Manchester producer Evan Majumdar-Swift mines the history of club music for slippery, enigmatic electro jams that move in unexpected directions, sounding melancholy yet playful.

9696 Dream

A timeworn means of rebelling against one’s parents: loud guitar music. But in Evan Majumdar-Swift’s case, embracing rock’n’roll represented a rejection of another strain of music long associated with youthful hijinks. His father, Matthew Swift, is hardly your garden-variety Boomer: In the 1980s, he’d been one of the promoters of Jive Turkey, a beloved Sheffield club night known for its interracial crowd and cutting-edge mixture of funk, soul, and electro. Warp Records was born there; the club’s resident DJs, Winston Hazel and Parrot, were responsible for two of the legendary electronic label’s first three records. So how else for young Majumdar-Swift to declare independence than to choose stoner rock over his father’s hoary old acid-house 12"s?
Eventually, though, he came around. By 17, Majumdar-Swift was programming beats on a screen, and within six months, he’d come up with a song good enough to make it onto his debut EP the following year. That record, perhaps not coincidentally, had more than a little in common with those original bleep’n’bass anthems that his father’s club night catalyzed, 32 years prior. The magic of computer circuitry had brought Majumdar-Swift full circle.
You can probably tell that Majumdar-Swift—alias 96 Back—has a thing for the rearview mirror. Until now, most of his output has drawn sustenance from the 1990s in one form or another, folding elements of classic techno, electro, and IDM into elegant if slightly anonymous throwback jams. By last year’s Sugilite EP, he had developed some genuinely impressive chops, reeling off a pitch-perfect invocation of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher circa 2001. But 9696Dream, the first installment of a projected trilogy, marks a major step toward developing a style all his own.
Majumdar-Swift’s music remains rooted in dance music’s past, but it’s no longer fixated on it. Instead of recreating well-worn sounds, he seems more interested in stripping them for parts. “Sat In” opens the album with exploratory chords that fizzle expectantly; synths squiggle around a tentative boom-tick beat, not a million miles away from Isolée’s spindly etudes circa Rest. “Freepass for Them” begins with an insistent groove reminiscent of Carl Craig at his most emphatic, then pivots to a chilly, square-wave melody that hums like a fluorescent tube. Couching an unrelenting rhythm in soft swirls of static, it’s an unexpected anthem—an android wolf in electric sheep’s clothing. Another neat mix of opposites, “Phone” pairs the glistening timbres of Japanese ambient techno with the desiccated downbeat of Detroit’s Urban Tribe; “RJam for Harp,” a highlight of the record’s back half, smooths blippy grime synths into a slippery electro jam.
There’s a dreamlike quality to these songs, one reinforced by their brevity. Rather than the six or eight-minute runtimes so common in club music, 96 Back’s tracks last four or three or even two—just enough time to set the stage and then, frequently, pull out the rug. The title track, for example, begins with a silky flourish of pads, then tightens its focus around a juddering, spring-loaded arpeggio. Twisting and turning, the melody moves like an animal running a maze, confused yet undaunted. Two-thirds of the way through, it stops, sniffs, and changes direction. The song’s movements have an emotional pull that’s hard to define, with a lyricism to their ebb and flow that’s rare for dance music.
Ultimately, 9696Dream’s ambiguity—melancholy and mysterious yet also playful and a little rogue—is what makes it so unusual, and so satisfying. Sometimes it feels like an ambient record with teeth; elsewhere, it’s club music with puppy-dog eyes. “Hide_NGroove” is a beautiful example of 96 Back’s enigmatic expressive abilities. Made of little more than neon-tinged synths flashing around a 4/4 kick, it encapsulates the kinds of themes that have animated techno for the past 30-odd years—spaceships and rubble, starlight and chrome—but it takes that history as a starting point rather than a destination. There’s a kind of damaged elegance to its lumpy groove; it’s wistful yet stubborn, at once guarded and full of heart. It sounds like the work of someone determined to honor the sounds he once rejected by using them to say something new.

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The veteran rapper’s latest includes a harrowing look at his personal life buoyed by some lighthearted, throwback fare.

Murs: A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable

A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable

“My name is Murs,” the chatty rap veteran introduces himself on A Strange Journey Into the Unimaginable, “and I’ve had a rough couple of years.” He’s not exaggerating. If Murs has kept an uncharacteristically low profile in recent years, now we know why: He was withering a divorce and a grueling custody battle, and by his account barely getting by. He cried every day for a year, he recalls on Unimaginable’s harrowing opening track, and just when things were looking up and he and his fiancé were expecting a baby boy, another blow: His son was stillborn.
Murs has always been an unusually candid memoirist, oversharing even the most mundane details of his life in a matter-of-fact flow, yet none of his nearly two dozen albums has ever touched on anything so heavy. And on Unimaginable’s opening tracks, he doesn’t shy from uncomfortable details. “It took me years to get to this point where I don’t want to die every day,” he raps on “Melancholy,” and even now, “I’m not too high; I’m not too low. I’m just here.” On the leadoff track “The Unimaginable” he lays his pain even more viscerally, mimicking the halting breathing of a panic attack. Murs recognizes there’s power in voicing his grief, even if others don’t want to hear it. “I mention the death of my son because it’s something that’s not talked about,” he explained in an interview. “You’re never prepared for it. Friends don’t call you to talk about that because no one knows what to say.”
Those first couple of songs warn listeners that they’re in store for a very rough listen. “This is not really music, it’s me dealing with my thoughts,” Murs stresses. Unimaginable is not Murs’ own A Crow Looked at Me, though. Once he gets some of the weight off his chest, the record brightens considerably and becomes more or less another Murs album, albeit a better than average one. Listeners who stopped paying attention to Murs sometime between his third and his sixth full-length with 9th Wonder may not have noticed when he signed to Tech N9ne’s Strange label several years ago, but here he embraces the new surroundings, recruiting the label’s house producer Michael “Seven” Summers to produce the whole thing. It’s hardly a radical departure—Seven’s jazzy soul and updated boom bap isn’t really all that different from 9th Wonder’s—but Seven gives some of these tracks a looser, live-band feel, and those drums, pianos, saxophones and acoustic guitars lend the record welcome warmth.
For returning fans piqued by the album’s backstory, Unimaginable offers a reminder that Murs is still pretty funny. On “Same Way” he brushes off a cold reception from his girlfriends’ friends and family: “I know what your family saying on the down low/And all your homegirls high key hate me though they still use my login for the HBO.” He leans even more overtly into the comedy on “Superhero Pool Party,” a throwback to the madcap rap of old-schoolers like the Sugar Hill Gang and Biz Markie. Batman won’t take his cape off in the pool; Professor X falls out of his wheelchair; She-Hulk shows up with some “bomb guacamole same color as her skin”—that sort of thing. It’s basically a three-minute dad joke, but he sells it by committing to the lunacy.
Inevitably, nothing on Unimaginable makes as much of an impression as those sorrowful leadoff tracks, which are so potent and heartfelt you can’t help but wish there were a few more of them. But sometimes less is more, and Murs deserves credit for refusing to turn his grief into something performative, a thought he shutters at on the album’s opener. “If I could take all of my tears and cry them into a chain/I wonder how many million more followers I’d gain,” he raps, “I could turn all this salty water that fell from my eyes into some diamond carats/Then when I cry in public I could finally do so without having someone tell me I should feel embarrassed.” Murs rarely preaches, but on this point his insistence is inspiring: Don’t ever let anybody stop you from grieving on your own terms.


The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter teams up with producer Sam Evian for an assured, exploratory, and warm record that mirrors a newly opened heart.

Loose Future

The promise of a new day lurks within the heart of Loose Future, the eighth album from Courtney Marie Andrews. It’s a switch of sound and aesthetic for Andrews, a singer-songwriter with an emo background—she toured with Jimmy Eat World at the outset of her career—who came to favor austere Americana over a series of albums for Fat Possum in the 2010s.
Listen closely and faint echoes of folk can be discerned embedded within the cool, polished veneer of Loose Future. Andrews sculpts songs with care, her strummed guitar providing a pulse that’s felt as much as heard. Despite this sturdy foundation, the album is essentially the polar opposite of Old Flowers, a stark and sad record that rightfully earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Americana album in 2020. There, Andrews plumbed the depths of a painful breakup, offering a melancholy meditation on the fading of love. Here, the world opens up thanks to a new romance, a reawakening that gives the album a sense of possibility: What lies ahead may be uncertain yet it feels positive, even joyous. As she sings on “Older Now,” a shimmering piece of self-acceptance, “life is better without plans.”
That embrace of the unknown would be enough to give Loose Future a sensibility distinct from Andrews’ other albums yet this thematic shift is eclipsed by her decision to expand her aural palette by working with Sam Evian. A producer who previously has helmed records by Big Thief and Cassandra Jenkins, Evian eases Andrews into a different sonic world, trading upon sounds from the peak of classic rock and new wave, the studio flair accentuating feelings instead of covering them.
Echoes of country-rock float throughout Loose Future—a steel guitar lends “You Do What You Want” a plaintive note—yet it’s only an echo, one of many colors at play. Loose Future is painted in bright, sounding vivid even in its slowest moments, as when “Let Her Go” is graced with layers of vocal harmonies or when “Change My Mind” gets a lift from supple strings. While the album never is quite lively, there’s a perceptible pulse provided by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear, his backbeat giving shape and structure to the gentle swirls of sound created by Andrews, Evian and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman. Sometimes, Loose Future evokes distinct sounds or eras. “These Are the Good Old Days” hints at girl-group pop, “Thinkin’ On You” is ornate country-rock decorated with chiming 12-string guitars, “Loose Future” recalls when Lindsey Buckingham refashioned Fleetwood Mac as a new wave outfit for adult contemporary airwaves. Usually, Loose Future seems to exist slightly outside of time, its retro stylings not there for fashion but emotion.
Andrews’ music always has been emotionally frank, an attribute that can make an album as heartbroken as Old Flowers feel a bit fragile. Although it sounds markedly different than its predecessors, that characteristic remains intact on Loose Future. The smooth, radiant production doesn’t amount to commercial pandering: It’s assured, exploratory, and warm music that mirrors Andrews’ newly opened heart.


The singer-songwriter’s fourth album is largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures. Throughout, Geist presents a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic.

