On his debut album, the N.Y. electronic producer Anthony Naples' vision is fully formed, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare.

Body Pill

To call Body Pill Anthony Naples' debut album should probably come with a big fat caveat: its eight tracks only amount to 29 minutes' total running time, and two of its cuts are just a sketch-like two minutes long. But who cares when the record holds together this well? It feels like an album, which, in the post-format day and age, is the only guideline that matters. And it certainly doesn't feel like a debut—at least, not in the sense of baby steps or half-measures. The New York electronic musician's vision is fully formed here, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare.
That confidence is all the more striking given that Naples is a relative newcomer. He put out his first record in 2012, on Mister Saturday Night, the label arm of a popular New York party series. Strikingly, "Mad Disrespect" was the first song he had ever completed—not bad at all, given how effortlessly it flitted between the cut-up soul of artists like Andrés and the slightly off-kilter vibe of artists like Four Tet and Caribou in dancefloor mode. Since then, he's recorded a handful of singles and EPs that have built upon the foundation established by his debut. They've all tended towards snapping house rhythms marked by flayed hi-hats and nervous, syncopated kick drums; he's fond of chopped-up keys and copious overdrive. Equal parts sweet and gruff, his club tracks are typically as juicy as a bruised blood orange.
But Body Pill, despite the title, swerves away from the club. Its opening track, "Ris", opens with two minutes of beatless drones, and the drums-and-synth figure that rises up out of the fog sounds less like dance music than a Casiotone reconstruction of the opening bars of Sonic Youth's "Teen Age Riot". "Abrazo", which follows, is a proper club track (even if that 3:25 running time may send DJs scrambling to come up with a follow-up before it fades out); its keening string loops and keyboard counterpoints are clearly in the vein of Pépé Bradock or Andrés, and it employs some of the toughest, most declarative drums on the whole record. Still, it doesn't take long to see that Naples' idea of dance music is a little bit different from the norm. The drums are sort of lumpy and disheveled; the hi-hat is turned up a hair too loud, and the snare sticks out like a broken front tooth. All that roughness is a way of balancing out the melancholy strings, but it also highlights the way even the strings are a little bit raw, their fidelity rough and their waveform crudely truncated; if this were a visual collage, there'd be Scotch tape visible over the corners of the picture.
The closing track, "Miles", seems like it'll be another of the record's go-to dancefloor cuts, given its overlapping layers of drum machine and sampled percussion and its eyes-closed deep house vibes; it rings like a lawn sprinkler aimed at a gamelan ensemble. But then a curious thing happens: shortly before the three-minute marker, it fades out, the tempo shifts from 120 to 110 beats per minute, and we're ushered out with tapped hi-hats and a tentative, burbling melody, as though someone had stepped on the hose. The rest of the album proceeds along similar lines, in which club-music convention is tweaked ever so slightly, its tropes repurposed for squirrelier aims. "Changes" balances absent-minded keys—a tinkly little up-and-down melody, an unbroken chord—with a cutting machine beat that spins idly in place, throwing off sparks. It's tough and drowsy all at once, and so is "Refugio", its tarnished counterpoints sounding like a conversation between two lonely robots. Most producers tend to visualize packed dancefloors when they're writing music, but I suspect this one was made with an empty room in mind, given the way its melody scoots like an idle gobo pattern across buffed hardwood. The only club-oriented track here that doesn't work so well is "Used to Be", which swathes swaggering, dubstep-inspired bass and drums in rosy Twin Peaks chords. It's not bad, but it feels aimless—even though, ironically, it's one of the record's most clearly defined tracks.
Perhaps he's simply better at abstraction. The drum-free, two-minute "Pale" sounds even more like a '70s public-television soundtrack cue than Boards of Canada's music does; "Way Stone", with its tight ripples of delay, might be sourced from rocks skipped across a still lake. Its wooden lead sounds like a kalimba wrapped in layers of sticky masking tape; at the short track's end, there's a rush of white noise like a seashell being held up to the ear. It's not terribly hard to make music that signifies varying shades of melancholy or unease; "moody" seems to be the default setting in dance music these days, from the underground to the main stage. But Body Pill is different: it's moody, but in a way that feels like he's not entirely clear about what the underlying mood really is. And there's an honesty to that. It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.


On her third album, the Los Angeles artist weaves samples of Iranian music into a rugged blend of dub and industrial.

Ground Groove

Maral’s music doubles as a means of fantastic transport. Soldered together from elements of dub, industrial, and anarcho-punk, it reflects both 1970s Jamaica and 1980s London, but the Los Angeles musician’s work draws most of its spiritual sustenance from Iran. For a decade now, Maral has been assembling a library of samples of Iranian folk, classical, and pop music. Her source material has come from far and wide: specialty record stores in L.A.’s Persian Square; her parents’ cassette collections; and trips to the homeland itself. From her childhood until her early twenties, the Virginia native regularly visited Iran with her family, soaking up the language, culture, and music. In the early 2010s, DJing around L.A., she began layering those samples over blown-out beats inspired by moombahton and Jersey club. By her landmark 2018 mixtape Voices From the Land of Iran, her style had crystallized, and she continued to develop it across wide-ranging mixes and original productions. She likened her debut album, 2019’s Mahur Club, to the memory of a trip overseas: “I wanted the release to feel like you are in a taxi in Iran with the windows down and the taxi driver is playing an old cassette and the sounds from outside are mixing in to create a whole new song.”
If Maral’s previous albums were diesel beaters zigzagging through crowded city streets, Ground Groove is a high-powered all-terrain vehicle putting its suspension to the test. Her third album follows the hybrid template of its predecessors, but the beats are more rugged, the range more adventurous. Distortion has always played a key role in her music, but it has never sung in quite the way it does here. She wreathes electronic percussion in fuzz, sculpting overdriven 808 kicks into ominously throbbing bass ostinatos; she drenches guitars in the no-nonsense scuzz of bands like Crass, a longtime favorite. Her grooves are indebted to dub reggae, and she balances terse electronic beats with loose, muscular drumming on an acoustic kit that lends a live, jammy feel to her rhythms. There’s something fundamentally Californian about the blend; “That’s Okay, Ruin It” sounds like a garage band navigating dub and stoner metal in an empty swimming pool.
It’s a short album, covering 11 tracks in just half an hour, and it doesn’t vary much in tone or mood: Most songs use the same sludgy bass and bone-dry drums. But the short track lengths work in the record’s favor. The songs are all clearly cut from the same cloth, yet they’re just different enough to catch the ear, one after the next. It’s not always obvious where one track ends and another begins, and some, like the twisting “Mari’s Groove,” blow through numerous contrasting passages in just two or three minutes. If the sullen atmospheres keep you locked into Ground Groove’s labyrinthine confines, then the sudden glimmers of light make you forget about looking for a way out.
The heart of Maral’s music remains the classical and folkloric Iranian samples that are woven throughout. They’ve never sounded as carefully integrated as they do here: While some of her previous productions were essentially edits—“Hayedeh,” from Push, grafted an extended sample of the iconic exiled singer over a loping beat—here it’s more difficult to tease out her sources. In “Heart Shimmer,” a snakelike tar melody is run through reverb and delay until it’s barely recognizable. In “Avaz-e-Del,” a doleful a cappella flits behind grinding trip-hop beats, like a mysterious creature glinting beneath the surface of a murky lake. The pitched-down lament running through “Behind the Rock & Into the Tunnel” could be a field recording of a regional folk song, but the way it’s been slowed and processed, it might as well be a transmission from the other side of the galaxy.
Rarely do these sounds assume center stage; instead, they lurk in the background, where the keening intonation and microtonal melodies add color to the battered, blackened beats. They also add considerable emotional weight. Maral has spoken of the “ingrained melancholy” of Iranian identity and culture, a sensibility handed down from classical Persian music and poetry, and the same melancholy runs deep in Ground Groove. If Maral’s rough-hewn drums and guitars evoke the aggression of punk and industrial, her samples convey a profound heaviness; the halting drums and minor-key or quarter-tone intervals sound not just mournful but positively exhausted. You don’t need to understand the lyrics or even the background of Maral’s source material to grasp its spirit. Her choices are intuitive, not didactic; she has said that her sampling is typically inspired by encountering a particularly captivating snippet “and wanting to see what that sound can do in a different context.” A child of the diaspora as committed to her culture’s future as its past, Maral turns roots into branches.


Ren Schofield continues to straddle noise and techno on his fourth album, pushing his ramshackle rave music to its breaking point.

LP

For all the noise, chaos, and dysfunction flowing through Ren Schofield’s work as Container, the Nashville techno producer never aims for less than total euphoria. That trancelike drive—as indebted to minimal techno greats like Daniel Bell and Robert Hood as it is Schofield’s early days in the Providence, Rhode Island noise scene—allows his music to sound perpetually on the verge of rattling apart. Even when spiraling into ear-searing psychedelia, Container is sturdily reinforced by a core of pure joy, an impish glee fueling its destructive drive. On his fourth album, LP, Schofield pushes his ramshackle rave music to its breaking point—and yet he’s never made an album that holds together quite as well as this.
All Container full-lengths have the same anonymous title of “LP,” a sign of the full-impact maximalism they share. Each one locks into its dissonant grooves, drilling deep into a seemingly limited palette of sputtering drums, mangled vocals, and synths. Under that unifying tunnel vision, each vividly named highlight could hold the weight of a title track (“Refract,” “Dripping,” “Rattler” suggest Schofield’s as great at naming tracks as he is terrible at naming albums). This LP continues that tradition with nine comparatively shorter pieces, each a convulsive vignette that tumbles into the next. With names like “Drain,” “Leaker,” “Juicer,” and “Chunked,” many are as efficiently self-descriptive as blender settings.
While the shorter tracks don’t form a cohesive arc exactly, placing slower atmosphere-builders next to LP’s manic sprints pays off in the long run. Moments like “Peppered” or “Leaker’ also show Container moves just as well when he‘s creeping and lurching. The latter rides a heavy, propulsive drum machine that lays a foundation for a squeaking synth that sounds pulled from the higher frequencies of noise mainstays Wolf Eyes. It sets up “Vacancy,” a two-minute burst of short-circuiting noise rock, where fluttering drum triggers and overdriven synth filters ratchet the tension every 20 seconds or so. Schofield speeds up before slamming into a breakdown that recalls Lightning Bolt’s classic Load Records releases. For a project that often surprises by how well it works on a dancefloor, it’s a moment aimed directly for the mosh pit.
In proper Container fashion, the extremes tend to hit all at once. Opener “Drain” barrels forward with wounded drum patterns, but hinges on a playfully bent synth melody pinballing throughout. It continues a shift from the fractal-like quality of Schofield’s early LPs, cramming more twists and turns into tracks less than half the length. The album closes with a tightly repetitive counterpoint to “Drain” on the aforementioned “Chunked,” which violently loops like a locked groove trying to bust out of its cycle. With so many moments playing off one another like that over the short run-time, it benefits more than earlier releases as a start-to-finish listen.
You can start to see trajectory to Container’s LPs after this fourth edition, though the changes are deceptively subtle considering how unruly any specific release is. What’s never changed (and likely the reason the series remains so consistent) is simply how much fun Schofield makes all this mayhem sound. Both noise and techno are genres beloved for their sonic freedom—but they can also earn the occasional gripe for stuffy self-seriousness. Schofield still straddles the two precariously, but he also embodies the best of the genres’ shared ideals. Both should be happy to have him.


