The allure of isolation defines Damon Albarn’s latest project. With only a few guests on the album, he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion.

The Now Now

At 50, Damon Albarn is still writing songs for the world’s most popular cartoon band because he believes in the romantic idea that an international charting group can change the world. Cartoons appeal to young people, which makes illustrator and co-founder Jamie Hewlett’s multicultural avatars—2-D, Russel, Noodle, the “imprisoned” Murdoc, and stand-in bassist Ace—a Trojan horse for the kind of politics that people prefer not to hear from millionaires. The records range from eco-centric protests to dystopian party playlists, all full of Albarn’s auteur charm and a faint scent of calculation, as if they’d been executive-produced by a bohemian pop-cultural think tank.
It’s hard to resent someone as melodically adept as Albarn, or so obviously in love with their work. On The Now Now—Gorillaz’s second album in two years, and Albarn’s fourth in five—he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion. Adrift from the group’s grand concepts, this is their least ambitious and most plainly enjoyable music in years: written on tour, hashed out by Albarn and Hewlett at their studios, and recorded in the space of a month. It is, in the band’s telling, a solo album by Albarn’s character 2-D. It sounds, to the less imaginative, like an outlet for the daydream funk, playful psych-pop, and upscale disco that presumably soundtrack Albarn’s rare days off.
When Gorillaz records do grate, it’s usually thanks to a kind of sarcastic opulence, as if they’d been dictated by a man in a poolside recliner who won’t put down his iPad. Even when they’re on form, there’s something not quite right about their version of pop. The album opens with “Humility,” which sounds like an A.I.-generated summer bop: basslines bounce, synths rush, and George Benson riffs frolic like dragonflies. Everything is in its right place, yet the tune, as well as plenty here like it, conjures the ennui that descends when you finally arrive at the beach and wonder, Is this it? It is. The Now Now is programmed fun, the affable kind that never threatens to whisk you away, but its wrongness is oddly compelling and part of Gorillaz’s world-building dexterity.
The Now Now succeeds partly because of its scarce guest list (Snoop Dogg and Jamie Principle, on “Hollywood,” are the only vocal features), relative to last year’s overstuffed Humanz. The allure of isolation defines the record—Albarn wrote it in penthouse hotel rooms—and the motif fits his themes of modern politics and technology. “Calling the world from isolation,” the album begins, a mantra that shape-shifts to allude to Brexit, gun laws, and other political specters. It’s handy that these themes are, with Albarn’s light touch, mostly interchangeable, because they later become entangled with the subplot of a sabotaged relationship. “Baby I just survived, I got drunk, I’m sorry, am I losing you,” he groans on “Fire Flies,” a come-back plea that might as well be Britain sending a rueful late-night text to the EU. After endless observational laments, it’s a welcome personal flourish, albeit undermined by plodding space-funk that’s barely more convincing than its penitent narrator.
Given his penchant for the music of Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s fascinating that Albarn remains such a sucker for generic pop-house and boom-bap beats. Gorillaz may be the only band in the world that could be improved by Diplo: Their rhythmic homogeneity—along with the space-station filters on Albarn’s already glum vocals—sometimes keeps these otherwise masterful pop confections grounded. Often the best songs are, accordingly, the folksiest, like “Souk Eye” and “One Percent,” fingerpicked acoustic numbers embellished by android whirrs and longing synths. They might have populated a follow-up to Everyday Robots, Albarn’s 2014 solo LP, were it not for their fairytale twinkle—the sense that everything is at once awful and full of magic, a quality that animates all of Gorillaz’s most apocalyptically pretty work.
Albarn had a shot at rehabilitating his languid balladry on Everyday Robots, his first latter-career album to let his melancholy just exist without ornamentation. The cartoon band can catch you off guard like that, in a summer pop playlist or a branch of Urban Outfitters, which makes the project, in a strange way, a more suitable solo concern than Albarn’s proper solo work. He’s his own institution now, neither a dilettante nor a polymath, comparable to none, still with a schoolboy eye for the absurd and an interest in almost everything. It might be too humble for its own good, but The Now Now is the rare commercial sojourn that feels like a product of real fascination.


My Morning Jacket: Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh / Chapter 2: Learning

If you're a My Morning Jacket fan, you likely know that the band have lots of unreleased material, old tapes, and reel-to-reels scattered around the silo propped against rusting farm equipment and crusted with the hardened wax of a thousand candles. And you probably figured out that unreleased material sounded rough and raw, all those songs saturated in reverb and tape hiss. And you knew scattered among that scattered archive-- long stepped over, or used as coasters for countless beers, or as ashtrays, or piled 10 high for footprops-- there were bound to be a few gems. You were, more or less, right all along, as these two mini-biographies from the band's original label, Darla Records, attest; both are subtitled "early recordings, b-sides, covers, y mas" (that's if I'm reading the scribbles along the spines correctly), which is an adequate product description, albeit one that omits a few live versions, several alternate takes, some half-assed doodles, tape experiments, and distractions on a bored Sunday afternoon.
Most of these songs, as you could probably guess, feature just Jim James, the voice of My Morning Jacket, either strumming a guitar or playing rudimentary drum rhythms. He ostensibly compiled these tracks for Darla and divided them onto two separate disks. The first, Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh, almost has the easy flow of a proper album, beginning with the relatively polished "Weeks Go By Like Days", a full-band track from the Darla 100 comp and ending with a faithful cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which is particularly affecting here because James sounds like he's singing from the void of outer space.
In between those two stellar tracks are alternate takes of "They Ran" and "Evelyn Is Not Real", which would end up My Morning Jacket's debut, The Tennessee Fire, with better arrangements; strong rarities like "I Just Wanted to Be Your Friend"; some strange, short doodles ("What Will I Do?" and "Isobella With the White Umbrella"); a fuzzed-out version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"; and, best of all, a ragged rendition of Santo & Johnny's "Sleepwalk" that leads into a live, slowed-down version of the Tennessee Fire track "Olde Sept. Blues". Surprisingly, the collection holds together remarkably well as you glimpse the band's creative process through its discarded recordings.
Chapter 2: Learning is even more scattershot, both in its songs and in its tracklist. That subtitle is very likely a disclaimer, a tongue-in-cheek caveat to fans who might otherwise expect too much. The demo versions of album tracks like "Just One Thing" and "Death Is the Easy Way" anchor this volume, but other tracks uproot it. The three frontloaded covers are straightforward, but unlike "Rocket Man", they're also unimaginative and almost unlistenable. James peppers the band's straightlaced reading of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" with sound clips from Top Gun, which apparently passes for clever. That song is followed by an even greater disaster, an almost note-for-note cover of "West End Girls", on which James mimics Neil Tennant's half-spoken delivery without displaying the slightest awareness of the Pet Shop Boys' devastating decadence.
But covers are half-serious undertakings anyway, especially on a hodgepodge compilation like this, and besides, James' rendition of "Dream a Little Dream" is almost charming-- that is, until he starts puppy-whimpering at the end. Similarly, the full-band version of Hank Williams' "Why Don't You Love Me" is a hoot until the drum solo coda, which in the liner notes James calls "Hot!" but which might be better described as "Incredibly annoying!" This percussive sound spoils "Nothing 2 Me" as well, burying a signature My Morning Jacket melody under six feet of reverby drums. This sort of self-sabotage can often sound fascinating if it serves a larger purpose, but here it sounds self-indulgent, juvenile, and-- quite frankly-- openly hostile, as if James is daring you to keep listening. Granted, he gives you good reason to endure all the shrill noise with songs like the live version of "Bermuda Highway" and "I Will Be There When You Die/Sunrides and the Girls Scream", but that only seems to make the lesser songs all the more grating.
At their worst-- which is much of Learning-- these two hodgepodge volumes will interest only the die-hardest of fans, those who probably already own the Darla comps and the European-only EPs. But at their best-- which is most of The Sandworm Cometh-- they offer a compelling if not altogether listenable chronicle of a band with an already prickly creativity and only a nascent idea of what works and what doesn't. Taken together, they're about what you might expect from My Morning Jacket's early stuff, give or take.


On their second proper album, the already-bizarre Quebec experimentalists splice and reformulate their DNA to become even more aggressively strange.

Le Mal

Exercise exposes the body as a machine, locking limbs into controlled motions without the conscious direction of the mind. Fitting for an album with a treadmill on the cover, on Le Mal, the bilingual psycho-jazz punk-funk quartet FET.NAT likewise give themselves over to mechanistic processes. They’ve essentially made two records from the same material: Le Mal’s first side features five songs performed by the band, while its back half is dedicated to MIDI reinterpretations—or degradations—of four of them. The structure brings to mind Neu!’s notorious second album, where, having blown their recording budget, the kosmische-rock pioneers padded side two with sped-up and slowed-down versions of songs from an earlier single. But Le Mal’s MIDI manipulations never feel like a ploy to fill the tracklist, nor even companion remixes. Rather, they find this already bizarre band splicing and reformulating their DNA to become even more aggressively strange.
FET.NAT hail from the small city of Hull, located across the river and the Ontario border from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. Fittingly, they’re a band that straddle musical and cultural divides: Atop the group’s spasmodic rhythms, lead singer and lyricist JFNO delivers his fragmented sing-speak in a hybrid franglais dialect. Hull’s greatest claim to fame, though, is that it’s a party town, a late-night destination for 18-year-old Ottawans eager to take advantage of Quebec’s lower legal drinking age. FET.NAT’s music is hardly the stuff of college-pub playlists, but for all their jarring sonic intrusions and tripped-up time signatures, they know how to entertain. If you can’t exactly dance to their music, you can certainly convulse enthusiastically.
Where FET.NAT’s earlier releases were built upon a bedrock of Beefheartian skronk, Le Mal ventures further down the polyrhythmic path of their 2017’s Gaoler EP, cross-wiring the cowbell-clanking, dub-funked faction of ’80s post-punk (Konk, Pigbag, 23 Skidoo) with the glitchy, skittering cadences of ’90s IDM. At times, like on the warped and distended “Des Fois,” JNFO’s mutating slow-motion delivery, Pierre-Luc Clément’s slap-bass spikes, Olivier Fairfield’s stuttering beats, and Linsey Wellman’s saxophone farts all seem to pull the song in different directions. But the resilient rubbery groove of “Tapis” is a testament to FET.NAT’s ability to maintain forward momentum even as Wellman’s sax squiggles upset their equilibrium. And on “Patio Monday,” a relentlessly hiccuping rhythm gives way to the simplest of pleasures—a giddy playground chant that conjures the image of schoolchildren playing double dutch on the floor of the Mudd Club.
Once FET.NAT start feeding their music through the MIDI filter, any concessions to accessibility swiftly break down. Where “Tapis” found JNFO’s suggestively whispered verses hovering unobtrusively below the groove, on “Tapis d’Orient,” they’re ominously foregrounded in the mix, while Seinfeld-worthy slap-bass tries to ward off a creeping influx of sci-fi synth oscillations. The greatest disfiguration is reserved for “Your World Is My Mystery Gift,” FET.NAT’s contorted freakazoid of a love song. In its original form, it’s the sort of electro-shocked serenade that might’ve sounded at home on the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. In its side two sequel, the song becomes a mutant slow jam, melting in a vat of ambient acid and disintegrated chipmunk-soul squeals. If the body is a machine, this one is prone to sudden decelerations and short circuits.


