided into clan-controlled enclaves. Over the years, he has seen the station targeted by Al Shabab, bombarded by Americans, and ransacked by looters; in one confrontation, he threw himself upon a grenade-toting thief who was determined to gain control of the building. “I… told him that we would both die before he took the keys from me,” Ali recalls. “I wasn’t joking and he understood that. So he left.” It’s in moments like these that the real importance of a project like this becomes clear. It’s easy to view a compilation like Mogadisco as yet another crate-digger’s search for funk’s holy grail—or, more cynically, to read the references to armed guards and suicide bombings as a kind of adventurism. But the music contained within constitutes the story of a people, a story currently in danger of vanishing, as Radio Mogadishu races to digitize its vast store of disintegrating tapes. “I have dedicated my life to this place,” says Ali. “I’m doing this so it can get to the next generation; so that the culture, the heritage and the songs of Somalia don’t disappear.” Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.

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The Bay Area rapper continues to make waves with an album of pop ‘n’ snap party records bookended by two more heartfelt cuts.

The Big Chang Theory

Nef the Pharaoh takes the weight of his hometown on his shoulders and struts like he’s not got a care in the world. Here’s a rising star who makes Vallejo street rap that pays homage to regional deities like Mac Dre and E-40 while simultaneously honoring Michael Jackson. Braggadocio is Neffy’s first language. He’ll drop silky raps for love interests on one song, nod 1990s-era Cash Money Records on the next, and can carry a hook that really sticks. He makes music for hedonists and lyrical purists alike, a creative writer who almost exclusively deals in music that could set off the club at any time.
Nef inked a deal with E-40’s Sick Wid It label a couple years back, solidifying what has become a very fruitful mentor-student relationship. Under 40’s guidance, Nef’s ethos was fully crystallized on last year’s The Chang Project and carries over here on The Big Chang Theory. The album begins with the heartfelt “Victim,” a surprise shot to the solar plexus and a highlight of art created in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Nef’s words and delivery are hopeless as he shakes his head at police brutality while admitting he’ll raise his son to hate cops with equal vigor. “Baby we got melanin, that’s why they hunt you,” he tells his kid. You’ll hear more trenchant analyses on race relations, but few will be as moving as hearing that the system has eroded a 23-year-old man to beyond repair—and that the cycle will likely impact his son, too.
Positioning “Victim” as the opening track gives it maximum impact, but Nef brings back personal issues again at the other end of the record. Rapping over the kind of piano chords 2Pac used to when he wanted to say something deep, closer “That Was God” offers a prayer. He gives thanks that no friends have been killed in 24-hours—such stark gratitude, but the melody of the hook is so simplistic, it captures the wide-eyed appreciation of faith that’s within Nef’s chest.
In between these moments of reflection are a grip of Bay Area party records, the kind of pop ‘n’ snap beats that the region has leaned on for decades without ever feeling worn out. “Boostin” updates JAY-Z’s “Girls Girls Girls” with Nef paying tribute to women in different area codes. “Big Boss Chang” is a Rick Ross-style declaration of his kingpin status, but Nef approaches the trope in his own way. Unlike Ross, he acknowledges the hyperreality of the claim (”This shit sound like a motherfuckin’ movie, goddamn”) before calling himself a young Evel Knievel (because he stunts so hard), and referring to knives as “Wesley Snipes” (Blade, you see). When it comes to trash-talking, there are few modern rappers that are better.
The only slight disappointment here is that The Big Chang Theory isn’t quite as strong as last year’s The Chang Project. That record felt like wall-to-wall potential singles. Even The Big Chang Theory’s flagship cut “86” isn’t quite as fluid and catchy as some of Neffy’s most bouncing moments. Culling the penultimate track “Totally Different” and its soft hook and wishy-washy beat would have helped the project’s batting average. But across both albums, Nef is the rare rapper who whose music feels free—free of narrative cohesion, outside interference, or any sense of pressure.


On Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites, the Sun Kil Moon singer offers piano-and-voice interpretations of songs ranging from Modest Mouse's “Float On” to “Send in the Clowns.”

Mark Kozelek: Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites

Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites

Cover songs have long been a crucial part of Mark Kozelek’s work. In the days of Red House Painters, Kozelek recorded devastating interpretations of songs by Kiss, Paul McCartney, and even Francis Scott Key to prove just how widely applicable his brand of melancholy was. His selection of covers—often picked straight from the classic-rock songbook—drew a clear line from his sepia-toned shoegaze to golden-era '70s radio, culminating in his curation of a John Denver tribute album at the turn of the millennium and his ensuing move toward more straight-ahead singer-songwriter material under the Sun Kil Moon moniker. In the first decade of the '00s, as Kozelek’s music found him less focussed on emotional extremes and more on the gray areas in between, he recorded subtle, gorgeous versions of songs by contemporaries like Low, Will Oldham, and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Up until his recent turn toward diaristic, autobiographical songwriting, these covers were some of his most revealing work: songs that felt as much a part of his legacy as any he had written.
In that sense, Kozelek’s latest collection of covers, Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites is his most classically Kozelekian release since 2010’s Admiral Fell Promises, the solo guitar mood piece that served as the finale for one season of his career, before 2012’s Among the Leaves ushered in a prolific era of controversies and absurdly big lyric sheets. Like Admiral Fell Promises, Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites features some material that will be familiar to longtime followers. Tracks like Bob Seger’s “Mainstreet” and the traditional folk song “Get Along Home Cindy” have appeared in his live sets for years. Meanwhile, a superior rendition of “Send in the Clowns” first showed up on his 2008 odds-and-ends collection The Finally LP, and “Float On” marks the twelfth Modest Mouse cover Kozelek has put to tape. As such, the title of this collection feels as much a means of drawing a tenuous thematic link between the material as it is a way of admitting, “These are just some songs that Mark Kozelek already knew the words to.” As with the previous release in this series (Sings Christmas Carols), you will probably know whether or not you want to hear it based on the title alone.
Still, it’s 2016 and it wouldn’t be a new Kozelek release without a few surprises. The most obvious change here is the fact that the sole accompaniment on the album is piano, an instrument used sparingly but effectively throughout his work. And while these performances are a far cry from, say, “Shadows”—the stirring piano ballad highlight from 1995’s Ocean Beach—Favorites has a few fine moments. “Float On,” a song whose tragic afterlife has found it Kidz Bopped and even worse, finally gets a rendition it deserves. Stripped of its iconic guitar hook, Kozelek’s rendition places the focus on the complex vocal climax at the end, made even more powerful by the understated piano part. Elsewhere, in a loving rendition of David Bowie’s “Win,” Chris Connolly's piano is the perfect accompaniment, alternating between jazzy, downtempo verses and bold choruses.
Other songs lack these dynamics, like the pleasant but unimaginative redos of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Roy Harper's “Another Day,” and the aforementioned Seger cover. Although the latter’s lyrics are a perfect fit for Kozelek’s recent turn toward rambling recollection, the performance feels characterless. While the best of Kozelek’s cover songs found him refitting the songs to suit his particular guitar tunings and vocal style, the arrangements here are mostly identical to their originals. Who would have listened to his AC/DC covers album if he had just strummed power chords and hummed along? On Favorites, it’s as if Kozelek just wandered into a piano bar, handed over a stack of sheet music, and hit record.
At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums. And while Kozelek’s weary, grumbly voice has helped to give a sense of depraved intensity to his last few releases, it sounds prettier here than it has in a while, thanks in part to the inherent melodicism of the songs he picked for the project. Still, for an artist whose cover songs used to reveal multitudes about the performer, Favorites mostly feels self-serving. Maybe that’s why he chose to start the set off with “Send in the Clowns,” a wry song of wasted love and regret. Coming from a 49-year-old guy who, with every new release, seems increasingly uninterested in pleasing anyone but himself, it also plays as a sort of non-apology. “My fault, I fear,” Kozelek sings, “I thought that you wanted what I wanted—sorry my dear.” What follows is a collection of songs that is unlikely to become anybody’s favorite: just more proof that Mark Kozelek Sings Whatever the Hell He Wants.


Unmasked in 2017 as Ghost’s mastermind, Tobias Forge trades in his papal regalia for a new persona on a darkly comic album that is lots of fun despite its flaws.

