Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke has made major headway infusing rap with new electronic textures both as one half of TNGHT and as a beatmaker in Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music stable. The guiding principle for Mohawke's sophomore album, Lantern, is to showcase his versatility.

Lantern

Over the last three years, Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke (born Ross Birchard) has made major headway infusing rap with new electronic textures both as one half of TNGHT with Canadian DJ Lunice and as a beatmaker in Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music stable. But he doesn’t seem to want to be defined by his hip-hop dabbling anymore. Mohawke said as much in conversation with Pitchfork this spring, where he was reticent to even utter the word "rap." And so the guiding principle for Mohawke's sophomore album, Lantern, is to showcase his versatility. He’s been pecking away at the record since he got swept up into the Yeezus machine, and it feels like a conscious subversion of everything people might expect to hear from a guy with credits on Nothing Was the Same, My Name Is My Name, and I Am Not a Human Being II.
For one, there aren’t any rappers on Lantern. It isn’t your typical producer's showcase, and our maestro doesn’t hide behind a parade of cleverly curated guest features. Only five of the album’s 14 songs bother with vocals at all, and the performers slide neatly into Hud Mo's vehicles, commanding attention as necessary but often hanging back in the mix, another paintbrush by the artist’s easel. Antony tiptoes around a napping lover on "Indian Steps", while Jhené Aiko mourns a doomed romance on "Resistance". Neither voice raises above a whisper as they bob gently over sparse, swirling arrangements. Lantern’s quieter tracks are broken up with moments of bedlam—Irfane’s helium-voiced lead on "Very First Breath" is the calming focal point in a disorienting array of bleating video game keys—and when it gets loud, the album's guest vocalists are terra firma underneath a pulverizing armada of synths.
The album’s more ambitiously orchestrated sections are a rewarding new look for the producer. The widescreen majesty of "Kettles" and "Scud Books" fully realize a sound Mohawke hinted at years ago with cuts like "Shower Melody", off his 2009 Warp Records debut Butter. "Kettles" abandons the idea that Mohawke needs to make electronic music at all, opting for heart-swelling neoclassical instead, before "Scud Books" takes everything he tried on the previous song and crams it back into a trap cut. "Lil Djembe" picks up Eastern instruments and drops a conventional approach to melody for a two-and-a-half minute excursion that presents one of the few times here Mohawke’s ideas come off better on paper than in execution.
Lantern’s risk-taking is daring and giddy, but its favored mode, and Hudson Mohawke’s best, is hooky, crowded, rap-conscious electropop. Lead single "Ryderz" employs an old trick from Mohawke’s benefactor Mr. West—overlaying a sped-up soul sample with syrupy embellishments —to heart-busting success. "Shadows" assembles an army of 8-bit synths, then runs them through a quick, showy drop for a cheap but mercenary thrill. The album’s closing stretch plays sneaky games with pace. "Portrait of Luci"’s much-needed breather quickly proves to be a fake-out; "System" follows, combining manic keys and a pulsating, insistent kick drum for the album’s most conventionally clubby indulgence before "Brand New World" closes things out at half the speed, loud, ratty guitar in tow like an homage to the overdriven brat pop of Sleigh Bells.
Hudson Mohawke became an EDM circuit sensation sort of by accident three years ago with the success of TNGHT, and he spent the year after that with his hand in a number of 2013’s biggest rap releases. But Lantern finds him wisely darting outside both scenes before anyone gets a chance to pigeonhole him. Scores of great producers settle quickly into an identifiable sound after a big break and proceed to churn out variations on the same song until the calls stop coming. But Mohawke’s puckish eagerness to try new things when the most eyes are trained on him suggests he’s thinking past his next move to the one after that. A less talented hand might’ve faltered juggling six different genres as Mohawke does throughout Lantern, but his knowledge of what gets a crowd moving, coupled with his good cheer in both playing directly to it and coyly holding back as he pleases help keep the album’s experiments a minimum of fun and danceable, but more often shocking and delightful.


On their second album, the Irish duo Mikron—brothers Michael and Ciaran Corcoran—make promising strides toward defining their own patch of techno turf.

Severance

Contemporary techno is rarely about anything external to the music. Not always, but frequently, a lot of techno is mostly just about techno itself. That’s especially evident in acts on the Sheffield label Central Processing Unit, who, since 2012, has devoted itself to the sounds its city helped make famous in the 1990s, fusing the clean-lined 808s of classic electro (an American import) with the evocative sheen of mid-1990s Warp Records at its most melancholy. The label’s roster has a compelling take on the style: When they’re good, CPU releases might be mistaken for their inspirations from decades earlier. When they’re great, they sound simply timeless. But they almost always stake out a position within familiar terrain. The CPU M.O. entails “pushing at the edges without reinventing the wheel,” as Resident Advisor’s Andrew Ryce once put it.
On their second album, the Irish duo Mikron—brothers Michael and Ciaran Corcoran—make promising strides toward defining their own patch of turf. Their debut album, 2016’s Warning Score, had plenty to recommend it, particularly its fusion of diamond-tipped drum programming with aquamarine synths. But at the end of the day, it was essentially a collection of genre exercises. “Black Sands” paid homage to Drexciya, electro’s avant-garde standard-bearers; “Re-Entry” lost itself in Detroit techno’s buoyant harmonies; the title track indulged in whip-cracking acid roleplay. Severance moves into a more distinctive territory.
The tempos are largely slower and their sound design, already one of their strengths, has become even more refined. Shrouded in bassy shadow, their synthesizers throw off the glow of streetlights in heavy fog; their drum programming flashes like fish in deep water. Severance is even more varied than Warning Score: “Ghost Node,” a highlight, channels new-wave synths into sleek, uptempo techno, while the opening “Embers” is melancholy, atmospheric acid. Mostly, they shuttle between slow-motion electro and ethereal hip-hop, using those spacious rhythmic frameworks to showcase the richness of their sounds. On “Aldergrove,” another highlight, the synths almost sound like a chunk of shoegaze that’s been broken off, sanded smooth, and polished to a dull sheen.
Mikron still aren’t putting any wheelwrights out of business. Echoes of their predecessors are easy to spot: Plastikman’s nimble hi-hats and wriggly 303 run through the opener; the echo-soaked “Imora” taps into the gothic strains of dub techno pioneered by Andy Stott and the Modern Love label; “Locus Reave,” the most forceful cut here, sounds like a more subdued answer to Lanark Artefax’s hi-def electro delirium. And Boards of Canada’s influence can be felt every time a stumbling breakbeat kicks up a lavender-scented cloud of dust.
But one track, in particular, stands out as an example of Mikron’s own developing voice. “Sunken Paths” wasn’t made in a vacuum; you could almost imagine it as a tug of war between Burial and Boards of Canada. But the way they wield its slippery, garage-inspired rhythm and glowing synths is so deft, those comparisons mostly fall by the wayside. It’s not a song about a genre or a style; it’s not about anything except the feeling that wells up while it’s playing. And that feeling, a hard-to-define mixture of melancholy and rapture, hits hard—and leaves a lingering mark.


On their debut LP, Sheer Mag keep biting at the forbidden fruit of 1970s hard rock. They dance the line between proto-metal and power pop on songs about romantic obsession and societal oppression.

Need to Feel Your Love

Seventies hard rock is like the trans fat of popular music—something the masses once gorged on freely and gluttonously, but which has since come to be viewed as being not all that good for us. From the derisive misogyny, to the skeezy sexual objectification (of minors, no less), to the thinly veiled racism and homophobia the music engendered during the disco-sucks witch trials, hard rock’s anachronistic qualities are as much philosophical as musical. And yet, it remains a forbidden fruit we just can’t resist, with artists both mainstream and underground forever drawing from its trough of pelvic-thrusting riffs, gooey twinned-guitar leads, and shout-it-out-loud hooks. Because, at the end of the day, we all just want to feel as good as the people who made ’70s hard-rock songs felt.
Harboring arena-sized dreams in their DIY-hardcore hearts, Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag have been on a mission to transform junk-food rock into something nourishing and nutritious. And they do this by reminding us of a fact we tend to forget when we see our ’70s heroes clinking champagne glasses at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame galas or embarking on cruise-ship tours: that this was once the music of clock-punchers and outcasts, and of lonely, bullied kids who, by blasting “God of Thunder” in their poster-plastered bedrooms, could imagine what it would feel like to fight back.
That Sheer Mag render their hi-fi fantasies in compact, boomboxed dimensions is not so much an act of punk-schooled subversion or even necessarily a reflection of their modest recording budgets. As guitarist Kyle Seely once explained to Rolling Stone, “We just like that range of fidelity.” Sheer Mag understand that, even though the music they love is often referred to as arena rock, it was more often first experienced through cheap transistor radios, chewed-up 8-tracks, and beaten-up vinyl spinning on Radio Shack Realistic record players.
But warped fidelity isn’t the only thing that separates Sheer Mag from the golden gods of the ’70s. In singer Tina Halladay, they possess a denim-vested, raspy-voiced dynamo who (with the help of co-lyricist/guitarist Matt Palmer) can elevate retro-rock tropes into fiery protest music for the here and now. Arriving hot on the heels of their early EPs compilation, the band’s first proper full-length, Need to Feel Your Love, plays like a Dazed and Confused soundtrack set against a backdrop of Trump-age anxiety instead of carefree Carter-era optimism. On the opening “Meet Me in the Street,” Halladay repurposes the cocksure posturing of an old Ratt lyric as an invitation to the sort of inner-city gathering where the bottles are filled with burning gasoline instead of booze—and where hard rock is both the rabble-rousing soundtrack of choice and something to hurl at the encroaching riot police. But if that song is meant to leave bruises, with others they intend to draw blood: On “Expect the Bayonet,” the gerrymandering that undermined the popular vote in last fall’s election becomes grounds for a violent coup, as the song’s pin-pricked, in-the-pocket guitar melody mimics a gently jabbing blade.
But Sheer Mag’s bilious contempt for the powers that be is always chased by sweet, honey-dipped hooks. Like the band’s first three EPs, Need to Feel Your Love continues to dance along the line separating proto-metal and power pop, but leans more often toward the latter. Bassist Hart Seely’s slightly crisper production lets you better savor the jangly acoustic strums underpinning the power chords, while liberating Halladay’s singing from the payphone fidelity of those earlier recordings. But the cleaner presentation only amplifies the natural grit in her voice—on soot-covered gems like “Just Can’t Get Enough” and “Rank & File,” Halladay comes on like Jennifer Herrema’s feistier little sister, while the band deliver a refined raunch like a Royal Trux whose spirit animal is Dwight Twilley instead of Keith Richards.
Having already struck the right balance of melody and menace at this early stage in their career, Sheer Mag are now eager to get a head start on another ‘70s rock rite of passage: the inevitable disco dalliance. On the title track and “Suffer Me,” the band’s usual Camaro-revving thrust downshifts into slow‘n’low grooves, while the riffs get melted down into a crystalline, sundazed twang from the Mac DeMarco-via-Dean Ween playbook. If the two songs follow similar templates, their subject matter contrasts sharply: the former is a beautifully aching plea to reignite an old flame; the latter is an unflinching account of the 1969 Stonewall riots and the struggles for acceptance that LGBT people still experience a half-century later. (“There’s a fear you can’t define,” Halladay laments, “there’s no peace and there’s no crime in living this way.”) But for Sheer Mag, there’s no difference between personal and political songs—they’re both natural products of the same bruised heart and worried mind. Whether Halladay is singing about romantic obsession or societal oppression, her need for the former only intensifies as the threat of the latter looms larger.
The cover of Need to Feel Your Love shows an airplane navigating dark, stormy skies toward a bright break in the clouds. On one level, it’s a Nevermind-like allegory of a band on the cusp of busting out of the underground to the potentially wider audience that awaits on the other side. It’s also emblematic of Sheer Mag’s desire to power us through these turbulent times toward better days—but they can’t say with certainty if those clouds are parting or closing in. Need to Feel Your Love closes on a sobering note with the melancholic jangle pop of “(Say Goodbye to) Sophie Scholl,” an ode to the White Rose Movement activist executed by the Nazis in 1943 at age 21. In Scholl, Halladay clearly sees an inspirational role model for today’s anti-fascist resistance, but her voice is also imbued with an audible sadness that such a song still needs to be sung in 2017—in America, no less: “It seems so strange/The blind constrictions and nascent pain/The contradiction from which we came.” It’s a long way from the boisterous, brick-tossing battle cries we hear at the start of the record. But when Halladay caps the song’s bittersweet chorus with “don’t forget your white rose,” she reminds us that despair is ultimately the energy source that fuels our ire.


