The London post-punk band’s second album is bigger, louder, and more textured as frontman Charlie Steen anxiously details the strange gap between youth and adulthood.

Drunk Tank Pink

Drunk-tank pink is the shade of pacification. Meant to neutralize hostility and placate violence, the color was originally developed for a naval correctional institute in 1979, and when studies appeared to confirm its calming effects, the bubblegum hue was splashed across prison cells, psychiatric wards, and of course, drunk tanks. South London loudmouths Shame seem immune to its powers. Their second album is named for the pigment, which frontman Charlie Steen slathered on the walls of a roomy closet at home. During a period of self-imposed hermetism inside what he christened “the Womb,” Steen sat in silence and channeled an internal noise.
While Steen sheltered in the Womb, guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith shuttered himself in his bedroom down the hall, trying to make his instrument sound like anything but a guitar. Their simultaneous isolation—which occurred before everyone in the world was forced to stay home—was a response to the partying and pandemonium of non-stop touring. The austerity has served them well. Far more complex than their 2018 debut Songs of Praise, Drunk Tank Pink is the sound of a band stretching into new shapes. They’re still young, loud, and shouty—but with the guidance of producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Foals), their latest work is detailed and dimensional, fueled by calculated intensity.
When Shame recorded Songs of Praise, they had barely stomped out of adolescence, and their transition into adulthood was informed by a rigorous tour schedule and rowdy gigs. Shame’s live sets are charged and rambunctious; Steen sings like he’s doing hard manual labor, jugular bulging and sweat dripping. Drunk Tank Pink maintains that energy, but textures the straightforward rock of their first album with layers of frenzied guitar work, restless percussion, and Steen’s total ferocity. Anxiety has always lived in Shame’s music, but it seems to have grown into a sizable mass. This record is the result of sitting still with that anxiety for the first time, pondering the strange gap between youth and adulthood. Drunk Tank Pink is the sound of Shame staring down that void and expelling their angst.
“Born in Luton” illustrates their newly multiplanar sound, kicking off with several splintered guitar passages that scratch against one another—a nod to Afropop’s rhythmic style, or perhaps new wave’s appropriation of it. Shame let their influences mingle here; the verses are propulsive and skittering, but the chorus stretches into a slow and heavy dirge. Steen bends accordingly, spitting clipped phrases at first, but reserving his energy to wail about the cruelty of boredom: “I’ve been kicking the curb, I’ve been chipping the stone,” he howls. “I’ve been waiting outside for all of my life.” It feels like waiting for adulthood to begin, only to learn that no such distinction exists.
“Water in the Well” is another showcase for Steen’s natural aptitude as a performer. He squeals and rasps and deadpans; his onstage vitality is palpable in the recording. Always a bit cheeky, he makes it hard to tell when he’s in character and when he’s running on conviction. When he asks, “Which way is heaven, sir? We all got lost somehow,” you wonder if he’s asking Satan himself for directions. His bouncy candor is another diversion, sharpening even the cruelest lines: “I’m not your lover, dear,” he barks on a later verse. “You’re just my special, special, special friend.”
Steen recognizes the importance of humor to Shame. “If it ever stopped being funny then the band would cease,” he told Loud and Quiet in 2018. It is hard to imagine the group functioning without an element of playfulness, but a handful of songs on Drunk Tank Pink enter more somber territory. “Human, for a Minute” reflects on how we see ourselves within the context of a relationship (“I never felt human before you arrived”), and whether we feel deserving of love. It offers no catharsis, save for Coyle-Smith’s simple, bright guitar riffs.
“Snow Day” and closer “Station Wagon” are Shame at their most audacious, and the theatrics serve them. The former fuses doomsday rock with the twitchy, swift percussion of Bowie’s “Blackstar.” The collision of punk force and jazz precision is a winning combination—one previously tested by bands like Squid and black midi. Shame are still able to make it their own, though, and there’s nothing quite as sinister as Steen glowering amid the “sting of mother nature.”
But the band reach peak drama on “Station Wagon”—an ambitious number that might have overwhelmed their tastes for unadorned punk just a few years ago. The six-and-a-half minute piece opens as a meandering Americana road poem before cracking into a major-key coda. As the instruments pile on, Steen spouts wild sermons from the pinnacle of human ego: “Won’t somebody please bring me that cloud?!” The song itself was inspired by Elton John, once known for his own delusions of grandeur, but Steen’s deranged pleadings seem revelatory, more deeply rooted than pop-star mythology. Had Shame tackled this subject three years ago, it might have amounted to a playful rock song. Instead, “Station Wagon” encapsulates the band’s development as songwriters, shouting back at the bombast of youth and the perilous chore of moving beyond it.

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The London rapper’s fifth album reinforces his dominance of the UK scene and marks his increasing cachet in international waters, but the decision to sing might be the wrong kind of risk-taking.

Big Bad...

Without Giggs, few modern London MCs—glitzy rap prince Fredo, post-grime rockstar AJ Tracey, anyone making UK drill—would be the same today. His debut album, Walk in Da Park, unzipped the subterranean world of a young gangster planting a stylistic flag in local turf. Years later, via Landlord, he would self-identify as a managerial godfather. Giggs made it out of what he habitually calls “the jungle” to kick down the industry door. Giggs designed the blueprint for spitting slow and cruddy. Giggs built the structural foundations of UK rap.
Big Bad... builds on the idea that he’s spent his career steadily ascending London’s layer cake. A promotional trailer for the album shows a giant Giggs towering over the commercial city center: smashing buildings, grabbing helicopters, and evading tanks. Understood allegorically, the implication might be that Giggs now transcends the city that birthed him, dominating it from way up high. It’s an attractive narrative. His influence over junior MCs, reputation in North America, and collaborative omnipresence with everyone from Lily Allen to Mr Eazi to Drake are all traits that are admirably, if imperfectly, reinforced on Big Bad.... It is repeatedly entertaining and experimental, and therefore memorable.
The video for the first single, “187,” starts where the trailer finishes. Giggs leaps south of the River Thames, shrinks down to normal size outside of Peckham Library, and marks his grand return through fierce, gravelly bars. The song caps an opening trio of hard-body tracks, alongside “Great Collectives,” with Auto-Tune powerhouse GASHI, and “Set It Off.” The rest of the album ebbs and flows between this trusted breed of electronic road rap and Giggs’ continued attempts at forging a new, forward-thinking vocal palette, in partnership with countless A-list friends. Most of it pays off.
Giggs is at his best while rhyming simple, fearlessly well-timed, cryptic truisms about the rougher edges of urban life, as calibrated by his razor-sharp mind and communicated via a slang dictionary that he’s kept tight to his chest for over a decade. Big Bad... overflows with different iterations of this strength. “Show Me Respect” channels the soulful, contemplative philosophy that “The Essence” and even “Slow Songs” once did: “I just show man the life/Used to show man the death/Mad years, but there’s so many left,” he ponders existentially. More of this introspection would have been welcome. Still, the thumping soundsystem intensity of bangers “Baby” (despite a bizarre reference to Madagascar’s monkeys), “Gwop Expenses” with Wretch 32 (a Snips beat with aesthetic nods to haunting old G-Unit instrumentals) and “You Ain’t” (one of the best displays of pure, hard British rapping in a long time), are all irreplaceable ingredients.
To have attracted French Montana, Lil Yachty, Swizz Beatz, Theophilus London, and Jadakiss from across the pond to contribute verses is a triumph in itself. It’s surreal to hear Swizz shout out Peckham, and reflect upon the fact that Jada’s D-Block style of hood realism would have undoubtedly influenced Giggs’ late-noughties takeover. All of these features do their job to accompany Giggs on his demonstration of newfound versatility, laid over a massive selection of crisp, heavy, whip-ready beats. The point is that only the Landlord could bring together, under one figurative roof, such a broad church of transatlantic hitmakers, from Jahlil Beats to Da Beatfreakz.
A nagging question looms over the album, though. Should Giggs be singing? His decision to do so is likely to divide audiences. Moments like the off-tune chorus of “Spun It,” whose rap verses are amongst the fiercest of Giggs’ career—“Man ain’t the aggressor, but I’ve been aggressive” he growls—were always going to be risky inclusions. The album could have been a few songs shorter. But risk aversion was never going to be a viable attitude going into a long-awaited fifth album at Giggs’ level. He can’t really be blamed for trying something new, even if the result does present the one crease in an otherwise well-ironed British trap project.
Recently, Giggs told BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac that he is happy because he is seeing more “yutes every day getting off the streets” through their music, like he did. Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think. Its reverberations will be felt for years to come. The bonus, of course, is that it seems realistic to imagine that somewhere out there, the next generation’s Giggs has been shown a clear path not only away from the increasingly violent London roads, but toward international stardom.


The London grime star has made the strongest record of his career, chock full of nimble, intricate raps that seamlessly integrate the nerdiest of signifiers.

