I’m Your Man reinvented Leonard Cohen at age 53. It is the most fun you can have while being told that life is a terrible joke.

I’m Your Man

Leonard Cohen appeared on seven of his album covers before 1988, always looking cooler and wiser than his listeners: he was the saturnine poet, the seductive man of the world. On the cover of I’m Your Man he looks better than ever, with his sunglasses and impeccable pinstripe suit—except that he’s eating a banana, the slapstick fruit. James Dean would not have looked cool eating a banana. Gandhi would not have looked wise. Cohen’s publicist Sharon Weisz snapped the picture at the video shoot for Jennifer Warnes’ version of “First We Take Manhattan” and thought nothing of it, but Cohen thought it summed up everything the album was saying about himself and the human condition: Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out, life hands you a banana.
Cohen was 53 when he released the album that reinvented him musically, vocally, linguistically, temperamentally and philosophically. It quickly became his most successful record since his 1967 debut and many people’s favorite. In Sylvie Simmons’ Cohen biography, also called I’m Your Man, Black Francis says: “Everything that’s sexy about him was extra sexy, anything funny about him extra funny, anything heavy was extra heavy.” Triple-espresso Cohen. Six of these eight songs were career highlights that featured on “The Essential Leonard Cohen” and his 2008 comeback tour. Over the years, they have been consistently covered and quoted and folded into popular culture. Not a bad strike rate for an album that, according to Cohen, “broke down three or four times in the making of it.”
Cohen was on his knees when he made I’m Your Man. His 1984 album Various Positions had revitalized his songwriting with his embrace of cheap synthesizers and contained “Hallelujah,” destined to become a modern standard, but it had been rejected by Columbia Records in the U.S. He was running out of money. Songwriting, never easy, had become “hard labor”—he had been struggling with “Anthem” and “Waiting for the Miracle” for years and wouldn’t nail them until his 1992 album The Future. Above (or below) all, he was poleaxed by depression, unable at one stage to get out of bed or answer the phone. He considered retiring and withdrawing to a monastery but he didn’t feel he had the spiritual mettle. He felt that the personality he had sustained for so many years—as an artist, lover, friend—was disintegrating. “My own situation was so disagreeable that most forms of failure hardly touched me,” he said. “That allowed me to take a lot of chances.”
Cohen clawed back his self-respect by telling the truth. His account of writing “I Can’t Forget” reminds me of Hemingway’s solution to creative block: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Originally, the song was about the Jews’ exodus from Egypt but Cohen felt he lacked the religious conviction to sing it. “I couldn’t get the words out of my throat,” he said. So he sat down at the kitchen table, abandoned any pretense to wisdom and began to write one true verse, a twist on Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”: “I stumbled out of bed/I got ready for the struggle/I smoked a cigarette/And I tightened up my gut.”
The actress Rebecca De Mornay, who began dating Cohen after I’m Your Man, summarized his attitude at the time: “Let’s get down to the truth here. Let’s not kid ourselves.” The truth, as Cohen saw it, was bleak. He had reached the end of a period of spiritual inquiry. His investigations would resume during the ‘90s when he spent years studying with the Zen master Roshi on California’s Mount Baldy, but on I’m Your Man he had reached a conclusion about how the world worked, and it gives the album a wry fatalism. His capacity for action is circumscribed by forces beyond his control. He is chained to music (“Tower of Song”), or a woman (“I’m Your Man”) or the memory of a woman (“Ain’t No Cure for Love”) and there’s nothing he can do about it. Bob Dylan said that with *Various Positions *Cohen’s songs were becoming like prayers—“Hallelujah,” “If It Be Your Will”—but there are no prayers here, and nobody to answer them.
To the extent that I’m Your Man is political—with its allusions to racism, inequality and the Shoah—it is the opposite of protest, because protest is futile here. The bomb has already dropped. The flood has occurred. The plague has arrived. The language of politics or religion or romance has lost its power to console or inspire. All that Cohen can do is describe the blasted terrain without flinching and find a way to inhabit it with some modicum of dignity. “I got some sense that the thing has been destroyed and is lost and that this world doesn’t exist, and this is the shadow of something, this is the fallout, the residue, the dust of some catastrophe, and there’s nothing to grasp onto,” said Cohen, demonstrating his ability to deliver an answer in an interview that’s as finely turned as a poem. The album describes the aftermath—a state beyond pessimism or anxiety or hope. “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain,” he said. “Me, I’m already wet.”
I’m Your Man is the most fun you can have while being told that life is a terrible joke. Because Cohen is a published poet and novelist and a limited musician, his grasp of pop music is often underrated, but he was enough of an entertainer to realize that this lyrical pill would require a lot of sweetening in the studio. The album began to take shape when Jeff Fisher, a keyboardist whom he had met in Montreal, arranged “First We Take Manhattan.” Cohen felt that if these words were couched in “serious Leonard Cohen music,” then they would be intolerable for both him and the listener. The song needed cinematic scope (Fisher’s version reminded him of Ennio Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone) and a beat you could dance to. The synthesizer enabled him to write to rhythms he couldn’t play on the guitar but it also connected him to cities, modernity, the tempo of the street. Fisher’s version, which resembles a militarized Pet Shop Boys, convinced Cohen the album was possible.
Then there’s the voice, which had acquired a morbid gravitas ideally suited to delivering hard truths but was not yet a midnight croak. Cohen shows considerable range here, executing each syllable with deadly precision on “First We Take Manhattan”; as intimate as a late-night phone call on the title track; a more ravaged version of his younger self on “Take This Waltz”; jaded and urbane on “Tower of Song.” His backing singers Jennifer Warnes and Anjani Thomas serve as confidants, accomplices, angels and hecklers, encircling that voice like garlands on a statue. Finally, and most importantly, there are jokes. It may be the humor of the gulag or the cancer ward—the black comedy of low expectations—but no less funny for that. “When things get truly desperate,” said Cohen, “you start laughing.”
The only man of action on the record, the only optimist, is the deranged narrator of “First We Take Manhattan.” Cohen had become fascinated by extremist rhetoric, from the KKK to Hezbollah, because its “beautiful world of certainty of action” stood in exotic contrast to his own sense that the human condition is defeat and failure. (“Anthem,” which he attempted during the *I’m Your Man *sessions, would articulate the consolation embedded in his anti-utopian philosophy—“Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”—but not for another four years). The fanatic believes he knows exactly what needs to be done. The fanatic can always get out of bed. Obviously, Cohen didn’t endorse any of these ideologies, so he imagined a movement of one, leaving it unclear whether the narrator is an impotent fantasist or a genuine threat. The understanding of the mindset is chilling but, Cohen reasoned, “I’d rather do that with an appetite for extremism than blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.” Zack Snyder, in a rare instance of good taste and humor, deployed it at the end of Watchmen, where it speaks for the deranged utopianism of Ozymandias.
I’m Your Man, which Cohen produced himself, has a reputation as Cohen’s synthesizer album, but each lyric demands a different setting. There’s a country song, a Casio blues number, a waltz, a Quiet Storm ballad and whatever the hell “Jazz Police” thinks it is. A friend of mine calls any near-masterpiece flawed by one outright howler a case of “Jazz Police Syndrome” and it’s hard to disagree, even if you accept Cohen’s intention to make “something quite wild and irresponsible,” inspired by hip-hop and the theme of a Pynchonesque “superagency” that secretly controls the world. Frenzied abandon isn’t one of Cohen’s natural modes, especially when it’s expressed through the medium of slap bass and stumbling drum machines. The joke fails to land.
“Jazz Police” is the most extreme manifestation of Cohen’s dedication to the sound and the language of “the street.” He made the album in fragments, in Paris, Montreal and Los Angeles, a city that he felt was “really, truly an apocalyptic landscape.” I’m Your Man is his least spiritual, least poetic, least romantic album. It has no patience for beautiful abstractions. “Ain’t No Cure for Love” (its title inspired by L.A.’s AIDS crisis) and the title track take sentimental clichés—I’m addicted to love, I’ll do anything for love—to brutal extremes. Love is the monkey on his back and he’ll go to any lengths to appease it, even if it means erasing his identity. “I’m Your Man” fades out with Cohen still singing, as if he’s going to keep prostrating himself at the feet of the object of his desire until he gets an answer. There’s a very good chance she’s not listening.
Cohen leaves the street just once, diverting all of his poetic energies into “Take This Waltz,” his lush version of Lorca’s 1930 poem “Little Viennese Waltz” that first came out in 1986 on the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. He said that translating his favorite poet took him 150 hours and a nervous breakdown, which may not be hyperbole because it must have been a mammoth task to honor Lorca’s sinister dreamscape while thoroughly Cohenizing the language. Lorca’s striking image of a forest of dried pigeons becomes “a tree where the doves go to die”; the melancholy hallway becomes “the hallways where love’s never been.” Lorca wrote it during the year he spent in New York, and Cohen’s song retains that dance between the old world and the new as well as the one between love and death.
If you had to boil I’m Your Man’s worldview down to just two songs, one would be “Everybody Knows,” a grim litany of human cruelty and injustice with a chorus like a Balkan wake. “It pushes things very, very far just to get a laugh,” he said. It’s been serially abused by posturing self-styled mavericks who miss the humor, from Christian Slater’s character in the 1990 teensploitation flick Pump Up the Volume to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but that’s not Cohen’s fault. He doesn’t valorize his cynicism or claim that it requires special insight. Everybody knows this stuff deep down, he’s saying. Let’s not kid ourselves. At a press conference in 2013, Cohen was asked by one earnest journalist what he thought about the state of the world. He paused and smiled and said: “Everybody knows.” Of course.
The other keystone is “Tower of Song,” which suggests Beckett’s famous line, “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” reworked as a stand-up comedy routine. “I was born like this/I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice” is the most famous of a string of very good jokes. Cohen laughed when he wrote that line: “a laugh that comes with the release of truth.” Elsewhere, he holds out the possibility that, despite all we’ve been told, things might not be as bad as he imagined: “There’s a mighty judgement coming but I may be wrong/You see you hear these funny voices/In the Tower of Song.” Even the music is comical, with its rinky-dink keyboard rhythm and faltering one-finger keyboard solo. On his comeback tour it functioned as both light relief and the key to his whole career—he recited the lyric when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. Here, its droll resignation steers the album away from futility at the last moment. This is Cohen climbing out of his depression by accepting his lot as a singer and writer—a lifelong resident in the tower he described as a combination of factory and bordello. Songwriting is how he makes himself useful. It’s not much, but perhaps it is enough.
Right up until his death on November 7, at the age of 82, Cohen was a great believer in useful songs. He once told a story about a conversation that helped him summon the conviction to finish the album when he was in a trough of despair. A friend told him that her father, who also suffered from chronic depression, had recently had a dream that made him feel better. It was a dream about Cohen. “I don’t have to worry because Leonard is picking up the stones,” he told her, smiling.
I’m Your Man gives the impression that Cohen took this responsibility very seriously. It’s not an uplifting album, but it’s a strangely reassuring one, because you feel that Cohen is working like a dog on the listener’s behalf to make the intolerable tolerable. Leonard is picking up the stones.