Mark Fell enlists Portugal’s Drumming Grupo de Percussão to perform captivating computer-generated rhythms on the sixxen, a little-known invention of Iannis Xenakis.

Intra

The story behind the English musician Mark Fell’s Intra, which marks the first entirely acoustic major release of his 20-year career, starts about four decades ago. It goes back to the moment that the influential Greek composer Iannis Xenakis decided that his 1978 percussion work “Pléïades” required the invention of a new metallic instrument, which he called the sixxen. In his score for the piece, Xenakis specified that each of the six required sixxens should feature 19 irregularly distributed microtonal pitches, utilizing frequencies separated by smaller intervals than the standard Western semitone. Additionally, none of the sixxens was supposed to be in “unison” with the others. Somewhat comically, it has been said that Xenakis objected to every version of the instrument built during his lifetime; he admittedly could have been a lot clearer about what exactly he was looking for. The idea of the sixxen appears to be as dissonant as the instrument itself.
Written expressly for the sixxen, Intra—an album of meditative pieces for metallophone—is a far cry from the elastic, hi-def electronic music with which Fell is most closely associated. Performed by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo de Percussão, Intra is a measured, oneiric, and glistening set of eight instrumental pieces inspired by South Indian carnatic music systems. Despite the shift in instrumentation, the album’s subtitle—Computer Generated Rhythm for Microtonal Metallophones—ties directly back into Fell’s longstanding practice of working with limited technological systems to facilitate creativity. It also provides some insight as to why these entrancing pieces feel so strange.
The musicians performing Intra were not provided with a musical score. Instead of “composing” in the traditional sense, Fell used computer software to design systems that generated a series of electronic sound patterns. During the Intra recording sessions, the musicians of Drumming Grupo de Percussão were fed these patterns via headphones and instructed to follow them with their instruments in real time as accurately as possible. One can only wonder what Fell’s original electronic patterns were like, and how they might sound when interpreted through an instrument less tricky than the sixxen. The artist initially began using this non-standard approach to composition with his Focal Music series for solo violin, piano, and other instruments; some of these were released in highly limited edition by the Tapeworm, a British cassette label, last year.
Intra’s architecture of sound is spindly, lustrous, and bending. In many ways, these contemplative tracks do sound like algorithms or slowly unwinding algebra problems. Each piece is based on a repeating central motif that slowly morphs, and the results are as serene as they are eerie. “INTRA-8” sounds like the good version of getting caught in a spiderweb, while “INTRA-7” could be the product of an impromptu jam session involving kitchenware found on a campsite. Contrastingly, “INTRA-3” and “INTRA-9” are delightfully spacious, using slowness to rev up a sense of mesmerizing clarity and painterly depth.
It is in the procedural  dimension of Intra’s shifting patterns that one can hear resonances with carnatic music, which Fell has praised for the variety and complexity of patterns its rhythmic structures are capable of generating. The album also strongly conveys the visceral sense of a computer modulating sound and executing code without prejudice. But if Fell’s processes suggest a hands-off approach to emotion, the sensitivity and expressivity of Drumming Grupo de Percussão’s playing is awe-inspiring. There is a whole world of textures in these tracks, from feathery to guttural and lots more in between. In the process the sixxen comes alive as a genuinely captivating instrument in its own right. Perhaps even Xenakis would have approved.


Following the dissolution of the group’s lineup, founding member John Rossiter plays alone for the first time, working up an intimate set of songs using just mic, laptop, and field recordings.

Shepherd Head

Over the course of six ambitious records, Young Jesus have cemented their place as one of the most thoughtful acts in avant-emo. Led by founding member John Rossiter, the Los Angeles group gradually became known for its esoteric maximalism, dropping 20-minute musical epics and incorporating instruments like flutes and saxophones into their arrangements. They emphasized their brainy side on their last full-length, 2020’s sprawling Welcome to Conceptual Beach, where a hypothetical shoreline evoked the intersection of knowing and unknowing. In contrast, Young Jesus’ latest album, Shepherd Head, strips things down to basics. This time working mostly solo, Rossiter enlists just a few peers to help flesh out eight swirling yet withdrawn tracks.
After touring burnout took its toll on Young Jesus’ lineup, Shepherd Head marks the first time that Rossiter has made music alone since he founded the project. He took his time working up these songs on his laptop, using just Garageband and a Shure SM57 microphone—a stark contrast to the months of workshopping and week-long recording sessions that shaped Young Jesus’ prior endeavors. While it’s as ambitious as the records that came before it, Shepherd Head is unusually restrained. Shying away from extravagance, Rossiter’s lyrics explore themes like solitude, the death of a close friend, and the dissolution of his band. Even though he occasionally masks his writing in vague poeticism, he still sounds more vulnerable than ever before.
The majority of the cuts on Shepherd Head exude a deep sense of introversion, but a few collaborators make their impact subtly felt. The subdued lead single “Ocean” features songwriter Sarah Beth Tomberlin, whose poppier sensibilities compliment Rossiter’s experimental edge well. The duo’s languid harmonies rest atop a delicate synth bassline and warbled vocal samples on the song’s chorus, making for one of the record’s most captivating moments. Tomberlin appears again, this time using her ad-libs to support a speaking role from poet Jamie Renee Williams, on the comparatively boisterous song “Gold Line Awe,” which sounds like Young Jesus’ wonky attempt at a big-tent house banger. “Believer” features another surprising guest: Los Angeles electronic up-and-comer Arswain, whose signature is audible in the song’s golden layers of ambient synths and voices.
Shepherd Head favors a palette of synths and piano whose warmth is accented by the use of found sounds and field recordings. Closer “A Lake” is supported by earthy clicks and pops, as well as a recurring sample of a disembodied voice that calls to mind folktronica’s heyday. “Satsuma” pushes Young Jesus’ sound to uncharacteristically futuristic places, morphing from a spoken-word intro into soaring IDM. And the title track offsets oblique lyrics with carnivalesque woodwinds and orchestral cymbal crashes. “It’s all for heaven, love/And all I offer/I will move towards my fear,” Rossiter sings in the song’s bright, waltzing first verse, before the song culminates in a wonderfully bizarre, wordless climax.
The album is pulled in two directions at once. Some songs play like a more intimate take on the tried and true Young Jesus formula. At other times—like on the dancey track “Johno”—the electronic experimentation makes this sound like an entirely different project than the one that put out Home back in 2012. But Shepherd Head thrives when it leans into the elements that make it so notably different from the albums that came before it. “I’ve run away from disagreements and/Abandoned older friends,” Rossiter sings on the opening “Rose Eater,” which tells the story of the full band’s split. Born from adaptation and self-realization, Shepherd Head captures Rossiter’s output as Young Jesus at its most personal.


Typically a clearinghouse for Pharrell's bad ideas, an N.E.R.D. record again serves as a parade of deliriously off impulses.

Nothing

Even among pop stars, a demographic made up entirely of magical thinkers, Pharrell Williams' all-encompassing belief in himself is remarkable. It's hard to imagine that he's ever had what he considered to be a bad idea. On the one hand, this sublime self-confidence is sort of awe-inspiring, and exactly the sort of attitude we demand from our pop stars. On the other hand, Pharrell has had an awful lot of wretched ideas.
Ever since 2001, his rock-band side project N.E.R.D. has been a reliable repository for all of the worst ones. Back when he and Chad Hugo were still dominating hip-hop radio, N.E.R.D. albums served a useful purpose: they brought the super-producers, endearingly, to earth. For every indestructible "What Happened to That Boy" or "Superthug", there was an "Everyone Nose" or a "She Wants to Move"-- something goofy and dubiously conceived where their reach wildly exceeded their grasp. N.E.R.D. albums may never have made for essential listening, but they spoke to an important part of the Neptunes storyline, fleshing out Hugo and Williams' image as likable, overly enthusiastic dorks.
So the fact that Nothing, their fourth album, is a parade of deliriously bad ideas-- terrible ones realized with fervent conviction, half-promising ones botched by disastrous execution-- shouldn't even really be held against it. That's sort of a N.E.R.D. album's reason for existing. The reason that listening to Nothing is so profoundly depressing, however, is because the first half of the above equation-- the part where the Neptunes are still cranking out lethal, indelible radio hits-- has more or less evaporated. Without that crucial ballast, both sides of the Neptunes story swing irretrievably into orbit. The worst moments on Nothing-- "Life as a Fish", for instance, which recycles the chord changes to In Search of...'s "Bobby James" and uses them to soundtrack Pharrell's preposterously dramatic retelling of God creating Earth; or the Jethro Tull smooth-jazz beat switchup of "I've Seen the Light / (Interlude) Inside of Clouds"-- are the sounds of an artistic compass spinning wildly.
True to form, Pharrell never sounds in the least discouraged steering his way through this wreckage. Whether he's assaying a timid version of Jim Morrison on "Help Me" or pillow-talk whispering his way through the mortifyingly stupid, Daft Punk-produced "Hypnotize U", he remains utterly convinced of his capabilities as a frontman. The songs that do work-- the double-time clavinet-and-bongos funk workout of "Party People", or the tense, minimal thump of the Deluxe Edition's "Sacred Temple" and "Nothing on You"-- hark back to what Neptunes tracks sounded like in 2004, when Pharrell and Chad still had a firm grasp on the rewards of tension and empty space. There isn't a lot left on Nothing, apart from these faint reminders, to indicate that these two guys were the same pair who once revolutionized the sound of hip-hop.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh, an era-defining event and live album that set the template for the large-scale benefit concert as we know it today.