Grime MC

Jme likes to boast that he can make a beat with anything: Logic, Fruity Loops, Sony Playstation, a Nokia phone, even Mario Paint. But after a decade of grinding—selling records, T-shirts, and mobile phone service—the 34-year-old producer and MC can afford better gear. And though his fourth LP proves he’s upgraded his equipment since his school days, Grime MC stays faithful to the history of London’s grime scene.
Grime MCs might rap, but heads will be quick to tell you that grime is separate from hip-hop. The genre traces its roots to the UK garage scene, where parties are focused on the floor, not the stage. Jme has been there almost since the beginning—the first Boy Better Know mixtape dropped just a few years after Wiley’s genre-founding “Eskimo” riddim. And the sounds of Grime MC, particularly the beats Jme made himself (“96 of My Life,” “Badman Walking Through,” “Brothers & Sisters”), are in the same vein as those early tracks: Booming bass, vintage drum machines, and sinister synths. While Stormzy and Boy Better Know co-founder Skepta (who’s also Jme’s older brother) flirt with more commercial sounds that have raised the scene’s profile, Jme has remained steadfast. With rowdy beats and BPMs that hover above 140, Grime MC is made for the dancefloor and steeped in the slang and Caribbean patois that permeates London’s underground.
Yet for a classicist, Jme appears to defy stereotype. He’s an OG who roots for the kids making UK drill, a vegan teetotaling street rapper, and video game obsessive who produces beats live on Twitch. He’s internet-savvy, but if you want to hear his new record, it’s only available for purchase only on CD or vinyl—no downloads, no streaming platforms. This oppositional stance to current industry norms doesn’t reflect an unwillingness to adapt to modern technology. Rather, Jme understands the flattening effect of DSPs, where Adele lives next to Stormzy who shares playlists with Beyoncé. Grime has always been a subculture, rooted in meatspace. By forcing fans to buy the record direct or from local shops, he puts the onus on the listener to seek him out. And it seems to have worked: Grime MC debuted at No. 26 on the UK Top 40 Albums chart. Weeks after its release, it’s sold out pretty much everywhere.
Opting out of the largest and fastest-growing part of the music industry certainly limits Grime MC’s potential ceiling, which is as good an indication of Jme’s goals as anything else. Having watched fellow MCs fall victim to aspirational greed, he rejects the emptiness of excess with the understanding that you can’t take it with you. “When I pass, I’m leaving a lot/Even my own skin has to stay and rot,” he raps on “How Much.” These aren’t the words of a man upset that a lesser talent has climbed higher, but of a man who’s counted his blessings.
And why shouldn’t he? At 34, Jme has made the strongest record of his career, chock full of nimble, intricate raps that seamlessly integrate the nerdiest of signifiers. At times, Grime MC feels like a retrospective, a singular statement representative of cumulative efforts. He features some of the biggest names in grime—Skepta, Giggs, and Wiley, to name a few—but outshines them all. His clear diction makes him accessible without watering down his idiosyncrasies, flexing his nerd cred via video game-raps and Star Wars references (“Man are out here gunning for my spot but with the accuracy of a Stormtrooper”). And he’s extremely funny, whether popping off one-liners (“Can’t see me like Japanese porn”) or setting up punchlines about the penises in Michaelangelo’s artwork.
In a genre often mired in cliché and gangster tropes, Jme shines as a rapper’s rapper. He’s long experimented with different lyrical styles, but has never quite achieved the level of execution he reaches on Grime MC. He crafts compelling stories, like the no-hook diary entry “96 of My Life”; he toys with clever forms of repetition on “Iss Mad” and “Knock Your Block Off”; and on “You Know,” he fires off a jaw-dropping quatrain imagining himself as a PC’s video card. As UK drill surges in popularity, some may see grime as an old man’s game. But if Grime MC is any indication, the genre—and Jme himself—has yet to reach its creative peak.


On Smith Westerns’ latest, Soft Will, the band still sounds like a bunch of cocky kids with a preternatural understanding of 1970s glam rock aesthetics and the physics of power pop songcraft. But the swagger has been tempered along with the tempos, showing off a new preference for stately balladry over snotty stompers.

Soft Will

Like so many child stars before them, Smith Westerns seemed to be headed toward an early burnout. Brothers Cullen and Cameron Omori and their friend Max Kakacek laid down the sandpaper bubblegum of their 2009 self-titled debut when they were still in high school; by the time of 2011’s Dye it Blonde, they were gleefully glomming onto the grandiosity of their classic-rock heroes, in the musical and “extracurricular” senses. Seeing Smith Westerns on the Dye it Blonde tour was like (I imagine) witnessing Faster Pussycat on the Sunset Strip in the late 1980s-- the music was very loud, the band appeared to be a little partied out, and the vibe of youthful decadence verged on self-destructive. As good as the first two Smith Westerns albums were, I questioned whether they could forge a career-- or even make it to the next gig. They were living out their college years in a rock‘n’roll band, a more eye-opening education in some ways, though it doesn’t exactly prepare you for adulthood.
On Smith Westerns’ latest, Soft Will, the band still sounds like a bunch of cocky kids with a preternatural understanding of 1970s glam-rock aesthetics and the physics of power pop songcraft. But the swagger has been tempered along with the tempos; a preference for stately balladry over snotty stompers steers Soft Will away from Electric Warrior and into All Things Must Pass territory.
Lyrically, Soft Will is like the undergraduate version of Vampire Weekend’s recent post-doctoral dissertation on mortality, Modern Vampires of the City-- VW’s cautious “Diane Young” could be an answer record to Dye it Blonde’s celebratory “All Die Young”. Omori is just getting to the point where he can finally see outside of himself, and understand that the world is a big, scary, unknowable place that you might not have licked after all. “I thought I was a loner until I went out on my own,” he sings on Will’s beatific closing track “Varsity”, as bell-like synths echo back to one of the all-time great “you’re all alone now, bub,” classics, Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to Remind Me”. Soft Will culminates with a graduation of sorts-- Smith Westerns have survived their adolescence as a band, learned the right lessons, and (gasp) seem to have grown up.
While the band’s outlook has matured, what hasn’t changed on Soft Will is Smith Westerns’ ability to turn out instantly likeable guitar and synth-based hooks at a prodigious rate. “3am Spiritual” opens Will with a callback to Dye it Blonde, as a simple six-string strum and lilting keyboard figure give way to a heart-tugging “Whoa! Yeah!” chorus. It’s a songwriting trick learned from poring over records that were born around the time the band members were-- Bandwagonesque and I Should Coco and (definitely) Definitely Maybe. Smith Westerns aren’t interested in changing up their formula, they’ve merely found a way to utilize it more thoughtfully.
Just as Dye it Blonde sounded like Smith Westerns with better (or any) production and more sophisticated songwriting, Soft Will elaborates on Dye it Blonde by sharpening the choruses-- the “tell me tell me tell me the answer 'cuz I’m not sure” bit from “Idol” is particularly sticky-- and refining the arrangements. On the instrumental “XXIII”, Soft Will even approaches the elegance of Air’s score for Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, evoking a similar end-of-childhood dread with its cinematic mix of doomy piano chords and spectral string swooshes. Smith Westerns have given their own coming-of-age an appropriately majestic soundtrack. (The guitar riff on "Best Friend" is like a cross between CC Deville's guitar solo from Poison’s “Something to Believe In” and Clarence Clemons’ sax solo from Springsteen’s “Jungleland”.)
In the context of Smith Westerns’ discography, Soft Will is both a fresh start and a conclusion to the first part of the band’s career. In case it needs be pointed out: Smith Westerns have already built an impressive battery of records. Few groups do wistfully melodic trad-rock any better right now. Smith Westerns haven’t only not burned out, they’re a budding institution.


The electronic artist of many pseudonyms returns with two complimentary records twinning house and techno within new, broadly ranging, self-contained worlds.

DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom: DJ Healer: Nothing 2 Loose // Prime Minister of Doom: Mudshadow Propaganda

Nothing 2 Loose and Mudshadow Propaganda represent the latest missives from an anonymous artist who has gained almost mythic status among fans of underground dance music. Previously working most frequently under the monikers Prince of Denmark (for techno-oriented works) and Traumprinz (for house-ier sounds), the artist revealed a cryptic website in early April and put up for sale the albums in question, released, respectively, under new aliases DJ Healer and Prime Minister of Doom. The titles sold out immediately, and now fetch a mint on secondary markets.
Little is known about the artist, who is male by all accounts, and possibly German, given his years-long relationship with the Weimar-based Giegling label (he’s since severed ties). He is simultaneously the type of artist who makes following underground dance music so rewarding—it’s a thrill to chase his records and follow his shifting personas—and one who intimidates potential new fans, who may find the aliases confusing and have little access to his music. Sporadic mixes and communication arrive via a Soundcloud account, including the retirement of the Prince of Denmark name, and the aforementioned website reveal. (For clarity this review will refer to the artist as Traumprinz, the artist’s longest-standing alias.)
Nothing 2 Loose, under the DJ Healer alias, is the more unique of the pair of new albums. It expands on a 2016 release as DJ Metatron that introduced vaguely spiritual overtones into the Traumprinz universe, overtones that nonetheless found their way onto plenty of dancefloors. He advances those themes through DJ Healer via extended spoken word segments and clever sampling. House music has long taken inspiration—and plenty of samples—from gospel music, whose soaring voices can help transport the communal healing of the church to the club; Nothing 2 Loose incorporates the more personal, self-help aspects of religion, foregoing bombast for moody contemplation and solemnity.
There’s no doubt the results can feel portentous at times, but there are enough moments of pattering reflection to support the spiritual overtones. Nothing 2 Loose is best in these moments, as on “Gods Creation,” where a pin-prick rhythm dances around warm pads and a spoken sample—“That’s God’s creation/It’s absolutely amazing to look at it”—the effect being something like a church-y Boards of Canada. Twelve-minute album centerpiece “We Are Going Nowhere” builds into a wavy chord progression and stuttering vocal sample, like Four Tet counting out rosary beads. Over time, Nothing 2 Loose reveals itself as a potent, immersive, and singular record (only the Roberta Flack-sampling Burial replica “2 the Dark” feels out of place), yet another expansion of Traumprinz’s breadth.
Mudshadow Propaganda, in contrast, is much more familiar experience, building as it does on the grainy, warm techno he explored previously on eight LP 8. This is sparse, minimal music full of chord stabs and rhythmic trills, and the simplest explanation for its effectiveness is that Traumprinz is simply better at molding this clay than most of his peers. It lacks the aggression and futurism that characterizes so much of the genre, sticking instead to the kind of smudged, sepia-toned palate more commonly found in underground house. The music is merely foreboding instead of dystopic, a better soundtrack for a spooky forest than a warehouse.
He’s an expert at giving you one excellent thing to focus on each track, a sort of proto-hook that keeps things interesting. “Tribal Days II” and “Tribal Days III” (there is no first variant) will make you realize just how anonymous congas usually sound. “Grand Finale” (it’s track six of ten) features a wormy, rotting lead line that threatens to fall apart before it reaches the next note. Closer “The Wai” rides trance-y chords and a vocal sample—“Show me the way”—to a surprisingly euphoric finale. Any of these tracks on a random side of a 12” might not turn heads, but collected they present a kind of inky, moldering sound that is amongst the most absorbing of album-oriented techno.
It’s tempting to speculate about the man behind all this anonymity. Traumprinz doesn’t DJ—the primary way even popular dance producers generate income—but he does have the capability to simultaneously release two records via a custom website suggests someone with plenty of resources and connections in the European underground dance community. But his shifting aliases and projects do a good job deflecting this curiosity, suggesting not some monolithic genius but rather a producer talented at producing across many styles. His records remain difficult to obtain but they’re available on YouTube (albeit as bootlegs: Nothing 2 Loose, Mudshadow Propaganda) and high-quality digital copies of his records have long found a way to file-sharing and leak sites (the copy of 8 that did so came accompanied with a digital-exclusive track, a hint that these leaks may be intentional).
By retiring (for now, at least) his lauded Prince of Denmark project, Traumprinz has allowed listeners to focus on Nothing 2 Loose and Mudshadow Propaganda as new, self-contained worlds. And while it’s the DJ Healer record that truly takes up this mandate, the Prime Minister of Doom project also feels potent in its cloistered, measly minimalism. Any artist who remains anonymous in social-media-saturated 2018 is susceptible to accusations of myth-making. You can remain anonymous on a white-label; vast multi-character epics require an author. Whoever is behind the Traumprinz projects is certainly guilty of this to some degree, but it’s refreshing to trace the whims of an artist who seems interested in many little myths instead of a single, immense one.