The Los Angeles electronic musician rebounds from a rare brain disease—and the temporary loss of her ability to speak and hear music—by confidently streamlining her pop impulses.

Lune Rouge

In the first weeks of 2016, the Los Angeles producer Jennifer Lee, who performs as TOKiMONSTA, quietly underwent a pair of surgeries to treat the rare brain disease Moyamoya. In the months following the procedure, she lost, for stretches, her ability to produce language and to hear music—traumatic, to be sure, for a person whose identity and livelihood are inextricable from sound.
Lune Rouge, Lee’s third studio album, was written following her recovery, but doesn’t attempt to directly narrativize her illness or posit anything so dramatic as a reinvention of sound or self. Rather, it serves an affirmation: The songs here have a pleasantly everyday quality, folding the eclectic—but sometimes grating—glitchiness of Lee’s older work into streamlined pop compositions. Featuring vocals from a number of artists including MNDR, Selah Sue, and Isaiah Rashad, the record remains something of a grab bag of influences; still, it feels like Lee’s most unified work to date.
The album opens somewhat gravely with a cinematic pair of tracks: its primary nod to the context in which it was written. “Lune” builds an orchestra of pretty strings and woodwinds before relaxing to make way for a post-rock guitar line; “Rouge” picks up that guitar and introduces a more familiar beat. Its lyrics sketch around something that never comes into focus: “I see the light/In your feeling,” she sings. Such is the emotional timbre of Lune Rouge: charged, to be sure, but vague enough for listeners to project a range of feeling onto its songs.
As is often the case with this sort of smartly-made EDM-lite, the glossy melancholy that introduces the album is quite effective in hooking in the listener. “Rouge” gives way to the somewhat blander “Thief,” an R&B track about romantic ambivalence featuring vocals from SAINTS; even as things get less interesting, Lee’s production has a narcotizing effect that invites tuning out. Citing a generational shift in the dominant modes of arranging and consuming music, Lee described Lune Rouge in a recent interview as “a playlist of songs for one person.” It’s funny to think of this collection of songs as a playlist, rather than an album proper—the distinction suggests it as a set better suited to affect management than expression.
In any event, being affect-managed can feel good, and the album’s high points are warm reminders of how music can smooth over hardship and sweep us into an easier mood. The danceable “We Love,” with vocals from frequent collaborator MNDR, is bouncy and spacious. Featuring Joey Purp, Isaiah Rashad, and Ambré, “NO WAY” exemplifies the generally relaxed disposition of this collection of songs, even as collaborators bring in lyrics about breakups and rejection. On “Don’t Call Me,” a kiss-off delivered with a sort of pastel dreaminess, Lee’s orchestral electro provides gently icy ground for Yuna’s vocals. The producer skillfully folds in oddball details (acoustic clattering and rounded abstract vocals form a beat on “Bibimbap”; sharp-edged strings give the otherwise conventional choral ballad “Estrange” satisfying texture) without superseding her familiar pop structures.
Lune Rouge doesn’t push hard stylistically, but it’s a comforting and confident album. It entertains life’s ups and downs while remaining faithful in our ability to ultimately have a good time. Things might be more complicated when the song is over, but it’s hard to turn down an offer of such soft-focus solidity.


The Nashville singer-songwriter looks backwards to move forward on an album that filters contemporary desires and sorrows through the timeless vernacular of country.

Sparrow

Orphans and sparrows fill the pages of the Great American Songbook, with standards like “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” evoking the lowliness of humankind and the redemptive compassion of God. In opening her new album, Sparrow, with a song called “Orphan,” Ashley Monroe aligns herself with that tradition. “How does the sparrow know more than I? When a mother is gone it learns how to fly,” she sings. “How does an orphan find its way home?” As she poses these questions to herself and to the listener, she is also engaging with the immense catalog of country, gospel, and folk that inspired her even before she moved to Nashville as a teenager.
On “Orphan,” she achieves flight, a string section supplying the gust of wind that holds her aloft and pushes the chorus toward the sky. The song is anthemic but never overpowering, beautifully restrained and alive to the nuances of melody and phrasing. It’s one of the most moving moments in her small but solid oeuvre, with Monroe embracing country conventions not as elements to be mimicked or revived, but as means of communicating her own confusion, anguish, and desire. She looks backwards to move forward.
Monroe recorded Sparrow after what she described to NPR as an “intense therapy-athon,” which allowed her to confront milestones as crushing as the death of her father and as joyous as the birth of her first child. The songs feel more personal than her previous work, but Monroe also understands that country music can balance such particulars with universals. Though tracks like the spryly melancholic “Mother’s Daughter” and the valedictory “Keys to the Kingdom” seem to derive from real situations, she pinpoints the emotions and sentiments we might all recognize and share. She sings not to confess but to connect.
Monroe worked on the album with Dave Cobb, who has produced records for Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, John Prine, Jason Isbell, and just about everyone else who has been described in Nashville as a new outlaw. After the rambling roots music of 2013’s Like a Rose and the countrypolitan sheen of 2015’s The Blade, both produced with Vince Gill, Sparrow whittles her sound down to guitars, bass, and drums, then glazes the songs with strings that flutter on “Rita,” swell on “Paying Attention,” and climb on “Hard on a Heart.” It’s not an unusual or unexpected sound, but the arrangements are so finely tuned and pair so perfectly with Monroe’s patient phrasing that they sound every bit as adventurous as the disco beats on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour.
At its heart, Sparrow is an album about pining and yearning, two stock themes in country music. On “Orphan,” she searches for stability and direction; on “Mother’s Daughter,” she longs for something like home. Some of the most powerful songs are about carnal desires. Drawing on examples set by Loretta Lynn and Bobbie Gentry, Lee Ann Womack and Lucinda Williams, Monroe writes frankly about sex, especially on “Wild Love” (“Pull my hair and call my name”) and “This Heaven.” “I wish I  woulda laid my hands on you,” she sings on “Hands on You,” letting those first syllables hang in the air like a series of bedroom sighs. The “you” in the song doesn’t even matter. What’s important is the desire itself and her regret over not acting on it.
The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection. When she sings about that haunted guitar she inherited from her heroes on closing track “Keys to the Kingdom,” she’s suggesting that music in general, and country music in particular, lets us voice our desires or at least accept that they’ll never be satisfied. It’s a fitting coda to the album’s emotional highpoint, “Daddy I Told You.” In a croon lightened by the peacefulness and confidence of an artist who’s spent her entire career building up to this moment, Monroe sings, “Daddy I told you I was gonna fly,” and the orphan becomes a sparrow, figuring out her wings on the way down.


Angus Finlayson’s first LP is shot through with concussive kicks, writhing basslines, and finely tooled drum work. But even at their most powerful, these songs are remarkably nimble.

Second Language

When Angus Finlayson began making dance music under the name Minor Science in the early 2010s, dirt was in vogue. Distortion was omnipresent; drum machines often sounded like they’d been dredged out of a canal, their circuits caked with rust. Finlayson’s debut EP, for London label the Trilogy Tapes, followed suit, slathering slow, sullen house beats in grit. But one song, “Hapless,” felt different. The bulk of the track, with its skulking drums and ominous spoken loop, was in keeping with the era’s lo-fi aesthetics. But at the center was a strange, slippery synthesizer pattern with a distinctly hi-def signature, its liquid textures and unsteady rhythms flickering like a coded message beamed across space and time.
Finlayson, a former Pitchfork contributor, has spent the years since trying to catch up with that signal, with each successive release pushing a little further into unknown territory. By 2017’s “Volumes”/“Another Moon,” the third of a trio of annual 12"s for London’s Whities label, he had reached his destination. Gone were the blunted moods and busted sonics of his early work; in their place, glistening timbres and exhilaratingly precise programming whose swiveling movements were reminiscent of robotic arms. That record remains among the most futuristic-sounding dispatches from the past decade of electronic music. On his debut album, Finlayson keeps moving further outward, fashioning a distinctive take on club music that seems determined to wriggle free of linear structure.
The first thing you notice about Second Language is its iridescent finish—on track after track, the synths have a vivid, shimmering quality—and the next is the force of its punch. The heaviest tracks hit harder than Minor Science ever has, shot through with concussive kicks, writhing basslines, and finely tooled drum work. But even at their most powerful, these songs are remarkably nimble. “Balconies” wraps footwork rhythms in a cushion of empty space, accentuating the springiness of the drums’ attack; “Gone Rouge,” another 170-BPM standout, takes earthbound rave tropes (dub sirens, Korg M1 organ basslines) and sends them darting through midair, deft as dragonflies.
Like Jlin and Objekt, Finlayson is a masterful sound designer. His targeted use of reverb, delay, and, crucially, the absence of those often ubiquitous effects, paired with filter sweeps and sudden moments of silence, suggests wild, artificial spaces where the laws of the universe no longer hold sway. And his shape-shifting arrangements, full of fake-outs and hard lefts, contribute to the sense of being strapped into a four-dimensional roller coaster.
It’s a short album, blazing through 10 tracks in 36 minutes. Even the club anthems, like “Polyglottal” and “For Want of Gelt,” don’t go much over four minutes; the tempos throughout are mostly breathtakingly fast, as though Finlayson felt he didn’t have a moment to waste. But the record has a unified palette, held together by bright synth melodies that occasionally hark back to Autechre’s wistful early albums. (Along with footwork, electro, and drum’n’bass, IDM is a major influence here.) Thanks to smart sequencing that balances bangers with pensive interludes, it feels less like a collection of club tracks than a suite broken into 10 interlocking movements.
Occasionally, Finlayson’s fidgety tendencies get the better of him. He has a habit of building up to a drop, deploying a heart-in-mouth cue that things are about to kick off in earnest, and then abruptly changing course, leaving all that tension unresolved. Doubtless this is on purpose, though sometimes it feels like he’s deliberately moving two steps forward, one step back, and one giant pole vault back to the starting line. But his playful qualities are commendable: There’s an explosion of percussion at the climax of “For Want of Gelt” that sounds like an entire rack of drum machines jolted to life by a power surge. It’s so over the top that it’s almost laugh-out-loud funny, which is a nice change in a genre that can be awfully self-serious.
The most exciting moments happen when Finlayson’s restlessness yields entirely new sounds, like the major chord that flashes out just once toward the end of “Balconies”; Finlayson seems to understand that repeating it even one more time would diminish its uniqueness exponentially. I’m particularly fond of a Durutti Column-like guitar that calls out and falls silent in the closing “Voiced and Unvoiced,” or the lo-fi, tape-warped guitar that pokes gingerly through the opening “Second Language (Intro).” That one’s even got a little distortion on it, a detail that stands out all the more vividly against the rest of the track’s pristine sonics. Perhaps, having mastered spotlessness, he’s ready to let a little dirt in again.


Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California,\n\ and they're ...

Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf

Songs for the Deaf

Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California, and they're putting the 'rock' back in 'blowing shit up' (in a healthy, non-terrorist kind of way). Now, it's no secret that, when it comes to rock's metal edge, these Queens want badly to be kings; you need look no further for proof than 2000's blistering, thuggish Rated R, on which frontman Josh Homme's searing guitars and theatrical vocals brought the band close enough to their goal to sniff the fleurs de lis. That, however, is history, and with Songs for the Deaf, the Queens have hit a new peak in their development: the sound is more massive, the chaos is more calculated, and with hired gun Dave Grohl at the kit, the band has an unprecedented drive that leaves them poised for their strongest bid for power yet.
"You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" embodies the greatest strengths of rock at its hardest-- stunning riffs, breakneck speed, and guitars that churn and spit like a threshing machine. It's riddled with decades-old metal cliches, but the Queens know what their audience expects, and they use this knowledge to continually twist rock stereotypes into a vicious full-nelson until they beg for mercy. It's fantastic, and this is just the first track.
"No One Knows" changes Songs for the Deaf's pace by sliding into an easy groove, sleazing its way across a dimly-lit bar, half-drunk and reeking of cheap cologne, to put the moves on your girlfriend (or, you know, you, depending). This is four-to-the-floor slime of the highest quality, folks, and it's the second installment in this album's triad of genius, completed subsequently by the next track, "First It Giveth". "Giveth" brings the drama like a champ, with Homme singing in pained falsetto over punishing riffs during the verses, and opening up into aggro-overdrive for the appropriately apocalyptic chorus.
But along the path to greatness, there are pitfalls, and one Homme often falls into here is the old "chamber of lost souls" effect (made popular by Alice in Chains on some of their later albums), which he uses to fill out the backgrounds of some of these songs. The multitracked Hommes aaah'ing melodramatically in undead unison make slogging through "Hanging Tree" and "Go with the Flow" a pretty grim endeavor. It doesn't help that these songs churn along interminably long after their riffs have run dry, either. And worse still, the band has quit winking at their metal excesses entirely, toeing the line between mindless fun and xFC-metal gothery. Fortunately, this is only a temporary decline, but that these two tracks hit back-to-back in the dead center of the record makes for a much steeper dropoff than if they'd been sequenced farther apart.
There's also the issue of the between-song skits. As skits go, these are pretty tame, but that doesn't make them any less obtrusive. The album even opens with one: the sign-on of KLON (that's "clone") radio, "the station that sounds more like everybody else than anybody else." It's a broad parody of the Clear Channel wavelength empire, and while admittedly pretty fucking funny, the target is a bit obvious-- especially given that PS2's "Grand Theft Auto III" beat them to the punch two years ago and pulled it off expertly. My biggest problem with these interruptions, though, is that they do little for the aggregate effect of the album-- after a couple playthroughs, they only serve to stifle the momentum QOTSA manage to develop.
Yet, this same biting cleverness also pervades many of the songs, lending an air of spontaneity and plain good times-- there's a fake stop in one of the early tracks that's so ludicrous I laughed out loud. And there are even better moments to be had elsewhere: the wavering surf guitar on "Another Love Song", or the good old-fashioned brain-sickness of "Six Shooter" and "Mosquito Song," the latter played lovingly by what sounds like the orchestra of the damned.
When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair. But even if they can't have it all, the guys do offer as real a showcase of metal-tinged panache and stellar songwriting as anyone might hope for from a band labeled 'stoner-rock.' Besides, if the entire album was as strong as the first three tracks, it'd probably burn you alive. As it stands, Queens of the Stone Age settle for attempted murder. And that ain't bad at all.


The Mississippi punk four-piece celebrate slugs, butter, lard, chewing gum—the important things.

Music for Donuts EP

Judy and the Jerks make food-fight music. This isn’t just because the punk four-piece have dubbed their latest EP Music for Donuts—although there is plenty of butter, lard, and other substances that would be a pain in the ass to get out of your hair. Their music splatters like mashed potatoes against concrete walls; it squirts like a flattened plastic ketchup bottle. There are brief pauses where a bassline flutters alone, as if reloading a spork and preparing for further warfare.
The Hattiesburg, Mississippi group has been a part of the local punk scene for nearly three years, and from the beginning, they have championed the grimy and grotesque. “She’s greedy, she’s a goblin/Be careful or she’ll put you in your coffin,” Gore sings on “Greedy Goblin.” On “Slugarama” there’s no room for disagreement on why slugs are simply the best. “When you’re a slug you can do anything that you want/Everyone thinks your gross/And you are/And it rocks.” The weirder the creature, the greasier the substance, the deeper Judy and the Jerks’ admiration.
On Music for Donuts, they continue to celebrate slippery objects for their authority-defying properties. The opening “Butter” is an anthem for the clumsy and reckless, and the adjacent “Lard” is a parent-taunting anthem: “I don’t care about anything/ I don’t care about you,” Gore jeers. “I’m a lard girl and I want to have fun.” If mushy substances divide us, then chewy ones offer unity: “Chewing gum is what we can all agree one/Chewing gum is heaven sent,” Gore sings on “Friends.”
Beneath this surreal cocktail of humor and absurdity lies real defiance. She describes her gaggle of friends as one not to be fucked with: “Don’t talk to me ‘cause I’ll bite you,” she snarls. “We’ve got big butts and we do it our way.” She celebrates the vicious attitude of geese while also frightening her harassers on "Goosey Girls." Throughout, Gore is never alone in her rebellion; Judy's jerks always have her back in a brawl. “We bark, we bite, we fight,” Gore shouts on “Friends.” There’s no doubt that she means it.


USA/Mexico are sludgy, nasty, and unclassifiable, meaning they fit perfectly into Austin's coterie of noise-rock misfits.

Matamoros

Austin’s USA/Mexico aren’t quite sludge or doom or death metal. Instead, they lurch somewhere in between the down-tuned pummel of bands like Buzzov•en and Eyehategod and the ultraviolent spazzes of Burmese or Brainbombs. A trio of Austin experimental rock veterans, they are led by Shit and Shine’s Craig Clouse on guitar and vocals and rounded out with Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth’s Nate Cross on bass. Their debut Laredo was a bent-out sunstroke of processed vocals and noise-laden riffs, and its followup Matamoros is slower, freakier, and somehow louder.
“Matamoros” rolls out slathered in feedback and erupts into what sounds like rubble coming to life. Clouse has an ear for crushing doom riffs, yet he prefers to take them on long marches to nowhere. “Matamoros” keeps rumbling on, gaining more feedback until it breaks apart. Closer “Anxious Whitey” takes this approach and stretches it over 17 minutes. It might madden some, but there’s a perverse satisfaction to hearing Clouse tease a sick riff only to let it bleed back out into nothingness.
Shit and Shine and Butthole Surfers dressed up experimental music in humor and absurdity, and USA/Mexico subtly maintain that tradition. “Eric Carr T-Shirt” is such a hammering trudge that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s named for KISS’s hair metal-era drummer; the result feels as appropriate for fans of this megamix of Paul Stanley’s stage banter as Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.”
Matamoros  also  recognizes the city’s fringe noise-rock past and present. Not only do they cover Cherubs’ “Shoofly,” they also get Cherubs’ Kevin Whitley to guest on vocals. Spray Paint’s George Dishner lays on even more hellish guitar onto the title track. Austin still feels like a mid-sized college town in some ways, meaning that if you’re into heavy and/or weird music, you’re bound to see the same folks frequently. “Vaporwave Headache” breaks through with rapid-fire sheets of abrasive guitar static, and it’s as indebted to Total Abuse’s scathing, bitter hardcore as it is Scratch Acid’s ur-noise rock. It has a punk tempo, but like everything else about USA/Mexico, it is too defiantly weird and alien for pigeonholing. That’s how they fit inside Austin’s storied noise rock and experimental music scenes: by refusing to fit exactly in anywhere.


On their proper debut, Speedy Ortiz join a small club of young indie rock bands writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over, but the charms here extend beyond frontwoman Sadie Dupuis’ clever and biting wordplay. The 1990s-indebted guitar crunch and quaking rhythms are a perfect match for her dark wit.

