The Gainesville, Fla., quintet composes bewitching digital folk on its immersive debut.

Hundred Waters

Chops have always been a touchy subject in indie rock circles, but at least it used to be fairly easy to know who had them before discussing whether or not they mattered. In 2012, it's rarer to find a band that doesn't incorporate button-pushing, vocal manipulation, or wholesale sampling as a primary compositional method-- how do you even begin to acknowledge the impact of technical proficiency outside of, say, AraabMuzik? On their gorgeous debut of bewitching digital folk, Hundred Waters find answers in a means similar to Braids' or Julia Holter's: Their stage setup might be a confounding tangle of cables and surge protectors, but there's a commitment to unapologetic, real-time virtuosity, compositional refinement, and vision that cuts through the nonchalant clutter of their peers. You can't pull of sounding this joyfully adventurous without being a serious musician.
The most obvious extension of that kind of serious musicianship is the Gainesville, Fla., quintet's confidence, and there are tangible ways in which it manifests here: Whether the pristine clarity of the production is the result of countless studio hours or just a monetary leap of faith (I'm more inclined to believe the former considering its tiny label), you immediately appreciate the investment of belief. And Hundred Waters streams for free on the band's website with the lyrics posted in plain sight, which might seem like a small gesture, but a heartening one if you think of how far out their way young bands go to obscure their words. If you have to shackle yourself to a computer, Hundred Waters allow and invite a more immersive listening experience in a terribly shallow format. Both make the same point: They're not afraid to ask for your full attention.
In a more abstract way, Hundred Waters plays out like a record unusually sure of itself despite having no obvious stylistic hook-- colleagues of mine have grasped at Broadcast and Dirty Projectors as comparisons, two bands who sound like hardly anyone else, let alone each other. I hesitate to use "folktronica" because I think the nomenclature can trigger more ill will than the music that was actually produced under that faux-genre, but that's really what you're getting here: Befitting a record with both "Sonnet" and "…---…" as song titles, Hundred Waters merges the digital and the antiquated sonically and lyrically. At their core, the songs are often in a folk tradition, albeit more towards the "freak-" than the coffee-shop type, vocalist Nicole Miglis heavily informed by pastoral England in terms of harmony and language. The lyrics to opener "Sonnet" are taken directly and entirely from a Percy Shelley verse of the same name, while the acoustic figures and woodwinds that vine upwards throughout it the suggest Espers' Ren Faire wake-and-bakes basking in sunshine rather than blacklights. Beyond the modal harmonies, there's an archaic poetry to these songs that some might find impossibly precious (note the spelling of "splendour" in the lyrics), but I find it congruent with the band's musical persona. "Boreal" and "Me & Anodyne" initially appear fantastical due to their purple wordplay, but they're stories grounded in the complexities of human relationships and the urge to opt out of modern mundanity. Likewise, focus on the ripeness of the lyrics, and you'll miss "Thistle" as an acrid sendoff written with a poisoned quill.
Occasionally, the faerie dust gets a little too thick (the free-time drum circle "Wonderboom" in particular), but even then you never get a sense that they're being overindulgent. More often, their playful side is where their virtuosity gets revealed: a nimble player piano roll that splits "Boreal" open, the expert deployment of syncopated kick drums accenting the chorus of "Me & Anodyne". "Visitor" starts off with the kind of half-melodic, half-percussive ripple of indistinct brass that's familiar in the wake of Animal Collective, yet it's a loop and a living thing, morphing into intriguing melodic shapes while the rhythm sections bustle skillfully. There are brief hat tips to glitch ("Thistle"), tUnE-yArDs' oblong rhythms ("Theia"), and the processor-spiked jazz of Four Tet ("Visitor"), but much of Hundred Waters is just love of pure sound.  It's particularly evident on near-instrumental pieces like "Caverns", which layers a gorgeous backward loop over a heaving percussion for an effect that's similar to crystal stalactites described therein, both extremely dense and yet translucent, and meditative closer "Gather" features an ostinato piano line and rich cello acting out its hopeful epitaph ("We can crouch in sanctuary/ Or we can gather our threads into rope and pull.")
Throughout, it's evident how much of the hard work occurred in the planning stages, such is the simply staggering sophistication of these arrangements. Though mostly clocking in at under five minutes, no single track exposes its hooks too quickly and their tendency to explore phrases and shapes before locking into a groove evinces a foreground of both improvisation and skill that suggest Hundred Waters just might be an omnivorous jazz band. And above all, they're the kind of discovery it's easy to get excited about: Their debut does more than enough to stand on its own, not only ambitious in its own right, but leaving little doubt about Hundred Waters' capability of handling wherever their ambition takes them from here.


The actress’ full-length debut is firm in its influences but lacking in variety.

Heart Head West

Cutting a debut record is tough enough without a day job, but despite her expanding  presence in television and film, actress Lola Kirke makes it look fairly easy. Following a 2016 self-titled EP, Heart Head West is Kirke’s first long player, and its lilting, laid-back posture allows her to plant one foot in confessional country music and the other in the weightless folk of Laurel Canyon. But regardless of Heart Head West’s stretch of sweet-and-sour ballads, its lack of textural and rhythmic variety leaves you hungry for something heartier.
Kirke’s music is most effective when she combines candied melodies with prudent lyrics that go down like a bitter pill. Opening track “Monster” is a prime example; Kirke plumbs the murky depths of her register before floating to its peaks. “What if nothing’s wrong?” she asks, “What if it was all just a song?” Kirke’s question poses a makeshift solution for one of the record’s most complex problems: How do you fuse dignity and the need for social acceptance? The song’s slide guitar and flourishes of harmonium form an elegant scaffold for Kirke’s smoke-cured vocals, and though her questions are never answered, she explores a relatable dilemma with grace.
One of Heart Head West’s primary flaws lies in its sequencing. “Monster” is a strong start, but the nine subsequent tracks are weaker  by comparison. “Born to Die” dilutes “Monster”’s formula, cutting it with the boho nihilism of Lana Del Rey (“Baby you were born to die” Kirke sings) and the breathy lull of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. The mood evoked is not a shortcoming, per se, but it registers as a little forced and musically thin. The unfortunately titled “Sexy Song” exhibits a similar lack in spark. Lingering in the same mid-tempo limbo as most of the record, it’s a lounge ballad from the perspective of a romantically neglected woman who’s this close to downright begging for sex—a welcome twist on the clichéd dynamics between men and women in rock music. Sadly, Kirke’s plea sounds more like an elegy for erections past rather than an empowered command.
Things pick up when “Supposed To” hurls the record’s sauntering tempo out the saloon doors with a boisterous rockabilly number. It isn’t the star of the album, but its scrappy guitar and Loretta Lynn sass make it a fun reprieve from the soft, grazed plains of Heart Head West. “Simon Says,” meanwhile, finds Kirke stepping to a doo-wop groove and crooning her catchiest line: “They all said it wouldn’t hurt anymore/Least not the way that it did before, but it does.” The crack in her voice cuts deep, making me wish she sang this raw more often.
“Point of No Return,” Kirke’s version of Jim Ford’s downtrodden classic, brings things home. Here, the production is simple and the delivery straightforward—but it’s the source material that truly shines at the end of the day. It was Ford, after all who wrote one of the greatest opening lines in country history: “Baby, if the cake ain't missing/How’d that icing get all over you?” While she does it justice, Kirke’s homage summarizes the core issue of her record: It is firm in its influences, but could benefit from growing beyond them.


This ensemble performance from 2018 offers an ideal introduction to the Swedish songwriter’s work, showcasing her vocal virtuosity and gothic drama.

Anna von Hausswolff: Live at Montreux Jazz Festival

Live at Montreux Jazz Festival

Last month, two scheduled appearances in Paris by the Swedish organist and singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff were canceled for a reason that, in our era of pandemic closures and right-wing hysteria about censorship, seems quaint: satanic panic. Von Hausswolff brings a religious sense of ceremony to her operatically heavy music, whether she’s pummeling a single distorted chord into oblivion, swaggering and soaring through gothic rock songs, or spinning long passages of ominous drone. She often performs and records in churches, on room-filling pipe organs. The Paris gigs had drawn a crowd of fundamentalist Catholic protesters to block the doors of the Notre-Dame de Bon-Port church, evidently riled up by a lyric from Von Hausswolff’s 2010 song “Pills”: “I made love with the devil.”
Yves Trocheris, the priest who made the decision to cancel, admirably defended von Hausswolff, making clear that he was acting out of concern for public safety and not because he agreed with the fundamentalists. Still, his straight-faced denial of her supposed satanism carried some unintentional humor. Listening to von Hausswolff’s new live album, you might not disagree with the protesters about the wild and dark forces swirling within this music. There is something threateningly subversive about performing it in institutions with histories of rigidness and repression—but maybe raising a little hell isn’t such a bad thing.
Live at Montreux Jazz Festival was recorded in 2018, during an electrifying ensemble performance of material drawn from Dead Magic and The Miraculous, von Hausswolff’s two latest records at the time. The setlist makes Live at Montreux an ideal introduction to her work for anyone drawn in by 2020’s breakthrough All Thoughts Fly, her fifth album and first for Southern Lord, which set aside her commanding vocals and backing band in favor of stormy solo organ instrumentals. Like Nick Cave, for whom she was opening that night in Montreux, von Hausswolff is a rakishly charismatic singer, with an air of menace that seems sincere and playful at once. She pairs this theatrical expressiveness with old-school vocal virtuosity, as likely to stun you with a melodic leap as she is with a turn from pristine bel canto to rock’n’roll growl.
Live at Montreux charts a rough trajectory from one pole of von Hausswolf’s songwriting style to the other. Opener “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall” is the closest thing to pop, a tale of a doomed relationship set to a deceptively bubbly organ ostinato. Closer “Come Wander With Me/Deliverance” is a 15-minute barrage, with doom metal riffs and passages of noisy free improv downshifting suddenly into chord changes that would sound at home in a Romantic-era symphony. The misty tunefulness of the former mode splits the difference between Cave's murder ballads and Kate Bush's art-pop fantasias; the Wagnerian rumble of the latter is more akin to Swans or Neurosis. Von Hausswolff and her band—guitars, bass, drums, percussion, synth, pipe organ—deliver both sides of their music with thrilling high drama and careful attunement to subtleties of harmony and arrangement. Even the ambient-leaning sections move purposefully, with each new layer added or subtracted pushing the whole somewhere new.
Von Hausswolff is no nostalgist, but there is a throwback appeal to her treatment of the rock concert as an ambitious and occasionally solemn spectacle. In addition to the more direct reference points, Live at Montreux also recalls, in a roundabout way, recordings like Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet and Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii, weed-scented live totems of the 1970s that gave the sense of the musicians as wizards and the stage as their conjuring ground. There’s nothing ironic about the music’s foreboding heaviness, but it does have a sense of mischief. You can practically hear von Hausswolff smiling as she slips into a vaguely demonic register during the opening section of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” turning an otherwise mundane line—“My feet are not enough”—into an unholy incantation. The climax of “Ugly and Vengeful” involves passages of overwhelming density and dissonance juxtaposed with largely unaccompanied vocal runs. The band gears up for a moment before slamming back in each time, like a supervillain gleefully brandishing torture devices before administering them.
Though Live at Montreux is an inviting survey for newcomers, it's also worth hearing if you’re already familiar with the source material. Some songs, like “Pomperipossa,” are reworked for maximum force, but the greatest rewards are subtler: the delicacy of the drum fills in “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall,” the way the band pauses for breath before the coda of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” or shifts the harmonies of its chorus by changing a single note. Next time von Hausswolff rolls through Paris, those angry Catholics should give her a chance. Her music may be devilish, but it isn’t without grace.