On a pair of new albums, the composer teases compositional ideas on upright piano and then accompanies them with lusher, more realized studio works.

Statues I / Statues II

Spencer Zahn has freely lent his talents since relocating to New York in the mid 2000s, touring with artists like Empress Of and Kimbra and contributing to studio albums over a wide sweep of genres. As a devout student of ECM, he’s equally comfortable straddling the rigorous austerity of classical music and the liberatory ethos of spiritual jazz. On last year’s Pigments, a partnership with R&B superstar Dawn Richard, his lush arrangements set the stage for a sprawling drama with Richard as the leading lady. Now Zahn is pulling back the curtain, training the spotlight on himself as he indulges in the music that fascinates him most.
Statues is a double LP, and for each Zahn dials into a different mode. On Statues I, he’s at his most somber and sedate, playing unaccompanied at an upright piano and listening to a selection of his favorite recordings while improvising alongside them. “Lawns” gives the game away most readily; it’s a skeletal interpretation of a classic by the late free jazz legend Carla Bley, borrowing the central melody but slowing the tempo. Zahn loops the phrase like a prayer, as if trying to communicate with Bley’s very spirit. The remaining pieces are originals, but use repetition to similarly lofty effects, as on “Snow Fields”; he taps out a leisurely refrain, turning the dial down to a glacial pace and conjuring the beauty of a still winter day. Some tracks can rely too heavily on these repeated passages, like “Two Cranes” or “Never Seen,” which is rescued by an extended improvisation in the midsection.
The most fascinating parts of Statues I are the moments where Zahn’s expressiveness shines through. His play is lively on “Lullaby for My Dog” and the recording betrays his emotion. His fingers strike the keys, coming down with an audible thud. His seat creaks as he swings from side to side, inviting us to imagine the space he occupies. On the lithe “Sway,” notes hang in the air, reverberating around the room. When the tones drop out, the sounds of Zahn’s shifting frame become perceptible. He’s vulnerable and exposed.
Statues II brings him away from live performance and into the studio. Here he’s iterating on the luxurious production of Pigments, working vignettes from his Yamaha CP-70 electric keyboard into tape loops and sharing them with friends who expanded upon them and gave them to Zahn to reassemble. Opener “Changes in Three Parts,” is an immediate departure from the delicate solo piano of the previous LP, with swirls of horn and piano dancing around one another. A drum pattern creeps in near the end, but it’s not really keeping time; it’s moving with the same fluidity as Zahn’s improvisations.
Even where the composition remains sparse, the music on Statues II feels fully realized thanks to its additional texture. On “Morning,” twinkling tones ring out from Zahn’s keys as pitched percussion dances along like stones skipping across water. Tunings and tempos are carefully tweaked, transforming disparate fragments into something alive and dynamic. “High Touch” ascends to free-floating reverie with a soaring trumpet solo from Spencer Ludwig, channeling the specter of Jon Hassell. Outro “Shadow Setup” is the most varied in its intricate layering, its chorus of synth washes and horn riffs coalescing into a dramatic crescendo. Zahn’s piano remains the fundamental framework throughout, but now each piece is properly refined with structure the acoustic numbers were lacking.
Statues I may feel slight in comparison to the ornate beauty of Statues II, but it’s the rehearsal before the performance, training your ear for Zahn’s compositional ideas. Statues II builds upon that foundation, imbuing the emotional core of the music with movement and vibrancy. Zahn shows restraint, then lets loose—and it’s a joy to watch him build up to that confident climax.


Venerable art-rocker Robert Wyatt-- an almost anti-pop star in the Scott Walker mold-- releases a beautiful protest in three parts. Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera all guest.

Comicopera

Robert Wyatt has the saddest voice in rock, which is fitting-- he's had plenty to be sad about, beginning with the 1973 accident that left him confined to a wheelchair. But Wyatt has also long been relatively at ease with his injury, if not sanguine, and has used his perch to take account of the world around him, growing increasingly politicized as the 1970s progressed and Margaret Thatcher ascended the ranks of power in the UK. At times his politics has overshadowed his music and, in the case of "Shipbuilding", even granted him a minor hit.
Not that Wyatt is anyone's idea of a traditional rock singer. Since his days drumming in Soft Machine through his work as a solo artist, he's carved out a pretty unique position for himself as an almost anti-pop star. Like latter-day Scott Walker, Wyatt's essentially created his own genre, a mish-mash of jazz, art-rock, and experimental music. It's also, as with recent Walker, equally compelling and challenging, but as much as Wyatt requires concentration, his albums are generally emotionally rewarding and only confrontational in their eerie serenity.
Despite the preternatural calm in Wyatt's amazing voice, here he seems more agitated than ever. Describing his new album Comicopera in the press notes, Wyatt reveals an almost tragic distaste for the direction western civilization has taken. Indeed, the album ends with Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian as a declared form of protest. "It's to do with feeling completely alienated from Anglo-American culture at this point," he says. "Just sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is 'You've planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart.'"
Those are strong words from someone so famously gentle, and in fact Comicopera ("comic opera") proceeds along a three-act structure. It begins with "Lost In Noise", a five-song suite (mostly written with poet and partner Alfreda Benge) addressing the personal, broadens to "The Here and the Now" (resolutely political) and ends with "Away With the Fairies" (where Wyatt indulges his polyglot form of protest). Wyatt is aided throughout by such regular collaborators and co-conspirators as Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera.
Delineated acts aside, the disc maintains a certain sonic consistency, carefully balancing discord with grace; the structure does pay off, however-- particularly the first two-thirds. "Lost in Noise" begins with "Stay Tuned", a mournful Anja Garbarek song, but it's the astounding duet with Monica Vasconcelos, "Just as You Are", and the spacious chamber pop of "You You" that stick out as highlights.
With "The Here and the Now", things turn rueful and cynical, if deceptively poppier. "A Beautiful Place" (an Eno co-write) and "Be Serious" are an agnostic's stab at spiritualism; "How can I express myself when there's no self to express?" is the latter's take on religion's habit of doing the thinking for its adherents. "Mob Rule", "A Beautiful War", and "Out of the Blue" comprise Wyatt's state of the world dissection. The first song addresses the build up to war, and the second the deceptively sunny disposition of a soldier after a successful military run. "Out of the Blue" then switches the perspective from the bomber to the bombed. It's this victim that seethes with "everlasting hatred."
By necessity and by design, this is also where the disc loses focus, and Wyatt begins to rely on some dissolute fragments (including one actually called "Fragment"), the poetry of Federico García Lorca, and the music of Cuban composer Carlos Puebla, whose tribute to Che Guevara, "Hasta Siempre Comandante", ends the album on a mischievously radical note.
Forget for the moment that Guevara spent far too much of his later life fighting against many of the very freedoms that Wyatt (one assumes) holds dear. The song's message is still clear enough. It's Wyatt's subversive equivalent of "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?", a venerable lefty's call for a return to lost values, a cry for revolution from someone for whom violence, let alone a raised voice, is one step beyond a last resort. It hangs there at the end of the disc like a question left unanswered.


A set of one-take recordings from Jeff Mills’ four-piece techno-jazz-funk fusion band—and one terrific Terrence Parker remix—are a reminder of the importance of editing.

Voodoo Magic

Is there any practice likelier to strike fear into the heart of the right-thinking music fan than the jam session? True, there have been bands—Can are a notable example—that have turned their improvisational nous into wonderfully adventurous music with the benefit of strict editing. But for most musicians outside the actual jam-band scene—jazz players excepted, of course—getting together to bang out musical thoughts results in little more than the bare seeds of ideas.
Voodoo Magic, the first album from cerebral Detroit techno producer Jeff Mills’ improvisational quartet Spiral Deluxe, does not exactly disprove this theory. Most of the four original tracks here were laid down by the four-piece techno-jazz-funk fusion band in one-take recordings during a two-day session in Paris in an attempt to “capture the moment.” And frankly it shows, although probably not in the way the band intended. The album’s title track is flat-out terrible, as bass guitar and drum machine show off to each other in an antipathetic musical stew. It’s the kind of formless noodling you might just about excuse if it took place at a gig while the guitar player was re-stringing his instrument and the singer was having a strop. On record, though, it comes over as self-indulgent, amorphous nonsense that should never have left the studio. The song also illustrates one of this album’s biggest problems: a weird tonal combination of glossy, sub-“Seinfeld” bass elastics and drum-machine thump that sounds ill-fitting at best and downright curdled at worst.
Yet buried somewhere within this elaborate self-gratification is the germ of a good idea. Jeff Mills may be at his best making thunderingly precise techno that wastes not a second of its relentless energy, but he is also the rare musician who can actually play the drum machine live, accompanying everything from his own DJ sets to the Montpelier Philharmonic Orchestra on his trusted 909. Gerald Mitchell, who plays keys in the Spiral Deluxe, is also a hugely accomplished player who has worked extensively with fabled techno collective Underground Resistance. When Mitchell’s soaring piano runs and classic Detroit keyboard lines combine with Mills’ masterful drum-machine work, as in the propulsive opening five minutes of “E=MC²,” supported by Kenji “Jino” Hino’s wandering bassline and Yumiko Ohno’s Moog burbles, you can feel the spark. Here, the quartet comes close to combining jazz’s unfettered melodicism with techno’s propulsive charge. That the song then breaks down into a garden-fence chat between bass twang and polite drum-machine strokes is frustrating, but you can, at least, glimpse what the band was aiming at.
Perhaps most infuriating, though, is the fact that the solution to all this dawdling is painted in mile-high fluorescent colours on the album’s closing track, a wonderfully tight Terrence Parker mix of “Let It Go.” Parker’s remix cleverly excavates every last ounce of funk and soul from the original song, which precedes it, and pushes them into the red. Coming just too late for redemption, this life-affirming example of classic Detroit house (reminiscent of the output of Underground Resistance’s Happy Records in the 1990s) is a reminder of what the rest of the album isn’t: urgent, tight, vivacious, and damnably alive. That Parker distills the bass, so fussy and flash on the original, into one simple, repeating line that actually enhances the song is telling.
As an end to the album, Parker’s mix of “Let It Go” is both brilliant and troubling, a belated sign of what Voodoo Magic could have been if Spiral Deluxe had thought less about capturing the moment and more about smashing that moment down to its essence. Playing live is all well and good. But Parker proves that proper editing is magic.


