Noise musician turned rapper Travis Miller made his mark as Lil Ugly Mane with *Mista Thug Isolation, *a weird and wonderful album that, five years after its release, still commands a cult status.

Mista Thug Isolation

How does Travis Miller, a noise musician from Richmond, Virginia, not only make the transition to hip-hop but end up making one of the decade’s most defining underground rap albums? Five years later, on its fifth vinyl pressing through small Italian label Hundebiss, Lil Ugly Mane’s Mista Thug Isolation still commands a cult status. It is largely based off the slowed down, nearly psychedelic remixes of DJ Screw and the hazy horrorcore of early Three 6 Mafia, both sounds experiencing a renaissance at the time even when Houston and Memphis’ mainstream sounds were beginning to wane in popularity. One of his first guest appearances was on Spaceghostpurrp’s mixtape Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991), which was treading similar territory. Nothing comes from a vacuum, but *Isolation’*s brilliance is that despite its familiar influences, it sounds totally alien from anything before or after it, even in Lil Ugly Mane’s own catalog.
Isolation was produced by “Shawn Kemp,” which is really just Miller’s production alias. It’s a nod to his ’90s obsessions, but he went from horrorcore pastiche into a capable producer in his own right in just over a year from his first full-length, Playaz Circle. “Cup Fulla Beetlejuice” is classic Three 6 production mixed with goofy Halloween ghost sounds; “Lean Got Me Fucked Up” is bassy enough to justify the song’s name. He also works in Wu-Tang piano in “Bitch I’m Lugubrious” and “Serious Shit,” as well as some smooth saxophone in the latter. Despite beginning with a throwback to his noise days, parts of Isolation are surprisingly pleasant. “Breezem Out” and “Lookin 4 Tha Suckin” are the greasiest quiet storm songs, while “Mona Lisa Overdrive” sounds like Clams Casino remixing Kool Keith’s Sex Style, with Miller keeping his own horndog persona in check. This can be traced back to his core influences: Screw’s mixtape of chopped and screwed R&B Late Night Fuckin Yo Bitch and Three 6’s “Da Summa” both showed serenity in darkness. Isolation came at the tail end of Witch House’s popularity, and while bands in that sphere also toyed with Screw and Three 6 like Miller did, he went beyond overt druginess to establish the album’s wide-ranging, yet consistently menacing production.
A project such as Isolation has to potential to have “tourist” written all over it, but the most surprising thing about Miller is that he has serious bars. While he traffics in the same boastfulness rife in hip-hop, he’s got a gift for absurdity with the strangest and catchiest lyricism. Sometimes it manifests in casual nihilism, like this slouching gem from “Lugubrious”: “I ain’t really nothing like a hero/I just wanna get my dick sucked and multiply them zeros.”
Miller also isn’t weird just to be weird. As with his production, he finds new edges to common tropes. “Serious Shit” blows up the vaunted concept of the hustle: it’s one thing to rap about making a lot of money (“The earth revolves around currency/Copernicus”); it’s downright evil to “stay grindin’ till my pockets straight Halliburton.” Isolation is not a record of social commentary, but he still wants you to know who the really malicious grinders are. Miller’s taste for black metal blasphemy, which he explored in past projects Seidhr and Vudmurk, emerges in the raunchy “Slick Rick,” where he talks about engaging in affairs in church, “leave ‘em looking messy in the presence of God.” He applies metal’s over-the-top hysterics into hip-hop in Isolation, which is why he can pull off doing shows wearing an Incantation long-sleeve.
A year after Isolation’s release, Miller toyed with the idea of retiring Lil Ugly Mane, which never came to fruition, even though it was completely understandable. Despite the underground hype, bolstered by an Earl Sweatshirt cosign, he didn’t really use it to advance himself, never being into touring or pursuing bigger features. He recently admitted in an interview for his side project Secret Circle that the idea of money for bars, second nature for established names, is still a new one for him. It gets real lonely being in your own lane. His later works would deal with paranoia and depression more personally, especially his new project Bedwetter whose debut came out earlier this year. In Isolation’s reckless and sometimes nonsensical boasting, it’s hinted at. The record is the fever dream of a conqueror, where nightmarish sounds become a perverted form of dream pop and fantasy eliminates the concept of consequence. He’s moved away from ghoulishness since then, but he’s still cerebral like no rapper above or below.


For three decades, this 1989 album has remained one of dream pop’s chief benchmarks. While these songs will be forever associated with David Lynch’s work, the album stands proudly on its own.

Floating Into the Night

When she was in high school in Creston, Iowa, Julee Cruise was a popular girl with a host of deep-rooted suburban fears—boys, cars, getting sucked down the bathtub drain—and a secret pastime that even those closest to her never knew about: making prank phone calls. “I’d call people if I was angry at someone and wanted to scare them. Or I’d call and not say anything at all,” she reflected in a 1990 interview. “There’s something kinda voyeuristic about doing something like that.”
Eventually, Cruise made contact with the world. First in Blue Velvet and most prominently throughout Twin Peaks, she sang the eerie, beautiful songs that reached from the screen and pulled you inside David Lynch’s mind, giving voice to the complex web of emotions that kept his characters suspended in time. Her debut record, 1989’s Floating Into the Night, is the latest from the Lynch universe to receive a welcome vinyl reissue from Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. And while the lyrics were written by Lynch with music composed by his right-hand-man Angelo Badalamenti, and most of the songs will forever be associated with his work, Cruise’s album stands proudly on its own.
Over the past three decades, Floating Into the Night has remained one of the benchmarks that all dream-pop artists are measured against. It set the standard for several reasons. One, of course, is that its songs were paired with some of the most unforgettable, vividly rendered dream sequences ever caught on camera: from the foggy, rainy vistas of Twin Peaks to its dusky barrooms, sepia-toned living rooms, and demonic purgatories. If you have any relationship to the images these songs accompanied, then just hearing the opening baritone-guitar pulses of “Falling” or the wheezing gramophone band of “Floating” can elicit an intense rush of emotions.
Even stripped of this context, Floating Into the Night captured something important about dreams that plenty of other artists in the genre have ignored. Like most dream-pop records, it has the ability to wash over you, misty and serene, with a late-’80s synth gloss that made one of Cruise’s friends dismiss it as “white wine Muzak.” But Cruise and her collaborators also had the ability to shake you awake, to twist an image that should be pretty into something broken and grotesque. There are obvious examples: the nightmarish orchestral stabs that interrupt the whispered revery of “Into the Night,” the hellish fade-in crescendo of “I Remember,” or the disorienting drone and piano solo in “I Float Alone.” Lynch and Badalamenti shared a penchant for long, simmering builds and sudden cuts, dives into sentimentality harshened by pure horror. Their music together accomplishes a similar effect, never allowing you to feel fully at ease.
Cruise was a natural collaborator, able to skate along gracefully without stumbling around these turns. It’s hard to think of another singer who could find so much space and resonance in words like “dark” or “alone,” and by subduing her musical-theater belt into a curling wisp of smoke, her mezzo-soprano takes on a haunted, slow-motion quality: If you close your eyes, you can almost see each word forming as she sings them before dissolving into blackness.
The initial inspiration for “Mysteries of Love,” Cruise’s first collaboration with Lynch and Badalamenti, was This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren,” and you can hear what they admired in the recording: its sparse alien landscape, and the sense of longing in Elizabeth Fraser’s crystal-clear voice cutting through the mix. But they quickly evolved into their own sound, evoking a less heavenly tableau with more smoke in the air. Within this setting, Cruise favored a hushed delivery in layers and layers of multi-tracked harmony and unison vocals, like Christmas carols by ghostly choirs on deserted streets. (“This will be a very expensive tour because Julee will have to hire nine backup singers,” Lynch jokes in a priceless clip from the recording sessions.)
Both Cruise and Lynch spoke of America in the 1950s as an enduring influence, and the songwriting spans aspirational jazz standards like “The World Spins”—a recording that, no matter how you listen, seem to play on a format that must be handled gently so as not to shatter—to early rock’n’roll throwbacks like “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart.” In the latter, Cruise remembered Lynch instructing the sax player to conjure “big chunks of plastic” from his instrument, suggesting the visceral, physical thrill they still found in music from this era.
Even with these specific reference points, there is no true precedent for Floating Into the Night, and its greatest asset remains its timelessness. Describing her inspiration, Cruise pinpointed the feeling of paranoia that accompanies any surge of joy or new love. “There’s always that voice that says, ‘It’s going to go away,’” she explained. “That voice can be very disturbing and destructive, and that voice is talking all through the album.” If Lynch’s work remains a confounding acquired taste for some, then Floating Into the Night is a record that anyone can at least understand. It is the sound of a burgeoning crush accompanied by the quickening realization of their power to hurt you; it is your hometown at night, with a familiar stillness so quiet it can keep you awake; it is the voice on the other line, distant and mysterious, but close enough so you can hear every breath.


Salt-N-Pepa laid out their best music and bravest activism on Very Necessary, an album about love, agency, and take-no-shit femininity from the Queens rap trio.