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A decade ago, Lady Gaga created an enormous, bravura flex of electronic pop. An anniversary edition arrives with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies.

Lady Gaga: Born This Way the Tenth Anniversary

Born This Way the Tenth Anniversary

Lady Gaga was wrapped in raw beef when she announced her third album at 2010’s MTV VMAs. The meat dress was only a warm-up. Born This Way, first released in May 2011, is a bravura flex of electronic pop as big as a Bosch canvas that charges between hair metal riffs, taint-tightening bass, and synths that crackle like hot coals. On her best front-to-back album, Gaga belts each crushing hook with every fiber of her chest, with personal pain turned into placard-ready manifestos. She sings like she’s making a blood pact.
In a way she was. On Born This Way, Gaga, who is bisexual, made pop her pulpit and pledged her fight for LGBTQ+ rights in alliance with her young, queer fanbase. In February 2011, the album’s bright, brash title track became the first U.S. No. 1 hit to directly reference the trans community, with the lyrics, “No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I’m on the right track, baby/I was born to survive.”
As if to reinforce that these songs are for everyone, Gaga now marks 10 years of Born This Way with six “reimagined” versions of its songs by LGBTQ+ artists and allies. It works best when they scorch the earth. Big Freedia, who was supposed to be part of the album back in 2011, turns “Judas” into exuberant New Orleans bounce with drumline snares, squealing sax, and a gospel choir; The Highwomen’s “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is inviting folk-rock that could be an early Heart treasure. The faithful covers from Years & Years, Orville Peck, and Kylie Minogue are less distinctive; most unforgivable is Ben Platt’s mawkish take of “Yoü and I,” which already has two wonderful, and very different, remixes from Mark Taylor and Metronomy.
A decade ago, Born This Way was mostly co-produced by Gaga with RedOne, DJ White Shadow, and her then-musical director Garibay. The “Banditos,” as Gaga called the crew, made the record over 18 months on her 2009-2011 tour. They worked around her erratic schedule—Gaga claimed to hardly sleep, subsisting on “music and coffee”—and set up laptops backstage and a makeshift vocal booth in her tour bus. On-the-road recording isn’t uncommon for a busy pop star—Rihanna recorded 2011’s Talk That Talk in a similar fashion—but the time crunch distills the kinetic energy of Gaga’s stadium-sized life straight into music. If it sounds like she’s singing every phrase with an exclamation point, well, it’s likely because she was due on stage in 10. There was also a practical reason for urgency: Incredibly, given the commercial success of The Fame and its sibling EP The Fame Monster, Gaga’s Monster Ball live dates had put her three million dollars in debt, and she needed the next record to get her back on the road and out of the red.
She called the album “a giant musical-opus theater piece.” It was made to be performed on a stage set up like a Transylvanian castle, and is laced with enjoyably over-the-top gothic flourishes: Gregorian chants on “Bloody Mary,” echoey organ on “Highway Unicorn.” Created in arenas, for arenas, Born This Way’s Vatican-sized ambitions imbue the album with a holistic sense of scale. With the exception of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, mainstream pop hasn’t sounded this big since. And it set a bar for promo excess in the iTunes era too, with stunts that dropped a spider-silk blanket across pop culture. Gaga arrived at the Grammys in an egg, wore prosthetic horns, and partnered with corporations like Google, Starbucks, and Zynga, the tech company whose popular FarmVille app offered in-game album previews and motorbike-riding sheep.
Gaga often sounds like she has gazed into the depths of hell and is back to tell the tale. (“I have been for three years baking cakes, and now I’m going to bake a cake that has a bitter jelly,” she said of her music’s evolution). “Government Hooker” is a sneering dance stormer that sends up powerful creeps and, with DJ White Shadow’s aircraft hangar-sized techno, takes her pointed polemic to the rave. Amid the airtight industrial pop of “Scheiße,” the best non-single of Gaga’s career, she rebukes the dumb shit that trailed her—the sexism, the transphobia—with a monster hook sung in pseudo-German and vulcanized synths that squeal like a Formula 1 starting grid. Caustic messages make Born This Way’s triumphant moments feel alluringly sweet. The fist-pumping album closer “The Edge of Glory” soars with self-belief, as Gaga’s repetitions of “I’m on the edge/The edge/The edge” build momentum like an athlete spinning the hammer throw.
She switches vocal styles like she changes satellite-dish-sized hats. On the scuzzy disco-pop “Heavy Metal Lover,” she coos coquettishly before flipping to Auto-Tuned camp. “Dirty pony, I can’t wait to hose you down,” she growls. The wonderfully blasphemous “Judas” is pop-house whiplash with the drama of Mosaic law. You can guarantee that some gay bar, somewhere in the world, is blasting it right now, with or without the video starring Norman Reedus as the sleazy daddy love interest. “Hooker prostitute wench vomits her mind,” she sings, as if catching darts in her teeth and spitting them back.
Gaga described Born This Way’s title track as a “magical message song” for the Prop 8 era, and, she wrote on Instagram recently, it was inspired by disco artist Carl Bean’s fabulous 1977 cover of the gay liberation classic “I Was Born This Way.” Of the whole record, it’s the song that has aged least well, both for its essentialist message and dated electropop. As Owen Pallett recognized in a 2014 article for Slate, its major-key composition was a departure from the “sexy, spooky” minor-key songwriting of Gaga’s biggest hits. In an aim to reach everyone, she broke from her own winning formula. In 2011, the unsubtle “Born This Way” may have been what the world needed, and it’s intensely meaningful to many queer people—including Gaga, who has the phrase tattooed on her left thigh. Still, you wish a better song had become the de facto soundtrack to LGBTQ+ rights in the Obama era. Ten years on, it’s a weak link in an album that has so much more to say about freedom and autonomy, and, elsewhere, embraces being an outsider while pausing to question the social norms that push some of us to the fringes.
These days, it’s cool for pop stars to play the bad guy or the vengeful ex. But it was less so in the early ’10s, when the charts were cluttered with party-rocking rubbish and self-affirmative dreck. It’s hard to rankle at Gaga’s version of outsider empowerment, perhaps because it’s rooted in something real. On the joyful “Bad Kids,” a song inspired by hearing fans’ stories while on the road, Gaga makes high school jibes sound like phrases you’d want to wear on a badge: a “degenerate young rebel,” a “bitch,” a “jerk,” a “brat,” “a selfish punk [who] really should be smacked.” At other times, she looks unflinchingly inwards. “Marry the Night,” a song about Gaga’s pre-fame years on the Lower East Side, puts a megaphone to a bruised mind racing with survival instinct. A cinematic video seems to reference the sexual assaults she suffered at 19, which, she said in a 2019 interview, led to hospitalization and a “psychotic break.” These details, which she didn’t share at the time of Born This Way’s initial release, cast a starker shadow on this hustler’s anthem. It was always a fantastic soundtrack for stomping down the street; it’s also a solemn vow to “marry the dark” despite the violence that can lurk in its shadows.
Born This Way’s reclaimed confidence goes down to the half-woman, half-machine composite on its cover, a mutant gynoid that screams with the fury of a saint. It’s ridiculous, ugly. People hate it. It’s also a perfectly punkish match for this scrappy colossus of an album, an apex of off-the-leash creativity and unapologetic commerce. It still makes you want to live without the Scheiße—but is just as suited for a world full of it. For an hour it makes you feel like you are made of steel.

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Balancing broad comedy with pointed political satire, the Detroit rapper continues his evolution from skilled MC to producer polymath on his latest album.

Deathfame

Quelle Chris has carved a niche for himself at the edges of alternative hip-hop. His music is as distinctive as it is capacious, and he’s probably one of the only rappers whose discography contains a verse from Roc Marciano and a hook from the Tune-Yards. As he approaches 40, Quelle Chris has deepened his ability to write perceptive lyrics and developed his skills as a beatmaker. Recent work on the score for Judas and the Black Messiah has shown the effort he’s made to stretch his wings, and he’s evolved from a very skilled MC to a producer polymath. While he’s rarely shied away from humor, on his new album DEATHFAME, he balances broad comedy with pointed satire, providing direct political address with a looseness that keeps it all from sounding like mere cant.
Collaboration brings Chris down to earth (long-time producing partner Chris Keys appears on several piano-driven tracks and Knxwledge provides a boom-bap beat) but isolation suits him. By creatively overdubbing his vocals, he reflects the uncertain world around him. Though there’s long been a dubby texture to Chris’ production, DEATHFAME turns the reverb and echo up to the point of pure abstraction. His words still carry weight and specific meaning, but this album is his 808s & Heartbreak, a piece defined as much by its ambience and vocal timbre as its lyrics.
While Chris has never been afraid to crack jokes, his flow here is considerably more deadpan, carrying a sense of solemnity. He sounds sincere when he sings that he’s grateful to be alive on “Alive Ain’t Always Living,” but his voice slows down to a stroll by the track’s conclusion, as if life’s exhaustion has caught up to him. His flow similarly captures the duality of life reflected in the beat, a calming soul keyboard melody cloaked in static and unsettling distortion. The album’s title, repeated by Quelle Chris himself and disembodied voices, hints at a painful recognition of the unstated purpose of the rap industry, where tragedy is so often intertwined with commercial success: “Let these corporations sink their fangs in my legacy’s neck before I dip,” he declares on the title track.
With a distortion-heavy and almost vaporwave-like approach to sound, the production on DEATHFAME recalls Actress as much as it does Madlib. You can hear the bones of a backpacker-friendly jazz rap palette, but they’ve been scrambled and reassembled here. The drums on “King In Black” bang like sheets of metal in a thunderstorm, clanging and slowed, less chopped and screwed and more dragged through the mud. A fat double-bass line and free-form piano join in, forming a robotic jazz combo, and Chris pitch-shifts and manipulates his own voice into a hundred different directions. Nevertheless, DEATHFAME never loses touch with rap—as twisted and filtered as his voice might become, Chris still spits bars over what generally sounds like beats. These futuristic environs match the inventiveness of collaborators like Navy Blue and Pink Siifu—it’s like Chris is cosigning the experimental tendencies of a new generation.
The techno of Chris’ native Detroit has often been connected to the city’s history of machinery and industry, and while DEATHFAME doesn’t sound much like Underground Resistance, it’s hard not to place the album’s distinctly metallic sound in that context. Voices are weathered and eroded, and the percussion sounds oxidized; the production embraces the rust and decay of industrial neglect, lending a concrete weight to the abstract heaviness of the lyrics. While it may sound like a transmission from a distant universe, there’s no reality DEATHFAME could come from but our own.


