Weezer return to basics on their eighth album, and first for Epitaph Records.

Hurley

Hurley is Weezer's first record for Epitaph, a partnership that makes a ton of sense since that label has long been the province of smart-alecky teens who like skateboarding and jacked-up power-pop. And it's doubly fitting because Weezer are getting back to basics here after a few years recording with Lil Wayne and letting the other band members sing. Indeed, there is something of a noticeable "return to form" about Hurley-- their best album since at least, uh, Maladroit. The first single, "Memories", is actually about older Weezer-- sure, the lyrics are sub-Ben Folds nyuks ("playin' hacky sack back when Audioslave was still Rage") and the X Games-style brass fanfare can be a turnoff, but as with 2008 single "Pork and Beans", the autobiographical framework of it gives it a certain charm.
Nobody is going to confuse this with 1990s Weezer-- there are still plenty of oddball collaborations (Michael Cera, Linda Perry) for one thing-- but the lows aren't as low or as frequent as they were in recent years. This is still a Mk. III Weezer album where songs are constructed more like sitcoms: each has a single premise based on a rigid structure and a comforting predictability, and each can be experienced in virtually any order. The listenability is at its lowest when it sounds like the producer was meant to pipe in a laugh track. "Where's My Sex?" is pretty much D.O.A., and Cuomo doesn't do much to revive it, the "big reveal" being the phonic similarities between "sex" and "socks" ("I can't go out without my sex/ It's cold outside and my toes get wet"). "Smart Girls" is laughably half-assed, which is more than I can say about lyrics that lack so badly for any sort of detail that you could simply replace "Smart" in the title with "Dumb" or any other adjective.
It's a shame Hurley is so dependant on such lyrical hijinks, because the one thing Cuomo's never abandoned is a ruthlessly economical approach to songwriting. When Hurley works, it's because Cuomo is a master of form. Even if you're not going to be the one singing along, it's easy to imagine "Ruling Me" offering some sort of platonic radio-rock pleasure, while "Hang On" positions itself as the one where the kids will be waving their iPhones in the air. But when the two instincts clash on "Trainwrecks", you hear a perfectly anthemic chorus get lost in a confused verse where Cuomo doesn't put in enough effort to indicate whether it's a riff on hipsters or on himself.
Which leads to the question that's accompanied pretty much everything Weezer's done since The Green Album: Is this a bad album on its own terms, a rush job that could have worked better were the band not releasing records at this pace? Or was Weezer always a goofy pop band subjected to indie ideals they never believed in? The answers depend more on the listener than anyone else. You can't deny that Cuomo feels no shame and is making exactly the kind of music he wants, and there's ultimately something disarming about that.


Hayley Kiyoko’s ambitious debut is at its best when it’s barbed and confrontational, but the former Disney star is still trying to hone her budding pop star identity.

Expectations

There’s a lot riding on this. Hayley Kiyoko, the 26-year-old former Disney star, is one of pop’s few openly gay female artists, whose fans have taken to calling her “lesbian Jesus.” It’s tongue in cheek, but speaks to the hunger for representation among marginalized fandoms—the hoards who flocked to Kiyoko’s early music videos, which offered rare representations of relationships and flirtations between women. Kiyoko now has to balance their interests against her own budding pop star identity, plus the demands of the mainstream that she (and label Empire/Atlantic) evidently want her to break into: Expectations seems like a particularly loaded title.
For her part, Kiyoko seems ambitious. The album comes with a kind of conceptual architecture: opening with the “Expectations (Overture),” and containing a pair of two-part song suites, plus an interlude called “xx.” The sound of the sea and distant birds sometimes color the edges of the songs, giving a rough sense of a contained world, but not much more than that. It doesn’t seem like a leap of faith to guess that the elegant storytelling of Melodrama was an inspiration here, though Expectations doesn’t really use its structure for neat narrative or stylistic tricks in the way that Lorde did.
For one thing, it lacks that kind of songwriting consistency. The obsessive “Wanna Be Missed” has the breathy luster of a forgotten cut off the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, although Kiyoko’s ecstatic crescendo lands with a thud on the blankly intoned line, “I’ve never felt nothing like that,” as if waking up from dental anesthesia. “Let It Be,” the song that closes the album, and puts a lid on the tempestuous relationship that courses throughout, is as stompy of feet and jingly of bell as the Lumineers. “Palm Dreams,” a cheap postcard to Los Angeles life, sounds oddly dated and features a refrain (“Party with us”) that sounds swept from Justin Timberlake’s cutting-room floor. It’s the only song here featuring anything close to a blue-chip songwriter, in “Boom Clap” co-writer Fredrik Berger, which may indict the resources and priority levels afforded to this album.
Those are the most disparate parts of a truly enjoyable if rarely remarkable record, one that lacks the budget of high-end pop but aspires to its trappings. Kiyoko isn’t yet a particularly distinctive vocalist, but “confrontational” is a mode that really suits her. Single “Curious” has a similarly choreographed shuffle in its chorus to Dua Lipa’s “New Rules,” and contains a few pin-sharp barbs worthy of Lorde: “Did you take him to the pier in Santa Monica?” Kiyoko taunts at a girl who’s dropped her for a dude. “Forget to bring your jacket/Wrap up in him ‘cause you wanted to?” Plus it has a perfectly turned kiss-off: “I’m just curious,” she sings, with icy mocking: “Is it serious?” (That and a textbook pop pause pre-chorus: one of those brilliant, tiny spaces that feels like taking a breath before a giant leap.)
Similarly barbed is “He’ll Never Love You (HNLY)” which balances Kiyoko’s well-worn weariness with the rigmarole of being a straight girl’s experiment with deservedly bratty, indignant delivery. This is Expectations at its best: Kiyoko trading in specificity rather than generic neediness, representing an experience that rarely finds an outlet in pop (see also: Years & Years’ brilliant “Sanctify”). The writing on “What I Need” might not be of the same standard, but duetting with Kehlani on a certified Bisexual Bop is inspired, and has legs as a genuine hit if the label is prepared to attempt to push a queer love song into the mainstream. Given that Halsey and Lauren Jauregui’s comparable “Strangers” scraped the Billboard 100 at… 100, I wouldn’t hold your breath. Kiyoko’s debut won’t blow past anyone’s expectations, but it contains just enough intrigue and individuality to sustain them for a second shot.


A sequel in name only, Yachty’s leaden, rap-heavy album demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be.

Lil Boat 2

The reign of the self-proclaimed King of the Teens is over. At 20, Lil Yachty has aged-out of that constituency and there are a host of contenders already eager to replace him. In his quest to conquer the whole yung demo, he discovered teens are fickle and manifold, creatures of varying interests prone to unpredictable changes of heart. After being heralded as the harbinger of a new era in rap, the metrics didn’t bear out his impact. His debut, Teenage Emotions, was streamed considerably less in its first week (24,000) than records by the significantly less hyped a Boogie Wit da Hoodie (54,000), the younger XXXtentacion (67,000), or Yachty’s self-professed rival, Lil Uzi Vert (100,000). He reckoned with the unimpressive showing by saying, “I disconnected with my fans because I tried to do this other stuff,” the other stuff being his straight-faced struggle raps. Based on those comments, it seemed his next release would surely return to his original model of pure, unadulterated song.
At this point, with his royal status in question, Yachty is at a crossroads. His label, Quality Control, is quietly rebranding him as a Migos understudy, a bit player in their streaming rap empire. But Yachty has other ideas, and he plans to soak up as much bandwidth as possible by fanning his own flames. On Lil Boat 2, it’s like he’s daring you not to like him. And so his sophomore album is a sequel in name only, a far cry from the candy-coated, bittersweet melodies that made him a viral sensation on the original. He’s a bruiser now, you see, trading in earworms and weightlessness for gravity and outlandish braggadocio. Maybe it’s a masterful troll that thrives off the misdirection. Maybe the most subversive thing he can do at this point is to dismantle his playhouse entirely, becoming the thing no one said he could be. It certainly is one of modern rap’s more bizarre, and fascinating, heel turns.
After opening with the on-brand crooner “Self-Made,” Lil Boat 2 becomes decidedly bar-heavy and grey. It’s made up of nearly 70 percent tuneless rap flexers with dark, creeping synths; “Boom!” embodies its title, and the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “Count Me In” is all muffled low end. This shift in tone is purposeful, almost forceful. It demands that the listener accept Yachty on his terms and shamelessly argues that he can be anything he wants to be.
The issue is that an album reliant on Yachty’s ability to rap can’t hold up to scrutiny. He is a rather spiritless writer. He only has a couple of rough song ideas. He is incapable of fitting his outsized personality into his pedestrian bars. But the sheer gall of this gambit is occasionally enough to tickle one’s curiosity: Attempted reinventions can be mesmerizing, even when they fail spectacularly. In this instance, he really goes for it. He does triplet flows. He splits punches. He packs cadences and stacks phonetic sounds. Take that, Funk Flex.
Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly. His big, showy rap boasts are unimaginative, sometimes predictable, often bafflingly plain in their presentation: “Running to the money like I’m Frank Gore/This ring costs more than a Honda Accord.” He knows how to spend but not how to sell.
The central theme of Lil Boat 2 is simply how rich Yachty is and how broke you are by comparison. He is money-obsessed and really quite bratty about it. “These niggas hate ’cause I’m too rich,” he spits on “Mickey,” the implication being no one actually dislikes him or his music; they’re simply jealous. “I was buying diamonds, you was waiting for tax refunds,” he raps on “Flex,” a song that also works as a nominal diss of his longtime radio nemesis. “Tell your baby daddy I’m richer,” he raps on “Baby Daddy.” You can guess what “Whole Lotta Guap” is about. It isn’t even off-putting that he’s constantly haranguing you about the wealth gap; the real insult is that he flaunts his money in the most mundane of ways.
Duets with PnB Rock and Trippie Redd show that Yachty is still capable of flourishing in a more melodic space, but his refusal to lean into that mode is what makes Lil Boat 2 sound so leaden. Songwriting isn’t his strong suit, and while he’s taken great strides in that area, it was a mistake to build an album out of his raps. It can be entertaining to watch the gears turning, though. There aren’t any moments where he’s noticeably outpaced by his more gifted guests, as he holds his own with NBA YoungBoy, Tee Grizzley, 2 Chainz, and Offset. His best rapping gets packed into “FWM,” a free-flowing outlier that’s as natural and fun as the more whimsical songs in his catalog. His grill-bearing, chain-swinging performances on Lil Boat 2 make me a bit wistful for those—and maybe that was the point. We must suffer through the new Yachty to reassess the old one.


