On her first solo album in over a decade, the avant-pop artist weaves introspective thoughts through shapeshifting, operatic arrangements.

Dust Gatherers

Seaming To’s musical heritage doesn’t immediately scream rebellion. The London-born singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist comes from a family of concert pianists, and she followed their path at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, where she trained as an opera singer. From there, she embarked on a prestigious set of collaborations, appearing on multiple albums with the band Homelife, and later featuring on Robert Wyatt’s 2007 album Comicopera. But subversion is front and center on Dust Gatherers, an album of eccentric compositions and significant emotional depth. It’s To’s most successful marrying of avant-garde iconoclasm and classical tradition to date.
On her 2006 EP, Sodaslow (For Us), Seaming To introduced the defining characteristics of her impressionistic music: adventurous vocal lines, dramatic genres shifts, and warm melodies built from supple strings and washed-out piano. Her first full-length album, 2012’s Seaming, added elements from mystical horror to the mix. In the decade since that release, she shifted her focus toward film and theater compositions, but Dust Gatherers picks up where its predecessor left off: an avant-pop opus that threads abstract, cerebral themes with subtle wit and a sense of the supernatural.
Dust Gatherers veers smoothly and swiftly within its ambitious narrative framework. “Blessing” is a haunting meditation on God’s all-reaching power, like a psalm and incantation in equal parts, and To underscores its words with an operatic chorus of multi-tracked vocals full of shimmering drama. In “Tousles,” she addresses a lover with eerie invitations (“Pluck at my heart, put hinges on it, so you can open me easily”) as trickling oscillators drive an ever-expanding backdrop. “Brave” leans into a sense of mischief, with whispery overdubs and plinky analog synths adding a whimsical touch.
Whether the mood is playful, intense, or downright unsettling, To consistently makes space for introspection. On “Pleasures Are Meaningless,” she spins a stretched, shapeless lament for voice and piano that flips into autobiography, signed with the phrase, “Seaming, seemingly.” In the verses, To reflects on a lifetime of aspirations, only to find that everything was “meaningless, a chasing after the wind, nothing gained under the sun.” The intrepid vocals at the foreground—growls, gasps and spinning lines reminiscent of Meredith Monk—and the gothic horror of the arrangements obscure these fraught, personal explorations.
To’s compositions are rooted in the French impressionism of Claude Debussy. On “Water Flows,” she stacks clarinets atop her fluid, wordless vocal melody. Accompanied by clarinet and piano, To paints in thin strokes with accented curves on “Traveler,” while “Pleasures are Meaningless,” with its delicate color palette and sense of yearning, evokes the intimate ballads of Bill Evans. With those compositional foundations in place, piles of effects—overdubs, delays, reverbs, oscillators—can clear in an instant to reveal new depth. After the humid atmosphere of the album’s first half, “xenamax” is three clear-sighted minutes of tuned percussion, analog synths, and a juddering machine that sounds like a taut rope on a suspension bridge. With each album, To takes increasing control of each aspect of her art, but she is also an exacting excavator. As she drills into the overlapping layers of Dust Gatherers, what she finds at the core is vulnerable and unexpectedly moving.


The Nashville star blends genres with charm and style on his first new album in five years, a marker of what modern commercial country can do at its heights.

Southside

For a clean-cut white guy who plays acoustic guitar and sings commercial country, Sam Hunt has recently become one of the most polarizing artists to emerge from the Nashville machine. His coup began six years ago when he staged the velvetiest of revolutions, wresting country radio away from the bro-country tailgaters and hidebound schlock-slingers with his triple-platinum debut Montevallo. Brushed with hints of hip-hop, R&B, and Top-40 smooth country melodies, Montevallo was successful to the point of nearly paralyzing its star: It’s taken more than a half-decade for him to concoct a follow-up. The album also incited a backlash among country purists, which Hunt fueled with unthinkable provocations like wearing a flat-brimmed hat and singing Drake’s “Marvin’s Room” at his shows. Those alarmists had little to fear besides the onset of what some have called “boyfriend country”—mostly populated by saccharine artists who attempt to channel Hunt’s earnest charm without his flair for experimentation.
But Hunt is, finally, back, seemingly aiming to both prove his country cred and guard his status as one of the genre’s innovators. Southside is a
variation on Montevallo’s theme, not a reinvention—but if anything, it shows a clarity of purpose that his debut lacked. Hunt pulls in both directions at once, building seemingly endless layers of traditional country cues (fiddle, banjo, dobro) over a syncopated pulse that permeates almost the entire album. The way he threads the country/hip-hop needle is enviably organic, a sly but effective repudiation of his critics.
Southside’s first two songs establish the tension that makes the album so compelling. The mournful ballad “2016” is as traditional as they come, with its finger-picked guitar and talk of whiskey-laced sorrow. It’s the first of a few gutting tracks on the album about his now-wife Hannah Lee Fowler, whom he left to pursue music and then had to woo back—a situation that, unmediated, sounds like a country song in itself. He’s seen the error of his ways: “It turns out going out and chasing dreams and lonely women ain’t freedom after all,” he sings over a wailing pedal steel. But his self-serious balladry is immediately tempered by the lilting “Hard To Forget,” where samples of a classic country song (Webb Pierce’s 1953 hit “There Stands The Glass”) weave into a bouncy beat complete with stuttering hi-hats.
It’s on “Hard To Forget” that Hunt lays out the album’s overall style. Instead of using the massive resources available to him as a marquee act on a major label to ramp up the accessibility and polish, he layers songs with pleasantly casual licks, countermelodies, and even muffled conversation. Additional vocal tracks occasionally make it sound like bystanders are singing along—maybe “Downtown’s Dead,” as he sings on one of the project’s early singles, but Southside still channels the ease and conviviality of a Broadway honky-tonk.
Those experiments tie together moody R&B ballad “Nothing Lasts Forever” which features both Vocoder-like effects and a synthy guitar riff, and the raucous “Let It Down,” whose trap-bluegrass core was inspired in part, Hunt says, by Ken Burns’ Country Music docuseries. On “Breaking Up Was Easy In The 90’s,” one of the album’s highlights, that same hip-hop-dusted backbeat supports a fittingly retro country lament about a very 21st-century problem: trying to get over someone whose Instagram Stories you can’t stop watching (the “dying on my phone” flip is particularly smart). That it feels uncontrived is refreshing in a sea of ready-made Music City soundalikes.
Hunt takes more risks when indulging his Drakiest tendencies. On “That Ain’t Beautiful,” he laments the decisions of some wayward but disarmingly familiar, woman (one would never imagine “You can split an Adderall with a stranger in a bathroom stall” crooned so sweetly) to a point that’s patronizing, if seemingly well-intentioned; on “Drinkin’ Too Much,” he apologizes to Fowler in an occasionally slurry monologue—she’s responsible for its conclusion, a simple piano rendition of the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” They’re odd songs, anomalies on an album that for all of its subtle risks remains mostly approachable enough for a country radio playlist.
But a little off-center is exactly what commercial country, with its endless aesthetic complacency, so desperately needs. And Southside’s experiments are made with enviable effortlessness: It’s a little rough around the edges, not self-consciously provocative. Hunt doubled down on his initial mission—making hip-hop and R&B in country sound hip instead of hokey—and it paid off with this collection of songs that are, more than anything else, fun. He proved, once again, that those genres are only as disparate as music marketers would have you believe, and that there’s still plenty more fruit to be borne of their inevitable cross-pollination.


New York punk trio Show Me the Body’s latest release is a scattered 17-track “collaborative mixtape” featuring guests such as Moor Mother, Mal Devisa, Cities Aviv, Dreamcrusher, and Princess Nokia.

Corpus I

Show Me the Body’s new release, Corpus I, opens with a terse, comically vague directive, sneered by an anonymous New Yorker—or, perhaps, by the city itself. “I don’t give a fuck what you do with this—just do whatever,” the man barks, “Don’t fucking make excuses: Just do what you know how to do.” This intro provides a facsimile for the born-and-bred Queens trio’s broader creative essence: crass, off-the-cuff proceedings, shaped by five years of sweat, spit, and especially subway steam. New York bands like this are getting harder to find as the gears of gentrification rumble on. But Show Me the Body are DIY stalwarts, and they rise to the city’s challenges. Their music subverts hardcore’s sonic cornerstones—swapping guitars for banjos, substituting gang vocals with gruff half-raps—while holding its core values sacrosanct: directness, aggression, anti-authoritarianism, community, and most importantly, inclusivity. If a venue isn’t all-ages, Show Me the Body will likely take their business elsewhere.
If you pitch a big tent, people will come; if you throw a stylistically-amorphous rager under it, that audience may well grow. Considering how Show Me the Body’s debut album, last June’s Body War, managed to render chaos so catchy, the trio’s recent crossover—illustrated by their unlikely confirmation for this year’s Coachella, the proceeds from which the band plans to donate to charity—should come as little surprise. But Show Me the Body aren’t ones to bask in the spotlight. They’re passing it off to their peers with Corpus I, a 17-track “collaborative mixtape” created alongside their extended creative family in New York and beyond.
Corpus I is a fiery, hopscotching roll-call spanning nearly every subdivision of the experimental vanguard: showstopping vocalists Eartheater and Mal Devisa; a bevy of left-of-center MCs, including Cities Aviv, Blunt Fang, Denzel Curry, and Princess Nokia; a host of meme-steeped rappers and producers (Yo Chill, Babyglock, Tony Seltzer). Best of all are appearances from noise auteurs Dreamcrusher and Moor Mother, whose glitched palettes draw out Show Me the Body’s subterranean din better than a mosh pit ever could. The band are gracious hosts, constantly propping up podiums for their guests–a stomping backbeat here, some freewheeling axework there–and backing away, letting them do the heavy lifting.
The all-star oddball cast hold up their end of the bargain, for the most part. A punk posse cut of sorts, Corpus I highlight “In a Grave” finds Show Me the Body conducting a thrilling cipher in a hazardous basement. After some hooted braggadocio from frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt—whose vocals once again resemble Anthony Kiedis rapping with peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth, for better or worse—Curry and Eartheater swoop in to breathe some life into the skittering, chrome-laden beat, before spoken-word titan Moor Mother enters the frame. “I keep telling you, I keep saying, B/But you don’t hear me because you’re here to kill me,” she sulks with teeth bared, before striking a bargain: “Well, let me finish my verse.”
The other group efforts don’t fare so well. “Why you lying” and “Cyba Slam fif world dance party (Uppa echelon dance remix)” resemble insufferable post-internet Jock Jams. Meanwhile, “My Whole Family” fails to derive any frisson from an otherwise sturdy pit machine comprising four punk singers (Pratt, Skunk Rott, Chris Wilson, and Pierre Botardo). Show Me the Body’s aims here are admirable and ballsy—namely, their attempts to find common ground between disparate styles, scenes, and perspectives and introduce their expanding fanbase to a formidable roster of lesser-known peers. But the execution of Corpus I is too scattershot to ensure a knockout.