The New York-based songwriter Aaron Maine stays in the lane of writing delicate, evocative songs with homespun beats, but he never quite locks into the kind of groove that made his last record Pool so satisfying.

The House

On his 2016 release Pool, Aaron Maine swapped out the ramshackle guitar rock that had so far come to define his primary project Porches for a glitzy set of homemade beats. He applied the songwriting skills he had picked up as the leader of an indie band to an entirely new setting, one which allowed him to indulge the paranoia that had lurked around the edges of Porches so far, but never quite come to the forefront. The House, the third studio LP to Porches’ name, furthers the exploration of the tension between how you’re seen and how you feel, but never quite locks into the kind of groove that made Pool so satisfying.
In its tightest moments, The House boasts some of the most gripping tracks Maine has ever released as Porches. “Find Me” vaults forward with a techno punch as it examines the psychological layout of overwhelming anxiety, the kind that traps you indoors, away from the party, deep in your own head. “I think that I’ll stay inside/If you don’t think that they’d mind/I can’t let it find me,” Maine sings, the usual disaffection in his voice cracked by what sound like raw nerves. While he never exactly specifies what the “it” is that’s hunting him, the blooming instrumentation fills in the gaps. There’s a second voice echoing his own, pitched-up and pixelated, more alien and broken than any of the backing characters heard in Porches songs before. The voice repeats Maine’s words but garbles them, like Kiiara’s gobbledygook chorus on the 2016 hit “Gold,” which only sharpens the tension. It’s like Maine is speaking and has no idea if anyone is hearing what he thinks he’s saying, the gap between his intention and his reception growing unfathomably, unmanageably wide.
“Find Me” also includes the closest thing The House has to a pure pop hook, an indelible chorus complete with chirps of synth horns that’s probably the catchiest thing Porches has put out since 2013’s ecstatically nonsensical “Townie Blunt Guts.” But where Maine once favored the irreverent, he now leans toward the sincerely soul-searching, which can be touching or tepid depending on the song. The spare, lovely “Country” deals in simple imagery: a loved one caught in a pristine moment while swimming in a lake. “Can you make it light?/Can you do no harm? Break the water with your arms,” Maine sings. While oblique, his lines rest solidly enough on a single vision that they hit home; you can almost be where he’s been, which makes empathizing with the moment all the easier. But many lyrics on the album get tangled up in the immaterial and the cliche, like Maine is trying to talk his way out of an ambiguous feeling and never quite getting there. “It is good to know ourselves/Because most of the time/I have no idea/Who I see in the mirror,” Maine pronounces on “By My Side,” reiterating a visual metaphor already sung threadbare by Michael Jackson and Christina Aguilera, for starters. The scattershot instrumentals accompanying him don’t help his case much; he’s singing in circles, both lyrically and melodically, and the syrupy beats he’s laced together struggle to get off the ground.
Punctuating The House’s actual songs are occasionally baffling interludes (one, “Åkeren,” is sung entirely in Norwegian, a first for Porches), which play more like unfinished sketches than intentional moments of quiet. On “Understanding,” Maine’s father guests on the track and warbles vaguely about love over honeyed synth chords; on “Swimmer,” MIDI arpeggios cycle behind Auto-Tuned vocals for just under a minute. These tracks don’t get anywhere, and they add little to their surroundings—they’re not portholes into Maine’s songwriting process so much as they’re the dregs thereof. Breaking up finished songs with undercooked ones can sometimes work as a sequencing strategy, but The House, especially in its B-side, barely has any momentum to break up. Aside from “Ono,” whose muscle does, eventually, kick in, the album’s second half tends to stagnate, circulating the same water metaphors Maine might have put to use on Pool. When The House ends on a stanza mostly lifted from Roy Orbison (“Anything you want/Anything you need/Anything at all”), it feels like a fitting enough synecdoche for the bulk of the album: a reiteration, slowed down and sapped of its original spark, familiar enough to go down easy but not quite spirited enough to get the current flowing again.
Correction: An original version of this article misidentified the singer on the song “Understanding.”


Released in 1983, Noir et Blanc still sounds like a broadcast from the future—the influential work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synths, strange effects, and stranger time signatures.

Noir et Blanc

Noir et Blanc was released in 1983, yet it still sounds like a broadcast from the future. The work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synthesizers, strange effects, stranger time signatures, and acoustic instruments—steel guitar, clarinet, kalimba—and singing over them in Swahili, Kikongo, Lingala, and pidgin French, it reappears now not so much as a reissue, but as a boomerang across space and time. The title, which translates as “black and white,” doesn’t do justice to a collision of sounds and ideas that yields something more like an iridescent spray of color, like a firehose shot across a beam of sunlight. Far from binary opposites, its composite parts break down into a thousand dynamic shades of grey. It is an album that unseats assumptions.
Most records this influential inspire reams of imitators, sometimes entire genres. That this one did not might come down to the uniqueness not just of its sound but also its circumstances. Kinshasa’s Bony Bikaye was living in Belgium, working on an album by a Congolese soukous band, when he told the French composer Hector Zazou of his interest in krautrock and Stockhausen. Zazou made some introductions, and Bikaye was soon in the studio with the electronic musicians Guillaume Loizillon and Claude Micheli (collectively known as the duo CY1), who laid down knotty sequences and gurgling metallic textures while Bikaye multi-tracked his voice in warm, woozy layers. This reissue makes five of their demo recordings available for the first time, and they sound wonderfully alien: weird, vine-like tangles of arpeggiated synthesizer and sweetly harmonized vocals, robotic and ghostly all at once.
Zazou played the demos to Crammed Discs, a Belgian label with post-punk roots and globe-trotting tastes, who liked what they heard, and the group reconvened in a Brussels studio to record a proper album, assisted this time by a handful of collaborators. Crammed co-founder Marc Hollander played clarinet, and Vincent Kenis, his bandmate from the group Aksak Maboul, contributed spidery guitar—shimmering harmonics, desert-blues pedal steel. The British progressive-rock legend Fred Frith contributed scraping violin to a few tracks. Lithe, raindrop-like pulses alternate with convoluted rhythms in 5/8 time, and drums related to Jamaican Nyabinghi drumming link up with sounds found on Depeche Mode’s earliest recordings. The record’s time-traveling powers are apparent in its very few bars, which sound for all the world like brisk, blippy dancehall reggae from two decades hence, and from there, all bets are off. Congas run through ring modulator erupt into soft bursts of white noise; Hollander’s clarinet traces a Balkan melody, while Bikaye playfully explores the depths of his gravelly baritone.
At times, it’s difficult to tease out exactly what is electronic and what’s acoustic. In the liner notes, Kenis describes how Konono Nº1, whom he had discovered around that time, inspired his use of guitar effects, and in “Mangungu,” his guitar bristles with harmonics, while vine-like synths wrap around a convoluted rhythm. In “Eh! Yaye,” a dry, flat drum machine is garlanded with pings, chimes, and even a bicycle bell, while Bikaye’s voice is spun into an entire chorus. Kenis’ guitar solo here—a tribute to to Demola Adepoju, King Sunny Ade’s steel guitarist—is among the album’s most electrifying moments.
“Dju Ya Feza” comes closest to the period’s post-punk: The grinding beat sounds almost industrial, and the dissonant, hardscrabble guitar glows red hot. Perhaps it’s because Bikaye’s almost comic style of sing-speaking here is so seductive, but no matter how hard you listen, you can’t quite catch everything that’s going on in the background: chirping birds, flying sparks, the whine of ricocheting bullets. “Munipe Wa Kati” explores the same idea to more dulcet ends, weaving plucked kalimba and electronic birdsong around a synthesizer pattern that leads the ear away from conventional notes and toward the realm of pure texture. For these musicians, making sound was a kind of sleight-of-hand, and electronics were alchemical tools for turning familiar sounds deeply unfamiliar.
Adding to the strangeness of it all was the fact that the names on the record’s front cover—ZAZOU/BIKAYE/CY1—obscured more than they revealed. There was little indication that CY1 was a duo, for one thing, and even less that Zazou didn’t play a lick of music on the record. It was a trio masquerading as a quartet masquerading as a trio, basically: Bikaye, Loizillon, and Micheli shared writing credits, while the record was “directed” and arranged by Zazou, according to the fine print. (This was Zazou’s M.O.; in 1993, The Wire described him as “a convener” in the mold of Bill Laswell or Peter Gabriel: “a strong attractor, the hub of a conferencing system through which musicians of the world meet.”)
The record wasn’t entirely without precedent. Two years earlier, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts had run non-Western sounds through Anglo-American art-rock and electronic processing. That same year, Craig Leon’s Nommos had channeled Malian mythology into all-electronic compositions whose metallic machine beats anticipate the sound and texture of CY1’s rhythms. Still, the sound of the record was wildly anomalous for the period. Even today, with modular synthesis arguably more popular than it’s ever been, CY1’s twitchy oscillations sound like a transmission from another planet, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to think of another record, then or now, that combines such far-out beats with such hypnotic Central African melodies.
Whatever accounts for the magic that created the album, it was a one-time thing. CY1, Bikaye, and Zazou would tour together, but the full group never put out another record; there’s nothing else in CY1’s discography at all. And Zazou and Bikaye’s subsequent albums Mr. Manager and Guilty !, with their garish gated snares and comparatively conventional electro-funk flourishes, only underscore how remarkable Noir et Blanc was, and is. Thirty-four years later, its quicksilver palette sounds as joyously original as ever.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut, an existential anchor of the neo-soul movement.