Incorporating South Asian instruments and singing in English and Hindi, the New York singer-songwriter crafts a concept album from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess.

Asha’s Awakening

Raveena’s music has a delightfully pacifying effect, like slipping beneath a down blanket at the end of the night. Her delicate voice is typically set to acoustic guitar melodies and spacious percussion, an established sound that the New York singer-songwriter has spent the past few years tinkering with. She suggested a shimmery new direction with last year’s one-off single “Tweety,” a blast of Y2K R&B nostalgia whose shift in vocal and production styles was welcome: The pillow-soft songs on her 2019 debut could go down easy, but they were relaxed to a fault. Raveena’s luminous sophomore album, Asha’s Awakening, is a throat-clearing moment for the singer, drawing on both Western and South Asian inspirations and collaborations for a blend of dance-friendly R&B songs and soothing ballads, each of which stands on her distinctive, quiet strength.
Asha’s Awakening is a concept album from the perspective of a Punjabi space princess. Raveena uses this otherworldly construct to ruminate on personal growth, modern culture, and relationships over butter-smooth backdrops. The standout “Rush” melds laidback guitar and radiant synths into the type of blissed-out song destined to drift over summer picnics. Raveena has always excelled in this mode, but here she takes bigger risks, especially when she ups the tempo. “Kismet,” a breezy highlight fueled by joyous handclaps and keys, sails on a lithe bassline and rhythmic verses in Hindi and English. On the flirty “Secret,” Vince Staples provides Raveena with a slick counterpoint over a low bassline and swarmandal, riffing on the Bollywood-sampling production trend of the early 2000s to playfully create something that’s entirely her own.
Asha’s Awakening breaks up the pace in its latter half, with mixed results. On the spoken-word interlude “The Internet Is Like Eating Plastic,” she wryly muses on technology’s grip on her attention, but her blunt platitudes slide into cliché. (“The internet has me stupid and smart at the same time,” while relatable, doesn’t offer much insight.) The album also ends with a 13-minute guided meditation in which Raveena encourages mindfulness over birdsong and buzzing synths. The overlong addendum feels tacked on, a bonus track to reaffirm the distilled sense of tranquility the album has already achieved.
That serene aspect is mainly borne out through the album’s lush production. Raveena made a point of incorporating Indian instruments in her arrangements, a choice that’s most potent on “Asha’s Kiss,” featuring the legendary singer Asha Puthli. The pair duet over electric sitar, chiming bells, and a gently pattering drum, and the meeting of two generations forms a lovely centerpiece. Over six minutes, the song grows light and diffuse, as though Raveena and Puthli are both basking in its hazy warmth. The mood is further sustained on “Time Flies,” where Rostam provides a languid, sublime backdrop for Raveena’s bittersweet sendoff to her twenties. “Knowing I’m growing even if I’m falling apart,” she sings in a whisper over light-handed tabla and strummed guitar; “Knowing I’m okay even if I gotta restart.” The affirmation is earnest, but it isn’t cloying; through Raveena’s tender delivery, it’s illuminating, capturing an artist whose confessional instincts find harmony with her artistic ambitions.


Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on the latest release from D.C. punks Priests. At just 17-and-a-half minutes, Bodies and Control and Money and Power has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around.

Priests: Bodies and Control and Money and Power

Bodies and Control and Money and Power

All that hopey-changey stuff isn't quite working out for Katie Alice Greer. "Barack Obama killed something in me," Greer screams at the tail end of Bodies and Control and Money and Power, the latest release from D.C. rabblerousers Priests, "and I'm gonna get him for it." Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on Bodies. Every anxiety-ridden, admonishment-flinging second of Bodies finds Priests—Greer, drummer Daniele Daniele, guitarist G.L. Jaguar, and bassist Taylor Mulitz—all revved up and ready to go: for them, settling down's just as bad as giving up. As Greer insists on opener "Design Within Reach", if you're "facing fear only when you have to," well, you just made the list.
Bodies—which follows two small-batch cassettes and a 7" on the band's own Sister Polygon imprint—may be Priests' big coming-out party, but it's hardly their first time at the rally. You might know Greer from punk hero Ian Svenonius' Chain and the Gang, while Jaguar's been a staple of the DC underground since his teenage years, volunteering at storied District hotspot Fort Reno. After launching Priests in 2012, they quickly made a name for themselves on the back of their fiery live shows. Even on record, it's not hard to see the appeal; they're a restless bunch, largely unconcerned with polish, careening fitfully from one provocation to the next. Jaguar's deranged-surfer anti-riffs and Mulitz's corkscrewing basslines chase each other like junkyard dogs, never letting each other out of their sights for very long. Daniele's deeply innate drumwork is the cool-headed counterpoint to her bandmates' writhing and reeling. And Greer, well, Greer is just something else altogether; whether she's doling out castigations or on the verge of a crack-up, she's an impossibly commanding presence, splitting the difference between control and chaos.
Sure, their music—which triangulates turn-of-the-80s Los Angeles,  early 90s Olympia, and NYC b-movie-obsessives the Cramps, if that band spent a little less time at the drive-in and a little more time cataloging the horrors on 6 o'clock news—isn't likely to win them many points for originality, or for that matter, subtlety. But, from the first blast of feedback to the flirtation with light treason that closes it out, Bodies doesn't let up for a second; at just 17-and-a-half minutes, it has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around.
While promising enough, Priests' pre-Bodies releases too often seemed resigned to simple sloganeering, to placing message above medium. Songs about the pernicious influence of television, product placement, and, er, Lana Del Rey hit soft targets at full force; their passion was never in doubt, but for every point they landed, two more seemed pulled from the pages of a dog-eared Punk 101 textbook. At its best, Bodies atomizes that early furor, a powerful weapon to train on a more deserving set of targets. On "Powertrip," Greer rails against the confluence of authority and condescension; on "Design Within Reach," she's reminding us how often creature comforts place a wedge between the haves from the have-nots. "Right Wing" reels off a laundry list of invasive police-state maneuvers; "Modern Love/No Weapon" lifts lines from punk progenitor Jonathan Richman and image poet Diane Wakoski as a way of outlining its "plans to disrupt."
It'd be reductive to pigeonhole Priests as merely a political act, because things are never quite that cut-and-dry. "When you are just a kid you want everything to be new," Greer recalls on "New", "but you go into an old house, and everything is so scary." You can take "New" as a charred childhood memory or a quick-take comment on our disposable culture; for Priests, the personal and the political are always within shouting distance, but Greer's more explicit commentary is often placed alongside lines that leave quite a bit more to the imagination. Politics are front-and-center on the unusually poppy "Right Wing", which kicks off with purse searches and pep rallies. Still, by the song's end, Greer's insisting "I'm not trying to be anything." Closer "And Breeding" touches on post-Y2K unease and Obama-era disenfranchisement, but its first few lines imagine an Elmer's-huffing teen scribbling something about "monkeys and robots, monkey and robots" in the folds of a math ledger.
Does Greer contradict herself? Sure, maybe, and there are times when it seems she's throwing just about everything at the wall in the hopes that some of it'll stick. But political lyrics—or any lyrics, really—need not be coherent to hit home; they've just got to be compelling. Greer occasionally treads over well-worn territory; sometimes she seems to sling her lyrical Molotovs at anything that isn't bolted down. And there are plenty of moments where Greer seems almost pressed for time; the onslaught of interviews Priests have given in the run-up to Bodies illuminate many of the EP's less readily apparent messages, but without that extratextual support, portions of Bodies remain open to interpretation, and some of its more implicit messages occasionally get a bit lost in the shuffle. "We don’t have a thesis statement for our band,” Greer told the Washington Post last month. “We’re still figuring out what we’re trying to say, so if it’s nuanced and confusing to people, that’s cool. It’s nuanced and confusing to us, too.”
Priests are still a relatively new band, with just a few releases to their name; even counting Bodies, their total recorded output clocks in just about an hour. Given their relatively slim output and their occasional difficulty honing in on their targets, it seems like they've still got a couple kinks to work out. Still, the brash, unflinching Priests just feel necessary; they're just as angry—and perplexed—about the state of things as any of their peers, but unlike those who'd rather retreat into apathy, they refuse to just lie down and take it.


Two figures of underground rap—Philly’s Sadhugold and Virginia’s Ohbliv—team up for a politically blunted, cult rap record in the making.

The Ra(w) Material

The Ra(w) Material opens with a hazy, slightly off-kilter double-tracked voice chanting, “Caveman, caveman make me a wheel.” Undulating keys and slurry drums kick in next, sounding for a second like they’re two loops running deliberately out of sync. The vocals brag about copping fire from Prometheus and stacking cash like the alchemist St. Germain, before the track is overtaken by the manic sampled dialogue of a religious zealot—at which point the beat dissolves into a misty soul loop. It’s like some fantastically blunted cacophony whose closest antecedent is the Jungle Brothers’ Crazy Wisdom Masters, a record Warner Bros. deemed too experimental to release back in the ’90s.
It turns out, the alien rapping voice belongs to Sadhugold, a Philadelphia producer who wears a stocking mask in photos and is best known for crafting beats for the underground cognoscenti that include Mach-Hommy, Your Old Droog, and the Griselda camp. It also turns out that Sadhugold rhymes very well indeed, much in the same sort of syncopated style as Madlib’s rapping persona Quasimoto. Forming as Czardust alongside Virginia’s Ohbliv—a producer whose work is similarly revered in the same circles—the duo have elevated the usual vanity hip-hop collaboration into a maelstrom of head-spinning loop science intertwined with philosophical commentary.
The Czardust world is like a puzzle box. Focus on one of Sadhugold’s raps—which are filled with brags like, “Fuck this rap shit, my nig’, let’s wrangle these chickens/It’s time to cash in with self-help books and religion, ya dig?”—and you might find the vocals fading out mid-line to be replaced by one of many cut-and-paste-style speeches. On “Murder He Wrote,” which starts out dominated by a simmering bass line and Gothic choral refrain, a female voice asks if God will heal the Earth from disease. This prompts a frantic response from a Public Access preacher who rattles off a crazed mix of Biblical references and hip-hop patter: “I’m the Lord, motherfucker, not who you thought I was supposed to be… Like my nigga Mystikal say gon’ be that way long after they release Mandela because you nincom-fuckin’-poops don’t know Jesus.” While this unfurls, a snippet of The Notorious B.I.G.'s “Hypnotize” seeps through in the background, tempting the listener to wander into another new pocket of sound.
Backed by pained guitar and monstrous bass, “Phantom of the Options” opens as a moralistic rap that includes the question, “Who can turn a terrorist into a sob story?” As you anticipate the second verse bringing forth answers, the lyrics are totally swamped by news reportage documenting the limits and justifications for violence in the name of self-defense. “What are we supposed to do if we can't protect ourselves?” laments a scared voice as the heady track ends.
All these overlapping loops and voices could sound haphazard, but Ohbliv and Sadhugold bring things full circle towards the project’s end. On “Serpent Power,” the same verse that opened the album is layered back into the song, linking the myriad sampled speeches about Christianity, the Ku Klux Klan, and Five Percenter rhetoric to the beginnings of mankind. Then on closing cut “Whattup,” Sadhugold zones out and perfectly encapsulates the cosmic Czardust ethos: “I close my eyes and embrace the blackness of space/’Til the colors and the spirit gods is back in my face like, ‘What up?’”