Vancouver singer/songwriter Stephen McBean (Pink Mountaintops, Jerk With a Bomb) unveils his best project to date: Black Mountain, a rollicking, wildly adventurous reconfiguring of 1960s and 70s nostalgia that's as duty-bound to the present as it is sympathetic to the past.

Black Mountain

Prolificacy can be a death knell for a less-than epochal rock band, so Stephen McBean decided to diversify. The fruitful Vancouver singer/songwriter has, over the past few years, spread his yield among no less than three bands-- Pink Mountaintops, Black Mountain, and Jerk With a Bomb-- each exploring slight but intriguing variations on reference-happy rock'n'roll. His latest undertaking is Black Mountain, whose self-titled debut full-length is a rollicking, wildly adventurous reconfiguring of 1960s and 70s nostalgia that's as duty-bound to the present as it is sympathetic to the past.
Black Mountain hits somewhere between Jerk With a Bomb's stellar but more straightforward Pyrokinesis and Pink Mountaintops' smarmy, sex-laden brand of vespertine blues-- only jacked up a good 20 decibels. McBean's voice is pleasant and instantly recognizable; having such an established songwriter behind a freshman outing is a tremendous advantage, and Black Mountain seem to know it. When the band aren't venturing on plush, static jams, his coy bluesy vocals tether the songs in familiar melodic space.
Svelte and upbeat, opener "Modern Music" stands apart from the rest of the album. Over jellybone saxophone and scattershot drumming, McBean and sidekick Amber Webber take jabs at "another pop explosion" and claim they "can't stand all your modern music." It's a trite argument, but nevertheless one for which Black Mountain makes a compelling case. Ironically, "Modern Music" is the album's least anachronistic and, almost as if to spite itself, catchiest number. "Druganaut" fits better into the retro regalia the band revere, weaving a loose-limbed vamp that, besides a few simple chord changes, seldom varies but is gradually added to. The vocals don't drop until nearly two minutes in, but the gap is barely noticeable. After the vocals arrive, it's into a series of haymaker guitar stabs and beefy drum fills, followed by a beautiful guitar feature-- spotted with ran-backward licks-- that exemplifies Black Mountain's penchant for texture and sameness within traditionally peripatetic verse-chorus-verse structures.
When Black Mountain evoke glue-sniffing shredders of yesteryear such Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin, their technique falls nearer to Galaxie 500 and the Velvet Underground, who forsook showmanship and dug deep in search of music's fundamental soul. "No Satisfaction"-- with its chunky strumming, honky-tonk piano, radiant plucked guitar and cheap-o sax-- most directly channels those aloof, technically slovenly forebears and, not surprisingly, is this album's best song. But there's nothing overtly sloppy about Black Mountain: Although it often wades in droning, repetitive passages, the album is impressively tight.
Some may hear these shopworn melodies and clamor "bar band." But if Black Mountain ever tried to make a night-to-night living in blues cover haunts, they'd do it by torching the stage and leaving patrons agog in WTF stares. The Vancouver quintet aren't some cabal of slack beer-bellied crooners; they can play their instruments, they have multi-chord vocabularies and, perhaps most importantly, they know how to give their songs proper recorded treatment. Black Mountain has that golden must-be-analog sound, with the perfect amount of tarnish to make the songs feel lived-in without burying them in fry grease.
Interestingly, Black Mountain are least effective at their most unpredictable. "Heart of Snow" resists structure, feeling out a plaintive acoustic strum before meeting up with a frail guitar and piano line, which meanders to a tense climax before erupting into a simplistic but captivating odd-time stomp. Unfortunately, the tension is drawn out as the band acquiesces back into a lugubrious Webber vocal passage, quashing the swelling momentum and rendering the eventual resolution less cathartic. "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" is the antithesis: the track is mercurial but calculated; its stilted operatic grandeur is a welcome bit of certainty. Orbiting the album's most generic and derivative riff, "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" starts with a clarion call-- a booming full-band hit or five-- then settles into a lurching unison guitar figure. The song seesaws for a bit, then has a mood swing and dives into a forlorn interlude, before picking up right where it left off and riding its central riff raw.
Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves. Stephen McBean may be playing it safe by partitioning his rep, but the consistency and breadth of his work is staggering amid so many once-and-dones.


The Montreal singer-songwriter’s debut album uses heartbreak as the springboard for an innovative brand of indie rock that’s both fiery and introspective.

what we say in private

Sometimes loss calls for a personal rediscovery. When Alexandra Levy endured a recent breakup she used various creative outlets—painting, journaling, making music—in order to recall who she was before and redefine herself in the aftermath. As a result, the Montreal singer-songwriter came up with 10 songs that embody the tumultuous cycle of pain, anxiety, patience, and acceptance that accompanies major heartache. Her debut album as Ada Lea, what we say in private, is a peculiar vortex of intense emotion and experimental pop music.
Ada Lea’s music is a fusion of solemn acoustic-guitar melodies, belligerent distortion, warped saxophone cries, spectral synthesizers, field recordings of birds and snowmobiles and airplanes, and volatile tempo fluctuations. At times her tendencies lead her toward the tempered earnestness of Wilco, while at others she taps into a raw fury evocative of PJ Harvey or Angel Olsen. Ada Lea creates a space for a vision of indie rock that’s both bright and moody, fiery and introspective.
Ada Lea begins her chaotic ride with the unpredictable “mercury.” A thumping buzz fades in and out as a resolute electric guitar takes the reins. Then the tempo shifts, the buzz falls away, and we’re left with a solemn bass line that wobbles against Lea’s wispy vocals. Both the arrangement and her voice seesaw between aggression and sorrow. She begins to break down her relationship’s demise: “There is always one person who does love/Just a little more than the other.”
Sometimes it feels like Ada Lea might be an untrustworthy narrator. Her lyrics are vivid and visceral yet sometimes unsure of themselves. In “the party,” she questions whether she recalls the moon’s color correctly and if she read the night’s tone accurately. “You have always followed the sun/And I the moon, or have I misremembered?” she asks meekly on the Big Thief-like “yanking the pearls off around my neck...” She displays unusual candor for someone whose self-understanding has been thrown off its axis: “I can’t help wondering if I tricked you into loving me.”
Levy journaled furiously for 180 days after her relationship ended, and she uses those journal entries for inspiration throughout the album. “I want the days to hurry by without losing my mind,” she sings on “180 days.” An electric guitar pitter-patters restlessly as she awaits a time when things won’t hurt so much. Across its four minutes, a harp occasionally radiates from behind her, while a static-laced drum machine sounds like a hard drive rupturing. Like her emotions, the song comes in ripples of light and dark. Just as she laments on the edgy closer “easy,” healing isn’t automatic—it’s messy and inconsistent.
Ada Lea’s unsettling moments are just as affecting as her quiet, intimate ones. “the party” is one of the album’s most muted songs; the sound of traffic imbues a warm fuzz. Then whirling, high-pitched synths descend upon the chorus, like a halo. Throughout what we say in private, Lea’s heartbreak, recovery, and struggle for self-awareness feel like a walk on a bumpy gravel path branching into numerous shadowy detours.
Take “for real now (not pretend),” where Lea trades singing for spoken word. One moment she is telling herself it’s going to be a good day, and then she’s thirsting just to feel anything. These tonal and emotional shifts, as Ada Lea vacillates between timidity and aggression, are what make what we say in private so exciting. But it’s Levy’s willingness to wrestle with her own vulnerability that leads the album to its highest peaks.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their 10th studio album, the UK electro-pop heroes look back on the end of the 20th century, when hooks and choruses dissolved into blissed-out loops and vibe became paramount.

Saint Etienne: I’ve Been Trying to Tell You

I’ve Been Trying to Tell You

In his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks samples the following quote from biologist Gerald Edelman: “Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” For 30 years now, British pop heroes Saint Etienne have made songs out of their recollections and record collections. Saint Etienne’s songs anticipate big nights out, practice self-care the morning after, call for more, more, more—all with equal panache. Their music collapses the timeline. “I feel nostalgia for an age yet to come,” the actor Michael Jayston says at the end of a lovely meditation on ’60s psyche and ’90s ambient from 2002’s Finisterre.
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, the band’s 10th album, takes as its subject a moment from the end of the 20th century when pop music discovered it could loop almost any sound into a hook, and multinational corporations sold the idea that music was less about the instant the needle hits the record and more a never-ending, ever-present stream of cool. Lead single “Pond House” is soundtrack-y in the way of fin de siecle pop, ebbing and flowing in a pool of rootless cosmopolitanism that is in fact grounded in a specific time and place. Gone is the urban-planning sophistipop of Saint Etienne’s previous album, 2017’s Home Counties; in its place, here comes… Natalie Imbruglia, courtesy of her 2001 single “Beauty on the Fire.” “Here it comes again,” Imbruglia sings, sampled, her phrasing bobbing among white-capped breaks, algal blooms of acid, and a bassline oceanic enough to return thoughts of the late genius Lee “Scratch” Perry, who famously evangelized that dub could change the past, as well as the future.
Whatever you think of Natalie Imbruglia, “Pond House” might not change your mind. You might even think it’s Saint Etienne’s recherché chanteuse Sarah Cracknell on the mic. The point is the vibe, an act of imagination in remembering downtempo radio pop as a mix of capitalist blissout and PTSD numbness. A track like “Fonteyn” rolls a piano vamp into a crisp little beat, then suddenly ignites into plumes of mood that could either fill the floors of an after-hours joint or score a Sephora. It’s a familiar sound, evocative of that time when clubbing became a consumable global lifestyle, expensive and escapist and extractive of local cultures. Saint Etienne are that most thoughtful of bands; a track like “Fonteyn” could use a bibliography. But it’s also a bit of a blur.
“Little K” swarms with birdsongs, which are too much with us on records today. In the moment Saint Etienne is remembering, though, they promised the coming of new dawns on ambient-house records and, like canaries in coal mines, warned of bass-driven destruction on jungle mixes. Saint Etienne uses them as field recordings, not metaphors. “No need to pretend,” Cracknell says in a cool, clear voice. Back then, climate change hovered on a distant horizon; today, birds face mass extinction. Saint Etienne captures them on record like they’re already gone.
Most of the album is similarly mournful: Opener “Music Again” tosses and turns in a haze of harpsichord before Cracknell (or someone) decides she “never had a way to go” and the track gives up. “Blue Kite” is a gloaming of fiddle and its echoes, lovely but falling short of the kind of full-on invocation of the spirits Coil achieved after dark at the century’s end. But “I Remember It Well” should be enshrined among the band’s loveliest of songs. Like Space Afrika’s recent stunner Honest Labour, “I Remember It Well” ascends Massive Attack’s Mezzanine in order to see Spiritualized floating in space. Guitars break hearts, beats heal them, a choir commiserates. If Saint Etienne ever give up on disco for good, they can always turn to post-rock.
Hopefully they won’t. Highlights like “I Remember” prove that acts of memory can be consolations. As a whole, though, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You could try a little harder. The album is accompanied by a film by Alasdair McLellan, a bit of which serves as a video for “Penlop.” It’s beautiful, all fuzzy lights and pretty boys on scooters, but a little bloodless. If only the stakes felt higher: that the songs were either catchier or deeper into dub, that in this moment Saint Etienne embodied a little of the brains and brawn of Oliver Sacks on a motorcycle. Or that, as in their eternal masterpiece “Like a Motorway,” music was a matter of life and death. The act of memory is an act, both deed and pose. I’ve Been Trying to Tell You feels passive, lost in nostalgia for an age it hasn’t fully reckoned with. Bet it sounds gorgeous on the radio.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Magik Markers' first album in four years was recorded in J Mascis’ attic, in vocalist/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio's dad’s basement, and at a number of East Coast practice spaces. For all the different environments, Surrender to the Fantasy takes the focused quality of the noise trio's recent output and adds warmth and melody.

