A sampler of music recorded at Chris Blackwell's studio in the Bahamas, this record is also a symposium on the polyglot tendencies that made the dance underground of the first half of the 1980s so unpredictably rich in ideas.

Various Artists: Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986

On the surface, this compilation is intended to be a broad rundown of a specific studio's output-- that of Compass Point, the Bahamian outpost established by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and manned by a who's who of reggae session players including the ace production team/rhythm section of Sly & Robbie. But it might as well be a symposium on the polyglot tendencies that made the dance underground of the first half of the 1980s so unpredictably rich in ideas. Name a genre that either established itself or peaked in the late 70s or early 80s-- electro-funk, disco, reggae, dub, post-punk, old-school hip-hop-- and it's represented in the music on this compilation, rarely without being comfortably fused to another genre to spectacular effect.
The most well-known cuts on Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 might as well be shorthand for this type of fusion-- Tom Tom Club's chirpy, blissed-out Caribbean/new wave/rap pastiche "Genius of Love", Talking Heads' jittery Afrobeat-inflected digital rave-up "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", and an extended version of Ian Dury's BBC-banned "Spasticus Autisticus", which retorted to Britain's patronizing declaration of 1981 as "Year of the Disabled" with Spartacus-lifted shouts of solidarity, bitingly arch lyrics ("So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin/ And thank the creator you're not in the state I'm in") and a vertigo-inducing bass/synth interplay. There's just one baffling decision in the famous names department-- instead of something from the superb Nightclubbing, Grace Jones' tenure at Compass Point is represented by the digital reggae of "My Jamaican Guy", and the combination of her flat singing and the gradual tedium of its seven-minute extended mix makes for an unexciting way to open the compilation.
But Funky Nassau gets better in a hurry, thanks not just to the usual post-punk suspects but also due to the fringe artists, obscurities, and ostensible novelty records (emphasis on novel) that fill out the bulk of the collection. There are two tracks that, thanks largely to house music pioneer François Kevorkian, prove to be the collection's most surprising highlights. Cuban-born Guy Cuevas' 1982 France-exclusive "Obsession" piles glimmering keyboards on top of a Bernard Edwards-caliber bassline and comes up with a late-disco gem that sounds triangulated between Havana, Paris, and NYC. And the Kevorkian mix of "Dance Sucker", the 1983 debut single from Scottish obscurities Set the Tone, sounds like a uprocker's take on a circa-1988 Nine Inch Nails demo, with a lead singer belting out sneering Reznor-isms (and the occasional Nic Offer-ism) over a packed wall of electro.
Where most of the tracks on Funky Nassau breathe free with loose-jointed smoothness, disco deconstructionist Cristina's "You Rented a Space" is a claustrophobic slab of electronic dub where the percolating bass and the staggering but sure-footed rhythms practically corner you in a hallway and breathe down your neck. (Cristina's decadently sly voice knows better, and aims directly at your inner ear: "Your lovin' is as cold as the cold clasp of death.") And then there's Bits & Pieces-- basically Sly & Robbie working under an alias- - cranking out a playful but heavy cover of Yarbrough & Peoples' 1980 hit "Don't Stop the Music", replicating its fuzzed-out synth-funk faithfully but throwing in a subtle reggae backbeat and, for kicks, a few likeably daft rap lyrics about hairstyles. The Compass Point sound proved that the sound of the Caribbean could cover just about anywhere-- and, at the same time, helped create music that couldn't have come from anywhere else.


With Hesaitix, the Berlin-based DJ and producer has built a strange world that lives and breathes. It’s a catchy, fascinating electronic album that lives in a lucid unreality.

Hesaitix

“For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix  offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects.
Though a sly sense of humor runs through Whipple’s productions, there’s also an unwavering sincerity. On Piteous Gate, this quality felt distinctly cinematic—interested, maybe, in its own artifice—but with Hesaitix he builds a world that lives and breathes. Though the album is anchored by percussive epics, Whipple uses uneasy ambient passages to carve out the environment in which Hesaitix takes place. Opener “Nemorum Incola” (whose title, per a rough translation from the Latin, means “forest dweller”), layers a rippling metallic phrase over a sample of insects, birds, and burbling water. “Blurred Cicada I” and “Blurred Cicada II” each recall the warbling sound of bells or an organ, stretched to woozy effect. These songs open up strange corners, lending a sense of the cavernous: the place we’ve entered seems to exist beyond what we can hear.
Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world.
I think of video games as a touchstone for Whipple’s high-definition world-building—the environments he creates often glossy and fantastical—but the organic realism of landscape painting also comes to mind. Work that’s technologically engaged often equates the organic with the real and the synthetic with imaginary; Whipple seems unconcerned with such binaries, locating a lucid unreality throughout. Hesaitix contains some of the earthiest dance music I’ve encountered, but that’s not to say that listening to it is a particularly human experience. And yet, this release has a strong sense of a center: a thoughtfulness comes from both its moments of fury and its more level interludes, as with “Ihnaemiauimx,” the sweet note on which the album concludes. It’s peaceful in a dark-night kind of way, the kind of serenity that can only be achieved through some comfort with the unknown.
Though there’s an impulse to process this sort of sonic radicality in ideological terms (take, for instance, a recent editorial for Resident Advisor that charted the popularity of CDJs among Whipple and his peers along a Jamesonian conception of postmodernity), I can’t help but believe that the implications of the forms mapped here are somehow more mysterious. Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form.


On this woozy collaborative EP, the grime producers Mr. Mitch and Yamaneko trade the genre’s brute force for restraint, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion.

Yaroze Dream Suite

Few genres ride the cutting edge as efficiently and boldly as grime. Much like hip-hop, grime’s startlingly adventurous productions have often predicted the shapes and sounds that will bubble up from the underground and into the pop sector. Recent innovations from the likes of Rabit, Logos, Murlo, and Visionist have stretched grime’s boundaries, nudging the genre into ever more surreal and unexpected directions.
In 2014, Gobstopper label boss Mr. Mitch and London-based producer Yamaneko further solidified their places among this new wave, with the release of Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace, respectively. Parallel Memories contained gossamer textures and breathless tracts of negative space. Pixel Wave Embrace was animated by the idyllic moods and vivid colors of meditation tapes and video game soundtracks. Both pointed to a softer, slower, and sparser approach to a genre infamous for its whiplash juxtapositions and hardline tenacity.
Over the last year, Mitch and Yamaneko have been working intermittently on a joint project, Yaroze Dream Suite, the results of which are collected in this four-track EP. “There’s a Venn diagram where Parallel Memories and Pixel Wave Embrace meet and a lot of this project came from there,” Yamaneko has said, and for the most part that sentiment holds true. Opener “Pixel Dreams” sets the tone for the EP’s woozy, climate-controlled atmosphere. Built around a strikingly simple melody and spacey, shivering synth tones, the track is the most successful marriage of the two producers’ styles: Mitch’s love for cool, weightless minimalism and Yamaneko’s new age-mining ambience. Plinking chirps, video game sound FX, and trap-like snaps lend the song additional heft, but the outcome remains keenly delicate, dulcet.
Closer “Spirit Temple” is similarly jaunty—all skeletal beat programming and melodious synths. Like “Pixel Dreams,” it trades grime’s brute force for restraint, as its arrangements unspool slowly. This scenic take on grime allows the listener to zoom in on each component, drawing out subtle threads and small pockets of emotion that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. “In the Moonlight,” featuring guest vocalist Hannah Mack, flutters with ghostly sirens, prodding synths, and a plaintive sax line; when Mack invites us to “Free your mind/‘Cuz everything’s sublime,” it underscores the EP’s central theme. This is grime engineered to float, not punch.
Despite the EP’s pillowy silhouettes and beguiling tempos—and several moments of outright bliss—Yaroze Dream Suite often falls prey to its own moderation. Where the duo’s solo releases come across meditative and understated, YDS occasionally scans as mild, and, at times, underdone. No where is this more apparent than on “Awakening,” a brooding cut chiseled from rumbling pads and disembodied vocals; it circles itself a half or so dozen times without going anywhere particularly surprising, or novel. The scope of the EP just feels smaller. Still, YDS remains fascinating throughout, and the question of how its ideas will shape the duo’s future output is enough to strike the interest of any grime diehard.


Chicago’s Lili Trifilio writes about heartache and insecurity with the wistful, plainspoken honesty of power-pop.

Honeymoon

Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio wasn’t familiar with TikTok until after her song went viral on the video-sharing app last summer. The self-released “Prom Queen,” a protest of Euro-centric beauty standards, has soundtracked hundreds of thousands of TikToks, many of which feature a girl posing in front of a phone camera to illustrate Trifilio’s opening lines: “Shut up, count your calories/I never looked good in mom jeans.” Those lyrics distill the Beach Bunny formula: sentimental and wistful, with a plainspokenness that prompts immediate sympathy. TikTok is better known for surfacing meme-ready rap bangers than indie rock, but Trifilio’s heavyhearted charm struck a nerve.
For almost two years, Trifilio was Beach Bunny’s only member. In 2017, eager to compete in a battle of the bands competition near her home in Chicago, she began putting together a group. On “Prom Queen” and its eponymous 2018 EP, she delivered teen-diary anecdotes in a bright voice that complimented the sticky hooks of her band’s twee-leaning pop-punk. With Beach Bunny’s debut LP, Honeymoon, Trifilio—now 23—levels up from Prom Queen’s wide-eyed stories of heartbreak, though the fears instilled by past romantic blunders continue to creep in. “You stay, you go, you say ‘I’m sorry’/I’m sorry too, for wanting you,” she hollers in “Colorblind.” “I’ll change the channel/I’ve seen this show before.”
Trifilio cites Marina Diamandis as a songwriting inspiration, though Beach Bunny’s sound more often echoes the sun-kissed garage rock of Best Coast or the fired-up power-pop of Charly Bliss. While Prom Queen often luxuriated in grief and resisted the notion of moving on, Honeymoon’s most rewarding moments come when Trifilio swaps the insecurities for a newfound assurance: “If you’re gonna love me, make sure that you do it right,” goes the chorus of early single “Dream Boy.” “Cuffing Season” combines a therapy session and a pep talk as Trifilio’s narrator attempts to remain resolute in a case of “are we, or aren’t we?”
At other times, Honeymoon’s lyricism can feel too slight: “She’s your girl, she’s in all your pictures/California girl, I wish I was her,” Trifilio laments in “Ms. California,” rehashing a tired trope of female jealousy. “But I’m confident when I’m with you… When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody,” she sings in closer “Cloud 9,” lines that feel superficial even as the insecurities they describe ring true. Thankfully, the rich, surfy melodies help to distract from the weak points.
Like Crazy For You before it, Honeymoon isn’t especially singular or groundbreaking—but Beach Bunny’s raucous spirit means it never goes stale, either. Trifilio excels in straightforward, recognizable experiences of heartache, while still leaving space for listeners to attach their own nuance. Even as we get a little older, Honeymoon suggests, the adolescent anxieties of earlier Beach Bunny songs never fully wane; we just get a little better at handling them. As long as there are heartbreaks and insecurities, albums like this will have purpose.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of TikTok videos to feature Beach Bunny’s “Prom Queen.” It has been updated with the correct number.

