First released in 1996, Tom Jenkinson’s debut album feels like a time capsule of the era’s drill’n’bass and jazzy jungle. It’s steeped in inventive rhythms, gorgeous melodies, and giddy fun.

Squarepusher: Feed Me Weird Things (25th Anniversary Edition)

Feed Me Weird Things, originally released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, is the Squarepusher LP you could take home to meet your mom—the well-dressed eccentric to “Come on My Selector”’s slobbering psychopath. That’s not to say it is easy listening, exactly, but Squarepusher’s debut album marked a rare moment in Tom Jenkinson’s long and extremely irregular career when he sounded vaguely in line with prevailing musical trends—relaxed and relatively sociable, rather than creeping around in his habitual field of one.
No one will confuse Feed Me Weird Things—long out of print but now reissued for its 25th anniversary—with Faithless’s “Insomnia” or the other big Ibiza hits of 1996. Squarepusher’s music is a tangle of beats, bass, and melody, a combustible mixture of musical ideas that dynamites the repetitive nature of much electronic music. But the short-lived mid-’90s trend for drill’n’bass, spearheaded by Aphex and Luke Vibert, meant that Squarepusher’s beat mangling and hall-of-mirrors funk didn’t feel quite as solitary in 1996 as it often does today. Echoes of Richard D. James’ dual Hangable Auto Bulb EPs, released in 1995, can be heard in Feed Me Weird Things’ fractured grooves, and album highlight “Theme From Ernest Borgnine” is straight out of the Aphex playbook, marked by a colorful melody and tortured breakbeats.
Drum’n’bass—particularly the jazz-influenced strain that was approaching its peak in 1996—was another kindred spirit. If you squint, you could imagine Feed Me Weird Things’ “Squarepusher Theme” or “Kodack” slotting onto Roni Size / Reprazent’s debut EP, Reasons for Sharing, or 4 Hero’s 1997 EP Earth Pioneers: Squarepusher’s shared loved of live bass and moody chords reflects the jazz-funk heritage that underpinned a lot of British dance music in the ’90s.
Squarepusher’s drums, too, have a certain groove on Feed Me Weird Things that sometimes gets submerged in the wild beat contortions of his later work. The intricate rhythmic cut-ups and shock FX attack that would become Squarepusher’s trademarks are certainly present on Feed Me Weird Things but remain at recognizably humane levels, making a song like “Smedleys Melody”—essentially Django goes jungle—almost a straightforward listen.
Despite the album’s familiar touches, there are still moments that sound like no one but Squarepusher. Perhaps Jenkinson’s biggest innovation over his mind-bogglingly fertile career has been to combine the maximal drum programming of drum’n’bass with the extreme noodle of his live fretless bass playing, and that combination comes to the fore on Feed Me Weird Things. Jungle, for all its kinetic intensity, would usually leave a solid bassline to hang your critical faculties on; the dazzling complexity that closes “Windscale 2,” however, provides almost no mental repose, as bass and drum face off with all the unhinged intensity of speed-chess fanatics at a blitz-game orgy.
The sugar that gilds this particular pill—as so often in Squarepusher’s career—is his lustrous tonal sensibility. Gorgeous melodies and harmonies run rampant on the album’s best songs. This, of course, is another gift that Jenkinson shares with Aphex Twin. But whereas Aphex’s melodies tend to be indebted to classical music, Jenkinson also knows his way around an artful jazz chord progression. “Squarepusher Theme” and “Tundra,” Feed Me Weird Things’ two opening tracks—also two of its best—throw you into this divide right from the off. “Squarepusher Theme” has a chord sequence of abnormal elegance, while “Tundra” combines a funereal melody with an “Amen”-bothering beat that suggests Metalheadz meets Selected Ambient Works Vol. II.
Squarepusher has moved on considerably since Feed Me Weird Things, exploring everything from mutant UK garage (“My Red Hot Car”) to the aptly named live album Solo Electric Bass 1. But Feed Me Weird Things might be his most personal release, giving us a peek at the jazz-funk-loving bass enthusiast behind the outrageous production tricks. For all the audaciousness of his music, it sounds like Jenkinson is having fun here, reveling in the excess of his own indulgence. This timely re-release, which brings Feed Me Weird Things to streaming for the first time, allows the wider world to join in his twisted game.

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With four hypnotically uncomplicated, 11-minute tracks, this is  Dominick Fernow at his simplest and most powerful.

Pleasure Ground

Pleasure Ground is Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) at his simplest and most powerful. Originally released on a double cassette by Fernow's Hospital Productions, the album contains four 11-minute, hypnotically uncomplicated tracks. His black din and bruising screams continue to test ears, but Fernow's noise is never sloppy, hewing to repetitive patterns that build into trances. Calling this the most accessible Prurient album is like calling the Antarctic sun warm, but anyone who finds previous releases forbidding might be surprised by how much there is to latch onto here.
Fernow begins with a piercing tone similar to the opening salvo on his last effort for Load, Black Vase. That record's siren rang for 15 minutes, but here crunching jolts quickly break up the dog-whistle spine of "Military Road". A lung-stretching howl soon chimes in, extending a lone stanza ("Will you miss the abuse/ The intimate violence/ The parade of bruises/ The badge of punishment?") into a glacial mantra. Doling out his words in metered chunks, Fernow's singing mirrors the rhythmic lurch of his surrounding noise.
"Military Road" sets a template that the rest of Pleasure Ground perfects: Long tones and extended screams sliced into simple patterns. These protracted pieces can be intense, but they're also surprisingly song-like, like three-chord punk tunes stretched to painfully beautiful extremes. "Earthworks/Buried in Secret" follows with descending chords that bend and collapse under the weight of Fernow's fire-breathing. Here he turns four words-- "what of this destruction"-- into a novel's worth of abstract vowels and consonants. His lyrics in the past have teetered between dark poetry and gothic cartoon, but on Pleasure Ground their simplicity is effective.
The album's final two pieces pull Fernow's approach into new territory. "Outdoorsman/Indestructible" is a Prurient first: A piece so quiet you actually have to turn it up. Over a distant rumble, Fernow moans a Haiku-like description of burning paper falling to the ground. The music's restraint is similarly Zen-- even a final burst of singing sounds stoic, like an eerie calm after a storm. "Apple Tree Victim" is even better. Like a black-noise version of Fennesz's "A Year In a Minute," the piece loops distorted chords under Fernow's lyrics, which equate sexual climax with gory death. Prurient records can feel like footnotes to Fernow's engulfing live show, whose muscular workouts whittle arena-sized metal to its purest core. But "Apple Tree Victim" captures his sweaty stage energy perfectly, and it's difficult to imagine Fernow topping it or the rest of Pleasure Ground anytime soon.


The UK techno producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, returns to techno after a few years of ambient electronic music. The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture: There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks like inchworms through radioactive ash.

From Farthest Known Objects

The UK producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, traffics in toughness. He's long represented one of the most forbidding corners of the techno scene; just consider the name of his turbulent duo with Regis, British Murder Boys. But even at its most bruising, his music is marked by its formal inventiveness and formidable intelligence. The beats on his late-'90s Tresor trilogy—Basictonalvocabulary, Balance, and Force + Form—seem unusually alive, like the shuddering birth pangs of AI; when people talk about electronic music having "organic" properties, this is what they mean.
While he once titled a mix CD This Is for You Shits, Child has been dialing down the screwface lately. Recent years have found him trading dungeon pummel for beatless soundscapes: His ambient sets at the Freerotation festival have become legendary for their lysergic drift, and on albums like 2013's The Space Between People and Things and last year's Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle Vol. 1, both released under his own name, he has turned his hand to experimental electronics—cerebral, austere, and unconnected to anything as carnal or compromised as a dancefloor.
With his new album, From Farthest Known Objects, he wades back into techno's roiled waters. All eight tracks employ four-to-the-floor rhythms, flickering triplets or 16th-note syncopations, and studiously greyscale atmospheres. There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks' blasted expanse like inchworms through radioactive ash. "z8_GND_5296" swings like Kompakt's slinky "Schaffel" releases; "GN-108036" barrels forward as inexorably as Jeff Mills' most single-minded rollers. (The track titles all reference distant galaxies at the dawn of time; Child imagines the tracks themselves as waveform transmissions from these faraway star clusters, which is itself an idea that goes straight to techno's roots.)
On closer inspection, though, nothing here resembles conventional techno: for one thing, save for the anchoring kicks, where are the drums? This is not your usual percussive array: There are no snares, no hi-hats, no claps, no toms—just knots of metallic whine and white noise. The low tones grumble like weary old men; the high ones scatter like drops of water in an oiled pan. Even the kick drums barely register as such; on the opening "EGS-zs8-1" they crumple like paper bags, and on "BDF-3299" they might be gargantuan oil drums struck by a felt-tipped mallet.
The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture. But to say that there are no drums is also to acknowledge that there are no "notes," either: Put another way, it's all drums, just not the usual sound sets we've become accustomed to. Despite the softness of their attacks, every element here is essentially percussive in nature, which imbues the music with an unusually primal sensibility: The gnarled "A1703 zD6," with its wooden clunk and spongy texture, suggests early humans thwacking gourds and logs, and it heaves like a rotten tree trunk spitting termites.
One of the things that distinguished Maui Jungle was its sense of discipline: Most of its tracks sounded like they had been made using just one machine or process, and From Farthest Known Objects is no different. Despite its greater density and complexity, it represents the same kind of rigor. I have no idea how Child made the music—he has said only that he explored "new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware"—but it doesn't sound like the output you'd get from a standard array of gear, with drums and bassline down below, and pads and leads on top. It sounds like one source being spun in nearly infinite ways, like a single electrical signal being channeled down a long, convoluted pipe and emerging like a live wire spitting sparks. It feels elemental, which is appropriate, given the subject matter—like a techno tribute to Carl Sagan's famous maxim: We are made of star stuff.


On a striking live set, the Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist and vocalist stages some of the band’s most beloved material with passion and reverence.