Very Necessary

In 1990, Salt-N-Pepa walked onto the Hollywood set of “The Arsenio Hall Show” ready to spread awareness about HIV and AIDS. The men in the audience were fervently doing the signature Hall bark well beyond the call of the show. The Queens trio—Cheryl “Salt” James, Sandy “Pepa” Denton and Deidra “Spinderella” Roper—were there to promote their spot in a fundraising traveling tour of Heart Strings, a new musical about AIDS and HIV featuring Cher and Magic Johnson, where they would perform their PSA-rework of “Let’s Talk About Sex” titled,  “Let’s Talk About AIDS.”  Maintaining its message that if you’re having sex, you have to talk about “all the good things, all the bad things,” the alternate version fine-tuned the song so that its focus on sexual health was more explicit.
But it was hard to tell who in the audience was there to hear Salt-N-Pepa and who was just there to look. “We’ve talked about the image of female rappers in the past,” said Hall. “Your image is a lot more lady-like. Do you think that’s the reason for these guys?” A clearly frustrated Salt responded, “We’ve gotten a lot of flack about that.” She looked exasperated. “I’ve heard people say we’ve gotten over on our looks. First of all, I ain’t know I look that good. To get over for six years on your looks? We’ve been around for awhile and if it’s just looks, then that’s messed up.”
If their fan base included dudes who just had crushes, they only made up a sliver. The rest were there because S-N-P were spearheading a movement toward take-no-shit femininity that didn’t require them to dress like B-boys. “We’re not soft, we’re not hard,” Spinderella explained it to Arsenio. Salt lifted her Docs over his coffee table and told him their style was all lipstick and combat boots.
So much of the first decade of Salt-N-Pepa forged a path for women to follow for the next twenty years, both in rap and pop music, as well with social and sexual mores. The whole map of their conquest is laid out on their 1993 album Very Necessary. The confidence of “Push It”—which Pepa has insisted is about dancing, not about sex—and the emotional intelligence of “Let’s Talk About Sex” are present, but the womanly conviction here is far more plentiful than it had been in their music before. It was a palliative to the hyper-misogyny spewing from their male contemporaries. If Snoop Dogg and friends were going to harangue hoes, then in Salt-N-Pepa’s world, words like “hoe” and “hooker” were just as applicable to men. They maintained their themes of sexuality and empowerment—and were in good company with Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” and TLC’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”—but it got a new look. Whether in combat boots or pum pum shorts, their message was still clear: women need to have agency over their sexuality and, if she’s safe, she can express it however the hell she wants.
The album’s lead single “Shoop,” in particular, is unintentionally prescient about the contemporary inverted misogyny so many feminists engage in now, in jest or otherwise. In the video, Pepa tells Salt and Spin about her weakness—“men!” they chant in unison—while she scours guys on Coney Island playing dice. It is reverse catcalling, a playful way of leveling the field of objectification.
In a 1995 conversation with Mary Wilson of the Supremes for Interview, Salt conceded that the perception of the group changed once they started talking more frequently about their own sexuality instead forecasting what goes on behind other people’s closed doors. “When we get raw and sexy some people say, ‘Why do you have to go there?’ I feel like, as long as you’re letting the world know that you're intelligent and you're to be respected and you have a mind of your own and you're taking care of business, ain’t nothing wrong with showing off what you got, especially when you work out almost every day to get it. Of course, you have to show it with taste and with class. It’s about having an attitude of your own.”
Part of that attitude was putting men like the ones in the “Arsenio” audience squarely in their place: sometimes women get to do the barking and no one gets to judge them for it. Very Necessary is packed with anthems that are unafraid to look at men with the same ogling eye and do not accept being told it’s unladylike. “None of Your Business,” the album’s third single, denounced slut-shaming before it even had a name and is stridently dedicated to pushing a message that no matter how desperately you want to judge women, it will not matter to them. Spinderella calmly raps, “How many rules am I to break before you understand/That your double standards don't mean shit to me?”
Just as combative, “Somebody’s Gettin’ on My Nerves” is one of the album’s finer (and fiercer) points. Salt-N-Pepa make club records, but this track shows off they fare just as well when the bars are the focal point. Salt raps with a sober precision that only comes with a particularly refined and potent fury (it is not dissimilar to Ice Cube’s bite on N.W.A. diss “No Vaseline”). It is also the perfect playground for knockout punches like Pepa’s “You rolled up on me in your man's Beemer/And I could look at you and tell you was a meat-beatin' daydreamer.”
Some of this ferocity is bolstered by the production handled by Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. While quips like, “Get off my bra strap, boy/Stop sweatin’ me” are part of S-N-P’s power, the track’s menacing bass is what keeps it ice cold. Azor had been mentoring the group since he put Pepa and Salt together as the duo Super Nature in the early ’80s. He had seen them through their four preceding albums, but after relinquishing production control to Salt for the Coltrane-sampling single “Expression” from their 1990 album Blacks’ Magic and a toxic romance between Salt and Azor ended, the women wanted more say in what went into Very Necessary.
A 1994 New York cover story reveals that Azor found “Shoop” uncompelling and that he wanted the group to take an even softer approach. Despite how much of a hand Azor had in the album production, Salt-N-Pepa's interest in keeping it more "street" endured. Songs like “Nerves” and “None of Your Business,” do have the trappings of the gangster rap that was populating the charts, its toughness mainly comes from the take-no-shit vocality delivered by the group. The album’s textures are as sundry as the city they are from: Opener “Groove Me” is indebted to the outer boroughs’ West Indian populations; “Break of Dawn” lifts the ecstatic sax from the J.B.s’ James Brown-produced “The Grunt” and takes Joe Tex’s funky “Papa Was Too” and pounds them into Queens Boulevard brashness. Public Enemy may have been the first to use “The Grunt” on their 1988 track “Night of the Living Baseheads,” but Salt-N-Pepa were in good company, as Wu-Tang Clan and 2pac both used the same sample in that year.
On top of the beats, it was Salt-N-Pepa’s relentless campaign for social and sexual agency that drove the album. “Sexy Noises Turn Me On” may sound a little bit dated in 2017, but the frankness with which the women express their needs is anything but. It is the precursor to so many Foxy Brown one-liners and songs like Rasheeda’s “My Bubble Gum” and Nicki Minaj’s “Get on Your Knees.” There are calls elsewhere on *Very Necessary *for reciprocity, like when Salt raps: “You’re under my control/I got your heart and soul/Go down and take your time” on opener “Groove Me” but they were pushing to do even more than just smash the insidious taboo that women can only perform oral sex, not receive it that many of their descendants have rallied for (see: Lil’ Kim’s entire 1996 debut album Hard Core).
This attitude bleeds through to tracks like “Step,” which uses a hefty sample of Hank Crawford’s jazzy “It’s a Funky Thing to Do” and comes off optimally unbothered. “Somma Time Man” is reproachful of male promiscuity (just like their 1986 Otis Redding-interpolating song “Tramp”), but so much of the critique is about infidelity and the lack of safety. Ultimately, Salt-N-Pepa’s mantra when it came to AIDS was, “If you don’t get it, you can’t spread it.” It is their entire ethos: sex is happening everywhere and it cannot be ignored because like all other thrills there are risks—risks you take with your heart and risks you take with health. If you’re doing it right, there’s no shame attached to it. It’s why they wrote “None of Your Business,” but also why they spent many of their television appearances talking about how easy it is to put on a condom.
Pepa and Salt appeared on “Charlie Rose” a year before the album was released to talk about their activism. “Some guys don’t think it’s macho, some girls are insulted if you ask to use a condom,” Salt told Rose. Pepa offered, “It’s not macho to get AIDS… You have to wear condoms like you put on a jacket when it’s cold…” With many fans confiding in them their own diagnoses with HIV and AIDS, they felt it was their responsibility to keep the conversation going. *Very Necessary *closes with a skit unlike almost any that has ever appeared on a pop album. Titled “I’ve Got AIDS,” the sketch is a harrowing performance from two members of the multicultural peer education group WEATOC from Boston, Massachusetts. The script is bold and stark, featuring a female member, distraught, explaining to her boyfriend that she has just come home from a clinic where she was told she was HIV positive. Her partner then accuses her of being with other men because, even though he is untested, he couldn’t possibly have HIV. To close it with something so dark is to remind your audience to take care of themselves and that committing to your cause means using your platform to disrupt. Their fearless outspokenness has been unrivaled in the mainstream, conscious rappers be damned.
Salt-N-Pepa, however, do not explicitly call themselves activists or even feminists. In the same interview with Mary Wilson from the Supremes, Salt also said: “I think we’re feminists to a certain degree. But I have no problem with the man being the man, as long as the man knows how to be a man.” The biggest song of their career, “Whatta Man,” is a paean to good-looking respectful guys. Peaking at No. 3, the track united the trio with En Vogue, who were still riding high off of their star-making sophomore album Funky Divas, released the year before. Although the song’s ballast may be “good men are hard to find,” the use of Linda Lyndell’s classic “What a Man” and Spinderella referencing Whitney Houston deep cut “My Name is Not Susan” in her verse still keeps it a celebration of womanhood. The video co-starred Naughty By Nature’s Treach, Pep’s IRL man at the time, and remains one of their fluffier offerings. In the context of the album, however, it rounds out the robust portrait of women’s romantic interiors: Not all love is fleeting and when it is good, it is so good.
That lyrical flexibility made Salt-N-Pepa so versatile. Like their contemporaries Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, the group was interested in exploring their own world, from quotidian romances and jealousies to the ever-present threat of AIDS, as well as gang violence and drugs. This panoramic view of not just personhood but womanhood paved the way for someone like Nicki Minaj to be a pop superstar while still sticking to her Smack DVD roots. Whether they were thinking about it at the time, their output has always been about giving women opportunity to express themselves.
In a recent interview on BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, rapper Remy Ma noted that because it is a genre that clings to youth, its legends get brushed aside. The acclaim dwindles and no one graduates to become like the Who or the Rolling Stones. Salt-N-Pepa were celebrated at VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors in 2016, but the event was specifically about female MCs and the celebration was a catch-all including so many artists for whom they were the forebears. They are classic enough to have toured with both the Fat Boys and N.W.A. (who were the women’s openers!) but are now relegated to ’90s nostalgia package tours, top-billed with people like Vanilla Ice. Instead of being canonized for their contributions to the genre, they are playing side-by-side with someone whose one hit song made a mockery of it. But that’s the thing about Salt-N-Pepa: There is so much more there than what you see on the surface.


On his latest LP, the producer Ceramic TL (aka Egyptrixx) collaborates with Turkish composer Ipek Gorgun on another heady investigation of the global environmental crisis.