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Are We There may be Sharon Van Etten's most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent—the peak of a steady upward trajectory. Her songs emphasize the moment, both in the quality of her performance and in the rawness of her lyrics.

Are We There

From the first notes of her 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love, New Jersey native Sharon Van Etten wrote with seeming effortlessness about the depravations of romance and the contortions of a heart either committed or broken, displaying a penchant for wrenching turns of phrase laden with dire implications. When she sang, “The moral of the story is don't lie to me again,” on “Consolation Prize”, it was the “again” that stuck in your gut, suggesting a pattern of aggression and acquiescence that would not necessarily end with the song. Her voice toggled fluidly between brave and broken, dogged and defiant—often within the same line. She whispered, then jumped to a fierce vibrato that could stop an army. Disclosing her darkest moments proved both empowering and unnerving, as though startled by her own strength. Even on her debut, she displayed the poise of a pro.
As with so many singer-songwriters—for whom lyrics and vocals take primacy over every other element—Van Etten never sounded quite so self-assured musically. Because I Was in Love showcased her quiet vocals and surprisingly nimble guitarwork, with producer Greg Weeks of Espers mostly staying out of her way. That subdued sound was going to be impossible to sustain for another album, much less an entire career, so it seemed almost inevitable when she introduced a full-band sound, complete with flourishes of pedal steel, on her follow-up, Epic. On 2012’s career-making Tramp, she worked with the National’s Aaron Dessner and emerged with her fullest and most fully realized album to date, even if it occasionally sounded overly decorous, even fussy. Her catalog has been a series of trials and experiments, driven by restlessness and perfectionism in equal measure, although weirdly the transitions between albums only serve to render each one more volatile and unpredictable.
It is, then, notable that Van Etten herself produced her fourth album, Are We There, with some assistance from Stewart Lerman. The two met while working on the second soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire and decamped to his New Jersey studio to record these new songs. Lerman’s work with Loudon Wainwright III, the Roches, and other singer-songwriters makes him a good fit for Van Etten, but perhaps more than any of her previous records Are We There sounds self-determined and self-directed. The music fits snugly against her vocals, with her guitar and piano foregrounded on opener “Afraid of Nothing”. As a result, these songs move fluidly and dramatically, but never ostentatiously. Even the woodwinds on “Tarifa” sound understated, as though careful not to distract from Van Etten’s performance.
It’s the most comfortable she’s sounded since Because I Was in Love, which is not to say the music lacks color or character. “Your Love Is Killing Me” is built on a Jenga-style assemblage of post-rock guitars and jittery snare taps, and even as it sprawls into a six-minute jam (her longest song to date), it never topples. Instead, the music only reinforces her repeated proclamation, “You tell me that you like it.” Elsewhere, Are We There softens and quietens. A purposefully stiff drum loop lends “Taking Chances” its brooding, conspiratorial tone, reining in the chorus and setting up an effective one-chord organ solo. The stark piano on “I Love You But I’m Lost” flutters nervously, as though reminding you that Van Etten’s whispers can convey screams. There is a live quality to the music, as though she has crafted each note with concerts in mind. Her songs emphasize the moment, both in the quality of her performance and in the rawness of her lyrics. As a result, Are We There may be her most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent—the peak of a steady upward trajectory.
Even as she has settled into a successful solo career, Van Etten continues to write incisively about the volatility of love, with no loss of urgency or investment. Her songs tend to be excruciatingly confessional, largely indistinguishable from the singer herself, and Are We There reveals a new self-awareness with regard to her primary subject. On “I Know”, which features Van Etten alone on piano, she declares, “I sing about my fear and love and what it brings,” as though we didn’t know that already. On closer “Every Time the Sun Comes Up”, she asks, not entirely rhetorically, “People say I'm a one hit wonder, but what happens when I have two?” It’s a sly way to preempt any complaint that she has only one emotional or musical setting, but the next line turns the song upside-down: “I washed your dishes, then I shit in your bathroom.” Recently, Van Etten told Pitchfork that the line was originally a joke with her band, but it’s not hard to see why this incredibly anti-romantic line would have stayed in. It reveals the driving idea behind the album: It’s not the big moments that define or doom a relationship, but the everyday routines, the small sacrifices that accumulate over time, the stark realities of sharing your life with another person. You see them at their best and their worst, their most beautiful and their most vulgar. To her credit, Van Etten has never shrunk from this horrible and wonderful understanding.


Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. Neither of these seem to be the case with Villagers though, and the re-recorded songs that make up Where Have You Been All My Life? swell with a different frustration.

Villagers: Where Have You Been All My Life?

Where Have You Been All My Life?

Look up "re-recorded" on whatever streaming site you use, and you’ll find original performers doing hasty and underwhelming renditions of their biggest hits. Everything from "Hang On Sloopy" to "Pour Some Sugar on Me" to "O.P.P." stand as testaments that it’s nearly impossible to improve upon a definitive version. Villagers prove to be the exception to this rule with Where Have You Been All My Life?, a collection of re-recordings of material from their three previous albums that reframes the songs in an impressively cohesive manner.
Many artists re-record their best work because they’re in a dry spell and/or they’re sick of watching their old label make money off of the songs they made when they were young and signed a bad contract. What usually hinders re-recorded versions is a sense of "we got it right the first time" frustration that undermines the spirit of the original, but the new versions on Where Have You Been… swell with a different determination, one of "We’ve got to get it right this time." Recorded in one day last July, these mostly acoustic versions were reportedly all first or second takes with no overdubs.  The band had already been touring in support of last April’s Darling Arithmetic for three months by the time they went into RAK Studios in London. Arithmetic tracks account for half of the songs on here, but Villagers have restructured the older songs to fit the sound of the newer material, unifying them in their delicate harmonies, brushed drums, and double bass arrangements.
A definite highlight on this collection is "Memoir," which Charlotte Gainsbourg recorded a version of in 2011 and which appeared as a Villagers B-side a year later. The distracting crowd noise and flat-tire-on-the-highway rhythm of that version were wisely left off this most recent recording, and the song touches a nerve even more discomfiting than before. Its desperate romantic lyrics hit more directly. "In the orgy I can vaguely hear the outline of your call," singer and songwriter Conor O’Brien sings at one point before telling the subject of the song, "you were the lighthouse to my broken boat." The latter image connects the song on this compilation with "My Lighthouse," which first appeared on 2013’s {Awayland}.
"The Waves," also originally from {Awayland}, is another highlight. On that album, it had an electronic undercurrent, which was later taken several fathoms deeper when remixed by house duo Psychemagik. The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece.  The Where Have You Been All My Life? title comes from a line in “The Soul Serene,” but naming it as such feels like Villagers begging for new audiences to ask that same question of the album. The music within warrants it.
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What does Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient series have left to say about the state of contemporary electronic music?

Pop Ambient 2012

What's left to say about the Pop Ambient series? That it appears every winter? Check. That it has become a bit of a chore? Done. That shifts in its tone and content are subtle? Been there. That it rarely breaks artists of note? Got it. It has become difficult to tease differences out of the series as its chapters have grown voluminous, and I'll submit that the real question we need to ask about the Pop Ambient series is not what remains unsaid but what the series itself has left to say. Pop Ambient 2012 arrives at a time when ambient and experimental artists routinely sing for their supper, offering theoretical frameworks and positioning their works as commentaries on music, media, and memory.
The goals of the PA series and its artists are largely sonic, bridging the gaps, however tenuously, between electronic music, modern classical, and pop. The series' flower motif suggests a kinship with Erik Satie's concept of furniture music, or music explicitly intended for the background. Gorgeous soundtracking is a fair, modest goal of ambient composers, but music of this ilk-- from Leyland Kirby (and his Caretaker alias) to Emeralds to Oneohtrix Point Never-- has felt so vibrant and rich in recent years that the offerings here seem slight. Stop me if you've heard this one before: PA12 contains another new Wolfgang Voigt side project (Mohn, with Jörg Burger), a Kompakt techno stalwart making his first-ever series contribution (Superpitcher), and notable outsiders (Simon Scott). Intrigued? Which volume of the series did you pull off the shelf to listen to in anticipation of these revelations?
Forgive the cynicism. The failure of PA12 has little to do with the individual tracks, most of which could, at worst, be harmlessly swapped out for the third-most-forgettable offering on any given PA compilation. There are highlights, as always: the beautiful simplicity of the piano that steers Superpitcher's "Jackson"; Wolfgang Voigt's ruptured, surprising orchestrations on "Rückverzauberung 5". Five years after lighting up PA07 with the Field's "Kappsta", Axel Wilner debuts his new guise, Loops of Your Heart, whose "Riding the Bikes" closes PA12 with lacy, somnambulent guitar. (In other words, the only new standout on PA12 is the alias of an artist who has already released three full-lengths for Kompakt.) There are more obvious missteps than in previous years, though. On "Richmodis", Triola masses clanging minor chords into a long, useless noir. Mohn's comp-opening offering, "Manifesto", is not just slow and ringing but comically ponderous. Magazine's self-edit of "The Visitors Bureau" is pro-forma symphonic drift.
Just as Now That's What I Call Music 40 hardly suggests permanence, PA12 is damned by its place in a series that grew stale several years ago. This is not even the best ambient compilation Wolfgang Voigt has appeared on in the past year: Kompakt regulars Andrew Thomas and bvdub (who makes an appearance here) compiled Air Texture Vol. 1, a frothy, generous collection that outmaneuvers PA12 at every turn. Ambient music feels rich and diverse right now, willing to engage with wider worlds. The expanses of PA12's tracks belie how cloistered and small the compilation actually is. There's nothing wrong with music that knowingly fades into the background, so long as you accept that sometimes the only room you're wallpapering is your own.