Prequelle

Call it the Daft Punk Principle: No matter how far they go to keep their true identities under wraps, a band of pseudonymous alter egos will eventually get unmasked—by the press, by their fans, or even by their own volition. So it has gone with Ghost. The Swedish rockers’ Catholic-inspired cosplay shtick finally unraveled in the courts last year, amid a royalties dispute between the group’s zombie-pope figurehead, Papa Emeritus (né Tobias Forge), and his band of chrome-masked sidemen, known as “Nameless Ghouls.” The biggest bombshell fell out of court, when Forge revealed to Radio Metal that he and the Ghouls had never been a group in the traditional sense. He went on to compare Ghost to pioneering black-metal act Bathory, who performed as a band but were essentially a solo outlet for multi-instrumentalist Tomas Börje “Quorthon” Forsberg.
His identity as Ghost’s architect revealed, Forge stood at the same crossroads where Kiss once found themselves. Would he stick to the outlandish personas and sepulchral faux communions for which he was known? Or would he prioritize songwriting over theatrics, ditching his papal roleplaying for a more straightforward sacrament? On Ghost’s explosive fourth album, Prequelle, the Swede straddles both paths, spiking the band’s old ornate style with youthful vigor.
Rather than reprising his role as Papa Emeritus, Forge has stepped into the Sunday shoes of one Cardinal Copia, a sprightly, pale-faced clergyman who rolls his R’s like Spanish royalty and carries a boombox wherever he goes. His gleeful, “Thriller”-esque choreography in the music video for “Rats,” Prequelle’s fist-pumping first single, epitomizes the record and the paradigm shift it heralds: As Forge pirouettes his way through the burning, rodent-infested streets like a vampiric Gene Kelly, Ghost’s old solemnity fades away, revealing an easily accessible dark comedy that proves immensely fun despite its flaws.
A concept album loosely centered around the Black Plague, Prequelle bridges the classic rock of Ghost’s most recent full-length—2015’s Grammy-winning Meliora—and the disco flirtations of 2016’s Popestar, an EP of covers that reinterpreted non-metal songs by Eurythmics, Echo and the Bunnymen, and more. But the second style predominates, with producer Tom Dalgety shoving proggy keyboard lines to the fore on songs like the ELO-tinged instrumental “Miasma” and “Pro Memoria,” a soaring reflection on mortality undercut by some of Ghost’s laziest lyrics to date (“Don’t you forget about dying/Don’t you forget about your friend death/Don’t you forget that you will die”). With its ham-fisted wordplay (“I wanna be/Wanna bewitch you in the moonlight,” goes the chorus) and four-on-the-floor rhythms, the album’s ABBA-worshiping centerpiece “Dance Macabre” is even goofy by Ghost’s standards—but it’s damn hard not to nod along with it.
Prequelle is not entirely devoid of raw power. “Rats” and “Witch Image” get their strength from smoldering licks and stacked harmonies plucked from the Ozzy Osbourne playbook, providing metalheads with a welcome break from all the mid-tempo durdling. Given the unremarkable tracks that follow it—particularly “Helvetesfönster,” an ostentatious, baroque instrumental reminiscent of Medieval Times muzak—the latter might as well be the record’s closer.
The real keeper, though, is “Faith,” a glam-rock stomper engineered for maximum impact, from the interwoven vocal arrangement (Forge’s demonic growls on the penultimate chorus deserve a shout-out of their own) down to the sidewinding solo. The unmasked Ghost’s revised approaches to dramaturgy and group dynamics don’t always sync on Prequelle, but when they do, the performance is nothing short of showstopping.


The Harlem rapper’s latest project merges mainstream and underground rap flows while combating the perils of newfound success.

Paranoia

A menacing production swallows the start of his new EP, Paranoia: A True Story, and Dave East gets straight to the point. The 808 Mafia crafts a beat fit for a phantom, tangled with warped violins and darting hi-hats. “Paranoia gettin’ the best of me/I don’t want nobody next to me,” he admits. For East, he’s assessing how far he’s come while scanning how far he has to go. With one foot on fame’s doorstep, and another rooted firmly in Harlem’s fast life, East doesn’t know who to trust—and for good reason.
After seven years of releasing mixtapes, the Harlem rapper’s buzz is growing beyond the streets. Channeling the spirit of Styles P and Jadakiss, East spews the narratives of his transformation from a Division 1 basketball player to an underground rapper. His mentor Nas signed him to Mass Appeal and he snagged a partnership with Def Jam. These two milestones alone seemed like a ticket out of the housing projects where he recorded hustler’s music like No Regrets and Gemini. But, with the recent murders of two of his cousins, it’s difficult for East to rest easy under fame’s spotlight.
A year ago, he was rapping, “Everybody keep telling me make a club record/You ain’t trappin’ no more, stop doing drug records.” This year, Paranoia attempts to merge the two. At times, East is introspective, mourning the losses of his cousin and aunt. Other times, he’s superficial, with a daily appetite for Philippe Chow. But even on his more polished efforts, he accentuates every bar, similar to the ’90s rappers he echoes. “I might have that ’dated’ flow, but I’m among all this young, wild turn up. I got the same energy,” says East, an alum of  XXL’s 2016 Freshman Class alongside acts like Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert. On Paranoia, East is a contortionist—flaunting his urge to be flexible, an ethos that challenges the notion that New York rap has to be all boom-bap beats.
East meets old acquaintances in the opening skit who say “I love you, boy” to his face and “Let’s get this nigga...,” once he leaves. With cynicism wrapping itself around East’s throaty delivery, paranoia courses through songs like “Wanna Be Me” and “Found a Way.” He’s seen friends turn on each other in “The Hated,” and is dodging schemers on “My Dirty Little Secret.” But the bottom of the album reveals why he’s become more paranoid over the last year and a half: his daughter Kairi Chanel. “Stash tucked away for my daughter in case them people find me,” he raps on the soulful “Have You Ever.” His unease is just a glimpse of vulnerability in a landscape where male fragility is an anomaly in street-centric rap.
Though East is in limbo, teetering between the fast pace of both worlds, his attempts at a more mainstream sound aren’t lost in translation. “Perfect,” a slow-burner with Chris Brown on the chorus, is a softer track that breaks his hardcore optics. Producer Harry Fraud lends his hand to “Maneuver,” crafting a similar horn-driven sound reminiscent of his work with French Montana’s breakout hit, “Shot Caller.” East pays homage to his mentor in its opening line, “I’m out for dead presidents to represent me,” and he and French dip and dodge on the flashy record.
True to its name, the project certainly feels like East is looking over his shoulder, but Paranoia feels a bit disjointed. The skits and interludes are drawn out and do little to drive the concept forward, and Nas’ “feature” is nothing more than him talking on the track. East has described this project as an “appetizer” for his debut album. With the machine of Def Jam behind him, East has the ability to deliver a stronger debut album. He’s made a conscious effort to withhold some stories from his come up, not just hood tales but stories of class divisions in America, told not as a gimmick on record but as reality without a mic. And judging from his work this year, he’s not running out of bars.


Ancient Warfare are a quartet from Lexington, Ky. that trades in cinematic Americana. Their debut is coolly understated and compelling, a vision of America laying somewhere between concrete and dreamscape and containing echoes of numerous previous decades.