Geist

Earlier this year, the transcendental folk musician Shannon Lay performed a tarot reading for her fourth solo album, Geist. In a video posted to her Patreon, she revealed one of the deck’s most dramatic and foreboding images: two figures plummeting from a burning castle struck by lightning—the Tower card, known in some decks as the Tower of Destruction, said to be a harbinger of violent and sundering change. Geist, an album largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures, is a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic. It’s perhaps a different way to interpret the Tower: how ruination can lead to resurrection, and life can feel sweetest when one surrenders to change.
After traipsing around Los Angeles’ art-punk and garage-rock scenes, eventually joining Ty Segall’s Freedom Band, Lay now primarily plays solo, turning down the volume and directing her energy inward. Folk music, she found, best translated her pre-modern and mystic vision of the world. Her influences—the soft psychedelic folk and pastoralia of Vashti Bunyan, Sandy Denny, and Anne Briggs—spoke for Lay on her solo debut, 2016’s timid and reverb-drenched All This Life Going Down. On her second album, Living Water, she removed the reverb and inched closer to the center of the mix. By 2019’s August—named after the month she decided to pursue music full-time—she sounded bolder, more jovial and experimental. It seemed to come from a place of generative optimism and willful abandonment.
On Geist, Lay is more distinct and expressive than ever; it’s the sound of an artist seeing themselves—their personality and temperament—reflected back to them for the first time. Lay tracked her vocals and guitar at Jarvis Taveniere’s (Woods) studio, before sending them to multi-instrumentalists Devin Hoff (Sharon Van Etten, Cibo Matto) and Ben Boye (Bonnie Prince Billy, Ty Segall). Those recordings were then transferred to Aaron Otheim (Heatwarmer, Mega Bog) and Sofia Arreguin (Wand) for additional keys and flourishes, while Segall provided a guitar solo on “Shores.” The result is far more aesthetically focused and meticulously arranged than the process might suggest.
Though Lay homes in on ideas about change and metamorphosis, she still encourages stillness and sitting with the present moment. You can hear this in the instrumentation: how it moves like an underwater current, shifting then settling, then shifting again. On “Rare to Wake” and “A Thread to Find,” Lay’s fingerpicked melodies move like two chalices pouring liquid back and forth. Her harmonies, rich as the Roches’, float over piano as her voice simultaneously embodies childlike curiosity and sagacious wisdom: “Without change something sleeps inside us/Rare to wake,” she sings in a slithering melody.
Lay is the kind of songwriter who doubles as a spiritual guide, kindly and patiently directing the listener towards their own sense of inner tranquility. As if leading by example, the songs on Geist gradually decelerate, until, by album’s end, Lay’s simplicity and dilatoriness become the source of her power. “The way you kiss will always be a very special thing to me,” she sings on the  slow-moving Syd Barrett cover “Late Night.” The sentiment may read laughably frank and facile on the page, but at Lay’s considered tempo, it makes clear her intention to eke out the most essential parts of each feeling and every moment. It’s the kind of joyous, vital detail that can only be drawn by keeping still long enough to truly take stock.
Correction: An earlier version of this review omitted the mention of Syd Barrett.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Three of Wu-Tang's top MCs show up together on this 30-minute LP for three whole songs, padding out the rest with skits and guest verses.

Ghostface Killah / Raekwon / Method Man: Wu-Massacre

Wu-Massacre

Initially, the most shocking thing about Raekwon's long-promised 2009 album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II was that it actually existed. You could say the same for Wu-Massacre, a new collaboration from Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and Method Man. Unlike Cuban Linx II-- a long-rumored sequel to a decade-old record-- talk of Wu-Massacre only began to surface last July. Tracks were leaked shortly afterward, videos were filmed, cover art was revealed, and now, it's here. Forget about Wu-Tang product; that timetable is unthinkable for most major hip-hop releases.
The limitations of that turnaround are unmistakable on Wu-Massacre. The three stars appear on a total of three songs together, and the padding they needed to push the album beyond CD-single status is obvious from the credits alone: two skits, guest verses from nearly every Theodore Unit B-teamer (Sheek Louch sorta counts at this point), and three remakes. All to account for about 30 minutes of music.
"Criminology" was on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, and it's probably the one word most closely associated with Raekwon's style. But for reasons that escape logic, he doesn't even show up to open the album on "Criminology 2.5". Hearing Method Man paraphrase some of his old lines ("Fuck that, criminology rap/ Niggas hate and I hate back, floating the flyest Maybach") is a little like watching Speed 2, and the beat itself is just a glossed-up karaoke version of the original. "Mef vs. Chef 2" is better, but again, the sequel suffers from context-- on the original, whoever RZA chose as the winner of the duel of the iron mic would get the track on their solo release. Here, it shares space with a 30-second rant from Tracy Morgan on worthless hoes.
Still, at the record's core are three MCs willing to spend a little critical capital and just have fun over pitchshifted soul beats. Method Man could have felt like a third wheel here, but his concise hooks anchor the more awkwardly wordy ones from Ghost and Rae. Whether he's playing the seducer on "Miranda" or the verboloigst on "Gunshowers", Meth flexes the understated versatility that made his turns on Cuban Linx II so enduring. Ghostface thankfully sounds energized and committed again after last year's cynical Wizard of Poetry, which helps overshadow the familiarity of his material. "Youngstown Heist" finds him back in deranged "Shakey Dog" mode, which is fun again until Sheek Louch and Bully tank the song's second half.
But you evaluate what you got, not what you wanted, and being too harsh on Wu-Massacre is kind of like criticizing a hamburger for not performing a steak's duty. Twenty-five minutes of these three on autopilot still hits more often than not, ultimately making this disc a mixtape-y More Fish-style companion to Cuban Linx II-- hardly necessary, but not inconsequential.


Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, the English musician constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present.

Prize

Oftentimes when Rozi Plain prepares to perform live, her body shuts down. “It’s just sort of this intense fatigue and I can barely keep my eyes open,” the English singer-songwriter has explained. Under a veil of nerves, she succumbs to rituals she doesn’t quite understand, like frantically brushing her teeth or doing vocal exercises she doesn’t really believe in. It’s as if when Plain tries to picture what will go down onstage, her brain grows weary, overwhelmed by possibilities. Her fifth studio album, Prize, might serve as an antidote. Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, Plain constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present in the moment. Whereas 2019’s What a Boost was a centering breath, Prize reframes her calming presence as a state of mind to take with you after the music stops.
As a bassist in the UK folk group This Is the Kit, Plain understands the importance of subtle momentum, the kind that lends airy music a fiery passion. She replicates that approach on Prize with the help of her go-to crew—drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, bassist Amaury Ranger, guitarist James Howard, and pianist Gerard Black—turning a quiet combination of instruments on “Help” into a breezy, groove-forward single. Plain’s songs flow like streams of consciousness, all ambiance and fade-ins, and her stacked vocal harmonies draw out emotion from that tranquility. On “Complicated” and “Conversation,” she sands down the edges of the electric bass and guitar, creating the illusion that they’re being played inches away from your ears. A compelling cast of guest performers, including saxophonists Alabaster dePlume and Cole Pulice, the Comet Is Coming’s Danalogue on synths, Trash Kit’s Rachel Horwood on banjo, and harpist Serafina Steer, among others, contribute to the music’s dreamlike quality.
Across the album’s 40 minutes, an image of Plain begins to develop: She doesn’t believe in the past as a compass or the future as a roadmap. She has no tinted lens through which to reimagine the world, nor a nostalgic fixation on old memories. Instead Plain writes about her surroundings and the way they make her feel as if she’s in the present. She brushes off the past as merely what “existed before you” and accepts the future with equanimity, offering, “What is it if it’s not?” Time is out of her hands and she knows that denying such is willful ignorance. As she puts it in “Prove Your Good,” “I like to say/It had to be this way.”
Plain’s apparent effortlessness as she grapples with indecision and recenters herself in the now could prompt envy—that is, if it weren’t for how swiftly the music ushers you into that same state of mind. She refashions small details into grounding opportunities: a gorgeous swell of strings, courtesy of violinist Emma Smith, that triples in size during “Sore,” like the sudden explosion of purples and pinks during a sunset; the jaunty vocal harmonies shared between Plain and This Is the Kit bandmate Kate Stables in “Agreeing for Two,” replicating the warm pain of cheek muscles that have laughed too hard; an extended saxophone outro by dePlume in “Spot Thirteen” that mimics the feeling of watching the final wisp of smoke rise from a dwindling fire. Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.
By the album’s closer, “Blink,” Plain distills that mindfulness into a display of camaraderie. “Blink if you love me, everyone everywhere,” she sings cooly. “With elastic energy, circular it has to be.” And with that, the album’s final note segues back into the opening track, inviting you to play it on loop and to linger a little longer in its demonstration of active presence—not quite as an ode to infinity, but as a key for those shackled to anxiety about what tomorrow, next week, next year might bring.


Here, Alan Palomo delivers the most comprehensive Neon Indian album yet. He's presenting the 51-minute record as a double album and there are interstitial bits to ensure the beat never stops. The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples—more of everything.