On her self-produced second album, the Melbourne folk singer embellishes her stark, bluesy songwriting with symphonic touches that occasionally get in the way of her daring vocal performances.

Storm Queen

Grace Cummings’ voice is unusually gruff, rootsy and ragged as car wheels skidding over rocks. Born in Victoria, Australia, where the land is constantly under threat by bushfires, Cummings was drawn to the cragginess of Bob Dylan and Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, as well as to the vivid melancholy of traditional Irish folk music. As a teenager, she played drums in a series of AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix cover bands. Today, she performs a mixture of canyon-inspired folk music and blues rock, the full tapestry of her influences on clear display.
Cummings’ debut album, 2019’s Refuge Cove, released by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Flightless Records, felt intensely lonely and alive. Her voice filled the large, reverby atmosphere, mostly unembellished, as she strummed a rusty-sounding  guitar. Storm Queen, her self-produced second record, retains the ornate minimalism of its predecessor, although it comes with a smattering of symphonic touches: baritone saxophone, timpani drums, theremin.
The extra instrumentation, provided by an ensemble of local Melbourne musicians, is perhaps an attempt to broaden Cummings’ sonic picture, but it mostly feels unnecessary and arbitrarily deployed. The saxophone skronks like a human scream on the title track, while the theremin whistles like an undulating shriek on “Fly a Kite.” Both sound like a double of Cummings’ voice in a way that seems to rob her of catharsis; they do the yawping for her.
Cummings has a penchant for spontaneity. The majority of the songs on Storm Queen were recorded in three takes or less, and there’s an almost uncomfortable closeness to each recording; it feels intimate and live, as though the band is playing in-the-round. Unfortunately, Cummings’ relationship to the musicians who surround her feels incongruous. Her vocals are as uncontrolled as a volcanic eruption, but the carefully noodled Led Zeppelin-like riffs that accompany her strums tend to diminish her dramatic performances.
Still, Storm Queen possesses a magnificent tension, with each song veering wildly between catharsis and dissonance. “Dreams” is a highlight, with Cummings’ voice exuding seething intensity and world-weariness over an acoustic guitar that sounds both ruddy and psychedelic. She screams like somebody making scary faces in the mirror, filling the space of the song with unfettered energy before undercutting each attempt at release with a dismissive snarl.
The desire to ascend—like a kite or a bird, two recurring motifs throughout the record—is where that tension arrives, in both the lyrics and music. “Go fly a kite/Tie your troubles to the tail,” Cummings sings on “Fly a Kite” with melodramatic, baroque melodicism. The record’s most compelling moments, however, aren’t in their ascents, but in the gritted tension that seems to animate each song and make Cummings’ voice sound like a kite stuck to its tether, a netted bird desperately flapping inside its trap. In these solitary moments, she becomes wild, demonic, and dangerously uncaged.

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Drawing inspiration from the abject state of contemporary Britain and nourished by fantasies of righteous violence, the latest album from the UK producer is his heaviest in years.

Fire

Twenty years ago, Kevin Martin was a man obsessed. Week in and week out, he did the rounds at reggae shops across London, flicking through bins of imported 7"s in search of the latest, wildest riddims from Jamaica. Martin’s background lay elsewhere: He had started out in the late 1980s as a post-punk saxophonist and screamer—one of his frequent collaborators was Justin K. Broadrick of grindcore legends Napalm Death—and in 1994, he had curated the landmark drone compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism. But dub was slowly creeping into Martin’s music; in the mid ’90s, he compiled Virgin’s Macro Dub Infection series, which traced dub’s pulse through post-rock, hip-hop, noise, and techno. By the end of the millennium, when Jamaican dancehall producers were making some of the most inventive beats on the planet, riddims like Steely and Clevie’s “Street Sweeper” had definitively rewired Martin’s brain. Hunkered down in his studio in Northwest London, Martin attempted to translate that ruthlessly spartan energy to his own doomy sensibilities. The result was 2003’s Pressure, released under his alias the Bug: Pairing Martin’s bare-knuckled bass-and-drum barrages with Caribbean-rooted singers and deejays like Paul St. Hilaire and ragga legend Daddy Freddy, the album established the Bug as one of the heaviest outfits in UK bass music.
Heaviness can take different forms: It can land like a punch or weigh like a lead blanket. Following the Bug’s equally tough London Zoo, Martin shifted his focus to King Midas Sound, a collaboration with British-Trinidadian dub poet Roger Robinson, and the force of his closed-fist blows gradually dissipated, as though melting into pure gravity. There were collaborations with Austrian experimental guitarist Fennesz, post-metal minimalists Earth, even the doleful folk musician Grouper. Over the past couple of years, working under a variety of aliases, Martin has kept up a steady stream of increasingly ethereal recordings, each one more eerily disembodied than the last. But on Fire, the pendulum swings back to the other extreme. Drawing inspiration from the abject state of contemporary Britain, nourished by fury and fantasies of righteous violence, it is Martin’s heaviest album in years.
Following a two-minute intro of pandemic-themed scene-setting, in which Robinson’s grim speculative fiction is set to Sunn O)))-like drones, the album explodes into action with its second track, “Pressure.” The ragged foghorn blast that opens the song feels genuinely apocalyptic, like the last sound you might hear before the world comes crashing down. Variations on this motif turn up across the album, peppering the record with fight-or-flight triggers.
Martin hasn’t sounded this energized since Pressure, and some of his techniques—like the sizzling bass tone of “Demon,” which suggests a smoldering speaker cone flapping in the wind—date all the way back to his ’90s work in the duo Techno Animal. He never overcomplicates: Most of these tracks throb away at 140 BPM, syncopated kick drums telegraphing an anxious, slow/fast cadence, bass writhing like a pit in the stomach. The monochrome character of his onslaught makes small details stand out: In “Fuck Off,” an insistent bass pulse is accompanied with hints of Psycho’s shower-scene string stabs; “Bang” is backlit with coruscating chords, as though a curtain of flames blazed behind his bomb-crater bass. Uniformly sullen, the record’s minor-key basslines do little more than inch up and down, as though they were too exhausted, too sick with rage, to offer anything more. Martin’s melodies aren’t just economical, they’re practically miserly—products of a wartime economy hoarding all of its resources for ordnance.
War is all over these songs, and it’s not just idle chat; it’s a metaphor for the spirit of insurrection that fuels the whole album. “This is a war/Ideological war,” croaks Kingston dub poet Nazamba on “War.” On “Bomb,” veteran grime MC Flowdan promises, “Well if a war man’s more than ready/Done them live on telly/System’s corrupt, needs to get bun up”; on “Pressure,” he is still more explicit in his call for vengeance: “While we a hunt for the food and them a argue about tax/People are dead, mum’s still crying/The fire’s gonna blaze on these aristocrats.” Martin’s bleak backdrops leave plenty of room for his vocalists to shine: “I kick shit, I rip shit, I leave shit with no head,” mutters Moor Mother on “Vexed,” in what must be one of the year’s most apoplectic performances. It’s not just what she seethes, but how she seethes. She snarls like she’s on the prowl, burning up with spite.
For all the omnipresent menace, it’s often a wildly fun listen, particularly when the rising UK MC Logan is on the mic. It’s present in the menacing way he growls, “Tell dem bwoy deh fuck off,” or the death-metal gurgle he puts on his chanted refrain of “War/Clash/War/Clash”—they’re as satisfying as the one-liners in any over-the-top action film. But the album casts a solemn shadow: The album’s final track, “The Missing,” is a spoken-word elegy for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people perished when a council flat went up in flames. (The 2017 disaster highlighted the deadly consequences of inequality in contemporary Britain. A public inquiry cited multiple “systemic failings” that led to the victims’ deaths; survivors called the public-housing development a “death trap.”)
Dub poet Roger Robinson somberly sketches a scene of holy deliverance, mourners attempting to hold onto the feet of their loved ones as the bodies of the dead ascend to the heavens: “A hundred people start floating from the windows of a tower block; from far enough away they could be black smoke from spreading flames.” The synthesizers swell in volume, an ambient lament. “Amongst the cirrus clouds, floating like hair, they begin to look like a separate city,” Robinson intones. “Someone looking on could mistake them for new arrivals to earth. They are the city of the missing. We now, the city of the stayed.” This moment of mournful gravitas puts Fire into context. It’s a reminder that Martin is not just a masterful stylist, in ambient and dancehall alike, but that his best work is grounded in a powerful sense of justice. Burrowing down to the elemental, he and his vocalists tap into an intoxicating wrath. It is electrifying, cleansing, and cathartic, like a fire that razes a corrupt system to the ground.
Buy: Rough Trade
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The L.A. noise-rock band's original score for Max Payne 3 replicates the third-person shooter action game's slow-motion frenzy.