The Pale Horse

The band name and album title for Ancient Warfare's The Pale Horse suggests metal—something blackened, possibly from somewhere Scandinavian. But the band turns out to be a quartet based in Lexington, Ky. that trades in cinematic Americana. Focused around the songwriting, singing, and guitar playing of Echo Wilcox, Ancient Warfare take a well-worn form and invest it with some of the mystery of its best practitioners. From the start of the album, where a low guitar reverb effect leads to a quick pause before Wilcox simply sings the title word of the opening track, "Darlin'", there's a heavy-lidded mood at play the kind of slow intensity that can be terribly boring in the wrong hands, but The Pale Horse is immediately compelling. In the first song alone, there are quiet touches that emerge with time—how the violin part floats upward, the extra guitar notes picked out towards the conclusion—testifying to the quiet power of a carefully detailed performance.
Wilcox began Ancient Warfare as a solo project in 2010, with the encouragement of Shangri-La Productions' Duane Lundy, who serves as this record's producer and engineer. By now, she has assembled a powerful lineup: the muffled, reverbed punch of Emily Hagihara's drumming on "Dreamcatcher" loosely evokes "Be My Baby", while Wilcox intones "dream" like a woozy afterecho of the Everly Brothers, even as the arrangement gets noisier. Hagihara also contributes piano, bass, and vocals on nearly every track, while Rachael Yanarella's violin work serves as both melodic counterpoint and ghostly atmosphere.
But Wilcox remains the center of the band, exuding a cool confidence in her singing and playing. Hers is the kind of rich voice that blends beautifully into the arrangements even while you yearn to hear more of it on it's own. The entire album is a mood piece to some degree, but it never simply repeats itself: Sometimes it's as simple as a quiet key change or a shift from lyrics to wordless tones, as near the conclusion of "Tusk and Mouth". Never once does she sound like she is straining to get across.
Lyrically, her voice is still emerging, but even with slightly forced lines like "Kentucky's shades of grace," from "Lickin' Lies", she sells it with her detached cool. The less graceful turns of phrase are still of a piece with the impressionistic stories she weaves. Her vision of America is understated, laying somewhere between concrete and dreamscape and containing echoes of numerous previous decades. Depending on your angle of approach, you could hear Lee Hazlewood, Emmylou Harris's riffs on cosmic American music, the Walkabouts, Mazzy Star, Mojave 3. (The bandmembers themselves have namechecked figures like Aimee Mann, Patti Smith, Karen O, and the Pixies.) But despite all these other voices informing theirs, Ancient Warfare have hit upon a singular lonesome-highway energy, the kind that you can study but cannot fake.


Matthew E. White's debut shares a number of traits with his hero Randy Newman's Good Old Boys: it's southern, definitely other, and full of tales about painfully human creatures yearning for transcendence, and finding that their flawed flesh-and-blood selves get in the way.

Big Inner

Years before he became known to younger generations as a grinning, gray-haired fixture at the Academy Awards, perpetually nominated for life-affirming musical contributions to whatever Pixar blockbuster came out the year before, Randy Newman created tangible three-dimensional worlds in the space of two-minute songs. Matthew E. White was among those who got lost in those worlds, rubbing shoulders with the funny and fucked-up characters that Newman created out of a singular mix of spite and empathy. White became so obsessed with Newman that he eventually tracked down the 60-something singer-songwriter at his Los Angeles home, and handed him his own CDs. It was, in a way, a passing-of-the-torch in reverse.
In White's mind, his debut album, Big Inner, might very well be an attempt to re-create Newman's 1974 concept album about southern otherness, Good Old Boys. Inner is certainly southern, it's definitely other, and the songs collectively tell the kind of story that always appealed to Newman, about painfully human creatures yearning for spiritual transcendence and finding that their own flawed, flesh-and-blood selves always seem to get in the way. But where Newman was among the most literary of the late-60s/early-70s post-Dylan generation of singer-songwriters, White's primary mode of expression on Inner is musical. With his background in jazz arranging and natural grasp of American roots music, the native Virginian has positioned himself at the head of a corps of young and veteran musicians-- including Bon Iver's Reggie Pace, Phil Cook of Megafaun, and David Hood-- determined to revive long-lost record-making traditions in the service of re-imagining psychedelic music as gospel hymns.
Big Inner is the first product of Spacebomb, a production entity and record label with a house band composed of White, bassist Cameron Ralston, and drummer Pinson Chanselle at its core. (There is also a sizeable horn and string section, and a choir.) The idea is to bring artists to White's Richmond, Virginia, headquarters-- essentially the attic of a house on the west side of town-- and arrange their songs in the mold of velvety 70s soul, laidback New Orleans funk, and cosmic country-rock, with a special emphasis on vintage-sounding instrumentation and sweaty intimacy.
White introduces Spacebomb as a fully realized aesthetic right away on Inner's opening track "One of These Days", which has the pulse of Willie Mitchell's productions for Al Green's magical run of early-70s LPs. White and his band play softly but not without purpose; their grip on the central groove remains steadfast even as a procession of ghostly funeral horns enter the picture to send the song in a pleasantly disorienting direction.
He revisits this subtle uneasiness between beauty and chaos throughout Big Inner, as the songs lyrically explore the ecstasy and agony of religion, and how it can explain away the mysteries of the universe, but never permanently. The stately gospel number "Gone Away" is mired in death, with the lord's mysterious ways offering little in the way of consolation. White sings in a pained murmur about how "we cling to the cross with tremblin' and fear," because we know the end will inevitably come. If "Gone Away" pulls you into the darkness, the sinewy bass line in "Big Love" implores you to dance away the knowledge of impending mortality. "Let's begin to spiral," White says, and-- as gospel music is intended to do-- he makes that universal "sinking into the unknown" feeling seem uplifting.
Randy Newman's gift was making his snapshots of racist rednecks and drunken asshole romantics seem like actual people, rather than the creations of a wise-ass Angeleno preoccupied by southern culture on the skids. White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul. The final song on Big Inner, the nearly 10-minute "Brazos", wraps with White and his choir repeating a mantra about how Jesus is our friend and can deliver us from "life's crushing blow." Whether that's truth or fiction is irrelevant; in the magical moments that White creates, it's the wonderment that matters.


The prolific songwriter’s latest is an acoustic detour, a quiet soundtrack for overcast days.

“Hello, Hi”

The key to Ty Segall’s appeal is his sheer volume—not in terms of decibels but rather his creative output. “Hello, Hi” is his 14th proper solo album but that number balloons if his collaborations, cassette-only releases, cover albums, live records, and other miscellanea get added to the mix. Constant motion doesn't leave much time for reflection and, fittingly, there isn’t much room to breathe within Segall’s music: It’s a flurry of fuzz tones and frenzied, frenetic rhythms, all tied together with trippy melodies.
Some gnarly guitars rear their ugly heads on “Hello, Hi”, but it’s mostly a departure for Segall, bringing the 35-year-old songwriter to quieter environs where he can pick an acoustic guitar and harmonize with himself. The shift might be attributed to the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the second full album he has released since the coronavirus outbreak, preceded by cloistered noise of 2021’s Harmonizer.
“Hello, Hi” shares a basic origin story with Harmonizer. Both albums were recorded at Harmonizer Studios, a workspace Segall installed in his home in Topanga, California. On Harmonizer, he waded through thick smears of synths and guitar grime. Here, he’s weaving plucked and strummed acoustic instruments guitars into tapestries accentuated by layers of harmonies and the occasional noisy squall. It’s like a photo negative of a typical Ty Segall record; every familiar component is in place, they’re just presented in a different shade that makes it clear what colorful elements are missing.
Sudden movements, clattering rhythms, and Segall’s devilish sense of humor may be absent, but the calmer surroundings focus attention on the candied harmonies and sweeter melodies. It's a soundtrack for overcast days, not sunny carefree afternoons. Often, Segall's reedy warble resembles the elfin trill of Marc Bolan, particularly on the soft, spartan settings of “Blue” and “Don’t Lie.” For a musician as steeped in glam and garage as Ty Segall, such T. Rex allusions are certainly deliberate, and while they’re pleasant, even charming, these nods wind up highlighting how so much of his work stems from this formative influence: He's finally worked his way back to the ’60s and delivered his own Tyrannosaurus Rex record.
There are certainly pleasures in such fan worship. Ty Segall is an expert craftsman, sequencing albums so the gaps of silence—such as the slow crawl that acts like a fanfare on “Good Morning”—have as much impact as the burly guitars on the title track. This graceful ebb and flow is evident on individual cuts like “Looking at You,” where a gentle folky guitar phrase expands and contracts with increasingly forceful overdriven guitars. And yet, it’s best appreciated holistically. The dead space and repetition are what give the album its momentum, and the ambling detours have an idiosyncratic charm that belongs entirely to Segall.


Swedish psych band the Amazing's new album is one of the rare rock records of recent vintage drawing discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy.