For this 88rising showcase, Joji, Rich Brian, AUGUST 08, and the rest of the label all act like promising pop stars but are often overshadowed by the outside talent they bring along.

Head in the Clouds

88rising is half media brand and half label. Their goal is to build a platform for Asian rappers and singers who’ve adopted the sound of contemporary American hip-hop and reinterpreted it through the lens of their own lives, often to massive viral success. While not all of its roster is from abroad—singer AUGUST 08 is from Los Angeles—most of it is made of young artists from China, Indonesia, and Japan who initially took it upon themselves to create videos and songs that blended mischievous humor and chest-thumping braggadocio in the hopes of maybe one day falling into pop stardom. Head in the Clouds is the final push to that dream, pairing 88’s roster with some of the most distinctive voices in hip-hop right now for a collection of trap anthems, poolside bops, and starry-eyed ballads aimed to infiltrate the Top 100. Unfortunately, only a handful of the album’s 17 tracks stand on their own as singular works; the rest are stiff, boilerplate copies of songs by other artists currently racking up streams.
The ones that do succeed sound like they were written purely for top-down twilight rides in the summertime. “Peach Jam,” a collab between oddball YouTube personality turned singer Joji and Memphis’ BlocBoy JB is a pulpy ode to sex built around a recurring “Hey-ya!” chant. It acts as one long bridge, the kind of morsel that inspires VIP sections to jump on couches and collectively sing out of tune. And “History,” a solo cut by the droll MC Rich Brian, is further proof of the Jarkata rapper’s knack for melding his low huff of a voice with playful production to build understated hits, as he wistfully looks back on a past fling over bright flute synths and tinkering hi-hats. The lyricism displayed here is nothing special—BlocBoy may take the crown for the most senselessly evocative line when he raps, “You my baby like fetus,” on “Peach”—but the songs are breezy and fun without overextending their reach.
The same can’t be said for the syrupy R&B tracks, primarily handled by AUGUST 08 and 19-year-old singer NIKI. Woozy opener “La Cienega,” named for the major thoroughfare in L.A., is a cliché take on the tedium of fame, erected on blasé lyrics about the “glitz” of “la la land” and a hulking synth line that aims for sensuousness but instead comes off hammy. Later on, “I Want In,” a dedication to willingly losing sight of a lover’s imperfections in a haze of lust, sees AUGUST 08 and NIKI trying to embrace the sounds of caribana and soca to listless results, a duller version of one of PARTYNEXTDOOR’s dancehall-tinged melodies.
That’s the issue at the core of Clouds: Most of its songs sound too familiar. For an album that was created by 88rising as a means of promoting its talent, it provides very little opportunity for the label’s artists to have their own voice. The big-name features compound this problem, as they dictate the tone of the songs they appear on. The Playboi Carti-led “Beam,” for example, is a lo-fi Murda Beatz-produced banger that would fit in seamlessly on the Atlanta rapper’s latest album, Die Lit, but then Rich Brian shows up and more or less repeats Carti’s opening verse.
But if there’s one 88-signed act that does stand out on the compilation, it’s Higher Brothers, a quartet of rappers from Chengdu, China. Members MasiWei, DZknow, Psy. P, and Melo have been building a dedicated following in their home country for years now and they get to flex their muscles on tracks “Let It Go” and “Disrespectin,” which both feature the kind of rampageous, hard-hitting production that suits their kinetic brand of hip-hop. “I never look at the past, higher we go,” Psy. P belts on “Let It Go” in a mix of Mandarin and English. Here, Clouds briefly snaps out of its role as a playlist of serviceable summer jams and shows us what makes these artists special—and what the West has been missing out on.


The troubled outfit's latest album bitterly recounts the Decline of Foxygen.

Seeing Other People

Foxygen ascended swiftly to indie-rock fame and descended just as quickly into glam-rock tragicomedy. The years following their 2013 breakthrough We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic felt like watching Nadia approach the deadly staircase in the TV series “Russian Doll.“ Each time they face-planted, they returned with a hard reset: The 24-song behemoth ...And Star Power and tighter 40-minute follow-up Hang were both comparable to any number of coked-out comedown albums meant to demoralize label accountants and chase off casual fans before getting reassessed as cult classics. Seeing Other People is overtly about the Decline of Foxygen and little else, and sadly, it’s their most convincing performance in years.
In an open letter announcing Seeing Other People, Sam France wrote, “Goodbye to the drugs, to the partying. Goodbye to my twenties now, Goodbye to my Saint Laurent-model-body.” The last line is a piercing timestamp on Foxygen’s success— France bore a striking physical and artistic resemblance to early Hedi Slimane it-boys like Zachary Cole Smith, Ariel Pink, and Chris Owens, runway Cobains whose supposed subversion of rock-star cliches started to look more like the real thing. “Well I have got this work/But I’d rather powder my nose instead,” France croons on the album’s opening line. The song dramatizes France’s writer’s block, a hoary fourth-wall-smashing trick that nonetheless makes for the album’s best song. “Work” is the one time where Foxygen’s center holds—legendary session drummer Jim Keltner shows up to play a kit made of trash, embodying their competing impulses towards acerbic yacht-rock excess and eccentric lo-fi ingenuity.
When the hooks or musical trick shots on Seeing Other People go missing, the bitterness persists. On “Livin’ a Lie,” France scolds a namedropping, clothes-stealing industry flunkie in a wispy cadence resembling any number of breezy album-stuffers on Views or Scorpion. He plays a delusional stoner on “The Thing Is,” the most brazen Bruce Springsteen ripoff this side of the Gaslight Anthem and indicative of Seeing Other People’s all-encompassing, aimless acidity—maybe they’re mocking the Boss or the critics and fans that misinterpret The River or Born in the USA as documents of American exceptionalism, or maybe it’s just a Ween-style goof meant to antagonize for its own sake. In the world of Foxygen, nothing is more honorable than a batshit idea taken to its illogical conclusion.
It’s a testament to Jonathan Rado’s retro-futuristic production that a band with such obvious reference points still always sound like Foxygen, and maybe France is saving the specifics for his upcoming memoir Sam Francisco: Confessions of an Indie Rock Star. But whether their disengagement is a conscious decision or a byproduct of their malaise, it's a moot point: They’ve mostly abandoned the sturdy songcraft that made them a resilient option for TV and film syncs. “News,” “Flag at Half-Mast” or “The Conclusion” could have all served as their farewell address. Instead, they’re stuffed consecutively into the album’s final third, each belaboring their point (“No, we ain’t got news,” “Fly my flag at half mast,” “I think we should just be friends”). It's like watching a high school senior trying to fill a word count just to get out of this semester with a passing grade.
As a pivot towards candor from a firmly tongue-in-cheek band, Seeing Other People had the potential for newfound pathos. But while they’ve proven adept at replicating the most granular sonic details of their heroes, introspection isn’t something Foxygen can learn on the fly. They spent the last decade offering soul-glam cosplay shrouded with scarfs and irony, and the bitter aftertaste of this act comes through most clearly in Seeing Other People’s rock-bottom moment: “I’m never gonna dance like James Brown/I’m never gonna be black/and I’m never gonna get you back,” he sings on “Face the Facts,” an honest appraisal of bygone glory days ruined by a supremely tone-deaf joke. Like any act that communicates primarily through pastiche, Foxygen have perpetually raised the question: Do they really mean it? On Seeing Other People, they drop the act and give it to you straight: If you are getting tired of Foxygen, well, they are, too.


It's been a long time since you've heard a band pull off this sort of southern-fried slop-pop with such charm, craftiness, and self-deprecating wit.