Max Payne 3 OST

The new video game Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter that mixes cover-based and run-and-gun mechanics. Translated from the jargon, this means you peek over Max's shoulder as he hides behind stationary things and shoots at moving ones. He can also slow down time, turning frantic gunplay into underwater choreography in the manner of countless action films. The L.A. noise-rock band HEALTH's original score distinctively replicates this torpid frenzy, mostly by setting slow, languid themes against fast, urgent drums. In between, a moment of suspense is trapped and prolonged, and the feeling that something momentous is about to happen seldom flags. It's a generous and commanding piece of work, slightly checked by the homogenizing pressures of its format.
Max Payne 3 is organized around linear, contained events. This permitted HEALTH to create full-fledged compositions, from drafty FX hymns to throbbing anthems, instead of trying to rig up an album from bits of modular music-- a challenge faced by Amon Tobin with valor but mixed success on his fifth album, the score for Splinter Cell 3. But Max Payne 3 is still a pulse-pounding A-list action game, and the necessity for every rhythm to be impeccably flush, every change clearly telegraphed, keeps the music from feeling as dangerous as it might. It lumbers majestically through two modes, moody and awesome. You can never completely forget that some of it exists solely to make running down generic corridors feel heroic.
HEALTH habitually blend abrasive guitar and synth shards into clouds of heavenly opacity, tethered down by drum circles. This earthy yet ethereal sound, heralded by bands such as Boredoms and Liars, is a natural fit for Max Payne 3's pressurized slowness, although here, HEALTH sound more like their remix records than their mainline catalog, tearing down dance music to a brutish 4/4 thud and building shimmering towers of junk atop it. Any expansive collection of atmospheric instrumentals coming down the pike right now is going to call to mind Symmetry's epic Themes for an Imaginary Film, whose soft, rounded contours HEALTH answer with hard, brittle edges. The worst thing you can say about the score is that it sometimes effectively resorts to clichés.
HEALTH score easy points with liberal use of the musky attack-less string pads we call "cinematic" and rigid synth-and-bass arpeggios whorled with silvery John Carpenter fingerprints. The doomy chord pulses of "Shells" do exactly what they're meant to do: seamlessly get you hyped. You don't want to be distracted by any sonic quirks when you're trying to shoot a Brazilian commando in the face, though you might crave a few when you're not. But HEALTH also manage to sneak in things that freshen up the ears: Persian music inflections on "The Girl", vocal harmonies that find a whimsical seam between early music and Brian Wilson on "+90", and the baile funk slant of "Max Favela", one of the sole hints that the game takes place in sunny São Paulo and not Siberia.
Video gaming and music have a long history. Music helped arcade cabinets snare players. It provided auditory feedback on home consoles. In the 90s, notably in Japanese RPGs such as the Final Fantasy series, the irritatingly catchy ditty gave way to accomplished synthetic orchestral music, which could handle the emotional and narrative nuances emerging in games. In return, video games gave music a new market in lines such as Guitar Hero, plus heavily influenced new genres such as chillwave and, of course, chiptune. The core appeal of playing electronic instruments and playing video games is the same: Getting to release godlike powers in virtual space at the press of a button.
Back in 2005, a major artist like Tobin scoring a game felt novel, and it still slightly does. Plenty of games now use licensed music from indie bands, but few have original scores by name artists. But as games become more respectable and more like movies, as hard-pressed musicians seek out new revenue streams, and as interactivity continues to overtake passivity in our habits of virtual consumption, more frequent and closer collaborations between big-name artists and game designers look inevitable. HEALTH's quality but workmanlike release doesn't convince me that it'll be any great shakes for the standalone music market, but it's going to be fantastic for games.


On their earthy new album, the Bay Area metal trio Worm Ouroboros exhibit a literary flair and mysterious, eternal power.

What Graceless Dawn

The Bay Area metal lifers who comprise Worm Ouroboros are individually responsible for some of the heaviest music in the underground, but together they take a subtler, slower approach. Equally akin to ’80s acts like This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins as their contemporaries on the Profound Lore imprint, Worm Ouroboros inhabit a ghostly, gothy atmosphere. Since debuting in 2007, they have competently inverted the traditional structure of doom metal and post-rock (unrelentingly heavy albums with ambient interludes), making music that glides patiently and quietly, exploding only when the tension can no longer be contained.
Like Come the Thaw, their excellent 2012 album and first with Agalloch/VHOL drummer Aesop Dekker, their follow-up What Graceless Dawn is only six tracks long, though it spans over an hour. Tellingly, it takes Worm Ouroboros 15 minutes into the album and halfway through the second track, “Broken Movements,” before they unleash the full force of their sound. Until then, it’s mostly whispered vocals over Jessica Way’s chilly guitars and Lorraine Rath’s slithering basslines, with Dekker’s artful drumming knocking eerily against the walls. When “Broken Movements” reaches its climax, they all converge into a thunderous roar. Rath and Way wrap their vocals around each other like a string section, soaring over Way’s crushing riffs; together their voices form the guiding light of the album. But while Worm Ouroboros have never sounded more powerful as a three-piece, these type of crescendos are not the focus. The most crushing peaks instead come from its softer moments, like the heartbreaking coda to “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” or the haunting intro of “Ribbon of Shadow.”
Throughout the record, the trio maintains a consistent, earthy mood, occasionally playing off one another with the intuition of an improv group. It pushes Warm Ouroboros to new heights. Way’s guitar can reverberate with a lonely, Lost Highway howl and sparkle with a metallic shimmer, often lending the album its texture; Rath’s bass playing serves as its melodic foundation. Dekker, meanwhile, eschews his typical assault with a more dynamic palette. His slow patter in the midsection of “Suffering Tree” gives it the feeling of an apocalyptic Christmas carol, while his dramatic, double bass drum rolls in “(Was It) The Cruelest Thing” provide a late-album burst of adrenaline.
While each of the album’s songs take a similar route through their 10-minute runtimes, Worm Ouroboros layer their music with enough nuances to keep things from getting too dense. As indicated by their band name, which is derived from the title of a cultishly beloved 20th century sci-fi novel, Worm Ouroboros have a literary flair. It’s inherent to their deeply poetic lyrics (“Weighing our worth in sacks of black earth/Filling our hearts and our graves with their sum”) and by the whispered passages of William Blake that open and close the album. Blake’s poems also give the record its bookending track titles, “Day” and “Night,” suggesting that What Graceless Dawn thematically covers a 24-hour span. This might be true (particularly if the span of your day mostly involves staring awestruck at a blackening sky, contemplating mortality with a lingering sense of dread). But Worm Ouroboros’ power feels mysterious and eternal: In just an hour, they conjure up an entire lifetime of darkness.


The Brooklyn trio follows 2009's Beast Rest Forth Mouth with a record that's admirable in large part because its ambitions are as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures.