Baduizm

While recording a demo in her hometown of Dallas in 1995, Erykah Badu found love in the simplicity of a rim shot. It’s a fundamental drum technique: the act of striking the metal edge and the head of a snare simultaneously to produce a full, explosive hit. To her, it was also a creative spark. Badu called up producer-songwriter Madukwu Chinwah, asked what “that tick-tock sound” was, and had him compose an entire rim shot-based rhythm for her. They made a song out of it, connecting the kick and the snare with the stimulating sensation of love: Boom. Clack. Boom. Clack: She made all her music this way, letting the groove lead her into streams of consciousness that became worldwide gospel.
Out of those demo sessions came her February 1997 debut, Baduizm, bookended by the original recording of “Rim Shot,” split into an intro and outro. The record went double platinum by summer and that year won the Grammy for Best R&B Album under the banner of a divisive new subgenre, neo-soul. Baduizm was an instant hit of intimate existentialism. It stripped the act of soul-searching down to its philosophical elements, mining abstract concepts like self-love, romantic love, and spirituality. There’s a throughline to albums like Solange’s 2016 opus A Seat at the Table, which similarly harnesses the power of Black music as a salve. They are full of control and surrender at the same time, confident in their search for answers even when there are none.
Badu’s musical style had roots in the smooth harmonies of ’80s groups like Mint Condition and Tony! Toni! Toné!, along with the early songs of Meshell Ndegeocello, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that neo-soul crystallized into a subgenre with a foundational crew of rebels: D’Angelo, Maxwell, Badu, Jill Scott. Heralded as prodigies, they made lush serenades and instrumental jam sessions with a political center. Their musical and artistic identities affirmed the mutual bond between Black love and liberation. But in carving space for this retro sound, the music world presented neo-soul artists as saviors who were bringing R&B “back to basics,” which dismissed the innovation that was already driving the genre.
The truth is that, in 1997, R&B did not need any saving: Aaliyah’s music lived in the future. Mary J. Blige was turning anguish into hip-hop soul. And while artists from Usher to Brandy to Blackstreet added new-school bounce and flavor to the pop charts, neo-soul glimpsed back to a time when Marvin Gaye was crafting timeless soul out of divorce proceedings. The ensuing neo-soul era was illustrious, merging the familiar crackle of vinyl sounds with contemporary relationship angst. It was prestige R&B, with D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar (1995) and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996) as prototypes. Still, the man who coined the neo-soul term, Universal executive Kedar Massenburg, knew even the acts he’d signed, including Badu, had rejected the label.
In many ways, the backlash was grounded in fear. Black musicians can be hyper-vigilant of the relative impermanence of their culture and wary of being boxed in. “Because, when you classify music, it becomes a fad, which tends to go away,” Massenburg told Billboard in 2002. Though he didn’t see neo-soul as a “marketing strategy,” it was just that: a way to repackage ’70s soul for the masses and train listeners to value live instrumentation and vocals over the computerized pop-R&B of that era. A 2002 Vibe essay described neo-soul as a “sublime paradox,” reflecting a common gripe at the time—“new soul” implied that soul had somehow died. Raphael Saadiq, one-third of Tony! Toni! Toné!, went so far as to call neo-soul “disrespectful,” though he recognized its intent. “I understand it for marketing reasons, I get that,” Saadiq told Billboard in 2002. “But people who really love music can’t respect that because it’s not new soul. You either have soul or you don’t.”
For Massenburg, the endgame was preservation. Neo-soul was helpful as a concept for the moment yet fleeting because Black music perpetually finds ways to escape time. Badu was always shape-shifting her way out of categorization, and Baduizm was the beginning of her decades-long ritual of reinvention. The album builds its ecosystem around her hoarse, cackling tone, which drew so many early comparisons to Billie Holiday that Badu’s publicist began asking interviewers to avoid the subject. Like Billie, Badu performed emotions that hit all corners of a room, her freeform scatting a product of jazz and blues. “More than Billie and I sound alike, I think we feel alike,” Badu said in 1997.
As a child of the ’70s, Badu grew up on Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Chaka Khan. But more accurately, the locus of her sound was hip-hop. She was born Erica Wright in Dallas, two years before hip-hop emerged as a subculture. A young Erica started performing at age 2 on a recorder her grandmother taught her how to use, though she was only allowed to sing church songs. Both her mom, Kolleen Wright, and her grandmother were actresses. (Badu didn’t see much of her father, who was in and out of jail.) Badu’s first show was a first-grade play where she sang the novelty song “Nuttin’ for Christmas.” Around 7, she wrote her first song on a piano her grandmother bought her and then 20 more tunes in the first week.
Badu began interrogating big ideas when she attended a Catholic school. “I thought it was odd that we didn’t question what we were doing,” Badu said in a 2018 interview with Vulture. “What is this ‘blood of the lamb’? What does this mean? And whenever I would ask questions, I would either get manufactured answers or get in trouble for asking questions. I just thought I was not fit for society.” In reality, it was the best artistic vantage point and the genesis of Badu, the philosopher. Curiosity is the centerpiece of her work. She later studied dance at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and majored in theater at Grambling State University before dropping out in 1993. Post-college, she taught dance and theater to a youth group, along with disciplines like yoga and breathwork. Her growing attraction to spiritual methods became the fabric for a body of work devoted to pursuing wisdom and healing. She actually practiced what she preached, then took her studies out on the road, exposing listeners to strange and deeper ways of thinking.
Between jobs, Badu performed in Dallas as a duo with her cousin Robert Bradford, aka Free, under the group name Erykah Free. Their earliest breaks were opening gigs for visitors like A Tribe Called Quest, Naughty by Nature, and D’Angelo. After completing a 19-song demo titled Country Cousins, the two began shopping their music to labels. From Bad Boy Entertainment to Priority Records, everyone, including Sean “Puffy” Combs, passed on signing them. Meanwhile, Badu did another performance at the Austin music festival South by Southwest, which she had been doing since she was 19. She’d changed her name from Erica to Erykah and later adopted the name Badu, after one of her stage riffs: “ba-du, ba-du,” which unbeknownst to her at the time, also meant “to manifest” in Arabic. A demo tape got back to Massenburg and he soon signed her to his Universal label, Kedar Entertainment, as a solo act in 1996.
One unlikely source of inspiration for Badu was her time spent working at Steve Harvey’s Comedy House, where she would play Lucille Ball to his Ricky Ricardo. During shows there she flowed like a rapper and was quick with a joke on the mic. Her humor lent Baduizm a distinctly light edge on tracks like “Afro (Freestyle Skit),” where she threatens to repossess the pager she gave a dude who’s dodging her messages. “Certainly” opens with a sparkle of keys that quickly blends into a trembling bassline as Badu reflects on a surprising new love with sly wonder: “Who gave you permission to rearrange me?” The song’s final note holds and travels effortlessly into the opening crescendo of “4 Leaf Clover,” a vigorous remake of Atlantic Starr’s 1983 hit “Touch a Four Leaf Clover.” It’s a welcome jolt at the album’s midpoint and a master class in vocal control. (It makes sense that Badu cited Brandy’s 1994 debut as a primary influence.)
Outside Texas, a generation of soul stars was cropping up in enclaves like Philadelphia, home of the Questlove-backed Roots, who’d just brought keyboardist/songwriter James Poyser into the mix. Working with Badu, they doused Baduizm with live instrumental flourishes on three tracks: “Afro (Freestyle Skit),” the scratchy lounge number “Sometimes,” and the sleek “Otherside of the Game,” about the dilemma of loving a drug dealer. The latter’s occasional horn stabs waft between rim shots as Badu submits, “Work ain’t honest, but it pays the bills.”
The album’s most transcendent moment, “Next Lifetime,” finds her at another crossroads, not above entertaining an illicit affair. The possibility of it hangs in the air and folds beautifully into the song’s woozy ambiance: “How can I want you for myself when I’m already someone’s girl?” Her solution is more divine than definite: She’d have to see him in another lifetime, maybe as butterflies, such a gorgeous way to use reincarnation as a send-off.
You could just sit and listen to Badu and get lifted if you wanted, but the path to true enlightenment required deeper engagement. “On and On” debuted when I was in eighth grade, where the girls in my chorus class ingested its cosmic mantras, having experienced only puppy love. “You rush into destruction ’cause you don’t have nothing left,” we sang anyway. We, too, picked our friends like we picked our fruits. Paired with the ease of bebop, Badu’s lyricism formed scriptures that were too self-aware to be sanctimonious. As a teacher, she had banter for days. “I work at pleasing me ’cause I can’t please you,” she asserts. There’s a moment in the middle of “Appletree” where she drags a line, as she does, like the most confident cigarette pull, and finishes her thought with a high wail: “I… can’t control the soul flowing in me. Ooh-wee.”
Badu has long been held up as an Earth Mother with an endless stash of sage and knowledge whose image resonated because she adhered to the lifestyle in the real world. This was, of course, an integral appeal of the neo-soul movement: the visual contrast between the authentic bohemian goddess and the glamorized R&B star. Badu brought African aesthetics and scholarship into the pop arena without flattening what they represented. There was a meaning behind the headwrap; the incense and candles she lit on stage; the numerology, derived from the Five Percent Nation (“Most intellects do not believe in God/But they fear us just the same,” Badu crooned in “On and On.”) At the same time, her music actively challenged bad politics and systems. She sounded not only informed but empathetic. And this is the same analog girl who later became a digital savant and a doula who sells out vagina-scented incense. But the current era of reckoning has revealed how some of hip-hop’s most radical thinkers have failed to confront retrograde ideals within their own generation. You could hear the record stop when Badu said schoolgirls should wear knee-length skirts or when she “saw the good” in Bill Cosby and Hitler. Turns out, there are limits to being theoretical versus pragmatic; it lifts the veil a bit off a musician known for both her social awareness and otherworldly mystique. Sometimes the teacher needs teaching.
But under the tenets of Baduizm, that’s how the world should work: an infinite exchange of ideas on our endless journeys of self-discovery. Life is a circle, and fittingly, Baduizm’s endpoint is its beginning: “Rim Shot.” By then, Badu has taken you on an odyssey. It’s a testament to her voice, purpose, and charisma that the album maintains intrigue through its latter half, anchored by musings like “No Love” and “Drama.” Amid subtle knocks, Badu rattles off a list of afflictions: “World inflation, demonstration, miseducation/No celebration to celebrate your lives.” Her follow-up, 2000’s Mama’s Gun, would organize these loose threads into an overtly political project with a less circuitous worldview. As Daphne Brooks wrote for Pitchfork, that record “offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement.” Baduizm, though, set a mood and intention for decades to come, not only for Badu but for her future benefactors. The album positioned her as an artist in flux, immune to categories, whose career is proof of Black music’s ability to morph too quickly to ever be contained.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The latest from Norwegian electronic producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm finds the missing link between the modern classical works of Steve Reich and Tangerine Dream's cheesy grandeur, resulting in a fist-pumping, hyper-cosmic space-disco epic that conjures both the retro-futurism of Logan's Run and Manuel Göttsching's influential 1981 electro-prog mammoth  E2-E4.

