On their first album as a trio, these jazz-rooted musicians create a luxurious atmosphere drawing from funk, krautrock, and noirish electronica.

Ilhan Ersahin / Dave Harrington / Kenny Wollesen: Invite Your Eye

Invite Your Eye

Nublu, the downtown New York venue owned by saxophonist-composer Ilhan Ersahin, makes a big tent of improvised music: You might catch a party-starting Brazilian forro ensemble one night, a shaggy rock’n’roll jam band the next, and a straightforward post-bop quartet on the third. Ersahin himself is a frequent performer, as are Dave Harrington, Darkside member and journeyman guitarist, and Kenny Wollesen, a drummer whose sideman work includes collaborations with John Zorn and Bill Frisell. Like the club itself, all three men are rooted in jazz but not limited by it.
Ersahin gets top billing on Invite Your Eye, their first album as a trio, and his fluid playing is a constant across eight tracks that pull variously from funk, krautrock, and noirish electronica. But the album’s sumptuous atmosphere and collage-like approach to composition will be familiar to any follower of Harrington’s projects: Darkside’s flickering psych odysseys or the electro-jazz miniatures of his 2019 album Pure Imagination, No Country. In addition to playing guitar, bass, and various keyboards on Invite Your Eye, Harrington also served as producer, using the trio’s live ensemble takes as raw material for editing and embellishment, much like Teo Macero did with Miles Davis’ 1970s albums. Harrington is very good at this sort of tinkering: As a purely sonic experience, Invite Your Eye is spectacular. Playing on my home setup, I wished I were instead worshiping at the altar of some $100,000 hi-fi system, ideally with drugs in my system and the sun setting outside my penthouse window. Even in its occasional dissonant moments, this is luxurious music; you don’t listen so much as you bathe in it.
Harrington’s interventions can be drastic, as with Wollesen’s drum kit on the Afrobeat-inflected “Dusty Village,” which seems to descend into a vat of codeine in the final stretch, becoming suddenly slow and sticky as Ersahin’s sax wails on as if nothing has changed. But the most affecting moments are subtler, blurring the line between performance and production, theme and improvisation. Earlier in the same track, a chantlike sax melody takes the lead for a few bars before disappearing, as if beamed in from a different recording entirely. Was it written into the composition? Overdubbed later? Or did Harrington find a particularly piquant section of a different Ersahin solo and drop it in here? Who cares? It sounds great. This could be the album’s guiding ethos.
Psych-funk workouts in the vein of “Dusty Village” make up roughly half of Invite Your Eye. The trio’s playing is top-notch throughout, and Harrington’s production is filled with one inventive moment after another. But as compositions, these groove-oriented tracks can be a little undercooked, often chugging along on a single chord, sounding more like plushly appointed jam sessions than proper tunes. This is a fairly minor gripe: Listening to Ersahin’s sax melt away and reassemble itself atop the heist-scene rhythm of the title track, I don’t really care that his solo isn’t anchored to any particular central melody. Still, it would be interesting to hear this trio make an album with compositions as finely wrought as their arrangements.
I’m more partial to the spacious, relatively free-tempo explorations that make up Invite Your Eye’s other half. On “And It Happens Everyday,” the album’s opener and best tune, Harrington leads the band through a series of sunlit chords, sounding more than a little like Frisell. Ersahin spins out delicate arpeggios, the sturdiness of the harmonic framework giving him better footing as a soloist than he gets on the one-chord groovers. The two-part “Long Goodbye” suite bears no direct relation to John Williams’ title theme to the Robert Altman slacker-detective classic, which strikes me as mildly unfortunate—these guys could probably nail that song’s delicious languor. But there’s something of the film’s shaggy-dog aspect to the way “The Long Goodbye” ambles through its ideas, especially in its second part, an assemblage of vibraphone, piano, and fizzing electronics that dissolves just as it seems on the verge of cohering. The music doesn’t always follow a clear line from one point to the next, but when the scenery is this beautiful, Ersahin and company can get away with losing the plot from time to time.


Channeling new age and spiritual jazz, the multidisciplinary artist’s debut solo album creates its own thoughtful and potent world with the help of many guests and many flutes.

Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Shabaka Hutchings’ tenor saxophone shows up exactly once on this album. Around 10 minutes before the LP ends, he summons the fierce momentum and sandpapery grit that have powered beloved bands like Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, and helped to make him one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past decade. As is usually the case when Shabaka—now billed by first name only—picks up what he has called the “big, loud, shiny horn,” the solo is thrilling. But this brief, incendiary statement carries a special weight in the wake of Shabaka’s announcement—made on New Year’s Day 2023 and clarified that summer—that he would be taking an indefinite hiatus from the tenor and his groups that feature that instrument.
It’s easy to admire Shabaka’s stated reasons for putting down the horn: a feeling of burnout stemming from a heavy touring schedule that has kept him “on the road consistently treating the performance of a spiritual practice as a commodity to be sold repeatedly”; a quest to generate “energy without tension,” which has led him instead toward various flutes, including the Japanese shakuhachi and the clarinet, his original and, in his eyes, principle instrument. But could a Shabaka album with almost no tenor really have the same impact as his prior output? The answer is yes, absolutely, and that’s primarily because on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace—the artist’s first full-length statement in this vein, following a 2022 EP, Afrikan Culture—Shabaka hasn’t just subbed out one signature instrument for another; instead, he’s remade his music from the ground up.
Shabaka’s prior work was as much dance music as jazz. You couldn’t help but move to the heady electro-funk of the Comet Is Coming, the mighty Afro-Caribbean grooves of Sons of Kemet, or the richly layered intercontinental exchange of Shabaka and the Ancestors. Perceive Its Beauty, on the other hand, focuses on tranquility, a sense of meditative communion with a variety of guest vocalists and instrumentalists. Of course, Shabaka is hardly the only musician thinking along these lines lately. New Blue Sun, André 3000’s own flute-pivot LP, which featured a Shabaka cameo on shakuhachi, signaled the mainstream arrival of a wave that’s been building steadily across the past decade or so wherein various questing sounds of the 1970s—from Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders to Steve Reich, Brian Eno and private-press New Agers like Iasos— have swirled together in a plume of incense, wafting across the decades to inform artists working in and around jazz, electronic music, and more.
But, despite a significant overlap in personnel between Perceive Its Beauty and New Blue Sun—André himself appears on one track here, as does his New Blue Sun collaborator Surya Botofasina, while that project’s creative catalyst Carlos Niño turns up throughout—the two albums have little in common. Whereas New Blue Sun offered sprawling sonic environments, Perceive Its Beauty presents more focused episodes, thoughtfully sequenced to move from abstract and spacious to pulsing and upbeat and back again. (Also, it must be said: As an instrumentalist, André 3000 is a proud novice, while Shabaka is a classically trained practitioner with years of professional experience and a deep dedication to craft.)
The album’s parade of guest stars might feel like a distraction if each of these artists weren’t so well integrated into Shabaka’s overall vision. Opener “End of Innocence” and fifth track “The Wounded Need to Be Replenished” feature different piano luminaries (respectively, Jason Moran, known for his brilliant reimaginings of jazz history, and Nduduzo Makhathini, the South African bandleader and sometime member of the Ancestors), but each achieves a similar kind of pensive beauty. On the former, Shabaka’s clarinet traces liquid arcs over Moran and drummer Nasheet Waits’ somber, abstract textures, while on the latter, the leader’s flute floats wisp-like among Makhathini’s spare phrases, with Niño’s percussion and Botofasina’s synth heightening the feeling of aqueous suspension. In both cases, as much as Shabaka’s tone on these instruments differs from his steely projections on tenor, the artful poise of his phrasing remains fully intact.
Of the album’s many vocal tracks, the most transporting are those that treat guest singers more like fellow instrumentalists. On “Insecurities,” Moses Sumney seems to channel the timbre of Shabaka’s flute as he joins the leader and harpist Charles Overton with wordless lines. On “Kiss Me Before I Forget,” Lianne La Havas melds her voice with Shabaka’s clarinet, creating a lovely braiding of tones, and on “Living,” Eska Mtungwazi’s multi-tracked singing unites with the strings of Miguel Atwood-Ferguson to create a lush, orchestral feel.
Tracks featuring the poets Saul Williams (who contributes a serene monologue to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become”) and Anum Iyapo (Shabaka’s father, who declaims tenderly on album closer “Song of the Motherland,” referencing the title track of his own 1985 album), and rapper Elucid (who brings incisive verses to “Body to Inhabit”) feel a bit less interactive, with vocals sitting out in front of the ensemble. But each piece makes room for compelling interplay between Shabaka’s flute and Charles Overton’s harp, with Brandee Younger, a fellow harpist who has brought the instrument a fresh wave of attention in jazz in recent years, adding to the richness of “Body to Inhabit,” along with Esperanza Spalding, who contributes an insistent bassline. On “I’ll Do Whatever You Want,” André 3000’s flute ends up making less of a discernible impact than producer Floating Points, who gives the track its psychedelic synth pulse, and ambient trailblazer Laraaji, who adds droll vocal excursions and a signature laugh at the end.
Amid the ever-shifting personnel, it’s the confidence of Shabaka’s vision and the potency of his playing that leave the strongest impression. Throughout Perceive Its Beauty, we hear him confidently stepping outside the boundaries not just of jazz but of any easily defined genre and finding a firm footing. Taking in a category-defying track like “As the Planets and the Stars Collapse”—another standout instrumental, with its lush bed of harps and strings, and Shabaka blowing his flute over top with as much muscle as grace—you don’t miss the big, loud, shiny horn, or the in-your-face ensemble sound of a band like Sons of Kemet, in the slightest. The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same.


The Chicago-based improvisational artist layers politically charged sound collages over drum machines and a children’s choir. The result is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times.

Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble: Where Future Unfolds

Where Future Unfolds

Four years ago, the Chicago-based improvisational artist Damon Locks began layering vocal samples of speeches from the Civil Rights movement over original beats programmed on a drum machine. These politically charged sound collages gradually expanded and transformed into the Black Monument Ensemble, a 15-member performance collective that features singers from the Chicago Children’s Choir and musicians active on the city’s jazz and improv scene, including clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, drummer Dana Hall and percussionist Arif Smith. Where Future Unfolds is the fruit of Locks' vision, an ensemble performance recorded live at the Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory last year. Locks' project feels revelatory in its bridging of the past and future, its blend of old and new. This is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times.
"Statement Of Intent/Black Monument Theme” fires the ten-track album into life. It’s a song commandeered by Locks, who delivers an impassioned sermon against a backdrop of shimmering wind chimes and rattling percussion. “Confrontation/Dislocation by avenues and blocks/Whole neighborhoods upturned/Officials constantly re-framing, presenting, re-presenting, composing and positioning," roars Locks in a similar fashion to hip-hop poet Saul Williams, before reaching and repeating the climatic mantra “Some things never change—black monuments.”
The music moves easily between Afrofuturist gospel—typified by the spacy synths of “Which I Believe It Will” and the luminous electro beats of “Which I Believe I Am”—and hip-hop grime. “The Colors That You Bring” sets the choir’s soulful harmonies against wavering strings and murky boom-bap drums, like a civil rights protest movie scored the RZA. Upping the intensity, sampled fragments of archived speeches are embedded in the songs; on “Solar Power” a voice proclaims, “There's no black person on this planet that will disagree with freedom.” These spoken snippets give the album a militant edge, recalling interludes from the classic Public Enemy records, where speeches from social reformers like Frederick Douglass were fused with steely breaks.
Where Future Unfolds began as a retelling of the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, but as the title suggests, it is also concerned with what is to come. At one point we hear the sweet, youthful voice of Rayna Golding—the daughter of Black Monument Ensemble singer Monique Golding—leading the choir in a vow: “I can rebuild a nation no longer working out.” The line comes to encapsulate the tenor of the album: gritty sentiments that radiate an optimistic glow. In the way that music from old eras can be sampled and repurposed into new forms, Locks’s majestic work strives to reach better days by looking back and learning from the past.


After seven years-- an eternity in punk rock-- Steve Albini, Todd Trainer, and Bob Weston return, digging in their heels, relishing their in-jokes, and doing what they do best.

Excellent Italian Greyhound

You're not even really reading this. Why would you? I could rate this album a 12 divided by Q or say it's on par with seven ham-and-cheese Hot Pockets and it wouldn't matter. Anyone who cares has already marched to their nearest independent retailer and purchased Excellent Italian Greyhound, laughed aloud at the dog picture, shook the unmarked CD from the gatefold cover (because Steve Albini hates digital recordings-- and you), and spun the vinyl with warm, grating satisfaction. The reviews are irrelevant, and one from Pitchfork probably means even less to Shellac listeners than most.
Shellac's audience is built-in and guaranteed in a way that, despite Touch & Go's perfectly respectable roster, no other active band on the label can claim; they're the last real band standing on the last real label standing. Steve Albini's notorious reputation may precede him, but Shellac have maintained their integrity by cutting out the promoters, the promos, the PR, the interviews, the hype, and the bullshit. Who cares about integrity any more, you ask? Just wait. One day you'll tell your kids who Albini and Ian MacKaye were and get blank stares in return. You'll watch your children grow up to become managers and "indie" PR shills for groups with at least two exclamation points in their bandnames while you shout about how "back in my day, bands used to stand for something" while slack-jawed, iPod-toting orderlies push your wheelchair in a circle around the nurses' station at the old-folks home. That Shellac continue to seek the shortest path between the music and the fans is a point worth repeating.
Yet there's a point, I think, when the fans will wonder what they're getting beyond a pat on the back. Excellent Italian Greyhound is unique in being one of very few albums anticipated for seven years-- a punk-rock eternity-- that still feels rushed. Albini and Bob Weston are both very busy engineers, and Shellac was never a full-time gig for either of them, or drummer Todd Trainer, so no one within reason gets pissy over the wait between their records. Plus, the band's very occasional live shows (which have thankfully increased in number lately) are still essential life experiences. Of course, you could say the same for a band like Fugazi, whose last release, The Argument, came out way back in 2001: They pushed past boundaries and expectations until the very end before wisely resting on their laurels. Here, Shellac are simply digging in their heels, relishing their in-jokes, and doing what they do best-- and not much else.
All that said, EIG's first half is a holy affirmation, and maybe short of "Prayer to God" features the band's best opening track. "The End of Radio" is a minimalist three-chord funeral march for (you guessed it) radio, as Albini assumes the character of the last DJ (and man) on earth, screaming dedications to a deserted planet. While the vocals aren't as foaming as they've been during live performances, the more desperate and pathetic tone fits this clever conceit. Albini errantly lets out nervous patter and thanks non-existent sponsors before wailing, "Can you hear me now???" and letting loose with the crackling guitar lines we love Shellac for. "Steady as She Goes" is another live staple finally seeing release, exemplary of the thin, metallic chug they've patented, though it's without the tension or left turns of their earlier work.
The band saves the stretching out for side two. "Lulabelle" is undoubtedly the strangest and most difficult track to get through: Its heavy riffage is interrupted by a long segment of the Sinatra-like crooning of some pretty unsettling lyrics, plus voiceovers from maybe-movie announcers and Strongbad. The juxtaposition is hilarious and disturbing, and while you may never play it more than a few times, it's the most confrontational the band gets on this record, as well as closest in spirit to At Action Park or Albini's former projects. "Boycott" is a quick-and-dirty anti-capitalist rant from Weston, and though the metronome tick of the instrumental "Kittypants" strikes me as filler, the other instrumental, "Paco", is a vicious highlight with atmosphere that's as sparse and evocative as an Ennio Morricone score. The odd interlude that introduces "Spoke" gives way to straight-up punk rock with unintelligible screaming from both Weston and Albini. I can't help but feel like the joke's on the listener here, but it's hard not to smile at it.
I bring up Fugazi because they're the only of Albini's like-minded contemporaries still (maybe) kicking, and because the Weston-sung "Elephant" makes the curious choice of directly quoting them at the start ("Here comes the argument"), before proceeding with some slippery bass chords and militant rhythms that are pretty darn close to sounding like the flagship Dischord band. Elsewhere, the relentless hammer-ons and spat-out non sequiturs of "Be Prepared" ("I was born wearing pants!") stop abruptly in midstream to start an oddly cheerful groove that sounds not unlike Thin Lizzy. It's a gleeful moment, but there was a time when Shellac barely acknowledged other bands, leaving a blazing trail of influence in their stubborn wake. Not only is Excellent Italian Greyhound Shellac's most off-the-cuff record; it's often an uncharacteristically indebted one.
For those of us scratching our heads and laughing at that album cover, anyone who's seen the band live knows that they're hysterical, and EIG, like 1000 Hurts before it, proves you can still provoke listeners without being uniformly dour. Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them.


The son of Willie Nelson has led a charmed life, playing with Neil Young and inspiring Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born. His own band’s throwback roots-rock toes the line of escapism.

Lukas Nelson / Promise of the Real: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)

Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)

Looking the part has never been a problem for Lukas Nelson. Between his scruffy charisma and clear love of the stage, the rocker looked so much the part that Bradley Cooper recruited him as the “authenticity consultant” for A Star Is Born, modeling his character’s look and presence after Nelson’s. That gig bloomed into a bigger role contributing to the film’s soundtrack, parts of which Nelson co-wrote, and on screen, where Nelson and his band Promise of the Real appeared as Cooper’s backing group. Symbiotic relationships don’t get more glamorous than this: a rock star who looks like a movie star, helping a movie star look like a rock star.
For Nelson, A Star Is Born was just the latest lucky break in an already charmed life. The son of Willie Nelson, he inherited quite a bit of his father’s talent and, just as importantly, enough of his father’s connections and goodwill to grant him a head start in an industry where traditionalists devoted to the 1980s Rolling Stone Record Guide ideal of Good Music aren’t exactly hard to come by. By his early 20s he was opening for and recording with his father; after 2014’s Farm Aid he and his band began backing Neil Young, further cementing their standing among rock purists. Even before his big-screen moment, his band was already well on its way to becoming to throwback roots-rock what Greta Van Fleet are to blacklights and bell bottoms.
Lady Gaga lent her star power to Nelson and Promise of the Real’s 2017 self-titled breakthrough album, and an air of celebrity hangs over the group’s new Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) as well. Sheryl Crow sings backup on the title track, a Byrds-esque imagining of a better world, while Kesha graces “Save a Little Heartache,” a breezy piña colada of a blues-rock jam, and Neil Young sits in on pump organ on a rustic reprise of the title song. Randy Houser and Shooter Jennings both guest, too, although they take a respectful backseat to a father/son duet on “Civilized Hell.” The younger Nelson’s reedy lisp so resembles his father’s that it’s like hearing Willie sing with a Benjamin Buttoned version of himself.
Sometimes Nelson even seems to be writing for his father’s voice. “I don’t trust computers anymore, gonna buy a little weed in the marijuana store,” he ambles over some leisurely twang on “Lotta Fun,” accompanied by Margo Price. “Simple Life” doubles down on the boomer-baiting, playing like a worry-free rewrite of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound).” Nelson’s entire persona is pitched somewhere between a tailgater at a Jimmy Buffett concert and Paul Rudd’s surfer bro in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, bragging that he quit wearing a watch because his cell phone has a clock. To the extent he acknowledges society’s woes, it’s only to recommend how best to ignore them.
That escapist worldview may be the most divisive thing about an album that otherwise aims to build bridges. Nelson is a natural showman, and his band plays with similar spirit—there isn’t a moment on Turn Off the News where they seem to be faking their enthusiasm for this material. There’s a fine line between escapist and naïve, though, and Nelson and company aren’t afraid to toe it. The extent to which listeners enjoy this record depends on how much they buy into the fantasy of Nelson and his famous pals clinking Coronas around the pool while the rest of the world goes to hell. If it feels a little hollow, well, that’s by design.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Tupac’s 1996 double album was made in a frenzy. It is paranoid and brazen, fun and fearless, but it is Pac’s singular style that keeps one of his greatest records from coming undone at the seams.