George Harrison / Ravi Shankar: The Concert for Bangladesh

The Concert for Bangladesh

In the spring of 1965, the Beatles were roped into filming a movie in support of their upcoming album Help! To say its slapstick comic plot has not aged well would be an understatement: a fan gives Ringo Starr a ring belonging to a group of “oriental mystics,” as the DVD box puts it; wacky antics ensue. The band, perpetually stoned out of their minds, did not particularly enjoy making the movie, but for one member, it was transformative in its way. George Harrison was the group’s youngest member, a diligent guitarist who was all knees, elbows, and biting humor. He was deemed the “quiet” Beatle, but a better label might be “the searcher.” While filming a scene set at an Indian restaurant, Harrison began toying around with a sitar belonging to some hired background performers. Fascinated, he purchased his own, and brought it to the studio for Rubber Soul, their next album, to accompany John Lennon’s infidelity lullaby “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).”
Harrison and the Beatles were not the first Western musicians to find inspiration in Indian classical music—John Coltrane and Philip Glass both studied the tala, its metric cycle; Glass’ fellow minimalist composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young experimented with drones; rock bands like the Yardbirds, the Kinks, and the Byrds used their guitars to emulate the sitar’s distinctive tone. But Beatlemania ensured that anything a member dabbled in became a cultural phenomenon. “Norweigan Wood” helped kick off the popularity of so-called “raga rock,” a brief fad for Western pop that gestured vaguely at Indian musical and spiritual concepts; a raga is the melodic framework of Indian classical music. As critic Sandy Pearlman wrote of raga rock in a 1966 issue of Crawdaddy, “If used only in the interest of exoticism, it can quickly become shopworn and ‘ordinary’ and not particularly justifiable.” Pearlman pointed to “Norwegian Wood” as an example: Since the sitar simply echoes Lennon’s guitar melody, its presence conveys gimmicky Orientalism and not much else.
Roughly in tandem with these developments in British and American rock, master sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar experienced his own surge of Western popularity. In the 1940s and ’50s, he had established himself as one of India’s most celebrated musicians, composing for ballets and films, working as the music director of All India Radio, and founding its National Orchestra, Vadya Vrinda. He began touring internationally and releasing recordings with Columbia, EMI, and World Pacific, and by the late ’60s had gained a large following abroad. As a romantic vision of India captured the Western imagination, he floated between superstardom in both the classical and countercultural spheres, performing at both Lincoln Center and Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He was also unimpressed with “Norwegian Wood,” telling a reporter, “If George Harrison wants to play the sitar, why does he not learn it properly?”
Soon enough, the pair met and discovered they were kindred spirits. Shankar began instructing Harrison on melodic structure and playing technique, as well as the underlying spiritual discipline. As Harrison’s interest grew more sincere and less LSD-laced, he became so preoccupied with the sitar that he essentially abandoned the guitar for a period. Suffocated by fame and lost within the power dynamic of the Beatles, Harrison found new meaning in Indian music and philosophy. Times changed—the ’60s ended, the Beatles broke up, Western mainstream interest in Indian music subsided—but Harrison remained. His friendship with Shankar would prove to be one of music’s richest.
In the summer of 1971, the pair were in Los Angeles finishing the soundtrack of Raga, a documentary about Shankar’s life that Harrison and Apple, the Beatles’ multimedia conglomerate, were helping finance and distribute. But Shankar’s mind was elsewhere.
The Indian subcontinent had been divided into two independent nations in 1947 after decades of British colonialism. Each of them housed a religious majority: Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The partition triggered a massive, horrifically violent wave of migration; the division of Pakistan into two non-contiguous territories, one on each side of India, was especially precarious. Although East Pakistan had a slightly larger population, the government was based in West Pakistan, over a thousand miles away, resulting in many political, cultural, and economic disparities. In March 1971, East Pakistan declared independence, adopting the name Bangladesh, and West Pakistan responded with a brutal attempt to quell the movement for autonomy. Over the next nine months, between 300,000 and 3 million Bangladeshi people were killed in a military and militia campaign that has since been recognized as a genocide. Millions of refugees poured into India, straining an already exhausted system.
As a Bengali himself, Shankar wanted to plan a benefit concert to raise awareness and funds for the refugees. He hoped that one of his famous friends, perhaps Harrison or actor Peter Sellers, might be willing to introduce the show and help bring in a little money—maybe $25,000 if they were lucky. When Shankar told Harrison about the unfolding humanitarian crisis, the guitarist immediately volunteered his services. With a surge of Beatles-learnt self-confidence, Harrison suggested that they raise the stakes and release an accompanying film and album. “Straightaway I thought of the John Lennon aspect of it, which was: film it, and make a record of it, and, you know, let’s make a million dollars,” he later said.
Things moved quickly from there. Harrison spent the following weeks planning the concert and enlisting friends to perform. After he consulted with an astrologer—as one does—it was decided that the Concert for Bangladesh would take place on August 1 at Madison Square Garden. There would be two shows, an afternoon set and an evening set, both of which were recorded for the album and film. Tickets were all $10 or less and sold out in a few hours.
At the top of each performance, Harrison emerged to address the audience. With Shankar, he implored them to listen to the performance of Indian music that opened the show with concentration and respect. “Through our music, we would like you to feel the agony and also the pain and lot of sad happenings in Bangladesh and also the refugees who have come to India,” Shankar explained. Their instructions were prescient: After the musicians—Shankar on sitar, Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, Kamala Chakravarty on tambura, and Alla Rakha on tabla—tuned their instruments, the audience burst into applause. “Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more,” Shankar dryly remarked.
With that, Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan launch into “Bangla Dhun,” an emotional instrumental piece that draws on Bengali folk melodies. The duo’s rapport is instinctive and familial, having played together since they were young adults; Khan was both Shankar’s brother-in-law and the son of his guru. The two maestros begin the piece with a brief alap, an improvisational, contemplative exploration of the raga’s melodic possibilities. Chakravarty’s tambura drone and Rakha’s tabla join as the players transition into a medium-tempo gat, the more structured portion of the composition. About halfway through, as the pace increases to a breakneck drut laya, Shankar and Khan’s playing is so heated it seems to erupt into fireworks.
Up next was Harrison, who was admittedly nervous to lead the show. “Personally, I prefer to be a part of a band, but...it was just something that we had to do in order to get the money and we had to do it quick so I had to put myself out there and hope I’d get a few friends to come and support me,” he said at a July 27 press conference. When the lights came back on, it was clear how modest he was being: He had recruited a 24-piece band that included Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, the Apple band Badfinger, a horn section, a seven-piece soul choir, and more. All agreed to perform without a fee.
As the concert’s organizer and main attraction, Harrison was faced with a decision: fade respectfully into the background, or own the spotlight and put on a good show. From the opening riff of “Wah-Wah,” Harrison’s fiery declaration that he was done being creatively stifled by his former bandmates, it’s clear that he chose the latter. Looking like a sharp-dressed wizard in a white two-piece suit with the Om symbol embroidered on the lapel, Harrison exudes a radiant maturity; it’s staggering to remember that he was only 28 years old.
The Concert for Bangladesh also marked the first time that Harrison performed songs from All Things Must Pass, his triple-album opus from the year prior. Though it was easy to poke fun at Harrison’s spiritual transformation and embrace of Indian philosophy, his earnest belief is undeniable here. During “My Sweet Lord” and “Awaiting on You All,” two of All Things Must Pass’ most overtly religious songs, you can hear his yearning for connection with a higher power reach the rafters of MSG. Both songs espouse the belief of Harrison’s beloved Hare Krishnas, that through “chanting the names of the lord...you’ll be free,” and the gospel choir and Preston’s high-voltage organ playing heighten their joyousness. Harrison’s Beatles hits are unleashed from their studio restraints, expanding into their fullest forms. The acoustic “Here Comes the Sun” is as comforting as a warm soak. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” sounds like Harrison and Clapton—his dear friend and romantic rival, who was deep in the throes of heroin addiction— exorcising their demons in real time. “Something” is bursting at the seams with passion—for another human, a divine being, or for the all-consuming feeling of devotion itself.
Following Harrison’s desire to avoid the center of attention, the concert was arranged like a revue, with performances from the star intermixed with showcases from the backing players. Preston’s rendition of his gospel-rock song “That’s the Way God Planned It” is particularly electrifying, and culminates with the keyboardist leaping to his feet and running to the front of the stage to boogie in exaltation.
Aside from whether or not Clapton would make it through the night, the concert’s other big question mark involved one Robert Zimmerman. After his mythic motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan retreated from his platform as the conscience of a generation, performing live only rarely. “Right up till he came on the stage, I didn’t know if he was going to come,” Harrison later said. His song selection was also surprising. Maybe he was moved by the occasion, or maybe he wanted to do something special on behalf of his pal Harrison, but instead of playing cuts from recent albums like New Morning, he played long-dormant folk classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” There’s not a hint of cynicism or ennui in his nasally voice as he sings of forgotten souls and conjures visions of wastelands; it’s the raw intensity of a poet crystallized in amber. In a few years, Dylan would step back into the spotlight and onto the hamster wheel of constant transformation, but the man caught on tape here is luminous in his stillness.
The concert closed with a performance of Harrison’s recent charity single “Bangla Desh,” often regarded as the first of its kind. Harrison begins by offering some narrative context: “My friend came to me with sadness in his eye/He told me that he wanted help before his country dies...Now I’m asking all of you to help us save some lives.” Then, with the full emotional weight of his backing band—and, in the film, a jarring montage of starving children—behind him, Harrison starts hollering the one word that he hopes his audience takes away from the performance: “Bangla DESH!” Concise, direct, and with a killer saxophone solo, “Bangla Desh” makes a convincing argument: Yes, the ’60s were done. The Manson murders terrified a nation, Altamont crashed and burned, Joplin and Hendrix were dead, and the Vietnam War raged on. Fear and doubt had poisoned the well of idealism. But right here, right now, Harrison suggests, you can honor some of the decade’s lost promises by lending a hand to help a fellow man.
The Concert for Bangladesh was a clear and immediate success. Ticket sales raised around $243,000 for UNICEF, nearly ten times Shankar’s initial expectation. Overnight, the name Bangladesh and its people’s plight became known to the world, which was the sitarist and organizer’s priority. But the celebratory bubble burst quickly. The album was beset by delays and issues with taxes and performance rights; proceeds from its sale were held by the IRS for years. “It was uncharted territory, the scale of it,” Apple employee Jonathan Clyde told The Guardian years later. “The money did eventually reach Bangladesh, although perhaps not in time to help the refugees at that point.” The general public was unconcerned with these issues, however, and The Concert for Bangladesh topped the charts and won a Grammy for Album of the Year.
The Concert for Bangladesh’s successes—its camaraderie, humility, and triumphant money-raising—established the framework for large-scale benefit concerts as we know them today. Fundraising magnate Bob Geldof reportedly reached out to Harrison for advice when planning 1985’s multi-continental Live Aid event. (Harrison’s advice: “Do your homework.”) With star-studded lineups that ensure broad news coverage, benefit concerts continue to be an effective (and popular) way for celebrities to raise money and awareness for a cause. At the same time, it’s easy to feel cynical about these occasions: A pop star gets to play philanthropist for a day before returning to their life of privilege. Conceptually and practically, the “benefit concert” is a short-term commitment to long-term, complex problems; and when it comes to raising money for international crises, there’s usually a whiff of white Western saviorism in the mix. And as the Concert for Bangladesh revealed, getting donations to the people who need them is not as simple as it may seem.
Still, the Concert for Bangladesh was a musical triumph and a momentous collaborative effort. In 1972, alongside Allen Klein—the late-era Beatles manager who was partially responsible for the concert’s financial disarray—Shankar and Harrison were awarded UNICEF’s “Child Is the Father of Man” award for their fundraising efforts. Shankar, initially so skeptical of “Norwegian Wood,” had come to view his collaborator as family. Harrison, he later said, was “my student, my brother, my son, all combined.” If Harrison’s earliest interest in Indian music had involved some trendy fetishism, The Concert for Bangladesh demonstrated that his commitment—to the music and the people themselves—had blossomed into something deep and profound.