I Love You, It's Cool

For a band that spends more than two years between studio albums, Bear in Heaven don't seem to have hang-ups about fucking around with the final result. This has worked out well for them: 2009's breakthrough Beast Rest Forth Mouth was the result of streamlining the proggy excesses of Red Bloom of the Boom into something familiar, wholly of the moment, and yet impossible to pin down-- you knew some combination of "indie," "rock," "synth," "dance," and "electro" should work, and yet not a single hyphenate stuck satisfactorily. A year later, the band commissioned artists ranging from High Places to Justin Broadrick for Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed, which defied all expectations associated with indie rock remix records by actually being pretty good.
Now a group whose albums can be described as "highly anticipated," Bear in Heaven masterfully punctured the hype cycle by slowing their third LP, I Love You, It's Cool, by 400,000 percent and streaming it on their website for over 2700 consecutive hours-- if you missed it, the deluxe version of I Love You comes with two hours of it. But besides being one hell of a PR stunt, the drone version of I Love You unintentionally laid out a crucial rule of engagement for Bear in Heaven's latest artistic divergence: Don't rush to judgment with this thing. It might not take four months for it to finally click for you-- but it might.
Wisely, the Brooklyn-via-Alabama trio use "Lovesick Teenagers" as the jumping off point for I Love You, specifically the Lindstrom & Christabelle version that appeared on Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed. The result won't be wholly unfamiliar due to Jon Philpot's boyish, confidently projected vocals, and even with all the crystalline textures, you never lose sight of Bear in Heaven as a wood-and-string, flesh-and-bone rock band at its core. The difference here is that while BRFM was a consistently locomative record, it took most of its rhythmic cues from easily identifiable indie precedents: the redneck punk-funk of Modest Mouse, Animal Collective's electronic tribalism. There's more of the Field in the way opener "Idle Heart" and later "Cool Light" play out: short, anticipatory windups that slowly thrust forward into a momentum that's constant throughout and never feels as fast as it actually is. This lends I Love You a structural fluidity that can make it slippery upon the first couple of listens, verses and choruses identifiable while in progress, but ending and beginning a few bars earlier than you'd usually expect.
Though I Love You doubles down on sequencers and digitization and was forged in the midst of Bear in Heaven's seemingly endless touring regimen, it's worth keeping in mind that they're not looking to carry hard drives for your favorite Kompakt producer. As Philpot memorably sings amidst the strobelit propulsion of single "The Reflection of You": "If you could dance with me/ I think you would like my moves." Note "if" and "think," which is really indicative of how Bear in Heaven write more about the idea of dancing than dance music proper-- someone who refers to "my moves" is likely a dead giveaway for a wallflower at heart. It's a contrast that works for them, as I Love You generates a legitimate libidinous charge amidst the friction of their new four-to-the-floor rhythmic constancy and the remnants of their previous itchiness: drummer Joe Stickney dropping flailing solos on "Cool Light", the bent guitar melody that prods Philpot like the sleep-depriving light pollution described on "Noon Moon", penultimate "Space Remains"' laser-tag meltdown. They could just be vessels for the uneasiness spilling over from Philpot's lyrics, which dare to get literal so as to portray the narrator as embittered, self-loathing, morally casual, or just out for a good time. "Kiss Me Crazy" indulges in a mutually destructive and irresistable romance that makes you think its title is missing a comma, while "Warm Water" gives itself up to some of I Love You's most beatific passages while masking its austere rejection. The synths hush as Philpot sings, "get up, c'mon," something that can be mistaken for a call for action when its context calls for closure: "I wanna love/ Without feeling your love."
Tracing back to why I Love You is such a slow burn, there's a fundamental challenge to Bear in Heaven's attempts to integrate the vast, incremental buildups of Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Axel Willner within the context of four-minute indie rock songs with their expected allotment of payoff. Weirdly, it's most evident in "Sinful Nature", even though it immediately jumps out the way "Lovesick Teenagers" did. As with "Lovesick", Philpot's lyrics are simultaneously empathetic ("You're let down by God/ You're let down by boring strangers") and conspiratorial ("Let's get loaded/ And make some strange things come true") toward its subject, and it's a hell of an arrangement, too. After the opening flashbulb pop of disco synths, the deep, liquid undertow of the rhythm section sounds like it could ebb infinitely. And yet, there's a point after Philpot sings the title and the beat drops out that "Sinful Nature" and I Love You beg for release, yet they strangely demur amongst the rising action, leaving a wash of backmasked reverb as the climax. I Love You never allows itself that chance to boil over again, and considering Beast Rest Forth Mouth remained unified despite its occasionally volcanic choruses, the solidarity of I Love You wouldn't necessarily be compromised by a couple of visceral peaks. The protracted cohesiveness leads to other minor quibbles I can't quite shake: the simonized synth textures and Philpot's piecemeal approach to constructing melody causes a couple of lulls where the record bleeds together, and the opium-laced swirl of "Sweetness & Sickness" feels like a closer marooned from some Bear in Heaven record that isn't this one.
Plenty of records from established bands seem to underwhelm on first listen, but what thankfully kept me coming back here? I think of recent releases from Tanlines, the Antlers, Chairlift, and Hooray For Earth that functioned in a similar way-- each from New York, each possibly identifiable as "synth-pop." It's the kind of thing people point to when trying to figure out why Brooklyn doesn't appear to be on the cutting edge of indie rock anymore, but it's an unfair projection to assume that's what Bear in Heaven are aiming for. Similar to Burst Apart or Mixed Emotions or Something, these are songs that feel welcoming because of how they reflect and integrate themselves into real life-- the people, relationships, and emotions described herein are relatable and open-ended, and hell, considering the sound of "urban maturity" is typically seen as strictly the realm of baritones and bassoons, it's refreshing to think Bear in Heaven and their colleagues might be onto a refreshing alternative. It'd be unreasonable to expect Bear in Heaven to keep writing "Lovesick Teenagers" over and over again as adults with messy romantic complications, and I Love You, It's Cool is admirable in large part because its ambitions are every bit as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures-- you don't have to call it "adult indie," but it feels like conflicted indie rock for adults.


Though the ethereal presence of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell is unmistakable, the UK band’s self-titled debut is often tedious.

The Soft Cavalry

The old “this isn’t a side project” cliché applies a bit differently to the Soft Cavalry, a UK band centered around the married duo Rachel Goswell and Steve Clarke. Already revered as the sighing singer-guitarist of reunited ’90s dream-pop trailblazers Slowdive and their country-folk successor, Mojave 3, Goswell has built on that legacy in recent years with a low-key supergroup, Minor Victories, and as a guest on new albums from American Football and Mercury Rev. Her ethereal presence is unmistakable on the Soft Cavalry’s self-titled debut. But the dominant voice here belongs to Clarke, who played in various lesser-known acts before meeting Goswell while tour-managing for Slowdive in 2014.
The Soft Cavalry arrives less as a Slowdive extracurricular activity than as a new outlet for Clarke, whose brother and former bandmate Michael Clarke produces. Along with Midlake/Mercury Rev keyboardist Jesse Chandler, the lineup also includes a drummer who has collaborated with the Clarke siblings on other projects (including backing Ricky Gervais in a 2016 mockumentary film). The resulting collection of cavernous electro-rock, elaborately adorned psych-pop, and winsome ambient-folk is polished and professional-sounding, but it’s also as tedious and unmemorable as the group’s name.
There are glimmers of promise. Lead singles “Dive” and “Bulletproof,” also the album’s opening one-two punch, set Steve Clarke’s wispy, overly processed lead vocals and Goswell’s glassy harmonies amid click-tracked gloom that’s passably reminiscent of Radiohead’s early-’00s followers like Doves. Slowdive fans should welcome Goswell’s lead vocal on the pastoral lullaby “Passerby,” though the song is also an example of how the type of nature metaphors often used to describe her other band are something of a tic in Clarke’s lyrics, as “mountains peak,” “rivers flow,” and “waters break.”
Within this lane of poe-faced, British-style, aughts-throwback indie rock, the album doesn’t lack for variety. “Never Be Without You” is a jangling love song that reaches for the Cure but falls short. “Only in Dreams” is drumless and meditative, with fluttering woodwinds. “Mountains” is a painfully cheesy neo-psych power ballad. The biggest departure is “Careless Sun,” which drapes Clarke’s and Goswell’s vocals in vocoder-like effects, though with its orchestral bombast and portentous lyrics about “ancient prophecies,” it’s also the album’s worst clunker.
Most songs are brooding and midtempo, underpinned by one-finger piano lines and bland drum programming, repeating undistinguished metaphors longer than concision might demand. The title of romantic duet “The Velvet Fog” happens to be American crooner Mel Tormé’s nickname, but the song’s trudging pomp-rock recalls any number of early-millennium UK hype bands that most people have rightly forgotten. Finale “The Ever Turning Wheel” is an arena-scale, seven-minute enactment of a commonplace lyrical concept about a wheel that’s “not slowing down.” On the same song, Clarke also urges, awkwardly, “Keep your head above the water that is rising.”
The most intriguing non-single on The Soft Cavalry is “Spiders.” Although still a little ponderous, and at least a minute too long, the song works because the ideas behind it are as remarkable as the album’s always-lavish production. The bass line is so bare and jagged that it’s almost a hook, and the lyrics, which I hear as comparing a new love to two spiders building a fresh web together, are genuinely unusual. “Leave our webs,” Goswell and Clarke’s voices intone, “Begin again/Like spiders.” It’s a shame their first album as an artistic unit isn’t as compelling, but with luck and a little inspiration, there will be more silk to spin.


Amadou & Mariam reached international acclaim after 2005's Dimanche à Bamako; they follow that with a more global record featuring guests from France, the Ivory Coast, and Canada, as well as Englishman Damon Albarn.

Welcome to Mali

2005's Dimanche à Bamako rocketed Amadou & Mariam to international acclaim more than three decades after the beginnings of their respective musical careers. It was a richly deserved arrival that retained the spirit of their music with new beats and sounds incorporated by global pop star Manu Chao and his co-producers Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais. On Welcome to Mali, Moreau and Jais stick around to steer the duo toward a harder, more outright pop approach.
Damon Albarn also drops in to produce the opening track and first single "Sabali", one of the best things he's been involved in this decade. The song opens in overtly nostalgic territory, with Mariam Doumbia's resigned opening lines run through a light filter, but it soon jumps into a different realm, with her falsetto sweeping over mournful keyboards. It's not every day you hear an African record that uses ELO as a touchstone, but this song does it to devastating emotional effect.
That opening shot is part of an eclectic landscape that at times sounds West African and at others sounds completely divorced from geography. Dimanche à Bamako, which means "Sunday in Bamako", Mali's capital, felt like a product of that city. Welcome to Mali, however, seems a strange title for a record that sounds so global. The dramatic string arrangement on the English-language "I Follow You" is distinctly European, while Canadian/Somali rapper K'Naan's shout-out to the "original West Coast-East Coast collaboration" could either refer to Africa's East and West Coasts or to Africa's West Coast and America's East Coast-- the two ends of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Sequencing is important, too-- the Western strings of "I Follow You" come on the heels of the solo-bowed instrument that lends a place-less feel to "Bozos". Amadou's guitar is a little less prominent on this record than the last, but close listening reveals impressive stylistic dexterity as he moves from simple strumming to fluid melodic playing to staccato rhythmic patterns inspired by the Malian ngoni, a cousin of the guitar.
Somewhat improbably, Amadou & Mariam have become a musical laboratory where the two principle players, the blind couple from Mali, are willing to try nearly anything. Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoli drops in on one track and it feels completely natural. Pianos aren't common in Africa because the weather makes it tough to keep them in tune, but there's piano all over this album, and it sounds great rubbing up against koras (17-string West African harp) and balafons (West African marimba). On the title track, Amadou's guitar accents the chorus with big, bent surf chords, and it sounds not only logical but inevitable.
"Inevitable" is a pretty good word for the stardom of Amadou & Mariam. People this amazingly talented and open to new sounds and ideas rarely remain obscure, especially after so many years honing their craft and building their catalog. On further examination, in fact, Welcome to Mali might not be such a strange title after all. This album is an affirmation of global connectivity and an emerging global culture that transcends and repurposes tradition as it sees fit-- the sound of Mali merging with the world at large.


On his second solo album, Stranger Things actor Joe Keery fights his way through the simulation with winking, off-kilter synth-pop.