Spider Bags: Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World

"Everyone's heart gets broken some time/ Just not like mine." If North Carolina (via New Jersey) drunk-rockers Spider Bags ever want to sell bumper stickers at their merch table, let this line-- taken from the teary, beery ballad "Lord Please"-- be the slogan. It's a lyric that perfectly sums up the band's place in a venerable tradition of country-rock hurtin' songs and their singular status within it.
Sure, you've heard bands like Spider Bags before; on first contact, you'd swear they were some half-remembered mid-1990s band that got lost in the college-radio shuffle among the Silver Jews, the Grifters, and Ass Ponys. But it's been an awful long time since you've heard a band pull off this sort of southern-fried slop-pop with such charm, craftiness, and self-deprecating wit. On their second album, Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, Spider Bags re-imagine Neil Young's Tonight's the Night as a Saturday-night party album: They're bleary eyed and wobbly kneed, but they're going down on swinging (or, at least, swigging).
Spider Bags' ragged but resilient spirit has made them heroes to Titus Andronicus, who have covered the Bags' signature song "Waking Up Drunk", though Bags don't share their New Jersey successors' penchant for burn-it-down drama. But the songs on Goodbye Cruel World twist and turn more than you'd expect from a country-rock album, riffing on standard verse-chorus-verse templates before introducing an even more rewarding, final-act change-up, whether it's the poignant pedal-steeled finale to the front-porch picker "Swimmer on a String" or the giddy stream of "na na na na na"s appended to the early-Replacements trash-pop of "Dishrag". Even the typical juke-joint rave-up "Long White Desert Rose" upends the formula, revealing its chorus only during a sustained build-up in the final 90 seconds, and sending it aloft on a bed of "ooh ooh ooh" backing harmonies.
Though Spider Bags have just two albums and a handful of 7"s to the their name so far, the band's MySpace bio is quick to point out that its members have been playing in bands for 15 years, and Cruel World's best songs ruminate on their refusal to grow up, albeit with a wisdom and clarity that you acquire only in your mid-30s: on the corroded jangle-pop of "Hey Delinquents", frontman Dan McGee plays an advisory big-brother role to a younger generation of misfits, while "Que Viva El Rocanroll" is a sloshed, shoulder-to-shoulder last-call waltz for those who really should know better than to stay out past 3 a.m. on a weeknight. And then there's the seven-minute colossus "Trouble", on which McGee owns up to a lifetime of deviancy before his mantric chorus line yields to a surprisingly nasty bout of wah-wah-pedal abuse. If there's a problem with Cruel World, it's that it never regains its proper footing after this monster jam; for an album that routinely inspires a certain raised-fist perseverance, the somber, Califoned pastorale "Here Now" is a bit of a bummer note to go out on. Sure, that album title sets you up for life's great letdowns, but Spider Bags' greatest attribute is making you believe you can rise above them.


This box packages most of Meshuggah’s recorded work—7 studio albums and 3 EPs—and offers an overview of how this extreme metal band pushed the entire genre head-first into the future.

25 Years of Musical Deviance

It’s always unmistakable when you hear it: the sound of a genre being thrust head-first into its future. Even 20-plus years later, the first two tracks from Meshuggah’s 1995 sophomore album Destroy Erase Improve still induce that goosebump-y feeling of a chapter in music history being written in real time. On these two tracks alone, “Future Breed Machine” and “Beneath,” the Swedish quintet singlehandedly revolutionized metal by creating a startlingly fresh rhythmic template that's been widely imitated but never duplicated. This box packages most of Meshuggah’s recorded work—7 studio albums and 3 EPs. Completists and casual consumers alike should be aware: None of the music on this set is remastered, nor does it contain any live material. It also lacks much of the bonus material that was included on previous reissues of the individual albums. It is what it says it is: A box with albums in it. But taken together, it allows listeners to chart the band’s course prior to its gargantuan footprint on metal and, perhaps more importantly, its drive to continue exploring ever since.
To put it in layperson's terms, Meshuggah significantly upped the “math” factor in metal by overlaying time signatures in such complex and absorbing patterns that listening too intently can throw off your breathing and make you too conscious of your heart rate. Like metal’s answer to Steve Reich, Meshuggah’s music consists of a meshwork of phrases playing out in lengthy cycles which intersect in ways that initially sound unnatural and even arrhythmic to the human ear. Trying to follow drummer Tomas Haake’s snare hits in relation to the accents in guitarists’ Mårten Hagström and Fredrik Thordendal’s sliding riffs is akin to watching windshield wipers slide in and out of alignment.
Such is the band’s impact outside of metal that it has inspired formal musical analysis from the conservatory sphere. For stunning visual graphs of Meshuggah’s rhythmic “deviance,” you can consult pages 4, 6, and 9 of UNC Greensboro music theory professor Guy Capuzzo’s 2014 paper A Cyclic Approach to Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah. Seven years prior, CUNY professor Jonathan Pieslak (who, in addition to composition studies the intersection of music and radical/extremist culture) wrote Re-Casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah for Music Theory Spectrum. When the band released obZen in 2008, Nuclear Blast included a printout of Pieslak’s paper in the presskit.
It’s amusing to note that the members of Meshuggah have minimal musical training and as such don’t interpret their music the same as a theoretician would. In an interview (that I conducted) that same year, Haake basically shrugged-off Pieslak’s analysis and countered that he feels the music as if it were all laid-out over a basic 4/4 platform—which seems absurd but offers a peek into how the band sees its own style. “The 4/4 that we write and play around is the most important aspect,” he said at the time. “I usually play eighth notes on the hi hat all the time. So everyone in the band can headbang.”
For better or worse, there are few other clues as to how Meshuggah found its signature groove. In the same interview, Haake denied Reich as an influence and went so far as to claim that he couldn’t trace Meshuggah’s style to any outside influences at all. While hard to believe, Haake’s claim suggests that the band is only dimly conscious of the depth of its own music and is in fact blindly following a muse of unknown origin—a sign of the most pure form of creation. When you listen to the first four titles in this set—the 1989 Meshuggah EP (widely known as Psykisk Testbild), the band’s 1991 full-length debut Contradictions Collapse, the 1994 None EP, and the aforementioned Destroy Erase Improve, the transformation from an unremarkable death metal band nursing a Metallica influence to world-dominating game changer appears inexplicably swift.
None, the first of the band’s releases to include Hagström and set the band’s four-person creative core in place, shows the first stirrings of what make Meshuggah so unique. Thordendal begins to come into his own, with glimpses of spacey Allan Holdsworth/Wayne Krantz-inspired leads that add a splash of the inverted new-age jazz fusion that became so integral to Meshuggah’s sound. Hints of Haake’s headbanging groove and tricky snare placement appear as well, but even then None documents a band clumsily bumping around to define itself. Released just 8 months later, Destroy Erase Improve captures Meshuggah striding forward with breathtaking authority and leaving its early work—and the rest of the metal pack—in the dust.
By the time the band returned in 1998 with Chaosphere, it was clear that Meshuggah was working from a position of confidence. Clearly, the elements that defined its vocabulary had gelled into a new language no one had ever spoken before. Paced more evenly than Destroy Erase Improve, the hard-thrashing Chaosphere offers a snapshot of Meshuggah at their most fluid, as an unrelenting procession of uptempo riffs swirls in a rhythmic vortex. The uniform attack of the songs might suggest that Meshuggah had taken a step backwards, but the opposite is true.
Even amidst the Ritalin-fueled technical death metal bonanza of the mid-90s, Meshuggah’s brand of mathematical precision stood out. Where the typical approach at the time was to overwhelm listeners by cramming as many ideas as possible into a tune or even a single measure, Meshuggah exercised an unprecedented level of patience. By sustaining its technical prowess over elongated passages, the band showed that it had more control than its peers. Of course, pushing boundaries ultimately spells trouble for just about any artist with the nerve to do it, so it’s no surprise that Meshuggah ran up against the limits of their own innovations on their next album, 2002’s Nothing.
At this stage, Hagström and Thordendal made a significant change by switching from 7-string guitars to 8-string guitars. Most bands get “heavier” by tuning-down, but with Meshuggah the opposite happened. Where the breakneck tempos of the previous two albums highlighted the band’s unparalleled dexterity, the lower tuning lent itself to slower tempos that simply plod. As a case in point, “Rational Gaze” sounds like a re-hash of the Chaosphere track “New Millennium Cyanide Christ,” only without the drive and passion. Haake, the band’s principal lyricist, fashioned Nothing as a cold stare into the all-encompassing emptiness that fuels the music’s existential dread. You’d expect that the newly-adopted doom-y approach would suit the material well, but instead of an invigorating experience contemplating bleakness, Nothing feels more like the sound of Meshuggah trying to pull their van out of a swamp.
Especially after a four-year wait, Nothing appeared to slam the brakes on Meshuggah’s forward progress, and it would take the band a few more releases to recalibrate its sense of direction. An engaging side detour, the 2004 EP I consisted of a single 20-minute piece of music stitched together out of random ideas. After the stultifying Nothing, the meandering I cast the band as both looser/more free to experiment but also somewhat creatively lost. And the chances it took on I, some of which verge on free noise, would turn out not to bear fruit when the band released its next proper full-length, Catch Thirtythree, the following year. As an indication of the holding pattern Meshuggah was in at the time, Catch Thirtythree begins with “Autonomy Lost,” yet another rehash of the groove from “New Millennium Cyanide Christ.”
When Meshuggah returned three years later with obZen, however, the band had somehow hit on a magic combination of its earlier freneticism and its later affinity for brooding reflection. When bands opt to mash their approaches from previous records into a hybrid sound, it usually signals a kind of creative surrender, a waving of the white flag that they’re done pushing for modes of expression. Not so here, as obZen showcases a once-again strident Meshuggah moving through the things they do best with confidence and—more importantly—with renewed vigor. The variation in tempos works wonders, and even when the music slinks along at a sludgy crawl, obZen never fails to engage with its layers of subtlety.
It’s been four years—a typical break—since the last Meshuggah album, 2012’s Koloss. On Koloss, once again the band shifts down to a slower, groove-oriented approach, but this time it sounds more limber and less encumbered by its own muscularity. As a result, the space in the arrangements leaves room for something approaching a tribal-percussion feel. Meanwhile, a shift towards a slightly more raw production style allows for the band’s energy to shine through in ways that Nothing and Catch Thirtythree lacked. There’s no telling where Meshuggah will go next, but if Koloss is any indication we shouldn’t be surprised if the band still has a few curveballs up its sleeve. Wherever its music goes from here, though, its impact on its home genre remains unassailable—and unforgettable.


Even among the glut of bands currently exploring the first-wave strain of post-punk, East Berlin’s Diät stand out. Positive Energy is a dark punk record, but the title isn't an ironic pose: they use sarcasm as a way to get to the heart of the matter.

