Polo G blends pop and drill with ease and delivers a standout Chicago street rap debut that is meticulously crafted and honestly told.

Die a Legend

Chicago rapper Polo G is a writer in a world full of freestylers. In the data-dump era, where artists churn out as much music as they can, he makes two songs in the time it might take others to make 20. He is careful and meticulous, malleable and introspective.  His sound totters between drill and pop, sometimes hard, sometimes smooth. Eventually, he blurs the lines between them.
All of this is on full display on his brutal, powerful debut, Die a Legend. The title sounds like an epic fate, the kind that befalls a mythical hero. But for Polo G, it’s more of a cautionary tale. In his estimation, there’s no praise until you’re gone, and by then, it’s too late. He wants to leave a legacy, but he also knows you have to survive long enough to create one. The album art features photos of eight people in the clouds, like the ones you see tacked onto posterboards at funerals. Die a Legend honors their stories, their memories, their legends, with a painstaking account of the kind of violence that cost them their lives. It is one of the finest rap debuts of the year.
What draws you even closer to Polo G is the heartfelt essence of his raps. He can dive into the nooks and crannies of his life story or take an eagle-eye perspective, but he does both with a hypnotic, penetrating conviction. His songs are deeply meditative, and, in turn, revealing. “My mind keep racing, I been overthinking, I don’t get no sleep,” he raps. It’s that penchant for overthinking that’s led him to anatomize his own pain so carefully and so potently. His verses are so smooth and vivid it’s like you are a breath away from him at all times.
Polo G allows his songs to be jointless. With hardly another guest on this album (save for Lil Tjay on the sullen party hit “Pop Out”), his hooks feed directly into verses, like a snake swallowing its tail. They are simple but well-rendered, each distinctive but of a kind. Sometimes he’ll rap an entire verse in the same rhyme scheme (“Last Strike”), something he likely picked up listening to Gucci Mane. Maintaining the same end rhyme throughout sounds less involved than untangling knotty wordplay, and many purists see doing so as less complex. But it takes a talented rapper to ride out a single current for an entire 16 bars, especially when each of its lines runs right into the next, as on “A King’s Nightmare”: “Spittin’ verses, I’m desperate, I need a mansion and a coupe/You done signed over your life and now you slavin’ in the booth/Now we hang ourself with chains, they used to make us rock a noose/Shorties hoppin’ off the porch ’cause it ain’t shit else to do.” That’s the difference between a wave-rider and a wave-maker.
The stakes on Die a Legend are often thrillingly high. The gut-wrenching storytelling of songs like “Dyin’ Breed” and “BST” humanizes revenge killers and reluctant criminals. Even as he parks the Benz at his new Calabasas home on “Picture This”—a lifestyle he didn’t know existed, let alone know that he could live it—he reflects on the bloodsoaked path he narrowly avoided to get there, on how he beat long odds with his rap lottery ticket. He sizes his life and his city up from all angles with acute perspective. The imagery is raw: blood-stained corners, “homicide puddles,” Securus call transfers, face-eating hollow-points. He calls the streets a scam. He compares retaliatory violence to reimbursement. He still gets depressed in his mansion.
Both the despair of his past and the optimism of his future are, in part, conveyed by his intoxicating singsong melodies, which bend into any required shape and are ripe with emotional complexity. Through minimal, subtly elegant, and largely keyboard-powered beats, he bares all, nearly stripping himself raw. For 40 minutes, he is so tender and exposed that listening can seem like an invasion of privacy. But he never turns hopeless. “I come from a dark place,” he raps, “I’ll never be there again.”


Would you know greatness if you saw it? This is the eternal question for people like me, posting their supposedly ...

Miles Davis: Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time

Would you know greatness if you saw it? This is the eternal question for people like me, posting their supposedly well thought-out pontifications for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to read. The issue of being able to distinguish what's good from what isn't seems like a job ill-suited for anyone who doesn't have the power of omniscience, or at least a good track record with uncovering genius. And yet, this is a request made by artists all the time-- that of acceptance, or some kind of recognition of what they've produced.
Maybe it's not really a matter of taste, but closer to keen perception and foresight. But while some folks may pride themselves in their ability to find interesting art, it takes popular consensus to brand a piece or work "great" or "revolutionary." Herein lies the dilemma: if you aren't able to recognize the inherent greatness of a particular piece of art, how can you appreciate any art at all? Or, if you do think you see genius somewhere, how do you communicate this to somebody else? These are the kinds of questions I have for the audience assembled for the Miles Davis Quintet performance at the Fillmore East in New York City on March 7th, 1970.
Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time is the official release of an oft-bootlegged performance of Davis' "lost quintet." His cohorts were Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira. Not a bad lineup for a band that never existed, save a few fiery performances in 1969 and 1970. In fact, at the time, the status of Davis' proper quintet (featuring Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Shorter) was a little hazy. Williams had left to run his own show with Lifetime, but Hancock and Carter would continue to play with the trumpeter on and off for a couple of years. Also, the issue of the new quintet actually being a sextet added to the confusion of just who, exactly, was a part of Davis' band.
One other oddity confronted the lucky few who were able to witness these guys live: almost all the music being played was unreleased, and unlike anything ever produced by jazz musicians. Most of the tunes performed at this Fillmore date (not to be confused with another release, Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East, recorded in June of the same year) were from the landmark Bitches Brew LP. Although Bitches Brew had been recorded the previous summer, it wouldn't be released until a few weeks after this performance. And as any of that album's millions of fans will tell you, its music isn't really the kind that sinks in on the first listen.
The Davis Quin/Sextet was opening for Steve Miller and Neil Young for these sets. But if the jazz community was bitterly divided over the notion of Miles Davis playing "rock" music, I can only imagine what was going through the heads of people accustomed to hearing "Cinnamon Girl," rather than "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down," for an encore. Judging by the audience response here, they probably didn't really know what to think. The applause is polite, but hesitant, and the two or three guys who wanted more at the end may have been anomalies, because it was pretty obvious the band had left it all onstage after the last number. To recognize greatness: it is elusive, and most likely, beyond the sensibilities of most hippies and/or mere mortals.
The first set begins as Holland, DeJohnette and Corea vamp to a furious funk groove. Heavy bass and some well-placed exotic percussion (supplied by the redoubtable Moreira, whose playing receives the ultimate dis by being labeled "superfluous" in the liner notes) kick things off, and by the time Davis enters, the brew is already quite hot. The tune is "Directions," and apparently, it refers to many at once. Miles seems to be aiming straight for the jugular while Holland takes the straight and steady, and when Shorter comes in, he leads DeJohnette and Corea on a path so ridden with turbulence and strife, it derails the entire tune. About five minutes in, it becomes impossible to remember that most of these same musicians had produced something like In a Silent Way, only a year earlier.
Afterwards, the band segues into "Spanish Key," one of the more straightforward pieces on Bitches Brew, but here already transformed into a three-headed monster by a band that obviously couldn't sit still on a bet. The three heads in question: a rhythm section which never actually came down from the highs of the previous rave, Davis, who was playing more aggressively and with more muscle than he ever had, and Wayne Shorter, who was playing like he never would again.
Of course, he wouldn't, at least with Davis. After this date, Shorter would leave the group to form the seminal fusion outfit Weather Report. When he first performed with Davis in the early 60s, he'd received the rap of being a Coltrane disciple (not a criticism, really), but had always possessed a natural calm that his spiritual mentor would discard in favor of pure expression and, often, fury. On this date, Shorter meets his maker, full of fire and machine gun lines on soprano and tenor sax that had only been hinted at on the great releases by the second Davis Quintet.
During the second set, whatever jazz history had not been rewritten got its due and then some. "Directions" (it appears twice, since these two discs document both an early and a late show) starts off innocently enough, with a low, humming growl from Holland, but quickly develops into the Apocalypse. There are moments when the music seems to cross over into the avant-garde and free jazz realms, especially whenever Shorter is playing a solo. Reportedly, Davis never considered himself a part of those camps, but it's clear he wasn't afraid to let his band steer the ship in that general direction, so long as they kept the groove alive. Corea brings it down a little with a few choruses of comparatively traditional playing, even if it isn't less intense than the others'.
The tune segues into "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"; very different, far greasier and Fatter (with a capital 'F,' as you can see) than the studio version on Bitches Brew. It could almost pass for hard blues-rock, if not for DeJohnette's relentless cymbal attack and Davis' distorted howling. Here, though, it seems to serve as a kind of breather so the band can rev up for "Bitches Brew," arguably in its finest version anywhere on this CD. It begins with ominous, woozy percussion, and some agitated horn punches from the leader. Then, out of nowhere, everything gets funky. Holland lays down some serious dirty pimp low end, filtered through that infamous "ring modulation" to give it the extra ass-mangling quality so desired in serious jazz performance. After a bit, Shorter drops another trip-bop bomb, and then the quiet comes back. Davis takes it out with a few quick, muted jabs, while the beat simmers below. And if I never heard another track by that band again, I'd still rank them alongside Davis' other classic groups.
The set ends with a version of "It's About That Time" (from In a Silent Way), spliced with something called "Willie Nelson." The first part takes the original and applies the underlying aggression of this set to its once peaceful groove. The second half takes the bottom out, and showcases at once the band's penchant for repetitive riffing and complete irreverence towards the way jazz solos were supposed to be played (I'm not sure there's a straight chord progression on the entire record).
When the track is over, the audience, who probably weren't sure of what had just happened, offers cautious appreciation via some very polite applause. The emcee announces the group again (Miles never spoke during performances), and there are a couple of calls for an encore. Moreira lets everyone know it's over by blowing his whistle, and I surmise that many of the people there were letting out sighs of relief. There's no way to know if they were aware of the jazz revolution starting right under their noses. Over thirty years later, I'm not sure I understand what the preceding hour-and-a-half was all about, except what I consider exceptional musicians taking exceptional chances. It's undoubtedly pointless trying to reduce music to levels of "genius," so from now on, I'll take whatever those guys had to say without much inclination of trying to put it into words.


The Fiery Furnaces singer's solo debut feels like a throwback to idiosyncratic, solidly crafted singer-songwriter LPs from the 1970s.