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On a new four-disc reissue of George Michael’s mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected LP from 1990, the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise.

George Michael: Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1

Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1

When George Michael released a mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected album in 1990, in the season of Nelson and Wilson Phillips, many critics responded as if Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block had announced a run for president. “If Listen Without Prejudice starts a trend among Michael’s pop generation to move beyond image to integrity,” James Hunter lauded in Rolling Stone, “it could make ‘rock and roll TV’ sound more consistently and convincingly like music.” Robert Christgau wasn’t fooled: “Whatever the sleazy details, his announced decision to hold off on the dance music till next time half-proves he doesn't know as much about stardom as he thinks, and the ruminations with which he proclaims his seriousness finish the job.”
For Michael, as ever, announcements traveled subtlest as music. At the time, his most recent hit was “Heaven Help Me,” sung and co-written by his bassist Deon Estus. It sailed into the top five in the spring of 1989, less than six months after “Kissing a Fool,” the last single from Michael’s blockbuster Faith. A featherlight stab at sophisti-pop (trumpet solos, plucked guitar), “Heaven Help Me” served as testament to Michael’s multi-format ambition and do-no-wrong commercial instincts.
That “Heaven Help Me” and “Kissing a Fool” did well no doubt reassured the hyperventilating Columbia record execs when, 18 months after the Estus single, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 came out in September 1990, preceded by its lilting acoustic single “Praying for Time.” The latter topped the chart for a week without fuss, notwithstanding a despairing vocal drenched in echo, reminiscent of Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon, and a lyric that heaped scorn on the rich who “declare themselves poor” while the rest of us hang on to hope “when there is no hope to speak of.” Fans, disappointed by Michael’s folly, clung to the “Vol. 1” part of the album’s title. At the time, unconfirmed rumors suggested Michael had canned an album’s worth of dance material. A legal battle between Sony and Michael then followed, worthy of Bleak House. It killed the pop singer’s American career momentum.
Thanks to a four-disc reissue complete with remixes, documentary footage, and Michael’s 1996 “Unplugged” episode, audiences can hear what Sony had wanted in the Listen Without Prejudice project: a collection of variegated hues in which the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise. Where once fans had to buy used copies of 1992’s Red Hot + Dance for “Do You Really Want to Know” and “Happy,” now they can appreciate how proximity to Michael’s covers of Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and the Pips underscores the rhythmic finesse of even the quietest material. George Michael, in other words, fucked up: at a time when Faith granted him supernatural powers, he should’ve released a double album of ballads and dance material. Overreaching? Critics might have said so. But to accumulate power, one has to use it.
In its way, Michael’s insistence on releasing the “Praying for Time” single was as brave as Fleetwood Mac’s sending “Tusk” to radio in the fall of 1979. Yet it fell off the chart as swiftly as it ascended. And now it was Columbia’s turn to realize there was no hope to speak of regarding the fate of its rather defensively-titled parent album, which, ominously, had stopped at #2 behind MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, an album that dominated its year as Faith had in 1988. In search of another “Faith” or “I Want Your Sex,” the label issued “Freedom!,” a house-inflected dance number in which Michael, again in high dudgeon but chipper about it, declared war on MTV and the system that forced him to look devastating in a leather jacket and stubble. Not giving a damn, MTV played the hell out of the video anyway—how could they not? The concept was novel: the besieged superstar out of sight, in his place a menagerie of supermodels. Disgusted with ubiquity, tired of his face, George Michael wanted to vanish.
But Michael couldn’t vanish: his voice wouldn’t let him. Pathos came as easily to him as melody to Paul McCartney. He loves because, despite the closet, he loved himself. Using the “Funky Drummer” loop, a Procol Harum-indebted organ, and an allusion to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (Jagger-Richards get songwriting credit), the third single “Waiting for That Day” taunts a fool who thinks he’s going to survive this new decade clinging to the stupid mistakes he’s made. The fool, it’s clear, is George Michael. Speaking of McCartney, British single “Heal the Pain” matches him in suppleness but exceeds him in sympathy, earnestness; instead of playing the douche whose shoulder to cry on is actually a penis in his hand, Michael sounds jazzed about being placed in this position—whenever you want him, wherever you will be, he can heal the pain. Michael’s sudden vocal ascensions at the end of each chorus lyric are a producer’s dream of an arrangement. XTC would have killed for the programmed bongos.
In the era of CeCe Peniston and Crystal Waters crossovers, the dance material on the bonus disc would’ve fit as snugly on the charts as a pair of Gap jeans. “Do You Really Want to Know” betrays his interest in Lime. “Happy” has faint hip-hop scratches, more muted trumpet, and a return to the falsetto harmonies of “I Want Your Sex.” The ebullient “Too Funky,” a top ten in the summer of 1992, boasts breathy come-ons over a Latin keyboard line and Michael, forgetting his rancor against the rich who declare themselves poor, getting the hots for a beauty of indeterminate gender drinking cheap red wine. The video was another supermodel revue, only this time Michael deigned to make an appearance—he played the director glowering, as if at gunpoint.
But the divisive stuff rests on the original album. To love Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go,” a marriage of gospel and cocktail lounge melancholy with a sardonic vocal, takes patience. In Michael’s hands, it becomes the cry of a reprobate immersing himself in the waters of his influences. The seven-minute “Cowboys and Angels,” the product of a fascination with Stan Getz later explored at length on 1996’s Older, buries a lovely post-chorus within its Michael-played bass amble; it gives up none of its secrets. When Poppy Bush asked for congressional authorization to kick Iraq out of Kuwait in January 1991, he turned the pan flute-graced anti-war cri de coeur “Mother’s Pride” into a minor hit. The power of his falsetto unsheathed gives “he’s a soldier waiting for a war” a fathomless sorrow.
God’s children. Choirs. A track called “Soul Free.” On “The South Bank Show” episode included, Michael sings “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.” He understood black music as the product of a familiarity with death leavened by the banalities of earth: love, sex, comfort. Something was happening that autumn to gay artists closeted from their fans. In October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released Behaviour, the quietest album of the Pet Shop Boys’ career. The unceasing piling up of bodies killed by HIV had made, for the moment, the bacchanal into a gauche if not repulsive gesture of sentimentality.
For those of us too young for the plague years—who can imagine, at least, a life lived instead of convulsing in agony on a hospital bed—chastising Michael for leaning on elegies and ballads in 1990 strikes me as glib. In its original form, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol.1 was the follow-up that Faith demanded; in this new incarnation, it’s a miscellany unruffled by notions of coherence, an attempt to make art out of George Michael’s quarrels with himself. Never again would these quarrels work to such bounteous ends.


On the 23rd album to bear the Guided By Voices name, the ageless and indefatigable Robert Pollard wrote every track and played every instrument himself.