All Eyez on Me

About 300 miles north of Manhattan sits the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison that, in 1995, housed its most famous inmate: Tupac Amaru Shakur. He had been sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in a sexual assault trial the previous fall. On top of normal psychological torture that comes with imprisonment, Pac was also having trouble sleeping. In November of the previous year—the night before a jury convicted him—he was shot in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. “I have headaches,” he’d later tell Vibe. “I wake up screaming. I’ve been having nightmares, thinking they’re still shooting me.”
But outside of prison, he was becoming a superstar. In March of ’95, Interscope released Pac’s third album, Me Against the World. It’s a remarkable record, at turns tender and fatalistic. There are fever dreams of the golden age in New York City; he mulls suicide and perches by windows with AKs. The album went immediately to No. 1.
It also had Pac’s first Top 10 hit, the towering “Dear Mama,” where he raps about “hugging on my mama from a jail cell.” Few mothers could relate more than Afeni Shakur, who was one of 21 members of the Black Panther Party indicted by a New York grand jury in 1971. They were accused of plotting to bomb two police precincts and the Queens Board of Education office, and of planning to shoot the officers who would flee from one of the precincts after the explosion. The Panthers were ultimately acquitted on all 156 counts in what was, at the time, the most expensive trial in the history of New York state. A month later, Afeni gave birth to her son who, growing up in East Harlem, was surrounded by radicals: the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army; Assata Shakur was a family friend. His stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and on the run for much of the ’80s—FBI agents would approach Tupac at school and hound him for information.
“Dear Mama” and the rest of Me Against the World was written and recorded at a tipping point. “I Get Around” and “Keep Ya Head Up” were gold records, and roles in the films Juice and Poetic Justice revealed a complex, magnetic actor. But legal bills were stacking up. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail for his part in a fight at a Michigan State concert; he served 15 days for assaulting the director Allen Hughes, who had fired him from the set of Menace II Society. Then, of course, there was the sexual assault case that ultimately landed him in Clinton. While he planned to appeal the case, he couldn’t scrape together the $1.4 million he needed to bail himself out. Royalties weren’t rolling in fast enough, and the Panthers were nowhere to be found. So there he sat with his headaches and nightmares.
Enter Suge Knight, the imposing co-founder of Death Row Records. By 1995, Death Row was a behemoth, and Suge had muscled his way into boardrooms, helped make Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg superstars, and taunted Puff in Midtown at the Source Awards in what’s arguably become the most-quoted podium speech in rap’s history. His grip on the West Coast might have been tenuous—Snoop was in constant legal peril, and Suge was likely beginning to sense that Dre wanted off of the label—but it was, for the moment, unquestioned. Burned onto the retinas of anyone in the business was Suge draped in blood red, chomping on an unlit cigar, scowling, dangling pop stars off hotel balconies by their ankles.
The exact business arrangement Suge negotiated for Pac’s bail is hazy: In The Defiant Ones, the HBO documentary that aired last year, those who worked at each major label say that Atlantic and Interscope financed and engineered Pac’s move from Interscope to Death Row as a way to placate Time Warner’s skittishness about gangsta rap. Either way, the bail got paid, and Pac was locked into a three-album contract with Death Row. It was a relationship that would irreparably alter Pac’s life, Suge’s life, and the arc of rap history.
It would also yield All Eyez on Me, one of the most sprawling, furious, paranoid, brilliant albums ever released. The anger that simmered in Tupac through his time in Clinton was stoked by Suge, by the assassination attempt, by the press and his rivals. Where Pac’s earlier work had described the experiences of those who were fleeing the law or the feds or death, now all those things were rendered in the first person. On October 12, 1995, Pac was released from jail. He flew to Los Angeles and immediately started recording. On his first night out, he cut one song called “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” a heartfelt elegy for an incarcerated friend finding Islam, and regards the growing distance between them with a mixture of pain and pride. But there was another song from that first madcap session, something sparse and sinister that would eventually open the album. He starts it in a whisper: “You don’t wanna fuck with me.”
~~
At the height of its power, Death Row operated out of Can-Am Studios, a complex in Tarzana, Calif., just over the hills from L.A. All that Suge surveyed was red: the walls, the couches, the chairs. On the floor was a red carpet, with the label’s logo outlined in white; the understanding was that no one could tread on the logo, a residual superstition from Knight’s days as a defensive end in Division I football.
From the moment he landed in California, Tupac wrote and recorded at an incredible pace. Some artists who worked alongside him during this period, like Nate Dogg, later suggested that this was so Pac could quickly satisfy his contract with Death Row and leave the label. It’s also possible he simply felt the clock ticking on his time as a free man. By 1996, that fatalism had begun to engulf nearly all of Pac’s writing; he was also keenly aware that he was out on bail, and a return to prison was a very real possibility.
Whether or not the Nate Doggs of the world were right about Pac wanting to burn through his Death Row obligations, there’s something almost Old World about the relationship Tupac traced between art and money. This is a superstar who was relying on expense money to eat, someone whose temporary freedom had been granted, magnanimously, in exchange for his art. When he says, on “Can’t C Me,” “If this rappin’ bring me money, then I’m rapping till I’m paid,” it warps the archetypal rapper-label relationship, and Suge comes out looking like a particularly brutal Medici.
Whatever the reason, Pac was working off the cuff, and he demanded the same from his collaborators. He challenged guest rappers to have their verses ready after giving them mere minutes to write—if they didn’t finish crafting something, or if they couldn’t nail it on the first take, they’d be cut from the song. The only artist who escaped this fate was Snoop Dogg, who slipped out of the studio to perfect his verses from “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.”
All of this gave All Eyez on Me the feel of a furious storm. “Heartz of Men,” which opens with the stutter from Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” is about that breathlessness: From the opening ad-libs (“Ay Suge, what I tell you, nigga—when I come out of jail what was I gonna do? I was gonna start digging into these niggas’ chests right?”) until the climactic “Tell the cops to come and get me,” there’s barely a pause, certainly never a second thought.
Pac’s greatest strength as a writer was his ability to isolate emotions: to identify them within himself, to evoke them in listeners, and to convincingly ascribe them to the characters he rendered, be they imaginary Brendas or caricatured Biggies. While he was an endlessly complex individual, Pac liked to choose one gut feeling and blow it up to its technicolor extreme—never to the point where it became unbelievable, but he had little interest in hedging himself or tacking on qualifiers. On All Eyez, that impulse, combined with the pace and method and recording (and with his legal situation, and with his mounting paranoia), made for an alchemic blend of horror, fate, and defiance.
During the sessions he was an omnivore, swallowing up sounds from his youth or his periphery, borrowing the syntax of those who floated in and out of Can-Am, distilling his collaborators’ most painful life stories for 30-second cameos. That’s what he coaxed out of Napoleon from the Outlawz on “Tradin War Stories”: a 10-bar verse about the day when, as a 3-year-old, he saw his parents murdered in front of him. “Got My Mind Made Up” might as well have been a Wu-Tang song. The album’s second disc, which is packed with guests like E-40, C-Bo, and Richie Rich, is practically a love letter to Bay Area hip-hop: not only the self-consciously political tradition that Pac came of age in, but also the swaggering, eccentric stuff that was seeping out of Vallejo.
There are two factors that help to unify such a sprawling, ambitious album full of disparate pieces. The first comes from the album’s phenomenal post-production and mixing. Sixteen of the 27 beats are credited to either Daz or Johnny “J,” each of whom delivers a career-defining performance. But All Eyez benefits greatly from DJ Quik, who was forced, due to contractual red tape, to work mostly under his government name, David Blake. Only “Heartz of Men” is officially a Quik beat, but the Compton legend did a significant amount of mixing and remixing. As varied as the sounds themselves are, the album has a uniformity of texture, and elegies like “Life Goes On” and larks like “Check Out Time” foreground their shared DNA.
Pac’s relationship with Dre never gelled like Suge had hoped. Dre had planned to use a solo version of “California Love” as his next lead single, but Suge’s edict that the best work of every Death Row artist be cannibalized for Pac’s album tabled that idea indefinitely. So All Eyez on Me is in the curious position of having its lead single included only as a remix with an entirely different beat. Though Dre’s other contribution to the album, the George Clinton-assisted disc-two opener “Can’t C Me,” is a highlight, the musical chemistry far outpaced their personal bond.
The other element that helps connect all these disparate threads is Pac’s increasingly singular rapping style. Since 1993’s jagged, Public Enemy-indebted Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., he had known precisely what worked for him. But on All Eyez, the component parts of his formula—voice, cadence, mixing, energy—cohere into something powerful, accessible, but inimitable. To go back to “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”: Listen to the interplay between Snoop’s silk and Pac’s sandpaper, one rapper slipping over the beat, the other clawing his way through it. The 21st-century notion that Tupac was an unexceptional technical rapper is absurd; some of his simplest approaches require incredibly powerful performances. He was a master of mounting tension, giving full dimension to words that would fall flat with from the mouth of anyone else.
That clarity of style and identity allows All Eyez to spiral out in the grimmest and most lighthearted directions without ever losing its focus. And so there are moments like the end of “All About U” where Snoop, curled up in a bathrobe, flips through the channels and cross-compares the Million Man March with Montell Jordan videos, but five songs later, Pac lets “No More Pain” bludgeon the listener into a sort of hollow hypnosis. The sugary “Thug Passion” slides right into the sober “Picture Me Rollin,” “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” into the incomprehensibly filthy “What’z Ya Phone #.”
All Eyez on Me is just as political as Tupac’s first two albums, which dealt with national politics in more overt terms. Pac’s writing is inherently and inescapably political, and his feelings about prison, about race, and about America permeate nearly every verse. On songs about video models, he slips in lines like “Life’s hell for a black celebrity.” Take this to its logical end: “How Do U Want It,” the gleefully sleazy single with K-Ci & JoJo, features a mid-song tangent about Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and C. Delores Tucker. For Tupac in 1996, sex would inevitably be wrapped up with politics and freedom.
The sexual abuse conviction that landed Pac in Clinton Correctional Facility has been documented exhaustively. In November 1993, Tupac and several associates of his sexually assaulted a woman in a New York hotel. A year later, he and his road manager were convicted of first-degree sexual abuse. (Each was acquitted on related sodomy and weapons charges.) Tupac was sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in prison, with the possibility of parole after the first 18 months.
Through the trial, Pac adamantly maintained his innocence. While the case is the subtext for much of Me Against the World, he addresses it head-on only in fleeting moments (“Who you callin’ rapist?”). What’s curious about All Eyez on Me is that Tupac raps so ravenously about, well, fucking. Two of the first three songs are about sex, and the fifth is “How Do U Want It“; then there’s “Phone #,” the conceit of which is “here’s a lot of phone sex.” It is defiant and it is tone-deaf; it is baiting those who believed the charges and it is an attempt to will something out of existence.
All of it was of a piece with personal feuds and paranoias. When “How Do U Want It” was pushed as the album’s third single, one of its B-sides, the anti-Bad Boy screed “Hit Em Up,” became perhaps the most famous diss track of the ’90s. Following the shooting at Quad Studios in Manhattan, Pac had become convinced that his former friend, Biggie, was involved in plots to kill him. And so you get Pac lashing out, taunting his rivals, trying to clear Biggie’s wife Faith Evans’ vocals for a song on All Eyez. But you also hear a chest-crushing fear come through on songs like “Holla at Me.”
In August 1996, just two weeks before his assassination, Pac was doing a press junket for Gang Related, the last movie he would ever act in. Someone asked him about his name. He talked about a man named Tupac Amaru II, who in 1780 led a revolt against Spanish colonists and what was effectively an economy of slave labor that exploited the native populations. In the centuries since, the uprising has been mythologized by some of those fighting for indigenous rights or independence throughout Latin America; in his own time, Amaru was marred by rumors of his uneven control over the rebels, with stories of brutal looting and violence dirtying his reputation and eroding support.
Eventually, two of his officers betrayed him, and he was captured. He was sentenced to watch his wife, son, and other relatives be executed, after which he was to be drawn and quartered in the town square. His tongue would be cut out and his severed head would be displayed on a stake.
Pac talked about this—the revolution, the betrayal, the execution. Then he composed himself. “People ask me what my name means, and I don’t tell ’em like Tupac Amaru,” he said. “I just say it means ‘determined,’ because I’m determined to never, ever negotiate again.”
All Eyez on Me was likewise without compromise—an exhaustive survey of Tupac’s brain matter at the most harrowing time in his young life. It captures him at his most vulnerable and provocative. He executes an array of styles at an almost impossibly high skill level that never feels like an exercise in form. What could have been (and perhaps what was) a creative work made out of obligation turned into a bloodletting, a remarkable final document from one of his era’s defining voices.
And yet for all the mania and fury, the best revenge Tupac exacted against enemies—those real and imagined—came when he was at his coolest and most controlled. Tucked into the back half of the second All Eyez on Me disc, “Picture Me Rollin’” is that proverbial eye of the storm. Pac opens the song rapping about frayed nerves and federal surveillance, then cedes the floor to CPO and Big Syke for several minutes. When he comes back in, it’s for a satisfied, almost tranquil monologue. He’s waving at Clinton Correctional from the outside—he sneers at the punk police, the crooked C.O.s. The District Attorney who tried his case is “that bitch.” He wants to know: Can you see me? Can you see me from there?
But his last words take on a sort of phantom quality. Pac’s surely talking to the guards who wish he was still under their thumb when he says: “Anytime y’all wanna see me again, rewind this track right here. Picture me rollin.’”