Major Arcana

God bless middle school bullies: Without the torment they’ve reliably inflicted on generation after generation of brooding, musically-inclined creative types, would there even be indie rock? At the very least there wouldn’t be “No Below,” one of the most striking songs on Northampton, Massachusetts, noise-pop quartet Speedy Ortiz’s proper debut, Major Arcana. “I didn’t know you when I broke my knee,” frontwoman Sadie Dupuis murmurs during the song’s wounded, palm-muted intro, “Spent the summer on crutches, and everybody teased.” Gnarled yet stingingly heartfelt, “No Below” blooms into a portrait of the artist as a friendless tween: death-obsessed, ditched by the one person at school who gets her, and left “freezing alone with [her] thoughts.” You know, the kind of early-onset trauma from which great, off-kilter bedroom-pop eventually springs.
The first album to bear Speedy Ortiz’s name (which itself is a nod to a doomed character in the beloved alt-comic Love and Rockets) was a solo affair. Dupuis’ self-recorded 2011 release, The Death of Speedy Ortiz, was a patchy, sardonic (sample titles: “Hexxy Sadie”, “Kinda Blew”) lo-fi gem in the tradition of early Sebadoh or Liz Phair’s legendary Girlysound tapes. But like the heroine of “No Below” (who later finds a companion to compare scars with: “Everything fucked up we both felt before/I’m glad for it all if it got us where we are”), Dupuis eventually found strength in numbers. By the time Speedy Ortiz’s promising Sports EP came out last year, she’d brought in some new recruits—bassist Darl Ferm, guitarist Matt Robidoux, and drummer Mike Falcone—to kick the firepower up a notch. It worked wonders: A Speedy Ortiz song used to sound like a personally gummed, exactingly aimed spitball, but the best ones on the explosive, earthquaking Major Arcana land like grenades.
Still, even as their songs have grown louder, gnarlier, and more compositionally ambitious, Speedy Ortiz have managed to preserve the intimacy and idiosyncrasy that made Dupuis’ early home recordings so compelling. Which is a testament not just to producer Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr., Chelsea Light Moving) but also to how receptively and thoughtfully all four members play off each other: Ferm and Falcone keep Major Arcana’s rhythms feeling fluid and adventurous but never sloppy, while the ongoing conversation between Dupuis’ vocals and Robidoux’s trebly, agile riffs is particularly essential to Speedy’s charm. As it does on “No Below”’s caustic, catchy chorus (“And though I once said/I was better off just being dead”), Robidoux’s guitar usually mirrors or embroiders Dupuis’ vocal melody, underscoring her words rather than drowning them out.
And thank goodness—because Major Arcana finds Speedy Ortiz joining a depressingly small club of young indie rock bands (maybe the first new members since Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold) writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over. “My mouth is a factory for every toxic part of speech I spew,” Dupuis quivers on the Mascis-indebted sludgefest “Tiger Tank,” and the rest of the record makes good on that promise. Like her hero Stephen Malkmus (she was once the frontwoman of an all-female Pavement cover band called—wait for it—Babement) Dupuis sings like someone palpably fascinated with the way words sound. Check, for one example, the way she scales the line, “criminally twisted puny little villain” in the opening moments of “Fun,” delighting in the texture of every vowel. Her lines strike a tricky balance between feeling loose and meticulously crafted—another trick she must have learned from memorizing Malkmus quotables. On highlights like “Pioneer Spine” or the hellraising “Cash Cab,” Dupuis has a knack for turning seemingly dribbled-out mouthfuls into catchy hooks; in a lot of cases you won’t stop to marvel at the ingenuity of her lines until you’re already singing along.
Speedy Ortiz wear their love of the 1990s on their torn, flannel sleeves, which makes this particular round of Spot the Influence about as challenging as a game of tee-ball: there’s the squalling, guitar-on-guitar carnage of Archers of Loaf, the grungy mysticism of Helium (Dupuis lifted the title Major Arcana from a book she was reading on black magic), and of course the deadpan wit of vintage Phair (“I was never the witch that you made me to be,” Dupuis tells a burnt-out old flame on “Plough,” “Still you picked a virgin over me”). But don’t let any of that lead you to think that Speedy Ortiz are your garden variety nostalgists. Even at its most distortion-caked, there’s a melodic confidence and a gimlet-eyed clarity about Major Arcana that’s a rare find in a debut. They’ve got reverence for their forebears, sure, but unlike a lot of recent bands exhuming the ghosts of indie rock past, Speedy Ortiz also have faith in the peculiar personality traits that set them apart from their heroes. With its quaking rhythms, twisted riffage, and jet-black wit, Major Arcana is a redemptive ode to the broken bones that grew back together a little crooked—the ones that taught Dupuis how to walk in her own weird way.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Aretha Franklin’s immensely personal 1970 album Spirit in the Dark.

Spirit in the Dark

Professionally speaking, Aretha Franklin had nothing left to prove. She’d shaken off a slow start in the music business after squandering years of her prime singing schlocky jazz on Columbia Records for a producer who once said, with a straight face, “My vision for Aretha had nothing to do with rhythm and blues.” She’d cemented her legend with “Respect,” a minor Otis Redding track that she elevated to a social-justice masterpiece. She’d established her voice as one of the 20th Century’s most distinctive instruments, right up there with Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.
On a personal level, it was another story. She had sung two years prior at the funeral of her family friend Martin Luther King Jr., and his assassination had left her shaken. She had recently separated from her husband and manager, Ted White, a volatile svengali who’d transitioned into the music business after a stint as a pimp. And she was already carrying another man’s child—her fourth, having become pregnant the first time at age 12, just two years after her own mother dropped dead of a heart attack.
Through this trauma came Spirit, a cathartic 1970 testimonial documenting the fusion of house-wrecking gospel and gut-wrenching soul that made Aretha Franklin Aretha Franklin. It is not her most famous record. It is not her top-selling record. What it is is her truest record, the one that best captures her essential ache—the pain of a black woman clamoring for freedom from the domineering men who suffocated her childhood, manipulated her career, mangled her personal life, and more broadly speaking oppressed her race and robbed her dignity. It’s an assertion of personhood, a monument to resilience in the face of pain. As if to make all this explicit she closes the album with a cover of B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues,” though when it finally arrives the song is redundant. If you’ve been listening, you already know why.
Franklin grew up in Detroit playing piano and singing in church for her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a powerful Baptist preacher so charismatic that nurses carried smelling salts to revive parishioners overcome by his word. The reverend’s sanctuary sat on Hastings Street, which at the time was Detroit’s black entertainment district, home to the bars where blues legend John Lee Hooker used to gig. The Franklin home was itself a kind of private club, a place for musicians like Nat Cole and Dinah Washington to relax after hours. Knowing he had a prodigy in the house, Franklin’s father used to wake her in the middle of the night and trot her out to perform for his tipsy guests.
The parties gave young Franklin an early lesson in the ways sacred and secular life commingled. At age 18, Franklin turned pro and embarked on a quest to integrate the passions and inflections—the blackness—of gospel music with the bourgeois politesse of the white pop charts. Columbia thought she could compete with Barbra Streisand. Franklin agreed, as did her new husband and manager.
Ted White was a man with a huge square head, a taste for custom suits, and a temper. Etta James once compared his relationship with Franklin to Ike Turner’s with Tina. White insisted that his young bride tour and record constantly; between 1961 and 1970, she released 19 studio albums. After years without a breakthrough on Columbia, White did manage to orchestrate Franklin’s 1966 move to the R&B-minded Atlantic Records, where she began her torrential creative streak with 1967’s I Never Loved a Man, but by then their relationship had frayed. In 1969, the two divorced. Restraining orders were filed. At one point, enraged that Sam Cooke’s brother Charles had visited Franklin at home, White pulled a gun and shot him in the crotch.
The outside world provided no safe haven. Violence rained all around her. King was murdered in Memphis in the spring of 1968. A few months later, Franklin performed the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, only to see it engulfed in riots. A few months after that, almost 150 people were arrested and one police officer killed during a black-power congregation at her father’s Detroit church.
Released after this period of profound turmoil for her country, her career, her race, and her family, Spirit in the Dark stands as a statement of triumph for having come through, survived, gotten over. Franklin doesn’t make it look easy; she reminds us that it’s difficult. The LP’s very first cut, “Don’t Play That Song,” is all about trying and failing to forget old hurt. The grainy black-and-blue cover photo resembles nothing more than a bruise.
She recorded most of the album in Florida, and still today it sounds so steamy you have to crack a window. Most artists start their careers rough and eventually smooth out; Franklin went the other direction, rasping her voice, heading from slick cosmopolitan Detroit all the way down below the Mason-Dixon line. In an exquisite North-meets-South anecdote that became music-industry lore, at one point during the Spirit sessions, Franklin spilled a bag of pig’s feet in the lobby of Miami’s posh Fontainebleau hotel and refused to pick it up.
Her band hailed from across the region. On electric guitar: Duane Allman, the virtuoso longhair just a year away from fatally crashing his motorcycle back home in Georgia. On organ, bass, and drums: the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a squad of Alabama ringers who’d cut their teeth with Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge. Singing backup: Almeda Lattimore, Margaret Branch, and Franklin’s cousin Brenda Bryant, a trio that could mimic a Mississippi tent-revival choir. And then on piano: the 27-year-old soul queen herself.
It’s easy to forget—because her voice makes us forget—that Franklin has always been a formidable pianist. But she could hang with anybody. “Don’t Play That Song” opens with her at the keys, thumping out chords. The second track, “The Thrill Is Gone (From Yesterday’s Kiss),” begins exactly the same way. In all, seven of the album’s dozen songs start with the sound of her piano summoning a divine vibration, making her seem like both the bandleader and minister of her own personal tabernacle.
In contrast with Sam Cooke, who left faith music in the dust when he crossed over to pop, Franklin found ways to bring the genres together. Spirit in the Dark embodies the synthesis. “You and Me” is either an ode to monogamy or a devotional to the Lord. The ecstatic title track is either a paean to the holy ghost or a first-person account of a rafter-shaking orgasm. If you’re not paying attention, “Try Matty’s” sounds like it could be a joyful hymn. It’s a hymn alright—to a barbecue joint. The effect isn’t so much about ambiguity, making us guess which thing she really means. Aretha Franklin is more about duality, making us believe both things at the same time.
Three-and-a-half minutes into “The Thrill Is Gone,” as Franklin contemplates emancipation from a soured relationship, her choir kicks in to “thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” Suddenly the song is enlarged. And yet somehow exhuming MLK doesn’t make “Thrill” any less of a breakup song. If anything it becomes more of one, equating the emotional wreckage of failed romance with a nation’s collective grief over a national tragedy. Intimate loss can be all-encompassing, the song suggests, and all-encompassing loss can be acutely intimate.
The goodbyes don’t stop there. “Like the dew on the mountain,” Franklin sings, “like the foam way out on the sea, like the bubbles on the fountain—you’re gone forever from me.” That’s a little number called “One Way Ticket,” and it’s supposed to be one of the happy songs.
When decoding so much material about regret and liberation, it’s impossible not to read into Franklin’s personal life. And yet at a certain point, her music—like all music—is less about the specific content and more about the general feeling. It’s the relief we all get when finally moving on from something bad, the exhaustion and exaltation. It’s the masochism of being glad for the pain, because pain is how we know what we had was real. It’s the euphoria Franklin conveys in “Pullin’,” co-written by her sister Carolyn before she died of cancer at age 43. The words come off as an open letter to an ex-lover. The music comes off as a jamboree.
Again the tune opens with Franklin’s piano. Again she sings a gospel melody, climbing and dipping and wailing. Again she calls to her backup singers and they respond to her, and again, and again, and soon the tempo is racing so fast that the song lifts off its foundation to become a kind of divine dialogue we don’t so much listen to as a witness.
“Pulling,” she sings. “Harder. Higher. Harder. Higher. Pulling. Moving. Pulling. Harder! Pulling. Higher! Moving. Higher! Higher! Higher! Higher? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Go ahead! Higher!”
The woman will not quit. She’s broken free now, free of the earth and its chains. She’s ascending to heaven, pulling harder, lifting higher until she levitates in a state of transcendence, still singing, still wailing, crying out to God and man alike in a joyful noise borne of suffering. She continues like this until her formidable band, by now apparently crippled with fatigue, stumbles to a halt.
A hi-hat shimmers, a kick-drum thuds, and then in one of the great mic drops of all time, the diva Aretha Franklin, returned to earth now in a state of grace, turns to her sidemen—or maybe directly to us—and utters a single word: “Well?”