Please Be Honest

As reunions go, the second coming of Guided by Voices was a remarkably generous affair. Between 2010 and 2014, the band’s beloved "classic" lineup from the early '90s—the guys responsible for GBV’s best records (Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, etc.)—returned to release six records, including three in 2012 alone, and play for thousands of enthralled faithful. The albums were only intermittently successful, but it was still a thrill to see Robert Pollard—the band’s ageless, indefatigable leader, its one constant across decades of lineup changes—scissor-kick his way across the country, a bottle of Jose Cuervo tucked under his arm, while his old buddies wailed away behind him.
Now Guided by Voices are back again—or at least the name is. You see, for Please Be Honest (GBV’s 23rd LP), Bob Pollard wrote every track and played every instrument himself. There is no Tobin Sprout, Pollard’s songwriting partner from the classic lineup; no Doug Gillard, Pollard’s guitar-shredding sidekick from the TVT and Matador years; not even Todd Tobias, Pollard’s near constant companion on his endless side projects and solo records. This time the Fading Captain rides alone.
And the results are a decidedly mixed bag. With its slapdash, lo-fi production and jarring transitions from ballad to rocker to quirky one-off, *Please Be Honest is a close sonic relative of GBV’s post-2010 discography, Let’s Go Eat the Factory *in particular. But this new Pollard-only GBV has less of the easygoing melodicism and sense of goofy fun that kept those records fresh, even at their most awkward moments.
Of course, this being Guided by Voices, there are still gems to be found. The stately opener "My Zodiac Companion" features one of the more anthemic Pollard choruses in recent memory. The breezy drum-machine jangle of "Kid on a Ladder" could fit on *Alien Lanes, *nestled somewhere between "Game of Pricks" and "My Valuable Hunting Knife." The title track serves up the record’s finest melody, sung in Pollard’s bittersweet higher register over nerve-damaged electric guitar. Refreshingly, the song touches on a real-world subject (Pollard’s attempt to get someone to level with him) rather than the usual carnival of GBV absurdities—the "cucumber guns," "shriveled artichokes," and "glittering parliaments"—that populate the rest of the album.
Despite its myriad eccentricities, aural and otherwise, GBV is at its core a power-pop band. But great hooks are frustratingly scarce on Please Be Honest, particularly on grinding, midtempo dirges like "The Grasshopper Eaters," "The Quickers Arrive," and "Nightmare Jamboree." One really misses Sprout’s songwriting—his emotional candor and vivid harmonies would have helped to brighten what is often a dark, brittle record. And while musicianship is never the point with GBV, many of these tunes, like the lurching, proggy "Hotel X (Big Soap)," would have benefited from a bit more finesse. Too many of the drum and guitar tracks sound like they’re being played with a hammer.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem with *Please Be Honest *is existential: The fact that it’s a Guided by Voices record at all seems entirely arbitrary. It could just as easily have been a Pollard solo album or a new record from Teenage Guitar (Bob’s other solo project) or the debut album from some other dreamed-up band (like, say, Kitchen Winners, Jet Logic, or the Easy Cyclists). Pollard seems simply to have finished a new batch of songs and decided they sounded like a Guided by Voices record—a strikingly anti-climatic backstory for the return of such a legendary act. Without a solid band identity and the sense of mission it provides, this new GBV comes off like little more than a side project, like just another star in the greater constellation of Bob (and not even the brightest one, considering the quality of Pollard’s recent Ricked Wicky records with guitarist Nick Mitchell). Please Be Honest certainly has its charms. But for the first time in Pollard’s career, Guided by Voices isn’t the main event—which, for the band’s legions of fans, is surely a loss.


On a split LP, the German computer musician and South Korean cellist apply unusual methods to their respective instruments, approaching the synthesis of digital and acoustic from opposite sides.

Hecker / Okkyung Lee: Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit)

Okkyung Lee and Florian Hecker (aka Hecker) both find freedom in limitation, channeling the infinite possibility inherent in cello and code, respectively. Their methods sometimes verge on hermetic; some of their weaker work sounds more like a demonstration of every sound that can be squeezed from their instrument than a robust composition. On Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit)—a split album co-released by computer-music heavyweights INA GRM and Editions Mego—both artists attempt to transcend the limits of their approaches by synthesizing their habitual palette with fresh sounds and techniques.
Hecker’s “Statistique Synthétique” leans toward the acoustic: His piece is composed from resynthesized field recordings collected from Croatia, Massachusetts, and other locations. This earthly foundation grounds the music’s strongest moments, where his elemental swarm of electronics mimics cricket chirps, a gushing river, and the warped strum of a zither. Though the work is unmistakably digital, Hecker’s use of field recordings grants it a natural narrative: Sounds flow from one location to the next, and the composition becomes a tapestry of landscapes, a churning, synthetic road trip.
The field recordings give “Statistique Synthétique” a coherent compositional thrust, but Hecker’s use of resynthesis essentially obliterates his source material, reducing the piece to an airtight slab of computerized noise marked by tired tropes—rising sine-tone glissandi, comical burps and gurgles, and dull, clunking thuds and thwacks—that sound well-worn rather than alien. In the final seconds, a raw field recording creeps in: We hear chatter, a car horn, a jackhammer. It’s a moment of much-needed vitality, but the music immediately cuts to black, and the world beyond the computer simply vanishes.
On Lee’s “Teum (the Silvery Slit),” a heavy-handed stereo effect—likely stemming from her use of INA GRM’s Acousmonium—smears her cello across the soundstage, casting a mysterious pseudo-digital spell over the cascading torrent. Though the sound of her instrument is instantly recognizable, in the composition’s strongest moments it becomes denatured, stripped of its natural qualities and reduced to sonic putty. Here, stretches of desert—creaks and scrapes of wood, ratcheting percussive blasts—give way to teeming waves of suspended screeches and plucks; her astoundingly flexible playing in turn recalls the icy chiming of Horațiu Rădulescu’s “Clepsydra” and the shadowy, tectonic crawl of Iancu Dumitrescu’s “Medium III.”
But Lee begins to run out of ideas in the second half. The music’s taut internal logic disintegrates as a steady droning note emerges, and Lee begins cycling through her bristling armory of extended techniques, breaking the pseudo-digital spell and regrounding her sound in the familiar realm of solo free improvisation. Here, Lee’s use of the Acousmonium becomes a novelty rather than a necessity. She summons multiple cellos, multiple Lees, but the sense of scale is lost; at its weakest, it sounds less like a truly unified composition than a simple copy-and-paste job.
Lee and Hecker have established themselves as pioneers in their respective fields through a relentless commitment to experimentation, but the singular nature of their music is double-edged. As they exhaustively mine the depths of their instruments, they risk succumbing to tunnel vision. This is why their strongest work involves active collaboration that allows them to recontextualize their approaches and overcome their inherent limitations. Though they are discrete compositions, “Statistique Synthétique” and “Teum (the Silvery Slit)” sound like complementary parts of a whole, each embodying what the other is missing: They lean enticingly toward one another in sonics and construction, and in their strongest moments seem poised to produce a genuine rupture. They never quite make it there.

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The New York live disco ensemble's self-titled debut is not just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism, it's a great pop record, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's.

Escort

The studio must be an oasis for Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, the leaders of Escort, New York's premier live disco ensemble. Do you have any idea how hard it is to play this stuff in a club without coming off like rank amateurs or soulless professionals? You have to be tighter-than-tight to replicate those metronomic rhythms, while also being loose enough to play through any in-the-moment human glitches. You can't wrong-foot dancers, but you also can't be so precision-tooled that you lose the sense of abandon that's essential to any good party. You're not competing with a drum machine, which is tough enough to do. You're competing with Nile Rodgers' Chic, a much more forbidding proposition.
In the safety of a recording booth, a band like Escort is allowed to flub multiple takes, correct any mistakes, and experiment without worrying about bringing the party down from its boil. They can tinker with their lush arrangements until they fit with the jigsaw-precision that was required of disco bands in the genre's pre-computer heyday. Escort is the result of all that fieriness and fine-tuning, the band's debut album after a drawn-out series of singles, teasing fans for more than half a decade. On the evidence, Balis and Cho are two producers who've listened long and hard to the history of their favorite genre, and who care about getting both the little details and the overall Broadway-meets-boogie vibe just right. They manage to replicate every Off the Wall horn blast and Patrick Cowley synth bubble with loving music geek precision.
But Escort isn't just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism. (Though it would be a singular achievement even if it were.) It's a great pop album, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's. Balis and Cho aren't quite up to Chic's level, obviously, as songwriters or players. But they've set themselves a similar task, out to prove that refinement and abandon aren't mutually exclusive. Like disco the first time around, Escort aims directly for the brain's pleasure centers, particularly the one marked "bubblefunk," but there's also an intensity and attention to sound design that comes from being both an in-the-moment live unit and studio rat tinkerers. All this astounding detail work is there to add extra thrills to songs that are instantly accessible, immediately charming. Rather than 12"-friendly extended disco remixes, these cuts are shaved down to the essentials. And the grooves would be strong enough with half the bells and whistles.
Escort just want you to have a damned good time, even if you don't know Walter Gibbons from KC and the Sunshine Band. And they're willing to risk all sorts of cheesiness to get you there. So it's no accident that "A Sailboat in the Moonlight" seamlessly switches halfway thorough, from hammy musical theater to lascivious funk. The "mutant disco" scene and the pre-crossover Loft underground cuts may be the pieces of the disco pie most palatable to indie-reared ears. But Escort remind revisionist critics that disco also had roots in supper-club schmaltz, showbizzy soul, and Las Vegas pomp. If there's a guiding spirit here, it's not benevolent weirdo Arthur Russell but master entertainer August Darnell at his most eager to please. The rhythm track on "All Through the Night" has the kind of crisp minimalism you find on the best DFA singles. But the rapid-fire R&B sassiness of the vocal takes us straight to the roller rink on teen night. Sure, it wouldn't play at a roller rink now, competing with the brutalism of 2011's pop-dance producers, but Balis and Cho's hearts are in the right populist place.
Escort take obvious pains that this update on one of pop's most opulently orchestrated of genres can stand, sonically, alongside the classics. Those strings! Even if they had the money, modern major labels still wouldn't lavish that much attention on recording a string section. And if that old-school analog lushness is computer fakery, then I'm doubly impressed. But given Escort's rep for throwing down live, I doubt it. It's easy enough to press a button and unleash a sampled swirl of strings or a blast of brass. It's something else entirely to be orchestrating violinists and trumpet players through a seven-minute monster groove. That kind of commitment is one reason Escort have ascended to the top ranks of neo-disco acts, swinging their way through the demands of disco with the consummate skill of the kind of crack big bands that were everywhere in the late 1970s.


