The Los Angeles rapper’s latest career move is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album that suffers from an almost total lack of imagination.

Kyoto

Tyga is preposterous. He’s a platonic doofus, a happy-go-lucky heel, and a distillation of Los Angeles’ most garish impulses. The canary-yellow Lamborghini shrieking through red lights on Sunset Boulevard? That’s Tyga. A pseudo-pensive pose on the glass-ringed balcony of a rented Hollywood Hills mansion, Instagram captioned: “it took alot of grindin to get here”? That’s Tyga. The guy in a gold backwards cap getting served legal papers at an L.A. Gear event? That, quite literally, is Tyga.
It’s appropriate, then, that his latest career move is a preposterous one. Kyoto is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album by a rapper previously best known for unsubtle lyrics about his unyielding acquisitiveness—he gets laid, gets money, and gets high. Why the sudden change in tack? “The last five years of my life has been a lot of me in the media because of my relationships,” he recently told Billboard, presumably referring to his time with Blac Chyna and a youthful Kylie Jenner. “I can’t even go to the movies with a girl anymore. It’s a gift and a curse. I really wanted to step in front of the narrative and create my own story.”
After 52 minutes of Kyoto, it remains unclear what that story is. Instead of addressing the alienating nature of celebrity, or the motivations for his romantic choices, or the past (and maybe necessary) falsity of his public persona, Tyga mostly opts for bad puns and shallow platitudes. On “Temperature,” a dancehall-style dud that recalls “1 of 1” from—sigh, deep breath—Bitch I’m The Shit 2, he intones in a half-assed patois, “I lost my watch and I still found time.” Or, on “Hard2Look” (more like “Hard2ListenTo,” amiright?), he sings, “I know this bustdown Patek won’t switch sides/I know this Lambo won’t switch sides/I know my true fans won’t switch sides.” Or, worse, on the hazy “King of the Jungle,” he admits, “I’ve been unfaithful/I’ve been lyin’ like the king of the jungle.”
More obvious than its spiritual emptiness is the album’s somnambulance. As is de rigueur in contemporary R&B, Kyoto tries to pass off silken textures and washed-out vocal samples as sensual and vulnerable. But those sensual, vulnerable tones should, ideally, boil at some point into something with a burning immediacy. These songs don’t, and much of the album just sounds exhausted. These inert instrumentals don’t do Tyga any favors: He’s more of a melodic, vibing vocalist than an outright singer, and the sparseness only serves to highlight his limited range.
Eventually, the yawning void of imagination at the center of Kyoto becomes downright oppressive. The album is nearly an hour of rote box-checking: two dancehall songs—check (“Temperature” and “Holdin On”); an EDM-inspired club track—check (“Leather in The Rain”); near-scandalous revelations about another celebrity, in this case Kylie Jenner—check (“King of the Jungle”); an A-list guest verse—check (Gucci Mane mails it in on “Sip A Lil”). I’ve seen more daring artistic flourishes on the walls of gas station bathrooms.
Sadly, this album seems likely to generate a crossover hit or two. My predictions: “Temperature” is going to score the transfer of a communicable disease at a Las Vegas pool, and “Leather in the Rain” will ooze from tinny fitting-room speakers at fast fashion stores across the country. For a project with a sexualized cartoon cat-woman on the cover, recorded by an artist known for his horniness, the whole of Kyoto is, well, flaccid.


Unlike many of their 1990s alt-rock contemporaries, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan continue to push ahead musically without having to rely heavily on past triumphs-- a winning streak that continues with their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins.

Saturnalia

While so many other 1990s alt-rock acts are rehashing their hits on nostalgia package tours, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan have pushed ahead musically without having to rely heavily on past triumphs. Dulli continues his surprisingly tenacious Twilight Singers project, and Lanegan has released six fairly well-received solo albums, although he's better known for collaborating with Isobel Campbell and Queens of the Stone Age.
Dulli and Lanegan have spent most of the 2000s collaborating flirtatiously, touring and recording together-- check out Lanegan's vocals on the Twilight Singers' cover of "Flashback" by Fat Freddy's Drop, from their 2006 EP A Stitch in Time-- but Saturnalia is their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins, a partnership that Dulli describes as "the Satanic Everly Brothers." The "Satanic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" might be a little more apt: The album finds them bursting forth from their studio, guns blazing but no clean getaway in sight. Musically, Saturnalia, named after the Roman festival where slaves and masters switch roles, is a concentrated dose of their usual badassery, never straying too far from the territory Dulli explored on the last three Singers albums, and even includes many of the same collaborators: wayward troubadour Joseph Arthur, Mathias Schneeberger, Dave Rosser, Martina Topley-Bird, Queen of the Stone Age Troy Van Leeuwen, and New Orleans organist Quintron (who illuminates "Seven Stories Underground").
The project's sense of familiarity, however, is not a negative. "Each to Each" revisits the eerie electronica of the Twilight Singers' debut, a welcome compliment to Dulli's vocals courtesy of guitarist Jeff Klein and synth player Natasha Schneider. With its odd chorale intro and a string arrangement that shifts chords tectonically, "Idle Hands" builds to a chorus that could scale a skyscraper. Scavenging the gutter, though, Dulli and Lanegan come across some new flourishes. Discordant strings add tension to opener "The Stations", which marches along at a midtempo before Schneeberger's churchly organ raises it aloft. Before the Twins can build to the expected finale, the song simply fades out, redemption thwarted. "God's Children" settles into a Whigsy blaxpoitation mood before drummer Greg Wieczorek hammers out a soaring chorus. "Who Will Lead Us?" is part folk and part gospel, so subdued that the tension never releases but bubbles into "Seven Stories Underground".
With a billion cigarettes between them, the Twins are well matched vocally: Lanegan sings like he's rising from the dead, Dulli like he's falling from grace. Together, they can make a line like "We're gonna have some fun" sound utterly sinister, which lends these lecherously slow burners their peculiar gravity. Lanegan sings "All Misery / Flowers" like a Tom Waits song, his vocal delivery tripping against the song's rhythms as he conjures junkie afflictions: "Little girls might twitch at the way I itch, but the way I burn, it's a son of a bitch." Dulli closes the album with "Front Street", which begins, somewhat morbidly, with the chirping of birds. It's no joke, but a chiaroscuro contrast with the song's pitch subject. "People to use, lovers to break, handful of pills, no life to take," he sings, flirting with the masochist lover/confidence man he perfected 15 years ago on Gentlemen and seemed to abandon with the Twilight Singers.
It's no coincidence that Sub Pop is releasing Saturnalia: The label was home to both the Whigs and the Trees, as well as to Lanegan the solo artist. These songs plumb their persistent themes of sin and redemption, damnation and salvation, but in a way that sounds like they're taking stock of their own long and undeniably tough careers, in which disappointment, death, and drug addiction are public record. As such, the album possesses a gruesome attraction for fans of both musicians, who will hear it as a bloodletting, as well as for newcomers, who may hear it as a violent shoot-out-- Dulli and Lanegan against the world, their fates undecided. The Twins push each other to go darker and deeper, to bare more of their souls, so Saturnalia sounds heavier, bleaker, simultaneously more desperate and more content than anything either musician has done in years. As they both sing on "All Misery / Flowers, "I did all I did just to get through to heaven." Dulli and Lanegan haven't reached the Pearly Gates yet, but that's our good fortune.


Taken individually, the pieces on this album from the Los Angeles-based accordion player can be moving, but their similar construction yields transcendence and tedium in equal measure.

A Hole in the Fence

Nothing else Walt McClements has recorded sounds remotely like A Hole in the Fence. The Los Angeles based-accordion player previously spent his career floating around indie circles, playing in groups like Hurray for the Riff Raff and Weyes Blood and heading his own project Lonesome Leash. His pop songwriting is vanilla and earnest, and the focus on accordion as a focal point provides a passing resemblance to Beirut’s early records, but with traces of post-punk skitter and fewer literary ambitions. By contrast, A Hole in the Fence, his first record under his given name, is all shadow and abstraction, full of heaving drones and flickering specks of reedy treble that steadily fluctuate and churn. While the album’s five pieces for electronically processed accordion sound like tentative steps into the unknown by a composer just figuring out his strengths, McClements often channels feelings of genuine wonder into his layers of swirling, overtone-rich chords.
On A Hole in the Fence, McClements imbues stylistic templates established by ambient minimalists like Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, and Kali Malone with a distinctive emotional urgency. His accordion, when unadorned by reverb and delay, sighs openly, expressing a tender melancholy with each of its expansions and contractions. McClements has stated that the music is informed by complicated memories of the “somewhat hidden worlds I’ve travelled through my life, from underground music and punk communities to train hopping and gay cruising grounds,” risky spaces where those excluded from mainstream society are relegated to seek connection and release. Ruminative melodic fragments feel like maps through these secret locations, and beds of drone swaddle the listener in an atmosphere both beautiful and mysterious. As each piece inevitably crests, there’s a sense that he is insistently trying to communicate exactly how it feels to live on the edge.
McClements’ process of molding simple musical figures into dramatic arcs makes travelogues out of his compositions. On “Naked (a showing of scars)” a circular four-note theme is tentatively introduced, the breathy accordion appears closely-mic’d without processing, only to then be slowly augmented with tight harmonies before expanding into monolithic slabs of reverb-laden resonance. The piece unfolds entirely in relation to that theme’s chant-like rise and fall, growing in intensity like a lantern that gradually illuminates more and more of a spectacular underground chamber. By juxtaposing the intimate sounds of the accordion’s mechanics—the wheeze of its bellows and the light tap of fingers hitting keys—with heavily processed surges of bass or dense chords smeared with delay, McClements provides depth to each of the environments he leads us through.
As the album wears on, the predictability of these incremental reveals lessens their visceral impact. Though there are variations in pace and theme, each piece shares the structure of a bell curve: A tranquil, anticipatory exposition grows into a rapturous climax of pulsating tones ringing out into the void only to finally collapse in on itself, leaving the listener with flickering reflections of what they just experienced. There are no truly unexpected twists; the closest we get to a sharp left turn is when the bottom drops out of the brooding, drone-laden “Reckon (holding burning beams),” and even that song makes a parabolic return to its airy opening motif. Taken individually, the pieces on A Hole in the Fence can be deeply moving, even transcendent, but the voyage becomes tedious when each path is indistinguishable from the last.
McClements’ mastery of the accordion comes through in the expansive nature of how he wields it, by turns soft and vulnerable or dense and cerebral. And while the contours of each composition resemble one another, the feelings evoked can range from the wide-eyed awe contained in the ambiguously triumphant swells of “Thresholds (through a hole in the fence)” to the wistful nostalgia heard in the pensive rising chords of “Rinse (repeat repeat).” Slowly, purposefully, he lets us revel in the magnitude of these moments before they finally dissipate.
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On her second album as Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer is more conflicted, more manic—and more in love, too.