Last Summer

The Fiery Furnaces' 2003 debut album, Gallowsbird's Bark, introduced a band that was utterly, irresistibly restless, from its frequent stylistic and tempo shifts to the ceaselessly discursive patter of frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger. This M.O. of ambitious itchiness was one Eleanor and her brother Matthew would only intensify with albums to come, including the sprawling landmark Blueberry Boat, the conceptually brave family affair Rehearsing My Choir, and the Frankensteinian live document Remember.
But a funny thing happened with the female Friedberger on the Furnaces' manifold zigzagging journeys from point A to point Z. Instead of just yelping or intoning strings of verbiage, Eleanor started to inform her delivery with nuance, irony, and wisdom. By 2007's terrific Widow City, the precocious hepcat of the group's early efforts was achieving real pathos on songs like "My Egyptian Grammar". The maturation deepened with 2009's I'm Going Away, which found Friedberger not only displaying increased subtlety as a singer but also taking a greater hand in crafting lyrics and melodies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the Furnaces' most polished and measured work to date.
Friedberger's debut solo album thoroughly carries over this relatively nascent understanding of her as an artist who can deliver sturdily professional, affecting pop. In fact, Last Summer practically makes I'm Going Away sound like one of the Furnaces' more madcap offerings by comparison. Simple but lovely piano melodies and richly mellow bass shepherd most of the tracks here, though Friedberger has paid lots of attention to filling the album's ample breathing spaces with guitar fills and percussive coloring. The warmly recorded, light-treading effort feels like a throwback to idiosyncratic but solidly crafted albums made in the 1970s by piano-driven popsmiths like Harry Nilsson, Todd Rundgren, and Joni Mitchell.
"Idiosyncratic" is an important qualifier. The success of Last Summer hinges on Friedberger's ability to put across a vocal and lyrical persona that excuses the fact that her tunes, while finely wrought, are hardly groundbreaking. As a vocalist she ably blends tough-minded forthrightness with a capacity for empathy and vulnerability. That's part of the reason why she can flirt overtly with girl-group sounds ("Heaven"), Motown ("I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight"), and funk ("Roosevelt Island") without seeming like an empty-vessel revivalist. It's what really good artists do-- they get away with occasional genre exercise and pastiche because the force of their own personality overrides any potential slavishness in the songwriting.
Nor has Friedberger sacrificed any of the serpentine panache of her lyrics. The strict sense of her stories may not always be easy to parse, but their logical slipperiness only strengthens the shifting feelings of longing, loss, estrangement, or nostalgia they convey. Friedberger keeps to the Furnaces' longstanding preoccupation with geography but narrows her scope in a way that heightens the album's sense of intimacy. Aside from "Inn of the Seventh Ray", which refers to an acclaimed California locale, Last Summer is all about New York, particularly Brooklyn. But Friedberger isn't interested in name-dropping Williamsburg's hippest bars, preferring to mention old neighborhoods and recreational attractions. Especially given the album's general 70s vibe, Last Summer feels much more like one of Woody Allen's classic cinematic love letters to the Big Apple than the work of any 21st-century scenester. From an artist whose mind and appetites have always ranged so freely, such a cohesive, uncluttered document is doubly revealing.


Compton rapper YG's follow up to 2014's My Krazy Life parts with DJ Mustard's snaps and dips into rich, classic g-funk, while YG grapples with the contradictions of being a celebrity gangster.

Still Brazy

YG’s debut My Krazy Life was a hardcore gangsta rap album, but the Compton rapper didn't present himself like a kingpin: On songs like “Sorry Momma,” he self-identified as a small-time house raider and set-claimer, a cog in a much bigger machine just looking to survive (and party in the meantime). But YG’s life has gotten crazier since then: Last year, he was shot by an unknown assailant at his Los Angeles recording studio. Since then he’s mostly used the attack to self-mythologize, boasting that he’s “hard to kill” and claiming that he left the hospital that night and continued working on his album the next day. Last month, shots interrupted the video shoot for his single “Thug” with rapper AD. Police believed the shooting to be gang related. “Gang-related” shootings in Compton are sadly routine; when near the set of a YG video, they can be a coincidence or a coordinated assassination attempt. How do you tell the difference?
These are the subjects that plague him on *Still Brazy. *The album is mostly a status update, examining how the collision between YG the gangster and YG the semi-famous millionaire disrupts his life in Compton. He uses his economical rap style, which boils every concept down to its root, to swat away an ongoing barrage of assaults, some brought on both his new life, others by his old one (on the title track, he shouts, “Why everybody want a piece of my pie?!”) Aside from being a finely crafted personal statement, Still Brazy studies the psychology behind being a celebrity gangster, the ever-present fear of retaliatory violence, or the risk inherent in simply getting caught at the stop light on the wrong side of town sporting the wrong colors.
“Who Shot Me?”, the song that reflects on the incident that left him hospitalized last June, is easily the emotional centerpiece of Still Brazy; its meticulous recounting of potential perpetrators shows off the sharpness of YG’s writing: “Having nightmares of me coming for dude/Having a hard time putting together two and two/They was in a brand-new truck, somebody sent them dudes.” The rest of the album spirals out from this incident, finding him consumed by paranoia, ducking foes both real and perceived, questioning friendships, and watching his pockets.
He also flashes a nascent social consciousness. In its replacement of feel-good party jams with protest music about race and sexual politics, S**till Brazy occasionally scans as My Krazy Life Goes Woke. “Blacks & Browns” weighs the “but what about black on black crime?” question against the impacts of classism and racism. Then there's his flagrant political statement “FDT,” an anti-Trump anthem that seems designed specifically to be chanted defiantly at rallies. Outside of the awful “She Wish She Was,” which plays like a cringey thread of meninist tweets, these moments deliver big, particularly the closer “Police Get Away Wit Murder,” which addresses the long history of police antagonism in Los Angeles (and by extension, all urban centers) over foreboding synths and a steadying drum kick. He’s a very efficient rapper who writes clearly and forcefully, but he isn’t out to offer solutions, just to ask questions and pose hypotheticals.
Still Brazy is his first departure from the isolated synth riffs of longtime collaborator DJ Mustard, but there isn’t much drop-off in chemistry. He is replaced on the boards by DJ Swish, Heartbreak Gang co-founder P-Lo, 1500 or Nothin’, and jazz rap maestro Terrace Martin. Alongside Iamsu!, P-Lo has been at the forefront of HBK’s hyphy revivalism movement. Martin has been a fixture on the west coast scene for over a decade now, working on albums for Snoop Dogg, Warren G, DJ Quik, Kurupt, Murs and, more recently, every member of Black Hippy.
Along with Swish, who handles the majority of the production, they create a palette spanning several generations of west coast rap music; these are some of the richest shades of g-funk, p-funk, and hyphy, reimaged in 1080p, a collage of retro sound packages reformatted into something new. It isn’t sequenced quite as carefully as My Krazy Life, which segued flawlessly from track to track, but it remains remarkably even. YG is as committed to the album format as someone like J. Cole, who has made a career out of trying (and failing) to replicate the “classic rap album.” YG, on the other hand, is merely focused on making a cohesive project that is more than the sum of its parts.
Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap. “I’m the only one who made it out the west without Dre/I’m the only one that's about what he say,” he raps on “Twist My Fingaz,” beating his chest in conquest. But Still Brazy is as much a cautionary tale as it is a triumph. Making it is having a million dollars to put on the head of the man who tried to kill you at your studio, but if someone is still trying to kill you after you make it, did you really get out?


Toronto-based Polyvinyl band mines music from the most extreme intersection of beauty and melancholy. Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and ex-member Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy guest.

Whore Luck

Here's Polyvinyl's cute lil' gift-wrapped, consumer-friendly tagline for Picastro's third album: "Whore Luck is an album of somber reflection and uneasy resolve." Gee, you think so? Polyvinyl might as well sell shotguns and say "this product, when pointed at the face and fired, may cause slight dizziness and nausea." You see, this Torontonian group isn't just bummed; their sickly, sparse acoustic/string arrangements are where sappy ballads and uplifting paeans go to die. They mine music from the most extreme intersection of beauty and melancholy.
Thanks to some auspicious festival slots and favorable internet buzz, Whore Luck finds Picastro getting called up from the rookie leagues to indie's AA level. Fittingly, their third album features chic cameos from Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and ex-member Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy fame, along with covers of Roky Erickson and the Fall tunes. However, frontwoman Liz Hysen hardly curbs her fragile dementia in the face of this newfound exposure, instead sounding just as terrified of the world as ever. Thanks to the additions of cellist Nick Storring and drummer Brandon Valdivia, Hysen's dark ballads can explore even deeper and more labyrinthine caverns, and Whore Luck often finds itself, for better or worse, getting lost in these sonic regions.
Early on Whore Luck, the difference is marginal. As opening tracks "Hortur" and "Car Sleep" demonstrate, creepy acoustic strumming still drives Picastro's songs, with timely cymbal crashes and moaning strings picking up the dramatic slack for Hysen's signature listless vocals. Not to be confused with My Brightest Diamond or Cat Power though, the lush arrangements quickly vaporize into a paranormal haze, Hysen's zombie-like delivery eschewing melodic delicacy in favor of soulless experimentation and-- for all we know-- feasting on human brains. Her take on Roky Erickson's "If You Have Ghosts" sucks out the song's flower power, replacing Erickson's pysch framework with a pump organ-led haunted house ambiance that very literally interprets the track's title. Brief ditties "Towtruck" and "Stair Keeper" follow, relying on the same pizzicato plucking and tape hissing used to frighten trick-or-treaters approaching your front porch.
Despite these bells and whistles, the band gels enough here to produce its most syncretic material yet. When Picastro co-opt the Fall's early gem "An Older Lover Etc." (titled "Older Lover" on Whore Luck), Hysen boils the song's melody down to a ritualistic chant, fading in and out of the spotlight amidst Stewart's trembling croons and Storring's schizo arrangements. Although Picastro still struggle to justify their maddening paucity as a stylistic choice versus their paucity as cover for lack of ideas, Whore Luck's growing pains appear as proof that the band still has room to grow and is headed in the right direction.


The New York band’s alluring new EP of cocktail-lounge house packs a seven-and-a-half-minute dancefloor heater like a magnum of champagne.