Arthur Ashin (aka Autre Ne Veut) has always been lumped in with the "bedroom R&B" of How to Dress Well and others. At his best, his singing feels directed to a shrine rather than the club. The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn.

Age of Transparency

The opening to Age of Transparency  teases us with memories of 2013's "Play By Play", still the greatest song Arthur Ashin (aka Autre Ne Veut) has ever recorded. "Baaaaaaaaaaaabe," he warbles, his voice soulful, strained and knowing, before he slides into a reprisal of "On and On", remaking the upbeat single into an exercise in jazz improvisation and bare-boned composition that goes just long enough before it chokes out into a sputter. A theme for the album is wrapped within; this set of songs extends something beautiful to its limits and then tries to will it beyond its end. Sometimes to a fault.
Ashin's showiness as a singer is part of his grandeur; his voice has always managed to pull a song together. Yes, he's been lumped into the inner mines of "bedroom R&B" or "PBR&B"–the latter of which is an innocuous title for a genre, an easy way of associating the soul of R&B with the electronic embrace of indie–but he has always had his eye somewhere outside the bedroom. His singing feels directed to a shrine rather than the club, and he's able to emote despair and acute yearning through the rawness of his voice, not in spite of it. It can be unsettling to hear that singular spark start to work against him now.
The disconnect could very well come from the fact that he's now surrounded by a proper choir, and on his most sonically incoherent album yet. On "Get Out" he is navigating a track that feels primed for cinematic pop glory, but the song flags as it goes on and his flights of melodic inspiration begin to feel like a parody of a blues singer. On "Over Now", a glitchy sample turns a dreary lullaby to the death of something or other into a vacuous wall of static; what is clearly meant to be a captivating mess of noise becomes literally difficult to listen to. "Switch Hitter" turns a menacing pop framework, with its elastic guitars and looming synths, into something that feels half-baked. Where these songs hit their most visceral moments is where they can feel their most contrived.
Joel Ford (Ford & Lopatin) and Young Ejecta appear on production again, but Ashin has graduated from his former roommate's Software imprint to a bigger label with a bigger budget, and with that his sound has become cleaner, denser, and glossier, barring some of the organic simplicity that he's benefited from in the past. His lyrics remain simple and poignant, but some of what surprised us on Anxiety has lost its newness here. The sudden moments of rapture–the ones that that pushed through layers of electronic ambience–remain, but are less frequent and more predictable.
That said, when it does all come together on this album, it really is quite gorgeous. "Panic Room" is some of his best writing musically and lyrically. The lines "I don't want to feel like you're not here with me/ Even when you say that you are not here with me" are heart wrenching on their own. Lay them on a wave of synths and the flutter of percussive rolls and the track is as enveloping as "Play By Play" or "Counting" were before it. "World War Pt. 2" dabbles with some frantic pop sampling before retreating, underscoring the fevered pull of a line like "heartbreak is not enough." "Age of Transparency" is another highlight. In these moments, where he approaches the brink and opens his arms to it, the messiness of his intense and manic music mirrors the messiness of life.
The title of Age of Transparency acts as Ashin's commentary on the way we live our lives out in the open, and his music seeks to pull you through uneasy, emotional dregs with its every turn. But what once felt intimate has started to lean to over-exertion. Here we see what happens after the fireworks have burst, when its casing is left smoldering and you're hoping for more.


Considering Nas' one-hot-album-every-10-year average, he's due for another great record. The sprawling, two-disc Street's Disciple isn't it, but it's a step in the right direction, as well in a new direction: If the Nas of Illmatic was trying to get out of the ghetto, the Nas of Street's Disciple is trying to get the ghetto out of the ghetto-- and find a decent babysitter.

Street's Disciple

I'm as big a fan of tableau vivant as the next, but what the fuck is going on with the cover of Street's Disciple? The Last Supper?! Nas is a prophet, check, but the Jesus Christ of hip-hop? Then there's that poor sonuvabitch in the white. Didn't he read The DaVinci Code? Doesn't he know he's standing in for Mary Magdalene, a prostitute? Does he not understand how stupid he looks wearing a crucifix to The Last Supper?! This may be the most unintentionally hilarious "intentionally hilarious" album cover I have ever seen.
Nas practically needed two discs to back this sort of shit up, which is perhaps one reason why Street's Disciple does the dirty double, with the first disc (purportedly) for the street, and the second one (purportedly) for the home. Sounds gimmicky-- and yes, it's "sprawling," "massive," "has lots of filler," "should have been one disc," etc.-- but guess what: It's cocksure and it works. Relatively speaking, Nas is an old guy now. He doesn't rob banks; he has babies and marries Kelis. He doesn't narrate ghetto life in the glorious present; he reminisces and takes stabs at reform. He no longer needs to prove himself; he just has to flow. Throughout Street's Disciple, Nas simply sounds confident, which is the key to pulling off tracks so thematically un-gangsta: When your best-known lyric is "I never sleep 'cause sleep is the cousin of death," it can be tough to sell a line like, "It was my night to watch my little girl."
"This ain't no sucka for love shit/ This ain't no Huxtable kisses and hugs shit/ First night we fuck shit and don't call the next day," says Nas on "Getting Married". In Nas' hands, the institution becomes an avatar of badassness, much like faith becomes-- to faith's chagrin-- a vehicle for bravado on the Barry White-sampling "Nazareth Savage" ("I carried the cross to help you afford that plasma screen"), or as education advocacy oddly becomes the new thug ideal on "War" ("Tell my daughter try her hardest so the best schools'll take her in"). Nas hasn't mellowed on the mic; he just has different priorities-- and impressively, he doesn't eschew the present for the sake of his dated guns-drawn Queensbridge persona.
"Live Now" most powerfully sums up Nas' street-tough-to-hubby transformation. Here, Nas describes his death-- not by bullets and rap romanticism, but by old age: "My daughter at my bedside, respirator in me... Trying to say something/ The whole room'll quiet down just to hear my last words." Yet, in the same song, as if to counterbalance that tenderness, he anxiously rehashes his past: "Admit I did live it a little bit/ Sweet pickle dick, freaks licked on it/ Lips I dripped on it/ Sex I shot pearl necklaces on necks and tits." The rhyme feels forced, but maybe pointedly so. Nas realizes hip-hop doesn't like the sissy, and he's careful to balance such personal affairs with the requisite bravado.
Nas obviously has no trouble here, and for the most part, Chucky Thompson, Salaam Remi, and L.E.S. front the boards hard and hookless, keeping the focus on the lyrics. Check "Nazareth Savage" ("I squeeze nipples like pimples to get the pus, get it?"), the token girls-I-fucked track "Remember the Times" ("Used to run my bubble bath, tons of laughs, sexy chick/ Mad skills, she used to try to eat my excrement"), or the previously released "Thief's Theme" ("Bust a shell at the ground, pellets hit the crowd/ Nobody like a snitch, everybody shut they mouth"). The content is the same as before, but the vantage point is a rocking chair: Nas presents his past as been-there-done-that, an abridged backstory included as a contrast to his present affairs, and perhaps as a concession to some listeners: "I had to make a song, speakin' on my old life/ For the thieves who come out at night."
The streets are paved with rags-to-riches rappers, but few of them keep the dirt on their shoulder after MTV and the first cool mill. If the Nas of Illmatic was fighting to get Nas out of the ghetto, the Nas of Street's Disciple is fighting to get the ghetto out of the ghetto. The Q-Tip-produced "American Way" is politically untimely but fiery, with Nas bemoaning the black vote's impotence, and at one point calling Condoleeza Rice a "coon Uncle Tom fool." On the equally vicious "These Are Our Heroes", Nas sarcastically salutes "the coons on UPN9 and WB/ Who 'Yes, master' on TV," and calls out Tiger Woods, Cuba Gooding Jr., and "Mr. Goody Two-Shoes" Jay-Z for selfishness: "What you doin' for the hood?" The carps aren't novel-- as Nas points out, "It's trendy to be the conscious MC/ But next year, who knows what we'll see?"-- but carry unusual weight from the Queensbridge darling.
Street's Disciple shares in the missteps we can expect from both double-disc sets and Nas albums in general (a fair number of shitty beats, and the occasional bomb like "I'm the disciple of music!"), but there's a compelling record in here somewhere, and that album is easily Nas' best in years. For the past decade, he's tried to prove he can thug with the best; now unconcerned, he's caught a fresh breath. Street's Disciple is flawed, but Nas' second wave of confidence is one of the most exciting things to happen to hip-hop this year.


A collection of Terre Thaemlitz’s gorgeous and thought-provoking deep-house 12"s turns a critical eye on history, identity, and club culture.