VEGA INTL. Night School

Alan Palomo of Neon Indian recorded VEGA INTL. Night School over the span of four years at a number of crash pads across America, but most crucial to the album was a self-described "magical winter" the singer spent on a Carnival Fantasy Cruise ship with his brother, who played in the house band. (Insert chillwave joke here.) The album contains enough reggae and Balearic tropical breeze to prove Palomo doesn’t shy away from pleasing the lido deck, but beyond the kitsch, an extended stay in a floating, inescapable city is an apt metaphor for VEGA INTL. Night School, where the inherent danger of total immersion is offset by generous hospitality.
Palomo acts a gracious host, delivering the most deluxe, comprehensive Neon Indian album yet. He's presenting the 51-minute record as a "double album" and the interstitial bits ensure the beat never stops. The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples—more of everything. Palomo might have seemed like someone stumbling onto a recipe with Psychic Chasms, but now it's clear that this is Palomo’s foundational music, his blues or funk.
Palomo's riff on the idea of "night school" is the album's unifying thematic construct: stay up after midnight, and you’ll learn about how human nature really works. In this way, the progression of Neon Indian is best seen as Palomo moving from PG-13 to NC-17—if you dial the Neon Indian hotline he set up for this album, what you hear is a voice purring "hey there, sexy." Everyone’s committing crimes of passion on VEGA INTL.—a missed phone call occasions a "CSI" investigation on "Annie" and on "Baby's Eyes" Vega harbors a charismatic murderer. Elsewhere, we're exposed to a polyamorous tryst in "Smut!" after a chance meeting behind the red curtain in the porno section of a video store.
So consider VEGA INTL. Palomo finally freeing his dirty mind, even as the music maintains a veneer of innocence. Neon Indian is an inherently nostalgic project, and Palomo views the musical cross-pollination of the early '80s as unfinished business rather than something to romanticize. Era Extraña framed Palomo as the rock star he could often seem on stage, engaging in the pouty, guitar-centric forms of post-punk—shoegaze and MTV-friendly goth in particular. Conversely, VEGA INTL. recalls the synthesists who took "post-punk" as a mandate to leave punk rock behind. The reggae bump of "Annie" and "61 Cygni Ave" recall Scritti Politti and the Police, and there’s plenty of Tom Tom Club and Blondie in the album's bubbly disco.
The cumulative impression of VEGA INTL., then, is that of a Carnival Cruise night based around New York's Danceteria, circa 1982, a place and time of glaring blight as well as utopian all-night clubs where synth-pop, disco, funk, R&B, and early hip-hop were feeding off one another. Any artist trying to capture the spirit of that specific era has to reckon with Prince, a personification of the idealism of early '80s pop, and Palomo finally gets there at the end of the record: "News from the Sun (Live Bootleg)" recalls both the insular psychedelia of Around the World in a Day, the "is it really live?" crowd noise of "Purple Rain", and the communal ecstasy of Sign 'o’ the Times. Before the final leap into a daredevil key modulation, Palomo delivers the record’s final line: "We’re all just waiting for something—'til love touches you like a hand in the dark." Those words encompass the starry-eyed ideal as well as the unsavory reality of how people tend to find love. Morning might bring to light all of the shameful things that have just gone down, but "News from the Sun" assures that whatever happens on this fantasy cruise stays there.


This 3xCD set was distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material spanning the period from 1968 through 1977 by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore.

The Lost Tapes

Can have always been a little cagey about what is and isn't in their vaults. The received wisdom is that the German experimental pop group spent years in their studio, jamming constantly and recording everything, with bassist Holger Czukay editing the most promising tapes into the magnificent pieces that they released on record between 1969 and the mid-70s. They've always given the impression that their records were the result of grabbing whatever happened to be nearest at hand; when they've gone back into their archives for studio material in the past, they've resurfaced with outstanding stuff. Unlimited Edition from 1976, a collection of tapes that were lying around, includes career highlights like "Connection" and "Cutaway"; Delay 1968 is a complete, splendid album that the initial lineup of the band, with cracked American vocalist Malcolm Mooney, recorded before Monster Movie but somehow neglected to release until 1981.
For the past 30 years, though, all they've hauled up from the archive has been a few discs' worth of live material. So The Lost Tapes sounded like a very big deal: A 3xCD set distilled from 30 hours' worth of unissued material (spanning Can's entire original incarnation), it was assembled by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and his son-in-law and frequent collaborator Jono Podmore, with the latter credited as editor. "Halcyon days, not outtakes," trumpeted the album's press release. That's not entirely true. A lot of these tracks are distinctly outtakes: alternate versions of familiar themes, or at least ideas Can executed differently elsewhere. "Dead Pigeon Suite", for instance, is 12 minutes of what appears to be exploratory jamming toward what became the taut, densely packed single "Vitamin C". It's fascinating to hear once or twice if you're a Can-head, but not terribly meaningful otherwise. (The title is a reference to the German TV movie, Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße, in which another version of it appears.)
"Messer, Scissors, Fork and Light", similarly, is Can working out the various hooks that coalesced into "Spoon". Half-familiar titles turn out to be germinal variations on "Mother Sky", "Soul Desert", and "Sing Swan Song". "Abra Cada Braxas" and "Blind Mirror Surf" aren't the same songs as Tago Mago's "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" and "Aumgn", but there's a family resemblance. There are lengthy live versions of "Spoon" and "Mushroom"-- not the same as the ones that appeared on last year's Tago Mago reissue, but of similar vintage-- as well as "One More Saturday Night", which is not a Grateful Dead cover but a live take of Ege Bamyasi's "One More Night". It's nice to hear appearances by both of Can's major singers, Mooney and Japanese hippie Damo Suzuki, although 10 minutes of Mooney chanting "are you waiting for the streetcar?!?" like a psychotic mantra is about eight too many.
The pity of The Lost Tapes' overambition is that it could easily be condensed to a single, first-rate album of genuinely new-to-record material. "Millionenspiel", the theme song from a 1970 suspense movie, is a terrific cut-and-paste rocker, featuring Michael Karoli slashing at a single whammy-barred chord on every downbeat and Czukay constructing a looped groove out of what sounds like amp noise. "Barnacles" is a disco-funk improvisation that appears to be from the late-70s period when bassist Rosko Gee had joined the group; it's the sort of thing that would have sounded as bandwagon-jumping as "Aspectacle" did at the time, and sounds as kickass as "Aspectacle" does now. And the jewel of the set is "Graublau", which I'm guessing comes from the sessions for Thomas Schamoni's film A Big Gray-Blue Bird that also yielded "She Brings the Rain": a thrilling suite, with Karoli shooting flames, the rest of the band in monomaniacal garage-rock mode, and Schmidt tossing shortwave-radio loops into the mix to give everyone something to attack and devour.
One more album as good as the good stuff: It's what everyone hopes for from their favorite defunct band. Can's archives, as it turns out, were deep enough for that. But they weren't infinitely deep-- not even three albums deep. Irmin Schmidt assessed the situation himself, when he was asked a few months ago whether there would be more releases from Can's trove of unissued recordings: "The rest is not worth putting out... That's sentimentality."


The veteran field-recording artist turns his microphones on New York City in the attempt to capture something essential lurking within the ephemeral.

Locations, Processed

The ache of memory throbs at the core of Chris Watson’s immaculate field recordings. The former Cabaret Voltaire member has become one of the world’s most revered audio documentarians. He has taken listeners into the depths of an Icelandic glacier, up close with the cavernous purr of a leopard in the wild, and across Mexico on a now-defunct railroad. Technically exacting though it may be, Watson’s work is never merely about capturing a sound for posterity’s sake. Watson tries to draw out something more ephemeral: “Events could haunt spaces,” he said in an interview last year. “I became convinced that some of the places I was going to embodied a spirit from another time. I was interested to know if you could soak up, absorb, that sonic environment through sound recordings.”
This is no simple task, and Watson’s approach is, for the most part, to get out of the way and let the spaces do the talking. On Locations, Processed, his new LP for Moog Recordings Library, he set up shop in New York City. The results were reassembled at Moog Sound Lab UK, the modular studio built around the 2014 reissue of the synthesizer manufacturer’s legendary behemoth, the System 55. For a generation or three, the Moog name will instantly conjure up proggy squiggles and Switched on Bach, but there’s not a single synth tone to be found here. The short LP is instead an immersive journey through reverberant halls and clanging streets, punctuated by snatches of quotidian conversation and startling intrusions.
Watson hasn’t always been shy about tweaking and layering his source recordings to dramatic effect, but Locations, Processed feels comparatively raw. It’s a record that requires a new kind of listening; you can’t take this material head on. Face the sounds directly and they can appear blunt, even boring. But sit back and relax your ears, and they assume an eerie, subliminal quality. “Room 343” compresses air into a molasses-thick ooze topped with a haunting whistle. The sound of passing traffic merges with ambient white noise to simulate deep breathing, while voices and an errant car horn slip into the mix with an elegance that feels planned. “Grand Central Terminal” could be recorded from inside a conch shell, so intense is its roar.
The entire A-side drifts through similarly heavy, hissing spaces, closing on the ominous “Central Park.” In its second half, Locations, Processed goes outside. “Times Square” breaks the ice with a brief conversation about apartment hunting before becoming engulfed by atomized bits of dialogue, laughter, and industrial sounds. Undulating low tones, perhaps from air traffic overhead, give the piece an unsettled mood. When sub-bass from a passing car and piercing sirens arrives, two and a half minutes in, the moment has all the power of a dance-music drop. “Broad Channel” clangs and stutters as the sounds of slamming doors and departing trains thud with combative ferocity. It’s barely a minute long and acts like an invigorating shot of espresso during a long, dreamy Tarkovsky film.
There are antecedents to Watson’s work. Brian Eno used frog and insect samples on Ambient 4: On Land, an exploration of England’s haunting landscapes that prefigured Watson’s mystical interrogations. Irv Teibel’s Environments series presented carefully edited recreations of natural phenomena. But Watson seems to exist in his own lane. His pieces hover in a tantalizing region between composition and chance. He cannot control who walks by his microphone, but he is interested in drawing our attention to something that goes beyond mere happenstance. New York is often described in kinetic or grandiose terms: bustling, overwhelming, larger than life. Watson hears something else, something deafening yet distant, filled with people yet weirdly vacant. Locations, Processed manages the impossible: Amid a deluge of energy, Watson records the empty space that surrounds the people who fill it.


With sparse arrangements and a lyrical focus on hearing loss and mortality, the latest solo album from the Hot Chip vocalist is a solemn and moving collection.