Though widely disregarded at the time of its release, The Kinks' 1968 apex, The Village Green Preservation Society, has had a profound impact on the present state of indie rock. Now, Sanctuary reissues the album in an expanded 3xCD box edition, compiling every song recorded during its sessions, restoring the original artwork, and fattening the package with extensive new liner notes.

The Kinks: The Village Green Preservation Society

The Village Green Preservation Society

It takes a Village Green Preservation Society to love The Kinks.
The problem facing The Kinks when they released The Village Green Preservation Society in late November 1968 wasn't merely the competition-- Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, Led Zeppelin's debut, and the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet offered plenty-- but that this subtle, funny, surreal, and at times almost tender record could have been recorded on another planet. During the summer of 1968, stateside fans were hooked on a high-intensity diet that had them jonesing for aggressive, overstated fare like "Street Fighting Man" and "You Shook Me" and "Communication Breakdown". The disconnect between The Kinks and the rock world's rapidly narrowing palette could hardly have been more pronounced. Compare the Stones' bombastic, urban "Sympathy for the Devil" with understated work like "Village Green", bouncing along like a horse and buggy as Ray Davies paints the landscape: "Out in the country, far from all the soot and noise of the city..."
Critics praised the album, the public ignored it, and Davies-- surveying the scene-- asserted that it wasn't created for public consumption. Intentions aside, The Kinks simply moved on, leaving small knots of fans to pledge secret allegiance to Village Green. However, as years passed and the weather changed, its following grew, and finally, one day, the verdict reversed and the album was touted as a masterpiece. Ironically, it might have happened sooner had the band not been so prolific up through the late 80s.
Intricately sketched and brimming with unusual arrangements, The Village Green Preservation Society was the first clear look at an iconoclastic, imaginative and sometimes brilliant artist as he came into his own. Audiences used to sizing up work on a scale created for rock gods and counter-culture icons were forced to consider this album as a piece of conceptual art. The Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards duos towered over and shaped the sensibilities of a vast army; Davies explored a deeply personal world that confounded fans even as it provoked their curiosity.
There's a clue to who he was in the song "Animal Farm", which opens with a cascade of chords played on a warm, acoustic 12-string, the folk music staple once used on songs like the Rooftop Singers' 1963 hit "Walk Right In". Davies' opening lines, forced to share space with the tongue filling his cheek, are a mouthful. "This world is big and wild and half insane/ Take me where the animals are playing," he sings, raising the Union Jack, while looking back through the chaos of the day to find a simpler, safer world.
The peculiar sensibility that first raised its head on 1965's Kinkdom with the hit singles "Dedicated Follower and Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" looks different in light of The Village Green Preservation Society. Before the latter album was released, those songs seemed like parody or blue-collar humor; in retrospect, Davies was showing a quirky, iconoclastic hand that would soon be more relevant to his music than the hard-rocking "You Really Got Me". It's also interesting to consider Village Green as a carefully sculpted product of Ray Davies' singular artistic vision. The album is commonly regarded as having the feel of solo work, and if this is a matter of opinion, the songs are singular enough as to probably make collaboration difficult. More than that, at a time when rock instrumentalists were beginning to stretch out, The Kinks' playing here always serves the songs, and Davies' vocals in particular.
By 1968, as the prevailing rock idiom tended to position music as an armored vehicle ready for battle, Davies did his best work with a quiet, ironic smile. The album-opening title cut begins with a simple groove built around acoustic guitars, over which Davies offers a bend pledge of allegiance to the mundane curiosities of modern life; in "Do You Remember Walter", he reminisces, perhaps as a geriatric adult; and on "Last of the Steam Powered Trains", he borrows and bends the first few bars of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful"-- an ode to the miseries of heroin.
The Village Green Preservation Society has been declared the band's masterwork in some quarters, and I'll agree-- if only because my favorite Kinks album, built around "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired of Waiting for You", has never been released. Even so, the album had received proper recognition long before the release of this three-disc set, which repackages the original album and adds a slew of extras: Bonus tracks are here in spades, along with a collection of period studio noodlings and a separate mono version of the entire LP.
Of course, while the special presentation does include a few interesting pieces-- looser non-album tracks like the humorous "Mich Avery's Underpants", "King Kong" and "Wonderboy", while hardly worth the price of this set, offer added insight into the album's sessions-- it's mostly padded by mono mixes that would be of little interest to anyone but the staunchest archivists. As such, disc one, the original album expanded with four bonus tracks (including a knockout version of "Days") provides the real meat: 36 years after its first release, The Village Green Preservation Society, loaded with so much imagination and possibility, stands more than ever as a vital work, and as one of rock's first classic, one-of-a-kind albums.


The collaboration between members of Broadcast and Focus Group creates lovingly rendered ambiance born of library music and musique concrète, steeped in eeriness and sweetened with wonder.

Children of Alice

For those attuned to Broadcast and the Focus Group’s wavelength, the 2009 collaborative album Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was a hallowed union. Throughout the 2000s, Broadcast had reimagined psych-rock in a way that mirrored the Focus Group’s adventures in library music and musique concrète—both artists’ warped nostalgia and movie-music mania dealt in temporal freefall, with spectral production that exhumed ghosts from radio static. On Witch Cults, these hauntological peas in a pod simultaneously peaked: In Trish Keenan’s daydream deadpan, the Focus Group’s Julian House found an anchor for his abstractions, while Broadcast’s oneiric detail flourished anew, unmoored once and for all from rock’s retro swing.
Six years after Keenan’s death, it’s the spirit of Witch Cults that pervades Children of Alice, James Cargill’s new post-Broadcast project with Julian House and Broadcast keyboardist Roj Stevens. Their debut ventures further into sonic wormholes—the structures are byzantine, melodies vanishingly sparse—but has the same buzz of eccentric minds dialing into a familiar frequency.
The trio, named in honor of Keenan’s beloved Alice in Wonderland, make music steeped in eeriness and sweetened with wonder. Children of Alice opens with “The Harbinger of Spring,” in which a strangled hum mingles with birdsong and children’s laughter. Beneath it all looms a three-note bass pulse, sounding faintly ominous, but it’s soon reborn in a palatable key. The record never settles into its unease. When a cuckoo clock heralds the hour, you notice the “boing” of its spring, a perfectly innocent technology. Jump-cuts splice the scenes into disjointed vignettes, but it feels less like psychic overload than the beguiling minutiae overheard by a baby between naps.
The album’s intrigue lies in its prelinguistic response to a hyperactive world. “Invocation of a Midsummer Reverie” collages a furious scurry of warped raga drones, distressed whistling, and erratic tabla. It ought to overwhelm, but the music, often aglow with Cargill’s warm synths, seems determined to witness mayhem with wide eyes rather than bloodlust. Even the faintly erotic skin-slapping sequence—with yelps and maniacal laughter—takes on a dreamy, aqueous quality, as if it were part of an arcane meditative ritual.
Between the field recordings and concrète collage, moments of grand beauty waft out of the ether. Eleven minutes into “The Harbinger of Spring,” an uneasy silence settles, then bursts into a celestial F-major 7th, scattering melodies like sunlight through cracked glass. More tamely rendered, the movement could transmit epic yearning, but its purpose here seems spiritual, admitting a sublime moment into the chaos. The group proceeds with irreverence—groaning brass, whirring static-gusts, murmuring speech—but can’t disguise the air of sanctity.
Throughout Children of Alice, intermittent flute lines evoke the alien, swannee-whistle voices of “The Clangers,” the strangely poignant late-’60s TV show that encouraged kids to imagine “less fortunate stars” than Earth, where life “might be very different, very bleak and dull.” Our fond nostalgia for the show feels somehow bound to its creepiness—slightly too-long silences, eerily calm narration—which is the hauntologist’s bread and butter. But Children of Alice is different from its predecessors. Its nostalgia feels less escapist than therapeutic, and its composure amid the mundane and deranged is more of a promotion for mindfulness. Unlike Broadcast, there’s no friction here between their daydreams and our reality; those worlds collapse into one, harmoniously intertwined. From its soundworld of small terrors rises something unterrifying, a mis-en-scène too lovingly rendered to haunt.