Where You Go I Go Too

My favorite trick on the opening title track to Lindstrøm's Where You Go I Go Too was first revealed on his 2005 album with Prins Thomas: During long stretches of its near half-hour length, the arrangement does this wonderful and unsettling thing where the music simultaneously seems to expand outwards, curl in on itself, and then unexpectedly swerve off to the side. With its shimmering, strobing synthesizer melodies, dizzy layering, and measured rhythmic pulse, "Where You Go I Go Too" superficially resembles the depth of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and the cheesy grandeur of Tangerine Dream. But, as with his recent covers of Can ("Mighty Girl") and Jon & Vangelis (last year's "Let It Happen"), its logic is all Lindstrøm: The more he embraces the work of others, the more he ends up sounding like himself.
The rest of Where You Go I Go Too transposes the ambitions of the title track into shorter settings: With its floating chords and bubbly enthusiasm, "Grand Ideas" is close to Lindstrøm's more classicist disco work and given a heightened intensity by its placement in the middle of the album, like a moment of clarity amidst the disorienting swirl. Closer "The Long Way Home" apes the title track's splendor but with a twist: The synth work of its first half is complemented by hyper-manicured guitar breaks. In its second half, the track capitulates entirely to its cornier impulses, shifting into plush and suffocatingly slow electronic disco-funk.
Stretching three tracks over 55 minutes and occasionally wandering far away from the dancefloor, Where You Go I Go Too has all the hallmarks of a masterpiece from a reclusive auteur. And while it shares its bloat, excess, and splendor with any number of cosmic disco or Balearic producers at the more decadent end of disco revivalism, it begs for a context more weighty than "disco revivalism." Paradoxically, Lindstrøm knows all the right moves to give his own brand of spacey disco an air of transcendence, but the result feels so effortless that his facsimile and the "real thing" become indistinguishable-- a fake so real it's beyond fake.


The Brooklyn producer Max Ravitz makes homespun techno with lush pads, errant noise, and intricate rhythms. His latest LP offers variations on the sound made with a limited palette.

Patricia: Several Shades of the Same Color

Several Shades of the Same Color

The album format persists as dance music’s Achilles’ heel. For genres whose popularity have been predicated on 12” singles and DJ mixes, house and techno need albums as much as, say, jazz needs music videos. They’re not necessarily bad propositions, but they can seem excessive and erroneous compared to the music’s roots. Of course, this has never stopped house and techno artists from diving headlong into the album format, often as an attempt to reach mainstream audiences beyond the crate-digging, club-haunting faithful. And from the 2010s’ influx of boutique labels focused on digital and cassettes, another trend has developed: album-length releases as experimental dance music’s bog standard. No doubt, their proliferation has yielded a number of cult classics over the years, but it hasn’t solved the inherent complications of filling a format meant for personal listening with music made for DJs.
Max Ravitz inhabits this unique dichotomy. During the four years he’s released homespun, hardware-built techno as Patricia, the Brooklyn producer has made the album format his bread and butter. His sound—a textural, desaturated techno that often incorporates lush pads, errant noise, and intricate rhythms—befits full-length records more than his less experimental peers. The first two Patricia LPs, Body Issues and Bem Inventory, explored Ravitz’s gritty motif with an ear for heavy dancefloor beats. Besides the strengths of their music, those records also used brevity to great effect, each with six tracks running over 30 minutes. There was plenty of variety for DJs to select from, even as the tracklists seemed intentional enough to encourage repeat plays.
By contrast, Several Shades of the Same Color is the most ambitious Patricia release to date. Its title can be taken pretty much literally: a bunch of techno variations made with a limited palette. Each of the album’s three 12”s develop discrete pockets of mood, ranging from the dubby and emotive to the eccentric and restless. At 15 tracks spread across 91 minutes, however, Several Shades trades its predecessors’ pointedness for glut, and its range for disorder.
Ravitz’s music is at its best when the melodic and percussive complexities entwine into labyrinthine patterns. The opening third of Several Shades iterates that formula masterfully, with the ebullient “Speed Wagon Night Bride” and the drumless “The Words Are Just Sounds” among its most memorable examples. When a markedly darker tone emerges after “Deku Tree”’s modular synth interlude, the shift brings a welcome contrast. “The Electric Eye Is Upon Me” is an ominous foil to the warm bounce of “I Know the Face, But Not the Name”; “Étant Donnés” is the bewitching, Aphexian counterpart to the muddy plod of “Thoughts of You.” And with its sluggish beat and downtrodden synths, “Thoughts of You” reveals some of the limitations to Patricia’s formula—that is, not every shade of techno suits his spartan methods.
There are no explicitly bad tracks on Several Shades, but its more pedestrian and utilitarian fare can seem redundant. Deep and banging as it is, “Shiba Inu Dub” sounds rudimentary next to the low-key alien funk of “Liminal States” or a swaggering oddball like “German Friendship.” “Feel Your Body” and “You Never Listen” are as hard-nosed as they are familiar, whereas “It Gets Worse at Night” subverts its basic 303 squelch with a broken electro skitter and cacophonous atmosphere. That said, “You Never Listen” is a bona fide dancefloor bomb that could go down massively in the mix. Where private listeners may find Several Shades lacking in fresh ideas as it nears its close, DJs will be no less spoiled for choice.
Just before the album’s end, “Alternate Mindset” compresses Patricia’s strengths into a dark diamond of a tune. Ravitz wraps a straightforward acid sequence in punchy syncopation, otherworldly synth, and sumptuous bass, all building on the low-slung groove. It’s at once clever and unrefined, heady and sensual, effortless and elaborate. Such deft balances are key to Patricia’s appeal, and Several Shades shines brightest when he tempers dance music’s immediacy with sounds that linger well after they’ve rattled the speakers.


The Wake, who recorded for Factory and Sarah, mixed nervously funky post-punk with bedroom synth-pop. After repressing two singles for Record Store Day, Captured Tracks has reissued the Glasgow band's 1985 sophomore LP along with non-album tracks from the era.