Chicago rockers Twin Peaks' first album ran a compact twenty minutes and was refreshing and ephemeral. Their new one is twice the length, offering two distinct versions of themselves—one of which sounds really good, and the other just okay.

Wild Onion

The Chicago rock band Twin Peaks spend half their time as a chugging power chord factory and half as a winsome power-pop band. Their first album, Sunken, which ran a compact twenty minutes and was as refreshing and ephemeral as a popped Schlitz can, contained hints of both. Their second, Wild Onion, is more than twice the length, in which they seem to be offering two distinct versions of themselves: in one, they're good-times party rockers, and in the other they're heartbroken sweethearts. You could cull down Wild Onion to make one nine-song version of either album, and one would be just okay and one would be really good.
The really good one would be the quieter one, probably: Twin Peaks are better melancholy than they are raucous. The mid-tempo rocker "Making Breakfast" has a riff and a wryly rueful air that recalls Tom Petty. "Mirror of Time" is a loopy and sweet psychedelic pop song, with a twinkling and watery mix of guitars and a melody like a pinwheel; "Telephone" is uptempo but light-footed and soft.
The melodies for their slower and more winsome songs hit harder and soar higher than the power chord explosions, which can feel a little stale, like maybe someone forgot about that Schlitz can. "Flavor" sounds suspiciously like Weezer's "Dope Nose" by way of "Rock And Roll All Nite." Their best songwriting flashes the joyful interplay of the guitars—Twin Peaks are the kind of guitar rock band who write riffs and solos you can hum—so the straight power chord stompers cut off their brio, a little bit.
There is one song they write on each record that feels like a next step: on Sunken, it was the chiming "Irene", and here it's the cool breeze of "Ordinary People", which channels the Kinks and Os Mutantes. It is a new mode for Twin Peaks; neither heartbroken nor fist-pumping, it's musing, distant, and a little dazed, like a good Clientele song. Also, like a good Clientele song, it makes you think of rain, whether it's mentioned in the lyrics or not. It is a bemused-thirtysomething song, written by some kids who have barely rounded 20, and it's a fresh testament to their talent.


Summoning the communal energy of a live band, the indie rock songwriter’s debut explores uneasy emotions, anxiety spirals, and perseverance.

The Parts I Dread

When Victoria Park was 19, her parents relocated from her lifelong home of New Jersey to Wyoming while she was away at college. Having already written a song called “New Jersey,” she wrote a new song called “Wyoming,” about forces beyond her control: “Can’t I blame you for everything/Market crashes, mood swings?” Recording under the spoonerism Pictoria Vark, she spent the next few years assembling songs, recording around the country, and utilizing the talents of close friends and remote musicians. Along the way, she played bass for Squirrel Flower and ingratiated herself in a DIY community that includes like-minded rockers Riverby and Harmony Woods. For someone who admits she’s “scared of change” in “Demarest,” a highlight from her debut record The Parts I Dread, Park has been forced to experience a lot of it, and these eight songs are filled with uneasy emotions, even at their most easygoing.
The production on The Parts I Dread, from Park and Boston musician Gavin Caine, benefits from the lengthy writing and meticulous recording process: This album sounds as polished as anything from higher-profile contemporaries Soccer Mommy or Snail Mail. Even though no two people were in the same room while recording, Park and Caine manage to capture the energy of a live band in explosive moments like the sudden, distorted climax of “I Can’t Bike.” It’s not just the production: On “Wyoming,” a routine indie backbeat gradually slows down for a dreamy chorus. Even the more mundane passages of “Wyoming” include panned percussion and shiny synths, creeping into the mix as if mirroring Park’s anxiety. That attention to detail makes up for the occasional weaknesses in Park’s endearingly light vocals: When she can’t belt the way a slow-burner like “Out” requires, a last-second whirlwind of feedback picks up the slack.
Park’s lyrics mostly focus on small interactions and idle thoughts, the kind of introspection born of abject loneliness. In “Good For,” she writes about a friend’s betrayal and the kind of “bad kid” who “fail[s] upwards on the backs of good ones.” The most invigorating moments are the most ambitious, when Park’s attempts at self-reflection spiral into anxiety. On “Bloodline II,” she tries to understand her parents’ decision to move (“Been tired your whole life/It’s what drove you out west”) before admitting her fear of turning out like them. The penultimate track, “Demarest,” leaves the biggest impression. It’s a surprisingly dark, ambitious song about perseverance, with lyrics that allude to a suicide attempt and the fallout from a toxic relationship. And yet, Park refuses to let the pain consume her: “It’s not that I’m into punishment,” she insists. “There’s more to live for than I know yet.”
While more minimal songs like “Twin” are almost too economical in their arrangement, Park’s lyrics are rarely ever that bare. Her best lines are direct and resonate with the force of a full band. When 30 people suddenly show up screaming on “Good For,” or when field recordings and chatter enter the mix on closer “Friend Song,” they’re refreshing bursts outside of Park’s own head. The record never feels self-indulgent or self-loathing—it just helps to have other people there to listen.


Ferreira’s latest album is rich and rewarding, the mark of a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation.

R.A.P. Ferreira: The Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Over the past decade or so, Rory Ferreira has built a deep, consistent, and strikingly versatile catalog. The nomadic artist, who now goes by R.A.P. Ferreira, was born in Chicago but subsequently lived in Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Maine, and currently Nashville; much of his early work was issued under the name milo, though his masterpiece, to this point, is the beautifully fluid sovereign nose of (y)our arrogant face, released in 2018 as scallops hotel. His new album, the Light-Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures, is rich and rewarding, channeling sovereign nose’s improvisatory air and pairing it with the aqueous vocals Ferreira has been refining since he left L.A. in 2015.
The album is packed with some of his most impressive, thematically sophisticated writing to date, and his most vivid imagery: ontologically curious snakes in one song, “pythons on leashes” in the next. Yet Ferreira has arranged it in such a way that the timbres of each song create and relieve tension on their own. Scriptures opens with “contrapuntal,” where his vocals are subdued—maybe tranquil, maybe weary. That voice disappears for much of the album. When it resurfaces toward the end on “praise & worship,” it’s imbued with something closer to dread, effectively recasting everything that came before it. On that latter song, Ferreira raps in near-monotone, “Guess I’ll follow that North Star home/Sure as the porn star moans,” an airtight couplet that gets at the tension between the elemental and the artificial—between what is inherent and what is performed—that so much of his work is about.
The music is texturally rich and rhythmically varied, even between songs by the same producers. See, for instance, the way the Tel Aviv-based argov balances the somber “contrapuntal” with the bright jazz bounce of “humboldt park jibaritos,” or how Nashville’s Brainweight lets his percussion shift from light and skittering to woozily full when “brother mouzone library card” becomes “hyperion.” Ferreira has never interacted so virtuosically with drums as he does on Scriptures. He cascades over them on “Blackmissionfigs” and leans his syllables toward the end of each measure on “gemilut hasadim”; on “uptown 37,” he jumps from pocket to pocket like a frog between lily pads. Some of the beats are microcosms for the larger intersections Ferreira himself embodies—take the gibbsfreelance-produced “wedding cake eighths,” which recalls the Los Angeles beat music scene of a decade ago but has all the hand-stitched grit and open space of those Freestyle Fellowship records he occasionally evokes.
In his videos, Ferreira has also developed a unique visual language that eschews elaborate plotting, conventional color correction, or any of the other markers meant to indicate a work has been professionally finished. Sometimes his videos flirt with the same aesthetics of internet ephemera that he references in his writing: The clip for who told you to think??!!?!?!?!’s “sorcerer” frequently looks like a fan-made edit, an illusion that’s punctured when Ferreira raps directly into the camera. The “east nashville” video is in this vein. He ambles across a bridge in no hurry, stopping to underline passages in the song; he dances in front of a minimally tagged wall, his body lit only from the chest down. It is not unfinished; it is not sloppy or “lo-fi.” It is a prolific artist arriving at the perfect unity between content and presentation, his carefully considered thoughts allowed to move his body, the camera, the microphone as if those things were animated by impulse alone.

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Fabric's latest was created by an up-and-coming Detroit techno producer, but not one genuflecting before his city's rich dance history.