DJ Sprinkles: Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs

By 2008, when Terre Thaemlitz unveiled her deep-house masterpiece Midtown 120 Blues, he’d been hired and fired as a DJ in some of NYC’s most infamous and beloved trans bars; sold out venues around the world while first relocating to Oakland and then Japan; and released a string of experimental recordings on heady labels like Mille Plateaux. (Thaemlitz, who identifies as transgender and subscribes to a “non-essentialist” notion of gender identity, uses alternating pronouns.)
Midtown 120 Blues, released under Thaemlitz’s DJ Sprinkles alias, was a culmination of all that, a collection of 12"s and associated tracks all bursting with bright ideas. Some were textural: “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” burned off a murky, funky throb with breaks as rosy as the morning sun. Others were textual: “Midtown 120 Intro” displaced traditional house voices—those too-often uncredited, gospel-inspired Black women demanding attention, sweat, and emotions—for her own kind of diva vocals, a furious murmur illuminating his understanding of house as a “very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon” fashioned in “hyper-specific” places: “East Jersey, Loisaida, West Village, Brooklyn.” Midtown 120 Blues was a statement of purpose that expertly synced up form, function, and feeling. Its power came from Thaemlitz’s context—her history underscored his authority to, say, talk shit about Madonna—and came for the colonized oontz-oontz that Europe’s Nightlife Industrial Complex sold back to America and called house music when it was more like music for luxury hotels.
Midtown 120 Blues set up a soapbox under the strobe lights. Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches and One-Offs, 19 languorous house tracks recorded around and after the major statement, looks underneath the dancefloor to the very foundations of society. The Balearic shuffle of “Useless Movement,” a collaboration with cyberfeminist Laurence Rassel, wonders whether the death of the author killed off women’s shot at recognition; it’s Lit Crit for the hips. “Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles’ Dead End)” remixes moments from Thaemlitz’s larger Deproduction project, which explores the destructive power of the nuclear family. The track puts comedian Paul F. Tompkins into a kind of Martha Wash drag, weaving a joke about right-wing discomfort with gay people’s existence in on itself until it becomes a call-and-response chorus that wrestles with the very notion of assimilation—all over crisp percussion. “Names Have Been Changed (Sprinkles’ House Arrest)” sets another Deproduction section, a long series of complex and excruciating depictions of incest, into an almost impossibly beautiful showcase for strings and lush hi-hats. A dub of this could be a heartbreak anthem; an a cappella might tear your soul into shreds. This does both at once. It’s some kind of terrible miracle.
The instrumental tracks on Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits reinforce the fact that Thaemlitz is among the finest producers of her generation. The nimble basslines of “Kissing Costs Extra” stay in the pocket like a pair of welcome fingers; the kicks are buoyant, even erotic in their bounce, if a bit too mid-tempo to achieve full sleaze. Almost 25 minutes spent in versions of “Sloppy 42nds” prove that the strike of a single piano key can hit harder than the most epic of EDM drops. One thing hard to remember about gay clubs, before we all had a phone in our hands for stimulation, was how boring they could be; you could stand somewhere forever, twiddling a swizzle stick to a mix not quite achieving liftoff—and then suddenly a look could catch a spark inside you, or a pattern of hi-hats could tickle your hips into motion. Thaemlitz works this boredom like Moodymann works anticipation, mining the mood for all it’s worth.
These recordings date back to 1998, the year Celeda and Danny Tenaglia began preaching a sacred text of house music: “Music is the answer/To your problems/Keep on movin’/Then you can solve them.” Compiled in 2021, when the clubs are closed and past-due reckonings of predatory DJs and entrenched industry racism and transphobia refuse to be ignored, this house music sounds more like a series of questions. What might it mean for a DJ to counter a crowd’s loved-up chants for “one more tune” with the shouts of “silence equals death” that form the climax of the astonishing “Hush Now (Broken Record Mix)”? After last summer’s BLM protests, how revolutionary, really, is dancing in the streets? Might “killing” the mood also have its uses?
House music, like collage, is a sample-based artform. But like techno, as artists like Speaker Music remind us, it’s built on Black labor. Sprinkles’ Bassline.89 EP, here in all its brutal glory, works over chunks of classic tracks by Black innovators like Farley “Jackmaster” Funk; elsewhere, the churning, humid storms of two long versions of “Masterjakor” suddenly clear into a third, quick flight into the blue skies of one of hip hop’s greatest one-hit wonders. And further complexities are mixed into these minimalist tracks. Thaemlitz insists his work be kept off all streaming sources, in part to “keep ‘queer’ audio and media functioning queerly, contextually, and with smallness.” This keeps Spotify from making money off her work, and fair enough. It also keeps YouTube’s bots from detecting the samples he uses—a practice that bothers her, he says, not for being found out but because YouTube then pulls down the tracks and blames her for their removal, angering fans. Both Spotify and YouTube are terrible, and artists deserve better. But in this smallness, there’s a tinge of gatekeeping. How do artists control who hears them and by what means? To be sure, these tracks will fill the dancefloor; but as with the productions of, like, every white DJ these days, they pay homage to Black musicians without paying them for their work. (The Sample Clearance Industrial Complex, meanwhile, is often little help.) And come to think of it, what did Midtown gain from its presentation as a white person playing the blues?
Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits is far more uncertain than Midtown; its power source is cohesion and nerve. Maybe, for Thaemlitz, music is neither the answer nor the question: It’s the problem itself.

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In a pair of electroacoustic radio operas, the American composer addresses the horrors of the Middle Passage and the moral equivocations of the contemporary church.

Freedom

Near the end of Joe Biden’s inauguration, on the grounds where just weeks before a band of right-wing radicals and white supremacists had tried to overthrow the government, Garth Brooks began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Unlike Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez, who’d performed with orchestral backing tracks, Brooks felt he could carry the civil-rights anthem alone, a cappella. Well, not alone: Brooks stopped the song to insist that those gathered around him sing, too. “Not just the people here, the people at home, at work,” he demanded, his tone pointed. “As one. United.”
“United” (not to mention “work”) very likely means something different to others in attendance—like, say, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, or Stacey Abrams and the voters she mobilized in Georgia—than it does to a white star enlisting them in his moment of glory. And something again still to the enslaved people the anthem’s author once bought and sold. What might being “as one” with them sound like?
It might sound like “Destination Freedom,” a harrowing composition by Yvette Janine Jackson, a Harvard music professor whose work explores Black traditions in both popular and experimental music. Jackson calls this piece, and another on her album Freedom, “radio operas.” The longform compositions incorporate musique concrète, electroacoustic music, traditional notation, and free improvisation. They are meant to be heard in total darkness. They are not easy listening, nor should they be.
“Destination Freedom” begins in a hold of treated sounds: notated and improvised efforts by Jackson’s chamber ensemble, Invisible People, often twisted in pitch and speed; recordings of the tumultuous Pacific Ocean; wood creaking in agony and voices murmuring, quietly calling for attention but just out of reach. The sound sways across the stereo field, back and forth, nauseous with dread. Halfway through the 22-minute piece, motion blurs into a passage of echoing wails and streaks of brightness. Here, Jackson’s maritime murk might summon the undertow of Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste, or the grand tragic depth of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. Yet it refuses to go under. Instead, like the Detroit techno duo Drexciya’s enslaved infants-turned-aquatic revolutionaries, it escapes just in time. The final six minutes or so is a futuristic baptismal of foamy hiss, off-grid beats, and incantation: “I want to cross over,” a woman chants, ever more the focus of the mix. The sudden clarity is not of this world.
The complexity of moral clarity defines “Invisible People,” the album’s second composition, which is based on samples of President Obama’s eventual endorsement of same-sex unions and condemnations by African American religious authorities. “Invisible People” marries text lifted from sermons, reparative-therapy propaganda, and internet comments with church piano and free jazz. (In a spirited essay accompanying the record, writer and musician Greg Tate lays out the strategy: “Those faux-liturgical Black religious voices become a choir of dissonance and counter-reformation within the work.”)
“Invisible People” presents the hatred straight, so to speak. “Fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will,” a male voice warns. Misogyny defines masculinity: “Males,” someone says with disgust, “coming to males with lust in their hearts as they should to a female.” Obama’s account of the evolution of his heart (or his political calculus) alternates with other men’s refusals, and Jackson doubles and triples their arguments. Composers often utilize repetition to signify or induce transcendence, but here, it underscores the wicked stubbornness of men.
Jackson’s piece is particularly notable for its negative space—not just the moments of silence between drum rolls or slurs but also the voices of those not included in all the back-and-forth: women and femmes and nonbinary people with skin in this game, the undocumented and uninsured for whom marriage was less a mystical transubstantiation of God’s grace into babies and more a matter of where and if they might live. Their silence is audible, as present in Jackson’s work as the doomscapes of enslavers’ ships. Too often, we’re asked to stop all our work and back up men like Garth Brooks as they center themselves in others’ histories. Jackson asks us instead to do the work of empathy—not by demanding unity, but in listening for who gets left out when we gather as one.

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On his third album, Jake Ewald reunites with former Modern Baseball bandmate Ian Farmer to explore pared-down folk-rock. It’s the furthest from MoBo he’s ever sounded.

Slaughter Beach, Dog: Safe and Also No Fear

Safe and Also No Fear

In late 2017, 12 days after Modern Baseball performed a weekend of farewell shows for hometown fans in Philly, co-frontman Jake Ewald released his second solo album, Birdie. The consecutive events suggested an amicable closure: Ewald was signing off on the emo/punk band he’d formed in college and relocating full-time to Slaughter Beach, a hypothetical destination created to inspire his songwriting. After two LPs performed entirely by himself, the beach must’ve grown lonely; on Safe and Also No Fear, Ewald’s third album as Slaughter Beach, Dog, he’s joined by a full ensemble that includes Modern Baseball bassist Ian Farmer, his first official reunion with a former bandmate since their indefinite hiatus. Together, they dive into the pared-down folk-rock Ewald had just begun to explore on previous solo releases. It’s the furthest from MoBo he’s ever sounded, and maybe as a result, also the least engaging.
Although its clunky double phrasing betrays some anxiety, a title like Safe and Also No Fear feels reassuring coming from Ewald, who’s grieved the loss of a close family member and supported bandmates through mental health crises in recent years. But the album rarely reflects a corresponding sense of personal triumph. Opener “One Down” leans on a pedestrian acoustic pattern that plods in one ear and out the other. “I dress up nice/I feel all right/I get loaded/And I come home late at night,” Ewald sings, without enough conviction to absolve the cliché. He falls into a half-spoken drawl on “Dogs,” a tender discourse on human friendships (“I know he always understands me/Even when I am being evasive”), but the stream-of-consciousness melody feels as aimless as another night at the neighborhood bar.
“Black Oak” achieves a more affecting result by ditching the vocal melody altogether: “His belly warm with drink/He leaned into the freeway in the night/Investigating exit ramps/Waiting for a sign,” Ewald recounts in an unnerving deadpan. The guitars drop out as the song’s protagonist meets tragedy: “They found him at the black oak/They dug him up last night.” A looping coda evokes the spaced-out lapse of highway hypnosis, as if the band were cruising those darkened roads themselves.
The spare electric guitar solos of “Tangerine” recall the charm of Birdie standout “Bad Beer,” or the sweeping arpeggios of 2016’s “Monsters.” But even with a full crew alongside him, it’s hard not to feel a kind of emptiness, a monotony that dampens Ewald’s personality. Throughout Safe and Also No Fear, there are flashes of his sheepish wit and contagious hooks—the same qualities that elevated quotidian anecdotes like “Tears Over Beers” in Modern Baseball’s discography. He sounds most confident on the harder-rocking “Good Ones,” a retrospective laundry list of letdowns, and “Heart Attack,” about the panic of realizing that the person you’re dating (or are you?) won’t return your calls. “My sunlight hurts my skin/I let the wrong one in,” he sings genially, reaching the album’s crowning achievement in wordplay: “Hand in hand grenade, you make me weak.” The blips of charisma are reminders of better music Ewald’s made prior; this time around, it feels as though he’s fighting against his own indifference.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Peter Bjorn and John follow their breakthrough record with an album of palette-cleansing instrumentals, drawing inspiration from downtempo electronica and their homeland's current infatuation with Balearic music. A proper follow-up to Writer's Block is due in 2009.

