In his improv duo with drummer John Truscinski, guitarist Steve Gunn makes purposefully stark instrumental music that remains as challenging and personal as his singer-songwriter records.

Soundkeeper

When Steve Gunn was in his early twenties and living in Philadelphia, he learned a valuable lesson from solo guitar legend Jack Rose. During his shift at a coffee shop, Rose refused a free drink to a police officer and was fired—an opportunity he took to devote himself fully to his craft. Gunn, an aspiring musician at the time, looked up to Rose as a kind of hero, emblematic of the ways you can navigate the world without compromising your values. “I was always picking his brains,” he told The Guardian of their friendship.
Now deep into his own career, Gunn has found several outlets for his vision. There’s his traditional singer-songwriter fare: the jammy, easygoing solo records under his own name, where he sings about memory and mortality, wandering and keepin’ on. And there’s the instrumental music where he blends these thoughts into a headier philosophy, following more closely in Rose’s lineage. With drummer John Truscinski, he formed an improv duo whose music is purposefully stark but remains deeply challenging and personal.
When Gunn began devoting himself more closely to songwriting in the mid-2010s, he referred to his work in the Gunn-Truscinski Duo as a kind of meditation, a way to summon his most instinctive voice. But just as his singer-songwriter records have grown more accomplished, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo has developed its own evolving sound: a stirring blend of drone and folk music, occasionally softened with a late night hum recalling Yo La Tengo. Their songs often consist of a repetitive, ragged motif from Gunn’s guitar, paired with a lyrical pattern from Truscinski’s kit. It is slow-burn mood music, remarkable for how much it is able to conjure with so few parts.
On Soundkeeper, their fourth and most ambitious album, the duo expands the boundaries of their sound while still holding back as much as they can. After two opening tracks where Gunn’s guitar work feels like scene-setting—chord progressions that resist the very idea of progression—the first riff emerges four tracks in, about 15 minute into the record. And the first thing that resembles an actual solo appears one song later, in “Pyramid Merchandise,” a ten-minute jam recorded live at Brooklyn’s Union Pool. Watching the video of their performance is a fitting complement to the patient sprawl of the record: Gunn tucked away on one side of the stage, pivoting forward, and Truscinski in the back, eyes fixed toward the ceiling.
The live setting suits the duo, whose work has always felt more focused on the spark of creation than the immersive sound design of experimental artists in recording studios. The 16-minute title track, another highlight, was also recorded during a live set, and it serves as the centerpiece of the record: the explosion from which everything builds and fades. In the rest of the songs, Gunn and Truscinski experiment with new textures: Gunn dabbles with piano and 12-string guitar, while Truscinski abandons the drums completely for one song, accompanying Gunn’s slide guitar in “Northwest” with a deep, resonant drone.
My favorite moments on the record arrive at the very end. “Windows” is a quiet, acoustic-based performance: the kind of laid back Americana that Gunn gravitates toward as a vocalist. To complement the music, Truscinski’s drum part follows the cadence of speech over rhythm; it feels spontaneous, intimate in a new way for the duo. A more direct conversation closes the record. Titled “For Eddie Hazel,” the seven-minute track pays tribute to the Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist whose playing spoke to a similar set of values as their own—virtuosic and refined, cosmic but grounded. Gunn’s electric guitar pulses and echoes, while Truscinski locks into a steady trance. It is the sound of two people with a rare gift for converging into one, or conjuring so many more, at their will.

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The 1974 album from the revolutionary singer and poet braided together his passion for music and literature. Its emotional pitch and fervent political tenor still resonates loudly in America today.

Gil Scott-Heron / Brian Jackson: Winter in America

Winter in America

Gil Scott-Heron’s literary side was nurtured by his grandmother who introduced him to the poems and stories of Langston Hughes when he was a young boy. He was raised by her in Jackson, Tenn., where he read Hughes’ texts in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper the old lady had delivered weekly. Inspired to start writing when he was in fifth grade, Gil filled notebooks with his own poems and prose as he began observing the world around him. “I’d do two-page things and gradually writing became like a rainy day pastime,” he told writer Nat Hentoff in 1971. “What I wrote got longer and longer... When I start to really get into writing, I can’t deal with whatever else is going on.” While Gil also began taking piano lessons, his first aspiration was to be a novelist.
After his grandmother died when Gil was 12, he relocated to New York City with his mother and together dwelled inside a Chelsea housing project. Years later, when it came time to choose a college, he opted for Lincoln University in Pennsylvania simply because it was Hughes’ alma mater. Although getting into the school as English major wasn’t a problem, Gil was also itching to complete his debut novel The Vulture. “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that my life depended on completing The Vulture and having it accepted for publication,” Gil once recalled.
Promising his family that he would return for his degree, Gil took a leave of absence after six weeks into his sophomore year and finished his Manhattan-based murder mystery. Coming at a time when the textual surrealism of Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Henry Dumas dominated the black-lit shelves, Gil's book had a more straightforward narrative that was closer to the black pulp style of Rudolph Fisher or Chester Himes.
It was that direct approach that he would use in his songs; the meanings behind “Whitey on the Moon” and “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” were complex, but the delivery was Everyman simple. When Gil did right by his mother and returned to Lincoln University in 1969, he and fellow student pianist/flutist Brian Jackson began combining poetics with soulful jazz arrangements. As Gil and Jackson laid the foundation for their future music, first with group Black & Blues and then as a duo, Gil’s novel was published by The World Publishing Company in 1970, who also simultaneously released his political poetry collection Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. It was off the strength of that book that Gil Scott-Heron signed a three-record deal at the then-fledgling Flying Dutchman Records.
Gil’s voice had this musical quality that was both gentle and gruff. Having grown up under the spell of gospel, blues, and soul, he cited the voices of Billie Holiday and Otis Redding as influences. When it came to politics, his heroes included Malcolm X (“…he was such a force in the lives of Black people”) and Nina Simone (“She’s been so outspoken. She was black before it was fashionable to be black.”)
In 1970, the year his voice was first heard on his debut spoken-word album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (based on his book of poetry), radical black pop was already bubbling to the top of the American landscape with James Brown promoting “Soul Pride,” Sly Stone’s integrated band waving their red, black, and green flags while singing, “Don’t call me nigga, whitey/Don’t call me whitey, nigga,” and Funkadelic’s feedback frenzy anthem declaring, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.” Groundbreaking spoken-word artists the Last Poets and the Watts Prophets were also a part of the equation.
It was Gil’s outstanding “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” the album’s first track, that became a declaration of who he was as both a writer, a rising star, and spokesman for his people—a provocative forewarning of black power that many romantically envisioned would one day overturn “the system.” It was a new kind of counter-cultural folk music tried to disentangle the zeitgeist of the times. In a Jet magazine story published in 1979, Gil took offense when a journalist compared his style to Bob Dylan. As a poet himself, he respected Dylan, but as he said, “There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art form from their lives.” He continued, “They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstance of the community.”
Over the course of his next two albums, Pieces of a Man and Free Will, he became that very kind of artist. His group straddled genres, refusing to box themselves into the soul slot, jazz jive, or a smooth singer-songwriter genre. As much as he enjoyed writing novels, Gil felt he could be more political with music than he could with a pen. “The novel doesn’t lend itself to writing in the immediately political way I can in poems and songs,” Gil once said. “However, that book costs $6.95, and how many of my people are going to get hold of that action. So I’m going to keep on writing songs and poems too.”
In between cutting records and doing shows, Gil sold his second novel The Nigger Factory in 1972 to Dial Press and got a fellowship at Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University’s famed Writing Seminars where he completed the still unpublished novel, Circle of Stone. After their Flying Dutchman contract was fulfilled, but before becoming the first artist signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records (Barry Manilow was the second), Gil and company had a brief layover at the jazz artist collective label Strata-East Records. It was there that he and Jackson, along with Danny Bowens on bass and Bob Adams on drums, made Winter in America, an album many consider their undisputed masterpiece, a synthesis of his parallel artistic mediums.
In that age of politically charged concept albums, most notably Marvin Gaye’s superb What’s Going On, Gil’s inspired lyrical goal with this new album was to create an audio novel that told the story of a junkie veteran from Vietnam hanging on the corner of Any Ghetto, U.S.A. and studying the world through his stoned perceptive. The album’s original title, Supernatural Corner, was the name of the space the unnamed junkie was supposed to occupy. Thinking in writerly devices, Gil planned to record spoken-word interludes between the songs that revealed that the vet was actually in a mental institution losing his mind.
It was that original title and concept that Gil gave cover artist Eugene Coles, the Baltimore-based artist who’d met Brian when he came down to hang with Gil at Hopkins. In 2015, Coles told Taon magazine, “The day before the masters were dropped off, Gil changed the name of the album...I didn’t think the painting looked like Winter in America. It was a totally different concept.” Despite Coles’ misgivings about the title, his ghetto-psychedelic image of the old man on the corner represents a detached isolation that perfectly illustrated Gil’s new title. Although the sun was shining, it doesn’t mean that chilly despair wasn’t around the corner.
For Gil, the metaphor of “Winter in America” was something he’d been thinking about since he watched the president of the United States assassinated on television when he was 14 years old. “The day that John Kennedy was killed is the day I’ve pinpointed as the day that started the Winter in America,” Gil told Mojo magazine in 2003. “The deaths of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King were all part of that.”
Ten years later, America hadn’t changed so much as it continued to buckle. Richard Nixon (one of Gil’s favorite political villains) stood in the White House, broken men returned from the Vietnam War, drugs flooded the streets, and racism showed its ugly face when it came to schooling, housing, and job security. Black leaders, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, were dead and surrogate saviors came in guise of badass movie Mack’s wah-wah walking through Harlem on the silver screen as they headed somewhere to “stick it to the man.”
However, Gil’s material wasn’t simply about entertaining the masses, he wanted to make a difference. His NYC blues ideology became his specialty and Winter in America—with its heavy Fender Rhodes presence (played by both Jackson and Gil), soulful flute, and intimate resonance in the recording that sometimes sounded like rough demos—was the perfect balance.
While I will admit that Gil’s words didn’t begin to resonate with me until I was in my 20s, as a young writer coming of age in the 1980s, I often played his albums to get a sense of his take on the men and women that dwelled in American’s chocolate cities, especially in my village of Harlem. I was a child then, at the time of album’s release, and “The Bottle,” an intoxicating track about the dangers of alcohol, was a radio and dance floor hit. Its heavy percussion (and Spanish count-off) appealed to black folks and young Latinxs raised to the sound of boogaloo and Fania Records. Years later, when Gil Scott-Heron was dealing with his own publicly documented substance issues with booze and crack that eventually lead to years of incarceration (journalist Alec Wilkinson’s 2010 New Yorker story on Gil was a harrowing account of that side of his life), I thought how haunting the song must be for its creator; it was, what Brian Jackson would later tell journalist Jeff Mao was, “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Perhaps the most depressing dance hit of those almost-disco days, the song is followed by the tender tracks “Song for Bobby Smith” and “Your Daddy Loves You,” a lovely ballad with Gil explaining to his future daughter (at the time he didn’t even have any kids) why the relationship between him and the child’s mother failed. With the mellowness of a lullaby and Jackson’s flute floating like a sonic bumble bee, the song feels beautifully sweet. Although Gil often is lauded for his pointed political side, few give him credit for his sentimental qualities.
“Back Home,” an autobiographical lament about not visiting his people down South, was Gil at his most literary. Reminiscent of Southern poetics of writers Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Dumas, “Back Home” conjures the country-boy memories of “piggyback rides down them dusty highways” and “collard greens and cornbread on my Sunday dinner.” Meanwhile, on the other side of that sunny picture is the darkly comic, moonshine misery of “H2Ogate Blues,” with the band members sounding like the rowdy audience and players in a backwoods juke joint. “Just how blind will America be?” Gil sang. “The world is on the edge of its seat/Defeat on the horizon/Very suprisin’/That we all could see the plot and claimed that we could not.”
More than four decades after its release, Winter in America rings just as loud and remains a monument to Gil’s legacy as a poet. It boldly proclaims how much we really matter through big pictures and intimate snapshots translated into the mediums of jazz, blues, soul, and literature. Still, while it was consciously thought of as novelistic by its creators, throughout his lifetime, Gil never disappointed his literary muses as he kept his eyes on the world even when it was upside down.
A year before his death on May 27, 2011, he released his dark masterpiece I’m New Here, an album that was brutally upfront about his descent, but honest in its self-evaluation of his troubled soul that was as “writerly” as the New York City drug novels of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., or Ray Shell. Even in the worst of times and situations, he was scribbling notes in his mind and waiting patiently for pen and paper to release those memories through poetry. He was scholarly and streetwise and found a way to balance it all in his material.
Gil Scott-Heron was still writing poems and prose until the end of his troubled life and the memoir The Last Holiday, which details he and his friend Stevie Wonder’s efforts to get Martin Luther King a federal holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012. That same year, he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; the prize was accepted by his children. While the warrior in him captured the seemingly never-ending turbulence of politics and race in our land of plenty, he also displayed a human side that relished a child’s smile, a lover’s caress and the grit of native-son soil. There were countless winters in Gil’s lifetime, but all throughout there was a raging fire burning in his heart.