Silence

Alexis Taylor’s voice makes you root for him. It’s high-pitched and delicate, yet also scrappy: the sound of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks learning that he can finally show his sensitivity, having outgrown his bullies. The friction between Taylor’s persona, lyrics, and delivery has always been part of what makes his art so compelling. Bouncing along to the laddish antics of his long-time group Hot Chip, singing about playing Xbox or professional wrestling, Taylor’s immaculate phrasing and gossamer tone catch us by surprise.
The English singer is now in his early forties, with a solo career that slowly outpaces the celebratory dance music of his main band. While Hot Chip continues to fine-tune its already-pristine style, Taylor has taken his own releases as an opportunity to dabble in new settings and slower tempos. For his sixth solo full-length, Silence, he scrubs away all traces of exploratory splatter. It isn’t his first “back-to-basics” record—2016’s Piano was even more stripped-down, and Silence shares that album’s conceptual bent. This time, though, the music never seems like an exercise in simplicity, but instead an exposition of Taylor’s strengths, namely his expressive vocals: It’s his first solo release that feels driven by necessity, not experimentation.
Taylor recorded many of these songs while navigating lockdown’s innate privacy void, singing softly into his iPhone at night so as not to wake his family. He had to incorporate contributions from musicians remotely—upright bassist Sam Becker, trumpeter Kenichi Iwasa, and harpist Rachel Horton-Kitchlew provided backdrops of string and bass—and Iwasa composed some of the horn parts without hearing the existing tracks. The past year-and-a-half has been chock-full of anecdotes like these, but Taylor also hewed Silence’s sharp focus from a less-widespread hardship: In 2019, he developed tinnitus, a ringing sound that imperils one’s ability to experience silence.
The condition adds immediate pathos to his lyrics. “Silence was my sparring partner,” he sings in a naked falsetto on the ballad “Death of Silence.” “Silence, my only friend/Never again will I experience silence/I’m haunted by the death of that friend.” Considering Taylor’s reputation for cheeky asides, this forthrightness is surprising, and it also sets his album apart in the world of singer-songwriter projects. Plenty of musicians have made records about knocking on death’s door and empathizing with other people’s illness, while others have changed their approaches to writing and recording as a result of auditory problems: Neil Young’s tinnitus informed the relative tranquility of 1992’s Harvest Moon, which shares Silence’s mid-life mournfulness. Taylor’s decision to treat hearing damage itself as a subject, though, feels rare.
Still, the record is never purely confessional. Its scope is wide-ranging, handling silence and its absence as a springboard for a range of subjects. Over swells of orchestration, Taylor references anechoic chambers, moments of silence, and the consequences of remaining silent in response to violence. Since they serve as a reminder that life comes with unwanted consequences, chronic conditions can put you in conversation with death, and Silence is suffused with a recognition of the end. On the nursery rhyme-esque “I Look to Heaven” and the skyscraping opener “Dying in Heaven,” Taylor grapples with Christianity’s promise of an afterlife, while “Strange Strings” describes music as an eternal force, trapped in people’s finite bodies. Hot Chip’s songs have mythologized electronic music’s embrace of repetition, but Taylor explores repetition through more old-school motifs here—the title track, for example, is another rendition of “Death of Silence,” giving the album an evident frame.
“I was melting away/Just melting away/When you played,” Taylor sings on the plaintive highlight “Melting Away.” In the past, he might have peppered this image of someone listening to music with references to fancy gear or nods to heroes like Stevie Wonder or Prince. But this time, there are no quips to separate us from Taylor’s emotion. His voice is like a one-man choir against the grave. Dispensing with the irony and bombast that always seemed essential to Hot Chip’s work, this solemn collection places the onus on Taylor’s singing. A voice, after all, endures: It might be what we’ll pine for when the ringing stops and the silence resumes.

Buy: Rough Trade
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T**he Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis.

The Attic Tapes

T**he Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. Renbourn sourced the core of the tracklist from a tape labeled "1962" that he discovered in the attic of fellow folk revivalist Mac MacLeod, pairing those few songs with various onstage collaborations from his salad days, before he and his guitar-sparring partner Bert Jansch and their band, Pentangle, helped redefine the scope of modern folk. Renbourn had yet to sign a record deal, so these takes are rough with their age and his youth. But the finale, a live duet with Davy Graham of "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down Out", is pristine, with the thin, lithe tone of the dual guitars rendered perfectly. Had Graham and a teenaged Renbourn somehow stolen into a proper studio back in 1962?
Actually, their Clapton Unplugged-like take on the American standard comes from an onstage rendezvous several decades after the heyday of the British folk revival. As a memento, it is quite poignant. Not only did Graham serve as a de facto mentor to Renbourn, but the younger guitarist opens this set with a hurried version of "Anji", one of Graham’s trademark numbers. But as a set-closer, it’s a bit of a bore, the sound of two old friends romping through the blues for their own amusement but without much payoff.
Alas, that makes it a fitting close for The Attic Tapes, a tedious if spirited set that lets us hear Renbourn learn where folk and blues had been rather than guide where it might go. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis.
The Attic Tapes mostly confirms what we already know about Renbourn and, really, the bulk of his motley crew of fellow crooners and pickers: They loved the rawness and magnetism of American blues and folk music, and they tried the best they could to recast it in their own image. There are a few originals here, like the halting and smart blues reordering of "Plainsong" and the peppy "Judy". But mostly, Renbourn plainly shows his roots. He turns Blind Boy Fuller’s doting but vaguely threatening "Little Woman You’re So Sweet" into the sprightly "Beth’s Blues". Like most every other pasty kid with a piece of carved wood and some strings, he works his way through Blind Willie Johnson’s "Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying". He flits between the notes and lifts and leaps with his voice in a way that suggests he’s celebrating his own vulnerability, a young man not old enough to know how painful it all could get.
Likewise, Renbourn’s take on "Portland Town", by itinerant and largely overlooked American banjoist Derroll Adams, seems to delight in tragic lyrics about bad marriages and dead children. And his cover of Jackson C. Frank’s perfect anthem, "Blues Run the Game", is overly emphatic, the verses brandished with unwarranted relish. It’s clear that Renbourn is an incredible guitarist, capable of making intricate patterns seem effortless even at such a young age. His jejune takes on these hard old songs suggest that he was, to date, simply an instrumentalist short on experience.
If you’re worried that The Attic Tapes is an opportunistic ploy to profit from Renbourn’s recent death, like a youthful journal published without the deceased author’s consent, don’t: Renbourn seemed enthusiastic about this project, even penning playful and informative liner notes that trace his lineage and sources more clearly than the recordings themselves. According to Riverboat Records’ owners, Renbourn died the day before they would have sent him the final artwork; he never had a chance to dig deeper for exact dates on these sessions.
Aside from its redundancy, though, the real worry with The Attic Tapes stems from the way it reflects reissue-and-archival culture at large. Though many labels interested in such work do essential excavations of forgotten sessions, albums and artists, there seems to be an increasing tendency to regard most anything that’s survived as a masterpiece—as though time transformed it like common carbon into a rare diamond. Everything presumed to be lost doesn’t need to be found. The situation seems doubly pronounced when the music involves an artist we already know—or, in the case of The Attic Tapes, a panoply of them.
In some way, I wonder if our relatively new era of seemingly instant and infinite information about what our favorite singers had for breakfast or where they’re vacationing and with whom has made the salvage of such basement reels and attic tapes seem more paramount, as though we’re retroactively rebuilding as much of the past as we can. That’s an intriguing endeavor, but it doesn’t necessarily make for essential records. During his 50-year career, Renbourn contributed to several of those, from Bert and John and The Pentangle to The Black Balloon. This makeshift reliquary—perhaps the final release in which Renbourn had a hand—is not among them.


One of Neil Young’s most widely bootlegged lost albums from the ’70s gets an official release. As familiar as the material may be, its ragged, magical charm remains greater than the sum of its parts.

Chrome Dreams

Sometime after completing Chrome Dreams in early 1977, Neil Young invited his Malibu neighbor Carole King over to hear his latest album. Years later he recalled, “About halfway through she went, ‘Neil, this isn’t an album. It’s not a real album. I mean, there’s nobody playing, and half the songs you’re just doing by yourself.’ She was just laughing at me. Because she crafts albums.”
There’s no way of knowing whether King’s withering assessment of Chrome Dreams played a part in Young’s decision to shelve the album in favor of the charmingly misshapen American Stars ’N Bars in the summer of 1977. Chrome Dreams may have been gone but it wasn't forgotten. Young lifted four of its tracks wholesale for American Stars ’N Bars, then re-recorded another song for that same album. “Pocahontas” and “Powderfinger” wound up on Rust Never Sleeps, “Captain Kennedy” popped up on Hawks & Doves, and Neil resurrected “Too Far Gone” for his 1989 comeback Freedom. Long before he started excavating lost albums and official bootlegs as part of the Neil Young Archive, Chrome Dreams survived as an acetate that worked its way into the bootleg marketplace, becoming relatively easy to find during the compact disc explosion of the 1990s.
All this subsequent recycling—a practice that ran all the way through 2017, when the late-night session that produced “Pocahontas” and “Captain Kennedy” was released in its entirety as the wistful album Hitchhiker—means that the long-overdue official release of Chrome Dreams carries a vague air of anti-climax. Forget unheard songs: Unlike Homegrown and Toast, two other “lost” albums released under the NYA’s Special Release Series banner, Chrome Dreams barely contains unreleased recordings. The hype sticker attached to the physical edition touts “2 previously unreleased versions,” which amounts to an alternate take of “Hold Back the Tears” and a slow, stumbling early “Sedan Delivery,” which would later take a punishing pace on Rust Never Sleeps.
Disappointing as that may be, Chrome Dreams offers a distinctly different experience than any other Young album from the late 1970s. It serves as an example of how albums manage to be more than the sum of their individual parts. Young is keenly aware how individual songs can harmonize and rhyme. When promoting Chrome Dreams II—a 2007 sequel that bears no overt relation to the album he essayed 30 years earlier—Neil explained, “Quite often I’ll record things that don’t fit with what I’m doing, so I just hold onto them for a while. Some of them are so strong that they destroy what I’m doing. It’s like if you have a bunch of kids and one of them weighs 200 pounds and the other ones are 75 pounds, you’ve got to keep things in order so they don’t hurt each other. So that’s why I held certain things back.”
In a sense, Chrome Dreams is a collection of songs Young held back so they wouldn’t battle with their siblings; he needed to parcel them out in order to give them a fair hearing. When delivered by Crazy Horse in full roar, “Powderfinger” provided Rust Never Sleeps with a clarifying blast of purpose, while “Too Far Gone” benefitted from an older, wearier Neil singing its melancholy refrain nearly 15 years after its original recording. “Captain Kennedy,” a delicate wisp of a song that distinguished Hawks & Doves, offered a bit of a respite in that album's haphazard clang yet it wasn’t quite at home there. It belongs among its bittersweet companions on Chrome Dreams, a record that very much is a product of Young aimlessly wandering out of the darkness that defined his mid-’70s.