Kevin Abstract seems like an endearing alt-rock frontman in a rapper's body. On American Boyfriend, his sophomore album, he explores the insecurities and ravages of his high school years.

Kevin Abstract: American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story

Kevin Abstract just happens to rap; in another era, he would have been an endearing alt-rock frontman. Only 20 years old, Abstract is a member of the self-described “All-American Boy Band” BROCKHAMPTON, and he travelled much of his childhood before recently settling out in Los Angeles. American Boyfriend, his sophomore album, holds onto the theme of constant movement as Abstract situates himself in a nameless high school in an unknown city, where he fantasizes about football players. His lyrical specificity is reserved for people: “Showed me obscure bands he was into/His mom was in the dining room, we’re in his bedroom,” he raps on “Seventeen,” as he describes afternoons spent with an unrequited crush.
He’s almost old enough to drink, but Abstract’s world here is for kids who are barely old enough to drive. His last project MTV1987 teased out tendrils of post-Odd Future Tumblr rap, harsh production, strained parental relationships, and sexually frustrated lyrics; American Boyfriend removes that youthful angst. He no longer chastises past lovers, but rather turns inwards to investigate what he even wants out of romantic relationships. “Can’t tell my family I’m bi/Can’t tell my mother I’m gay/The hardest part of my day/Is wishing I was fucking straight,” he raps on the album’s centerpiece “Papercut.” Where MTV1987 spoke down to women, the boys on American Boyfriend open Abstract’s eyes to new worlds and sides of himself. Only a year between projects, Abstract’s music is now imbued with a freeness and warmth that was previously only hinted at in his music.
Michael Uzowuru, an executive producer on American Boyfriend, who also worked on Frank Ocean’s Blonde (“Nights”) and Endless (“Rushes To”), helped bring Ocean’s genre-blurred vision to Abstract’s work. But, where Frank’s ideas languorously stretched the boundaries of traditional pop songwriting, Abstract’s are more frantic. At 16 tracks long and clocking under under 40 minutes, the album still dips into a few too many ideas. “Suburban Born” and “Runner” meander needlessly, where the wistful acoustic guitar and falsetto of the angelic “Yellow” speak to the same struggle of opposite poles of self-confidence and self-doubt. That moment, along with “American Boyfriend,” inches towards a Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness B-side territory. He doesn’t reach Billy Corgan’s dramatics, but it is encouraging to watch him reach.
Two years ago, Abstract wrote an open letter to Childish Gambino, where he described himself as “too black for the whites and too white for the blacks.” American Boyfriend appears to find Abstract still struggling through those issues of his high school days, as he places himself back inside those hallways and bleachers that made him feel like such an outsider. Even before Glover’s critically beloved TV show “Atlanta” and the surprise funk turn of “Awaken, My Love”, his inward-facing persona offered a direction for black kids like Abstract, who felt too removed from the ego of rap’s biggest stars. Abstract’s myth-building isn’t meant to occupy a stadium tour or a floating stage setup, but instead for the kids alone in class needing something to by another day.
The freedom of abandoning rap’s default confidence stance gives American Boyfriend an almost twee preciousness, Abstract isn’t afraid to swim freely in his emotions. On “Miserable America,” Abstract speaks about his mother’s homophobia and the racism of his boyfriend’s parents, as he mournfully observes, “They love gays, but they hate niggas.” Even in the familial and romantic relationships that should provide comfort, Abstract instead finds irresolvable identity conflicts. American Boyfriend can feel a bit scattered and unsure, but it’s an album seeking love in a world now primed to find new angles for hate. For that reason alone, it feels welcome.


Gates' major-label debut Islah, released this week on Atlantic Records with few pushbacks and (even more astonishingly) almost no big-name guest spots or features, suggests that no-holds-barred candor is working for him. The album is a sustained and triumphant outpouring, and Gates gives every good, bad, and ugly thing he has.

Islah

Kevin Gates does not mince words. It's his great gift, really. "I look like I’m balling 'cause I’m really balling," he correctly points out on his radio single "Really Really." As a rapper, he's perfectly comfortable reeling off "lyrical-miracle" technical displays, but his best music is rooted strongly in the 2Pac tradition of blunt-force honesty, and all his best songs emerge straight from the gut.
Gates' major-label debut Islah, released this week on Atlantic Records with few pushbacks and (even more astonishingly) almost no big-name guest spots or features, suggests that no-holds-barred candor is working for him. Someone, somewhere, correctly deduced that the appeal of Kevin Gates is that he offers the maximum amount of Kevin Gates, and they’ve left him alone to turn out as much of that product as he’ll offer. Islah is a sustained and triumphant outpouring, and Gates gives every good, bad, and ugly thing he has. It's by far the best single release of his career: It's more melodic and more focused; fiercer and more playful; funnier and sadder.  It's also probably the best pure rap release of the first quarter, and the best-case scenario for how a locally famous rapper can make a great album for a wider audience without getting lost in a corporate ledger.
His music scans unquestionably as gangsta rap, but then he puts in lines like these: "I used to tease you about your feet, we would laugh and we’d giggle/ And having breakfast on the beach, you don’t know how much that meant to me" ("Pride"). The line zeroes in on something important about Gates: In his personal life, he is decidedly not a model of human decency, but on record, he is not just vulnerable, but tender, maybe the rarest of pop-music currencies. "Baby hit this weed cuz it might calm you down/ I rub your feet listening to everything you talk about," he offers sweetly on the sex jam "One Thing."
The moody music, full of minor-key piano and delicate synths, feels pitched somewhere between dramatic alt-rock (Gates is a professed fan of Lifehouse and RHCP) and traditional street rap, staggering this way or the other depending on Gates' weathered, changeable voice. The new age synthesizers on "Ain’t Too Hard" could plausibly be sourced from a Lil B mixtape or a Belinda Carlisle single: "I’m commitment-shy, so when feelings get involved, I tend to run," Gates admits. He bursts into melody almost as often as he raps, which has led to Drake and Future comparisons, but his closest analog might be Fetty Wap, if he were stuck on an uncontrollable crying jag in the bathtub.
Despite this, you could never call Islah (named after Gates' eldest daughter, who often appears on camera with Gates in the rapper's Instagram videos) mournful or depressing. Like any street rapper determined to survive the late-'00s rap-album-budget implosion intact, Kevin Gates has become his own best hook singer, his best songwriter, and the best (and usually only) rapper on his songs. On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling. The chorus of mid-album track "Time for That" has the rhythmic playfulness of Jeremih's "Pass Dat," while "2 Phones," in which Gates struggles with the mobile-phone implications of the "keep your business and family completely separated" Crack Commandment, is deliriously good, the sort of hook you plunk down in front of an A&R rep and immediately collect house-down-payment money. But it's all Gates.
His emotional appeal, along with his ear for affecting melodies, makes him an odd sort of crossover star. His music has everything hardcore rap fans look for—emotional immediacy, a compelling voice, unimpeachable integrity—but he lacks some things that can reliably be counted on to draw in interested outsiders: a novel style, a flashy or "weird" persona. Gates is weird, yes, but not the kind brands typically attach themselves to. Imagine the chipper associate social media manager trying to build a "strategy" around Gates' famous admission that he discovered he was accidentally sleeping with his cousin, and feel a twinge of pity and horror.
And yet when you listen to the sure-to-be upcoming single "Hard For," you start to see it: The unlikely but powerful Gates fan coalition. The song is tremendously unusual—with its acoustic guitar backing and chorus chant "you’re the only one that my dick’ll get hard for," it’s practically an Uncle Kracker song about erectile dysfunction. But it’s also improbably beautiful: The second line of that couplet is "I’m confused, what the fuck you want my heart for?", a line that cuts painfully to the core of heartbroken post-relationship confusion. This is the humanity that brings out the best in Gates: His music paints a picture where life is messy, where close friends cross uncrossable lines all the time. Out of love and out of a healthy appreciation for the workings of karma, you massage your temples and forgive them.