Picture You

The Amazing’s Christoffer Gunrup would probably make fast friends with Mark Kozelek. At least to the extent you can predict anyone would. Not only is Picture You one of the surprisingly rare rock records of recent vintage drawing legitimate, discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin, Gunrup just so happens to be influenced by the same exact songs Kozelek namechecked on his spellbinding autobiography "I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’". There’s the Fender Rhodes hum of "No Quarter", as well as the capability to touch on jazz and prog-rock without being "jazzy" or "proggy". The Amazing spend vast stretches of time strolling the verdant expanses of "Rain Song", as well as basking in the glimmering acoustic sunrises of "Bron-Yr-Aur". And Gunrup’s vocals are that of a very melancholy kid mesmerized by everything, one who did see Zep as gods, but benevolent and nurturing ones—more Pan and Demeter than Dionysus.
The end result is a record that reverently draws from a dazzling array of past masters only to short-circuit critical capacity. Discussion of Picture You can only end up with slack-jawed remarks about how goddamn pretty it is. Stranger still is how the adverbs you’d feel tempted to latch onto that superlative somehow makes that seem like a bad thing: "obscenely pretty," "ridiculously beautiful," etc.  But the Amazing specialize in a beauty that isn’t airbrushed or slick or antiseptic, the kind captured by lad mags or Trevor Horn, everything exaggerated to emphasize its status as eye or ear candy. Nor is it smudged or vaporous like shoegaze. It doesn’t even make a full attempt at an au naturel realism of folk or the otherworldliness of psych-rock, though it does touch on those aspects. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy or intimidate.
Opener "Broken" is the Amazing at their most grand, but not grandiose—the guitars dip in the same deep water as the Cure's Disintegration, while Moussa Fadera plays his drums with the activity of Keith Moon or John Bonham. Yet, the guitars merely come off as being coated with morning dew, every cymbal splash sounds like it’s releasing a light ocean spray. Even when "Safe Island" ends with nearly three minutes of blistering harmonic feedback, it’s never meant to overwhelm, it’s more the encroaching low heat of a sweat lodge. This part is notably absent from the "single" version.
The Amazing’s previous album was called Gentle Stream and very much earned that title; this one is more like a lazy river—you know, the weekend summer outing where an inner tube with a cooler of beer drags behind, long stretches of a calming buzz that evolves into some serious disorientation only after you figure out where you’ve been the past six minutes. This is pretty much the whole point of "To Keep It Going", where Gunrup repeats the title and only the title for its five-minute duration. Picture You doesn’t jam or meander, it drifts knowing its final destination is preordained—“Fryshusfunk” and the title track take a few minutes to commit to basic song structures before getting into vast stretches of lead guitar interplay that never quite becomes soloing. The Amazing can be concise, though prototypical psych-folk fusions like "Tell Them You Can’t Leave" turn out to be the parts where Picture You feels like it loses focus.
There is focus here, though it's hard to elucidate: While the Amazing could certainly find themselves winning over the same festival crowds swooning to Tame Impala’s Lonerism and the War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream, what Picture You lacks compared to those albums is, well, a frame. Or at least the knowledge of who "you" is. Gunrup doesn’t commit his lyrics to the credits, and he even admits this on the band's website: "I have no idea how to describe the songs. If you theorize about the songs, it ruins the tension and passion. Just shut the fuck up and play, but play good."
In other words, he might have no better idea than I do about what these songs are actually about. And I certainly have no idea. "The Headless Boy" is the drumless acoustic ballad where the lyrics are most audible and it’s as slippery as the song called "Fryshusfunk". But during the Meddle-esque "Circles", Dunrup mentions watching Beverly Hills Cop II, whose soundtrack contains songs such as "I Want Your Sex" and Bob Seger’s "Shakedown", which exist in a completely different solar system than the one occupied by "Circles". But the impression given by Gunrup is that the same headspace that would lead someone to watching Beverly Hills Cop II in its entirety is similar to the one that’s amenable to Picture You—a fugue state where you somehow manage to be happily committed to your own incapacitation.


*Life Without Sound *is the most contemplative Cloud Nothings album yet.

Life Without Sound

With every album, Cloud Nothings have bailed on their past and re-shaped themselves into something more vital. Over their first three albums, Cleveland native Dylan Baldi seemed to be flooring the pedal in search of inspiration, from the lo-fi indie of singles collection Turning On to the pop-punk indebted self-titled debut to the increasingly serrated and howling peaks of Attack on Memory and Here and Nowhere Else. Somewhere in the long-gestating creation of their new album, however, Baldi stopped sprinting and briefly stalled out. Unsatisfactory demos piled up. Unproductive recording sessions and frustrations mounted, and a year of recording stretched on, the longest time Baldi had ever spent making one record. (Here and Nowhere Else was written after slamming some bad coffee and writing songs the day before.) Finally he broke through, and Life Without Sound, the result, is the most contemplative Cloud Nothings album yet.
This time, instead of becoming faster or more volatile, they pump the brakes and smooth out some of their more coarse edges. Baldi was inspired by the chaotic, freeform improvisations of  New York composer Malcolm Goldstein, and the album boasts an open-ended, impressionist feel that’s new for them. The quiet, almost mournful piano solo of “Up to the Surface” opens the album, and when Baldi’s voice appears, his singing is subtle and restrained. Displaced, disoriented, and alone, he paints a portrait of fire on the horizon and a planet frozen over. The narrator of Life Without Sound has a lot of this kind of stuff in his back pocket—poetry about isolation, desperation, self-evaluation, and trying to find a place in the world. The drama is rich, so when the lyrics temporarily fall away and the sound suddenly becomes massive, the payoff feels huge.
Producer John Goodmanson (whose pedigree includes records by Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab, and Unwound) recorded the band for three weeks, and in that time, he helped build moments like the climax of “Up to the Surface”—a big whorl of sound where TJ Duke’s bass lines become massive, threatening to eclipse Jayson Gerycz’s point-perfect drum fills and some dependably catchy riff work from Baldi. The album regularly oscillates between calm and upheaval, and with Goodmanson’s help, Cloud Nothings ride valleys into peaks effortlessly.
Baldi’s vocals were the final element to be recorded on the album, and he delivers his most emotionally complex performance to date. There’s a bruised quality to his delivery on “Surface” and an assertive resolve when he sings about moving on (and looking back) on “Enter Entirely.” You can hear both confidence and fragility on “Modern Act.” He’s always been good, but the album provides the best showcase for Baldi’s voice yet.
The biggest knock against Life Without Sound is that it comes up short on hooks. Historically, the most powerful Cloud Nothings tracks bob and weave in search of new melodies, turning up new earworms to replace the ones from moments earlier. Look at “I’m Not Part of Me” (maybe their best song)—each new hook somehow manages to dunk on the one that came before until the chorus reaches a shout-along fever pitch. There are scattered examples of this songwriting on Life Without Sound, but some songs just spin in place. “Darkened Rings” begins with momentum, but beyond its initial rush, it’s short on ideas. “Realize My Fate” becomes repetitive and stagnant even when the band turns the screws on the tension. Screams, massive guitar tone, and a muscular performance, it turns out, can only go so far.
Baldi has called Life Without Sound the band’s version of new age music. (Warning: Do not attempt to meditate to this loud guitar music.) The songs come with uplifting mantras (“feel right, feel lighter”) and encourage reflection in tumultuous times (“I knew peace in the terror of the mind”). Baldi declares his intentions to move past the heaviness, though he knows full well that’s easier said than done. “Moving on but I still feel it/You’re just a light in me now,” he sings, repeatedly, on “Enter Entirely.” It’s a powerful message, but it takes more than words to make this kind of music feel inspirational. They’ve eased back from their most breakneck inclinations, and while Life Without Sound isn’t their strongest work, it’s got the seeds that could lead to their next definitive statement. History shows, anyway, that Baldi’s not going to make the same record twice.


On his debut album, the 20-year-old Florida rapper offers a dead-eyed approximation of the SoundCloud rap zeitgeist; it’s an album full of undirected transgressions, less thrilling than numbing.