“Captain Kennedy” is an airy recording that shows why Carole King didn’t consider Chrome Dreams “a real album.” Young peppers the record with cuts that contain little more than his voice and a guitar, recordings unadorned by such niceties as harmonies and percussion. Compare “Pocahontas” to its overdubbed incarnation on Rust Never Sleeps: The additional 12-string guitars and airy backing vocals turn a stoned vision into a crystalline fantasy. “Will to Love,” a bizarre reverie where Neil imagines he’s a salmon swimming upstream to mate as he strums his guitar in front of an audibly crackling fireplace, continues these hushed hallucinations. These recordings—not demos, although they’re spare enough to be mistaken for them—give the listener the sense that they’re eavesdropping on Young, a sense of hushed intimacy that suggests Chrome Dreams drifts in a twilight slipstream. It’s a waking dream interrupted by sudden jolts of thunder, as when “Like a Hurricane” blows in after a pensive first act.
“Like a Hurricane” is familiar, particularly this version, which wound up on Decade, the ’77 compilation that consolidated Young’s expeditions into a digestible narrative. Heard within this context, though, “Like a Hurricane” sounds bracing, with the loud, lumbering Crazy Horse sounding cruder than usual when surrounded by contemplative calm. Such shifts in tone aren't unusual on a Young record, but these particular songs in these particular versions in this particular sequence carry an unusual power. Individually, many of the compositions are indeed the 200-pound titans of Young’s imagination, songs that defined his rich, prolific peak that weathered the years, enduring as core components of his songbook. It would follow that Chrome Dreams also is one of Young’s strongest albums—and it is, yet it also feels curiously amorphous, lacking the ballast of Tonight’s the Night and Rust Never Sleeps. Without an anchor of gravity, Chrome Dreams almost seems to beg to be broken out into segments yet every quivering, ragged rendition of these familiar tunes benefit from being heard in order. What matters are not the parts themselves but how they’re assembled. The connections, both intentional and accidental, are what gives an album its character. Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.


Featuring songs about handling love and fear, Jennifer O'Connor's sixth album seems to be an effort to reconcile the places in life that are rough around the edges.

Surface Noise

There's a quote attributed to BBC DJ John Peel wherein Peel defends vinyl's imperfections against the flawless sound of CDs, telling an acquaintance, "Listen mate, life has surface noise." Surface noise, on vinyl or in real life, is the gnarly stuff that grounds each of us in reality and gives us a shared point of human commiseration. Jennifer O'Connor's Surface Noise, then, seems to be an effort reconciling the places in life that are rough around the edges. However, in her songs about handling love and fear on her sixth LP, O'Connor scrubs all the grit out of her own music, delivering a flat, fine record that never really gets out of its own way.
O'Connor's voice is pleasant and gentle, floating in a low-to-middle range and surrounded by warm instrumentation. The album as a whole feels tidy and timeless. The flip side of that coin, though, is that you feel like you've heard Surface Noise before even upon first listen. Stacked against other indie-inclined singer-songwriters of recent years, it would be tough to pick Surface Noise out of a lineup. The songs bleed into each other so seamlessly that it's easy to listen to half of the record without realizing you've done so.
The album moves at a painstakingly moderate pace. "It's a Lie" sounds as though it might hold something interesting as it kicks off with slightly scorched guitar riffs, but they're swiftly relegated to the background. Plenty of albums simmer gently with an even temper, but there's usually an undercurrent of intrigue: tension, anxiety, sadness, anticipation. Somehow, none of that makes its way into Surface Noise.
In the back half of the record, "It's Gonna Get Worse" breaks into a half-hearted peppy rhythm, but O'Connor's defeated tone as she sings a refrain of "It's gonna get worse before it gets better" gives little hope that anything will ever improve. The record certainly doesn't.
Still, Surface Noise isn't a bad album by most definitions of the word. The instrumentation is tight and clean, and O'Connor's writing is direct. Together, these pieces make for a record that feels perfectly content, unburdened by hunger or ambition. But in its efforts to make sense of our collective earthly clamor, Surface Noise just feels like static.


The classical violinist Hilary Hahn holed up in Iceland for two months to record with German pianist and indie classical composer Hauschka. The result is a record about fiddling around happily with music's guts.

Silfra

The 32-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn has been at the lonely pinnacle of the classical A-list since she was all of 16 years old. It's not exactly a sphere that rewards, or even encourages, curiosity: The language used to assess soloists in Hahn's rarefied air comes disturbingly close the the kind used to appraise prize ponies, and the city-to-city nature of the violin-concerto circuit can make for a life that is almost as cloistered and repetitive. But Hahn has resisted stagnation, recording with alt-country singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, the folk singer Tom Brosseau, and even ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (that's her on Worlds Apart's "To Russia My Homeland").  She never seems to be insisting on a strident break from the world of orchestral tours, commissions, and Tchaikovsky concertos with any of these new projects -- just looking for something fresh and interesting to do. It has made her career one of the most refreshingly graceful ones in classical music. No project she has undertaken has felt forced, and that includes her decision to hole up in Iceland for two months to make a record with Hauschka.
Hauschka (real name: Volker Bertelmann) is a German pianist and indie classical composer who plays his piano "prepared," i.e., with small things placed on the piano's strings to produce new tones, à la John Cage. Over a series of albums filled with wistful miniature sketches, he's built a weird little sound world where the grotesque walks arm-in-arm with the twee. His pieces evoke a world of broken, rickety instruments, populated entirely by small, limping things. They can be nerve-rendingly cute and cloying, but at their best, they evoke the peculiar sadness you might feel when looking at, say, a toy-strewn suburban lawn.
Silfra is the result of Hahn and Hauschka's disappearing into an Iceland studio, feeling their way around each other, and recording an album based on their resulting improvisations. This sounds like a recipe for an undercooked mess, but Silfra succeeds where Hauschka's solo records haven't always, in part because his world sounds fuller and more inviting with collaborators in it. Silfra feels and sounds like two serious-minded musicians growing increasingly comfortable with each other, allowing themselves to be playful and silly. Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.
Hahn, for her part, does something that could be considered shocking for violinists in her circle: she willfully drains her million-dollar tone of most of its prettiness. Her playing on Silfra is often sickly, wheezing or shrill, in keeping with the slightly damaged sound of Hauschka's piano. On "North Atlantic", she plays a mournful melody with a breathy, anemic tone, while Hauschka's piano produces a dry "skree" sound that pokes the eardrum like a needle. She begins "Draw a Map" with a forceful gypsy dance that starts hobbling shortly after it gets started: The two of them doodle all over the melody's pristine surface with pockmarks and scribbles. If there's a dance being done here, it's on at least one bad leg.
In the album's liner notes, Hauschka and Hahn lay out specific stories and characters for each track, and a lot of them, it turns out, involved human meddling with existing structures: "Adash", for instance, is "the name of a boy who loves music and scratches lines into his CDs to create unpredictable catches, so that he can hear a section over and over again before it skips ahead to the next part." "Clock Winder" notes: "Some mechanisms still need human interaction to function." This gleeful tinkerer's spirit is what animates Silfra. It is music about fiddling around happily with music's guts, and it's most absorbing when heard through a fat pair of high-quality headphones, where you can register every scrape, plunk, creak, and twang.


Blending dancehall with pop-rap, 1980s soul, and 2000s R&B, the Jamaican singer’s full-length debut makes a flashy play for the mainstream.

Alpha

After six years of releasing singles, Shenseea’s full-length debut is here, and lo and behold, it’s a real singles album. The Jamaican singer (born Chinsea Lee) delivers 14 fully formed songs with polished production values, sticky hooks, and a few gimmicks. Not every song on Alpha will crack the Hot 100, but it’s easy to imagine that was Shenseea’s ambition each time she stepped into the booth.
Shenseea’s early music had a certain edge to it: Take 2016’s “Jiggle Jiggle,” where rasping synths, hard-edged drum machines, and Shenseea’s raps in Jamaican patois fused into a sweltering dancehall jam. Since then, her unusual journey to pop stardom has routed her through collaborations with artists as far apart as Vybz Kartel and Christina Aguilera, and she received a visibility bump with two guest appearances on Kanye West’s Donda. Alpha blends dancehall with pop-rap, 1980s soul, and 2000s R&B to form a commercially palatable (in the U.S. and Europe) form of Caribbean music. Rihanna is Shenseea’s most obvious analog, but you might also detect the chart-conquering reggae of Chaka Demus & Pliers and Shaggy. Halfway through the album, we get back-to-back tracks featuring Beenie Man and Sean Paul, two of dancehall’s biggest crossover stars. You can imagine the pair arriving at the studio with a specific remit: to guide Shenseea into the mainstream.
Of course, the quickest possible route is to simply jump on a fashionable sound. Shenseea recruits Megan Thee Stallion to make the very Megan Thee Stallion-like single “Lick.” Thankfully, it’s very good: With sparse electronic elements and extremely explicit lyrics, “Lick” is an obvious sister of “WAP.” Less impressive is “R U That,” where 21 Savage’s haunted-ship-through-the-fog vocals make an odd choice for the role of Shenseea’s would-be romantic beau. And the album is inexplicably bookended by unimpressive guest spots from Tyga. Closer “Blessed” was first released in 2019, but if Shenseea wanted to include tracks from her vast archives, she certainly had more exciting options.
Then there’s “Hangover,” which compares a doomed relationship to the knowledge that a night of drinking is going to leave you with a sore head. This concept, as well as the chipped acoustic guitar chords that don’t really go anywhere, might have been better left unheard. Most experiments do succeed, though, like the trippy ratchet-pop of “Bouncy,” featuring Offset. “Body Count,” produced by Scott Storch and Illa, features moody, ’80s-style synths that draw out Shenseea’s smokiest performance. And she’s an effective vocalist, switching from rapping to singing—or finding a pocket somewhere between the two—with confidence and control. Over the rocksteady-style guitar of “Lying If I Call It Love,” Shenseea summarizes an ongoing fling with enjoyable brevity: “Him fuck me confident/But I’m proceeding with caution.” Her vocal assuredness allows her to carry a risqué bar like “My pum-pum the tightest/My pum-pum-boom-boom-boom” without flinching.
A high point comes on “Deserve It,” a svelte love song that works off a plucked string loop that recalls ’00s UK garage and a syrupy vocal reminiscent of Christina Milian or Mýa. “You make me feel so welcome/And you so damn handsome,” Shenseea sings softly in a more region-neutral style. It’s far removed from Shenseea, the blistering dancehall phenom—but Shenseea, the rising pop star, made the commercially minded album she needed. Once its cycle is complete, more interesting terrain may lie further from the demands of the industry.


The instrumental duo go all-in on the possibilities of their raw steel-string chemistry, publishing an unplanned session straight to wax.