The New York-based musician explores the nature of longing in a set of pieces that merge modular synthesis with Hindustani classical music.

Delight

What does yearning sound like? A composer versed in Hindustani classical music might reach for Raga Bageshri, a melodic framework meant to stir longing for reunion with one’s lover. Bageshri dictates the melody of a slew of romantic film soundtracks, including “Aaja Re Pardesi,” theme to the mystical meet-cute amid the misty pines of northern India that opens the 1958 film Madhumati. Just like that film’s protagonist, electronic musician and vocalist Arushi Jain turned to Bageshri in a landscape filled with wildlife, using the raga to compose the nine tracks on her latest record in a makeshift studio on the shores of Long Island. What Jain yearns for on this record, however, is not a lover but an emotion. On Delight, Jain grasps for a joy that lies tantalizingly out of reach, bringing melodies informed by Raga Bageshri into dazzling contact with modular synthesis and digital manipulation.
That’s no easy task, given the baggage of a genre whose history is centuries old. Attempts to mix Hindustani classical and electronic music date back to at least the late 1960s, as documented by an archival compilation and accompanying book assembled by Emptyset’s Paul Purgas and released last year. Indian musicologist Gita Sarabhai founded India’s first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, in 1969 and experimented with marshaling the Moog to perform Hindustani scales. But Sarabhai was a purist, seeing in Western harmony a dangerous, alien influence on the traditions she was working to preserve in a state freshly liberated from colonial rule. Jain remains open to the possibilities of hybridity and cross-pollination, crafting her own sound in the space opened up by diaspora. Now, working with instrumentalists for the first time, she folds a bit of New York into her cascading, hybrid melodies.
These compositions represent Jain at her most vibrant, coaxing a cornucopia of sounds out of a single raga. Effervescent samples from classical guitarist Ria Modak punctuate a sea of eddying electronics on “Still Dreaming”; MIZU’s aching cello line on “Exquisite Portraiture” morphs in and out of a midnight hum; flutist Annie Wu has a bright, reverb-soaked duet with Jain’s synth work over an understated, evolving rhythm on “Imagine an Orchestra.” Jain’s pointillistic sound-design techniques also add to the pleasure of Delight. An aquatic feel permeates “Our Touching Tongues,” where Payton MacDonald’s glittering marimba flows forward and in reverse. And Jain breaks her voice into grains of sound in “Infinite Delight,” creating microscopic textures even as she bends between microtones. If Under the Lilac Sky was drenched in sunset hues, Delight emanates iridescence through a diversity of electronic and acoustic textures.
Bageshri is meant to be played at midnight; fittingly, Jain ventures into drum programming redolent of the heady minimal techno that permeates Brooklyn’s nightclub scene. “Imagine an Orchestra” and “Play in the Void” incorporate bass drums that pulse forth like a heartbeat. The first track is more relaxed and the second runs at a more anxious, anticipatory clip, as if the joy so desired were just within reach. By the time Jain divulges that desire in English—“I feel irresistibly drawn to your beauty,” she sings on closer “You Are Irresistible”—the album reaches a heavenly peak, and her pitch-bent vocals flit gracefully above four-on-the-floor kicks. It’s trance music of a different kind, a euphoria whose arrival is foreshadowed by record’s teasing Bageshri melodies. Descending like the rays of light that stream into the club as the morning sun rises, delight finally replaces yearning as the music fades into the ether.


Sam Beam's new Iron & Wine rarities compilation recalls a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners, and when it seemed he could take his indie folk sound in any direction imaginable.

Iron & Wine: Archive Series Volume No. 1

Archive Series Volume No. 1

In retrospect, there was no way that Sam Beam—or anyone else, for that matter—could keep singing such quiet, devastating songs. Recorded in his living room while he worked a day job teaching cinema in Florida, his early Iron & Wine material examined harsh truths about the precarious nature of marriage and family: Every child grows up and leaves home, every friendship is eventually defined by distance and difference, every marriage ends in death and loneliness. "One of us will die inside these arms," he sang on "Naked As We Came", off 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days. "One will spread our ashes ‘round the yard." It wasn’t always easy to hear that kind of clear-eyed sentiment, so it couldn’t have been easy to deliver it night after night after night.
Beam’s first forays away from that kind of minimalist folk and its treacherous intimacy were promising, with the Woman King EP and his mini-album with Calexico leading right up to The Shepherd’s Dog in 2007, still a career high. If subsequent albums have sounded less inventive and immediate, the reason wasn’t so much the widescreen arrangements, the experiments with psychedelic jazz and free rock, or even the full band Beam took into the studio and out on the road. Instead, it was a new tack in songwriting, which found him experimenting with fleeting impressionism over concrete details. Each new record put more and more space between Beam and the listener; his songs began to sound affected and oddly distant, as though he were filming a movie whose action took place entirely in the middle distance.
Coming at the end of that ho-hum run of albums, this new rarities catch-all Archive Series Volume No. 1 arrives like a breath of fresh air. Beam is currently between labels, with a few rumored collaborative projects (a duets record with Jesca Hoop, a covers album with Ben Bridwell) overshadowing any talk of his next studio album. While it certainly doesn’t constitute a do-over, it does gently recall a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners and when he could take that indie folk sound in any direction imaginable. Tucked under the bed or squirreled away in the guest bedroom closet, these songs become a point from which to measure his decade-long career, to see how far he has come since he made those first home recordings.
It’s bracing to hear him in this familiar setting once again, to hear the roomy ambience of opener "Slow Black River", a song strong enough to hold its own against anything on The Creek Drank the Cradle. But it’s also a good reminder of just how intricate his minimalist folk arrangements could be. Most of these songs feature just voice and guitar, yet there is a lot going on. There’s a physicality to Beam’s guitar playing, which makes even the slower tunes sound both urgent and casual. The lo-fi production erases any sense of depth in the production, which might be a problem for many artists but here it means that every instrument and every sound is on the same plane—a small wall of sound.
Beam’s strums can be percussive and quietly emphatic, highlighting the breeziness of the melody on "The Wind Is Low" and evoking a sinister force driving "Minor Piano Keys". When he adds instruments—a bass on "Judgement" [sic] or the slide guitar on "Loretta" or what sounds like a mandolin on "Wade Across the Water"—it’s restrained and specific, like a soundtrack composer insinuating emotions onscreen. On the lo-fi "Quarters in a Pocket" a rambunctious banjo conjures a contentment tinged with sadness: "Time spent with you feels like charcoal sketches for a painting that you won’t let me see," he sings over the spiky picking and plucking. "But I’ve come to find that comfort comes like quarters in a pocket, discovered accidentally."
Much like 2009’s Around the Well, the 2xCD retrospective that acted as an epilogue to his Sub Pop tenure and provides a template for Volume No. 1, the songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts. That may be due to the absence of the kind of overarching idea that animates his studio albums, or with the fact that at 16 tracks Volume No. 1 is simply too generous. That’s the nature of any kind of vault-clearing compilation: Instead of a simple snapshot of a period in his career, Beam has created something more like a charcoal sketch. Hopefully, more volumes will soon follow.


The dignified prog and pop star returns from another long layoff with a covers LP featuring takes on Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and Magnetic Fields.

Scratch My Back

What's he doing here? That was the first question that came to mind when a cover of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" showed up on blogs in 2008, featuring Peter Gabriel's familiar voice singing lead over Hot Chip's backing: "Feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too," goes the oft-quoted refrain, to which Gabriel added, "And it feels so unnatural/ To sing your own name."
It was surprising because Gabriel seemed like the kind of artist who would remain blissfully ignorant of the changes that have befallen the music business in the years since he released his last album, Up, in 2002. Somewhere between the time of the smash So in 1986 and the launch of the Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, Gabriel seemed to transcend the pop machine. He'd undertake offbeat projects (scoring films like The Last Temptation of Christ, making an early stab at interactive art with the EVE CD-ROM), release an album or two when he felt like it, mount the occasional tour, and appear on the odd film or TV soundtrack. But with his graying hair, air of intelligent dignity, and avoidance of celebrity trappings, he was the rare pop star who didn't seem to mind losing relevance or growing old. The last place you expected this guy to show up was singing lead on a blog-bait Vampire Weekend cover.
If nothing else, that Hot Chip cameo mitigated the shock that otherwise came with news that Gabriel's next full-length, Scratch My Back, would be a covers record, featuring songs by Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and the Magnetic Fields, along with work by Gabriel contemporaries like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Paul Simon. From the outset, it sounded like an idea dreamed up by a management team, a way to introduce Gabriel to the coveted New Generation of Listeners. But a recent interview on The Quietus, where Gabriel ran down the song selections and explained how he was introduced to each, revealed the project's organic roots.
The Scratch My Back songs are either lushly orchestrated by the Durutti Column's John Metcalfe or feature just solo piano; all are arranged in a sweeping cinematic style that steers clear of the Hot Chip collab's playfulness and humor. There's a fleeting "Hey, neat" factor in hearing Gabriel use his legendary "I'm bathing in red rain" / "I'm shooting into the light" upper register on lyrics by Justin Vernon and Elbow's Guy Garvey. And there's no question that the years have been kind to Gabriel's vocal instrument: he sounds ready to launch into a full-throated chorus of "San Jacinto" at any moment. But once the initial novelty wears off, we're left with some ponderous, dull, and ultimately pointless versions of songs that sound much better elsewhere.
Every song on Scratch My Back, regardless of its original tone or meaning, is flattened out and turned into this one melodramatic and depressing thing, often with Gabriel whispering half the words to go with the ultra-slow tempos. This uniformity of mood highlights the most puzzling aspect of the record: Gabriel's clunky phrasing. Throughout, he seems to be singing words without necessarily understanding what they mean. If you close your eyes you can almost see him reading them off paper. "You know me, I like to dream a lot/ Of what there is and what there's not," he sings in Lou Reed's "The Power of the Heart". Heard with Gabriel's stiff delivery, the humble declaration is entirely unconvincing. His take on David Bowie's "Heroes", glacially slow and building to a single climax, affirms, like many failed takes before it, that the original is about 70% brilliant record and 30% brilliant song. On Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble", the New York Knicks fan's line about a "turn-around jump shot" sounds exceedingly silly inside of a heavy, life-or-death funeral ballad.
All of which is to say that this album sounds earnest, professional, and ultimately very awkward. When the orchestra reaches yet another world-shattering crescendo on Arcade Fire's "My Body Is a Cage" (one more fine record that sounds melodically feeble in this setting), things almost start to drift into the campy territory of William Shatner's The Transformed Man. This album is called Scratch Your Back because all of the songwriters here will eventually return the favor and cover a song of Gabriel's, to be collected on a sequel. Here's hoping they have better luck. As for this collection, Feels So Unnatural wouldn't have been a bad title, either.