Perfect Lung

Like his debut album from 2016, the latest from Toronto producer Ceramic TL—better known as Egyptrixx—deals with the geopolitics of environmental catastrophe. A collaboration in experimental sound work with Istanbul composer Ipek Gorgun, Perfect Lung contains a song called “The Story of Our Salvation” that is only three-and-a-half-minutes long (a little short, maybe, considering the subject matter). For now, a story of salvation from eco-crisis does not exist. Or rather, it does not exist for anyone besides the world’s most powerful populations. So the track’s universal narrative is a speculative placeholder that may never come to fruition. It is pointedly followed on the album by “Magnitude of Oblivion, Refrain of Pacific Calm.”
Sitting down with Perfect Lung requires the listener to brace themselves a bit. The fractured edges of its amorphous synth textures glitter and ooze, sloshing around as if miles below the earth’s surface. And yet, entering the record’s sonic space is like being in the cabin of an airplane as it makes its final descent, straining the inner ear’s air pressure levels. Discomfort mixes with nagging elation. On his last record, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border, Ceramic TL made a point of using every nook and cranny of the sonic spectrum, and this one is comparably expansive.
Sign of the Cross set out to investigate the philosophical implications of the anthropocene, and this record continues the project by zoning in on more micro musical details. Gorgun is currently nearing the completion of her Ph.D. in Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University, and it seems like her ear for granular, protean detail—evidenced on her remarkable debut LP, Aphelion—is partly responsible for this shift. Sequenced arpeggios nudged out of shape are all over “We Lack the Clout the Decision Isn’t Ours to Make, There Was No Crusade After All,” cut through by harsh noise in a process of embattled symbiosis. “The Story of Our Salvation” moves by way of cascading textures, evoking pastoral electronica that grows queasy. In these moments, Perfect Lung feels like it is genuinely in conversation with the present. Elsewhere, when neon ’80s synth enter the frame, it inevitably evokes something like the Blade Runner soundtrack and feels more rehearsed, less imaginative.
What is a “perfect lung”? One thinks of homeostasis, the careful management of inputs and outputs, the immense labor of care. In an interview, Gorgun said it is “representative of a full breath, something that changes your whole existence once you breathe the air in with awareness, and something that is subliminally marketed under the category of wellness in a world literally coughing up polluted air.” With that, Perfect Lung embodies both speculative science fiction and a vérité-style depiction of the present. It chooses not to solely mourn dystopia, and yet—opting for complexity over convenient tidiness—it couldn’t be characterized as optimistic either. Like the remotely trembling currents that collide in the work’s sonic ecosystem, Perfect Lung remains torn by the sense of pervasive volatility.


Originally issued in 1980, Glenn Branca's first symphony for guitars now sees reissue through the Acute label that re-released his essential 1981 masterwork, The Ascension, last year. Lesson No. 1 is Branca's first great work, and documents the birth of a career whose influence would spread to everyone from Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine to Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai and Black Dice.

Lesson No. 1

When Glenn Branca's "Symphony No. 8" was performed in Denmark at an arts festival attended by the queen and several dignitaries, the press described the effect of his music as "sound terror." For Branca, there is no such thing as "too loud": His most recent composition is an ensemble for 100 electric guitars. But Branca's album releases are far less grandiose than his live performances. While works such as "Symphony No. 1" for sixteen performers have overwhelmed audiences with their disorientingly high volumes, oil-drum percussion and Branca's spastic conducting style, the live sound is too large to be even approximated through two speakers, leaving a listener to wonder what the big deal was about. In contrast, last year's reissue of The Ascension and this year's Lesson No. 1 contain earlier works for small ensembles. They may not have shattered as many eardrums, but on CD the sound remains close enough to grab hold of you and lift you into Branca's intense world.
The first two pieces on this album, "Lesson No. 1" and "Dissonant"-- originally released in 1980-- comprise Branca's first solo release after leaving punk/no-wave outfit Theoretical Girls. The liner notes quote him as regarding "Lesson No. 1" as a simple experiment in minimalism. Simple or not, it is most certainly huge. It begins with two guitars picking out pulsating Reichian riffs, before introducing a triumphant one-note wall of sound with organ and bass shifting underneath to give a sense of harmonic movement. It contains the seeds of Branca's future work with cells of tonal noise, and today can't help but bring to mind everything from the seared distorted walls of My Bloody Valentine to the triumphant crescendos of Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Oneida's ultra-repetitive jams. The guitars increasingly bend in pitch as the piece continues, exploring a microtonal world of detuned strings. Like minimalist composer Rhys Chatham-- with whom he briefly played before they became rivals-- Branca was interested in highlighting the harmonics extant in battling waveforms and the sounds that naturally emerge from repetition.
As "Lesson No. 1" encapsulates the ecstatic drama of future instrumental post-rock, "Dissonance" foretells the broken industrial sound of many composers to come, especially that of the Bang on a Can collective with whom Branca has associated himself in recent years. Scored for guitar, keyboards, bass, drums and sledgehammer, "Dissonance" replicates the pounding honking perpetual motion of city life, shifting in and out of polyrhythmic experimentation and more chugging guitar work. "Dissonance" dispels any notion that Branca's complexity might only be rhetorical. Whether you want to call it punk-fueled anti-prog or recontextualized art music, it is complicated stuff, requiring great practice from the instrumentalists and mental engagement on the listener's part.
Some classicists proclaim rock incapable of the emotional subtlety and variation of orchestral music. The extra inclusion of "Bad Smells"-- a piece written for Twyla Tharp's dance company in 1982 and played by an ensemble including Sonic Youth members Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo-- spends 16 minutes dispelling that notion. Though still a relatively early composition for Branca, it contains an overwhelming variety of moods and textures-- reverie, humor, triumph, anger, struggle-- and makes this CD worth considering even if you own the previous reissue of Lesson No. 1. This release also includes a video showing Branca conduct a part of his "Symphony No. 5", and it is a powerful thing to watch as this composer frantically embodies the electric energy of his own music-- or maybe it's the other way around.


Over the course of five albums, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. For all his off-kilter aims—his desire to emulate and kill his idols (audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies) paired with a love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk—his frustrating new collection fits into a number of timely pop cultural concerns.

Slim Twig: Thank You for Stickin' With Twig

Thank You for Stickin' With Twig

Over the course of five albums and many peripheral releases, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. It’s true that 2009’s slimy sample-heavy Contempt! wasn't about to find a mainstream audience, though the crux of his self-styled myth hangs on Paper Bag rejecting 2012’s A Hound at the Hem for being too far out, which feels off when you consider the rest of their roster. Compared to his previous records, Hound was Slim’s most accessible release: A concept album loosely themed around Lolita and L’Histoire de Melody Nelson that conjured L.A.’s chamber pop weirdos Van Dyke Parks, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman in a dank, oily guise. Owen Pallett provided string arrangements. Slim eventually issued the record on Calico Corp, the label he runs with his wife, U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy, and DFA Records saw fit to re-release it last year. They offered Slim a deal for new work, and encouraged him to "keep the music as weird as possible." In the meantime, he had released the milder Sof Sike to appease Paper Bag, a compromise he says he didn’t mind.
For all Slim’s off-kilter aims, Thank You for Stickin’ With Twig fits right into any number of very timely pop cultural concerns. His desire to emulate and kill his idols—audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies—paired with an abiding love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk aligns him with self-conscious, costumed rock’n’roll stylists like Father John Misty and Ariel Pink. Both FJM and Pink use bad taste and misogyny in an attempt to radicalize the traditional realms in which they work, and are credited as complex artists for it, though, as NPR’s Ann Powers highlighted in a recent essay on Josh Tillman, it’s a marketing ploy as much as any potentially genuine creative impulse: "Maybe for that reason, outrageousness now doesn’t seek to change much beyond itself. It’s provocative, but not necessarily oppositional or even that unconventional at its core."
With Thank You, Slim rejects FJM and Pink’s rejection of good taste, positioning himself as an ally on gender and wage equality, a woman’s pleasure, and an advocate for "dragging an appropriation of rock’n’roll kicking and screaming into a place free of cliché, sexism, and trod on association." It’s a big claim. And yet, Slim appointing himself as a corrective sits almost as uncomfortably as Pink’s "maced by a feminist" story and FJM's cultivated chauvinism. Pitchfork contributor Jes Skolnik wrote recently about "[recoiling] from men who are extremely keen to tell me exactly how Feminist they are." She continued, "[trust is] not something that comes with hardcore lyrics about the Right Topics." Given that Slim has talked about admiring "a lot of artists who would be considered assholes or even criminals like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Phil Spector," it’s hard not to raise a skeptical brow at his foregrounded activism on behalf of the disenfranchised.
Thank You comes at a time when we greet any art that basically musters the Bechdel test with the enthusiasm of serfs receiving crumbs from the master’s table. Type "Magic Mike female pleasure" into your favorite search engine and there’s a whole page of essays from high-profile outlets praising the film’s portrayal of women’s satisfaction. This is where Thank You starts, with "Slippin’ Slidin’", a desperate, sleazy devotional where Slim puts himself at the mercy of his sexual partner, his distorted voice matching the guitar’s gravelly thrust. That it sounds like Queens of the Stone Age covering T. Rex is surely meant to make some audacious point about a cock-rocking song concerning female pleasure, a level of extra-textural interest that Thank You assumes of its listeners. (Cop the extensive explanations that accompany its page in the DFA web store.)
Better is the subsequent "A Woman’s Touch (It’s No Coincidence)"—co-written with Remy—which confronts Yoko haters and attributes the Beatles’ wives with significant responsibility for their husbands’ success. This feels like a well-judged feminist statement coming from a male artist messing with rock’n’roll signifiers. It also sounds like a dub remix of the "Roobarb and Custard" theme tune that’s as irritating as it is fun. Also strong is "Fog of Sex (N.S.I.S.)"—if it were less corroded, its sharp lyrics might forge an anthem for gender fluidity: "Gender please/ Standardized questionnaire fee/ Simply mark which one you are/ Yet no option applies to me," Slim sings with Remy.
"A Woman’s Touch" and "Fog of Sex" are the opening book-end to a bog of courtly baroque interludes ("She Stickin’ With Twig"), twisted junkyard carousel songs ("Stone Rollin’ (Musical Emotion)"), doomy stutter ("Trip Thru Bells"), and drawling electric guitar that magically captures the gleeful menace of Captain Beefheart’s voice ("Textiles on Mainstreet"; see also). Everything is doused in unkempt psych sleaze; the middle section is in desperate need of a corset.
Amidst it is "Roll Red Roll (Song for Steubenville)". It starts as a murky waltz that veers again into that louche guitar tone, heralding inaudible lyrics that evoke the grim situation of the Steubenville high school football team rape case—all uneasy come-ons that don’t contain the option to say no: "You ever been a mule hon?/ You ever make it past the line?/ Even in a school zone/ I see you look just fine." Perhaps Slim has very personal reasons for wanting to inhabit this horrendous incident, but at the same time, the lyrics don’t convey a complex handle on its gravity. The only nod to Steubenville is in the title, which feels like another pat on his own back; outrageousness—masquerading as tribute—not seeking to change much beyond itself, again.
The empty Big Ideas continue: "You Got Me Goin..." features a slurped sample of the Chi-Lites’ "Stoned Out of My Mind", which is rekindled again later on "Out of My Mind", with added woodwind. Following the genuinely clever and brilliant Hound, the mess is wildly frustrating. "The trouble is once having killed one’s idols, there’s a tendency to also do away with melody, structure, clever lyrics, and a more ambitious approach to production," Slim told one interviewer of his attempts to avoid doing that. He wasn't particularly successful. It’s no surprise that he named the supreme self-sabotage that was Julian Casablancas and the Voidz’ Tyranny as one of his albums of 2014.
Perversely, the song where Slim confronts the tension between himself and his dearly held inspirations is both the least original and best of Thank You. The jaunty, confident guitar hook of "Live In, Live On, Your Era" evokes both the Stones’ "Rocks Off" and Bowie’s "Rebel Rebel", and sails through proggy patches as Slim delivers acutely written lyrics about the vital challenge of originality: "This ain’t the time to be cribbing in class/ One’s own voice is a great deal rarer/ With that in mind, start living out your era." As if to make—or break?—his point, he follows it and closes the record with a hoary cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier’s "Cannabis". "On and on, the jokes and meta-sonic rock commentary continue like so many Zappa-esque indulgences," state the notes that accompany the album. But in Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.