Surrender to the Fantasy

If you were up front during a Magik Markers show in 2004, singer Elisa Ambrogio might have handed you her guitar. And there you'd be, effectively on stage improvising in the eye of a violent noise jam with Pete Nolan going ape on his drums and former bassist Leah Quimby punching her bass beside you. You would’ve been apart of Magik Markers’ unformatted anti-songs, whose structure and shape could hardly be charted in the moment. They'd maybe make more sense later on one of the over 50 releases they put out on LP, cassette, and CD-R and hawked at the merch table after the show. There was a time when Magik Markers didn’t put much stock into the idea of “songs,” whether as a dialectical comment on performer vs. audience, as an act of political dissidence, or because they simply loved making noise music.
Truth is, they were just being honest. Read any interview with Ambrogio over the years, and one of the recurring themes is an all-eclipsing necessity to tell the truth with her music. Earlier this year, she said, “…telling the truth has the potential when done right to communicate a massive experience: the smaller and more precisely an honest human thing is rendered, is the more common it becomes.” This is somewhat tautological (few artists ride hard for “lying”), and it’s hardly a revelation in the big scheme of creating art, but the decade-long journey from the early days of Magik Markers to Surrender to the Fantasy is largely about mapping how they express themselves as performers and songwriters. And while intentions can be dubious, what emerges in Magik Markers' first album in almost four years is their formerly hidden songcraft, at once small and precise.
Surrender has been fermenting on two-inch in the years following 2009’s Balf Quarry. Recorded partially in J Mascis’ Attic in Amherst, MA, partially at Ambrogio's dad’s basement in the band’s hometown of Hartford, CT, and at many East Coast practice spaces in between, the band takes the focused quality of their recent output and at long last adds warmth. For all the different environments that Ambrogio, Nolan, and new bassist John Shaw recorded in, they managed to sedate chaos into 45 minutes of form and shape. These are more “songs” like the band has been making since 2007's BOSS, but for semantic’s sake, the band hasn’t been writing “songs” since BOSS so much as they’ve been better at whittling down what they’ve always done, being sure to leave all the knots and lathe marks in the final product.
They've finally and cautiously surrendered themselves fully to melody. Ambrogio opens the album on “Crebs” singing sweetly, “Everything about me feels so free” and the following songs stick pretty close to that sentiment. It's a natural step-though, and if you factor in Ambrogio’s bare songs as 200 Years (her collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny) and the band's recent friendship with labelmates/tourmates/split-EP-mates Sic Alps, the math checks out. “Mirrorless” has a cool desert look, riding on red-eyed fuzz and reverb, while the beautiful "Young" features little more than an acoustic guitar and a cello. The tenor of these songs are a far cry away from when Ambrogio sang, “This gun was made to pull the trigger” in 2007.
All the violence and spit of early Magik Markers now manifests itself in subtler ways than broken amplifiers and feedback squalls. They dip into amphetamine-surf rock with "Bonfire", fully booted Neil Young explorations in "Acts of Desperation", and shredded Shaggs via closer "WT". The heart of the album, however, beats in the near-seven-minute treatise "American Sphinx Face". Like Patti Smith and Kathleen Hanna before her, Ambrogio's fearless stream of conscious delivery is a coil of surrealism, politics, and intense love. Whereas much of Surrender takes a more conventional lyrical approach (the pointed platitude of "Youth" goes, "The worst part about being young/ Is thinking nothing ever comes”), Ambrogio's words on "American Sphinx Face" are delivered unsung, unadorned behind some proto-Markers psych-improvisation. "I intend to be loved and see how it goes," she says dryly. As the noise of the song grows wider and wider, Ambrogio sharpens her tongue: "In America every man is a king/ No good king but a dead king." The towering song gives shape and meaning to the tender pieces that surround it.
The risk to explore more "pedestrian" forms—to lay bare songs into the common world of structure, hushed melodies, and harmonies—gives Surrender a varied topography. The tiny moments of vulnerability in Ambrogio's voice or Nolan's barely-there drumming are buoyed by their noisy nature and their surreal sketches. More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years. Surrender could be viewed as a kind of acquiescence to plots and narratives, the kind Ambrogio was so opposed to when she started the band, back when chaos ruled. But to me this is leaning closer toward a more universal expression told in the Markers' own way—a set of honed truths that communicate on grand scales.


Once a crucial 2-for-1 reissue, this new version of Big Star's classic, disparate records adds nothing to their legacy or discography.

# 1 Record / Radio City

This is not a reissue of an album, but of a product. In 1992, Ardent/Fantasy released the first two Big Star records-- #1 Record (1972) and Radio City (1974)-- on one CD, which at the time seemed like a generous rescue project for two influential cult albums that were out of print in every format. Included were liner notes by pop historian Brian Hogg and journalist Rick Clark, along with a couple of fuzzy black-and-white photos of the band and a tear-off mail-in survey. For a Big Star newcomer with limited cash but a voracious musical appetite, it was a dream-- not simply more bang for your buck, but an instantly immersive introduction to the band.
However, the decision to re-release this "2 Complete Original Albums on 1 CD" set is questionable, not least because it is a slavish reprinting of the original. There's no mail-in survey this time around, but the reissue preserves the crowded layout of the original, except the digital printing is just above Xerox quality and the images even fuzzier than before. Just how little effort went into this re-release? The running time for both albums is still listed in the little red box as 73:00, despite the addition of two bonus single mixes that push running time closer to 80:00.
If this double release once benefited the first-time buyer, it ill serves the music itself, compacting two very different albums into one long, awkward retrospective. #1 Record showcases the collaborative songwriting of Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, who fashioned themselves as Memphis' own Lennon-McCartney. They alternate vocals between Bell's sandpapery rasp and Chilton's smooth falsetto (which doesn't even sound like it emanates from the same throat as those Box Tops vocals), and the result is one of power-pop's defining records. "The Ballad of El Goodo" takes as its refrain a line from an old spiritual-- "There ain't no one going to turn me 'round"-- which had become locally prominent as a civil rights slogan. The Big Star song is both tough and tender, communal and individual-- and genuinely moving without knowledge of its origins. #1 Record is shot through with an adolescent romanticism that kicks off in the restless energy of "In the Street", with its infectious guitar lick and rebel poetry lyrics and culminates on the Chilton-sung "Thirteen", an aching acoustic evocation of teenage angst.
Despite the reported hostility between them, Bell and Chilton are both strong presences on #1 Record, but their partnership was short-lived. Bell left the band shortly after the album's release and commercial failure, which made Big Star essentially a solo project for Chilton. So Radio City is a very different record. The transition between #1 Record closer "ST 100/6" and Radio City opener "O My Soul" was always jarring, but it's made worse by the addition of the single mix of "In the Street", which was originally the B-side to "When My Baby's Beside Me". Like the shortened mix of "O My Soul" that ends the new set, it's more interesting historically than musically.
On Radio City, Chilton, bass player Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens emphasize rhythm as much as melody, especially with the snaky guitars of opener "O My Soul", which hint at the singer's later fascination with old R&B sounds. It's still a pop record, and "She's a Mover" and "Mod Lang" might be their most Anglophilic moments ever. And then there's "Back of a Car", "You Get What You Deserve", and "September Gurls"-- one perfect pop gem after another that blur the line between album and singles band. In fact, Radio City is simultaneously a grab for airplay and sales and the beginning of Chilton's musical entrenchment that would continue through Third/Sisters Lovers (a Big Star album in name only) and into his solo career. More than that, it is the adult counterpart to its adolescent predecessor, forgoing the debut's single-minded intensity for a more nuanced mix of emotions ranging from jaded ("You Get What You Deserve") to resigned ("Back of a Car") to sentimental ("I'm in Love with a Girl").
For many listeners-- including, for a few years, me-- Big Star were more legend than band. They were the beloved patron saints for struggling musicians: These albums were inspired and inspiring but never found a wide audience, yet the fact that they eventually became so revered offered encouragement to young songwriters with their own dream of big stardom and No. 1 records. Even if you never found an audience in your prime, you could always hope for later cult success. And to some extent, of course, the myth overtook the music, which means these two albums tend to be slightly overrated. #1 Record begins to lag on side two, and Hummel's "The India Song" remains imminently skippable (I once tried to convince myself that it was a parody of Beatles mysticism, but that's wishful thinking). Similarly, the complexity of Radio City often masks an elusiveness that dogs Chilton even today. Even so, I would argue that such flaws make these albums all the more fascinating and endearing: "ST 100/6" is surely someone's favorite Big Star song, and Chilton's evasiveness made him a cult figure apart from Big Star.
That only makes the redundancy of this set all the more egregious: there's no sense of engaging with these records anew, no attempt to determine what they might mean now as opposed to what they meant 16 years ago. It may still be a useful introduction to Big Star, but it still stings as a major mishandling of a cult-canonical catalog, especially when Stax/Concord is releasing such handsome and informative reissues of Isaac Hayes' contemporaneous albums. On the other hand, the label is also issuing both Big Star albums individually on vinyl, which seems intended for those one-time newcomers who've grown to cherish both #1 Record and Radio City as totems of lost youth but who will view this shabby set as merely a relic of the CD Age.


