Five years after a landmark compilation that helped introduce the then-emergent sound of UK Afrobeats, London’s Moves Recordings takes stock of a half-decade of innovations in Black British music.

Various Artists: MOVES: 5 Years of Culture - Afrobeats / Rap & Drill

Four years ago, London-based independent Moves Recordings set out its stall with MOVES: The Sound of UK Afrobeats. It did exactly what a good scene-setting compilation should do: It provided a way in for the curious listener, pitched a broad tent for a still-evolving sound (J Hus, an early figurehead, released his debut album in the same month), and pointed to where it might go next. The compilation was curated by Afro B, an early champion of Afrobeats as it blossomed out of West Africa and was picked up by diaspora communities in the UK.
A year later, his song “Drogba (Joanna)” would emerge as an anthem. The track still rings out around stadiums today, and its instantly recognizable, shoulder-rolling “Jo, Jo, Jo” chorus makes a fitting opener for this new collection from the label that helped make it a hit. Where The Sound of UK Afrobeats explored the way UK rap and Afrobeats were cross-pollinating in the mid-2010s, this two-part, compartmentalized, and serviceably titled retrospective draws firmer boundaries: twenty tracks on 5 Years Of Culture: Rap & Drill, and 19 on 5 Years Of Culture: Afrobeats. It’s a fine stamp on an agenda-setting half-decade for the label.
Each half offers a thorough survey of two distinctly Black British scenes that have exploded in the past five years, from fringe concerns to chart-bothering, arena-filling, star-minting phenomena in their own right. This is an opportunity to flex: There aren’t many small independent labels that can boast hits from Wizkid, Davido, Mr Eazi, Chief Keef, Tiwa Savage, and Eugy in their catalog. But the release also offers a picture, if not a warning, of how quickly music now moves. The path from the incubation of a newish sound—the label’s first release in 2016, which features on Rap & Drill, was a remix of Belly Squad’s Snapchat-fueled, student-party sleeper hit “Banana”—to its uptake, replication, and eventual stagnation, thanks to speculative splashes from major labels with budgets to blow, is now something that can take months, not years. This is especially the case for the now-tired genre that became known as Afroswing (pioneers like Yxng Bane and the aforementioned Belly Squad are well represented here). UK drill’s turn has come too—look no further, if you can bear it, than Ed Sheeran’s summer swoop on the scene.
Yet, and this is credit to Moves’ canny A&Rs, there’s very little that sounds dated on this collection. The rap and drill selection, in particular, pokes out the spaces that remain for innovation: the pentatonic scales on TPL, JoJo, and Omizz’ “Skrr Reverse”; Offica’s Nigerian-Irish flow; Fizzler’s grimey skip and slide. The best moments on the Afrobeats side are those raw offerings from the likes of Medikal and Naira Marley that are shorn of any commercial gloss and put movement firmly first.
Given Moves’ proven knack for identifying what’s next, it’s a shame there’s not more of that on show. Despite packing in nearly 40 tracks, this double-comp only features a handful of new songs—two, from Lavish and A92 on the rap release, and a Eugy remix on the Afrobeats side—which makes you wonder what the difference is between this and a Spotify playlist. It could be questioned, too, why the label plumped for two separate, lengthy collections instead of shaving down to a single, more finely curated release. (The answer is most likely a mixture of pride and streaming numbers.) Less stringent titular confines might have opened up space to explore the label’s interests in other areas, such as amapiano or the emergent “freebeat” sound, or even its roster of angsty emo-rap acts, like BVDLVD, that have threatened to take off but never quite escaped their concentrated suburban fanbases.
But then, 5 Years of Culture never claimed to be a crystal ball. In another five years, who knows where we’ll be? You can be assured that Moves won’t treat that question as rhetorical. Listen carefully, and they’ll let you know before we get there.

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The more Alejandro Ghersi gives of himself, the larger his music as Arca grows. His latest feels both intimate and expansive, a connection between his melodic past and a chaotic future.

Arca

This album began long before Alejandro Ghersi became Arca. In the nascent stages of his career, Ghersi made dreamy synth pop songs as a teenager in Venezuela under the name Nuuro. These love sketches, sung in Spanish and English, showcased an upbeat singing voice and brightly colored electronic landscapes redolent of Postal Service or Passion Pit. What he did as Nuuro and what he now does as Arca couldn’t seem any more different. Arca’s sound is one of chaos and contortions, further defined by the unsettling visuals of morphing bodies suspended in space he made with longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. But when Ghersi debuted his newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) singing voice on Arca, it felt like a wormhole opened up—one that connected his prehistoric past to his visions of the distant future.
“Piel,” the first song Arca released from this album, felt shockingly new. He hums at first, intimating the cadence of a bedtime lullaby, easing a listener into the song. Then, seconds later, he sings towards the heavens, and acidic drips of distortion, bass, and chorus rumble in the background. The melody feels worn and romantic, and his voice slinks along to the beat like an old prayer. Finally, the music dissolves into a puddle of oozing beats and jumbled clanks. When you listen to “Piel,” there is no question you’re hearing an Arca song. And when you go searching for the answer to why that is, you keep digging into Ghersi’s timeline, trying to figure out how he could make something that feels so ancient and so otherworldly.
The 13-songs on Arca don’t represent an about-face for Ghersi, or even a reinvention. Rather, it imagines what would happen if he intermingled the music of his past (the pop songs he made, the Schumann and Mendelssohn he studied) with the radical noise and boundary-shattering pop he’s invented as Arca. Booming organs, mournful pianos, and classical instrumentation share space with a kaleidoscope of outré production. This juxtaposition is made even more clear by his voice, which proudly wears all of its imperfections: every cough, wheeze, and difficult breath is captured. That he’s using his voice at all is, for Ghersi, an act of time-travelling in itself. He says that his relationship with his voice on this album felt like “communing with [his] teenage self again.” He combines paradoxes and contradictions to create an experience that doesn’t feel like it’s part of our space-time continuum, but a separate universe he’s making on the fly.
The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque—it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily. Take for example the three-song sequence of “Coraje,” “Whip,” and “Desafío.” “Coraje,” is the album’s simplest song—Ghersi’s take on the piano ballad. The keys plink away as Ghersi searches for notes high and low. He even sounds like he’s crying at one point—moaning and whispering—his delivery becoming more watery as he reaches the finale. Seconds later, on “Whip,” he rips you from this emotional moment with a minute-and-a-half long track that’s mostly just the sound of a bullwhip rapidly moving back and forth. Then, on “Desafío,” he channels all the pop music he’s written for Kanye, FKA twigs, Björk, Kelela, and others into a single point. It’s warm, impossibly catchy, but densely detailed. It begins with the sound of an air raid siren, but then it cracks open, and Arca unleashes this joyous synth melody and airy drums. He sounds at ease, dancing between notes as he talks about the touch of lover feeling like the kiss of death (“Tócame de primera vez/Mátame una y otra vez”—“Touch me first time/Kill me again and again”). It’s as close to a straightforward pop song Ghersi might write under the name Arca, and it’s outstanding.
Throughout Arca, Ghersi strings together moments like these, finding beauty in contrast. And it’s not just because there is something dazzling about how different each moment feels from one to the next. There’s something legible, more direct about all of this. Hearing him castigate a lover on “Fugaces” (“¿Por qué me mentiste?”—“Why did you lie to me?”) or just saying something as simple as “I miss you” on “Anoche,” is something Ghersi hasn’t done before. Some of these songs sound like they were delivered as if he was right there in the room with you. Even if he claims many of the lyrics were improvised, there is still a strong intention—he’s reaching out and offering his hand. This close-quarters proximity gives these songs a pulse, a warm human heartbeat that seemed buried in all the noise of his older songs.
Ghersi recently revealed that he chose the name Arca because it was an old Spanish word for a “ceremonial container.” Arcas are “empty spaces” that can be filled with meaning. He has never been one to believe in anything as concrete as identity or category, but there is a sense on Arca that he’s looking back at what he’s done in order to reach something else altogether—he’s filling up his box with all the best possible versions of himself: past, present, and future. It’s all for the sake of imagining a world better than the here and now.


I could fill an entire paragraph right now simply repeating the name Weezer. Oh, Weezer, Weezer, Weezer. Oh, Weezer. How ...

Weezer (Green Album)