Bob Weir: Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado, Vol. 2

How fast should a Grateful Dead song be played? There is perhaps no question that has occupied Deadheads’ time and consumed more emotion over the last 20 or so years, ever since bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir reunited the band after Jerry Garcia’s 1995 death. The tempo wars have claimed several versions of the post-Garcia Dead, and if the question seems banal, it nevertheless conceals irreconcilable philosophical differences. For Lesh, these songs are meant to pump with energy, swirling up the audience in a psychedelic dervish. For Weir, they should be played slowly, with purpose and focus, “an audio playlet that needed to sink into the audience’s mind,” as writer Joel Selvin puts it. The music of the Grateful Dead, in Weir’s formulation, is bigger, vaster, and contains sweeping views; why speed through it?
On Weir’s second official release with his Wolf Bros project, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2, he stages some of the most beloved material in the Grateful Dead’s catalog with the passion and reverence of a couple spending their 50th anniversary looking back on their wedding day. It’s a striking set, one that does justice to Weir’s vision without ever succumbing to the sense of drag that can occasionally topple Dead & Company, the stadium-touring band he fronts with John Mayer. As is typically the case with Weir’s solo work, there is no lead guitarist, and thus no attempt to dig around in the DNA of these songs to discover what else they might contain. Leaning instead on bassist Don Was, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and especially drummer Jay Lane, Weir’s arrangements expand these songs outward, their scope and sense of majesty evoked by the horns, strings, and pedal steel of the accompanying Wolfpack ensemble. There’s never a question as to where we might be going, only an offhanded awe at how stately this music turns out to be.
Much of the album’s grace is owing to the pleasant contrast between Weir’s late style as a rhythm guitarist and the slickness of the band. His instrument is constantly buzzing, and he doesn’t strum it so much as brush at it in a way that makes it sound like a live wire being batted with a feather. He can be halting, sometimes a touch behind the beat, frequently rough as he roots around the edges of the songs in search of new rhythmic pathways. It’s a winningly hardheaded mode of playing, one that comes from having abandoned the concept of perfection or completion decades ago, and the romantic swirl of the band mimics the emotion of his playing if not the tone. It’s strangely comforting to hear them polish Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” as if Weir’s blocky soloing is a totally normal way for a guitar to sound in a country song.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions band, the ensemble is founded on the principle that folk music can also be dance music. Where the former group’s cavalcade of trombones and fiddles overflowed with ecstasy, Weir’s group is swishier and more straightlaced, occasionally coming off like a soul revue. In “The Other One,” they circle around the rhythm, the horns and piano coaxing Weir into the vocals like the JBs playing their boss onto the stage. They turn “Eyes of the World” into a ballroom shuffle that’s dewy with nostalgia, Chimenti throwing complicated chords that resound like questions and playing his way in and out of key like Thelonious Monk. The band sidesteps into “What’s Going On” in a starry-eyed flow state, with Weir altering Marvin Gaye’s lyrics to decry “culture wars”—a dodgy move for any white artist covering a Black singer—and equivocating the original’s source of power. “Let’s hope that love will conquer hate,” he sings, his uncertainty regarding its efficacy at least in keeping with the doubt-riddled ethos of the Dead’s songbook.
The Dead, after all, were not a reverential band. “Ripple” feints in the direction of psalmody, but it refuses to resolve itself, and makes a point of insisting that the listener has the imperative and responsibility to find their own way in the world. On Live in Colorado, the crowd is kept high in the mix as the band rounds into the song’s last verse, their collective rendition of the wordless coda making the entire thing feel like last call at a honky tonk. Weir takes “Brokedown Palace” to its vocal limits, fluttering the high notes like he’s waving goodbye along with the thousands of people singing the “fare thee well” chorus. Both songs are standout tracks from 1970’s American Beauty, and high points in the Dead catalog at large, but like any hymn, they achieve brilliance when they’re sung loudly and in earnest by a whole lot of people.
Across the Dead’s songbook, ambiguity and imperfection are spiritual principles to which one must submit oneself. “His job is to shed light, and not to master,” Weir sings of the storyteller in “Terrapin Station,” the song suite presented here in its entirety. The original band never performed “Terrapin Station” all the way through, and on Live in Colorado, the track’s 21 minutes are stitched together from a pair of performances, with Wolf Bros. having played the first half one night and the second half the next.
It’s one of the more beguiling songs Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter ever wrote: The opening guitar line, one of Garcia’s most delicate, seems to weave itself into being, and Hunter’s lyric uses a tale of thwarted love to suggest that heaven isn’t a place we set out to find so much as the product of the quest itself. Weir makes his way through the song with care, his oaken tone bringing a new level of gravitas to a song that’s already been invested with plenty of it. He knows how to rest the melody, dropping into a speaking voice for half a line, sharpening the story and drawing the listener in closer. Even if the technique is the byproduct of age—and his stunning performance on a dark and drifting “Days Between” suggests that Weir has greater control over his voice now than he ever has—the way his vocal ebbs and flows, gathering strength and spending it, reflects the song’s imperative to push onward despite knowing one’s limitations. Fifty-five years into a career that continues to take surprising and emotionally affecting shape, it suggests that Weir’s greatest audience is himself.


Dan Snaith's sixth album as Caribou is his most overtly personal record to date, one that’s remarkable for its intimacy, openheartedness, and joy derived from basic human connection. Owen Pallett and Jessy Lanza contribute.

Our Love

Dan Snaith spent the first decade of his career attacking a wide range of genres with the intensity of an autodidact and the cerebral coolness of an academic. Back when he was still recording as Manitoba without fear of legal challenges from disgruntled punk veterans, he dissembled the IDM of the late 1990s and early ‘00s on debut Start Breaking My Heart before moving on to kaleidoscopic, colorful psychedelia on Up in Flames. From there, it was on to chugging krautrock and rich, melancholy ‘60s pop on The Milk of Human Kindness and Andorra, respectively; the 2010 LP Swim, cobbled together from leftover DJ set material and inspired by the sounds of deep house and contemporary club music, grew his fan base further. Despite the huge breadth of sounds they explore, these albums all share an essential playfulness and engrossing curiosity.
It’s always been enjoyable to hear Snaith dive deep into a new passion and emerge with a new record awash in the ecstasy of influence: finely detailed, in love with its inspiration, simply tuneful, and yet thematically complex. Our Love, his first album as Caribou in four years, is his first full-length that doesn’t come with a major shift from the sound of its predecessor. This is body music on the same general wavelength as Swim, albeit slightly warped and refined. The differences, then, are deeper: this is Snaith’s most overtly personal record to date, one that’s remarkable for its intimacy, openheartedness, and joy derived from basic human connection.
Our Love is a quietly ambitious record, despite its modest title: in documenting Snaith’s personal vision of love, it seeks to render love in all of its universally complicated glory. It’s a warts-and-all depiction of a state of being that’s so often constrained to one or two facets in pop songs: obsession and disconnection, passion and jealousy, companionship and loneliness, all given equal weight. From the outside, Snaith looks the picture of domestic bliss, or at least stability—he’s been married for 13 years, and his first child was born in 2011—but many of Our Love’s lyrics hint at romantic trouble or marital discomfort. Nameless characters feel mistreated, are haunted by lurking suitors and bad memories, lament their broken love, look towards the future; when they’re in love, it’s with an intensity that verges on the maniacal. But it’s reasonable to conclude that the album’s songs aren’t near-direct transcriptions of events and feelings from Snaith’s life; instead, they’re extremes pulled from the necessarily complicated life two people build together over years and years, rich with joy but laden with baggage.
In any long-term relationship, there are moments of deadening melancholy where you feel like your organs have been put through an industrial shredder. It’s in those moments where you sniff at imagining your life completely different, or even with someone else—fantasies enabled by intense emotional pain. And then, somehow, things get better, and your heart is overflowing with love; you’re almost in disbelief, thinking, “How could I imagine a different life, even for a second?” Our Love captures the zig-zag between these two poles with an authenticity and honesty few albums manage, and the album’s excellent two singles, “Can’t Do Without You” and “Our Love”, focus on the latter sensation.
The kind of complex, slowly shifting relationship the album seeks to depict is mirrored by its own relationship to “dance music,” a term that’s broadly applicable to Our Love but awkward and inadequate upon closer examination. Snaith is an accomplished DJ, remixer, and producer, and he has a rock-solid grasp on the mechanics of the dancefloor: he understands how to get people moving, how to sustain intensity, and how small moves behind the boards can yield surprising results. A good example is the way he uses dynamic variation on highlights “Can’t Do Without You” and “Back Home”, using volume to make hooks hit that much harder. His 2012 record as Daphni, Jiaolong, was a dance nerd’s delight, a lean and brittle release forged by crate-digging and the need to churn out hours of material for marathon sets at European clubs, and its influence is felt in subtle ways on Our Love.
This album is glassy, warped, and largely digital where Swim was bold, bright, and decisively analog in places; there’s a warmth to it, but much of it comes from Snaith rather than his largely digital soundscapes. That said, Our Love only really glances at straightforward dance composition before choosing to shrug it off and take a different path. Most of the album is too slow and strange for the club, and its songs mutate in ways that are unexpected and offer different kind of rewards. The title track spends four minutes building to a strobe-lit, wildly pulsing frenzy, only to turn left into a lovely string outro arranged by contemporary maestro Owen Pallett, a longtime Snaith pal. The back half twosome of “Julia Brightly” and “Mars” are the two tracks that offer any kind of predictable dance-oriented pleasure, and even they’re a little off-kilter, with the former’s searing synth washes and the latter’s perky flute melody.
The key attribute is ultimately confidence. Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency. This can be traced, in part, to Snaith’s solid collaborative circle: from respected advisors like Kieran Hebden and his wife to other artists like the aforementioned Pallett and Jessy Lanza, he’s surrounded himself with people he trusts and appreciates, freeing him to take risks and pursue a pure artistic vision. Pallett’s arrangements on the title track, “Silver”, and closer “Your Love Will Set You Free” lend a lightness to an album that sometimes verges on uncomfortable depth; Lanza’s winning feature on “Second Chance” is a welcome dose of female perspective on a record dominated by Snaith’s, her melody and fluttering voice taking the album from one person’s love to something larger.
Speaking of voices, Snaith’s isn’t half bad either: a reluctant vocalist earlier in his career, he’s improved by leaps and bounds since then, lending an imperfect humanity to these songs even if he’s not quite carrying them. His imperfect delivery makes plenty of sense in this context, anyway: you can imagine him warbling these songs to his wife, or turning them into lullabies for his daughter. It’s a subtle cultivation of intimacy, but one that works in driving home the album's central conceit: that the love you feel for your partner, and the life and family you can choose to shape together, can be transformative. It’s hard work, and it’s not always easy, but it pays remarkable and lasting dividends. It can change your perspective and the effect you want to have on the world, and Our Love is a worthy tribute to that messy, unbelievably powerful force.