Cleveland’s one-man garage-rock industry Lamont Thomas has a wide vision of what is noise and punk, and if *Louder Space *was his hip-hop album, *Niggative Approach *is his funk excursion.

Niggative Approach

Lamont Thomas has made seven Obnox albums in as many years, and they’ve all been bold expressions of his wide vision. But his third, 2014’s Louder Space, was a true breakthrough. The hip-hop and R&B strains that course beneath his noisy one-man garage rock came into sharper focus on that record, his first made in a proper studio. It also showed that Thomas could delve deeper into specific sides of his persona—in this case, by crafting legit rap jams—without sacrificing the many styles of which he’s capable.
The three Obnox albums that Thomas made after Louder Space were solid and diverse, but *Niggative Approach *feels like its true spiritual follow-up. The album is heavily focused on beats—Thomas has drummed in many vital Cleveland post-punk outfits—and filled with earworm-ready grooves. If *Louder Space *was his hip-hop album, *Niggative Approach *is his funk platter, bubbling with big bass lines and filled with studio touches like horn sections and keyboard accents. There’s still a lot of punk spirit here; the album’s title nods to hardcore legends Negative Approach, whose singer John Brannon opens and closes the album with spoken exhortations to Thomas. But *Niggative Approach *is first and foremost about groove.
Many of Thomas’s grooves are so simple and powerful they feel instantly classic, as if he plucked them from some hidden vault of magic funk tricks. They also help create some of the most upbeat music he’s ever made. After Brannon’s brief invocation, *Niggative Approach *opens with three tracks ripe for blasting from car windows while cruising down beachside strips. “Hardcore Matinee” is positively bouncy, while “Jack Herer” sounds like a dream take on Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” “State to State” soars on a funky guitar line, chiming keyboard chords, and Thomas’s multi-voiced hums. Things even get romantic during “Carmen, I Love You,” a groove-ballad that Thomas could’ve sung while lying on the grass staring at clouds.
Balancing that early sunniness, *Niggative Approach *gets denser, noisier, and more complicated as it progresses. Thomas melds different styles through masterful layering, piling sounds onto each other so that they merge and fuse rather than blur or obscure. In tracks like the slow-building “You” and the haunting “Beauty Like the Night,” he builds walls of sound by letting each element—echoing vocals, wavy chords, rattling beats—settle against another. At his most extreme, as on “Audio Rot,” he buries everything so deep it sounds like the song is playing a few rooms away. But that’s the exception on Niggative Approach, which mostly maintains a crisp clarity no matter how thickly Thomas boils his sonic stew.
Thomas takes risks on Niggative Approach, which is pretty standard for him; nothing he’s made as Obnox has ever played it safe. Yet the boldest aspect of this album is how unabashedly hooky it is. Past Obnox albums were more about ebb and flow, alternating catchy jams with shorter jams or abstract interludes. But here Thomas doles out blow after blow, happy to jump quickly from one feel to the next. In less experienced hands this could be a recipe for listener fatigue, but Thomas continually finds new angles, maintaining diversity even as he’s charging full steam ahead. On Niggative Approach, his knack for variety and nuance is the strongest it has ever been.


With dreamy experimental production and standout Tyler, the Creator features, the L.A. singer’s latest is an affecting document of how pain can smolder beneath a veneer of nonchalance.

Snoh Aalegra: TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES

TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES

For much of Los Angeles-based R&B singer Snoh Aalegra’s career, the names of other musicians have qualified her own. She was inspired to become a musician after hearing Whitney Houston sing as a child. She was mentored by Prince in the final three years of his life. Last week, a tweet calling her a new generation’s Sade gained so much traction that Aalegra felt compelled to clarify that she isn’t.
It’s true that Aalegra’s golden-toned, jazz-inflected vocals make the Sade and Amy Winehouse comparisons easy. But it was sometimes hard to tell what made her earliest music distinct. On 2016’s Don’t Explain and 2017’s FEELS, her voice was often overpowered by extravagant production choices. She changed course on 2019’s -Ugh, those feels again, paring back the reverb and backing vocals to make room for irresistible pop hooks. Still, the lyrics at times felt anonymous. Her latest album, TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES, is her first project that sounds entirely her own. With exploratory production that’s as expansive and dreamy as it is frenetic, it’s an affecting document of the pain smoldering beneath Aalegra’s curated veneer of nonchalance.
Aalegra works with a number of new producers here, including the Neptunes and Tyler, the Creator. The resulting sound is both free-associative and boisterous, a haze of ambient synth decorated with pitched vocal flourishes, syncopated ad-libs, and zig-zagging beats. Listening feels like plunging your hand into a jar of marbles or swimming in a bioluminescent bay, an immersion in a world of glimmering baubles. Aalegra counters the experimental production with the most gracefully restrained vocal performances of her career. She sings the titular phrase on “We Don’t Have to Talk About It” with so much poise that you’re ready to overlook the hurt along with her. On “In the Moment,” one of two excellent songs featuring Tyler, she sings with the ease of butter gliding across a hot pan, alternately proclamating that she would die for her lover and that she’d be alright whether they leave or stay. Tyler’s verses raise the stakes, calling out her inconsistency and aloofness.
Opener “Indecisive” establishes the tension between Aalegra’s outwardly blasé attitude and the angst she’s quietly processing within. “See, I don’t really care/Now I start to sound like you,” she sings, swathed in echoes of synth and a beat that rushes forward like a child down a hill. It’s a declaration of independence that almost immediately betrays itself as overcompensation: a way to avoid feeling hurt by a partner who actually doesn’t care. Throughout the album, Aalegra makes refrains out of ambivalence: “I get it/Some things don’t work and that’s the way love goes,” she concedes on “In Your Eyes.” “I’m not tryna make you be mine,” she sighs on “Taste.”
But she can’t stop herself from expressing the depth of her desire, as on highlight “Tangerine Dream,” where she remembers the exact time of the flight that an ex was also on, or on “Everything,” when she sings about the way a lover’s hands feel on her face. The moments when Aalegra’s facade slips are compelling for their specificity and emotional heft, but also because they supply the album’s context and dimension, the true intimacy of knowing everything’s not OK. She could benefit from trading a few more generalities for evocative details. Though the depth and fluidity of her vocals provide texture as often as meaning, a few lines do fall distinctly flat: “I’ve always been a worrier/But I’ll always be a warrior” stands out as a false dichotomy of convenient wordplay. “Let your muse be your motivation/Picture perfect like a painting” feels similarly likely to be yelled by a SoulCycle instructor.
Around the time of her first project, Aalegra described her music as “cinematic soul,” and the descriptor has never felt more accurate. Any one of these songs could accompany an Insecure montage of rekindled love, impossible daydreams, or bittersweet nostalgia. In place of distinct characters and narratives, Aalegra deploys violet skies and neon peaches, geese flying south for the winter, love that hits like a flash flood—a language of natural phenomena and upheaval located within and beyond her own heart. It’s evocative and complex enough to establish Snoh Aalegra as a name worth remembering, even as it leaves you wondering what it might sound like when she finally faces the full extent of her feelings.

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Blending free jazz with South African protest music and rigorous academic study, the Cape Town drummer connects jazz tradition to contemporary oppression, and points a way forward for the music.