Upright and Even EP

Mr Twin Sister are a remedy for prudish pop not because they deliberately sing about sex, but because their muscular dance music is sexy. Sexy like a man wearing a satin button-up with only one of the buttons buttoned—like Picasso. Sexy like leaving red lipstick on the rim of a martini glass (and then realizing the lipstick has migrated to your chin). Mr Twin Sister’s latest Upright and Even EP—a slim four songs following a run of decadent albums—flourishes in this macho-but-not-sensual realm of cocktail-lounge house.
The group’s excellent self-titled 2014 album presented moments of hedonistic self-discovery as dapper, urbane grooves. Last year’s Al Mundo Azul was a pleasant if slightly less gratifying offering of late-night disco pop. Upright and Even exists in a similar universe of evenings where everything feels easy. You look great, you feel even better; you’re wearing a pair of slacks made out of a material that will surely catch fire if you’re not careful. Saxophone bleeds into strobing synth on the brief opener “Tommie,” a swirl of ’90s house and disco with flickers of trip-hop, as if the DJ is about to play Crystal Waters and chase it with some Gilberto Gil. On the unvarnished and slightly underproduced “Me Contuviste,” frontwoman Andrea Estella sings in Spanish over a meaty line of bass, sounding like she has a smirk tattooed on her face.
The EP’s centerpiece is “Resort,” a propulsive seven and a half minutes that go by in an instant. It’s a song for people who go to the club to dance, not to waste time: “They’re gonna fade/I’m gonna be here all night!” Estella sings. Think of it like Simian Mobile Disco’s sleazy naughties jam “Hustler,” but for lotharios who love French touch. Instead of stealing records, Estella is trying to get another club patron to buy all her drinks on their Amex, a lyric so specific that you can almost see the card’s hologram sparkling beneath a disco ball. The instrumentation sharpens around Estella’s words. Synths dip far into the low end, a drum machine chirps, a saxophone materializes like a heavy exhale before speeding ahead, rushing deep into blacklit club floors and crowds of people clown car-ing their way into a bathroom stall.
Upright and Even exists to be danced to: As an EP, it’s more in step with West End maxi singles than the compendiums of leftover songs some bands might release between studio albums. Mr Twin Sister aren’t new to this strategy—they did something similar in 2018 on Power of Two / Echo Arms, which was more candy froth than robust dance music. Upright and Even is the more successful of the two. It demonstrates a real sense of economy: Nothing feels like a leftover. Each song is a morsel, fully realized. It’s self aware, mature—in a word, sexy.


On his first new album since 2018, the Canadian songwriter with the gentle country lilt laments almost everything.

Say What You Like

Doug Paisley’s records have always evoked big, broad rivers, drifting across the Earth without hurry. His smooth country songs are doing ancient work, asking questions of love and death and doubt; these are not fleeting topical concerns or minor peccadillos but, instead, issues of epochs, worries that won’t be solved no matter how urgently the music moves. But just beneath that placid surface, where sighing pedal steels and trotting drums are more eddy than rapid, hidden dangers lurk. In almost every Paisley song, there is at least one line so loaded it can—like sharp driftwood or chiseled stones, swept inside the current—mangle or, at the very least, reorient. “I count the years off on a phantom limb,” Paisley sang on 2014’s Strong Feelings, his gentleness a wicked feint. “I finally hold a hand I know can win.”
The hazards hidden inside Paisley’s calm have never been as dense and potentially devastating as they are during Say What You Like, his fifth album and first since 2018’s incisive Starter Home. The contrast between his sound and substance has never been more striking, either. Backed on these 11 tracks by versatile Toronto band Bahamas, Paisley is cool above the country funk of “Say What You Like” and “Make It a Double,” collected over the spartan “Holy Roller” and “Rewrite History.” These songs, though, are a liturgy of grievance and disappointment, Paisley taking aim at old flames and distant friends, his own vaulting ambition or lack thereof. He shrugs his shoulders at sadness, then wallows in it, his only pal left in town. “We’re always somewhere between forever and walking away,” he sings during “You Turn My Life Around,” a kneecapping kind of love song. Say What You Like puts a pin in several of those somewheres.
A decade ago, Paisley—happily partnered, soon to be a father—spoke about how songs tended to get him in trouble. Lovers would wonder if a new batch of breakup songs were prescient or wishful, even when he protested they were about the past. Culled from a cache of more than 250 demos, Say What You Like feels newly bound to the present, back-of-the-napkin scribbles that capture the domestic realities of things you might say mid-spat or silently wonder when you’re low. “Almost” is the crux. With its lap-steel guitars, soft-breeze harmonies, and swaying drums, the modest quintet winks at bygone days of Hawaiian exotica, especially as it melted into country. But there is nothing ersatz about the lyrics: eight devastating lines about the Sisyphean effort of feeling good enough for yourself, let alone someone else. “Almost was somebody to someone who loved me,” Paisley sings twice, more curse than wish. His voice catches between the adverb’s syllables the second time around, stuck as though it were some snaggletooth mountaintop.
This fatalist sense of insufficiency—of having everything just less than right, forever and always—permeates Say What You Like, no matter the subject. “It’s the same old story in each new catastrophe,” he puts it in one instant, his voice blooming with the unexpected surliness of Richard Buckner. He is put out by the way people from his past perceive him during opener “Say What You Like,” by the way the place of his past can no longer hold him during closer “Old Hometown.” “Sometimes It’s So Easy” first seems a cocksure anthem for traveling on, sporting a restrained strain of the gusto that made George Jones great for so long. “Worst of all don’t stay home, pick up the phone, or be alone,” Paisley warns from experience when he reaches the second verse, tone now drooping. Even breaking up is an almighty struggle, just another way to fail.
Paisley’s even, steady countenance breaks more than ever before on record during “I Wanted It Too Much,” a stately ballad that shifts suddenly into an emotional torrent when Felicity Williams joins for a duet. As she chases him from verse to chorus, he speeds up until his voice starts to quiver, rushing into a wind of chilly uncertainty. “Don’t it look like everybody’s coming up when you’re on the way down?” they ask together, voices barely threaded. “I wanted it too much. I couldn’t stand up and take it.” The troubles beneath Paisley’s pretty songs breach for one of the first few times here. Line up every Paisley album, start to finish, and they can twinkle sadly in the background, like dusty country cassettes salvaged from a thrift-store bin. “I Wanted It Too Much,” though, is entirely arresting, his anxiety complete and unmistakable. It underlines what makes Paisley so good by subverting it. And then, of course, he eases back into something James Taylor might’ve crooned.
In another era of country music (admittedly, the one that serves as a primary muse), Paisley’s voice might have made him a superstar. It curls and keens, nasally but broad—Conway Twitty raised more on the Palace Brothers than the Louvin Brothers. These days, though, the biggest country singers can feel like anonymous conduits for a good time. There’s something else happening around the edges, with folks like Paisley, H.C. McEntire, Joy Oladokun, or Adeem the Artist offering very specific perspectives as both writers and singers. Their stories, turns out, have a sound. On Say What You Like, they take the shape of self-doubt so enduring that the songs can sometimes slip into the middle distance. Just maybe their presence, coming up from underneath, is enough to capsize a system that would never make space for Paisley’s bygone heroes.


The veteran West Coast rapper toggles between kickback anthems and pertinent reflections on his life and growth, but he’s missing the hunger and innovation of his best work.

I Got Issues

If you poll 100 rap fans to name the first living West Coast rapper that comes to mind, there’s a good chance that a significant number will name YG. It makes sense. The Compton-raised rapper’s ethos and image, drenched in blood-red and paisley paraphernalia while loosely adhering to the tenets of gangsta rap, have remained remarkably stable over the last decade. Since his stellar major label debut, 2014’s My Krazy Life, he’s balanced salient criticism and self-exploration with a true aptitude for hitmaking, letting crisp songwriting and infectious energy carry him onward. He’s delved into political protest (“FDT,” “Blacks and Browns”), the nihilism that accompanies a brush with death (“Who Shot Me?”), and loss of loved ones (4Real 4Real, a tribute tape to the late Nipsey Hussle).
On I Got Issues, the equilibrium is thrown off. Over the record’s 48-minute runtime, YG oscillates between kickback anthems and pertinent reflections on his career progress and emotional growth. By his own account, he created this project while “having the same approach” as he did on My Krazy Life and Still Brazy. But what’s missing is the hunger and innovation from those records; while he’s able to shoehorn in moments of legitimate lyrical quality, too often he leans on generic production decisions and vapid proclamations that ring hollow.
You can’t accuse YG of running away from himself: “Issues,” the album opener, has him confront his interpersonal conflicts, including his creative fallout with his close friend Mustard (conspicuously missing from this project) and his sustained grief over the deaths of his friends. “What’s up with your brother? Shit, I ain’t talk to Mustard/I just fell back, can’t let a nigga treat me likе a sucker,” he raps starkly, cryptically alluding to the reasons behind their frayed relationship. The curtain falls before we glimpse more than a peek, as he retreats towards more reliable subject matter: paranoia about his safety and freedom in his gangster-tinted lifestyle. On “Alone,” with its soothing flip of Delegation’s 1978 track “Oh Honey,” YG broods about the shelf life of his existence in the streets: “How many more contributions I gotta make?/How many more bullet wounds I gotta take?” he raps, a sobering acknowledgment of how confronting mortality doesn’t get any easier with age.
But it’s when he shifts away from his own emotions that the quality dips considerably. There’s not enough vocal variation or excitement to make some of his vulgar exhibitions interesting or even fun. The infusion of beautiful acoustic guitars on the DJ Swish-led production of “I Dance” aren’t enough to distract from his phoned-in Spanglish and juvenile, sex-obsessed raps; the cookie-cutter, Facebook-esque misogyny of “Baby Momma” is too on-the-nose to feel satirical or playful. When YG yells the chorus—“I hate my baby mama”—it feels as though he just had to get some things off his chest, which does not make for compelling art. Even when he tries to spice up a track’s composition, like singing the melodies himself on “Toxic,” the lyrics about gold-digging and modern-day entanglements feel empty, wasting a nice Mary J. Blige sample along the way.
A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious: the clock tolling and knocking bass of the Hit-Boy-produced “Maniac” is one of the few times that the rapper sounds at home, rattling off materialistic boasts with a chilling disposition over a groovy bounce beat; “How to Rob a Rapper” is a great California connection with Mozzy and Los Angeles rapper D3SZN, as each man efficiently finds the pockets amid stock rhythmic claps and hi-hats. But an attempt like the pop-leaning, Roddy Ricch and Post Malone-assisted “Sober” registers as soulless and out-of-place. The closer “Killa Cali” is a neat encapsulation of the incongruence damning I Got Issues: YG espouses a list of music legends who died in California and muses about his own guilt, as he raps, “Bullets done put my homies in wheelchairs/Got survivor’s guilt ’cause I’m still here.” He embarks upon an earnest tribute to those who have departed in his hometown—but with its sentimental and heartbreaking nature, it almost feels out of place among the numerous vapid missteps that precede it.