The Bristol-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s second album isn’t defined by genre as much as it is by Yola’s indomitable spirit.

Stand for Myself

The singer-songwriter Yola—born Yolanda Quartey in Bristol—was riding high in early 2020; she’d been nominated for four Grammy awards earlier that year and she’d been cast as rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming biopic on the 20th-century American idol. An opening slot on fellow country-rock alchemist Chris Stapleton’s tour loomed.
Then the pandemic hit, forcing the Nashville-based singer-songwriter to delay all those plans and lock down, which helped her focus on crafting the follow-up to her 2019 debut, Walk Through Fire. Renlisting the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach as producer, she emerged from the last year with Stand for Myself, in which she revels in possibility, using her curiosity to nourish her inner resolve and vice versa. Yola sings her truth as she immerses herself in different genres and styles, her formidable instrument guiding the way.
“When will you start living,” she wails on the slow-burning opening track “Barely Alive,” “now that you’ve survived?” The answer, Stand for Myself asserts over and over, is right now—although it’s important to note that Yola’s hope isn’t borne of wide-eyed optimism. She’s seen enough of the world to realize that life can be nasty, brutish, and short. Or, as she muses on “Like a Photograph,” a shimmering country-pop lament that recalls the era when Nashville helped guide the course of the adult-contemporary charts, “Whoever said life was like a river/That was gonna roll on forever/Had to have been out of their mind.”
But on the flip side, any chance to enjoy things is a gift, and Yola’s life experience doesn’t dim the joy of Stand for Myself; if anything, her keen knowledge of life’s indignities is a weapon that can be wielded in the name of living well being the best revenge. Take “Diamond Studded Shoes,” which blossoms from a barroom rave-up into a fiery dance-at-the-revolution anthem, gains steam each time Yola reaches its chorus, which rhymes “gonna turn out right” with “we gots to fight.”
Stand for Myself isn’t a record defined by genre as much as it is by Yola’s spirit, which transforms her matter-of-fact assertions of personhood into amphitheater-ready anthems. “Be My Friend” is a gripping testament to the transcendence offered by friendship, with folk-rock hero Brandi Carlile adding soaring counterpoint vocals to the track. “Dancing Away in Tears” is a sumptuous, horn-assisted slice of breakup soul that turns sobbing underneath the disco ball into a reason for living more passionately, a confident showcase for Yola’s belt that should at the very least get her a look-see for a slot on Silk Sonic’s tour.
Yola also shows off the many sides of her voice, which plants itself in the ground and scales octaves with aplomb. “If I Had to Do It All Again” pairs a knotty instrumental bed—quickly picked guitars, a tense organ line—with Yola singing in her upper register, tentatively wondering about the emptiness of life without a special someone. It spins up into a storm on the bridge, with strings rising and Yola’s voice expanding into a full-on bellow—and the mood shifts back and forth once more, with the song fading out as she digs further into the idea of letting go. It packs multiple stages of post-relationship grief in close to four minutes, with Yola’s vocal stylings and Auerbach’s savvy arranging highlighting the pointed lyrics.
Before the pandemic altered lives around the world, Yola was on the verge of a commercial breakthrough—awards-show exposure, a looming tour, a meaty movie role. But Stand for Myself, with its themes of inner fortitude only brightening the white-hot star at its center, vaults Yola to another place in the pop world, with her boundless curiosity and vocal brawn establishing her as a knowing, honest voice for those who need help summoning their own strength from within.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The latest issue from the always idiosyncratic Tompkins Square series features songs from guitarists who released their warm and surreal folk ragas and finger-picked fantasias to private press.

Various Artists: Imaginational Anthem Vol. 8 : The Private Press

While I was talking to Portland solo guitarist Marisa Anderson a few months ago, she lamented that at almost any point of an interview, she would be asked about the influence of John Fahey. Her pat reply went along the lines of sharing similar influences as Fahey (old blues, bluegrass, and country), but not being influenced by Fahey himself. No matter the guitarist or era, Fahey casts a long shadow from the early ’60s well into the 21st century, either from his direct influence or by association with his Takoma label (see also Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho). John Fahey’s renown follows the likes of American Primitive artists, be they Jack Rose, Cian Nugent, William Tyler, or Chuck Johnson, and it no doubt turns up whenever a new edition of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem series arrives.
For its eighth iteration though, Imaginational Anthem escapes easy allusion to the man. Subtitled “The Private Press,” this compilation features a clutch of nearly un-Googleable guitarists like Tom Armstrong, Herb Moore, and Nancy Tucker, who don’t once bring to mind Fahey’s six-string explorations. Compiled by former Other Music buyer Michael Klausmann and collector Brooks Rice, this edition of IA emphasizes the outsider musician, the ones who took matters into their own hands. Instead of waiting for someone else to ink them to a record deal, they simply pressed their own albums. What didn’t get sold at coffeehouse gigs wound up at Salvation Army or stuffed into used bins. In the case of Rick Deitrick’s 1978 album Gentle Wilderness (represented by the lovely rumination “Missy Christa”), he left them on hiking trails “so people would find them.”
The private press album is a fetish object among certain vinyl collectors, that rare musical treasure never to be scored in the Urban Outfitters record racks. It’s the subject of hardbound art books, prime material for reissues, and a veritable goldmine of untapped and hard-to-source samples. Endless Boogie guitarist Paul Major once compared finding and listening to such an album as akin to being in the Twilight Zone, the incredibly private sound of these unknown musicians casting “an underlying warm but surreal eerie feeling.” Fittingly, John Fahey pressed up his own records and stashed them in record bins at the start of his career as well.
Warm and surreal are good descriptors for this fetching and restful set that spans from 1968 to 1995. It’s home to 14 unique voices and their paths not taken. Perry Lederman’s brief “One Kind Favor” ranks as the “best-known” artist of the set, though the notes point out that’s only because he kept company with the likes of Jerry Garcia and Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen. It might last less than two minutes, but shows his influence from Indian raga (he even studied sarod with Ali Akbar Khan) and bottleneck blues. Joe Bethancourt’s “Raga” swathes his guitar strings in copious amounts of tremolo and reverb like fellow American Primitive icon Sandy Bull but with just enough wrinkles to sound only like himself.
Raga is a definite reference throughout the set, as is Greenwich Village folk, the music of the Scot-Irish hinterlands, and old-timey string bands. But no matter the source, it’s remarkable how these players weave something idiosyncratic out of their influences. Gary Salzman’s seven-minute fantasia “The Secret Forces of Nature” segues from clean finger-picking to sitar buzz to dobro before dissolving into some strange musique concrète. Herb Moore’s sparkling “Wen Also Found” from 1983 is an acoustic guitar piece that slyly multi-tracks other melodic figures and his own resonant sculpture (called the “scrapophone”) to beautiful effect. Moore might never be considered a figurehead of American Primitive guitar, but perhaps he’ll inspire a new strand: The liner notes tell us Moore was an early pioneer of computer music during Silicon Valley days, co-authored a book about Atari gaming consoles, and set human genome DNA sequences to sound. Let’s see Fahey top that.


The Darkness have never sounded more dated, or more like unsuccessful comedy rock, than on their depressing new album.

Pinewood Smile

It's a paradox: In order to take the Darkness seriously, you have to be willing to take a joke. Justin Hawkins is an award-winning songwriter who can layer guitars like Boston’s Tom Scholz and shatter glass like Ronnie James Dio. And yet, he has come off like both a rock god and a regular schlub putting on his unitard one leg at a time—making campy, funny hard rock that never tipped over into parody during their inevitably brief commercial peak in 2000. As a result, they’ve parlayed a kickass debut and one major hit in America into a Super Bowl commercial and opening gigs for Lady Gaga and Guns N’ Roses. As 2015’s Last of Our Kind made clear, the anachronism of the Darkness justifies their existence. All they have to do is show up.
But with Pinewood Smile, the joke is taken more seriously than ever. And all that’s left is the cynic’s view of the Darkness as some comedy-rocker combination of Russell Brand joining Tenacious D to front Steel Panther. Hell, there’s a simpering power ballad called “Happiness” that invokes D’s own “Friendship Test,” whereas “Solid Gold” (as in, “shitting out…”) takes its clueless A&R clichés from the flim Get Him to the Greek. While that era of absurdist, winking slapstick was often viewed as clever or even subversive in its time, it’s depressing to see, in retrospect, how many of the jokes were just outward projections of hetero male paranoia. The Darkness follow suit, a subtle and sad shift from their prior skewering of trouser-stuffing machismo.
Given that he sings from the perspective of a pirate earlier on Pinewood Smile, one can't doubt Hawkins' willingness to be out of his depth. But “Japanese Prisoner of Love” reduces “sensual deprivations/human rights violations” to group showers and the indignity of being “taken by force from behind by a stabby white supremacist named Klaus.” At best, it’s failed role-playing, but Pinewood Smile’s unexpected mean streak becomes indefensible on “Stampede of Love.” It’s not inexplicable—as two of the Darkness’ spiritual forefathers were responsible for “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Big Bottom”—but “Stampede” is more in the spirit of Shallow Hal as a full-length “no fat chicks” joke that doesn’t even try to half-ass a moral lesson about body acceptance. And it’s the closer, so Pinewood Smile ends with, “across the sand on a donkey ride/great fun till the donkey died” followed by 30 seconds of silence.
Hawkins has been singing about himself as a has-been almost from the start. And if he was to totally break kayfabe, there’s a compelling story to be told about how a band like the Darkness keeps on keepin’ on when they actually decline—when the advances shrivel up and the tour rider isn’t picking out the green M&M’s. “A moment in the sun/A lifetime in the shade/A year full of glory and an empty decade,” Hawkins shrieks on “I Wish I Was in Heaven”—fatalistic, gallows humor that could’ve fit on an Elliott Smith record and still be the most depressing track. But, as ever, the Darkness will not take the risk of full transparency, and Pinewood Smile does what all Darkness songs do. With their love of magnifico harmonies, hair metal iconography, fluency in dork culture, and pop proficiency, the Darkness still have more in common with Weezer than Queen.
But as with Weezer, the Darkness now operate in a vacuum that suffocates anyone who’s checked out over the past decade. They nearly function as live-action fan-fic. And most often, songs live or die based not on their hooks, arrangements, and certainly not on their emotional impact, but on premise alone. There are four additional tracks on the Deluxe edition, each more self-explanatory than the one before it: “Seagulls (Losing My Virginity)”, “Rack of Glam,” “Rock in Space,” and “Uniball.”  Meanwhile, “Buccaneers of Hispaniola” exists for the sole purpose of Hawkins’ shrieking the title. The Darkness once proved fully capable of writing songs that transcended the gimmick and spoke the universal language of pop. Whether or not these songs merit repeat listens depends on how much mileage the listener gets from acknowledging the dissonance of Hawkins making operatic metal songs about the shittiness of Britain’s railway system.
It’s tempting to give Pinewood Smile a pass in light of the Darkness’ marginal place in the pop culture discussion. Compared to infinitely more problematic and popular acts, Pinewood Smile feels more like of an off-color Facebook post or a cringey group text from an uncle who generally means well but has mostly opted out of evolving with broader cultural norms. No one expects woke-ness from the Darkness, but their reliance on making jokes at someone else’s expense complicates, if not completely negates, their appeal of evoking a bygone era of tighter pants and looser morals. Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003—and they’ve never sounded more dated.