Plunge

“Of course we’re growing restless,” wrote the Knife in the manifesto that accompanied their last album, Shaking the Habitual. They cited “hyper-capitalism,” Monsanto, ecology, privilege; they imagined the pulse of a throbbing dancefloor rearranging clubbers’ very DNA. It was a vision of music as catalyst: They had few answers, but they knew that something—everything—needed to change. “This time it’s structural,” they wrote, more presciently than anyone could have realized at the time. This bar graph could be your life.
If Shaking the Habitual feels like a long time ago now—four whole years!—then 2009’s Fever Ray feels like another era entirely. But then Karin Dreijer and her brother Olof have never put much stock in pop music’s three-minute jolts, despite the early success of singles like “Heartbeats.” For all the left turns of their respective careers, they seem less interested in following the calculated steps of the typical album cycle than in the long sweep of a far more unruly trajectory. They set their clocks not by the Grammys calendar, but something more naturally unfolding—moss time, maybe, or ice-melt time. Seven years passed between the Knife’s Silent Shout and Shaking the Habitual; eight years mark the gap between Fever Ray and Plunge. In that time, Fever Ray’s music and character have settled in with a deep familiarity in ways that the Knife’s constantly shape-shifting identity—with its stylistic detours, its costume changes, its forays into opera and Charles Darwin and queer theory—has not. The Knife keep you on your toes, but Fever Ray has always felt like a port in a storm.
From the beginning, Dreijer’s solo music has carried a supernatural charge: Her pitch-shifted voice and chiming parallel fifths are enough to make the hairs on your arm stand on end, as though you had been visited by a ghost. The idea of Fever Ray as a kind of transcendental mood music was reinforced by the use of “If I Had a Heart,” the opening song from Dreijer’s 2009 solo debut, in the opening titles of the History Channel series “Vikings.” If anything, the choice of the song felt like cheating: No matter how striking the visuals, they paled beneath the song’s powerful sway. More than merely atmospheric, Dreijer’s vivid sonics and imagistic lyrics tend to conjure entire worlds: Hit “play” and be instantly transported to a world of heavy skies, visiting magpies, velvet mites.
If the Knife’s evolution represents a gradual politicization, a shift from fantasy to praxis, the new Fever Ray is also political in a way Dreijer has not been before. She sings of “Free abortions/And clean water” on “This Country,” a grinding electro dirge at Plunge’s center; “Destroy nuclear/Destroy boring,” she cries, in one of those perfect couplets that go to the heart of her inimitably anarcho-Scandinavian perspective. (Fingers crossed that future Fever Ray merch includes T-shirts printed with those lyrics.) As she shrieks on “This Country,” “Every time we fuck we win/This house makes it hard to fuck/This country makes it hard to fuck!”
There is a fair amount of fucking on Plunge, which might come as a surprise. Where Fever Ray was largely about motherhood and the search for self—ideas she refracted through the lens of elemental forces, animism, images of fur and fire and snow—Plunge focuses all of its energies on love and desire, with a striking candor. Heads turned when, on the album’s early single “To the Moon and Back,” she shouted, “I want to run my fingers up your pussy!” When had Dreijer ever been this direct, this libidinous, this scandalous? And when, at least since “Heartbeats,” had she made anything that sounded quite as sweet or as perky, even cloying, as “To the Moon and Back”’s major-key arpeggios, Latin freestyle bassline, and delirious sing-song vocals?
But that song’s chipper tones turn out to have been a head-fake—an outlier in tone and mood on an album far noisier and more hot-blooded than Dreijer’s previous solo work. Plunge feels much more manic, more conflicted, than her debut. If Fever Ray was distinguished by its penumbral chill, this album puts the heat and light back into her alias: the fever, the radiance, the beams emanating from red-ringed eyes.
It’s not a total departure: Her electronic soundscapes are often soft and full of mystery, suggesting cobwebs glistening in the moonlight, and she has retained many hallmarks of her sound. She sends her synthesizer queasily pitching and reeling, and she favors synth patches that straddle the “real” and the artificial, like the wheezing pan pipes of “Mustn’t Hurry” or the faux vibraphones and woodpecker bursts of “To the Moon and Back.” Her ubiquitous perfect fifths, with their bold, unresolving tones, generate a kind of force field—a zone of life-giving vibration. It is hard not to feel invincible while Fever Ray is playing.
Which is good, because Plunge is riskier than anything she has made before. It is sometimes harsh, often dissonant, frequently audacious. Her voice no longer hides behind the pitch-shifting it once did; here it is sharpened and pushed high in the mix, the better to emphasize her strange, elastic, playful diction—vowels stretched and twisted in unpredictable ways, consonants that slice like paper cuts. Her voice throws off sparks as it comes into contact with similarly tempered sounds: the cascading rave stabs of “Wanna Sip,” Sara Parkman’s see-sawing violin in “Red Trail,” a scraped echo of John Cale’s viola in the Velvet Underground. “Falling” rides a beat crafted from dial tones, alarm bells, and patches of reverb as slick and hard as black ice. “IDK About You,” the album’s most thrilling song, hurtles ahead atop a 150-BPM beat of rolling toms and shrieking cuíca; Dreijer’s distorted vocals sound like she may have recorded them on her phone. The track is a collaboration with Nídia, a 20-year-old Portuguese batida producer, and it’s the song that ventures the furthest from Dreijer’s own moody wheelhouse.
The desire that fuels Plunge is shot through with danger, and although she never quite spells it out, the specter of societal taboo looms around the corner of every kiss. “That old feeling of shame/She makes me feel dirty again,” Dreijer bellows in “Falling.” She sings of toxic habits, of painting in blood, of “perverts.” Sometimes she sidles right up to violence, looks it in the eye, and stares it leeringly down: “Gotta love my tracks/And swing an axe,” she taunts a potential lover, practically daring them to swipe left. But elsewhere, the meanness of the world presses in. “A Part of Us” imagines planting a garden, building a family, but the idyll is shadowed by menace: “What we are/Brings the wrong kind of attention out here,” she warns, at once vulnerable and coiled, spoiling for a fight, “One hand in yours and one hand in a tight fist.”
Like Shaking the Habitual, Plunge is also accompanied by a manifesto of sorts. It is often cryptic. “Listen!” Dreijer writes, in collaboration with the British artist Hannah Black: “Sex is work, love is work, work is sex, work is love, the magical conversion of ‘is’ given impossible power by its delivery in music.” This is the language of someone projecting matters of the heart through critical theory—the language of someone grappling deeply with the implications of desire. Her meditations on the relationship between subject and object, song and lover, are as complicated as her tangled, tumultuous electronics, her drawn-out snarls. But the text also helps to spell out some things: “The decision to fall is harder than the fall itself,” she writes, underlining that the plunge in question is falling in love. Further on, she specifies, “I’m looking for a girl who stands 10 feet tall and has teeth like razors… I’m looking for a girl to affirm my reality, or cancel it.”
It is not until the album’s closing song, the enveloping “Mama’s Hand,” that she cuts to the heart of the matter. The cycling arpeggios suggest a slowed-down companion to the Knife’s “Forest Families”; the hopeful lyrics stretch backward and forward in time. The details are Dreijer’s to know and ours to guess; they concern family and motherhood and, perhaps, a new partner entering the fold. But it all ends on an unambiguous image: “The final puzzle piece/This little thing called love.” Plunge is not just a record about falling; it is more fundamentally about transformation. And here at the end of a profoundly, thrillingly restless album, she stakes out something like freedom.


The new EP is a retreat, another Of Montreal release where the standout track is the one that most sounds like Ziggy Stardust.

Rune Husk EP

People would appreciate Kevin Barnes’ music more if he released less of it. Two decades into his Of Montreal project, Barnes continues to average about an album a year, and far more if you count compilations and EPs. That Stephen King-like prolificacy may work for rappers who aren't concerned if you listen to their latest mixtape or wait for the next one, or guys like Robert Pollard, whose records ask almost nothing of the listener. But even Of Montreal’s best albums don’t exactly go down easy; they’re a serious investment of time, energy, and patience. We all only get so much time on this earth, and we can only devote so much of it listening to Kevin Barnes. And so since False Priest Of Montreal albums have piled up like unread issues of The New Yorker on a coffee table, guilt tripping you for failing to keep up with them.
For those who checked out after the band’s third consecutive Georgie Fruit album, or those who could no longer keep all of the group’s Seussian record titles straight, here’s what you’ve missed: a further bottoming out, followed by a run of decent full-lengths that felt a bit like apologies for the headaches that preceded them, including a kind of folky record, a more rocking one and, last year, a semi-EDM inspired one called Innocence Reaches. While by no means one of the group’s best records—it probably doesn’t even crack the 50th percentile—that last album seemed to outline a promising path forward for the band: Stay relevant by engaging with contemporary sounds instead of returning to the usual Beatles/Bowie/Prince triptych. But this is Of Montreal we’re talking about, and they’ve never been ones to follow a linear progression, so here we have their latest EP, Rune Husk, which ret-cons away the last record’s raved-up synths. It’s a retreat, another Of Montreal release where the standout track is the one that most sounds like Ziggy Stardust.
“Stag to the Stable,” with its punchy, Mick Ronson-esque riff, is the EP’s most purely fun moment, especially during a loopy bridge that riffs on one of Barnes’ go-to themes, transformation (“Disappearing is eerie when you don't even care to maintain a physical form/Or give voice to the pariah plaintiff in adjudication rooms.”) Unfortunately, the limp tracks bookending it feel like leftovers, possibly ones that predate Innocence Reaches by quite a while. Two are low-energy psychedelic sketches in need of a hook. The third is a slightly livelier one with the same problem.
Credit Barnes this, though: He may have made some misguided albums, but he’s never made a cynical one. Even on his lesser material, he digs in with gonzo determination, and that conviction can go a long way. “Island Life” almost coasts on his vividly grotesque beat poetry alone: “King Derelict outed shifty ranges and kinky drones/No fetal sex traumas without revenge, a boring execution climax of trinity maggot.” And when on the otherwise aimless “Widowsucking” Barnes enthuses “I’m wicked ’cause I have not peaked!” he’s so confident that you truly want to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible he hasn’t peaked. Mostly, though, Rune Husk reaffirms what we already know: Barnes has some more good music in him, and possibly even some great music, but he’s going to make us keep digging for it.