I could fill an entire paragraph right now simply repeating the name Weezer. Oh, Weezer, Weezer, Weezer. Oh, Weezer. How sad I am for Weezer. Let's backtrack. This requires a lot of personal history to be revealed-- total stream-of-consciousness memory recall. We'll start in 1994. In 1994, I was ten years old. Rock music was a new and relatively unknown concept to me. By rock music, I mean rock music: distorted guitars, hard-hitting drums, the harshness of grunge and rock. It had already broken onto mainstream radio, but I was too young to pay attention. I was a weird kid, busying myself with Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson records.
The girl who lived next door (and who also happened to take care of me on occasion, when my parents were out) was probably around 12 or 13 at the time. I thought she was beautiful. It resembled a crush, although it probably wasn't. And occasionally, we would listen to CDs. She brought over her very small collection-- mine was already three times as large. There was a blue disc amongst her discs. She pulled it out and pressed play. My world was blasted apart. She clearly loved this, and I had no idea what to think. "Undone (The Sweater Song)" was her favorite. It was one of those rare 'brand new' experiences I'm lucky enough to be able to remember. Not long after, I obtained a copy of my own. It was my favorite album for a very long time. I ordered lyrics from the fan club through the mail. I memorized the handwritten words while listening to the album on repeat. "My Name is Jonas" was pure beauty, and "Only in Dreams" was pure power. It still is.
Somehow, I didn't manage to pick up Pinkerton until 1999. I'd kind of forgotten about Weezer for a year or two, and then suddenly I remembered them. At first, I wasn't terribly impressed, clearly being more familiar with the sound of grunge and angst. And then I listened to it a second time and was knocked out all over again. I went back to "the blue album," this time understanding the intricacies of the sound-- what makes the songs so warm and effective. Its simple brilliance slapped me; it sounded as fresh as it did the first time I ever heard it. So naturally, as news of Weezer recording began to circulate late last year, I was overjoyed. How would they follow-up the blistering, angry Pinkerton?
And then, months later, Weezer released "Hash Pipe." It was on the radio one day a few weeks ago. I listened to it. I listened to the whole song, from beginning to end. And when it ended, I said no. I said no no no no no. No! Weezer! NO!! Where has Rivers Cuomo gone? What has he done? What has happened to Weezer?! WHERE ARE THE REAL WEEZER?!! My heart was broken. Really. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I hated music at that moment. For just a moment, I lost faith completely. It was an overblown reaction, granted, but even after I realized how ridiculous I was being, I still felt a hatred. The song was abysmal, no two ways about it. It wasn't awkward. It wasn't charming. It didn't have dueling guitar solos with soaring and intricate harmonies. And what it wasn't made it what it was: stale, polished, emotionless.
The new self-titled Weezer album, as it turns out, is average from beginning to end. There are maybe one or two decent melodies out of the ten songs here, and the only change in tone comes with "Island in the Sun," the album's only truly enjoyable song and its catchiest hook. It's the first and only moment of even moderate pleasure in the record's brief yet far too long 28-minute length. But even with this singular change in volume and mood, Weezer lacks the sense of dynamics and intricacy that Pinkerton-- and especially their debut-- held in spades. There's no power to these songs, and even less depth.
It's a de-evolution back through Pinkerton, through the blue album, and beyond. Like "Hash Pipe," it doesn't seem genuine anymore. But The Green Album doesn't generally sound like the canned, artificial angst of "Hash Pipe"; it has a sunny disposition, with songs like "O Girlfriend" and "Glorious Day." An actual line from the song "Smile," for instance: "Open up your heart and let the good stuff come out." It's unoriginal, moronic and tacky, and that's all there is to it. Nothing under the surface. Disappointment.
I was bitter. At Rivers, at Weezer, at Geffen and Interscope. This was one of my favorite bands. They were the only band whose fan club I have ever joined. They had significance. They opened musical doors for me. This album is not that Weezer. But I had to write a review, so I did a little research. And I read that, after the complete failure of the angst and emotional extremes of Pinkerton in the music world, Cuomo felt as if his goal to be a rockstar was completely obliterated. So he locked himself in his room for a year, with no outside contact, and when he came out, his work suddenly had no emotional content.
He's now afraid that fans of the band will hate the new album and lose touch with him and the group. He genuinely realizes that all of the feeling in his vocals and lyrics are gone, and he realizes that it's probably a phase. And I suddenly share his fear. So maybe the real Weezer-- the Weezer I know and love-- can come back now. After this phase ends and the album goes platinum, maybe they'll feel better about themselves. I'm going to go upstairs now to listen to the album that is 1994 to me, the album that is still new and marvelous to me after seven years, and fall asleep content.


Though detailed and accomplished, Steve Reich’s latest work dully reaffirms his place as a centrist in a field of extremists.

Pulse/Quartet

During the last two years, each of the United States’ four masters of musical minimalism—Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—turned 80. They are all still composing, performing, and proselytizing for their own aesthetic visions. Their bodies of work are reminders that the “scenes” shaped by critics or mere circumstances are rarely cohesive; they are disconnected threads, sewn together by necessity or dumb luck. To this day, for instance, Young remains the philosophical ascetic, the one who told  The Guardian in 2015, “I’m only interested in putting out masterpieces” despite having not released a record for nearly two decades. Riley is the imaginative mystic, the avuncular sort whose sense of play and exploded psychedelia has made him a multigenerational pied-piper. Glass is the crossover king, a composer whose twin senses of delicacy and bombast led to exquisite études and (for better and worse) that indelible Koyaanisqatsi score.
Reich has long sat squarely near the middle: A bit like Young, he is perennially devoted to a small clutch of consistent ideas, forever in pursuit of the perfect pulse or pointillist exhibition. But like Glass, his popular appeal owes something to his openness to diverse settings, whether that be the cascade of voices in  Tehillim or Pat Metheny’s guitar in  Electric Counterpoint. He seems a flexible ideologue, then, a centrist in a field of extremists. But Pulse/Quartet—Reich’s first major release since Radio Rewrite, his pallid exposition on two Radiohead songs—reaffirms that position in the dullest possible way: through technical challenges meant to push his familiar approach to new ends.
Pulse is one of Reich’s works for a large ensemble—four violins, two violas, two flutes, and two clarinets, all undergirded by the persistent plunk of the piano and electric bass. For 15 minutes, Reich weaves interpretations of a single theme above a static pulse, hoping to form a tapestry from a nice melody resurfaced with rich harmony. It is, well, pleasant. Pulse feels like the score for a short film about the heroism of an office worker’s rote existence, where a daily merry-go-round of busy work means nothing significant ever happens.
Time and again, Pulse reaches for some grand shift or climax just to settle back down and repeat the same idea through a slightly different framework. It is an interesting compositional exercise best reserved for the classroom, a sitcom-long shrug that’s pretty enough to be called beautiful and boring enough to be called tedious. And as the rubber band of an electric bass plucks away in the distance, one wonders what Reich’s music might sound like if he saw the low-end as more than a metronome. Pulse offers no clue.
Written for two pianos and two vibraphones, Quartet is a multiplayer pinball game of rapid-fire key changes and rhythmic acrobatics, where mallets on metals and hammers on strings bound off one another like permanent foils. Reich truncates the classic quartet form, dropping the middle minuet in order to create hyperactive bookends for his “Slow” second section. The result, writes Timo Andres in the liner notes, is like “one of those ‘Reich remixed’ albums, but this time the DJ is Reich himself.”
The sentiment is correct: Quartet moves constantly in at least one dimension, whether speeding up or shifting keys or dropping to a near-whisper. It suggests a real-time mixtape, spliced together from the influences on and highlights of Reich’s career. There are evocative moments, too, especially when the pianos and vibraphones lock into deep, passing grooves that reflect spirited conversation, not circumstantial crosstalk. But as with Pulse, its desired effect is minimal, a wash of motion that leaves the listener largely in the same place—in awe of Reich’s expertise and the indefatigable instrumental skills of the Colin Currie Group, but unfazed by the busy rush of so much sound.
Context does Pulse/Quartet no favors. Reich has rarely been a pure stylist or technician, even if his landmark Music for 18 Musicians hints otherwise. Instead, he’s often wrestled with big, burdensome issues—the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the arbitrary indiscretion of tragedies such as the Holocaust, the assassination of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan just after 9/11, and the events and implications of 9/11 itself. Reich’s sociopolitical spine has distinguished him from his minimalist peers, making his work matter in ways many have not risked. But Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.
It’s not necessarily the burden of the composer to make music that speaks to or for these times, of course. Pulse, after all, premiered exactly a week before the popular vote lost another presidential election; Quartet came two years earlier. But, if anything, Pulse/Quartet recalls the balm and spark provided by Reich’s most provocative stuff and demands you long for it—that is, the politically and historically charged work that made Reich’s place in the center seem so undaunted and daring.


Back in 1995, Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn broke into the electronic mainstream as the guest vocalist on ...

Temperamental

Back in 1995, Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn broke into the electronic mainstream as the guest vocalist on Massive Attack's "Protection." When the song became a monsterous club hit, it almost seemed as if the folk duo saw dollar signs. Suddenly, we were hit with Walking Wounded, the first Everything But the Girl full- length to be comprised entirely of smooth, soulful electronic music.
Sadly, their formula didn't work on a grand scale basis. It's not that it was a bad concept-- actually, it could have worked out quite nicely. The problem is, the jungle- style percussion is rarely varied, and when you've been hearing the same speedy breakbeat four times a measure for upwards of five minutes, it comes out sounding stilted, uninspired and sterile.
Despite extreme advances in the sound of electronic music in the three years since Walking Wounded was released, Temperamental sticks with the same sound Everything But the Girl offered up in 1996. The stuff probably still works as well as Walking Wounded on the dance floor at the local sportsbar, but for casual listening, it's incapable of holding interest.
The thing about this band is that they're not a bad band-- they work fine as an updated version of Sade. Their problem is, they're just so average. I mean, songs like "Hatfield 1980," "Downhill Racer," the album's standout, "Lullaby of Clubland," and the closing track, "The Future of the Future (Stay Gold)," a collaboration with EBTG- contemporaries Deep Dish, could work as singles. But at the end of 60 straight minutes of this record, you feel like you've just spent half your life in an upscale women's clothing store.


Over their 10-year career, Ra Ra Riot have swung between extremes, from the literary baroque pop of their breakout The Rhumb Line to the electro-pop of Beta Love. On their new album Need Your Light, they find a sweet spot, finding a bright synth-pop sound not far from Passion Pit.

Need Your Light

Over their 10-year career, Ra Ra Riot have presented two extreme versions of themselves. On one end there is their 2008 breakout The Rhumb Line, an orchestral pop record distinguished by collegiate literary references and scarred by trauma. On the other is 2009’s "Can You Discover?," a synthy, Auto-Tuned reworking of one of their debut’s tracks by Discovery, a collaboration between frontman Wes Miles and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij. In between these two poles, Ra Ra Riot have struggled for balance. Their sophomore record The Orchard played it safe, not falling too far from the tree of its predecessor, while their 2013 foray into electro-pop, Beta Love, explored an abundance of new sounds but lacked cohesion.
On Need Your Light, they finally hit the sweet spot. Working once again with Rostam, they key back into the chirpy, buoyant electronics of "Can You Discover?" and blend them with the string-heavy compositions of The Rhumb Line. The result could sit comfortably next to Passion Pit. On Beta Love, Miles’ vocals occasionally drifted into uncanny-valley territory, but Need Your Light brings him back down to Earth. On "Water," Miles’ falsetto constricts as he sings "Don’t punish me for what I feel" and then tightens even further to near-desperation as he imagines crawling out the back door, ripping off his tight clothes, and leaping into the water. "I Need Your Light" (also by Batmanglij) is the record’s biggest showstopper, with Miles’ voice repeating the title until it swells from a wisp into a belting, burning swan song.
But rather than feeling like outliers, the Rostam-produced tracks fit in well with the remaining eight songs produced by Ryan Hadlock, which lean toward a more traditional Ra Ra Riot mix of tight instrumentation embellished with processed flourishes. All the synths are large and loud, the violins glittering, and any memories of calm are quickly overshadowed by the music's insistent "dance yourself clean" imperative. "Instant Breakup" blooms slowly, hand claps and heavy drums creeping in before twisting into a synthy sugar spiral. The chorus of "Every Time I’m Ready to Hug" is an invitation to dance until your limbs are tangled.
Thematically, most of the 10 tracks on Need Your Light suggest taking a leap of faith—in this case, putting trust in love. The lyrics tilt towards the anthemic and dramatic: "'Cause I can’t see nothing without your light," "Love will get me up again," "I wanna know that love can change you." "Absolutely"’s lyrics, however, resemble a painful drunken New Year’s proclamation: "It’s the year of/ Absolutely being/ Absolutely nothing/ Absolutely crushing/ Absolutely everything/ Absolutely loving." On a bright record full of balanced sweetness, it’s the only moment that cloys, a reminder of the missteps that brought Ra Ra Riot here.