Boards of Canada's first significant release, 1996's Hi Scores EP, has been remastered from the original tapes and reissued. The duo's tonal tendencies were already well developed: all six tracks feature their trademark four-bar chord progressions and cycling contrapuntal melodies. But Hi Scores might be most exciting for the way it breaks from their later work.

Hi Scores EP

Hi Scores wasn't Boards of Canada's first proper record. By the time it appeared in 1996, the Scottish duo had released a minor armload of cassettes and 12-inches, all of it in extraordinarily limited editions. But, for all the general public knew, it may as well have been their debut, given the way it arrived like a bolt from the aquamarine.
Even if you lived it, it's getting hard to remember what it was like to discover music back then. But when Hi Scores began turning up in record bins, not only were listeners unlikely to know much about who they were or where the record came from, there were precious few ways of finding out. The snail-mail address listed on the insert sheet was just a P.O. box. A strip of Braille adorned the cover, heightening the record's cryptic aspect. And the name of the label, Skam, lent a vaguely unsavory air to it all. On Hyperreal's IDM listserv, it was ventured that Boards of Canada might be a synonym of Aphex Twin or Autechre or Mike Paradinas, or some combination of them.
It's useful to try to return to that state of ignorance, if only because so many layers of myth have been woven around the duo since then, a dense cocoon of fantasy and obfuscation. Some of that has been their own doing, like the coded 12-inches they distributed on Record Store Day last year as a pre-announcement of Tomorrow's Harvest—Willy Wonka's golden tickets as re-imagined by William Gibson. And some of it seems to have been the result of an obsessive fanbase hopped up on rabbit holes and Easter eggs. (From the fan site bocpages.org: "It has been suggested that the 'hi' of 'hi scores' could refer to the initials of BoC's alias Hell Interface." Well, yes, quite; and so might we connect the duo's reclusive tendencies to the fact that one anagram of the group's name is "A Bad Raccoons Fad").
But Hi Scores preceded all of that. There are ample clues of the kind of artists they'd become with Music Has the Right to Children, released just two years later, and not just because "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" is included here in an identical version. Five of the six tracks occupy the head-nodding, mid-tempo range that remains the duo's narcotic wheelhouse. Sampled breakbeats drive most of the songs here, but they sound different from the scratchy, dust-encrusted breaks that instrumental hip-hop producers like DJ Shadow and DJ Krush were using around the same time; Boards of Canada's breaks snap and thud with a weirdly rigid motion, and they're fleshed out with metallic drum-machine sounds, like the boxy snares of "Nlogax" and the dry, deflated hi-hats of "Seeya Later", that glint dully against the murk.
The duo's tonal tendencies were already well developed: all six tracks feature their trademark four-bar chord progressions and cycling contrapuntal melodies. The air is uniformly wistful, full of chimes and shimmering arpeggios and buzzing, tubular tones, like singing ghosts heard through a drainpipe. And while they don't wade as far into the lysergic depths that would distinguish Music Has the Right to Children—all those hazy, soft-focus tones meant to evoke the nostalgia of old nature films and washed-out Super 8—their synthesizers, subtly detuned, have a woozy, watery feel, slippery as something half-remembered. And on "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", the sound of distant voices anticipates the playground concrète vibes of Music and Geogaddi.
But Hi Scores might be most exciting for the way it breaks from their later work. The title track, soaked in faraway buzz, as though it had been recorded beneath high-voltage power lines, offers up an overdriven growl that's reminiscent of Aphex Twin's "Ventolin". It's unusually muscular for them, and the same could be said of "June 9th", whose laser zaps and faintly industrial crunch recall Autechre and Disjecta. And the best track on the whole release might be "Nlogax", a snapping electro cut with a break reportedly sampled from Indeep's "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life"; with the exception of the Hell Interface remix of "Midas Touch", it's probably the funkiest thing Boards of Canada have ever done. And played back at 45 RPM, it turns into shuddering, head-spinning techno—a tantalizing example of a path the duo could have taken, but never did.
It's not quite clear why, exactly, Hi Scores is getting re-released now. (A publicist notes that this is Skam's 20th anniversary, but that's debatable; 1994 was the year of the Autechre offshoot Gescom's self-titled EP, but that record bore the catalog number of SKA002. SKA001, the eponymous debut from Autechre in their Lego Feet guise, dates to 1991, and while almost nobody actually had the thing, its existence was known, or at least rumored, by the mid-'90s.) Apparently, Hi Scores has been remastered from the original DATs, and while the digital promo doesn't sound much (if at all) improved from the previous digital version, it's possible that the new edition of the vinyl will sound better than the original wax. But even that hardly matters much, given that this will be the first chance for many of the duo's fans to get their hands on the 12-inch at all. And while it might have been nice to be treated to some previously unreleased material—supposedly, there's still a trove of unreleased Boards music moldering on old cassette tapes—perhaps it's enough to have the original Hi Scores in all its crisp, concise glory. While it wasn't their first record, it's basically the spark that would ignite their reputation—the ember that would go on to fuel the whole glorious campfire headphase. Long may it smolder.


The post-punk project Nice As Fuck is the most low-stakes album Jenny Lewis has ever been a part of, but it hits its mark.

Nice As Fuck

For being one of indie-rock’s most clearly defined personalities, Jenny Lewis does her best not to be pinned down. In the decade or so since she lost interest in Rilo Kiley, Lewis has bounded from one project to the next, chasing whims, collecting collaborators, and generally trying on new hats with no fucks given about whether they fit or not. And although she’s always given the impression of being an open book, writing with apparent candor about her desires, convictions, and complete and utter inability to escape her own head, she’s made it increasingly clear that no single album offers a complete self-portrait. As she puts it on the self-titled debut from her latest side project Nice As Fuck, “If you want to know who I am, ask any one of my friends.”
Her new band teams her with Au Revoir Simone’s Erika Forster and the Like’s Tennessee Thomas (whose father Pete Thomas drums for Lewis’s pal Elvis Costello and played on Acid Tongue), and their debut is the most low-stakes album she has ever been a part of—which is saying something, considering she made a Jenny & Johnny record. Everything about the album seems designed to lower expectations, from its surprise release to its no-frills cover art. The group doesn’t have a publicist, which is virtually unheard of for a working band with a new album to promote in 2016, and the closest they’ve come to doing press is sharing a facetious band bio from Father John Misty that was more about satirizing the form than talking up the group. Really, the only way the band could have set expectations any lower for the record is if they offered $5 Subway gift cards in exchange for downloading it.
They were wise not to oversell it. This is a decidedly minor work, just nine songs in 26 minutes, and they all stick to the same skeletal template: Lewis sings over some vaguely dubby post-punk rhythms in the Pylon/Delta 5 mold. And that’s it. There’s not a lick of guitar on the whole thing, and keyboards are rationed nearly as strictly. A few notes of warbly synthesizer are smuggled into “Cookie Lips,” and although they’re not much, they sound like a Brian Eno production compared to the rest of the record. Warpaint played with some overlapping influences on their last album, which demonstrated the many ways that dub can be morphed and modernized, but Nice As Fuck have little interest in filling the considerable empty space they create. They play their post-punk homages completely straight.
It works in part because of the surprise factor (who knew Lewis had this kind of record in her?) but mostly because Lewis does what she always does: She sells the material. It’s a kick hearing her go full riot grrl on tracks like “Runaway” and “Door,” and lead Le Tigre-esque chants on “Homerun” and the album’s closing band theme (“We’re nice/as fuck.”) She’s also adjusted her songwriting to match her economical accompaniments, paring her usual wordy couplets down to concise slogans. Every line on the protest song “Guns” feels like a first draft it must have taken great restraint not to refine. “Crisis is not ISIS,” she sings. “Spilling our own blood/I don’t wanna be afraid/put your guns away.”
It’s hard not to see the album as a reaction to Lewis’s previous effort, the highly polished, achingly personal The Voyager. By most accounts that record took years to complete, while Nice As Fuck—at the risk of going out on a limb—probably didn’t. If history is any indication, the project will likely be just a pit stop for a Lewis, a way for her to stretch out a bit before throwing herself into something a little more demanding, and that’s fine—not every effort needs to represent five years of toiling and soul searching. Nice As Fuck may set its sights low, but it hits its mark.


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 the apex of the infamous UK band, a hedonistic and sampledelic Madchester masterpiece that reinvented post-punk for the rave era.