With 1973’s Índia, the samba singer Gal Costa cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, collaborating with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the process.

Índia

Brazilian samba singer Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos’ career began in 1965 and took off as the decade went on. While she released her first single as Maria Da Graça, she soon shortened her name further to Gal Costa, and found herself working with a vibrant new generation of singer-songwriters in her country, like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and his sister Maria Bethânia. She recorded an album of breezy bossa nova duets with Veloso in 1967, which served as both of their debut albums.
Soon after, Costa became a part of the revolutionary musical movement known as Tropicália. And by 1969, Gal was one of the most potent and popular voices in that group, scoring nationwide hits like “Divino, Maravilhoso” and “Não Identificado” while also pushing her sound to the extremes of psychedelic rock. (See the second album she released that year, Gal, for a dose of some of the era’s wildest sound.) As Caetano Veloso put it in his memoir Tropical Truth, Costa’s voice transformed from soft and dulcet to “incorporating vocal sounds that included both Janis Joplin’s grunts and the cries of James Brown.”
But by the early years of the 1970s, Tropicália as a movement was extinguished, as Costa’s key collaborators Gil and Veloso were first imprisoned and then exiled to England until 1972. Despite that, Costa’s star was ascendant—so much so that, across from her Rio home, a stretch of beach where the hippies hung out to smoke weed was deemed “Gal’s dune.”  Costa’s 1973 album Índia cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, from its government-banned cover image to its closing cover of the standard “Desafinado.” With it, Costa paid tribute to her country’s musical heritage while also bravely forging ahead in the post-tropicalismo era, one increasingly repressed by the military regime running the country.
Índia finds Costa drawing upon her past and pushing deeper into Brazilian mainstream pop (often shortened to MPB). Gil served as musical director and guitarist, while Veloso penned two songs. The show-stopping title track—arranged by Rogério Duprat, the “George Martin” of Tropicália—reveals an orchestral lushness not heard since Costa’s 1967 debut. Costa’s voice moves from a simmering murmur entwining with woodwinds to an impassioned cry at the soaring refrain. As penned by José Asunción Flores and Manuel Ortiz Guerreiro, the song was originally written from a male perspective. But in covering it, Costa keeps the feminine pronoun intact, singing “India of brown skin, with her little mouth I want to kiss.” Later that year, she shared a kiss onstage with fellow MPB superstar Maria Bethânia, a moment that author Rudi Bleys wrote in Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810-today, “paved the way for a lesbian coming-out in music.”
That Costa was emboldened in the face of repression is evident from the very cover of the album. Censored by the authorities of the Brazilian military regime soon after its release and instead housed in a plain blue sleeve, Índia’s cover may no longer shock, but it still startles. In the intervening decades of empowered female pop stars—from Millie Jackson to Madonna, Lil’ Kim to Rihanna—has any one of them baldly put their bikini-clad camel toe front and center on an album as Costa did back in 1973?
“Milho Verde” updates a Portuguese folk song with a battery of Brazilian hand percussion and multiple layers of Costa’s voice. Her strange juxtaposing of vocals comes over as akin to Veloso’s own abstract sound poetry album Araçá Azul from the same year. Veloso himself contributes the slinking ballad “Da Maior Importância” and bandoneon-bounce of “Relance” and also recommended the eloquent “Volta” by early 20th-century composer Lupicínio Rodrigues to Costa (he himself would cover the song as a single two years later). The funk vamp “Pontos De Luz,” arranged by Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, will no doubt sound familiar to beatheads—it was sampled by the likes of Madlib, and its snaking beat helped a robot learn to boogie on Kaytranada’s “Lite Spots.” Índia ends with a nimble take on Tom Jobim’s classic “Desafinado,” Costa’s voice a perfect vessel for the bossa nova standard.
The rest of the album perhaps doesn’t push boundaries like the cover photo and title track, but after the outrageous psychedelia of albums like 1969’s Gal, where else could she go? Instead, Índia revealed Costa to be an elegant interpreter of others’ songs, a trajectory that has subsequently made her a superstar in her home country. It shows that a former tropicalista like Costa could do more than just shock and astound; she could also seduce.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified the authors of the title track.


Is Nothing Feels Good the quintessential emo record? Maybe, maybe not, but you could do a lot worse than starting here. Though now 18 years old, the Promise Ring's landmark sophomore album retains the freewheeling spirit its members, then in their early twenties, imbued it with. Listening to it isn't about being transported back in time to their youth, or yours for that matter—it's about encapsulating all the frenetic, nervous joy that comes with new adulthood.

Nothing Feels Good

The Promise Ring didn’t write the book on emo; they just named it. One has to assume Nothing Feels Good graces the cover of Andy Greenwald’s genre exegesis, subtitled "Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo", partially because of its title: Greenwald takes us to the LiveJournal era and beyond, so "nothing feels good" speaks both to the performative oversharing and theatrical sadness most have associated with emo as well as the self-deprecation and guilt that is assumed of its fans. But even after 18 years, there’s no way anyone can listen to the Promise Ring’s landmark second LP and feel as if it’s an endorsement or cause of anhedonia; it’s one of the most effective cures.
The world of Nothing Feels Good doesn't pinpoint specific, identifiable emotions. It is a state of being, one where an overactive mind and overstimulated body aren’t exactly at war, but struggling to attain common ground. It’s feeling like your heart is pumping Mountain Dew straight to your brain and your central nervous system can’t be trusted. Davey von Bohlen himself is at a loss for words to describe it: many of Nothing Feels Good’s inscrutable, quotable lyrics are a result of internal miscommunication: "I got my hands on the one hand, and I don’t know where to put them", "I married a room, where I’ll at least keep my hands in order", "how do I explain your body to the rest of my day?"
The Promise Ring were in their very early twenties in 1997, when Nothing Feels Good was released. They retained the urgency and velocity of their rawer, punkier debut 30° Everywhere (also being reissued), matching it to the nervous energy of an entire freshman dorm at a midwestern public university on a Friday night. The Promise Ring can barely contain themselves here, their biggest difference from von Bohlen's previous band Cap’n Jazz, who didn't even try. This touch of restraint amidst chaos makes the Promise Ring a quintessential emo band, and it's the rhythm section that sets them apart from proper indie rock. Compare Nothing Feels Good to the predominant bands of the era—Yo La Tengo, Built to Spill, Pavement, and Belle and Sebastian weren’t exactly known for their exuberance, earnest embrace of pop or crisp musicianship, and while Sleater-Kinney and Fugazi were the only two bands with tighter rhythm sections, their concerns were far different than those of the Promise Ring. This was "college rock" but with a different set of reference points: Imagine if Fugazi’s "Do You Like Me?" were written from the mindset of "Call Me Maybe".
And so when skeptics conflate the Promise Ring with more pop-punk oriented peers like Saves the Day or the Get Up Kids, drummer Dan Didier and bassist Scott Beschta (sorely missed on subsequent LPs) are the best counterargument. "Is This Thing On?" starts Nothing Feels Good in a full sprint and from that point forward, Didier rarely repeats himself for more than four bars, filling every moment with syncopations, triplet fills, or double-time cymbal crashes. Beschta likewise forgoes indie's preferred thumbing of simple root notes, treating bass as an active melodic and rhythmic participant. It’s not music you can really dance to, but it encourages extroversion and restless giddiness just the same.
The sheer likability of Nothing Feels Good may result in its slightly underrated status—it lacks the mythic aura of Cap’n Jazz, isn’t granted the same hushed reverence of Diary, nor is it as currently influential as American Football, passionately defended as The Power of Failing, or as expansive and progressive as Clarity. But it's still subtly innovative—the unconventional song structures showed emo could become pop without verses and choruses, while their open-C tunings lent a warm beauty to even the friskiest songs.
More importantly, von Bohlen neutralized early emo's chest-beating with his off-key lisp and playful, poetic language, bridging the abstractions of Tim Kinsella’s Joan of Arc and Owls with Mike Kinsella’s plainspoken mash notes in American Football. Even when "emotional hardcore" was presented as an way out of its excessively aggro roots, it was still music meant to be taken very, very seriously—loud and fast and extremely earnest, not entirely concerned with melody, driven by an intense, cloth-rending yearning for spiritual deliverance. The guy at the center of Promise Ring songs is idealistic and well-read, but approachable; we come barrelling into a house party during "A Broken Tenor" and all of a sudden, one of the kitchen drinkers is quoting Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy".
Von Bohlen’s vocabulary is heavy on geographical and chromatic symbolism—he canvasses the continental United States and likes how his girlfriend looks in red, white and blue ("Red & Blue Jeans"), whereas on "B Is for Bethlehem", those colors represent flesh and blood. Conflating place and people names would soon become one of the emo's most tired cliches—the Promise Ring themselves were already guilty of it by Very Emergency ("Jersey Shore," "The Deep South"). Still, Nothing Feels Good is charged with the honest enthusiasm you feel upon discovering how much there is out there beyond your hometown, where every new city and every new person seems impossibly fascinating.
With sensations this intense, the potential for burnout is perilously high. Greenwald’s book views it as a foregone conclusion for emo bands and fans alike, and there’s a lot of evidence backing up this view—nearly all of the genre's legendary bands flamed out spectacularly, made overtly "mature" albums that were shunned by fans, or evolved into more sedate, wistful projects (including Von Bohlen’s own Maritime). "I don’t know if anything at all will be alright," von Bohlen sings on the title track, likely referring to the pressures of adulthood. But he was unfortunately prophetic: the Promise Ring would suffer a near-fatal van accident in 1999 and tried to put a happy face on things with the Botox’d power pop of Very Emergency. A year later, von Bohlen was suffering from severe migraines before a fist-sized tumor was discovered and removed from his brain, followed by an insertion of a prosthetic plate in his skull to replace an infected fragment. On the subsequent Wood/Water, the Promise Ring signed to Anti-, hired a guy who produced Smiths records, and von Bohlen wrote floral, folky songs about settling down, giving up on guitar music, and wishing he never was a singer.
Meanwhile*, Nothing Feels Good* sounds like the kind of record only people in their early twenties can make. The Promise Ring never did cash in during the subsequent gold rush (the closest they got was von Bohlen’s cameo on Bleed American); at least their place in the history books is literally secure. And rightfully so: from the first moment of "Is This Thing On?", Nothing Feels Good bursts with enthusiasm and nervy optimism, a tireless advocate for the thrills this style of music alone can provide.


