Loyalty

Tamara Lindeman is no longer singing about white lilacs, wild columbine, rhubarb pie and big jars of honey. On two previous albums as the Weather Station, Lindeman used acoustic guitars, banjos and a lexicon of bucolic imagery to write graceful, generous folk songs. The material wasn’t simple so much as vernacular, so that even the Toronto songwriter’s most intense reflections on love and lust espoused a downhome familiarity.
But Loyalty, Lindeman’s third and best LP, continues the inward pull of last year’s incisive EP, What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know. Her once-plaintive confessionals have morphed into intimate but impressionistic character studies, where the songwriter spares neither herself nor her subjects an analytical eye. And the acoustic instruments that once galloped or crept behind her have morphed into abstract backdrops—sophisticated but understated settings that accent the expressive voice above them. Loyalty feels like a 40-minute glimpse into a secret world, where familiar people (sisters, mothers, lovers) and traditional sounds (a fingerpicked guitar, a patient piano) lead intriguing, uncanny lives. It’s a place that demands to be revisited.
To make Loyalty, Lindeman and a minimal crew decamped to a deteriorating French mansion for a long wintertime recording session. Collaboration has long been integral to the Weather Station’s records, from a set of duets released in 2013 to the way in which Everything was recorded by two different bands in two different countries. But only Bahamas leader and multi-instrumentalist Afie Jurvanen and accomplished engineer Robbie Lackritz joined Lindeman along the Seine. They shared production duties, while Lindeman and Jurvanen split a dozen instruments evenly. These 11 songs often suggest you’re sitting with the trio in some small parlor as they play. The drums shuffle or canter quietly. The guitars stay hushed. The only real instrumental break, the smoldering electric coda at the end of "Tapes", remains gentle, hinting at an outburst but never delivering it. And whether hitting the brassy highs of "I Could Only Stand By" or the diffident lows of "Personal Eclipse", Lindeman’s voice rarely rises above an elegant whisper. It’s as if she’s trusting these revelations only to the people in the room.
All of this material indeed seems confidential, like a list of life problems that Lindeman is still trying to sort out for herself. Opener "Way It Is, Way It Could Be" sets the stage for this exacting ambiguity, where the uncertainty of the future unspools from a discrete, difficult present. Here, a relationship is good but neither as honest nor forgiving as she hopes. The partnership’s survival suggests a Schrödinger’s cat scenario, where Lindeman can simultaneously envision success and failure. During "Personal Eclipse", she takes stock of her general discomfort with society—its catcalling men, her introversion amid others’ extroversion, the loneliness such tension can induce—and tries to tease out its source. It’s an open-ended self-evaluation, with more lingering questions than actual answers. And "Like Sisters" questions the limits of friendship and choosing sides, even when it imperils your own happiness. "Sometimes you give, you’re giving all you have," she offers, stretching those last words with what sounds like regret. "And sometimes you’re the taker."
The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty. Mesas are "strange and red and snowy." Rivers are "serpentine, glinting." The low sunlight of November is "impossibly bright." Paired with the external turmoil and internal debate of these lyrics and the private way Lindeman and Jurvanen deliver them, such observations give Loyalty the feeling of fastidiously edited old journal entries—too lean and evocative to be a first draft, but still true to experience. It’s an approach that puts Lindeman in the company of Bill Callahan and Joni Mitchell, songwriters whose careful combinations of pedestrian details and profound insights also created secret, self-sovereign worlds. And like both of those songwriters, she’s a singer with an unmistakable and communicative voice, able to convey hope and hurt with equal clarity.
During standout "I Mined", Lindeman admits she is stuck: There’s a fundamental but indiscernible flaw in her current relationship. It’s the pea beneath the mattress that keeps her up at night, even as the seasons come and go. She alternately wants to find and fix it or just forget it and carry on. But she knows that’s impossible. "Your trouble is like a lens through which the whole world bends," she confides over prismatic piano, her voice suddenly harmonizing with itself as if to emphasize that this is the record’s thesis. "And you can’t set it straight again." These 11 tunes are expressions of woes that you can’t quite correct but can’t let go, either, worries that plague you but push you onward, too. These are public folk songs about the private problems—breakups and makeups, depressions and deaths—we’ve all suffered.


The National’s sixth album is their leanest and most aerodynamic, easily accessible and self-assured by virtue of focusing on the visceral power of Matt Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s taut, inventive drumming. It’s also their funniest and most self-referential.

Trouble Will Find Me

Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?
The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship—the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens—can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It’s a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.
It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National’s dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they're part of the same song.
“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love,” which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.
That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn't contain his sharpest writing—in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma—but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons,” hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up... FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons,” revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.
As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay— natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All the Wine,” he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer,” and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”
Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits,” LA Woman and Guns N’ Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation.”
Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms his medium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him—“There’s a lot that I’ve not forgotten/But I let go of other things.” As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement.


This instrumental companion to the San Francisco electronic musician’s 2019 album Weather is unfailingly mood-stabilizing and office-friendly, like a desktop screensaver of an ocean.

Simulcast

“Morale, like anything, is just another problem to be solved,” begins a chewy chapter in Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir about the author’s time spent working in the neo-capitalist Platonic cave of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. Heavy with the weight of corporate hubris, unchecked male ambition, and free nut mix, Wiener’s writing is an otherwise zippy babe-in-the-(Muir)-woods account, partway between a tell-all and a long piece of gonzo journalism, describing the dawn of the start-up bubble. Aside from detailing the morally ugly and aesthetically corny consequences of the Valley’s quick rise to becoming a living diorama of late-stage gentrification, the thrill of the book lies in watching a mass cultural movement assume a near-spiritual reverence for work. This is work as eternal pursuit of validation, work as shorthand for identity, work as a means for self-actualization and self-escape—work as a (if not the) justification for being alive at all. “They talked about achieving flow,” writes Wiener of her superiors, who RipStik gently around the office while taking conference calls and making insulting amounts of money, “a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner’s high.”
The idea of flow, a key tenet of corporate garbagespeak, is a fulcrum of the San Francisco-based musician Scott Hansen’s latest and most explicitly San Franciscan album, Simulcast. Operating under the Tycho banner, Hansen’s project—or, depending on your proximity to the creative class, entire brand identity—has become synonymous with a style of electronic patter so easily digestible that it approaches a degree of utility. Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.
Part of the pleasure of determining the breadth and scale of an artist’s hugeness is in scouting where their music proliferates and who it’s for. In Tycho’s universe, there are listeners, and there are use-cases. He exists in perfect symbiosis with streaming services’ mood-based offerings: Whether on a bevy of ready-made playlists from Spotify (“Chilled Vibes,” “Atmospheric Calm”) or across hundreds of user-made playlists titled with terms like “chill,” “study,” or, beautifully, “Adderall,” Tycho’s music has reached a state of ubiquity for the way that it softens or amplifies the blows of a daily rhythm. Much like the inescapable 24/7 streams by a YouTube channel titled ChilledCow, who owns the “lofi hip-hop radio” multiverse, Tycho’s work makes its implicit purpose to support, sustain, or beautify a brainspace. “I like how this music accompanies your mood, rather than strongly impose some emotions,” reads a top-upvoted comment on a YouTube upload of 2011’s Dive, whose viewership currently clocks 33 million views.
But Tycho’s music lies just this side of the utter artistic facelessness baked into the “beats to relax/study to” or “beats to sleep/chill to” streams; there will always be a small fistful of flags that alert you to the fact that you’re experiencing a Tycho song. There will be soft exhalations, pillowy radar loopings, cottony breakbeats, and extremely liberal inspiration from Boards of Canada. There will be album art with high-contrast sunsets. There will be warm electro-acoustic mist. There will be tabletop synth patterning that bobs harmlessly up and down a scale.
Simulcast blankets all of these suggestives under a weighted duvet: The album is an instrumental companion to 2019’s Grammy-nominated Weather in which each track carries the satisfying airtightness of a meditation app with deluxe features. (Cannily, the album announcement for Weather was accompanied by a literal web app.) Simulcast—a portmanteau of “simultaneous” and “broadcast,” like a live feed of a presentation played on several screens across a multi-bureau organization, is actively inspired by Hansen’s three-fold vision to strip the vocals from his last album, find peace in a chaotic world, and honor San Francisco’s beaches. As a result, the whole thing is not unlike finding yourself transfixed by a desktop screensaver of an ocean.
The work provides brief moments of happy fizz that unquestionably belong to Hansen’s hand. Tracks crescendo and decrescendo with peak points at equidistance on nearly every track. “PCH,” named after the sinewy highway that crescents California, is like easy-listening IDM; “Alright,” with its dilating snare buildups, is post-rock-on-the-sea; “Stress,” whose title suggests the thing one is dodging, is a beautifully limp exercise in motivational drum progressions that seem calibrated for the cubicle. As Hansen notes on a post of his handmade artwork for the track, “if you’re going to be stuck in a room, might as well put up some nice wallpaper.”
That Tycho’s music functions as a mental masseuse for the 21st century open-office drone, or a mood stabilizer for the nervous, is a fundamentally benevolent thing. Hansen, who has spoken with gravity, candor, and self-awareness about his music as an aid—whether of concentration or attitude—offers, in his own way, a mildly noble service. Here, it’s difficult not to summon the mother of all sound-as-motivational-mechanisms—the much-maligned Muzak Corporation, founded in 1934—and their Stimulus Progression series: fifteen-minute tracks of background instrumentals meant to give the listener a boost of productivity over the course of an hour. Early emissions of Muzak were billed as “functional music,” responding to the need to “fill the deadly silences” of the office, there to drown out human complexity for the sake of getting something done.
But human complexity often demands volume. Simulcast, in contrast, could be confused for interstitial podcast filler tagged “uplifting” and “electronic.” It might be background music for prescription drug commercials or a public university’s sizzle reel; music to soundtrack health food emporia, CBD dispensaries, entire theatres of retail operations with target audiences of Instagram users between the ages of 20 and 35. Tycho suggests a host of signifiers that spool into one another like a lorem ipsum of a certain type of contemporary aesthetics: kaleidoscopes, foliage, triangles; hand-lettered typography, galaxy prints, stickered Nalgenes, new bars in newly named neighborhoods. These things are not inherently bad, but they proliferate, at this point, almost to a point of unmeaning. I fear—as Wiener writes of San Francisco, smoothed by all that flow—that it is “all beginning to look like a generic idea.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Chicago’s local heroes grow up a little on their fourth album and lose some of their live-wire charm in the process.