Reality television, actors-turned-governors, and wrestlers-turned-rappers aside, it's hard to think of many things that elicit cynicism and offhand dismissal ...

Chutes Too Narrow

Reality television, actors-turned-governors, and wrestlers-turned-rappers aside, it's hard to think of many things that elicit cynicism and offhand dismissal like a sophomore album on the heels of a hyped debut. The dreaded "sophomore slump" is hardly a fictional pitfall fabricated by bitter music journalists and defensive cred-mongers; the pressures of turning out a second record can be crippling for bands who've encountered early success, and it often results in an album that pales in contrast to its predecessor. Yet, for every band that falters in the wake of initial success, there's another that puts their newfound experience to work for them, producing a second record-- a sophomore hump, if you will-- that delivers upon all the promise of their first. And with Chutes Too Narrow, the second album from much-lauded Pacific Northwest popsters The Shins, that sophomore hump is in full effect.
Arriving on a wave of pre-release hype in 2001, The Shins' debut record, Oh! Inverted World, immediately established itself as one of the most uniformly and universally likeable records of that year. Though not nearly the second coming of The Beach Boys as described by its most vocal proponents, the album was forged in melody and drenched in atmosphere, casting a thin but palpable haze over a beautifully arranged landscape of sincere hooks and sparse instrumentation. It was an immediately inviting formula, if one that ultimately proved limiting; the blurred sonics that blanketed the record also often smothered it, dulling the focus and clarity that frontman James Mercer skirted during the album's most powerful passages.
On Chutes Too Narrow, the blanket has been lifted, and the complexity and grace revealed underneath possess a surprisingly depth. Every instrument is allowed to exist in its own space, no longer smoothed together by excessive reverb. Mercer's voice resides comfortably at the front of the mix, revealing previously undiscovered layers of emotional subtlety and expressiveness. Every sound and syllable is perfectly and distinctly articulated, granting the album a much greater capacity for detail and profundity.
And then there are the songs. Dear god, the songs! The uniqueness and inventiveness of James Mercer's melodic sensibility simply cannot be overstated. On Chutes Too Narrow, as with its predecessor, Mercer makes brilliant use of his formidable vocal range, writing soaring melodies every bit as original as they are memorable. "Saint Simon", one of two or three songs on the record that could easily contend for song of the year, sees Mercer exploring an almost Bacharach-ian level of melodic sophistication. The track is host to an elegance of exposition and development not even hinted at on Oh! Inverted World, as it seamlessly segues from a straightforward pop hook to an ungodly gorgeous choral segment, replete with lush strings and chiming guitars. By the time Mercer reenters with a perfectly aching vocal melody, it's almost unbearable-- this is the kind of song that overwhelms simply with the intricacy of its beauty.
The evolution of Mercer's songwriting extends wonderfully into the louder songs on Chutes Too Narrow, as well. "Kissing the Lipless", the album's leadoff track, blissfully transgresses the restraint of Oh! Inverted World, building to an impossibly powerful chorus that slyly mirrors the melody of its verses. Indeed, while many pop songwriters seem to use verses simply as something to kill time between anthemic choruses, Mercer manages to squeeze some of the album's most memorable moments into places most songwriters would neglect or ignore. "So Says I", the album's first single, excels largely through the subtle variations worked into its verses, and enjoys its strongest moment in the transcendent harmonies that adorn a brief, seamless bridge.
The attention to detail on Chutes Too Narrow is truly impressive, but the way that these details combine to form music so effortless and emotionally rich is astounding. Chutes Too Narrow is host to enough perfect moments to carry ten records, each one arising spontaneously from the multifaceted frame of a masterfully constructed song. The album may alienate some listeners by eschewing the instant and consistent gratification of Oh! Inverted World for more involved, developed songs, but the clarity and intricacy of these songs renders the record a much more rewarding listen. Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness.


Toronto-based producer affiliated with London's Night Slugs label steps out with a strong full-length debut engineered for headphones and dancefloors alike.

Bible Eyes

The reputation of David Psutka's Egyptrixx among beat music cognoscenti was quickly cemented last year by tracks like "Battle for North America" and "The Only Way Up", the latter being one of the brightest cuts to come out of a packed-with-hits Night Slugs camp. His willingness to take the basis of UK funky into techier, more austere turf meant he could stake a potential claim as a progressive-minded genre-tweaker. Still, all through his previous peaks, you could hear his music stretching, testing itself, reaching for something ahead even as it planted a couple solid feet directly in the midst of a spotlit movement.
Bible Eyes is what those earlier singles were reaching for, and as a full-length debut it's a bit of a shock-- the familiarization process of a compelling new artist sped up into a rapid succession of surprising revelations. Earlier singles hinted at clean minimalism and deep rhythmic space, but that sound is significantly starker here. The rhythmic underpinnings feel more in line with Kompakt-brewed minimal house rather than a label that stormed the gates on the back of Girl Unit's colossal "Wut". Most basslines are pared down into pure percussion, pulsing like kickdrums instead of dubstep wobbles or electro throbs, but their deepness and intricacy playing off the snares and claps provides the momentum.
In those terms, you get songs like "Naples" or the title track-- cuts that seem both propulsively rich and structurally airy. The louder you turn it up, the bigger the spaces between the beats seem, the larger the drums loom, the more negative space to pit your steps against. And in evoking other stylistic side roads that don't slot as neatly into his post-funky precedent-- the Kris Menace-simpatico electro synths in the pop-friendly "Chrysalis Records", the straight-up tech house nod of "Recital (A Version)", the brooding dubstep of "Fuji Club"-- he gives those wide-open beats a lot of contexts to sink into your medulla and filter down your backbone.
But maybe the most surprising revelation is how willing Psutka is to use disorienting, inside-out melodies as a front-and-center element. Think of the current vogue for warped and faded tape-jam sonics freed from its nostalgic VHS trappings, made both crisper and noisier. At their most accessible, the fluttering, woozy chords from singles like "Drive You Crazy" and "Everybody Bleeding" are pushed just a bit further out; the shaky-kneed hook that cuts in halfway through "Liberation Front" has the tactile sensation of an aluminum-rubber alloy, all metallic sheen and resilient elasticity. At its most extreme end, you get "Barely", which foregrounds a squelching hook so dissonant and queasy-- yet so gravitational-- that it redraws the parameters of what it's possible to make anthemic.
And yet it all falls together in that calculated way bass music albums do when they're simultaneously engineered for headphones and dancefloors. This is an album that sounds invigoratingly abrasive when you're moving and pins you to your seat when you're not, a study in pushing the limits of distortion that works as just plain good club music. And it's eclectic enough to anticipate a half-dozen directions for Egyptrixx to go from here-- odds are he's not out of surprises yet.


The 24-year-old Cash Money singer upcycles ’90s R&B hits on an album of charmingly naughty sex jams—but his referential style is more than just a schtick.

4275

Popular R&B has reached the perfect vantage point from which to appreciate its 1990s heyday. Whether interpolated or simply borrowed, the sounds of Ginuwine, Dru Hill, and Xscape are seeping back into the charts. To recycle an old hit, all a young artist needs to do is repurpose a sliver of familiar melody or production.
The 23-year old Cash Money singer Jacquees is a master at this. Throughout his debut album, 4275, some of his best and most memorable performances contain upcycled elements—moments when he lures you in with sounds you’ve heard before. His breakout hit “B.E.D.” repurposes a whole bridge from Avant’s 2003 song “Read Your Mind” as a chorus. “Play the Field” steals the crunchy, croaking bassline from Ginuwine’s “Pony” and lays it out over freshly gurgling synths. The first time I heard “Inside,” a raunchy lead single that features Trey Songz, a throwaway bit of vocal noodling near the end of the song lodged in my head. It had been there before, in 1997, courtesy of Usher’s “Nice & Slow.” Familiarity is the front door to Jacquees fandom. Listening to 4275, it’s hard not to notice these touchpoints because they’re everywhere. But this isn’t just a schtick; it’s the artist singing in his first language.
Although it’s named after the house number of Jacquees’ childhood home in Decatur, Georgia, 4275 is hardly an account of his elementary school years. He sings almost exclusively about sex on the album—or, more specifically, about the titillating promise of sex. This oozing sensuality yields mood music, rather than a crass play-by-play. Jacquees’ voice, a velvety, rippling tenor, quivers and moans with tension, and he croons almost every word as a proposition. “You know that the decision is yours,” he sings, with a slithering smoothness, on “Studio,” before pleading, “Please don’t tell him where you goin’ ’cause it really ain’t his business.” On the sex anthems “House or Hotel” and “Whatever You Into,” he treats consent like a warm embrace. Still, there’s a charming and almost adolescent naughtiness to the way Jacquees romanticizes sneaking around. You almost want to whisper right back at him.
As pleasant as it is to listen to Jacquees creep around town, 4275 is burdened with extra baggage. Sixty-four minutes is too long to sit around in anxious anticipation, and sometimes the company makes the wait feel longer. Chris Brown and Trey Songz foul up the flow of the party. On the title track, Birdman and Jermaine Dupri chatter obnoxiously over the host.
But Jacquees remains gracious. He has a string of exciting collaborations with Young Thug and DeJ Loaf under his belt, and both pop up here on songs that leave the bedroom without losing the romance. With understated guitar strums, filigree-like finger picking, and backup from Young Thug, “Studio” makes a date out of sex. Carried by a swampy trap beat, the steamy DeJ Loaf duet “Red Light” stops in the middle of the road for the deed.
Elsewhere on the album, Jacquees stands on the shoulders of his heroes instead of jostling with his contemporaries. Jagged Edge and XScape’s LaTocha Scott pop up separately, like guests of honor reveling in a youngster’s appreciation of the classics. Jacquees’ most obvious influence, “U Know What's Up” singer Donell Jones, talks him up on the intro to “23,” as if to simply pass the baton.
All of these playful references work because Jacquees is so light-footed. He doesn’t just have a swaggering vocal style—he has sass. It’s in his moaning ad-libs (“aw yeah,” “mm-hmm”) and cheeky self-referencing, the way he tells himself, “Jacquees, saaang,” before launching into a verse. On “Beauty Doesn’t Cry,” you can almost hear the bawdy grin spread across his face as he issues a waggish taunt: “You got a scary movie and some ice cream/Girl, I know what that might mean.” He might as well be saying, “Girl, I see you.” Jacquees’ music may be simple and familiar, but the personality he brings to it could charm the pants off a mannequin.