Channeling her field recordings and sound collages into richly melodic slowcore overlaid with Auto-Tune, the Texas musician opens up a new expressive frontier in her work.

sentiment

Texan experimentalist claire rousay’s foray into melancholic, folk-inflected pop might surprise fans of her tactile collages of everyday sounds like jingling keys, overheard conversation, and suggestive murmur. Those better acquainted with the full extent of her sprawling catalog of self-described “emo ambient”—which spans hyperpop, text-to-speech recordings, and an unfinished Elliott Smith cover—might simply see this as another left turn. In fact, on sentiment, rousay brings together strands from her previous work into a revealing self-portrait, channeling her experimental musical language into the kind of earnest pop she evidently loves but until now has mostly shared as one-offs, swapping her habitually atmospheric ambient pieces for shorter, more melodic, lyrically driven slowcore songs.
Where a softer focus and everything perfect is already here were made up of abstract, shifting collages, sentiment has a stable core in her spare guitar playing and yearning vocals, to which she applies heavy Auto-Tune. Despite sentiment’s more conventional singer-songwriter mode, though, rousay doesn’t entirely abandon her avant-garde leanings, using found sounds and field recordings to enrich the album’s texture, depth, and storytelling. The result opens up a new expressive frontier in her work, finding original, affecting ways of exploring despair and desire.
Depression figures heavily in sentiment’s lyrics. The album begins with a harrowing confession: “It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday and I cannot stop sobbing.” The line, read by Theodore Cale Schafer, comes from rousay’s phone—an analog twist on the text-to-speech experiments on it was always worth it. sentiment’s frank, conversational lyrics build on a similar nexus of dread and black humor. Heavy drinking (“Blacking out ’til I feel okay” she sings on “it could be anything”) features throughout. Self-loathing proliferates: “I hate me too,” she sings on “lover’s spit plays in the background.” The album is full of sexual longing but links romance to feelings of inadequacy: “Spending half of my whole life giving you head, just in case you need to forgive me one day,” she admits on “head.” Exploring the “infinite void” described in “4pm,” rousay finds a dense tangle of memories, confessions, and emotions.
rousay’s concern across sentiment is not so much that these feelings will overwhelm her, but that they might be crushed into numbness—“an even worse reality,” as her note in “4PM” concludes. The album’s steady, lethargic pacing mirrors rousay’s dejection; “asking for it” swells dramatically before quickly petering out, as if it has lost its will.
rousay explores anhedonia most affectingly through her voice, using Auto-Tune to give it a robotic quality. Inspired by Young Thug and Sparklehorse, she used the effect on last year’s single “Sigh in My Ear” as well as on Bandcamp uploads like “meg,” “a bullshit creative (dressing room demo)” and “new monkey (unfinished elliott smith cover).” The vocal effect was stark and incongruous in these one-offs, seemingly applied mainly for its striking sound. In sentiment, however, by crushing rousay’s emotive outpourings into a neutral, dehumanized monotone, the effect becomes a powerful conceptual device, exploring the way despair can give way to numbness and exhaustion.
rousay’s use of found sounds, previously heard in collages like everything perfect is already here, throw rousay’s feelings of isolation in stark relief as she grapples with the tension between her innermost thoughts and the anonymous bustle of life around her. Her private reflections, run through cold, alienating vocal processing, clash with warm and lively field recordings from public spaces, like the chatter, birdsong, and crunching footsteps in “sycamore skylight.” Disconnected from this outer world, rousay attempts to “convince everyone that I’m ok.”
Despite the album’s overwhelmingly interior air, rousay is not alone on sentiment; a number of guest musicians help introduce color, expression, and textural variety. Her guitar playing is simplistic—she learned the instrument for this album—but it’s buoyed by expressive string performances. On “it could be anything,” the crescendoing violin of Mari Maurice (aka more eaze) is glorious, if short-lived, as is the fencing between cellist Emily Wittbrodt and violinist Julia Brüssel on “iii.” But even these guests’ contributions aren’t quite enough to rescue later tracks, especially closer “ily2,”from the album’s restricted pacing and palette.
Still, sentiment remains deeply moving, poignant, and original. Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life.


The Decemberists may have built their rep on historical backdrops and quaint theatricality, but their third full-length trades much of that in for more ambitious narratives and dynamic playing. Picaresque captures the band in peak form, packing in exotic instrumentation that creates a lush and evocative backdrop to Colin Meloy's story-songs, which here are more colorful-- and more topical-- than ever.

Picaresque

Re-sleeve that album cover! Disregard those silly liner-note photographs! Never you mind the Decemberists' attempts at theatricality-- Picaresque is the band's least stagy, most serious, and most accomplished effort yet. It's also as good a follow-up to Her Majesty the Decemberists any devoted fan could hope for. On that previous effort, head insurgent Colin Meloy proclaimed, "I was meant for the stage," and indeed the songs sounded like production numbers performed by eager actors in a cramped playhouse. That album still retains its considerable charm, but the Decemberists sounded less like a band than a traveling troupe at the behest of fickle royalty.
Picaresque easily dispels such limitations. Here, as he plaintively proclaims on "The Engine Driver", Meloy is "a writer, a writer of fictions." As its title suggests, the album collects a compendium's worth of well-crafted story-songs, most of which sound more literary than theatrical (the nearly nine-minute "Mariner's Revenge Song" excepted). In other words, the Decemberists are no longer the indie rock version of the Max Fischer Players; these songs are content to be songs, not one-acts, and the music is music, not sonic scenery. As a result, Picaresque sounds similar to Castaways and Cutouts and their live shows: The music is more dynamic and all the more evocative for not attempting to romantically conjure the past and filter it through Meloy's imagination. Despite some historical backdrops, most of these narratives are set in the here and now, a milieu that suits the band very well.
The spring in the band's collective step here may be somewhat aided by Chris Walla's crisp production, but I imagine it's mostly the achievement of the band itself, who sharpened their teeth on last year's mini-LP The Tain and now tend to Meloy's songs like bodyguards trotting alongside the presidential limousine. Chris Funk packs an arsenal of exotic instruments, brandishing his bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy, and dulcimer like firearms, and Rachel Blumberg, in her farewell performance (she has left to concentrate on her band Norfolk and Western) proves a capable foil for Meloy, her voice blending nicely with his on "From My One True Love (Lost at Sea)" and "The Mariner's Revenge Song". She also adds thunderous momentum to the opening "The Infanta", a heartbreak pulse to the quieter parts of "On the Bus Mall", and an athletic shuffle to "The Sporting Life", and her hi-hat decorates "We Both Go Down Together" like jewels on a lover's necklace.
In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives. He remains enamored with tawny historical verisimilitudes, which inform the devastating "Eli, the Barrow Boy", "The Infanta", and "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (the latter of which, legend has it, was recorded live around a single mic). But much of his chosen subject matter sounds startlingly contemporary, even if these songs still confront the familiar theme of impossible love.
A cousin to Belle and Sebastian's "The Stars of Track & Field", "The Sporting Life" views the roaring crowds, disapproving parents, unfaithful girlfriend, and disappointed coach from the vantage of an averse athlete lying injured on the field, and "The Bagman's Gambit" conjures a compromised U.S. government, a D.C. where everyone is for sale, as a backdrop for the story of a government official in love with a spy. Meloy's acoustic guitar is delicate here, while the band churns a car-chase momentum climaxing in a nightmarish freakout that sounds like Manchurian Candidate dementia triggered by "A Day in the Life".
Perhaps the best song he's written, "On the Bus Mall" is Meloy's own private Idaho full of boy gigolos amok in the city, and he evocatively contrasts their innocent affection ("Here in our hovel we fused like a family") with the grittiness of their lives: "You learned quick to make a fast buck/ In bathrooms and barrooms, on dumpsters and heirlooms/ We bit our tongues/ Sucked our lips into our lungs 'til we were falling/ Such was our calling."
The one standout, the apple among the oranges, is "16 Military Wives", which on first listen doesn't seem to fit the Picaresque aesthetic. It's not a story, but a protest song that uses a slick horn line and Meloy's loosest vocals yet (I distinctly hear a "whoo!") to tally the mathematics of war-- plus dollars, minus lives. But it's the sequencing that allows Meloy to work this aside into the album's larger mission: Following "To My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)", about futilely awaiting a lover's return, it becomes clear that the narrator could be one of the "five military wives" left widowed by "14 cannibal kings" while "15 pristine moderate liberal minds" look on helplessly. This is a new side of the Decemberists: angry, impassioned, and more in touch with the world than ever.


Mixing art-punk, industrial, and techno, the outstanding New Orleans four-piece emerge with a blistering vision of punk as possibility.