Here Comes Everybody

Some bands have to wait years or even decades to be fully appreciated. The Wake were built that way from the start. The Glasgow band can claim the unique distinction of recording for two of the preeminent British indie labels of the late 20th century, Factory and Sarah. Fittingly, their best music mixes nervously funky post-punk with wispy bedroom synth-pop. But of course, that combination was hardly obvious at the time, and it's easy to see how in an earlier media environment, the Wake must've sounded like lesser clones of New Order or the Cure.
The Wake will still probably always remain a cult band compared to those groups, but they've proven increasingly influential over the past few years. Stateside indie poppers the Drums have said they came together with "the idea of completely ripping the Wake off." Recently defunct Swedish duo Air France borrowed from the Wake for a song on their 2006 On Trade Winds EP. But leading the Wake revival has been Brooklyn label Captured Tracks, which reissued two of the band's singles for Record Store Day 2011 and has commissioned a handful of cover versions by its roster, whose members generally share the Wake's dreamy melancholy and independent mindset.
Captured Tracks has now lovingly reissued the Wake's 1985 sophomore album-- by some measure their best-- and the non-album tracks from the same era, which are even better. Singer-guitarist Gerard "Caesar" McInulty, who had previously been a member of pre-fame Altered Images, formed the Wake in 1981 with singer-keyboardist Carolyn Allen, drummer Steven Allen, and bassist Joe Donnelly, soon to be replaced by Bobby Gillespie, who would go on to greater fame with the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. But 1982 debut album Harmony hewed a bit too clumsily to the Factory line. Gillespie had moved on by the time of all but one of the tracks here, replaced by Alex MacPherson.
Here Comes Everybody holds up as a touchstone for aching, atmospheric synth-pop, all slinky guitars, crisp percussion, textured keyboard, and limber bass. "This is a page from my diary," Caesar begins on "O Pamela", which has since been covered by Nouvelle Vague; with a guitar-and-synth intro that uncannily predicts Tears for Fears' far glossier (and more commercially successful) 1985 hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", it could be the diary of more recent artists from Washed Out to Youth Lagoon, too. Nor is the album afraid of taking something schmaltzy-- like the embarrassing Don McLean quote on seven-minute "Melancholy Man", or the jaunty harmonica on heartbroken "World of Her Own"-- and investing it with fragile sincerity. Expansively wispy, this is a record best heard as a whole, a missing evolutionary link between Josef K and the Field Mice.
The most immediate examples of the Wake's legacy, however, and the tracks you'll most likely play for your friends, come on disc two, which collects the group's 7" and 12" releases from 1983 to 1987. The ambiguous 1984 single "Talk About the Past", with its twitchy guitar and splashes of piano by the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly, and 1985's loping contemplation "Of the Matter", with its elegaic vividness ("There's a shadow of a shadow moving in"), are both wonderful. But then so is the entirety of 1987's Something That No One Else Could Bring EP, which includes the luminously catchy "Gruesome Castle", with its proto-chillwave hook: "Arise, arise, and keep up appearances." The only relative duds are the murkily sprawled 1983 B-side "Host", with Gillespie, and the dubby finale "Of the Matter (Version)", which at the very least lets the record end with the original song's epigrammatic closing words: "And when you find me, you will find me alone/ Then we'll walk to your house, walk together, walk home."
Here Comes Everybody and its singles have been reissued before, in 2002 by LTM, but this is their first U.S. release, and their first vinyl pressing since the original Factory records. First available on Record Store Day alongside reissues of albums by Cleaners From Venus and Medicine, the box set I purchased online is simply but carefully packaged, with a 12"x12" booklet of historically significant liner notes by Caesar, lyrics, and photography, plus full sleeves for both records and a 7" featuring Portland-based Captured Tracks band Blouse's spaced-out cover of the Something EP's "Pale Spectre". On the flip is labelmates Craft Spells' complementary "Talk About the Past".
That last song, one almost explicitly referred to on the title track of Air France's Sincerely Yours labelmate the Honeydrips' 2007 Here Comes the Future, sounds especially relevant at a time when being internet-famous is no longer a novelty: "Have you heard the good news/ Everybody is a star/ Have you heard the good news/ Everybody works so hard." It's perhaps no coincidence that the title of Here Comes Everybody, a Finnegans Wake reference that confirmed the Wake's relationship to the James Joyce novel, was also the title of New York University professor Clay Shirky's 2008 book on crowdsourcing and "mass amateurization."
It might not be a surprise, either, that Caesar and Carolyn Allen, after teaming up with the Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars' Bobby Wratten as the Occasional Keepers, have selected 2012 to reunite for a new album by the Wake, A Light Far Out, which came out in early May on LTM. They might not ever be truly stars, but the time they've worked so hard for is, well, now.


In a season where “pussy” has become a household word again for all the wrong reasons, Pussy Riot return to exact their vengeance. At least, that’s the narrative for Nadya Tolokno’s xxx EP.

xxx

Four years ago, in October of 2012, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for “hooliganism” after staging a protest performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Pussy Riot leveraged performance and punk rock to critique the Putin regime as well as the Russian Orthodox Church. Although music was initially incidental to the project, Pussy Riot was championed in the Western imagination and among the international pop elite as a band—a characterization made manifest as Tolokno and Alyokhina were writ into riot-grrrl herstory and invited to perform alongside Madonna at a 2014 Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center upon their release. As of last year, the pair has been releasing music for the music sphere, including the Eric Garner tribute “I Can’t Breathe,” a Le Tigre collaboration made for “House of Cards,” and a pro-refugee track filmed in Banksy’s Dismaland. Now, Tolokno is releasing a solo EP on Atlantic imprint Nice Life, produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (who Tolokno also worked with on the chilling anti-corruption track “Chaika”).
Now, in a season where “pussy” has become a household word again, albeit for all the wrong reasons, the original pussy provocateurs have returned to exact their vengeance on macho would-be-rulers the world over. At least, that’s the narrative for Nadya Tolokno’s xxx EP. Working with pop music as a medium makes total sense for Tolokno, considering her irrefutable magnetism and keen understanding of media weaponization as well as the deity-like status with which we imbue pop music icons. That said, it’s disappointing to see the Pussy Riot name, which was built on principles of non-hierarchy, collectivity, and anti-capitalism, leveraged as a personal brand—something she has been critiqued for both by former members of the Pussy Riot collective and by other Russian feminists and activists. (Tolokno maintains that the Pussy Riot name can be taken up by anyone but as one meaning gets reified, the rest dematerialize.)
The songs on xxx are a mixed bag. Two of the three tracks are written in English and either directly or indirectly anti-Trump. At a time when “the Russians” are synonymous with Bond villains or election hacking, there’s something thrilling about seeing Tolokno fire back at America’s own villainous tendencies. However, both of these tracks can ring a little hollow.
Tolokno has said that “Straight Outta Vagina” was written as a response to patriarchy, misogyny, and the overrepresentation of dicks in pop music. In a phallocentric world where normalized derision of vaginas leads to lifelong body image issues, there’s a reason that Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party is in the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection. On the other hand, at a time when genital-centered essentialism is used by to perpetuate violence and to call for violent legislation against trans women, suggesting that only people with vaginas are affected by misogyny feels irresponsibly cis-sexist.
Out of all the anti-Trump songs coming out recently, “Make America Great Again” is the most direct. It’s an earworm that’s not quite as disastrous as Le Tigre’s pro-Hillary jingle, though if we’re going by Tolokno’s own criteria (“Let other people in/Listen to your women/Stop killing black children”) it would be far more accurate to say that America Was Never Great. While the lyrics are relatively low key, the accompanying video is all-out brutal, splicing dystopian footage of real Trump speeches with gruesome imagery of Tolokno being branded, sexually assaulted, and tortured by Trump goons in orange wigs.
One of the more mesmerizing tracks is “Organs,” a deft Russian-language track (English translation can be read by enabling closed captions in YouTube) with Tolokno rapping on the interplay of bodies and the body politic while bathing nude in a tub of blood. “In 2014, I was released from prison and put into a bloody bath,” Tolokno tells The-Village.ru, citing “the annexation of Crimea, the fighting on the territory of Ukraine, the downed Boeing, attacks on political activists (including ourselves), the murder of [liberal politician] Boris Nemtsov.”
The inspiration behind “Organs” is a sobering reminder that, burgeoning music profile aside, Tolokno is undertaking tangible, dangerous activism with regards to the Russian prison system. Shortly after getting out, Tolokno and Alyokhina co-founded Zona Prava, (Zone of Rights) an advocacy group meant to provide legal aid and informational support to prisoners, as well as Zona Pravda (Zone of Truth), a media site dedicated to in-depth coverage of courts, prisons, and labor camps, including trials, human rights abuses, hunger strikes.
The video for “Straight Outta Vagina” co-stars a young girl in a balaclava, implying the potential of a new generation of feminists. Thinking about the inadequate, cursory coverage that the ongoing prison strike has gotten in American media, I can’t help but hope that the next generation is inspired not just by Tolokno’s fearlessness as a performer but also her fearlessness as an activist.


The Atlanta rapper and Playboi Carti protégé aims to set himself apart with his zoned-out sing-rap.

Project X

Have you felt the Rage this summer? Click through any major label rap A&R’s Dropbox right now and you’d probably find folder after folder of beats made with the sneering synths and hollowed-out bass thuds that defined Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and a swath of the current rap landscape. It feels like the industry has been using the sound Carti popularized as a kind of cheat code for creating a viral moment: Some of the year’s biggest rap songs, like Trippie Redd’s “Miss the Rage,” sound like WLR leftovers. Label-supported rising stars like SoFaygo, SSGKobe, and midwxst have hopped on these beats as well.
In theory, Atlanta rapper Ken Car$on has a more natural connection to this trend than his peers. The 19-year-old is Playboi Carti’s protégé, signed to his imprint Opium in 2019, and he and his go-to producers Starboy and Outtatown were already experimenting with this type of production before WLR came out. Car$on’s summer 2020 EP Teen X now reads as a testing ground for Starboy and Outtatown, who’d later bring those molten melodies to WLR songs like “Meh” and “Control.” On his full-length debut Project X, Car$on deepens his working relationship with his core producers, and aims to set himself apart with his zoned-out sing-rap.
Unlike Carti, who yelps and screams all over WLR, Car$on is comparatively chill. The way he deadpans about drugs makes him sound like your high school friend’s cooler older brother. On the electric “Rock N Roll,” he seems to just shrug about being so high that he sees a UFO. With Auto-Tune, his voice turns glowing and percussive—think Duwap Kaine if he had a whole team behind him—and it gives rote chants like the one on the second half of “Run + Ran” a little more heft. Sometimes, he’ll punch in sung lines to create bright little vignettes. On “So What,” he matches the sweet thrill of a one night stand with bars that pile up on top of each other: “She love my aesthetic, yeah, she say I’m cool/Diamonds on my ears and necklace, they wet just like a pool!”
But as the album progresses, it becomes obvious when Car$on’s cartoonish cool shrouds lazy songwriting. For whatever reason, he’s hellbent on following every fun song with a record full of cookie-cutter, rapid-fire flows and stock phrases about counting his racks or diamonds wetter than the ocean. The quirks that make him interesting don’t have room to breathe when he’s trying to emulate Carti’s chaos or Lil Uzi Vert’s velocity. The most glaring error of bad imitation and sequencing comes in the two-song run of “Shake” into “Hella,” where he uses the exact same, one-word-chorus formula over beats that sound painfully familiar.
In a generous reading, Project X aims for an entirely different tone than Whole Lotta Red; Car$on and his producers are going for something sweeter, less scorched and serrated, and they achieve it in fits and starts. Still, I can’t help but feel cynical about Car$on’s rage agenda. He grew up around rap veterans like TM88 and Southside, yet in his interviews, he throws out rote rock star answers about his inspirations—in one, he says he doesn’t like R&B and only listens to himself, and in another, he says he doesn’t listen to rap and lists off All-American Rejects and Blink-182 as favorites. In truth, Car$on at his best sounds more like a student of online rap scenes like plugg, giving the swampy vocal techniques and playful songwriting a dazzling makeover. The irony of rage, however, is that by aspiring to be different, too many rappers end up sounding the same.