On their second album and first for Sub Pop, the Canadian indie rock group pairs shaggy guitars with sardonic observations.

Cooler Returns

Kiwi Jr.’s Jeremy Gaudet has a gentle voice that naturally tempers his barbed observations. Over the course of the band’s second album Cooler Returns, he takes passing shots at office drones, art school students, film school rejects, cancel-culture alarmists, sports bros, people who care too much and people who care too little—really anybody who lives an unexamined or over-examined life. And yet for all the judgement in his lyrics, you never hear contempt in his voice, which carries the unflappable quippiness of Stephen Malkmus and wry astonishment of Jonathan Richman. It’s puppyish, sometimes almost tender, with a kid-brother quality that makes even his most cutting barbs land like a very gentle ribbing. If he called you out by name, you’d have a hard time thinking he really meant anything by it.
On their 2019 debut Football Money, the Canadian group made a spirited grab for some of Parquet Courts’ market share, meting out jangly hooks with the affable dependability of a SpongeBob Pez dispenser. Cooler Returns, their first for Sub Pop, maintains the exuberant tempos and party sensibility, leaving a trail of red plastic cups in its wake even as it largely subs out electric guitars with acoustic ones, accompanying them with splashes of piano, organ, and harmonica. It’s an impatient, slacker-rock imagining of a folk album, Highway 61 Revisited by way of Harlem’s Hippies.

Once again their guitars are perfectly pitched. On the country-hued “Only Here for a Haircut” (yes, a haircut song, and no, Pavement comparisons never bothered this band), some chords ring out with George Harrison glossiness while others are as shaggy and impetuous as The Clean—rarely do hi-fi and lo-fi splendors coexist so harmoniously. But if those guitars are the foundation of these songs, Gaudet’s prose is always the centerpiece. His sardonic storytelling and mocking asides stand out even more than his 12-string, whether he’s skewering the arts scene on “Undecided Voters” (“I take photos of your photos and they really move people”) or roasting the exurban lifestyle on “Highlights of 100” (“I got plans to build my house, a great big house out in the country, 16 terabytes of land with asterisk and ampersand.”)

On “Tyler,” Gaudet recalls “falling apart in the green room while you drank half the headliner’s rider.” On a Hold Steady record, that vignette might have played into the band’s sordid look behind the red curtain. It could be a Los Campesinos! lyric, too, if the narrator puked at some point, but Gaudet never goes that sour. On Cooler Returns, it’s one pithy rhyme then it’s on to the next—and there are so, so many to get through. “I am not American but I feel the beat sometimes/When I run into the screen door at the retreat trying to learn the new lines,” he huffs over the jerky post-punk of the title track.
If Kiwi Jr.’s songs fall short of some of the great slacker-rock smartasses Gaudet fashions himself after, it’s because he doesn’t always have the conviction to match his irreverent observations. Behind their aloof veneers, Jonathan Richman and Stephen Malkmus’ lyrics outline very particular sets of values and beliefs. Gaudet’s sarcasm, on the other hand, feels more like a posture than a worldview. Still, it makes for an indisputably good time, and this band wears their light touch well. What Cooler Returns lacks in heft it makes up for with unadulterated kicks.

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Backed by a killer band of Nashville musicians, the guitarist electrifies and expands his inventive blend of Southern rock and space rock.

William Tyler / The Impossible Truth: Secret Stratosphere

Secret Stratosphere

William Tyler’s songcraft was forged in the South, but it needed space to grow, so he set his sights on the West like so many musical pioneers before him. The music of the Nashville-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist now evokes the desert vistas of the Southwest as much as the flatlands of Middle Tennessee, but there’s also a sparseness in keeping with the stretched-out landscapes and wide sky. The sense of isolation central to works like 2020’s New Vanitas and 2021’s “Frozen Shelter,” a 40-minute ambient composition that owes as much to the Caretaker as the KLF’s Chill Out, was inevitably influenced by the pandemic, and Tyler’s work has since tilted back toward collaboration. Secret Stratosphere, a new live album recorded in Huntsville, Alabama in 2021, is his first record credited to a full band, dubbed the Impossible Truth.
Each member of the band embodies a corner of the homegrown Nashville music scene that exists adjacent to—and in spite of—Music Row. Drummer Brian Kotzur is a veteran of countless bands, including Country Westerns and Silver Jews, but he’s most infamous outside the city’s limits thanks to his starring role in Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. Bassist Jack Lawrence is a longstanding player in the Third Man extended universe, while steel guitarist Luke Schneider synthesizes Cosmic American Music and new age. The Impossible Truth moniker might be new, but the relationships here are old and effortless, and Tyler’s been collaborating with his bandmates in some capacity or another for years.
As a collective, the Impossible Truth maintains the spiritual minimalism of Tyler’s solo work while expanding the sound. Kotzur’s drums roll like thunder on the horizon on “Our Lady of the Desert,” grafting a heavy backbeat that transforms the gentle Goes West cut into an enlivened Southern rock groover. The interplay of Tyler’s looping on lead guitar maintains a post-rock ethereality, but Lawrence’s chugging bassline is beamed straight out of an Allman Brothers set. Kotzur’s steady rhythmic foundation gives “Gone Clear” from 2016’s Modern Country a new intensity, its lush and twinkling layers replaced with fuzz and sweat. The Tyler recordings that most prefigure the Impossible Truth are the full band versions “Whole New Dude” and “We Can’t Go Home Again” from 2014’s Lost Colony EP. Both are reprised here, but there’s a restless spirit and livewire energy that the studio versions couldn’t capture.
In one of the set’s most unexpected moments, the band mutates the contemplative twang of “Highway Anxiety” into an interpretation of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” The distinctive electronic tone of Kraftwerk’s original is here substituted for throbbing drum and bass, while Tyler’s impressionistic guitars fill in on vocal duty. The result is similar to the spaced-out wanderings of Darkside, with a forceful beat scaffolding ethereal loops, but there’s a touch of whimsy, thanks to a sprinkle of glockenspiel. Tyler has often been credited with a kraut influence, but he disarms any pretensions after the performance: “That’s our favorite Blue Öyster Cult song!”
Tyler makes a similar crack before “Area Code 601,” the album’s finale: “We’re going to end with a kind of Hawkwind meets Charlie Daniels Band number,” an apt distillation of his current style. The song, a long-time staple of his live sets that has gone previously unreleased, is a nod to both of his homelands. 601 is the area code of Jackson, Mississippi, but the title is also a riff on Area Code 615, the instrumental supergroup of Nashville studio titans that came together in the wake of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Almost 50 years later, Area Code 615’s forward-thinking synthesis of down-home country and funky drum breaks is almost startling to hear. Their spirit is alive and well in Secret Stratosphere, a record that exudes the kind of off-the-cuff inventiveness and open-minded collaboration that can only come from years of fine-tuned experience.


Many of the most enchanting and popular indie pop records of the past few years have been filed under lap-pop ...

Camera Obscura: Underachievers Please Try Harder

Underachievers Please Try Harder

Many of the most enchanting and popular indie pop records of the past few years have been filed under lap-pop/indietronica. By marrying The Field Mice's shimmering sonics with (where applicable) lovelorn lyrical impulses, those on the Morr and City Centre Offices rosters, Múm, The Postal Service, Freescha, Casino Versus Japan and Broadcast have been providing the warm hugs for the Darla set that used to be administered by post-C-86 jangle-pop. True, The Aislers Set, The Lucksmiths, and The Clientele have continued to proudly (and successfully) wave the flag for more classic melancholia, but in the first couple of years of this new millennium, too few other have bands managed to approach their charm.
However, in the past year or so, there's been a shift back toward the more traditional indie pop thanks to the slight return of Belle & Sebastian and records by Saturday Looks Good to Me, PAS/CAL, Pipas, The Happy Couple, Ballboy and, most of all, Camera Obscura. The Scottish band's second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory. (Admittedly, as a co-ed, Glaswegian sextet, B&S comparisons would have come fast and easy even if Camera Obscura hadn't once featured Richard Colburn on drums or got their foot in the door of public consciousness with a single produced by Stuart Murdoch, "Eighties Fan".)
Underachievers was released in the UK last year on Spain's Elefant Records, and now Merge spreads the word in the U.S. and adds B-sides "I Don't Want to See You" and "Footloose and Fancyfree". Ignoring the infantilism of some of the more twee indie pop, Camera Obscura scold immature relationship decisions on "Teenager", offer tender advice on "A Sister's Social Agony", and go on the make on "Suspended from Class". Their honest, wide, and adult approach to heartbreak, romantic liaisons, and escapism is extended to the subtle range of influence-- most of which is shown off on the tracks sung by John Henderson. "Before You Cry" is a graceful nod to Nashville, "Your Picture" is a dead ringer for Leonard Cohen, and Motown stomper "Let Me Go Home" is the best of their soul boy all-nighters.
Camera Obscura keep their cards closer to their indie pop chest when Tracyanne Campbell is alone on the mic, and, despite the success of the aforementioned tracks, are all the better for it. "A Sister's Social Agony" apes the gentle harmonies and chimes of sibling-led vocal groups Four Freshman and The Beach Boys-- an appropriate and sly arrangement for the subject matter. Best of all are the gentle, luminous "Suspended from Class" and "Books Written for Girls", each of which feature self-deprecating lyrics, tender arrangements, and a lifeline for heart-on-sleeve acoustic pop.


The magnetic Jeff Rosenstock stays fully armed with his power-pop anthems, as full of indomitable hooks as they are of paralyzing doubt and cynicism.