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The singer’s latest album is both overbearing and underbaked, smothering lovely vocals and intriguing ideas underneath blockbuster features and irritating interludes.

Wasteland

In 2020, Brent Faiyaz ushered in his 25th birthday with “Dead Man Walking,” a single that distilled a fledgling philosophy for the next quarter of his life: “Do what you wanna, live how you wanna, spend what you wanna, be who you wanna be.” Slushy harmonies and sleek orchestral production added to the drama, but it was Faiyaz’s images that made the song stick. A window slices open, and smoke streams out of the car; diamonds “doing Toosie Slides in both ears” glimmer as he coasts down the Vegas strip. Drake, whom Faiyaz takes such pains to reference in this track and the rest of his catalog, perfected this kind of pitched-down plunge into nihilism, adrenaline as the only end game. But amid this impending sense of doom, Faiyaz charmed with an ethereal voice and compelling sense of ease.
“Dead Man Walking” went viral across TikTok, and remains one of the most graceful songs of the Maryland R&B singer’s career. The single seemed to offer a more elegant, elevated posture for the guy who branded himself a “walking erection” on “Fuck the World,” the title track of his previous project. But Wasteland, his latest full-length, shows that he’s learned the wrong lessons from his viral success. On the new album, he opts for grandeur over granularity, resulting in an expensive, ambitious collection that relies on gimmicks and conceit. Instead of trusting Faiyaz to carry his own momentum, Wasteland is both overbearing and underbaked, smothering strands of lovely vocals and wisps of ideas underneath blockbuster features and irritating interludes.
Faiyaz has said that he binge-watched Tarantino movies while making the album, and Wasteland is cinematic in the most clunkily literal sense. Three of the record’s 19 tracks are skits, and that tally doesn’t include the introduction—a swirl of menacing piano chords, crowd chatter, and fragmented intonations spoken by Faiyaz and Jorja Smith about tunneling into a high to escape and, gratingly, how Twitter has co-opted the word “toxic.” (“Shakespeare used it,” Smith chimes in, “The Taming of the Shrew.”) The two-and-half-minute-long ramble culminates in an intriguing, if not obvious question: “What purpose do your vices serve in your life?”
But Faiyaz spends the next hour dodging the answer. Instead, we get a plot. Wasteland follows Faiyaz’s character as he deflects the looming responsibilities of fatherhood, lying to the pregnant mother of his future child until she is so distraught that she threatens suicide. In a painfully drawn-out scene, “Skit: Wake Up Call,” Faiyaz crashes his car speeding to see her. Between these awkwardly scripted data-dumps, we get some gleaming songs—the catchy, Tyler, the Creator-assisted “Gravity,” the tingling percussion on “Addictions”, the hazy thrill of “Dead Man Walking”—but Faiyaz shoves the listener back into the overwrought narrative before any of the hits can metabolize.
Thankfully, the execution often surpasses the ideas—these are intricate tracks, twinkling through layers of texture. But they get clogged in swerves and side-steps. “Price of Fame” undulates through pitched-down vocals slowed to a sludge and frantic beat changes, meandering without any real center; “Ghetto Gatsby” slinks through an unnecessary Alicia Keys rap to let Faiyaz belt out in his stainless falsetto. Faiyaz is at his best when he leans into disorientation, dissecting and conveying it: “Maybe my sense of reality is turned off,” he croons on “Loose Change.” The most effective songs fade and float into vapor: “All Mine” unspools gauzy strands of harmonies, while on “Wasting Time,” Faiyaz lobs some passive-aggressive pleas —“You can have all the space/More than you need”—over a lilting Neptunes beat before Drake shows up to moan about The Queen’s Gambit and flushing condoms down the toilet.
Drake is the obvious touchpoint for all this, both blueprint and benefactor. But like the Weeknd, another clear influence, Drake grounds his aching melodrama in tangible grit, sculpting scenes out of specifics. Aside from “Dead Man Walking,” Faiyaz mainly opts for sweeping statements about how evil he is, a rigid moral clarity that sometimes comes across as laziness. He labels himself a “villain,” an “egomaniac,” a gaslighter, a nemesis who deserves his tragic end. Any concrete details he offers just further fuel the caricature. He tries to convince a possessive lover to have more threesomes; he lashes out at a woman spilling cognac on his Alexander McQueens; he leaves sex stains in the back of an Uber.
When he does briefly prod at self-examination, his revelations underwhelm: “Maybe I don’t need a hug/Maybe I’m just fucked up,” he hums on “Addictions.” On “Rolling Stone,” he wails what we’re meant to think is the thesis of the album: “I’m rich as fuck and I ain’t nothing at the same time.” It’s a vacant confession, offering only an outline of vulnerability. Sometimes, even emptiness has to be earned.


Written after the death of bassist Cliff Burton, Metallica’s infamously abrasive masterpiece gets its 30th-anniversary treatment at a time when its sociopolitical rumblings are painfully relevant.

...And Justice for All

…And Justice for All is the biggest metal band’s best album. I see you, Master of Puppets people, but I’ve strapped on the blindfold of Lady Justice and let the scales tip where they may: Justice wins. The songwriting of singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich is their most complex and vicious, retaining the power of their early thrash while jettisoning its simplistic schoolyard chants and avoiding the less-compelling hard rock tendencies to come. Use, abuse, experience, and enough beer and Jägermeister to make Keith Moon drive a luxury car into a swimming pool had tempered Hetfield’s reedy yell into something fuller and more forceful, with none of his later cigar-chomping bluster. The lyrics are a ground-level portrait of bureaucratic order pushing down on people too powerless to fight back. And the sound is nearly industrial in its ear-killing intensity, a piece of serrated steel designed to carve you and leave its nihilism in the wounds. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard this: You can’t hear the bass.
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, Justice has been remastered and re-released in a variety of formats—from a three-disc reissue with bonus material to a six-LP, four-DVD, 11-CD monstrosity that features a hardcover book of photos and liner notes and is stuffed with enough prints, patches, and assorted swag to fill a Christmas stocking. Three decades later, Justice arguably stands as the only Metallica album that’s as beloved as it is controversial. (The rest tend to skew one way or the other.) After the death of original bassist Cliff Burton in a 1986 bus accident, the band hired Jason Newsted as his replacement. They toured with him, recorded a covers EP with him, gave him moments in the spotlight on stage, and... absolutely buried him in the mix of Justice, his first-full length with Metallica. The result is the most abrasive-sounding album to sell over eight million copies ever. It’s as if, instead of adding canned crowd noises or fake room tone, Metallica preloaded it with tinnitus.
Newsted’s absence from the final mix is easy to explain, if not excuse. Some of the factors are innocuous: The three original members and the newcomer were not yet accustomed to each other’s playing styles, which led Newsted to track his basslines mostly to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar. Hetfield himself aimed for a low, pulverizing sound, eating up much of the range Newsted’s bass might have occupied. But reading the accounts of various producers, mixers, and engineers included in this set’s extensive notes suggests a more direct, less savory explanation: The bass isn’t there because the band, namely Ulrich and Hetfield, didn’t want it there.
Was this an extension of the extensive hazing to which “Newkid” was subjected by the band for years and which contributed to his departure years later? Was it an unspoken form of denial, processing Burton’s death by erasing his replacement in the studio? Was it simply a power trip by the band’s most dominant personality, Ulrich, whose vision for the sound of his own instrument was so specific and demanding that the people who helped realize it still speak about it with horror? The answer is likely “all of the above.”
But with the exception of producer Flemming Rasmussen, whose enthusiasm for Newsted’s largely unheard work makes him one of this story’s most endearing figures, and mixer Steve Thompson, who regrets having to follow Ulrich’s orders, all involved seem at peace now with the result. Even Newsted argues that “‘how it’s supposed to be’ is how it came out and what made a mark on the world.”
To the great credit of everyone involved, this reissue is no Star Wars Special Edition-style attempt to rewrite the past. You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades—closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman”—remains. (Should the itch for more bass persist, YouTube can scratch it.) It’s tough to muster much anger that the remastered version isn’t …And Justice for Jason when Jason himself feels justice has been served.
Justice begins and ends at a breakneck pace. Opener “Blackened” serves the same role as “Battery” on Master of Puppets—ahead at full speed. It’s a meditation on nuclear annihilation and global extinction that, with a few tweaks, could apply to our worsening climate crisis: “Fire is the outcome of hypocrisy… Color our world blackened,” Hetfield shouts, his clipped words another piece of the percussive array. A screed about Hetfield’s “undying spite” for the parents who coddled him in conservatism, closer “Dyer’s Eve” is as intimate as “Blackened” is apocalyptic. As a parent now myself, I hear my own worst fears about tossing my children into “this hell you always knew” echoed.
Between those points, the songs are expansive affairs, in length (nearly all of them clock in beyond six minutes) and in the techniques Hetfield, Ulrich, and guitarist Kirk Hammett use to make their sociopolitical points. The riff of “The Shortest Straw,” a song about the victims of political hysteria, speeds atop the song like it’s trying to outrun the mob. The slower, near-sludge sound of “Harvester of Sorrow” reflects its first line: “My life suffocates.” The martial hook of anti-conformist anthem “Eye of the Beholder” fades in from the distance, like an approaching armored convoy. In a rare moment of humor that comports with the band’s hard-partying profile outside the studio, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” incorporates the “ohh-WEE-ohh, YOOO-ohh” chant from The Wizard of Oz. LL Cool J must have been taking notes.
Justice’s centerpiece is, of course, “One,” the nearly eight-minute song about a mutilated war veteran. It sparks like an extended fuse before exploding in its final minutes with a Hendrix-style “Machine Gun” simulation and a Hammett solo that sounds like a panic attack. Thanks to an almost comically uncompromising video that spliced no-nonsense, black-and-white footage of the band with harrowing scenes from an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, it’s the song that broke the band to the world, receiving heavy airplay on MTV despite having nothing in common with anything else on the network. Listening again, it’s amazing how little time and familiarity have dulled its impact. All its elements—from the dour four-note hook with which it begins to that gunfire burst—work as an experiential unit. You strap in and follow where it leads, even if that’s the “life in hell” of a limbless, eyeless, earless, voiceless shell of a man.
At nearly 10 minutes long and with a dozen different time signatures, the title track employs many of the same techniques. Lyrics about the utter unfairness of the American legal system convey despair with force. “Hammer of justice crushes you,” Hetfield asserts before the chorus runs, “Nothing can save us/Justice is lost/Justice is raped/Justice is gone.” But these are not the distant, doomsaying pronunciations of some gimlet-eyed observer. Hetfield is also trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and it’s getting to him, too. The chorus and the song itself conclude, “Find it so grim, so true, so real.” Hetfield draws out the last word as if to reassure himself that he is not hallucinating these horrors, that this is really happening. These humanizing touches give the otherwise impenetrable music a necessary air of vulnerability, a quality inaudible in the machinelike mix.
In that sense, “To Live Is to Die” stands as the Rosetta Stone for Justice. A lengthy, plodding instrumental with sections where the guitars simulate melancholy strings, it’s the band’s tribute to its late bassist and an artistic outlet for their sublimated grief. Burton himself (with help from either the German writer Paul Gerhardt or John Boorman’s King Arthur movie Excalibur) provides the lyrics for the brief spoken-word passage, and they are bleaker than anything the band recorded before or since: “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world,” Hetfield murmurs as Burton’s voice from beyond. “These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives. All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home?” In “One,” the chorus runs, “Hold my breath as I wish for death”; here, Metallica mourn their late friend by posthumously publishing his own death wish. This isn’t The Black Album, but the spirit is as black as it gets.
Despite the demons present in Metallica’s work and the largely unspoken trauma inflicted by Burton’s death, they played on. Along with a deep dive into Hetfield’s vault of riff experiments, writing sessions, demo recordings, and B-sides that include many covers, the set features six concerts (and snippets of three more). These demonstrate Metallica’s determination to plow past their recent tragedy, a recurring theme in the liner-note interviews and a visible throughline in the book’s hundreds of playful photos from photographer Ross Halfin and others.
The recordings range from the previously released Seattle ’89 to a DVD of the bands performance at the tiny Delaware rock club The Stone Balloon. (Ulrich insisted on the gig just so he could say they’d played in every state). Though they vary in sound quality and though some include no more than a single Justice song, these sets document the group’s growing realization—audible in their blistering pace and Hetfield’s rising swagger—that they could blow any other band off the fucking stage. In his essay here, Sammy Hagar actually recounts that the pressure of having to follow Metallica on the Monsters of Rock Tour caused poor ol’ Dokken to break up.
It would cheapen the power of ...And Justice for All to say it speaks to our present moment in some uniquely prescient way. Metallica weren’t predicting the future; they were describing what they saw around them. It made them world conquerors for a reason. But if Justice sounds like Now as much as it did then, it only proves the album’s point. And by refusing to soften the blow and reshape the record’s sonic signature into something more ear-pleasing, this reissue correctly implies that the music stands the test of time as well as the words. It does justice to every nightmare note.