Focusing more than ever on dance music with an album the flows like a DJ set, the left-field R&B diva has made her most consistent record in years.

Flesh Tone

Kelis is the unluckiest R&B singer of the modern era. She's enjoyed big hits that have crossed over from urban radio to the novelty-hungry pop audience. The problem is just that, though: Songs like "Milkshake" and "Caught Out There" were taken as novelty songs in the U.S. With Kelis classed as a weirdo outsider-- or worse, nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Neptunes-- both 1999's Kaleidoscope and 2003's Tasty sank from memory once America had squeezed her striking singles dry. Kelis hit the scene in that brief window opened by Missy Elliot, when it looked like R&B radio might have room for more than one oddball with an experimentalist's bent. Despite the fact that her producer pals had the zeitgeist in a stranglehold for a few years, this proved not to be case, to say the least.
And so: the nine-track Flesh Tone. A decade ago, this album would have been career suicide. Now, it sounds so of-the-moment, a full-length exploration of the house music influence that's been all over the radio over the last few years, that it's easy to hear it as a pre-planned attempt at nine hits in a row.
If so, she's miscalculated a bit. This isn't one of will.i.am's stadium-storming pop-dance hybrids, despite the fact that the BEP scourge is now one of Kelis' benefactors. Nor is it one of the over-sugared confections Benny Blanco has spun for Britney or Ke$ha (where sugary becomes barf-worthy). No, this is unadulterated house music, of the sort that's gripped continental European hedonists for almost 20 years. Fans of Kelis-as-leftfield-R&B-singer should consider themselves warned.
Flesh Tone can be as harsh as anything the more brutalist French producers turned out last decade and as melodic as last season's Ibiza smashes. It's structured to flow as smoothly as a pop DJ mix, complete with shape-shifting instrumental segues between tunes. Kelis' producers, including such hipster-unfriendly names as David Guetta and Benny Benasi, have fashioned a catalog of super-club staple sounds. (Naysayers might call them clichés, with the obligatory upturned nose.)
Naturally everything gets sweetened a bit, given that Kelis is still working with the radio (rather than the dancefloor) in mind. The electro riff on "Acapella" lurks in the background, under Kelis' low-key ecstasy and Guetta's melodic bells-and-whistles. And "Scream" shifts from beachside house piano to Kelis imitating a haughty electroclash ingenue. All of this subgenre synthesizing is a bit shameless. It's also frequently great, at least if you're already enamored with big, bright, synthetic dance music.
Now you can't entirely chalk up Kelis' career foibles to a mercurial marketplace, or an unadventurous public, or label mismanagement. Sure, she lacks the show-stopping pipes of a Beyoncé. Most R&B singers do. But there's also something oddly mannered and/or affectless about many of her performances, which you can easily see alienating fans of a genre built on emoting. But here she's clearly working in the tradition of the archly mechanical disco diva, where little eruptions of passion color a delivery as metronomic as the beats. Whereas once her voice got lost between the Neptunes massive beats, on Flesh Tone Kelis blends with the rhythm for the first time.
And yet, despite Britney revitalizing her career with an even more robotic sound, despite the fact that you can turn on the TV and see the (even more) affectless La Roux strutting her chilly stuff, "Acapella" bounced right off the U.S. pop charts, which bodes ill for Flesh Tone. Maybe Kelis just can't catch a break. Or maybe Americans still want pop-dance that's more pop than dance. Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope. Hopefully the full-scale disco makeover won't scare off the future-funk fans who've sustained her career thus far.


The Orlando emo band You Blew It!’s sophomore LP, Keep Doing What You’re Doing, is a deeply satisfying “airing of grievances” record. The group's poised to fill a role for frustrated listeners who can no longer find loud, angsty rock'n'roll via traditional indie channels.