DEADSTAR

Smokepurpp’s DEADSTAR is an album that captures the sound of the moment. That’s neither a criticism nor a compliment. Its tempered-aggro style has a certain rawness to it, and it would be difficult to call it calculated. But it’s also not apt to surprise. His debut promises and delivers about what one could expect from a 20-year-old rapper in the right place (Florida) at the right time (now) stumbling dead-eyed over the zeitgeist. DEADSTAR is a consistent exercise in competence, of interest mainly for its proximity to the energy of this exact second.
Smokepurpp rose up from SoundCloud’s drug-addled underground, elevated in part thanks to his friendship with star, collaborator, and half-meme/half-man Lil Pump. Lil Pump short-circuits lots of things that make rap interesting, suggesting that the parodic repetition of tropes is really all the music needs to be about. Occasionally, he’s momentarily convincing. But Smokepurpp doesn’t convey the same sense of embodying a living exaggeration, and his personality feels slight, by contrast.
Nonetheless, the album’s greatest strengths are the novelty of its sound and Purpp’s ability to fit himself to that template without rocking the boat. Producer Ronny J, a New Jersey-born beatmaker who produces almost half of the album, is largely responsible for the former. His beats split the difference between the subtler, more musically adroit compositions of producer Pierre Bourne and the aggressive, bass-shredding bombast of XXXTentacion’s scene breakthrough “Look At Me!” That song serves as a blueprint for records like Smokepurpp’s “Audi,” for which Ronny J serves up a slab of thundering bass and harsh distortion.
With a beefier sound than Bourne, and an ear for rough-edged timbral and textural choices, Ronny J understands how best to complement the edgy, rock-inflected style of this new wave. The beats have a swaggering, macho affect, and the bass is mixed as if the speakers themselves can’t hold it. Songs by other producers reflect a similar tone; on the Ice Bream-produced “Bless Yo Trap,” each bar is punctuated with a red-alert siren and an echoing shot that slowly decays in the acrid atmosphere. (The occasional nursery-rhyme hook or carousel-like cadence can overlay whimsy atop this ominous canvas, giving songs a demented tint.) Though Ronny’s beats are sophisticated in some respects, the effect is the opposite: a bludgeoning, percussive, atmosphere-rending sound that aims to unsettle. It takes a sleeker, strip-club-oriented template and scuffs it, letting the wear and tear show.
This fits the entire rebellious pose of the movement; DEADSTAR’s cover is an homage to the funeral of semi-renowned shock-rock artist GG Allin, whose transgressive reputation (if not his music) has recently taken on portentous significance in hip-hop’s collective Pinterest mood board. The content throughout the album reflects Smokepurpp’s stated M.O.: “ignorance,” which feels like a headlong, punk-rock embrace of aimless self destruction, shaped by the shock-realism of the drill wave: “Off the lean, like a kickstand, can’t feel anything/Got a full clip I’m busting everything.” There’s lots of drugs, and guns, and sex, and cash. Its an album of undirected transgressions, and the effect is less thrilling than numbing. It’s tough to determine when that is a purposeful tonal choice or a default stance driven by a lack of imagination.
Smokepurpp’s style of rapping is straightforward, under-stylized, and unencumbered by the obligations of artistic self-consciousness. Why should he be, when the most successful streaming rap artist of the moment—Post Malone—is a massive, scalable triumph simply by repeating a series of unbelievable rap cliches? Similarly, Purpp’s lyrics seldom escape overfamiliar generality. It’s not that he’s not believable; it’s that each line takes a well-worn path, offering little to hang onto, little to distinguish it from earlier artists’ truths: novelty, principles, humor. In the second half of DEADSTAR, Smokepurpp’s sound begins to open up a bit, showing more musical range as the melodies creep in. It’s a smart move, to keep him from being painted into a corner by the of-the-moment sound that has defined him so far, particularly when there are bigger stars in that lane.
Yet rather than a developing a melodic approach, it’s his rapping (and writing) that could offer the greatest opportunity to redefine his sound in the wake of the Florida/SoundCloud rap takeover. This album offers little beyond its surface, though that surface is crafted with capable efficiency. What’s missing are those idiosyncrasies which suggest an artist honing his voice, pushing himself into more uncomfortable places, channeling his curiosity in the pursuit of a new creative path, or simply broadening his range by experimenting with the genre’s wide toolkit. These come with experience and applied passion. He’s a new artist, young and unproven, but he’s built a large audience. Optimistically, this is an opportunity for Smokepurpp, a ramp which will lead to a deepening of his stylistic acumen. Or it won’t.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit k.d. lang’s landmark 1992 album, an emotive and daring reinvention for the former country singer.

Ingénue

k.d. lang’s career started with a round of open-heart surgery. In 1983, the woman born Kathryn Dawn was involved in a 12-hour performance art piece in which she and her peers in Edmonton, Canada, re-enacted the first artificial heart transplant, using pickled carrots and beets for the organ. There are no surviving reports of the audience’s response, but lang recalled that the players came away dazed.
A year later, she took her career in a more conventional direction, albeit marginally. lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star. Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.
That’s a challenge for any artist—how to create an original expression of love or heartbreak when those emotions have been so comprehensively codified by decades of pop music? lang’s circumstances were very particular. She was irrevocably in love with a married woman, and there was nothing she could do, no cooling-off period she could wait out, to get what she desired. The crush was a lost cause, and despite heavy rumors about her sexuality and a much-remarked upon lesbian contingent in her fanbase, lang was also not yet officially out. It was the early 1990s: Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t come out for five years, AIDS-related deaths wouldn’t peak for another four, and President George H. W. Bush was renouncing his earlier support for gay marriage in a shameless attempt to maintain power. And yet, lang wanted to convey the specificity of her pain to as broad an audience as possible.
She was also perturbed by how pop was starting to crowd out the singing parts with the rhythm parts. Seeking a vehicle worthy of her voice, lang decided to hark back to the age of Peggy Lee, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney, the adult contemporary sound of her parents’ generation. The gulf between her artistic whims and mainstream potential could hardly have seemed wider. But lang, who had sewn plastic farm animals to her gingham skirt in her earliest, kitschiest phase as a country star, was skilled at subverting what seemed anachronistic, even if the growing queercore scenes in Olympia and London wrote her off as a mopey blight on their cause. That is the beauty of 1992’s Ingénue, which looks however you want it to look depending on the light—radical queer ur-text or MOR reverie—and lets lang shapeshift accordingly. It was her first all-original album for a reason, allowing her to create modes of tragedy, defeat, and roleplay as she tried to distill the truest essence of her own heartbreak, a state that makes subjugated clichés of us all.
Ingénue is irresistibly seductive, so much so that it drives home just how unavailable lang’s crush was: How could she resist this? lang described the sound of Ingénue as “post-nuclear cabaret” and “nouveau easy listening”: Opener “Save Me” soothes the room like a bath filling up, making the light swim and the temperature rise. From there, lang and stalwart collaborator Ben Mink conjure a sense of intimacy so acute it feels like a confrontation. Their obsessive “sonic cleanliness” heightens the atmosphere to a peak of sensitivity: The tapering bass of “Wash Me Clean,” a song that is otherwise pure, sustained glow, might as well be a finger running down the inside of your wrist. Long before the term ASMR was coined, lang knew how to simulate the sensations of heartbreak: the obsessively lovelorn can trigger the memory (or fantasy) of connection until it’s wrung dry, the spark drained.
But lang also threw in showpieces that showed exactly how dizzying heartbreak can be. Sometimes she vaulted between the two impulses in one song: “Season of Hollow Soul” starts with tense bass, brushed rattles, and clipped hi-hats, lang singing about her pain with the coyness of a detective surveying a crime scene but knowing better than to leave any trace. Then a skirt-ruffling, timpani-bashing chorus rushes in, a manic celebration of love’s capriciousness—“Fate must have a reason!” lang booms—familiar to anyone who has ever grasped for rationale in the pit of despair. lang upped the drama with nods to klezmer music and other European traditions, as well as the work of Kurt Weill and George Gershwin. The insistent dulcimer strings that herald “Still Thrives This Love” and the accordion that plumps the chorus of “So It Shall Be” set Ingénue further out of time, and heighten its underrated playfulness.
Obviously, nowhere is this clearer than on “Miss Chatelaine,” which earned its high camp credentials even before the lang accompanied it with a video where she wore the high-bouffanted, ballgown-clad drag of femininity, the lesbian Liberace. Here, lang is perplexed at how unrequited love has reduced her to this quivering parody, but also evidently delighted by it. You could read a little internalized misogyny into this—the song was named for a Canadian home-keeping magazine—but that would be boring, and miss the point. She takes the mickey out of herself: “Every time your eyes meet mine/Clouds of qualm burst into sunshine!” is not a lyric that found a second life on a Valentine’s Day card. And “Miss Chatelaine” is a towering millefeuille of accordion, frisky percussion and strings, a succession of audible exclamation points—a song with so many ornate moving parts that it’s easier to imagine its blueprint as a cuckoo clock than a black and white musical staff.
Ingénue—an album named for the roles ascribed to young women, and one that early screen stars wilfully exploited for professional reward—often finds lang questioning who she has become in the wilds of heartbreak. “The Mind of Love” comes from a similarly comic school to “Miss Chatelaine,” a pillowy torch song where she considers her plight with tender impatience. “Talking to myself/Causing great concern for my health,” she declares, with operatic boldness, only to circle in on the joke and ask, “Where is your head, Kathryn?” in an all-time great example of a star singing their own name. But lang also plays it dejected, a mode that can seem to weigh heavy given her evident spryness.
“Tears of Love’s Recall” is, at least technically, the album’s least interesting song—lang’s usual pin-drop vocal delivery is flattened to a series of unengaging sustained notes, and its cinematic air feels rote compared to the creativity elsewhere. And the lyrics are oblique, even tortured, like bad Shakespeare: “Love, thing of might and dread, stays the savior and poison to all of heart and head,” she sings over a pattering dirge. But what feels like emotion held at arm’s length spoke specifically to the elusive experience of queerness at the time. Reflecting on Ingénue for its 25th anniversary, lang remarked that its sometimes obtuse nature felt like a form of protection: “It was our own prison that we were trying to break out of, but it was also our comfort zone.”
On Ingénue, you hear lang brushing against the limits of internal experience. It’s an album about purgatory, a place where you work out who you are. But then there’s the lonely, self-flagellating hermitage of it. There is the private fantasy of a self, a side that lang makes genuinely sexy: “I can exist being caught by your kiss,” she belts on “So It Shall Be,” a moment of subjugation that soon melts away. “Outside Myself,” Ingénue’s most beautifully written song, explicitly evokes that dislocation: “I’ve been outside myself for so long,” she heaves, answering the earlier question from “The Mind of Love. It’s a great, rueful sigh of realization that obsession is as much self-neglect as self-indulgence.
Ingénue’s final track, “Constant Craving,” is lang’s conclusion to all this, a brilliant song about how yearning runs deep within us all, yet one that feels tacked on, in sound and in spirit. It’s brisker than everything that came before it, as if her label had asked lang to come up with a potential hit, although its plaintive accordion and melodramatic vocal tumbles probably weren’t going to shake Kriss Kross and Sir Mix-a-Lot from the top of the Billboard charts. And lang’s sanguine takeaway was another depersonalized construction—“Constant craving has always been.” She had sewed up the wound.
That it was this song that became a hit (No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100; later peaking at No. 15 in the UK) probably protected her. She released Ingénue in March 1992. Three months later, k.d. lang came out in an interview to The Advocate magazine, and her heartbreak had to bear the weight of a massive socio-cultural shift. Suddenly, Madonna was likening her to Elvis and seeing the potential in letting rumors about a dalliance spread; Cindy Crawford was sensually shaving her face on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, the best magazine cover of all time. lang enjoyed the performance of stardom for a little while before retreating again. She knew it wasn’t her.