The endlessly adaptable Chilean star flexes her versatility across synthy bossa nova, breezy trip hop, pummeling dance-punk, and dirty perreo.

Autopoiética

You might think you know the Chilean pop chameleon Mon Laferte, but allow her to reintroduce herself. The 40-year-old artist’s best work revolves around grief-stricken ballads—the kind you might blast in your depression dungeon while surrounded by smelly laundry and dirty dishes. Her videos and costumes have evoked the glamour of pin-up girls and rockabilly up-dos. But anyone who has tried to pin down Laferte to a singular mode has been sorely mistaken: She has experimented with SoCal folk-pop (2021’s 1940 Carmen), gloomy cumbia (2018’s Norma), and yearning boleros (many songs on 2017’s La Trenza).
Her new album Autopoiética is a refusal of stasis by an artist now 20 years into her career: “I’m a big bitch, star machine, microparticles subdivided into interspatial nanoparts,” she quips on “40 y MM,” breaking down her ineffability. Autopoiesis, a term coined by Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana in the 1970s, describes the cyclical self-maintenance of cells; Laferte adopts the scientific vernacular as a metaphor for the endless redefinition of self as she strays from nostalgic idioms and dabbles in pummeling dance-punk and dirty perreo. She lampoons anyone who tries to define her by fixed gender roles—“Not a beauty queen/Not a whore nor a princess”—while asserting her own pleasure: “Préndele Fuego” is a babymaking bossa nova tune where Laferte sings of the joys of sitting on her partner’s face and getting fingered on the dancefloor. In her words, this album is for the MILFs, maestras, and “hardcore señoras.”
One of the most thrilling left turns is “No+Sad,” an antidepressant dosed with 40 milligrams of goth reggaeton. Over blaring sirens and a spiky dembow riddim that rumbles under her vocals, Laferte seems to address the vitriol she’s faced as a cultural agitator. She snubs the haters who insult her “saggy breasts” and label her a communist, feminazi, and “tacky fucking bitch” (“pinche naca”), rehashing this slander in a coy whisper. It’s one of three songs on the album where she speaks in hushed tones, instead of reprising the maximalist vocal performances she’s known for. If anything, her words are more arresting when murmured. Meanwhile, “Tenochtitlan” and “40 y MM” illustrate Laferte’s love of Portishead, wading in the mellow tempos and airy vocals of ’90s trip-hop to tell a moving story about her immigration journey and longing for artistic freedom—another stylistic adventure.
Still, not everything feels fresh. “Mew Shiny” is an old-school ballad, reminiscent of classic rock, that teeters on cloying sentimentality, one of the record’s weakest moments. Luckily, Laferte embellishes some of the traditional songs with clever adornments and sharp reversals. At first glance, “Pornocracia” is a bolero sex jam, but a second reading reveals it as a rebuff of an objectifying partner. “Casta Diva” is an orchestral epic that interpolates the 19th-century Italian opera Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, accompanied by a divine string section and a macabre church choir. In the final minute, a thunderous boom and a steady dembow riddim crash into the production. Laferte’s voice, once the embodiment of seraphic bliss, short-circuits into unintelligible digital glitch.
While some of Laferte’s previous work verged on pure nostalgia, Autopoiética transcends mere reverence for the past. The choice looks good on her. Autopoiética challenges anyone who dared to relegate Laferte to late-career stagnation: She insists on boundless transformation.


San Franciscan five-piece churns out sharp, garage-minded jangle-pop with more bite than most of their peers.

The Mantles

If it weren't for the fact that "What We Do Matters" is such a good song (hands down the best out of a considerable few here), the remainder of the Mantles' self-titled debut might have suffered greatly at that song's assertion that "what we do matters/ If you don't think so, take a good look around." It's not overly declarative or pushy-- in fact, there's a feeling of uncertainty in its delivery that asks you to step back for a minute and give the statement a fair once-over. For a San Franciscan four-piece that churns out the same kind of sharp, garage-minded jangle-pop as a lot of their fellow Left Coasters, it's a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism. Of course this kind of stuff matters to people on some level, and if the Mantles are ultimately fishing for a compliment, I'll give them this: Most of The Mantles is much tighter and more athletic than stuff you'd traditionally find in this vein of late, with nearly every groove-furnished, guitar-spiked rumbler feeling more taut and refined with each listen. A lot of the talk about this band contains references to the Chills or the Dream Syndicate, and while a cursory listen will be able to dig that stuff up pretty quickly, most of the Mantles' debut packs more of a punch, as the Radio Birdman-propulsed "What We Do Matters" suggests. Pretty soon, the question has little to do with what matters-- they should've just had the balls to tell us that what they do is good.
Most of these songs do hinge on some Paisley Underground staples, leaving C-list cuts like the wandering "Burden" to be forever condemned to burn in Brian Jonestown Massacre demo hell. But with most of the livelier material, it's pretty clear that the Mantles are a band with a real set of teeth. "Yesterday's Gone", a psych-revved splash of Motor City thrash, boorishly boosts the infamous riff from "I Wanna Be Your Dog" while still retaining the grit and reinforcing the groove. Shaggy opener "Disappearing Act" can't help but interject surf's-up guitar licks, and even on the mid-tempo "Look Away"-- nicely padded with organ hum and a little pissed-off soul balladeering-- the song grinds to a near halt so the band can twist it into a desperate flop-around. It's these welcome spurts of primal boogie that afford some of the lighter fare an honest sense of drama.
The more dangerous themes become more and more apparent at almost every turn, as the titular theme of the sock-hoppy single "Don't Lie" feels less like a sad-sack plea and more like some weirdly formidable domestic warning. But read too much into anything on The Mantles and you'll run the risk of missing much of the purely pleasurable moments that require little effort to realize. Even with forgettable material, like the too-aptly titled closer "Thin Reminder", it's hard not to just plain enjoy these breeze-kissed tunes. In that respect, it's pretty easy to understand why these small fish are asking for that tiny bit of reinforcement in their big pond: "If you don't think so, take a good look around." It's only natural to feel a little bogged-down by your own niche constraints, but it really matters only if what you do works. Here, the Mantles have proved they have little to worry about.


After 2016’s loopy Painting With, Animal Collective return with a companion EP.

The Painters EP

One way to think of a shape-shifting group like Animal Collective is that they’re a different band with each album. Sometimes that’s true in a literal sense, considering that Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, David “Avey Tare” Portner, and Brian “Geologist” Weitz recorded without Josh “Deakin” Dibb on both 2009’s luminously definitive Merriweather Post Pavilion and on last year’s busily candy-coated Painting With. But one of the more intriguing observations from the Painting With press cycle was that Animal Collective had themselves toyed with switching band names, only to be dissuaded by practical concerns, like listeners being able to find their music.
It seems fitting that a previously suggested alternate name, the Painters, resurfaced during the demo process for Painting With. Like its predecessor, 2012’s Centipede Hz, the last record is dense and ornamented with samples, but it’s also brightly colored, synthetic, and dizzyingly hyperactive. After each Animal Collective album, the group has typically issued a related follow-up EP, including career highlights like 2005’s Prospect Hummer and 2009’s Fall Be Kind. The companion to Painting With is the four-song The Painters EP, and the records share a sensibility.
For however much Animal Collective have changed between each album, a juxtaposition between campfire primitivism and electronic experimentation has remained a near-constant. Painting With seemed to ball that up like never before into skewed, breakneck-paced pop miniatures. Generally speaking, more recent Animal Collective songs bang you on the head, lyrically and sonically, in a way the band didn’t previously, but they don’t necessarily get stuck in your head in the same way as a “My Girls,” either. The Painters EP was mostly recorded around the same time as its companion album, and while it’s a reasonably compelling elaboration on its predecessor’s synth-splattering aesthetic, it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind about this version of the group’s sound.
The opener and first single, “Kinda Bonkers,” resembles “FloriDada,” its counterpart from the last album: Both songs overcome their playful if obvious titles; both find Panda Bear and Avey Tare trading vocals in such a way that they’re almost finishing each other’s sentences; and both convey a utopian faith in transcending human differences. “Kinda Bonkers” distinguishes itself, though, partly because its odd burbles and tribal pulse are at a statelier tempo. And where “FloriDada” plays its vision of “a future/connected by sutures” into wry “where’s the bridge” puns, “Kinda Bonkers” resolves into a communal mantra: “Unity of all kind, unity of all kind.”
The middle of the EP passes pleasantly but less arrestingly. “Peacemaker” is more relaxed than almost anything on Painting With, and here the vocal exchanges tend to happen at the level of syllables, not half-sentences. At high volume in headphones, it offers enough squiggly nuances to hold interest, underpinned by glassy synth and a lurching rhythmic base. On the bouncier “Goalkeeper,” what precisely is being sung about this soccer savior gets largely buried in thuds and squelches.
Painters’ most notable inclusion is a cover of Martha & the Vandellas’ mid-’60s classic “Jimmy Mack,” done the Painters’ way: delirious, yawpy, and belching with synth. As anyone familiar with the original song might hope, it’s ecstatic with yearning, and it’s no surprise Animal Collective made a habit of working this into their 2016 tour stops. But the song doesn’t lend itself to their current manic style, and it’s hard to imagine choosing this take over the Vandellas—or any other version.
If hearing Animal Collective do “Jimmy Mack” tells us anything, it's that writing a great song, like painting a modern-day masterpiece, is difficult. Animal Collective have done it before, and they’ll hopefully do it again. Odds are, they’ll be a different band then, and, as a wide-eyed Painters EP narrator might point out, their listeners will be different, too.


The Compton rapper’s latest is a musical therapy session, a concept album filled with intimate writing and rich, varied production.