Seaside Rock

Peter Bjorn and John are known for crafting shimmery, lovelorn pop songs, so the idea of the mild-mannered Swedish rockers recording an instrumental (ish) album isn't really so far-fetched. As evocative as the lyrics often are on 2006's Writer's Block, the bongo drums and whistled hook on "Young Folks" (to name just the group's most well-known track) spoke to listeners around the world in ways words never could. Since then, PB&J's Björn Yttling has produced some very good records in his own right, including Lykke Li's Youth Novels, Shout Out Louds' Our Ill Wills, and Taken By Trees' Open Field. Meanwhile, Peter Morén-- the band's most distinguished lyricist-- fell comparatively flat this year with a solo album.
Still, the best parallel to the limited-edition Seaside Rock comes from not the trio's own Stockholm, but over on the west coast of Sweden. There, in 2006, Gothenburg electropop duo the Tough Alliance followed their Swedish hit debut, The New School, with a limited edition release of a similarly instrumental(-ish) LP called Escaping Your Ambitions-- an ambient voyage through the nature sounds and aquatic sonic imagery that had already become a "thing" in their seaside city's scene. It would give the band an escape from the burdens (self-imposed and otherwise) of the dreaded sophomore album. Likewise, on Seaside Rock, PBJ's Morén, Yttling, and John Eriksson delay the inevitable pressures of following up Writer's Block with an album of dreamy, morning-after beach-party comedowns all their own, to mixed success.
At its best, Seaside Rock-- like Escaping Your Ambitions-- sounds less like a band chasing a trend than having bubbling sounds rise to meet them. As distant as the Air-like bass grooves of the drumless "Favour of the Season" may seem from Writer's Block, the song's details show a sensitivity to pop elegance and eloquence that's altogether different from the nu-disco spaciness of fellow Swedish seafarers such as the Studio. On "Needles and Pills", the staccato guitars of Balearic music swell to an orchestral crescendo akin to Morricone played by school children. Jangling, harmonica-led finale "At the Seaside" sounds almost as good as the Go! Team's near-instrumental "Feelgood by Numbers" if covered by the Chills. And it's not hard to imagine Morén cooing over the ocean sounds and rumbling pianos of "Barcelona".
PB&J take subverting expectations too far, though, with three tracks featuring guest spoken-word monologues in three separate Swedish dialects. It's sort of like the Scandinavian equivalent of the Fiery Furnaces bringing out Grandma for 2005's Rehearsing My Choir. With its sauntering acoustic guitars and harmonics, "Erik's Fishing Trip" (a possible play on the Daydream Nation title) would grace the opening credits of some post-Napoleon Dynamite comedy indie-flick-- if not for the man murmuring over it in Swedish. "Norrlands Riviera" swaps his voice for a woman's, some bird noises, and very little actual music; the darker "Next Stop Bjursele" is where the album's concept of kids just learning to play instruments is most evident, with martial woodwinds squaring off against foghorns at a march-like pace. "Rock me, rock me, rock me, rock me," this track's monologuer concludes (in English).
As beautifully assembled as parts of Seaside Rock are, a couple of genre-specific tracks underscore its stopgap nature. "School of Kraut" is basically what its title implies: a bit of krautrock motorik topped by childishly innocent orchestration. But ultimately, it just leaves a craving for the real thing (teachers, leave those kids alone). And the calypso-flavored "Saying Something (Mukiya)", with its simple, repetitive steeldrum melody, would work almost disturbingly well as the score to a Little Mermaid video game. For all Seaside Rock's stubborn contrariness, there are few signs that PB&J are actually suffering from writer's block quite yet; with luck, they're just biding their time.


The Chicago rapper Verbal Kent has a lean, hungry style and a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato delivery. His eighth solo record features appearances from Freddie Gibbs and Torae and production from Apollo Brown.

Anesthesia

About two minutes into "Illustrate", Dan Weiss, the Chicago rapper who records as Verbal Kent, raps the following: "Examining the fabric of life, the life scientist/ Put my foot in your ass, it's shitty for podiatrists." The line raises a lot of questions. Given the context, wouldn't it, in fact, be Kent's podiatrist that this was shitty for? Would he go to the podiatrist immediately after administering the ass kicking? Is he going to the podiatrist as a result of the ass kicking? Is he barefoot? Can't he just take a shower?
Yes, this is devoting a little too much thought to a throwaway bar, but it illustrates the most frustrating issue with Anesthesia, Kent's seventh solo record (not counting an excellent 2013 collaboration with Red Pill and Apollo Brown as Ugly Heroes). His rhymes are lean, his delivery is hungry, and he has excellent taste in collaborators—Freddie Gibbs, Torae, and Red Pill all show up here—and producers. He has a knack for lining up consonant syllables and rattling them off in a staccato morse-code delivery that renders every line tense and jagged. But for the most part, Anesthesia is a thicket of non sequiturs, a "Family Guy" pile-up of unrelated images and decontextualized half-puns, free of any organizing structure that might lend them impact or meaning.
Absurdism in hip-hop has its place—in the late '90s, Kool Keith and Ghostface were masters of it, as was Cam'ron circa Purple Haze. The difference is that they were also expert world-builders, so even their stranger asides felt like they were obeying a certain internal logic. Kent's verses just feel like clumsy free-association: In the heavy-lidded "Add Anesthesia", which features sinister music-box production from Kaz 1, Kent says, "One-hitter in the parking lot/ Anne Frank with the discreet smoking/ Hid her in the parking lot." Later in the same song, he offers the even-more-baffling "Huddle up and nurse from the nipple/ Suck on the same tit, so when effects ripple/ It's a simple thing to solve."
Traces of a stronger record turn up throughout Anesthesia, and when Kent manages to follow a train of thought from start to finish, everything suddenly clicks. On the breathless "Suit Case Switch", he trades motor-mouthed verses with Freddie Gibbs, running roughshod over Apollo Brown's beautifully woozy, '70s-soul-quoting production and nicely working a protracted heist metaphor. In the album's latter half, Kent briefly dabbles in autobiography, and the emotional grounding focuses him. In "Notes", he struggles with the news that he's about to become a father and, aside from a nonsensical digression about albacore tuna, it's poignant and striking. And on the soft, soulful "Is This My Life", Kent seems to be alluding to either substance abuse or the 2003 stabbing that almost took his life when he declares, "Recovery's a myth/ Because you don't ever really return/ You just become a new version of the person you were/ And those of us that make it out a little wiser/ Instead of more bitter, get to shine a little brighter."
Those few flashes of earnestness and coherence suggest the album Anesthesia might have been. Its title, along with a few pointed, passing references to self-medication, imply that Kent had some desire to explore the ways people choose to numb themselves. But none of those ideas are ever fleshed out; instead, Kent keeps falling back on stuff like, "Teach and grade my own masters' thesis/ Hot chili pepper temper, Flea pleading with Anthony Kiedis." The line makes a kind of sense, inasmuch as both Flea and Anthony Kiedis are in a band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Otherwise, like so much of Anesthesia, it's about as resonant as a Wikipedia entry.


How do we rate these DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Thugged Out Pissed Off lacks a healthy portion of the fits of stylistic dementedness and infectious exuberance that made his last two releases like Hoop Life and his Chance the Rapper collaboration charming.

Thugged Out Pissed Off

People who still keep up with rapper and social media mystic Lil B have their own personal rubric for grading his tapes. What tracks I can show to my friends that think Lil B can’t rap? How ridiculous are the style experiments? What funny celebrities does he have "more bitches than," and have "hoes on his dick like"? Is anything on this as good as "Like a Martian"? Is anything on this as good as "I’m God"? At this point, B's set his own parameters such that there’s no way to identify what "going astray" might look like for him. In everything from his capricious tweets to his mixtapes, he’s made a perspective in every direction a perspective in itself.
So how do we rate new DatPiff-based landfills full of Lil B music, which arrive about three years since he has done anything genuinely surprising, or figured out that he didn’t have to? Sometimes it feels like you have to commit to either categorically disdaining the BasedGod brand, or endorsing all of it. When you have a 50-plus track Lil B release, like the recent Thugged Out Pissed Off, there’s a song or 10 to satisfy any of your favorite B song types or subjects. The majority of his tapes since 2012’s God’s Father have been this large-scale: Perhaps there’s no going back when you’ve gotten into the habit of running long and holding yourself to a standard that no one except you remotely understands. How does he decide when a tape is done? With Lil B, you can’t qualify what you’ll never feel like you really processed.
The tape kicks off with the musical equivalent of a slow-motion strut into the boxing ring with the robe hood up: a trap-ified flip of Giorgio Moroder’s funereal Scarface theme. The track sets the mood for the tape pretty well, insofar as we can generalize that of a 63-track-long collection of freestyles: Thugged Out Pissed Off is a little more self-serious, a little more dead-eyed, and a little more disinterested. It lacks the exuberance that made 2014's H**oop Life and last year's Chance the Rapper collaboration charming. You, the listener, will spend a little more of the portion of the collection asking "Why this?"
As with a lot of the music which defines the notorious genre of cloud rap—from Raider Klan affiliates to disciples like Yung Lean—part of the appeal of Lil B (or, at least, the source of his novelty) for his fans is the contradictory perspectives he squirms in and out of. He’s usually playing at some comic book version of a hard-ass, a bathetic mystic, or a confessional "real hip-hop"per. On this tape—as if celebrating of the impending release of *Deadpool—*he’s in full-on noxious mode. He plays the anti-heroic Stanley Kowalski of hustlers with a "dirty dick like Charlie Sheen," and dallies on the subject of "knocking out bitches." It seems as if he's intending to indict roided-up possible form of masculinity through first-person character study, and as always with B, it’s hard to put together any fixed explanation. "I’m a jealous guy so I beat up my bitches/ I’m so insecure, I don’t even trust me," he drawls on "Play the Hood," showing his cards a bit.
Lamentably, there is little in the way of songs fit for crying in pet stores or fun, non sequitur-filled bangers to balance all this out, or make the body of this thing—the middle two hours, perhaps—less boring. If you love the playful WTF moments, they don’t get too much more compelling than flips of "Coco" and "Jumpman" (the choruses, respectively: "I’m in looove with the Based God" and "Based God, Based God, Based God, Based God"). These are exercises which it’s hard to imagine even the most diehard, TYBG-tatted devotee getting excited about.
The best songs on this tape pair oddball versions of party-rap production—a fair amount of Mannie Fresh’s laser-tag bounce and calls of "whodie" here—or slurred, I’m Gay (I’m Happy)-style boom-bap, with lyrics revolving around racial identity. "I Was Born Poor" couples a Hot Boys-ready, cymbal-driven beat with a velour sitar sample, and finds B dreamily murmuring about his ancestry ("Booker T. Washington, still got that honor/ Born into bondage, still became a scholar"). On the purely musical end, there are a handful of unusual gambits that stick with you: the triumphant singing on "With Me" is placed like a R&B break in the middle of an early '00s rap track and comes out sounding like something close to Tiny Tim.
But even the pleasant details are forgotten too quickly. Even more than, say, 2013’s 101-track *05 Fuck Em—*a similarly unwieldy but much more engaging release thanks to a good haul of truly bizarre style experiments—it feels like B is just hitting a deadline and releasing what he has lying around. Sure, that’s probably what he’s always done, but this feels more like a perfunctory archive purge. Thugged Out Pissed Off creates the image of a Lil B who is unsure if he wants to keep up things exactly as he’s been doing them, but doesn’t know exactly what he should do instead.