After a few years of non-stop activity that found them moving from clubs to a Mercury Prize win and Grammy performance, Franz Ferdinand took time off and have re-emerged with an album that, more so than stoking current commerical prospects, is an exciting look at the band's potential future.

Tonight

The standard line about having your whole life to write your first album and only six months to write your second seemed especially true in the case of Franz Ferdinand. The Glaswegian band issued its sophomore effort You Could Have It So Much Better some 18 months after its 2004 self-titled debut-- a narrow window considering that first record yielded three top 10 UK singles, a Mercury Prize, and a steady touring itinerary that saw them ascend from clubs to concert halls to the Grammys. But the quick turnaround and life on the road didn't affect the quality of the material so much as the band's performance of it-- sounding brawnier and brasher than on their debut, Franz Ferdinand ripped through the album's 13 songs.
Franz Ferdinand must've therefore been happy to sit out the past three years. In the time since Franz released their last album, their American contemporaries the Killers have already gone Springsteen and then swung back to their synth-pop roots, while next-generation UK upstarts like the Arctic Monkeys have weathered their own cycle of hyperbole, hibernation, and orchestral side projects. During that time, Franz Ferdinand first seemed poised to reemerge as the biggest pop band in the UK-- having initially tapped Girls Aloud guru Brian Higgins (Xenomania) to produce their third album-- or the most commercially suicidal, eventually parting ways with Higgins and indulging in extended studio jams, electronic experiments, and deconstructed, Martin Hannett-like recording techniques (complete with tales of using human bones for percussion).
In his review of You Could Have It So Much Better, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe praised Franz Ferdinand for making albums that played like compilations of discrete but equally great singles, refreshingly bereft of the conceptual heft that marked the band's indie-rock peers at the time. Here the group dial that back from the start: "Ulysses" is less immediately striking than the band's previous headlining singles, as well as more lean and mechanistic. But it ably asserts Tonight's slow-burn methodology: If that "la la la" chorus sounds unremarkable at first, by the third round, it's unstoppable.
Instead, Tonight's patient pacing supports Franz singer Alex Kapranos' claims that these tracks share a nocturnal theme, reinforced by a gradually arced dusk-to-dawn sequence, a wandering spirit, and surprises that spring out of the shadows: "Send Him Away" comes on as a cool snap-along Sly Stone strut before intensifying into an unlikely but effective Afro-psych-funk jam; "Bite Hard" is a piano ballad reborn as a thick-heeled glam-rock gallop; the slo-mo-disco group chant "What You Came For" explodes into roadhouse-metal thrashing. But seeing as many of these arrangements were extracted from improvised jams, the shifts rarely feel forced, sounding more like the inevitable climaxes to Kapranos' seedy, increasingly desperate, club-crawling narratives.
It's only on Tonight's would-be epic "Lucid Dreams" that the album's exploratory approach works against the band's pop instincts. Appearing in a considerably different, elongated eight-minute version than the one that debuted on the band's website last fall, the song is now outfitted with a re-arranged, slowed-down chorus that makes it stumble where it should soar. But if the extended fade out feels overlong and anti-climactic on its own terms, in the context of Tonight it provides an effective, slate-cleaning set-up for the album's two sweetly serene closers: space-age bachelor-pad lullaby "Dream Again" and a solo acoustic-troubador turn from Kapranos on "Katherine Kiss Me".
More so than stoking the band's current commercial prospects, Tonight is an exciting record for what it could potentially spell for Franz Ferdinand's future-- from here, you could just as easily imagine the band further exploring electro-house productions, or stripping their sound down and making a folk record, or delving into tropical laptop-tronic pop. Or, if you just want them to keep re-writing "Take Me Out", well, hey, they can do that too-- see: "No You Girls", a standard-issue but still irresistible disco-floor stomper that imagines Bowie re-recording "Oh You Pretty Things" for Scary Monsters (and which recently assumed its natural habitat in an episode of "Gossip Girl). As the band that provided the exclamation point to the post-punk revival of the early 00s, there was good reason to question Franz Ferdinand's current standing in the pop world, now that that trend is on the wane. However, as it turns out, their return is perfectly timed to remind us that, in a world where UK rock is so uninspired the Brits were forced to make superstars out of Kings of Leon, you really can have it so much better.


With his new More Is Than Isn't, RJD2—an artist who has played with many different genres and sounds—has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments.

More Is Than Isn't

A little more than a decade after Deadringer came out, there's enough music—and enough attempts at reconfiguring his style—to help you construct a picture of how all over the map RJD2's career has been. Whether it's a clear picture is another thing entirely; his shift from underground rap production next big thing to muddled indie-pop singer-songwriter to studio-bound funkateer has done a lot to confuse any set-in-stone ideas of what the RJD2 sound was or is supposed to be. His partnership with Aaron Livingston as Icebird seemed like a good first step towards a reconciliation of everything RJ had built up in his portfolio over the previous ten years or so. But it also opened the door for a big “now what?" and the hesitant anticipation of future work that could build on the idea of an all-encompassing, canonical RJD2 musical identity.
And now, for what feels like the first time in his career, RJ has released an album that comes across as a successful culmination of all his previous ideas and experiments rather than simply a new shift in style.. The title of More Is Than Isn't says as much; these are established trademarks and tics—bombastic drum breaks, sunshine-gleam brass, an armada of mothership synthesizers—that definitely sound like they came from the same hands that Deadringer, Since We Last Spoke and The Colossus did. But it's that first album's boom-bap crate-digging, its follow-up's prog-funk ambition, and his most recent album's cartoon neo-soul all streamlined into an overarching sound, with all the Pavlov triggers and odd quirks and over-the-top crests that combination implies.
With this album uniting everything that made RJ RJ over the years, it establishes a definitive place for him after all this time: that of the hip-hop-inflected neo-soul fusionist producer who is just as comfortable working in moods as genres. With his instrumentals, it's as though he's working more in potential-soundtrack mode than anything; it's easier to describe his beats nowadays for what montages or scenes they could evoke rather than where their component parts could place them demographically. You can definitely dance to a lot of it: the Isley-flecked groove of “Behold, Numbers!” extends this summer's disco-funk revivalism into early fall, “Winter Isn't Coming” goes all neon-space-pyramid with high-BPM footwork-jostling bongo breaks, and the Rick Rubin-oid, Mellotron/piano/space-laser breakdown showcase “Her Majesty's Socialist Request” has already proven through its video to be a killer b-boy/b-girl anthem.
The vocal cuts are both a bit less frequent and a fair amount stronger than in his last couple records. There are a couple strong rap tracks, with emerging Columbus art-rapper P. Blackk rolling out fluid doubletime boasts over the Southern bounce-style “Bathwater” and old Soul Position partner Blueprint harnessing some of that vintage “Final Frontier” smoothness into nimble heist-metaphor storytelling for the Meters-go-caper-flick soul twang of “It All Came to Me in a Dream”. And while RJ does lend that hesitant falsetto of his to one of the tracks—the twee, contemplative “Dirty Hands,” where he actually fits well amongst the beatless chimes and strings—he largely leaves the vocals to R&B singers who can do his heavy-breaks production justice, like Icebird collaborator Aaron Livingston (“Love and Go”) or Little Brother's Phonte Coleman (doing a more straightfaced—and affecting—version of his Percy Miracles loverman schtick on “Temperamental”). It peaks on “See You Leave,” a cut featuring Roots-affiliated rapper STS and singer/writer Khari Mateen, that's as buttery as it gets; on an album that fits right in with R&B and hip-hop's free-for-all cross-genre fusion it's good to hear that RJ can build trad-soul beats with the best of them.
Still, as easy as it is to click with these songs as dance tracks or muso-appreciation fodder (RJ can still program and orchestrate a breakdown like nobody's business), it's better still to zone out and catch their sense of mood. While the vocal tracks are well-realized, this is the first album RJ's made in a long time that actually feels like it's satisfied to say most of what it has to say in instrumental form. His style-weaving, retro-contemporary instrumentation dislodges sounds from their own times and finds new modes for them. So when he rolls out burbling synthesizers that recall the early '90s heyday of ambient techno and 70s prog and glazes them over a class-of-'88 no-bullshit boom-bap break (“A Lot of Night Ahead of You”), or constructs a noir-jazz ballad that snaps from early Tom Waits tipsiness to uptempo Mayfield-style funk (“Got There, Sugar?”), all the parts fit together to turn a pastiche into something a bit less beholden to the sum of its parts. It's less about where the pieces come from than what they're evoking. And even if it's made clear by the conceptual thread that ties the album together—a three-part suite that leads off the album, appears at the halfway mark, and concludes it with three emotively varying takes on the same melodic theme—the fact that the whole of More Is Than Isn't evokes so many different well-built moods is testament to how much he's been able to elaborate on what he's capable of.