Positive Energy

It’s easy, even facile, to compare post-punk bands with a monotone baritone vocalist to Joy Division. In a world of unending and presently meaningless commercial riffs on the infamous Unknown Pleasures artwork (look, you can get it printed on leggings!), the Manchester quartet are the first reference for people who don’t know much about the subgenre—that’s not a slight, simply a fact.
Post-punk is rich and expansive territory, though, and there have been bands mining it consistently from 1978 onward. Even among the glut of bands currently exploring the first-wave strain of post-punk, East Berlin’s Diät stand out, much like their labelmates Total Control. Their song structures are playful and unique, their riffs memorable, their lyrics sly and clever, and their rhythm section unbelievably taut (check the drum solo that opens "Toonie"). While there will doubtless be comparisons to Joy Division, I hear more Blitz circa Second Empire Justice in the guitar lines (bless Diät’s hearts for using the chorus pedal to genuine effect rather than just applying it flat across the entire record), more Crisis in the politic, more Bauhaus in the unfettered energy of the playing, more Modern English circa Mesh and Lace in the song structures.
Diät are more than the sum of their influences, and they prove what I suspected from their first two 7"s, released in 2012 and 2013: their debut LP was worth the several-year wait. These songs were worked to the smallest detail. "Young and Successful" is wry commentary on how we internalize the capitalist work ethic, and on the line "Write a manifesto, write a shopping list," the song ends abruptly, hanging, grasping, as it should. "Hurricane", with its slow percussive build and sharp riff, is about Chris Dorner and the inherent tensions of policing, and the subject fits perfectly with the ominous instrumentation. "Nightmares" is fast and meaty and propulsive, more punk than post-.
There’s also a Cannanes cover on this record, of all things, and it is a really good one: that is to say, it does right by the well-loved original while putting Diät's own powerful spin on it. This brings me to the title of the album—Positive Energy might seem like a misnomer upon first bleak recognizance, but it’s not. Look no further than a cover of a song by a well-loved Australian indie pop band (some say they were among the '80s twee originators) on a dark punk record for the truth: "positive energy" isn’t an ironic pose for Diät. It’s not the kind of sarcasm that goes nowhere. It’s in their approach to music—sarcasm as a way to get to the heart of the matter, with the beating heart still going despite the outside world’s many attempts to still it, that heartbeat being the most important thing, the only thing.


The “Alaska” star’s second album, which shares its title with her Harvard Divinity School thesis, asks big questions about life through confident pop anthems.

Surrender

After emerging in 2016 with “Alaska,” a folksy electronica song that went viral after impressing Pharrell Williams, Maggie Rogers started checking off the boxes to become a pop star: a debut SNL performance, a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, sets at every festival under the sun. When the pandemic began, she decamped to her family’s home in Maine, where she reconnected with nature and wrote a collection of songs called Surrender—which is also the name of her 2022 Harvard Divinity School thesis. Oh yeah: While working on the follow-up to her 2019 debut Heard It in a Past Life, Rogers was enrolled in a year-long masters program focused on the presence of religion in public life. For the 28-year-old singer-scholar that meant considering questions like: Does an artist hold a responsibility to their audience? And how can performance be a conduit for a transcendental experience?
If it sounds a little Ivy League Hannah Montana—finals by day, Met Gala by night—Rogers’ return to academia served her well. On Surrender, she sounds renewed, submitting to the pull of her heart without apology. She plays hooky from adulthood on the upbeat “Be Cool” and gives into her carnal instincts on “Want Want”; she’s turning off the radio and listening to the wind instead of suffering through “that song I’m supposed to know/By some fucking bro,” as she teases on “Anywhere With You.” She’s still processing her whirlwind rise to fame, and learning what to prioritize: “Took me all this long to figure out/It’s not worth it/If I can’t touch the ground,” she sings on the ballad “Horses,” which uses the titular animals as a symbol for the freedom she so badly desires.
The album itself reflects Rogers’ newfound autonomy: She’s trimmed back on her debut’s stable of producers, co-producing Surrender herself alongside Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Shawn Mendes). One of the best moments, the escapist fantasy “Anywhere With You,” was co-written with an old friend, Holden Jaffe, who makes music under the name Del Water Gap (Rogers performed in an earlier version of the project while in college). On the song, Rogers lifts a companion out of their existential malaise before the pair hit the road in search of something bigger than themselves. Like so many road songs, it’s also a declaration of devotion, a commitment to journeying forward together even as their thoughts on forever differ: “You tell me you want everything you want it fast,” Rogers bellows atop a cathartic crescendo that would not sound out of place on an early Arcade Fire record. “But all I’ve ever wanted is to make something/Fucking last.”
Rogers’ hunger is matched by her physical voice. Her once breathy tone has deepened into a register that sounds right at home alongside a singer like Florence Welch, who contributes backing vocals to “Shatter.” And on the opener “Overdrive,” Rogers sounds absolutely gigantic as she laments a crumbling relationship atop a wistful piano melody. When she lives in this range, her guttural voice grounds the idiosyncratic production flourishes—wiggly synth squiggles, playful beats, whimsical samples—that have occasionally overcrowded her songwriting. She’s still inclined to make unexpected choices, like on the state of the union “That’s Where I Am,” a sleek and confident pop anthem built atop waves of distortion and wobbly effects. The flourishes are more subtle on the sprawling “Begging for Rain,” even with the barely-contained jazz extrovert Jon Batiste on melodica, lending a softness to Rogers’ reflections on futility: “You work all day to find religion/And end up standing in your kitchen/Wondering ’bout the way its always been.”
While Rogers has certainly grown as a songwriter, there’s still the odd moment in need of some fine tuning. On “I’ve Got a Friend,” Rogers pays tribute to a pal with a cornucopia of complexities—she’s “been there through it all/Masturbates to Rob Pattinson staring at the wall.” It’s the type of feel-good acoustic number meant to inspire appreciation for one’s own chosen family (and their weird sexual proclivities) but the simplicity of lyrical structure alongside the overflowing earnestness comes off as juvenile in the context of Rogers’ more ambitious or poetic swings. “Shatter”’s fervor is fueled by a relentless onslaught of heavy-handed ’80s new wave, and that’s before a clunky line like, “I know there’s people everywhere with injustice on their lips/And there’s this open wound bleeding between my hips.”
But then there’s a song like “Symphony,” which underlines that Rogers is at her best when she’s given a challenge. Co-written with Gabe Goodman, the five-minute pseudo-lullaby gradually builds into a constellation of swirling electric guitars and huffy breathwork until there’s a natural exhale. “Can you live like nothing’s left,” she murmurs. “Forget your emptiness/Take a breath.” When Surrender follows this advice, it suggests that Rogers has grasped something like transcendence, a release worth chasing.


Intriguing debut by composer Ryan Lott is an unusual blend of approaches, especially for a release on Anticon: the lyrical concerns of Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, sonic techniques from Massive Attack, and the classical habits of Nico Muhly.

At War With Walls & Mazes

Son Lux's debut, At War With Walls & Mazes, resembles the classical concerto. Electronic composer and Son Lux leader Ryan Lott is the soloist, with gentle, sparse vocals, against a backdrop of classical instruments. Occasionally a single organic sound rises behind Lott's utterances, like the bass guitar peeling away from the timberline drum creaks and overlapping whispers on "Raise". These are rarities; for the lion's share of the album's 45 minutes the mood is severe. Son Lux perches over a digital wilderness-- a wilderness of recreated crowd noise, cracked samples, and mutated loops. Laid out as a narrative (beginning with "Prologue" and tidying up with "Epilogue"), with sharp, direct titles ("Wither", "Stand", "War"), Walls & Mazes has a coarseness, a fatalism, between Lott and the landscapes he creates. It's a heaviness of heart relieved only when those interceding instruments (cello on "Stay", the supple, measured piano on "Break") twine with the vocals against the molded chaos.
But there are lights in the darkness and a holy ghost in the Son Lux machine. At War With Walls & Mazes is an album infused with a religiosity that's at times humble and unnamed and at times romantic. "Where have all the holy gone?/ Is there no one to condemn you?/ Where have all the wicked gone?/ Is there no one left to beat you down?", he asks on "Break". The imagery is clear, the sentiment classic, and the delivery hushed and awed. It's the sonic background that's so affecting. That twist in the combination produces odd troikas of comparison: the lyrical concerns of Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, production techniques from Massive Attack, and the classical habits of Nico Muhly.
And even when Lott is playing for us here on Earth, the album's concerns are stained. "Will you love me/ Like he loves me?" Son Lux mews on the clinging, almost uncomfortably sensuous "Stay". That "He" should probably be capitalized. Later, on "Betray": "You will betray me baby/ And I will be true." (Sucks to be "You"). Lott is a performance artist at heart-- he's had his multimedia projects featured in the Guggenheim and produces as much music for choreography as he does for just listeners. As an album, Walls & Mazes may have moments of gauzy, near-inert tinkering-- "Stand" and "Tell"-- and it's no doubt an emotionally draining listen, but as a project, as an aesthetic, there's a resonant, engaging conflict. A good friend of mine once said there were only three proper subjects for rock songs: God, Girls, and Growing Up. Ryan Lott proves with Walls & Mazes that he's got the first one down. How orthodox will the next ones sound?


The London rapper’s third album extends his carnal and philosophical investigation of masculinity against lush, robust beats that evoke a distinctly Black British take on G-funk.