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Neil Young's new album Storytone involves ten tracks recorded live in front of an orchestra. Despite the manic activity of Neil Young's 2014—which involves a tech startup, anti-oil advocacy, a book and panitings—the high concept of Storytone barely raises an eyebrow.

Storytone

Even for an artist with the mercurial track record of Neil Young, this has been a pretty strange year. Since turning 68 last November, Young has become a tech startup figurehead, an enemy of Canadian conservatives and oil companies, a second-time author, and a watercolor artist. He’s done a European tour with a modified Crazy Horse, U.S. shows all by his lonesome, and recorded a no-fi covers collection with Jack White. And perhaps most notably, he’s divorcing his wife of 36 years, and has been spotted canoodling with a notable ex-mermaid.
Amid that manic activity, the high concept of Storytone barely raises an eyebrow. Ten tracks recorded live in front of a 92-piece orchestra and choir or a jazz big band, the project doesn’t fit neatly within either the acoustic or electric categories that have been the magnetic poles of Young’s career. But it also calls back to some odd moments from his discography: the orchestrated excesses of "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There’s a World" from Harvest, with a dash of 1988’s largely forgettable This Note’s for You. Once again, he’s fallen in love with the actress, and only a symphonic scale will do.
Unlike the Voice-o-Graph pops and crackles of A Letter Home, which seemed like a classic Neil joke on the heels of his fidelity-obsessed Pono pitch, Storytone spares no sonic expense, with the arrangements set to maximum lush. So maybe call it A Little Touch of Schmeil in the Night, even if the songs only sound like standards and Young is far from your typical crooner. A set of 10 songs predominantly concerned with the withering of old love and the promise of new—and, as such, haunted by his recent romantic tabloid escapades—Storytone is unabashedly melodramatic and earnest, occasionally sounding more like the passions of a 17-year-old instead of someone on the brink of their seventies.
Unfortunately, aside from placing that unorthodox warble against a velvety backdrop, Storytone plays it straight, often veering into the deep schmaltz of a Vegas revue. The arrangements, by Michael Bearden (who has worked with Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga) and Chris Walden (an arranger for Michael Bublé and "American Idol"), are exquisitely produced but hollow, gilding the songs without adding any thoughtful counterpoint. "Who’s Gonna Stand Up?", Neil’s latest eco-anthem, is given a dark, cinematic urgency, and the light countrypolitan stomp of "When I Watch You Sleeping" recalls the rustic sweep of 2005’s Prairie Wind, but more typical are the harp and chime twinkles applied without subtlety to "Tumbleweed" or the Navy Pier blooze of "Say Hello to Chicago".
Helpfully, you can assess these additions thanks to Young providing solo versions of each track on the album’s deluxe edition—sparse near-demos on guitar, piano, and ukulele that come closer to the intimate sound of his recent, rambling theatre sets. Stripped down, the dark, doubtful elements of "Plastic Flowers" or "Say Hello to Chicago" come to the fore, Young’s tenor sounding vulnerable instead of overmatched. Here, the contradiction of putting a protest song against fracking and fossil fuels right next to a song called "I Want to Drive My Car" is somewhat resolved, as the latter gets a hushed version that makes Young’s autophilia sound more like an embarrassing addiction than a passion. But the solo versions of the more PDA material in the album’s back half make something of a case for their fancier counterparts, leaving nothing to hide valentine lyrics unavoidably about Daryl Hannah (the “A Man Needs a Mermaid” joke writes itself).
Despite the dual versions, Storytone never finds a comfortable middle ground: the orchestral versions too maudlin, the solo versions over-sharing. More so than the goofily overwrought Harvest tracks with the London Symphony Orchestra, the flaws of Storytone throw back to Young’s restless '80s (or 2002’s Are You Passionate?), where genres were meticulously recreated but often a poor fit for his songwriting and performing strengths. For an artist who can make an orchestral roar with Old Black or twist an emotional knife on a pump organ, the extra gloss is subtraction by addition.


Suprise release Thank Your Lucky Stars is Beach House's second full-length in as many months. Spiritually, the album feels closer to the darker mood the duo cultivated before they signed to Sub Pop.

Thank Your Lucky Stars

Over the last decade, Beach House have been remarkably consistent: at regular intervals, they put an immaculate new record into the world, and each tends to satisfy the same need. Until now, their pace of releases has indicated a grasp of the spot their music held in listeners’ hearts; the world that Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand build on their records is a place we want to revisit, but the spaces in between records has felt essential to that magic. They are in their own way a theatrical band, and what’s more theatrical than a well-placed pause?
Which all makes the appearance of Thank Your Lucky Stars, the band’s second full-length in as many months, surprising. Depression Cherry is still very much in view, and as fans, it feels a bit like the cast to a hit show suddenly reappearing for one more encore after the house lights have switched on and we were filing out. Thank Your’s nine songs were recorded at the same time as Depression Cherry, and they do have a slightly darker edge: Legrand said that the album was more "political" in nature and that they felt the need for these songs to exist on their own, separate from the long-lens telegraphing of the typical album release cycle.
Their sound feels purposefully smaller, tamping down the reverb that made Teen Dream, Bloom, and Depression Cherry feel like they were recorded in great stone cathedrals. You can hear them experimenting more with "off" notes in their otherwise-immaculate arrangements. On "Somewhere Tonight", Legrand lets a sour note sneak into one of her organ runs, and "One Thing" opens with a heavy cloud of electric guitar that feels more tethered to snaking cables and rattling amps than usual. Spiritually, the album feels closer to the mood the duo cultivated before they signed to Sub Pop: These songs feel pneumatic, dusty, like they are pulling a blanket around themselves in a heatless attic to ward off a threatening chill.
The mood is also bleaker in spots, as if joy and comfort had vanished from the songs along with the reverb. "All Your Yeahs" is closer to the midnight sulk of Johnny Jewel and Chromatics than their usual open-air romanticism. And "Elegy to the Void", the album’s clear standout, might be the most death-obsessed Beach House have ever been: The organ processional that wells up in the song’s intro has a funereal tinge, while Legrand sings darkly of "Sons and daughters/ Bending at the altar/ Disappearing in the mirror." The song offers a series of gorgeous images—a "black clock, looming distant" and "freckle-faced young virgin"—as it surges into a slow-motion burst, Scally’s normally crystalline guitar breaking apart like a DNA strand uncoupling.
But Thank Your is still undeniably a Beach House album, a familiar mix of warm tones and chilly sentiments. With the imprint still fading on Depression, *Thank Your’*s impact is undeniably dulled, causing a strange "too much of a good thing" problem. You start noticing surface similarities that you wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise: Play the arpeggiated keyboard figure that opens this album’s "Common Girl" next to Bloom’s "On the Sea", for instance. Their music is built on echoes: even their self-titled debut felt like covers of chansons you didn’t remember. Timing isn’t everything, of course, and Thank Your Lucky Star**s, as surprising a gesture of generosity as it is, is still welcome. But Legrand and Scally, who know their way around a stage, would do well to gracefully exit left for a while and give this run of music some time to sink in.


Drawing on funk, Afrobeat, and spiritual tradition, two beautifully crafted albums from the elusive UK group passionately consider the entirety of the Black experience in this moment.

SAULT: Untitled (Black Is) / Untitled (Rise)

Untitled (Black Is) / Untitled (Rise)

