Chairlift's Moth is a glossy and odd record about being overwhelmed by love and sensation, and it is also the band's most song-for-song consistent release to date.

Moth

Moths seem like an error in evolution. Instead of morphing into the bright symmetry of a butterfly, a caterpillar becomes a dull and monochromatic flicker, flying in meaningless orbits around a light source and sometimes annihilating itself in it. There’s something familiar in this pattern, though; it resembles something as exposed and human as falling in love. "We liked the idea of the moth as a metaphor for vulnerability," Caroline Polachek of Chairlift said in an interview with Pitchfork last year. "There are risks everywhere, but it doesn’t question them."
"Crying in Public," one of the advance singles from the duo’s new album, Moth, is about being so overwhelmed with emotion, with the feeling of falling in love, that the narrator starts crying on the train. "Each autumn leaf and passing breath," Polachek sings. "Each antidote to sudden death." The song captures the near-panicky edge to this feeling, the moment your environment becomes so charged with possibility you find yourself noticing everything: birds, breakdancers, light pouring in through trees. It's too much, and its too-muchness makes you feel small, like an exposed nerve in a vast world. On Moth, Polachek and her bandmate Patrick Wimberly aim to embrace this too-muchness, expanding their sound and opening themselves up, and the result is the indie pop band’s most emotionally generous and consistent effort yet.
"Crying in Public" is the song on Moth that most resembles their earlier work, a kind of flowing and gelatinous synth pop that feels dense and enveloping, the texture of feeling itself. It seems related to the buoyancy of "Bruises," from their debut, or to "I Belong in Your Arms," from 2012’s Something, but while those records described the cellular rush of love, "Crying" describes love’s ability to gently create inner and outer space. There’s also a groove buried in the texture of the song, a kind of irregular flutter at its center, as if Chairlift are deliberately trying to simulate heart arrhythmia.
It’s in this often-fidgety percussion that Moth distinguishes itself from Chairlift’s other records. Sometimes it feels as if the drums were sketched out first and the songs built organically around them. Lead single "Ch-Ching" forms itself explicitly around handclaps alternating with glassy and brittle drums. It’s both animated and oddly inflexible, and the effect is disconcerting, like watching a skeleton learn how to walk. "Show U Off" inherits its groove from Busta Rhymes’ "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" and fills its blank spaces in with nervous post-disco guitar.
Sometimes this instability intensifies their compositions. Closer "No Such Thing as Illusion" feels so empty that it sort of works like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, its pockets of nothing enhancing the something. "Polymorphing" evolves through at least three different arrangements. The horn charts are possibly the most striking feature of the record; saxophones unreel in trembling ribbons or sprout from the songs in abrupt, harmonic blooms. It’s only when Moth loses this tailored sense of groove that it starts to feel shapeless; "Ottawa to Osaka" melts in and out of coherence, and "Unfinished Business" is only motivated by an irregular, clustering snare and Polachek’s vocal, which approaches notes as if they were mapped coordinates.
Sometimes the arrangements verge on fussy; there’s an airless quality to "Romeo," which is both distracting and appropriate, as the song’s about running, exhaling instead of inhaling. Polachek sings from the perspective of Atalanta, an elusive character from Greek mythology, and the drums underpinning the song give it the rhythm of one of Atalanta’s footraces, to which she would challenge her potential suitors in order to avoid marriage. "I’m going to run/ ‘Til you give me a reason to stop/ To fall on my knees," Polachek sings, as if challenging someone to surprise her, as if she’s allowing herself the capacity for surprise.
For all of these tics and irregularities, Moth is overall Chairlift's best and smoothest long-player statement. As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of.


What does it mean to get older in punk? Were the good old days ever that good? Though the titles change, the Pennsylvania band’s song remains the same.