The Passion Of

In 2018, Special Interest located the middle ground between no wave and Nina Simone. The quartet’s debut album, Spiraling, began with a song—tough, anthemic, guttural, and glammy—called “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather.” Evoking Simone’s Civil Rights Era anthem and the cool cultishness of their VHS-referencing band name, “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather” fittingly opened with the High Priestess of Soul herself: “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I performed, I just want them to be to pieces,” goes the sample, and then the band follows in Simone’s high stakes. “The law is on my back/Every night,” Alli Logout shouts out. “The law is on my back/That’s why we fight.”
In this current moment of razing systems and exposing histories, Special Interest is attuned to the future. “We are on the brink of a major collapse of everything,” Logout said in a 2019 interview. “I think what we are doing speaks to that. I want complete, total destruction of everything.” Perhaps when Logout screams “trust no wave” on “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather,” it meant just that: Trust that your impulse towards destruction is for a reason.
The Passion Of is the sound of art-punk, industrial, ambient, techno, and glam imploding on themselves. It’s vicious and physical, blistering at the edges of Maria Elena’s serrated guitars, Nathan Cassiani’s bass playing, and Ruth Mascelli’s blown-out synths and cavernous drum-machine beats—The Passion Of is made of sparks. Logout’s holler can pivot from playful to taunting to gnarled to vulnerable in an instant, and their pen is consistently ablaze, whether writing about sex and longing at end times or gentrification and the militarization of cities. The second track is a scorcher called “Disco III,” a ferocious blur of pain and ecstasy in the lawlessness of night, examining “sodomy on LSD!” “Disco III” follows Spiraling’s “Disco” and “Disco II,” which says a lot. At the core of their careening, rattling, irreverent noise, Special Interest honor and channel the Black and gay legacies of dance music and infuse them into their 2020 vision of punk as possibility.
The animating “NO” of punk hits different with Special Interest: “What happens when there’s nothing left to gentrify and genocide is on your side?” Logout yelps in syncopated shouts on “Homogenized Milk,” describing the violence of such uprooting. Special Interest’s chaos is twisted but clear, a blustering push forward, asking inexhaustible questions, notably on the mesmerizing technoise banger, “All Tomorrow’s Carry.” It’s another lucid narrative of gentrification and displacement, about partying with an eye to the police state: “I watch the city crumble/Arise from the rubble/Another tawdry condo,” Logout observes in a cold post-punk speak-sing. “But would you bat an eye/Waiting for war machines to pass you by?” This is the horror of real life that many choose to overlook. Special Interest insist that you see it.
The whole of The Passion Of seems to take place after dark, in the shadows, but it burns red. Amid the ugliness there is palpable joy and lust that embodies a liberationist ethos. “And I laugh/And I cry/Boo hoo hoo/Ha ha,” goes “Don’t Kiss Me in Public,” like turning the breadth of human feeling itself into an art concept. “A Depravity Such As This” is the record’s purest techno moment, a contorted buzzsaw banger of shrieked four-on-the-floor wreckage. And nowhere is the emotionality of The Passion Of more felt than the aching ballad “Street Pulse Beat,” as Logout describes pleasure out of reach: “I can’t take you there/Where desire unfolds,” they sing, “Maybe I don’t know myself/But to know you now I know.” “Street Pulse Beat” bears out a rare sensitivity; its punk build makes its infatuation, desperation, and noisy euphoria sound like a secret.
If there is a thread to this music, it is survival. That considerable power comes into granular focus on The Passion Of’s monumental closer, “With Love,” which roils like a siren call. Logout narrates the stark realities of navigating life in a Black queer body—of “our fathers in cages,” of “the legacy of poverty within me,” the tyrannies of a world in which “We can’t breathe/In the fantasy of freedom/Choked out from me”—before envisioning an abolitionist future, “to free the millions from the mass cages.” Amid the song’s shrill metallic roar is the “the sweet smell of the rot of society” giving way to “agency and honesty/Joy with autonomy” and “the bliss of infinite love.” They illustrate a world collapsed and reborn.
“The words I write that are bubbling inside of me could have been written yesterday or five years into the future,” Logout recently said in an interview. “They are not my own, they are from those I carry inside my DNA and from my friends I listen to, learn from, and struggle with.” In the lyrics to “With Love,” they quote the autobiography of activist Assata Shakur: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” This insurrectionary song, and The Passion Of in full, heed Shakur’s revolutionary call. The song continues:

A glimmer of light through grief
Like from the deepest depth of the sea
We welcome you to join us
As our tongues bleed this decree
Lucid the veil we see
The spirits they stand with thee
With passion aroused we call
For tomorrow the people take all

By nature, punk offers a moment of ignition. But for Special Interest, there is also a horizon.

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On her dazzlingly detailed new album of experimental post-footwork, the Indiana producer pushes extreme rhythmic precision so far that it begins to feel psychedelic.

Akoma

Rigor is a virtue for Jlin. The Gary, Indiana producer and composer born Jerrilynn Patton is the kind of artist who watches Whiplash and identifies with the teacher, who’s argued that “you shouldn’t create simply because it sounds good to you,” who rejects loops and builds her fearsome post-footwork beats from scratch. It’s surprising, then, to learn that she left a few “mistakes” in her 2017 opus Black Origami; “I like feeling vulnerable,” she told Tone Glow. But while that album seemed to fly off the rails in exactly the way the creator desired, her new album Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey. There’s a delightful contrast at play: Despite the record’s un-psychedelic qualities, the way it yanks the synapses could make you swear you’re seeing colors.
Akoma is technically Jlin’s third album, and her first new solo LP since Black Origami, but the breadth of her craft has expanded vastly in the time between. She scored Autobiography, a dance piece by Wayne McGregor, and pushed her sound into gnarlier realms of tech-noise on her Embryo EP; most auspiciously, she became a Pulitzer finalist for Perspective, a collaboration with Third Coast Percussion. It feels like a miraculous journey for a producer who started out making beats while working 96-hour weeks at a steel mill—and who emerged from a hyper-regional Black dance subgenre that’s been underground for such a long time the 36-year-old Patton recalls hearing footwork at a neighbor’s house when she was four. But Patton’s always been that good, ever since she debuted on the seminal Bangs & Works Vol. 2 compilation with “Erotic Heat”; Pitchfork’s Jonathan Williger was right to question in his review of Perspective why it took collaborating with a classical ensemble for the Pulitzers to take notice.
Akoma wears its classical bona fides on its sleeve, not least with guest appearances by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet. Neither of them is really asked to do much: Glass’s spider-fingered études fill the gaps between the drums on “The Precision of Infinity,” while Kronos saw away madly in the distance on “Sodalite.” It’s funny that Jlin’s actual collaboration with a string quartet is so much less string-heavy than “Summon,” a sort of warped chamber piece that seems perpetually poised to collapse like some delicate paper structure. For that matter, Björk is a ghost on “Borealis,” which came from a proposed collaboration whose parts Jlin salvaged for her own purposes. These luminaries’ names seem present in the credits for the same reason Patton decided to name one track after an Egyptian goddess and another after her “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” (actually a cobbler, it turns out): These figures are as much collaborators as inspirations and exemplars, pushing Patton to give her best.
There are enough beat-switches, breakdowns, switcheroos, and change-ups on any given track to give “Bohemian Rhapsody” hives. “Speed of Darkness” and “Open Canvas” are the two longest and most compositionally impressive cuts, the former assembling and reassembling itself out of pockets of silence, the latter something of a free-jazz riff on earlier Midwest dance classics like “Percolator.” Four-on-the-floor kicks appear, disappear, and leave nothing but triplets and pockets of empty space, and it’s a safe bet that if a song settles into anything resembling a groove it’ll splinter apart just as rapidly. The underlying structural logic governing these tracks isn’t always easy to suss out, but there’s no doubt that it’s there; this music is always developing, never meandering, repeating elements only when necessary.
Patton’s music draws from a wide range of sources in addition to electronic and classical music. Her love of HBCU marching bands carries over from Black Origami, and the arrangements should inspire nods of recognition (and memories of grueling rehearsal) from anyone who’s ever been in or written for drum corps. Sometimes Akoma sounds like fife-and-drum blues or AACM jazz or African music, even when it’s written in the language of footwork, where whip-crack 808 and 909 snares are the norm. She even includes a few more traditional juke cuts like “Auset” and “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” to show what she’s capable of in a more conventional mode—and how far she’s come from Bangs & Works. Footwork has always drawn from omnivorous sources (check out Traxman’s face-melting AC/DC flip), but Jlin’s work is lighter on samples than most productions in the genre, and her inspirations are deeply woven into the music’s rhythmic DNA rather than left floating on top.
Jlin’s music is light on melodic and harmonic elements, which can make it a non-starter for those who require something pretty to latch onto. What’s going on in the foreground often exists to perfume the background, as on “Iris,” where the distant ghost of a cell phone ringtone snakes through a near-overwhelming barrage of drums and a vicious acid bassline that sounds like someone grasping a large flying insect. Those accustomed to thinking of percussion as an inherently auxiliary instrument will have to readjust their expectations, as will anyone looking for a casual listening experience and unwilling to enter an almost prey-like state of alertness. Jlin’s world is not always an easy one to navigate, but the endorphin rush her music provides just might inspire a listener to add a little more challenge to their life.


Tom Jenkinson continues to hop through styles and sounds, here taking on French soft-rock, disco-pop, and techno-rock.

Squarepusher: Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator

Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator

If anything exemplifies Daft Punk's ascension to both commercially viable template and honest-to-god artistic inspiration, it's Squarepusher chiming in with his take on the robots' sound. Put simply, it's hard to imagine Shobaleader One: D'demonstrator existing without Daft Punk and the generation of French producers the duo inspired. If the album's not a wholesale rip-off of DP's aesthetic-- there's a little too much of Squarepusher's fidgety programming and fusion-esque bass acrobatics for that-- then it certainly feels like a very thorough homage in places. From sound (vocoder-dependent disco-soul with occasional moments of robot-rocking out) to image (robot masks, though paired with Sunn O)))'s druid robes), this record owes monsieurs Banglater and de Homem-Christo at least a nod of respect.
Or who knows, maybe Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson grew up listening to the same records as DP and just got around to making this album after a couple-dozen creative detours. (Smooth 1970s jazz isn't a million miles off from the soft-rock schlock DP transmuted on Discovery, after all.) But Jenkinson has never been shy about grabbing whatever sounds are in the cultural air and abusing them for his own ends. (See for example the entirety of his early career as breakbeat culture's supposed enfant terrible.) Sometimes this shameless snatching from other artists/genres has led to some thrilling perversions of hot trends, as with his earliest jungle-biting broadsides or 2001's UK garage nose-tweak "My Red Hot Car". Unlike those amped-up records, though, Shobaleader One just sounds lifeless. There's little thrilling, or perverse, about it, as if Jenkinson wanted to make a French pop-dance record without fully embracing the airy funk or noisy bombast that makes the Gallic innovators' music fun.
Squarepusher's usual bass frippery becomes sluggish when slowed down to a synth-pop pace-- too much "virtuosity," not enough boogie. And when Jenkinson takes on the brutal low-end cut-ups of the Ed Banger label, the results are a little too restrained to stand up. French house and synthetic R&B at Squarepusher's usual frantic tempos might have been enjoyably wacky enough for a few spins, but for some reason Jenkinson decided to play it straight, with very mixed results. Shobaleader One's not tuneful enough to pass for pop, not funky enough to satisfy a club, and lacks the wildstyle (if sometimes infuriating) excess of Squarepusher's other records. Whether hard or soft, there's nothing here that you can't hear executed with more joie de vivre by a half-dozen Frenchmen.