POST-

Many artists spent the past year trying to make sense of our toxic sociopolitical landscape, but few did a better job than a guy whose album dropped several weeks before the 2016 presidential election. The results of November 8 may have hit like an isolated, cataclysmic incident, but it increasingly appears to be the logical endpoint of the American experiment, caused by and resulting in economic and cultural panic which Jeff Rosenstock’s breakthrough solo album WORRY. tackled with righteous, frenzied eloquence. To paraphrase “Wave Goodnight To Me,” when it all came into focus—insistent police brutality, urban displacement, the bursting of the music festival bubble, Reddit’s sociopathic influence—Rosenstock was ready for it, the rare artist who managed to be both prescient and timely in 2017.
WORRY. itself was an unexpected culmination of a more encouraging decades-long process, an undersung, anti-commercial punk lifer making the record of his career and getting frighteningly close to mainstream acceptance while everyone played catch up. Hours after a cathartic, drunken New Year’s Eve show in Philly, Rosenstock surprise-released his third solo album POST-., which asks the $7500 question: Can Rosenstock’s musical and political passion withstand expectations now that the inconceivable is his new normal?
Rosenstock toured WORRY. relentlessly from the moment it dropped and he hasn’t lost his ability to read the room. "USA" announces his presence: “Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted/Trapped in my room while the house burned down to the motherfuckin’ ground.” Later, while collapsing hungover into a dream-pop breakdown, he rallies a crowd to sing in unison: “We’re tired and bored.”
“USA” is a moment that could be found on Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor—a seven-minute us-against-them salvo that sees the Civil War as unprocessed national trauma, continuing and ever-evolving along culture and race lines. He’s seeing them everywhere; not just the burnouts at Midwestern gas stations that are exoticized in Red State safaris, but the patriarch of a suburban family in a crossover SUV. “I won’t hate you, I just need to know/Please be honest/Tell me was it you?” he begs, demanding to find out who exactly betrayed America and put people in power whose entire platform runs on political shitposting meant to do little except expedite the death of the disadvantaged. It all builds to a cheerleading chorus of “Et tu, USA!”, but it really sounds like “F U/USA,” already the frontrunner for the most fortuitous misheard lyric of 2018.
As an outright call to arms, “USA” is an outlier on POST-. True to its title, it takes stock of what happens after the shock subsides and a more unsettling fear arises—a world where a steady refrigerator-buzz of dull outrage becomes our emotional baseline. “Yr Throat” and “Powerlessness” touch on how invigorating it felt to finally be heard, the moments of genuine hope in seeing us finding common ground. But those songs are only briefly about hope; they’re mostly stewed in the pervasive, underlying doubt about whether any of it is sustainable or whether America is worth saving in the first place—and whether even bringing these doubts up makes you a cynic or an asshole.
“I called it positivity and congratulated myself on a job well done/But after a couple of days the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone,” he sings on “Powerlessness,” a painfully relatable self-flagellation. How much can one give of themselves before it becomes necessary to fall back on the things that bring you mindless joy? Is it so wrong to lose yourself in “first-person shooter games/Guitar tones, ELO arrangements/The differences in an MP3 and a vinyl record that you can hear”? GUILT might have been the more appropriate title for this record, as it’s often the byproduct of acting on worry and fear.
The darker, more introspective POST- inverts the festival-core unity of WORRY. with accounts of lovelorn sadsacks trying to pull themselves out of the quicksand of self-pity by leaning forward and staring at their navel. “TV Stars” and “9/10” continue to tease out the musical theatre that’s underpinned Rosenstock’s best work, Broadway pop-rock ballads that find an unforeseeable midpoint between Ted Leo and Billy Joel. But the brief victories that propel the day forward—finding lost keys, minor lotto winnings—get sucked down a void of crippling distractions, staring at the news trying to stay awake and, later, getting stoned and staring at sitcoms trying to go to sleep. “Melba” is the closest thing we get to an unequivocally happy song, and it’s only because a dream of starting over in Australia is sufficient enough to get through a shit day.
No one needs Jeff Rosenstock to tell us “it's just like Black Mirror, innit?” in 2018, but POST- never lets its righteous anger or exhaustion come at the expense of empathy and melody. Even when “Beating My Head Against a Wall” is the only way Rosenstock can resist giving an opponent a Richard Spencer, we get a brilliantly primitive Ramones homage out of the exchange. Whereas any praise of WORRY. likely mandated a retelling of his backstory as an ethical compass and consummate defender of punk’s least credible subgenres, POST- is a confirmation of Rosenstock as one of punk rock’s greatest, most effusive living songwriters. It’s his most easily accessible work yet. Compared to the genre-spanning opus of WORRY., POST- is immediate, raw, and yet more open to interpretation. It’s almost a throwback to his former band Bomb the Music Industry!’s chug-and-point Long Island shout-alongs without the whiz-bang synth effects. While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.
To hear Rosenstock tell it, we’re all gonna need it. Which brings us to closer “Let Them Win,” a preposterous 11-minute saga. In light of what came before, had it been presented with the same triumphant resilience of WORRY.’s grand finale “Perfect Sound Whatever,” “Let Them Win” could’ve come off as cheap pandering or sloganeering. Instead, Rosenstock’s band stumbles and trudges, a callback to the punchdrunk chants of “USA”—they’ve felt tired and bored and disillusioned and now, dear lord, we are exhausted. But with every bit of depleted energy Rosenstock and friends can muster, they swear there’s absolutely no way we’re gonna let them win again and concludes with five minutes of synthesizer drone. POST- could not have ended on a more appropriate note than one of sustain—whether or not Rosenstock’s prophecies once again come to pass in 2018, for now this is the sound of a cautiously optimistic new year.


Now down to a quartet, the group’s latest album falls short of the kind of stellar pop songwriting the UK girl group once possessed.

Fifth Harmony

Fifth Harmony, the group’s third studio album, opens with “Down,” a song that sports practically the same perfect hook from their 2016 hit “Work From Home.” Only this time, there is absolutely nothing supporting the song other than the same pseudo-tropical keyboard line that has been plaguing Spotify Daily Mix for the past five years. “Down” is briefly salvaged in the middle eight by a strangely complementary Gucci Mane, whose bare-bones verse is underlaid with crunchy, distorted bass. Fifth Harmony acrimoniously lost a popular member, Camila Cabello, last year, and the group has a lot to prove with this album—beginning with an ersatz facsimile of your last hit single truly does not bode well.
Let’s zoom out: During a recent stint on “Celebrity Big Brother,” former Girls Aloud member Sarah Harding drew serious ire for dismissing Fifth Harmony, probably the world’s most prevalent girl group, as “slutty,” criticizing them for their sexualized stage outfits and video choreography. In response, Fifth Harmony’s Dinah Jane threw out a swift Mariah-Carey-“I-Don’t-Know-Her,” and ex-Girls Aloud member Nicola Roberts took to Instagram to call out Harding’s poor judgement. It was petty tabloid drama, and Harding’s comments were completely reprehensible, but the whole debacle illustrated an interesting point in the history of girl groups in general. Both Girls Aloud and Fifth Harmony were born from reality TV competitions (the former on “Popstars: The Rivals” in 2002 and the latter on “The X Factor” in 2012), and during that decade, what the public looks for from a pop group has changed dramatically.
At the turn of the 21st-century, access to pop stars was limited to things like fan clubs and TV appearances, with the traditional music industry serving as a stringent gatekeeper to that content. Now, there really isn’t a way to reach tweens—forever the pop star's bread and butter—without social media and massive online appeal. It’s in this realm that Fifth Harmony have flourished internationally in a way that old-school, second-tier groups like Girls Aloud never could. Between the four of them, the members of Fifth Harmony have almost 15 million Instagram followers, and even their two most famous songs, 2015’s “Worth It” and last year’s absolutely ubiquitous “Work From Home” have taken on a life of their own online, in the form of ridiculous, brilliant memes.
The downside to a social-media-driven public profile is that your music can’t help but seem secondary when it is so crucial to actively promote the music’s image and brand. And listen, image and brand have always has been a hugely important aspect of pop music, and some of the most iconic moments in pop history have come from fashion and style. But in the early ’00s, the girl group (and boy band) market was fiercely competitive—coming off the glory years of TLC, Destiny’s Child, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and countless others, there was just no room for boring tunes. Today, the only other girl group to match Fifth Harmony’s popularity is Britain’s Little Mix, and even they have cornered the market on middle-school sleepover pop while FH strive for something more adult. But ultimately, on their third, self-titled album, Fifth Harmony have fallen short of just about every conceivable metric other than Billboard streaming chart positions and YouTube views.
Even with “Down,” they even fail to reach their own standards for what makes a pop hit. That song is as good as it gets on Fifth Harmony, with the exception of little moments here and there that hint at something as immediately likable as their past successes. “He Like That” uses a sleepy, slowed-down surf guitar to sweep the group into a sensual groove, but lyrics like “Pumps and a bump/Pumps and a bump/He likes the girls with the pumps and a bump,” convey playground fumbles rather than the raw sexuality they were clearly going for. “Angel,” a mid-tempo R&B jam that uses trap-like percussion to its advantage, repeatedly asks the question: “Who said I was an angel?” Well, no one did, most notably yourselves, who frankly haven’t said much of anything this entire time.
Fifth Harmony isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it sits quite comfortably with many other acts dominating the charts at the moment. But it’s too safe, too by-the-numbers, too beige to stand up to even Fifth Harmony’s previous work, which carried more lyrical and musical heft. At just 33 minutes, so much feels like filler greater ideas of the past and future. The real shame here is that, in the midst of a worldwide girl group slump (except for Asia, where J-pop and K-pop groups still reign supreme), Fifth Harmony could actually build something worth celebrating, even if it’s just for the teens who make up their core fanbase. Say what you will about One Direction, but they went from “X Factor” also-rans to some of the most successful pop acts around, at a time when the mere concept of a boy band was laughable. From the 1960s onwards, girl groups have tackled themes of love, heartache, betrayal, and independence just as potently as the most obscure and ardent singer-songwriter or rock god, and it’s a shame that Fifth Harmony represents such a lackluster marker in that history.