You Blew It!: Keep Doing What You're Doing

Keep Doing What You're Doing

Good songwriting doesn’t always require the absence of lyrical nonsense. Sometimes all you need is one memorable line that lends meaning to the gibberish that surrounds it. Tanner Jones of You Blew It! excels at this kind of songwriting. Take “Match & Tinder”, the first song from the Orlando emo band’s sophomore LP, Keep Doing What You’re Doing. At one point, Jones sings, “I’ll struggle to put your shoes over mine in my head and use it to piece together my confidence.” Immediately after that sentence, he adds this equally inscrutable grab-bag of nouns and verbs: “I can hardly breathe, so I’m scanning for space that lends asymmetry where I’ll put mind over matter to put this matter out of my mind.” Now, I’ve played “Match & Tinder” many, many times, because it has an addictively chunky riff and pleasurably hyperactive drumming and therefore is an excellent example of sensitive-dude melodic punk rock. But I never notice the aforementioned vocab casseroles when I’m listening. Because “Match & Tinder” (and the entirety of Keep Doing What You’re Doing) really boils down to the last line, which is kind of brilliant: “I’m having trouble trying to find the right way to say I feel less than confident.”
Keep Doing What You’re Doing is an “airing of grievances” record—Jones constantly directs his ire at an unnamed somebody who has somehow disappointed him, whether it’s the person with “habits” in “Regional Dialect” or the cretin who has given Jones “the displeasure of enduring your lack of manners” in “Rock Springs”. But the way he delivers these indignities—in a pained, shaky howl that’s constantly fighting to stay above the din of YBI!’s wondrously ringing guitars—is indicative of a guy who’s projecting his displeasure at himself onto others. Even when Jones is pointing the finger, he always sounds like the most vulnerable guy in the room. You know, typical emo stuff.
Since forming in 2009, You Blew It! have survived various lineup changes by zeroing in on the tenets of their genre like a religion. The group is not shy about proclaiming its influences—its Topshelf Records bio directly references emo O.G.s Cap’n Jazz and 00s torch-bearers Algernon Cadwallader, and says “YBI! cherrypicks from 90s emo and indie.” That’s exactly what YBI! did on its 2012 full-length debut Grow Up, Dude, where the band’s fat hooks were submerged (and occasionally torpedoed) by booming, fumbling production. If you’re 35 and grew up on Nothing Feels Good and LP2, Grow Up, Dude will make you feel 15 again. But it will also make you feel like you’re 15 if you’re actually 15. This is the difference between “retro” and “timeless”: Emo will remain eternally relevant because people of a certain age will always have trouble trying to find the right way to say I feel less than confident.
What sets Keep Doing apart from Dude is that, musically speaking, YBI! have grown in self-assurance by leaps and bounds. With the production assistance of scene stalwart Evan Weiss (who also plays bass on the record), You Blew It! have fashioned Keep Doing into a deeply satisfying, full-bodied, big-tent rock record. There are four credited guitarists in the liner notes, and it sounds like each of them contributed at least one guitar track to every song. “Award of the Year Award” is a perfectly spat gob of romantic petulance—Jones’ one killer line is “You can always consider me a friend, just strictly in the past tense”—set to over-amped power pop. The ballad “’Strong Island” opens with nearly 30 seconds of beautifully strummed power chords that usher in the bass-driven verse like a fanfare. By the closing number “Better to Best”, YBI! is in full-on anthem mode, with a triumphant chorus of "whoa"’s pushing Keep Doing toward the majestic grandiosity of arena rock.
The bugaboo among some of the scenesters that form the core of YBI!’s audience is that the band has been positioned in the music press as a leading proponent of the so-called “emo revival.” Those that have been paying attention all along understandably bristle at the revival talk. So let’s set that bothersome word aside: What’s really happening is an emo reclamation by a segment of the rock audience that bailed on the genre 10 or so years ago.
For a while, the itch for shouty, earnest guitar music was scratched by records like The Monitor and Celebration Rock, collections that were considered MOR indie, but would perhaps be marginalized in 2014, just as countless other punk and emo records from the past decade have been relegated to the corner. Now, a band like You Blew It! are poised to fill the role for frustrated listeners who can’t find loud, angsty rock'n'roll via traditional indie channels anymore. If this is the music that speaks to you, here is where the action now is. So, forget the emo revival—this is about two subsets of rock fans being pushed together by aspirational emo bands reaching beyond their niche on one side and the eclipse of traditional indie by mainstream pop on the other. Keep Doing What You’re Doing marks the precise point where these audiences meet, get drunk, and turn it up.


L.A.-based folkie's debut sees her collaborating with producers of Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, and Band of Horses fame.

Catching a Tiger

When Elisabeth Maurus aka Lissie released her debut EP, Why You Runnin', in fall 2009, it seemed a new voice was emerging in indie folk. After years of playing around Los Angeles and performing guest vocalist duties for house artist Morgan Page, Lissie was gaining ground as a recording artist, introducing herself online with acoustic video performances of understated folk songs, including a cover of Hank Williams' "Wedding Bells". Her voice stood out more than the actual songs: at times raspy and at others full and precise, like Grace Slick or Neko Case. After the EP's release, Maurus switched to the electric guitar and gathered a backing band.
Catching a Tiger, her debut LP, is dominated by an odd mix of producer-writers including Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Modest Mouse), Band of Horses bassist Billy Reynolds, and British session guitarist and producer Julian Emery. There are numerous other composers involved in the album, including singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt (for the leaden piano ballad "Oh Mississippi"), but Maurus wrote or co-wrote every track. Her collaborators seem to have led Maurus down the garden path, transforming some promising unreleased tracks into bland songs sapped of atmosphere and personality. The narratives follow suit: The clear singles feature jilted-teenager juvenilia and cheesy tales of rebellion, while the tracks with Lissie's stamp firmly on them feature mature, creative lyrical twists on familiar ideas, deeply rooted in folk.
In other words, the standouts on Tiger were either written entirely by Maurus or co-written with more synergistic contributors like Craig Dodds (Sugababes, Amy Winehouse) and Angelo Petraglia (the so-called fifth member of Kings of Leon). These songs capture a physical environment as well as an emotional one; geography and psychology feel inseparable. "Record Collector", co-written by Dodds, uses unobvious words ("hue" instead of "color"); wry, poetic narration grounded in nature ("Everywhere I went/ There I was/ With a choir of bees/ They were all abuzz/ Oh my, how amusing"); and rhyming that isn't forced or bland. In the process, Lissie whoops and darts all over the scale, showing off considerable vocal range and expressiveness.
But Lissie's conversion to the electric guitar starts to seem calculated once you hear King and Emery's contributions. A couple of them-- "Cuckoo", "Loosen the Knot"-- are fun enough, and the stories feel authentically Lissie's, but they pale in comparison to her own compositions. Wanting to avoid the woman-and-acoustic-guitar cliché is understandable, but the work has veered too far in the other direction, best exemplified on "When I'm Alone". When it debuted as a live performance video earlier this year, it seemed like Lissie's strongest song to date. On the album, it's thin and unmemorable. The guitars, previously bold and howling, are now pushed down into the mix as part of the rhythm section. Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice. Let's hope she listens to it more in the future.


This massive box set offers perhaps the definitive and most comprehensive collection of Philip Glass’ work ever assembled.

Philip Glass: The Complete Sony Recordings

The Complete Sony Recordings

In 1976, composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson executed an ingenious end-run around the cautious classical music establishment of their day. After a short workshop and tour in Europe, the creative partners decided that Einstein on the Beach—a four-hour plus, non-narrative opera—was ready for its American debut. So they rented the Metropolitan Opera house for two nights.
It was more than a sold-out success. It was a decade-defining sensation in New York’s artistic community. The brief run also set Glass and Wilson back nearly $100,000. (Renting the biggest opera house in the country wasn't cheap.) In the immediate aftermath of Einstein’s American premiere, Glass famously went back to driving his cab. But the pinnacle of this composer’s early, hardcore minimalist period—which relied on hypnotically long, not-quite-repeating melodic lines—would lead to a major-label deal before long.
CBS Masterworks reissued Glass’ independent studio recording of most of the music from Einstein in 1979. Glass had shortened some scenes for the first LP issue—on the logic that without Wilson’s stage tableaus, trims were advisable. But everything that made the recording still clicks. The synths have a snarl that’s appropriate, given the opera’s Downtown New York parentage. The big ensemble riffs motor along at thrilling tempos; the “trial” scenes unfold with otherworldly ease. The spoken vocals produce deadpan surrealism. (Check out the delirious syllabic layering in “Knee Play 2.”)  And the instrumental performance of the Philip Glass Ensemble—which included wind instruments and a small chorus—is locked in beyond belief.
Forty years on, this first recording of Einstein has never been bettered as an audio-only experience of the opera. A booming live performance from 1984 comes close; a ‘90s re-recording that restored the excised music isn’t anywhere as energetic or as charming. The only rival way to experience this avant-garde triumph involves doing so with Wilson’s dazzling staging added—something that’s now possible, thanks to a home-video version of Einstein’s most recent revival tour. Still, the inaugural Glass recording remains the ideal way to put the melodies and rhythms into your ears.
After reissuing Einstein, CBS Masterworks signed Glass to an exclusive contract as a performer. Over the following decade, Glass delivered nine albums to the label: a haul that included two other stage pieces from his first opera trilogy, an iconic solo piano set, and several long-form works for the composer’s house band. Those protean sessions form the core of The Complete Sony Recordings. (That title reflects the subsequent corporate acquisition of CBS Records; stray Glass recordings for Sony that postdate his CBS years are also included.)
This 24-CD box also offers a few exclusive bells and whistles meant to entice collectors—some of which prove revelatory. But in a classical marketplace clogged with reissue sets, the key selling point of this one is its contextual comprehensiveness. Full librettos, stage-action summaries and various liner notes are provided not just for Einstein, but for every album here. Most importantly, the box’s accompanying book provides key information on two of Glass’ most important dramatic works: the Gandhi opera Satyagraha and the ancient Egyptian tale Akhnaten—a piece that saw Glass writing for a traditional opera company, for the first time.
Though it didn’t immediately take the opera world by storm in 1980, Satyagraha is now acclaimed as as one of Glass’ milestones. The commission allowed Glass to leave his various odd jobs behind and to focus on composing full time. He responded with a magisterial score that dramatized Gandhi’s time in South Africa, and that also reflected the thinker’s broader journey from newspaperman to activist to political philosopher. The second act’s climactic “Protest” has a galvanic force, thanks to Glass’ strange-but-stirring union of string orchestra and synthesizer. In the third act, Satyagraha looks ahead to the subsequent legacy of nonviolent direct action, as extended to Martin Luther King, Jr. Glass’ score closes with an ascending melody that, with its simultaneous suggestion of vulnerability and determination, makes for one of the most soul-stirring moments in contemporary opera.
In an abstract theatrical touch, the entire libretto for Satyagraha is adapted from the Bhagavad-Gita—the Sanskrit text of which creates a spiritual accompaniment for the opera’s stage action. To follow the narrative on a recording, English-speaking audiences need a track-by-track translation of the Sanskrit, as well as summaries of each scene’s onstage particulars. Akhnaten works similarly, through multiple ancient languages. And Einstein’s blizzard of English fragments is also better studied with a printed lyric sheet. Prior budget-CD reissues of all the early Glass operas have ignored this. Consequently, the small hardcover book included with The Complete Sony Recordings feels as though it’s worth its weight in gold.
A lovingly produced reissue set of the opera trilogy alone could have fetched a high price. (After all, those recordings occupy ten of the CDs here.) But this box wisely expands its purview to include everything in the label’s vaults—including shorter, oft-forgotten theatrical works like The Photographer. As a result, this set allows listeners to re-encounter the decade of Glass’ rise to a position of pop-culture prominence.
While Glass was often sensitive to the idea that he was betraying his classical training by become a “crossover” artist, the Sony recordings do shed light on his fascination with the way different audiences might absorb contemporary composition. His first album under the exclusive contract with CBS, 1982’s Glassworks, was a consciously scaled-down look at his aesthetic. Instead of presenting multiple hours of his gradually morphing themes, the suite of six compact pieces plays in just under 40 minutes. The standard mix is perhaps the most well-known and ubiquitous of all his recordings. But since 1982 was also the era of the Walkman, Glass and his sound designer created a version of Glassworks “specially mixed for your personal cassette player.”
The inclusion of the “cassette mix” in this box marks its first digital release. Bursting with low-end thump and a punchy, less-separated stereo sound, this bonus mix of Glassworks blows away the more genteel, familiar version. Here, the album’s first emotional swing—from the pensive “Opening” to the mechanized march of “Floe”—registers even more grandly. Better than any other CD in the Sony box, it comes closest to representing the potent live sound of the Philip Glass Ensemble, when amplified in a large venue. (This mix of Glassworks also prefigures the strategy of contemporary classical imprints like New Amsterdam, which work to produce recordings in ways that will appeal to all sorts of listeners.)
Not every experiment from this period paid off. Songs from the Trilogy was a useful compilation, back when recordings of Glass’ early operas represented a more substantial physical-media investment. Now it’s a curiosity. And Songs from Liquid Days is a strange misfire. Its harmonic progressions and ensemble tempos seem consistently alienated from the pop-song lyrics (written, variously, by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega). And the vocal performances—by the Roches, Linda Ronstadt and the lead from the cast of Satyagraha—often sound equally uncertain of the appropriate texture to pursue. Still, it’s a fascinating look at a composer with a long corporate leash, and a willingness to play around.
More successful are albums for Glass’ ensemble, originally commissioned as scores for dance performances. These include the miniatures found on DancePieces and the opulent, side-length statements on Dance Nos. 1-5. And the composer’s popular reputation hit a new level with the release of Solo Piano—still one of the most fervently beloved entries in his vast catalog. This record gave fans an intimate encounter with Glass’ solo-instrumental style, and also offered premieres of major pieces like “Metamorphosis” and “Wichita Sutra Vortex.” The former is a piece that has been admired and performed by Blood Orange. The latter is a work that many elite classical virtuosos fail to pull off with exuberance of the more technically limited Glass.
In 1993, Glass jumped from CBS/Sony to Nonesuch—a label that he’d been sneaking movie soundtracks to, on the side, for some time. Before long, Glass would establish his own imprint, Orange Mountain Music (which remains the place to find his latter-day chamber music, operas and symphonic statements). But Sony has also stayed in the Glass business, here and there. It recorded Itaipu/The Canyon—one of Glass’ early forays into orchestral writing for its own sake—in 1993. (Glass would quickly outstrip this effort with several later symphonies.) Thanks to the label’s association with Yo-Yo Ma, this box gets to claim Glass’ fine soundtrack to Naqoyqatsi (on which the cellist performs).
Sony also has the rights to Passages, Glass’ 1990 reunion with Ravi Shankar, his onetime mentor. On that album, each composer arranged themes by the other. Not everything there comes off seamlessly, but it’s a blast to hear Shankar’s adaptation of Glassian melody. The box also gathers obscure sets like Organ Works—an interesting series of Glass arrangements, performed by Donald Joyce. There’s also a rarities collection titled Recent Recordings. It’s a fun listen, even if it contains some recordings that aren’t all that recent. (A short Glass Ensemble performance at the 1984 Olympics torch-lighting ceremony? Sure, let’s have it!)
Aside from the obscure “cassette mix” of Glassworks, however, the exclusive material advertised on the packaging doesn’t have much to do with the true value of this box. The real attraction is the half of the set that sits in the excellent-to-iconic zone of Glass’ catalog. A lot of that material has been widely available for years—though often without important contextual material that can aid deeper immersion. This reverent, smartly produced set fixes that problem. In doing so, The Complete Sony Recordings represents a worthy completion of the company’s original investment in a young composer.