Fabric 45

For a world still actively exploring its own boundaries, techno is history obsessed and ferociously insular. So when relatively unknown Detroit producer Omar S told the dance-music site Resident Advisor, "I don't even know who Ricardo Willalobo is"-- backhanding Ricardo Villalobos, techno's frustrating, progressive king-- pundits rushed to their keyboards, birthing messageboard threads that reached 10 pages in length but rarely moved past a collective oh no he didn't. On the one hand, Omar S knows how to handle press-- curse, a lot (nine instances of "fuck" in under 150 words!); show more interest in illegal auto racing than the genre you perform in; claim to not buy music; claim, even, not to really like it. On the other hand, the prospect that he really is a know-nothing-- or, at least, that he doesn't care about his environment-- is magnetic. In a scene that often seems to feed off itself, it's hard not to wonder what Omar S is eating.
So London club and label Fabric asks him to make his own mix, and he turns in 80 minutes of his own tracks, some dating back to 2004. ("I don't need other people's music; I got over 100 songs released.") Whether that's heresy or not, I don't care. Most of this stuff was only on vinyl until now, and it's just as easy-- and as rewarding-- for me to think of this disc as a compilation of his productions as a DJ mix.
His music isn't unlike his public persona-- brash, bitter, soulful, and vaguely threatening. The tracks collected on Fabric 45 aren't funky, but they have a zombie-like imperative to them. They're not melodically complex, either, and when he builds a half-memorable tune-- "Oasis 13 ½" or "Psychotic Photosynthesis", both which resemble Kraftwerk, a little-- he straps it to the bassline in a way that suggests he thinks melody is frivolous. They're built on blocky, simple sounds, but structured with subtlety and control. For someone who flaunts as much confidence and ego as Omar S does, his music is almost impetuously basic at times-- he's like a woodsman who builds a lean-to in your living room when you already set up the air mattress. It's not conservative, it's gutter, it's flamboyant.
The occasional vocalists-- on "U" or "The Maker"-- sound lonely and disoriented, like deep-house divas who collapsed in alleyways before ambling home in the last few minutes before dawn. Video-game samples pollute 19th century church organ ("Strider's World"); and brutish, deadlocked four-four gets syncopated with noise ("Simple Than Sorry"). Zealots say the crown is "Psychotic Photosynthesis", a dizzy, slow-bubbling track whose melody peels out of its bassline so carefully that it's hard to notice until it's fully arrived-- it definitely stands out, but doesn't overshadow.
While it's tempting to draw Omar S into the long narrative of Detroit techno, he doesn't fit the mold: Detroit, as I always heard it, represented a banging but sophisticated futurism; Omar S, by comparison, is definitively unrefined. The cover of his one full-length album, 2005's Just Ask the Lonely, is a sloppily altered photo of him playing an arcade console whose display shows a picture of what are presumably his kids. He claims to sign his white labels with the same marker he uses working a day job at Ford. Just Ask the Lonely takes its name from a Four Tops song-- another Detroit institution, Motown. "Day", on the Fabric mix, samples the Supremes' "Come See About Me", briefly. Omar S' music doesn't have any of the charm of Motown-- it's unfriendly, nocturnal stuff. But in a way, Motown's an even better touchstone than Detroit techno: Music made with efficiency and confidence; music that didn't have to be too aware of what was going on around it because it was busy trying to make a little world of its own.


On their latest set, Mali’s Tinariwen ensemble mix Western African styles, feverish group workouts, and world-weary lyrics, collaborating with Kurt Vile and Mark Lanegan in the process.

Elwan

Since coming to the attention of Western listeners in the 2000s, the Tuareg artists in Tinariwen have managed to keep their “desert blues” sound intact, while varying some elements of songwriting craft. The largely acoustic aesthetic of 2011’s Tassili saw input from American indie talents, like TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and Wilco’s Nels Cline. On 2014’s Emmaar, Tinariwen reveled in some funkier arrangements.
Elwan offers another solid collection of tunes that merge West African styles and guitar riffs inspired by American folk forms. The album can swing quickly across a wide range of moods, moving dramatically between feverish group workouts and more personal, acoustic laments. And the continued political turmoil in their native northern Mali—including the targeting of the band’s members by Islamist militants—has provided these songwriters with no shortage of inspiration for world-weary lyrics.
This time around, Tinariwen’s collaborations work more ideally than on previous outings. Sometime Queens of the Stone Age member Alain Johannes brings his “cigar box guitar” to the grooving, communal song “Talyat.” And on the uptempo opener, “Tiwàyyen,” guest guitarist Kurt Vile merges fully with the other members of the ensemble. During this first appearance, there’s little sense that he’s interested in calling attention to himself. (The song’s real stars are the spirited backing vocalists, who swarm during the choruses.)
On bassist Eyadou Ag Leche’s “Nànnuflày,” though, Vile’s reverb-heavy guitar tone is more easily recognized. The romanticized sense of reverie in his playing—familiar from albums like 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze—seems to exert a strong influence over the entire band’s performance, thereby giving Tinariwen a new vibe to inhabit. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, one of the group’s principal singer-guitarists, makes the most of this opportunity, turning in a chilled-out performance that is threaded with less vocal ornamentation than usual. The final minute’s vocals are turned over to Mark Lanegan’s coolheaded baritone: a choice that risks merely gilding the lily, but just plain works.
Naturally, this core group of players doesn’t really need any help when it comes to fashioning sublime performances. On “Assàwt,” acoustic arpeggios are sometimes joined by darts of electric-guitar filigree—a mirroring of the way the song’s solo vocalist routinely welcomes a chorus of companions by his side. Elsewhere, the propulsive rock energy of “Sastanàqqàm” leavens the mood for a spell, while the mantra of “Ittus” reflects a seriousness of intent. (The latter song’s lyric reads, in its entirety: “I ask you, what is our goal/It is the unity of our nation/And to carry our standard high.”)
It can be tempting, at this point, to take all the strengths of Tinariwen for granted. Once again, all their music is crisply played, and smartly sequenced. Yet while Elwan may not herald any grand stylistic breakthrough, it does manage to synthesize some of the group’s most recent experiments in a way that helps distinguish it within their overall catalog. English translations for the lyrics are available on their label’s website, but the spirit of each song is generally discernible from the performance choices. The purpose of Tinariwen’s music doesn’t undergo radical redefinition—and it doesn’t need to do so. From their beginnings in a refugee camp to their latest iteration as a world-touring entity, they can provide exultation and encouragement like few other ensembles, on any continent.


The Paramore singer’s debut solo album is emotionally vulnerable and musically ambitious, one that seeks catharsis and enlightenment in tangled corners of pop music.

Petals for Armor

The use of voice memos in pop music—whether the dry, abstract interludes of Sonic Youth or the litany of voicemails throughout hip hop history—necessarily signals a pause, a moment to listen closely. But rather than a message from a missed connection or words of wisdom from a mentor, the new record from Paramore’s singer Hayley Williams features an intimate dispatch from her home. With her goldendoodle Alf barking in the background, Williams describes, sheepishly, a potential delay in the production process: “Uh, sorry, I was in a depression,” she offers by way of explanation. Trailing off, she adds, “Trying to come out of it now…” That moment of quiet reflection, understated in its depiction of the murkiness inherent to mental health, is an exemplary snapshot from her solo debut, Petals for Armor: intense emotional vulnerability couched in the creature comforts of her homestead.
As Williams describes it, Petals for Armor began as an organic outgrowth of extreme introspection—specifically intensive, full-body therapy through a process called EMDR, in which the person in treatment is asked to recall distressing imagery, processing the experience through sensory input under the guidance of a therapist. For Williams, whose 2017 was marked with both immense highs—the release of Paramore’s triumphantly pop-oriented After Laughter—and definitive lows—a divorce from her partner of 10 years—therapy invoked powerful, at times grotesque imagery of nature. “I started having this vision where I was so gross, covered in dirt and soil, and there were vines and flowers,” she recounted. But that surreal vision became a sign of the inherent power and resilience in a body so outwardly fragile and feminine. Williams began writing songs around the same period, at the advice of a therapist.
On Petals for Armor—originally released as three distinct EPs—Williams traces a meandering, multi-faceted path to recovery, one that might ring familiar to anyone who’s undergone the taxing process of intensive therapy. “Leave It Alone,” one of the earliest songs Williams wrote for the record, addresses the cruelty and irony of loss with chilling clarity: “If you know how to love/Best prepare to grieve,” she sings, her voice tipping upward, knowingly, on the last word of each line. The instrumentation, thick with gently sloping violins, brings to mind a post-rock dirge, invoking the leaden air of mourning without veering into maudlin sap.
On “Rose/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” joined by the disaffected chorus of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, she conjures a similarly haunted atmosphere, opening with ghostly, swirling vocals dense with delay. But despite the overcast mood, the lyrics hesitantly tell a story of regrowth. Through floral metaphors—“he loves me now, he loves me not,” wilting and blooming—she captures the history of women’s suffering, gesturing to intergenerational trauma without falling into hackneyed, broad-sweeping statements of feel-good empowerment. These hazy moments, which often reveal their depths only upon repeated listen, invoke a careful, considered path to self-love, one that doesn’t avoid its darker corners.
The more hushed tones scattered throughout the album contrast her bolder statements, the musical equivalents of sudden breakthroughs. On “Cinnamon,” an uptempo ode to the comforts of nesting and making a home, Williams creates layered melodies with her vocals, beginning with animalistic yells of “ahh” and “ooh” and taking a sharp turn with highly syncopated, all-business enunciation on the versus: “Home is where I’m feminine/Smells like citrus and cinnamon,” she sings cooly, moving through the syllables of the final words like a percussive triplet. Here, as on “Creepin’,” with its robotic digital processing, Williams’ vocals sound towering and all-encompassing, as if she’s not simply claiming her power through words, but through taking up more space in the mix.
Though the strength of Petals for Armor is derived from the complexities inherent in self-actualization, it is, at times, weakened by its musical and lyrical scope. Shifts in mood, as when the downtempo, shuffling ode to friendship “My Friend” leads into the propulsive synth-pop anthem “Over Yet,” are slightly jarring within the progression of the album, even if they’re expected within the context of therapeutic treatment. And after rage and recovery are discussed with such nuanced sensitivity early on in the record, it’s disappointing to hear her sing about love and sensuality with easy platitudes, as on the sophomoric refrain of “Taken.”
Occasionally, these shifting moods occur within the span of a single song, as on “Dead Horse.” The song opens with that candid voice recording, which fades discomfitingly into bright, party-ready synths. Though it’s not new for Paramore to hide dark lyrics—the song details Williams’ affair with her now-ex-husband—within fluorescent melodies, the carefree nature of the somewhat-tropical house production can come off as if Williams is wearing a costume, playing the role of scorned ex through the lens of a dancehall singer. “Watch Me While I Bloom,” with its upbeat jazz rhythm and winking lyrics, similarly grates with its forced brightness, Williams’ cheery delivery coming across like a precocious lead actor in a school play.
But even these weaker moments are small inside a record that is revelatory in its breadth, a manifestation of trust between its personnel: Taylor York, the record’s sole producer, and Zac Farro, who provided instrumentation, are long-time Paramore bandmates, lifers after the group’s many tumultuous shake-ups; Joey Howard, who helped pen several songs, is the band’s touring bassist. Somewhat counterintuitively, considering the familiarity among the players, the record, at its best, transcends the boundaries defined by their previous music, creating new soundscapes that recontextualize Williams’ powerful tenor.
“Crystal Clear,” a pared-back march into the terrifying unknown, showcases the malleability of her voice. Beginning with woozy synths, the song picks up rhythm with skittering drum blasts, both of which take a backseat as soon as Williams’ swinging vocal enters. Here, Williams flows with the thematic current, her voice swaying and hanging heavy as she discusses overcoming romantic hang-ups. But by the time it reaches the chorus’ simple, hesitantly hopeful refrain, there’s a distinct lightness in her vocals, the relief palpable as she repeats, “Won’t give in to the fear.” We’re left with a vision of Williams that mirrors the strongest moments on Petals for Armor, one that takes the long way to enlightenment.