As a musical companion EP to 2016's HOPELESSNES, Anohni makes explicit the connections between gender and ecocide, and asks herself and her audience to recognize complicity and take action.

Paradise EP

In May 2016, just a few weeks after releasing her powerful record HOPELESSNESS, Anohni debuted an accompanying live performance at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. The cavernous drill hall amplified her thunderous production to prophetic heights, but the presentation was less a showcase of artistry than it was a persuasive address. Anohni herself stood shrouded in a veiled habit beneath a towering screen that showed an assortment of women mouthing along to her songs. Never once was she, nor her collaborators Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and Christopher Elms, the center of attention. The point was clear: the words coming out of her mouth are so universal and enduring that they are greater than one individual.
Nine of the artists, poets, and activists featured in the Armory show reappear on the cover of Anohni’s newest seven-song EP, Paradise. They are shown weeping, drenched in blood, faces weary with pain. These are the people whose concerns Anohni works to vocalize, those who understand that womanhood and the Earth from which we subsist are deeply intertwined. “Only an intervention by women around the world,” Anohni writes in an accompanying piece, “With their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy, and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.” The singer has spoken extensively about gender and ecocide as a member of the Future Feminism collective, but never before has she been so explicit about their cause-and-effect relationship. “My mother’s love/Her gentle touch/My father’s hand/Rest on my throat,” she sings on the title track, contrasting the feminine Earth with those who wish her harm. More than simply tossing around blame on Paradise, Anohni takes responsibility herself and urges her audience to do so as well.
Once again reunited with her production crew of Lopatin and Hudson Mohawke, Paradise comes off as a HOPELESSNESS companion piece rather than a stand-alone album. Even as her music grows increasingly industrial, the organic remains a constant presence, a subtle reminder that we carry the earth within us. Like a biodome filled with an assortment of ecosystems, Paradise jumps from rocky and volcanic to chirping and tropical with just the slightest change of beat, while each song sticks closely to its appointed terrain. On the furious title track, skittering percussion and booming production support Anohni as she describes apocalyptic loss and turmoil. “Staring at myself/I feel giant and trapped/Seemingly/Without escape,” she observes, inferring that the Earth’s destruction incites mortal dysmorphia. “I’m here, not here.”
The abrasive “Jesus Will Kill You” picks up where HOPELESSNESS’ “Obama” left off, a mournful interrogation of those who use their power to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. “Ricochet,” on the other hand, is a joyful, bouncing promise to “curse” and “hate” the creator for the state of existence. Both songs’ invocation of a punitive deity may seem sudden since Anohni tends to explore corporeal matters rather than the spiritual. But in the year since HOPELESSNESS, her rage and pain have transcended human action.
The final track, “She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss,” also closed out the Armory show and was the most powerful moment of the evening. The song itself is a pleading ballad about how the Earth holds her tears and simply accepts change. “Who will remember her? If not her children,” Anohni asks. As it was at the Armory, the rhetorical question is again raised by a speech Aboriginal artist Ngalangka Nola Taylor originally presented at the World Economic Forum. “We are wondering what is happening to the world. Everything is change, changing,” she asks in broken English. “How are we going to stop and work on it and work together and make the world a better place to live for all of us?” Anohni provided one solution just days before the release of Paradise.
She revealed on Facebook that the EP contains a seventh bonus track called “I Never Stopped Loving You” that is available for a small price: “a gesture of anonymous vulnerability” communicated over email. By asking her audience to connect intimately in exchange for a piece of herself, Anohni presents a reminder that there is a human behind the materials we consume, just like there is an Earth from which we were born and from which we harm without thought. Paradise challenges its listeners to emotionally engage with their surroundings in hopes that they develop a conscious understanding that there are consequences to our daily conveniences. As Anohni continues her resistance, she recognizes the battle is impossible to win without an open heart.


The black metal firebrands achieve a rapturous synthesis of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophical pontifications and musical obsessions.