Fifty-some years ago, Nina Simone recorded a song for the children. On its face, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” offers encouragement and hope. Beneath the surface, its somber chords and heavy gait reach for something more complex, unable to ignore the darkness clouding the aspirations of the next generation. In 1969, there were plenty of reasons for a young Black person to feel broken. Within the decade, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and four little girls in Birmingham had been killed for being Black. The relentless violence communicated that no one was safe, not the exalted leaders or the purest innocents. Amid so much violence, to carry optimism for the youth was more than just an act of resistance. It was testament to the resilience of Blackness. During a live show at Morehouse College that same year, rocking an Afro, hoop earrings, and a black orchid wrapped around her wrist, Simone improvised the melody and lyrics while the band chugged along: “When you’re feeling depressed, alienated, and real low, there’s a great truth that you should know/To be young, gifted and Black, your soul’s intact, don’t you forget it!”
Untitled (Rise), the second of two beautifully crafted albums released by UK outfit SAULT this year, closes with a song for the children. Like Simone’s work, “Little Boy” holds space for light and dark. A frank warning about the “boys in blue” pivots gracefully to divine affirmations: “Heaven’s angels, shining down on us/They won’t go away, God has chosen us,” before the song ends abruptly, on an unresolved note. 2020 is not 1969, and though “Little Boy” contains more sadness than Simone’s song, it champions that same sense of resilience, one forged in a powerful sense of self and unafraid of struggle. It’s a moving finale to a pair of albums that mirror the external and internal tumult of a year marked by global protests for racial justice. Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) are protest music and much more: They are music for the sense of loss that persists when the chants begin to waver and the crowds disperse. They are simultaneously a reprieve and healthy kindling for the fire that rages on in those who don’t have the privilege of turning it off. They are combative, introspective, affirming, and heartbreaking. They are a portrait of Black pain and joy in all its complexities, and in their refusal to flatten Blackness, they are rehabilitative.
While many of this year’s protest anthems have taken cues from hip-hop—think Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” and Pop Smoke’s “Dior”—SAULT’s more obvious inspirations spring from musical styles of the 1970s, blending a rhythmic foundation of funk and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat with disco, soul, and R&B. Not much is known about the elusive group, who’ve shunned press coverage and declined to volunteer their names. But publications like Variety, the Chicago Reader, and Paste have traced them back to at least two British artists, producer Inflo (who’s worked closely with soul singer Michael Kiwanuka and rapper Little Simz) and R&B singer Cleo Sol, with additional credits listed for Chicago rapper Kid Sister and one Kadeem Clarke. In 2019, the group similarly released two albums, 5 and 7, forays into minimal funk with a political edge that hinted at the work to follow.
Untitled (Black Is) arrived, fittingly, on Juneteenth, just 25 days after the killing of George Floyd. If the timing wasn’t clear enough, the album’s sharp refrains, spoken-word interludes, and deliberate use of repetition make its intentions clear. Echoing the best of Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Black Is is shaped by gorgeous melodies and unequivocal messaging. The haunting shouts of children in “Stop Dem” ring long after the rest of the song has fallen away, a forceful reminder that selective listening is not an option. This call to action is repurposed throughout the album’s first half in several related yet distinct styles along the continuum of Black music, mimicking the chameleonic flair of veteran session musicians. Prominent drum kits and bass guitar exude the warmth and fullness of a live band as the group cycles through the West African bounce of “Don’t Shoot Guns Down” and the soulful whimpers of “Why We Cry Why We Die.” Black Is draws heavily from Black religious traditions, from the spiritual quality of the stunning “Hard Life” to the synthy gospel of “Eternal Life,” which feels like beaming straight up to heaven. On the gentle and contemplative “Sorry Ain’t Enough,” the group turns inwards, confronting the challenges that can arise within a movement: “Can you forgive your people?/They’re just hurting inside/If you look in the mirror/You will see it’s just pride.”
As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus. “Bow,” featuring Michael Kiwanuka, brings a mid-album injection of vim via Afrobeat-inspired rhythms and soukous guitar licks as it advocates insistently for pan-Africanism and international solidarity. The lo-fi intimacy of “Black,” the closest the album gets to hip-hop, succeeds in finding a perfectly imperfect loop around its titular thesis statement. The swinging oohs of “Miracles” introduce the album’s soft landing, marking a clear distinction from the urgent militancy of the opening. Like a collective exhale, the record’s final moments are loving and calming. At 20 songs, Black Is is ill-suited for short attention spans but therein lies its strength: It passionately considers the entirety of the Black experience in this moment.
Released 13 weeks after Untitled (Black Is), Untitled (Rise) follows a similar structural course with greater production value and attention to detail. Shiny strings undergird a mission statement that doesn’t sacrifice the bite of Black Is but situates itself more firmly in hope. Rise devotes most of its time to dance-driven grooves that flow freely between disco, carnival-esque drum breaks, and polyrhythmic Afrobeat, embracing the motivating power of finding joy in the face of pain. This joy is not escapist; it’s fuel for the ultimate goal of liberation. The uplifting drum break of “Strong,” coupled with the twinkling electric piano of “Fearless,” complement rather than minimize the clarion call to keep fighting for justice. “Street Fighter” presents the directive more bluntly (“We gon’ fight it whether you like it/Keep playing the music loud”), openly challenging the violent history of backlash against Black music. On Rise, hope is often imagined via religious imagery. With its angelic chorus, album standout “Free” weighs the shortcomings of a close relationship against the love of God, while the bright optimism of “Son Shine” uplifts the divine as a protective force.
Rise’s “You Know It Ain’t” expands the spoken-word interludes of Black Is into a full song. While these moments can feel heavy-handed at other times, here the humor is welcome and specific: “I see you over by the water cooler on your break talking ’bout, ‘Tanisha, your mental health is super important to me’/But you know it ain’t!” Both albums’ energy shifts considerably towards the end, but where Black Is aims for comfort, Rise spills over with grief, fear, and uncertainty. The melancholy chords and frank lyrics of “Scary Times” offer the clearest distillation of this tension, and the heart-wrenching instrumental “The Black & Gold” sounds like the sun setting on a life. Their heaviness feels like an acknowledgment of the loss that shadows Black people’s desire for better, a subtle reminder to say their names and never forget them. Like the bittersweet optimism of Nina Simone’s song for the children, SAULT’s work embraces dualities—light and dark, happy and sad, life and death—transforming them from opposing forces into sources of strength.
In an op-ed for NPR this year, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard lamented the neutralization of Marvin Gaye’s soulful rebuke of Black death, “What’s Going On.” “It hit me then just how many people listen to the groove and the melody of this song, without really hearing the words,” Blanchard said. “And that made me realize that many well-meaning people have heard only the melody of our plight, without knowing what the song means for us.” SAULT’s albums reinvigorate the musical language of Black protest with a message no less urgent—and a delivery no less commanding—than it was half a century ago. Their whole-hearted commitment to making sound inextricable from meaning reflects the demands of a moment when abolition is gaining more traction with young activists than reform. The fight for Black lives deserves art that mirrors the depth of the crisis and the spirit of the movement. SAULT’s work rises superbly to the task.

Buy: Untitled (Black Is) - Rough Trade / Untitled (Rise) - Rough Trade
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The East London rapper/singer is mostly successful in creating a portrait of late nights out by using the sounds he grew up with as the backdrop for his free-wheeling ruminations.

N_O CALLER ID

The rapper/singer LYAM, born Liam Harris-Williams, got his start through the ad hoc East London crew TTY, an elusive collective of artists who gained a profile for their nebulous rap-R&B music and notorious rooftop parties. Young Turks eventually signed the group, and they holed up in one of the label’s studios to write and record an EP. While they worked on this record, they simultaneously asked for Miharashi jackets and a monogrammed Prada bag in their contract (as one does) and threw parties in the studio with guest DJs Sampha and RZA (also as one does). The resulting Cry, But Go, released last year, came laced with LYAM’s glowering rhymes over sparse, freeform beats drawing on grime and electronic music. The EP acts as a prelude to the styles LYAM adopts across his solo debut, N_O CALLER ID, on which he crafts a patchwork of grime, Motown soul, and other sounds that he grew up around to match his free-wheeling rhymes on ambitions and anxieties.
The album is suffused with an after-hours vibe—drinks, raves, and speeding cars populate his sleek vision of London. Different voices flit in and out: clips of conversation shuffle between backbeats and guest verses heighten the momentum. Some tracks from the Cry, But Go sessions were used for the album, like on the laid-back “Frith’s Place,” where seesawing synths, a jittery beat, and vocals from R&B singer Lauren Aude form an introspective backdrop for LYAM to reflect on a night out marked by jealousy. Clutching a bottle of Hennessy “like a hand grenade,” his mind wanders to his own dark headspace: “I’m blind with open eyes nowadays,” he raps venomously. “Every time I close ’em see my own demise.”
Trying to keep up with LYAM as he unspools his overactive mind over hazy beats offers its own potent buzz.  On moody standout “Misery,” New York producer Sporting Life loops Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” into a ghostly, menacing setting for LYAM’s rapid-fire delivery: “Lemme go, lemme be, lemme breathe,” he gasps, words collapsing together, “Look in the mirror and I can’t see me.” When he dials into party-minded decadence, he maintains the madcap energy: The boastful “Apollo” rides a glitchy backbeat cut with sharp vocal samples as LYAM convincingly describes how he’ll steal your girl, while “Origami” has brash London rapper Shygirl delivering one of her best coolly shrugged-off verses to match LYAM’s more languorous flow.
The airier R&B songs on N_O CALLER ID don’t land with the same impact. He leans into meandering melodies on “Willing 2,” which floats on distorted, glassy synths and echoing background vocals. LYAM pinpoints evocative details—losing his license to thrill a paramour, again questioning how much he lives in his own head—but the song barely shifts from its narcotized backdrop and cyclical chorus, leading to stasis instead of intrigue. “AWAI,” the clearest pop song on the album, relies on a similar crutch as LYAM treads water while trying on an Auto-Tuned, Drake-ian voice. Yet the rapper seems comfortable in his own lane, and largely pulls it off across N_O CALLER ID. He soundtracks the late-night mental state after a night out when all the highs and lows blur together into one irresistible image.

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The producer Sote makes mind-melting electronic music at the center of a vital scene in Tehran. On his latest record, he applies his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments.

Sacred Horror in Design

Ata Ebtekar’s biography complicates the narratives the West likes to tell itself about ideas of freedom, progress, and the relationships between center and margins, modernity and tradition. Born in Hamburg but raised in Iran, Ebtekar moved with his parents back to Germany when he was 11, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war; at 17, he moved to the Bay Area, where he studied audio engineering, taught courses in digital audio, and, under the alias Sote, recorded mind-melting electronic music for labels like Warp. Eventually, however, he chose Iran. Four years ago, at 41, he moved with his own family back to Tehran. There, he teaches computer music and sound design and is at the center of a small but vital scene of artists making bold, original electronic music.
Their success is a testament to their resourcefulness. The hurdles to creating experimental music in Iran are real, from the difficulty in securing venues to the scant availability of gear or recordings. (In a recent interview, Ebtekar noted that he can’t even buy music from iTunes: If he were to log in to an American bank account from Iran, U.S. authorities could freeze his assets here.) At the same time, this community’s dedication to avant-garde music with no overt social message challenges many Western assumptions about “political” expression in a so-called closed society. They get by as best they can, basically—not unlike their peers in the West, caught between capital and their own less-than-ideal political situation.
Ebtekar’s music has always been intense. His Electric Deaf 12”, from 2002, remains one of the heaviest records in Warp’s catalog: Pummeling breakcore run through scabrous distortion, it suggests Aphex Twin or Squarepusher being blasted with an anti-matter ray. Over the years, however, he has focused his approach less upon heaviness than slipperiness, emphasizing microtonal frequencies, electro-acoustic techniques, and the kinds of granular textures and head-spinning polyrhythms employed by Autechre. His 2014 album Architectonic, for Rabih Beaini’s Morphine label, is an answer to the question, “What would techno sound like without conventional percussive sounds?” Its shuddering, clanging pulses suggest magnetic fields colliding, and freezing rain skittering across windshields.
But Ebtekar’s far-out futurism is balanced by an equal interest in the past. A significant proportion of his catalog—particularly 2006’s Dastgaah, 2007’s Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today (1966-2006), and 2009’s Ornamentalism—has been dedicated to fusing electronic processes with traditional Persian music. He takes up those ideas with renewed vigor on Sacred Horror in Design, applying his customary digital processing to traditional Persian instruments like the santour, a kind of hammered dulcimer, and the setar, a long-necked, four-stringed lute.
It is an immediately appealing blend. The album opens with “Flux of Sorrow,” in which plucked and struck strings dance within vast fields of reverb. As the music progresses, it seems to toggle between the “real,” physical world of force and resistance and a funhouse-mirror digital universe where hard edges and straight lines melt into pliable sheets of sound. “Boghze Esfahan” begins with quiet acoustic figures but quickly turns deeply strange, as string sounds morph into buzzing bell tones, icy clinks, and evil wheezing. In “Plural,” galloping setar is fed into a whirling vortex of rising pitches, suggesting a cassette player about to go supernova. Essentially a trio record with Arash Bolouri (santour) and Behrouz Pashaei (setar), the album exists in a strange and provocative limbo in which Ebtekar’s collaborators’ spare melodic riffs and dazzling instrumental runs wear an eerie electronic halo, and played rhythms spark intricate algorithmic patterns.
There are risks inherent in the project, in no small part because the sounds at the record’s core come coded with such specific sets of assumptions—for Iranian listeners, they’re overwhelmingly traditional, while Westerners will find them exotic by default. Additionally, Ebtekar has worked within traditional Persian scale systems, which lends the music a modal feel that’s a world away from Western music. But what makes the record so successful is how thoroughly Ebtekar has managed to integrate the two sound worlds. Using a fluid, almost narrative sense of arrangement along with his heavily abstracted sound design, he fashions a third way between his influences’ two opposing poles. In a recent interview, Ebtekar explained his concept of what he calls “The Other Sound” as an attempt to “reshape and deconstruct familiar concepts into untried forms to challenge the system.” Sacred Horror in Design does that: Simultaneously honoring traditional musical forms and exploring the far edge of sonic expression, he brings his “Other Sound” flickering to life in a virtual space beyond borders.