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This engaging compilation of work by the former Japan vocalist begins begins with a version of a song from his old band, moves through material from his solo LPs, and closes with a new song.

David Sylvian: A Victim of Stars: 1982-2012

A Victim of Stars: 1982-2012

David Sylvian's voice bears such a calmly forceful cadence, full of carefully enunciated words that trail off into a pristine nasal murmur, that he can dart between genres and surface with music positioned resolutely in his own sound world. The former Japan singer has spent a great deal of time reflecting on his solo output in recent times. In 2010 he released a retrospective of his non-album collaborative work, Sleepwalkers. If that record was a treat for fans, A Victim of Stars feels like a crack opening in the door for anyone left behind, a way to get a feel for Sylvian's far-reaching mood swings since Japan disbanded in 1982. It's neatly ordered, beginning with a hint of the early trappings of his solo career via a version of his former band's "Ghosts"; taking in a smattering of material from his full-length albums; and closing with a new song bearing a title that summarizes the divisive areas of exploration that break-up his career arc: "Where's Your Gravity?"
Sylvian's voice is a unique beast, pitched somewhere between the type of feigned disinterest typical of all the Ferry and Bowie acolytes the New Romantic movement produced, but with greater cracks and world weariness appearing with age. By the time A Victim of Stars lands on "Small Metal Gods" from 2009's excellent Manafon, there's a buckle and strain to his singing, a distinct warble in his throat, a palpable swoop down toward earthier terrain. But it's still grounded in the unreal, demonstrating Sylvian's preference for keeping his audience at arm's length. If there's one element of style that remains in place on this compilation, it's the tendency to untether his voice, to leave it floating in space, while the instrumentation-- sometimes fussy, sometimes so minimal it's barely a whisper-- politely searches for space around it, as though the singer is performing an awkward first dance with his own work.
Dialing back from "Small Metal Gods" to the material from 1984's Brilliant Trees is like taking a leap from someone at peace with their place on the planet to someone still figuring out who they are. But even the shift from "Pulling Punches" to "The Ink in the Well" (the first two tracks from Trees) is substantial, with the former all 1980s lipstick traces and watery slap bass, while the latter is sunk in a bed of acoustic thrumming and gently brushed drums. Both are perfect ease-in access points to Sylvian's solo work and among the best-known material here. But a better early warning of what was to come is "Forbidden Colours", Sylvian's 1983 collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's a fully formed piece of orchestral pop, with Sylvian taking on the mantle of wraithlike torch singer-- the vantage point from which he's clearly most comfortable as a performer.
One of Sylvian's biggest detours from that mode of operation was Secrets of the Beehive (1987), a largely acoustic-driven work represented by a clutch of songs here. On "Waterfront" from that album it's easy to detect the Scott Walker influence that continually reemerges in his career, while "Let the Happiness In" is the kind of low-key, jazz-inflected ballad that would fit easily into Mark Hollis' solitary solo album. Fellow outliers such as Walker and Hollis are the kind of company Sylvian has comfortably kept throughout his solo work, and, like them, he has often deviated tangentially in pursuit of untried provinces; Secrets of the Beehive was followed by two protracted instrumental collaborations with members of Can, Plight & Premonition (with Holger Czukay) and Flux and Mutability (again with Czukay, along with Jaki Liebezeit, Marcus Stockhausen, and Michael Karoli).
It would have been difficult to bring in such work on A Victim of Stars, on account of the sheer length of the material in those collaborations. As such, it's important to note this is only a small part of Sylvian's story, a few splintered factions that hint at fuller, more expansive stories told elsewhere on his full-length recordings. But as a handhold into those tales this works surprisingly well, occasionally even dipping into the uninhibited environments Sylvian likes to extend to, such as the subdued funk of the nine-and-a-half-minute opener to 1999's Dead Bees on a Cake, "I Surrender". It also highlights his immaculate taste in collaborators, with earlier work alongside Sakamoto and Robert Fripp complemented by Blemish-era compositions marked by the spooked-out electronics of Christian Fennesz and Derek Bailey's guitar passages. The ghostlike curls of feedback on "Late Night Shopping" from that record are the perfect place to drop Sylvian's voice, where his tenderly accented tones lightly vacillate between calm and disquiet.
Sylvian's partnership with Fennesz now stretches over a number of recordings, with both clearly sharing an appreciation for abstraction in art. It's an impulse that loops back to the earliest song present here, "Ghosts", which fleetingly lapses into glitch-heavy electronics at crucial junctures in its evolution. It's not easy to string a single narrative from A Victim of Stars-- Sylvian's career is in a permanent state of flux and reinvention. But he works best when his songwriting is pulled away from the concrete, when there's open-endedness for him to spin his focus around. But nothing here is ever wholly drawn into that world. Sylvian's role often feels like that of a curator, tugging in elements of free improvisation but never letting it overshadow, lest his absorption with songcraft, opulent orchestration, ambient electronics, and dozens of other impulses suffer. A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.


The third album from bassist/songwriter Thundercat is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once. Drunk's oddball soul confronts the challenge of just trying to live life.

Drunk

Thundercat gives himself a pep talk at the beginning of Drunk: “Comb your beard, brush your teeth … beat your meat, go to sleep.” At least he’s in marginally better spirits these days. Following the death of his friend and collaborator Austin Peralta, his last two releases—2013’s Apocalypse and 2015’s The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam—explored the concept of extinction and what the spirit might endure when the body expires. On these records—along with Flying Lotus’ 2014 album You’re Dead!, where Thundercat contributed bass or vocals to many of its songs—the singer and preeminent bassist (born Stephen Bruner) tried to make sense of a devastating truth. Peralta was gone, and one day, he will be gone too.
All this cosmic morbidity leaned on Thundercat’s music, which takes on many forms all at once: ’70s funk, R&B, punk with tinges of fusion. His art is undeniably black, yet the structures are loose enough to pull in all sorts of listeners. It speaks to those who love soul and ska equally, those who spazz just the same when George Duke or Bad Brains flash across the iPod. Thundercat is equal parts Nintendo generation, ’60s flower child, and hardcore skater bro. His live show is punk as hell; serene studio tracks are given loud, frenetic makeovers. On top of all that rests Thundercat’s smooth falsetto, a transcendent voice that can usher you into some sort of demise (“Descent Into Madness”), sing lovingly to his pet cat (“Tron Song”), or make drugs seem perfectly fine (“DMT Song,” “Oh Sheit It’s X.”).
If Thundercat’s recent work focused on the uncertainty of death, Drunk confronts the challenge of just trying to live life. It’s a marathon through the mind of Bruner that uses his casually humorous and honest songwriting to detail that which is cool and that which sucks. Cool? Kenny Loggins and Dragon Ball Z wrist-slap bracelets. Sucks? Friend zones and the police state. Featuring Kendrick Lamar (“Walk on By”), Wiz Khalifa (“Drink Dat”) and Kamasi Washington (“Them Changes”) among others, Drunk plays like an anxious stoner album, the aural equivalent of late-night channel surfing. Its 23 tracks present a fluid narrative that begins on a somewhat bright note and gradually fades into darkness—a concept record that takes you through a bleary night of drinking, drugs, funk, and heartbreak with Thundercat himself.
He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once. Each song hovers around the two-minute mark, defying those ‘70s fusion forebears whose tracks could drag on over dense harmonies and time signatures. Drunk hits all the melodic and emotional themes Thundercat aims for without belaboring the point. On openers “Rabbot Ho” and “Captain Stupido,” he comes off a bit goofy and red-eyed, leaving his wallet at the club after a night of partying. “Bus in These Streets,” which resembles the theme of 1980s children show “The Great Space Coaster,” uses a sarcastic nursery rhyme flow to chide our collective social media dependence (“Thank God for technology ‘cause where would we be if we couldn't tweet our thoughts,” Thundercat quips). “Jameel’s Space Ride,” a transitional song near the album’s end, uses a chiptune-inspired beat while he sings of the struggle between minorities and law enforcement: “I’m safe on my block, except for the cops/Will they attack, would it be ‘cause I’m black?” This, of course, is after he literally meows about how cool it must be to be a cat.
All this oddball soul feels more anchored to Thundercat's humanity than his previous releases. We see him here as both a heartbroken insomniac, someone who looks at the world alongside Pharrell on “The Turn Down” and wonders if “everything we do is weak,” and a juvenile jazzbo who wants to “blow all [his] cash on anime.” Much like The Golden Age of Apocalypse and Apocalypse, which leapfrogged several different genres with dizzying results, he’s able to keep it all together, offering a puzzling ride that feels coherent despite its moving parts. Unlike his past work, which put his musicianship on great display, Drunk presents the defining picture of Thundercat as a person: quirky, political, thoughtful, weird—and sometimes drunk. These descriptors aren’t surprising if you follow him on Twitter, but here, Thundercat comes off like the guy who you can hit up at the bar and riff on pretty much anything. Given all he’s gone through personally, it’s an honor to hear Thundercat feeling like himself again.