Lookout Low

Twin Peaks are one of the most prominent Chicago rock bands of the past decade. If you’re not convinced, scroll through the subreddit dedicated to the quintet, who are lovingly nicknamed “the dudes” by many a Peakshead. For much of the band’s career, the loyalty to Cadien Lake James, Clay Frankel, Jack Dolan, Colin Croom, and Connor Brodner was justified; since their 2013 debut mini-LP Sunken, the band have crafted bustling garage rock that was typically at least pretty good. Like their peers in Whitney and Post Animal (and even their old high school buddy Chance the Rapper), they owe a great deal of their success to the propitious Chicago scene, which builds a safety net from the devotion of their city’s audience. “You want to play well [at hometown shows], but if you play like shit, you know no one’s gonna care,” Frankel told Vice. In a live setting, the band’s music was a catalyst for those rowdy gigs that fans embraced—but on Twin Peaks’ fourth album, Lookout Low, it sounds like they’re finally tired of crowd surfing.
Considering Twin Peaks have been at this since they were 19, signs of them growing older were inevitable, but much of Lookout Low sounds more fatigued than mature. This album brings piano and a Croom-arranged horn ensemble to the forefront, invoking classic rock touchstones like the Grateful Dead and the Hollies. Old rock’n’roll influences are nothing new to the band; usually, they’ve been able to manipulate cues from their predecessors into an aesthetic that still felt contemporary. But this time around, like the Dr. Dogs and Edward Sharpes before them, Twin Peaks rely too heavily on these retro methods and often sound blatantly borrowed. As a result, there isn’t a fresh moment throughout the album’s 43 minutes. “Ferry Song,” inspired by Croom’s daily commute into the city during his stay in New Orleans, is about as invigorating as such a commute itself. Opener “Casey’s Groove” is too lethargic to earn its name, and the closing “Sunken II” only reaffirms the record’s monotony.
Lyrically, the album doesn’t do too much to redeem itself, and the platitudinal references to “the ice within my heart” and “sing[ing] our favorite songs” feel even more stale amid the tedious instrumentation. Lead single “Dance Through It”—which the band joked recalled Sheryl Crow—lived a short life as a Twitter meme, but it doesn’t leave a lasting memory otherwise. “Got a problem everywhere she goes/But she doesn’t pay mind to it,” James sings, although the stakes must not be so high: All she has to do is “dance through it,” as we’re reminded over 20 times throughout the song. “You’ve been bummin’ around/The bitter heart of December/Blame it all on the weather/Needless to say, I’m glad it exists,” Dolan sings on “Unfamiliar Sun,” as if to say he’s relieved to be able to attribute his laziness to the calendar alone. And then there’s “Better Than Stoned,” where Frankel howls gleefully about finding a love that gets him even higher than marijuana does.
There are fleeting moment on Lookout Low, like the rollicking “Oh Mama,” where some of the band’s old charm starts to poke through. There’s a reason local press dubbed Twin Peaks Chicago’s “Next Big Rock Band” in their early days, and for a while, that prediction seemed quite viable. But here, they mostly sound exhausted—like they’ve run out of ideas or motivation. When Dolan sings “I really run my mouth/I hardly use my brain,” he and his bandmates make it difficult to disagree.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This rough and potent offering from rural Washington State combines black metal ferocity with operatic post-rock.

Two Hunters

Most of the arguments I've heard in the past three months about Two Hunters, the excellent and sprawling second album from Olympia, Wash., metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, have been divergent echoes of extremism. Those who take Burzum's best black metal as an unholy grail argue that Wolves' black-metal half-- characterized by impenetrably fast drums, focused guitars and ferocious, muffled vocals-- is competent enough, if somewhat standard. Meanwhile, those who've heard of the record's operatic, post-rock menace-- serpentine female vocals where most bands would put keyboards and gauzy keyboards where most bands would be countering guitar arpeggios-- find Two Hunters compositionally imperfect, lined with missed opportunities a smarter band would have recognized. And those eager for a successful post-rock/black-metal merger find that Two Hunters-- which more often bleeds one dichotomous idea into the next rather than stack them into one dense moment-- isn't that album.
But none of this really matters, whether you're trying to understand Wolves in the Throne Room as a band or enjoy one of the best-paced post-rock or most well-tempered black metal albums you've ever heard. Wolves in the Throne Room-- two brothers and a friend who share a sylvan dwelling and a plot of self-sustaining land outside of Olympia-- aren't really into compromise or expectations. In interviews, they've said they're "not black metal, or, more accurately we play black metal on our own terms" and "I don't know what post-rock is." They've declared that they don't think of themselves as a progression in the grand black metal scheme, so post-black metal labels need not apply. They've publicly damned their need to tour in a van, to maintain a MySpace page, to sign to a record label. "We'll see how long we can keep it up before we retire to our farm," the trio told Ultimate Metal's Jason Jordan in a surprisingly candid 2006 interview. "A loud voice in my head tells me that we should only play this music on the winter solstice, drunk on mead and cider, burning torches to remind us of the long-forgotten sun." Like the band's polytheistic sound, such a Cincinnatian attitude could be seen as ambivalent or even irreverent: Do you want to be a band or a bunch of farmers? Do you want to nod at black metal or do you want to play it? Do you really want your guitar player to ignore the obvious chord change on the beautiful "Cleansing", or do you want to perfect your umpteen-minute broods?
Actually, that's about right: Two Hunters is mostly indifferent to conventions, or at least their corollaries. The black metal portions of "Vastness and Sorrow" indeed sound like U.S. black metal, and the instrumental middle third of the same track sounds like Pelican with sharper talons, bigger wings, and a pacemaker. But the record's real power emerges from the subtle bleeding between the memes, not to mention their stark juxtaposition. The metal moments come in long, grand, ferocious sweeps that keep everything in motion, and the instrumental moments often seem truncated or incomplete because they're interested in the same sort of motion, always seeking the next stop. Nothing's precious or perfected on Two Hunters. It's rough and potent, even when guest vocalist Jessica Kinney delivers its most beautiful moment with her lullaby aria on "Cleansing". After all, it's a record about the world ending so it can begin anew. If the world's ending-- and Wolves in the Throne Room believes it is-- that missed chord on "Cleansing" is trivial.
And there's no better example than closer "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots". It uses the rest of the record as its prototype, its dynamics serving as catapults and its pace implying wars and fires and rescues and rebirths. It eases in, guitar notes hanging over zephyr synthesizers that are effective if trite. One chord stops short, and the pounding drums and roaring guitars doze everything. Five minutes in, the double bass drum pushes the envelope, then disappears, sheets of guitar feedback intertwining. The moment is broken by another surge, all militaristic march and tortured yowls. It melts away, returns and melts away again. Only the guitars are left to slink around Kinney's voice. She fades, too, leaving field recordings of birdsong and wind. Its work done on one of the year's most singular, unflinching records, Wolves in the Throne Room return to the farm, expecting fire and floods, with the wars of extremists raging at their backs.


Continuing his recent forays into more literal storytelling, Spencer Krug's collaboration with Finnish prog-rockers Siinai is a swirly, molten rumination on heartbreak.