The Storm Sessions

Many inspired albums rise from the ashes of foiled life plans. Elkhorn’s sixth LP in five years is the rare example of the album that rose from the ashes of “plans tonight”: On the evening of an important gig opportunity, the instrumental duo of 12-string acoustic player Jesse Sheppard and electric guitarist Drew Gardner, along with collaborator Turner Williams Jr., found themselves snowed in and unable to make it to the venue. Rather than let their creative energy go to waste, the three set up shop in Gardner’s Harlem home studio, pressed record, and channeled the forces of weather into two side-length jams, hoping to salvage something. By the end of the night, they had The Storm Sessions.
It’s important to know The Storm Sessions is an improvised album before hearing it—even coming from a band that’s always leaned heavily on improvisation. It contextualizes its shortcomings, and in a way, it’s the most Elkhorn thing Sheppard and Gardner could do (besides organizing an American primitive guitar festival in John Fahey’s hometown): going all-in on the possibilities of their raw steel-string chemistry to the point of publishing an unplanned session straight to wax. Both halves of the album, “Electric One” and “Electric Two,” run a little over 20 minutes and are divided into three parts each. They add up to a pair of space-out marathons that don’t wind as much as they loiter on the same chord and notes for several minutes at a time, like they’re waiting to pounce on prey that never really appears. Sheppard’s 12-string is the anchor; he wields his lowest strings like a giant staff, striking them sparingly and deliberately as if they could vibrate the earth beneath his feet. Gardner plays above and more freely, while Turner is the wildcard third wheel, adding jagged texture with his electric bouzouki and his shahi baaja, an electrified Indian zither.
Their crescendos don’t always feel earned. The final surge of “Electric One (Part C),” for example, takes almost 20 minutes to set up, but the rise is awkward, like a live studio audience responding to the “applause” sign. When it lands, it lands well: Gardner and Turner’s crackling noise envelops them and flutters onto the tender ground of Sheppard’s acoustic like a thick, windless snowfall. It’s really nice; it just doesn’t justify the journey of a full LP side to get there. The predictability and sheer length of these routes mean The Storm Sessions works best for passive listening—not the kind of qualified compliment to which bands generally aspire, but one with plenty of value nonetheless.
Hearing The Storm Sessions repeatedly bump up against these limitations might tempt you to throw on a different expeditionary steel-string album with the benefit of plotting and execution—like Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing, a masterclass in both building a scenic journey and setting trap doors. Or, for that matter, another Elkhorn record: Their double album from last year, Sun Cycle / Elk Jam, was their first to prominently feature drumming (with beautiful results), and there’s a surprising amount of contrast between those records and this one. There, Elkhorn hired someone to keep time; here, they’re less concerned. The Storm Sessions’ improvisation has the spirit of adventure, but the album winds up feeling stuck at home.

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The younger brother of YNW Melly is only 12 years old, and his debut is sure to have middle school dances on smash.

BABY GOAT

YNW BSlime spent his middle school vacation playing Fortnite until his older brother, Florida rapper YNW Melly, told him that if he didn’t leave the house and come hang out at the studio, he was taking back his credit card so he couldn’t buy V-Bucks, the in-game Fortnite currency. BSlime gave in and reluctantly accompanied Melly to New Era studios in South Florida. There he was pushed by his brother to go in the booth and spit a freestyle and to BSlime’s surprise, everyone loved it.
In February, YNW Melly was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Police in the city of Miramar, Florida claimed that Melly shot and killed two members of his YNW crew. (Melly plead not guilty and prosecutors are currently seeking the death penalty.) After his arrest Melly’s music grew; his single, the eerily prescient “Murder on my Mind,” originally released in 2017, peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since gone multi-platinum. Then, in July, as his YouTube account crossed two million subscribers, “Slime Dreams,” the debut music video of his 12-year-old younger brother YNW BSlime, was uploaded to his channel.
Even before his arrest, YNW Melly’s sing-songy rap was breaking through on SoundCloud, YouTube, and in Florida—Kanye West appeared on his January 2019 single “Mixed Personalities.” His piano-heavy ballads sounded like he was performing warm-hearted odes to his first love, but typically they were twisted and heavily detailed stories about murder, death, home invasions, pain, and jail. As a singer, YNW BSlime’s vocals were similar; you could tell he grew up on Young Thug like his brother. But instead of Melly’s rough edge, BSlime’s raps are brighter, like he sings hopped up on Honey Buns and dollar cans of Arizona iced tea.
On BABY GOAT, the debut of YNW BSlime, the preteen sounds a lot like what would have happened if a My World-era Justin Bieber got to experience the pessimistic lovesickness of Juice WRLD. As far as rappers too young to drive go, BSlime is pretty gifted; he has syrupy vocals and he doesn’t rely on shock (See: Matt Ox and Bouba Savage). His love ballads can be mature, but not uncomfortably mature. “Is this love that I’m feeling? I think I’m losin’ my mind/I need you right now, I’ll give you all my time,” he sings on the charming intro “Like That.” Though it’s less about his lyrics, which are what you would expect from a 12-year-old, and more about the whistle high range that can hang with hip-hop’s sing-rap elite.
But BSlime isn’t breaking any new ground. “Just Want You” falls too far down the sappy Kidz Bop lane. On “Wipe Your Eyes,” he deviates from his usual sunny vocals for a grating, Lil Keed-like high-pitched screech over a pedestrian acoustic guitar. “Nobody Else” has a bouncy R&B rhythm and fingersnaps that will have middle school dances on smash, though I have trouble getting past BSlime flirting like someone who has clearly never flirted before. He’s at his best on BABY GOAT when he’s writing mildly angsty coming-of-age pop singles like “Slime Emotions” or when he’s by the side of his brother on “Dying For You.”
Next to Melly, it’s clear that BSlime needs more experience. Their lyrics aren’t that much different, but Melly’s very troubling emotions elevate his writing. BSlime, on the other hand, is harmless. He’ll keep you engaged for two and a half minutes with that glossy singing voice, but after 13 songs you realize he could have held back on some of the melodramatic romance. That should change as he gets older. In the meantime YNW BSlime is still the little brother of YNW Melly that happens to sing—at least now he can run up those video game charges freely.


The stalwart and defiantly odd Nashville band Lambchop's latest reinvention finds them embracing a Vocoder-drenched, largely electronic sound. It is as lush and gorgeous as any of their past work.

FLOTUS

Over the course of Lambchop’s two decade-plus career, they have been remarkably consistent. Even with their various lineup shifts, there have never been any tumultuous breakups, no big reunions, no major controversies. Any of their 12 studio releases could reasonably be your favorite. But while each of their albums sound unmistakably like Lambchop, no two of them sound quite alike; from the bouncy alt-country of Thriller, to the stark lounge folk of Is a Woman, through the sweetly orchestrated ballads of their last album, 2012’s excellent Mr. M. As a frontman, Kurt Wagner—with his inimitable baritone, like an agoraphobic Bill Callahan—has also shifted and stretched in his own quiet way. Sometimes he’ll greet you with a pre-coffee grumble; other times, he’s singing in the shower with a wispy falsetto. Like any good leading man, Wagner redefines himself for the role he’s playing, but he never lets you forget that he’s in control.
So while FLOTUS, the band’s Vocoder-drenched, largely electronic new album, might initially feel like a shock, the reinvention is not entirely unprecedented. Last year saw the release of The Diet, an album by Lambchop side project HeCTA– featuring Wagner, as well as drummer Scott Martin and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Norris– that found Wagner singing his characteristic melodies over dance beats and au-courant synths (“You shouldn’t have to change a thing, except your mind,” he sang in the album’s highlight). Those ideas come into full bloom throughout the nearly-70 minute FLOTUS, though it’s less tentative and more seamless, with even Wagner’s vocals sounding like an instrument in the mix (this is not merely Lambchopped and Screwed). Like Bon Iver on 22, A Million, Lambchop exist here as a modern Americana act refusing their genre’s assumed aesthetics. But unlike the post-Yeezus cacophony of 22, A Million, FLOTUS is as lush and gorgeous as any of Lambchop’s past work, sometimes floating by with the luxurious chill of hotel lobby music, but never losing its sense of direction.
With the majority of the album eschewing traditional song structure, the most immediate way to listen to FLOTUS is as a bridge between its twin epics: the opening “In Care of 8675309” and its closer, “The Hustle.” In Lambchop’s lineage of long, slow-burning album openers, “8675309” is their longest and their slowest-burning. It also serves as a smooth gateway into the band’s new sound, with Wagner’s heavily effected vocals–like the church organ setting on a cheap keyboard with the speakers muffled–rising from tentative opening notes to full-blown crooning by the end, accompanying one of the album’s best melodies. Wagner has cited both Kendrick Lamar and Shabazz Palaces as inspirations for his new direction, but a more fitting reference here might be Future, whose use of Auto-Tune is less ornamental and more foundational to his very cadence and word choice. As such, “8675309” is not merely a great Lambchop song with a weird vocal effect; it’s a great Lambchop song because of the weird vocal effect.
“The Hustle,” on the other hand, arrives at the end of the record devoid of any vocal effects. Hearing Wagner’s untreated voice by that point makes it sound even more powerful and vulnerable. “I don’t want to leave you ever,” he opens, his voice warbling and reverberating all on its own, “And that’s a long, long time.” Over the course of its jazzy, stuttering 18 minutes, the song slides between movements, like Destroyer’s similar tour-de-force “Bay of Pigs,” before closing with the faint sound of piano. “It was raining like a movie/And it was hard to look away,” Wagner sings, a fitting metaphor for how captivating and uncanny but wholly natural the song feels.
While none of the other tracks on the album are as immediate as “8675309” or as stunning as “The Hustle,” they each reveal their charms on repeated listens. The ones that focus on simple, repeated phrases–like “You are very remarkable” in “NIV” or “Take it on the chin” in “Directions to the Can”–become catchy in an effortless way. The less vocal-focused songs function as opportunities to appreciate the other members of the band. Tony Crow’s piano in “Howe” is as lyrical as any of Wagner’s appearances, and Matt Swanson’s bass in “Old Masters” slithers with soulful charisma. Every part of the record speaks to the greater whole, from the album cover (a close-up shot of Wagner’s wife, Mary Mancini, the Chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party posing with Obama), to the title: both an acronym for “First Lady of the US” and, according to the liner notes, “For Love Often Turns Us Still,” a meditation on how simple things still render us speechless. “Given enough time, I can pretty much draw a correlation between any separate objects,” Wagner has said. The disparate pieces of this album play to that strength, unfolding like a long riddle.
It’s to the band’s credit that FLOTUS exceeds its novelty. In a year when Springsteen, Bowie, and the creator of a hit Broadway musical have all cited Kendrick Lamar’s music as an inspiration, FLOTUS does not come entirely out of left field; it’s a solid, satisfying listen, devoid of context. Wagner’s lyrics are as cutting as ever (“See the flowers wilt/From the government they built/As the hammers wail/On a ship that hasn’t sailed”) and the band already sounds comfortable with their new sound, settling into a weightless groove that make you feel as if they’ve played this way forever. It’s one of Lambchop’s greatest strengths, that even when they’re overtly experimenting, they wear it as naturally as the garish pearls that have adorned their stage attire. “There’s that old saying about an artist having only one or two good ideas in his life and is doomed to repeat them,” Wagner recently said in an interview. “I reject that notion. I think I have maybe five.” What’s clear after listening to FLOTUS, is that he’s only getting started.