Oasis’ third album from 1997 was always more circus than substance. The bloated and indulgent remaster only reinforces it as one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music.

Be Here Now

The circus around Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now, makes the modern hoopla surrounding Frank Ocean, Kanye West, and Beyoncé look like amateur hour. Never was the hunger for new product greater, and never was the infrastructure designed to supply it in poorer shape. Back in the summer of 1997, the Manchester band’s label, Creation, and management, Ignition, were mobilized for battle, attempting to downplay the hype after months of tabloid chaos and over-saturation. Oasis had actually made another album, which should have been news enough.
Never mind that in September of ’96, Liam Gallagher had bailed on their diabolical MTV Unplugged performance before walking out on an American tour because, he claimed, he needed to buy a house. Two months later, he was arrested on London’s Oxford Street at 7.25 a.m. with his pockets full of cocaine, described by police officers as “an unkempt man, obviously the worse for wear.” The following January, Noel Gallagher left the nation clutching at pearls after declaring drug-taking to be as normal as having a cup of tea. The pair of them could barely leave their houses for the throngs of paparazzi camped outside.
The new record was also encumbered by what may have been the greatest millstone in pop music history: the double success of 1994’s Definitely Maybe and 1995’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory), which had already been minted as era-defining classics. You can see why the powers that be were trying to manage expectations. Journalists issued with a cassette of Be Here Now had to sign an absurd contract stating that they wouldn’t talk about the album while in bed with their partner. Ignition brought lawsuits against nascent fansites that carried any trace of copyrighted material. They called the police on three local radio stations that broke the embargo for lead single “D’You Know What I Mean?”, and pulled a raft of exclusive tracks from the BBC Radio 1 Evening Session after it was deemed that DJ Steve Lamacq hadn’t layered enough jingles over the songs to deter home-tapers. Even label staff were forbidden to enter the office at certain hours, lest they overhear the album, and at one point, Creation got a specialist in to check whether their phones had been tapped by Murdoch rag The Sun. It’s almost as if there were stratospheric amounts of cocaine involved at every level of the operation.
It might sound like damage control, but if anyone was engaged in that, it was the British music press. They had looked foolish after underrating What’s the Story (upon which Oasis played to 250,000 people across two nights at Knebworth), and were aware that Britpop’s luster was starting to tarnish. Every major news program sent a camera crew to regional record shops on the Thursday of release (MTV UK captured a young Pete Doherty in the queue in London), and HMV issued special certificates to first-day buyers. Magazine sales were predicated on their access to to the band, a valuable commodity that could easily disappear at the first sign of dissent, as evidenced by the album’s desperate and ingratiating reviews: “Oasis’ third LP is a veritable rock’n’roll monsoon of an album; a giant jigsaw puzzle, an elemental force, a monster that cannot and will not be contained,” claimed Vox. “Dem a come fe mess up de area seeeeeeeerious,” suggested Charles Shaar Murray in Mojo. Q actually called it “cocaine set to music,” which was about the only factual statement amid the lashings of hyperbole. Of the many cultural changes that Be Here Now triggered, the shift in power from the music press to marketing men may be the most toxic and enduring.
What sounded like a dog’s dinner in 1997 sounds no better on this 2016 remaster, which remains one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music. It’s not necessarily the songs—Noel Gallagher’s way with a hook is diminished, but passable enough to make “do you know what I mean, yeah yeah” feel sticky and semi-poignant. Even “Stand By Me” is genuinely touching. But the mix is gristle to Definitely Maybe’s fillet. There were reportedly up to 50 channels of guitar on each of Be Here Now’s tracks, sometimes coupled with a 36-piece orchestra, the effect evoking something like hell churning around a cement mixer, or agonizing indigestion. Aside from a two-minute reprise of a nine-minute song, the shortest track is 5:13. It boasts more key changes than a single series of “X Factor.” The morse code blips in “D’You Know…” supposedly spell out “bugger all.” A toilet appears to flush at the end of the title track. “In the first week, someone tried to score an ounce of weed, but instead got an ounce of cocaine,” said co-producer Owen Morris. “Which kind of summed it up.” After the two massive shows at Knebworth, there was nowhere left for them to go. The lyrics are jaded about success and filled with a foreboding sense that nothing’s set to last. (And they only add to one of pop’s greatest mysteries: How can two such naturally funny men be so bereft of lyrical talent?)
It’s easy to write off Oasis given what they became, but as the forthcoming documentary Supersonic makes clear, they were irresistibly magnetic in the early days. Their god-given wit and lack of inhibitions had even made traditional rock star excess into a guilty pleasure for fans who knew better than to buy into the cliche of throwing televisions out of windows. Be Here Now was the flipside of that Faustian pact, trading a generation’s communal optimism for empty calls-to-arms. Noel, at least, realized this and was doing down the record months prior to its August release. “It’s rocking but it’s not innovative,” he said in February ’97. “There’s no new ideas going on. It’s just us.” Within a few years, he admitted that he had been “making records to justify spending fucking thousands on drugs.” This reissue contains “NG’s 2016 Rethink” of “D’You Know What I Mean,” though that’s the only reworked track. “Someone (I can’t remember who) had the idea that we revisit, re-edit the entire album for posterity’s sake,” he said in a press release. “We got as far as the first track before we couldn’t be arsed anymore and gave up.”
So why bother reissuing a record so shit that it never even became a cult classic, that its warring creators can’t even be bothered with it? (Other than to flog £100 vinyl box sets, that is.) There are two-and-a-half hours of bonus materials here, few of them essential and most of them familiar: B-sides, demos, and live tracks—including the live debut of “My Big Mouth” at Knebworth, which somehow sounds better than the studio recording despite being recorded in the midst of a mob. Of most interest are the previously unheard and surprisingly fleshed out demos that Noel cut while on holiday in Mustique with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp (who plays slide guitar on grim blues pastiche “Fade In/Out”). In a sense, this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now: as bloated and indulgent as the record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product’s status.
It wasn’t just the end of Oasis’ imperial period, but the record industry’s as well. Ten days after the album came out, Princess Diana was killed in a car accident, shifting the national mood towards mass grief and mawkish sentimentality. Britpop receded to make way for a more humble kind of rock star in the likes of Travis and Coldplay. Although Oasis rightly questioned the absurd wave of national mourning, they also, in some backflip of contrarianism, started dedicating “Live Forever” to Diana at their autumn ’97 gigs. There was a lavish stage setup at these shows, with the band entering and departing through a giant phone box. The echoes of “Doctor Who”’s time-traveling Tardis were unavoidable: Oasis belonged to the past now.