Hello Exile

The Menzingers write about basically one thing, though contrary to this tweet, it’s not the waitress outside the all-night diner. The seven-year span from their second LP Chamberlain Waits to 2017’s After the Party is a longitudinal study of men in their 20s struggling to process the passage of time, drinking away the tragicomic pain of reliving the good ol’ days that never happened. Imagine “Glory Days” if it was just the third verse, the high-school jocks and heartbreakers replaced by guys in dumpy vans and stalled relationships wishing they committed themselves to something more substantial—or as “House on Fire” put it, “waiting for your life to start, then you die.” After the Party occasionally gave the impression that the Menzingers recognized this form of nostalgia as an artistic dead end, posing “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?” as an existential crisis. Instead, Hello Exile reframes it as a question with a single, obvious answer: They’re gonna go right back to making Menzingers songs about getting older.
“How do I steer my early 30s/Before I shipwreck, before I’m 40,” Greg Barnett announces at the outset, and despite the parallels to the aforementioned line from After the Party opener “Tellin’ Lies,” the intention is different—there’s an unexpected optimism amidst the pervasive societal turmoil of “America (You’re Freaking Me Out),” a willingness to see a wasted 20s as a dry run for responsible adulthood instead of a sunk cost or an endlessly renewable resource for self-loathing. Like most bands in their position, Menzingers commit to living in the moment by proclaiming “we do politics now.” While the title of “Strawberry Mansion” would usually promise yet another hardscrabble account of drinking Keystone Light in the Keystone State, this time, the Menzingers describe the impending environmental apocalypse in the same language as “Born to Run” (“Set a course for the sun/To bittersweet oblivion”).
And while none of Barnett’s insights on “America (You’re Freaking Me Out)” are remotely original—“What kind of monsters did our parents vote for?”; “Cranks for Christians in powerful positions/I’ve always felt like all their pomp and circumstance is just cover for the devil to dance”; “Can’t you recognize truth from clever lies?”— they paint a sympathetic and empathetic portrait. Menzingers’ narrators aren’t radicals, and neither are the Menzingers; their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.
Since they perfected their craft with On the Impossible Past, the boundary between Menzingers songs and parodic “Menzingers songs” has all but disappeared, undermining their heartfelt honesty with bingo cards of burly, sensitive-rock-guy tropes seen through Pabst-colored lenses. “I was getting fucked up with a high school friend/Wondering where all the good times went”; “I know what you’re thinking but I can’t stop drinking”; those used to be the subtexts of Menzingers songs, but now they’re choruses on songs literally called “High School Friend” and “I Can’t Stop Drinking.” The plot to “Anna” is quintessential “Menzingers”—a guy starts to realize his girlfriend’s outgrowing him (“It’s like our studio apartment is just a place to keep your stuff”) and can’t summon the confidence to make up the ground between them. Instead, he begs her “please come back to Philadelphia” so they can relive their first days living together, dancing in the kitchen and “drinking cheap red wine.”
As it is in many Menzingers songs (scare quotes or otherwise), “cheap” is an important qualifier, one that cuts against Anna’s job promotion and newfound upward mobility. While people might not ever face abject poverty in a Menzingers song, they’re always one squandered paycheck or shitty tour away from couch-surfing for the next year. But throughout Hello Exile, “cheap” ends up exposing a poverty of new ideas: Barnett wants to rekindle a relationship on “Portland” with “cheap Champagne and roses”; he swears this “cheap motel” is temporary on “Strain Your Memory,” even though you’ll find him plastered off “cheap beer” in “I Can’t Stop Drinking,” and when everyone comes together in a “Farewell Youth,” they’re “drinking the cheap stuff.” “Farewell youth, I hardly got to know you,” Barnett sings, but even though they get older, “Menzingers songs” remain the same.

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The guitarist continues his 2010s hot streak with some of the brightest, scrappiest music he’s ever made as a solo artist.