The duo Big Business’ latest is an anxious and adventurous little record, too eccentric and playful to be accepted as metal but too loaded and loud to be taken as most anything else.

Command Your Weather

Save some late-career marketing miracle, the loud-and-proud duo Big Business will forever be billed as a metal band, bound to inherently intractable tags such as sludge, doom, or stoner. In many respects, drummer Coady Willis and guitarist Jared Warren have asked for it: They issued their earliest records on the boundary-testing metal bastion Hydra Head. Not long after becoming Big Business, Willis and Warren also became active members of the Melvins, an outlandish metal institution with decades of international influence and a die-hard cult of converts. And their music has always been heavy, what with Warren’s burly tone, Willis’ busy drumming, and surly harmonies that sometimes suggest a peculiar folk-rock band on an unexpected hair-metal kick.
But even more than its devilishly deviant predecessors, Command Your Weather—Big Business’ fifth album, second since Hydra Head essentially crumbled, and first as a basic duo since their debut—evades heavy metal’s stylistic stronghold. Instead, it confirms anew that Big Business remain a band without comfortable genre quarters, as indebted to power pop and psychedelic rock as they to sludge or stoner metal. Sure, the closer, “Horses,” approximates doom’s funereal lurch, and “Father’s Day” kicks and pounds through a thick groove tapped from a vein that stretches from Sabbath to Kyuss and beyond. That, however, is simply the foundation on which Big Business build their strange, singular, and steadily evolving catalogue. In true Big Business fashion, Command Your Weather is an anxious and adventurous little record, too eccentric and playful to be accepted as metal but too loaded and loud to be taken as most anything else.
“Send Help” even borders on the willfully antagonistic. Over the plinks of a toy piano and howling horror-film organ, Willis and Warren harmonize about existential anxiety like a ghoulish Simon & Garfunkel. “You don’t have to get bigger,” they repeat in the chorus, “but you have to get out of this space.” That line serves as a sort of credo for Big Business, who take most every chance to push out of their comfort zone. Though “Father’s Day” sounds like a straightforward ripper, Willis crams a math rock song’s-worth of rhythmic tricks into its march. The vocals, meanwhile, crisscross and undulate wildly, as if ever-florid producer Dave Curran were attempting to harness the Beach Boys behind the boards. There are extended percussion breaks and a cappella chants, solos that threaten to shoot skyward like Hawkwind and themes that seem sharp enough for a spot on a modern rock station’s summer playlist (or, at the very least, a Torche album). Even “Horses”—a seven-minute, glacially paced genre piece—pivots into eccentricity and accessibility, suspending its strange hook about suffering beasts around ringing church bells.
A decade ago, when Big Business were both in their infancy and new to Los Angeles, enlisting in the Melvins likely felt, to some extent, like finding a readymade safety net or incubator. The elder Melvins had a touring infrastructure, a fanbase, and invaluable experience as an oddball duo that had long dared to do metal a bit differently. But Big Business is now five albums into a career that continues to produce a half-dozen mostly perfect pop songs at a time, and they seem still to be spinning their wheels with respect to audience and perception. Willis and Warren are forced to joke about their sludge-metal associations in interviews rather than be recognized for something much more distinct and delightful. They write hooks deserving of Cheap Trick or Sloan, then deliver them with the strength of Boris and the playfulness of Ween. Had they not made that choice to serve a supporting role in someone else’s career a decade ago, would they live less deep in an ill-fitting pigeonhole? Maybe, but Command Your Weather—an album about making the best of bad circumstances—does exactly that, spinning out songs that are total hits even if most people miss them.


Balancing a gutsier sound against the restrained emotion of her voice, the Irish singer-songwriter’s debut flits between clinical detachment and startling closeness.

Personal History

Whether it’s a first therapy appointment or a first date, downloading an abridged version of yourself can feel like the most perfunctory of intimate experiences. For Dublin-based singer-songwriter Ailbhe Reddy, it’s far more interesting to think about what remains unsaid. On the title track of her debut album, Personal History, Reddy pines tentatively for her ex and “the romance of watching TV,” before the drums crash in to underscore her frustrated howl: “I don’t wanna go on dates/And hear personal histories.” Playing with the clinical undertones of the title, which is taken from the term for medical records, it’s simultaneously scathing and vulnerable. Compared to the softness of a lived-in relationship, Reddy seems to say, night after night spent sharing life stories with strangers feels procedural.
Fresh off a year of psychotherapy study, Reddy consciously deploys therapeutic language throughout the album. “I protect my ego,” she sings of a fight with her partner on “Between Your Teeth.” The result is a lyrical voice that flits between clinical detachment and startling closeness, combined with a sound that is gutsier and grungier than the brooding folk songs of her 2016 and 2017 EPs. Personal History feels more aligned with inspirations Reddy has named in the past, like Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, and Fiona Apple. While her songwriting might not be quite on par, Reddy similarly mixes streaks of anger and catharsis with biting, self-deprecating humor.
Previous EPs hinted at the emotional range of Reddy’s voice—as on 2017’s fragile “Relent”—but Personal History expands it hugely. Saving her powerful belt for only the most visceral moments, she shows a more restrained side on the somber, wintry piano ballad “Walk Away,” and evokes the light touch of Laura Marling on the gentle “Loyal.”
Not everything on the record is so inventive. “Time Difference” brings a fresh, upbeat feel to the tracklist, but its central concept—a long-distance relationship—feels under-developed. It operates on one level, but Reddy is capable of much more when she adds a layer of self-awareness to her angst. In the opening bars of “Self Improvement,” jangly guitar and harmonies set an uplifting tone as she sweetly sings: “I’m off the meds again...Until I can’t cope again.”
It’s these jarring details that elevate Personal History: the knife-edge of Reddy’s voice when she tells someone they “talk like a historian,” or the cold, anxious synth stabs on “Looking Happy,” a track about watching your ex live their best life on Instagram (“Just turn it off!” she pleads with herself on the chorus). Reddy easily inhabits an aloof, deadpan character—see the “Looking Happy” video, in which she holds a Wednesday Addams-style staring contest with camera—but the richness and openness of her voice removes the record from cynicism. Instead, Personal History constantly confronts us with emotional honesty, pressing on bruises that feel all too familiar.
Correction: A previous version of this review included mention of a song that was mistakenly included on an advanced copy of the album. That mention has been removed.

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R.E.M. acknowledge a few misteps with their 14th album Accelerate, trading the sleepy studio experiments of their recent LPs for renewed vigor and louder guitars.

Accelerate

In a lot of ways, the R.E.M. story ended with 1996's underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. That was the final R.E.M. disc to feature drummer Bill Berry, and in retrospect, Berry brought a lot more to the band than simply his drumming. But that hasn't stopped R.E.M from awkwardly furthering the plot. First came the often pretty but not quite rewarding Up. Next, the pleasant but uneven Reveal, and then Around the Sun, which even most hardcore fans disdained as lackluster at best.
But if rock-star longevity is at least partially political, the savvier-than-ever R.E.M. took it upon themselves to control their message. As the band's studio output dragged, it presented itself as a revitalized live outfit, turning out inspired performances that seemed wildly disproportionate to its increasingly dull LPs. Reveal didn't warrant a tour, but tellingly, the band's 2006 greatest-hits collection did, and on stage, R.E.M. relished the opportunity to disprove naysayers with blistering sets that spanned their entire career.
Accelerate is the name of R.E.M.'s new album, the band's 14th, and it attempts to port that newfound vigor to the studio, not just by trading longtime producer Pat McCarthy (on board since 1998's Up) for U2 associate Jacknife Lee, but also by paring down the excess and sharpening the focus. Accelerate might as well be called Reverse, as it self-consciously aspires to recapture the spirit (if not necessarily the sound) of R.E.M.'s prime. Throughout its 11 songs and 35 minutes, only two tracks top the four-minute mark, and many run less than three. But velocity is not the same thing as vitality, and brevity is not the same thing as urgency. Accelerate ultimately isn't so much a back-to-basics move as a redefinition of what "basic" even means to an arena rock band. Accelerate's broad strokes, big riffs, and beefy production (the album was reportedly recorded in "just" nine weeks) are admirable, as is the disc's concision, but its success is still more as a step forward than a slam dunk.
Still, the very fact that R.E.M. recognized a problem and made an effort to remedy it is pretty impressive from a band of their stature. You can immediately hear the results on the lead song "Living Well Is the Best Revenge": Jacknife Lee has given the track (and the rest of the album) a refreshing sense of grit that's at odds with McCarthy's fussier studio constructions. Peter Buck's guitar rings and chimes with a layer of aggression one step beyond that of Monster, the band's previous "rock" record. Drummer Bill Rieflin plays with a Ministry-honed power, Mike Mills' backing vocals are absolutely key, and Michael Stipe's vocals are gruff, pissed off, and mixed low enough to make the lyrics tricky to make out.
But "Man-Sized Wreath" is no match for that airless rush-- its vague 60-isms might make a solid B-side, but it's hardly a continuation of the opener's call to arms. The same can be said of the slick, safe single "Supernatural Superserious", the kind of song R.E.M. could write in its collective sleep. "Hollow Man", aside from its piano intro misdirection, might as well be the Gin Blossoms, Counting Crows, or any other middle of the road band R.E.M. influenced. "Houston" is about as weird as R.E.M. allows themselves to get these days, but against the odds the track's a highlight. It's a curious 6/8 dirge adorned with what sounds like a wheezing organ, featuring some nicely enigmatic lyrics and a musical toughness that updates the insular world the band introduced with Automatic for the People. Again, like "Living Well Is the Best Revenge", it unfortunately highlights the relative mundaneness of the next two songs, the title track and "Until the Day Is Done".
Accelerate make a surprise finish, though, with its last four songs pushing the band to fresh places. "Mr. Richards" is a vaguely blurry hybrid ballad that hints at shoegaze, invoking the band's staid studio experiments but connecting them to the group's more aggressive origins. Similarly, the self-referential "Sing for the Submarine" recalls an Up-era waltz while name-dropping some blasts from R.E.M.'s more distant past. "Horse to Water" is pure rush, just over two minutes of condensed energy unlike anything R.E.M. has done to date, a kick in the nuts to anyone not impressed by what came before it. And as closers go, "I'm Gonna DJ" is an oddball but memorable choice, perfectly selected for its gonzo agitation.
If you forgot the last couple of R.E.M. discs as soon as they were released, love it or not, "I'm Gonna DJ" and much of what precedes it at least ensures that Accelerate won't be forgotten quite as quickly. But, like any act of rehabilitation, it's no seismic shift, just a move in the right direction. It's as if the band strived for resonance but settled for a satisfactory glimmer of renewed relevance.