Raum is the collaborative project of Grouper's Liz Harris and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, a solo artist and member of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty, and their debut, Event of Your Leaving, is damaged and euphoric.

Event of Your Leaving

It's not hard distinguishing the work of Grouper's Liz Harris from that of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on their collaborative debut, Event of Your Leaving, a fact that speaks to the singularity of their respective approaches. Formulating a signature musical language is especially impressive within the abstracted terrain of ambient drone and wordless dream-pop, where they've each made some of the most distinctive sounds of the past decade. Harris, with her analog and oft-depressed toolbox of charcoal drones, acoustic strums, and ethereal singing, has arguably been the most prominent artist working in this realm. But Cantu-Ledesma, also of San Francisco post-rock band Tarentel since the 1990s, is a fixture in his own right, having delivered around two-dozen releases for labels like Type, Blackest Rainbow, and his own, Root Strata. Cantu-Ledesma's drones are dense, bright, and harsh, most cohesively captured on 2010's compulsively listenable Love Is a Stream—a properly mesmeric attempt at teasing the ecstatic essence from Loveless-style shoegaze noise, amping his deconstructions into the red while capturing the blissed out totality of real love.
Event of Your Leaving, a project in-process for at least two years, proves just how complementary these seemingly conflicted aesthetic spirits can be. Where Harris makes subtle, interior, and dread-laced music that often sounds buried underground—it can feel embedded with existential questions of mortality and death, and did so explicitly on this year's The Man Who Died in His Boat—Cantu-Ledesma makes blown-out, skybent music, with the affect of something heavenly pouring down. Where Grouper works with images of the natural world and somber moods, Cantu-Ledesma's beaming washes of pastel-shaded white noise are optimistic; his song titles have included "White Dwarf Butterfly" and "Stained Glass Body", carrying the romance of a love poem or emergency meditation. Grouper's music can recall the tapestry of William Basinski's decaying tape loops, but Cantu-Ledesma's radiates as if possessing regenerative power. If Grouper is the inexplicable feeling just after loss, Cantu-Ledesma's is recovery. Both produce emotionally overwhelming drone abstractions with unconventional beauty. They use idiosyncratic tones to articulate things that are unspeakable.
This duality is absolutely crushing on Side A. Cantu-Ledesma's blistering noise allows crevices of space to fill in and contribute a certain brightness and color, as if poking holes so that rays can shine through, while Harris' drones ground the sound. It is damaged and euphoric, and often sounds as if there is a steady wind churning through while the sun beams down, capped with the somewhat confounding angelic or supernatural aura that is quintessential of Grouper. The repetition of 13-minute opener "In Stellar Orbit" is like a massage for your brain cells—the gentle, circling abrasion underpinned by light and occasionally skull-piercing noise, gorgeous and grating as it floats off. "Blood Moon" is the energetic epitome of the project, reaching the record's visceral peak while simultaneously managing to amp its grace. The defining characteristics of Cantu-Ledesma's sound are here, coupled with layered drones that could be a distant choir.
A noticeable sadness marks Event of Your Leaving's second side. The cinematic title track is the record's shortest, and seems to function like an overture. The light is drained as a swell of downcast drones are marked by minor piano keys and oscillated vocal parts that recall Grouper's earlier records. The flecks of piano are brighter on "In Held Company" and there are sublime negotiations throughout, between the severity of the austere instrumentation and featherlight vocals—and later, between the track's considerable white space and a soliloquy of drone. An anxious, distressing rumble permeates the record as it closes, and though the album imposes no narrative, there is an undeniable trajectory from innate hope to total loss of vitality. Event shows this process with no resolution, just honest closure fading into silence.


The Catalan composer’s third album creates an immersive and at times thrilling world out of piano, electronics, and her remarkably agile voice, which is processed, stretched, and pulled apart at will.

Pripyat

Marina Herlop’s music is driven by her remarkable voice: She is capable of both hopscotching through operatic upper registers and settling into a dreamily dulcet tone, often within the same song. The Catalan experimental musician explored relatively traditional classical styles on her first two albums, 2016’s Nanook and 2018’s Babasha, whose songs for voice and piano, with occasional electronic accents, reflected her conservatory training. Pripyat, Herlop’s third album and first for cult label PAN, takes a surprising left turn. Introducing more pronounced vocal manipulation, drum patterns, and further digital embellishments, Pripyat is her most multidimensional and fascinating work to date, stretching the human voice in seemingly infinite directions.
The addition of a third instrument to Herlop’s toolkit—especially one as boundless as production software—dramatically expands her sound. The decision to focus on electronics was as much practical as artistic. Piano and voice “were the only tools I really had,” she admitted of her previous albums. Yet the computer is essential to Pripyat’s astonishing breadth as it moves between off-kilter rhythms and atmospheric electronics while showcasing the strength of Herlop’s voice. On “Lyssof,” she sings a bounding a cappella verse before glitchy production swarms her: A crinkled electric guitar line, metronomic synth pads, and digital chatter threaten to collapse in on each other before coalescing into a recognizable shape. “Abans Abans” minces a piano melody into tinkling ribbons over a thudding, deconstructed drum beat, taking a full minute before Herlop’s voice arrives in various alien forms to thread each part together. She builds tension with these disparate abstract elements, carefully constructing an immersive world around her voice, which is continually processed, stretched, and pulled apart at will.
As on Herlop’s previous albums, the majority of the lyrics on Pripyat are in an imagined language, forcing her music to rely on syllabic phrasing and harmonies. She was also inspired by the Carnatic music of Southern India, interpolating the style’s percussive vocal expressions on “Miu” over an amniotic backdrop of rippling tones and vibrating feedback. Earlier, during the standout “Shaolin Mantis,” Herlop gasps, coos, and chirps over watery chords and a juddering, danceable drum pattern. Evoking Björk’s mischievous vocal tampering, here Herlop leans into a thrilling sense of play and invention. Listening to Pripyat is a vertiginous experience, like moving through the stops and starts of Herlop’s mind in real time.
A subtle theme of renewal courses throughout Pripyat, conveyed through both its mercurial sound and its title. The album is named after a city in northern Ukraine that was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986; today it stands as a ghost town overgrown with trees, flowers, and shrubs. It’s a striking, eerie, and surprisingly fitting image of posthuman life to pair with Herlop’s polymorphic music. Pripyat gives shape to a future world, one where language isn’t required to establish deep connections to the earth and to one another.


The second full-length from this Brooklyn band is a striking consolidation of the spiky psych-prog tendencies of its 2007 debut into a pop framework.

Beast Rest Forth Mouth

While it may seem as if there's not a new release without a hyphenated genre to give it birth, Bear in Heaven's second LP feels fresh simply because it resists easy categorization or comparison. This isn't to say it's sonically groundbreaking, though-- fitting for an album whose title references the four main navigational directions, Beast Rest Forth Mouth is as familiar-feeling as it is difficult to pinpoint. Mostly made up of textural, spacious three- to four-minute pop anthems with towering choruses, BRFM is a welcome reminder that an album doesn't have to be bombastic to feel huge and important. Take out the earbuds and let it fill a space: This is music that's bigger than your iPod-- music you'll want to feel all around you.
Though not quite coming out of nowhere, BRFM seems like a surprise gift-- a striking consolidation of the spiky psych-prog tendencies of their debut into a pop framework. In terms of career gear-shifts, the move Caribou made with Andorra is the most recent precedent. Though at 41 minutes the album is economical and sharp in its execution, the band-- all from Georgia and Alabama-- still imbues its compositions with the generosity of spirit that makes the best Southern rock so invigorating. "Beast in Peace" opens the record with a gentle lockstep before shifting seamlessly into a mile-wide chorus. Then, they expand that chorus even further, like switching to the widest camera lens to capture a vista they just realized the full vastness of. Elsewhere, as its title indicates, "Ultimate Satisfaction" is an IMAX-wide ode to what starts out as a simple thought, then turns bodily-- the refrain of "coming down!" charts the sensation spreading like a spasm. That towering exultation is also felt on the primal "Deafening Love". While aiming for a similar sense of awe-inspiring bliss, "Love" widens the focus and luxuriates in the tremors, approximating a more protracted take on Jane's Addiction's "Mountain Song".
Yet Bear in Heaven's greatest trick is creating music that evokes the sort of physicality and scope that could soundtrack a Hollywood film, but also works equally well at stirring up intimate bodily passion. Lush synth beds, warm electronics accenting polyrhythms, and Jon Philpot's yearning, boyish howl coalesce into a vibe that's muscular without being macho, and which strikes a rare balance between nuanced emotion and overwhelming sensation. Even when delving into more disconcerting subject matter-- dabbling in self-loathing on "Wholehearted Mess" or confronting paranoia on the slinky "You Do You"-- Philpot still manages to imbue the songs with an atmosphere of seduction and intrigue.
An album like BRFM couldn't exist without a paean to the most severe and high-stakes of endeavors, and first single "Lovesick Teenagers" more than meets the requirements for 2009's Epic Song About Tortured Young Romance. With briskly alternating synth chords spitting by like fast-moving highway stripes, the titular couple are doomed to crash, but most likely in a JG Ballard sort of way. The pair martyr themselves in order to eternalize their passion, and the band is generous enough to resurrect them later, in the reprise of "Teenagers" that closes the album, seamlessly and surprisingly emerging from "Casual Goodbye". As a gesture, it's a slight nod backwards to the suite-like structures of their debut, but moreoever a celebration of abundance that wraps up an album overflowing with feeling. It's also an exclamation point signaling that Bear in Heaven not only clearly recognize their own best instincts, they're not shy about dwelling on them. Sure, bands can adapt to the current musical climate by adding extras to LPs, tweaking release dates to accommodate fan interest, or even giving away their music free. A curtain call like "Teenagers", though: now that's generosity.