Recorded across four nights of longform improv at L.A.’s Enfield Tennis Academy, then cut up and remixed, the quintet’s debut marks an exciting milestone in the city’s emerging jazz scene.

Small Medium Large

There were no rules at Enfield Tennis Academy. The tiny Los Angeles cocktail bar, with its specialty in avant-garde jazz and a name that winked at David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, dodged any accusations of snobbishness by cutting out the usual strictures: no two-drink minimum, no ban on talking or cell phones, and for a while at least, no cover charge. ETA became a destination for the new jazz scene’s westward migration from Chicago to L.A.; a weekly improv session led by Tortoise and Isotope 217 guitarist Jeff Parker was the highlight of the schedule, and a phenomenal recording of those shows, 2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, finally let the world know what was happening in the cramped back space of that long, narrow club. But despite its momentum, ETA officially shut down at the end of 2023, closing another chapter in the history of West Coast jazz.
It will take a long time to uncover the full extent of ETA’s influence on the L.A. scene. So let’s start now, with SML, a new quintet who recorded their debut album, Small Medium Large, across four nights of longform improvisation at the venue. The group represents the next wave of jazz artists to hit the western shore: saxophonist Josh Johnson, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann are all Windy City transplants. Bassist Anna Butterss arrived in L.A. from Australia via Indiana, while percussionist Booker Stardrum was drawn there from his native New York. (Butterss and Johnson also happen to appear on Mondays at the ETA). They take their cue from an important record on Chicago’s International Anthem imprint, Makaya McCraven’s 2015 album In the Moment, on which he cut up and remixed live improvisations to create a fusion between jazz and hip-hop. SML shares McCraven’s method but not his style; rearranging their concert recordings in their home studios, the group crafted a set of songs that drives like Afrobeat and drifts like kosmische.
The post-production technique is sometimes identifiable—the ultra-fast loops of “Switchboard Operations,” for example, belong on a classic Oval track—but the fervent energy of the live performance shines throughout. “Three Over Steel” begins with nine or 10 seconds of a reverse tape effect and then plows ahead with an undeniable groove. This is either live jazz or a facsimile too good to spot, right down to the way Uhlmann’s guitar solo picks its way through delicate one-note stretches while the audience holds their breath. At other times, the degree of editing is irrelevant. “Dolphin Language” is a new-age wash of ambient synthesis more remarkable for its calm, aquatic atmosphere than for any display of chops, whether on an instrument or a DAW.
Of course, McCraven didn’t invent the cut-and-paste approach. In 1969, producer Teo Macero edited Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way by cutting down 40-odd reels of 2-inch tape into a sleek 38 minutes, combining live performance with studio manipulations for the first time in a jazz context. SML are intimately familiar with this history, as they prove on “Industry,” a funky number in the vein of Davis’ Macero-produced On the Corner. Over Butterss’ and Stardrum’s chugging rhythm, Johnson plays his sax in short bursts and then solos with himself, either through deft editing or impossible dexterity. Later in the track, Chiu’s synth takes off like a rocket in homage to Herbie Hancock’s spacier voyages. Herbie is there too on “Feed the Birds,” a synth-led interstellar journey (the birds are fed, presumably, on the way up). The band soars through clouds of the starstuff that Chiu’s keyboard emits, with Uhlmann’s guitar spiraling out in fractal patterns over the NASA-precise rhythm section.
Referring to the post-genre turn that McCraven and Parker initiated, McCraven has called the word “jazz” “insufficient, at best, to describe the phenomenon we’re dealing with.” Small Medium Large might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter. At the very least, it represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community that, for a decade now, has only moved from strength to strength. ETA may be gone, but SML is here, and hopefully to stay.
Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that the venue was named Enfield Tennis Academy; the actual name was simply ETA.


The soul singer's second album for Daptone finds him in a more optimistic mood, channeling the sound of 1970s greats like Al Green and Curtis Mayfield, and the sheer power of his voice is undiminished.

Victim of Love

With a roster that has boasted singers like Sharon Jones, Lee Fields, Naomi Shelton and the sadly departed Joseph Henry, Brooklyn-based label Daptone Records have forged their retro soul ethos for a decade now with a very calculated method: correcting history’s mistakes by signing aging soul starlets who have fallen through the cracks of time. So how label co-founder Gabriel Roth must have fussed when he came across Charles Bradley, a James Brown impersonator with a harrowing backstory. Enduring homelessness, extreme illness and the murder of his brother (all of which are outlined in the festival circuit documentary Charles Bradley: Soul of America), Bradley came with a marketable narrative and a dynamic stage presence. Most importantly, his voice gives Daptone’s house musicians a leading man who can channel not just Brown, but Otis Redding, Al Green, and Teddy Pendergrass to boot.
To both Bradley and Daptone’s credit, the singer’s first album, No Time for Dreaming, didn't cash in on his distressing life story, but world-weariness did seep into his songwriting. It was as though harsh life lessons had taught Bradley not to expect a great deal from his apparent "big break." The love songs weren’t so much passionate romantic odes as they were desperate declarations of reliance, while the record’s marquee song, “Why Is It So Hard”, offered a cold flipside to the American dream. But what a voice. This wasn’t revivalism for revivalisms sake (a sneer sometimes made at Daptone), but a collection of songs sung with earnestness and authority that it trumped any such criticism.
Two years on, Victim of Love is a more optimistic record, from the Motown-inspired catchy pop-soul number “You Put the Flame on It” to the gorgeous “Through the Storm”, a quiet elegy to bury his past traumas. But these fuzzy moments are offset by new forays into more coarse instrumentation. “You Put the Fame on It” aside, producer Thomas Brenneck pushes his artist from the 1960s into more 70s R&B than he’s previously been accustomed to. Think Curtis Mayfield’s transition from the swinging doo-wop of the Impressions to his solo, psychedelic blues of the early 70s. “Hurricane” trods much the same path as “Freddy’s Dead”, albeit replacing Mayfield’s drugged out nightmare with an environmental warning, while his handprint is all over the sizzling funk workout “Confusion”. Elsewhere, “Strictly Reserved For You” could easily slide into Al Green’s golden 1972-1975 run, and the chipped guitar lines that recall his great collaborator “Teenie” Hodges are matched with some fuzzy Sly Stone-esque axe.
But Victim of Love is ultimately a less successful record than No Time for Dreaming. For one, Bradley seems less connected with this set. “Love Bug Blues” offers him some blaxplotiation-style cool to ride on-- all nasty guitar lines, fluttering jazz flutes, and forceful horn stabs-- but the lyrics uncomfortably cast him as a horny singleton who has caught glimpse of a potential new conquest. His major flaw, however, has been and continues to be his lack of ability to interact with his band. At times, like on overwrought ballad “Let Love Stand a Chance", he sounds completely detached from what’s going on around him, as if he cut his vocal a capella in studio far away from his collaborators. This isn’t helped by Brenneck, who turns Bradley’s voice way up in the mix. Considering the singer’s sheer power it’s sometimes an imbalance. For example, the title track is a bare acoustic jam only backed up with some soft background “oohs” and “ahs”, yet Bradley attacks the arrangement with full speed gusto and his potent voice begins to overwhelm.
These blemishes underline that Bradley is still something of a novice to professional recording and requires guidance to funnel his talents onto wax. That’s the job of Brenneck and the Daptone hierarchy, who are probably calling the shots when it comes to his evolving sound. But Bradley has a rare gift of being a singer worth hearing regardless of the material, and this alone is worth the price of admission.


The gravel-voiced Nashville rapper’s writing is all tension with just enough release to ensure he doesn’t explode.

Love Drug

For over 20 years, Starlito has been rapping about how stressful it is to be a rapper. Years on the independent mixtape grind in his native Nashville put his slippery monotone within earshot of Cash Money in the mid-2000s, and the artist formerly known as All $tar used his growing platform to grapple with the increasingly high costs of fame. He can shit talk and flex with the best of them—he and Memphis rapper Don Trip’s Step Brothers series is a masterclass in affable and thoughtful bully rap—but he won’t pretend the strain of real life and the rap industry hasn’t put him on the verge of quitting altogether. Fearing his biggest hit, 2005’s oft-remixed “Grey Goose,” would box him into a corner as an alcohol rapper, he’s made sure to split time between partying and pain rap, channeling the tact and entrepreneurial savvy of a Young Dolph or Key Glock without the outsized persona.
On Love Drug, his first solo project since 2020’s Paternity Leave, his raps still cut to the bone, but his outlook has metastasized into something even darker. Starlito’s knack for standing firm in the middle of the storm gives every story lethal urgency, whether it’s about a shootout or just a dead phone battery. But this time, there’s no lighthearted hijinks to dilute the soul-crushingly heavy thoughts. Opener “Writer’s Block” bleeds from various losses—dead friends he should be sharing oysters with, love affairs barely remembered through the haze of a Xanax addiction. Even brief moments of respite (“I celebrate breakin’ even”) are immediately followed by more strife (“I ain’t say it was easy”). Throughout Love Drug, Starlito’s writing is all tension with just enough release to ensure he doesn’t explode.
That sorrow is the album’s lifeblood, the harrowing byproduct of systems that suck the profit and vitality out of the Black bodies not being set up to fail on street corners. On highlight “Put the Gun Down Craig,” a plot beat from the 1995 comedy classic Friday inspires intense reflections on the ripple effect of gun violence, from familial paranoia to snitch culture. “I hate we had to shoot guns, can’t lie; I don’t want no new smoke,” he says plainly, as producer DTdaKidd’s bass and drums pop like shots. Compare that to “iH8RAP,” the album’s only stumble, where good points about media literacy and false rapper personae are drowned out by preachy soapboxing and a guest appearance from YouTube shock jock Charleston White. Lito doesn’t need the help to make his messages any more powerful: “‘Feed your mind, starve your ego,’ I got that from Starlito/This part from Jermaine, align your heart with your brain.”
Otherwise, his blunt thoughtfulness continues to carry his rumbling voice far. He stands tall next to guests like Alabama’s bluesy bard NoCap (“Don’t Cry,” “Pocket Full of Pain”) and punches through the beats, whether a somber groove from producer ZIPS (“Wanna Be There”) or an earthshaker by Memphis heavy hitter Tay Keith (“Bipolar Bear”). Lito stays 10 toes through it all, outwardly unmoored but desperately trying to maintain from within. His quiet devastation comes to a head on closer “Retire My Jersey,” which mixes in autobiography and lessons from Gucci Mane and former labelmate Lil Wayne with the bloodletting. “In the airport, they call me the GOAT/When I’m in the mirror, feel like I’m seeing ghosts,” he says, flow harsh and direct as a mug of black coffee. Starlito may never outrun his demons, but he’s more than content to let the work speak for itself.