Francis Trouble

Albert Hammond Jr. has spent the last half-decade making the most of a second chance. After clawing his way back from the cocaine, heroin, and ketamine habits that nearly cost him his life, the Strokes guitarist has churned out the most focused music of his solo career in 2013’s AHJ EP and his 2015 follow-up, Momentary Masters. His new full-length, Francis Trouble, was inspired by a lost twin who died in a miscarriage while Hammond continued to grow in utero. Reflecting on this family story led him to imagine the titular Francis, an energetic alter ego bearing the spirit of the sibling he never knew. It’s a creative rebirth that aligns with Hammond’s own new lease on life.
It also sounds like a recipe for music that’s somber, if not a little ponderous, and yet Francis Trouble extends Hammond’s recent hot streak: It’s some of the brightest and scrappiest music he’s ever made. You can hear his background as a rhythm guitarist in the album’s arrangements. Beats are uniformly brisk; every riff sounds as clean and crisp as a pressed and fitted button-down. Even the solo on “Set to Attack,” the album’s one moment of guitar heroism, stays orderly until its waning seconds.
Hammond’s writing is sticky enough to override any attempt to plumb the album’s depths for meaning. It’s hard to keep an ear out for oblique references to identity crises or other potential subtexts when melodic guitar lines are being unfurled every few seconds. (Hammond himself has discouraged any sort of close reading in a press release: “What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analyzed or taken too seriously.” Noted!) While he’s been writing power-pop stunners like this album’s “Far Away Truths” and “Strangers” for well over a decade, he spends a good chunk of Francis Trouble tip-toeing out of that well-defined comfort zone. “Muted Beatings” strikes a delicate note without giving up any of its nervous energy, and the ominous “Tea for Two” includes an extended passage that sounds like Hammond’s take on Destroyer’s Kaputt. After hearing “ScreaMER,” I dreamed about hearing him on a double bill with the word-drunk gentlemen of Parquet Courts.
Tapping into the character of Francis has unlocked a new degree of confidence in Hammond’s singing, and his vocals throughout these songs are surprisingly varied. He jumps from the classic cool of “Far Away Truths” to the skittish gasping of “Muted Beatings” without pause, where he once might have spent an entire album in the former mode. His impassioned howling on “Tea for Two” creates an urgency that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and he chews on vague-but-stylish kiss-offs like “Tell all your friends/Why we burn at both ends.” Not every choice makes sense: Hammond’s subdued approach doesn’t suit the Thin Lizzy-isms of “Stop and Go,” and he wastes the emotive pre-chorus of “Strangers”—one of the few moments on the album that feels explicitly linked to the loss behind its title—with a lunk-headed chorus and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”-style vocal affectations. Yet he has better luck elsewhere, and Francis Trouble often rings with a happy-go-lucky spirit and easy tunefulness that Wings-era Paul McCartney would have appreciated.
When Hammond’s solo career began with Yours to Keep in 2006, it seemed like little more than a cute diversion from his role in one of the decade's most important rock bands. It was hard to imagine a world in which you could think about Hammond without thinking about the Strokes. Since then, that group has become yet another bloated blockbuster franchise, coming together for a new release every few years even though it doesn’t seem like anyone involved particularly wants to be there. Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay Hammond is that he’s done enough good work to outrun the shadow of the riffs he laid down on Is This It and Room on Fire. And if your candle is still burning for the band that made “Last Nite” and “Under Control,” why waste your time waiting for another Comedown Machine when Francis Trouble—tight, affable, and unpretentious—is ready and waiting?


After a run of bad luck and tragedy, Rogue Wave reconvene for their second post-Sub Pop album.