Moonface / Siinai: With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery

With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery

The first record where Spencer Krug really let his imagination run wild was called, fittingly, Shut Up, I Am Dreaming. Since then, the grand theme of his catalog has been the tension between the world in his head-- which is peopled by dragons, courtesans, and kings-- and the persistent, alarm-clock nag of the world around him. In his work with prog-pop juggernauts Wolf Parade and his more fanciful onetime solo project Sunset Rubdown, Krug has fashioned himself a kind of indie rock Don Quixote: a raving, good-natured lunatic more comfortable in the realm of metaphor and myth than physical world. And for the same reason that Don Quixote would have been a shitty boyfriend, a Krug song very often ends in heartbreak. In an early Wolf Parade track, his companion complains about the din of city buses, and he tells her to "pretend [they're] whales, keeping their voices down." She will do no such thing. Yelps our hero, "Such were the grounds for divorce."
The title doesn't lie: Heartbreak is once again the main preoccupation on Krug's latest record as Moonface, but With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery continues the recent forays he's made into more literal, brick-and-mortar storytelling. "Fast Peter", the strongest track on Moonface's largely lackluster 2011 release, Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, told a story about a friend's long-distance romance in brutally clear language. (The opening couplet: "So Peter loves a girl/ The way that only Peter does/ He told me all about it on the balcony when we were high on drugs.") "I would like to be able to do more of that sort of writing," Krug said about the Spartan approach of "Fast Peter" in a recent interview. And most of the time, Heartbreaking Bravery makes good on that promise: There's a purposeful simplicity to its narrative approach and a concreteness to its imagery-- even when our narrator sounds less than engaged. "The bed looked like a butcher's block/ And you liked it better when I was on top," he drones on "Yesterday's Fire", his indifference backlit by a swirling, sky-on-fire soundscape, "And I thought about nothing at all."
The Siinai of the title is a Finnish band that sounds like Tangerine Dream meets Explosions in the Sky atop a mountain that is particularly prone to lightning strikes. As their name implies, these guys rarely hit a note that's not epic (their most recent album was a grandiose, kraut-indebted affair called Olympic Games), and their chugging, apocalyptic compositions mostly provide a nice undercurrent to Krug's brooding wordplay on hypnotic slow-burners like "Heartbreaking Bravery" and "Quickfire, I Tried". Krug's arrangements with Sunset Rubdown in particular married the arty ambitions of prog rock with the crayon-bright, glockenspiel-dappled aesthetic of mid-2000s indie rock, but Siinai are more about swirly, molten swaths of gray. It's a decidedly more mature sound for Krug, which echoes the record's thematic concerns with aging. "I'm too old for you, anyway," he sings to the love interest on "Yesterday's Fire". A few songs later he seems to have learned his lesson: "She was only 23, or she was only 24/ I headed for the door."
Krug's retreat from flowery metaphor is occasionally too extreme: The chorus of "Shitty City" actually goes, "And it's a shitty city now/ It's a shitty/ City/ Now." That track in particular finds the Moonface and Siinai symbiosis to be a little disjointed: The instrumentation is fiery and volatile, but Krug's efforts there feel perfunctory and a little uninspired. Thankfully, those tracks are few and far between, and overall this collaboration with Siinai proves to be one of the more compelling Moonface records to date.
Though Heartbreaking Bravery is an improvement on Organ Music, it's a little misleading to speak of Moonface in linear, progress-oriented terms. The project is amorphous on purpose, a sort of open-ended mantle for whoever Krug feels like collaborating with in the future. "I want to make it impossible to get stuck in a rut," he's said, "wherein any one sound or image is expected by anyone from Moonface." Still, given how inside his own head Krug can seem, his inclination towards collaboration-- and letting other people into his dreamworld-- seems like a progression in and of itself. "I'm not the phoenix yet," he howls in clipped syllables on the album's titular track. Maybe so, but given the guy's prolific output, it's only a matter of time before he burns this particular sound to ash and revives Moonface as something completely new.


His new album with the 400 Unit feels a little one-note, but Jason Isbell can still rouse with an anthem show off his gritty country and even breezy pop skills.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound

The Nashville Sound

The last time we heard from Jason Isbell, he was mid-revelation. “To a Band That I Loved,” the closing track on 2015’s Something More Than Free, eschewed his usual topics—the south, sobriety, self-acceptance—in favor of something simpler: the healing power of live music. Finding its center at another band’s concert, “To a Band That I Loved” was a new kind of song for Isbell, showcasing the maturing perspective of a songwriter who could summon wisdom from every corner of his psyche. Unlike Southeastern’s rock-bottom ruminations, most of the tracks on Something More Than Free came from a place of contentment, narrated by characters who bounced back from hard times with newfound serenity. “I don’t think on why I’m here or where it hurts,” Isbell sang in the title track, “I’m just lucky to have the work.”
The Nashville Sound, Isbell and the 400 Unit’s full-band follow-up, is, in many ways, a step backward. For one thing, he’s thinking about where it hurts again—and he doesn’t have much to say about it. A lumbering seven-minute song called "Anxiety" all but stops the momentum of the record, hammering in a few platitudes about what it’s like to be anxious along with an unimaginative variation on the melody from “Yesterday.” “Anxiety, how do you always get the best of me,” he sings, “I can’t enjoy a goddamn thing.” While Isbell’s best lamentations often placed you alongside him—riding the same roads, nursing the same hangovers—this one asks you to do little more than feel sorry for him. It’s indicative of an album that feels sadly one-note, with some of Isbell’s least distinctive songwriting to date.
Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments. “Hope the High Road,” with its heartfelt instructions for living a better life, is rousing enough to earn a place on future setlists, even if it’s a good deal less nuanced than his previous anthems: a song that’s all moral and no story, from an artist who made his name crafting exactly the opposite. “Cumberland Gap” is another highlight, but it gains its momentum entirely from the 400 Unit’s mighty performance, with Isbell’s pat narrative doing little to raise the stakes. The song’s best lyric, about a nondescript bar where “if you don't sit facing the window you could be in any town,” feels all too symbolic of Isbell’s own lack of direction.
While the album’s most ambitious songs are often its least effective (like the needlessly epic "Anxiety" or the well-intentioned but flat political song “White Man’s World”), its best moments are when Isbell keeps it simple. “If We Were Vampires” is a stirring duet from Isbell and Amanda Shires, the 400 Unit’s fiddle player and Isbell’s wife. It’s a standard in the making, as earnest and luminescent as any ballad he’s composed, and the couple’s best collaborative performance to date. “Chaos and Clothes” is equally intimate, capturing a double-tracked solo performance in the vein of Elliott Smith’s late-‘90s work. It stands as one of the album’s only effective experiments: one that makes you hear Isbell’s voice differently and illustrates his growth as a breezy pop songwriter while his grittier work with Drive-By Truckers fades further in the rear view.
Opening number “Last of My Kind” tellingly picks up a few steps behind where Something More Than Free left off. While “To a Band That I Loved” peaked with a stirring realization of Isbell’s place in the world (“I thought everyone like me was dead”), “Last of My Kind” finds him on his own again, unsuccessfully trying to fit in with college students and city-dwellers. The resentment is mutual. They mock his lack of refinement, he critiques their lack of empathy; they laugh at his clothes, he snivels at their poor rhythm. All the while, Isbell laments that the world he knows is “an old and faded picture in my mind.” It’s a funny and moving song, as its lingering question (“Am I the last of my kind?”) grows more poignant with each chorus. As powerful as it is, you can’t help but wonder why one of our most capable songwriters is lingering in the doubt of his past, when he’s learned the answers better than any of us.


Fifteen years into their career, the duo are still finding ways to make discord feel utopian.

Goons Be Gone

No Age is less a rock band than a lenticular 3-D image of one—your perception of them is liable to shift depending on your vantage point. From one angle, singer-drummer Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall are a punk duo capable of making the noise of a band five times their size; from another, they’re meticulous sound designers, applying just as much attention to subliminal details as the actual songs blaring over them. But on their last couple of records, the perspective shifts have been whiplash-inducing: where 2013’s An Object stripped out their engine to play around with the scrap parts, 2018’s Snares Like a Haircut found them fully reinvigorated and ready to rejoin the circle pit.
With Goons Be Gone, they opt to let the pendulum gently sway between these two poles. Now 15 years into their career, No Age have reached the point where they could easily settle into a dad-punk comfort zone, a fate suggested by the opening “Sandalwood,” which sounds like Thurston Moore covering the Velvets covering “Gloria.” Their lifelong Hüsker Dü worship continues, but “Feeler” pivots away from their buddy Bob Mould’s gale-force aggression to embrace the more melodic graces of the Grant Hart songbook. Overall, they’re still too restless to settle into familiar archetypes—when, on the latter song, Spunt kindly invites us to “board onto the rhythm of my astroplane, and find out where I’ve been,” the duo make good on that cosmic promise by unleashing an ominous textural whoosh where most bands would just drop the guitar solo.
In moments like these, Goons Be Gone feels like two wildly different albums dubbed atop each another, where late-’80s-style indie-rock songs are perpetually fending off strange ambient undercurrents that threaten to consume them. The album’s highlights revel in that dichotomy: the frantic “War Dance” tries to outrun its own ray-gun squiggles as if dodging battlefield bullets, while the brisk “Turned to String”—which exhibits the sort of post-hardcore Tom Pettyisms that The Men mastered circa New Moon—feels liable to launch itself from the heartland and into space at any moment. And those two tracks are linked by the rapturous “Toes in the Water,” a tremolo-soaked lo-fi instrumental that gradually builds into a cyclone of distortion, like a Glenn Branca noise symphony trapped in a suburban garage.
Spunt’s lyrics tend to deal in cryptic directives and enigmatic romanticism—on the twangy dream-pop of “Smoothie,” he addresses the subject of his affection as “my tambourine.” But when you consider Goons Be Gone’s title, alongside lines like “I’m astonished by your ignorance today,” a subterranean theme emerges: Spunt and Randall are two family men trying to ward off the bad vibes as their country descends into chaos.
But that tension dissipates when No Age let their experimental impulses completely take over: “Working Stiff Takes a Break” strands a Minutemen-style rant inside a shapeless pawn-shop synth doodle, while the sputtering “A Sigh Clicks” sounds like the duo found a cool, siren-like sound effect to base a song around, but failed to come up with one. But maybe these are the sort of whiteboard exercises that are necessary to arrive at a charming oddity like “Head Sport Full Face,” whose locomotive riff and melodic guitar hook could almost pass for Room on Fire-era Strokes, but whose detuned-radio frequencies and convulsive rhythm honor No Age’s art-damaged pedigree. Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

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More intimate and less reverential than a traditional remix album, collaborator Richard Barratt’s full-length rework casts Róisín Machine in deeper shades of modern house and techno.