Beautiful and Brutal Yard

Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s best-known revelation after a decade of exile and imprisonment was that “the line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” J Hus seems to have had a similar epiphany after 27 years of London, and eight or so navigating the music industry. On the cover of his third album, Beautiful and Brutal Yard, there are two houses: one engulfed in flames, the other smothered in bright blooms. Smoke and petals intermingle, and the whole thing takes the shape of a human heart.
Like Solzhenitsyn, J Hus is just as concerned with unpicking the knots of his own humanity as he is the societal structures and injustices that have shaped it. Where a contemporary like Dave trained his focus on the meta structures, Stormzy on the spiritual, Hus is utterly physical: in his comic posturing, in the way he rolls words on his tongue like hot food, in his juvenile descriptions of sex, and—more so than perhaps any other rapper working in the UK at the moment—his ability to make even the stiffest listener move. More specifically, he’s interested in what it means to be a man. Driven by this inquiry, Beautiful and Brutal Yard ends up a sprawling tome on the nuances and pressures of Black masculinity. The album’s intro implores Hus to show people the real him; the rest of BABY is the sound of him figuring out what exactly that means.
After 2020’s Big Conspiracy was mired by leaks and a forced rush release, Hus effectively disappeared from public life. (The fact it still hit No. 1 in the UK spoke to his unique influence.) He wrote off live shows and sequestered himself in the studio, emerging sporadically as a featured artist. It was around this time, you sensed, that Hus started wondering where he truly belonged. “I was in my home but I was feeling like a foreigner,” he raps over a tumbling bassline on “Comeback.” In BABY’s album trailer we see him pulled between country estate and social housing. But more than what or where you call home, it’s love, pain, and power—and how men can express them—that form the binding concerns of BABY. So we hear Hus operating in different modes: walking guns into nightclubs, robbing watches over palm wine guitars; curling up with Jorja Smith on “Nice Body,” while she begs him to open up. Wanting to flirt, on “My Baby,” he downs drinks for Dutch courage.
Hus has always contained these multitudes. The one bounding out of prison and onto Drake’s stage at the O2 in 2019, and the one—hot-headed, with PTSD—that put him behind bars in the first place. The one obsessed with willies and the one with weapons; the one obsessed with calling his willy a weapon. He rhymes in patois, MLE, pidgin, and Wolof. Musically, BABY slides effortlessly between moods too: horns and slinky drums here, plucked G-Unit strings and sliding 808 basslines there. Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox. Thumbed, hall party highlife basslines are refigured for a new generation—though some of the more choice lyrics about “the finger blaster” and sticking a “thumb in your anus” might raise more than blushes among the aunties and uncles. The instrumentation is plush and organic: Drums slap and rumble, skin on skin; guitars glisten. If 2019’s “Must Be”—all sex-groove sax and murderous threats—was Hus experimenting with a distinctly Black British take on G-funk, then those trials have reached maturation here.
All this opens up pockets for Hus to explore and subvert the clichés of modern masculinity. He’s endlessly playful with language, toying with his vowels on “Massacre.” He channels the ironic East End gangsterism of Guy Ritchie movies and grime MCs on “Come Look,” where intimate descriptions of violence play off against threats to whack someone’s “noggin.” The charisma with which he carries it off only emphasizes how awkward Drake is droning on about “your backside” being “so fit” on summer front-runner “Who Told You.” Other guests to the Hus house fare better. Naira Marley is pure arm’s-length cool on “Militerian”; Villz reprises his road-rap sidekick role from a 2015 Crib Session on “Comeback”; and Burna Boy delivers a hook for the ages on thematic centerpiece “Masculine”—splitting the word “balaclava” into an exquisite couplet. It’s the kind of touch that would seem simplistic if it didn’t come dripping with so much charm.
Back in 2017, Hus clammed up with shyness at a mention of the Wolof nickname, “baba,” that his mum gave him. “I think it means baby or something in my language,” he said. Six years later, as BABY draws on (it does lack some of the compactness of Big Conspiracy), Hus raps a whole song in his mother tongue. Even laying aside the technical feat, “Come Gully Bun (Gambian President)” feels revelatory as he figures out how to piece all the bits of himself together. “Avoid all the bullshit and the nonsense,” he soothes on the final track “Playing Chess”—a whole world away from the gun-waving opener. “I know how it feels but I can’t really say,” goes the chorus, at a loss for words. “I did let myself go,” he re-roots himself, “but never again.” Welcome home, Momodou.


Although it’s neither as purposeful nor as prescient as many of his earlier EPs, Sam Beam’s latest release carries far more weight than its self-deprecating title implies.

Weed Garden EP

Let’s start at the end of Iron & Wine’s new EP, Weed Garden. As the final verse of the final song, “Talking to Fog,” reaches its climax, Sam Beam offers a vivid description of happiness. It’s a place “where our memories of singing fill the air above our heads” and “the faces of our family and friends go on and on.” With each line, his delivery grows faster and more insistent, until the words spill out of his mouth and he sounds more like a soothsayer than a folk singer. It’s one of the most jarring moments Iron & Wine has conjured in quite some time, particularly when the instruments fall away and Beam, singing a cappella, admits: “But it’s hard to find.” In a song about sorrow and depression, he’s hopeful enough to dream up a beautiful space of healing and nourishment, but realistic enough to know that it’s almost impossible to get there. Nothing is ever certain in these songs, nothing guaranteed.
Such realizations lend Weed Garden more weight than the odds-and-ends collection its title implies. Beam penned these songs for last year’s Beast Epic but didn’t complete them in time. For fans, “Waves of Galveston” may be the standout, a favorite of live audiences that dates back five years. With its loping verses and buoyant chorus, it mingles the mundane with the fantastical: “There’s a graveyard by the pizza parlor,” Beam sings, as though pointing out local landmarks to a visitor. “Snowbirds fly away like secrets no one really wants to know.” It’s impossible to tell if he’s observing the real place or imagining some mythical Galveston; either way, he’s playing up the Texas city’s history of destruction—most famously in 1900, most recently in 2017—in a way that doesn’t feel fully earned. The metaphor dwarfs the song.
Perhaps that’s why it's on an EP instead of an LP. Beam has used the abbreviated format strategically throughout his career. 2003’s The Sea & the Rhythm quickly followed his full-length debut, enlarging his frame of reference to prove he was no fluke. Two years later, the excellent Woman King and the Calexico collaboration In the Reins introduced electric textures that predicted the twisting paths he would take on 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog. Weed Garden is never quite so purposeful or prescient. We do get to glimpse novel facets of Iron & Wine, like “Milkweed,” whose melody seems to dissipate even as the words leave Beam’s mouth. On the other hand, we also get songs like “Last of Your Rock ‘n’ Roll Heroes,” whose folk-funk groove is an ungainly as its flippancy toward its titular subject.
Perhaps that’s why “What Hurts Worse” stands out: Rather than offering a new trick by this old shepherd’s dog, it reinforces what makes Iron & Wine so distinctive. Beam excavates everyday truths, writing about relationships with a directness that can be disarming: “Let’s become the lovers we need,” he sings, forcefully. “Who knew we’d be needing so much?” And yet, there’s something celebratory in the melody, something that suggests our needs and our pains can define us in positive rather than negative ways. It’s a song that recalls Iron & Wine’s early albums, when Beam seemed like the scout we had sent ahead to report back on our final moments, to show us the fate that awaits us all. While his music has grown more ornate, both musically and lyrically, the idea of you and me and him and everybody else in the world as finite beings continues to inform every strum of his guitar and every softly uttered syllable.


*Brokenlegged *is a rich and multifaceted emo record, exploring not only the expected moments of catharsis, but the hangovers that arise in their aftermath.

Brokenlegged

The title of Labor Pains was wasted on Sinai Vessel’s debut. Frontman Caleb Cordes joked that the process of making the follow-up had become a full-blown “DIY Frank Ocean sort of thing”—writing, recording, ditching the original mixes and re-recording has put five and a half years worth of distance between Brokenlegged and its predecessor (three and change if you include the Profanity EP). It’s an odd position for an emo band to be in—perfectionism is about the exact opposite of what its devotees ask for. After all, this music thrives on unsteady vocals, careening aggression and the immediacy of desperation and epiphany. Listeners and artists tend to age fast, distancing themselves from their dearly beheld truths of two years prior. When Labor Pains dropped in 2011, today’s conscientious scene leaders Modern Baseball and the Hotelier were still teenage pop-punk bands. Fortunately, Cordes has made the most out of the protracted wait: Brokenlegged is a rich and multifaceted emo record, exploring not only the expected moments of catharsis, but the complicated hangovers that arise in their aftermath.
It makes for a logical follow-up to the gnarled, strident Profanity, which used mewithoutYou and Pedro the Lion as both sonic and lyrical guidance in how to extricate oneself from an evangelical upbringing. Reaffirming North Carolina as home after college, Cordes described the main theme of Brokenlegged as, “trying to figure out how to live among people who haven’t come to the same realizations of truth as you...who just take the status quo as being the truth.” Whatever that meant for him during the creation of Brokenlegged, it’s a loaded statement that’s going to be interpreted a very specific way in January of 2017. Red-state living isn’t addressed all that much in indie rock (or any genre) and as we’ve all seen on our Facebook feeds and family gatherings in the past few months, even well-intentioned attempts to breach this topic easily fall victim to either barely concealed anger or condescension.
Lead single “Dogs” (a presumptive sequel to Profanity’s “Cats”) could have fell victim to both, as a loftily-worded worded indictment of religious zealots. The general theme is familiar, exposing the hypocrisy of fundamentalists othering those who live in their same community in the name of love, and Cordes doesn’t fall into the same trap. There’s a “write what you know”/“know your enemy” wisdom in “Dogs” that puts it in a league with Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash” or the Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee, rare examples of indie rock that look directly at this kind of pathology rather than simply looking down on it.
“Dogs” is something of an outlier; most of Brokenlegged isn’t as overt about its spiritual and political leanings. The few immediately understandable lyrics—“It gets better every day, move along,” “I used to be scared/I used to be just like you”—are crucial guideposts through Cordes’ occasionally impenetrable thickets of allusive imagery.
Often times, it's easier and just as rewarding to derive the meaning from the clenched intensity of Sinai Vessel's hardworking and exceedingly dense arrangements.  The songs have sturdy, solid cores, and intriguing details at the edges justifying the band's exacting craftsmanship. Grace notes, like the vibraphone ringing through the pregnant atmosphere of “Ramekin” or the caustic yells that interrupt “Laughlin,” push Sinai Vessel outside of the swaying, ocean-sprayed sound that defines the bulk of Brokenlegged. Though the eight songs here barely take up a half hour, they assume the heft of a record twice its length.
Ironically, Cordes’ painstaking songwriting only comes off as ostentatious on the album's sparest song. “Died on My Birthday” is a solo acoustic number performed as grave and solemnly as it’s titled, its immediacy sapped by counterintuitive word choices: cacophonous phrases like “rattles our lentil bowls” and “cruel lunch” land like sprained ankles, while “arbiter” and “fortnight” become distractions in the way “judge” or “two weeks” wouldn’t. Some might hear it as Brokenlegged’s answer to the Hotelier’s “Housebroken,” a brief tailspin on a record with an otherwise masterfully controlled trajectory. It just also just as easily have an “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”-like life outside of Brokenlegged, the breakout on an otherwise glistening, depressive and cohesive record. Either way, the manner in which Cordes puts himself out there with his superhumanly earnest delivery ensures it truly belongs. Brokenlegged isn't perfection—could it be trusted if it was?—but every second sounds like it earned its right to exist.


On their sixth studio LP, the Walkmen use mariachi horns and echoes of 1950s production styles to realize their wounded, anxious, and affecting songs.