Dialectic Soul

Asher Gamedze’s Dialectic Soul attempts to fuse the cerebral with the elemental by finding points of connection between the American and South African jazz traditions. If this sounds like the opening of a master’s thesis, that’s because it is. Gamedze, who was introduced to American audiences through his work on Angel Bat Dawid’s The Oracle, originally planned to submit this album along with his dissertation on South African jazz. The academic provenance of the work is reflected in its liner notes, which contain a schema for understanding the record and an introductory essay from historian and critic Robin D. G. Kelley. But the music is much more approachable than its intimidating supporting texts. By blending free-jazz excursions with South African protest music, Gamedze and his collaborators make the heady intimate and the complex intuitive: The music they play here expresses both the jubilation and the terror inherent in jazz creation.
According to Gamedze, the “state of emergence suite” that makes up the first third of the album attempts to represent how colonial violence generates resistance. The song’s tripartite structure is as indebted to Max Roach as it is to G. W. F. Hegel (its three parts are named after the dialectic: “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis.”) We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite also contained a three-parter, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” that attempted to link American racism and colonialism. This is not the only connection the two artists share. Both use free-form drums in duet with another instrument to represent a particular conflict in the Black experience. Think Abbey Lincoln’s screams matching the anger of Roach’s drums on “Protest. ” For Gamedze, “solo drums in free time symbolise autonomous African motion, moving through and resolving its own contradictions.” The opening duet of the “state of emergence suite” puts this idea into practice; in the “thesis” section, his drums seemingly deflect all points of entry for Buddy Wells’ tenor sax. But this is not obfuscation, it’s determination. Wells’ sax, which, according to Gamedze, “introduces the violence of colonialism,” cannot conquer the tireless roving drums.
Gamedze’s commitment to unceasing change characterizes the remainder of the album; his drumming refuses to stand still in history, leaving the other players to draw their own distinct narratives around it. The rest of the “state of emergence suite” is a mixture of modal wanderings and percussive chaos. Robin Fassie-Kock’s trumpet and Wells’ sax fuse together only to break when interrupted by Gamedze’s throbbing drums and Thembinkosi Mavimbela’s darting bass. The horns seemingly unite against this fury by splitting apart. Fassie-Kock plays Eric Dolphy-like intonations on his trumpet, where each sound takes the listener to a more astral space through its dilation. Wells’ sax slowly warps; its notes expand until their shape seems unnatural. It feels like watching firefighters slowly surround a building wracked by an ever expanding flame; as they douse water in every direction, you marvel at the fact that the structure still stands.
This may be due to Gamedze’s search for connections between Western innovations and African tradition. He builds a syncretic edifice: His heroes are constantly remembered. On “eternality,” a bebop number that loses itself in the wind, Fassie-Kock’s trumpet will lie low, stab in the air, and twirl endlessly, its sound reflecting the capacious attitude of its player. The song’s menacing horns and Art Blakey drum patterns give it the melancholy atmosphere of modal records of yore, yet its combustive nature and sometimes atonal solos bring to mind the experiments of Ornette Coleman. It’s an ecumenical elegy to past legends strung together with their contributions. Yet Gamedze is not satisfied with homage; he is concerned with how the oppression that generated the music he loves is carried with us in the present. “hope in azania” comes from the South African liberation tradition. Its joyful melody belies the fact that it is crucially a song about being underfoot. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the glowing timbre of its united horns and the bouncy nature of its bass. But if you follow the path of Gamedze’s drums, which rush and clatter without wavering in their intensity for even a moment, you can hear the rage underlying the jovial mood.
Gamedze’s drumming seemingly halts for no one; the closest he comes to stopping is on the album’s other song of remembrance, and the record’s most spiritual cut, “siyabulela.” Its percussion glitters, its horns are muted, and its tempo is slowed all the way down. The song is one of gratitude and acceptance, and it hinges on the voice of Nono Nkoane. Gamedze takes a marching rhythm here, appropriate for the memorial nature of the procession (he was inspired to write a version after hearing the song at a friend’s funeral). He increases tempo for a final solo of gratitude; it’s an attempt to make a noise that cannot be forgotten.
It sometimes seems like contemporary jazz musicians only have two options—mimic what worked in the past or plumb the uncharted depths of left-field improvisation. Here, Gamedze shows that a third option is available: pursue the links between past and present. By fusing rigorous academic study with his musical practice, Gamedze connects jazz tradition to contemporary oppression. He does not merely lionize old jazz masters; he argues that their restricted circumstances necessitated revolutionary departures of form. The rapturous possibility that lies at the heart of Dialectic Soul comes from a recognition of this fact: If past fetters still bind us in the present, we can find new ways to free ourselves.

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On his sixth album since re-starting his career post-jail, Gucci remains focused, funny, and at the top of his game.

El Gato: The Human Glacier

“People probably ain’t used to it...But they’re gonna have to get used to it because it’s here to stay.”
Be honest: You were just a bit skeptical when you read the above pronouncement from Gucci Mane two summers ago. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a doubt lurked that the healthy, optimistic Radric Davis who emerged from prison—so unfamiliar that some fans suggested he had been replaced by a clone—was really here for good.
But there he was in October 2017, more than a year later, slim as ever and smiling at Malcolm Gladwell as the bestselling author asked questions about his life and work. There he was last month, asking his followers what he should get his wife, Keyshia Ka’oir Davis, for her birthday (she requested a baby boy). And here he is again with El Gato: The Human Glacier, the fifth solo full-length Gucci has released since his July 2016 comeback album, Everybody Looking, and another project that gives the lie to the myth of the tortured artist. A healthy Gucci Mane makes significantly better records, every time.
Flooding the market has long been Gucci’s signature move. The difference these days is the product is undiluted—or as he puts it on “Strep Throat,” a Gato standout, “Used to get slept on/But now the work ain’t stepped on.” The new record, produced in full by 808 Mafia head (and longtime Gucci collaborator) Southside, is a tight half-hour of streetwise raps on which the sunnier reality of the artist’s real life is only occasionally explicit, as when he ends the second verse of “Smiling in the Drought,” a song about the benefits of forethought in drug-dealing, with the line, “See you later alligator/’Bout to meet with Oprah.”
In features and on his more commercial albums since his release, Gucci has often been ebullient—his guest spot on N.E.R.D.’s “Voila” consisted entirely of him proclaiming his ability to perform magic. Gato opens in a different vein, with the ice-cold lament “Rich Ass Junkie,” a song as full of pathos as any Guwop has released. In its first verse, over mournful organ keys and heartbeat bass, he lays out the plight shared by many who abuse drugs, including both buyers and sellers. “Money down the drain/Dog food in the vein,” he raps. “Cause I’m the one that serving her, am I the one to blame?” There’s an ashamed, ad-libbed “no!” immediately following, but the question answers itself.
As ever, Gucci is a phoneme alchemist, able to transubstantiate syllables until he creates a rhyme (“stuntin’” matches with “Backwood” on the track “Dickriders”), or to go from word to concept to song like a masterful improviser taking suggestions from an audience. The best examples here are the one-two punch of “Mall” and Side EFX,” the latter of which includes the instant-classic Gucci-ism “Bitch you thirsty like a cactus.” And he’s still got one of the best ears in rap. There’s not a miss among the beats here, and even Southside’s stranger choices reveal themselves as fitting backdrops for Gucci’s pop instincts. On “Sea Sick,” for instance, the rapper revs up his flow midway through the song, neutralizing the beat’s grating recorder sound by calling attention to its tempo instead of its pitch.
In the first week of 2018, Gato became Gucci’s 18th top 10 debut on the Billboard rap charts, tying a record held by middle-aged veterans E-40 and Tech N9ne. All of which is simply more evidence of the artistic benefits of clean living: When stable, Gucci easily approaches the realm of genius, consistently building hype for each new product. It’s no wonder that Gato, a platonic version of one of his early street mixtapes, has been able to stoke as much interest as the more commercial records he’s released lately. As Gucci has entered this new period of his life, he’s accomplished an extraordinary amount. It’s not gauche or even suspect to hope and pray that he keeps it up.


A collection of soundtrack cues from the third season of “Twin Peaks,” Anthology Resource Vol. 1 is most effective when it remains in the background, tugging at the edges of your subconscious.

Dean Hurley: Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△

Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△

You don’t have to pay attention to Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△. In fact, I’d go so far as to make that an order: Do not pay attention to Anthology Resource. This album of ambient music and soundscapes from the astonishing third season of “Twin Peaks,” by the show’s music and sound supervisor Dean Hurley, will frustrate focused attempts at listening. Passages feel overlong and repetitive, despite 11 of the collection’s 18 compositions clocking in at two minutes or less. Moments of beauty and terror burst out of the murk, only to dissipate with aggravating speed. Hurley’s airy electronic tones conjure up a sense of space so distinct you can practically see it, as titles like “Weighted Room / Choral Swarm,” “Tube Wind Dream,” “Interior Home by the Sea,” and “Forest / Interior” make clear. Yet the effect of sitting and listening intently to song after song is like looking through a window at these strange new worlds, only for someone to abruptly close the blinds on you over and over.
Here’s the thing, though: So what?
Of the various “Twin Peaks” soundtrack albums coming down the pike—the Angelo Badalamenti–based original score and a collection of the songs played by the show’s many musical guests at the Roadhouse are also on the way—Anthology Resource contains music that really isn’t meant to be noticed. These are the sounds that accompany overhead shots of the forest, or crackle and hum during visits to—or from—the otherworldly Black Lodge and the strange supernatural realm beyond it. They lurk in the background, helping co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost create a mood of mystery and menace, only occasionally leaping out to positions of prominence in the overall work. In that role, they’re ruthlessly effective.
As a longtime Lynch collaborator, Hurley is familiar enough with the filmmaker’s sonic palette to get playful with it. Several songs evoke Lynch’s musical muse, Badalamenti: “Slow One Chord Blues (Interior)” sounds like one of the composer’s red-light rock grooves, but being played by a band at a party down the block, its guitar and bass distorted by distance; “Tube Wind Dream” has the feel of one of the wistful musical paeans to the doomed Laura Palmer from Fire Walk With Me, while “Angel Choir Reveal” and “Seven Heaven” echo its redemptive finale; “Eastern European Symphonic Mood No. 1” is a pastiche of the drawn-out minor-key synth lines Badalamenti laid down for Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
Elsewhere, “Electricity I” and “Electricity II” are true to their titles, sizzling their way into an industrial cacophony not unlike the abrasive screech that accompanies the staticky Lynch/Frost Productions title card at the end of each episode. Similarly, “Black Box” sounds like a failed attempt to receive a transmission from one of the show’s many bizarre communication devices (or, perhaps, a radio station). Even the album’s most song-like track, “Night Electricity Theme”—featuring an ominous but contemplative melody halfway between Abigail Mead’s score for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and the Haxan Cloak—has a title that telegraphs the director’s preoccupations.
Indeed, Lynch’s love of these jittery audio-visual sensations is well documented. “Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing,” he writes in his meditation treatise cum memoir Catching the Big Fish. “It’s magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights.” Add “wind through the trees” and you’ve pretty much nailed every sound on this album. All of these phenomena are characterized by an unpredictable ebb-and-flow, sparkle-and-fade rhythm.
The same can be said of one of Lynch’s other great interests in life, the one he credits as the font of his creativity and success: transcendental meditation. Introduced to the pop-culture world when its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, taught it to the Beatles, and now practiced by figures from Lynch and Martin Scorsese to Katy Perry and Howard Stern, the technique is based on the mental repetition of a mantra as a means to reach a deep inner peace. The trick, however, is not to focus on that repetition: TM practitioners are taught to take the various thoughts and sensations that arise during meditation as they come, without making any concerted effort to clear the mind or bear down on any particular idea or goal.
In this light, Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△ makes more sense, both as an accompaniment to “Twin Peaks” and as a standalone album. You’re not meant to make this music the centerpiece of your mental landscape, any more than you’re intended to ignore the on-screen imagery to listen to it during the show. Take it as it comes—noticing it when it becomes noticeable, enjoying it when it becomes enjoyable, and drifting away from it when it drifts away from you.