Permalight

Do you know what it's like to have a slipped disc in your neck? I do, and if it weren't for the spinal tap and blood patch procedures that followed, it would probably be the most painful experience in my life. Rogue Wave singer/guitarist Zach Rogue suffered two slipped discs in his neck, essentially rendering him paralyzed for a span of months. When his condition improved and the songwriting muse began to call again, like many who've been laid up for a significant time, it seems like he just wanted his life back: Rogue made Permalight, the most active, physical, and fun album the Oakland band has ever released.
Rogue Wave have two solid albums to their name (Out of the Shadow, Descended Like Vultures), but both used distorted guitars for texture more than visceral force, and had no dance-related influence unless you count playing in waltz time. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, their new drive can be awkward. Even more unfortunately, it's most notable on what should be their catchiest songs. "Good Morning (The Future)" seems to think the future is IDM + fey indie songwriting à la the Postal Service. (Hey, it worked for Owl City.) Both "Good Morning" and the title track are hooky, but both come off like pep talks when they hope to seem like ecstatic roars. The chintzy vocal effects aim tobe inspired production touches; instead, they feel hastily tacked on, almost arbitrary.
Otherwise, Rogue Wave succeed in making their most aggressive album. That's all relative, granted, as hinted at by cautiously aggressive titles like "We Will Make a Song Destroy", "Per Anger", and "Solitary Gun". But due to curiously anemic and trebly production, the guitars comes across thin and brittle-- a band bringing knives to a gunfight. "Per Anger" fares best because its jangle doesn't stray far from Rogue Wave's area of expertise, and "Solitary Gun" has a sturdy melody. Elsewhere, "Right With You" and "We Will Make a Song Destroy" try the Pixies' whisper/scream dichotomy but end up somewhere between R.E.M.'s Green (if we're being generous) and Better Than Ezra's angsty Friction, Baby phase (if we're being realistic).
Rogue Wave are tough to root against, considering they've experienced a run of terrible luck that could have them drinking the Wrens under the table: their "Lake Michigan" used in ill-fated Zune commercials, a split from Sub Pop records despite an astonishing track record with TV music coordinators (four songs on "The O.C." alone!), Pat Spurgeon's debilitating kidney problems, and the departure and, later, shocking death of bassist Evan Farrell. You can't blame them for not dwelling on any of that, but now that Rogue's back in good health, here's hoping his band soon does the same.


Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at the UK band Sade—from quiet storm mainstays to defining a generational vibe—with new reviews of four of their records.