Lisbon

The Walkmen are kings of dejection. For about a decade now, they've turned their albums into symphonies of disappointment and resentment and regret. Their proudest moments, then, are also their most down-and-out. Their best song, "The Rat", is a world-weary, old-before-its-time rager, a song from a young guy seeing that he's already falling out of step with the universe and feeling pissed about it. Their second-best song, "In the New Year", sounds triumphant and optimistic at first, but on further listens it reveals itself to be as much a plea as anything else, a secular prayer that shit just please start working out right. The specific brand of desperation that the band conjures is miles away from, say, the throbbing, dread-laced depression of fellow dapper New Yorkers the National. The Walkmen are more theatrical and unwound than that-- they're the guys out in the middle of the street, screaming up at the sky, begging to know why everything always falls apart.
In that elegantly disheveled mutter-wail thing of his, frontman Hamilton Leithauser starts new album Lisbon off by singing: "You're with someone else tomorrow night/ Doesn't matter to me/ 'Cause as the sun dies into the hill/ You got all I need." He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance. The band's specific style of indie rock is very rooted in a scrappy, scratchy New York tradition that dates back to the Velvet Underground or Bob Dylan, but their take on it is theirs and theirs alone. You know one of their songs right away when those winding, circular guitars and surging drums and gargling vocals kick in. They're so performative in their sadness, but that stuff never rankles or comes off tantrumy, since the band is just so good at this stuff. There's a song on Lisbon called "Woe Is Me", and it's not even remotely a joke. Great song, too.
This is a band that cares deeply about things like microphone placement, and so everything sounds just unbelievably crisp and warm-- except when it's not supposed to, as on the purposefully weird, strangulated two-minute panic attack "Follow the Leader". And even though they sound very much like themselves throughout, there are some great variations in here. "Stranded" uses beaten-down mariachi horns to massively graceful effect. "Victory" (which, naturally, is about never achieving victory) has the same sort of blood-pounding chorus that "The Rat" does. "Torch Song" is a song about a song, about not knowing the right song to "calm down all the madness," but the amber Twin Peaks Angelo Badalamenti fuzz on the track is just heart-stopping gorgeous. The Walkmen know what they're doing here.
In early interviews, Leithauser claimed that Lisbon got its sonic inspiration from ancestral Sun Records rockabilly. That influence never makes itself overtly known, but there are a few slick little old-school nods here and there, like the relentless Tennessee Three train-chug rhythm on "Blue as Your Blood", or the ahh-ahh backing vocals on "All My Great Designs". More than that, there's an economic speed and simplicity at work here; the songs might be reflective self-lacerating wallows, but they're fast wallows. Drummer Matt Barrick tends to play just off the beat, but he hits his drums just incredibly hard, with the sort of crisp wallop you feel in your teeth fillings. On the album's big, transcendent, loud moments, his crash cymbals sound like fists raining down on you from heaven, and he's still very much a force even on the quieter songs.
And that brings us to "Angela Surf City", the song on this album that deserves a place alongside "The Rat" and "In the New Year". It starts off tense and withdrawn, Leithauser singing about some relationship without ever letting us in on what, exactly, is going on. Underneath, there's a tense, withdrawn surf-rock beat. And when the chorus starts to well up, the music underneath keeps surging upward, becoming huger than anything the song should be able to handle, then getting even huger from there, as Barrick lets off relentless Bonham-level thundercracks. Leithauser sings guarded, terse stuff that I don't necessarily understand, but he wails it so hard that it comes out anthemic: "You took the high road! I couldn't find you!" The Walkmen play with restraint, and they don't usually allow themselves earth-shaking moments like that. But when those moments come, they're enough to send you spinning.


Though they’ve been releasing music since the late ’80s, the New Zealand noise trio remain as vital, corrosive, and challenging as ever.

Trouble

Age, according to conventional wisdom, is supposed to bring some measure of contentment. Edges have been worn off, battles have been won (or forfeited), and the prickly dissatisfaction of youth has given way to a philosophical cultivation of stability. Real life seldom turns out that way, of course. But with age, our impulse to see everything as an all-or-nothing binary means real life’s messy mix of war and peace becomes, at least, embraceable. It’s a familiar perspective for the Dead C. Formed thirty years ago in Dunedin, New Zealand, the trio of Bruce Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats has spent the overwhelming majority of their lives carving a cruel, transcendent path through the tangle of the noise-rock underground. Sometimes corrosive, sometimes constructive, the band’s output has remained as steady as it is volatile.
*Trouble *is the Dead C’s first full-length since 2013’s Armed Courage, and while the band has only aged three years since then, the accumulated weight of decades is everywhere. That weight, though, is no hindrance. Instead, it’s wielded like an industrial machine on “One,” the first of the album’s five, number-titled tracks. Extrusions of static and microaggressive twitches of dissonance, courtesy of the guitars of Russell and Morley, dot a minefield rife with Yeats’ percussive skitter. Halfway through its twenty-minute sprawl, the song splits open just wide enough to hear Morley’s ghost-moaned vocals, a sound halfway between a mumble and a hymn. Similarly long, “Four” is more taut—a strangulated barrage of wah-pedal feedback washed in jazzy, impressionistic cymbal-work. As it picks up steam, it collapses spectacularly under its own mass.
Though Trouble is nimble and fluid, the Dead C draw mainly on the gravity of their years. There’s a mournful air to “Two” after the opening drumbeat crawls to a momentary halt. The guitars helix around a sour melody, curling in the empty space where something used to be. Here, the album’s utilitarian non-titles make sense, as if to avoid conferring any context or intent. Likewise, a vague sense of loss howls through “Three,” which is also the record’s only true interval of fragility; the ten-minute middle of the song lapses into unhinged, human-like cries of confusion, weariness, surrender, and ultimately rage. It’s an uncanny-valley effect that captures a primordial eeriness, ancient and unsettling.
“I think of myself as the Jimi Hendrix of no technique,” Russell told *Wire *in a 2013 interview. As self-deprecating as he was, his offhand comment is as true now as it was then. And it applies to the Dead C as a whole. At just over five minutes, “Four” is the briefest track on Trouble, but it’s also the album’s heaviest and most conventionally accessible. Motifs, if not outright riffs, abound; the song’s play of rhythm, texture, and dynamic borders on the metallic. It’s enough to make you imagine the Dead C, men in their fifties, embarking on a new career as a doom band. Not that they’d need to. With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.


The composer turns to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 for inspiration in his bittersweet new orchestral work.

Voices

Deemed humanity’s Magna Carta by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 established a baseline for human rights around the world in the wake of the devastation of WWII. Its 30 articles respect the dignity of every human being and commit to nondiscrimination, while also guaranteeing rights to education, nationality, marriage, and leisure. It was an ambitious, wholly idealistic document then, and now—with the declining trend of democracy around the world—the goalposts of the UDHR feel even further away.
Which may be one of the reasons why composer Max Richter based his latest work, Voices, on this profound piece of legislation. Richter brings together recordings of people in over 70 countries reading the document with a massive, peculiarly assembled orchestra. Emphasizing the lower timbres of the ensemble, there are credits for 13 double bassists and 23 cellists, an inversion of most philharmonic rosters that Richter deems an “upside down” orchestra. Since his emergence in 2004 with The Blue Notebooks, Richter has proven adept at couching 19th-century romanticism in 21st-century pessimism, often using the human voice as conduit.
On “All Human Beings,” it’s fitting that one of the document’s main architects, Eleanor Roosevelt, appears first, her voice wrapped in crackle as she reads the preamble to the UDHR. But then the album’s principal voice, that of actor KiKi Layne, emerges to narrate the first two articles, before giving way to a solemn theme and a mournful violin solo. Already it feels like an insurmountable chasm between the words and the music, the hopeful ideal of the declaration offset by melancholy, Richter’s lament accentuating our failure as a global society to enact even a few of these guiding principles.
More voices arise and overlap (the album credits 32 Declaration readers), some reading the text in their native tongues, others lingering at the periphery, with Layne’s voice reappearing to demarcate sections. In the brief “Journey Piece,” Layne recites an article over a chatter of voices, which then mix with birdsong and a passing car. The unadorned piano at the heart of “Prelude 6” also stands apart for its spareness. Fascinating as it is to hear the full text of these articles aloud, the prose doesn’t have quite the same supple musicality as previous Richter sources like Franz Kafka’s journals or the letters of Virginia Woolf. After a few times through, the primary text of Voices starts to take on the rigidity of an employee conduct handbook from HR.
Voices’ most transportive moment comes during the 11-minute centerpiece “Chorale.” At first, Layne oddly recites the opening articles of the UDHR again, but when she recedes, a wordless choir takes her place. Their assembled voices eschew language altogether yet speak to the lofty themes of the Declaration. They present the curious entity that is humanity joined as one, stronger together yet always at risk of splintering. Such a beatific sound speaks to our angelic aspects, even when the music of Richter also suggests human fragility and our fallible nature.

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Talking Heads’ third album revealed a band to be relentless interrogators of music and its place in culture. It is a landmark album for the past and present of art-rock, an undisputed masterpiece.