Newly reissued for its 25th anniversary, STP’s sunbaked album of glam and pop and rock ranks as one of their best, separating them from the pack of post-grunge wannabes.

Stone Temple Pilots: Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop (Super Deluxe Edition)

Depending on your perspective, Stone Temple Pilots’ debut, 1992’s Core, was either the last of the first wave of big-alt rock records lumped under the name “grunge,” or it was the first major album to arrive in the wake of the genre’s success. Either way, it caused enough chop to trouble the already turbulent waters of Puget Sound. For the first three years of the band’s career, most critics and artists viewed them as poseurs grasping at the hem of Eddie Vedder’s cutoffs. In his 1993 Spin cover story, subtly titled “Steal This Hook,” Jonathan Gold reports that Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was fond of calling STP “Stone Pimple Toilets.”
But for the millions of teenaged Gen-Xers headbanging to “Sex Type Thing” in their Geo Prizms, the question of whether Scott Weiland and his bandmates—brothers Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass and guitar, plus drummer Eric Kretz—had a cultural right to their Big Muff pedals and thrift-store clothing didn’t matter. They wrote killer rock songs, and that was enough. This, it seems, was also STP’s first priority. At a time when authenticity was considered in terms of artistic novelty and personal torment—and when critics thought authenticity was music’s primary aim—STP understood alternative rock as merely another kind of pop music and were content to work within its established forms. When the flannel grew too warm, they simply shrugged it off.
Remarkably, they didn’t bother putting on anything else. Their third album, 1996’s Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop—reissued for its 25th anniversary with a collection of alternate takes and a 1997 live set from Panama City Beach—is glammy and sexy in a way that would make Seattle’s gatekeepers blush. Its experimental streak—while slightly overstated in later years—showed that they were willing to explore new sounds, but only if they resulted in pop gold. The songs themselves are emotionally direct, conjuring T. Rex, Bowie, and Exile-era Rolling Stones; like those totems of exhaustion and bravado, nearly every song sounds like it was made at 4:30 in the morning.
Everything moves quickly and smoothly, Weiland’s voice raspy like a skate blade on old ice. While the band’s early singles like “Plush” and “Dead & Bloated” were more melodically developed, they could come off as plodding and a little pushy, cornering you like a grad student at a party who really wants you to get where he’s coming from. “Pop’s Love Suicide” and “Tumble in the Rough,” which kick off the album, both sound like they’re being hammered out of tin. They move with a newfound speed and ease, but their casual arrangements and flat melodies make them feel slight; you can barely imagine them soundtracking a Surge ad, much less standing against the post-grunge glam that Spacehog were already perfecting.
It may seem unfair to frame Stone Temple Pilots in relation to the artists they were channeling, but originality was never their goal. “The last thing I wanted to do with this band was make everybody believe we invented something,” Robert DeLeo told the L.A. Times in 1994. Accordingly, many of Tiny Music’s best moments come when the band openly embraces its influences. “Lady Picture Show” is a stately piece of Beatles pop that sounds like a version of “You Never Give Me Your Money” that’s been left in the street for a few days. Though Weiland would later say that it’s about “the horrific gang rape of a dancer who winds up falling in love but can’t let go of the pain,” the song never wears its emotional heaviness too proudly; like Paul McCartney delivering “Eleanor Rigby,” Weiland comes off as a concerned—if lyrically obtuse—observer, and the distance he places between himself and the subject gives the song a melancholy air that’s light-years removed from the clumsiness of “Sex Type Thing.”
“Big Bang Baby” goes one step further, namechecking Bowie’s “Station to Station” and directly nicking the chorus melody from the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” While the latter made Pitchfork’s then-editor accuse them of plagiarism in a genuinely deplorable review upon its original release, Weiland was trying to use one of the most famous rock songs of all time as a sly comment on the weight of stardom: “Sell your soul and sign an autograph,” he sings in the preceding lyric. When the band shifts from the churning glam of the chorus to a beautifully chiming refrain of “Nothing’s for free,” the irony is apparent. Rarely had they sounded so in command of their craft.
“Adhesive,” meanwhile, showed that Stone Temple Pilots were still tuned in to alternative radio, its slow blooms of overdriven guitar and subdued vocals floating in the same galaxy as Hum’s 1995 hit “Stars.” Weiland was in the grips of a heroin addiction that would slowly erode his life over the next two decades. But now, roughly two years after the death of Kurt Cobain, he was keenly aware of himself as a product and how his own death would likely be co-opted by the industry. “Sell more records if I’m dead,” he sings. “Hope it’s near corporate records’ fiscal year.” Even as the song rises to a chorus, his voice remains weak and thin; it’s one of the only times on Tiny Music that he returns to the alienation that marked the band’s early work.
Despite the occasional introspective moments, Tiny Music is primarily an album of expansion. It was recorded in a 25,000-square-foot mansion north of Santa Barbara, throughout its bathrooms, hallways, and even on the lawn. The tracks here that were preposterous to critics at the time now seem like the album’s most carefully considered—and daring—moments. NME called “And So I Know” “blatant easy listening” likely because the cool sway of its starry guitar-jazz was wildly at odds with what passed for sensitivity among male-fronted groups at the time. While the song was never released as a single, it showed that a rock band could be sincere without being abrasive, broadening the era’s narrow conceptions of authenticity and masculinity, even if only slightly. A few years later, Incubus would sell a ton of records playing basically the same kind of song. You can also hear the past and future of alt-rock radio in “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart,” whose burning chorus would’ve fit on Alice in Chains’ Dirt, and whose choppy, pepped-up verses cleared a happier path out of grunge that bands like Third Eye Blind would gladly follow.
A complete take of the abbreviated album opener “Press Play” aside, the alternate cuts collected on this reissue are more interesting than essential, but the Panama City Beach concert captures Stone Temple Pilots’ power as a live band. Parts of this set aired on MTV’s Spring Break, and if the crowd chatter during the quieter moments is any indication, this was not the most attentive audience STP ever played for. But the band doesn’t seem to notice or care. Dean DeLeo covers so much ground, he seems to be playing rhythm and lead at once, steering feedback and slide guitar through the verses of “Big Empty” and replicating the ripples of organ in “Lady Picture Show.”
Hearing Weiland toggle between the voice he used on Core and Purple and the coy shout he developed for Tiny Music is a reminder that his vocal transformation in the mid-’90s is arguably Tiny Music’s biggest artistic leap; he takes melodic lines with a tongue-curling insouciance that makes him sound like Bono gone hoarse with jet lag, and his ability to convincingly inhabit both the swirling darkness of the first two records and the bright pop of Tiny Music in this set is remarkable. The tracklist is split evenly among their three albums, highlighting just how many hits these guys had already accumulated by 1997.
In his 1996 review of Tiny Music, Spin’s Charles Aaron suggested that Stone Temple Pilots fundamentally lacked irony. That’s not quite correct, even if by “irony” Aaron meant the kind of cynicism toward the trappings of rock culture that the alternative movement had been so keen to avoid. While that supposed deficiency prevented them from being accepted by the alt- and indie-rock stars of their day, it also allowed them to embrace big, powerful, goofball rock’n’roll without second-guessing their ambition. Sure, that’s probably how Scott Weiland ended up duetting with Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis on Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other and how we all ended up with Velvet Revolver. But it’s also how Stone Temple Pilots managed to evolve into a much more interesting band without losing their pop appeal. For a band who was regularly accused of chasing trends, Tiny Music proved they were willing to buck the defining characteristic of the era: They made being in a hugely famous—if somewhat dopey—rock band sound like it might actually be fun.

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Returning with mightier riffs and wilder improvisations than ever, the trio offers a spiritual vision of metal, one well timed to a moment of crisis.

May You Be Held

Few bands clad a soft heart in tensile steel quite like Sumac. All of the abstruse metal trio’s four albums over the last five years have been ever more imposing, like self-perpetuating obstacle courses in hell. Ricocheting between formidable doom and barbed improvisation, Sumac sound preternaturally belligerent. But the group’s core is the spiritual yearning of Aaron Turner, who since his later days in Isis has often attempted to repurpose metal’s malevolent mechanics for personal transcendence. Sumac’s May You Be Held might be the closest he has ever come. For a vertiginous hour, Sumac pirouette around riffs and collapse into bedlam, hurtle through feedback and snap back into lockstep. As violent as they may sometimes seem, these songs are timely psalms of perseverance and rebirth, weaponized for whatever comes next.
Three years ago, Sumac traveled to Tokyo to work with Japanese experimental godhead Keiji Haino. That experience not only led to two intriguing collaborative LPs but also challenged Sumac to stretch their parameters; their subsequent full-length, 2018’s colossal Love in Shadow, disrupted their formerly relentless force with unmoored instrumental explorations and extreme dynamics. May You Be Held indulges this tension like a favorite new habit. The metal sections are mightier, tightened with pneumatic precision. The improvisations, meanwhile, are more adventurous, pushing harder against the boundaries of the songs themselves. The uncanny hybrid suggests something Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun band might have made in a different setting, or something his son, Caspar, might have eventually found with his own Massaker. Where those splenetic groups decried our failures, Sumac’s tirades ponder fixing them, too.
Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length. They race, for instance, into the 20-minute title track like a power trio of agile all-stars, moving in perfect lockstep through a rhythm and riff that recall Touch & Go’s best toughies. It begins with a bleak picture of a warming world, scarred by fires and floods and droughts. But in the second half, after an impasse of noise that curdles until it crumbles, Turner shifts into a prayer—perhaps for the next generation (he is a new father, after all), perhaps for the world at large. “May the light dance in your eyes,” he shouts as the song flirts with anthem status, like “Forever Young” for metal-loving parents. “May your limbs move through gleaming waves.” Sumac’s jarring sounds emphasize the long odds of such well wishes.
“Consumed,” likewise, is a hard-won paean to resilience—and perhaps the pinnacle of Sumac’s first six years. For most of these 16 minutes, Sumac seesaw between churning sections so muscular they’d make Mastodon flinch and stark atmospheric spans that feel like walking into the mouth of some haunted cavern. Turner scowls at a world of ruin, a place of acrid smoke and desiccated bodies. The band slams into a wall of feedback only to return twice as heavy, twice as fast, and exponentially more exhilarating. Turner sings of a hero born to save the world, or at least believe that it might be saved. It’s an evangelical moment, enough to make you momentarily trust in deliverance.
May You Be Held works a lot like a church service—tales of tribulation and evil meted out alongside words of encouragement, delivered with the high volume of utter conviction. The album begins with a gorgeous but ghostly invocation in which Nick Yacyshyn’s bowed vibraphone drones wrap around Turner’s meticulous feedback and Brian Cook’s rumbling bass like lace. An hour later, the record ends with a furtively optimistic benediction: A stunted guitar riff and faint percussion crawl from the morass of a church organ played by Turner’s collaborator and wife Faith Coloccia. “Metal has always been for me an affirmation of life, one of the only ways I’ve felt spiritual ecstasy,” Turner recently told me. “Sumac is almost this ritualistic practice of tapping into that energy.”
Both Turner’s stentorian bark and Sumac’s bellicose sound can be off-putting; this is not passive or polite music. But this kind of sermon feels especially galvanizing right now, in a moment where a steady tide of endless dread suggests at least the possibility of actual insurgency. May You Be Held reckons with how bad it may truly get—“Vomit and ash/Spilled across the floor,” Turner grunts at the album’s center—and tries to fight to the other side.