On her solo debut, the double bassist largely lets her instrument play a supporting role for her distinctive soprano vocals, working through deep feelings via quietly adventurous songwriting.

Carmen Q. Rothwell: Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere

Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere

As a proficient double bassist that has appeared on a considerable list of records, Carmen Q. Rothwell knows her instrument inside and out. A skilled player is often recognized for technical virtuosity, but an underappreciated aspect of mastering your instrument is having an intuitive understanding of its strengths. On her debut album as a solo artist, Rothwell forsakes flashiness in favor of letting the bass do what it does best—play a supporting role. Rothwell allows her voice to take the lead, which seems appropriate for a collection of songs where she’s talking through her feelings. Amid struggles of a romance slowly grinding to a standstill and her late father’s protracted battle with cancer, she wrote through her pain and created an eye of tranquility in the center of a storm of emotion. Calling to mind the airy sweetness of Blossom Dearie and the extended techniques of Meredith Monk in equal measure with her distinctive soprano, Rothwell has created something informed by her experience with jazz, but with a strong experimental bent.
Don't Get Comfy / Nowhere neatly divides itself between its two themes, a suite of three songs representing each. “Don’t get comfy,” Rothwell sings on the opening track, bringing you into the unease of her love affair: “Something is amiss.” Rothwell plucks sharply at the strings at sparse intervals, leaving each note plenty of space to ring out. More layers of Rothwell’s thinly transparent vocals enter the fray, repeating the same phrase out of phase with the others. You hear her inhale and breathily sigh, every utterance bearing the gravity of words not spoken lighty. In contrast, on “Blissful Ignore,” she lifts that weight and floats like a feather in the wind. “I’d adore staying a lifetime in your mind’s affections,” she chirps, selling herself on the temporary solace of denying an impending collapse. Her bass comes alive, punctuating her syllables as if following behind her like a specter—a reminder of the anxiety beneath those hollow words.
“Nowhere”—the most structurally simple, but perhaps the most evocative track—begins the side of the album where Rothwell grapples with her father’s passing. Her bass thumps like a steady heartbeat as she sings, “You can go any time/Wouldn’t it be sweeter to follow the light?” A more frantic, irregular bassline cuts in, and the vocals speed up along with it, simulating the tumult of the moment right before a painful loss. The track inches to a crawl right before it ends—the pulse returns, but it’s even slower than before. It almost feels as if you’re intruding on a private moment, standing in the doorway as Rothwell sits at her father’s bedside.
Rothwell ruminates on the aftermath of her emotional journey on closing track “Will I Find,” asking, “Will I find a way to say I love you too?” It’s about the closest the album gets to a “song” in the traditional sense, conjuring up shades of something you might find in a book of jazz standards. The bass supports the intonation of her vocals once again, but it feels different this time—looser and gentler, as if it’s singing along with her. There’s a lyrical simplicity that matches the album's musical simplicity, but that isn’t to say that it lacks depth. Each track is built around a plainspoken refrain, like a nagging feeling you can’t get out of your head. Don't Get Comfy / Nowhere speaks to the intensity of strong emotion, which requires neither florid language nor flamboyant displays of virtuosity to be universally understood.

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The rapper and producer team for a set of elaborate compositions with energetic, unpretentious writing.

Jay Worthy / Harry Fraud: You Take the Credit, We’ll Take the Check

To hear him tell it, Jay Worthy’s origin story would render him a digital-era 2Pac. At 17, the Vancouver native relocated to Compton, where he ingratiated himself with gang members and music industry figures alike. A chance run-in with A$AP Yams opened doors for Worthy’s fledgling rap duo LNDN DRGS; persistence and networking led to EPs with Curren$y, G Perico, and the Alchemist. His devotion to the West Coast canon—twinned with a knack for surrounding himself with the right collaborators—has resulted in one of the more overachieving rap catalogs of the last half-decade.
Starting with their 2015 debut, the LNDN DRGS tapes have occupied a space similar to Le$ and Larry June’s work: evocative soul samples and lifestyle raps so unembellished as to sound improvised. More recently, as on 2021’s G-funk homage The Ballad of a Dopehead, Worthy’s devoted himself to genre fare. His rigid flow and colloquial bars recall Mack 10, a modest Inglewood rhymer whose connections ensured access to Los Angeles’ most in-demand producers. Beat selection remains Worthy’s calling card, and on his latest album, You Take the Credit, We’ll Take the Check, New York producer Harry Fraud supplies a slate of elaborate compositions for Worthy and his guests.
One of the most distinguished—and distinctive—rap producers of the last decade, Fraud is still able to meet rappers on their own turf. The most cohesive tracks on We’ll Take the Check play like tributes to the LNDN DRGS sound forged by Vancouver producer Sean House. On “Tonight,” a Moog synth and smoky horn sample frame a summer night’s itinerary; the funk licks on “Winnipeg Winters” are crisp, but the capacious snare sounds like it’s playing through a wall. With his attention to technical detail, Fraud replicates the sunset-on-Sunset glow of 2015’s Aktive and 2019’s Affiliated, their whiffs of danger and anticipation. Kamaiyah’s animated melodies steal the show on “Good Lookin’,” but Worthy slides over the upbeat drum pattern, sketching a vibrant California cityscape in a succinct 12-bar verse.
Fraud’s more avant-garde arrangements yield mixed results. The Larry June feature “Pacific Coast Highway” flashes an intricate vocal loop, but the lethargic tempo and barely-there percussion leave the rappers sounding overmatched. “Almighty” abandons drums entirely, and despite Worthy’s energetic delivery, his first-person rhymes (“I’m from the hardest block, out in Compton where they shootin’ docs/Gangbangin’ so real, swear to God this shit will never stop”) aren’t as kinetic. Worthy’s unpretentious writing can make for a refreshing neighborhood-guy pragmatism, but his vocals lack depth in the absence of a bassline. The more understated beats on We’ll Take the Check would have been better suited for a more idiosyncratic rapper.
Which isn’t to say Worthy’s music is wholly uncomplicated. His painstaking mythology—a Compton transplant who’s paid his dues at every turn, a non-native evangelist of West Coast funk—has cultivated respect in his adopted hometown and recording studios on both coasts. He’s such a natural mover that his prodigious use of the n-word (Worthy identifies as South Asian) goes largely unremarked. His reputation as an artist and a hustler has granted him entree into some of rap’s most rarefied chambers; no one’s making him use that word.
Fraud is just the latest A-lister to endorse Worthy, and the give-and-take between headliners is the main attraction on We’ll Take the Check. On “Helicopter Homicide,” Fraud’s dusky minimalism foregrounds Worthy and Conway’s tales of woe; when Big Body Bes clocks in with a spoken-word rant, the song transforms into a work of abstract art. The syrupy guitar sample on “Believe” is a standalone triumph, and Worthy’s imagery (“It’s the dream, little homie, hotels and snow bunnies/Big rims on Lex bodies, we thuggin’ like John Gotti”) meets it with eager flamboyance. On We’ll Take the Check, a great producer approaches the top of his game with a rapper who mostly knows to pick his spots.


Milk Music are a product of the fertile Olympia scene and Cruise Your Illusion finds them pulling influences from post-punk, classic rock, and blues. Lead singer Alex Coxen is a candid lyricist who conveys both piercing emotional vulnerability and confrontational punk swagger.