Greta Kline is a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her charming new indie pop album Zentropy touches on love, aging, and the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city.

Zentropy

Indie-pop has always privileged shy people who manage their world by making it feel as small as possible. Enter Greta Kline, a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her new album, Zentropy, is 10 songs and less than 20 minutes long, opening with a complaint about art school and closing with the eulogy of a pet dog. In between are explorations of love, aging, and the other intricacies of private life, all rendered with the simplicity of a stick-figure drawing.
As its title suggests, Zentropy is a playful but disciplined album. Most of it consists of pretty, tuneful music in a tradition that connects Best Coast to Beat Happening to pared-down takes on 1960s girl-group pop, anchored by a three-piece drum set and an electric guitar—the utility kit of a band that occasionally wants to get loud without ever having to leave the living room. Its longest song is two and a half minutes long, and its best, “Birthday Song”, is just over a minute. “Just because I am a certain age, doesn’t mean that I am any older/ Than I was yesterday,” it starts, Kline’s voice as sweet as a child’s but firm as a board.
Kline is not afraid of cute, self-evident statements like this, nor is she afraid of using them as a bait-and-switch for more complicated ones. “I think how repulsive to you it must be when I refuse to do the things you want me to,” she sings a few seconds later. Like every line on Zentropy, it sounds innocuous when you hear it, but conveys a feeling so rich it could fill a song five times as long. “Repulsive” alone has an almost atomic presence: Pry into it and something unexpectedly big might explode.
Toward the end of the album, Kline confesses, “I do what I/ Have to do/ This is when I say my ‘I love you.’” For a 19-year-old, she has an unusually good grip on the obligations and nuances of long-term relationships, and an ability to relate them in ways that feel clever but direct. “I’m bitter like olives,” she jokes on “Leonie”, but then pivots: “That’s why you like them and I don’t.” Her simplicity is her mask: It makes her seem like she doesn't have anything to say, which is why it’s so surprising when she does.
In the same way rappers exaggerate confidence to give listeners the thrill of feeling strong, Kline—as is custom in our time of ironized over-sharing—exaggerates her sadness to make space for real vulnerability. “I’m the kind of girl buses splash with rain,” she sings. Not just a girl, but a kind of girl: A cliché you’ve seen in movies and heard about in songs. And yet, as soon as she sings it, her sadness feels light and abstract—something playacted. There’s an argument here: The first step to feeling better is to let yourself feel bad; the second is to realize that whatever you’re feeling is probably somewhere on TV right now.
For all its little-girl-lost poses, Zentropy is a tight, confident album. Kline—the daughter of actors Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—seems emblematic of the way culture is being re-zineified by shows like "Girls" or publications like Rookie: Examples of young female voices who can articulate intimacy in a way that feels savvy and clear. But she also belongs in a larger conversation about older things: the New York poet Frank O’Hara (of whom she is a fan), the sweeter moments of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, or the sister group the Roches—clever, funny writers who navigated the margins of urban life with heartache and whimsy. What Zentropy reminds me of most is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, a movie that did less to capture the sociological particulars of Brooklyn in the 2010s than the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city.
In the past few years, Kline has released over 40 albums and EPs on Bandcamp. Had she wanted to, she could have included 50 songs here, maybe 60. But why muddle the point? She knows what she wants to say and she is saying it. If there are weak moments on the album, it’s when she steps back into a bigger sonic picture: the girl-group chorus on “Dancing in the Public Eye”, the distancing echo of “I Do Too”. Like any music whose strength lies in its intimacy, the fewer reminders Zentropy gives us of the world outside, the better.
Is this music simple? Yes. Solipsistic? That too. But in Kline’s withdrawal, there’s also a kind of humility: Never will she speak for anyone’s experience but her own. “He was just a dog/ Now his body’s gone,” she sings on "Sad", the album's last song. “So what is left, but me and my poem?” Nothing, maybe, but that doesn’t matter: The poem is plenty.


As he approaches his eightieth year, the veteran folk craftsman embraces good times and creature comforts on a collection of homespun tunes that radiates his familiar charm and insight.

The Time of Foxgloves

Michael Hurley is nothing if not dependable. Every few years since his debut in 1964, he’s released another collection of homespun tunes from wherever he was laying his head. Each album treads similar ground as the last—absurdist tales sung with the conviction of a sage, shoulda-been folk standards, and honest-to-God standards dressed up in their rattiest outfits—but that barely matters. Hurley steadfastly follows his own compass, always pointed slightly askew of true north, and does what he does with the workaday dedication of a craftsman. His songs often contain flashes of brilliance, but it’s his consistency that makes him such a remarkable figure and a hero to the counter-cultural folk milieu.
As such, despite its upgrade in fidelity, diversity of instrumentation, and a jump to a more established label, The Time of the Foxgloves is not an attempt to inaugurate a late-period renaissance. This is just how it’s always been, even during periods where there was less attention paid to his latest recordings. Foxgloves is as charming and insightful as any of Hurley’s albums, and it radiates intimacy and coziness even with an expansive list of collaborators. He’s joined by several other singers, most notably Josephine Foster, and each duet feels like a conversation between old friends. Moving his operation out of his living room in Astoria, Oregon and into a professional studio has done nothing to diminish the rustic feel of his music; Hurley still recorded his parts on the same four-track he’s used for years, and the first sound you hear before the soft strum of acoustic guitar is warm tape hiss.
Creature comforts and good times dominate the songs on Foxgloves. There’s the shared glow of having a drink with a close confidant (“Beer, Ale and Wine”), the joy of a nighttime rendezvous with a lover (“Love Is the Closest Thing”), and the warmth of returning to one’s homeland (a ramshackle cover of the Louvin Brothers’ “Alabama”). Even when Hurley sings of painful ordeals, like on “Are You Here For the Festival,” which opens with inquiries into a broken heart, it’s tempered by the promise of a full belly and good music. Last year, Hurley described himself as “ruthless, callous, mean, ornery,” but when listening to these songs it’s hard to imagine a rotten word passing his lips. All we get here is his gentle, age-worn tenor asking to be left alone by sorrow as he takes in the unrefined beauty of the Oregon woodland.
That particular reflection takes place on “Lush Green Trees,” an unhurried number that trots between folk and jazz, joining Hurley’s lone guitar with a bass clarinet that gingerly swings and dances around his hushed voice. Though not all of the songs on Foxgloves are as slow, enough are to give nearly the whole affair (especially the second half) a languid, dreamy quality. The instrumental “Knocko the Monk” features Hurley on banjo tracing a spare, twangy melody over a bed of droning pump organ. Even the slinking “Se Fue en la Noche,” the song that most resembles the most popular work of his ’70s heyday, is easygoing and unobtrusive. Thankfully, Hurley’s songwriting is quirky enough to save the album from becoming sleepy, as he slyly zig-zags between slack and slanted takes on bluegrass, country, and blues.
Listening to a new Michael Hurley album is like sinking into a well-worn couch cushion; we’ve been here before, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less satisfying than the last dozen times we’ve taken a load off in this exact spot. Right down to the hand-painted cover, Foxgloves fits the mold and goes down smooth. Even as he approaches 80, Hurley’s ability to synthesize different strains of American traditional music and twist them to fit his own idiosyncratic vision is as sharp as ever, and the effortlessness of it all testifies to many years of practice and refinement. Just because the sun goes down every day doesn’t make today’s sunset any less spectacular.

Buy: Rough Trade
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DJ Paypal's name might be ironic and trollish, but his love of Chicago footwork is sincere. On his playful and mind-expanding new mini-LP Sold Out, he not only makes incredibly good footwork but helps pave the way for its future.

Sold Out

Footwork producer DJ Paypal doesn't appear on the surface to be the type of artist that treats his influences with any sort of mindfulness. From his trollish stage name to the plainly ironic bite of Pen and Pixel's distinctive, lens-flare-heavy aesthetic on the cover of his new mini-LP Sold Out, he reads on first glance like just another node on Internet Art's massive recombination engine, which endlessly churns out kitschy (and occasionally brilliant) assemblages of random late-capitalist pop-cultural detritus.There's also the matter of the style he's working in: footwork is a particularly holistic musical form that until very recently has been virtually inseparable not only from the dance style that it soundtracks, but also from the brutally segregated, impoverished black neighborhoods on Chicago's South and West Sides where it was born.
It's a minor revelation to find out that Paypal's far more sincere than his image would suggest. The way that the drums on Sold Out's titular opening track pulse in and out of focus is an expert move well out of reach of the average SoundCloud dilettante, and throughout the album he displays the kind of rule-bending that only comes from closely studying the rules first. "A lot of kids hear like five tracks and start making footwork, and that’s not respectful," he told Pitchfork recently. It's clear from his music that he has listened to thousands and absorbed them into his DNA. And not only does he make incredibly good footwork, he's also helping to clear a path for its future evolution.
Paypal's a member of the L.A.-born Brainfeeder coalition of artists representing a certain organic, jazz-indebted segment of bass music experimentalists, and like most of the best material to come out of the Brainfeeder camp, it reconnects beat-based music with styles of pre-digital black music whose more radical avant-garde aspects have been forgotten over the years, or dulled by overfamiliarity—bebop, free jazz, and especially the synthesizer-crazed soul and fusion artists of the '70s.
"Ahhhhhhh" combines blissed-out piano riffs, pitched up vocal harmonies, and a burbling bassline. "With Uuuuuuu" and "On a Cloud" teasingly reference early synth-funk (the latter with a vocoder part that Paypal and coproducers Nangdo and DJ Taye blend into a crisp solo trumpet). Other parts of the record reach even further out—"Slim Trak" folds in Brazilian samba drumming, while "Say Goodbye" (featuring Keiska and Tielsie), drifts into a stoned-genius hybrid of dream pop and J-pop that's easily compelling enough to sustain an entire LP.
At the same time, Paypal's also a member of Chicago's venerable footwork music crew Teklife, and his tracks never lose sight of the style's more utilitarian roots scoring YouTube footworking videos and high school hallway dance battles. The old slogan that "music wants to be free" is a truer fit for remix culture than the music piracy advocates that coined it. There's a point in the life cycle of every musical style where it has to expand its worldview and open itself up to new participants and new influences, or else it stagnates and withers away. No artist needs to ask permission to borrow an influence, and with so much music available and making it becoming so cheap, it's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.