Happy Mondays: Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches

Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches

The models are dressed for a 1990 music video shoot, but no one seems to have told them it’d be a Happy Mondays video shoot. To be fair, Happy Mondays appear to have no idea that they’re at a Happy Mondays video shoot either. At least a dozen women in tasteful cocktail dresses gyrate in an empty sound studio as Happy Mondays pantomime a song called “Kinky Afro,” wearing what looks like the clothes they slept in the night before.
That is, if they slept at all. The first look Shaun Ryder gives to the camera is so far beyond “hungover” that it’s uncanny, like a still from an I Think You Should Leave sketch 30 years ahead of its time. His fly also appears to be halfway down. The only guy in the band that’s playing in sync is Mark “Bez” Berry, the mascot/dancer/occasional percussionist whose main instrument is himself, except when he starts patting Ryder’s back like a bongo after a model steals his maracas. “Kinky Afro” is all quotables, but the most important line is, “What you get is just what you see.” And what you saw in this video is exactly what you got on Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches—a Madchester masterpiece that could only come from the scene’s most functionally booted band.
“Kinky Afro” isn’t Happy Mondays’ biggest hit or defining song—that would be Pills’ rhymin’ and stealin’ lead single “Step On,” or the epochal Paul Oakenfold remix of “Wrote for Luck,” or “24 Hour Party People,” their sex, drugs, and on-the-dole anthem, and the namesake of an indispensable 2002 Factory Records magical realism biopic. After the tragic death of Ian Curtis at 23 ends the revolutionary post-punk phase of Factory, Happy Mondays appear in the film’s second act as unwitting insurgents, a signing that propels Factory founder Tony Wilson’s nightclub, the Haçienda, from a struggling warehouse venue to the locus of the ecstasy-fueled rave revolution that’s sweeping the UK. By the end of the movie, the Mondays are comic relief; with Factory in dire financial straits, they take a meeting with EMI, announce that they’re “going for a Kentucky [Fried Chicken]” when presented with a vegetable platter, and never come back. When we see them eating from an actual bucket of chicken, it’s a gag based on the open secret that “KFC” was the band’s code word for heroin.
However, “Kinky Afro” remains Happy Mondays’ biggest hit in America. It’s central to the legacy of their third album, which was released on Elektra and recorded in Los Angeles because that was where these guys were less likely to get in trouble in 1990. Then again, maybe the famed Capitol Studios was just a proper compromise; if relative sobriety was truly a priority, the Mondays wouldn’t have also floated Amsterdam and Jamaica as options.
By the time Pills was properly released in November, Happy Mondays had headlined Glastonbury, the Oakenfold-led “United States of the Hacienda” tour was a smashing success, and Madchester-lite singles from Jesus Jones and EMF had topped Billboard. American publications attempted to sum up the band’s raison d’être in a few sentences. “The new music is buoyant, almost goofy,” Newsweek proclaimed. “Scrubbed and mellow and often stoned out of their gourds, their Monkees haircuts bobbing...the fashion grafts British football gear onto American hippie glad rags—with a soupcon of the Jetsons’ futurism.” The upstart UK publication Vox singled out that passage from “Stark Raving Madchester” as proof of how poorly prepared America was to meet the Mondays on their own terms. At a 1990 music industry seminar titled “Stars of Tomorrow,” Wilson took an even more antagonistic tack towards the New York audience: “You used to know how to dance here. God knows how you fucking forgot.”
It’s hard to tell whether even the most enthusiastic UK rags shared Wilson’s beliefs, or whether or not Happy Mondays were great as opposed to merely infamous. The almost universal critical acclaim that awaited Pills didn’t change the perception that the music was happening in spite of the people who made it (“stupidly excellent,” “against all odds, this is a stunningly good record”). Details about their creative process from the time are scarce, but their drug-seeking habits are well-documented and often played for laughs, whether it’s arranging international opium deals near Marlon Brando’s house or hitting up crack dens in Harlem almost immediately after arriving in New York for their tour with the Pixies.
And so, if there was a lot riding on Pills, none of that seemed to get through to Ryder. “It’s hard to tell if the Mondays idolize anyone,” NME wondered, even as the Mondays surrounded themselves with avant-garde idols. Looking at the credits from their initial run, they could be mistaken for cred-conscious bohos trying to transcend their hardscrabble, Mancunian roots. 1987’s Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) was produced by John Cale, not because it was a particularly inspired stylistic match but because, in Wilson’s cynical view, the halo effect of the Velvet Underground served as a hedge against poor initial sales of their debut. 1988’s Bummed, meanwhile, was an epic grudge match of substance issues—in one corner, the Mondays, newly enamored with ecstasy, in the other, Factory producer Martin Hannett, deep in financial turmoil and various addictions that would end his life at age 42.
Ironically, the producer most responsible for Happy Mondays’ enduring critical cachet had nothing to do with Loaded or Unknown Pleasures. Long before he became a Vegas EDM punchline, Paul Oakenfold and partner Steve Osborne were up-and-coming acid house producers who were tapped to do a remix of Bummed’s massive centerpiece “Wrote for Luck,” which they pushed out to seven minutes with the help of an N.W.A. sample (a trick that would be repeated on Oasis’ Be Here Now, one of the few ’90s UK blockbusters even more notorious for rampant drug use). The partnership continued to flower on “Step On,” a quasi-cover of John Kongos’ “He’s Gonna Step on You Again” intended for a 40th-anniversary Elektra compilation that soon became proof of concept for Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.
“Step On” only vaguely resembles its source material: The opening piano strokes are swiped from any number of Italo disco songs, the drum loops could pass for New Jack Swing, Ryder’s verse cadence is nicked from “Come Together,” and the most famous lyric is on loan from Steve McQueen. Still, this recombinant approach honors the spirit (if not the politics) of Kongos’ original, which is credited as the first song to use sampling.
This approach—stripping down a cover of everything but vibe—also worked for “Bob’s Yer Uncle.” Originally conceived as a take on Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” Oakenfold insisted the Mondays keep their sinister groove, as they layered the Daktari theme song, snippets from The Exorcist, and assorted porno films. And, once it became clear that Bez was in no shape to contribute proper percussion, Ryder boasted, “We got somebody who I think was called something like Fidel Castro in. Mega.” (His name was actually Tony Castro.) And since this is a band whose previous album, Bummed, was a joke about anal sex, Ryder took some liberties with the lyric, “I won’t let you leave my love behind.” “It’s our version of a Balearic love song,” Ryder told NME, “where we’re talking about fucking chicks up the arse.” This was a statement Ryder gave after 17 years of sobriety; it took him a moment to remember that Wilson had requested “Bob’s Yer Uncle” be played at his own funeral.
On past records, Happy Mondays were an inspired post-punk or punk-funk band limited by their technical proficiency. In linking up with Oakenfold and Osborne, the Mondays just had to nail a couple of bars at a time and let the producers piece it together in the studio. Pills begins with a glimmering acoustic strum reflecting their new milieu of casinos, Jacuzzis, luxury sports cars, and private jets. And, in the case of Bez, getting hit on by the star of Pretty Woman and being so loaded he didn’t recognize her. But immediately thereafter, guitarist Mark Day’s snarling, loopy riff mirrors how Happy Mondays actually appeared: misfits who’d swagger into the room, steal your wallet during a bender, and help you look for it the next day.
Day runs his signal through an ultra-premium Leslie amp on “Grandbag’s Funeral,” creating an impossible funk rhythm that sounds like Led Zeppelin’s “The Wanton Song” if its title was more truthful. The slide riff from “God’s Cop” sounds like it’s being played with the edge of a switchblade, whereas “Dennis and Lois” just sounds like U2 guitarist the Edge, a soaring tribute to a couple of NYC scene lifers that predates Achtung Baby by a year. While his brother served as the band’s mouthpiece, Paul Ryder’s basslines serve as the body and soul, the mirror image of fellow Factory bassist Peter Hook by putting groove and murk at the front rather than melody. And if drummer Gary Whelan or Bez couldn’t nail their parts (and the latter rarely could), they had no qualms about being replaced by drum machines or loops of their better takes.
In other words, Happy Mondays were the only Madchester act that truly envisioned their music as post-punk, or even post-rock, with Pills perhaps the first example of a rock band reinventing themselves as a sampledelic hip-hop act. It’s a link made all too clear as “God’s Cop” lifts the same drum loop featured on De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I.” With a presumably dim grasp of copyright and licensing law, Happy Mondays took full advantage of early hip-hop’s openness towards collage, interpolation, repurposing, and when necessary, outright theft. The hook on “Kinky Afro” was assumed to be a rip from “Lady Marmalade,” but Ryder had an ingenious alibi—he claimed he couldn’t have been stealing from Patti LaBelle because he was actually stealing from John McClane in Die Hard.
In some ways, they were ahead of the curve; Ryder bragged about never writing down his lyrics and using music as a loss leader for a lucrative drug racket when Jay-Z was still making money from ’88. “We were giving [ecstasy] away at first, like good drug dealers do. That was good marketing,” Ryder explained, less enamored with the potentially utopian impact of the drug on UK’s music scene than the fact that local police were more concerned about crack and heroin than all-night raves. “We were selling them at £50 a tab, which was a fucking fantastic earner. Bass strings are expensive, aren’t they?”
Happy Mondays’ viewpoint may have been more cynical than their peers, but hardly out of step. “The philosophy is simplistic, the politics nil,” Newsweek said of the Madchester scene, which itself was an oversimplification, if not outright wrong. The Mondays were libertines and libertarians, an approach that Ryder might describe as laissez faire, or, in less fancy terms, “Loose Fit.” Pills’ most seductive groove might have been interpreted as a cultural anthem two years prior, but by the time they could afford the top gear they used to shoplift, the Mondays didn’t seem to have much allegiance to “baggy.” “Loose Fit” is Ryder’s philosophical credo rather than a fashion statement, a call to wear life like a loose garment and not to step on anyone’s toes.
The most heartfelt moments on Pills are, understandably, protest songs about the reigning political issue of the day, namely: letting Shaun Ryder take drugs in peace. Inspired by a rare instance of Ryder facing consequences at customs, “Holiday” stumbles upon a trenchant take on classist policing: “You don’t look first class/Let me look up your ass.” “God’s Cop” is a sendup of quasi-celebrity bobby James Anderton, who claimed a supernatural mandate to bust up raves. “God’s Cop” is, in some ways, a protest song, but more effective as a parody. Rattling off crude jokes about feminine hygiene and stolen credit cards, the most damning blow Ryder can land makes Anderton sound like a member of the Mondays’ entourage: “Me and the chief got soul to soul!/Me and the chief got slowly stoned!”
In America, Madchester remained a curiosity at best, but that’s no fault of Pills. In the same condescending way that innovations in hip-hop or electronic music are described as “the new punk,” the American mags were particularly guilty of comparing Happy Mondays to other guitar bands—claiming that Madchester was the “second Summer of Love,” or the second coming of the Beatles or the Sex Pistols. Perhaps that speaks to the limited imagination of rock scribes, but in the ensuing years, most of the biggest Madchester acts revealed themselves as boomer rock in baggy drag.
As for the Mondays, their reputation as a drug band with a music problem became a lot more literal. 1992’s Yes Please! is the sort of album most people encounter through “Worst Flops of All Time” lists before they ever hear it, if they hear it at all. The lore is far more fascinating: an overmatched Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz trying to wrangle a band of active drug addicts in Barbados, the unrealized desire to collab with Bushwick Bill, Ryder selling the furniture at Eddy Grant’s studio to buy crack cocaine and developing a throat infection that left him incapable of recording vocals. While Yes Please! is certainly uninspired and dated, it’s nowhere near the disaster its reputation suggests—a reputation that all but ensures its eligibility to be reappraised as a cult classic, unlike 2007’s truly inessential comeback Uncle Dysfunktional.
Ryder and Bez briefly got back into the UK press’ good graces with Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah, a deeply mid-’90s melange of alt-rap and spiritual mumbo jumbo whose title winks at sobriety (not sexuality), even though the collective’s drug regimen was only slightly less intense than the Mondays’. Over the past 30 years, it’s become clear that fame is their greatest addiction. Whether popping up on Shameless or Shaun Ryder on UFOs or I’m a Celebrity…South Africa, it’s been difficult to keep Ryder off television; I’d say his finest role came in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where he voiced masturbation enthusiast Maccer, a washed-up, bucket-hatted leader of an “extremely baggy” band called the Gurning Chimps. Bez likewise never stopped moving, touring the reality show circuit to pay off tax debts and winning Celebrity Big Brother in 2005. In the time since, he’s been an anti-fracking advocate and an online fitness instructor; it’s unclear whether he actually learned to play the bongos for real.
Yet all of these non-musical ventures have likely done more to burnish Happy Mondays’ brand over the past 30 years as a spectacular rave’n’roll swindle. It’s why Pills manages to resonate not just with the laddish electro-rock bands that stuffed FIFA soundtracks in the 2000s, but the Tough Alliance and the Armed, subversive, high-concept projects that toy with perceptions of cultism and violence as much as they act upon them. Or basically any hardcore band that cares a lot about merch drops.
The band knew to end on a possibility—that the ’90s could have turned out much differently than they did. After years of trying to establish plausible deniability for Madchester as a scene and a sound, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches closes on a note of peace, happiness, and love with the fittingly titled “Harmony.” “What we need is a big, big cooking pot/Big enough to cook every wonderful, beautiful, trustworthy, lovely idea we’ve got,” Ryder sings over the “Sweet Jane” chord progression, reimagining the Mad Men finale if Don Draper found self-actualization in Ibiza. In 2023’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, author Vincent Bevins surveyed the mass movements of the 2010s and found a common terminus point—the moment when the ultras arrive on the scene, either leftist punks or football fans who determine the ultimate course towards anarchy or tyranny. Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches imagined a third way for Madchester, one that remains eternally alluring for any musical movement trying to balance drugs, thugs, and hugs, all raving under one roof.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