Cruise Your Illusion

Too straight for hippies. Too far-out for punk. We're like the ultimate outsiders, Alex Coxen told this website in the fall of 2011. That is not just a stoned interview quip from the frontman of Milk Music, but rather a whole estranged state of artistic mind. These guys honed theirs at home in Olympia's freak scene-- a subterranean enclave of deep rock bands like Gun Outfit, Broken Water, Weird TV, Son Skull, Hysterics, Family Stoned (note that any or all may have broken up by now, Oly-style), groups with primitive web presences or none at all, mostly documented by one tiny label and an ink-stained, broadsheet zine. Olympia's had one of the most fertile rock undergrounds in America as of late, with Milk Music its paradigm and heart.
On the surface, Cruise Your Illusion begs to be defined by time and place. But the hissy 1980s and 90s rock of Dino Jr. and SST that Milk Music's earliest layers of thrashing, burnt fuzz recalled are now gone. There's temptation to color Milk Music an Olympia band, and yet Coxen's rapturous electric guitar leads feel more like the sound of transcending wherever you might be. And while you want to point out how Coxen's strangled, gold-hearted wail and sky-kissing solos are studiously indebted to moonlit 60s classic rock, his approach is direct and ecstatic enough to sound new. The songs have got real, heartfelt groove.
Coxen is also a candid lyricist who variously conveys the piercing emotional vulnerability of country blues or a confrontational punk swagger. Of his most affecting themes are sincerity, a free mind, and a world that repeatedly turns on him. Coxen winks at a cop, steals a car with a deluded bandit, hangs on a falling star. He's performative in his role of the outlaw rock eccentric-- journeying, daydreaming, and dancing around declarations of his creative intent.
"No, Nothing, My Shelter" is one of the best songs here-- a charming ode to Jimi and Elvis with a rock-as-saviour theme that goes for the vein of "Rock and Roll" or "Hey Hey, My My". It showcases delicate emotional heft and arresting imagery of a "crushed velvet moon," as Coxen sings open-hearted of an uprooted, nomadic existence. "I often grieve with Hendrix/ I often turn to the King/ In my suffering," he sings on one of Cruise's most striking hooks. "I've always been a dancing man/ To shelter the pain/ Whenever Jimi's playing." This is endearing stuff, and it helps that Coxen maps shining guitar leads you want to lose yourself in.
Elsewhere Coxen's more of a bratty punk vagabond. "Don't fuck with me, man/ I'm illegal and free," he demands on a charged anthem. It might come off as a bunch of talk if not for the fact that the music itself is unhinged and lawless. On "New Lease on Love" Coxen puts romantic lines alongside gutter slang, a recurring technique of juxtaposition from the school of Patti Smith. "Cruising With God", meanwhile, might be the record's most heartwarming song, carrying religious connotations appropriate for an off-the-grid guy who has clearly approached music as sacred. The entire first verse is a take-down of phony music journalists "From The L.A. Free/ To the NME," who all love Milk Music. "But even with the music on/ Baby you've got it all wrong," Coxen sings, confidently. "You haven't danced in so long." He lets out a shriek. It's sort of sweet.
Eight-minute closer "The Final Scene" is an astounding piece of music, with backwards guitar parts, subtle flecks of soft harmonica, and sharp melodies that are beautifully harmonized into something of a 1950s doo-wop burner. Coxen stretches out the raw urgency of his rasp and shades it, conveying skin-crawling melancholic feelings more so than specific thoughts-- he references Shiva's blissful dance, a laughing reaper, crumbling mountains, angels riding a moonlit hearse. It's grandiose and at times almost comically earnest, something you could picture Lee Hazlewood singing straight. But Coxen's howl is desperate and unguarded, the opposite of a cool-talker. The song feels half its length.
Cruise Your Illusion holds its ground, but there are sociological elements to Milk Music's story that make the experience of the record even more fun. In June they're touring with comrade acts Merchandise (from Tampa, Fla.) and Destruction Unit (from Tempe, Ariz.), all three of whom came up on the American D.I.Y punk circuit and have been wary of breaking through to wider popularity. They've instead favored a Sonic Youth-style embrace of counterculture and expanded musical vocabularies, thus amassing cult followings on their own terms. It's a moment that reminds me of Simon Reynolds introducing the post-punk era in Rip It Up and Start Again; "Young people have a biological right to be excited about the times they're living through," he wrote. Milk Music's message, ethos, and spirit speak well of our own.


The songwriter’s most direct and brash album yet has no time for saxophones or keyboards. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words.

Twelve Nudes

Ezra Furman is a highly thoughtful interviewee, often at the expense of convenient, neatly packaged answers. Hearing the songwriter dish on religion, rock’n’roll, and the United States of America with frequent pivots and pauses isn’t so different from hearing the four albums she’s recorded post-Harpoons—the first of at least four different backing bands that Furman has led—which jumped around doo-wop, blitzing sax-inflected pop, and scratchy-edged garage. Furman gives the same impression in both contexts: She has a lot going on up there, and she seems to feel a responsibility to sort through it all. An impatient conversationalist might prod her to just spit it out. On her most direct and brash album yet, Twelve Nudes, Furman does exactly that, and spits in a few faces along the way.
By the time of last year’s Transangelic Exodus, Furman’s cinematic opus about going on the run with an illegally harbored angel lover, she had moved on from her latest backing band, the Boy Friends, which she once defined as “a punk-soul-garage band.” Her new, nameless backing band has pared down to just one of those descriptors: punk. It’s volume over verbosity on Twelve Nudes. She’s upset; she’s enraged; she “should not be alone, the way things are going”; she has no time for saxophones or keyboards, let alone silly band names—not in 2019, when equality appears to be the last priority of the powerful. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words: “The kind of sex you want is the kind they’d like to make illegal”; “You register to vote, they make it impossible.”
Three years ago, Furman offered solace to fellow Perpetual Motion People on “Restless Year,” when she offered that “If you can’t calm down, you can listen to this.” She calls back to that lyric directly on Twelve Nudes’ opener, “Calm Down aka I Should Not Be Alone,” to disclaim that she can’t offer such respite here: “I know you can’t ’cause I can’t calm down,” she shrieks, blasting three-chord, major-key floodlights into accounts of habitual panic-sweating and thrashing around in bed at night. What she can offer, however, is a kick in the pants. “If you’re really at the end of your rope/No, you don’t take the night off/Too many demons to fight off,” she barks later.
One thing that remains the same with Furman on Twelve Nudes: She likes using classic templates to sing about new changes. That’s settled once “Sympathy for the Devil” is lifted not even 35 seconds into the album, but it’s especially moving on the one song where Furman unclenches her jaw and pulls back—all the way back, so that we can see what’s beneath her fight. Her governing ambition, she sings, is that she just wants to be someone’s girlfriend. “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” adopts a chord progression not far off from that of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and Furman reveals that she’s “been thinking about ditching Ezra and going by Esme” (she rhymes her new, Salinger-evoking name with “résumé,” as in the thing she’s been neglecting while “responsible friends” are updating theirs—a groaner, but an endearing one). She takes this breather, speaks her truth, exhales, and then it’s right back to our regularly scheduled rage. It’s a bold inclusion framed by a fine choice in pacing.
“I’m a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation,” Furman said in a recent interview, 12 years after her debut with the Harpoons declared “I Wanna Be Ignored.” There’s been an evolution between that early song and the recent quote, as though Furman has accepted and now decided to embrace this confrontation. If confrontation is what they see, it’s what they’ll get, Twelve Nudes seems to say. If there is progress to be made for the marginalized, it won’t come without being loud. Furman musters her best rallying cry on “Evening Prayer aka Justice”: “If your frail human heart is still pumping/Then make this one night you remember,” she pleads. “Time to do justice for the poor.” Furman pushes her growl to its limits to get this out. She knows what time it is.

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On their collaborative debut, the Louisiana sludge band and the Kentucky songwriter funnel gothic majesty and charred metal into moments of unlikely wonder.

Emma Ruth Rundle / Thou: May Our Chambers Be Full

May Our Chambers Be Full

Thou want to make a new world. Sure, the Louisiana sludge militants sound obliterating—Bryan Funck screeches with anguish, as if a scab were being repeatedly ripped from the surface of the band’s music. But Thou have long hopscotched among labels, collaborators, and split-mates, creating a non-hierarchical network of partners. They do what they want, whether covering Nirvana in quasi-exhaustive fashion or weaving an exhausting web of side-projects. Even their New Orleans hub, Sisters in Christ, feels as much like some communal anarcho-outpost as a record store. In Kentucky, songwriter, painter, and bandleader Emma Ruth Rundle occupies a related role. She works in multiple groups while making her own transfixing chiaroscuro folk-rock, too.
Together, Rundle and Thou shape a grand world of their own. On their seven-track collaborative debut, May Our Chambers Be Full, gothic majesty and charred metal curl into moments of unlikely wonder. At their best, these songs pair the power of a rock-radio anthem with the gnarled eccentricity of their respective DIY roots. Chambers suggests a mutual-aid network: Rundle, an evocative singer with a kind of priestly command, supplies Thou with a central melodic ballast. Thou, one of the most dependably mighty bands to emerge from the South this century, add intensity and muscle. Funck’s serrated screams cut across Rundle’s resplendent tone like a hacksaw grinding against a diamond.
These bits are enthralling. Rundle and Funck volley verses back and forth, for instance, during “Out of Existence.” She initially gives in to the band’s relentless rush, allowing herself to be swept inside, while he climbs atop it, sneering from above like a gargoyle. But the guitars, interwoven like a cat’s cradle, swell beneath Rundle during the climax. The effect is transcendent, lifting you from your own gloom for 30 seconds, too. On “Magickal Cost,” Rundle rejoins Funck after the black metal tirade at song’s center, the superhero and arch-villain suddenly joining teams and making your hairs stand on end.
But Chambers as a whole feels much longer than its 36-minute runtime, even to the point of tedium. Wayward psychedelic blues solos and self-indulgent sections interrupt the momentum. “Into Being” spends two minutes searching for its finale through lysergic guitars or arcing harmonies. Aimless passages like these often make the songs feel like a mélange of moments that lose strength as parts pile on. After “Out of Existence” hits its pinnacle with Rundle, Funck takes another unnecessary verse. You’ve forgotten her blissful sting by song’s end.
This fatigue and vertigo stem from the glut of tools at their disposal—and, it seems, their lack of restraint with them. Everyone feels a little like Chekhov’s proverbial gun: If they’re here, they’d better get used. By album’s end, Rundle and Funck build a seesaw of sorts, too often vying for space within the same line or song. They almost crowd KC Stafford out of the otherwise spectacular “Monolith,” a neo-grunge blast that suggests new avenues for Thou. There are four guitars on every song here, reinforcing the sense that everyone must have something significant to say or play.
However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself. You witness Rundle’s ability to command a formidable band. You sense Thou’s willingness to expose their melodic heart. Most important, though, you hear two acts committed to considering other ways of existing, or to outstripping our expectations not as an act of public evasion but as one of private exploration. Maybe that’s the essence of building a new world—the most inspiring aspect of May Our Chambers Be Full, even at its almighty heights.

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The minimalist classical Tower of Meaning is the greatest outlier in Arthur Russell's recorded catalogue: the most uncharacteristic one-off project in a career that is full of them.