The largely acoustic, ambient Radiance and Submission is the furthest afield Canadian producer CFCF's projects have ever gotten from his midtempo electronic roots, but it still feels of a piece with his discography. This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

Radiance and Submission

I never gave up on night bus. Along with glo-fi, seapunk, witch house, and a host of other disyllabic hashtags, "night bus" was derided during the great microgenre boom of the early 2010s—irrefutable evidence, it was thought, of the Internet's insistence upon inter-genre incest. But unlike a lot of its contemporaries, night bus was never as easy to define as influence + influence or adjective + genre. Named after a Burial track but as easily applied to the music of 50 Cent, Tim Hecker, the Eurythmics, the xx, and Vangelis, night bus was more a tone or a mood than a genre in and of itself. It was often categorized as midtempo, minimalist post-dubstep—trip-hop, sort of—but its proponents always stretched it to more disparate moods and eras. As someone drawn to those touchpoints, it was nice to finally have a name for it all, an easy-enough way to connect Björk, "Twin Peaks", and Birdman.
The Canadian electronic producer CFCF, too, has always been attached to night bus—he was a frequent poster on the message boards that birthed the term, and his 2010 mix Do U Like Night Bus helped crystallize the breadth of music to which it might be applied. He has, in the intervening years, stretched that mixtape into a trilogy of nocturnal, reflective volumes, including last November's Night Bus 3, which was knowingly subtitled "Death of Night Bus", as if in acknowledgment that, yea, all microgenres must pass. This is probably just as well. A couple years after its invention, night bus is the last standing of its contemporaries—and yet CFCF will not let it go softly. Even his proper studio records can feel like academic experiments within the night bus aesthetic, further defying its easy categorization by leaning into its applications in quiet storm (Outside) or minimalism (Music for Objects).
All of which is to say that, while the largely acoustic, ambient Radiance and Submission is the furthest afield CFCF's projects have ever gotten from his midtempo electronic roots, it still feels of a piece with his discography. The mood remains nocturnal, even if the bus has made its way out of the city and now rattles through a pitch-black desert. This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades. Like all of CFCF's music, it is exquisite in its details, as when the haze of cicadas buzzing throughout "Tethered in Dark" finds a rhythm in a palm-muted riff, all before receding back into the fog of circling insects. There are surprises, too, if subtle ones: "La Soufrière" begins with a similar naturalistic buzz, but halfway through blooms into something startlingly songlike. It's one of the shortest tracks on a short album, but, as with recent short-players by Earl Sweatshirt and Thundercat, Radiance and Submission holds together thanks to the clarity of its vision.
This patient, almost painterly approach to songcraft has always defined CFCF's work, which might on other records have faded in instead with soft synthesizers before five minutes of smart, pulsing boom-bap. Over 60 minutes, this meticulousness could all feel a bit too polished, but Radiance and Submission bucks that by forming itself entirely out of the interstitial moments. The establishing shots and denouements of his compositions are here turned into the raw material for something strange and fascinating and (for him, at least) new. He has mentioned Chris Marker's indescribable film travelogue Sans Soleil as an influence in the past, and its compositional method—the reassemblage of the periphery into a focal point—could well be part of it. Night bus was always about intermediary spaces, anyway: a long trip home from a club, an overnight journey spent staring out the window. If there's a through line to the musical works we categorize with the term, it's their quiet ability to transform these lonely moments, to make a pair of headphones not a way of shutting out the world but of letting it in.


Hayley Williams and co. pivot to jittery, crackling post-punk on their sixth album, but the monotone vocals and political lyrics don’t always play to their strengths.

This Is Why

Twenty years ago, Hayley Williams was a naive if precocious homeschooled teenager and a devout Christian who had just signed to a major label, first as a solo act and then as the singer of Paramore. Now, she is a 34-year-old divorcée, a fierce advocate for abortion access, and a role model and formative influence for a new generation of pop stars. She has been famous for more than half her life, a position that can both foist premature adulthood on teen idols and shield them against the outside world. Paramore’s sixth album, This Is Why, trembles with the paranoid anxieties of a grown woman peering outside her bubble: a bit out of step, a bit pollyanna, but all the more furious at the status quo.
In the five years since Paramore’s last album, After Laughter, the jagged, sinister sound the band carved out on their earliest records has returned in the poison-laced anthems of artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Willow. Meanwhile, on a pair of solo albums, Williams brought in collaborators including boygenius and experimented with softer, more intimate production. As she reunites with bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York, Paramore seem reluctant to retread their old rhythms: “We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams said last month. Instead of regurgitating the gnarled mall punk of their previous records, on This Is Why they reach for the propulsive sounds of post-punk. The genre’s wry lyrics and crackling energy hold sentimental meaning for Williams, who grew up on the early 2000s British post-punk revival. “It always reminds me of getting my driving license…Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was always on in the car,” she said on her podcast last year. Yet in pursuing the sounds of their youth, Paramore lose the exuberance that launched their larger-than-life hooks into the stratosphere.
They’ve pivoted before, to Day-Glo ’80s synth-pop on After Laughter, where Williams’ impassioned frustration was a perfect fit for bright-sounding songs about being mad as hell. This time around, it’s a riskier bet. The barking monotone of Bloc Party and the Rapture is an odd choice for a vocalist with such an arresting range. While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. When Williams adopts the flat affectation of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, she crucially misses the irreverence and quotidian absurdity that make Shaw’s non sequiturs hilarious and commanding. Instead, we’re given schoolyard taunts (“na-na-na-na”) and a summary of Williams’ recent medical history. Williams has masked prosaic lyrics with her booming voice in the past, but without a melody as her guide, she comes across as uninspired. “Getting better is boring,” she sighs. It certainly sounds like it.
This Is Why is front-loaded with similar lyrical missteps and ironies that would make Alanis Morissette roll her eyes: “No offense/But you got no integrity,” Williams sings with a smirk unearned by the weak disses on “Big Man Little Dignity.” On “The News,” a stilted treatise against the depressing churn of the 24-hour news cycle, Paramore appear to emerge from an early-2000s time capsule, only to be shocked and horrified by what they see on television: “a war” raging on the other side of the world, with no recourse other than to change the channel. It’s a sophomoric and one-dimensional outrage that lacks the venom Williams has brought to her political statements outside of the band. In interviews, the three members of Paramore openly discuss their political awakenings as Christians raised in the South, but they struggle to incorporate that nuanced perspective into their music. Instead, Williams spits a list of adjectives that feel straight out of 2016: “Exploitative, performative…rhetorical,” and, of course, “deplorable,” as if those words still burn fresh in her mind. It’s not that her anger is misplaced; it’s just that it comes off as too lazy and too late.
Once they shake off their millennial discontents, Paramore find their groove in the record’s second half, combining the atmospheric density of Williams’ brooding solo albums and the band’s bloodthirsty 2009 release Brand New Eyes. “You First,” with its Silent Alarm-esque guitars, is propelled by the full ferocity of Williams’ voice. Her vocals on the bridge weave hypnotically before crashing into the bombastic belting of its chorus, and Williams finally sounds at home, confidently waging war alongside the band’s newly sharpened contours. “Figure 8” adds the velvety drone of a clarinet before Williams takes control. “All for your sake, became the very thing that I hate,” she sneers. Her falsetto on “Liar” sounds inspired by the wistful melancholy of Phoebe Bridgers, yet when she doubles her vocals at the end, harmonizing with herself over chiming guitar, it’s still unmistakably Paramore. The rich instrumentation adds a layer of depth while remaining a natural fit for a band driven, above all, by fury.
“Thick Skull,” the first song written for the new record but the last in its tracklist, is the most optimistic vision of Paramore’s future: Williams’ patient lower register melds into her fiery roars, as if synthesizing her past and future selves. “Only I know where all the bodies are buried,” she sings. “Thought by now I’d find ’em just a little less scary.” The song marches slowly but with purpose, punctured by Williams’ screams and honeyed crescendos. It’s about making the same mistakes over and over again instead of growing wiser with age. But it’s also about bouncing back, ready to face the next challenge, even with bleeding fingers and mounting casualties. Paramore used to find inspiration in revenge; two decades later, they’re betting that resilience is the best way to get even.


The five tracks here are among the most satisfying productions the Icelandic musician has released, a mix of comic, deranged, and weirdly sensual moods.

Oli Gumm

Bjarki’s brief career has been both prolific and precocious. The Icelandic electronic musician first broke through in 2015, at the age of 24, with a two-track 12” on the Russian DJ Nina Kraviz’ label трип. The record—a coiled, peak-time techno banger backed by a slice of after-hours gloom—was well received, but that’s true of dozens, maybe hundreds of similar debuts in the techno scene, year in and year out. For most young producers, such a promising start might have led to a fairly well-trodden path: another 12”, maybe a few longer EPs, all leading up, a few years later, to a debut album. But Bjarki skipped a step or three, and instead, he opted to unleash the contents of his hard drive in the form of not one but three albums for Kraviz’ label, each one a triple-vinyl package, all in the span of a single year: thirty-seven tracks in all, not including still another 12” and a handful of compilation tracks. It was a lot.
Hard-drive dumps are tricky business. Richard D. James got away with one, back in early 2015, but then, at the time, people were still buzzing about his unexpected return from a 13-year hiatus as Aphex Twin; they were predisposed to want more. (He also happens to be someone whose fans respond approvingly even when he plays sandpaper discs in place of records.) Bjarki’s offering, on the other hand, scanned as the work of a young artist with potential who could stand to learn to edit.
Lately, he seems to be doing just that. His output has slowed, his focus intensified. The five tracks on oli gumm are among the most satisfying productions he has released. Inspired by the pile-driving sound of 1990s hardcore techno like the Mover, along with the skull-scouring distortion of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin,” it’s thrilling from beginning to end, a nonstop cavalcade of steel-toed kicks, lacerating cymbal work, and sharp-edged acid riffs punctuating apocalyptic atmospheres. At the same time, no-frills floor-fillers are rarely as squirrelly as these. Even his toughest tunes, like the 148-BPM opener “oli gumm 2-2,” seem to dance over spongy ground, and his layered drum sounds feel both brutal and yielding at the same time, like sledgehammers sheathed in a mix of velvet, bubble wrap, and moss.
Keeping his riffs simple, he lavishes attention on texture: Minor-key synths sparkle like a curtain of icicles; a single metallic ping pierces the gloom like the Evening Star cutting through fog. Each lo-fi scrap—remnants of rave siren, construction-site clang, shrieking feedback—comes wreathed in a silvery halo. It’s a curious effect: The individual materials are bruised and battered, but put together, they seem almost opulent.
The moods he evokes are a mix of comic, deranged, and weirdly sensual. “7 filakaramellur lion bar,” one of the EP’s brain-bending standouts, harnesses the kind of gravelly vocal sample you’d find in an old Chemical Brothers tune, twisting and distorting it until it turns eerie and menacing; another vocal loop, just as indecipherable, might be an anguished beast trapped in a cistern. At the same time, his hooks are as giddy as Woody Woodpecker’s unhinged laugh, while the whispers swimming through the background have a calming energy. It all comes to a head on “hatann satann,” in which a no-nonsense stomp is set against a welter of weird, bubbly chirps and squeaks: synthetic birdsong, loosed balloons, the yelps of an injured dog. It’s primal, animalistic; it has all the industrial intensity of the classic Berghain sound, but weirder—a grayscale foundation flooded with fluorescent color. The hooting, squealing noises tug every which way against the gridded rigidity of the rhythm, suggesting a duet for factory machinery and free-jazz reeds—discipline and chaos locked into mortal combat.