Promise

High gloss, high glam, and high production-value defined the majority of pop music coming out of the UK in the mid-’80s. Synth and technopop traveled across the pond to take over U.S. airwaves and MTV programming blocks, while Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie, and Tina Turner were redefining the idea of Black pop-stardom.
Through the excess, the London band Sade swerved outside the lane with their anti-pop debut, 1984’s Diamond Life. The cosmopolitan collection of sounds and tales from a life far sexier and more interesting than the listener’s changed music across genres, both ushering in sophisti-pop and pushing urban radio’s quiet storm format to a peak rivaling adult contemporary.
Promise, from 1985, is the ideal second album, firmly establishing the Sade template without retreading the same material of the band’s debut. The album feels like a volume in a series, as does each subsequent addition to Sade’s catalog. I was nine years old when the album dropped, and my parents, part of the young Black middle-class sophisticate set that helped break Sade stateside, kept Promise and Diamond Life in rotation together as though the two were one long extended play. I’ve grown into the music—over the years, Sade has soundtracked my falling in love, recovering from love, and remembering lost love. When my friends became fans with 1992’s Love Deluxe, I was already a deep devotee. To date, Promise is the album that most resonates with me top to bottom.
Promise is lush and unhurried, reclining somewhere between jazz, Brazilian pop, and soul. Multiple articles and reviews from the time of release leaned on the same descriptor for the singer, the band, and the music: “cool.” It’s mood music, at the purest definition: Stuart Matthewman’s sax, Andrew Hale’s keys, and Paul Spencer Denman’s masterful bass envelope listeners, transport them. The live recordings were a departure from the heavily programmed production of the era, and the sparse elegance that some found—and still find—too loungy is one of the primary factors in Sade’s sound and catalog aging beautifully.
The lead single, “The Sweetest Taboo,” was a quick hit. It was likely chosen to kick off the project because it’s the most radio-friendly offering—it could have been tailor-made just for the late-night “quiet storm” radio format. The sexy midtempo was infectious to me even when I was 9 years old doodling the lyrics in English class—lyrics I didn’t completely understand in context—after hearing the song on repeat around the house and in my parents’ car. The percussion loop, Adu’s breathy vocals, the horn showcase in the bridge; “The Sweetest Taboo” is an accessible and efficient sample of all the best elements of Sade. But Promise’s opener, “Is It a Crime,” is Sweetback’s (the name Matthewman, Hale, and Denman perform under as a trio) showcase. This, for me, is the definitive Sade song; for six minutes and 21 seconds, we’re on a ride with Hammond organs and djembes with Adu pleading over big band-style crescendos. She describes her love as one that “dives and jumps and ripples like the deepest ocean,” and that’s what the song does, waves of sax and piano cresting and breaking over Adu’s insistent declaration of love.
“Is It a Crime” is reason enough in itself to laud Promise as a masterwork, but the LP boasts a tighter and more confident Sade unit than Diamond Life, with more intentional story-telling and longer compositions. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts: You can wrap yourself up in the music and Adu’s soft-touch tone, recall or lament life and love through the lyrics, or fully immerse yourself with both. Lyrically, Promise is a collection of short stories exploring the varied stages of love and relationships; some autobiographical to Adu, who co-wrote every song on the album but one.
While Promise—and Sade’s music in general—is often categorized as sexy or relaxing, the smooth ease of Adu’s vocals over the mellow instrumentation belies the melancholy in most of the album cuts. “War of the Hearts” frames the end of a relationship as a standoff; two people exhausted from hurting each other, but too stubborn to call the cease-fire that would end it. There’s “Jezebel,” the deceptively simple story of a sex worker, told in innuendos, “Jezebel, what a belle/Looks like a princess in her new dress/How did you get that?/Do you really want to know? she said.” Even though the lyrics are about Jezebel’s projected determination and control, the track is an example of Adu’s almost halting vocals conveying the emotion and backstory typically attributed to bigger voices.
“Tar Baby,” one of the final tracks on the album and seemingly inspired by her own biracial background, feels under-examined now. Adu has apparently never talked about this song—it’s title heavy with suggestion, not yet considered a slur, but still problematic enough to be intentional during its release in 1985. It starts tentatively—the story of a shameful, unexpected pregnancy. But then it turns in tempo and lyric to a celebration of the undeniable love and joy of a child. The album ends with a sad smile, “Maureen,” an uptempo tribute to a friend Adu lost a few years before recording. Sade remains cheerful even in its refrain: “Never gonna see you again/And you’ll never meet my new friends.”
Promise was the chaser to Diamond Life’s shot; one that positioned Sade for the elusive legend status she and the band have achieved today. They didn’t record Diamond Life with U.S. stardom in mind; that was a trial run. Promise was the commitment—a declaration of voice, sound, and style that was then unlike anything else in the mainstream sphere. Rather than a departure or different direction from the first album, Promise simply executes on a higher level, and the repeated success provided the leverage for the group to continue to follow their own formula, in their own time.
The quiet storm era encompassed everything from straight down the middle R&B (Luther Vandross), to classic soul, to jazzy soul (Anita Baker), to British imports (along with Sade, soul band Simply Red and synth-pop group Art of Noise were popular with the after-dark format). It wouldn’t have been unusual for “The Sweetest Taboo” to follow gospel-bred singer Shirley Murdock’s powerfully delivered “As We Lay,” or precede newcomer Whitney Houston’s glossy and gorgeous “Saving All My Love for You.” But I never needed Sade, the singer, to give me more vocally; I didn’t need the lyrics to go deeper. “It’s all simple and unpretentious, and that’s what music is to me,” Adu shared with Rolling Stone in a rare interview in 1985. “It should take you somewhere and move you in some way, and that’s what I want our songs to do.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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A versatile dandy, Jidenna tries on many different musical styles with his debut album—but all that changing quickly grows tiresome.