Crooked Machine

Along with the release of her sublime fifth record Róisín Machine, Róisín Murphy spent 2020 bestowing fans with remixes, extended cuts, and alternate versions with the drunken benevolence of someone throwing dollar bills off a club balcony. These new edits—which included extended disco cuts; truncated pop edits; wonky, late-night remakes by album collaborator DJ Parrot, aka Richard Barratt; and one squelching, completely essential Soulwax remix—weren’t just streaming-optimized cash grabs or irrelevant leftovers. They made good on the album’s avowed philosophy of “I’ll make my own happy ending”—ways for listeners, who, for the most part, had to engage with the album’s paean to nightlife from their homes, to craft perfect nights to suit their own needs, handed over by a diva with enough dancefloor experience to know that sometimes, more is more.
Less than a year later, Murphy presents another gift: Crooked Machine, a Róisín Machine companion album featuring remixes by Barratt under his alter ego Crooked Man. As a member of bleep techno progenitors Sweet Exorcist, Barratt is a UK underground legend; Murphy, who met him in early-’90s Sheffield, describes Barratt as “an inspiration all my life,” and has said that Róisín Machine represents a rose-tinted reflection on their memories of the time. That Barratt was such a significant part of both Róisín Machine and the ’90s Sheffield electronic scene gives him a unique authority to undertake a project like this. Crooked Machine is more intimate and less reverential than a traditional remix album, and Barratt plays more boldly with structure and tone than would someone from outside the fold.
Crooked Machine presents a new embodiment of the Róisín Machine ethos—a testament to the transformative power of the dancefloor, redone in shades of house and techno altogether darker and a touch more modern than its predecessor. If the original record typified the intellectual, glamorous buzz of the club, as well as the way personhood is remade and redefined in nightlife settings, Crooked Machine is a more kinetic piece of work, slightly more accessible in its palette and more consistent in its tone. Róisín Machine was a memoir, and Crooked Machine is a blank journal and pen, ready for one’s own stories of debauchery.
Where many remix albums strike as fodder for completists, Crooked Machine feels designed to work independently of Róisín Machine, with appealing, well-defined entry points. As if to prove its ease of use, album opener “Kingdom of Machines” takes on one of Róisín Machine’s densest songs, “Kingdom of Ends,” giving it the floor-filling treatment it always deserved. The original was a masterful exercise in tension and release that never actually developed into a dance track; nearly a year later, “Kingdom of Machines” finally provides a drop. The album’s closer, the electro house barnstormer “Hardcore Jealousy,” simultaneously manages to feel modern and classic, its piquant buzzsaw synth and, later, the introduction of a breakbeat, recalling both late-aughts Ministry of Sound compilations and the recent revival in breakbeat-heavy dance music.
Murphy’s first album with the electronic duo and romantic partnership Moloko famously took its title from a pick-up line she delivered to her eventual bandmate at a party: “Do you like my tight sweater?” Like an inversion of that legacy, Barratt’s retelling rids Crooked Machine of any easy-to-follow lyrical lines or hooks. Instead, song titles and distinctive phrases get slathered in echo and thrown back into the mix seemingly at random, making the most memorable moments of Róisín Machine sound like snippets of conversation yelled on the dancefloor. Sometimes, this is straightforward—the hook of “Game Changer” placed straight into its dubby remake “Name Change”—but other times, Barratt gets cute with it, as on “We Are the Law,” where the titles of “We Got Together” and “Murphy’s Law” ricochet off each other without context over a spacey tech-house track. It’s a moment of strange levity that brings Róisín Machine’s self-conscious myth-making into Barratt’s goofier, more liminal world.
Like sitting for a portrait, giving up the entirety of an album to a single collaborator for remixing is a uniquely revealing experience. Far from removing her from the record, Barratt highlights the durability and versatility of Murphy’s art—placing her in contexts both more modern and more abstract, and still letting her come out on top. Dance legends are made and broken on the strength of their remixes, and here, as on last year’s stack of tracks, Murphy proves she can rule not only festival stages and stadiums, but sweaty nights at home or in clubs, too. Her voice itself is less present, but she is felt in every second, and even that element of Crooked Machine lends itself to Murphy’s brand of dancefloor wisdom: Sometimes, as on Róisín Machine, you need to speak your dreams into existence—and at others, you need to just shut up and dance.

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The London producer’s third album tests the boundaries of dance music not just for the sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge.

Reflection

For what is ostensibly club music, Loraine James’ productions can feel fiercely guarded. Many dancers and DJs favor smoothly paved superhighways to bliss; James’ zig-zagging tracks are filled with potholes, speed bumps, and the occasional vertiginous bridge to nowhere. The London musician likes her beats jagged and her melodies slippery, and there’s an abrasiveness to her work—club bangers and sofa chillers alike—that seems to warn: Don’t get too comfortable.
But about halfway through Reflection, her third album, James breaks the fourth wall and makes an unexpected overture to her doubters. “I know you may not like this one/But it’s just fun, you know, it’s just fun,” she murmurs, as music-box chimes and video-game chirps tussle over erratic kicks and snares. “I know you might not like this one/So press the skip button.” As the song lumbers on, drawing us deeper into its murky swirl of 8-bit bleeps and percussive shards, she shifts her address from the incurious streamer to the frustrated punter. “Hate the music that I’m playing/That is why you’re not staying/That is why there’s no dancing,” she intones, actually singing now, with surprising gentleness. “You are in a hurry/Leaving the club early.” It’s hurt, accusatory, and apprehensive all at once. And despite the brooding beat, it’s also slyly funny, underscoring the irreverence that runs through her subversive approach.
James has often insisted that she makes not just club or bass music, but experimental music, full stop. “Self Doubt (Leaving the Club Early)” is a good reminder that she’s right. Like the entirety of Reflection, the song demonstrates a degree of risk-taking that’s all too rare in dance-adjacent music. James’ work often explores the tension between club music and listening music, and between community and solitude. “I’m a shy person,” she has said; “I just like playing a dark, smoky room, not giving a shit what people think.” Reflection neatly encapsulates both sides of that seeming contradiction: It is both as restive as her music has ever been and as reflective as its title suggests. It tests the boundaries of dance music not for the mere sake of experimentalism, but as an expression of vulnerability and a vehicle for self-knowledge.
James’ beats are as tough as ever on Reflection. Hi-hats explode in rat-a-tat bursts. Staggering kick drums bounce like a boxer against the ropes. Blasts of sub-bass threaten to topple anything in their path. But where drum’n’bass wields powerful sounds in the interest of steely efficiency, there’s something cavalier about James’ grooves, as though they could happily fall apart at any moment. That refusal to satisfy expectations is a big part of what’s so compelling about them.
Lyrically, the album’s ruminative tone is far from the beats’ scrappy, devil-may-care attitude. Like last fall’s Nothing EP, much of the record is spent collaborating with guest vocalists, and despite their considerable range, virtually all of them focus on questions of identity and purpose. The opening “Built to Last” runs Zürich singer’s Xzavier Stone’s determined couplets—“Mountain top, what I aim for/Work hard til that day come”—through thick vocal processing, rendering self-actualization with the consistency of buckwheat honey. In “Black Ting,” London drill artist Le3 bLACK raps in soft-spoken triplets over a cat-footed beat, juggling knotty rhymes with the occasional declarative statement: “There’s a lot on the line/We must prove this.” Nova matches the floating synths of “Insecure Behaviour and Fuckery” with free-associative verses that build to an unexpected climax, juxtaposing a Thelma & Louise-inspired cliff jump with Drexciyan Afro-futurism. The Baths collaboration “On the Lake Outside” feels at once like a stylistic outlier and the album’s thematic heart. Draping languid synthesizers over a beat like a stick being dragged across a metal fence, James fractures Baths’ voice into multi-part harmonies as he sets the scene in boldly imagistic terms: a lake, a rowboat, the sky reflected in water. Then he cuts to the chase: “I was always a little off/But I get up and get on.” It’s an elegant way to frame Reflection’s abiding interest in struggle and perseverance.
The album’s best and most revealing tracks are those where James herself takes the mic, though she’s careful never to give away too much. In “Simple Stuff,” she ponders a private question, muttering along to a deconstructed UK garage groove: “I like the simple stuff/You like the simple things/What does that bring?” Is she talking about a relationship? The vagaries of taste? The cryptic lines fit the trickiness of her beatmaking, whose odd angles suggest impossible spaces where normal laws of physics do not apply. In “Change,” the album’s longest track, she pursues a similarly interior line of inquiry. “What are you gonna do about it? Huh? What? What are you gonna do about it?” she asks, her voice pitched high and childlike in the fashion of the Knife or Fever Ray, giving her interior monologue an otherworldly presence.
James is most direct on “Reflection,” essentially a spoken-word piece set to ambient bells and syn-flutes. “Haven’t seen family or friends/From Rugby to Essex,” she muses, almost whispering. “Feels like the walls are closing in.” Written, presumably, in the depths of lockdown, it’s a meditation on isolation that will resonate with many who lived through the claustrophobic doldrums of 2020. “Everything will be fine, I think,” she says; then she changes her mind: “Feel like my head will explode.” Despite the song’s relatability, there’s a sense that we’re eavesdropping on private thoughts. James comes right out and says as much: “This is a reflection/Just mine not yours.” It’s a moment of intimacy that, in turn, engenders a powerful feeling of trust. Her music may sound as guarded as ever. But on Reflection, Loraine James has invited us in.