Tower of Meaning

During his lifetime, Arthur Russell maintained only a very small cult fan base beyond the direct circles of artists who found his work so moving. Our understanding of the singer, cellist, producer, and composer's artistic identity, then, continues to evolve, as lost or cobbled-together releases trickle out via the Russell archival label Audika Records. Among the different versions of Russell, the eccentric disco obsessive and the confessional singer/songwriter remain his most familiar modes. The aspiring avant-garde classical music composer is less known, with the least recorded music to show for himself.
Yet Russell spent years of his life absorbed in this scene. During his composition studies at the Manhattan School of Music and Dartmouth University, he found inspiration in the work of the previous generation of downtown New York avant-garde composers—studying the early minimalist music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and the spare, pacifying orchestral works of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and one of his teachers, Christian Wolff. In works like his 48-hour-long experiment Instrumentals, he blended rock'n'roll influences with modern classical methodology. But the newly rereleased Tower of Meaning recordings capture a set of incidental theater music that bears an even clearer mark of those influences. Eschewing the pulsating, pop-influenced underpinnings of almost all of his other work, Tower of Meaning is the greatest outlier in his Russell's recorded catalogue: the most uncharacteristic one-off project in a career that is full of them.
And like many of Russell's creative ventures, there were other famous figures tangentially involved with this project. The pieces included on Tower of Meaning were written for a production of Euripides' Medea by legendary opera and theater director Robert Wilson in the early '80s. The collaboration was facilitated by Philip Glass, who worked with Wilson on seminal avant-music-theater work Einstein on the Beach in 1976. A fight between Wilson and Russell resulted in the music being axed from the program, and it went unheard until Glass released the tapes on his own Chatham Square label—in a run of 320—some years later. Ironically, outside of his landmark cello-and-vocal release, 1986's World of Echo, Tower of Meaning was the only finished and properly pressed "Arthur Russell" album during his lifetime.
Devoid of its dramatic context, and peppered with abrupt track ends that suggest lost tape reels, this music feels more in-process than many of Russell's "unfinished" music does—a skeleton to be filled in. Each of the seven tracks consist mostly of long, repeating strings of block chords, voiced by mixed string, wind, and brass ensembles. In later movements, a harp and hand drum, respectively, provide decoration in between the chords, perhaps suggesting the court music of the play's time period. Some of the harmonies have a brittle, dissonant quality; others feel open and cavernous; a few feel a couple of ticks away from pop music. The three types are mixed up thoroughly in these pieces, and it takes a while to become acclimated to this fidgety vocabulary.
But the most notable and challenging thing about the pieces on Tower of Meaning is their lack of arc or climax. Russell's misty but urgent song accompaniments have a similarly static quality, accumulating mass gradually and never drastically. But Tower of Meaning takes a very different approach to achieving a similar effect. The chords move in no consistent meter; there is almost no variation of dynamic across the album, and the chamber orchestra is stark and untreated with effects. Over time—consistent with most of Russell's work—this begins to create a pleasant, soothing effect, despite the sometimes-jarring nature of the harmony.
Ultimately, the approach finds overlap with that of ambient music. A few years prior to writing the Medea score, while at the Manhattan School, Russell told a skeptical composition teacher that he liked writing pieces that the listener could "plug out [from] and then plug back in[to] again without losing anything essential." On Tower of Meaning, it's easiest to do this during the culminating piece of the album, "Fragments From Tower of Meaning," which assembles chordal ideas from earlier tracks into a cyclical chamber orchestra piece, punctuated by a Pavlovian chime, which becomes more warm and enveloping across its 21-minute duration.
It would be tough to claim that Tower of Meaning is one of Russell's greatest efforts. Then again, it was not designed to be: It sounds very much like it was written as a functional component of Wilson's larger picture, not to be disseminated separately. Also, it has more of a clear grounding in a pre-existing musical lineage than anything else that Russell ever released. Yet Tower of Meaning works well within its own self-imposed boundaries. It has definite jolts of Russell's playful, try-anything-once mentality. Like most of his best music, it manages to position itself just slightly outside of convention, at a jaunty angle.


Stephen McBean has always made music for the open road, but if you value your own safety, don’t listen to Get Back, his first record as Pink Mountaintops in five years, while behind the wheel—or for that matter, while doing anything that requires specific and steady motor skills.

Get Back

Stephen McBean has always made music for the open road. Black Mountain’s lofty mix of proto-metal, prog rock and regal folk suggested late-night drives in the fall, big guitars battling back the crisp autumn air. Meanwhile, Pink Mountaintops—his assumed solo act that’s wrangled together various full bands of collaborators during the last decade—scored perfect spring treks with the top down, as McBean delivered exclamatory anthems about love, friendship and sex. But if you value your own safety, don’t listen to Get Back, the first Pink Mountaintops record in five years, while behind the wheel—or for that matter, while doing anything that requires specific and steady motor skills.
The album’s first half is consistent enough, offering a bright-eyed romp through McBean’s record collection. Opener “Ambulance City” dances in a way that's reminiscent of Television, taut drums pushing at the backs of anxious, steely guitars, while McBean finds a path between Phil Spector and Mudhoney during “Through All the Worry” and dips into messy Springsteen love for “Sell Your Soul.” So the wreck, panic, and disaster set in around “North Hollywood Microwaves", during the song's soul-torturing second half. There's a seesaw of dipping saxophone and diving guitar bouncing between a rubbery bassline and repeated strings of non-sequiturs—and then the rapping starts: “I’ve seen rows of cocks/ And it’s looking like corn/ Waving in the wind, I’ve sworn,” rhymes Annie Hardy, frontwoman of Giant Drag and an occasional and unfortunate emcee.
She continues to shoot through a surreal sequence of images and admissions concerning “Ooey-gooey cum”—where it goes, where it comes from, how many gallons one can manage, how it gave her AIDS, how she now gets it from bears, and, of course, whether she prefers polar or black bears. “Cum talk, what the fuck?” she exclaims toward the end over John Wahl’s screaming, Zorn-style saxophone, and as a listener, it’s hard not to ask the same thing.
The trouble isn’t that McBean thought it best to include a rap verse on Get Back, or even that the only woman to appear on this album sets herself up as an automatic punchline. (J Mascis plays guitar on Get Back—can he rap about dicks, too?) And considering his inclusive stylistic approach, the rap's presence isn’t that surprising, really: while 2009’s Outside Love was a grand, romantic rock record with hooks as arching as the Smiths', earlier Pink Mountaintops material (particularly the project’s 2004 self-titled debut) experimented with beat machines, oblong structures, and sudden interruptions as though playfulness were half the point of the project. Why not add a few rap verses?
But “North Hollywood Microwaves” epitomizes the nostalgia-based indecision that generally plagues Get Back. This is McBean’s aging record, where he gazes at the golden years of his youth with wanderlust. He questions how he ever made it out alive, wishes to revisit those high-flying times, and asks if modern youth locked into “computerized segregation” will end up okay, too. He posits that 1987, when he would have been a late teenager, was “The second summer of love”, referencing the joy of doing dirty deeds along the kid-cruising strip of his midsize Canadian hometown. And he praises those old pals who persevered when the mayhem went bad: “I could understand how you’d rather split than take my hand,” he sings during one of the album’s best moment, with chiming bells and clanging guitars adding electricity to the sudden solemnity.
The sentiments are there, but McBean essentially handles these questions by flipping through his record collection. Whether it’s the lyrical references to Eddie Cochran, the Boss, and Richard Hell, or the way these songs sound like his handwritten copies of tunes by the Go-Betweens, Television, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Amboy Dukes, there’s the overwhelming sense that McBean is mining the past for comfort in the uncertain present. “North Hollywood Microwaves”, an out-of-nowhere aberration in a relatively wide-ranging oeuvre, is McBean’s admission that he’s not sure if he’s even comfortable with his own leaden nostalgia. It’s not just that the rap is bad (it’s horrible, actually)—it’s that the edgy, subversive decision spotlights the antique stitches and seams that hold Get Back together, both conceptually and musically.
I’ve wondered how Get Back might be different without “North Hollywood Microwaves,” or at least without its rapped appendix. Doesn’t it seem unfair, after all, that a largely enjoyable rock ’n’ roll album with 10 songs should be dismissed because of one track’s blindsiding goof? It does, and there’s little doubt that, with no “North Hollywood Microwaves”, Get Back would be pushed toward the safe bounds of mediocrity. But even after a long spell without much of a sound from McBean, I’m still intrigued by his work, or at least the possibilities of what he might continue to make. If Get Back were just yet another decent, mid-tempo rock record, which it mostly is, it would be safe to assume that McBean has told us his story and taken his music to its alternately heaviest and most radiant places.
But Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging. Still, the adventure—bear semen notwithstanding—makes me want to stick around long enough to give McBean at least one more chance for a road trip.


The short EP from the California singer showcases his ear for cool sounds, and every track puts his dynamic personality and oddly calibrated synths front and center.

Chiquito EP

No teenager dreams of driving an SUV, but Omar Banos isn’t the type to take a functioning car for granted. On his debut EP as Cuco, the 19-year-old bedroom pop singer and sometimes kinda-sorta rapper pays tribute to his Honda CR-V, a compact utility vehicle mostly notable for its safety features. “Riding down the street in my Honda SUV,” he sings, “Picking up my homies in my CR-V.” There’s a long, inglorious tradition of outsiders rapping about mundanities that more traditional rappers would never touch, and usually the joke isn’t remotely funny (we see you, Lil Dicky). But Banos sells it, in part because he isn’t entirely joking. When you’re a teenager, cars are freedom, and Banos sings with a genuine affection for his that’s all too relatable.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t rap more, even though he’s passable enough at it that he could consider going that route: Rap is about fantasy, or at least striving for more, but Banos is fundamentally happy with what he already has. He spends his self-recorded Chiquito EP in a content daze, smoking the hours away, daydreaming about crushes, and enjoying the sun (he’s from Hawthorne, California, home of the Beach Boys). The idea of upgrading to a more glamorous ride never even crosses his mind.
Lots of Banos’ early press has kicked around the term “heartthrob,” and you can lose some real time parsing how much irony, if any, is in that word. Though nobody’s going to mistake him for one of the One Direction guys, he does have a sort of non-threatening, ’80s John Cusack thing going for him, and many of these songs cast him in the Lloyd Dobler role. A go-getter? Hardly. But boyfriend material? Definitely. He’s the classic “in loving with being in love” type.
Banos has an ear for cool sounds, and every track on Chiquito puts his oddly calibrated synths front and center. Mostly they’re just window dressing, though, a showy new way of packaging some time-tested bubblegum hooks. The trap drums and chopped-and-screwed effects that open “Sunnyside” are a fake out; the song itself is so faithful to the spirit of 1950s pop that it could be a cover of a forgotten Platters number, at least until it drifts off into flighty scribbles of smoked-out electric guitar at the end. The goopy, modernist synthesizers of “Summertime Hightime” make a statement, but they’re not nearly as memorable as Banos’ woozy delivery: “Summertime is the time I like to get high wit’ chew, it’s true,” he sings with a blissful drowsiness, sounding as if he’s pouring himself a bowl of cereal after a very satisfying nap.
Even his lyrics that aren’t overtly romantic sound like pickup lines. On the sticky-sweet “dontmakemefallinlove” he plays the lovable fuck up with clear glee, cheerfully singing “I don’t think I’m right for you, I’m just disappointing you.” It’s reverse psychology; the lyrics say “don’t date me,” but his puppy-dog delivery says “you should totally date me.” He delivers the EP’s most earnest serenades in Spanish on “Mi Infinita.” The translation may or may not do the line justice, but “When there’s a new romantic movie, I want to reenact those scenes with you” is a mighty endearing sentiment.
Banos makes nearly everything sound effortless. There’s only one track that feels forced, and curiously it’s the first one. The EP’s most conventional rap song, “Lucy” is fine for what it is, and if nothing else its production shows that Banos can do a decent Clams Casino impression. But compared to the spirited pop that follows, it sounds out of place and secondhand—its boast about feeling like John Lennon could’ve been ripped from the Soundcloud page of literally hundreds of struggle rappers. It’s the one moment on Chiquito where Banos sounds like he’s playing on somebody else’s terrain, and there’s no reason for it. An artist with this much personality doesn’t need to adopt somebody else’s.