Decide

Joe Keery knows what you are probably thinking—another actor with a musical side project? Ugh. To Keery’s credit, making music is more than a passing vanity project; before he found life-altering fame playing Steve Harrington, the reformed bad boy of Stranger Things, he played guitar in the Chicago psych-rock band Post Animal. Over the last few years, in between roles as a murderous rideshare driver and a beleagured video game designer, he’s been kicking around a solo synth-pop project called Djo. As suggested by the moniker, which is pronounced like his first name, it’s still him—but with a wink.
Djo’s vibes-forward second album, Decide, conceals its anxieties about change and identity beneath an onslaught of synthesizers and Auto-Tune, often in the interest of fun but occasionally to its detriment. Written and produced alongside Adam Thein, Decide takes full advantage of studio wizardry. Opener “Runner” begins with a series of borderline 8-bit bleeps as Keery commits to growth—“People never change/But I have to try”—delivered in a crystal-clear falsetto. Soon enough, the song transitions into a slicker, chromatic sound, all vocodered vocals and savvy electronica that wraps up with a strangled shout. Sometimes, the full-bodied pastiche can’t hide some clunky lyricism. “I know my hair looked good in the bathroom at the bar/Turns out I left my wallet at the bathroom bar” goes one such line on the Talking Heads-esque “Gloom.” An exploration of the pitfalls of ego—and potentially good-natured jab at his own famous mane—it’s a charming attempt at nodding to his audience, even if his songwriting isn't quite up for the challenge.
It is ironic, then, that the best tracks on Decide tend to be the longer ones, when Keery’s instrumental impulses are allowed to spiral in unexpected directions (those psych rock roots die hard). While agonizing over the grip of social media, “Half Life” toggles between ominous stillness and bursts of sparkly brightness in a manner that evokes a dopamine loop. “On and On,” a song about doomscrolling, coasts along on a throbby wobble before skyrocketing into an arena rock-sized percussion breakdown.
Decide is a fun, off-kilter synth-pop album that proves Keery’s talent, but by its conclusion, a clearer picture of its maker fails to emerge. (One lovely exception is “End of Beginning” with its lyrics about returning to Chicago and reconnecting with a past version of himself.) As on his debut TWENTY TWENTY, Djo proudly reps influences like Daft Punk and Tame Impala, borrowing their tricks without adding much in the way of innovation. Still, the lack of personal revelations is forgivable: Keery has explicitly said that he hoped the Djo persona—he sports a ’70s bowl cut wig onstage and in promo pics—would help distance himself from his onscreen roles. There is something tragic about an album preoccupied with the fakeries of technology made by someone whose fans have as largely formed a relationship with him through the screen. But with Djo, he is finding his way through the simulation.


Since their inception, Kylesa have translated instability into energy, outlasting membership changes and tragedies to create strange and compelling stylistic welds. But on their darker sixth album, the Savannah band sometimes let this genre pillaging overtake their songcraft.

Ultraviolet

Kylesa have always been a moving target. Since their inception, the Savannah, Ga., group has translated instability into energy, outlasting membership changes and tragedies to create strange and compelling stylistic welds. During the last decade, they’ve shouldered themselves nominally somewhere between sludge metal and psychedelic rock, but those terms are simply outsider touchstones for Kylesa’s brilliant internal turbidity. Indeed, their music is a mix of hardcore force and pop approachability, narcotic textures and double-drummer thunder. They are less defined by any one of those elements than the way they treat them as critical components within a grand crucible, parts meant to be steadily whisked into an alchemic whole. To wit, when Brooklyn Vegan asked frontman Phillip Cope to list his favorite songs of the year in 2010, he named the usual suspects and stylistic peers (Torche, High on Fire) alongside dream-state indie rock (Beach House), insurgent post-punk garage rock (Abe Vigoda), and bands that, like Kylesa, still get dubbed metal because of heavy pedigrees and references (Alcest). This variety has long served Kylesa well, too, pushing them toward wider acceptance even as they’ve redoubled their strange syntheses.
After a string of LPs that have consistently found Kylesa fortifying these wayward genre aggregations, Ultraviolet-- their sixth album and second for Season of Mist-- is an unexpected misstep. At first, Ultraviolet might feel passive or polite, as though Kylesa is the metal band auditioning for a roster spot on Sub Pop or Merge. There’s a slow-burning ballad, a straightforward charge or two, and at least one tune that stretches shoegaze reverie over quickly flickering riffs. It’s as if they’ve tempered their approach, eliminating the exciting outliers of their toolkit to arrive at a hard rock album that sounds standard enough to be safe. Past Kylesa albums have felt alternately like bulldozers and magnets; Ultraviolet often feels only like another middling record.
But the problem is that Kylesa have actually let their genre pillaging overtake their actual songcraft-- that is, in trying to give the psychedelic, shoegaze and jam band aspects of their sound more room within the spotlight, they’ve created a mess that sometimes seems rudderless. The first three tracks, for instance, feel like a non-navigable maze with no steady vectors or outlined intentions: Opener “Exhale” shortchanges a great hook from Laura Pleasants with verses that don’t support the same weight and an instrumental breakdown that simply stalls the song. “Unspoken” hides behind an unnecessary 80-second introduction and subsequently plunges into an unremarkable and overly long solo, with Cope dancing around the impressive groove as though he’s ashamed of its simplicity. And during “Grounded”, Cope drowns many of his own vocals in effects, hiding them behind the wallop like coded messages. Likewise, Pleasants harmonizes the chorus with herself, singing in a round that distracts from the song’s sizzling riff. Time and again, from start to finish, Ultraviolet pauses to concede to such extraneous effects and rockpiled elements, as if Kylesa have finally made the mistake of brandishing their eccentricity rather than simply thriving on it. Ultraviolet rarely feels singular or confident; it’s the sound of a band attempting to underline its claims to distinction.
But when Kylesa allows those extrinsic factors to emphasize their momentum rather than detract from it, they are unstoppable: “We’re Taking This”, for instance, is a monstrous flogging, with guitars that twist like rusty corkscrews, drums that push ahead like a cavalcade, and a refrain that feels like a battle cry. Thing is, all of Kylesa’s itinerant weirdness is here, too-- guitars that suddenly warp out of time, drums that pull back enough to give the textures space, and backmasked harmonies that swirl around Cope’s lead like vapor trails. The same holds for the two-minute bruiser “What Does it Take”, which gallops from the gates and doesn’t pull up until the next song begins. But Kylesa shoehorns a kaleidoscopic guitar solo into the tune and saturate the space between the drums and the vocals with guitar effects, not a central riff. “Low Tide,” the album’s best surprise, is a drifting, magnetic ballad; overactive bass, distant harmonies, and streaks of soft guitar noise create an impressionistic web for its starry-eyed hook. In all three instances, Kylesa’s disparate strains work together to create the same inexorable sense of euphoria that unites most of the band’s influences, if no longer their entire catalog. Kylesa albums once seemed cut instantly from whole cloth. Despite its highs, Ultraviolet is a patchwork of arduousness, with some seams still showing.


There’s nothing redeeming about Tekashi 6ix9ine’s DUMMY BOY, though he surely wishes there was.

DUMMY BOY

That fame is a drug is a cliché, but for Tekashi 6ix9ine there’s no other explanation. The polarizing, 22-year-old Bushwick, Brooklyn-raised, rainbow-haired rapper spent years desperately searching for a way to catapult himself into the limelight. He horrified the fashion world with a now infamous outfit that displayed the words “Pussy Eater” and “Nigga” on a long black jersey in bold, but that brief virality didn’t pan out. Then, an 18-year-old Tekashi 6ix9ine scratched and clawed for internet cool points by posting a heinous video to Instagram in which he performed sexual acts on a 13-year-old, resulting in a plea deal and years of excuses. Finally, when all other tactics proved to be disastrous failures, he dealt himself to a well-known set of Brooklyn-based Bloods that saw Tekashi as their meal ticket. In exchange, Tekashi viewed this as an opportunity to land the credibility he sought.
Just days before DUMMY BOY was set to be released, Tekashi 6ix9ine’s world started to crumble. At a probation violation hearing, a judge required him to disassociate from all gang members. After popping up on the Breakfast Club radio show to speak about his break from the gang, threats against his life were made, and in an effort to avoid a public act of violence, the FBI rushed a racketeering and firearms charge onto the crew, including Tekashi, who now faces life in prison. His album, DUMMY BOY, first delayed, then leaked, then rushed to release, seems aware of this new reality.
The Tory Lanez-assisted “KIKA” is a blatant effort by Tekashi to clear his name. The track, which seems to have been recorded in recent weeks—indicated by Scott Storch’s low rate rip off of Kodak Black’s “Zeze” instrumental—is Tekashi dipping back into his tiresome gruff-voice screamo flow as he attempts to separate himself: “I do my own shit, fuck all them niggas I used to roll with/I know you used to see me with niggas, but that’s that old shit.” He then implements an instantly stale running joke throughout the album of getting cut off before he is allowed to scream his signature ad-lib and call to the gang, “TR3YWAY!,” like on “KIKA” when Tory Lanez says, “‘It’s fuckin’ Tr-’/Oh wait, I forgot you can’t say that shit.” It’s a facade that Tekashi tries to hold up throughout the album with jokes, but instead it comes across as cries for help.
But a majority of DUMMY BOY isn’t about his impending case, and is mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks. On “BEBE,” he taps South Florida producer Ronny J—known for speaker-blaring production for Denzel Curry and Lil Pump—to lace him up with a cheap, imitation reggaeton track. On the Lil Baby-featuring “TIC TOC,” Tekashi hops on an instrumental that incorporates an acoustic guitar as he tries to repeat the success stories of “Sold Out Dates” and “Drip Too Hard.” But Tekashi does find himself two relevance-seeking confidants in Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, both of whom appear twice on the album, with Kanye considering his plight on “FEEFA”: “They tried to say I wasn’t black no more/About as black as Macklemore.” The album is deeply reliant on guests—on every song but one—and for an artist who made his name solo (“GUMMO” and “KOODA”), it feels like a self-realization that his ideas are running slim.
Online, there’s no trending “free Tekashi” hashtag and no outpouring of support from the artists and influencers—besides Nicki Minaj—who pretended they were blind as they gladly used up every last bit of his stardom. Uninspired as it is, DUMMY BOY is an album that will have an impact and likely would have done more if he was around to promote it. Yet, it will be known as the moment Tekashi 6ix9ine realized that maybe the fame he’s tirelessly tried to achieve and sustain wasn’t worth it at all.