The last time I was lost in the Enchanted Forest, stomping through the snarls of black branches, snapping sticks and ...

Animal Collective: Here Comes the Indian

Here Comes the Indian

The last time I was lost in the Enchanted Forest, stomping through the snarls of black branches, snapping sticks and rustling the leaves, I came across a bent hag. She whispered a few words, scattered some herbs to the wind, and shrunk my hands into little one-inch nubs at the end of my full-grown arms. Helpless, and with nightfall hastily approaching, I stumbled across a campfire that had been built by the friendly furry creatures of the Animal Collective.
I could hear noises coming through the trees as I approached: They were making feral cries in the darkness, beginning "Native Belle" and startling me for just a second. After a full day of jamborees and playing Indian in the woods, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist and Deaken were dancing like children around the crackling fire among the pines. Their voices were twisted electronically to the point that they were hardly distinguishable, swirling around as though just loosed from the Ark. I felt feeble in my attempt to join in, my hands cursed as they were, but the Animal Collective made me comfortable in my new body, showing me that even with such undersized tools-- and scarcely more than drums, voices, effect-laden guitars and keyboards-- infinite sounds were possible.
Holding my hands up into my ears, all the sounds flickered like primitive wah-wah pedals along a cave wall. Even with these hands, I could still clap, and did so right in the middle of the Gibby-tronic slurs and screams of "Hey Light". The wolf-howled bursts quieted into snapping pattycakes and chanted rounds around the dying embers. These communal murmurs were far removed from their first spastic sounds. Panda Bear showed that by tightening my hands into balled fists, my very arms could become drumsticks, conveying endless energy, every surface a percussive experiment. Even as I tap out this recollection, they clack against the keys rhythmically, moving with the rounds of distorted campfire singing; not as a regular beat, but as something stumbled upon and followed into the wild.
The thinly veiled vocal menace of Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising is laid out on "Infant Dressing Table" with much clanking, wailing and gurgled regurgitation. Seemingly innocent as a newborn babe, "Two Sails on a Sound" mutates the dark forest into the wood panels of Whitley Strieber's downstairs den, suggesting the presence of silvery aliens. As a piano sampled from Cluster II plinks out "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", the twelve-minute abduction transcends glory-glory hallelujah altogether. "Slippi" is a lost Missa Luba ritual disguised as basement hardcore, an ecclesiastical outburst of joyfully chanted heart patters. "Too Soon" creaks as near to the ground as cricket tremors, interrupted by the shrapnel of the exploding frogs that fall from the trees. Our hands also tremble with inevitable release. It is a natural death for such forest-dwelling creatures as us, slowly losing hold, rising and falling.
The odd pop traces from Avey Tare and Panda Bear's much-beloved Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished have become discernable at certain moments on this day, but only echoed distantly in the woods, not so much lost as Gone. The music was stripped down to that ecstatic skin of mouth, hands, and feet, invoking a rhythmic rapture I had previously only associated with Boredoms and certain tribal recordings. While it's hard to grasp exactly what the Animal Collective was up to here that day in the forest, I have fumbled for hours tonight with my withered paws to gain some kind of understanding, and to hope for just one more glimpse of the ghosts with whom I was so sure I'd danced.
Editor’s Note: This review previously contained a phrase that did not meet our current editorial standards and has been removed.


The producer born Archy Marshall crafted The OOZ to be alien and timeless. It is the richest and most immersive album the London singer-songwriter has made yet, under any name.

The OOZ

Archy Marshall doesn’t star in his own music—he wanders through it. You might find him spotlit and center stage, foregrounding his violent voice like a fist denting chrome. Or you might find him muttering quietly to himself in the margins, barely audible. He might fail to show up entirely, letting the thickly painted sounds of his productions do all the talking for him. Listening to the London singer-songwriter’s music sometimes feels like waiting for a sea creature to surface: We only ever catch furtive glimpses of him before he disappears again.
He’s recorded as Zoo Kid, as King Krule, and under his own name. There might be some internal logic at work in the different aliases, or it might just be the natural behavior of a hermit crab scuttling between temporary homes. In any case, his magnetic and midnight-black new album The OOZ is his first release as “King Krule” since 2013’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, which was his breakthrough and his first release for XL Recordings. Why the return of Krule is probably a secret only the grim-faced Marshall knows; perhaps the moniker is reserved for the music he makes with his vocals front and center, the guise where he plays at being a frontman. Or perhaps the name is a statement of purpose, of newfound confidence. Whatever the case, The OOZ is the richest and most immersive album he’s made yet, under any name, by some distance.
On 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, he was still raw and only 19 years old, working uneasily under the guiding hand of producer Rodaidh McDonald. Since then, he has wrested control of nearly every knob dictating his sound, and The OOZ feels like a piloted journey deep, deep into suffocating loneliness. The sound is tarry, warm, wet: Overwhelming bass lines, the kind that make you aware of the screws in your subwoofers, lurk beneath trebly keyboard chords with flecks of jazz harmonies embedded in them, like glass shards in a carpet. Down here, genre boundaries blur or disappear, so depending on the angle you approach The OOZ, you will find yourself listening to a trip-hop record, a dub record, to punk rock, to tender jazz balladry, or watery R&B. The guitars, slightly out of tune strummed hard and imperfectly, are back in the mix for the first time since 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. But everything is hard to make out on its own, so each listen sprouts rich new suggestions: When he barks the title of “Dum Surfer” over fat saxophones, it sounds for all the world like “don’t suffer.”
In his mouth, words create distance as often as they communicate an idea. Over and over again, he tells us how far we are from him, speaking both plainly and in riddles to keep us at arm’s length. “He left the crime scene without the Motorola/Still had dreams of being Gianfranco Zola,” he mumbles on “Biscuit Town,” a decontextualized scene like a piece of aircraft fell to earth. Other people, when they appear, are usually fallen and unhelpful—“Yeah, she scatters just like one of the people,” he screams on “Vidual,” a howl of bitter scorn and betrayal. On “Logos,” he offers us the chilling image: “I caught my mum, she stumbles home/Through open ground, back to broken homes,” hinting at the sort of necessities that might have led to the development of his wild-eyed, insistent solitude.
Marshall’s music is one of overwhelming nausea but also overwhelming determination, an iron will and a sickened heart working in tandem. “Half man with the body of a shark” he repeats 21 times on, well, “Half Man Half Shark,” a freakish vision of a hybrid creature with no resting state. Later in that same song, he yelps, “Twisted raw adrenaline/Racing through my bones, racing through my body,” sounding electrocuted by his own nervous system. Elsewhere, he refers to insomnia, nights haunted by memories, and pills that don’t work.
But beneath all this desperation, as usual, are luxurious moods and textures, ones that make self-loathing sound so visceral, so tactile, he almost confuses you into wanting it. He makes some of the most gorgeous sounds of any working producer: There is a faintly out-of-tune guitar swelling like buckling linoleum behind him on “The Locomotive,” a disoriented sound sent spinning into deep space by a distant alarm. Your ears want to follow it, to track it until the second it disappears. The diffused piano that waters through “Cadet Limbo,” or the snare knock and high whine of “Biscuit Town,” or the wash of eroding synths that disintegrate one Hz at a time over four minutes of “The Cadet Leaps”—a life spent tormented and alone has few comforts, but Marshall girds himself with gloriously odd sounds, each as piercingly memorable as a lost lover.
He’s long played the bridge troll underneath human civilization, a creature with a fearsome bark and a lonesome heart, but on The OOZ he luxuriates in the role with newfound comfort. “I wish I was people,” he mumbles on “The Locomotive,” and there’s something almost funny about it. The spot where disgust turns seductive, where rot becomes ferment—this is his home. Everything we find truly sexy as adults, after all, repulses us as children, and the sour atmosphere of the music seems to come from this place: the realization that maybe some revolting experiences have subsidiary benefits. “Slipping into filth/Lonely but surrounded/A new place to drown/Six feet beneath the moon,” he has his dad recite on “Bermondsey Bosom (Right).” He sounds peaceful, even gentle. The world is a filthy, utterly debased place, his music suggests, but there are rewards of sorts for those determined to survive it. In this spirit, The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive.


Short Movie is Laura Marling's most open and airy album yet, though it remains enigmatic. It is her first album written on electric guitar, and she clutches every guitar fill like it’s a long-lost piece of her identity, luxuriating in space and writing bigger and hazier songs to match.