The electroclash duo returns from a nine-year hiatus with a new creative brain trust in tow, but a few standout singles aren’t enough to redeem a plodding, repetitive album.

Sir

It’s 2018 and Fischerspooner have returned after a nine-year absence as an in-studio supergroup. Sure, why not? The group began as the performance-art project of frontman Casey Spooner and co-writer/producer Warren Fischer before finding surprising success as electroclash’s signature act. That genre’s celebration of artifice, coupled with the suspicion that it was all an art-school lark, created a mountain of critical skepticism that Fischerspooner have had a hard time surmounting ever since. Yet of their three previous albums, two displayed tremendous proficiency in the booth: #1, from 2002, remains a sexy, sleazy snapshot of its time and place, while 2005’s Odyssey convincingly refashioned their sound into muscular electro-rock. They really only blew it with the rickety dance pop of 2009’s Entertainment, and as another great prefab star once sang, two out of three ain’t bad.
For their comeback, Spooner and Fischer have joined forces with (among others) Chairlift vocalist Caroline Polachek, Beyoncé and Run the Jewels collaborator Boots, Saddle Creek Records’ in-house sound wizard Andy LeMaster, pop superstardom’s go-to engineer and mixer Stuart White, and freaking Michael Stipe. Speaking of comebacks, Stipe’s writing and production on the record constitute his first major musical outing since the dissolution of R.E.M. following 2011’s Collapse Into Now. As if in homage to the formation of this alt/indie/R&B Justice League, Spooner sculpted himself into a superhero’s physique, though with his long hair and soup-strainer mustache he looks less Marvel Studios and more like a human mash-up of the Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott characters from Road House. But the transformation has more to do with Spooner’s mid-life embrace of his own sexuality, which he addresses throughout the record with more candor and unapologetic lust than ever before. In fact, Stipe turns out to have been Spooner’s first boyfriend, way back in 1988, providing Sir with a juicy backstory to match all its attention-getting musical collaborations and stylistic shifts.
On the album’s singles and opening track, the results are pretty spectacular. “Have Fun Tonight” is its biggest electroclash throwback. It’s a stomping, threatening salute to nightlife's illicit lure that makes effective use of Spooner’s limited vocal palette by juxtaposing high-pitched come-ons with a repetition of the title phrase that sounds like an order issued at gunpoint. “Togetherness” is a slow-jam showcase for Polachek, whose co-lead vocals alternately soar, screech, and sigh with all the precision and control you’ve come to expect from her, while Spooner injects the sensual litany of his lyrics (“The back of your hand/My bottom lip/Down my throat”) with a palpable ache. The unexpectedly lush and lovely middle eight, meanwhile, makes Spooner’s description of his lover as a sharp-toothed predator “engineered for cruelty and charm” sound downright complimentary. The remaining singles—“TopBrazil,” a midtempo number with a sly melody that sounds like an Odyssey outtake, and “Butterscotch Goddam,” arguably the record’s horniest moment, which is saying something—provide their own pleasures, if not quite reaching their counterparts’ heights. Album opener “Stranger Strange” is an inviting slice of sexual psychedelia; its slow groove, crescendoing synths, and marvelously unhinged vocal yelps and yowls are the aural equivalent of parting the beaded curtain at the entrance to an orgy.
If you’re feeling generous and inclined to favor diaristic directness over sonic strength, you can add album closer “Oh Rio” to the list of highlights. Spooner juxtaposes his teenaged sexual awakening, flipping through Bruce Weber photos in the back of a bookstore, with a growing awareness of his own mortality, reducing a beachside tryst with a younger man to a series of wearying symptoms: “Hacking up a lung, flayed out in the sun/Sometimes dreams have to die.” Musically, there’s not much going on, but those words would be powerful coming out of anyone’s mouth, much less the guy who used to flagrantly lip-sync to “Emerge” twice per show, since it was their biggest hit. Add it all up and Sir would make a heck of an EP.
The remainder of the record, though, is just plain forgettable. The aptly titled “Everything Is Just Alright” sets the dreary tone near the top with a maddeningly repetitive chorus and the first signs that Spooner’s chronicles-of-an-aging-lothario lyrics will bear diminishing returns over time. (“I’m kind of buzzed, you’re kind of dumb,” I’m kind of bored.) Fully five different songs—“Discreet,” “Strut,” “Get It On,” “I Need Love,” and “Try Again”—trod the same tired ground of plodding beats, slovenly melodic structure, and phrases repeated like a nervous tic. Only “Dark Pink” distinguishes itself with a major-key melody and big ’80s horns, but it’s over before it can get anywhere interesting.
It’s hard to blame Spooner, Fischer, or Stipe for wanting to flood the zone after such prolonged absences from the scene. Yet Sir’s highs show that this peculiar team is perfectly capable of coming up with good ideas. The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak. Sir starts sexy, finishes sad, and boasts a quartet of bangers in between. Unfortunately, that leaves you with more than half the album left to endure.


Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but the South African trio's second studio album is id rap at its worst, lacking scope or imagination even in its excess.

Ten$ion

If you're unfamiliar, Die Antwoord operate on the principle of "zef," a philosophy of intentional ignorance and crassness. It's the latest in series of personas for rapper Ninja, né Watkin Tudor Jones, but even with that conceptual bent in mind, it's still hard to process Die Antwoord as an idea, especially on Ten$ion where they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired and tropes and lazy lyrics. In some ways it's the worst of both worlds: We've seen and heard it all before, and now it's dumbed-down even further. The blunt simplicity of Ten$ion could be seen as the mastery and refinement of a fledgling aesthetic (stupid for the sake of stupid). But this is a step back. Whatever cultural interrogation Die Antwoord might have been performing with $O$-- and it was hard to tell-- is totally absent here.
Die Antwoord abandoned their deal with Universal because of perceived pressure to be "like everyone else out there at the moment," and it's immediately clear from Ten$ion opener "Never Le Nkemise 1" that their sound has gotten a whole lot more... expensive. Earlier tracks like as "Enter the Ninja" and "Wat Kyk Jy?" hinted at big-room ambitions but still sounded endearingly cheap and shoddy. But "Never Le Nkemise 1" begins with a blockbuster-worthy bit of string-led melodrama and pseudo-choral vocals and quickly slams down into a-- what else?-- dubstep throwdown, all fiery blazes of scorched-earth LFO threatening to drown out Ninja's screeches of "that's why we keep it motherfucking gangsturrrrr!"
Say what you want about this zany group of South Africans, but attention-grabbing early singles like "Enter the Ninja" at least showed a clever dimension to their sound, with quick-fire raps that were easy enough to get swept up in. But there's nothing remotely thought-out or careful about Ten$ion. Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but this is id rap at its worst, and even their excess lacks scope or imagination.
By its very nature, the Die Antwoord project is style-over-substance, but Ten$ion goes out of its way to prove that point. The boasting shouts of "'EY SEXEE, 'EY SEXEE" on the chorus of "Hey Sexy" are hopelessly awkward, and Ninja's Ludacris crib, "Get out the bitch, get out the way," feels like an embarrassingly misguided attempt at relating this duo to mainstream hip-hop currency-- a decade too late. If their lyrics are emptier than ever ("I took drugs at the age of 13/ Jesus Christ/ What the fuck?"), their attempts at shock value ring disturbingly hollow. If you aren't getting a little restless by the album's ending stretch, "DJ Hi-Tek Rulez" might snap you out of a cock-eyed stupor with its gruff, digitally altered grunts of "DJ Hi-Tek will fuck you in the ass... You can't touch me, faggot," amid other violently homophobic slurs. There's no shortage of allowances made for this kind of stuff in hip-hop, on an album this silly and concerned with dumb, thoughtless fun, it's especially troubling. It doesn't sound anything like a joke in the impenetrably convoluted layers of irony and self-mythologizing that is Die Antwoord.
What are we left with then? Die Antwoord were stuck with the "rave-rap" tag from the beginning, and it wasn't too bad a description, emphasizing not only the trio's danceability and playfulness but also its stark-raving-mad, go-for-broke tendencies. But this time around, the emphasis is on the "rave." Which is great for the in-house production but detrimental to pretty much everything else. The songs here are even less collected than before, jumping from flashpoint to flashpoint in a frenzied hunger to see how many times they can climax in each four-minute chunk of energy. It's exhausting, and the fragmentary, dissociative scatter takes the vitality and primacy out of the music. For a band so obsessed with its own self-consciously humorous image, Ten$ion in part fails because it feels so strangely humorless.
So while they might have succeeded in their quest to bypass the constraints of major-label rules and pressures-- apparently Universal rejected the album for being too vulgar-- they've gone and picked the most unfortunate parts of their oversized, manufactured personalities to highlight. Ten$ion is proof that you need more than just aesthetic and press savvy to really get by. They might have left their potentially comfortable new home to forge their own path, but Die Antwoord sound like they have no idea where they're going.