The Chief

Jidenna cut a memorable figure when he emerged in 2015, looking like a roguish extra from a cancelled period drama: natty three-piece suit, slim cane with gilded accents, shiny cufflinks. He proved to be a shrewd repackager on “Classic Man,” which pulled from DJ Mustard’s minimalist bounce and made it No. 22 on the Hot 100. But in his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.
You might have seen this coming: Jidenna has spent the past two years releasing a series of singles with the apparent goal of appearing on as many Spotify playlists as possible. “Long Live the Chief,” carried by a squeaky, nails-on-the-chalkboard synth tone, was a distant descendant of Jeru the Damaja’s 1993 boom-bap classic “Come Clean;” “Chief Don’t Run” paired bluster with a beat that sounded like a more ornate version of Tyga’s “Rack City;” and “Little Bit More” seemed built for the express purpose of giving DJs something to play after Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”
It turns out these singles offered just a sample of Jidenna’s talents—this is a man with a suit for every occasion. “Trampoline” channels festive brass, while “Bambi” attempts an audacious combination of post-war crooning and of-the-moment drum programming. There’s hammy singing with piano (or strings), more strains of pop-hip-hop, you name it, and the 31-year-old stacks a jumble of imagery on this changing bedrock. He loves animal metaphors—“A lion don't ever lose sleep when it comes to sheep” or “shit’s getting wild—safari!”—and drawing from a well worn selection of cultural titans: Frank Sinatra and the Dalai Lama, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, James Bond (“He’s a Roger Moore nigger/I’m a Sean Connery”).
Between all the beasts of prey and Madame Tussauds-worthy famous figures, Jidenna also alludes to police violence and racial inequality, and these moments tend to be his sharpest. “They’ll shoot you down without warning,” he laments on “Helicopters,” displaying the hoarsest—and strongest—part of his voice. The most potent song on The Chief comes second to last: “White Niggas” imagines a white family that is struggling with addiction to prescription drugs and facing the same sort of systematic police oppression that afflicts black communities. It’s a simple premise with a big pay-off.
Jidenna tries on styles and allusions, but he doesn’t always fill them out or imbue them with personality. At a time when many rappers shift tone from syllable to syllable, you’ll find little of that excitement on The Chief. He often delivers rapped lines conversationally and sings cleanly, but neither register has much character. Given this, his turn to the dancefloor on “Little Bit More” represents a canny understanding of his strengths. In the business of making immensely popular songs for warm-weather events, the vocals are meant to be smooth—any sort of burrs represent an impediment to frictionless forward locomotion. Here, where anonymity is prized, Jidenna sounds most comfortable.


Lou Barlow's 1987 home-recorded indie folk cassette album is re-released yet again in a variety of formats with an hour of bonus material, and once again under the original Sentridoh name.

Weed Forestin'