Short Movie

Laura Marling is a particularly standoffish singer/songwriter, reserved in interviews and tauntingly prickly in song; a typical line, from A Creature I Don’t Know standout "Sophia", is "I never did say whatever it was you did that day." As she’s grown, she’s moved farther in this direction, away from the plain-spoken vulnerability of Alas, I Cannot Swim into vocals that curl words into secretive murmurs, and lyrics that tiptoe up to confessions then stop just short. Mythology and formal allusions swirl around even her candid moments, assuring that any autobiography is lost in the fog.
So it’s a mild shock to hear Marling sing "We shared an apartment on the Upper West Side" toward the beginning of her fifth record Short Movie. The lyric is rooted to a specific place, a specific happening in her life. It’s even a precise moment—2012’s post-Hurricane Sandy blackout, which left most of lower Manhattan without power and "dark, as if no one lives there," as she says on "False Hope". In interviews, Marling acknowledges Short Movie is more unguarded, though characteristically only to a point: "The arm’s distance was getting closer with this record for sure, but then I stopped," she told The Guardian, declining to elaborate.
In part, the new sense of openness comes from the sound. Short Movie is her first album written on electric guitar—specifically, her father’s old Gibson 335. It’s not a drastic change, as Marling’s uptempo tracks have always had muscle, but it’s palpable nevertheless. Marling toured Once I Was an Eagle with longtime cellist Ruth de Turberville (who contributes lovely arrangements on Short Movie) but little else in the way of a band or instrumentation, and on Short Movie, she clutches every guitar fill like it’s a long-lost piece of her identity, luxuriating in space and writing bigger and hazier songs to match.
The arrangement on "Warrior", for instance, is stranded atop a canyon of echo and given an arrangement so vast and dusty that Marling almost gets away with the America rip (yes, that one). "Warrior" is hauntingly serious, but elsewhere you can hear here loosening up: "Strange," a near-spoken disembowelment of a hapless cheating man, wouldn’t work without the cruelest hitch of a laugh in Marling’s voice as she informs him, "I don’t love you… I’m pretty sure that you know." It’s easily the standout: every syllable delivered like acid, and lyrics that continually walk up to the line and cross it—right up to "No, I do not believe we were born equally."
Short Movie has been called Marling’s "quarterlife crisis" album, but the crises she's grappling here are the same ones she's confronted her entire career: love as a threat to autonomy, suitors as perpetual disappointments, wariness of intimacy but also of the alternatives. Album opener "Warrior" is a mythological conceit typical of Marling—men as warriors, women as the steeds they misuse. Marling is the sort of artist to deliver "I feel your love" like it’s synonymous with fear, or choking gas; "Walk Alone" is the sound of a woman who’s sat with herself long enough to realize, horrified, that what she hears inside is a lonely-morning dirge.
This turns out to be Short Movie’s main, minor downfall: Most of these themes were explored, in more eviscerating detail, in Once I Was an Eagle, and the album meanders in the second half. Without an overarching conceit like Once I Was an Eagle, Short Movie comes off sounding like a transition record, a short movie in the sense that it’s a prelude to something bigger. But Marling’s career is remarkable in part because album after album she not only delivers on those bigger things, but delivers them in her idiosyncratic voice. She’s spent her entire career dodging comparisons, but by now she has earned the right to be compared only to herself.


Six months after his Passed Me By EP advanced like a scorched-earth campaign over the ruins of dance music, Manchester-based DJ and producer Andy Stott is back with another six tracks of charred, crawling techno.

We Stay Together

Six months after his Passed Me By EP advanced like a scorched-earth campaign over the ruins of dance music, Andy Stott is back with another six tracks of charred techno. You can bet that in the fast-zombies-versus-slow-zombies debate, Stott sides with the groaners and stumblers: As was his previous record, We Stay Together is a Frankenstein's monster pieced together from scraps of club tracks pitched down to an agonizing crawl. Funny things happen at this speed: The beats lurch violently, kicking up clouds of ash with every impact; every syncopation becomes a hesitant shudder. Sampled vocals, looming in the background, turn to a jellied groan.
The record begins rather demurely with "Submission", five minutes of choral samples and ambient flutter that suggests the sound of a thousand pigeons ruffling their feathers in a catacomb. "Posers", which follows, sets up the idea that will maintain across the rest of the record, with a slowed-down railroad chug, tri-tone strings, and dissonant washes of synthesizer; distant horns sound the mournful call of a failed hunt. Despite the leaden drowsiness, it still moves: There's an infectious sense of groove in its shuffling percussion and echoing finger snaps.
After "Posers", the record's fastest track-- around the same tempo as many of the slow-motion house and disco records being produced by artists like John Talabot, Kassem Mosse, and Blondes; it only feels slower, thanks to its blasted, narcotic production-- things get really torpid. Not just sluggish, but also nasty and mean, degraded and depraved, with more of that death-gurgle bass that led me to compare Stott's last record to Sunn O))). If anything, We Stay Together sounds even more like it could have been released by Southern Lord.
On vinyl, We Stay Together serves a two-for-one purpose: It's meant to be played at 33, but if you speed it up to 45, most of the record's tracks actually become punishing, industrial-strength techno, the kind of sledgehammers associated with Berlin's famously intense Berghain club. Even played like this, though, they don't sound like "normal" techno: they're warped, muted, blown out-- they sound wrong. "Bad Wires" becomes like Surgeon being run through a cubic meter of boiled wool; the clanging "Cracked" comes to sound like several dub techno tracks being played in parallel, with rhythms so disorienting you may wonder if Stott simply sampled a particularly hairy passage from an old DJ mix and slowed it down by 30%.
There's another reason to get this record on vinyl: It sounds way, way better. That might seem odd, given that so much of Stott's sound has to do with using compression, distortion, and other effects to make his music not just strange but even ugly. But, on wax, his swollen low end growls in a way that's almost sensual. (If you must buy digital, pay the extra bucks for the FLAC version; the difference between the high-bitrate version and a compressed MP3 is very real.)
Despite the surface similarities between We Stay Together and Passed Me By, it doesn't feel like Stott is repeating himself. Both records may seem like hellish vultures picking over the carcass of dance music, but every track on the new record yields fresh morsels. Fans of Stott's labelmates Demdike Stare, and all the other goth-n-screw artists out there at the moment, will be happy to gnaw on these bones.


The grime producer's latest LP play simmers down the tension to hint at more meditative things lurking below, trying to blend wild movement with more contemplative ambience.

A Little Light

Slackk’s taken a wild route from grime mixtape archivist to R&S Records signee. It’s a discography that made his influences easily acknowledged—grime dons like Wiley and D Double E on his two-year stint on the Local Action label, or Chicago ghettotech and footwork via his releases under the alias of Patrice & Friends—but makes his next move unpredictable. Anyone willing to work out those influences alongside nods to house and ambient is willing to go anywhere, but getting it all properly focused is harder than letting that eclecticism take you wherever you feel like going.
Like last year’s Aviary EP, A Little Light takes the promise of his 2015 R&S debut EP Backwards Light and simmers down the tension to hint at more meditative things lurking below. But while Aviary was packed with a joyful bombast with earlier nu-grime and ramped up the mood to something giddy without making it feel empty, there’s not much on A Little Light that fits in either mode. The scattered chord progressions and nerve-jostling drum patterns that laced Aviary with all that promise are diluted enough that Slackk’s musical ideas feel in transition. The moments of crushing bass stand out just as often as the moments where more delicate ambience takes over, but they hardly work together.
When they do, it’s because they lay down a strong mood, which it’s pretty hard not to do when you’re oscillating somewhere between Terror Danjah bass and Aphex Twin twitchiness. Two standout cuts, the chunky jaw-clenching dub lurch of “Desert Eagle” and the halogen-and-laser glow of “Deluxe Night Edition,” hit that sweet spot between momentum and reflection by juxtaposing the kind of beats that show you just how to move with melodic hooks. It’s not complicated stuff, but the freedom to let a track either propel you or wash around you is at the core of some of Slackk’s best music.
And splitting those tendencies does a lot to sap the emotion from songs until they’re just a little ambient puzzle to tinker with or a straightforward beat to absentmindedly nod to. Opener “Spring Mist” has its own problems—a crowd-pleasing rattle of post-Neptunes drum pattern is smothered in a sort of weightless digital ocarina of twee, too precious to wild out over and too heavy on the kicks to relax to—but at least it’s a contrast. There’s a twofer in the middle of the album that points out the weaknesses of him just letting a glimmering shard of near-beatless ambient noodling ride (“So Far, the Sea”) or laying down a solid-enough beat without much of a shot to build much further over it than a distracted-sounding synth wriggle. They might stir up some attention, but there’s not much mood or feeling behind it, just a bit of churning forward motion that feels propelled by the passage of time and not much else. As pure instrumentals, a good portion of A Little Light risks feeling like a piece of eye-catching scenery in search of some occupants.
Not that Slackk’s said everything he needs to say on those first two R&S EPs. He still shows new ways for him to manipulate mood and tone without really finding a lazy comfort zone, much less falling into one. Some of the weirder little sketch-interludes he drops in an early hint at weirder ideas. “Maze” looms like some sort of space cathedral and lets off a few inside-out arpeggios and is more melodically staggering than anything else on the record, and the simple loop of groans that makes all 27 seconds of “Sefton Park West” feels simultaneously melancholy and creepy. And even when his sound’s a little more recognizable and easy to compare to his peers, it at least comes with the sense that he’s doing more than escaping into his own headspace. It’s a start—or better yet, a restart.


These Australians have crafted an assured and accomplished album that integrates an array of psych rock references into a powerful whole.