The perpetual Atlanta B-lister sounds like a guest on his own albums, outshone by features from Gunna, Young Thug, Offset, Big Sean, and more.

The World Is Yours 2

An Atlanta transplant from Queens and the (unofficial) fourth Migo, Rich the Kid has built a career as the perpetual barnacle on the underbelly of better artists. Even in his own music, he is best enjoyed as a side item: on his Kendrick Lamar-led single “New Freezer,” on a series of mixtapes with Migos, on label compilations. As if cognizant of this, his album, The World is Yours 2, boasts 14 features across 16 songs.
And yet, somehow, Rich the Kid thinks he’s a generational voice. “The album is going to be the most streamed album,” he told Billboard, presumably with a straight face. “I know for sure. I am the hottest artist in the fucking world.” To be clear: He isn’t. But he’s probably right that the streaming algorithms will love him: His songs are so generic they could could auto-play after just about any popular rap song of the moment.
He has a ton of money and no imagination; not since Lil Boat 2 has a rapper made flexing sound so boring. “They know I got cash, I ain’t gotta brag no more,” he raps on “4 Phones,” despite the fact that he’s already been bragging for nearly 30 minutes. The rare glimpse of even a half-interesting thought is usually indebted to another rapper. His pinky looks like a waterslide. His racks taller than Yao Ming. His plug’s in Beijing. All ideas repurposed from artists he’s worked with, most of them on this very album.
The best moments all come courtesy of his guests: the Jay Critch hook on “Like Mike,” the Gunna flow on “Fall Threw,” the Vory song Rich basically guests on toward the end of the album (“Ring Ring”). The clunker king Big Sean, of all people, upstages his host with the verse of the album: “I go off, go in, go up, but never go back/I know we in a league of our own, bitch, I’m pro-black/Just hit a lick for my grandsons and I don’t have sons/But that’s how far I’m thinking ahead, bitch, and some,” he raps on “Two Cups.” There is a cleverness, a sense of identity, to his verse that the rest of the album is desperately missing.
Production can be the great equalizer, and The World is Yours 2 is often redeemed by its beatmakers: Frank Dukes, Wheezy Beats, T-Minus, Sevn Thomas, Nard & B, D.A. Doman, and frequent producer Lab Cook. Together, they patch the obvious cracks in his songcraft. The haunted whistling of the intro, the piercing squeal of “Save That,” and the booming drums of “Splashin” all help lacquer over the platitudinous raps. The only thing more engrossing than all this rich production is imagining, while Rich the Kid busily squanders goodwill, what a more engrossing rapper might have made of it.


The second nominally solo album from the former Yuck frontman uses improvisation, repetition, and group interplay as ways of breaking free of traditional modes of songwriting.

On&On

To improvise is to stand at the edge of a precipice and cast yourself over, with the belief that something—your own proficiency, other players, familiar musical meter, or pure luck—will catch you on the way down. The legendary free-music guitarist Derek Bailey referred to it as “playing without memory”: to rid oneself of standard chords and pre-established songwriting expectations and instead allow spontaneity to guide a performance.
When Daniel Blumberg left Yuck in 2013, this was the world he immersed himself in—one that wasn’t predicated on mining ’90s rock nostalgia so much as consummating his ever-evolving vision. He established himself as a fixture at the London experimental music haven Cafe OTO and spent the next five years performing and collaborating with other like-minded musicians, releasing music in various formations—Hebronix, Oupa, and Guo, to name a few—but mostly making art and staying out of the public eye. After going through a breakup, Blumberg dipped his toes back into conventional songwriting, resulting in his 2018 solo debut, Minus. That record was built around unhurried ballads with atonal flourishes, whereas his latest album, On&On, is based on repetition and reinterpretation of recurring themes, like he’s looking to break free from having to arrange traditional songs altogether.
On&On features the same musicians from Minus (Ute Kanngiesser on cello, Billy Steiger on violin, Tom Wheatly on double bass, and Jim White of Dirty Three on drums), who Blumberg has credited with being instrumental to his artistic process. Iterations of the title track are interspersed throughout the record like temporal markers, each of them more formless than the last, with an additional “&On” appended each time to signify the developing nature of the work. These recurrences share just the semblance of a melodic motif; some are gentle, others chaotic. On the opener, he summons a reverie with gentle acoustic guitar and artificial harmonics. “Take a man out for a walk, holding his hand,” he muses, seconds before a sudden, violent thwock punctures the stereo field. Is that a percussive non-sequitur by White or a fortuitously toppled instrument? It doesn’t really matter; it’s forever a part of that one recording, and it will never happen again.
Blumberg and the quartet move with gentle fluidity, displaying a trust that can only be forged by hours of listening to each other play. You can hear this on songs like “Sidestep Summer”—where a discordant groove gives way to a delicate chorus that slips away almost as soon as it arrives, replaced by abrasive splashes of sound—or the simmering pitter-patter and room noise that opens “Silence Breaker,” where the band is joined by Elvin Brandhi, the improvisational lyricist who’s also Blumberg’s partner in the duo BAKH. Though it’s billed as a solo album, On&On captures what is ultimately a community effort. The songs are Blumberg’s, but the performance belongs to them all.
The seven-minute indie-rock centerpiece “Bound” is the closest Blumberg comes to writing something reminiscent of his past projects. There’s a powerful moment at its midpoint when the pining guitar line disintegrates and all momentum suddenly grinds to a halt. “It was a mistake to put that ring on your finger,” Blumberg moans as layers of textural tremolo bowing begin to lift him up. “When I hit the hay/When I end the day… To be online forever/To be offline together.” It’s the only time he makes specific reference to modern-day ailments, as if to remind us that he hasn’t entirely sequestered himself away.
Like Minus, On&On was recorded and seen through completion by producer Pete Walsh, the longtime Scott Walker collaborator who worked with the pop star turned avant-garde enigma for decades. It’s hard not to draw career parallels between Blumberg and artists like Walker or the late David Berman, who mentored Blumberg and to whom the album is dedicated. All of these artists got some taste of music stardom early in their lives before rejecting that premise altogether and dedicating themselves to the notions that moved them: craft, process, and perilous experimentation. Blumberg asserts that even for the creator, a song can be whatever you need it to be in the moment, a vessel for self-exploration. On&On shows that he’s wholly enmeshed his songwriting and improvisation in a way that feels unique to him.

Buy:
Rough Trade
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The jangle-pop band’s latest is a deceptively cheery-sounding reckoning with the violence of white American history.

South Somewhere Else

Theo Hilton started Nana Grizol in 2007 as a way to express his anxiety as a young gay man in Athens, Georgia. Since then, Nana Grizol has released four albums, all unified in their jangle-pop sound and themes of queerness and American ennui. Their newest album, South Somewhere Else, is similar—it’s equally scrappy, with warbling vocals and booming brass band—but now, Hilton seems to be preoccupied with his own whiteness. On South Somewhere Else, he explores his individual identity within the greater American framework of violent white history.
Considering its topic of choice, the album sounds fairly chipper. Guitars bounce around, distorted and messy, and Hilton has a snotty delivery that makes everything sound like a speech he was forced to give in front of his middle-school gym class. “Plantation Country” bursts with crashing cymbals and a shrieking trumpet while Hilton muses on, well, our plantation country, the “beauty that disguises violence,” white complicity in its “soft, insipid silence.” It’s hard to define the mood of this—Is Hilton angry? Ashamed? Or is he just recounting the facts as they stand? His lyrics are often verbose and vague, which prevents some of words from packing a punch in the way he might wish.
You can hear parallels to  bands like P.S. Eliot, white bands defined by their small-town experiences, singing about the insecurities and dissatisfactions that plague everyone. For many non-white listeners, myself included, the appeal of these bands lies in the universality of the emotions, but there is still the issue of place and skin. This makes his reckoning on South Somewhere Else welcome, if a little obscure. He wonders about the “comfort in the dream of simple pasts” and asks himself if he finds accountability “too tough to task.” As listeners, do we feel bad for him here? Are we meant to be glad for the white Americans who find solace in rewritten history? Just as the image of a beautiful, bloody plantation conjures up “aggressions/in the answers that evade the questions,” it’s difficult to know where Hilton stands beside sunshine-y guitar and hard-to-parse lyrics.
On the title track, Hilton makes his feelings more explicit. “It was assumed that the South was a thing that took place somewhere else,” he sings, his lilting voice bouncing on top of toe-tapping piano, like he’s talking over beers at his hometown bar. He visits relatives who “couldn’t quite tell” you about your hometown’s history; he gazes out at the “Jim Crow geographies” that “haunt all of the streetscapes we’d come to know well.” This is when Nana Grizol is best. The production is joyous, but a little embarrassed about feeling so. Hilton’s words are precise, and makes it clear that the only reason that the racism and white supremacism of the South felt like it was somewhere else was because the band itself is white. Hilton says it plainly, while tracking his story through “all white restaurants,” that maybe the South was somewhere else, “we weren’t noticing where power was held/Captivated, the capitol’s … white liberal logics prevailed.” And they will prevail, unless white Americans are willing to concede their faults, their obliviousness, and their history, as Hilton does here.
“About the Purpose That We Serve” is one of the album’s most raucous moments, but still self-consciously so. It feels like Hilton is aiming his displeasure at white people or liberals, offering “Some food for thought, one just might choke on what they’re given/There’s so, so many voices—look around and you’ve got choices — but the/Angle’s always altered for convenience.” It’s impossible to deny the timeliness of this sentiment. We have a government that refuses to care for its people, an indoctrinated population that believes what the government gives them is all that they deserve, and everyone else marching in the street, getting shot, maimed, or killed occasionally for not being like the others. But this album isn’t a protest album. It’s an admission of privilege and of history, and an often catchy, summer-y one at that. Hilton ends the album sarcastically, facetiously instructing that “You’ve got no way of knowing/So leave it to the ones who do/Be it a priest or politician/Know it’s never you.” That’s how the ruling class wants you to feel, isn’t it? That the South is somewhere else, that you’re not smart enough, not strong enough, not white enough, or rich enough to do anything that could change anyone’s life. But the South is here, and so are you.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Produced entirely by Kenny Beats, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade.