More Black Superheroes

Westside Boogie knows he’s toxic, but he’s working on it. Toxicity—especially when it comes to relationships—is nothing new in hip-hop, though it’s become something of a meme over the past decade. And though Boogie hasn’t reached Future levels of performative irony just yet, unpacking the tribulations of love and his time immersed in California gang culture is central to the Compton rapper’s music. Every sepia-toned memory of friends lost, like 2014’s “Still Be Homies,” is matched by the petty romantic squabbles of 2016’s “Two Days” or “Nigga Needs,” with Boogie unafraid to be the complicated antihero of his own story.
More Black Superheroes, Boogie’s second album under Eminem’s Shady Records, searches for deeper meaning in navigating emotional vulnerability as a Black man. Honesty means little when it’s not backed by actionable change, and Boogie finds power in admitting when he’s fallen off the trail. “Running from my issues/Don’t give me your praises/Just want you to know that even heroes still need saving,” he says bluntly on “LOLSMH II” before lamenting that “fame is a prison.” Like Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Superheroes is a concept album from a thirtysomething California rapper putting themselves through musical therapy. What distinguishes the project is Boogie’s earnestness, which makes his struggles feel tangible.
Boogie’s songwriting is at its best when he homes in on just being another dude from the block with his own set of problems. On “Stuck,” the tug-of-war between old and new thinking manifests in the banal (putting chips on a sandwich) and the raw (telling his mother he loves her more). “Nonchalant” is a jaunty back-and-forth between Boogie and vocalist Mamii where he lays out his destructive habits (“She into crystals to release/And meditation at the beach/I’m into actin’ like a thief/And comin’, takin’ all that peace”) and then acts surprised when she stops answering his calls. On several occasions, he dwells on the irony of continuing to make songs about the harmful patterns he’s perpetuating. He’s the rap game Sisyphus, making emotional progress and watching most of it slide back down the hill.
The subject matter isn’t much different from other Boogie projects, but there are enough new variations to keep his thoughts fresh. He’s more likely to let his guard down, indulging the idea of romance on “Can’t Get Over You” and “Somethin Strange.” On “LOLSMH II” and “Prideful II”—both sequels to older songs—he rattles off tales of lust and deception worthy of an episode of Insecure. The production, primarily handled by executive producer Keyel, sways between the modernized G-funk grooves and synthetic lowrider snap that have always characterized Boogie’s music. Sometimes, like on “Prideful II,” the sounds meet in the middle, hi-hats bouncing next to guitar strums and vocal coos. Boogie sounds as comfortable singing over soul drums and smooth bass licks as he does rhyming over steady speaker-rattling drums.
While Boogie handles every sound thrown his way, the structure of the album occasionally derails its ambitions. Closer “Anthony (War)” dilutes the effect of previous track “Windows Down” and its shock ending: soul-bearing confessions cut off by a car crash. This snag briefly detracts from Boogie’s intimate writing, which is as sticky as a wad of gum. As opposed to the straightforward way 2019’s Everything’s for Sale approached the transactional nature of love and death, there’s a tinge of irony to More Black Superheroes that gives weight to its darker moments. Honesty may be his superpower, but he’s no better at avoiding temptation or succumbing to emotional impulses. And yet, the dichotomy of trying versus succeeding to better yourself is the latent theme of the album. You can't be a hero if you’re not willing to face your demons.


Discovered gathering dust in an old storage unit, the Detroit artist’s lost album from the ’90s is an interesting curio that slots nicely alongside techno’s current renaissance.

Unsolved Mysteries

The eccentric producer and Detroit native Jimmy Edgar once described his label Ultramajic as a platform for “futuristic music, digital shamanism, and virtual altars.” Even its newest release, a collection of lost electro tracks from the mid-to-late-’90s, fits so well with the label’s forward-looking ethos, but the story behind Unsolved Mysteries sounds like classic Edgarian lore. In 2014, Edgar took possession of an East Detroit storage unit that contained over 1,000 vinyl records, some rare, broken recording equipment, and boxes of over 100 DAT and reel-to-reel tapes, one dusty box of which contained tapes from 1995 to 1998 inscribed in black Sharpie with the name “ASHTAR LAVANDA.”
Edgar at first assumed that it was a pseudonym of an already prominent Detroit recording artist, but after two full years of searching—Google came up with no results—he tracked down the real Ashtar Lavanda, a previously unknown producer who hadn’t released any music (in a recent  interview, he said that he assumed that the tapes that gave rise to Unsolved Mysteries had been tossed in the garbage long ago). Lavanda still resides in the Motor City to this day, where he apparently works in the medical industry.
And while all of this sounds almost too serendipitous to be true, especially considering Ultramajic’s willfully obscure roster of artists, it’s fitting given much of the genre’s tropes: Electro has always been infused with a certain sense of mystery and myth-making. From the time when a 14-year-old Edgar would download electro tracks on GeoCities websites to the Afrofuturistic myth that Gerald Donald and James Stinson fleshed out as Drexciya, the funky sounds derived from the Roland TR-808 are frequently encased in an epic, enigmatic backstory.
The provenance of these tracks aside, the six songs that make up this collection of archival recordings are undeniably fun additions to the canon, and by clocking in at only 22 minutes, it’s tight enough to not overstay its welcome. “Opulence” starts things off with a rising arpeggiated synth line and some classic 808 rhythms, and “Gratiot Shake” follows with an even funkier bassline that’s accentuated with vocoded commands to “shake it” and “get freaky” along with some sci-fi phaser sounds. The title track and closer “Marfa Lights” are the highlights—the former’s menacing refrain contrasts well with its rickety percussion, and the latter’s more atmospheric touches end things on a relatively breezy note.
Lavanda himself didn’t exactly have lofty ambitions for these songs—he claims that when he was programming these tracks in the ’90s, he just wanted them to play on the “New Dance Show,” Detroit’s local, techno version of “Soul Train” (Ultramajic uploaded an Ashtar Lavanda mix to YouTube that plays alongside clips from the show, and the audio and the visuals sync up remarkably well). In light of the genre’s current renaissance, with artists like DJ Stingray and Helena Hauff leading the pack, this collection sounds surprisingly fresh. When asked what he thought about these songs finally seeing the light of day, Lavanda responded: “It would have been better as a record in the ’90s.” And while it’s not necessarily a crucial release, and Edgar’s claims that it belongs in the cultural memory alongside acts like Drexciya or Dopplereffekt are overstated, it does accomplish what Lavanda wanted—it’s a pretty playful, taut selection of songs to dance to.


Late Night Tales, the compilation series that asks artists to create their ultimate "late night" mix, has become an institution. Röyksopp’s installment includes a new original, a Depeche Mode cover with fellow Norwegian Susanne Sundfør, and top-notch curation and sequencing.

Late Night Tales

In its second decade of existence, Late Night Tales is an institution. The compilation series asks artists to create their ultimate "late night" mix and has featured a variety of acts, from MGMT to Belle & Sebastian to Four Tet, Jamiroquai, and Lindstrøm. The line-up's been so diverse, it's interesting it took until now to ask Röyksopp to curate an entry: the group's always showcased a smart design sense as well as an open acknowledgement of other music's influence on their work. Unsurpisingly then, on their 19-track collection, the veteran Norwegian dance duo's instincts on curation and sequencing are top-notch, offering a feeling that's sweetly compelling but gently guarded.
“Daddy’s Groove”, the duo's sole original contribution to Late Night Tales, is the opener. In light of Daft Punk’s retro doings this year, the title, the treated vocals, and the easy pulsing pace of the song feel shaped by larger trends. Röyksopp also offer a studio recording of early Depeche Mode B-side “Ice Machine”. Their version features fellow Norwegian performer Susanne Sundfør on lead vocals and a generally faithful take in the main arrangement with a slow, dramatic start to give it its own flavor. Sundfør’s lead vocals contrast nicely with a brief midsong break from the duo.
Röyksopp's selections generally live somewhere in a late-1970s/early-80s setting. The most compelling include Tuxedomoon’s “In a Manner of Speaking”, a showcase for part-time member Winston Tong’s portrayal of romantic miscommunication over a stark arrangement of nervous guitar and distant swirls, Vangelis’ “Blade Runner Blues”, a pure synthesizer realization of the late-night and disconnected melancholy of Blade Runner that steers clear of the pounding doom of its end theme, and F. R. David’s remarkable synth ballad “Music”, which sounds like a Eurovision winner with all heart and inspiraiton and no irony, even 30 years after it was originally written.
There are also choices that merrily trash received ideas of coolness. Like “Stranger on the Shore”, Acker Bilk’s clarinet-lined Easy Listening smash from the early 60s, which is a kind of outlier from the midcentury that nails both big band jazz and romantic film music. Ready to be reclaimed by the cassette/chillwave generation, Andreas Vollenweider's 1981 track “Hands and Clouds” is a brief bit of swirling delicacy that sounds like a lost track from the high point of West Coast radio stations like the Wave. Meanwhile, the neo-classical impulses of acts like Johann Johannsson, whose composition of strings and deep electronic bass plus voice of “Odi Et Amo” features here, showcase a further connection at work.
Part of this Late Night Tales' joy lies in the atypicality of the choices from bands that might not seem to fit at first. “The Somnambulist” is an XTC B-side recorded in 1980, when the group was peeling out energetic brawlers like “Generals and Majors” and “Life Begins at the Hop,” but the song consists solely of Andy Partridge’s voice in a calmly sung undertone over a moody keyboard/drum machine riff. Thomas Dolby’s similarly chirpier side is exchanged for a slower grooving funk punch on “Budapest by Blimp”, itself acting as a callback to earlier numbers on the disc like Vangelis and Rare Bird’s 1977 effort “Passing Through”, while still standing out in its own right, concluding choir vocals and all. This Mortal Coil's showcased not through something overfamiliar like “Song to the Siren”, but via their live-in-a-room sounding cover of Emmy Lou Harris’s “Till I Can Gain Control Again”.
There's a sweetly consistent mood throughout; it’s something you can put on and treat as ambient sound, but there’s also a clever subtlety in their process. Rare Bird’s entry leads into the similarly paced and feeling “Light of Day” by the Little River Band from three years later, but the latter’s lusher harmonies-- not to mention string accompaniment-- feel like a wider development of the easy, understated swing already introduced by the former song. Following the steady, descending feeling of “Music” with Prelude’s reverb-heavy a capella 1974 cover of Neil Young’s “After the Goldrush” is breathtaking. Immediately continuing with the literal wave crashes and bossa nova lounge lizardry of Richard Schneider Jr.’s 1977 cut “Hello Beach Girls” maintains and reworks that mood, Schneider’s occasional laughs and smooth smarm a remarkable contrast to Prelude’s steady, angelic approach.
The collection ends with English actor Benedict Cumberbatch continuing his spoken word story from last fall's Friendly Fires entry in the series. The tale of a night out and house party is not quite of a piece with the rest, but it is a literal late night tale-- and, hey, why not stick with a theme? In any event, ending on a note that's both ruminative and engaging works well with Röyksopp’s intent, fitting into the overall series with a yacht-rock-for-fjords feeling that's all its own.