Hydra Head's final (for now) release is a split between Godflesh/Jesu leader Justin K. Broadrick under his new solo moniker, JK Flesh, and prolific electronic noise insurgent Prurient. It serves as a cross-generational cycle between two aggressive sonic explorers.

JK Flesh / Prurient: Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination

Worship is the Cleansing of the Imagination

How and when will you die? That question, of course, has fascinated centuries of thinkers, from philosophers plundering mortality's meaning to laypeople simply hoping to have their affairs in order when life comes to a close. In most cases, the end is unpredictable-- a car crash, a heart attack, a disease that comes on swiftly and decisively. But businesses often sense that doom is inevitable, that accounts receivable are no longer balancing accounts payable in a way that's sustainable. They have the rare choice of how to handle their own demise: They can choose to hide this from their customers and one day simply shutter the doors, or they can choose to throw themselves on the great public pyre, making a show of their mortality and allowing the faithful to plunder their wares another time or two.
In September, Hydra Head Records joined the latter caste: For nearly two decades, Hydra Head has been a fearless syndicate of loud, a label at the vanguard of risky releases paired with adventurous packaging. In 1999, for instance, they released Isis' excellent Sawblade EP-- notably, featuring a cover of Godflesh's "Streetcleaner"-- on a CD-R affixed to a full-size metallic sawblade, painted red or black. Consistent with Hydra Head founder Aaron Turner's ecumenical vision of heavy, they embraced the grindcore of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, the wretched malevolence of Khanate, the noise purges of Merzbow, the arithmetic bludgeon of the Austerity Program, and the astral wonder of Pyramids, to name a few.
The list of accomplishments is exhausting. It exhausted Hydra Head's funds, too, leading the label to announce the first of two going-out-of-business fire sales in September: Enthusiasts could buy bundles of backstock at incredibly deep discounts, with the hope of paying the bills and finishing the final releases. Two months later, Hydra Head put test pressings, original artwork, and even Turner's Les Paul on sale with the hope of raising enough money to keep the label’s sizable back catalogue in permanent circulation. The willingness of customers to spend $800 on a Torche and Boris 10" or $180 on an Isis box set became a functional tribute to the label, a way to push it into some future while kowtowing to its expiring glory.
Hydra Head's final (for now) release has much the same effect: A split between Godflesh/Jesu leader Justin K. Broadrick under his new solo moniker, JK Flesh, and prolific electronic noise insurgent Dominick Fernow as Prurient, the six-track Worship is the Cleansing of Imagination serves as a cross-generational cycle between two aggressive sonic explorers. Broadrick's three tracks here are the more concussive, comprising electronic drums massive enough to suggest EBM on steroids and damaged textures occasionally abrasive enough to be classified as power electronics. His opener, "Fear of Fear", is a savage and short trip, a cyclone of a beat rumbling through fields of bass and blown-out guitars. Fernow focuses less on a pulse, instead using loops and layers to build a cyclone of sound that he either subsequently pulls apart or simply lets collapse. He leads with "Chosen Books", which matches Broadrick's gambit by dogpiling roars and whirs and hums until the frame of the sound system begins to quiver. These are similar but separate paths to the same plane of aggression, an idea that could serve as the retroactive Hydra Head mantra.
The best cuts on either side bear out that idea, too: "Deceiver" is Broadrick's most provocative and ambitious cut here. It opens as an industrial dirge, the toll of a church bell stretched into a subterranean groan. That sound cycles throughout the piece, while Broadrick adds and removes layers like a marionette. The hyperkinetic beat occasionally bursts open to douse the track in noisy shrapnel and low-end torture. "Deceiver" casts Broadrick as the controller of his past, able to funnel his experiences into these intense five minutes. Worship closes with "I Understand You", one of the most strangely beautiful pieces of music in the catalogues of Prurient or Hydra Head. Fernow wrestles simultaneously with disparate sets of impulses, attempting to thread a punishing squelch sustain around a keyboard line that hovers just on the horizon. The din overtakes the melody for a bit, but Fernow eventually pulls both themes back together before letting the keyboard disappear entirely. The noise spreads like ivy on a wall of disappearing ruins.
Both Broadrick and Fernow share the broad musical view implicitly espoused by Hydra Head for the last two decades. Broadrick's oeuvre stretches from the atavistic blast of Napalm Death's debut and the militant stomp of Godflesh to the diaphanous loom of Jesu and the exploratory throb of Techno Animal. In Prurient, Fernow has wrestled with noise and poetry, corrupted beats and rhythm-less roars. He's made black metal in Ash Pool, muted and mutated pop melodies in Vatican Shadow, and gone for full-on dance bombast in Cold Cave. If Hydra Head is indeed done, this is an excellent and appropriate ending for a big-eared label never confined by expectations of its output or intentions. These six tracks provide heaviness in a half-dozen different ways, a functional and fitting elegy for an imprint that achieved that mission with enviable consistency.


The pop singer architects her legacy with a new documentary and live album from her 2019 tour. As a performer, she’s fun and loose, even as her newest music feels more like a means to an end.