The Ohio rapper’s new EP devours a half-decade of online scenes and styles and spits them out into a psychedelic combination that often feels overly referential.

War

The rap industry has always moved fast, but the tempo at which new hip-hop trends spread and proliferate means that many artists can become deeply influential while still being relatively young. Dayton, Ohio’s Jasiah is an obvious byproduct of the speed of digital music, steeped in a world of online micro-genres, furiously sliding between contemporary rap-rock and something closer to hyperpop. It’s easy to mistake his work for what’s colloquially generalized as “SoundCloud rap,” but really, his music thrives on YouTube, where the algorithm will autoplay fan-made hour-long loops of his visuals for “Break Shit” and “Crisis,” directed by omnipresent video bro Cole Bennett.
Jasiah began attracting attention online in 2018 with a tribute to XXXTentacion—a spirit hovering over his music. But his two primary influences are artists his age: Florida’s Denzel Curry and the more elusive cult rapper Sybyr of Maryland’s ANTI-WORLD collective. Jasiah’s 2019 debut album Jasiah I Am offered spare, guitar-driven ballads and angsty vocals alongside a Travis Barker feature; and while that record is indebted to X, his new EP WAR leans more in the direction of another anti-Christ figure, 6ix9ine, featured on Jasiah’s 2019 Law and Order-sampling single “Case 19.” Like 6ix, WAR is pure animated aggression, all cut-throat and forceful, a 15-minute blitzkrieg with a cover that puts a militaristic spin on the alt-comix aesthetic of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills.
Listening to Jasiah’s music feels a lot like channel surfing: His first viral hit, the Yung Bans-featuring and Ronny J-produced “Shenanigans,” flipped SpongeBob SquarePants, and 2018’s  “Regular” built its beat from Regular Show dialogue. “Crisis,” WAR’s closing track, chops up Courage the Cowardly Dog, and several other songs on the EP would be at home in a Saturday morning cartoon. “Spit” blasts big band brass, and “Surfs Up” samples Bruce Morgan’s classic surf rock piece “Exotic.” “Break Shit” crafts a spy movie theme from an unexpected source: a flip of the horn-heavy “My Spies,” by the ’80s London-based Afro-Caribbean band The Republic. The self-produced “Unintelligible,” featuring frequent collaborator Nascar Aloe, is the most sonically extreme of the EP’s cuts and the most interesting indication of Jasiah’s hybrid potential. Its frenetic chiptune-like electronic beat almost recalls the futuristic hardcore of Machine Girl or anamanaguchi; the influence of Maryland’s ANTI-WORLD is most prevalent in the song’s brief flirtation with electronic music.
Given his screamo-inflected vocals, it’s surprising that Jasiah so frequently gravitates toward instrumentals that aren’t rock or punk-influenced at all—though the EP’s core rhythm has mosh-ready aggression. The cartoonish quality of his sound sets it apart from vocally similar artists like City Morgue, but its novelty and referentiality can sound engineered with TikTok success in mind. Hoodrich Pablo Juan collaborator Danny Wolf proves Jasiah can do something different with the horror movie squeaks and stabs of “In N Out,” a bow-throwing posse cut that enlists TheHxliday and Rico Nasty—Jasiah’s most literal connection to hyperpop, given her collabs with 100 gecs and Charli XCX.
Jasiah’s music is ultimately indicative of his digital origins. Even more than hyperpop, WAR takes an accelerationist approach to rap, devouring a half-decade of online scenes and styles and spitting them out into a chewed-up psychedelic combination. He screams loud enough to make you listen, but it’s hard to tell if his shouts will sustain for longer than 15 minutes.

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The Massachusetts producer’s new Christianity-themed album infuses Chicago drill and Atlanta trap with an air of holiness.

Scriptures

Devstacks might as well have a Ph.D. in Chief Keef studies. The Springfield, Massachusetts, producer is part of a SoundCloud-based community that builds on moments of instrumental grandeur scattered across Keef’s discography (see loosies like “Fool Ya” or tapes like GloToven), imagining what would happen if that small slab of his style was its own thing. What materialized is a microgenre dubbed “regalia,” which basically infuses Chicago drill and Atlanta trap with the orchestral extravagance of old Hollywood epics and royal animes. Scriptures, the seven track mixtape entirely rapped and produced by Devstacks, is an all-out showcase for the style and a mesmerizing journey in its own right.
If the title isn’t a dead giveaway, or the massive cross on the album cover, let me tell you that Christianity is the mixtape’s overarching theme. But it’s channeled into the hallowed production more than the messaging (although he does rap at one point, “She say she a Christian/I think she a liar/She was in them streets/But she said she retired,” so maybe that’s something.) The intro “Praise God” is true to its title, sounding like it should be playing over an impassioned speech from The Ten Commandments; by the time Devstacks starts lightly murmuring, you hardly register his brags about Prada and how he could “bag yo’ mama’.” Instead, his voice feels like another instrument added to the layers. The following track, “Nun Like the Rest,” is similarly over-the-top, making you feel like you’re staring upward in a cathedral, thanks to digital whispers that don’t sound far off from sped-up Grimes.
The fluttering, melodramatic beats are the main draw; the plain lyrics and melodies are secondary. I listen to Scriptures much like I do a Pi’erre Bourne album. You could point out the unimaginative simplicity of say, “Cookin’ all these beats like I’m bakin’,” on “U Didn’t,” but really the song is about how his voice inhabits the guitar-driven spectacle. Or you could note how his vocals are flat and boring on “Can’t Help It,” but the celestial bent he puts on mid-2010s Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital makes you want to let it slide. It’s hard to forgive “Facetime,” though, because the beat just sounds like an Opium reject.
The brevity of Scriptures is a blessing, because its sound is so potent that hearing too much would be like biting into a head of garlic. Structural shakeups could give the sound more legs: A bright spot in that respect is “Glo Up,” which starts off with Devstacks repeating “Had to glo up, had to show them” while synths that sound like choral chants keep the Biblical mood intact. Then in the back half, the beat fades out and turns to quiet yet heavenly pianos and choir croons. Devstacks catches you off guard for a moment, which goes a long way. As any Keef head knows, sometimes those few unpredictable seconds blow your mind the most.


There's something irresistible about that Chan Marshall. Recording under the Cat Power moniker, she's got a magic coolness ...