The North Carolina rapper’s third album in 13 months is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects. This time, they’re starting to go stale.

Blame It on Baby

On DaBaby’s biggest song, he asked himself to switch the flow. He didn’t. “BOP” hurtled forward like he’d been shot from a cannon. His potent, barraging raps sound like they’re spurting out of him; the joke goes that they’re all different versions of the same song. DaBaby aims to be everywhere at once: on remixes of any Spotify chart-topper, coursing through TikTok, following pop culture wherever it leads. Of course he put out an album in the middle of quarantine—on the cover, he poses in a face mask, declaring his relevance to The Current Moment.
Blame It on Baby reaches for more and resonates less. Half the album is stacked with the same regurgitated phrases and flows from earlier projects, stale the third time around; for the rest, DaBaby follows formulas other than his own. Though he’s known for being a capital-R Rapper, DaBaby clears his throat—literally, before admitting, “My voice kinda fucked up”—and tries to sing, sometimes with grating results. On “Rockstar,” he doesn’t imitate Roddy Ricch as much as adjust his tone to complement the feature. His voice becomes softer, as close as DaBaby gets to tender, as he talks about the physical jolt of PTSD, “waking up in cold sweats like the flu.” On “Find My Way,” he dribbles syllables over languid guitar. He follows A Boogie’s lead on “Drop,” catatonic and crooning. This is the first music he’s released that sounds limp.
Some of that slowness comes from trudging through the murk of non-apologies and fledging repentance. DaBaby apparently slapped a woman at a recent event; in January, he was arrested for allegedly robbing someone and then pouring apple juice on them. Aggression is a key facet of DaBaby’s music, fueling his viciousness and velocity, and it’s often cartoonish; still, the record’s glimpses of violence can become disconcerting, especially when they involve women (“Put my dick down her throat ’til she throw up,” he raps on “Lightskin Shit”). “Can’t Stop,” the album opener, is weighed down by DaBaby’s insistence that he’s not sorry. On “Sad Shit,” he mimics a generic, desolate Drake song, soaking his voice in AutoTune and rasping pleas. It’s all fake, the sentiment and the sound, and after a few crooned apologies, DaBaby shouts, “Fuck that,” and goes back to tallying up the women he’s slept with. It’s not until “Jump,” eight tracks in, that the album turns familiarly propulsive—but it’s not DaBaby, it’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again doing his best DaBaby impression.
If you’ve listened to DaBaby for a while now, you know his bits. He groans about fans asking for photos. He growls that he’s a dog. Even his most creative rhyme patterns become predictable when he’s employed them so many times before. Usually, the repetition is accompanied by rattling bass and blown-out speakers, or raps so fast the flows create a vortex; on these more subdued, slowed-down tracks, every recycled word is noticeable. Most of his past producers have followed the Jetsonmade model of pouncing drums and bass, a concentrated bump of adrenaline, but the production throughout this album slinks and tingles. DaBaby’s charm gets diluted; he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to.
Ever the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral. “Nasty” pairs a gleaming lilt from Ashanti with a fun, dynamic Megan Thee Stallion verse. It doesn’t have the explosive power of “Cash Shit,” Megan and DaBaby’s last collaboration, but the song is still mesmerizing, with DaBaby’s absurd, precise eroticism in full force. The album’s payoff arrives on the title track, a two-minute opus that stitches together four beat switches and contorts DaBaby’s flow over and over. It builds, it thrills, it makes you feel like you can run through a wall—everything a DaBaby song can and should do, when he asks it of himself.


This 5xCD box set from Cherry Red offers a compelling look at shoegaze's prime era. Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality.

Various Artists: Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995

Like band names, genre terms usually lose their literal meaning once they get established. Just as the corny reference of "My Bloody Valentine" was wiped away by the band’s might and majesty, "shoegaze" became a phonetically evocative word—those oozy vowels and soft sibilants—that suited the blurry sound. The literal meaning—and the fact that it was initially intended as a derisive term— disappeared.
The compressed accusation in "shoegaze"—coined by someone at NME, a music paper less supportive of the genre than its rival Melody Maker—is that these were bands too bashful to meet the audience’s eyes. Unlike the attention-seeking egos that typically front British bands, the shoegazers were self-effacing, hiding behind their hair and glancing down at the array of effects pedals at their feet. Shoegazers were insufficiently invested in the performative aspects of rock: the genre was all about sound, not show.
Despite starting as a slur, "shoegaze" fit the genre like a glove and soon supplanted the competing descriptors. "Dreampop," an invention of A.R. Kane’s, enjoyed small and short-lived currency in the U.S. The other contender was The Scene That Celebrates Itself, coined by a Melody Maker editor. A tautology, of course—show me a Scene That Denigrates Itself—but it did convey the incestuous vibe of the early movement. Most of the bands knew each other and fraternized, and they generally hailed from the Thames Valley (London, Reading, Oxford).
Remembering shoegaze’s other name made me think of Brian Eno’s "scenius" concept: the idea that music evolves through collective processes, in an incremental and reactive way, rather than through heroic innovators making giant steps that everyone else follows. A sound emerges and everyone wants in; the style—usually a mixture of new technological possibilities and aesthetic choices—becomes the idiom through which you express what you have to say. Like all languages, the style stipulates and restricts possibilities as much as it creates them.
The first few discs of Still in a Dream, a new 5xCD box from Cherry Red, make a good argument in favor of scenius. Picking almost randomly, one example of the perfectly generic here is Pale Saints' "Sight of You." It is not ur-shoegaze (that would be MBV’s "You Made Me Realise"), but it is echt-shoegaze. The name Pale Saints vaguely gestures at the Pre-Raphaelites and mystic devotion; the song title proposes love as a rapture of the gaze rather than a fever of the flesh; the sound is choirboy-pure vocals and guitar that works as a billowing curtain of texture rather than propulsive riff. Two other absolutely typical, absolutely lovely specimens of shoegaze here are Lush’s "De-Luxe" (like being buffeted by flower petals in a wind-tunnel) and Slowdive’s "Slowdive," where the slightest of chord sequences ripples the silvery guitar wooze. Where the genre’s progenitors My Bloody Valentine—mystifyingly absent from the box despite providing its title—churned with dizzy-making desire, the effect with second-wave shoegaze tends to be more virginal. Slowdive certainly emit none of the dark erotic energy of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song from which they took their name.
Along with "scenius," another Eno thought sprang to mind when listening through the box: Eno hailed MBV’s "Soon" as "the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." That got me musing: why would "vague" be a good thing for music to be? How would you distinguish between the deliberately indistinct and the merely insubstantial? And how does this sonic vagueness relate to life?
Shoegaze’s nebulousness has to do with its slightly "off" relation with both rock and pop. The genre fetishizes the sound of the guitar, but is relatively uninterested in the other things that guitars have traditionally done—riffs, solos, grooving. Shoegaze introduced a new generation of guitar heroes who weren’t dramatic. Rather than the spotlight of a solo, there would be a mid-song caesura of abstract carnage. The heroism took the form of explorations into texture. Kevin Shields was the scene's Hendrix figure, but the contrast between Jimi the showman and Shields the shy man is telling. No guitar-face or swaggering about the stage. The music was designed to overwhelm in the live context, but in a way that was impersonal—as though the band were victims of the sound as much as the audience, or simply conduits for the torrential noise.
What also made shoegaze such an indeterminate proposition as regards proper rock and proper pop was the way it used rhythm and the voice. It’s tempting to say that this is a genre consisting of non-drummers and non-singers. Certainly, re-listening to Ride’s "Drive Blind" was a bit of a shocker: how did a group get so big with such a shaky voice upfront, with a drummer that could barely hold a beat? But mostly the subdued rhythm and buried vocals was a deliberate aesthetic choice rather than a matter of deficiency. Voices were mixed to be half-obscured by the blizzard of sound; the rhythm section just about kept up with the guitar tumult. Shoegaze was as not-quite-pop as it was not-quite-rock. The melodies harked back beguilingly to a hazy, half-remembered '60s, but had little to do with what '80s chart-pop considered "a tune." Shoegaze’s brief stint as the reigning alternative sound in the UK was ended by Britpop, and it’s the emphasis on "pop" there that is significant. Groups like Oasis and Blur mixed the voice upfront and above the instrumentation; songs acquired anthemic choruses; singers got cocky and in-your-face.
Shoegaze, in contrast, made a fetish of the swoon. The sighing vocals, the sickly drooping drones and melodic descents, the wavery timbres—these signature sonic effects induced listener responses like rolling your eyes back in your head or swaying slightly as if about to faint. The feeling transmitted by shoegaze at its most compelling combined surging urgency and heavy-lidded languor. It suggested threshold states: drowsily slipping into a nap in the mid-afternoon, not being able to shake off the dream in the morning. The connective thread with all these sensations is the relinquishing of control, the scary bliss of losing orientation and agency.
I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to imagine that this had some kind of semi-conscious resonance for a generation that felt powerless. It’s quite hard to reconstruct how bleak things seemed in the late '80s and early '90s; in both Britain and America, conservative governments were in third-term ascendance, and mainstream popular culture from hair metal to Hollywood seemed be in sync with the rightward shift. For many—not all, but many—this encouraged resignation, a withdrawal verging on hibernation. That’s why American nu-punks L7 wrote their anti-slacker anthem "Pretend We’re Dead" as a wake-up call from apathy. That’s why Welsh nu-punks Manic Street Preachers declared that they hated Slowdive more than Hitler—for being so dreamily disengaged, advocates for reverie rather than revolution.
This anti-politics of vagueness comes through clearly on one of Still in a Dream’s more unusual and surprising inclusions, a lost classic that I would never have filed under shoegaze: AC Marias’s "One of Our Girls Has Gone Missing." AC is Angela Conway, an associate of Wire (whose Bruce Gilbert was involved in the sculpted-snow sound of "One of Our Girls," which ought to thrill anyone who loves Chairs Missing and 154.) Drawing on the John le Carré genre of ice-hearted espionage fiction and the idea of the agent who goes AWOL, Conway’s lyric imagines a strategy of dissidence through disappearance:"“She has lost her color/ And faded away/ Moved into thin air."
As a frontline journalist covering much of this music at the time, I recall that the '60s allegiances of shoegaze seemed obvious and paramount. They were harking back longingly to the '60s as a refusal of the '80s—the decade of Thatcher and Reagan. But that necessarily meant a return of '60s sounds without any of the hope or confident dynamism of that decade; change would not be coming, change in fact was being reversed. That’s one reason why the word "dream" was so emblematic of the era (Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation being only the most conspicuous example). Rather than turn dreams into reality, now it was more like dreaming your life away, assisted by recorded relics from that lost time. Rather than "we want the world and we want it now" (the Doors) or even "we’re all normal and we want our freedom" (Love), the spirit was crestfallen and crushed: "There’s a place I’d like to be/ There’s a place I’d be happy" (Galaxie 500’s "Tugboat"), or the murmured, barely audible "much rather be" in "All Different Things" by Bark Psychosis.
Listening today, though, the '60s-ness of shoegaze recedes to a surprising degree. Especially on the first disc—which includes shoegaze-spawning but not-really-shoegaze greats like Cocteau Twins, the House of Love, A.R. Kane—I don’t hear the Byrds or Velvets, I hear the glassy textures of John McGeoch, Vini Reilly, or Clive Timperley of the Passions (the glorious glistening echoplexed intro to "I’m in Love With a German Film Star"). Yes, the "ba ba-ba-ba ba" bit in "Christine" by the House of Love harks back to '60s pop of the Turtles type, but Terry Bickers' crystalline cascades are totally modern in their moment.
In other shoegaze groups, a surprisingly large amount of New Order and the Cure is discernible: the processional glide-rhythms, the high-toned droning basslines. Despite being swathed in prismatic guitar-miasma, Kitchens of Distinction sound like Modern English more than anything on "3rd Time We Opened the Capsule." Even with the overtly classicist outfits like Spacemen 3, for all the signposted allusions to the Velvets, Beach Boys, Stooges, and their refusal of '80s tropes (gated drums, Yamaha DX7 synth—i.e. the very things that groups like Haim now deliberately redeploy), a record like "Hypnotized" could only have been made at that particular time. If you placed it alongside records actually made in the '60s, it would jut out jarringly.
Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. The stricture of only one track per artist means that the inessential gets inevitably over-represented and the defining greats get short-changed and effectively demoted. A five-disc box set of shoegaze organized around quality and innovation as criteria would be about 1/3 My Bloody Valentine. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality. After that you get the influenced: the second and third waves, as well as fellow travelers (Cranes), outliers (Mercury Rev), and offshoots (Seefeel). Shrewdly, the compilers cut off in '95, and don’t attempt to corral any of the shoegaze homages or revivalists of the last 20 years.
I had a great time with the first disc (late '80s), a good time with the second and much of the third (lovely to remake the acquaintance of Moose and the muscular Swervedriver, who had a bit of Thin Lizzy in their make-up), but by the fourth, the trip down memory lane took on a purgatorial aspect. "More of the same, only slightly different" is good up to a point, but with any genre you can have too much of a good thing. Although primarily a UK genre—and in some way reflective of British character traits like diffidence—the Americans did join in: sometimes inventively warping the MBV blueprint (the blow-torched beauty of Medicine’s "Aruca") and other times cloning it (Swirlies). You can always quibble about choices (why "Rollercoaster" as opposed to two dozen other Jesus and Mary Chain candidates?!). But overall Still in a Dream is a job well done: an accurate portrait of an era that, while it can’t really be described as a lost golden age for rock, nonetheless provided sorely needed radiance and refuge during a particularly grim period.