Vince Staples

Vince Staples thrives on contrasts. His lyrics are filled with first-person accounts of a grim adolescence and isolated moments of anguish that feel both lived-in and distant all at once. And then, before you know it, he cracks a joke and reframes the whole experience. The beats on his last three proper albums—2015’s Summertime ‘06, 2017’s Big Fish Theory, and 2018’s FM!—jump from minimalist hyphy pulses to warbling UK garage tones with a concussive sense of whiplash. Even in the midst of chaos, Vince’s high tenor splits through these walls of sound like a hairline fracture.
The content of Vince’s bars hasn’t changed much, but his latest album, self-titled Vince Staples and produced entirely by EDM-turned-rap producer Kenny Beats, is more uniform in sound. Distorted samples and peppy 808s permeate nearly every track, creating an atmosphere somewhere between the glossy minimalism of his 2016 EP Prima Donna and the muddled gloom of his Michael Uzowuru-produced 2012 mixtape Winter in Prague. There’s no concept or alleged double album conceit at work, no grandiose beat experiments or Big Boy cameos to distract from the artist at the center. Though it’s far from his most exciting music, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade.
For his part, Vince is still in the liminal space between mainstream fame and the business end of a .38. He’s been the face of Sprite campaigns and has an upcoming Netflix show, but death and decaying memories lurk around every corner. Parsing out the difference between the real and fake is hard enough when you’re not famous, but the paranoia lingers in the back of his mind. The end of “Sundown Town” dwells on the fear of meet-and-greets with fans turning into assassination attempts. “Taking Trips” features a striking bar about keeping a gun in his swim trunks when he goes to the beach. On “Are You With That?” Vince reminiscences on a childhood spent with friends who are now “under the ground” before disarming listeners with a hilariously blunt demand: “Fill these voids or fill my bank.” He’s still a smartass operating in a bad man’s world, and money remains both a motivation and a balm.
Stories like these have never been swallowed by any of Vince’s songs in the past. Horrific narratives like “Nate” and “Blue Suede” could bore into your memory without the banging arrangements that power them. This is a point Vince Staples makes often: The stripped-back production on these songs helps new revelations sting and tickle a bit more than usual. Lines like “Shoot cuz he was poppin’ hot shit/Now he on a Pro Club” from “Lil Fade” feel bolder in this context, even if the songs themselves aren’t particularly thrilling. Vince trying his hand at melodies on “Are You With That” or adopting a sputtering flow on “The Shining” are neat and inviting changes delivered with the energy of a shut-in turning down the thermostat. Vince Staples has movement but lacks velocity, which casts his words in the most intimate light imaginable.
Kenny Beats, ever the chameleon, responds by offering up some of his mellowest cuts. Mid-tempo synth chirps and drum claps propel both “Are You With That” and “Mhm” while a ghostly vocal sample gives “Law of Averages” the chill of a James Blake song. Some songs, like “The Shining,” veer into lo-fi territory. Even If you’re looking for the booming pastel energy of Kenny’s recent collaboration with TiaCorine or the breathless vibes of his work on Vince’s FM!, Vince Staples still has plenty to recommend. The sonic palette is grayscale without being boring, stoic without missing bounce.
Vince and Kenny Beats have easy chemistry in and out of the booth because both are consistently proving how adaptable they are to any facet of rap. There’s no beat that Vince’s bleak diarism can’t mutate just like there’s no regional style Kenny can’t add to his collection at will. They’re two unstoppable forces who would rather work together than fight each other. Vince Staples is a minor affair by design, proof that there’s fire to be found even in the duo’s quietest moments.

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The producer and visual artist builds an uncanny, disturbing world on his debut LP that recalls his collaborations with Björk, Arca, and FKA twigs.

Labyrinth

Skin is a boundary that Jesse Kanda trespasses in his visual works. A frequent collaborator of Björk, Arca, and FKA twigs, Kanda creates worlds of opalescent membranes and semi-human figures that match those artists’ ideas about the physical body. In the video he directed for twigs’ early track “How’s That,” a glistening human form deflates and then billows like a scrap of silk. His debut LP as Doon Kanda, Labyrinth, is the aural equivalent. While his first two minimalist EPs, 2017’s Heart and last year’s Luna, were fluid and open-ended, the full-length is engraved with baroque detail.
Kanda wrote the majority of Labyrinth in triple meter, a time signature common to formal dance styles like the waltz. He envisions “venues transformed into an alien world” through the dissonant force of his music, but the result is more camp than alien. Opener “Polycephaly,” with its lush synthetic piano, sounds like it could back a nightmare sequence in a gothic horror movie. “Dio” begins with a throbbing beat and machine-like whir before synthetic strings rise up and distort, melting like the twisted bodies that populate Kanda’s visual works. It’s the sound of glamorous decay, and by oozing over the beat, the strings rebel against the rigid formality of the meter, almost throwing it off. The force of the waltz is unbreakable, though, and continues on nearly uninterrupted to closer “Entrance.”
Over the course of its thirteen tracks, Labyrinth loosely chronicles growing anxiety and its dissolution, peaking at “Mino” before settling into a level of serenity at “Bunny.” Kanda is most successful when he interrupts the album’s emotional arc; “Wing” is the first track that departs from triple meter, and consists only of humming synths and the sound of fluttering insect wings. It introduces a more quiet chaos than that of the highly ornamented tracks that surround it. On “Pieridae,” the album’s omnipresent synthetic strings slide around skittering percussion without overwhelming the piece. “Search,” the comedown after “Mino,” features eerie synths and a metallic ring, like something gone awry in the engine of an ancient car. The album’s slower moments allow the music to catch up to its own strangeness.
Labyrinth is not just a musical project; it comes complete with ten visual works, showing Kanda’s emphasis on world-building. The characters rendered in those works are smooth and slick, made of something like flesh or polished stone. The winged figure on the cover of the album is bone-white and pocked with cavernous holes, windows into an inside that’s largely empty. There’s a softness in its pose that counteracts the uncanny form; though it stands erect, its head is slightly bowed, hands gesturing toward prayer. That softness manifests in the music, present in the sweeping, darkly sweet melodies of “Nastasya” and “Bunny.” In these moments of pleasure with discomfort hovering beneath, Kanda reaches synthesis between his visual and musical universes.


The experimental ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's In Summer is some of the most emotionally evocative noise music of the year.

In Summer

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has described his latest work, a five-track cassette release called *In Summer, *as a “catalogue of photographs.” The songs are meant as snapshots of people, places, and interests he developed in 2015. It’s not an unusual thing to say about your music;  there are ways in which songs can crystallize a memory better than a photograph. Cantu-Ledesma’s work is wordless, often rhythmless, making it a strange vehicle for visuals, but In Summer somehow lives up it’s visual description, and it is possibly one of the most pastoral and emotionally evocative pieces of noise music that’s been released this year.
*In Summer *opens up with a magnificently colorful soundscape, “Love’s Refrain,” which throws a listener into a middle of a blooming world of warm noises: hiccuping warbles, burps of noise, static that fringes the track like pieces of confetti frozen in mid-air. Unlike so much ambient music or noise, it isn’t attempting to be atmospheric or even alien—it is heated, lush, and decidedly terrestrial. The song tears itself apart as it progresses, careening into a wall of noise in its closing minutes. Susan Sontag once wrote that a photograph invited a viewer “to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability” and that in this experience the photograph itself testifies “to time's relentless melt;” in over seven minutes of collaged noise, Cantu-Ledesma somehow manages to convey this feeling without a single word.
He reproduces it throughout *In Summer *with varying levels of success. In “Little Dear Isle” he smashes together found sounds (the rustling of leaves and bird calls) with a menacing drone that transforms around the two-minute mark into something crunchier, distended, and buoyant. It’s a strange contrast to the nature sounds behind it, transforming bucolic trappings into something much more sinister  Some others are less successful: The title track is predictable, a beautiful drone that suddenly takes a left turn into a minefield of dissonance. “Blue Nudes (I-IV),” the album’s longest track (over 7 minutes) is more or less a solid block of sound. It’s less evocative or visual than the album’s other songs, and is textured in a more sculptural way. For what it’s worth, Cantu-Ledesma’s makes vases and planters, that he sells on his website. They’re beautiful, colorful, purposefully imperfect, and very layered. There is something of that art present in this song.
The album concludes with “Prelude,” which drops you into pure chaos. The guttural growl of a dog, an indistinct whisper, and roiling static make it one of the most *alive *moments in the record. It’s terrifying and wistful, and it all dissolves away in the presence of a single piano playing the same set of notes over and over again. The last thirty or so seconds are near-silence, a wonderful way to close out a record which is so much about degradation and natural processes. *In Summer *situates itself in a conversation about  decay and entropy, and takes a stance that is almost optimistic because it renders chaos and dissonance thoughtfully and beautifully.