Origin of the Alimonies

Liturgy have never opted for the path of least resistance or readiest acceptance. When they burst from Brooklyn nearly a dozen years ago, they were an exhilarating addition to an already promising U.S. black metal scene, aggressive enough to command and strange enough to captivate. They could have made a fine career in that image; instead, their firebrand inclinations prevailed. Founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix raised hackles with a high-minded black metal manifesto. Aesthethica burrowed deeper into theology with post-rock muscle, while The Ark Work confounded through mystical chants that recalled Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Philip Glass. Last year’s H.A.Q.Q., made with a new lineup after an extended hiatus, went wild with symphonic flourishes and brittle electronic edits. Such provocation could sometimes feel glib and hollow, as though the wholly serious Hunt-Hendrix were tickling black metal just to see if it would flinch. Liturgy became troll bait, a punchline.
But Origin of the Alimonies, Liturgy’s second album in as many years, is as believable as it is provocative, as obvious as it is obscure. A rapturous synthesis of Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophical pontifications and musical enthusiasms, Origin finds a balance that has long proven elusive for Liturgy. Like Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady almost 60 years earlier, Origin of the Alimonies wrestles with ideas that can seem too grand for music to contain; throughout these seven tracks, it sounds as if Hunt-Hendrix were fighting to hold the reins enough to make the point once and for all. On Liturgy’s most compelling album in a decade, and arguably ever, she does.
Liturgy’s black metal core, built around Hunt-Hendrix’s time-stretching “burst beats,” remains intact, thanks to the return of the athletic quartet that debuted on H.A.Q.Q. But a gaggle of marquee New York improvisers—trumpeter Nate Wooley, flautist Eve Essex, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and so on—broaden Liturgy’s textures and techniques. Scraped violin strings chatter with tremolo guitars. Pounded piano figures complicate splenetic rhythms. At one point, during “The Fall of SIHEYMEN,” Liturgy sound like a symphony being led by John Zorn toward the Naked City.
This mix may seem off-putting at first. Despite the transgressive audacity of each previous Liturgy release, none has been so full of distinct ideas or different idioms. The record begins and ends with alternately tense or tender chamber-ensemble miniatures, delicate passages that suggest infinite ellipses. Between them, there are spans of yearning black metal, gyrating electroacoustic improvisation, and strutting electronic meters, all splintered, shaved, and spliced into uncanny mosaics. Origin—meticulously arranged, concisely edited for maximum impact—is by far the shortest Liturgy album. This brevity can feel disorienting, like watching a television that shuffles among several channels every few seconds.
“Apparition of the Eternal Church,” the record’s 14-minute climax, is an interpretation of Olivier Messiaen’s Apparition de l'eglise eternelle for a black metal band and pulsing piano. Messiaen’s piece is a beautiful but foreboding masterwork about the shock of encountering God for roaring organ. Liturgy’s version is equal parts ecstasy and terror. Hunt-Hendrix and Bernard Gann divide the melody between their guitars and a string section, a combination that foretells a glorious crescendo and a horrible calamity. Neither arrives. Instead, Liturgy collapse, as if falling prostrate before God in an overdue moment of acceptance and release.
Musical twists and spasms aside, Origin is the most approachable Liturgy album yet. It is, as billed, an origin story, an allegorical narrative for the mechanisms of our universe. The specifics get arcane, so start with this simplification: Light and dark want to coexist. In its pure form, light overpowers and destroys the dark. When light transforms into “ideas” and dark into “matter,” they not only interact but reproduce, birthing music, drama, and philosophy. In broader terms, it’s a high-stakes drama about wanting something you can’t have until you figure out how to evolve.
In May, Hunt-Hendrix announced she was transgender, a fact she had spent a lifetime fighting. “I am a woman. I’ve always been one,” Hunt-Hendrix wrote. “Through a long-developing process, I’ve finally broken free from some kind of compromise.” In the months since, Hunt-Hendrix has started hormone therapy and “watch[-ed] my body evolve into what it is supposed to be.” She has less shame and more empathy, she said in a recent statement, and years of suicidal thoughts have abated. A year ago, while explaining the indulgent H.A.Q.Q., Hunt-Hendrix seemed burdened by the need to make people understand; this year, explaining Origin as an opera, she was occasionally playful, intent for you to know her philosophical framework isn’t intended for everyone.
Origin of the Alimonies radiates this sense of liberation, the feeling that Hunt-Hendrix has found the other side. These songs affirm the rebirth pondered in Anohni’s “Another World,” a hymn that acknowledges personal frailty and collective folly while longing for some place more nurturing. Hunt-Hendrix doesn’t stop with a wish: She imagines the process that might produce another world and the promise it holds should we make it together. So long as we’re willing to understand what we can become, Hunt-Hendrix suggests, that other world might not be so far out of reach.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After an all-star pop album, SMD regroup with a 2xCD record of tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and negative space.

Delicacies

There's changes of artistic direction, and then there's Simian Mobile Disco. Go back to last year's bloated, all-star sophomore slump Temporary Pleasure, and you're confronted by a production team that sounded like they were squandering their indie-dance crossover cred, scraping together a pop-skewing record that tried to please everybody and disappointed half of them. So what do they do for a follow-up? An album of tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and wide-open, between-beat negative spaces that sounds almost completely alienating outside a dancefloor context-- as well as a second disc of the tracks mixed together. And every song is named after an exotic gastronomical oddity, at least one of which has made Gordon Ramsay throw up. So much for compromise.
That titular premise of Delicacies is by design: The intent was to produce songs that, like the bizarre foodstuffs they were named after, appeal only to a select few with adventurous palates. The main idea at play here seems to be the way they approach the buildup, the moment in dance music that crests to something approaching euphoria-- only in this case, they replace that high with something more evocative of anxiety and dread. The longest track is a near 10-minute controlled spasm of palpitating kicks, itchy snares, rusty bass, and hissing swells; not for nothing is it titled "Nerve Salad". Most of the album follows that uneasy path, playing up the sparseness and austerity of the drum sounds and the low end so that any appearance by a non-percussive element feels a bit like uncomfortable jolts. Not that there are a lot of non-percussive elements to start-- melodic hooks, or what pass for them, splinter off into deliberate rhythmic counterpoints or beat-accenting stings more than they actually provide an easy riff to cling to.
And even if some of Delicacies starts to sound a bit samey to ears more attuned to the less minimalistic strains of house, the distinct moments have character to spare. "Hákarl", named after the fermented shark dish that defeated Ramsay's gag reflex, sweats out an acid-inflected strain of suspenseful, quick-stepping techno that evokes a sort of nauseous tension, especially during the jaw-clenching drone that seizes the track up at the midway point. Leadoff track "Aspic" is maybe the most immediately danceable, shuddering through a deliriously twitchy future funk reminiscent of Juan Atkins' classic Model 500 track "Off to Battle". And "Ortolan", named after a bird prepared, served, and eaten bones-and-all, stirs up a dueling pair of basslines and lets a synthesized chime tone sink deep into them, congealing into a halfway-Krautrock groove that provides one of the album's few moments of lightness.
Most of Delicacies is collected from a series of singles that debuted on SMD's label of the same name, a sort of field-test project where they'd assemble a track with a limited, self-imposed deadline and a quick turnaround time, then drop it on club crowds to gauge the reception. That they succeeded on these terms says something about how easily they threw themselves into such an adventurous idea. And if the results aren't necessarily the kind of up-front and accessible electro that would appeal to their "Hustler"-adoring base, it's definitely an interesting shot at regrouping and concocting a few rapidly refined ideas.


The ’90s alt-rockers’ first new album in more than 20 years has the vibe of a beloved record that was, for whatever reason, sitting on a shelf.

Old LP

In their ’90s heyday, that dog. existed in between two major pillars of alt-rock: Grungy, bemusedly annoyed rock and zingy, precisely detailed alt-pop. An L.A. band whose pedigree included music-biz royalty—lead singer and songwriter Anna Waronker is the daughter of label exec Lenny Waronker, while sisters Rachel and Petra Haden, who provided backing vocals and instrumentals, are children of jazz bassist Charlie Haden—they developed a fierce following from the periphery of alt-rock radio, which had already begun to sideline fun (and female voices) in favor of self-pity by the time the group broke up in 1997.
that dog. got back together in 2011 as a four-piece, along with drummer Tony Maxwell. Playing their songs—particularly those that they hadn’t played live before—energized Waronker, whose hiatus years included a rock opera co-written with Go-Go Charlotte Caffey, music for TV, and two solo albums, to return to the spiky, elegant mode of her onetime band.
What’s remarkable about Old LP, that dog.’s first album since their split and their first as a trio (Petra left after the reunion shows), is how little time seems to have elapsed. The harmonies still have gooey centers; the fuzzed-out guitars and precisely arranged strings still bounce off each other like highly attuned dancers. Compact and thoughtful—the band worked on the album for years—Old LP has the vibe of a beloved record that was, for whatever reason, sitting on a shelf.
The album opens with “Your Machine,” a showcase for Waronker’s plaintive vocals that crests into a full-on power-pop starburst, as distortion-heavy riffs rise up to counter her pleas for notice. “I am incomplete/Impatiently/Awaiting your receipt/And graciously/Eating crumbs thrown at my feet,” goes one lyric, a poetic echo of the “thanks for your support!” messages issued by artists in the era of online patronage. When the noise eventually recedes, allowing Waronker and the harmonies behind her to rise up, it’s a moment of pop triumph.
From there, that dog. balance beauty and muck, with marshmallow-sweet vocals and careening strings adding tension to the breakneck chorus of “Just the Way” and the weepy violins of “Drip Drops” filling out the lyrics’ minimalistic portrayal of heartbreak. “If You Just Didn’t Do It” sounds excavated from a lost volume of DGC Rarities, with a shimmying beat and defiant, closing string flourish that offer a subtle update of ’90s alt-rock’s satisfying bite.
Like much of the best 2019 music from still-at-it ’90s alt-rockers—Juliana Hatfield, Versus, Team Dresch—Old LP works because its growth doesn’t pander to modern notions of “cool.” But the way the band re-balances the grime-vs.-grandiosity equation with each song demonstrates that when it comes to musical math, the proof matters as much as the outcome. The title track, which closes the album, isn’t just a sweet elegy to music’s power to conjure bittersweet memories. “I never wanted you to leave/I hate that there’s no choice/That I can’t hear your voice/Unless it’s on an old LP,” go the lyrics, which were written after a memorial service for Charlie Haden. It’s the first time Waronker and Rachel Haden have sung a duet on record, their voices darting in and out of each other while cymbals crash and strings swoon. Looking back, which Old LP does with gentleness and honesty, doesn’t have to be a nostalgia trap.