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The former Smiths guitarist absorbs the political shocks of 2016 on a characteristically polished album that imagines life in an alternate universe that values kindness, curiosity, and intelligence.

Call the Comet

Like many citizens of Earth in the year 2018, Johnny Marr wishes he could live in a different world. Sorting through the political wreckage of 2016 and its twin seismic shocks, Brexit and Donald J. Trump winning the American presidency, the former Smiths guitarist wondered what it would be like to reside in an alternate universe, one that valued kindness, curiosity, and intelligence instead of crassness and cash. Marr channeled that thought experiment into Call the Comet, his third and most thematically ambitious solo album.
Despite its sci-fi framing, Call the Comet isn’t a concept record, nor does it sound especially futuristic. The album comes into focus, on opening track “Rise,” via a pulsating guitar line that faintly echoes the tremolo riff that fueled “How Soon Is Now?”—and that isn’t the only moment that plays on the legacy of the Smiths. “Hi Hello,” one of three pre-release singles, threatens to slide into the comforting confines of the melody to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” But these feints at the past aren’t self-aware nostalgia; they’re signs that the ever-restless Marr—a rock star who chose to spend a quarter-century as a hired gun, roaming from project to project—is starting to slow down in his middle age.
Some of this settling is literal. After an extended sojourn in Portland, Oregon, Marr relocated to his native Manchester early in the current decade. The move coincided with the launch of his solo career via 2013’s The Messenger. (A decade prior, he’d released Boomslang with his short-lived band the Healers.) The album fused the muscular aspects of the Smiths with remnants of the sleek synths of his Bernard Sumner collaboration, Electronic, resulting in a signature sound that existed comfortably out of time. Evocative of pre-Nirvana, pre-Britpop college rock, the music was nonetheless too accomplished and too comfortable in its own skin to access the hunger of a young indie act desperate to prove itself.
Marr stuck to this template on 2014’s Playland, and he doesn’t really shake things up on Call the Comet, either. Like its two predecessors, the album was produced by the guitarist in conjunction with James Doviak, who has been in Marr’s orbit since he joined the Boomslang tour in 2003, and their comfortable chemistry is evident in the album’s cozy familiarity. Even the electronic accents that could be characterized as left turns, like the ping-pong rhythmic loop that runs throughout “New Dominions” or the chilly New Romantic bounce of “My Eternal,” belong within Marr’s carefully cultivated lineage. However forward-thinking its lyrical content may be, Call the Comet remains anchored by his well-appointed traditionalism. That conservative approach to songwriting is buttressed by Marr’s estimable studio skills: Every harmony, riff, and cymbal splash is in its right place.
Such consummate craft has its allure. Call the Comet is a towering aural monolith: It glistens and gleams, its parts so delicately fused they can be hard to untangle. The album is so densely packed that it’s easy to miss Marr’s overarching themes, a shame exacerbated by his habitual neglect to draw attention to his lyrics. A pleasantly flat, unassuming singer, he functions mostly as a conduit for his melodies, which is only a detriment on an album with so much potential thematic resonance.
Only a close listen—preferably with a lyric sheet in hand—reveals the social consciousness of Call the Comet. Marr kicks off the album with “Rise,” a warning that “it’s the dawn of the dogs” delivered to a pulse that’s not a far cry from The The’s roiling Dusk. This darkness extends into “Bug,” whose shimmering, insistent surface obscures Marr’s assertion, “Everybody feels the aching/Population is sick and shaking.” The illness is cured by the titular heroes of “The Tracers,” otherworldly empaths who come to Earth because “they know we’ve lost the way.” Marr doesn’t follow a precise narrative, but his ultimate destination is “Spiral Cities,” a utopia where all the residents are united by open, observant eyes and a desire to get lost in the glow of love.
Once you dig through the layers of musical gloss to unearth Marr’s message, his mild vocal performance jibes with his idealism. He’s writing with compassion, not anger on Call the Comet; this isn’t protest music so much as a plea to our better angels. Such an open heart is uncommon in these combative times, and Marr’s sincerity gives his flawed album some appeal.


The former Dead Confederate frontman surveys his tangled personal history and uncertain future on a Southern glam rock album that is the highlight of a frustrating career.

Dude, the Obscure

T. Hardy Morris may have chosen the title of his new album simply for the pun, but perhaps he really did recognize himself in Jude Fawley, the doomed protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. Both men are products of the provinces, Jude hailing from the fictional English county of Wessex and T. Hardy from the Deep South. Just as his fictional counterpart dreamed of fame as a scholar, the musician strove to invade the rock mainstream with his band Dead Confederate. Jude went through marriages the way T. Hardy goes through musical acts, including the super-ish-group Diamond Rugs and his recent backing band the Hard Knocks. However it was intended, the title evokes long and futile toil toward an unrealized dream.
Fortunately, Dude, the Obscure is neither a book report nor a history lesson, neither a concept album about professional disappointment nor a literary song cycle. Rather, it plays like a meditation on rock’n’roll in midlife, by an artist who might be nursing lowered expectations or even gaping emotional wounds but not diminished artistic ambitions. This may be Morris’ best record; it’s certainly his most complex and compelling statement, surveying his tangled personal history and the uncertain future that awaits. “I have only death ahead of me, I have only life behind,” he muses on the opener “Be.” “My one and only certainly, and the feeling is sublime.”
Considering its subject matter, Dude could be a real downer. What light breaks through the darkness comes from the music itself, which generally avoids the Southern rock riffs of Dead Confederate in favor of a more distinctive and wide-ranging sound—call it Southern glam rock. Morris doesn’t rely on the guitar as much as he has in the past; it’s there, of course, strumming solemnly on “Cheating Life, Living Death” and stabbing relentlessly on “When the Record Skips.” More often, it provides texture and fanfare, leaving ample room for other instruments. On “The Night Everything Changed,” a travelogue of wasted and forgotten nights, the pedal steel sounds like a synth. The rhythm section borrows a drum-and-fife snare beat to give “Be” the feel of a procession through harsh territory, then adds a queasy pulse to the redemption-seeking closer, “Purple House Blues.”
It’s a quiet album that inhabits the weird headspace of a person who’s just waking up or has begun to nod off—a space where memory gets dodgy and submerged worries bubble up to the surface. Morris’ reedy twang sounds comfortable in this strange territory, even when he’s facing down hard truths about marriage, music, life, death, and obscurity. “Homemade Bliss” is an unabashed love song (“Wherever it is that you are standing, that is the center of the earth”), but even its cries of devotion are freighted with a sense that these bonds are only temporary, that they’re fading even as he sings. That undertone makes the song’s hook—a sharp, shouted “And I love you!”—come across as desperate and triumphal at once, the battle cry of the romantic as well as the skeptic.
Especially after 2015’s Drownin on a Mountaintop, with its hurried production, meta asides, and half-baked lyrics, the sharp focus of Dude is refreshing. If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.


On his ninth album, Anthony Gonzalez is still trying to recapture childhood’s pangs of wonderment. This time, his nostalgia leads him back to the youthful drama of his own Before the Dawn Heals Us.