On his new project, the Detroit rapper lets his bleakest thoughts pour out. His nuanced renditions of pain make it hard to turn away.

Scorpion Eyes

In the last year or so, BandGang Lonnie Bands’ music has taken on a more insular and fatalistic bent. Spurred by the death of two close friends and fellow members of the Detroit crew BandGang, his 2021 single “Heartburn” and mixtape Hard 2 Kill introduced his revamped sound: ominous Michigan-style beats, increasingly jittery flows, and hardened but vulnerable lyrics. Inspired by the way 2pac aired out his darkest feelings on the paranoid 1996 album All Eyez on Me, Lonnie’s newest project, Scorpion Eyes, lets all his bleakest thoughts pour out. It’s harrowing and thorny yet full of skillful rapping, clear-eyed storytelling, and subtle but impassioned vocal tics.
There’s an uneasy edge to his voice, shaky and high-strung no matter if he’s in a pessimistic mood or if he’s trying to conceal his fears by puffing out his chest. A lot of his lines end with exasperated exhales or are trailed by incoherent murmurs, as if he’s gathering his thoughts in real time. The title track sets the album’s tone: Death isn’t looming in the background, it’s the topic. Unlike Pac, who at times seemed accepting of it, Lonnie is fighting to care. “Why you taking life for granted?” he asks an unknown rival, but it works just as well pointed inward. Later, his voice tenses up as he raps, “I think I need some therapy, I’m sparring with depression/I been sippin’ heavy lean, battling with addiction,” over a skittish instrumental that accentuates the nervous mood. They feel like words he’s saying for the first time.
Throughout the album he isolates and dissects his own feelings in ways that feel almost invasive to hear. On “Help Me,” his croaky vocal cadence stretches until it strains as he tries to swat away suicidal thoughts fueled by a pill addiction and the anxiety that his kids are destined to inherit his struggles. He’s lonely on “Rolling Stone Cold,” aware he’s his own worst enemy but too goosed-up on pride to do anything about it. “Still a Mama Boy” tells a story of regret. He feels as if he wasted his mom’s hard work and vents by comparing himself to his dad: “Thinking about how pops did my mama make me wanna kill him/She ain’t even be bitter, she begged me to fuck with him/I hate I even got a couple traits like that fuck nigga.” The switch between angry and wistful is seamless.
Not all his attempts at self-criticism are sympathetic, though. On “MarkTwain,” he raps about smacking a woman in front of his daughter, and just because it’s said in a remorseful tone doesn’t mean he gets a pat on the back. Like a lot of tortured, self-destructive men in art, he tries to justify treating the women in his life terribly by playing it like the guilt that haunts him is just as bad.
In more ways than one, Scorpion Eyes is a difficult listen. With so many rappers killed by violence and addiction in the past few years, it’s chilling to hear Lonnie rap so openly about his own fears. But what makes Scorpion Eyes so hard to turn away from is the nuances of the music, how pain comes through in so many ways beyond the lyrics. With “Strathmolism” it’s the worn-out singing that wouldn’t be out of place on a No Limit mixtape. On “Stop Wrapping My Life,” it’s the frequent pauses he takes between lines that make every bar feel soul-wrenching. “No Pillow Talkin” conveys the same jumpy energy as the songs on Drakeo the Ruler’s Cold Devil: like the walls are closing in. None of it makes the discomfort go away, but music this complex, layered, and blunt doesn’t come around too often.


The second album from Baltimore's Co La represents a compositional step up from 2011's Daydream Repeater, smoothing the seams between his heavy sampling and original music-- provided in part by ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian on vocals.

Moody Coup

"Melter's Delight", the first single from Co La's second album Moody Coup, features a sample from the Upsetters' "Cloak a Dagger", a voice introducing the track as "Music to make you stagger!" It's a lovely line, and its boastful, confident tone runs counter to Co La's practiced docility. This type of fake exotica-- the desire to displace yourself, but only gently so-- is Co La's M.O.. On Moody Coup he idles more purposefully than on his debut, Daydream Repeater, kneading his many samples into frothy, dubwise vignettes that tickle with recognition.
Co La burdened his debut with a lackadaisical approach to sampling, leaving recognizable snippets (the Supremes!) relatively untreated and then doubling down by looping them ad nauseum. Moody Coup represents a compositional step up, with Co La smoothing many of the seams that showed on Repeater. His samples are better hidden and the tracks, while plenty rhythmic, are no longer quite so stubborn. An infusion of sub-bass turns unassuming moments into a surprise rattle. Vocals from ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian mean that this album's melodies aren't entirely outsourced. The result is like a baby-shampoo version of Black Dice: lots of rustle and friction but nothing that would hurt your eyes.
This explains why Moody Coup, despite a wide range of sounds (reggae, barbershop, ambient, techno), spins so easily. Tracks such as "Remarkable Features" and "Head in Hole in Space" are summer storms: They come together quickly, make a little noise, and move on. This will sound like a backhanded compliment, but Moody Coup is an album that doesn't necessarily reward close listening, because Moody Coup is an album where the details don't necessarily matter that much. "Baby's Breath" stirs bongos, childrens' laughter, and what sounds like dripping water, but sussing out the ingredients isn't nearly as gratifying as letting the song's carbonation hiss and fizzle. On "Make It Slay (Barbershop Solo)" and "Un", Co La approaches the snap-and-crackle noir of Nicolas Jaar but filters out the dance DNA, leaving amiable puddles of sound.
When you're in the sound-art game, the flipside of friendly and gentle is frivolous, an accusation that does get lobbed at Co La. Moody Coup succeeds, though, because of how naturally it comes together, because of how deftly it mimics the rhythms of, say, whiling away a Saturday afternoon. It takes skill to be both abstract and inclusive-- ask Four Tet-- so it's not an accident that Co La's sampledelia lands so softly. Moody Coup is the "take only pictures, leave only footprints" sign at the gates of experimental music: an ode to niceness.


The reggae-lite collaboration between Sting and Shaggy is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

44/876

Why Shaggy? Presumably, if Sting wanted to go 50/50 on a reggae album, he had options. Toots Hibbert is still in fine voice. The Wailers aren’t really the Wailers anymore, but Sting and the Wailers has a hell of a ring to it. And if he were looking to make a splash on the adult contemporary charts, Michael Franti probably could have made it happen. But Shaggy? Mr. Boombastic? The guy who sings like he’s auditioning to voice a breakfast cereal character? Why?
It turns out the two just really hit it off. Sting even refers to “my good friend Shaggy” early on the duo’s unlikely collaboration 44/876, and the album never leaves any doubt that Sting means it. Just look at them posing on those motorcycles, like your parents in their most embarrassing vacation photo. Even when the material falls flat, as it frequently does, there’s some pleasure in picturing these two entirely unobjectionable personalities living their best lives, knocking back Coronas while gently busting each other’s chops with the superficial banter of Liam Neeson and his middle-age golf buddies in the Taken films. It’s such an old-man record you can almost feel your testosterone drop listening to it.
44/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises. Does Sting feign a Caribbean accent? Yes, obviously. Does he fetishize white sandy beaches and honor the ghost of Bob Marley? You know he does. Are there air horns? Yup—all those boxes are checked right out the gate on the opening title track, another inglorious addition to the canon of reggae songs about how great reggae music is. “It shakes me to my soul with a positive vibration, I start dreaming of Jamaica,” Sting sings, standing out like a fanny-packed tourist against unexpectedly contemporary pop-dancehall production fit for a Sean Kingston album. The track’s modern sheen is a fake-out; the rest of the record is more UB40 than Top 40.
In a Rolling Stone profile, Shaggy makes a crack about women getting pregnant to the album’s steamy single “Don’t Make Me Wait,” but by and large the Shaggy here is a far less randy one than the “It Wasn’t Me” Shaggy at the turn of the century. He’s not as miscast as he sounds on paper. Nobody will mistake him for one of reggae’s greats, but he’s a game performer, down for whatever the album throws at him, be it dub, rocksteady, or yacht rock. His toasts color otherwise colorless songs without disrupting the tasteful romantic vibe Sting sets so carefully. And while there’s some initial absurdity in hearing him opposite Sting, one of the stateliest and most humorless of all of rock elder statesmen, the album never acknowledges it, not even on “Morning is Coming,” where Sting is awoken by to the serene song of a nightingale… that happens to share the severe nasally voice of Shaggy.
More often Sting is the one who sounds out of place. His voice has taken on a smoky hue that can work for him when he leans into it, especially on the jazzy, The Dream of the Blue Turtles-styled “Waiting for the Break of Day” or the torchy “Sad Trombone” (yes, that’s really the title, and no, it doesn’t get the reference). Yet every time he reaches for his higher registers he shows the limits of his range, inviting unflattering comparisons to his youthful heyday with the Police. There was a time when Sting legitimately could have nailed a designated reggae album, but his realistic window for that closed quite a while ago. Maybe that’s why so many of these songs, even the upbeat ones, dwell on missed opportunities and the passage of time.
The great irony of 44/876 is, despite its inherent disposability, it’s actually one of Sting’s more enjoyable albums, simply because he’s actually having fun here. At times, the album almost feels like Sting’s treat to himself, a reward for all those grief-stricken song cycles, symphonic works, and that one album with all the lute on it. After decades of treating music as a solemn obligation, he deserves a little vacation, and 44/876 is as close as any Sting album has ever come to sounding like one. The music’s usually pretty lame, but at least the company is nice.


It's not easy being Nas. No matter what the man does, no matter how strong he comes, people still ...