A new reissue of the illusory soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ 1991 road film, which featured the final recordings of CAN and Talking Heads, highlights its forlorn and decadent melancholy.

Various Artists: Until the End of the World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Write a song that sounds like the future. This was the challenge German filmmaker Wim Wenders posed to some of his favorite acts back in 1990, when he began compiling the soundtrack for his dystopian road movie Until the End of the World. What will you be writing about in ten years? How will your music sound? Set in 1999, the film follows its characters around the globe, across different continents and through different landscapes, chasing a machine that allows you to see your dreams. Music plays a crucial part, often mingling with these dreams until they become indistinguishable—fitting for a long-gestating project inspired by Aboriginal concepts of the subconscious.
Of the 20 artists to whom Wenders posed that challenge, almost all of them complied (Ray Davies was allegedly a holdout). Each seemed to rise to the occasion in a different way. R.E.M. and U2 offered outtakes from their recent hit albums, while David Byrne reclaimed an old Naked outtake to create one of Talking Heads’ final songs. Can reunited for a single session, inviting original vocalist Malcolm Mooney to chant the percolating “Last Night’s Sleep.” Such was Wenders’ reputation after 1984’s Paris, Texas and 1987’s Wings of Desire that he could coax rarities out of the world’s biggest bands and persuade others to get back together. Despite a soundtrack with so many endorsements, the film was a flop, mainly because Wenders was forced to pare his five-hour opus down to a more marketable two-and-a-half hours. The theatrical cut was leaden and confusing.
That makes Criterion’s new release of Wenders’ director’s cut a revelation, even more startling than Run-Out Groove’s new vinyl reissue of the soundtrack. The two have always existed slightly apart from each other; many more people heard the soundtrack than bothered to see the film. Still, they both start in the same place and trace similar journeys. With its woozy horns and debauched beats, Talking Heads’ “Sax & Violins” offers a jittery vision of the future, even if the track itself was a few years old by then. There are a few detours, most notably Julee Cruise’s otherworldly cover of Elvis Presley’s “Summer Kisses Winter Tears”; if it sounds like it’s from a very different kind of movie, that might be because it was produced by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.
What’s most remarkable about the album, however, is its consistency despite the variety of artists and sounds. Its tone is forlorn, almost decadent in its melancholy, which manifests in a strange, uneasy shimmer that runs through so many of these songs. Lou Reed’s “What’s Good” ponders the everyday details that change when a close friend dies. On the spoken-word number “It Takes Time,” Patti Smith and husband Fred “Sonic” Smith sound like they’re circling the same dark memory, each afraid to approach it directly, as the music thrums and shivers around them. Depeche Mode trade their synths and guitars for what sounds like a Black Lodge jazz combo, and Martin Gore’s lyrics welcome death as a respite from an unruly world: “Mother, are you waiting? Father, are you pacing? I’m coming home.” It could be a cover of an Appalachian hymn from 1899.
Fitting for a film by Wenders, these are songs full of vehicles and highways, evoking the odd isolation of hours spent hurtling alone down an empty road. “Whispering, as I was driving/Quietly the car rolling like a bullet,” Neneh Cherry chants on “Move With Me (Dub),” a sleek disassembling of a track from 1992’s Homebrew. Only Nick Cave, in one of his most actorly performances, offers much in the way of a story within his song, which involves a bomb in a bread basket, an exploding hotel, a blind pencil seller and his dead dog, set to a drinking-song chorus that’s one of the soundtrack’s purest highlights.
There is a sense of finality, to these songs, as though the soundtrack is marking the end of… something. Maybe an era of alternative music. Until the End of the World includes three legendary bands that were defunct by the time it was released—Talking Heads and Can, but also Berlin-based goth-adjacent outfit Crime & the City Solution. There are several acts that were moving permanently out of the underground and into the mainstream—not just R.E.M. and Depeche Mode but k.d. lang (who duets with Jane Siberry on “Calling All Angels”). Until the End of the World was released just three months after Ten and two months after Nevermind, two albums that redefined rock music for the new decade. This soundtrack doesn’t live in that world. Like the movie, it remains unmoored from the past, gesturing towards a future that’s always enticingly out of reach.


Expanding from a duo to a trio, complete with saxophone, the Manchester group embraces newfound production gloss without sacrificing its indie-pop roots.

private LIFE

Aren’t all our lives private lives right now? Over the past year, as the shutters have come down on the outside world, many of us have lost access to those spontaneous human interactions that occur in public space; the self that we show to others is increasingly that which we select, mediated through a feed or screen. The fourth full-length from Manchester’s Virginia Wing—here expanded from a duo to the trio of Alice Merida Richards, Sam Pillay, and new recruit Christopher Duffin—never addresses lockdown specifically. Understandably; perhaps they’d rather not pin a piece of their art to this dismal era. But the album’s themes—of isolation, dealing with trauma, and keeping one’s mind on an even keel—feel very much made for these times.
Formed in 2012, Virginia Wing have evolved from a halting indie group into—well, what exactly? Today they’re signed to Fire, a storied UK independent label that dates back to the 1980s, and their music increasingly embraces production gloss and pop sensibility. Discussing inspirations for private LIFE, they mention Prince, Timbaland, and the hip-hop producer Scott Storch alongside leftfield touchstones like Kleenex and the Slits. If it’s still tempting to call them a DIY group, that’s because this music still feels like it comes from a shared and private world.
“I’m Holding Out for Something,” the album’s opening track, is the group’s poppiest song to date, and maybe their best. Powered by a boom-clap rhythm and blissful filtered synths, it’s a sideways swing at ’80s freestyle, guileless in its big melodies and grand, unchecked emotions. Richards’ exultant vocal faintly recalls Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings, the obscure Scottish indie-pop group whose “The Leanover” was recently rediscovered by the TikTok generation. It’s the kind of song made for throwing shapes in your front room, perhaps while singing into a hairbrush, and in the track’s video, Richards does pretty much exactly that.
Deeper in, Virginia Wing synthesize their influences in bolder, stranger ways. “St. Francis Fountain” and “Half Mourning” are pop songs by structure, but they owe much to the textures of new-age music, blooming with strings and washes of synth. The addition of Duffin to the group’s lineup, meanwhile, has had a transformative effect. A tenor saxophonist, he’s played alongside Richards and Pillay before; his group XAM Duo joined forces with Virginia Wing on 2017’s collaborative record Tomorrow’s Gift. Here, he brings some gorgeous soloing—listen to him fluttering mischievously in and out of Richards’ sober vocal on “99 North.” More broadly, though, he contributes to a mood that runs throughout private LIFE: a lush, numinous quality inherited from spiritual jazz. With its serene delivery and harp-like tones, “Soft Fruit” resembles Broadcast if they were raised on Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders rather than Silver Apples and United States of America.
A band who played a UK tour in front of a sign reading “End Rape Culture,” Virginia Wing don’t lack for a politically engaged sensibility. But like its predecessor, Ecstatic Arrow, private LIFE feels less like an album raging against injustice than one willing a better, kinder world into being. Richards’ strength as a vocalist is that she sounds powerful even when she’s laying her vulnerabilities bare. On “Return to View,” a spoken-word piece with shades of Laurie Anderson, she addresses the listener directly. “I’m conscious of taking up all of the space/With my breath,” she intones. “I’ve got issues to address/And habits to change.” Many music-makers treat songwriting as a form of therapy, but it’s nice to hear that idea communicated so tangibly here: the sound of getting better, bit by bit, every day.
The album isn’t perfect; it could use one or two more bold pop bangers, and it tails off a little toward the end. But that, too, is understandable; this is an introspective record by design. private LIFE is an album exploring the urge to hide away from the injustices of the world, tempered with the awareness that at some point, you’ve got to face up to them. Right now, in the first uncertain months of 2021, Virginia Wing’s utopian visions feel especially invaluable. This is joyful music with a spirit of self-preservation at its core.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The art-hardcore band’s fifth album is a dynamic departure for the group, a long, psychedelic, concept-heavy odyssey that dips into many genres along the way.