In 1995, the indie rock trio lurched headlong into its own sound. Now, newly reissued on vinyl, the pop-focused and densely referential Electr-O-Pura remains a monument in the band’s vast catalog.

Electr-O-Pura

In the fall of 1994, Yo La Tengo spent three nights opening for Johnny Cash, then at the cusp of a resurgence with his Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings. The Hoboken, New Jersey trio have been characteristically self-deprecating about the experience: Guitarist Ira Kaplan—who shares vocal duties with his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley, and the bassist, James McNew—remembers accidentally insulting the audience, who were none too taken with the band’s understated noise-pop. A star-struck McNew, spotting Johnny and June Cash Carter at the side of the stage, almost dropped his instrument mid-song.
“Everything’s gotta be rebooted these days,” Kaplan said from his and Hubley’s home in a recent retrospective, discussing a 25-year-old music video that enacts a similar juxtaposition. Directed by Yo La Tengo’s then-roadie Phil Morrison, who went on to helm the breakout 2005 indie movie Junebug, the 1995 clip for “Tom Courtenay” imagines the band being asked to open for a fantastical reunion of the Beatles. It’s no spoiler to say that the gig doesn’t quite pan out as hoped. The song and the video are each funny and heartfelt, referential and personal, grandiose and unassuming. Both tell you a lot about who Yo La Tengo are, and where they were as the ’90s alt-rock boom fizzled.
Electr-o-pura, currently being given a reboot of sorts by longtime label Matador, occupies a place in Yo La Tengo’s discography that was rarefied before and seems almost impossible now. Released in May 1995, about 11 years after the band formed, Electr-o-pura was their seventh album. So it was a long time coming, maybe unthinkably long, given their modest popularity, in this era of streaming’s short-attention-span economies of scale. But Electr-o-pura was also the second in a nearly impeccable four-album run that began with 1993’s noise-pop gauntlet Painful, peaked with 1997’s expansively intimate I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and then slipped away into the moonlit hush of 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. And it still sounds low-key monumental, like the work of a group that might share a bill at the Mercury Lounge with a reanimated Fab Four.
Unlike the albums immediately before and after it, Electr-o-pura doesn’t represent a gigantic leap, just a great band lurching headlong into its own. It was Yo La Tengo’s second album on the upstart label Matador, and second album with producer Roger Moutenot, who would go on to oversee all of the group’s following albums until 2013’s Fade. And it was their second album with the official membership of McNew, who’d originally stepped in to stop a revolving door of temporary bassists on 1992’s inchoate May I Sing With Me. Emboldened by all this familiarity, the band tore into their emerging signature style—woozy folk-pop ballads, feedback-streaked guitar jams, organ swells, plenty of ba-ba-bas—with shrugging audacity. Fittingly, it’s the first Yo La Tengo album with all three members identified as co-songwriters.
“Tom Courtenay,” again, illustrates why Electr-o-pura and Yo La Tengo have stood the test of time. At the most superficial level, this beloved live-show staple is one of the band’s uptempo fuzz-pop songs, like Painful’s “From a Motel 6” or I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’s “Sugarcube,” and probably their catchiest. The name-dropping of British Invasion-era movie stars also fits into the concept of this band of dedicated fans (Kaplan, as is often noted, was formerly a music critic for New York Rocker and Village Voice) cosplaying their way into the big show. Most importantly, though, Kaplan himself didn’t actually know much about these old movies—Hubley, the daughter of two professional animators, was the film obsessive. “It was another way of writing about and to Georgia,” Kaplan has said. This was a private world for two. Opened up to an audience, the couple’s shared secrets and inside jokes could signal not exclusivity, but personal connection, ultimately fostering a community of fellow fans.
The rest of Electr-o-pura doesn’t always stick in your head as quickly, but it’s often as rewarding. The opening “Decora,” where Hubley begins with a nonchalant murmur of, “I see you crawling across the floor,” picks up from the flickering dream-pop of Painful; the way that Hubley bends syllables and moans the title phrase on the chorus recalls My Bloody Valentine’s wavy “glide guitar” technique. “It’s not the first time you’ll take a fall,” Hubley warns, memorably adding, “Act like you’ve never seen double before.” The closing “Blue Line Swinger,” also sung by Hubley, is one of Yo La Tengo’s very best songs. No strangers to lengthy instrumental passages, here they stretch out for nine-plus drum-heavy minutes of whammy-bar mangling and organ rushes, as Hubley seems to address a lover gnawed by depression and self-doubt. “Out of the darkness you will come around,” she assures, “and I’ll find you there.” The song is proof. It’s indie rock at its most epically beautiful.
In between, the songs engage in a dialogue with other music that’s like an intimate conversation by other means. After “Tom Courtenay” fades out, “False Ending” fades in, with a raucous clamor akin to the infamous “I buried Paul” section tacked on as the fake-out conclusion of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” A couple of tracks later, though, “Paul Is Dead” recalls not so much the Beatles as the subway strut of the Velvet Underground and the sunshine harmonies of the Beach Boys, while Kaplan deadpans about a guy who’s singing along to the Rolling Stones song blasting in his headphones (“Sympathy for the Devil,” judging by the “woo, woo!”). The second verse shifts dramatically toward the personal, as Kaplan describes a drunken first meeting that grows into something more, then recognizes the impossibility of ever fully understanding another human being, even those we know best. “I try not to hide what is true,” Kaplan sings, and it’s like an artist’s statement.
The lessons from cult records could also be used to convey behind-closed-doors desires. A year after Electr-o-pura, Yo La Tengo appeared, as the Velvet Underground, in the film I Shot Andy Warhol (they have self-deprecating stories about that, too). On “My Heart’s Reflection,” simmering with barely suppressed tension, Kaplan repurposes the central conceit of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” as he suggests, with disarming vulnerability, that he and a lover dress up as each other, locking the room and throwing away the key. There’s even a thrill of danger in his voice as he blurts, “Let’s jump the ship/Let’s cut out.” Why not? The best reason for being intensely protective about privacy is to enjoy it.
A similar tinge of downtown disquiet runs through the guitar workout of “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)” and the clanging, organ-blasted “False Alarm” . But there’s self-aware humor, too. The former is the first of two songs on the album, that pun simultaneously on Flying Burrito Brothers song titles and the prime culinary offering of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, where Yo La Tengo were recording for the first time. On “False Alarm,” Kaplan refers to McNew by name and mentions the title of a song tucked away deeper on the album, “(Straight Down to the) Bitter End.” That one is Hubley-led fuzz-pop, a caustic character study that features the evocative line, “The stars that shine but don’t belong to you.” Yo La Tengo shone while walking among us.
In the video looking back at “Tom Courtenay,” Kaplan, who is wearing a black band T-shirt, jokes about how he still dresses the same all these years later. Yo La Tengo’s vision of a welcoming, everyday bohemianism has gone in and out of fashion, but it was never exactly trendy. Electr-o-pura attracted the group’s normal glowing reviews, but it sold less than Painful. Yo La Tengo wouldn’t crack the Billboard 200 album charts until the 2000s. Back then, they were just moderately successful enough to lose to Pavement at ping-pong on the Lollapalooza tour, headlined by Hole and Sonic Youth. While the beverage museum that prompted the album’s title (Electropura was a brand of purified water) was eventually donated to Goodwill), Yo La Tengo have continued to put out several mostly strong albums, along with film scores and other instrumentals. If the pre-reboot High Fidelity, originally published the same year as Electr-o-pura’s release, exhibited toxic masculinity and the misbegotten belief that what you like matters more than what you are like, Yo La Tengo offer the possibility of a more coequal relationship between romantic partners—and one where what you like matters because you, generally, like each other.
For this reissue—part of Matador’s Revisionist History series, which also includes Mary Timony’s Mountains, Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes—Yo La Tengo labelmate Lucy Dacus reminisced fondly about discovering Electr-o-pura, with its CD packaging that intentionally messed up the track times (purportedly because reviewers kept singling out the longest songs on the band’s albums as the worst!). Dacus’ stark “Tom Courtenay” cover brings to mind Yo La Tengo’s acoustic, Hubley-led rendition from a 1995 B-side, which sounds like Camera Obscura and might be better than the album version. The reissue rightfully concentrates on the proper LP only, now pressed for the first time across two vinyl records. But part of the Yo La Tengo experience, driven home in their free-wheeling concerts, is the notion that their songs are never finished. Electr-o-pura lives up to that standard, whether in alternate takes or subsequent re-recordings.
The song on Electr-o-pura with the most quintessentially Yo La Tengo-esque story is the serene ballad “The Hour Grows Late.” A whispery Kaplan paints a scene not too distant from some that Yo La Tengo must’ve experienced in their earlier years. A musician packs up his drum machine and, gradually, his guitar, peeking out at empty seats, clock ticking. Kaplan sings that he wants to send this song out to someone called Richie Van “in his thrift store corner of the world.” It’s a nod toward an amazingly obscure singer, whose equally obscure record—a thrift-store score for Kaplan—inspired Yo La Tengo to cover the future Gilmore Girls soundtrack highlight “My Little Corner of the World” a couple of years later. On Electr-o-pura, Yo La Tengo were poised in between finding themselves and going their own way, and the end result is still exhilarating. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings-era audiences may have been irritated, but after Electr-o-pura hit shelves, Yo La Tengo started covering Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” during encores. They’d learned from the best, and they knew that even though they might only be a triumvirate of hapless Richie Vans, they belonged on the same stages.

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Strong melodies and actual songs always lurked deep inside-- or perhaps underneath-- the music of Liz Harris' Grouper, but you had to work to hear them underneath layers of sonic muck; here, she strips away much of the effects-laden gauze and the result is an arresting album of pastoral psychedelic pop.

Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill

Liz Harris, who does business as Grouper, strips away much of the effects-laden gauze of her earlier work on this, her third proper album. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill is ethereal and hazy, but never overly so. Two songs reference sleep in their titles, three water. Some strong-ass melodies and actual songs always lurked deep inside-- or perhaps underneath-- Grouper's music, but you had to work to hear them underneath layers of sonic muck. Here, those elements are more prominent, and there's something simple and beautiful but also a little bit obscure going on. Laconically strummed acoustic guitars and gently plunked pianos serve as the primary instruments, abetted by ambient washes and echo boxes (which this time are not all set to 11).
Released earlier this year, the record has already been compared to classic releases from the British label 4AD, especially their flagship act the Cocteau Twins. This makes sense in that both have subdued, minor-key melodies. And both feature whispery-voiced female singers whose words are tough to pick out. Beyond that, though, it's about as exact as comparing KISS to the Ramones-- both those bands were loud and made records in the mid-1970s and had lead singers who were dudes, but that's about it. This remarkable album is actually what I personally always wanted 4AD records to sound like, only they never quite delivered the hazy pleasures their beautiful sleeve art promised (with the exception of Kurt Ralske's rock band Ultra Vivid Scene). Dead Deer is druggy and sexy and arty and pretty, but never pretentious.
Others have made similarly reverb-drenched, pastoral psychedelic pop before. In terms of contemporary musicians, the work of the Portland, Ore.-based compatriots Eva Saelens (aka Inca Ore), Charalambides co-founder Christina Carter, and Honey Owens (aka Valet) might spring to mind. Inca Ore's music is far heavier and murkier, however. And Christina Carter is more firmly working within a psych-folk idiom, while Valet is much more on a bluesy, guitar-based trip. Let someone else criticize me for making my own inexact comparisons to sounds of yore: A handful of these songs bring to mind the criminally forgotten records that Lida Husik recorded for Shimmy Disc in the early 90s. On "When We Fall" and "Invisible", Harris sounds like Vashti Bunyan singing in an echoey hallway. Others bear some resemblance to the band Clay Allison (who later became Opal and, in a different configuration, Mazzy Star) ca. their 1984 Fell From the Sun EP. And "Traveling Through a Sea" recalls the work of the always echo-friendly New York-based singer-songwriter Azalia Snail.
I had the best experience playing this album on a long drive the other week. It's easy to apply whatever music you're listening at any given moment to your surroundings; when the music plays and you're by yourself, you can imagine it as the soundtrack to the imaginary movie you star in. Anyway, here I was driving in the morning past farmland north of Eugene, Ore. This would not be the most fascinating movie, OK. But I kept seeing these small dirt storms form out in the unplowed fields to the left while the lovely "Fishing Bird (Empty Gutted In The Evening Breeze)" played on repeat. I'm not sure this album is the perfect road trip music for everyone-- I'd certainly caution against playing it late at night when you're already sleepy, or operating other heavy machinery as it plays-- but since these songs seem to appear and then vanish into the air, the mini-tornadoes gathering themselves together lazily out of the wind and the dirt seemed the ideal, hypnotizing accompaniment.


Though their 1994 album became most famous for a surprise hit remix, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s spare, pensive style never sounded more fully realized than here.

Everything But the Girl: Amplified Heart

Amplified Heart

A phoenix rising from the ashes. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Pick a cliché we use to talk about resilience, and it can probably be applied to Everything But the Girl. The British duo’s career appeared dead in the water when Todd Terry’s club remix of “Missing,” the lead single from their 1994 album Amplified Heart, swept across American dancefloors, eventually carrying the song to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100—their first U.S. top 10 single—and paving the way for their reinvention as trip-hop/drum’n’bass fusionists on 1996’s Walking Wounded, the most successful album of their career. No one expected Terry’s remix to take off the way it did—certainly not Everything But the Girl’s UK label, Blanco y Negro, which had summarily dropped them a few months before.
Today, it’s ironic to think that the duo’s biggest hit was right around the corner, and some suit just couldn’t hear it. But at the time, Everything But the Girl had been twisting in the wind for a while, and perhaps it’s understandable that major-label A&Rs didn’t see the record’s potential, couldn’t fathom that pop music’s pendulum was finally swinging back toward the duo’s spare, pensive style, which never sounded more fully realized than on Amplified Heart.
If Walking Wounded is remembered as Everything But the Girl’s miraculous, odds-beating comeback, Amplified Heart represents the first time they got a second chance. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt had been making music together, their creative partnership inextricable from their romantic one, since 1982. Not only had they outlasted virtually all of their post-punk contemporaries, but they’d put out six albums and traversed nearly as many musical styles: bossa nova, jazz, jangle pop, orchestral soul-pop, adult contemporary. By the time they released 1991’s Worldwide, a too-smooth-for-its-own-good record that was met with total indifference, they were running on fumes. “In many ways it was absolutely invisible,” Thorn wrote of the album (not “a dreadful record, just a not-good-enough record”) in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen. They were an ’80s band with ’70s ideals, and the wan Worldwide suggested they just weren’t made for the new decade.
Worldwide came out in September 1991; a few months later, Watt’s health mysteriously began worsening. He was hospitalized for weeks, wasting away; doctors scratched their heads. Finally, they put him in a coma, opened him up, and discovered a rare disease, Churg-Strauss syndrome, ravaging his insides. Several times, he almost died. It’s not hard to detect signs of the experience carved into Amplified Heart. Written and recorded in the year following Watt’s recovery, the album presents a rare mix of austerity and optimism, fragility and determination.
The very first notes of “Rollercoaster” signal a newfound sense of purpose: There’s an unusual eloquence to the call-and-response interplay between double bass and synth that opens the song. It’s not only a matter of tasteful restraint; Thorn and Watt had done that plenty of times before. Here, the way the two sounds twine around each other, gliding fretwork mirrored by the synthesizer’s G-funk legato, feels as perfect an expression of two lovers’ self-sufficiency as anything in their catalog.
Across the record, virtually all of the fluff of their previous album—twinkling digital keys, flugelhorn and soprano-sax solos, reverb plusher than the seats of a luxury SUV—has been banished. The duo’s newfound minimalism came in part from Massive Attack, who, in the summer of 1993, had sent Thorn a cassette of demos for their second album and asked her to sing on them. But where the resulting “Protection” was foggy, skunky, stoned, Everything But the Girl’s approach to reduction sparkles. Pared down to guitar, standup bass, drum kit, and the occasional programmed beat, Amplified Heart champions the virtues of economy without sacrificing any of the group’s habitual luster. There are few elements in play, but every one sounds like a million bucks. And by rubbing away the generic sheen of high-end production that smothered Worldwide, the duo’s music breathes anew.
So do their lyrics. (On earlier albums, Watt had let his partner handle the bulk of lyric writing; here, each contributed five songs.) Though Thorn had long excelled at nostalgic snapshots and finely drawn character studies, Amplified Heart moves in the opposite direction, boiling down universal sentiments—loneliness, longing, confusion—into simple, indelible images. A turbulent love rolls like a freight train through someone’s life; a depressed woman eats her meals in bed, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with the sound turned down.
Only a fool would try to map the inner life of this most private of couples onto their lyrics (for years, interviewers tried, and failed, to understand their domestic dynamic), but Amplified Heart excels at giving voice to the inevitable frustration of any long-term relationship—particularly the occasional, nagging doubt that you can never really know your partner. “Even though I share your bed/Baby, I don’t get inside your head,” Thorn laments on “I Don’t Understand Anything,” and a few songs later she pleads, “Do you ever get me?”—her voice catching on “get,” clicking like a key unlocking an empty room. Balancing out the doubt is “We Walk the Same Line,” a deceptively chipper song about hanging in for the long haul that’s built upon memories of Watt’s hospital ordeal. The two had been through hell, and though they were loath to reveal too much, they were happy to drop artful clues. (In “I Don’t Understand Anything,” Thorn even hinted at a frustrated desire to have children—terrain she finally revisited on her 2018 song “Babies.”)
The album’s first side is the stronger, with a stellar three-song opening run (“Rollercoaster,” “Troubled Mind,” and “I Don’t Understand Anything”), a charming (if slightly cloying) he-said/she-said duet (“Walking to You”), and, finally, “Get Me,” an understated love song flecked with the faintest trace of house music. But the second half’s few failings—namely the jump from the maudlin “Two Star” to the perky “We Walk the Same Line”—are more than compensated for by “Missing.”
What, 25 years later, is left to say about “Missing”? For a song that has largely been eclipsed by its most famous remix—and Todd Terry’s rework is a masterpiece—the original stands out in part for its quirks. The time-keeping cowbell is louder than you might have remembered it, and at first seems almost out of place; the first few notes of the bassline are dead ringers for the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Almost immediately, though, Thorn draws you into one of her typically detailed vignettes, as the song’s narrator steps off the train and stands beneath the window of a lover from years ago, long gone, maybe dead. The song’s chorus—“And I miss you/Like the deserts miss the rain”—shouldn’t work; on paper, it’s just a hair too much. But singing it, their voices twinned in close harmony, they sell it. Thorn’s voice, in particular, is the very incarnation of yearning. At regular intervals, an eerie, synthetic siren sound—a key element of the remix that gets its start in the original—drives home the hurt. In the face of such emotion, any corniness in the metaphor falls away. Of course it’s a desert, it had to have been rain—these things are elemental, fundamental, and so is the feeling the song captures.
Far beyond the impact of Todd Terry’s remix, the sound of “Missing,” and that of Amplified Heart in general, has resonated widely. Its careful strain of folktronica set the precedent for Beth Orton’s Trailer Park two years later, and then a whole raft of tuneful, trip-hop-adjacent sounds. Fifteen years after the album’s release, its gauzy mix of guitars and drums resurfaced on the xx’s debut album. And Everything But the Girl themselves turned out to have the world ahead of them: two more albums as a duo, three children, parallel solo careers, and several acclaimed memoirs. The narrative around them is of a group rescued from the brink; it’s one of pop music’s great comeback stories. But the genius of Amplified Heart is that none of that was foreordained. Here, all you can hear is relief at being alive, and the hunger to hang on a little longer.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This live album is culled from a show late in David’s Bowie’s 1974 tour. It’s heavy on material from Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane and finds a drug-addled Bowie in a moment of transition.