At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile ...

A Ghost Is Born

At the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's non-traditional 2001 "release," I was in the midst of a two-year exile away from the home city I share with the band. While the rock-crit throngs lined up to praise the album's experimentalism, screw-the-Record-Company-Man martyrdom and accidental 9/11 relevance, it merely seemed to me like a postcard photograph that perfectly sums up all the things you love about a city, a sonic map of Chicago's every contour. Putting YHF on the stereo was all it took to cue up a mental slideshow of the city's palette: "Reservations" the gray tones of a frozen-over Lake Michigan, "Heavy Metal Drummer" the humid orange of a Grant Park festival, and "Radio Cure" the brown shade of El-track alleys.
It's very possible, then, that the underwhelming feeling projected by A Ghost Is Born is linked to my address being restored to a Chicago zip code, where I have the city's essence accessible right outside my courtyard gate. Early returns on the album veer wildly from rapturous proclamations that this record solidifies the band's genius to cred-snipers who see it as a crippling failure. To me, it sounds like neither extreme, but rather like a band in need of a break, a band that's been reading their press, a band straying too far from their strengths, and a band that's still too good to let any of these things completely obscure their talents.
A lot of those assumptions are based on the simple fact that A Ghost Is Born is a wildly uneven album, fluctuating in both mood and quality over the course of its one hour runtime. Less cohesive than any other Wilco release, Ghost fulfills all the stereotypes of the album-after-the-breakthrough: So you've played the band reinvention card, what next? On some songs, the band take refuge in their past incarnations ("I'm a Wheel", "Hummingbird"), on some they dip their toe in the water of other bands' pools ("Spiders/Kidsmoke"), and on others they take the previous album's achievements to uncomfortable extremes ("Less Than You Think").
But more than anything, Jeff Tweedy confirms the fear I've held since I was exposed to most of this new material last year during Wilco's tour-closing show: He now revels in extended guitar solos. Five of Ghost's first six songs dissolve into noisy fretboard fingerings, and it's no coincidence that this first half of the album is where most of the weaknesses lie. As a Neil Young fan, I'm no anti-soloist, but for an artist as lyrically and vocally gifted as Tweedy to resort to expressing emotions through age-old bombast and pyrotechnics, something must be gumming up the songwriting works.
Three of these shut-up-and-play guitar sections come in songs so sleepy and hazy ("At Least That's What You Said", "Muzzle of Bees", "Hell Is Chrome") that they practically invite idle speculation about Tweedy's prehab pill regimen. Sluggish and flat, they're the opposite of the idea-packed YHF material, with the affected quirks that fill out the arrangements unable to dispel the overall grogginess.
"Spiders/Kidsmoke", on the other hand, dabbles in a marathon Krautrock vamp, spoiling one of Wilco's best new songs with a cyclical arrangement that erases the tension and release of its live arrangement. Where "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" spent its lengthy runtime constantly shapeshifting, "Spiders/Kidsmoke" seems to content to simply spins its wheels for upwards of 10 minutes.
Only "Hummingbird" manages to cut through Side A's gloom, revisiting the Beatles-pop of Summerteeth, albeit without that album's hyperactive keyboards. Many of A Ghost Is Born's brighter spots seem to be spin-offs of Summerteeth"s classic rock obsession rather than blippy YHF explorations-- despite this being Wilco's first release since the departure of canon-worship keyboardist Jay Bennett. Remaining within the safe confines of their more traditional influences, the piano-strut of "Theologians" echoes the white-soul of The Band (Wilco's closest ancestral analogue), while the slapdash "I'm a Wheel" is an encore-ready reminder of the group's early, 'Mats-evoking days.
There are only two songs on A Ghost Is Born that supercede Wilco's influences and arrangement struggles, moments when studio texture and songwriting merge smoothly to represent the album's grey mood in a way that's genuinely moving rather than disappointingly motionless. Whereas the ambient storm that drifts over the entire album can be distracting, on "Wishful Thinking" it creates just the right overcast backdrop, guiding Tweedy's softly cracking voice as he combs through feedback blankets looking for love's tunnel-end light. Grandiose yet mellow, "Company in My Back" makes the best use of Wilco's current keyboard-heavy lineup as piano and Casio verse-color exploding into dulcimer cacophony on the chorus.
Nevertheless, A Ghost Is Born squanders its second-half capital in the final reel, whipping up an impenetrable, unnecessary 10-minute noise squall to conclude the thin-ice beauty of "Less Than You Think". In interviews, Tweedy has explained the segment as a aural replica of the migraines that propelled him towards pharmaceuticals, but even the deepest empathy won't prevent its unrewarding drone from propelling listeners towards the ">>" button. Hit it, and you're treated to the forgettable "Late Greats", rock-by-numbers with lyrics that unfortunately seem to indicate Tweedy's complaisance with the obscurity = good, radio = bad logic of his loudest booster-critics.
In the end, the ambitious misfires and pre-coffee drowsiness of A Ghost Is Born don't ruin the album entirely-- they only serve as distractions that make it much more difficult to excavate the band's strengths from the surrounding detritus. Certain islands of success continue to give me that feeling of purified Chicagoness, even as I spend my days commuting through the actual city. Should my daily premonition of the CTA's silver snake surging off its elevated track come true, I can't think of a more fitting score for my mass transit demise than "Company in My Back". But it pains me to see Wilco celebrate this album by getting right back on the tour bus, outfitted with a new guitar-army lineup, and spending yet more time away from the city from whence they derive their power. Won't you come home (and stay home), Jeff Tweedy?


Dream Music is a reissue of two self-released records from the early ’80s by an obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. His work, weird and entrancing, sounds remarkably fresh in 2016.