The composer and percussionist’s latest work is intricate and eerie, drawing attention to the small sounds that slip unnoticed in the chorus of a busy day.

Icons

In the early 2010s, the avant-garde percussionist and composer Eli Keszler created a series of audiovisual installations involving lengths of piano wire hung from massive structures: gallery rafters, the Manhattan Bridge, a water tower in Louisiana. The wires, combined with a network of motorized beaters that strike them according to fluidly shifting patterns, create a quasi-autonomous musical instrument, generating huge masses of pointillistic sound. Sometimes, these installations perform solo; sometimes, they are joined by Keszler and other collaborators. The sounds of the wires are so complex as to be essentially unpredictable, making it difficult for performers to accompany them in conventionally musical ways. For Keszler, the machines’ indifference is part of the point. “There’s just the random information that the installation spits at the piece, which is one of the best parts: you get all these contradictions,” he told NPR Music in an interview about Archway, the Manhattan Bridge piece. “You try to do something, the installation doesn’t care.... It doesn’t respond to the way you’re feeling.”
My initial approaches to Icons, an album Keszler created during a year spent quarantined in Manhattan, put me in the mind of those installations. The music situates his marvelously intricate playing, on a drum set and an array of pitched percussion, within electroacoustic settings that can seem icily disengaged from his feats of expressive humanity. He has said the album was inspired in part by wandering through the sudden stillness of the city in 2020, the way it drew his attention to small sounds that might otherwise slip unnoticed into the chorus of a busy day. The music bears that out in ways that can almost feel literally representative. A drum fill clatters like change on a bodega countertop. A melody behind it loops quietly but insistently, just at the threshold of perception, like the tolling of a church bell newly audible from several blocks away. Uncanny field recordings arrive from nowhere. Monolithic harmonies loom at the edges, empty but illuminated. Like the city itself, this music will happily churn on without you if you fall behind.
Keszler's profile has been on the upswing in recent years. He’s appeared on several Daniel Lopatin projects, including the score for Uncut Gems. His 2018 album Stadium was excellent, and far more approachable than much of his previous work, draping his dizzying rhythms in silky jazz chords and arranging them into miniatures that sometimes resembled instrumental hip-hop. Icons arrives via the dancefloor-friendly UK label LuckyMe; two weeks before its release, the percussionist logged an unlikely collaboration with Skrillex. If Keszler faced any temptation to capitalize on this momentum, tweaking his approach for larger audiences, he resisted it. Icons is a considerably more challenging album than its predecessor. The microscopic funk breaks of Stadium appear occasionally, but more often, the tempo is slow and the atmosphere is eerie. Most of the tracks aren’t calibrated for individual listening, but the album as a whole also resists any linear narrative. Beginnings and endings are difficult to discern. A composition might lurch to what seems like its close, linger in silence for a second or two, then shake itself back to life.
Keszler’s signature as a drummer involves incredible densities of strikes in impossibly tiny temporal spaces, carefully and quietly arranged. He favors a closed hi-hat and tightly tuned snare drum, pinpricks that go silent almost as soon as your ears register them. Even when he rolls across toms and open cymbals, the effect is far from bombastic; more like the patter of soft rain. His mixture of delicacy and abandon, the defining sensibility of Stadium and 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, recedes a bit on Icons. During the most immediately ravishing passages, on tracks like “Civil Sunset” and “The Accident,” he brings his ability on the kit to the fore. Elsewhere, the action is more elusive: barely audible bell tones skittering like skipped pebbles across the void of “God Over Money;” a persistent creaking deep in the background of “Dawn,” which might be a virtuoso performance on the world’s smallest percussion instrument, or just a recording of an old door. Appreciating Icons involves adopting an attitude similar to Keszler’s: actively refusing to tune out these diminutive sounds, paying close attention to their infinite variation, daring to hear them as music.
On my first few listens, I found the album’s layers of contradictory sound distracting and confusing. I wanted to hear Keszler’s playing in an environment with less clutter. Eventually, I started to feel the rhythmic connection between, say, the percussive freakout at the end of “Static Doesn’t Exist” and the looped chatter of the field recording that accompanies it. If I had to guess, I’d say that the musicality of these relationships is deeply intuitive for Keszler. But he might be plotting them according to some elaborate design. A blurred boundary between composition and improvisation is a recurring feature in his work. The wire installations were partially about a John Cage-ish openness to the possibilities of chance, but the sounds they made were not purely random. They were happening according to the rules of a system that Keszler engineered, presumably with great care. Similarly, by feeling or by logic, by intention or by accident, Icons coheres into something strangely wonderful. Listen closely and its stoic surfaces start to open up, seeming less like an abandoned city, or those indifferent wire installations, and more like a living place.

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On this new mixtape, Oakland rapper and former Das Racist member Kool A.D. collaborates with the producer Trackademicks to focus on a looming Bay Area influence: hyphy.

Official

Kool A.D. has been on a tear lately, even by his own prolific standards. Official marks his sixth release this year; he’s been keeping a pace of a mixtape a month all summer. He continues to steer towards Lil B comparisons (July’s Zig Zag Zig is 100 tracks long and features a “BASED FREESKRYLE”) and he remains similarly willing to put his experiments and process on display. However, unlike Lil B, who—“California Boy” notwithstanding—tends to stay in his lane stylistically, Kool A.D. continues to roam the sonic map. Recent releases have ranged from focused rap mixtapes that recall his work in Das Racist (Gods of Tomorrow) to entire albums of self-sabotagingly spaced-out bedroom pop (Kool A.D. is Dead). With Official, Kool A.D. has now turned his focus to that other looming influence in the Bay: hyphy.
Official is a collaboration of sorts between Kool A.D. and Trackademicks, a Bay Area producer and rapper known for his work with Mistah F.A.B. and an unofficial remix of E-40’s crossover hit “Tell Me When to Go.” Here, Trackademicks provides seven songs’ worth of textbook hyphy beats: heavy thuds of bass, ’90s synth presets, and plenty of 808 claps. In keeping with this sound, Kool A.D. slips, chameleon-like, into a hyphy persona. While he’s dabbled in the hyphy sound plenty of times before, particularly on his “bus route” trilogy of tapes (“California Music Channel” on 2012’s 51 was produced by and featured a verse from Trackademicks), Official represents a sustained and far deeper engagement with the subgenre. Here, Kool A.D. fully embodies the native sounds of his terroir, gliding over these tracks with a smooth E-40-esque flow. Even his use of regional slang and delivery of ad-libs (either whispered or half-sung in a higher register) is on the nose throughout the course of Official.
Unlike his previous work, Kool’s focus here is on staying in character, a task that he seems to delight in. In place of the usual interplay between stoned clowning and profundity we get lines about partying, money, women, and stunting regarding his access to all of the above. Take the chorus of the trunk-rattling “Rollin’ Thru the Town:” “We be rollin’ through the town/Blowin’ hella clouds/Woofers hella loud/With the windows rolled down like/Ay, ay, ay, ay/Ay, ay, ay, ay.” “This Mane” feels a little closer to Kool’s wheelhouse, with the rapper repeating the phrase, “Y’all ‘aint even fucking with this, mane” until it becomes a sort of hater-baiting mantra. “Clapper” is the closest we get to any internal conflict, with Kool slipping into his usual flow during the first verse, though he's back to full hyphy mode in time for the chorus (“This a clapper mane, bruh, this a heater/Slap it in the old school, slap it in the beater”).
This is pretty low-stakes stuff, but it makes for a fun, breezy listen, especially compared to Kool A.D.’s longer, more freewheeling releases, which can feel impenetrable to all but diehard fans. That said, unlike most of those projects, there aren’t any quotables or moments of clarity to be found here, just seven tracks of lighthearted character-study. Kool A.D. has typically repurposed and flipped other rappers’ lines as well as his own and Official feels like a radical extension of that impulse, an album-length exercise in mimicry. Then again, hyphy’s loose energy has always served a primary influence for Kool and Official can be just as easily read as a love letter to the sounds of his hometown. Official probably won’t soundtrack an east Oakland sideshow any time soon, though were it to pop up at one, it wouldn’t raise many eyebrows.


Taking influence from the legends of Laurel Canyon, the Nashville songwriter crafts an earnest, tranquil listen that opens up a rich world of detail.