The Lost Tapes

It's not easy being Nas. No matter what the man does, no matter how strong he comes, people still come back with, "It ain't Illmatic." It's an unfair way to judge someone's work, though you can hardly deny that statement's accuracy. After all, the 90s only spawned a handful of other hip-hop records that can even be mentioned in the same breath as Nas' 1994 classic. With songs like "Life's a Bitch", "One Love", and "N.Y. State of Mind", and producers like Pete Rock, Primo, and Large Professor, Illmatic not only signified Nas at his nastiest and most poetic, but it also represented the pinnacle of 90s NYC hip-hop. The falloff has been a bitch; Nas' sins include releasing what can politely be considered a string of mediocre albums, ghostwriting for Will Smith, and immersing himself in enough beefs to keep a fleet of hip-hop gossip columnists busy for years.
But, after all these disappointments, we still hold out hope for the return of hip-hop's prodigal son. And The Lost Tapes does, on the surface, seem like a possible candidate for that revival. Ostentatiously released for the real headz, this collection features tracks only previously released on mixtapes or over the Internet. Hopefully, this means none of the jiggy, commercial-friendly nonsense that's really dragged down his records the past few years.
The album's first track, "Doo Rags", finds Nas doing what he does best: reminiscing about his youth in the ghetto over a jazzy, piano-based loop. Nas namechecks Beat Street Breakers and the X-Clan while railing against "political thugs in shark suits [who] persuade us to pull triggers." At the end of the second verse, he raps, "Your paper money was the death of Christ/ And all these shorties comin' up just resurrect your life/ It's like a cycle." After the science of "Doo Rags", the resurrection of Rakim's only true successor seems like a real possibility.
Unfortunately, Nas' return is pretty short-lived. On the next track, "My Way", Nas returns to his pimped-out, diamond-studded-glocks persona. He raps, "Living my life like everyday is my last night/ Alcoholic on toilets I shit blood/ Foreign cars, models and stars, life of a rich thug." Yeah, okay. But it must be said that Nas does add a little more to the gangsta formula than most. In the second verse of the song, he gives a vivid retelling of the death of his friend Ill Will, whose name Nas has used for his record label, and concedes that he "still feels broke with millions in the bank." The Alchamist (aka Primo-in-Training) provides a nice but somewhat generic beat.
Ever the provocateur, Nas does take a couple of shots at his rivals. On "Purple", he raps, "I don't like the way P. Diddy did Shyne with different lawyers," while on "Everybody's Crazy", he insults someone by calling them a "Sisqo fag." In "Black Zombie", Nas veers back towards black conscious, deriding the media's stereotypes of African-American as gangstas and hoes, the inequality in the educational system, and black-on-black violence. After hearing Nas spin gangsta narratives on "Blaze a 50" and "My Way", and after being subjected to the hype surrounding his long string of self-provoked beefs, it isn't hard to spot the hypocrisy in these otherwise noble sentiments. But, when you think about it, haven't the boldest and greatest of us been mired in contradictions: Lenin, Bill Clinton, Bob Dylan, Tupac Shakur...
So, maybe we can forgive Nas of his moral contradictions. But what's a little harder to swallow are some of the beats on this album. The Barry White sample on "No Idea's Original" is nice, but it doesn't fit Nas' flow on the track. And while "Blaze a 50" is an interesting narrative involving betrayal, sex, and murder, the generic violin-based track almost ruins it. Despite its flaws, though, The Lost Tapes is nice. Not a return to form, per se, but possibly as close as we're likely to get. Besides, after all the years and disappointments, the expectations for Nas have finally subsided. What I'm saying is, if you can manage to forget Illmatic, you might actually like the guy again.


The soundtrack to a documentary about the flagship indie label features early material from Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and other industrial icons.

Various Artists: Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records

When Wax Trax! filed for bankruptcy in 1992, cofounder Jim Nash offered an accompanying statement. “We have been credited with being the primary label behind the development of what has become known as ‘industrial’ music,” Nash wrote, detailing how the label had gone bankrupt in explanatory sections with titles such as “Ministry, Al Jourgensen and Crazed Management.”
Nash died in 1995; his business and life partner Dannie Flesher died in 2010. Their legendary Chicago record store has been gone for over two decades (the original store, in Denver, has continued under different ownership since the late 1970s), as has the label it spawned. But the latter has been resurrected by Jim's daughter Julia Nash, who started making the Wax Trax! documentary Industrial Accident after driving to Arkansas to retrieve store and label relics from Flesher's garage.
As a business, Wax Trax! suffered from shaky business practices, but as a label, it developed as cohesive a label identity as any U.S. indie. Flagship artists include their most famous U.S. alums Ministry and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, German industrial stalwarts KMFDM and Belgian electronic body music pioneers Front 242. The label’s acts tended towards an over-the-top visual presentation and intense musical physicality, creating a catalog that unified pummeling beats with riffs and hooks.
Musical genres are like leftist politics; as soon as a sect is named, the argument about inclusion begins. Industrial Accident is lucky enough to have the genre arbitrated by Chris Carter of industrial icons Throbbing Gristle, whose members all released later work through Wax Trax! In one of the documentary's funnier moments, Carter dubs some of the label’s releases “industrial, I guess. Ish.”
The soundtrack for Industrial Accident is more than industrial-ish; the only outlier is Revolting Cock Chris Connelly's Scott Walker-influenced solo track “Shipwreck.” Opener “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” by Chicago's My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, epitomizes both the band’s early output and the signatures of the first industrial hits: oddly sourced vocal samples, a single unvarying bass riff, and processed shout-sung vocals. TKK were also viciously campy, like the label founders, and thus went endearingly all-in on parent-alarming imagery: sex, drugs, the devil.
The inherent camp of Chicago industrial makes complete sense considering the label’s second official release was a single by Divine, John Water’s transgressive drag performer muse. After Divine came Ministry’s “Cold Life.” Al Jourgensen’s musical evolution has been well documented—Industrial Accident includes footage of Big Black and an appearance by Steve Albini, who inspired or was ripped off by Jourgensen, depending on who you ask—but the actual missing link between Ministry’s various musical phases seems to be this previously unreleased version of “Tonight We Murder,” a song written with and sung by TKK’s Frankie Nardiello (aka Groovie Mann). Here, the clubby bass and bubbly synths disappear and menacing drum loops and guitar riffs take their place.
Wax Trax! never met an Al Jourgensen side project it didn’t like, from his Pailhead work with Ian Mackaye to the prolific, often sophomoric Revolting Cocks. “Animal Nation” sounds like the product of the time Jourgensen spent with young TVT recording artist Trent Reznor; it is slinkier than most RevCo output, with the kind of strong vocal melody and funk-inflected groove that would soon make Reznor the more famous of the two.
Everything else here is a mixed bag of welcome surprises and curios: KMFDM's “Vogue (Apart Version)” and Front 242’s 2017 live recording of “Headhunter” are fine, if slightly less satisfying, variations of the originals, both of which were charting dance hits. There’s always been a market for dance music you can bang your head to, and “Headhunter” met that need so well that it made Front by Front the label’s biggest seller.
In the ensuing years, the Wax Trax! brand hasn’t exactly claimed a place in the American indie canon. Even at its peak, it struggled for respect; in a 1992 Maximum Rocknroll interview, Albini derided it as “based on campy, dress-up humor, taking drugs and disco.” The focus on societal horrors was largely juvenile, and the questionable flirtation with fascist imagery is best left in the past.
But the beats, they were hard, and the influence of Wax Trax! artists has been widespread and diffuse. The artists influenced by its output today are three or four generations removed—Kanye West's best album, Yeezus, wouldn't have existed without Wax Trax! And just as with the label's original output, that could be a statement of credit or blame.


The guitarist and the pianist collaborate for an album of gentle, edgeless improvisations.

Steve Gunn / David Moore: Let the Moon Be a Planet

Let the Moon Be a Planet

The acoustic guitar and the piano are chummy enough in popular recordings, but there’s little concert music written for the duo. Without the magic of compression, how could a mere six or 12 hand-stirred strings, with a little hole to catch the sound, hope to match more than 200 strings pounded by hammers in a big reverberant crate? Steve Gunn and David Moore offer eight lovely answers on Let the Moon Be a Planet, which inaugurates Rvng Intl.’s new “Reflections” series of collaborative albums. It may be too laid-back and vibey to bolster a repertoire, but it blends their respective voices—film-grained fingerstyle for guitarist Gunn; film-score minimalism for pianist Moore—into a tranquil, slow-running elixir.
Let the Moon Be a Planet isn’t exactly a classical record, having more in common with the deconstructed Americana of William Tyler. But it advances the classical guitar expedition Gunn began on 2021’s Other You, trading the steel sting that had defined his playing for the supple shimmer of nylon. A couple of years ago, as he told Guitar World, Gunn got a chance to play an old Gibson Folksinger and felt inspired to buy a six-string Córdoba C5, a classic beginner’s nylon-string model. It appears to be the very guitar he’s holding on the cover of Other You, and it contributed much to that record’s soft L.A. weather. And Moore, whose pellucid tone anchors the ensemble Bing & Ruth, is a classically trained pianist who gets invited to play baby grands on cliffsides and spinets in parabolic glass houses. He clearly cherishes Glass, Eno, and Debussy, though he’s more apt to pay tribute to Ecco the Dolphin, The Simpsons, and American Beauty.
Gunn and Moore first collaborated on Nakama, an EP of collaborative renditions of Other You songs, which led to a series of remote improvised sessions they finished together in upstate New York. The result is Let the Moon Be a Planet, an elaborate and far-out title for a mild and mossy record. It’s generous with bright major keys, undemanding on the ear; Gunn and Moore seem particularly fond of the hopeful sunrise of D. While some songs are atmospherically chorded or tonally furtive—the dry arroyo of “Scattering,” the lunar shadows of “Libration”—high pianism is subordinate to graceful touch and tender feeling.
Moore often dwells on little etudes patched up from simple scales, which you can pick out easily if you have a keyboard handy. Gunn’s close-mic’d chords and rustic ringlets bring more vigor and variety, soaring up and looping back to trace every path in small patches of harmonic terrain. That’s not necessarily a knock against Moore, because what elevates Let the Moon Be a Planet is the edgeless interplay of the voices, not what either is doing on its own. Lead and accompaniment join in a constantly changing ratio as Gunn and Moore hand melodies back and forth with the fluid ease of relay racers, and the pieces proceed in unbroken, radiant streams.
Improvised music often feels like traveling over a long distance, which Let the Moon Be a Planet does on the Music for Airports-like “Basin.” But more of it feels like sitting still and watching the world go by. The more you pay attention to the songs’ structures, the less interesting they seem, and I would have liked to hear the piano put a little more space between this record and “Soft Guitar & Piano Music for Stress Relief” on YouTube. But perhaps the point is more about feeling good than seeming interesting, and at least the piano equivalent of cowboy chords makes sense in the Americana context. Any given moment sounds wonderful, though not much lingers beyond a deep sense of calm.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit JAY-Z’s second album, one that’s more gripping as a show of raw skill than it is as an act of myth-making.