David Bowie: Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74)

Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74)

The 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor captured David Bowie at his lowest point, hollowed out so exquisitely by drugs that you wince to look. Riding a limo through the California desert, he mouths Aretha Franklin’s’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” like someone half-starved: a dark speck adrift in a blank landscape. “Since you’ve been in America,” the director Alan Yentob ventures, “you seem to have picked up a lot of the idioms and themes of American music, American culture. How’s that happened?” Bowie peers down at the carton of milk he’s been drinking from, and mentions the fly floating around there—a “foreign body,” just like him, gorging on the scenery.
Cracked Actor documents the Diamond Dogs tour, which posed glam rock’s dying form in angles of severe decadence. Bowie spent millions of dollars on the sets, among them a nightmarish cityscape and glass-walled “asylum.” He sashayed along moving catwalks; he sang “Time” sitting cross-legged in the palm of a giant hand. Psychedelic Dietrich. The cocaine mania is still visible: such brittle abandon, so many fleetingly brilliant ideas. “Cracked Actor” the song, one of Bowie’s cruelest lyrics, describes a former movie star sniping at his prettier hirelings: “Forget that I’m fifty, ‘cause you just got paid.” On the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie reduced this exchange to abstraction. He would do “Cracked Actor” wearing shades and holding a skull, eventually making out with the prop.
It was one of the only times Bowie seemed uncertain about his next self. Midway through his scheduled 1974 dates, he dumped the elaborate theatre (imagine those dystopian facades rusting in the sun) and rebranded as the Soul Tour. Bowie’s first live album, David Live, was taken from that first half of the tour, but the recording process went badly wrong, forcing various players to overdub their parts in the studio; its final mix muffles all but the flimsiest noise. A damp jog would feel more intense than this “Suffragette City.” Bowie even grew to hate the cover, where he looks barely capable of holding up a microphone—he later joked that David Live should’ve been called David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory. With the new live album Cracked Actor, produced by Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longest-running collaborator tries to reconstruct that time, a moment of grand ambivalence.
Cracked Actor the album and Cracked Actor the film draw on the same recordings, as if each were miming shadow puppets against a common light. Fans have bootlegged the show for almost three decades now—anyone could make this material sound better than David Live. Hearing drums here distinct from murk, you can tell how complex the rhythm of “1984” was, its groove swerving in circles to welcome every new element. Bowie spent the mid-‘70s obsessed with power, wielding it through deeper and deeper timbre, until his seductions seemed purged of emotion: a ballad sung by a vampire. Cracked Actor shows he was already using his phrasing to command attention. “Moonage Daydream” finds him slinking around like some cabaret diva, his voice alternately a pout, a gasp, and a broken squeal. “The Jean Genie” begins with Bowie at a diffident snarl, sliding lyrics along the lone guitar as it trembles in response. He sings the line about underwear, and the crowd whistles.
The few Cracked Actor tracks considered for 1975’s Young Americans got cut from the final release, but it could be a premonition of that album. Bowie had changed his band mid-tour trying to approximate R&B, adding extra backup singers and the endlessly nimble guitarist Carlos Alomar. The bulk of the setlist draws on his last two glam-era records, neither of which were terribly coherent to begin with: Diamond Dogs especially resembles a paranoid collage, thrown together from disparate sources, including a 1984 musical vetoed by Orwell’s estate (rather too perfect given the author’s contempt towards “fashionable pansies.”) That allows the musicians to insert funk riffs or piano flourishes at will. Horn parts first recorded with blown-out, raucous production swoon and beguile. He always did hire the best. Bowie studied genres like captivating faces—the most devoted mimic a girl could hope for.
“John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” was such a strange gambit in 1974 that it only got released five years later, when every white anglo wanted to record disco singles. Closing out Cracked Actor, the song might be heard as a knowing joke, the parable of the horny bisexual: “If he gives it to you/He'd better take it from me.” In Alan Yentob’s documentary, Bowie sings it to no one and everyone, flicking his hair around. But that groove just keeps going, swiveling towards infinity, as backing vocals collapse his denials into a single word: “I’m dancing, dancing, dancing…”. The mask has splintered; the smile is helpless with yearning.


Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s ...

Lovebomb

Engaging with a Terre Thaemlitz record is a commitment. Though he started making ambient house records in the early 90s, latter-day Terre Thaemlitz music is not for the background. Well, you might get away with playing a record while you read one of his lengthy essays from the CD booklet, thus interfacing with Thaemlitz's ideas on two levels simultaneously. But in general his theory-driven work requires both heavy concentration and a certain amount of back-end reflection to be absorbed. There's nothing light about his intent, concept, tone or sonics.
Lovebomb is Thaemlitz' exploration of "love", and I use quotes because Thaemlitz is a skeptic. The tightly-spaced 32 pages of liner notes, which are written in both English and Japanese (Thaemlitz moved from the Bay Area to Tokyo) lay out in detail how, despite the spread of the West's version of "love," the meaning of the word still varies greatly from place to place, and indeed even within a single closed cultural system.
The essays that accompany the tracks provide the theoretical backing, but despite their liberal use of poststructuralist jargon, the meaning of the music is even less clear. This is a strange album. Having listened to it 15 times or more, I can hardly recall a thing about it once I slip it back into its case, and sometimes my memory doesn't even last that long. As Lovebomb is filled with odd pockets of silence ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes long, sometimes it's easy to forget that you're listening to music at all. The music seems designed to resist easy assimilation, and this is one of the more fragmented records I've heard. Tracks range from tiny snatches of sound to epics more than ten minutes long. There are plunderphonic cut-ups, noise, raw found recordings, ambient drones, delicate piano mediations...just as you're getting into one mode Thaemlitz he changes his pitch up, thus keeping you at arms length.
And yet, despite the pretension and the dense impenetrability, certain aspects of Lovebomb are so undeniably powerful that you have to give yourself over to Thaemlitz. First, there is "Between Empathy and Sympathy is Time (Apartheid)". On this track Thaemlitz takes an Apartheid-era militant speech from a member of South Africa's African National Congress and filters it through the music of Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You". I mean "filters" literally here. The speech is run through a vocoder that varies along with the Riperton tune, so that the words of the speech-- about acquiring weapons, killing policemen, bombing factories-- are shaped the harmonic qualities of the song. It's a haunting and utterly unique effect, and the track is difficult to describe in terms of emotional complexity. It's somehow sad, frightening, confusing, inspiring and intellectually engaging all at the same time.
And then there are several places where Thaemlitz' genius for sonic texture and dynamics come through. The title track moves from almost inaudible silence to room-shaking, bassed-out distortion and back again over its 10 minutes, but it somehow manages to remain compelling and coherent as a composition. And "Sintesi Musicale del Linciaggio Futurista (Music Synthesis of Futurist Lynching)" provides an interesting contrast between its minimal Music For Airports-style piano and a mangled spoken word collage. And in running down Lovebomb's high points, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the gorgeous sleeve (drawings of a lynching and a scene from a subway terrorist attack are gussied up with scattered photographs of roses), which Thaemlitz illustrated and designed.
And somehow, some way, something about "love" is what ties all this together. It's difficult to understand the ideas at work without going back to the liner notes, but even the essays bring more questions than answers. In the CD booklet Thaemlitz offers, "Love-- no matter how inexplicably mentally consuming-- is not so much an emotion as an equation of contextually specific cultural variables." And elsewhere, "Love is...a redundant construction of pacifying hysteria, a mandatory insult to appease our senses." I'm not positive, but I think this is just a fancy way of saying:
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
Love stinks


On their first album in nearly 40 years, the Zamrock pioneers prove their malleable, genre-spanning style still sounds like the future.

Zango

On October 24, 1964, the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia gained independence, ending 75 years of colonization. The newly sovereign African nation renamed itself Zambia, for the Zambezi River that carved its way through the western part of the country. The spirit of liberation was in the air; the booming copper mines offered native Zambians unprecedented economic freedom, which in turn led to a flourishing of culture. Emmanuel Chanda was 13 years old and obsessed with the pop radio stations whose broadcasts reached the mining town of Kitwe, where he and his older brother lived. He adopted the nickname “Jaggery” in tribute to his rock’n’roll hero, later Africanizing it to “Jagari.” By 1972, he would be the frontman of Witch and arguably the biggest rock star in Zambia.
Witch (an acronym for We Intend to Cause Havoc) headlined the thriving local music movement known as Zamrock. The genre blended traditional African rhythms and instrumentation with a host of countercultural influences—psychedelia, hard rock, soul music, funk. (James Brown’s 1970 concerts in Zambia would prove a foundational moment in the genre’s history.) Witch’s 1972 full-length Introduction was the first commercially released Zamrock album, and the band soon became leaders of the burgeoning scene. Those halcyon days wouldn’t last long. The copper market crashed, the AIDS epidemic killed almost everyone who had ever been in the band, and Chanda took up a humble, pious life as a gemstone miner. Now 71, he’s made an improbable return to music with the vibrant, vigorous Zango (“meeting place”). It’s the first new Witch album in almost 40 years.
The seeds of Witch’s resurrection were planted in the early 2010s, when Now-Again Records reissued their ’70s albums and stoked a new wave of interest in Zamrock. We Intend to Cause Havoc, a Searching for Sugar Man-style documentary, followed in 2019. Director Gio Arlotta introduced Chanda to bassist Jacco Gardner and drummer Nico Mauskoviç, both of whom play on Zango. The new band also includes keyboardist Patrick Mwondela, an architect of Witch’s short-lived disco era who never played with Chanda in the group’s first iteration. With its diverse assortment of musicians from across Zambia and Europe, the new version of Witch has a freewheeling, shambolic quality. Zango is accordingly all over the map. Recorded at the same Lusaka studio where the band made much of their iconic ’70s work, the album feels like a late-night Zamrock party, with Chanda and a flock of guest vocalists passing the mic while the band bobs and weaves behind them.
Zango is rooted in classic Zamrock, and it builds on the inherent malleability of the genre’s sound. The band slinks seamlessly between passages of Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat, spacey psych-pop, and stomping, Sabbathian proto-metal. They also fold new sounds into the framework. Hip-hop hadn’t yet reached Africa in the ’70s, but the Zambian rapper Sampa the Great sounds at home trading slithery verses with Chanda on the smoldering “Avalanche of Love.” Soulful guest vocalists Theresa Ng’ambi and Hanna Tembo complement Chanda elsewhere on the record. Their presence serves as a welcome rejoinder to the dearth of women in the original Zamrock scene.
In simultaneously nodding to the Zamrock tradition and updating its sound, Chanda and his bandmates capture the same feeling of possibility that characterized those early Witch records. On Zango’s closing track, “Message from WITCH,” he assumes the same emcee persona he used on “Introduction,” the first song Witch ever recorded. Just as he did in 1972, Chanda introduces his bandmates, only this time, he also sheds light on his intentions with this music: “It unites beliefs/Conquers xenophobia/It laughs at hate speech/Ends sexism/It erases homophobia/Shatters antisemitism/Embraces every race.” Zamrock isn’t stuck in the ’70s. In Witch’s hands, it still sounds like the future.