Lighten Up

Erin Rae makes gentle music that’s easy to listen to over and over again, and yet it is never boring. The Nashville songwriter’s 2018 album Putting on Airs established this strength with 12 impeccable, minimalist recordings that showcased her subtle vocal style and acoustic guitar playing: It also demonstrated a consistent gift for writing earworms. With her latest album, Lighten Up, Rae keeps the songwriting focused and tight while broadening her stylistic palette, landing on a sound that’s less acutely folksy and more classic, unpretentious pop music.
Produced by Father John Misty collaborator Jonathan Wilson and recorded at his Topanga Canyon studio, Lighten Up is unabashedly influenced by the vintage sounds of a more famous Los Angeles county canyon: The delicate, organic style of Laurel Canyon legends like Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill is all over this album, as is the light psychedelia of late ‘60s and ‘70s pop-country. Bobbie Gentry, Lee Hazlewood, and Don Williams are among Rae’s named influences, and their heavily-produced, laid-back aesthetic is clearly echoed in her work.
Rae and Wilson wear the weight of these familiar influences well, using buoyant layers—not to mention, appearances from Kevin Morby and Hand Habits—to temper their retrophilia. On the album’s catchiest track, “True Love’s Face,” Wurlitzer, organ, piano, and slide guitar slip in and out to create a pleasant, casual groove—the sound of talented people just having fun in the studio. Five of the album’s 12 songs are supplemented by a string quartet, tapping yet another ’70s cue to provide a more expansive and ambitious sound. Occasionally, as on “Gonna Be Strange,” the grandness can be cold compared to the more intimate moments, but it more often adds heft to her understated vocals.
The themes of Lighten Up are connected to those of Putting on Airs, further exploring the intersection of personal relationships and mental wellness. There’s a tone of of therapy-ready, self-actualization to some songs; “Lighten Up and Try” toys with contemporary country’s didactic strain, radio-ready songs that tell a listener what to do or feel. But there is a sincerity to Rae’s music, both lyrically and stylistically, that makes even those sentiments convincing—it comes through the speakers like a warm hug. “Enemy,” a song about the nemeses that lie within our own heads, is hazy and mellow, a finger-picked jam that sounds like the perfect salve for the kind of spiraling self-loathing it describes. An epic journey, “Cosmic Sigh” skirts trite jargon about personal growth in favor of poetry: “Just before the old ways die/They lure, they lie.”
Rae’s songs are so soothing and serene that some of them almost work as lullabies, earning placements on the dreaded lean-back, “vibe”-oriented playlists with titles like “Indie and Chill” and “Soft + Slow.” Yet her easygoing delivery and meaty accompaniment create a rich sound that stands on its own. Within the tranquil atmosphere of Lighten Up is a world of musical and emotional detail, crafted with earnestness and care. Rae’s lyrics are frank and optimistic, warm and sensitive; her plainspoken honesty speaks to songwriting of an older vintage.
The way Rae sings, with abundant melodic flourishes, clear enunciation, and an even, intentional vibrato, also ties her music to a bygone era. Memorable, refreshing, and most rarely among her “Americana” peers, melodically interesting, her songs bring welcome abstraction and airiness to the sometimes overly literal world of 21st century country music. “Modern Woman,” by title alone, reads as yet another superficial girl-power anthem: Press play, though, and you’ll hear a bouncy reaction to exactly those kinds of songs, one explicitly meant to promote the broadest and most inclusive possible definition of womanhood by going far beyond country’s usual white, straight, cisgender heroines.
“Round up the old perceptions,” Rae sings in “Modern Woman.” “Lay them on down.” It’s as close to politics as she ventures on Lighten Up; she mostly takes an introspective tack instead of an observational one. But there is a core generosity to this music, made to explore one woman’s healing in a style likely to make us feel a little better, ourselves.
Buy: Rough Trade


The debut album from R&B singer Niia, produced by Rhye’s Robin Hannibal, is a placid mix of trip-hop and sophisti-pop. It imparts lovelorn angst and sweet romanticism in equal measure.

I

In 2013, Niia Bertino emerged as a mysterious figure in R&B. A classically trained pianist and jazz singer, her first single, “Made for You,” thrived as a haunting soul ballad that, when paired with producer Robin Hannibal’s scant backing track, allowed Niia’s voice to shine. A year later, on “Generation Blue,” she and Hannibal delved into 1980s dream pop, the kind of serene synth-driven melody you’d hear in a John Hughes film. Then, on “Body,” Hannibal’s production took a lighter turn; with its faint guitar riff and barely-there percussion, it closely resembled Hannibal’s work with Rhye, his nostalgic R&B duo with Toronto singer Mike Milosh. Much like Milosh, whose feathery falsetto draws comparisons to Sade, there’s a rich subtlety to Niia’s inflection that fits well with Hannibal’s nuanced soundscapes, no matter what mood they emit.
So while Niia’s debut album, I, is technically a solo endeavor, it feels like a collaborative effort with Hannibal that compiles trip-hop and sophisti-pop into one set. It feels brighter and more streamlined, fusing elements of Niia’s heavier jazz-influenced sound with modern bounce. Keeping with Niia and Hannibal’s previous output, I is a placid affair, in which Niia explores the thrill of new love and the complications that arise along the way. “Last Night in Los Feliz” might be its best song: Amid the composer’s delicate orchestral soul, Niia recalls the softer side of devotion, when she and her partner would embrace each other under the stars. Yet there’s a hint of sadness beneath it all, like Niia is holding on to moments that are slowly beginning to fade.
Compared with songs like “Made for You” and “Libertine Hero,” these tracks are easier to digest, making I a fluid listen that imparts lovelorn angst and sweet romanticism in equal measure. On “Sideline” and “Day & Night,” Niia plays the role of a jilted lover pleading for one more chance. On “Nobody” and “Girl Like Me,” she becomes the innocent pursuer, speaking sweet nothings that land softly on the ear. “I don’t even care what time it is,” she sings on “Nobody,” “... I want to play Mr. and Mrs.” Lyrics like these cut both ways on *I: *Hannibal’s sparse soundtrack draws immediate attention to Niia’s songwriting, which fastens nicely to the beats, leading to a sustained groove. Though as it plays, the words seems secondary to the music and don’t really hold up in the long run.
Niia’s voice is impressive here, but without stronger narratives to reinforce it, the instrumentals emerge as the record’s most enthralling element. To that end, I sets a refreshing vibe that brings to mind groups like Quadron and Zero 7, evoking a grown-up ethos tailor-made for yacht parties or chill Sundays at home. Yet without distinct standouts, *I *fades into the backdrop, resulting in a decent album that’s a bit too comfortable. Given the resonant power of Niia’s tone and the dynamic essence of Hannibal’s arrangements, they could stand to take a few more risks.


Bringing together members of Interpol, the Walkmen, and Bonny Light Horseman, the indie supergroup’s debut album is a carefully crafted pastoral travelogue.

Muzz

Like “Superman” or “superfood,” the term “supergroup” conjures an image of energy and might: a many-tentacled mutant band, drawing power from its individually famous members. Muzz, though, is the kind of supergroup that feels more like a nourishing break from other, more demanding endeavors. Paul Banks, whose dour, authoritative baritone can’t help but draw attention to his day job as Interpol’s frontman, formed the new band with two old friends: Matt Barrick, a fellow Meet Me in the Bathroom-era veteran best known for drumming in the Walkmen, and Josh Kaufman, a longtime producer and multi-instrumentalist whose resume includes work with the National and Bob Weir, as well as his own folk group, Bonny Light Horseman.
The trio had the poor fortune of launching the new project in early March 2020—a fluke of timing that ensured their first-ever “live” performance was a socially distanced unplugged session—but this album had been gestating for years before that. (In fact, Banks and Kaufman have been friends since their high-school years, with pictures to prove it.) The earliest Muzz sessions occurred around 2015; later, the band convened at various studios and practice spaces, letting the project evolve at a leisurely pace. Now, at a moment when such in-person collaboration feels impossibly luxurious, the self-titled full-length finally arrives.
Muzz’s music sounds similarly unhurried, from the start-stop murmur of “Bad Feeling” to the foggy folk drift of “Patchouli,” an impressive mood piece colored by synth pads that unfurl like a slow-motion iTunes visualizer. While Banks and his Interpol colleagues have spent decades fending off Joy Division comparisons, Muzz swaps out the icy atmospherics for a warmer, earthier slate of influences, including Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Slide guitar, pedal steel, and horns fill in the margins; one of the better tracks, the somber, dramatic “Broken Tambourine,” boasts a piano overture ornamented with birdcalls, as though it were recorded in an open field many miles from Interpol’s natural habitat.
The result is perhaps the weariest-sounding supergroup album you’ll hear this year. Occasionally the band shifts up a gear, resulting in overcast mid-tempo rockers like “Red Western Sky” or “Knuckleduster,” which reprises the galloping shuffle Barrick used on Walkmen classics like “Juveniles.” Mostly, though, Muzz is an intricately crafted pastoral travelogue, piecing together the sighing psychedelic twang of “Evergreen,” the acoustic jangle of “Everything Like It Used to Be,” the gorgeous campfire reverie of “All Is Dead to Me,” and the folktronica death rattle of “Patchouli.” Though it often sounds lovely—thanks to impressively layered arrangements and Kaufman’s obvious instrumental mastery—it could have benefited from summoning more of the urgency associated with Banks’ and Barrick’s respective bands. Without it, listless songs like “Chubby Checker” and “Trinidad” float by without leaving much of an impression.
Given how distinctive Banks’ voice is, it’s impossible for this stuff not to sound at least a little like Interpol. Once he crooned about the subway being a porno; here his lyrics (written in collaboration with his bandmates) summon images of oceans and red western skies. Still, the singer retains a knack for beguiling, impressionistic imagery (“The bees in the frying pan/The shards in the carpet”). If there’s an inadvertent theme, it’s what Banks describes as “meditations on mental health and the quest for happiness.” That’s apparent on the group’s best song, “Evergreen,” with its velvety groove and cryptic references to an unnamed medication taking over one’s life.
Whether Muzz wind up being a lasting band or a one-off diversion, this is a promising debut from three old friends who have an instinctive grasp of each other’s talents. For Interpol loyalists, it’s a lot less patience-testing than a rap mixtape titled Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. And for Banks, it’s got to be nice to have a band that doesn’t require you to wear a suit all the time.