Innerspeaker

From the Vines to Wolfmother to Jet, recent Aussie rock exports have been painfully indebted to arena rock-- quick to recycle a sound but rarely succeeding in revitalizing it. Perth three-piece Tame Impala play with some of the ingredients of arena rock as well but do so in aid of more leftfield, organic sounds and interesting excursions. The result is a cleanly executed and frequently dazzling debut: Innerspeaker is a psychedelia-heavy outing that toys with paisley pop, stoner vibes, and an expansive array of swirling guitars.
On first listen, Innerspeaker provides a lot of dots to connect: There are patches of late-60s American psychedelia, buzzy Motor City riffage, and decades of British pop, ranging from the pastoral pop of the Kinks to the vivid expansiveness of the Verve to the narcotic warmth of the Stone Roses. Frontman Kevin Parker shares an eerie vocal similarity with John Lennon, both in tone and in the way he allows his voice to soar with each melodic turn or rhythmic surge. Though most of the album is a little restrained lyrically, Parker's rapturous phrasing conveys the meaning. Mixed by Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann, each component here is set on an even plane, allowing bass lines and delay-swept guitar bursts to melt into one another, cultivating a uniform feel that's vintage, far-out, and irrepressibly cool.
By all accounts, fixing their gaze so intently on established influences should play as either disingenuous or forced. It's difficult to be so plugged-in to a vintage feel without the music seeming time-capsuled, but the band's vibrance help these songs sound very much alive. Tame Impala aren't taking a purely revisionist approach-- you aren't left with a feeling that their intention was recreate some lost Love demo or an Jimi Hendrix Experience deep cut. If anything, their record points to some of the same roads traveled recently by bands like Animal Collective or Liars, but dials back the eccentricities and difficulty level, leaning on the guitar rather than electronics, and focusing their efforts through more traditional pysch-rock prisms. They aren't as adventurous as their more offbeat peers, but because of their lazer-guided hooks and tangible pleasures, they might wind up reaching more people.
This is very much an album's album-- it sounds best as a piece, where you can get lost in its heady expanse. With the kaleidoscopic stereo-panning on "Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind?" or the maddening stomp on "Bold Arrow of Time", Innerspeaker demonstrates a subtle yet encompassing sense of control, never obstructing the grander motifs while still offering a variety of odd details that guide you back to the album's hooks. There aren't any standout singles on Innerspeaker in the sense that it's unlikely that people are going to be asking you to throw on certain tracks by name (though if in a pinch, "Expectation" and "Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind?" should suffice nicely). But when an album is able to tinker with and update familiar textures and moods without blurring the lines too much or just plain overdoing it, you can believe that psych fans will be asking for it to be thrown on regardless. If you're smart, you'll oblige them.


Slim Twig comes over like an intriguing cultural cross between John Waters, Vincent Price, and Gene Pitney—high-minded, campy, and playful enough to draw us into his surreal world of rockabilly blues and horror. His latest, originally released in a small run on his own imprint and now picked up by DFA, has been framed as a bizarro interpretation of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.

A Hound at the Hem

Slim Twig is a young man from Toronto named Max Turnbull and, among other things, his work makes the case that Bobby Pickett’s "Monster Mash" might well be a cultural high-water mark. He's by no means a novelty act, however; Turnbull takes underground art seriously and literally, releasing spooky, risen-from-the-grave albums like A Hound at the Hem that feature multi-layered, sophisticated pop songs mired in misdirection and haunted-house trickery.
When he was the toast of Toronto a few years ago, Slim Twig was an intriguing cultural cross between John Waters, Vincent Price, and Gene Pitney—high-minded, campy, and playful enough to draw us into his surreal world of rockabilly blues and horror. A precocious theatre kid at the time (his parents are filmmakers Ross Turnbull and Jennifer Hazel; he himself played Ellen Page’s love interest in The Tracey Fragments), he took as much care of his visual persona—a nattily dressed, pompadour-sporting crypt-keeper—as he did his music. However divisive, he was Canada’s great grey hope for an unlikely moment, shielding us from the restless, driving spirt within.
His work has drawn comparisons to wily shape-shifters like David Bowie, Suicide, Nick Cave/The Birthday Party, and David Lynch, all of whom have certainly drawn power from the same hair-raising darkness that feeds Slim Twig. He recorded A Hound at the Hem in 2010 but shelved it in favor of a more palatable album called Sof’ Sike. Apparently Hound’s edgy, mind-altering textures were a bit much for anyone accustomed to the comparably direct, accessible releases he'd dispatched up to this point. For all of his slick grit, nothing seemed to spook him and his business associates as much as the enigmatic A Hound at the Hem, which, after a small self-released run in 2012, is finally reaching a wider audience via DFA.
The record starts so beautifully with "Heavy Splendour"'s soothing string arrangement by Owen Pallett and executed by St. Kitt’s string quartet. But the progression deliberately goes awry. Turnbull’s penchant for dramatically off-kilter musical flourishes and gestures means that an infectious pop progression is often perverted and unsettled; some kind of howling, dissatisfied specter possesses each song’s eerie  soundscape.
A Hound at the Hem has been framed as a call-back to Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier's 1971 masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson, which is a loose but orchestral concept record inspired by Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita. Turnbull’s adaptation of his source material is distorted and murky, barely articulating notions of ill-advised romance before reflecting them in a funhouse mirror. He adopts different voices, calling and responding with himself, as he utters mostly indecipherable lyrics. Rather than firm intent, he primarily conveys foreboding attitude and an outsider’s cold-as-ice swagger. On "Clerical Collar", he sounds like Jim Morrison fronting a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, strains of "L.A. Woman" seeping through with a creepy choir of low and high voices emerging during every chorus.
A Hound at the Hem is a twilight zone of madness and provocation. As the album unfolds, Slim Twig rarely ever sounds like the same guy, each song (hell, each verse) presenting multiple personalities and tones of expression. Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.


With Spoon producer Mike McCarthy behind the boards, this blues-rock band from Dayton, Ohio, aims for a slightly cleaner sound to accompany songs that are a touch more introspective.

The Mountain

Since 2005, Heartless Bastards have been writing traditional blues-rock that they record in a simple and more or less lo-fi manner, which means they bleed authenticity from both ends. So the cleaner and more carefully arranged sound of their latest album, The Mountain, is a new step for them. From the opening title track, it sounds like a confident one. A muffled guitar introduces the simple minor-key progression, but then the whole band kicks in, stretching the sound from pan-and-scan to widescreen, while a soaring electric slide guitar adds to the song's understated majesty. Producer Mike McCarthy has done a fine job of making the band sound clean without being antiseptic, but the focus is very much on the dirty guitars and the voice of frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom. Her voice is distinctive, powerful, and exudes an easy lived-in authority; it's the kind of voice any band playing this kind of straightforward rock would die to have fronting them.
Heartless Bastards seem like their trying to grow and diversify without losing sight of themselves or their sound-- a tricky undertaking since they've made it thus far on bare-bones rock. But even with the added touches, The Mountain still a pretty austere affair. The most ostentatious moments are the record's softer ones. "Wide Awake" is one example, with its reserved strum augmented by mandolins, a martial drumbeat, and Wennerstrom singing an ambitious, vaguely Eastern-sounding vocal melody (Led Zeppelin III seems seems like the band's North star on how to add depth). "Early in the Morning" and "Out at Sea" are more typical plugged-in mid-tempo stompers, the latter having a few overdubs and incidental noise that slyly suggest a psychedelic touch. "Nothing Seems the Same" is that song's simmering cousin, gradually building and receding without ever bursting through, with some of the same production touches.
If anything drags The Mountain down, it's tempo. The title track is immediately deflated by the acoustic campfire strum of the following "Could Be So Happy", though the simple ascending chorus promises that it'll linger in listeners' minds once it's over. . "Hold Your Head High", however, is maudlin world-weary, little-help-from-my-friends tripe that even Wennerstrom's voice, hammering every brassy high note within reach, can't save. "So Quiet" is another folky detour, with a string chart that screams starched collars in comparison to the band's blue ones, and they follow that right up with "Had to Go", more acoustic fun with added banjo and fiddle. Compared with the record's earlier slow songs, "Had to Go"'s languid tempo seems purposeful and patient, with Wennerstrom in total control of the melody-- but most arresting is the open space that they've allowed into the song. The last two songs signal a return to volume and normalcy, but while closing track "Sway" is a perky step sideways from the record's somber tone, "Witchypoo" is not nearly sublime enough to sustain its sluggish pace. With The Mountain, Heartless Bastards have shown that they have the tools and the talent to take at least tentative steps forward into a more ambitious and diverse sound. But it's surprising that they sound so introspective here when they could, and occasionally do, sound world-beating.


On their 12th full-length album, the Swedish metal institution have never sounded more comfortable with their full-on prog transition, which works both for and against them.

Sorceress

Around the time when Opeth were recording their second album Morningrise, they formed Steel, a tribute to the ’80s speed metal they grew up with. They only released one EP, Heavy Metal Machine, and its cheekiness and obvious nostalgic air (that stuff was already ancient in 1996!) did not obscure the fact that Mikael Åkerfeldt is a legit shredder. Dan Swanö, Opeth’s producer at the time and former mastermind of Edge of Sanity, sounded legit charming, like Brian Johnson trying his hand at AOR. Steel felt like dudes just kicking it, which is something you would never say about Opeth. Åkerfeldt has moved away from metal and fully embraced progressive rock with Opeth’s more recent albums, but their 12th full-length, Sorceress brings to mind Steel’s carefree attitude as much as Genesis and King Crimson. They’ve never sounded more comfortable with their full-on prog transition, which works both for and against them.
Heritage signaled their shift into progressive rock five years ago, and 2014’s Pale Communion further solidified the transition, but Opeth is still largely thought of as a progressive metal band. Åkerfeldt's growls don’t appear here, and even though five years have gone by, it still takes some getting used to. It’s one of the challenges of considering modern-day Opeth: for all of their merits, the first time we heard “Demon of the Fall” (one of the few ’90s songs they still play live) is hard to block out. Sorceress’ strongest moments are when the metal creeps back in ever so slightly. Even with the death metal gone, they can’t put away their Deep Purple records. The title track begins with an electric piano boogie that gives way into a chugging rhythm. Chug? On an Opeth record? By restraining the crunch to give space for Åkerfeldt's vocals, it actually works. “Sorceress” acts as a nod to American progressive metal bands who took from Opeth’s more metal moments.
In the dueling organ and guitars of “Chrysalis,” you could be tricked into thinking they’re moving back towards metal for a minute. “Era” recalls Rush’s earlier hard rock days, with Åkerfeldt’s croon more soothing than Geddy Lee’s wail. While he’s no Neal Peart, Martin Axenrot’s business gives that song a metal life while not being explicitly such. Hell, acoustic intro “Persephone” wouldn’t be too out of place on an At the Gates record. Opeth need not cater to those who tuned out after Heritage; still, those glimpses of familiarity account for most of the record’s real highlights.
Opeth’s contrasts between death metal and clean refrains were a hallmark of their sound, but frankly, some of their transitions from death metal to clean refrains were clunky, to say the least. Their new direction has largely solved that issue in terms of inter-song dynamics, but, as with Heritage and Communion, they still struggle with maintaining momentum. Right after “Chrysalis,” “Sorceress 2” and “The Seventh Sojourn” bog the record down. Indulgence is not the crime; Sorceress proves Åkerfeldt has embraced control, and there’s nothing like the 20-minute “Black Rose Immortal” from Morningrise again. But “Sorceress 2” is a pointless acoustic interlude that doesn’t really serve as a continuation of “Sorceress.” It’s adrift, whereas “Sorceress” is assured and steady. “Sojourn” is the bigger offender, with its vaguely Middle Eastern percussion and acoustic guitars. If Opeth took pieces of “Sojourn” apart, they could make some really strong songs out of them—the drums would go great with the crunch of the title track, and the strings might not even so bad if there were some other active force competing against it.
Even more shameful is that they’re followed by “Strange Brew,” the most convincing argument for Opeth abandoning metal. “Sojourn” awkwardly attempted to go psychedelic; “Strange Brew” does it effortlessly. There’s enough guitar flash and bombast characteristic of modern prog bands, yet Åkerfeldt knows how to hold back, cutting in with his somber voice just as he and Fredrik Åkesson start to get hyperactive. The soft piano that leads it off syncs better with “Chrysalis”’ ending, so it’s clear those two tracks work together side by side—it’s as if they forgot to remove all the rough sketches in between. Opeth have gotten better at self-editing with Sorceress; still, their jammier tendencies fail them in the album’s lackadaisical middle, showing they may just be a little too cool. Giving Steel another go just might inspire them to find the right balance of looseness and rigor.