For these alt-rock throwbacks about the causes and effects of bad relationships, it’s the unapologetic singing of Sonia Sturino that’s the secret weapon.

Common Blah

If you live long enough, you will eventually hear the same stories—or repeat them yourself.  What changes is, hopefully, how they’re told. Portland, Maine’s Weakened Friends embrace that axiom as it relates to vintage indie rock on their full-length debut, Common Blah. Singer and guitarist Sonia Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman, and drummer Cam Jones pick apart the causes and effects of bad relationships over familiar strains of alt-rock and grunge. In only three years, though, Weakened Friends have found their literal voice and emblem of musical interest: Sturino’s multifarious, melodramatic singing. Amid a trend of 1990s revivalism led by singing men, Sturino gives Weakened Friends the welcome feeling of letting loose that, in turn, makes Common Blah seem audacious despite abiding by alt-rock’s usual themes.
Given the glut of ’90s-obsessed acts that Boston breeds, it makes sense that Weakened Friends consider it their second home—a feeling apparently reciprocated by the city, which awarded them a Boston Music Award last year. Whereas local contemporaries like Pile echo Drive Like Jehu or now-defunct weirdos Krill emulated Pixies, Weakened Friends opt for the punchy eccentricity and pop hooks of Veruca Salt. During “Aches,” depth charges of grunge distortion get a bounce in their step from Sturino’s wiry guitar bends. The blown-out volume of “Peel” is balanced and sweetened by Hoffman’s downplayed vocal harmonies. And Jones steers the pulsing “Younger” with a frenzy of pounded cymbals and insistent snares, switching his emphasis in the chorus to highlight the song’s hook. Even when J Mascis appears on “Hate Mail” for a long-winded guitar solo and to draw Weakened Friends closer to the era they’re honoring, he doesn’t steal the thunder. The song’s core melody is too catchy for second place.
For Sturino, each song serves as a reminder of the dark period that prefaced the band’s formation: the overwhelming weight of perceived inadequacies, the perils of losing someone to addiction, or the belief that she had to endure toxic relationships for the sake of steadying her life. She sings about all of it in exaggerated leaps, ending notes with a guttural trill or pushing out words with a squeaky whine. At times, maybe it’s too much, even cloying, as when she seems to mock the breathy affectations of pop stars during “Blue Again.” But her yell soon transforms into a raw scream, a pure emotion. Turns out, this isn’t overcompensation. Sturino’s dramatic delivery comes from a need to feel the vibration of her voice exiting her body. Without that physicality, she says, she can’t enjoy singing in the first place. Her commitment feels bold and defiant, an introvert learning to be comfortable with some measure of external extravagance.
In the same way, the monotone mumbles of Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch are praised for being plaintive, Sturino’s rubbery inflection deserves recognition for its recklessness, the way it takes risks and leaps in communicating these feelings. By comparison, Common Blah’s most mild songs, like “Early” or the title track, tend to underwhelm when Sturino shies away from the style that transforms Weakened Friends’ pleasing throwbacks into dynamic, vital tunes. Hoffman and Jones are in total control of the rhythm section, but they’re not the reason to show up. When Sturino digs into her delivery, Common Blah shifts from an album of familiar alt-rock into a welcome reminder of how ’90s revivalism can actually sound rejuvenated and reaffirming.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the stunning 1981 debut from the English post-punk band, an archly subversive album with style just as sharp as its politics.

Playing With a Different Sex

The Au Pairs had been warned. And it would have been so easy not to do it. It would have been so easy to stay silent, passive, and do as they were told. But let’s be real. A political punk band isn’t going to stop being political for the sake of some airtime on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. That would be so very boring. That would be so very stupid. Because, if you have a platform, saying fuck you to Margaret Thatcher and saying fuck you to Northern Ireland for torturing female political prisoners on live television was exactly what you should do.
Thus: the Au Pairs got up there and performed their song “Armagh,” even though they were told they really shouldn’t. There was the heaving snarl of Jane Munro’s bass, the strident slant of Pete Hammond’s drums, and the dueling guitars and vocals of Paul Foad and Lesley Woods. “We don’t torture,” Woods sang, “We’re a civilized nation!” Anything can happen on live television. The Au Pairs knew that. They were never asked back.
They weren’t interested in making things easy. They didn’t often write lyrics that you could get your head around quickly, nor did they construct songs focused on delivering a dopamine hit on first blush, even if that was, perhaps, the ultimate intent. And in their politics, they weren’t interested in any sort of armchair socialism, theoretically dense, pseudo-Marxist whatever bullshit. “We’re not an army on a mission, we do commercial songs,” Pete once said, tongue-in-cheek, to NME in 1980. Chiming in, Woods said: “We’d like to be number one.”
Here is what they did instead: write music that, while not exactly militant, was explicitly political. There is no way to listen to “Armagh” and not taste how much the band detested Margaret Thatcher and her curdled, inherently cynical realpolitik. There is no alternative, Thatcher famously said about capitalism being the only system that works. Wait, seriously? the Au Pairs seemed to say in response. They were cynical about the idea that following the ’60s, everyone was supposed to be so liberated—how could that possibly explain Thatcher? It was not as if we had finally figured out everything about sex. The Au Pairs were blunt about all of this in a way that made people uncomfortable. “All I do in writing lyrics,” said Woods, “is try and provide a new understanding of situations that people take for granted or accept as natural or normal.” This is what made their debut album, Playing With a Different Sex, a revelation.
At the end of the ’70s, Rock Against Racism—a disparate network of anti-fascist, anti-racist bands that formed in opposition to an increase in support for the National Front, a far-right, fascist political movement and an uptick in violence against people of color throughout the country—was at its height. Thatcher and Reagan were about to bring their bootstrap politics to higher offices. The situation was unsustainable. In 1978, in Birmingham, the Au Pairs formed out of their local RAR chapter. Woods had just dropped out of Birmingham University, and like many other young people in an economically ravaged, post-industrial Britain, was living off of the dole. Through RAR she met Paul, who introduced her to his childhood friend, Pete. They started playing together, inspired by the blade-sharp, discordant sound of bands like Gang of Four, the Slits, and the Pop Group. At first, they were a band called End of Chat, which was more leftfield jazz and funk than rock’n’roll. After spending time playing together, with Woods writing the lyrics and the band co-writing everything else, they decided to become a four-piece, symmetrical. Two women, two men. Munro joined, and at some point, End of Chat became the Au Pairs. And the Au Pairs became a post-punk band that sounded like absolutely no one, with Woods’ perfectly pitched alto, a certain sonic symmetry, and lyrics that were abstract but entirely potent.
They became very big on the indie club circuit, very fast. Their first performances took place just four weeks after Munro joined. They went from “merely edgy and oppressive,” as one reporter wrote, to having “a cohesion, an unforced flow of power and sense of resolution and purpose.” They toured with Gang of Four and the Buzzcocks, playing high-profile gigs that landed them a deal with the indie label Human.
Along the way, Woods became a palpable stage presence. She wore high heels, a full face of makeup, and sang with shocking explicitness about sex. It wasn’t exactly well-received. “I don’t know how they call themselves feminists when they dress like tarts,” one showgoer told a reporter for Rock On. “You’re a girl and you sing about boys and girls and that’s okay because it fits into music,” Woods quipped to Melody Maker, paraphrasing one particularly misogynistic review of the band. “You couldn’t sing about Marxist ideology because you’re not intelligent enough.” In the eyes of the band’s critics, what Woods was doing couldn’t be called “feminist” at all. Isn’t it bad for women, one might incorrectly think, to stand up there like a piece of meat? Why couldn’t the Au Pairs be more like the Gang of Four—cut all the salacious stuff and just focus on theoretical Marxism?
When it comes to the sexual revolution, there are rules: Enjoy sex, but enjoy it the right way. Be a feminist, but don’t be femme. Be a lesbian, but don’t secretly covet the gaze of men. Woods was queer, sexually fluid. She wrote about the freedom of loving who you want, and she wasn’t always sex-positive about it. This provocation was the essence of the Au Pairs as a political project: Their deliberate handling of sex forced a conversation many would have preferred to dismiss as anti-intellectual or disgusting. The sexual revolution may have promised to destigmatize the actual enjoyment of sex, but does liberation happen just because men know they’re supposed to make women cum? Does sex actually have to be about cumming? That’s the essence of “Come Again,” a breakneck beatdown that almost scans as surf rock, with its swinging lines of guitars and shuffling drums. “Is your finger aching?!” Woods shouts in one moment as the guitars crash into each other, white-capped and supercharged, “I can feel you hesitating!”
When reporters asked what the Au Pairs’ songs were about, Woods usually said something along the lines of “personal relationships.” Here’s an example: “We’ve never been into party politics,” Woods once said to the Birmingham Evening Mail. “I write about personal relationships and the attitudes people have to each other.” Personal relationships is, perhaps, a mannered way to describe Playing With a Different Sex’s opening track, “We’re So Cool.” Girl meets girl meets boy meets boy’s girlfriend meets boy. Or however you’d like to interpret it. The lyrics are opaque enough that you can draw your own conclusions. “I don’t mind if you want to sleep on your own,” sings Woods, playing it so cool, so chill. Beside her, Munro’s bassline is a jackhammer, plummeting, smashing itself into concrete. The guitars feel like sticking your finger into an electrical outlet. But then, just when you think that fucking whomever you like is some kind of nonstop all-night free-love Dionysian utopia, Woods reminds you that actually, sex is a power exchange. “You must admit,” she sings, “When you think about it, that you’re mine.”
The record came out in May 1981 with a striking cover. Shot by the Magnum photojournalist Eve Arnold, the photograph features two young women in Inner Mongolia training for the militia, running through a field in pink dresses and white scarves. It cemented the record’s ethos: that of chaos and collectivity. Somehow, this translated into a bona fide indie hit. Playing With a Different Sex peaked at No. 33 on the UK album charts and No. 1 on the Brit Independent Charts. “Here, unless I am much mistaken, is the band that will provide the biggest sales for a small independent record label since Joy Division,” wrote a writer for the Guardian after seeing the band play at the 100 Club. Woods’ dreams of being “number one” were realized, sort of. They were critical darlings. Lester Bangs namechecked them, alongside the Slits and the Raincoats, as “the absolute best rock ‘n’ roll anywhere today.” He continued: “The other night I saw God in the form of the Au Pairs.” Greil Marcus called them “the UK’s most interesting and challenging band.” Kurt Cobain loved them too.
Challenging, as Marcus puts it, is a good word for it. For all of the Au Pairs’ commercial ambition, Playing With a Different Sex is an oblique piece of music. It is one of those records that requires you to rewire your brain a little bit. They play with dissonance and repetition, taking one phrase and beating it into the ground until it becomes less of an earworm and more of an absurdist echolalia. The playful “Dear John,” warps images of kingfisher-blue cars and a sex maniac named John, repeating his name through the epistolary song. Robert Christgau, in a rare lukewarm review of the record, referred to the band as a “bored Gang of Four.” I get it. “Headache for Michelle,” for instance, is nearly seven minutes of downtempo dubby post-punk. It seems like it’s going nowhere, with its meandering bassline and occasional flickers of guitar. But spend more time with it, and it becomes almost like a meditation. The little guitar flickers start to feel like needle pricks on your skin.
And then there is “It’s Obvious,” where repetition and dissonance rejiggers itself as something completely ecstatic. It is the Au Pairs’ anthem, an absolutely perfect post-punk song. First it is the drums, a playful sort of military march. Then it is the braggadocio of the guitar and the way the bass feels like a snake wrapping itself around your throat and maybe you like that. Then Woods’ voice comes in. She sing-speaks in maxims: “It’s nice. It’s paradise. You’re equal, but different.” It is an emerald in a dumpster of a punk song, the record’s climax, its final sigh. It is unmistakably sexy, taking the band’s sexual politics and almost allowing them to be purely pleasure-oriented, if only for a moment. Woods isn’t breaking off from being directly political here, but in “It’s Obvious,” more so than any other song on the record, the operative is to actually feel good. To lose yourself. A guitar break in the second act is like a Wile E. Coyote motorcycle smokeout skronk, where the Road Runner wins and there’s a sense of gratitude about having an Acme dumbbell fall on your head. To put it in simpler terms, it makes you want to just say goddamn.
The Au Pairs, like many great punk bands of the era, flamed out as quickly as they took off. They toured too much. Their original project of communication and closeness between four people, as Foad once put it, began to sour. Their follow-up album, Sense and Sensuality, wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor, written in a rush as tensions started to boil. They broke up soon after, and it became clear that, like many cult bands, the Au Pairs would be remembered by their first record, a nanometer in the cosmic cuticle that is the history of the universe. It would always be about Playing With a Different Sex. It was always about saying what you feel about your relationships with other people. It was all about being radically honest. This is the kind of ethos that would later start riot grrrl. This is the kind of ethos that would make Kathleen Hanna scream “girls to the front.”
It was ironic how things ended: a massive communication breakdown, Woods deciding not to share any of the rights or royalties to the songs. When asked about it in an interview with the Guardian in 2021, Woods said: “Women need to control their own music.” And while this is true in principle and in reality, there is perhaps a notable distinction to be made between, say, Scooter Braun controlling your masters and refusing to share songwriting credits with the people you were in a punk band with when you were young. But then again, Woods never claimed to be some kind of saint. She wanted to be number one. And for a perfect, exhilarating moment, she was.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