The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from ...

7

The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from critic Mort Goode: "Johnny Mathis advances the art of remembering." I don't hear Mathis on 7 (though he could be here somewhere-- with Jeck you never know) but I imagine these words appear because The Art of Remembering would be a great title for a Philip Jeck album. For most of the 20th Century, the phonograph record was the primary time-based storage medium. You could buy pre-made 8mm and 16mm reels, but home films never had the market penetration of recorded sound. Music, speeches, plays, sound effects, sporting events, even film storylines were preserved and sold on records.
The vinyl record was one of the primary devices for storing culture's collective memory. Hundreds of millions of these fragments were strewn all around the world. What happened to all these chunks of data? Most decayed or were rendered obsolete and were tossed out, but plenty are still in circulation, and a good number of them wound up in Philip Jeck's record collection. Jeck makes music by playing, mixing and processing vinyl records (mostly obscure ones), and on 7, he reflects our memories back to us in a profound and terribly exciting way. Here, Jeck is at the peak of his creative powers.
The first track "Wholesome" shows how damn pretty Jeck can sound when so inclined. You expect pieces built from old manipulated vinyl and loops to be prickly with a disturbing undercurrent, but "Wholesome", which isolates, stretches and repeats a Disneyfied swirl of night sky strings and impressionistic piano plinks, is like a flower in perpetual bloom. It gets distorted and blacker toward the end when Jeck rolls off the treble completely, but that's just the sun setting and, like e.e. cummings said, if it has to happen, this is a beautiful way. "Wipe" is just as lovely with a different feel, distant and lonely instead of warm and welcoming. It reminds me of Experimental Audio Research circa "Tribute to John Cage in CAG*E", music for drifting slow through space, a cold drone echoing in an asteroid's cave.
"Now You Can Let Go" is where Jeck robs the memory bank for identifiable fragments. He turns crackly loops of locomotive chugs into percussion, pushes corny three-note jazz phrases nicked from a Steamboat Willie short into a dub chamber, and keeps a recording of a lathe humming along to bind it all into a singular sound machine. "Some Pennies" is doubly referential, as the ghostly bass ostinato looping through was also the central element of (the even more powerful) "Vinyl Coda I", recorded in 1999. It's an ominous piece of music, but somehow never threatens; despite its bleak overtone, "Some Pennies" is subtle and invites intimate observation. You want to inch closer and pick the piece apart, each layer of sound folded inside, a world within a world.
I like to think of "Bush Hum" as a reference to our president and the violence that's accompanied his term in office, though the sleeve notes indicate that the sole sound source for the track is the ungrounded hum of a Bush turntable run through a delay pedal. Still, the abrasive, atonal buzz generated by Jeck's processed electrical circuit could stand in for the sounds of war. An atypical track for a man whose music always incorporates the friction of the physical, "Bush Hum" is nonetheless very effective. Closing the album is the 10-minute veil, a slowly evolving rumble of Wagnerian strings, the symphonic loops of Zauberberg Gas without the kickdrum. How did Johnny Mathis say it in 1957? Oh yeah, "Wonderful! Wonderful!"


Danish prog-pop maestros, here sporting an absurdly long album title, consolidate everything that's made them interesting to date.

No More Stories Are Told Today...

I've always wondered why prog rock was one of the few genres that got skipped over for a comeback. Is it just that it takes too much technical proficiency to play? Is it that latter-day prog metal bands like Dream Theater ruined it for everyone? Did the asteroid of punk actually kill off rock's dinosaurs? As someone who came up on old, (let's face it) unfashionable progressive rock, I do occasionally like to come across a new record that scratches those old itches, and Mew always seems to come through for me. The Danish trio (originally a quartet) doesn't do 17-minute epics, extended solos, lyrics about Chinese scripture, or crazy odd-metered jamming, though. Rather, they seem to have captured the exact moment when Carl Palmer, Steve Howe, Geoff Downes, and John Wetton realized prog was done for and started thinking about forming Asia.
And that's not a bad thing at all! And the Glass-Handed Kites (2005), with its continuous mix and suite-like structure, nailed just about everything you could do right with that formula. Their new record, which has a whole freakin' poem for a title (No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away is how it reads complete), is a hair less awesome, but it won't lose them any fans, and its poppiest moments might even gain them a few. It doesn't open in the most welcoming way-- "New Terrain" is half-backward/ half-forward, with instruments and vocals switching back and forth for the whole song. Playing it backward gives you a different song, called "Nervous". The disorientation fades pretty quickly, though, once the tangled, King Crimson-ish guitar refrain and lung-full-of-helium vocals of "Introducing Palace Players" kick in. That nasty riff is one of several instances where Bo Madsen's guitar playing serves as a sort of dry, dissonant foil to the music's otherwise lush, floating ambiance.
Another of those songs is the other single, "Repeaterbeater", which, the way it kicks in with a hard rock rush before lifting off with multi-tracked vocals and high-wattage keyboards, seems designed as a follow-up to Glass Handed's biggest hit, "The Zookeeper's Boy". It's like "Heat of the Moment" if it was played by Phoenix with the Bee Gees sitting in on vocals. While these songs and a few others ("Beach", especially) foreground the band's accessibility and odd arena appeal, they do still chuck a few knee-buckling curveballs at you. "Sometimes Life Isn't Easy" could contain the seeds for five songs if you cut it up. The intro is a total mindfuck, with super-high falsetto outbursts and saxophone that comes out of nowhere, but it quickly winds down with some warm synths and a gentle verse vocal backed by what sounds like a choir of children. The chorus may be the most joyful thing this band has ever put to tape.
Mew show signs of trying to shake themselves out of habits, reversing their slow build approach on "Cartoons And Macramé Wounds" by starting the song at its peak and slowly ramping down from there. "Hawaii" is raw and rhythmic, with the guitar taking more of a lead role than usual in the opening verse, before giving way to a xylophone solo and anthemic final movement. The same method of through composition shapes closer "Reprise", a song that could easily be used to re-soundtrack Blade Runner in a pinch. Over the course of a long career (they formed in 1994), Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date. I'm still not sure if the word Mew means something in Danish or they're just named after something their cat said, but I'm ready to start using it as shorthand for quality prog-pop.


Didn't It Rain ranks with the best of the albums from the late singer and songwriter Jason Molina, and the 2002 album has been reissued in a deluxe edition. While this may have represented the slow, sad end of his Songs: Ohia moniker, the project didn't go out with a whimper.

Didn't It Rain

“The last Songs: Ohia record is Didn’t It Rain,” Jason Molina states definitively in a 2006 interview—not published in its entirety until after Molina’s death in 2013—with the blog Underground Bee. That statement answers a question that Molina left wide open with the release of his 2003 album The Magnolia Electric Co., which also became the name of the band that he primarily recorded under for the remainder of his life. It might all seem like so much semantics, but there’s a profound and telling truth behind Molina’s line drawn in the sand: 2002’s Didn’t It Rain, the eighth studio album by his haunting folk-rock project Songs: Ohia, was intended to be an end.
Molina’s music, especially in the wake of his death, has taken on an air of myth, but it’s the most unassuming kind of myth imaginable. A trailer-park kid with a garage-sale guitar, he spun his upbringing in Ohio and West Virginia into the stuff of hardscrabble eloquence. He began recording solo under the name Songs: Ohia in the 1990s, at the height of the slicker, more traditional alt-country boom. But rather than kick shit, Molina followed a path parallel to Will Oldham’s: cryptic, fractured, and with the faint, deconstructive underpinning of post-rock. Molina, though, struck closer to full-throated confessionals, even as his eerie guitar tunings and oblique angles of vocal engagement—marks of an autodidactic—kept him squarely sequestered as an outlier.
Didn’t It Rain doesn’t veer from the pattern Molina had established by 2002. But it’s a step forward in assurance, while remaining anything but assuring. Recorded live in the studio with a handful of musicians, including Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford from Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops, the album is a slow sketch in black chalk. The title track is one of Molina’s greatest compositions, full of glistening, suspended chords and a refusal to comfortably resolve. Molina’s narrative perspective is just as uneasy: “No matter how dark the storm gets overhead,” he sings, “They say someone’s watching from the calm at the edge.” Where are we watching from? Who is he supposed to be? The answers aren’t hidden; he doesn’t seem to know. And that slipperiness feeds into the song’s simple, circular swell.
Vocally, Molina reached new heights. Notes dip, quake, and hover. Syllables are either softly stretched or sharply snapped. He harmonizes with Benford in heart-stopping glimpses of intimacy, sounding far more like Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of slow-core contemporaries Low than any kind of corny ’90s Americana act. If anything, there’s a walloping melancholy that matches Gene Clark at his White Light loneliest. “I’m gonna help you all I can,” Molina ultimately offers on “Didn’t It Rain”, but every quiet pocket of emptiness in the song screams that he’s powerless to keep that promise. The song’s title may be borrowed from a gospel traditional, but it isn’t about salvation. It’s about having a hand, any hand, to hold as the inevitable comes crashing down.
Molina was always imagistic, and the piercing hollowness Didn’t It Rain gives him more room than usual to project his nightmares and daydreams. In particular, the moon and the color blue surface repeatedly—not only in the titles “Steve Albini’s Blues”, “Blue Factory Flame”, “Two Blue Lights”, and “Blue Chicago Moon”, but in the way those motifs are worked into the fabric of Molina’s harsh, hushed revelations. The image of a blue moon is one of pop’s most enduring emblems of loneliness, and Molina milks that archetype for all its worth on “Blue Chicago Moon” and “Blue Factory Flame”. They’re the only two tracks played with a full band, but Molina whittles that fullness into a bony vestige; both are creeping and tentative, with picks skidding off strings as if barely willing to activate them.
Cut from the same ragged flannel as Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Danger Bird”—minus the smoldering guitar solos, which Molina wouldn’t begin to incorporate in earnest until Magnolia Electric Co.—“Blue Factory Flame” opens with one of Molina’s most indelible verses, and one that’s become bloodcurdling in the wake of his death: “When I die/ Put my bones in an empty street/ To remind me how it used to be.” But he follows it with a sharp shift to the everyday, a move that mitigates morbid pity with something that almost approaches levity: “Don’t write my name on a stone/ Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio/ The Cleveland game and two fishing poles/ And watch with me from shore.” When, on “Two Blue Lights”, he equates the moon with lights from a late-night bus, all those lunar allusions become ghostly, recursive reflections of each other, a way of amplifying the beauty and dread that Molina never seemed ready to separate.
The moon would also prove to be a looming symbol of austerity and menace on Molina’s next album, Magnolia Electric Co. Here, though, it shines wanly, filtered through a more polluted atmosphere. That’s heard even more clearly on the eight bonus tracks included with the new, deluxe reissue of Didn’t It Rain—six of which represent songs from the album proper, and two of which (“The Gray Tour” and “Spectral Alphabet”) would turn up in different versions on later records. They’re gorgeous, acoustic demo renditions, managing to strip down arrangements that are already skeletal. But they lack the spark of Molina’s in-studio push-and-pull with his handful of collaborators. They do, however, provide an even less guarded portrait of Molina at the time; on the demo version of the self-referential “Cross the Road, Molina”, his pleas to “Set my pulse/ To the Great Lakes pulse” feel almost transcendentally pagan.
Didn’t It Rain would be the slow, sad end of Songs: Ohia, but it isn’t a whimper. It’s where Molina felt the need to contract himself to a pinpoint, gathering all his energy into a lonesome quantum, before unleashing the wholehearted force of Magnolia Electric Co. He couldn’t have known what was to come, including some of his best work and worst times, but it’s obvious this is the sound of Molina standing on the brink of something. He didn’t seem to know quite what yet, and that stark uncertainty imbues Didn’t It Rain with a sickening yet heroic alchemy: the ability to make smallness and helplessness feel somehow brave.