Dream Music

Given the hazy, post-genre melange of Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid’s own releases, it makes a certain kind of sense that he’d be interested in signing artists who represent his diverse tastes. The Leaving Records roster represents an almost baffling mix of post-house experimentalists (Seiho), hyper live-samplers (Deantoni Parks), American primitivists (Guy Blakeslee), world music pioneers (Laraaji) and straight up New Agers (Matthewdavid himself under the “Mindflight” moniker). Throw in some “Where did *this *come from?” reissues and you’ve got a label almost like no other. Leaving’s latest release, SunPath’s Dream Music, is in some ways its most obscurantist yet, but shows the label definitely has an ear for the uncommon and special.
Following last year’s triple cassette reissue of works by Laraaji (known most for his work with Brian Eno on the Ambient 3 album), Dream Music is a reissue compilation of two self-released records from the early ’80s by a beyond-obscure New Mexican New Age artist named Jeff Berry. The Laraaji release seemed to trigger a growing interest by the label in New Age, as it was followed by Matthewdavid’s own Trust the Guide and Glide under the Mindflight moniker. Trust the Guide channels the genre’s most familiar (and cloying) tropes, playing like a love letter to sounds many already struggle to take seriously. Dream Music, however, is something else entirely: an entrancing and truly weird blend of New Age, ambient music and outside art that still sounds remarkably fresh 30 years later.
It appears that Berry’s career of music-making was entirely limited to these two records, Yasimin & The Snowflake Dragon (1980) and SunPath 2 (1984), each of which consists of two 30-minute pieces of music and both of which were made during time Berry spent living in Northern New Mexico, which he described in an interview to Aquarium Drunkard as inspirational because “[It was] fresh. Unspoiled... The place oozed magic.” It’s easy to read this quote today and roll your eyes, but the quest for spiritual meaning and the hope it could be expressed through sound is core to the identity of not just New Age, but much experimental and ambient music as well.
In going after these visions, Berry’s goal with each of the four compositions on Dream Music was to evoke images, which lead to him spending a considerable amount time searching for specific sounds and/or inventing ways to manufacture or capture them. Beyond the driving moans and whirs of his Prophet synthesizer—which dominated ambient, New Age and synthesizer music in the late ’70s and early ’80s, as the first polyphonic synthesizer—and a handful of flutes, the instrumentation on Dream Music is conjured by a variety of homemade instruments and field recordings by Berry himself. The list of sound-makers he provides is lengthy but highlights include “Peyote ceremony water drum; self-built & chromatically cut glass; Mexican dove ocarina; field recordings of two Colorado streams: one outdoors & one inside a cave”; and “a field recording of a raging snowstorm captured under a full moon outside of the cabin window.” The latter two of course read like back-patting “Oh, of course you dids,” but to Berry’s credit, you can actually hear and identify these sounds within the recordings, and understand how they contribute depth and fullness to the compositions.
You can feel the infusion of these found sounds most acutely on the two tracks that make up the second cassette, the SunPath 2 album, specifically on second track “Stream and Crystal,” which begins with the stream recordings. Here, he leads with the stream recordings that run from beginning to end, giving off the sense that the synths are there to embellish the running water and not the other way around. Additionally, “Stream and Crystal” is the only cut of the four featuring vocals, with a two-minute spoken word recording of Berry’s own gentle incantations. “I awakened in a cave holding one of the crystals in my hand, becoming aware of my heartbeat, becoming aware of my breath...” he says, and continuing onward as the musical parts float in and out. After twenty or so minutes, the ornamentations drop off and only the sound of echoing, flowing water remains, bubbling and drip-dropping for another nine minutes as you feel yourself drift internally, before the water sounds build slowly and loudly into an unexpected crashing thunder that makes you realize Berry has literally lead you inside the cave to the base of a rushing waterfall. As cheesy as it might sound, the full experience of listening for thirty minutes to just running water with a careful dashes of synth and flute on top actually imparts the precise feeling Berry described—an awareness of your heartbeat and your breath.
“Gá Te,” the other track from SunPath 2, is the darkest and most emotive of the four. Beginning with the aforementioned “raging snowstorm” recording, “Gá Te” delivers a dark-of-winter tone of lonely menace that makes it easy to imagine yourself alone in a car or on a hill trudging toward a remote destination alone. As the snowstorm fades away, apocalyptic '80s television soundtrack synths emerge, setting the mood, before stark, quiet Prophet chords arrive to ring and hum ominously in a way that might recall for modern ears the sounds of “Vletrmx” or “Garbagemx” from Autechre’s *Garbage *EP. Both tracks from the first cassette Yasimin and the Snowflake Dragon have their moments as well, though neither touches the majesty of these two.
What is so impressive about Berry’s approach and technique—let alone the fact he made all of it in a pre-computer age—is that he manages to create these beautiful canvases while feeling neither contrived nor cheesy. His work is less redolent of George Winston, Enya, or Yanni than of Eno’s Apollo, Tim Hecker, or Oneohtrix Point Never. And impressively, Dream Music is *actually *“meditative” in a way that things described as being “meditative” rarely are, and despite the possible goofiness inherent in talk of “crystals,” “magic,” and “other dimensions,” it exudes a kind of naive authenticity of a spiritual experience that is just breathtaking.
Apparently Berry felt that the magic of New Mexico ran out in 1985, which led him to head for Wyoming, where he still lives today, no longer making (or at least, sharing) music of any kind. But thanks to Matthewdavid and Leaving Records, we now have Dream Music, which joins other notable recent reissues in making a quietly compelling case for New Age music as a respectable form of art.


The Oakland trio’s understanding of the art of death metal continues to deepen and spiral off into unexpected territory.

Providence

The work of H.P. Lovecraft looms large within the extreme-metal imagination, and the Oakland trio Ulthar—who take their name from one of the author’s short stories—is far from the first band to fall under its spell. The band’s sophomore LP, Providence, which is named for Lovecraft’s hometown, features album art studded with skulls and plague buboes, resembling one of those cursed Victorian mourning wreaths woven from human hair. Those surface-level clues immediately alert the listener that they’re in for an unsettling ride (and is, artistically, par for the course for Ulthar). There is a certain ghastly air to the proceedings, as though the trio had discovered a nest of eldritch tentacles in the cellar while recording and decided to keep on playing. With Lovecraft himself, the true horror was what a racist, anti-Semitic shitbag he was, but here, that wyrd atmosphere is conjured in good faith, and conducted with blackened grandiosity.
The people involved have decades of experience between them in the study and execution of extremity, from drummer Justin Ennis’s tenure in NYC black metallers Mutilation Rites and current project Void Omnia to vocalist and guitarist Shelby Lermo’s experience with Bay Area death cult Vastum and bassist and vocalist Steve Peacock’s time in off-kilter blasphemers Pale Chalice and Mastery. It is unsurprising that Ulthar is a good band, but Providence is not just a good record, it is a great one, and the reasons for that go far beyond its creators’ resumes.
They couch their devotion to old-school death metal orthodoxy within a modern context; there's no mud, or murk, or self-conscious efforts to sound lo-fi, and the technical aspects are presented plainly, without apology or artifice. Providence allows no time for niceties on its short, brutish opening track, “Churn,” from which “Undying Spear” offers a brief respite before the rippling melody is torn to shreds by an imperious blast. Ulthar’s sound mingles black metal, death metal, doom, and thrash, and they skitter between genres in the leaps of a scale. But Providence owes a particular debt to Finish masters like Demigod, Convulsed, and Demilich, an earlier cohort who innately understood the importance of tempering technical flights with grounded riffs and headbanging tempos.
There is a certain sameness to a few of the album's eight tracks, so those that take the time to experiment invariably stand out. “Through Downward Dynasties” creeps in with an eerie ambient intro, flush with whooshing synthesizer effects and ominous undertones. It soon explodes into a flurry of blastbeats, precise scales, and icy, controlled chaos. Album closer “Humanoid Knot” revels in its own strangeness, from Lermo’s unhinged cackling to its slow, juddering riffs.
Recorded by Bay Area mainstay Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios and mastered by Adam Tucker at Signaturetone Recording, the album just sounds good, always listenable despite its undeniable brutality. They started strong on their 2016 demo and hit their stride with 2018’s monstrous Cosmovore, but with Providence, Ulthar has raised the bar on themselves yet again. With each release, their understanding of the art of death metal continues to deepen and spiral off into unexpected territory.


The sixth proper album from Calgary-based multimedia auteur Chad VanGaalen is one of his finer efforts, demonstrating his uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft.