Fantasy

Many people have a defining moment of their childhood; for M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, childhood seems like the defining moment of his life. Each album since 2008’s John Hughes-inspired Saturdays=Youth has communed with a specific set of nostalgic keepsakes, whether that be Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming), classic Nintendo scores (DSVII), or Punky Brewster (Junk). While Gonzalez has been uncharacteristically mum on the subject of the ’80s and ’90s ephemera that inform M83’s new album, its wide-eyed zeal signals the band’s continued interest in reliving those early pangs of wonderment that adulthood cruelly snuffs out. It’s called Fantasy because of course it is. The first (and only) words on lead single “Oceans Niagara” are “Beyond adventure!” because of course they are.
Fantasy represents a course correction after Junk’s more playful vibe, but it’s also a slight reclamation of that album’s bright, garish elements. In a classic “return to form”-baiting move, Gonzalez delicately throws Junk under the bus in the press release: He says he let “negative things,” namely his distaste for “the world going too fast,” influence that album, while this time, he yearned to recapture the “energy” of 2005’s youthfully dramatic Before the Dawn Heals Us. The timing for his return to that album makes perfect sense: M83 have always been inspired by 20-year-old aesthetics, and now their early material is old enough to fit the bill.
The big emotions of songs like “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” and “Teen Angst” are back, but, befitting Fantasy’s name, they’re harder to pin to real-world concerns like car crashes or hormones. The patient build and bottomless vocal harmonies of the cavernous ballad “Us and the Rest” tug at heartstrings, but the lyrics contrast all that pathos with sci-fi absurdity. Here is the second verse in its entirety: “Hello freak!/Can you see the sky ladder/By the limbo café/Leading to the green ray?/Sometimes it fades…” Sure, you could argue that listening to M83 for the lyrics is like watching Terrence Malick films for the dialogue, but Fantasy is by far the once-mostly-instrumental band’s most verbose offering to date.
Gonzalez has said that he wanted to be more “present” this time, in the interest of achieving a more “personal” album, and at times, like the 10cc’d-out closer “Dismemberment Bureau,” we get a clearer picture of the balance between his long-standing reverence for bygone media and his creeping sense of dread about what’s replaced it. “Do you miss the day/Of human revolution,” he and Kaela Sinclair ask, invoking one of the 20th century’s biggest cultural game-changers: “Television/What a good way to learn/About us, and the heirs of our land.” Those moments of clarity are fleeting. Fantasy is certainly wordier than its predecessors, but if anything, the added syllables muddy up the message for a band that’s been defined by snappy, fantastical one-liners—“The city is my church”; “We own the sky”; “I’ll travel in your dreams.” Instead, songs are dominated by phrases better suited to advertise Mountain Dew: Dune Edition: “cosmic adrenaline,” “immortal energy,” “limitless star,” and “metal rapture.” Though they sometimes aid, or at least complement, M83’s head-in-the-clouds world-building, the writing on this album doesn’t reflect Gonzalez’s professed interest in revealing more of his own psyche. To be fair, it’s hard to envision what deeply personal M83 lyrics would even look like at this stage in their career. The high-wire drama of Before the Dawn Heals Us and Saturdays=Youth are the closest they’ve ever come to relatable, but even that felt like an extension of the band’s exaggerated and intensified vision of late 20th-century adolescence.
The music offers a much more legible roadmap for understanding where M83 are today, 20-plus years into their lifespan. Gonzalez might seem to be following a familiar trajectory: from unexpected breakout hit to lukewarmly received reaction to, now, an attempt to console day-one fans. But that narrative’s a bit too neat. It ignores the merits of the risks that Gonzalez took on Junk, and the unexpected left turns of that album that carry over to Fantasy. There’s nothing quite as knowingly unhip as a Steve Vai guitar solo (“Go!”) or a reanimation of the corpse of Taco’s chintzy 1983 synth-pop cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (“Bibi the Dog”), but every hint of krautrock cool is paired with unabashed camp. If I had to guess what’s on Fantasy’s moodboard, I’d go with the Giorgio Moroder-produced NeverEnding Story theme song and the iconic, pan-flute-led intro to the ’90s educational children’s show Eyewitness.
The interplay between sounds that read as retro chic and those that sound impossibly dated is fascinating, an ever-shifting conflict within M83’s work that reveals larger truths about pop culture’s arbitrary nostalgia-recycling complex. At one point in the early 2010s, “Baker Street”-style wailing saxophones couldn’t have been more uncool, yet they helped turn “Midnight City” into an inescapable hit. The main battlefields here are the songs “Deceiver” and “Sunny Boy,” both of which begin with distant, solemn intros but then morph into more playful shapes when the beats drop. The M83 of old would’ve piled on massive drums and melodrama, but here, Gonzalez opts for an Avalon strut and a “Major Tom” boogie, respectively. M83 was once maligned for its dramatic ’80s pomp, but today, that’s precisely what tempers the impact of Junk’s brasher sonics.
Gonzalez and producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen pulled out all the stops on Fantasy’s sound design—the album credits list 37 different synths or keyboards and include an “effects and treatments” section that reads like the entire pedal department of your city’s largest Guitar Center. In its opulence, pursuit of writerly sci-fi imagery, and obsession with the band’s legacy, this album feels even more labored over than the ambitious Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (which, despite having nearly twice as many tracks, is only seven minutes longer).
What Fantasy is missing isn’t any one synth preset, or a cultural reference for the next season of Stranger Things to popularize. It just lacks urgency. The best M83 songs aren’t necessarily complex, multi-movement epics, but they go up, taking us skyward and sparing no gut-punches along the way. The cascading “Oceans Niagara” has some of that going for it, and “Earth to Sea” offers some much-needed catharsis in the middle of an album otherwise split between midtempo plodders and peppy boppers. But otherwise it feels like Gonzalez has held onto teenage aesthetics while stripping them of the theatricality that is the true source of their power. Without the emotional stakes, Fantasy is just a narcotized Neverland.


On her lush and captivating third album, the pop star looks to the heavens, summoning the cosmic power of love and the divine feminine.

Red Moon in Venus

According to astrologers and ancient mythology, a blood moon, or red moon, is a bad omen, a portent of natural disasters, economic catastrophes, or the death of a great patron. Luckily, a red moon is an infrequent occurrence: a full moon in total lunar eclipse, its deep, rusty glow reminding us that perfect alignments are rare. It’s this emblem of burning intensity and divinity that guides the genre-defying Colombian-American pop star Kali Uchis through Red Moon in Venus, her third studio album, and second sung mostly in English.
Uchis has spent the better part of the last decade redefining the boundaries of Latin pop music. She perfected a blend of R&B and pop on her acclaimed debut Isolation, then took that expansive versatility to the left on the Spanish-language album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, where she prescribed love as a powerful anti-anxiety medication. Watching her loungey psychedelic spirit evolve into confident, shapeshifting pop has been fascinating; a generation of fans have fallen under the spell of her experimental nostalgia music. She is like a modern day La Lupe: channeling music across cultures with a timeless aesthetic that allows her to fit any idea into her singular vision.
Red Moon in Venus luxuriates in the most sublime sounds of Uchis’ career. It’s a fantastical record, illustrating lush, lovesick vignettes and high-femme escapism without relinquishing control. Chirping birds, blooming flowers, and professions of love pepper “In My Garden” and lead single “I Wish you Roses,” two tender devotionals that set the album’s faithful vision of love ablaze. The album’s first half progresses like the early stages of a relationship: endless, saccharine, all-consuming. “Wanna spoil me in every way/It’s Valentine’s like every day,” she sings at the top of the pop-funk highlight “Endlessly.” Rose-tinted glasses? On. But only for a while.
Even at the album’s most picturesque, Uchis never loses her grip on reality, intent on exploring despair with equal intensity. “Fantasy,” featuring R&B star and Uchis’ romantic partner Don Toliver, is an Afropop dance number that ends the infatuation seen in the first half of the record. The song explores love at its most sensual and carefree: “On my body/Don’t let go of me/I just want the fantasy,” Uchis begs. But then she abruptly interrupts: “That’s it, that’s the end of the song—come on baby, let’s go home,” declaring the honeymoon phase over. R&B kiss-off “Deserve Me” is grounded by the realization that it’s better to be alone than to remain in a toxic situation. The undulating, Tame Impala-esque psychedelia of “Moral Conscience” rests on a wise and scornful foretelling: “When you’re all alone/You’ll know you were wrong.” Uchis maintains her sultry alto composure throughout, allowing the idyllic production to support what should be moments of deep rage. She’s cool and collected because she knows a better love awaits.
Uchis’ serenades are a warning to lovers everywhere, a way of owning her femininity in a culture that would cast it in a subordinate role. One moment she’s interpolating soul trio the Temprees (“Love Between”) and the next she’s taunting an ex that their new girl would eat her pussy if she let her (“Hasta Cuando”). Her confidence is reminiscent of others who often straddle the line between bad bitch and dedicated lover, like Beyoncé or Tinashe. In the video for “I Wish you Roses,” Uchis poses in a bed of pink flowers, making symbolic reference to a scene from the 1999 film American Beauty that explores a middle-aged man’s fatal obsession with a girl. Instead of focusing on demoralizing depictions of femmes fatales, “I Wish you Roses” emphasizes the desire to heal: “With pretty flowers can come the bee sting/But I wish you love,” she sings, reaffirming a soft yet firm hold over her lover and their destiny. Uchis knows the power of her sex appeal; instead of reifying it in the patriarchy, she finds reclamation and release in femininity.
Red Moon in Venus makes a case for allowing love’s every phase to wash over you like a powerful tarot reading. Uchis’ blissful melodies often call on the universe’s cosmic energies to deliver divine intervention and feeling. “See I’m praying God will send me an angel/Will the angels bring me back to you?” she coos over the smooth jazz-pop of “Blue.” In its shades of grief and desire, Red Moon in Venus asks us to feel the force of love’s power, whether for good or ill. One of its best moments, the gently spangled “Moonlight,” uses a principle of astrology—the moon as the center of inner emotional wisdom and divine femininity—as a space to relinquish love’s brutish gravity and give into the transcendence of possession. “I just wanna get high with my lover/Veo una muñeca cuando miro en el espejo kiss kiss,” she playfully asserts, more featherlight, liberated, and Cancer sun than ever. Kali Uchis’ music is a path towards a kind of spiritual enlightenment, but only if you open yourself to life’s most feminine energy.


Real Ting is the first project of the impressive rising young London MC Stefanie Allen (aka Stefflon Don). The mixtape is a slightly rocky intro, but her raw talent shines through.