Sir Richard Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism. On his new Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, Bishop explores the Andulsian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across Morocco's borders.

Tangier Sessions

In the 1920s, a reactionary trend began to take hold in classical music. Composers began to imitate and quote styles from centuries past: particularly, the music of Baroque and Classical masters like Bach and Mozart. Simplicity and symmetry became the order of the day, instead of density and sharp dissonance (hallmarks of the prevailing avant-garde). "Neoclassical" is a fitting descriptor to use when comparing the bulk of Sir Richard Bishop’s solo recordings to the far-flung experiments of the Sun City Girls, his disbanded, performance art-inclined avant-rock trio. As the Girls did, Bishop mixes and matches pan-continental musical styles (from East Asian traditional music to gypsy jazz), but he does so less abrasively: with simple tools (a guitar or two) and little theatricality. As in the most compelling neoclassical compositions, Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism.
Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, was recorded in just a week during a short visit to the Moroccan city. Like much of his output both alone and with the Girls, it’s largely improvised. Bishop circles around and tries out instantiations of a melodic phrase before committing to one, seemingly debating where to move in real time. A particularly clear example of this phenomenon is the speed-ramping "International Zone", which grows in rhythmic complexity and tempo as the guitarist hones in on a central, raga-like melodic pattern.
Stylistically, the album evokes Morocco as a hub of cultural exchange. Bishop often explores the Andalusian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across the country’s other borders. In the seductive, cyclical crocheting of "Mirage", there’s traces of the Mali-centered "desert blues," a style sometimes considered to have inspired the American blues, but which now, in contemporary practice, re-emulates it. Elsewhere, Bishop’s haunting melodies recall the sound of the oud, a popular lute-like instrument in North Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Greece.
This image of Moroccan culture as manifold and mysterious is a prevalent one in literature and film, usually contributing to an atmosphere of intrigue or seediness (see Casablanca, Naked Lunch or Jim Jarmusch’s recent Only Lovers Left Alive). Bishop playfully evokes some of the Hollywood Morocco on Tangier Sessions. There is the flamenco chugging of the appropriately titled "Safe House", which comes across like Bishop scoring a farcical chase scene in a spy film. The energetic piece not only breaks up the otherwise meditative album nicely, but seems to acknowledge the music’s inherent cultural tourism, or the way this part of the world has historically captured the Western imagination.
The Sun City Girls’ tendency toward exoticism is hard to avoid; indeed, when doing something like shrieking in faux-Far Eastern gibberish, they push it in their listeners’ faces. Does Bishop’s more polite collage-artistry, too, condescend to and totemize its source material? To some extent (so, often, does the music of John Fahey, Claude Debussy and The Nutcracker), but Bishop’s irreverence doesn’t overshadow the beauty and gentle, sometimes breathtaking intricacy of this music. He’s spent decades getting musical vocabularies from all over the world under his fingers, and even when his improvisations begin to meander, what he creates from his well of options is remarkable and wholly his own.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the oddball rock maverick’s final studio album, a MIDI-powered vision of the uncanny and bizarre future of music.

Jazz From Hell

Imagine the dismay on Frank Zappa’s face when he concluded that not even the London Symphony Orchestra could help him realize his dreams of being a classical composer. With an entire philharmonic at his disposal, their three-day recording session in early 1983 was a complete mess. Members of the orchestra were skeptical of Zappa’s work, the sessions ran short on time, and the resulting albums, London Symphony Orchestra Vols. I & II, required laborious editing to correct all of the ensemble’s out-of-tune mistakes. After years of smashing his head against the wall trying to corral flakey rock musicians into pulling off his sky-high musical ambitions, the classical world turned out to be the biggest joke of all.
Though employing the LSO might come off as needlessly opulent for most rock musicians, for Zappa it was a logical next step. Growing up in suburban Southern California, he had begun notating sheet music at 14, obsessing over Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky records and forcing his friends to listen to them after school to test whether they got it or not. Varèse in particular enthralled a young Zappa, both in the French composer’s unbounded embrace of new electronics and the way he deconstructed his rhythms to question the very nature of what constitutes music. He embodied everything hilarious and futuristic that Zappa wanted to achieve.
Of course, for an aspiring young musician, forming a rock band in your friend’s garage is a lot easier than assembling a chamber orchestra. But as Zappa climbed through the ranks of L.A.’s fried, shaggy underground scene in the ’60s and ’70s alongside his Mothers of Invention, he never shook off the habit of handling his band as if he were a conductor. Lined with twinkling marimbas and woodwinds, his albums were feats of studio wizardry that constantly seemed as if they were ripping apart at the seams. Whether he was stitching together tape collages on surreal opuses like 1969’s Uncle Meat, giving the prog bands a run for their money with the ornate rock symphonies of 1970’s Burnt Weeny Sandwich, or stirring together jazz fusion with big band arrangements on Hot Rats, he continually found ways to incorporate new, popular sounds while never fitting neatly into one box.
The only thing that could outpace Zappa’s pen was his desire to blow raspberries at the hypocrisies of American culture, and in his classically Californian way, Zappa always let his own need for personal expression steer the ship. His juvenile sense of humor wasn’t for everyone—even if he saw his greatest commercial successes when he put it front and center on albums like Apostrophe (’) and Over-Nite Sensation—and his jokes often teetered between harmlessly eccentric and tastelessly bitter. He used his songs to make a stand against the mass-produced counterculture of the day, and to call out what he saw as corporate-approved rebellion being packaged and sold to the brainwashed masses. He came off as a crank, but for every cynical loogie spat at hippies, L.A. scenesters, and anybody else he deemed phony, there was a guitar solo so rippling with feeling that it was impossible to deny his freewheeling spirit.
By the ’80s, however, Zappa had majorly cleaned up his image, trimming his mane and donning suits to go to battle against the censorship hawks in the PMRC and secure late-night spots lambasting Ronald Reagan on Crossfire. Though his eloquence in interviews made him a trustworthy advocate against conservatism in music, artistically he had found himself at a crossroads. After his scathing suburban screed “Valley Girl” shockingly became his biggest radio hit ever (and ironically helped to popularize the very stereotype it lampooned), Zappa responded by plunging deeper than ever before into classical music, as if to cement his identity as a real-deal composer lest his reputation forever be that of a mere novelty act. Thus the London Symphony Orchestra fiasco, whose two ensuing albums hardly lived up to Zappa’s high standards. He found slightly more luck with smaller ensemble performances, but with little commercial recognition, Zappa’s composerly prospects seemed dimmer than ever—until he got his hands on a Synclavier.
One of the first MIDI composition tools, the Synclavier was a breakthrough in studio synthesis that allowed users to sample sounds, create them digitally, and edit their compositions endlessly via a computer interface. It was a bulky, prohibitively expensive piece of equipment—mostly reserved for high-end studios—that nevertheless paved the way for the DAWs of today. As state-of-the-art as it once was, its dinky textures might now seem laughably primitive in all their rubbery simplicity (just listen to the first 10 seconds of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”; that cartoonish clang is how the Synclavier reproduces the sound of a gong).
Luckily for Zappa, laughter at his music was never anything to be ashamed of, and with the Synclavier he had finally found a way to wield a pocket symphony capable of creating songs he believed no human performer could ever replicate in a thousand hours of rehearsal time. (In interviews he proclaimed that if he’d had a Synclavier as a teenager, he never would’ve bothered starting a rock band.) “Right now we have a president from hell, and a National Security Council from hell,” he explained in a promotional video for his new album on which he’d showcase everything he could do with the new instrument. “So we should have Jazz From Hell, also.”
Compared to the warm analog Moogs and ARPs that dominated popular electronic music in the ’70s, Zappa’s MIDI tones on Jazz From Hell exist in a disembodied negative space. Live sampled instruments emerge from silence only to instantly vanish again, their tactile tone adding to the overall uncanniness. While some critics deemed this digital sound too cold and lifeless, the album’s half-rendered hooks and keyboard-locked rhythms now seem shockingly ahead of their time, predating much of the experimental electronic music that would come to define the 2010s. In its playful plasticity, Jazz From Hell prefigures the chintzy ideas of Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Fire-Toolz, and even 100 gecs.
Throughout Jazz From Hell, Zappa becomes the brain-scrambling maestro he always wanted to be, calling back to the lush, snaking melodies of earlier instrumentals like “King Kong” and “Peaches en Regalia.” The album’s time signatures shift so rapidly that anything resembling a downbeat tends to catch you off guard. But that disorientation is precisely the point; “What are the physical limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm?” he asked Sound on Sound in 1987, explaining how his songwriting process usually revolved around testing music theory concepts to see how far he could push them. “How big is the ‘data universe’ that people can take in and still perceive it as a musical composition?”
For all its complexity, Jazz From Hell is hardly a serious listen—it squiggles and dashes about like stock music that’s broken out of its cage, begging to find new ways to be played with. “Night School” launches the album with a pep rally whose bassline bounces as enthusiastically as workout music on the Wii Sports island. The song shares a name with an absurdist political talk show Zappa had been pitching around that time, and its punchy synths could easily make for a twisted version of a newsdesk’s “this just in!” theme.
Mischievous as it might be, there’s a surprising softness to Zappa’s songwriting that hints at the whimsical soul hiding underneath; you can hear it in the delightful keyboard that cruises up and down “Night School” before ending in a scattering of digitized pixie dust, and especially on the album’s central knockout “While You Were Art II.” As the track tumbles about in a cyclone of desktop tones, Zappa refuses to let any instrument settle into one place for even a second, yet amid the chaos its flutes and strings betray an almost sweet sense of curiosity. After a midsection that slows down to take a breath, the song roars back with a smorgasbord of ersatz slap bass and marimbas, swerving through a wondrous display of freeform silliness.
Save for the joyous “G-Spot Tornado,” the remainder of the album is more atonal, allowing Zappa to push his compositions into truly bizarre realms. On “The Beltway Bandits,” he slinks through a sinister jungle nightmare, while “Massaggio Galore” mutates vocal samples of Zappa and his children into something that sounds like a death metal band playing the Seinfeld theme. The title track represents some of the most esoteric music Zappa ever wrote, which is really saying something.
Jazz From Hell certainly doesn’t offer much to challenge the critics who accused Zappa of being too stiff. Committed though he may have been to expanding the possibilities of rock percussion, grooves were never really his thing. But he was overflowing with melody, and his love of live improvisation served to counterbalance all his tightly wound compositions. “St. Etienne,” the lone guitar track on Jazz From Hell, embodies this dichotomy: Taken from a concert recording of “Drowning Witch” from several years earlier, it floats in a jazzy, gaseous haze, clearing room for Zappa to fire off one fluttering lead after another. It encapsulates his approach to the guitar—virtuosic yet messy, a wild scribbler trying to make sense of his oceanic toolbox. In the song’s final minute, Zappa’s fingers begin to swirl around the upper neck of the guitar, blurring together into a golden shimmer of notes. In moments like these, you can see Zappa’s shroud of mockery dissipating away to let his fountainous ideas erupt forth all at once.
Against all odds, Jazz From Hell earned Zappa his first Grammy. Zappa responded by going on TV to question whether any of the voters had actually heard it. His congressional battles with Tipper Gore over censorship couldn’t prevent the album from being slapped with a Parental Advisory sticker in certain stores, though the music was entirely instrumental (the title of “G-Spot Tornado” turned some record store owners’ heads). In the following years he continued to work with the Synclavier, completing an entire other concept album that contained some of the darkest and most challenging music of his career. And he finally found an ensemble capable of bringing his classical compositions to life: The Yellow Shark, released in 1993, captured a concert by Zappa and the Frankfurt-based Ensemble Modern, in which Zappa conducted a program of selections from throughout his career with a group that respected and understood his craft. They even proved him wrong about humans being incapable of performing his Synclavier songs, closing out the setlist with a nimble performance of “G-Spot Tornado.”
A month after the release of The Yellow Shark, Zappa died from prostate cancer. Jazz From Hell was the last studio album he released in his lifetime, and in many ways, it is the culmination of his career: purposefully confrontational, proudly ridiculous, a winking ploy to force listeners to question their own boundaries and tastes. He had always been a composer trapped in the body of a rock star, and like the avant-gardists who inspired him, he didn’t always make music for regular rotation—his work lives just as much in the mind, assembling jungle gyms of logic, tugging at the limits of what constitutes rock, classical, comedy, sincerity, intelligence, stupidity. In diving headfirst into a new world of elastic artificial sound, Zappa found his calling, a concerto so willfully harebrained you can’t help but crack a grin.