GoldLink’s second album stretches far beyond his home in the DMV. It is a confluence of black music; hip-hop tracing its way back to the universal sounds of Africa.

Diaspora

GoldLink’s 2017 album At What Cost was a monument to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It was a valiant attempt to capture the unwanted (read: gentrified) remnants of a lost city before it changed for good. But it wasn’t bitter about what was lost; it was hopeful about what it found. His second album, Diaspora, stretches outward. It pulls not just from across the music of the many displaced black communities the world over, as you might expect from the title, but follows the tendrils of influence back to Latin America and China. It is daring to follow your most local album with something so international, which just happens to be the best music of his career.
Because this is a GoldLink album, the center of his diaspora is still D.C., and he can’t help but sneak in DMV locals from Gaithersburg (Bibi Bourelly), Capitol Heights (Lil Nei), and Woodbridge (WaveIQ), along with Virginia Beach’s Pusha T. But the album follows throughlines from D.C. to Los Angeles to London, then to Nigeria, closing the gaps between rap, R&B, Afrobeats, reggae fusion, and pop music in the process. GoldLink proudly stands in the middle of a tremendous musical legacy, honoring its many corners and the many people who represent them. “GoldLink,” as he says on the song “Yard,” “is a black work of art.”
As such, Diaspora is first and foremost a confluence of black music; hip-hop tracing its way back to the universal sounds of Africa. The album doesn’t make rap feel global; this isn’t an attempt to unpack the sham “world music” genre. By connecting dots, it makes the world feel smaller. It’s another illustration of how the realm of black music is interconnected. With producers hailing from London, Los Angeles, Ghana, and Kenya, Diaspora is ambitious, expansive yet intimate, dutty wine-worthy, and slick.
As the diaspora converges around GoldLink, he performs a heightened version of his patented stoicism. “Sold weed, sold pills, sold D, sold this, sold that/Look, I don’t wanna talk about it all/Seen fiends, seen death, seen shots, seen this, seen that/Look, I don’t wanna talk about it all,” he raps on “Maniac,” and his verses largely stick to that withholding pattern. There aren’t any metaphors. He isn’t setting up punchlines. It’d be inaccurate to call him a storyteller. He mostly raps in narrative told through epigrams and personal proverbs.
The chronicles, which are all anecdotal, have lessons or tidbits baked into them. “Couple months ago, I was in the city on a date with a single ting/You’d prolly know her, and I never show, and she told me how she get security/But I always tell her, ‘I’m a hood nigga and this famous shit is new to me’,” he raps on “No Lie.” Some info is imparted as exposition; some the listener obtains second hand through dialogue. He’s never quite forthcoming, always concealing something, which is fitting for someone who kept his face hidden through much of his breakthrough. But his raps are bracing, and he is in complete command.
Whether navigating the “Future Bounce” of his debut mixtape, Soulection’s “lo-fi beats to chill to” aesthetic, or the more intensely rhythmic music of the black diaspora, GoldLink nestles so deeply into the groove it’s as if he’s been sucked into a riptide. His flows are so painless they’re almost leisurely. That natural almost easygoing sense can be quite a juxtaposition with his hard knocks raps (“Turned 13, had my first stick/Ride around the city with the stolen whips/Fought niggas ’fore I had a first kiss”). He is a brass tacks rapper whose verses are nearly spartan in their presentations of his ever-changing life (“I done seen so many come, I done seen so many go/Pistol packing, then I started trapping, then I started rapping, then I blowed”), but his cadences are always poised, precise, and fluid. He’s swift when he has some margin but he’s even better in tight spaces, as on “U Say,” where he twirls between the polyrhythms like he’s jumping double dutch. Diaspora is simply further proof that there isn’t any beat he can’t zip his way through.
It’s GoldLink’s ability to seem at home in any space that makes Diaspora so coherent, and so specific to him, despite pulling music from all over. He is the anchor. He is as snug next to Wizkid as he is with Khalid. He has Bibi Bourelly singing in Lingala on a song with British-Nigerian Afro-fusionist Maleek Berry. As “Coke White / Moscow” and “No Lie” rev up to bigger and sleeker second acts, he simply adjusts his default setting like he’s shifting into another gear. On “Rumble,” he is the bridge between his DMV roots and rap’s global impact: He brings together the extremely local Lil Nei and Got7 rapper Jackson Wang, a Hong Kong native working in the K-pop industry. These two wouldn’t be rapping together under any other circumstance. Working that unlikely pairing is undeniable proof of Diaspora’s ambition to harness rap’s power to integrate.


On the vaporwave producer and label boss’ new album, smeary synths and boyband-inspired vocals feel less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.”

Ooh Rap I Ya

What happens when a genre inspired by the hollowness of branding itself becomes a brand? Over the last few years, George Clanton’s 100% Electronica label has carried forward the momentum of a decade of vaporwave, taking the genre offline, launching festivals and merchandise, and minting an overall more consumer-friendly presentation of a sound once confined to the most baffling corridors of the internet. Though he’s remained a constant ringleader, Clanton himself has been relatively quiet in terms of output, only dropping the occasional loose single and a collaborative album with the frontman of 311. As his profile continued to rise, it remained to be seen how he would eventually follow up his invigorating 2018 debut, Slide.
After five years, the questionably titled Ooh Rap I Ya reveals that not much has changed: ’90s big beat drums reign supreme, shoegazey guitars provide some modern polish, and Clanton’s voice is still swinging for Tears for Fears levels of anthemic cheese. Where Slide deftly blended Clanton’s various projects together—melding his smudged electro-pop as Mirror Kisses and more traditionally vaporwave collages as ESPRIT 空想 into one body-thrashing rockstar entity—Ooh Rap I Ya struggles to find new or better ways to make the pieces fit. The longer it goes on, the more its densely smeared synths start to feel confused rather than euphoric.
The songs on Ooh Rap I Ya can be roughly split into two categories, each attempting to unveil a deeper layer to Clanton’s persona. On one hand are songs like “Justify Your Life,” “I Been Young,” and “F.U.M.L.,” which take the charged-up Y2K pop of Slide and refract it through a wearier lens, casting Clanton as a hungover partygoer who’s getting older and coming to terms with past mistakes. The remaining tracks (concentrated in the back half of the album) showcase Clanton the psychedelic soundscaper, favoring his slo-mo production and largely relegating vocals to the background. Each half has its moments and misses, but taken together, they suggest an artist without a particularly strong commitment to either direction.
When Clanton does hit the target, the results are nectar-sweet: “Justify Your Life” cultivates a vintage downbeat haze, its trip-hoppy drums and fretless bassline rolling in like waves. It feels like something you’d find on a VHS compilation of forgotten MTV-era breakup jams (you can practically see the overdone blue filters and piped-in rain). Nostalgia figures heavily into Clanton’s chillwave boyband playbook, and he knows how to have fun with these tropes, even if it’s only skin deep. “I Been Young” is a best-case scenario, its slamming Breakfast Club piano chords conjuring a sense of time passing by—a sentimental slow-rider served with a wink. Some of Clanton’s impressions are better than others though; getting to the song’s arms-in-the-air chorus requires wading through a verse where Clanton hisses in a limp staccato somewhere between Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake, undercutting any emotional catharsis. At a certain point, ironically embracing corniness just circles back to being corny again.
“You Hold the Key and I Found It” kicks off the album’s more instrumental stretch by digging into a deep groove of looping drum breaks and syrupy synths that hit a pleasingly stoned stride. “Vapor King / SubReal” achieves a similar effect, but as the tracks keep coming, the limits of Clanton’s beatmaking toolbox become increasingly apparent. Songs breeze past the five-minute mark without evolving much, and by the fourth time he’s wheeled out a drum sample that sounds like it was pulled from a folder of Screamadelica outtakes, it’s hard not to tune out. This might be for the best, as the album’s final songs begin to incorporate a kind of sing-songy chanting that recalls the sounds of old “world music” dollar-bin fodder. And if there’s some deeper meaning to the gibberish mantra of the title track, Clanton doesn’t illuminate it.
Vaporwave has taken on its share of regrettable baggage over the years, but in spite of its complicated reputation, the genre really did predict a sea change in the way popular music would be created, consumed, and understood in a post-internet world. Clanton has made it his goal to take that legacy into the future, but Ooh Rap I Ya plays it entirely too safe, feeling less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.” This could have been saved by meatier hooks, a more realized emotional arc, or production choices that didn’t feel as if they were well and fully covered by Neon Indian and Washed Out over a decade ago. As is, these tracks are neither heady enough to coast purely on vibes, nor consistently catchy enough to work as pop, leaving one with the impression that Clanton’s strengths might lie more in branding than songwriting.