Confronting the climate crisis and the prospect of humankind’s demise, the veteran experimental musician takes an unconventional approach: He gets in touch with his feelings.

ForeverAndEverNoMore

Brian Eno is known for many things: pioneering ambient music, famous collaborators, the creative embrace of chance, a sly sense of humor, his love of cats. But you wouldn’t describe him as particularly extroverted or sentimental. He’s not, as some might say, “sad boy emo.” So it’s a little unexpected that his new album, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, arrives with an accompanying 375-word statement in which he uses the word “feelings” 13 times. “It took me a long time to embrace the idea that we artists are actually feelings-merchants,” Eno writes, presumably in earnest. “Art is where we start to become acquainted with those feelings, where we notice them and learn from them—learn what we like and don’t like—and from there they start to turn into actionable thoughts.”
What has made Eno suddenly so in touch with his inner child? Oh, just the dying planet and the prospect of humankind’s demise. “I’ve been thinking about our narrowing, precarious future, and this music grew out of those thoughts. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’ve been feeling about it…and the music grew out of the feelings”—bold text Eno’s. Underpinning FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is a theory, one you have to admire for its sheer lack of cynicism: By redirecting our emotional impulses toward the planet and away from ourselves, we’ll have a greater chance of reversing the Earth’s environmental trajectory.
This suggestion is so uncharacteristically hippie-dippie that I feared Eno might, at best, create a patchwork of nature sounds along the lines of Irv Teibel’s Environments series or, at worst, cover “Big Yellow Taxi.” But what’s curious about FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is how little warmth or whimsy the music exudes. In 1975, on his most treasured vocal-based album, Another Green World, Eno created “pop” songs and sound pieces that obliquely imagined the world’s various topographies and ecologies. Almost 50 years later, he’s explicitly addressing the Earth, but he’s producing the sonic equivalent of an icy tundra.
FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE has been touted as Eno’s first primarily vocal-based LP since 2005’s Another Day on Earth, but that’s a little misleading. The singing isn’t straightforwardly melodic; it’s just one more textural layer in smoothly reverberating sound design that’s full of arcing synth notes, periodic pings and chimes, and shimmering background tones. There’s no percussion, no major chords, and no choruses or bridges. Typically, Eno will lay out verses in threes, slightly altering the lyrics each time, like Jewish prayers or dissolving mantras. On opening track “Who Gives a Thought,” for example, he recites the title at the start of each verse to ask rhetorical questions about fireflies, nematodes (an invertebrate otherwise known as a roundworm), and laborers. The implication throughout is that the vocal melodies and lyrics are meant to induce a meditative state, but the arrangements are so mercurial—slight effects intervene suddenly and randomly—that anything approaching zen is impossible.
As glossily stark as the album might be, the music isn’t entirely grim. Some of it is plainly gorgeous. Even when he’s intoning apocalyptic imagery on “There Were Bells” (“There were those who ran away/There were those who had to stay/In the end they all went the same way”), Eno fills the background with chirping birdsong. The very next track, “Sherry,” has a melody structured like one of longtime Eno collaborator Robert Wyatt’s, gently curling around a Rhodes-like keyboard, starry guitar licks, and a distant vocal patch that recalls Aphex Twin’s “#1” on Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. Incidentally, Eno wields that vocal effect most remarkably on one of the album’s two wordless songs. On closer “Making Gardens Out of Silence,” initially composed for an exhibit at London’s Serpentine gallery, eight and a half minutes of undulating synths, strings, and sustained vocal tones bear the otherworldly, transportive qualities of Eno’s Apollo or his Ambient series.
Eno once again has collaborated with Leo Abrahams, Peter Chilvers, and Jon Hopkins, three people he’s consistently worked with in various configurations over the past 15 years. At times you can parse their contributions immediately: Abrahams’ shimmering guitar textures, Chilvers’ Bloom-like sound effects, and Hopkins’ seismic synth-bass rips. These are all skilled musicians with unique perspectives, but their involvement is the album’s one drawback. As an artist, Eno is famous for his sonic “treatments'' and for his willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory, but for all of the record’s virtues, it’s a little too treated, a little too familiar; at times it verges on being a little too antiseptic. Eno’s written statement and the gravity of the subject indicate a grand departure, but FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE feels nonetheless like a continuation of his work since the mid to late 2000s.
Speaking of the 2000s, when I listen to FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, I’m reminded of David Sylvian’s 2003 album Blemish, which similarly used wintry electronic music and off-target singing to evoke devastation, though in that case it concerned the dissolution of a relationship. Crucially, Sylvian offset his blistering laptop electronica with Derek Bailey’s fractured, improvised acoustic guitar, giving Blemish a distinct tension. But what they both have in common is a pronounced sense of intimacy, and in Eno’s case a familial one—his niece Cecily appears as a vocalist, and his granddaughter’s handwriting features prominently in the video for the song “We Let It In.” It’s exactly the kind of unconventional thinking people have come to expect from Eno: an album about something vast and daunting, made with and for the people closest to you.


Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz is a free 23-track album—written and recorded outside the governance of Miley Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members. It is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.

Miley Cyrus: Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz

Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz

Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz dropped from the sky to cap off last weekend’s Cyrus-hosted VMA Awards like so much phallically-deployed glitter. The free 23-track album, written and recorded outside the governance of Cyrus' label and co-produced in large part by Wayne Coyne and other Flaming Lips members, appeared on Sunday accompanied by a New York Times interview where Cyrus detailed its making. In it, she recalls being told by her team that the album was too long. She proceeded to add "Miley Tibetan Bowlzzz", as an impetuous reminder that Cyrus plays by no one’s rules but her own. That pretty much says it all: Dead Petz is the definition of a vanity project, an indulgent collection of experiments that exist for no other reason than because they can.
It would be hard to imagine Cyrus and Coyne’s talents combining to worse results: there’s nothing here as pleasant as her appearances on the Flaming Lips’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover album last year, nor are these collaborations audacious enough to fail in exciting ways. Mostly they are tossed-off Diet Yoshimi detritus, the kind of music these guys can fart out in their sleep. There are bright spots, many of them via former mentor Mike WiLL Made It’s handful of productions. But on the whole Dead Petz is a borderline unlistenable slog through dorm-room poncho bullshit and blissfully ignorant acid koans ("Can’t you see, all the clouds are dying?"), delivered earnestly from an ex-child star seemingly unaware of how fundamentally inseparable her own privilege is from her "do whatever the fuck you want all of the time" ethos, and enabled by a 54 year old who should know better.
Take "Dooo It!", the album's single of sorts. There's a lot going on in the track—weed, flying saucers, queries about the origins of the moon—but the part I keep coming back to is Cyrus proclaiming, "Peace, motherfuckerz! Do it!" Far be it for me to dash the idealistic, psilocybin-fueled dreams of a 22-year-old multi-millionaire whose emancipatory phase has swerved from ratchet-lite twerk ambassador to proudly pansexual LGBTQ advocate and Wayne Coyne bestie: she’s figuring it out, as 22-year olds do, though rarely from such a precipitous platform. But still: "Do it!" As if it were just that simple.
But that’s why having an editor is important, and why "No parents! No rules!" is almost always better as a slogan than as a creative mode. "Self-control is not something I am working on," Cyrus trills on Mike WiLL cut "Slab of Butter (Scorpion)", and while she seems to be having a blast, we are left with the utterly pointless witch-house skid mark "Fuckin Fucked Up" (not to be confused with "I’m So Drunk"), and "BB Talk", a rambling monologue that wastes one of the album’s few salvageable hooks. "1 Sun"  namedrops Grace Jones alongside tuneless invocations to "Wake up, world! Can’t you see the earth is crying?" There is a twee piano ballad about a dead blowfish friend, who her human friends eat at sushi dinner. The circle of life, man. (She fake-cries at the end.)
Presumably, Cyrus will look back on all this and laugh, having learned something about herself and about making art, and move on, as she seems to have done with 2013’s Bangerz. And there are moments of promise here—most often, when Coyne backs off a bit. She’s much better at love songs than drug songs. "Space Boots" streamlines the album’s cosmic vibes into an electro pulse somewhere between Kavinsky and Rilo Kiley, with sweet, direct lyrics that pierce through the fog of bullshit: "I get so high cause you’re not here smokin’ my weed/ And I get so bored/ Cause you’re not here to make me laugh." Best of all is "Lighter", a stunning, '80s-nodding Mike WiLL ballad that poignantly redeems the general "whoa, dude" vibes: "We never get to see ourselves sleeping peacefully next to the ones that we love," she sings. It’s genuinely moving.
Cyrus returns to idealized depictions of sleep and dreams often here, and given how hyper-regimented most of her life must have been, her attraction to relinquishing control to drugs or the subconscious makes sense. But for all the Instagram nudes and real talk about gender and sexuality in the press, very little of Dead Petz reveals much about Cyrus beyond the bacchanalia and non-sequiturs. I can’t shake the sense that Dead Petz exists more as a glorified VMA party favor than as a work that can stand on its own.
Speaking of: the biggest irony of Cyrus’ clash with Nicki Minaj is that if Cyrus were to pay closer attention, she might recognize Minaj as a trailblazer for the career path she's trying to take—a massively famous woman who does things the "wrong" way, pisses a lot of people off in the process, and refuses to give a fuck. As far as surrealist pop albums this decade, it doesn’t get much ballsier than Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded. But the stakes there were huge, and there is literally nothing at stake for Cyrus here. In a way, Dead Petz is a fascinating milemarker of pop music in the post-album, post-Internet era: a major pop album that lands with a splash, then sinks like a brick, as ephemeral as the Tumblr culture Cyrus draws from. Maybe that’s the most visionary aspect of Dead Petz: it feels like it was built to disintegrate.