The Baltimore band’s latest is another emotional tour de force that tests the limits of their long-running sound.

Future Islands: People Who Aren’t There Anymore

People Who Aren’t There Anymore

By the time Future Islands scored their first hit, they were already four albums into their career. It’s been nearly a decade to the day since their viral performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on The David Letterman Show, a milestone that was hardly a starting point for the band: “I was actually holding back,” singer and lyricist Samuel T. Herring has said of his rousing stage demeanor during the show. “That’s what was going on in my head—don’t go too far.” The implication there is that some part of him knew he’d have the chance to go further.
“If I said too much, please let me know,” Herring sings on “The Thief,” a sparkling highlight from Future Islands’ new album People Who Aren’t There Anymore. It’s a jarring sentiment to hear from someone who proudly dances like everyone’s watching, who usually has so much to say that he moonlights as a rapper. And though the Baltimore band has hardly drifted from their new wave-filtered synth-pop in the past decade, People makes it clear that things have changed.
The album largely revolves around Herring’s breakup with a long-term, long-distance partner, with whom he used to spend the bulk of his time in her native Sweden. Travel restrictions during the height of the pandemic meant the pair were often apart for months at a time, though it wasn’t until after Herring began writing People that they decided to split for good, meaning these 12 tracks follow Herring’s heartbreak in real time. During the album’s first half, he ponders sending messages in bottles across the ocean, counts the days until he gets to board his next plane to Sweden, and mulls over the agony of having to text his partner “good morning” just before he falls asleep—a seemingly innocuous interaction that only amplifies the physical distance between them.
Herring has sung about grief, heartbreak, and disappointment several albums over now, and though the events that underscore People have surely impacted him—“Regret and fear have an appetite,” he laments on the up-tempo dance number “Give Me the Ghost Back”—it feels at times that he’s running out of ways to evoke his strifes, his passionate yowls lessened by his clichés. His imagery on the punchy album opener “King of Sweden” is hampered by weak rhymes like “I’m always flyin’/So I’m always cryin’” and sentiments of feeling 15 years old again. The funky, bass-thumping “Say Goodbye” harps on the logistical difficulties of connection across time zones, as Herring measures past time by how many cigarettes he’s smoked.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that even if this is the most catastrophic heartbreak that’s ever happened to Herring, the band is content to write essentially some version of the same songs they’ve been writing for the past decade. They are good songs, but it’s almost impossible to draw any deeper meaning from Herring’s writing while it seems like the sequel of a sequel of a sequel. The synths are perpetually new wave, the drums are sturdy and out of the way, the guitars are only there for a little texture. Future Islands still sound the same as they did on Letterman, indicating that the band’s biggest strength still lies in Herring’s ability to command a stage rather than the studio.
And Herring knows he tends to succumb to a fruitless cycle: Album closer “The Garden Wheel” is perhaps People’s best example of his metaphorical writing. He analogizes his fizzling relationship to a garden that’s been excessively tended to: “We worked the earth so much/It turned to dust,” he sings over a mellow, guitar-forward instrumental. But the line can also serve as a symbol of Future Islands’ approach to their art: You can’t always return to the same soil expecting new growth.


The eighth album from the English songwriter is the best work of her career. Soothing, immersive, and self-produced, it conjures a dreamlike atmosphere with songs that spiral out into the ether.