Real Ting

In late 2015, then-ascendant South London rappers Section Boyz made their presence felt with “Lock Arff,” the breakout single that netted them a place on BBC’s Sound of 2016 longlist at the end of that year. It’s usually an indicator of success when a song gets remixed—“Lock Arff,” a sprawling opus that boasts contributions from each member of the six-person crew, left little room for anyone else to get a look-in between verses. But a version with two new verses by Stefanie Allen (aka Stefflon Don), stripped of everything but the original beat and chorus, impressed the Section Boyz enough that they cosigned its official video treatment. The remix and video in turn raised Stefflon Don’s profile enough to land her on the 2017 Sound of… longlist at the end of last year.
In between, the young London MC stayed busy—churning out more remixes or hopping on songs by compatriots like Angel and grime veteran Lethal Bizzle. All of that that momentum culminated in Real Ting, her first full length solo project, released just before 2016 drew to a close.
With a running time of under 40 minutes, the tape’s rocky start is acutely felt, taking up more space than it should in proportion to the remaining nine tracks. “Intro” is a somewhat cartoonish announcement of Allen’s formal arrival on the scene (“Look to the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Don!”) set to an excerpt from Nile Rodgers’ Coming To America score. The melody plays during the scene in which King Jaffe Joffer tracks Prince Akeem down in Queens; from the eastern borough Allen bears south for inspiration on “Real Ting.” It’s startlingly derivative of Brooklynite Young M.A’s “OOOUUU”—from the punchline delivery to the ad libs.
Comparison to established artists can be a boon or a blight for an emerging talent, foreshadowing similar levels of success in the former case or inviting dismissal in the latter. Since “Lock Arff” went viral, discussion of Stefflon Don has often touched on the parallels between her and Nicki Minaj: owing to her cadence, a penchant for brightly-colored hairstyles and a tendency to slip back in and out of Jamaican patois, which can resemble Minaj’s Trinidadian Creole to the untrained ear. Thankfully in Allen’s case the similarities seem both incidental and positive; no rapper could or should corner the market for bravado, and Stefflon Don clearly possesses a lot of it.
Real Ting picks up steam by track three “Tight Nooki,” an upbeat dancehall jaunt featuring Jeremih. It capitalizes on the unstoppable “Bam Bam” riddim, made famous by Chaka Demus & Pliers in the early ’90s, and complements the pair’s previous collaboration on Jeremih’s Late Nights: Europe mixtape. “Family Ties” is deeply personal, touching on a childhood marked by violence and her mother’s legal troubles (“She was looking at ten but the lawyer beat the case/By the grace and the power or the mercy of the state.”) The family affair is rounded out by her brother Dutch, who goes into detail about his own run-ins with the law, and UK House star Donae’o. “Envy Us,” another dancehall-tinged standout with an assist from Tottenham upstart Abra Cadabra, is a good example of the rhythmic space for which Stefflon Don’s voice is well-suited. But the tape’s overall scattered quality positions it as a teaser of things to come rather than a cohesive collection.
It’s hard to tell if or where the line between a mixtape and an album should be drawn—in 2017 a mixtape can be the vehicle for an artist’s unpolished experiments, or be in with a serious chance of winning a Grammy. On *Real Ting, *listeners get a proper introduction to Stefflon Don and a fuller understanding of her artistry. She sings as well as she raps, is a scholar of many genres (trap, dancehall, house and more) and has wide-ranging influences; the outtake from a Margaret Thatcher interview on “Lik Down” and even the antics of “Intro” are revelatory of her cultural interests beyond the music. So if Real Ting is her CV, it’ll be fun to watch her find her footing at work.


Father's I'm A Piece of Shit finds the Awful Records head trying to forswear his debauched lifestyle, reckoning with the morning after way too many morning afters.

I'm a Piece of Shit

The SoundCloud description for Atlanta rapper Father's last project, Who's Gonna Get Fucked First, makes no excuses: "32-mins of pure, unfiltered debauchery." His note on its follow-up, I'm a Piece of Shit, is similarly candid, but this is the morning after way too many morning afters and he's full of regrets: "The melancholy result to all my fucked-up decisions."
Molly tracers are still visible on "Up Still," but the party is definitely over. "Everything dies, everything's a lie," he sighs. Only a hater or a sociopath doesn't feel a tweak in his chest when somebody else plops his heart on the table, and the fact that the Awful Records patriarch is not only fully shouldering the blame for the shambles his love life is in, but also shrinking back into self-doubt, elicits even more empathy. That the album is almost chock-full of bangers lends credence to the theory that you create your best art when you're emotionally wrecked.
Accepting responsibility for his actions aside, I'm a Piece of Shit is generally a more mature record than Who's Gonna Get Fucked First. Who's Gonna Get … is druggy and dripping with sex, but the sex is consensual and the attitudes progressive, with Father and friends eschewing tired old slut-shaming in favor of sexual liberty and justice for all. "You call her ass a ho? Please let a player know why you’re such a square, bro," Richposlim asks on "BET Uncut."
I'm a Piece of Shit continues that narrative, but it's "mature" in a more literal way. Even though Father's only in his mid-twenties, he seems to crave the sort of relationship someone a decade older does. And why not? Fame ages you. "I'm tired of looking for love as much as I'm tired of looking for drugs … Been grew tired of all these bitches on my dick like broomsticks," he says on album opener "Why Don't U." This is the kind of record made when the thrill of having a Baskin-Robbins variety of women waiting after every show has dulled and monogamy seems so much sweeter. There's lots of talk about staying the night and wanting a "bitch to come hold me."
In fact, Father's sexual appetites increasingly are Prince-like (as are some of his sounds: the drums on "Spit or Swallow" sound a lot like the Linn LM-1 Drum pattern on "Raspberry Beret"). Both artists are insatiable, and Father, just like the Purple One, knows that real freakery is about diving into the deep end physically and emotionally—and you can only wade so far with a one-night stand. As the production on  "Slow Dance 2 [Interlude]" morphs from twinkly to trippy Father murmurs "Until the brink just to see how close it brings us," and it's a disarmingly intimate moment.
On "Party On Me," the tables have turned. "When I'm not around, do you even long for me?" Father asks, wistful. It's one of the album's standout tracks, thanks to iLoveMakonnen's pleading chorus and a longing beat, and the juxtaposition of nursery-rhyme singsong cadences, a tinkly marimba and such despairing, vulnerable lyrics deepen the ache. "Startin' to think these bitches slept with me just for amusement … I wanna die a little, cry a little, get a little high right now," he raps in "Y U Make It Hurt Like This." His nakedness on I'm a Piece of Shit is more shocking than any stripper orgy at the Sheraton, mostly because it refutes the carefree, no-strings-attached clichés that litter rap—after awhile, crew love just ain't no fun.


The latest album from the Toronto saxophonist, best known for his work with Destroyer, is an inventive work of auditory storytelling exploring his own fraught religious background.

The Fellowship

Joseph Shabason is a Toronto saxophonist best known for performing with Destroyer, memorably serving up those transportive sax licks that graced Kaputt a decade ago. But in his parallel career as a composer and solo artist, Shabason takes a different tack, minimizing the instrument’s potential as a vehicle for scene-stealing solos and disguising it into what he has called a “dense chordal instrument”—a sound that, like much of Shabason’s music, feels curiously suspended between ’80s new age nostalgia and a more processed, alien cadence.
Yet there is nothing alien about the emotional core of Shabason’s music. Shabason creates instrumental music with richly personal, unabashedly human underpinnings, and his previous albums, 2017’s Aytche and 2018’s Anne, both used field recordings and snatches of interview chatter to investigate intergenerational trauma. His latest work, The Fellowship, focuses on Shabason’s own past, examining his fraught religious upbringing within—and eventual need to walk away from—an insular Islamic community called The Fellowship, which his parents joined before he was born. The result is an undeniably inventive work of auditory storytelling—even if it requires an accompanying CliffsNotes of sorts for listeners to grasp its thematic weight.
Shabason’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and their lingering trauma apparently inspired his parents’ decision to leave Judaism and raise Shabason in a fellowship led by the teachings of a Sufi sheik named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. “Life With My Grandparents” uses a chilly template of fretless bass and heavily processed sax murmurings to convey his parents’ troubled childhoods, and features the record’s only trace of a human voice (a faint cassette sample of a child’s babbling). The title track, with its fluttering birdcall and yearning pan flute, could soundtrack a movie montage of a young family seeking out a new beginning. It is airy and optimistic, a glimpse of daylight in a drab room.
As a teenager, Shabason wrestled with the implications of the dogmatic teachings he’d been raised to believe. “By 13, I had smoked weed and I was terrified about what God was going to do to me,” the musician recalled in a Talkhouse piece. This album’s thorny midsection is a musical suite of songs titled after age ranges in Shabason’s youth, which use nonconventional instrumental choices to illustrate that spiritual tumult. If the gentle new age sheen of “0–13” suggests the innocence of Shabason’s early childhood, the more unsettled unravelings of the track’s final minute represent his growing unease.
This turmoil explodes into full view on “13–15,” which recruits a barrage of marimba and flute squawks to illustrate Shabason’s pained questionings. If the composition sounds distressing, so is a crisis of faith. Equally turbulent is “Comparative World Religions,” a piece that takes its title from a college course that inspired Shabason’s self-reckoning and eventual renunciation. With its unsteady gamelan convulsions, the track is among several that reflect Shabason’s attempts to channel the composer and interdisciplinary artist Maggi Payne. “So Long” is the narrative culmination, a soft-focus coda that luxuriates in loungey textures yet subverts the artificiality of smooth-jazz timbres to convey the very real emotional relief of letting go.
You could easily slot The Fellowship alongside a recent string of albums from talented, nonreligious songwriters reckoning with complicated relationships to faith. There was last year’s Youth Pastoral from New York musician Ben Seretan, whose songwriting expressed unresolved feelings on an evangelical upbringing, and Kevin Morby’s Oh My God, a secular album shot through an impassioned gospel prism. Each of these records approaches religion with more empathy and nuance than, say, XTC’s “Dear God.” (As Shabason himself has put it, “I have a lot of anger towards religion, but this was a way to approach it with curiosity.")
What separates The Fellowship is that it confronts these themes as a wholly instrumental work. The downside of such an approach is that it’s impossible to fully grasp the album’s narrative arc without the aid of a written guide—detailed promotional materials, for instance, or any of the highly personal interviews Shabason has given. Without such thematic grounding, The Fellowship still delivers rich and emotionally engaging ambient-jazz, but some of the more abrasive passages (“13–15,” “Escape from North York”) wind up feeling more like fragmented narrative transitions than satisfying compositions. This is an album that demands more than passive listenership, but also rewards it. On its own cathartic terms, The Fellowship is a fiercely creative record that offers nothing less than an auditory document of private liberation.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Composer/performer/improviser David Toop’s latest release traces the seam between sound and music, paying attention to the hidden sounds that surround us and turning silence inside out.