Prefuse 73 aims to recapture some of the goodwill squandered since the next-Shadow heights of his 2003 LP One Word Extinguisher and its companion piece, Extinguished: Outtakes, and he manages to do so thanks to a bonus disc.

Preparations / Interregnums

Guillermo Scott Herren's many aliases-- Prefuse 73, Savath & Savalas, Delarosa and Asora, Piano Overlord to name a few-- make it easier for him to organize wav files on his laptop but, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the self-imposed categorisations could be holding him back. Now, when he releases a Prefuse 73 record, it's supposed to sound like a Prefuse 73 record-- blips, bleeps, bap, mood, and a couple of friends offering rhymes and/or production flourishes. In a way, the multiple monikers make Herren a slave to expectation. Such is his plight, from the next-Shadow heights of 2003's One Word Extinguisher and Extinguished: Outtakes to the overcrowded mainstream-baiting blunder Surrounded by Silence to the automatically forgotten pseudo album Security Screenings, the producer has largely squandered his Extinguisher love with a series of missteps and diminished retreads. I was ready to deem the numbingly characteristic Preparations another so-so step in the same direction, but then I listened to the album's "bonus disc," Interregnums, which isn't a Prefuse album (or a Savath album or a Delarosa album...) and is all the better for it.
First thing: Interregnums (def: a gap in continuity) is a bonus in the sense that it's an unexpected benefit, but it is not a bonus in the sense that it's a shameless collection of unworthy ephemera used to sucker loyal fans. In fact, Interregnums is six minutes longer than Preparations. The disc finds Herren in full-on composer mode as its 15 lush suites do away with all the flashy cut-and-paste sampling theatrics, leaving us with a grandiose version the unavoidable melancholy that permeates most of his best material. It's Gil Evans' cool crossed with John Williams' sentimentality and the tortured soul of Endtroducing... and it's a welcome surprise.
Interregnums' swelling orchestrations were apparently borne out of the string-laden pieces originally prepared for Preparations. But while they're buried underneath the typical micro-programming and airy organs on that album, Interregnums fleshes them out into flowery instrumental ballads anachronistic in their sweet sadness. For all his break beat panache, Herren has always marked his Prefuse albums with considerable bleeding heartbreak (see: emo-glitchers like the unmistakably overcast "Storm Returns" off Extinguisher or Surrounded's stop-start hip-hop lament "Now You're Leaving").
On Interregnums, such wrenching sensations are exposed, embellished, and expanded upon. "The Last" throbs quietly like a leftover instrumental from Björk's insular masterpiece Vespertine. Meanwhile, "Let It Ring Ensembles" utilizes a saintly choir and emergency broadcast bleats to recall Sigur Rós trapped between earth-ending crescendos. Herren tracks his tears with lavish silent movie strings that all but write their own screenplay-- "Thorough Light" sweeps with star-gazed longing and the near-seven minute "Spacious and Dissonant Part 2" applies the same Prefuse-style ADD beat making technique to grand emotionalism, swinging from playful to eerie to depressive like so many French art films. With its overt melodrama, the disc can occasionally fall into soap opera-soundtrack territory but, more often than not, its luxurious textures aptly convey its desires.
Oh yeah, the actual new Prefuse 73 album called Preparations. Starting things off with a 31-second intro featuring diced vox and a queasy, uncertain atmosphere, Herren could be forcing a comparison to the similarly ignited Extinguisher. But instead of segueing into a blistering kiss-off like "The End of Biters - International", we get "Beaten Thursdays", a Prefuse-by-numbers groove that bumps along inoffensively before petering out. While there's nothing outright embarrassing on Preparations-- no mismatched collaborations or fast-forward-itching Beans guest shots-- there's little that holds up aside Herren's most accomplished work. Gone is the humor and anger that sometimes livened the Extinguished discs, replaced with a relentless mid-tempo ambivalence. "I Knew You Were Gonna Go" hints at something deeper than a shoulder shrug with its see-saw lilt and closing vocal sample of a bygone version of Jimmy Webb's "Do What You Gotta Do", and "Smoking Red" takes decent advantage of the talents of indie rock's most furious drummer, Battles' John Stanier, but they're exceptions. Even at 46 minutes, Preparations is wearying; it's the same Prefuse tricks once more, with less feeling.
If Herren had integrated the Prefuse qua Prefuse Preparations with the riskier, more rewarding Interregnums, he would've ended up with a double-album hodge-podge not unlike label mate Aphex Twin's fascinatingly bipolar Drukqs. As is, though, Interregnums will be considered the lesser disc due to its unfortunate "bonus" status, which is a shame because it trumps its predictable sister CD in almost every way imaginable. In a Pitchfork news interview from earlier this year, Herren hypothesized about his upcoming release: "I feel like half the kids that buy it are just going to throw [Interregnums] away and keep [Preparations]." He should be emboldened to know it might just end up the other way around.


The soundtrack for William Friedkin's controversial and problematic 1980 thriller features a stunning array of hardcore punk and hard funk, including rare songs by the Germs.

Cruising OST

The music on the Cruising soundtrack would not have been found on the jukeboxes at the Mineshaft, the Anvil, Ramrod, or any of the other New York leather bars where much of William Friedkin’s 1980 thriller is set. In the liner notes for this elaborate vinyl reissue by Waxwork Records, the director notes that most nights these bars would have reverberated with pop and disco: “The music in the Mineshaft was the same in all the dance clubs, gay and straight: Disco—Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, the Delfonics, the Village People, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Jacksons, the Pointer Sisters. That is what was playing in the club scenes when we started filming in the summer of 1979 but I didn’t think it fit the mood of the film so I decided to replace it.”
What he used instead was tough, taut hardcore punk and hard funk by acts like Willy Deville, the Cripples, Mutiny, and the Germs. Friedkin’s decision makes a certain kind of narrative sense, as Cruising follows a straight cop (played with deer-in-headlights intensity by Al Pacino) who goes undercover in New York’s post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS gay community. For the kind of story that involves catching a killer—or possibly multiple killers—KC and the Sunshine Band might have sounded too welcoming. But DeVille’s sinewy blues-rock grooves and the Germs’ smeary attack helped establish the fetid atmosphere of dread and danger the film was gunning for.
And that’s what made the film so controversial even before its release. Gay rights activists objected to its depiction of the leather-bar scene as violent and depraved, and Village Voice writer Arthur Bell (who penned a series of articles that partly inspired the script) called it “the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen.” Protestors sabotaged shots, blowing whistles during filming and unplugging lighting cables. Cruising was a flop upon release, but it’s one of those films that has enjoyed a long and curious afterlife, constantly reconsidered and reinterpreted, as hailed today as it is reviled for its depiction of this particular subculture.
The Cruising soundtrack lives just outside that ongoing debate, partly because the music is so completely incongruous with the film’s milieu and partly because on its own, it is a pretty kickass punk album. Friedkin worked with producer Jack Nitzsche to corral a bicoastal roster of acts, only a few of which survived beyond this project. Together, they create a mood of constant antagonism: “In the heat of the moment, don’t you forget all the things we haven’t done yet,” DeVille sings on opener “Heat of the Moment.” It’s hard to tell if he’s talking about fucking or fighting, such is the relentlessness of the band’s groove. On the Cripples’ “Loneliness,” frontman and disabled rights activist Shawn Casey O’Brien, who had cerebral palsy and took the stage on crutches, barks and brays like he’s trying to parody blues-rock machismo, and Madelynn Von Ritz makes the most of her androgynous snarl on the swaggering glam-swamp stomp “When I Close My Eyes I See Blood.”
“Lump” is the most obviously danceable track here, but it’s not as light as the pop and disco on the Mineshaft jukebox. A bouncy funk number by Mutiny, a short-lived group headed by former Parliament-Funkadelic drummer Jerome Brailey, the song has a claustrophobic, even frantic edge. This expanded version of Cruising shows not only how versatile Mutiny could be, but how well punk and funk and even avant-garde jazz meshed. Nitzsche’s collaborations with Mutiny bassist Barre Phillips and guitarist Ralph Towner were omitted from the original soundtrack release, but “A-I-A” sounds like the ghost of New York’s long-gone bohemias, Phillips’ bassline veering from springy to hypnotic to menacing to mournful. It’s a full movie in just under ten minutes.
And then there are the Germs. What has made the soundtrack such a fascination for punk fans is the legendary but little-heard cache of songs the band recorded with Nitzsche just after the release of their debut, GI. The sessions were legendarily fraught, with frontman Darby Crash struggling to write new songs; some have argued that the pressure drove him deeper into the drugs that would later kill him. Similarly, the band found the producer difficult to work with and dismissive of punk in general, so they were never quite happy with the results. Those songs appeared in very rough form on the 1993 anthology MIA, but this is the first time they’ve been properly mastered for a vinyl release. Any hesitation on the part of Crash or the other Germs is not evident in songs like “My Tunnel” and “Going Down,” which sustain the attack the band launched on GI. Best of all is the caustically catchy “Not Alright,” which reveals the wit and imagination in their music: Crash stretches out the melody uncomfortably, repeating phrases desperately, while Pat Smear plays his guitar like he’s shoveling dirt into a shallow grave.
If those five songs—all sequenced together on one of six sides—sound like the Germs’ mythic second album, then this whole reissue plays like an alternate history of punk rock, one where the Canadian proto-queercore band Rough Trade exerts immense influence and the Cripples’ O’Brien takes his place as the scene’s poet laureate. In the film the leather-bar scene doesn’t gain much from punk, but on the soundtrack punk gains a lot from its proximity to leather: Especially after the heteronormalizing influence of MTV-era pop-punk in the ‘90s and well into the 2000s, it’s good to be reminded that it was once a safe haven for the misfits and outcasts who flocked to big cities seeking like-minded communities and creating their own scenes. Cruising gives a megaphone to artists whose voices were often squelched in mainstream rock and certainly in mainstream filmmaking.