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Raury is a genre migrant who exists adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it, and All We Need isn't the transcendent project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling. Much like his last album, Indigo Child, it's an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius.

All We Need

Raury made his big debut in 2014 with the folk-leaning EP Indigo Child, which was anchored by its single and centerpiece "God’s Whisper". That EP was a daring first statement with soulful alternative rock jams supercut with real, recorded fights he had with his mother. It was stuffed with big ideas, but it often had trouble wrangling them. Still, it effectively established Raury as this sort of genre migrant who existed adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it. The singer-songwriter has a real sense for composition and a knack for ambiguity, and he, like his stylistic forebear André 3000, remains at arm's length from hip-hop, never quite a full-fledged rapper but certainly draped in the tropes of the genre, reaping the benefits of everything cool and useful that comes from identifying with it. He is literally indie rap, and his debut album, All We Need, searches further for perfect balance.
All We Need isn't the transcendent Raury project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling, the one that reconciles genre distinctions and renders them obsolete. It isn't ahead of its time or magnificent in scope. Instead, much like Indigo Child, it's merely an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius with as many hiccups. The wrinkles haven't been ironed out yet; his genre-mashing can be scatterbrained and even hollow. Sometimes, like on the RZA-featuring "CPU", it works well and sometimes, like on Big K.R.I.T.-featuring "Forbidden Knowledge", it completely misses the mark. Raury emerged with a fully formed aesthetic, but his sound, albeit fascinating, still needs time to incubate.
From start to finish, All We Need scans as Indigo Child Redux with similar pacing and nearly identical tropes. This one is anchored by its single, "Devil’s Whisper", which puts a slightly darker tint on the hand-clapping-around-the-campfire folk of its predecessor. The album is mostly a reprise of his boho hippie rap tunes, wandering in and out of folk territory with lots of stringy acoustic riffs, hedging toward rock with hip-hop spirit, casually blending influences like a Tumblr kid that grew up in a post-Napster world. The writing is angst-y and centric to a wide-eyed, teenage worldview: chasing girls and soothing parents and saving the Earth. On the opening title track, he sets the tone for his flower child vibes: "Don’t hate, my brother/ God is our friend/ I walked for miles and/ I see no end/ To the hate."
Many of the songs call for unity and love with several mentions of an impending Armageddon, and Raury tackles these huge topics with ambitious arrangements. On "Revolution", he pleads for divine intervention over strum-heavy riffs, throbbing 808 bass, hand drums, and vocal chops. On the slow-moving "Peace Prevail", which has a tempering rhythm and melting bass, he borrows André 3000's flow to rap about being a rap outlier ("Been by myself since the White T’s/ Been by myself since Dem Franchize Boyz did that dance on that hoe in the white tee") before praying for peace with a chorus of voices at his back. There’s significantly more rapping here than on his last release, and while dextrous rapping isn’t exactly his forte, there are moments where he finds his flow. It doesn't feel like he's gotten that much better at what he does, but he seems to be figuring it out. He's got people like Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello and underground Atlanta rapper Key! on the album to help him. With an album replete with Spanish guitar jams, wide-eyed hip-hop, and psychedelic rock k-holes, there isn't much ground left for Raury to cover. Now, he must figure out how to do it all just a little bit better.


The Manchester band are attuned to the absurdity of our times. The hyperactive synthpop of their fourth LP is full of surreal vignettes evoking our increasingly nightmarish world.

A Fever Dream

Since emerging in 2010, Everything Everything have written songs uniquely concerned with the modern human condition and its miserable roots in how we live. Like almost none of their indie-rock peers, the Manchester-based four-piece are attuned to the absurdity of the times: Tangled up in their hyperactive synth-pop are surreal vignettes about scoring dates during an airstrike (“My Kz, Ur Bf”), verses juxtaposing celebrity worship and drone warfare (“Undrowned”), and, in 2015’s “Fortune 500,” an empathetic account of an extremist driven to regicide. At their wittiest, the band’s volcanic melodies, pop culture zigzags, and swirling tongue-twisters can pop open your brain like a champagne cork. Everything Everything make coherent art from the shrapnel of rolling news.
On A Fever Dream, their fourth album, the melodramatically-inclined group confront an increasingly melodramatic and nightmarish world. Brexit is one named scourge, though beyond lamenting xenophobia on songs like “Put Me Together,” their targets are usually implied rather than stated. Luckily, unknotting Jonathan Higgs’ allusive lyrics makes for rewarding work. On “Big Game,” he sizes up an individual with dishonest intentions, an inflated sense of authority, and tinier-than-average hands (“Wrinkled little boxing glove”). In the end, the vaguest insult hits hardest: “I’m tired,” Higgs soothes over twinkling guitar, “And you are ridiculous.” On an album cast in the shadows of evil, it’s a welcome sort of rallying cry for the exhausted.
As their themes come into sharper focus, Everything Everything are planing down the fanciful arrangements that made their first records alien and thrilling. The band always managed to make haywire rhythms sound intuitive, but like 2015’s Get to Heaven, A Fever Dream is easier to digest yet somehow harder to love. Still, they’re sharp enough to pull off straight songs. Lead single “Can’t Do,” which sounds like SOPHIE’s “Bipp” after a glass of hot cocoa, observes a concerned citizen waking up to some nebulous threat: “That was the future on the phone/He says it’s up to me,” Higgs sings urgently. The narrator soon becomes defensive—“I can’t do the thing you want!”—and, absolved of guilt, slides back into hedonistic complacency. In the age of political extremes and ecological doom, the harried “reasonable man” is an archetype. Here, Higgs exorcizes his culpability and calls for collective responsibility.
In tackling generational anxieties, pop music tends to concern itself with the tip of the iceberg—the observable symptoms rather than the disease. For its part, A Fever Dream is at least conscious of the iceberg’s body, and never threatens to plow into it. Faint praise, maybe, but consider the perilous waters they inhabit: “Ivory Tower” opens with the harrowing scene of privileged racists dancing around a gallows in blackface, a dicey satire that would fail without Higgs’ nimble touch. Few of Everything Everything’s radio-refined peers bother trying to tap into present-day concerns, and fewer still could pull off the black humor of “Night of the Long Knives,” an end-of-days anthem whose diabolical synths sound like an air-raid siren performed with festival horns. As “the bomb” drops, Higgs’ narrator, unsure whether to be transfixed or terrified, glibly soothes his victims: “Shame about your neighborhood.” It’s a chilling brush-off, the familiar tone of official indifference when blood appears on the hands of the state.
When his punches land, Higgs is piercing enough to spar with Keston Sutherland, the fast-tongued British poet who intertwines the horrors of Iraq and Guantanamo with requiems to fast food and washing-machine product codes. Like Sutherland, Higgs’ dispassionate writing style conceals latent political outrage—at war, colonialism, and the economic system that demands their survival. Unlike Sutherland, Higgs’ words glimmer with sorrow: Everything Everything’s music feels emotionally open, despite lyrics that will scan as bewildering, vague, cryptic, or poetic, depending on your patience. Of present concerns, Higgs says he’s writing to tackle our mistrust of the media, police, and politicians, and “to tap into ideas of neighbours and communities.” That might sound facile—what use is community when the neighbors want to deport you?—but in practice, Everything Everything are nothing if not savvy craftsmen. A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream—darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled—is a fine monument to the nation’s despair.