Weather Alive

While writing Weather Alive, Beth Orton noticed the way the sound of her piano—a used, soot-filled, and possibly haunted instrument she purchased at Camden Market—would fill the house while her kids were at school. “Not to complain,” she recently told The Guardian, “but motherhood is lonely.” Playing for hours, she inhabited these solitary exercises, allowing the songs to become vessels for memories, methods of communicating with distant versions of herself. In “Friday Night,” she recalls formative years spent self-medicating with alcohol and reflects on some friends who never broke the habit. Her parents, who died while she was a teenager, appear in a song called “Lonely.” Near the end of it, she sings the title 12 times in a row in a cracked whisper, until the syllables sound as natural as do-re-mi.
These are fragile, isolating moments, and fittingly, Weather Alive is the first of Orton’s eight records that she self-produced. And while she has stated the experience of listening to it with other people has been “excruciating,” the music creates a completely different effect when opened up to the world: It is immersive, soothing, and communal. Surrounded by an ensemble of musicians who tend to elevate every record they appear on—drummer Tom Skinner, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, bassist Tom Herbert, and saxophonist Alabaster dePlume—Orton lets each song remain true to its origin as a solitary spiral. Only now she invites more people to stand alongside her, following her paths to their own ends.
The spiritual predecessors are other transformative records defined by their atmosphere—Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. On first listen, more than any one song, you will most likely be struck by individual sounds and textures. As a pianist, Orton gravitates toward dark, silvery cobwebs of melody, repeated motifs that drift in and out of the light. “Friday Night,” an early highlight, feels a bit like a folk song—maybe “After the Gold Rush” set to the tempo of a plane picking up speed along a runway at night—but Orton sounds too moved by its rush of memories to stick to the melody. Letting the words echo through its descending chorus, her voice breaks at just the moment you expect it to take flight, drawing attention to how she sounds at her most ragged and lost.
As a singer, Orton has never sounded more attuned to her material, and her melodies have never felt more transportive. When she introduced herself in the ’90s, she developed a reputation for bringing a tender, human touch to the UK’s burgeoning electronic scene. Because she found sanctuary as a teenager in discos and raves, it was only natural for her to bring the same level of intensity when she collaborated with artists like William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. More than any record she has made since that decade, Weather Alive brings to mind these early collaborations, her gift for blending genres and their associated scenery. In the past, the menacing, downcast aura of “Forever Young” might have been a trip-hop experiment fit for dimly lit lounges and clubs. Now she embraces a seasick, live-sounding approach, characterized by the grain of her singing and the hypnotic pulse of her bandmates’ performance.
Orton’s writing, too, has grown more elusive. She has spoken in interviews about her diagnosis with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition she is reluctant to describe in much detail beyond its resulting seizures and memory problems. The lyrics on Weather Alive, which occur in bursts and fragments, often circle around these types of disembodying experiences. “I have lived as a satellite,” she sings. “I saddled up/I settled up/I don’t sit right.” Other songs seem designed to capture and prolong brief portraits of serenity, a practice that might feel counterintuitive to someone more prone to meditating on darkness. “Almost makes me want to cry,” she sings repeatedly in the title track. “The weather’s so beautiful outside.”
The lyrics set a scene, but the landscapes tend to form gradually with each element of the production: washes of synths and wordless backing vocals, bursts of electric guitars and flickering percussion, slow drone of a saxophone. When she drifts from the narrative in “Weather Alive” to explore meaning beyond words—“Something like, something like, something like,” she sings around the five-minute mark, as if instructing her bandmates to follow her lead—you start to consider each song as an improvisation: a conversation that could drift into tears or laughter, personal revelation or total silence, depending on the mood.
This nebulous approach has always been central to Orton’s music, which defied categorization from the beginning. In a 1999 interview, she seems exhausted and uncomfortable trying to pinpoint her genre: “Maybe I’m sort of folk-soul-blues-jazz…,” she says, letting her voice trail off into a series of comic, unintelligible syllables. When the interviewer starts asking about specific influences, she changes the subject immediately, noting she just saw Madchester group the Happy Mondays play the other night and they were pretty good. They also seemed a bit tired, she added, acknowledging it was near the end of a long tour for them.
It’s the type of observation a fellow musician is uniquely qualified to make, but it’s also one that Orton seems to focus on, with something resembling obsession, more than two decades later. Listening to Weather Alive, you get the sense that each song is inextricable from the time it was made, the emotions surrounding it, the room where it was written, the view outside the window, the initial response from each collaborator. The atmosphere of a particular song, the quality that allows it to fill a space, she suggests, is dependent on each of these factors. The most upbeat song on the record is called “Fractals,” and its lyrics are uncharacteristically elaborate, as Orton wraps her head around the span of a lifetime and our ever-evolving perspective on love and dreams and hope. “In the hand of the unknown,” she sings, “I made an art out of believing in magic.” Weather Alive is a testament to her conviction, an eerily physical experience with the power to make believers of the rest of us.


On their first album in half a decade, Steve Hartlett and his reunited band of fuzz-rockers turn up both the overdrive and the emotion, fortifying tender songs with muscular squall.

Tru

Ovlov just weren’t made for these times, though that has more to do with singer/guitarist Steve Hartlett’s humble career ambitions than his 1990s indie-rock comfort-food aesthetic. At a time when once-independent musicians can resemble overworked content creators forced to feed the internet-industrial complex with a constant stream of songs and selfies, Hartlett has adhered to a policy of striking up the band only when it feels right.
Since cropping up on the East Coast DIY circuit in 2009, amassing the sort of fervent cult fanbase that gets tattoos in their honor, Ovlov have had to break up a number of times in order to keep it together. Their most recent disintegration, in March 2015, seemed to suggest a greater degree of finality, however, with Hartlett expressing his uneasiness with demanding a full-time-band commitment from the revolving roster of friends and family members that have helped him realize his creative vision. But after redirecting his energies to his solo project Stove, he returned to Ovlov’s Facebook page in early 2016 to sheepishly announce an intention to reunite the band, “sometimes but not all the time.” Ironically, that commitment to be non-committal has since yielded two years of steady touring, a vinyl compilation of their early EPs, and now, Ovlov’s first proper album in half a decade.
The division between Ovlov and Stove was always blurry—the former may lean on Dinosaur Jr. overdrive while the latter wobbles on a rickety Guided by Voices foundation, but both ultimately forge a symbiotic relationship between Hartlett’s crestfallen melodies and his fuzz-pedal abuse. While Stove began as a wholly solo endeavor, it quickly formalized into a proper band in its own right—one whose bassist, Michael “Boner” Hammond Jr., is part of this current Ovlov line-up. But with Tru, Hartlett soundly reasserts Ovlov’s signature strength: the band’s ability to fortify tender songs with muscular squall in a way that doesn’t obscure their emotional intent, but amplifies it. Harlett’s songs tend to deal in themes of loneliness, estrangement, and the inability to communicate, and the onslaught of noise ultimately serves to make that desire for connection feel all the more cruelly out of reach.
Compared to its 2013 predecessor, am, the new album is less late-’80s Dino Jr., more early-’90s Sebadoh: While Ovlov are still as wonderfully wooly ever, they’re unleashing the noise in more purposeful, sculpted spurts and displaying a greater willingness to let their melodies sparkle through the clouds of distortion. Tuneful, feedback-slathered surges like “Half Way Fine” and “Spright” feel as comfortable as a beaten-up pair of Chuck Taylors, introducing dramatic dynamic shifts and savvy melodic change-ups to keep you on your toes. You may not always be able to make out Hartlett’s lyrics amid the cyclonic fuzz, but the despondence and disillusionment in his voice always cut through loud and clear. And when he can’t quite find the right words, he and fellow guitarist Morgan Luzzi unleash that simmering angst through nonverbal means, like the roiling guitar tsunami that brings the hazy-headed “Baby Alligator” to a cataclysmic close.
While Tru may initially favor a more patient, mid-tempo pace than the band’s previous work, it eventually achieves the same levels of joyride abandon. “Stick” proves that Ovlov need not blow out their amps to deliver the white-knuckled thrills, with the song’s pin-pricked guitar refrain tiptoeing atop a cascading motorik rhythm like a walker on a wire. And on its second side, Tru hits its exhilarating peak with the frantic stomper “Fast G” and the absolutely sublime “Short Morgan,” where Hartlett’s continuous, single-sentence lyrics snake through the light-speed jangle of the verses en route to a seismic, rocket-launching chorus.
Following that adrenaline spike, Ovlov grant themselves a deserved comedown in the form of “Grab It From the Garden,” a grungy, slow-motion ballad that, at nearly seven minutes, is practically twice as long as everything else that precedes it. The extended length is easily accounted for by the climatic, Mascisian sludgefeast that eats up the track’s second half—but in Ovlov’s case, it feels like less a display of guitar heroics than a violent purging of all the complicated emotions that Harlett has been wading through over the course of the record. It ultimately reinforces the idea that, for Harlett, making a new Ovlov record isn’t simply a matter of finding the right players and amassing the sufficient number of songs; it’s about waiting until his internal reservoir of pent-up frustrations and messy feelings is ready to burst.


On his latest tape, the Rochester rapper softens his most outlandish barbs. He’s still magnetic, but the sluggish beats sometimes interfere with his oddball flows.

RXK Nephew / Harry Fraud: Life After Neph

Life After Neph

RXK Nephew and Harry Fraud shine as a duo once the topic of steak arises. On “Hunnid on the Dresser,” a highlight from their new mixtape Life After Neph, the Rochester rapper only gets one diss off before he’s distracted by a slab of sizzling meat; soon, he segues into a cooking session so intense that his wrist snaps off like Thing in the Addams Family. Life After Neph is full of the rapper’s oddball pop culture references and weirdo energy, but it also reflects his throw-everything-at-the-wall release strategy. (Check his YouTube channel: Chances are he dropped a new song today, and that it doesn’t sound much like yesterday’s). Measured subtlety was an asset on The Onederful Nephew, his June tape with DJ Rude One, but here the beats feel overly polished. Instead of offering ample grooves for Neph to settle into, the production on Life After Neph is too slippery for his signature flows to get traction.
Fraud is a versatile collaborator; he has made a career curling his samples to fit around different creative partners’ styles. At his best, Fraud’s moderate touch accentuates Neph’s booming register, keeping the beat steady under his tumbling verses. Neph sounds 12 feet tall over the eerie chorus of “How I’m Coming”; he is equally in command on the mellower “RX Instructions.” The atmospheric “Hunnid on the Dresser” is prime real estate for Neph to take a more conversational approach to the chaotic one-liners that made “American Tterroristt” a classic (who else threatens Santa with a hammer?) As he’s started to become the boss of his own life, Neph says he’s tempering the volatile Slitherman persona that drove his early output. On Life After Neph, he raps about innocuous subjects like holiday discounts and bowling over sparkly loops, easy jazz flips, and even the interpolated melody of a Tears for Fears hit.
The album’s highlight is the final track, “Top Chef Neph.” Over ’80s-style synths outfitted with 808 claps, a sweating Neph calls on his girl to help him whip up another feast of epic proportions: Tomahawk steak, a shark-filled seafood boil, and a loaded baked potato for good measure. The production kicks up the punchiness of the earlier cut “Dub 4 U”; you can feel Neph catching his stride as he fires away on matters of taste. There’s even a glimpse of his affinity for conspiracy theories: “Shut up, your food was 3D-printed.”
Although it’s fun hearing Neph, a father himself, embrace dad-coded pleasures like prowling Home Depot for a Blackstone grill, the energy level sometimes suffers with a producer as laid-back as Fraud. His sunny sample flips were a trampoline for Kamaiyah and Jay Worthy earlier this year, but richer beats on tracks like “Authority Figure” and “Gotta Eat” can weigh Neph down. Life After Neph benefits from the same focus and short tracklist DJ Rude One brought to The Onederful Nephew, but the latter had an ember at its center that’s missing here.
Still, “Top Chef Neph” ends the project on a sharp, silly high note that reveals how Neph might sustain his artistic momentum, if and when he gets tired of sharing a new song nearly every day. As he settles into new responsibilities—he released his proper debut studio album this year, the first project he recorded completely sober, and has plans for his own label—Neph is still figuring out how to translate his overflowing verve into a more benign package. It’s not a Michelin-star recipe yet, but with Fraud, Neph manages to carve out space for the outlandish barbs and hollered metaphors that bring his most eager disciples back to YouTube each morning.