On December 99th, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) sounds like he no longer believes his own words, or he’s tired of hearing himself say them. It is by far the worst thing he’s ever released.

December 99th

In January 2016, rapper/actor Yasiin Bey announced his departure from entertainment. “I’m retiring from the music recording industry as it is currently assembled today—and also from Hollywood, effective immediately,” the artist proclaimed. “I’m releasing my final album this year, and that’s that.” In the 10-minute clip, posted to Kanye West’s personal website, Bey—formerly known as Mos Def—sounded weary, yet resolute. He was being detained in South Africa after trying to leave the country on a World Passport. Bey had been living in Cape Town since 2013, seemingly content with a low-key existence away from the spotlight.
Over the years, the rapper has been responsible for some of underground hip-hop's most resonant music. 1998’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star, with friend and fellow Brooklyn lyricist Talib Kweli, is a widely heralded classic, and a year later Bey released Black on Both Sides, a remarkably nuanced LP full of introspective soul. Bey’s sophomore album—The New Danger, released five years later to the day in 2004—marked a drastic shift from the relaxed aura of his first record. With beats by producer Minnesota and contributions from his rock band, Black Jack Johnson, Bey opted for an edgy rock sound that occasionally missed the mark. But if nothing else, at least he sounded inspired, like he actually gave a shit about the art he’s releasing. After 2006’s True Magic, another dud released to fulfill Bey’s contract at Geffen Records, he rebounded on 2009’s The Ecstatic, a flurry of repurposed beats by Stones Throw affiliates.
December 99th, Bey’s new album with producer Ferrari Sheppard, is by far the worst thing he’s ever released. I’m not just talking music; I mean this is the saddest thing—album, commercial, or film—with which Bey’s been associated. There’s nothing even remotely redeeming here, and it makes me wonder how long the rapper was awake before he wrote and recorded this material. For its 31 minutes, Bey sleepwalks through every track, mumbling nonsensical flows that never connect at all. And when he’s not doing that, he whistles through these instrumentals—like a poor man’s Negan here to terrorize Rick Grimes. Instead of a finished project, December 99th feels like a demo that listeners should never hear. These are the lines you fumble through while you think of better lines to write. On “Local Time,” the message is noble enough, but the rapper’s lethargic drone makes it tough to digest for a discernible extent: “We experience tests today/Above all, we are blessed today/Same as every day/In a special way.” Bey built his career on these sorts of affirmations, but they land with a thud on December 99th. It’s as if the rapper no longer believes his own words, or he’s tired of hearing himself say them.
The only bright spots come from Sheppard’s soundtrack, but even those are few. “Tall Sleeves” boasts dark, smoldering synths that emit a sultry vibe. Tracks “Special Dedication” and “Heri” feel lush and aerated, giving Bey evocative canvases on which to create. But for the remainder, especially on “Blade in the Pocket,” “Seaside Panic Room” and “Shadow in the Dark,” the music sounds underdeveloped, exposing Bey's disengaged, flat mumbling in the harshest possible light. While Bey and Sheppard share the blame for this debacle, December 99th is ultimately a bigger strike against the rapper’s legacy. For an artist who once uplifted the masses, it seems he needs someone to do the same for him. Maybe he’s leaving at the right time.


Lil Pump’s debut is loud, hyper, and catchy. There isn’t a moment where the 17-year-old rapper, seemingly born in some viral think tank, doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked.

Lil Pump

Rap has always favored the young, but never more so than in 2017, where the genre’s entire distribution model is tilted toward internet-savvy artists on the vanguard of social and musical trends. Along with fellow Miami native and frequent collaborator Smokepurpp, 17-year-old Lil Pump is part of a surge of SoundCloud rappers so intuitively aware of what plays online that, knowingly or not, they’ve essentially Moneyballed rap music, racking up tens of millions of streams with no-budget songs they’ve barely even bothered to master. Major labels used to spend small fortunes to achieve that kind of reach. Lil Pump doesn’t even need a real microphone.
In truth, even the most well-financed A&R team could only dream about creating a rapper as shareable as Pump, who at first glance can seem less like a real artist than a computer’s too-perfect aggregation of what rap looks and sounds like at this precise moment. He’s got Lil Yachty’s sense of flamboyant style and adventurous hair and Lil Uzi Vert’s taste in drugs, designers, and bright, cartoony cover art. His biggest, most blown-out tracks play like the tortured last gasps of an imploded subwoofer. And, in an evergreen angle that’s always catnip for the media, he carries an air of punk rebellion. A memorable New York Times profile opens with an account of Pump sparking an all-out brawl after kicking a fan in the head on stage, then instructing a friend to send footage of the scuffle to a hip-hop blogger. A self-marketer to the core, he played the incident for maximum viral reach.
If all that suggests a certain cynicism, it’s to Pump’s credit that none of it comes through in his music. There isn’t a moment on his brisk self-titled debut album where he doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked, and that kind of total commitment is all too rare on any rap album, mumble or otherwise. Where Uzi and Yachty tend to check out of their lesser material, Pump doubles down on every song, injecting SremmLife-levels of enthusiasm into even the rare ones that fall short of their goal of rattling around in listeners’ heads for hours after just a few exposures. Every track is loud, hyper, and catchy just to the brink of obnoxiousness, with only a couple crossing that threshold by a step or two.
Chief Keef is ostensibly the model for Pump’s economical, catchphrase-heavy style of rapping, and Pump has cited him as an inspiration. Compared to Keef’s tough guest turn on “Whitney,” though, Pump sounds like a kid brother too giddy with mischief to maintain a straight face. The album is filled with moments like that, guest spots from elder statesmen that mostly underscore Pump’s youth. A throwback, Lex Luger-style beat from producer Bighead highlights the generational divide between Pump and a half-present Gucci Mane on “Youngest Flexer,” while Rick Ross has never sounded more like a wooly mammoth succumbing to the tar pit than he does cast against Pump’s boyish patter on “Pinky Ring.”
As the first extended exposure to an artist previously heard only in brief fits, Lil Pump’s debut is impressively consistent, a sign that the divisive rapper may have more staying power than his many detractors have predicted. But even at a trim 36 minutes, the album does hint at some of the traps Pump could fall into if he runs out of ways to keep his routine fresh. Like Lil Uzi Vert or Mac Miller, whose voice Pump’s recalls during some of the album’s lazier hooks, Pump sometimes defaults to sickly simple melodies. The album’s two outright duds, “Foreign” and “Iced Out,” tell a stark cautionary tale: If you scale back Pump’s modernist trappings, buff away his signature distortion, and tame his jumpy energy, you’re basically left with Wiz Khalifa, and the world really doesn’t need another one of those.
While nobody would mistake him as one of rap’s great thinkers, Pump isn’t nearly the meritless insult to hip-hop that his grumpiest critics have cast him as. Compared to some of his SoundCloud peers, his album is almost downright traditionalist—it’s certainly not as audacious as Playboi Carti’s own self-titled debut, a perpetual motion fidget spinner of an album that regarded rap as entirely optional. That record was, in its own way, an art piece, but Pump couldn’t care less about art. Even his distortion isn’t artful in any meaningful way; it’s just a signifier of volume and excitement. Lil Pump’s one and only concern is turning up and he can do it with the best of them.


On his expertly written 10th album, the Texas storyteller delivers some of his most intense and humane work.