The orchestro-punk Godspeed offshoot Thee Silver Mt. Zion's excellent seventh album examines the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value. The songs are more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything

Last September, at the Polaris Music Prize gala in Toronto, writer/Pitchfork contributor Jessica Hopper introduced shortlist nominees Godspeed You! Black Emperor by distilling their many achievements down to a single word: “no.” Which is to say, the Montreal ensemble’s success is a direct product of their refusal to engage in traditional music-industry practices or self-promotional glad-handing—an outlook that also extended to not showing up at the Polaris ceremony, nor gladly accepting the $30,000 purse they won later that night. (As per band tradition, they let their feelings be known via a collectively written communiqué.) However, offshoot band Thee Silver Mt. Zion—featuring Godspeed guitarist Efrim Menuck, violinist Sophie Trudeau, and bassist Thierry Amar, along with violinist Jessica Moss and drummer David Payant—has been more amenable to countering all that “no” with the odd “yes.” Though they share with Godspeed a deep suspicion of authority and institutions, and the faintest of hopes that sanity will prevail in a world gone mad, they’ve come to broadcast their ideas through more clearly communicated means: interviews, lengthy onstage addresses, lyrics we can all join in on, and songs that are both more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics.
But while Menuck has become a more confident and charismatic vocalist over the years, his lyrics are often rendered in broad-strokes, addressing faceless bogeymen (a Dylanesque procession of bankers, hangmen, and the like) and macro societal maladies, while rooting their more sanguine songs in communal, universal affirmations. So the great strides made on the band’s seventh album, Fuck Off Get Free We Pour the Light on Everything, aren’t so much musical—it’s a logical extension of 2010’s Kollaps Tradixionales—but philosophical: This time, it’s personal. The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value—and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture.
Menuck and Moss became parents in recent years; that’s their boy Ezra we hear in the new album’s opening seconds, delivering the band’s simple mission statement: “We live on the island called Montreal, and we make a lot of noise… because we love each other!” The experience of new fatherhood factored into some of the songs on Menuck’s scaled-down 2011 solo release, Plays High Gospel, but that intimate perspective is retained here amid Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s orchestro-punk onslaught, with the band’s usual big-picture concerns intensified by the lingering question of what kind of world their children will inherit.
True to the band’s “Memorial Orchestra” and “Tra-La-La Band” suffixes, Thee Silver Mt. Zion albums have always contrasted eulogy with euphoria, but on Fuck Off Get Free the feelings of joy and terror are one and the same. Rather than use violins to embellish their guitar riffs, the album’s monstrous opening track (which, like Kollaps’ “I Built Myself a Metal Bird” is the rare TSMZ song to just charge out of the gates without an extended build-up) fuses the two into the same dissonant frequency. But amid this sound of confusion, Menuck leads the band in a group chant that’s almost nursery-rhyme-like in its simplicity; that album title may seem like a mouthful to read, but it’s surprisingly easy to sing. Fuck Off Get Free’s most exhilarating song is likewise a maelstrom of conflicted emotions: over the course of its 14 minutes, “Austerity Blues” channels screeching cacophony into rousing catharsis, however, Menuck’s triumphant refrain—“Lord, let my son/ Live long enough/ To see that mountain torn down”—is undercut by the implication that the singer won’t be around to see the better world he’s fighting for. And that latent anxiety comes boiling to surface on the raging “Take Away These Early Grave Blues”, which refines the heavy-metal klemzer heard on Godspeed’s 2012 colossus “Mladic” into a more concentrated burst; Menuck coyly acknowledges this otherwise despairing song’s shout-along accessibility when he fashions a hook—“let them sing our/ pretty songs”—that recalls the similarly sarcastic chorus of Nirvana’s “In Bloom”.
But even the album’s actual pretty songs are suffused with grave prophecies: The deceptively gentle “Little Ones Run”—a piano ballad sung by Trudeau and Moss—presents a bedside lullaby that parents can sing to calm down babies during the next extreme-weather eco-disaster (“Wake up darling the moon is gone/ The sky’s a mess and falling down”). Meanwhile, the album’s emotional centerpiece, “What We Loved Was Not Enough”, is a comment on modern-age ennui that could conceivably waltz its way onto the back half of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor (if that album was a little less disco and a little more Dischord), however, for Thee Silver Mt. Zion, the cost of apathy is more severe than just social disconnection: “There’ll be war in our cities/ and riots at the mall,” Menuck warns, before repeating his most chilling prognostication four times—“all our children gonna die.” All the while, the rest of the band sings, “and the day has come, when we no longer feel,” the sweetest of harmonies couching the bitterest of sentiments—i.e. that numbing oneself to atrocities is the only way to endure them.
And yet, amid this procession of devastation, Menuck sees a sliver of a silver lining, when he sings, “kiss it quick and it’ll rise again,” and the album’s closing track, “Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez)”, channels that cautious optimism into a dreamlike haze that's equally haunting and comforting. Its title name-checks the Detroit theatre where The MC5 recorded their incendiary 1968 debut, Kick Out the Jams, and the song is introduced by an interview clip in which guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith issues a statement of purpose that Thee Silver Mt. Zion could easily claim as their own: “Music is a way of life, it’s more than just something you do on the weekend … it’s something you devote your life to.” But more than simply forge a spiritual connection between Thee Silver Mt. Zion and their proto-punk forefathers, the song’s central image—of a once-legendary venue reduced to ruins—serves as a symbol for the loss of radicalism in popular music.
And through that lens, the parenthetical shout-out to Pro Era rapper Capital Steez—who threw himself off a New York City building in late 2012—makes more sense, as a requiem for a kindred, politically outspoken voice silenced before his time. But for all the sorrow couched in Menuck’s trembling tenor, there is a sign of life amid the Grande Ballroom rubble: “The glass in its windows are still breathing,” he sings, suggesting the same anti-establishment ethos that fuelled a band of Motor City delinquents in the late-60s, and his own cabal of Montreal outsiders in the late-90s, and a teenaged Brooklyn MC in the early 2010s will persist long after he’s gone. Back in 2003, when this once-instrumental band was still literally finding its voice, Thee Silver Mt. Zion asserted their core ideology by naming their third album This Is Our Punk-Rock, and the increasingly aggressive albums released in the interim have made the members’ hardcore roots all the more apparent. But to ensure that the contrarian, questioning spirit of punk endures through future generations, Fuck Off Get Free reminds us of one of the key principles of hippiedom: teach your children well.


Another retrograde UK guitar band held up as the Next Big Thing, the very solid Vaccines aren't either as good or bad as that claim suggests.

The Vaccines: What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?

What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?

Late last summer, months before the Vaccines had gone on to grace the front of the NME above a cover line heralding "The Return of the Great British Guitar Band," the magazine's website was already reporting concerns about the London band getting over-hyped. After the feverish debate that quickly ensued in the UK music press, such talk has come to sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Among the Vaccines' detractors, meanwhile, hardly a review deadline goes by without some pun on the quartet's debut album title, What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?
The Vaccines, much to their credit, are savvier about expectations than their champions and critics alike. Led by singer Justin Young, who previously played indie-folk under the name Jay Jay Pistolet, and guitarist Freddie Cowan, whose older brother is in the Horrors, these guys know firsthand how hype can be a double-edged sword-- one that has already propelled their meat-and-potatoes pub rock near the top of the UK album charts, to uncertain impact on their long-term reputations. The real joke of the album title, after all, is that it raises the same question the band posed of "Post Break-Up Sex" on their bombastic, pleasant-enough second single.
The answer, on that song, is that we should expect a chance to forget our past loves for a little while, followed by a sense of overwhelming guilt. For better or worse, there's nothing here that warrants either such reaction, let alone the paroxysms of hyperbole going on in the British press. Sure, the band's buzzing guitars, thick reverb, and bouncy rhythms lack any particular spark of originality that might help listeners avoid compulsively thinking of names like Ramones, the Jesus and Mary Chain, or, yes, the Strokes. Then again, there's no shame in catchy, concise, sharply executed tunes that communicate mildly fresh takes on relationships, either-- and this album has more than a few.
The Vaccines are at their best when they're upbeat, flecked with surf, and surprisingly hard to get out of your head. Take "If You Wanna", which bops likably along like a somewhat higher-fidelity Best Coast as Young warbles about an ex he'd take back in a second, or "Nørgaard", a playfully loutish ode to a Danish model. But there's also "Blow It Up", which borrows from the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better" a little too blatantly to enjoy in its own right. "Under Your Thumb", for its part, appears to take critic Ellen Willis's argument that the Rolling Stones' similarly titled tirade actually isn't sexist as a challenge to write a song about a man completely submitting to his (presumably, female-- name's Eleanor, anyway) lover.
It's easy enough to imagine the Vaccines' slower songs going over well with an outdoor crowd drunk on sun and beer. Previous NME favorites Glasvegas already have the "swooning anthems with girl-group beats" thing pretty much covered, but the Vaccines do it here twice: over droning organ on "Wetsuit", which again recalls the U.S. beach-pop crowd, and then another time on the dreary "All in White", which occupies much the same U2-echoing expanse as lesser bands the Temper Trap or White Lies. The most awkward moment is slo-mo finale "Family Friend", which builds to an embarrassingly neutered wall-of-noise crescendo. In a final possible reference to Best Coast, Wavves, and their stoned sunshine set, Young wonders aloud if everybody really feels "as high as a kite": "Well, I don't really know if they do, but they might." An old "MADtv" sketch comes to mind: "Lowered Expectations".