Fake Shore Drive / AintNobodyCool / SRFSCHL


Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s fuzzy, rococo synthpop confections have a magic power: They sound like whatever you grew up with, whenever that was.

Mercurial World

Magdalena Bay is a band moonlighting as an extremely online brand. The duo’s website is like a defictionalized Hypnospace Outlaw page: a weirder-than-history recreation of GeoCities. Their TikTok is a whirl of ironic promo, unironic promo, and surreal, post-vaporwave memes filmed in a Rose Quartz and Serenity haze. They have a spooky Space Invaders game; they mailed cryptic brochures to fans. None of this extramusical worldbuilding is new, exactly. An incomplete tour: Taylor Swift’s Tumblrverse, Kanye and Future’s video game (actually, maybe don’t revisit that), Gorillaz’s Shockwave wormholes, that time in the mid-1990s when artists kept making interactive CD-ROMs. But Magdalena Bay commit to the bit.
There are two basic reactions one might have to this level of self-styling. One is to burrow and obsess, relishing the lore and surrendering to the feeling that, as one devotee put it, you’re “now in a cult.” The other is suspicion: seeing style and concluding there can’t be substance. This is the old radio-pop backlash, gussied up for the personal-brand era. It’s also not exactly accurate. The duo behind Magdalena Bay, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, spent a few years in a progressive rock group called Tabula Rasa. When they heard Grimes’ Art Angels, they were surprised to discover intricate arrangements and high-concept storylines that weren’t so far from prog. On their old albums, you might hear a particularly spacey interlude or frenetic guitar line and imagine it recostumed in synth pads and glitter. Alt-pop became a gateway to radio pop; among Magdalena Bay’s many TikTok memes is a skit about how they couldn’t possibly give up Charlie Puth. Judging by the Max Martin-ish strut of some of their singles, they’re not not serious.
For all Magdalena Bay’s scattershot onlineness, Mercurial World is surprisingly old-fashioned. The album’s careful sequencing is full of gentle dissolves and impeccably timed key and tempo changes—refreshing in a genre where the typical M.O. is to spam Spotify and call it an EP. And for all Magdalena Bay’s neo-Y2K moodboarding, their album doesn’t particularly sound like 2000; the Mariah-ish ballad “Prophecy” is the closest they come. Instead, Mercurial World sounds like whatever you grew up with, whenever that was. Their stated influences are current: Grimes’ big concepts and new age haze, Charli XCX’s winking-robot shtick, Caroline Polachek’s MIDI choir vox. Their songs frequently sound like the early ’10s: “Follow the Leader” is like a remix of Beyoncé’s “Party” with the saturation cranked up to max, and the fuzzy synth line threading through the chorus of “You Lose!” is more or less the one from MGMT’s “Kids.” Think of “Secrets” like one of those online quizzes that guesses your age: When the intro slinks in, do you hear “Rock With You”? “Say You’ll Be There”? Something newer, maybe Kaytranada?
Mercurial World is also old-fashioned in its flaws. Like many actual Y2K albums, it sags in the middle. Tenenbaum’s called Fiona Apple her songwriting “north star,” and there are glimmers of this influence in her earlier songs, but on Mercurial World she writes in a more conventional style. That’s not automatically bad; “Chaeri” is one of many strobing synthpop tracks with sad hearts, but its regrets over abandoning a depressed friend feel highly specific. Compared to the rococo production and the quasi-storyline, though, the actual lyrics of Mercurial World often seem like unadorned afterthoughts.
Mercurial World just isn’t that kind of album—nor does it have to be. “The End” (actually track 1; accept it and move on) does the “Material Girl” interpolation that’s basically required with this album title. But Magdalena Bay do it with detail, trailing off like Madonna did with an a cappella fade-out and skating chiptune glissandos back and forth over the arrangement, like a trail of Kid Pix sparkles. The album is full of these little tweaks and stamps and glitches, and they seldom feel gimmicky. “Domino” is Mercurial World at its most thrilling: the best hooks of the album paced like a video game rollercoaster, maximalist glitter rush followed by sinuous soprano descant. It’s genuinely evocative. It’s also, in Magdalena Bay TikTok myth, the siren song of the LOLWUT meme. Both things are true at once, and in its own way, isn’t that beautiful?

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dan Snaith’s new LP as Daphni contains unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from his recent Fabriclive 93 mix. Some tracks falter in the context of an album, but others flower in new ways.

Joli Mai

Until now, for Dan Snaith, an album of Daphni tracks may have come as a bit of an afterthought. Since his debut Daphni album in 2012, Snaith has continued to focus most of his energy on his main project, Caribou. He once revealed that his dancefloor-oriented Daphni alias is all about immediacy. “I could make a track, play it one weekend, have it pressed up on Monday or Tuesday, and it could be in shops three weeks later,” Snaith said several years ago.
After releasing the remarkable Caribou album Our Love in 2014, Snaith has largely ended his live shows with that group. Instead, armed with an arsenal of exclusive remixes and productions on his thumb drives, Snaith plays extended DJ sets to dancefloors across the world. This year, Daphni DJ sets came into the spotlight when London’s Fabric club tapped Snaith to contribute the 93rd edition of their Fabriclive mix series. Just a few months later, Daphni is back with a new album, Joli Mai, consisting of unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from Fabriclive 93. In fact, 11 of the 12 tracks on Joli Mai were first heard in some form on Fabriclive 93. The omitted track, “Vulture,” was featured prominently on Midland’s Fabriclive 94. It’s safe to say Snaith envisioned these tracks exclusively, or at least primarily, for the club.
Snaith is the rare electronic producer who has a totally distinct sound from the jump. You can hear it on the first synth stab, or vibrant arpeggio on a track, where his synths drift and ripple in a fantasia. As Daphni, Snaith’s tight percussion is distinctive, too—his bass drums don’t thwack as much as they thump, creating a rounder-sounding low-end that is physical, but not overly aggressive. There’s an inherent joy on each Daphni track, with rhythms propulsive enough to make you sweat. It all blends together in an alchemy that’s ecstatic but understated—fun, unpretentious, and positive dance music that is neither too flashy nor too dull.
Just as Daphni’s first album, Jiaolong, was comprised of a number of dancefloor tracks and singles lumped together into a single package, Joli Mai is easier to categorize as a compilation of the producer’s recent work than a proper studio album. In contrast, the Fabric mix was intentionally and scrupulously stitched together as a pristine vision of a Daphni DJ set. And listening to the mix, alongside the unmixed versions of the tracks on Joli Mai, it’s clear that Snaith’s meticulous work for Fabric is the context in which these tracks are truly meant to be heard. Still, in the re-contextualizing these tracks for an album format, some falter while others flower in new ways.
Joli Mai is a grab bag in terms of style. Snaith’s hypercolor synths are on full display, along with his tight vocal sampling, which he perfected on Our Love. The beats themselves span disparate eras and scenes. He touches beatdown disco, shuffling house, rave anthems, and straight up psychedelia while maintaining a cohesive eclecticism. Tracks like “Vikram,” only a minute-long vocal snippet on the Fabric mix, is extended to almost six minutes of gorgeously unfurling melodies and superimposed beats. “Vikram” exemplifies a patience in arrangement that Snaith didn’t have the space to explore on his Fabric mix, and hearing the version in full is rewarding in its own right. “Hey Drum,” another vocal one-shot that was scattered throughout Fabriclive 93, is extended for an additional two minutes, giving the meandering track a more definite, self-contained structure than the jerkiness felt in the Fabric mix.
There’s deeper territory for Snaith to explore than heavy drum workouts and flashy, effervescent melodies. You can hear a deep, gentle dub at the very end of “The Truth” that touches a more minimal nerve than anywhere else on the album, and this lithe outro didn’t make the cut for the Fabric mix. Snaith seems more interested in spilling all of his ideas on the floor as colorfully as possible than managing them with focus and discretion. Joli Mai is loaded with effusive energy and  expertly executed ideas, but alongside the specifically tailored Fabriclive 93 mix, Daphni’s new album feels extraneous—an unnecessary step for a DJ quickly reaching the height of his powers.