Moon Pix

Moon Pix has a wonderful origin tale, one simply too good to miss an opportunity to retell: Chan Marshall was living in a barn with singer-songwriter Bill Callahan in a South Carolina town called Prosperity, on the brink of saying goodbye to music forever—or so she told scores of eager interviewers—when she woke up from a horrible nightmare. “Hell came to get me again,” she told The Fader, attempting to describe the mortal panic in which she awoke. She wrote the songs that night, with visions of spirits pressing the glass. Voilà: Her very own crossroads.
This is the kind of myth that music fans cling to make their treasured albums seem more magical, and sometimes we can use these tales to terrorize their teller. When Moon Pix came out in 1998, the fevered hush of possessive adoration surrounding Chan Marshall was at its peak: This was the era of shows stopping and starting, of her faltering voice and mid-song apologies, of breathless reports of said interruptions showing up in the music press, as if Marshall were a consumptive 19th-century heroine. For her most avid listeners, this was the moment when Chan Marshall’s life and Cat Power’s music swirled together most hypnotically, most dangerously, when one threatened to consume the other.
The problem with extricating these complicated ideas—who is making my music? Is this person feeling the feelings I feel?—is that sometimes an artist makes something dangerously potent, a piece of work with a mood so thick that it demands an explanation. Moon Pix is undoubtedly that album for Cat Power. We play it for some of the same reasons we play Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Slint’s Spiderland—to bask in the suspended time it creates every time it fills a room. She made albums with more indelible songs on them, but she never again made an album so darkly spellbinding.
All of the production choices that go into an album like this wind up feeling a little haunted, because the atmosphere they generate feels so unlikely and so unreal: Yes, that is the backwards drum loop lifted wholesale from Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere” on the album-opening “American Flag,” and yes, there is almost nothing happening around it—the drone of feedback around the electric guitar blurs into the whine of the sample, so they sound like one hybrid sound. But there is no real accounting for the heavy sense of doom this imparts, why it makes us feel like a low ceiling is suddenly moving lower.
And yes, Chan Marshall sings “my new friend plays the drums” before a startled little crash of snares answers the line—as if she has reminded the guy at the kit to wake up, and he has fired off a panicked fill to assure her he’s working—and this gives the music a certain unmade feeling, as if unfolding in real-time. But that doesn’t explain, exactly, its incantatory effect. Nothing can really explain it besides intangibles like conviction, intensity, shared intention. Whatever nameless thing Marshall and her hired band were pursuing on Moon Pix, they were united in their pursuit, and this sustained fever of artistic purpose is another element in the mix, just as palpable as the instruments or the lyrics. It doesn’t take many elements to generate a trance, but it requires a Herculean level of concentration and empathy.
All of this witchiness seeps into every fiber of the songs. Marshall reached out to the Australian trio Dirty Three, with whom she had toured. She asked her record label, Matador, to cover her airfare to Melbourne, and they complied. Nearly three months went by, during which not a note was recorded. Then, days before guitarist Mick Turner had to leave the studio, they crashed Sing Sing Studio and recorded everything, uninterrupted, for four or five days.
As a result, the band plays as if sleepwalking across a five-lane highway—everything sounds high-stakes and somehow perfectly in place. The drummer was Jim White, a highly skilled player capable of navigating hairpin turns, but here he only played in eruptive splashes. He mastered a sort of controlled aimlessness, a series of managed stumbles that lent an air of hunger to the music. Questlove, another technician with a metronomic heartbeat, perfected a similar blindfold-tightrope style to play D’Angelo’s Voodoo, dragging just a millisecond behind the beat. In both cases, the tension their restraint generates is palpable, nearly visible on the surface of the music, like a neck bulge.
If the arrangements were a canvas, then Marshall’s guitar would be the unruliest blot, hogging the most white space. She plays rhythm guitar the way people talk at a cafe—excitably, with varying levels of purpose and speed, prone to slumping off into peculiarly timed silences. Listen to her instrument at the center of “Moonshiner”—she speeds up, slows down, flubs a note here and there, places some notes a little more loudly than others without seemingly meaning to; some of her chords are choked off by her fingers. Her guitar nudges every other instrument into the corner of the mix, moving the entire baggy-shaped composition forward, pulsing blood through its veins with the irregularity of a heart murmur. Everything—everything—in the music seems to be responding directly to her, and to her innermost thoughts. When flute wanders up and down modal scales behind her on “He Turns Down,” it sounds loosed directly from Marshall’s singing mouth.
All of the shapes Marshall’s music would later take were vaguely discernible here: the careful way she arpeggiates that root chord on “No Sense,” over and over, and how closely the figure evokes the luxurious stretch of Al Green’s Hi Records band, how the hesitation on the downbeat heightens the tension to near-erotic levels. You can hear her future as a soul balladeer on The Greatest whispering at you. On the rudimentary finger-picked minor chord of “Back of Your Head,” you can hear the shadows of future Cat Power dirges like “Babydoll” lurking.
And on “Metal Heart,” the album’s moral center, you can feel her clasping her fingers around a message, a mantra that would follow and sustain through the next decade. “You’re losing the calling that you’ve been faking and I’m not kidding/It’s damned if you don’t and damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo,” she sings. The “you” in the song, addressed with such affection, feels like Marshall herself—an unverifiable, if inescapable, impression.
She would go on to sing other songs to other “you’s,” also with unclear subjects: on You Are Free’s “I Don’t Blame You,” she offered another benediction to a reluctant and tortured performer. “They never owned you/And you never owed it to them anyway,” she sang. She was coy for years about the song’s source, telling one interviewer it was simply about “that feeling of not being understood, but supposedly being understood by everyone” Years later, she would tell a Guardian reporter it was definitely about Kurt Cobain “blowing his head off.” But whoever it was, her solidarity with them was unmistakable: That person onstage who “didn’t want to play,” was always Marshall, using someone’s story to tell us a version of her own.
By the time of 2012’s Sun, she was comfortable and confident enough to start speaking directly to other people, to her idea of “kids” that were not her own obvious narrative surrogates—“You ain’t got nothing but time, and it ain’t got nothing on you,” she asserted, bravely. But here, in the haunted circle that was Moon Pix, she realizes something about herself, her art, and transmits it to us for the first time. “Metal heart/You’re not hiding/Metal heart, you’re not worth a thing,” she sang on the chorus. An “Amazing Grace” quote escapes her like a hiccup—she sounds startled to find herself singing it, mimicking the nature of revelation itself. Grace—itself accidental, capricious, not to be owned—seems to guide Marshall through Moon Pix like a waking dream. If we still yearn to embrace her tale about that single fevered night of songwriting, about keeping devils at bay with just her voice, well, we have Moon Pix to thank for prodding us into believing it.


Originally meant for a 2003 release, these unreleased songs from Nas’ latter-day output pale in comparison to the rapper’s greatest work.

The Lost Tapes 2

In February 1999, just before the mp3 era reached its peak, 13 tracks from Nas’ forthcoming double LP I Am....The Autobiography leaked onto the internet. With the core of the album in the wild almost two months before the scheduled release date, Nas and his team at Columbia panicked, scrapping the original tracklist and pushing back the album release date.
I Am....The Autobiography was intended as a concept double-album, with one disc recounting his life from birth to death by suicide and the second dedicated to his afterlife. The leak blew up that grand scheme, and the album was officially released as the haphazardly assembled single-disc I Am, without most of the leaked songs. Some would be released as part of the career nadir that was late ’99’s Nastradamus, but the rest circulated for years in varying fidelity, creating an aura of mystique around these “lost” tracks. When they finally saw an official release in 2002 as The Lost Tapes, it solidified the resurgence sparked by 2001’s Stillmatic and the legendary beef with JAY-Z.
But The Lost Tapes 2 is a sequel in name only. Originally meant for a 2003 release, the project was delayed by his signing with Def Jam and their subsequent disagreements, and it’s unlikely this compilation is the same as the one he intended to release back then. Miles away from the leaked gems on The Lost Tapes—considered some of Nas’ best work—this sequel comprises detritus from the last decade or so of Nas’ storied career.
Even if the lows of Nas’ post-millennium output have been plagued by corny hooks and questionable beat selection, his failures were often in the service of experimentation—or in the case of Nastradamus, a rushed production process—and he’s never lacked access to the game’s premier production talents. The credits for The Lost Tapes 2 reads like a hip-hop all-star team: Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, No I.D., RZA, Hit-Boy, Eric Hudson, DJ Dahi, Pete Rock, and the Alchemist are all featured. And there are indeed some highlights: The Swizz Beatz-produced “No Bad Energy,” a moody slow-burner washed in atmospheric background vocals that suits his wistful nostalgia, the crunchy lo-fi wizardry of RZA’s “Highly Favored,” or the vintage Queens boom-bap of Pete Rock’s standout “Queensbridge Politics,” in which Nas plays the wise old uncle, at his most comfortable and confident.
But it’s tragic to hear what he’s done with some of these productions. For much of the record, Nas sounds like he’s trying too hard. “It Never Ends” is a swirling piano beat from Alchemist primed for a laid back flow that Nas...inexplicably yells over, biting The Notorious B.I.G.’s infamous “Seven Mac-11’s…” line in what appears to be a tribute. This mismatched energy is also apparent on a perfectly serviceable beat from Pete Rock (“The Art of It”), in which Nas sandwiches a single decent verse (“Pulled out the barrel/Four-fifths rip through bone marrow/Make his toes spiral the dirt/While his feet kick up rock, he’s a sprinter”) in between two head-shakers (“A life, Adidas under A, the B for beater, Bottega/British Knights sneaker...” and so on through the alphabet). “Beautiful Life,” his most direct reference to his divorce from the singer Kelis, offers no real clarity to their mutual allegations of abuse, and its celebratory tone leaves a stale aftertaste. Like most of the songs on Lost Tapes 2, it never should have seen the light of day, a sentiment that was, at one point, shared by Nas himself. That he would release an album that didn’t even meet his own standards is dispiriting.


San Francisco-based experimental alt-country band evokes untainted portraits of an Ol' West less steeped in folklore than shear, elemental love of life.

The Court & Spark: Dead Diamond River EP

Dead Diamond River EP

Twang: the plight of any alt-country musician. From Jeff Tweedy's inauspicious beginnings in Uncle Tupelo, to dusty latter day folksters like David Pajo and Will Oldham, the genre has always been haunted by detractors who yield the word like incriminating evidence. If the indie music press shares one thing in common with the right-wing media juggernaut, it's its eager defamation of this innocuous onomatopoetic device. Much like "liberal" in today's so-called political journalism, twang has come to mean something dirty among the critical elite.
Aside from the obvious imbecility of the idea that any singular element can be inherently bad in music, twang is a relatively harmless quality to vilify. After all, the last thing one could call Ry Cooder's slide guitar meditations is pretentious. In fact, alt-country was founded in part to counter the sort of discreet braggadocio so virulent in underground music. The Court & Spark certainly belong to this category, albeit cast down a somewhat more experimental tributary. Conceived and reared in San Francisco, the band are as indebted to Cooder et al as anyone, and their vast soundscapes evoke untainted portraits of an Ol' West less steeped in folklore than shear, elemental love of life. And yes, their songs twang along with the best of 'em; see their tender "National Lights", off 2001's Bless You, one of the exemplary y'allternative songs of the last few years, for proof.
But The Court & Spark are so much more than twang, and it only takes a few bars of "Invercargill", the opening cut off the group's new EP, Dead Diamond River, for them to reiterate it. Three years removed from their last full-length effort, the California quintet have had sufficient time to explore, hone, and expand their sound, and if this concise five-song collection is any indication, their forthcoming Witch Season LP should provide a more nuanced companion to the band's erstwhile work.
Of course, given the band's rootsy aesthetic, there are the haggard old tricks-- dolorous tempos, heart-rending vocal deliveries, and plenty of pedal steel ("Bar the Door, Davy" even intercepts, verbatim, a riff from The Decemberists' "Clementine")-- but the band are adventurous enough in their retreads to revere a long lineage of forebears while simultaneously taking steps toward an advanced sound. Aforementioned "Invercargill" dabbles in mesmeric psych-folk atmospherics before performing an abrupt turnabout, dissolving inwardly, and emerging with a drowned-out rag that it rides to an anti-climax. Before long, the amicable "Lucia" cozies up to some bucolic acoustic fingering, and The Court & Spark are back to being their humble old selves again.
But don't be fooled. The Court & Spark are a very sophisticated animal, and any intimations at simplicity are readily dispelled by the finesse of their arrangements. What saves songs like "Lucia" from succumbing to vapidity is a keen sense of dynamics, and a killer knack for arranging familiar instruments. Throughout Dead Diamond River, acoustic guitars, vibraphones, glockenspiels, pedal steels, organs, and analog synths intermingle with harmonious fluidity, resulting in a sum much greater than its parts. You don't need to have seen San Francisco to appreciate their visceral orchestrations; like any successfully evocative folk music, the portraits the band etch are almost better than the real thing for their fictitiously preserved perfection.