Dua Lipa’s star power sounds muffled on her much-anticipated third album, which has many interesting ideas for songs and a surprisingly low hit rate.

Radical Optimism

Dua Lipa is a pop star who stridently resists personal disclosure in her work. This added an irresistible biographical quirk to “Houdini,” the hard-edged, darting lead single of her third album. As she often does, Lipa was challenging a guy to impress her before she gave him the slip. Lipa herself is an elusive presence, which isn’t to say she’s reclusive. Although it’s been four years since her second album Future Nostalgia, the British Albanian-Kosovar 28-year-old has remained omnipresent thanks to various luxury brand campaigns and the contractually attendant magazine covers, roles in Barbie and Argylle, her podcast and book club, and the album’s pandemic-delayed tour. Despite that visibility, she appears glamorous, distant. It’s quite admirable that she refuses to trade on her private life for intrigue, especially when celebrity subtext has never been a more powerful driver of pop success. At the same time, it’s hard to decipher what she stands for as an artist, and harder than ever on the confused Radical Optimism.
Lipa’s 2017 self-titled album was the sound of a young pop star coming into focus. A long-gestating grab-bag of thrusting nightclub staples seared by her white-hot burn of a voice, it finally took flight when the sisterly video for “New Rules” turned an album track into a whopping hit (and seemingly just in the nick of time to avoid being sent to guest-vocalist purgatory). It bought her the right to become an artiste on the focused Future Nostalgia, which transmuted the sounds of Lipa’s ’90s youth, the playfulness of the Spice Girls and the funkiness of Jamiroquai, into weightless disco reverie. Hers was the first major lockdown promotional campaign, and you wonder whether COVID curbed the lifespan of these lusty bops by depriving them of their natural dancefloor dominion, or in fact cultivated it, giving them a lasting power no marketing team could have dreamt of.
Going by the curiously opaque, even defensive press that led into Radical Optimism, you begin to suspect the pandemic did a fair bit of the heavy lifting. Of her new album, Lipa, er, divulged to Time recently, “I’m just a different person, so of course this record is going to be different. I have different thoughts, wants, needs, and perspectives.” Go girl, give us something? She’s bristled at the entirely accurate notion that “Houdini” has anything to do with disco; elsewhere in the promotional word salad, she has spoken frequently of the inspiration of Britpop and the energy and experimentation she hears in the likes of Primal Scream and Oasis. But listening to Radical Optimism with Britpop in mind might recall the Arrested Development bit in which Michael Bluth is forced to ask, “Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?”
Of course, despite Lipa’s well-touted business acumen (her own production and management company; media-empire ambitions), it’s not her job to boil Radical Optimism down to the elevator pitch. So what is it? The album opens with a sensual invitation in “End of an Era,” a psychedelic, Avalanches-style candyland about kisses driving you mad that sounds convincingly lightheaded—but it then leaves Oz never to return. For all the Britpop chatter, it’s actually a strikingly European-sounding record, for good and bad, made primarily with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Danny L Harle, “New Rules” co-writer Caroline Ailin, and Tobias Jesso Jr. In that Time interview, Lipa said that as far back as her debut, she hoped she would one day be “deserving” enough to get in a room with Parker. Before you ask, she did manifest it—but more important is what you do once you get there.
Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry. This results in leaden thumpers like the bell-ringing Euro-pop of “Illusion,” in which Lipa taunts some other sap who thinks he can outmaneuver her. It climaxes in a primary-colored synth burble: filter house stripped of the filter, French touch gone heavy-handed.
A handful of songs reach for ABBA’s wounded-but-persistent pride and golden songcraft: “Training Season” has the vigor of a “Lay All Your Love on Me” or “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”; “These Walls” the bittersweet valediction of “The Winner Takes It All.” But as with much of Radical Optimism, both songs are brutally overstuffed and desperately in need of breathing space. Parker (absent on the latter) has a taste for clutter, the rhythm section always firing like pistons, and the too-vigorous effort grounds Lipa’s gift for airborne fantasia.
A few songs even wade into Eurovision-worthy schlager. “Happy for You” welds a vulnerable sentiment about Lipa’s benevolence towards her ex and his new girlfriend (“She’s really pret-ty/I think she’s a model”) to a gaping, cavernous breakbeat that provides a strange big-tent conclusion to an album with an otherwise busy affect. Similarly, “Falling Forever,” which swaps Parker for the other “New Rules” co-writers Ian Kirkpatrick and Emily Warren, is a bizarre assault, with Lipa yodeling “how loooooooooong” against galloping drums. Both are almost as odd and awkward as anything off Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl, as individual songwriting choices and within the context of the album—although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were written with the climactic fireworks of her impending headline set at Glastonbury in mind.
It’s not that Lipa and her collaborators can’t make unusual sound clashes work. Two standout songs are elegantly odd, as uncanny yet comforting as the memory of that one foreign radio hit that dominated a great holiday. The understated “French Exit” splices a Café del Mar acoustic guitar refrain amid skittish flute runs and conversational verses, and climaxes in a sophisticated, string-laden kiss-off and one of the album’s best choruses. (Lipa has a taste for spoken-word interstitials in her stiffest R.P., but her almost mournful “filer à l’Anglaise” finishes the song like a drop of good olive oil.)
And “Maria” ditches Parker, brings in Andrew Wyatt and Julia Michaels, and makes especially good on Harle’s involvement. He co-produced Caroline Polachek’s Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You; the latter did bravura things with the influence of British and continental pop from the early 2000s. “Maria” dabbles in the pacy acoustica of French DJ Bob Sinclair’s “Love Generation” and Alizée’s “Moi… Lolita” as Lipa sings a paean to her lover’s ex for making him the man he is today. “Faintly Sapphic fixation with the other woman” is a well-worn pop trope by this point, but the force of Lipa’s cries in the chorus—“Maria!/I know you’re gone/But I feel ya/When we’re alone”—resounds with a curiosity and emotional richness that’s all but absent elsewhere.
To hear Lipa talk about Radical Optimism is to hear her talk about weathering chaos gracefully; or as the cover puts it very literally, keeping your cool while swimming in shark-infested waters. But most of the lyrics are about dodging depth rather than diving in: outsmarting advances, clean breaks, clean hands, no mess. The lover-on-the-lam vibe belies the sentiment of “Anything for Love,” a scrap of a song that mines Janet Jackson at her sweetest as Lipa laments a time when “we used to do anything for love”—a romantic notion not particularly in evidence here. Similarly, the half-baked lyrical conceit and unconvincingly winsome tone of “These Walls”—as in, “If these walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up”—positively shrugs as a relationship meets its death knell.
The Cher cosplay of “Whatcha Doing” is another inadvertent reveal: Late at night, Lipa debates making her move on a guy she likes but worries about ceding her power. “If control is my religion,” she sings, somewhat mixing her metaphors, “then I’m heading for collision.” She decides against the approach, able to imagine them together in the future but not right now. It’s telling: The overthought Radical Optimism puts Lipa so many steps ahead she’s hard to make out. Her tight grip reveals an empty hand.