Dose Your Dreams

Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham has made a career on a being a bit much: The Canadian punk recently produced an extreme wrestling documentary called Bloodlust and looks like he could get in the ring himself, particularly when the burly, bearded, and frequently shirtless frontman of Fucked Up smashes bottles over his head on stage. He always sings like he’s trying to exfoliate his larynx with loose pieces of his ribcage and they’re the most abrasive vocals anyone will encounter from a band putting out records on Merge. Glass Boys, from 2014, represented Abraham’s purist vision of Fucked Up, a punk rock teleology that traced DIY ethics back to the ancient Greeks and had more guitar overdubs than a Smashing Pumpkins album.
Yet, compared to the band’s double-album rock operas and wooly Zodiac EPs, Glass Boys was a model of hardcore austerity, and its mild reception felt like a referendum on guitarist Mike Haliechuk ceding his artistic control. The line on Fucked Up is that they’ve been expanding the horizons of hardcore, even though it’s a genre they’ve bore little resemblance to, starting with their 2006 debut Hidden World. At this point, it’s clear that Fucked Up are part of the indie rock orthodoxy and everything that made Fucked Up a critical sensation—the saxophones, disco beats, not-all-hardcore genre experiments, and the adventures of David Eliade—are back with a vengeance on Dose Your Dreams.
It begins by recasting the titular character from their 2011 opus, David Comes To Life. Once a budding revolutionary stuck in a lightbulb factory risking it all in the name of love, David inexplicably begins the ambitious Dose Your Dreams as a drugged-up white collar schlub who quits his job on the very first song (”None of Your Business Man”). Minutes later, he meets an elderly mystic named Joyce who guides him through a psychotropic vision quest that challenges his perceptions of reality and vaguely resembles The Matrix, I guess. The plot of Dose Your Dreams could be sussed out like a Magic Eye image if you glance at the titles for long enough (“Living in a Simulation,” “Joy Stops Time,” “How To Die Happy,” “I Don’t Wanna Live in This World”), but anyone who can retell it from memory is either in Fucked Up or read the press release.
Though a thematic sequel to David Comes To Life, Dose Your Dreams demands forgetting everything you know about Fucked Up, and that includes seeing them as a traditionally structured band. Abraham even had to clarify on Instagram that he wasn’t quitting, just trying to accept a lesser role. Sharing the mic with Abraham, guitarist Ben Cook, and drummer Jonah Falco are a litany of guests from Polaris Prize Winner Lido Pimiento to singer Mary Margaret O’Hara to J Mascis. Abraham appears on only about 2/3rds of Dose Your Dreams, which is still about an hour’s worth of a guy who dominates every track he’s on. His voice is a hammer that sees everything as a nail when Haliechuk and Falco are working with stained glass. But Abraham’s unwavering commitment to brute force just as often works to the band’s advantage here, especially since Haliechuk is prone to lyrical flourishes that would send Colin Meloy to his fainting couch (“But who is this tramp sat in front of me/She smiled and said, ‘Jilly I be!’”).
Despite Haliechuk and Falco’s bombastic concept, Dose Your Dreams functions similar to the recent hip-hop blockbusters that share its 82-minute length, best enjoyed in chunks or humming in the background between the singles. There’s plenty of the jet-roar symphonies that typified David Comes to Life, but also new looks at dream-pop, corporate cock-rock strutting, dubby disco, Supertramp, mini-marathons of krautrock, and pure ’90s alt-rock. Even if the creation of Dose Your Dreams was acknowledged by all parties as a contentious power struggle that permanently altered Fucked Up, it at least sounds like one hell of a party.
This is particularly true on the title track and “Talking Pictures,” which sounds a bit like Abraham letting loose at a Madchester rave in 1991. These songs are what likely led composer Owen Pallett to describe this album as Fucked Up’s own Screamadelica, though much of Dose Your Dreams can be enjoyed as a home version of “Beat Shazam”: based on the three-song run of “How To Die Happy,” “Two I’s Closed,” and “The One I Want Will Come For Me,” this could’ve been called Fucked Up’s Loveless, Person Pitch, or You’re Living All Over Me as well.
Even with all this dynamism and attention to detail, it feels exhausting to even consider returning to all 82 minutes of Dose Your Dreams. Fucked Up have gone all in on maximalism, but it never feels like they fully interrogated its implications—by the time the jackhammer industrial pulse of “Mechanical Bull” and “Accelerate” push the album in genuinely new directions, they bear the weight of an hour’s worth of extraneous choruses, multi-tracked guitar solos, and five-minute plot-movers. For the size of the ask, where’s the emotional buy-in? David’s storyline basically evaporates 10 minutes in, Abraham feels like a guest amid the cavalcade of other voices, and it’s less of a new path forward for Fucked Up than getting back on course as a generation’s most hardcore indie rock band. There’s a Gatsby-like void at the center of Dose Your Dreams—it’s a big party, but it’s unclear who or what exactly is being celebrated.


This collaboration from Amsterdam’s Jonny Nash and Suzanne Kraft is a work of profound tranquility. In the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life.

Jonny Nash / Suzanne Kraft: Passive Aggressive

Passive Aggressive

It’s no secret that albums are getting longer, but Jonny Nash prefers concision. He has said that his favorite format is the mini-LP: 30 or 40 minutes long, one piece of vinyl, not too many twists and turns. The format is particularly conducive to home listening; it’s the right length, he finds, not just to set a mood, but to immerse the listener in the artist’s “sonic world.” He likes the format as a musician, too: as a vehicle to explore a specific idea or a temporary obsession.
So far, his Melody As Truth label has been geared along exactly those lines. Modest in sound and scope, yet unusually committed to its cozy parameters, the Amsterdam label has, in its three-year run, dedicated itself exclusively to quiet, contemplative ambient experiments by Nash and his friend Suzanne Kraft (aka Diego Herrera, a former Los Angeleno now also based in Amsterdam). Each release so far has offered a snapshot of a process or a mood. Nash’s 2014 EP Phantom Actors was a set of limpid new age studies for synth and piano that could have been mistaken for a lost Mark Isham demo. The following year, his Exit Strategies modeled itself upon the liquid guitars of the Durutti Column and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. Kraft’s 2015 album Talk From Home, meanwhile, tackled airy synth-and-guitar miniatures, while last year’s masterful What You Get for Being Young used similar sounds, just fewer of them, and ended up being as evocative, and elusive, as the scent of a crisp autumn morning.
Following a split 7” and a split cassette, Passive Aggressive is the duo’s first collaborative album, but it’s not immediately obvious that it’s the work of four hands instead of two. If anything, it is quieter and more spacious than anything either musician has done on his own. It sounds as though, instead of encouraging each other to add more ideas to the mix, the two musicians focused their energies on subtracting everything extraneous. The results appear as effortless as Japanese calligraphy: a constellation of gestures in which no motion is wasted, and so seemingly natural that the creator’s hand disappears behind the work.
The pair recorded the album in a week of sessions last summer; instead of their usual array of hardware synthesizers, they opted for software-based tools. They have described their desired aesthetic as “future-ECM,” a reference to Manfred Eicher’s iconic jazz and contemporary-music label, in which empty space and suggestive textures are often as important as melody or rhythm. There’s certainly something to that characterization, though the music’s restraint has even more in common with the hushed margins of Editions EG’s catalog, not to mention the Italian minimalist Gigi Masin, who plays with Nash in the trio Gaussian Curve. The more melodic songs, like the bookending “Photo With Grey Sky, White Clouds” and “Time, Being,” suggest Talk Talk muting most of the channels on their mixing desk.
The palette is limited to slowly unfurling synth pads, a liquid trickle of piano, and, most intriguingly, a stubby sound that uncannily resembles an upright bass, except slightly too perfect to be the product of mere wood and catgut. In “Time, Being,” Nash contributes some of his characteristic clean-toned guitar; in “Small Town,” a backmasked filament reminiscent of Robert Fripp flares up. They like to dribble soft staccato attacks over watery backdrops, and they prefer melodies that slip ambiguously between major and minor keys, opting for seconds and fifths over thirds. It all conjures ambiguous, open-ended moods that accommodate a listener’s own emotional state rather than enforcing one of its own.
To call Passive Aggressive placid would be an understatement. It is an album of profound tranquility, and in its modest ambitions it can seem almost slight at first—not just ambient music, but Ambien music. Still, heard on good speakers in the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life. Taken together, this entrancing 40-minute listen amounts to a core sample of a mood you can’t quite put your finger on, which only keeps you drilling ever so gently deeper.


The debut EP from cryptic London artist Naaahhh offers five tracks of murky electronic ambience, though it contains unmistakable traces of UK rave culture.

Themes

Kiran Sande, the shadowy figure pulling the strings behind London electronic outpost Blackest Ever Black, is one of those label bosses who can make a record sound essential through sheer turn of phrase. The debut release by Naaahhh comes with next to zero biographical information—just the promise that he, she, or they hail from “under London,” plus a found photo of a hippy raver, cross-legged and grinning on an Afghan rug, with a half-rolled joint laid out in front of her. Luckily, Sande’s liner-notes make up for some of the gaps in the narrative, promising “sidereal downers for all hardcore ravers” and “paranoid street music meets the cosmic disturbances of musique concrète, the MDMA spine-freeze of isolationism and England’s hidden reverse.” With a billing like that, it’s hard to resist.
It’s not that Naaahhh’s music struggles to live up to the accompanying prose, exactly. But Themes has you squinting into its depths in search of the promised ingredients, like a fortune-teller sifting through tea leaves. Here we have five tracks of murky ambience, devoid of anything you might recognize as a beat, but rhythmic nonetheless—an ooze of sound with dark, rippling tides mottling its surface. Casting around for antecedents, you might compare “Empty Rituals” to the more haunted and abstract works of Coil or Nurse With Wound, veteran British industrial units for whom sound was a carrier for occult or spiritual currents; or “Neck Devour” to the blasted, Gristle-y dub of Wolf Eyes circa Dead Hills.
True to Sande’s description, though, there are unmistakable traces of UK rave culture buried in Themes’ fabric. The throbbing, faintly seasick synth washes of “Blooz” imagine some ancient jungle or hardcore 12” with the beats and bass peeled away, leaving just floating, faintly toxic atmosphere. “My Theme” and “Theme 2,” meanwhile, could be club music as viewed from the “Stranger Things” alternate dimension of Upside Down. Muffled rhythms pulse interminably, gooey bass notes affect a dismal plod, and high quavering melody lines ghost around in the higher registers—a grotesque parody of rave’s ecstatic euphoria.
Over and out in 28 minutes, Themes draws to a close before your first impressions have quite had time to coalesce. This is neither uncommon nor necessarily unwelcome for a label that deals in the cryptic. But there is the sense that this is a project still finding its form. Whether Naaahhh follows on the heels of former Blackest Ever Black groups like Dalhous and Raime in blossoming into something dimly beautiful, or Themes remains a one-off emission from the dark side, remains to be seen.