The spoken-word poet's latest album is a meditation on social justice and protest in the Internet Age. Williams’ vision of the Internet as a kind of new frontier resembles a scene from The Matrix, and the serrated industrialism of the music is pure '90s.

MartyrLoserKing

Eighteen years ago, Saul Williams introduced himself to the world by chanting, "I don’t rhyme on track." He’s largely kept that promise. Though bred in New York’s '90s spoken-word scene, and prone early on to shouting his verse in a declamatory speech rendered like cipher freestyle, he quickly transitioned into a career that resists easy categorization. His underrated 2001 debut, Amethyst Rock Star, summoned the ghosts of the Black Rock Coalition and Living Colour; his incendiary 2007 collaboration with Trent Reznor, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, spun from Public Enemy-inspired industrial hip-hop to a cover of U2’s "Sunday Bloody Sunday."
Still, Williams remains a poet at heart. He wraps his recordings in metaphorical language and allusions to themes both subtle and pronounced. He’s a good songwriter—his Nike-approved 2004 single "List of Demands (Reparations)" proves that—who sometimes gets lost in the clutter of his ideas. That was the problem with 2011’s Volcanic Sunlight, a thrilling yet enervating work that patched together a post-disco ditty ("Dance") with a Janelle Monáe cameo, a feminist sing-along called "Girls on Saturn," and uneven hip-hop-inflected pop-rock like "Rocket."
Volcanic Sunlight was primarily produced and mixed by the French producer Renaud Létang, who is known for his work with Manu Chao and Feist, and the new MartyrLoserKing also finds Williams working with one producer, former She Wants Revenge frontman Justin Warfield, for a meditation on social justice and protest in the Internet Age. But this time, the results are more harmonious. Williams continues to hop across genres as usual, but the album’s tonal qualities remain consistent. "Horn of the Clock-Bike" consists of two piano bars looped into a motif. "Ashes" filters his voice like an AM radio transmission while the beat quickens into a bass-y techno thump. On "The Noise Came From Here," Warfield underlines a Rwandan Twa melody, "Bigirimana," with synthesizer accompaniment, and Williams portrays the undiminished spirit of his neighborhood despite the "police, sirens, guns." "All Coltrane Solos at Once" evokes Justin Warfield’s '90s trip-hop tracks like his Bomb the Bass number "Bug Powder Dust."
MartyrLoserKing doesn’t necessarily rise or fall on Williams’ ability to clarify his thoughts into a clear, memorable hook. When he simply repeats, "Fuck you, understand me" on "All Coltrane Solos at Once," he doesn’t need to say anything else. But it’s noticeable when he drifts amidst the industrial-tinged alt-rock of "Think Like They Book Say," and he has nothing but an enthusiastic shout of the title to anchor him. Throughout the album, he offers some wonderful turns of phrase, like when he sings on "Burundi," "Nike swoosh on bare feet/ Whitney Houston’s crack pipe/ The greatest love of all/ Watch me rise to watch me fall." He evokes an image of poverty-stricken neighborhoods before settling on a somewhat tired metaphor of "hacking" into and disrupting societal disparities as Warpaint vocalist Emily Kokal accompanies him.
MartyrLoserKing may be a call to 21st-century activism, but it also seems anachronistic. Williams’ vision of the Internet as a kind of new frontier resembles a scene from The Matrix, and Warfield’s serrated industrialism is pure '90s. We now know that technology enables our capitalist lusts, and our desire to have every ethnic and gender variation reflected in our culture is often reduced to a mere call for better customer service. Despite his occasionally dazzling wordplay, Williams doesn’t offer a solution for how we can evolve beyond our own inherent narcissism. He’s too optimistic for that.


Holed up in their East Harlem apartment, the bassist and harpist express the early days of lockdown intimately and beautifully with one mic and a set of mostly covers from John Coltrane to Kate Bush.

Dezron Douglas / Brandee Younger: Force Majeure

Force Majeure

COVID-19 has put the music world in jeopardy, canceling concerts and threatening the livelihoods of countless people at every end of the business. The virus has also led to the predominance of the livestream, changing the nature of performance itself: Solos and duos are more common, romantic couples collaborate frequently, lamps are the new LEDs. The virtual gig is as intimate as an Instagram feed—to the sorry extent that it’s unlikely to put food on an artist’s table.
No album I’ve heard has documented this predicament as directly as Force Majeure. A collaboration between the harpist Brandee Younger and her partner, the bassist Dezron Douglas, the record is named for a clause in contracts that enables venues and promoters across the world to cancel events because of an “act of God,” which became a euphemism for the global pandemic. Marooned together in their East Harlem apartment, and without a foreseeable chance to make income from touring, Douglas and Younger streamed a set each Friday during which they ran through a range of numbers, cracked jokes, commented on the dead-seriousness of now, and offered a strangely personal window into their coupledom against the backdrop of New York City’s lockdown.
The couple collected the greatest hits of their quarantine series, which ran from March to June, into Force Majeure, a 51-minute, proudly impromptu record. Aside from one shimmering original, all of the compositions are covers, including jazz mainstays such as John Coltrane’s “Wise One,” hits by pop titans like the Stylistics and Kate Bush, and even a selection from Sesame Street. The result feels like a rediscovery of common ground. Since meeting at the Hartt School of Music, Younger and Douglas have each played bandleader, and they’ve recorded together frequently, but their careers have ridden different highs: Younger established herself as the harpist of choice for A-list pop musicians, appearing on Beyoncé’s Homecoming documentary as well as on releases by Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Common, and Moses Sumney. Douglas has equal facility on the upright and the bass guitar, and he’s followed a more conventional trajectory as a sought-after sideman, performing most notably with Pharoah Sanders. Force Majeure gives the impression of two busy musicians relearning how jazz can be a shared language as well as a weekly balm. On a version of Sanders’ classic “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Douglas calls out chord changes, like he and his partner haven’t run through the song together before, or at least not in a while: the result, nonetheless, is fluid and assured.
The limitations imposed by Coronavirus become strengths. Force Majeure was recorded on a single microphone, and likely for technical reasons, Douglas relies mostly on an acoustic double bass. Younger loses the crutch of the larger ensembles favored by the maestras of her instrument, Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, forcing her to engage with more pluck and forethought. One of the record’s most beautiful tracks, “Gospel Trane,” transposes Coltrane’s original piano part to the harp, a sly commentary on the depth of Younger’s engagement with her predecessor as well as an ingenious demonstration of the harp’s versatility. Elsewhere, playing the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Younger’s strumming makes the main hook sound like a circular guitar riff. Douglas’ bass work is a similar exercise in resourcefulness and possibility. He slaps when the songs beg for a beat and moves between percussive structure and melody with honed instincts.
Sprinkled throughout is Younger and Douglas’ banter—calling these conversations “skits” would be misleading, considering how off-the-cuff their ad-libs are. On the outro, Younger advises listeners, “Don’t go to bars.” Douglas counters, “If you go to the bar, go to the ones where there’s not a lot of people.” A minor, good-natured disagreement plays out, one that is hilariously relatable for anyone who’s navigating COVID safety while living with another person.
This improvised speech circles around, a couple of times, to a statement that serves as the album’s theme: “Black music cannot be recreated, it can only be expressed.” Force Majeure never feels like a retread, but a response to the difficult circumstances of its creation—an expression of coupledom, identity, and persevering domesticity that could only exist in the gloom and chaos of 2020. Unadorned with tech or post-production, the bass, harp, and spoken voice offer us the experience of jazz-as-process. We’ve already seen this process unfold, week after week, in front of a webcam. On record, Younger and Douglas show us the extent of the musical path they blazed, which may be narrow, but they cleared it beautifully while the rest of the world was standing still.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The North Carolinian singer comes roaring back from multiple strokes to deliver a raw and thrilling solo debut.

No Dados

Music history is littered with tragic tales of talented people robbed of their creative lives by sudden illness, injury, or death. A decade ago, North Carolina’s Reese McHenry nearly joined them. The singer, known in her local community for her hurricane vocals at the front of the band The Dirty Little Heaters, suffered four strokes, which resulted in a handful of heart surgeries and other complications that threatened to derail her career permanently.
These days, McHenry is as vivacious and healthy as ever, and she’s spent her recent years bouncing back with a vengeance. She returned to the fold with The Dirty Little Heaters, issued one LP in 2015 as The Second Wife, released a seven-inch as Reese McHenry & the Fox, and teamed up with the boisterous Spider Bags for a 2017 collaborative LP. With No Dados, her solo debut, McHenry delivers a cohesive and thrilling exhibition of her raw talent.
No Dados tumbles forth with “Magnolia Tree,” a rager that shifts gears while McHenry howls like the fierce offspring of Janis Joplin and Robert Plant. McHenry finds simpatico spirits with her backing band Drag Sounds: The band’s 2016 album, Sudden Comfort, is loose and easygoing, but here they floor the pedal, as if possessed by McHenry’s spirit.
Though McHenry’s powerhouse vocals make it difficult to read her as anything but a monolith of confidence, her songs churn with anxiety. “You think that things can’t get worse/But I’m here to tell you that they can,” she begins on “Murdered Love.” She frets about infidelity and disappointment, tempering bitterness and admissions of her own thorniness with pleas to make it all right again, closing “Can You Say?” with “What are we trying to do?/Can you say you don’t miss me at all?”
But even amid her worries, McHenry can serve up a heavyweight hook. Her “Oh-oh, this fever’s gotta go” refrain on “Fever” is an immediate earworm, as is the shout-along titular kiss-off of “Bye Bye Baby.” And as she sings “Why don’t you love me, baby?” on “Clogged and Idle Freeways,” McHenry braids together anger, despair, and menace with precision and sincerity. For most of her career, McHenry has flourished within her local music scene, but with the unapologetic might of No Dados, McHenry aims for bigger stages.