David Toop: Entities Inertias Faint Beings

Entities Inertias Faint Beings

“In a lot of ways I’ve come to dislike music,” David Toop told The Wire in 2003. “I love sound, I love silence, but music as a whole I don’t like anymore.” You might assume that would have troubled him, given that Toop, then 54, had been deeply involved with music for most of his life, in virtually every role imaginable: performer, improviser, composer, critic, theorist, archivist, curator, and label owner. But if it represented any sort of crisis for him—six years before, burnout and “indifference to contemporary music” had led Toop to hang up his hat as a music journalist—it didn’t hold back his output. Since making the statement, Toop has continued to perform and lecture, released a half-dozen albums, and written two books, including the recently published Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation, and the Dream of Freedom.
But Toop’s turn away from music, that complicated category of organized sound, has been crucial in one very important aspect: It has allowed him to ask probing questions about the nature of listening. Those questions come to a head on Entities Inertias Faint Beings, his first studio album since 2007’s Sound Body. Offering a vibrant array of rustle and hum, the new album traces the seam between sound and music, between the intentional and the incidental, between expression and mute abstraction. A partial index of its sounds would include the whine of rubbed wineglass rims; shortwave radios on the fritz; the electric buzz of the forest canopy at night; the languid click of fingernails across guitar strings; the whirr and flap of a 16mm film projector’s take-up reel. It is an album about paying attention to the hidden sounds that surround us, about turning silence inside out. And it is an album about using sound to find one's own bearings.
Entities Inertias Faint Beings got its start as an autobiography—or, more precisely, it is the result of what turned out to be an abortive case of writer’s block. Its genesis lies in three periods of solitude: first a stay on Tamborine Mountain in subtropical Queensland, Australia (“so silent at night that I listened to recorded music—Japanese gagaku, Buddhist ritual from Bhutan, Korean Confucian music—as if drifting into cavernous black space,” Toop writes in his introduction to the album), and then on Queensland’s Gold Coast, where cicadas harmonized with helicopters. Back in Cornwall, trying and failing to write his life’s story, he began sifting through several years' worth of personal recordings he had stored on his computer: small, percussive thunks; filament-like drones; the crinkling of paper. Shuffling, layering, and arranging—not so much composing as feeling his way through the material, as if improvising—he added new sounds to the mix, like a quiet passage of acoustic guitar from one of his daily practice sessions, and a hydrophone recording from his garden pond. And in London, he fleshed out the pieces with the help of musician friends. The improvising saxophonist John Butcher lends trilling, bird-like sounds to two tracks; Rie Nakajima's battery-powered motorized objects rattle and whirr, suggesting insect colonies in upheaval.
The overall result—thematically, anyway—is something like one of W.G. Sebald’s literary peregrinations: a palimpsest of place, memory, and accident, although its precise route is unknown to all but its creator. There is little to tell us what any of these clicks and pings might actually be. Several of the album’s track titles suggest cryptic headings scrawled on notecards in dusty filing cabinets: “dry keys echo in the dark and humid early hours”; “pieces of wood and iron, phials of odours”; “sea slug.” They function as indices of possible experiences, and if they explain little—do the bassy gurgles of “sea slug” really come from a gastropod mollusk?—they offer unusual and inviting travelogues consisting of little more than white noise and feral throb.
But Toop can’t quite resist sneaking music—that most elegantly ordered aspect of organized noise—back into the equation. Again and again, understated wisps of melody, harmony, and rhythm surface briefly and disappear just as quickly, sending out ripples that supercharge every corner of this lovely, engrossing album. In the album’s centerpiece, “ancestral beings, sightless by their own dust,” Sylvia Hallett’s sarangi, a bowed string instrument from Hindustani classical music, weaves an eerie, mournful air over slow, methodical pulses. Then, at the track’s end, a jungle’s worth of growling, chirping, buzzing sounds swells and is swallowed in turn by the steady gush of a tropical rainstorm. Toop has compared his compositional processes to traditional Japanese stone gardens—one track, “setting stones,” quotes a thousand-year-old passage on the subject—and at its most engrossing, Entities captures the uncanny qualities of inanimate objects in conversation with one another. It is a way of suggesting that the music exists independently even of its creator; it is a product of the act of listening itself. By the act of focusing our ears, we bring it to life—and vice versa.


The sleepiest rapper in Odd Future teams up with an old-school mentor for a short, low-stakes mixtape.

Aren’t U Glad You’re U?

Domo Genesis never tried to match the anarchic intensity of some of the larger personalities in Odd Future. Forget “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school”; Domo mostly seemed to care about killing time and burning joints. After holding his own but rarely turning heads as a member of MellowHigh, he revealed on his 2016 solo debut, Genesis, that his true talents may be curatorial. With its dapper, late-night production and spirited guest turns from far flashier weed enthusiasts like Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J, it was one of the more stylish recent Odd Future releases, even if Domo himself was usually the least interesting thing about it. To the extent that the album failed as an effort to brand Domo as a marquee rapper, it’s simply because he isn’t one.
His output since then suggests that he’s come to terms with his place in Odd Future’s second tier. Domo didn’t rope in any major outside star power for 2017’s Red Corolla, a mixtape as humble and workmanlike as the car it celebrated, and on his new Aren’t U Glad You’re U?, he seems even less interested in wooing the masses. Save for perpetually underrated Little Brother veteran Phonte, who delivers one of the tape’s standout verses without trying all that hard over some bumping, blunted soul on “Shaq Carried Kobe” (“This ain’t no shit for the ascots/This is for the galaxies and planets of Asgard”), the 20-minute tape’s only guest is executive producer Evidence, of yesteryear backpack-rap idealists Dilated Peoples.
In 2018, there may be no more efficient way for a rapper to lower the stakes on their latest project than by recruiting a guy like Evidence to produce the whole thing. Yet as throwback collaborators go, you could do far worse. Especially for those who used to rock “Worst Comes to Worst” back in the day, it’s nice to hear him working with a younger artist—albeit in a way that’s less “catching up with an old friend,” more “exchanging a respectful nod with someone you used to bump into at parties as you pass each other on the street, then keeping it moving.” No, it’s not going to make your day, but it’s a net positive.
A low ceiling hangs over the entire mixtape, which never aspires to anything more than serviceable raps over serviceable beats, most of which are the kind of no-frills loops and scraps that some producers would save for beat tapes. There are flickers of heat, but they’re rare. Domo shares some of his sharpest raps for “Free Krik,” over a staticky beat with shades of “Scenario”—the kind of trim, focused track that Vince Staples used to hit out of the park in his mixtape days, before his artistic ambitions scaled up. Unlike Staples, though, Domo can only sustain that kind of intensity in short bursts. On “Brake,” he sounds unconvincing casting himself as a menace to society: “If I don’t get mines, I’m gon’ break shit…Try to knock my hustle, you gon’ end with a break wrist.”
Domo’s rapping is such a place-holding exercise that even when Evidence takes the mic for a short solo spotlight, “Fuck a Co-Sign,” it barely registers as a change in tone. Both rappers seem to understand that a project like this only needs to be good enough, not great—and, in fact, that anything significantly more memorable might just call attention to how flat the rest of the tape is. These kinds of stripped-down beats-and-raps exercises will always hold some appeal, but there’s no need to glamorize the unremarkable. This is boring music from two artists who’ve set the bar so low you almost wonder why they even bothered.


When I picked up Pole's first CD (humorlessly titled CD 1) there was a little sticker on it with ...

CD 2

When I picked up Pole's first CD (humorlessly titled CD 1) there was a little sticker on it with a quote extolling the virtues of Pole's experimental electronic update on dub. I got the record home and heard nothing of the kind. Yeah, it had some deep bass here and there, but I couldn't see how the sterile electronic production or the random, buzzing sonic excursions could be compared to the sticky, free- flowing ambience of dub. I mean, I still liked it, but I found myself confused by the comparison. Now, with Pole's latest offering, the EP CD 2, I understand.
CD 2 brings to the forefront the catchier, more rhythm- oriented side of Pole's (somewhat limited) musical personality. Or, as the electronic eggheads of the European continent from whence Pole sprang would probably describe it, the music on CD 2 is "Sound with a bit more organization." There are very clear patterns, choruses even (well, kind of...), that bring a little funk to the table. A little bid-a-boom to go with that digital sshhh...
Now, this is ambient electronic minimalism I'm talking about, so I mean it when I say "a little" funk. But that small bit makes a big difference. And when combined with the dry, yet spacious production environment that brings to mind a microprocessor's idea of what comes out of a Jamaican mixing board, these patterns make for a fun EP. And the "pure sine waves, hold the overtones please" kind of bottom end is the clincher. So, I'm sold-- a cold electronic version of dub. They nailed it.