In My Lifetime, Vol. 1

One night in the fall or winter of 1996, JAY-Z and The Notorious B.I.G. were relaxing at Daddy’s House, the studio that Bad Boy owned in Midtown. This was almost certainly after the car accident that shattered Biggie’s left leg and forced him to use a wheelchair, and later a cane, as he worked slowly on the sophomore album that he planned to call Life After Death… Til Death Do Us Part. The rappers were friends if not exactly peers: Big’s first LP, Ready to Die, had taken on a mythic quality, where Reasonable Doubt, Jay’s debut from two years later, had been a modest success.
That night in the studio, Big played Jay some works in progress: “Hypnotize,” “My Downfall,” a handful of others. Jay was a little envious, looking at somebody who by the age of 25 had mastered virtually every popular style of rap and was slipping tangents about kidnapping plaintiffs’ daughters onto radio singles. He was, it seemed, peerless. Worse: Jay only had one new song of his own to share.
It didn’t sound like Reasonable Doubt—it had a little more gloss and bounce—but it was knotty, sarcastic, vivid. It was called “Streets Is Watching,” and it ramped up to a virtuosic, 42-bar final verse full of drug operations that teetered on state lines, looming droughts, visions of God, impaneled grand juries. Big heard it once, and then he played it again, then five more times. Finally, he stopped, and looked at Jay out the corner of his eye. “Is the whole album gonna sound like this?”
He wouldn’t live to find out. In the early morning hours of March 9, 1997, Big was shot and killed at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The case, as you probably know, is still unsolved.
After Biggie’s death,  Puff Daddy, who had discovered Big and then put himself all in the videos, dancing, set out to pay tribute. He asked Jay to write verses for “I’ll Be Missing You,” a flip of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that would also feature Big’s wife, the singer Faith Evans. Jay declined. Instead, he drove down to Virginia Beach and channelled his grief into a song called “The City Is Mine,” which was produced by Teddy Riley, featured Blackstreet (plus saxophone by a then-unknown, pre-Neptunes Chad Hugo), and was built around a sample of Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City,” which sounds like an extremely sensual elevator ride. “What’s the deal, playboy?” he asks at the song’s beginning. “Just rest your soul.”
“The City Is Mine” is In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 distilled into a four-minute sample: wrought with grief and buoyed by extraordinary technical skill, packaged in (and maybe marred by) a fixation on the most commercial sounds of the moment. It captures Jay doing things he’d try more audaciously in the future: “I’m the focal point like Biggie in his prime/On the low though (shh), the city is mine” is the polite precursor to what he’d do four years later on The Blueprint: “And if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one.” It’s the sound of a remarkable talent attempting the leap into superstardom and fucking up the landing just a little bit.
Big’s death had left a vacuum in rap; that Jay was in a position to dream of filling it was a minor miracle. After brokering a small deal to promote a single and then a slightly bigger one to distribute Reasonable Doubt, his label, Roc-A-Fella records, was able to leverage that album (along with Jay’s work as a ghostwriter on Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na) into an unusually favorable arrangement with Def Jam. Jay’s appearance on Life After Death helped signal this next, presumably more lucrative era for the Roc. The song he was on, “I Love the Dough,” is a perfect little triumph, all sheen and sneer. Big washes Jay, but that’s beside the point. He was welcome in the real-cash Monopoly game.
The first way to understand Vol. 1 is as Jay’s Bad Boy album. Despite jilting Puff for “Missing You,” Jay recruited that label’s producers to handle about half of the album’s beats, and the ones they didn’t touch mostly replicate Bad Boy’s signature shine. At times, this works beautifully: the way the O’Jays are flipped into a somber suite for confession on the jarring closer “You Must Love Me,” or the way Rene & Angela, who were the basis for “I Love the Dough,” morph into something sinister for “Imaginary Players.”
But, as is characteristic of every Bad Boy release (even that skit on Ready to Die), there are lapses where the album seems to have been thrown together haphazardly. For example, it’s impossible to reconcile the fact that the unforgivably desperate “I Know What Girls Like” is made to flow right into “Player.” In the latter, you have one of the slickest, most irresistibly arrogant songs in Jay’s catalog, complete with that absurdly condescending final monologue. But you spend half of that track trying to scrub your brain of clumsy bullshit from the song before, like: “I never seen a face like yours before/And I’ve been around some cute whores before.”
Fortunately, Jay has always had a gift for giving emotional depth to his albums without cheating or showing his hand too early. The violence that’s introduced on “Rhyme No More” (“Shoot up the whole block, then the iron I toss”) and complicated on “Streets Is Watching” (“For the first time in my life, I was getting money, but it was like my conscience was eating me”) is given a second, more harrowing layer of guilt on “You Must Love Me.” That song opens with a verse to Jay’s mother, who was struggling with her own addictions just as Jay began hustling: “All you did was motivate me: ‘Don’t let ’em hold you back!’/What’d I do?/Turned around, and I sold you crack.” The next verse recounts the time that Jay, at just 12 years old, shot his brother in an effort to retrieve some stolen jewelry. His brother survived, then asked to see Jay in the hospital the following day. You must love me, he raps.
The album’s masterpiece, though, is “Where I’m From.” The scaffolding is an Yvonne Fair sample that sounds like a steel city grinding its inhabitants into dust. Jay raps vividly about the Marcy Houses, describing himself and his neighbors as “foul” all while taunting outsiders: Prodigy, the Mobb Deep MC who feuded with Jay for years, took the line about Marcy being where “you and your mans hung in every verse in your rhyme” as a direct shot. It’s also the most acrobatic rapping Jay had done to this point in his career: There are times when he’s deep in the beat’s pocket, and others when he’s rapping as if the beat is a mere suggestion. In the middle of the second verse, there’s an absolutely breathtaking passage:

I'm a block away from hell, not enough shots away from stray shells
An ounce away from a triple-beam, still using a hand-held weight scale
You're laughing—you know the place well
Where the liquor stores and the base dwell

This sort of free, cascading run, where every line is extraordinarily technical but sounds as if it was ripped from casual conversation, is something he’d continue to perfect over the next several years but would mostly abandon by The Blueprint, opting instead for digestible midtempos. With hindsight, Vol. 1 is more gripping as a show of raw skill than it is as an act of myth-making: The way he floats over the beat on “A Million & One Questions” and burrows into it on its twin song, “Rhyme No More,” or that extended, staccato climax to “Streets Is Watching,” is the element of his post-9/11 catalog that’s most sorely missed.
The softer songs are tougher to grapple with. “Lucky Me” has its own cult following (Lil Wayne has its title tattooed on his neck and a verse from it tattooed on his leg) but is stiff and overproduced; its complaints about fame are more exhausting than insightful. And then, of course, there’s “(Always Be My) Sunshine.” “Sunshine” shares a Kraftwerk sample with a Whodini song; it’s the sort of thing that can be rehabilitated with time, but would have seemed painfully out of date in the moment. And then there’s its video, where dancers run through fierce choreography in what looks like the stomach of a Rubik’s cube while Jay mugs in a lime-green suit. It’s awful. “Sunshine” has mostly been relegated to the footnotes in Jay’s career—it wasn’t a big enough success or spectacular enough a failure to seem, today, like a turning point—and that’s fortunate, given how close it flew to an extremely fluorescent sun.
Eight years before Vol. 1 came out, Jay-Z was living in London. His mentor, a fellow Marcy Houses native who went by Jaz and who, for a time, had a reputation as one of the best unsigned rappers in Brooklyn, had been advanced nearly a half-million dollars by the record label EMI. He brought Jay across the Atlantic, to the flat in Notting Hill, to soak up whatever he could while the album got made.
At first, the label guys seemed nice enough. Jaz’s finished records were sounding close enough in spirit to their demo versions. But at some point, EMI insisted Jaz record a gimmicky, ukelele-driven song called “Hawaiian Sophie.” It was an utter disaster. The video was full of hula dancers gyrating in front of green screens and palm trees painted on large tarps that were hoisted clumsily toward a soundstage “sky.” Imagine the Lost pilot staged by kids at a summer camp. Jay, who appears in the video behind giant sunglasses, draped in a lei, would later say it was “nearly career suicide.”
“Hawaiian Sophie” was supposed to turn Jaz into a star. But when it inevitably bricked, the label stopped returning his phone calls. The album dropped in May 1989 as little more than a tax write-off. That’s when executives at EMI finally picked up the phone—to call Jay, wondering if he was interested in a record deal of his own.
This turned Jay’s stomach. He buried whatever rap dreams he had, skulked back to the States, and moved his crack trade from East Trenton, New Jersey down to Maryland. This was a good idea until it wasn’t: There were shootouts in nightclubs and rumors of sweeping police investigations.
When Jay returned to music, he was wary of and wearied by the EMI experience. The “Sophie” debacle seemed to shape his approach to the industry for the years to come: It confirmed his distrust of record companies; it urged him to hone the double- and triple-time skills he’d been developing, then shed them for something more communicative. The impeccably dressed kingpin from the Reasonable Doubt cover could never be seen in Bermuda shorts. He even references “Sophie” on the opening song of Vol. 1—both the fact that it exists, and the fact that it made him disappear. And yet it’s impossible to see the “Sunshine” video without thinking, for a second, about all those plastic palm trees.
There’s this incredible trick that Big pulls at the beginning of Life After Death. It opens with a narrative song called “Somebody’s Gotta Die”; the broad strokes are that one of Big’s old friends knocks on his door in the middle of the night with blood on his shoes, saying that their mutual friend had been shot. A revenge plot whirs to life—and ends with a tragic mistake. Straightforward. But in the first verse, as he’s talking himself into a frenzy, Big shatters the implied divide between these crime tales and real life: “‘Cause I’m a criminal,” he raps,

Way before the rap shit
Bust a gat, shit—Puff won’t even know what happened

On an album that is primarily about the experience of being a rap star, Big is staring into the camera and smirking, as if to say: For all you know, I could be in the streets right now. The times when Big shows you the seams of this stardom add to the effect—the barbs at New York rappers on “Kick in the Door,” the tongue-in-cheek ode to the other coast on “Going Back to Cali.”
By comparison, Vol. 1 labors to achieve the same feeling. Its plays for radio feel deliberate, as if they were pulled from a totally different set of sessions than the “Where I’m From”s and the “Streets Is Watching”s. Big blurred those lines between pop and pure instinct (“Playa Hater”) or reveled in just how arbitrary they were (he has those threats to kidnap daughters on “Hypnotize,” he raps about phone taps on “Mo Money Mo Problems”); the only time Jay comes close to this fourth wall-fracturing magic is on “Friend Or Foe ’98,” when he’s about to kill a rival hustler in a “two-hotel town,” and leaves him with a message to send Big in heaven. The songs on Vol. 1 are almost uniformly excellent. But the greater the commercial and mythic stakes Jay tried to attach to the set as a whole, the more the vacuum threatened to swallow them all at once.