On his fourth studio album, the Louisiana rapper chills out, finds some inner peace, and sticks to the middle of the road.

The Ceremony

Picture it: Kevin Gates cuddles a miniature bulldog before strolling past an exotic car collection and stepping into an elevator. Two floors up, the doors open to a Beyoncé concert, and Gates has a ticket. As Adderall meets alcohol, the Baton Rouge rapper leans into the giddy delirium, tearing off his shirt and singing with the crowd, lyrics be damned. The vivid celebration scene Gates conjures on “Yonce Freestyle,” a single from his new album The Ceremony, hovers as high as his most infamous performance photo. So why does the record sound so firmly rooted to the ground?
The different failures to launch across these 17 songs are, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an even keel. Anguish has been a key force stringing together Gates’ weathered bleeding-heart blend of Dirty South beats and unflinching “up-North” lyrics. But grizzled street raps aren’t standard on The Ceremony. Before the lyre-textured album opener unfurls, Gates ad-libs “Real medicine music.” The theme here is indeed healing: through reflection, redemption, and plenty of makeup sex. Phone calls from old off-the-porch contacts ring in his ears as a symphony of birdsong (“Birds Calling”). Sometimes, things get a little hokey. On the cut actually titled “Healing,” Gates is proudly “doing yoga and attracting my twin flame through meditation.” Elsewhere, he cleanses his Mercedes Benz with sage (“God Slippers”).
Well-documented goofiness aside, Gates never aspired to be a meme rapper, and he’s spoken about developing a signature poring over Tupac, Nas, and JAY-Z. Fellow Louisiana gentleman Lil Wayne eventually plucked Gates from a prolific mixtape run to be a bubble player on Wayne’s YMCMB roster, but Gates never popped. After he cultivated an underground following on his label Bread Winners’ Association, Atlantic caught up. Gates had already been mining Taylor Swift melodies for needle drops. His mainstream crossover felt destined, despite the turbulence of his early career.
But over a decade since inking a big-time deal that almost immediately lost momentum due to a devastatingly timed prison sentence, which he addresses on “Letter 2 My Fans,” Gates sounds weary of radio rap. He’s a hall-of-famer as far as major-label debuts go—2016’s Islah exemplifies the spoils of corporatization with minimal compromise in every belted hook. But where a more polished, pop-minded sound was jet fuel for Gates there, it’s quicksand on The Ceremony. The writing is all about moving forward, but the sonics keep Gates frozen in time, fused to an outdated Hot 100 sound that’s incongruous with his matured, quieter stylings.
While Gates is doing sun salutations on the beach, the veteran producers crowding The Ceremony seem content to splash around in the shallows. There’s potential in a more Zen effect for Gates— take the line, “Put her arms over her head and move that ass without no hands” on “Broken Men,” which he trills in a tone so theatrically somber it’s camp. But no one in the studio was ready to capitalize, and Gates’ monkish sermons fall flat atop one too many servings of limp “type-beat” trap. His pen isn’t dry, but his contacts list might be—someone should facilitate an intro with DJ Haram. Longtime collaborator DJ Chose demonstrates the strongest sense of Gates’ style as they dig into trauma on the ballad “Heal You.”
Gates hasn’t lost the dextrous lyricism that carried pre-Atlantic gems like The Luca Brasi Story’s near-acapella “IHOP.” The crashing piano chords of the don’t-give-up diatribe “Do It Again” clearly rustle the enforcer within, and the spare syncopation of “It Won’t Happen” pushes Gates to get gymnastic with his rhyme schemes. When he catches the beat in his upper register, you can almost hear rust flaking off the gears.
He still loves the ladies too, and as soon as he gets to it with a down-low lover via a reverently recycled T-Pain hook on early highlight “Lil Yea,” Gates’ taste for cooed held notes and boy-band arcs shines. Obviously, his shirt comes off. But as with “Yonce Freestyle”—which squanders a Sexyy Red feature that should’ve been a slam dunk—the jubilation is hollow, like the “woo-hoo!” you let out to save face after your friends catch you checking your email at the club.
The peace Gates references throughout The Ceremony is hard-won, but it's also such that you’re not inclined to disturb it. There’s a palpable urge to slip out of the room when he lets you in on a tender moment with his partner, not hang around for another song. Gates hasn’t exactly been lost in the muck of the corporate rap game, but as he focuses on other pursuits, the raw mud he fashioned into some of his greatest music is hardening into something far less ductile.


It's no secret: Les Savy Fav like to fuck shit up. Baldly transgressing the most basic assumptions about rock ...

Inches

It's no secret: Les Savy Fav like to fuck shit up. Baldly transgressing the most basic assumptions about rock singers, the band's frontman is a pudgy, bearded, wild-eyed freak whose unpredictable stage show tends to scare off men and women alike. Their studio output varies from barked, discordant indie anthems to synth-heavy art-punk. And their new singles record, Inches, reverses all the usual rules that compilations of its ilk abide by.
For most rock bands, a singles compilation is an afterthought-- an offhanded concession to fans who may have missed out on the limited pressings. For Les Savy Fav, a singles compilation was a forethought, conceived before the band had even recorded a song for it. Now, seven years after its conception, the career-spanning project finally comes to fruition, collecting the A- and B-sides of nine seven-inches, all originally released by different labels.
For those who've been keeping up with these singles, the excellence of Inches is a foregone conclusion. While many contemporary indie bands reserve their singles for the release of marginal or subpar material, Les Savy Fav's tend to offer songs that are not only better than the band's album cuts but, despite the disparate conditions of their production, more consistent as well. For a band so prone to brilliant and exhausting outbursts, it's not surprising that their defining album would come in this form.
And without a doubt, this is Les Savy Fav's defining album. The high points on Inches are not only the finest songs the group has ever recorded, but are also the most indicative of their strengths as a band. "Our Coastal Hymn", released in live form as a hidden track on The Cat and the Cobra, is possibly the catchiest song in their entire repertoire-- hook after blistering hook, all energized by the band's trademark frenetic grandiosity. Never overpowered by its angularity, "Our Coastal Hymn" is less an anthemic punk song than it is a pointy anthem, unconventionally catchy and tremendously forceful.
Tracing the band's chronology backwards, Inches shows Les Savy Fav continually reshaping and revitalizing their sound with new textures, and expanding their palette of both sounds and approaches to recording. The album's newest track, "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin", is a sparse and direct dance-punk epic, with Harrison Haynes' terse, robotic drumming perfectly anchoring frontman Tim Harrington's pained screams. Les Savy Fav's most recent LP, Go Forth largely failed to sustain itself, as the band's energy was substantially defused by Phil Ek's production, but Inches' diverse pacing allows even the Ek-produced "Fading Vibes," on which the band revisits the more straightforward guitar-rock sound of their first album, to stand out as one of the best and most unique recent Les Savy Fav tracks.
Of all the remarkable tracks on Inches, "Yawn Yawn Yawn" remains my personal favorite. Here, Seth Jabour's endlessly inventive guitar playing is in top form, masterfully and subtly building from a clean, rhythmic figure in the verse to a soaring, distorted chorus. Lyrically, the song is further proof that Harrington has more in common with Daniel Bejar and John Darnielle than he does with his harder-rocking contemporaries. Like many of Les Savy Fav's songs, "Yawn Yawn Yawn" explores themes such as sex, partying, decadence and disaster. And, as usual, Harrington relishes his words like a storyteller, delivering them with both conviction and humor.
The first pressing of Inches comes with a bonus DVD that further solidifies its status as Les Savy Fav's most essential and representative release. Videos of three songs from a 2003 performance at Brooklyn's Northsix provides a welcome glimpse of the awe-inspiring Les Savy Fav live experience. Although Harrington's theatrics are usually the most frequently discussed aspect of Les Savy Fav's live show, the distance provided by the footage puts the emphasis largely on the virtuosity and spontaneity of the band's individual players. And the video of "Who Rocks the Body" is just fucking hilarious, as Harrington asks a stuffed rabbit, "Who rocks the party that rocks the bunny?"
Unfortunately, Harrington's notorious live antics have resulted in many people writing off Les Savy Fav as a joke or a novelty. And without a doubt, the band's previous recorded output has largely failed to demonstrate the musical prowess spoken of by their fans. But Les Savy Fav have always demonstrated a uniquely off-kilter sense of humor, and it seems strangely fitting that the very album their fans have been waiting for has, in fact, been underway since the band formed. With Inches, Les Savy Fav brings together a full seven years of solid musicianship, deviously catchy songwriting, and explosive punk rock energy, discarding all the gratuitous dissonance and convoluted song structures that often plague "post-punk." Finally, this is Les Savy Fav.