James McMurtry: The Horses and the Hounds

The Horses and the Hounds

James McMurtry stands out even among the Lone Star State’s finest songwriters, a community of artists known for the local color that saturates their story-songs. Much like his old man, the late novelist Larry McMurtry, he’s a fiction writer rather than a confessionalist: He just so happens to choose heartland rock as a vehicle for his tales of Americans at their lowest, searching for a fast buck, a little salvation, or maybe just a quiet moment to get their hearts in order. He crams his songs full of vivid details, the kind that many other writers might not even think up but that create a sense of a larger world outside the song.
Take “Jackie,” a heartbreaker from his 10th studio album, The Horses and the Hounds. After a melancholy electric guitar intro that sounds like the beginnings of an ice storm, the song opens with McMurtry describing a plot of land: “Half a section in the short grass at the foot of the plains/Grows broomweed in the dry times and ragweed when it rains.” McMurtry savors those plant names, not just the specificity of species but the sound of those compound words, setting up a story about a woman who  risks her life to keep a horse ranch afloat; it ends with the image of a white cross on another nameless piece of land.
More than 30 years after his debut, 1989’s Too Long in the Wasteland, McMurtry has become what’s known as a songwriter’s songwriter: someone whose facility with words and influence on other artists far outstrip his mainstream notoriety and album sales. On The Horses and the Hounds, he homes in on his favorite subjects, with hardscrabble songs about good people at bad extremes, the disintegration of small towns in flyover America, and the corruption of corporations during times of war. Maybe it’s the snappy production courtesy of Ross Hogarth or maybe it’s the new perspective afforded by the six-year gap between albums, but McMurtry sounds more engaged here, more focused, and more generous to his hard-luck characters.
Even in his saddest and angriest songs, McMurtry takes obvious pleasure in choosing just the right detail. On “Decent Man,” inspired by a short story by Wendell Berry, he spins a yarn about a man who commits a hasty murder and the daughter whose devotion still confounds him. McMurtry makes you smell the gunsmoke in the air, just as he makes you feel the bone-deep regret of the narrator. “When you’re shooting at a coffee can, a .38 don’t kick that bad/But it kicks right through my bones every second of every day.”
Working with members of McMurtry’s touring band and a small crew of session musicians, Hogarth brings some rock’n’roll crunch to the guitars on the title track and “Blackberry Winter” and some cinematic drama to “Jackie” and “Vaquero.” But most of all, you can hear Hogarth’s touch in the vocals. McMurtry has never been burdened with much range or power, but he’s cultivated a barbed deadpan delivery that suits his storytelling. His voice trips over the rhythmic patter of “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call,” the best song ever written about checking into a hotel with Fox News blaring in the lobby. On opener “Canola Fields,” he conveys a sense of joy so uncomplicated that it sounds cathartic, as though his narrator is relieved to find a happy memory to turn over in his head.
None of these ideas are new for McMurtry, but they do sound more intense on The Hounds & the Horses. The best and most humane moments are those when you can hear him  simply breathe between lines: Hogarth engineered the microphones to pick up every nuance in his voice, which means you can often hear McMurtry inhale before a lyric and exhale afterwards. It adds a precarious quality to the words, as though he must steel himself to impart bad news. That quality makes a song like “Jackie” sound all the more tragic. “How it ended that bad, we can wonder all day,” he sings, drawing out that last syllable like he’s struggling to maintain his composure. He makes the character sound like an old friend, lifting her tragedy out of the song and into the everyday world.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Exploratory yet grounded, futuristic yet melodic, alien and charming, Cluster were among the best krautrock bands ever. This no-frills box set traces their heavenly horizon-to-horizon arc.

Cluster / Brian Eno / Dieter Moebius / Roedelius: Cluster: 1971-1981

Cluster: 1971-1981

When the German rock renaissance began in earnest in the mid-'90s, it was the result of multiple factors. Can's catalog was reissued on CD; they gained verbally outspoken fans like Sonic Youth, Tortoise, and Stereolab; and Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik provided a crucial roadmap for casual listeners. For the most part, the revival foregrounded the era’s headiest rock bands and no doubt appealed to classic rock fans looking for new thrills: Can, Neu!, Amon Düül I and II, Faust and the like. And while Kraftwerk already enjoyed success in the worlds of early hip-hop, electro and industrial circles at this time, a purely electronic act like Cluster went unnoticed for the most part. But as listeners dug and listened deeper, the charms of the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius began to gain their own cult following. Now,  their discography is rightfully regarded as one of the era’s finest. Exploratory yet grounded, futuristic yet melodic, alien and charming, the eight studio albums they recorded from 1971-1981 are now compiled in a handy if no-frills box set. With it, Cluster’s heavenly horizon-to-horizon arc—which spans from the dawn of electronic experimentation to the rise of new age and synthesized pop music—can finally be fully gleaned.
As Asmus Tietchens’s liner notes put it, the group arose from a heady blend of post-war artistic intent: Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, the Frankfurt School, as well as the rise of '60s hippie counter-culture. The group began as Kluster, a three-piece featuring Roedelius, Moebius and fellow synth pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. Seeking to breach boundaries, this incarnation utilized the electronic components of academic composition in ways that moved from high art to all-night happenings. And while Schnitzler exited the group the same year, their 1971 self-titled debut (titled here Cluster 71) carries forth that rebellious spirit. Across three long untitled tracks, the unfettered live-wire sound of their early experiments continued on in the studio. While Kraftwerk’s (now-disowned) debut album dates from the year before, it placed electronics alongside organ, flute, drums and violin; Cluster 71 is the buzzing, churning, crackling sound of electricity itself, made audible in all its untamed glory. Its closest peer would be Tangerine Dream’s Electronic Meditation, but even that album feels more restrained in comparison.
The next year, Cluster II would venture even further into the lightning field. Some numbers, like “Für die Katz',” have a slow cycling guitar line, but circuits spark and simmer on all sides around it, rising and falling like a cardiograph. One of the box set’s meager bonuses is a live concert from this same year. It’s slightly longer here, a shame since these early Cluster shows were usually all-night affairs that rippled and surged for six hours or more, soundtracking chemically altered altered mental flights much like Terry Riley’s concerts would.
The first two albums fleshed out their obtuse experimental side, and by 1972 the duo moved out of Berlin. They relocated to the rural village of Forst on the river Weser and set up shop in a massive manor that might be regarded as the group's unofficial third member. Bucolic climes altered Cluster's music as much as Brian Eno, producer Conny Plank or Michael Rother would in the ensuing years. But don't think Forst just inspired mellow idylls; when they released 1974’s Zuckerzeit, it was one of the most audacious about-faces any band had attempted. Rather than the unhurried, unstructured, beatless freeform explorations, Zuckerzeit (which I’ve seen translated as both “Sugar Time” and “Sugar Era”) was electronic pop at its most protean and still acts like a sugar overload: giddy, infectious, manic and a little queasy. The ten tracks belie the fact that the album is two solo halves welded into a whole, each person contributing five tracks and each mapping their musical personas. Utilizing an early analog drum machine, Roedelius's "Hollywood" is epic, its shuffling, chugging beat paired with sweeping synths that strafe across the song like eagles, each successive synth layer pushing towards a heart-stirring new summit. Whereas early Cluster albums might have taken an entire side to reach such a climax, now they moved to dizzying heights and back down in a pop song's runtime, anywhere from two to six minutes. Moebius' "Caramel" is equally infectious, his lines not as dramatic as his partner's but more kinetic, wiggling in and around the pistoning programmed beat. While Kraftwerk no doubt set the electronic paradigm for the decades to come across numerous genres, the dynamic established between Roedelius and Moebius was also influential. Theirs showed what a sound world two individuals could manifest—expansive yet efficient at once—and it's a dynamic that's powered most electronic music groups ever since, from the Chemical Brothers and Orbital to Daft Punk and any B2B DJ set.
By the time 1976's Sowiesoso appeared, the effects of rural living were audible on tape. While there's a stiff, rigorous Teutonic aspect to many of krautrock's biggest artists, there's a pliancy and playfulness to Moebius and Roedelius in contrast to the other sounds of the era. Kraftwerk was more formal, Can was more kinetic, Faust more Dadaist, Neu! more manic, leaving Cluster as the most Romantic, and no where does that shine through than on their latter albums, beginning here. Melody, ambience, wistfulness and gentleness underpin songs like " Zum Wohl" and the title track. But that doesn't keep weird quirks from arising, like the little drum circle that emerges around the campfire-warm "Umleitung" or the drunken lilt of closer “In Ewigkeit.”
Around this time, charmed by both Cluster's output and that of Harmonia (their trio with Neu!'s Rother), Brian Eno trekked to Forst for two collaborative albums, which no doubt solidified an aesthetic begun with Another Green World that would soon carry over to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and Eno's ambient series. And while oblique strategies informed Eno's work during this time, there's a casual tone to Cluster & Eno and After the Heat that suggests neither strategy nor willful obliqueness were needed in the forest. The cover of the former hints at the sounds within, a microphone craning towards the evening sky as if to record drifting clouds. And while one might be inclined to chalk these albums as the work of a trio, producer Conny Plank’s fingerprints are all over these albums, suggesting a quartet at work. The ten tracks are as formless and minutely shifting as that photo suggests, lovely and intangible daydreams.
Elegant piano and twanging guitar entwine on “Ho Renomo” and then drift apart, while pensive piano chords slide across synth flares on "Wehrmut." The ambience suggests peacefulness, but there’s always something a little unsettling in these pieces. “Die Bunge” sounds like frog and bird calls from an alien bog, a concept that Eno would revisit for *Ambient 4 (*On Land) a few years on. Recorded a few months on, After the Heat kept the open experimentation of the previous encounter intact while edging closer to Eno's sense of song craft. Songs like “Broken Head” and “The Belldog” could have landed on Before and After Science, the lone instances of vocals intruding upon Cluster's otherwise wordless music. There’s more of a pulse to the album, from the brass burbles of “Oil” to Holgar Czukay’s wobbling bass on “Tzima N’Arki,” and fans of Eno’s mid-70s highs will find yet another green world to be had here.
As the decade drew to an end, the synthesizers and drum machines that had once defined the avant garde had increasingly become part of pop music’s fabric. After years of working with Plank, for Großes Wasser, Cluster recorded with Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann, finding a sound both darker (“Avanti”), sweeter (the charming etude of “Manchmal”) and funkier (the too-short space-disco of “Prothese”). After years spent exploring shorter times, the title track comprises the entire second side, an epic that touches on Cluster’s tropes from the decade prior: sustained piano chords, strange synth trickles, eerie drones and skeletal drums. By the time of 1981’s Curiosum, British new wavers, new-agers, synth-poppers and industrial miscreants alike had fully embraced Cluster’s examples within their own music, so much so that the miniatures of their last full-length album that decade sound more like Cluster emulating these newer artists (be they OMD, Cabaret Voltaire, or Throbbing Gristle) than the other way around. It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all.