Light Information

Chad VanGaalen has been consistent about his favorite track on Light Information, the sixth proper album from the prolific Calgary-based multimedia auteur and one of his finer efforts yet. Invariably, his pick is “Prep Piano and 770,” the one instrumental. As the title hints, it’s based on prepared piano and a Korg 770 monosynth. All of its contemplative chimes and retrofuturist squiggles are inspired by a floating bell that can be heard and, apparently, seen from the outhouse near a rustic cabin where the VanGaalen family goes (and, um, goes) on summer vacation. And no, before you ask, it’s actually track number three.
Since Sub Pop picked up VanGaalen’s bedroom-recording collection Infiniheart a dozen years ago, the warbling-voiced singer and impressively wide-ranging songwriter has kept tinkering with his warped noise-pop sensibility, as much mad scientist as one-man band. VanGaalen’s previous solo album, 2014’s invitingly easy-going Shrink Dust, could span pedal-steel plaintiveness and comic-book grotesquerie in a single song. VanGaalen is also an accomplished animator and illustrator. Shrink Dust was partly billed as a soundtrack to what would be his 2015 film Tarboz, and VanGaalen has directed videos for Sub Pop labelmates including Metz and Shabazz Palaces. These days, much of his musical work is in the form of his hallucinatory scores for Adult Swim’s “Dream Corp LLC.” Writing a traditionally structured song, he has said, doesn’t come so easily to him anymore.
Produced and almost entirely performed by VanGaalen, Light Information demonstrates he still has an uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft, while also gently questioning the societal pressures that might lead us to miss the point of creating and appreciating art in the first place. If, as VanGaalen has said, the overarching theme of Light Information is to somehow escape from technology, the end feeling is less “infinite content” than “cultivate your garden.”
The origins of Light Information predate Shrink Dust, and it’s a fittingly murkier-sounding and more riotous work, hewing closer to synth-streaked fist-pumpers like “Replace Me” from 2011’s Diaper Island or “Bare Feet on Wet Griptape” from 2008’s Soft Airplane. But the hooks still strike bloody vein. VanGaalen’s calamitous best here includes the galvanizing apocalyptic opener “Mind Hijacker’s Curse,” with its water-bong sound effects, bah-bah-ing “she’s got nobody” refrain, and what might be the album’s thesis statement on the fickleness of time: “Time just can’t be trusted,” VanGaalen frets. Spacier but no less urgent is “Host Body,” where VanGaalen imagines “parasitic demons” that “eat me from the inside out,” which he has said relates to time “turning you into a different person.” First single “Old Heads” has a chorus so jaunty it could be missed that it’s a sci-fi vision of transhuman cyborgs.
VanGaalen’s melancholy moments, when they come, are as gut-wrenching as ever, no matter how carefully cloaked in sardonic humor. The folksier, comparatively pared-down “You Fool” opens with a “semen-coated television controller thrown into a dirty hotel room corner,” and the unapologetic narrator volunteering to sleep on the floor. But the subtle showstopper is “Broken Bell,” where VanGaalen can offhandedly mention needing to visit a father who’s dying of cancer and then nudge a live audience into warm laughter by musing, “Should I take the advice of the graffiti on the wall telling me to go suck it?” It’s a Sufjan Stevens- or Mount Eerie-level meditation on mortality, despite VanGaalen concluding, “I’m not really good at this.”
One risk with mud-caked home recordings by indie oddballs is they can tend to blur together. “Golden Oceans” gunks up its sing-song melodies enough for early Wavves or Times New Viking. “Faces Lit” girds elliptical tech observations in rickety churn that could fit along a continuum with Built to Spill and Deerhunter. The anxious “Locked in the Phase” brings to mind happily revived Ontario indie heroes Constantines, whose lead singer Bry Webb had the B-side of VanGaalen’s one-off “Primitive Brain” single last year. “Mystery Elementals” is another scuzzy rumination on time’s inscrutability. Each of these is solid but doesn’t quite hold up to the album’s highlights.
A last-minute addition to the album, the fluttery finale “Static Shape” is also one of its sunniest songs—and VanGaalen’s. “Carve a shape into the static, and try to remember all the beautiful magic,” he sings, amid burbling electronic percussion and backing vocals from his two daughters. “Try to remember as much as I can and not to lose faith in my fellow kind.” It’s a gorgeous summation of why VanGaalen, in interviews and press materials, can seem more interested in ambient drone or gardening or architecture or, the nerve, his friends and family than feeding or monitoring the content mills. Like Jonathan Richman, VanGaalen doesn’t have a cellphone. But he has faith that if he follows his weird muse, opens up his mind in a way that a few people who are receptive to it might apprehend, that static will take shape, strike a chord. As usual, it may take a few listens, but he’s right. “Prep Piano and 770” isn’t really the best track, but it best captures that humbly optimistic spirit, like tranquil tones and breathtaking vistas observed from a shitter.


Zach Condon's horn and ukelele remain in Brooklyn for the bulk of his sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Instead, he returns to France-- the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar.

The Flying Club Cup

More than three minutes into the Lon Gisland EP's "Elephant Gun", the horns pause, and the song lingers on a few of Zach Condon's syrupy syllables before returning to Beirut's strongest melody. It's the sound of Condon and his band shedding its layers of self-packed cultural baggage. As Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy wrote earlier this year of Lon Gisland: "Condon has shown that, yes, there are songs behind the international flavors, that his work would be interesting even if he kept the trumpet at home."
Surprisingly, Condon's horn remains in Brooklyn for the bulk of his sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Condon himself returns to France-- the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar. It's clearly a place he loves. "Once we got there, we kept trying to go to other places, but we didn't feel like traveling so much as being in Paris," he said when I interviewed him a year ago. It's reflected here, with both Gallic brass and accordion and song titles that reference French cities and locations. Crucially, however, Flying Club Cup would be a triumph even with those layers stripped away; that's not to say that the cultural patina obscures the "real" songs underneath, but its removal allows us to sidestep mind-numbing questions about authenticity and intention.
Flying Club Cup deftly showcases Condon's gifts: "Nantes" sounds exotic without directly referencing a particular era or feeling, and "A Sunday Smile"-- despite being about specific people and places-- evokes universal sensations such as sleepiness and warmth. "Un Dernier Verre (Pour la Route)" and "Guyamas Sonora" show off Condon's increased love of piano-driven pop songcraft-- as well his band's frequent trick of introducing the best part of the song (here, the way the lithe percussion and ukulele contrast with the heavy accordion and his vocal layering) three-quarters of the way through. "In the Mausoleum" begins with some "Come On! Feel the Illinois!"-ish piano (Sufjan Stevens playing the U.S. cultural cannibal to Condon's worldly connoisseur), but what I like best is the violins, arranged by Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett (in conjunction with Beirut's violinist Kristin Ferebee), which are strong throughout the record and provide a perfect, light-as-lashes counter to Condon's thick instrumentation.
Vocal layering is another Beirut gift, but it also weighs heavily on each track, which is appropriate when nearly every song is about feeling weary or old beyond your years. But despite the well-traveled themes, Condon's vocal melodies, as on standout "Cliquot", are still dangerously romantic, veering closely to musical theater. Condon also does well by "Forks and Knives (Le Fête)", where the instruments hold back to give him more room to sing. And here, once you get past this spent-cigarette, empty-hotel story he's selling, it's obvious that what Condon lacks in lyrical ability, he more than makes up for in prosody. He has an impressive flow, a delicate glide that perfectly compliments the oft-commented-upon exoticism that tends to divide Beirut listeners. On The Flying Cup Club, and maybe on all of Beirut's records, this exoticism takes the form not of alienation but of a search for a familiar place within what seems (or sounds) unfamiliar, difficult, or repulsive. It's the process of searching that untethers the record from any limiting sense of place, be it an Arrondissement in Paris or a village in the Balkans.


On the South Korean artist’s astounding third album, the past and the present, the real and the fake dissolve seamlessly into surreal, maximalist pop music.

After the Magic

At a time when even the most modest indie rock projects are expected to provide a captivating origin story and annotated talking points, the still-anonymous South Korean artist Parannoul stated just the following about their new LP: “This album is not what you expected, but what I always wanted.” What we actually know about Parannoul hasn’t changed all that much since 2021’s To See the Next Part of the Dream: They live in Seoul, are open to collaboration, though intensely protective of their privacy, and express what they truly want out of music through seemingly incompatible forms. In Parannoul’s hermetic world, hyperreal synth presets achieve the same uncanny dissonance as dream-pop’s gauzy guitars; emo shares a language with shoegaze; bedroom pop sounds alternatively like one person on a laptop and the soundtrack at a planetarium laser show. At any given point on their astounding third album, After the Magic, Parannoul can be described as any of these styles, all of them, or maybe even none of them—a seamless synthesis that provides a direct line to its author’s unique worldview even as they reveal nothing else about themselves.
Parannoul’s recent split LPs and singles suggested that the production might slowly recede out of the red into softer, more shimmering tones. Yet none of it served as proper preparation for the optimism revealed in the bracing, crystalline clarity of After the Magic. More so than any guitar-based act, the dramatic tonal shift recalls Oneohtrix Point Never reinventing their timbral vocabulary from his murky masterpiece Replica to the spotless, supernatural R Plus Seven. It’s still “electronic music,” though instead of letting ghosts in the machine warn us about technological entropy, Parannoul’s “fake” and “sterile” instruments create a curious warmth, if only from our memories of associating computers with creative possibility.
The first sound heard on opener “북극성 (Polaris)”—and indeed, quite a few songs on After the Magic—is an acoustic guitar, presumably not one of the MIDI presets used on To See the Next Part of the Dream. Before long, Parannoul fills the space with the most obvious of ersatz sounds: spotless cocktail piano rolls, slap bass, synthesized saxophones, all knowingly used as prompts to remember an older, more innocent era of technology. Yet in its slippery reference points—ambient music of the early home-computing age, shoegaze’s drum’n’bass software update, various phases of J-pop incorporating state-of-the-art electronics—After the Magic collapses the nostalgia wormhole, implying that, someday, 2023 will also be remembered as the good old days.
While Parannoul haven’t completely ditched the super-saturated guitars that made their past work sound like M83 and Smashing Pumpkins, the most unexpected change on After the Magic is how they recall the spirit of those projects at their most buoyant. Whether the miserablism of the past was a defense mechanism or a conscious stylistic choice, what remains in its absence is Parannoul’s belief that any emotion worth experiencing has to sound as overwhelming as it feels. The magic is not in the mundane, but in big elemental feelings—turning 20, falling in love before you know how to describe it, literal and figurative space travel, the resurrection in every sunrise, and the endless possibilities of a summer night. Or, as the lap-pop lullaby that closes After the Magic suggests, just watch the fireworks.
And where Parannoul once rendered depression and self-loathing as imposing monoliths, After the Magic’s panoramic music sprawls towards the horizon in every direction. “북극성 (Polaris)” teases at some conventional structure and the late-’90s merger of alt-rock and electronica—itself another fleeting ideal for guitar-centered music. But halfway through, as Parannoul marvel at the possibility of transmitting a crush from the cosmos, the stereo field is flooded with strobing neon synth effects, as if they were abducted by a toy UFO.
The singular and surreal mood of Parannoul comes from the paradox of the music’s creation: arena-sized anthems made in a small room, the sound of 20 people in a recording studio borne of a computer, the feeling of community made mostly by one person. The enormous suite of “Parade” sounds like an arena anthem cocooned from the outside world. While getting swept up in the incapacitating rave rhythms towards the end of “개화 (Blossom),” Parannoul let out an impassioned howl found nowhere else on the record; even an English translation of the lyrics (“I wish I could not wake up”) can’t confirm whether they’re in agony or ecstasy. The volcanic second half of “도착 (Arrival)” imagines how Billy Corgan would have constructed a Siamese Dream-style guitar symphony in 2023—in complete isolation, their voice at the center of countless tiny overdubs stacked like kindling until the mix combusts.
What are the intentions behind Parannoul’s decision to remove their own ego or personal narrative from After the Magic? Even the elusive Burial eventually got doxxed, so perhaps one day we’ll find out. But the effect of their monastic approach isn’t to keep people out, but to extend the space for inner exploration—to float in a state of half-remembered bliss, or to sit in uncertainty, questioning whether all of this momentary joy can be trusted; to indulge in the most alluring promise of nostalgia, revisiting familiar scenes and sounds and ending up with a different outcome. For all of its stunning sound design and genre alchemy, none of this works without the effect captured in every piano line, every enveloping blanket of guitar fuzz, every pristine K-pop melody delivered in Parannoul’s heavy-lidded sigh. It’s an album that might make one hour of our lives so powerful that we spend the rest of our days trying to remember it.