All I Know So Far: Setlist

Somewhere, on some radio, a P!nk song is playing—that’s been true for the past 20 years. She opened for NSYNC, then outlasted them; she wrote a surprisingly delicate anti-Bush ballad with the Indigo Girls, and her career outlasted that presidency; she collaborated with the lead singer of the now obsolete band fun. at the height of its popularity, in a song that still gets radio play; she wore giant sunglasses and mimed jabbing a toothbrush down her throat to mock the Paris Hilton archetype of female celebrity, and stayed relevant longer than both Hilton and anti-Hilton backlash. P!nk’s music oscillates between self-destruction and self-compassion, a balance she’s struck since her breakout album M!ssndazstood in 2001. After a litany of brash statements and cries for help, optimized for shock value (“Teachers dated me/My parents hated me”), she builds to a plea: “I’m a hazard to myself/Don’t let me get me.” On an album that strained to prove how dangerous or damaged or derailed the 22-year-old singer was—all dirty socks and diamond rings, extended metaphors describing her childhood as “my Vietnam”—“Don’t Let Me Get Me” was the song that stunned. There’s always a sudden softness in her party tracks, or a raw, brazen aside in her ballads.
P!nk is architecting her legacy now, and the industry is celebrating her for sticking around. On Sunday, Billboard gave her its “Icon” award, days after Amazon released a documentary, P!nk: All I Know So Far, following the massive 2019 European tour behind her 2017 album Beautiful Trauma. In recent years, P!nk has become known as a live entertainer, performing stunts and singing through elaborate acrobatic routines. The film focuses on her decision to bring her two young kids with her as she practiced and performed; they flail in the background of her rehearsals, diaper-clad and puffing on a trumpet backstage. “I want tour to be perfect for every single person that walks through those doors with a ticket in their hand,” P!nk says at one point, “but I also want it to be perfect in my kids’ minds. And I kill myself to do both.”
That strain hovers over the film’s accompanying live album, which leaves out some of P!nk’s more potent songs and instead asserts her place in a punk-adjacent musical canon, arguing that motherhood is fundamentally compatible with her watered-down brand of rebellion. All I Know So Far: Setlist is crammed with rock covers, some more successful than others. She braids a stomping version of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” into a performance of her 2008 track “Funhouse,” which both tamps down the absurdity of P!nk’s metaphors (“This used to be a funhouse/But now it’s filled with evil clowns”) and highlights Gwen Stefani’s clear influence. Less thrilling is her take on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which sags under the weight of ceremony without adding much to the original.
As a performer, P!nk is fun and brash and loose. “I forget the words,” she murmurs on the recording of her Nate Ruess collaboration, the sappy mallcore duet “Just Give Me a Reason.” “Screw that,” she says, and asks for a do-over. “I like that song.” She bounces on and off the beat on “Who Knew,” spilling over the song’s boundaries, and in the disarray the lyrics become disarming—“I’ll keep you locked in my head,” she whimpers, “until we meet again.” When she belts, her usually raspy voice scrapes at the notes, sometimes quivering with emotion. “I’m alright,” she cries on “So What,” convincing herself in real time, “I’m just fiiine.” On “Just Like a Pill,” one of the best songs she’s written, the audience rushes in to fill the gaps when she pauses; the recording becomes a document of this joint need, artist and audience working in tandem to cement a narrative of endurance.
The narrative P!nk wants to tell is that she’s a “renegade,” as she cooes on the title track—a new addition for the album, rooted in female empowerment—and that she’s stayed ahead of the times. But in reality P!nk is less revolutionary; she’s updated her music and her message in ways that seem both heartfelt and primed for mass appeal. The album includes her viral 2017 acceptance speech for the MTV Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, somewhat jarringly slotted after a series of live songs, and in it she recalls talking to her then-six-year-old daughter about the toxicity of beauty standards and the freedom in androgyny. The applause fades into the next track, a blaring EDM beat from Cash Cash thumping under snippets from P!nk’s past interviews—“I need to know my pain is helping your pain,” she says, as the beat wheezes and drops. The messaging shows up on the album’s new songs, which seem less like anthems for the downtrodden and more like vessels for the statements P!nk wants to make now. At the Billboard award show, she and her nine-year-old daughter hung suspended in the air as they performed “Cover Me in Sunshine.” Guitar played somewhere offscreen, a low, forgettable strum. They twirled above the stage and chirped about “good times.” P!nk swung toward her daughter and their foreheads pressed together. It’s one of the weakest songs of her career; it may also mean the most.

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This promising self-released record from a young singer-songwriter mixes grim and emotional songwriting with expansive electronic production.

Plantation

"Still can't feel much of anything," Malcom Lacey sings on "Tearing Up Old Asphalt", a slow-burner from the South Floridian's first LP as Arrange, Plantation. With his soft voice awash in electronic hums and next to a tranquil piano line, you can almost believe him. But the claim seems mostly aspirational. His unassuming vocals quiver and crack with emotion, giving the impression not of a person who can't feel, but of one who must be cautious of feeling too much. That's a common symptom of being a teenager, which Lacey is. So it's extra-impressive that Plantation never goes over the top. Instead, this highly personalized fusion of dark indie-pop and laptop ambient taps into volatile wellsprings of longing, resentment, and fear with controlled intensity.
Plantation is very much a bedroom production. Often using either a cloud of tone or a simple piano figure as a base, Lacey fashions understated, compact hooks from guitar, vocal loops, and software synthesizers, and then rolls them out for just long enough to lodge them in memory before they vanish. As mentioned in a Playlist review of "When'd You Find Me?", Bright Eyes might wind up with something like Plantation if he judiciously added vocals to a Kompakt Pop Ambient sampler. But Lacey's vision is unique, and makes the album cohesive despite its piecemeal diversity.
Many different touchstones flow into one retiring mood. Opening instrumental "In Old Theaters" has the stately drive of M83. The standout "Tiny Little Boy" nods to R&B with splashy mechanical drums and a soulfully lilting vocal performance. A techno influence becomes more pronounced in the back half: On "Blinds with You", a droning synth line soars and slumps with weary majesty over crisply staggered drums, and "Veins" owes an unabashed debt to the Field's slithering pulses. The blurry melodies of chillwave, the drafty space of dubstep, and the hypnotic repetitions of classical minimalism are all contextual influences. But everything blends into a unified voice thanks to Lacey's knack for thoughtful connective tissue and striking lyrical point of view.
This is thoroughly a break-up record, but Lacey deals in implication and austerity. His perspective has a mature balance: He makes accusations that cut both ways, and then he questions them. We get not just the wounded heart and its grudges but the filter of the skeptical mind, watching from a critical distance. *Plantation'*s recording quality is a little uneven, but that seems a small price to pay for the genuine intimacy that can occur when a young person holes up in a bedroom with a computer, a guitar, and his complex sorrow, figuring out on his own what can be made of it all.


Accompanied by family members and former bandmates, the Go-Betweens songwriter crafts a sparse but deeply felt album.

Robert Forster: The Candle and the Flame

The Candle and the Flame

Forty years after the hunt began, Robert Forster has found what he coveted, right in his front parlor. “That striped sunlight sound” he’s called it—as thin, keen, bright, and warm as the Brisbane summers he and his band the Go-Betweens pined for when touring the world, often for terrible paydays and negligible sales incommensurate with their euphoric reviews. For his eighth solo release, The Candle and the Flame, Forster has recorded a hangout album—with the people he actually hangs out with. The songs sound as fresh as morning air through open kitchen windows.
COVID-era exigencies and health emergencies shaped the material. Shaken by wife Karin Bãumler’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer in July 2021, Forster wrote “She’s a Fighter” as she endured chemo: a two-line ditty with vigorous strumming, an acerbic five-note electric fill, and light marimba accents. Rarely has he allowed rhythmic vigor to signify by itself. Intimates back him: Former Go-Between Adele Pickvance; his son Louis of the gawky indie rock band the Goon Sax, on bass and guitar; daughter Loretta on second guitar. Bãumler even joined on xylophone and ba-da-da backup vocals.  To make claims for The Candle and the Flame as a Major Statement belittles what the Forster family endured—as if he had Major Statements in mind. They play as if willing Bãumler to fight.
This Robert Forster sounds less complacent than confident. Devotees know their man; he can afford to apotheosize himself with his nasal, abashed, slightly mournful vocal timbre. “I Don’t Do Drugs I Do Time” confirms his knack for marrying an eyebrow-raising title and a conceit so obvious that of course no one thought of it before he did. Time fascinates him, and time will not relent. “Feel changes in my mind/I’m walkin’ to school in ‘69/The next day I’m 35,” he sings over a couple chords. A nod toward George Jones, “Tender Years” registers how an inward eye turns outward, with Bãumler as the subject: “Walking through salt and water, I see how far we’ve come.” Louis’ bass grounds the sentiment with a riff as inevitable as a hug. The Forster who as a Go-Between commemorated the early days of married seclusion and flipped through a notebook of familiar-names-now-memories has long understood how love can be a byproduct of curiosity.
If The Candle and the Flame follows the Forsterian pattern of skeletal albums preceding a fuller, thicker-bodied one, it stands out because simpatico players have kicked around and toughened up the fuller, thicker-bodied ruminations. Forster finds resonances in the everyday. He knows, per “The Roads,” that the colors of the country are green and brown and red. Think before you speak, he offers in “It’s Only Poison,” and speak before you’re forgotten. Far from stifling the imagination, these descendants of what he praised in an earlier song as a family of “honest workers” have kindled it. The Candle and the Flame is an entrancing flicker.


The Scandinavian disco luminaries join for an album that draws on space rock, dub, leftfield disco, and post-punk, made more for the mind than the dancefloor.

Square One

It’s been eight years since Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas released their last collaborative effort, 2009’s proggy and unfocused II. And while there was never a “conscious uncoupling,” the two beardo disco luminaries have since taken to working with others. Lindstrøm has paired with Todds Rundgren and Terje, while Prins Thomas has mostly explored the single life with sprawling solo albums, capped by last year’s ambitious almost-100-minute ambient exploration Principe del Norte.
Square One finds Prins Thomas working with fellow Norwegian and scene legend Bjørn Torske. While Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas garnered the most notice in the West for exporting spacey disco in the mid-’00s, Torske had already been doing dubby disco since the late ’90s and worked closely with the late producer Erot (known for producing Annie’s breakout “The Greatest Hit”). But Prins Thomas and Torske apparently have recordings that stretch back to 1997. That Prins Thomas is influenced by Torske’s work is a given—his tracks have been habitually woven into Prins Thomas’ official mix albums, be it Cosmo Galactic Prism, Live at Robert Johnson, Rainbow Disco Club Vol. 1, or Paradise Goulash—so the two connecting in the studio is sympathetic. Rather than revisit their mischievous nu-disco days, the results of this session are laidback, intuitive, and ideal for drifting deep into space.
“On U” may namecheck Adrian Sherwood’s lacerating punk/dub imprint, but the track itself is built up from a mellow and deceptively simple motorik beat. Almost imperceptibly, the gooey bassline has a conga drum stick to it, soon joined by a ghostly electric organ chord, some guitar glissando, and a sizzling ride cymbal. So loose is the track that the duo appear to perform a nifty trick, making it at once build towards a peak while at the same time seeming to unspool, its groove in ever-widening circles like clay wobbling off of a potter’s wheel.
While all seven tracks feature drums, rarely does a single beat on the album ever rev above 100 bpm. (The lone exception comes on the classical space-disco squiggles of “Kappe tre.”) Rather than offer rhythmic propulsion, the drums primarily serve more as underlying pulse for the layers of analog keys and echo effects. “Arthur” begins as slo-mo disco, but the addition of a hand drum dilates the space between the beats; unidentifiable analog noises flutter in and out of the mix. And while the track only clocks in at seven minutes, its leisurely pacing gives it the feel of one of L&PT’s double digit-length head-trips.
The album’s longest excursion is the nine-minute “12 Volt,” which at times promises to have its rumbling dark bassline coagulate into something more sinister. But Torske and Prins Thomas keep tweaking the track until it starts to resemble the waning minutes of Steve Miller Band’s “Macho City,” all simmering hi-hat, tocking percussion, foreboding bass, and ambience like steam off of hot asphalt. The speed notches up on “K16 Del 1,” as cowbell, thumb piano, and toms give the track a tribal feel; shimmering noises soon swell up and dissipate the rhythmic tension. Bits of space rock, dub, leftfield disco, and post-punk all feed into Square One, but despite the Scandinavian disco pedigree of its two participants, it’s less a dancefloor weapon than a soundtrack for dorm room philosophizing.