Fear of Music

Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, begins at maximum velocity and minimum warmth. Congas, funk guitar, chirping synths: Everything is in motion, and yet curiously, nothing seems to be moving. A guitar figure like a crying baby keeps tripping the song’s downbeat, and in the closing seconds, a phased guitar line comes in played by Robert Fripp, layering 5/4 over 4/4 and effectively erasing whatever forward momentum this blank, pistoning thing was creating to begin with. The groove feels uncanny, a little inhuman, like a flag rippling in no wind.
The words, meanwhile, consist of barked nonsense syllables from Hugo Ball, a German poet of the Dada School. Dadaism mocked the very idea that words could convey meaning, that speakers could carry authority; for a band so devoted to verbal communication they named themselves after it, it was a forbidding gesture. And for fans of the New York band in the late ’70s, hearing “I Zimbra” might have felt like watching their hero obliterated in the first frame of the movie.
It was exactly this sort of hero’s-journey narrative into which Fear of Music seemed to cast a wrench. The band’s popularity and acclaim had been gathering heat; “Take Me to the River,” their stiff-legged cover version of the Al Green standard, peaked at No. 26 on the Hot 100. They’d appeared on Saturday Night Live and American Bandstand, and they’d been touring to steadily bigger crowds. Already the quintessential New York band to New Yorkers, now they risked becoming the quintessential New York band to everyone else—maybe even to the sorts of folks who lived in the “Big Country,” the places about which Byrne had already admitted, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”
Fear of Music can be read, in part, as an attempt to throw buckets of conceptual cold water on everything that had made the Talking Heads beloved, or to at least submit it to rigorous forensic testing. They experimented with their songwriting process; instead of working from Byrne’s compositions, they entered the studio cold, jamming together until the shape of something promising emerged. As they did on More Songs About Buildings and Food, they enlisted Brian Eno as producer, but this time Eno played a much bigger role: It was Eno who suggested a Table of Contents approach to the tracklist, which turned the song titles into a litany of proper nouns, and it was he who furnished the Hugo Ball poem for inspiration when Byrne was struggling with writer’s block.
As a band of former design students, the Talking Heads thought harder than most about presentation, about the telling power of surfaces. On Fear of Music, they repeatedly drew attention away from the picture to gesture at the frame: The radio announcement for the album was a simple, stilted intonation—“Talking Heads have a new album/It’s called Fear of Music”—repeated over and over. The album cover was a black obelisk, alternately bumpy and smooth but admitting no light and emitting no clues. There was a song called “Electric Guitar,” and the refrain, as the electric guitars gnashed their teeth in every available space, was “Never listen to electric guitar.” The bittersweet futility of this command neatly encapsulated a band that was a tangle of conflicting impulses in 1979. They shunned every method that had worked for them before, attempting perhaps to become a different version of themselves, and yet they only purified their essence. In jettisoning old methods and throwing themselves into new ones, they embraced the only true underlying force of their music: relentless interrogation.
The album plays out like a series of mini-stand up routines about the absurdity, or the pointlessness, of human observation. Each song contains at least one declaration of seeming authority (“Hold on, because it’s been taken care of”; “Find myself a city to live in”), which Byrne goes on to repeat with increasing mania and decreasing confidence. As the music subdivides itself into a million tiny repeating phrases, you feel a grasping mind trying and failing to find purchase.
“Everything seems to be up in the air at this time," Byrne observed mildly on “Mind,” with deadpan irony. On Fear of Music, he became our metaphysical straight man, able to defamiliarize the world, object by object, with his through-a-telescope gaze and his curious tone. He describes his “Mind” like some peculiar object that has crash-landed in his living room. “Drugs won’t change you/Religion won’t change you/What’s the matter with you?/I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Byrne mutters. Imagine a multi-tentacled alien attempting to put on a pair of pants; this was Byrne trying to make sense of reality.
The album is almost heroically funny, each song a fit of pique aimed at the broadest and most pervasive targets imaginable: paper (things never fit on it), electric guitars (you should never listen to it), and air—for god’s sake, air. “Air can hurt you, too,” Byrne reminds us—a hell of a retort to the patronizing suggestion to “get some air.” He agonizes over the existence of “Animals”; “They’re never there when you need them/They’re never there when you call them.” He sounds incensed, deranged, his voice going guttural and squeaky—the performance is a hair’s breadth away from shtick. His voice rises to an indignant peak at the biggest insult: Animals “don’t even know what a joke is.”
The music seems to know exactly what a joke is, and there are points where it seems to be laughing directly at you. There’s the “nyah-nyah” keyboard refrain on “I Zimbra,” the chittering keyboard on “Mind” like a bird that won’t shut up outside your window, undermined by Tina Weymouth’s banana-peel bassline. Like any good joke, the music seems to be constantly retelling itself, circling back on the first thought before the second thought even begins. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, stop me if you’ve heard this, stop me, stop me. It’s the sound of propulsive uncertainty. “Still might be a chance that it might work out,” Byrne squeaks on “Paper,” which is what you say just before everything falls apart.
The scratching sound on “Cities” mimic pencils blackening every inch of a paper’s free space, and the keyboards, the vocals, strike with the force of a typewriter hammer smacking paper. This was writing and thinking as a percussive act, each note a small panicked violence on reality, the force and insistence belying the foreknowledge that all this would disappear eventually. Cities would fall to war, the good times would end, were always ending—if Byrne wasn’t going to break his bug-eyed poker face to spell all this out to you, Jerry Harrison’s guitars and keyboards were going to scream it. The guitar that intrudes at the end of “Mind” is like a pained groan, begging Byrne to shut up. The ratcheting sound ringing throughout “Cities” sounds like a scythe trying to sever the talking head from its body, once and for all.
At the center of Fear of Music is “Life During Wartime,” inarguably one of their five most iconic songs. The lyrics ratchet paranoia all the way to the top: We open with a van loaded with weapons, rumored but not seen, and a gravesite “where nobody knows.” A triumph consists of finding some peanut butter to last you “a couple of days.” Everything else—records to play, letters to write, identity crises to have (“I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times now…”) is just quaint, a reminder of better times when we were allowed to be miserable for our own little reasons. Significantly, it’s the calmest that Byrne had ever sounded on record to that point—all the quavers in that reedy voice were suddenly smoothed out. The panic is always in the anticipation; when the disaster hits, we’re oddly calm. “The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.” I’m getting used to it now—is there any proclamation of success bleaker?
The song, and Byrne’s vocal performance, offered a premonition of the shellacked hair and hard angles of his big-suit, early-’80s Stop Making Sense era, which would begin in earnest with 1980’s masterpiece Remain in Light. There was an incipient pitilessness to the American air; the country had just elected Reagan. New York City was a pyre of burning tenements and a city teetering on the brink of financial ruin. When chaos descends, talk is the first thing deemed cheap. So Byrne burned his notebooks, as the lyrics went, and all that was left was the burning in his chest that kept him alive. Civilization is a privilege; anxiety is a privilege; worrying about paper and minds and dogs and drugs are privileges, and they might constitute the best and sweetest moments of your life. That’s the joke, that’s both the setup and the punchline: You think you’re miserable now? This misery is the good part.
And that would be the epigraph of Fear of Music if it weren’t for “Heaven.” It’s a song that Byrne almost didn’t write, based on a melody he nearly threw away. Eno heard Byrne humming it to himself and drew the song out of him, like a forced confession. The band in heaven plays your favorite song, plays it all night long. It’s a place where nothing ever happens; everyone leaves the party at the same time, and every kiss begins again exactly the same. The song is a prayer for order, a cessation of observation. When the act of observation, which grants us our humanity and fuels our neurosis, falls away—what’s left? Pure experience, untouched by anything else. “There’s a party in my mind, and I hope it never stops,” Byrne says on “Memories Can’t Wait.” Maybe the best moment happens when everyone leaves.

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Across four short volumes, the Montreal singer-songwriter introduces a lonely and diverse set of songs written with an exceptional eye for melody and texture.

Helena Deland: From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied”

Helena Deland’s From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” bears an unusual title: Exactly what kind of thing is this? And its format is unusual, too. So far, there are four volumes to the “series,” and the most obvious interpretation would be to call it a set of singles. But volumes one and two appeared simultaneously, back in March, as a single EP: two songs on each side, with different covers on the front and back of the sleeve. Now volumes three and four follow a similar conceit, this time with five songs total.
On Spotify, Deland has created a playlist that bundles them all up in a single, album-like package. Somewhat confusingly, both of volume four’s tracks trickled onto the streaming service, and the playlist, in July and August, followed by volume three’s “Lean on You” in September. But that jumbled quality seems inherent to the project. “The songs are to be considered as their own little things,” says Deland, a Montreal singer-songwriter. “They are part of something larger, yes, but they live on their own.”
Despite the name “Altogether Unaccompanied,” these are not for the most part unplugged or acoustic versions. In fact, the set bundles together a set of sounds rarely found under the same roof: Americana-tinged indie rock, yacht pop, folk, woozy synth balladry. “Take It All” is a simmering trip-hop song that steams like rainy pavement in the summer heat; “A Stone Is a Stone,” a waltz, wouldn’t sound out of place on a jukebox sandwiched between Angel Olsen and Cat Power. “Two Queries” is just acoustic guitar and voice, clear as a moonlight revelation: The guitar has the small, thin tone of an answering-machine message, while Deland’s multi-tracked vocals swim in chilly reverb. “Wait, what do you love/About the way/They move around you?” she sings in a breathy vibrato, and then she answers: “They circle you the most.” It could be a song of wonderment—I imagine a diver watching colorful fish swirl—or a reproach to a lover who aspires always to be the center of attention. The second stanza doesn’t clear things up—“Wait, what did you say/About your mom/And how she had to/Get used to/Being alone?”—but her tone is radiant, practically beatific. In 54 words, and less than two minutes, she has spun out a short story that refuses to yield its secrets.
Deland has a knack for sketching in broad strokes, just enough to capture the imagination without filling in too much detail and closing off possibilities. “Claudion,” a gorgeous, billowing synth-pop tune, sounds like it might be about a divorce, but it turns out to be inspired, she says, by taking acid with a friend. What stands out, again and again, is a fundamental tension between desire and ambivalence, tenderness and regret. In “Body Language,” wanting to stay and needing to get out are all tangled up in a kind of quiet desperation; “A Stone Is a Stone” frames mixed feelings about leave-taking in the lilting motion and reverberant guitars of a roadhouse slow dance. “Perfect Weather for a Crime” sounds like it’s about an affair she knows is a bad idea, and it’s positively electrifying: strutting and trembling, nerves jangling with anticipation.
Deland has said that her reluctance to put out a typical long-player is what led to the novel structure of these releases, but all nine songs actually make for a remarkably satisfying album—surprisingly so, given the range of styles. But the mood is pretty uniformly blue, and having top-notch players doesn’t hurt—bassist Jesse Mac Cormack’s agile but understated playing is particularly notable. And the production, handled by Deland and Mac Cormack, also helps everything hang together: The guitars have a delicious sizzle, the drums just the right amount of bite, and the keyboards and reverb soak up empty space like sponges. Her melodies and arrangements are almost unfailingly captivating: Just listen to the way “Lean On You” builds and builds and then unexpectedly slips into a middle section you never saw coming, like a cyclist cresting a hill and discovering the mother of all mountain views. Even when her writing doesn’t quite reach those heights—the melody on “Body Language” is a little more humdrum, the groove less relaxed than simply lackadaisical—the nuance of her voice helps carry things forward. Beneath her often wispy tone, she’s a powerful presence.
“Rise” makes for a gorgeous finale. The acoustic guitar faintly echoes the filliping figures of Nick Drake’s “Which Will”; Deland’s husky lower register recalls Rebecca Gates, just as the song’s skeletal arrangement does Gates’ band the Spinanes. Once again, she’s singing about reluctant farewells, and the song’s central image—two people sharing a bed, the arm’s distance between them narrowing—is drawn in a way that suggests volumes without ever revealing too much. It’s as lovely a song about loneliness as anyone could ask for. “Altogether Unaccompanied” might not quite be right: With Deland’s songs as a companion, solitude becomes its own reward.