In 1986 and 1987, a young dude in Massachusetts played bass in a band that was making some noise in independent music circles. And while his position was enviable for someone of his age (he turned 21 during this stretch), he was already feeling some insecurity about his role in the group. The band was called Dinosaur, and they were led by a savant guitarist and songwriter named J Mascis; the bassist was a kid named Lou Barlow who had more to say musically than this band would allow him. And so, building on the weird acoustic song called "Poledo" that he'd been allowed on the band's second album, You're Living All Over Me, he began recording at home in earnest. Where Dinosaur were known for their blown-out guitar energy, Barlow's solo project, which he called Sentriodoh, was quiet, a conversation spoken in a whisper. Here and there, his friend Eric Gaffney helped out on percussion, but the focus on these early recordings was squarely on Barlow's voice, his brief tunes, and the steady strumming of his guitar and ukulele. He put out a Sentridoh cassette in 1987 in a tiny run and called it Weed Forestin'.
As luck would have it, Barlow had the perfect voice-- chesty and reasonably deep but always on pitch-- and songwriting style for this kind of music. He sounded like someone who'd lived a while and seen some things even though he really hadn't, but his naivety and inexperience turned out to be an advantage. Performing his songs for his four-track, he sounded utterly alone, and the tunes took on a diaristic feel. He sang about being lonely and jerking off and feeling unloved, but he also had a sense of humor and was able to laugh at himself. Many of the songs were just sketches-- there were 23 of them in 45 minutes-- but they never felt incomplete, exactly. It was more that, when Barlow had said what needed to be said and introduced his melodic or lyrical idea, he was cool with just stopping and moving on to something else. This music was more about process than resolution.
Barlow now brings the original vision of Weed Forestin' back into print. It's an album with a strange release history. After those initial cassettes, which were issued in two editions as Barlow added more songs to them, the album was eventually reissued by Homestead on vinyl. By then, however, they came out under the name Sebadoh, the one used by Barlow when in full collaboration with Gaffney (he'd continue to release solo material as Sentridoh). Eventually, Weed Forestin' was combined with an edited version of its Sebadoh follow-up, The Freed Man, and was released on CD in 1990 as The Freed Weed. I'm going to guess that this is the version through which almost everyone who heard these songs in the 90s first encountered them (including yours truly). But this set brings Weed Forestin' back to its initial form, under the Sentridoh name. It comes in multiple editions, including deluxe vinyl (I worked from mp3 promos for this review), and comes with an hour of bonus material called Child of the Apocalypse, which adds early versions, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
It's worth asking whether a 25-year-old album of home-recorded indie folk is worth reissuing at all. This is, in one respect, music very much of its time, when small-run print zines were the only source of information about this low-key and obscure music, and the independent scene was still very much in the underground. Does Weed Forestin' have anything special to say in 2012 that isn't being said by the thousands of home-recording kids currently on the cusp of turning 21?
It's not an easy question to answer, and, since I encountered this music in the 90s and it opened my ears to a new way of listening to and thinking about music, I may not be the right person to ask. But to my ears, Weed Forestin' holds up very well, and represents a sort of ideal for what a home-recorded singer-songwriter record might be. For one, there's the sheer tunefulness of Barlow's songwriting. Even though he was writing fragments, songs like "New Worship", "Gate to Hell", and "Brand New Love" are filled with fresh melodic turns you don't quite expect and chord changes that lodge in your brain (later covers of some of these tunes would bear out their strength as compositions). Hearing this stuff at the time, Barlow came over like a suburban Nick Drake remaking Pink Moon in his bedroom (which made even more sense when Sebadoh eventually covered "Pink Moon" on Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock). And Weed Forestin' could also be seen as a young dude's version of Joni Mitchell's Blue, another record Barlow came to admire, talking about self-doubt and his place in the world around him and in the simplest and most direct terms.
And the structure of Weed Forestin' elevates it further. It's sequenced to flow, with garbled tape pieces, swells of sampled symphonic music, and even a snippet of Eric Burdon and the Animals' "Sky Pilot" to keep it moving along. It works an appealing edge between a collage and a proper album, and has the feel of a mixtape. Part of the allure of home recording of this kind, which continues to this day, is the blurring of the lines between listening to music and making it. Barlow arranged everything to give it a sense of context that made the completed project feel whole.
All of which explains why the copious bonus material is even more for-fans-only than is typical for this kind of release. We're talking about extras here, for a 23-song album of bits and pieces. And since the assembly of Weed Forestin' proper feels anything but random, the dump of additional material doesn't add a whole lot. There are reasonably interesting tape collages and instrumental and alternate versions of some of the album's better-known songs, but they're not the sort of thing anyone but the most dedicated fans would return to. I'm glad they exist and are available, and it makes perfect sense to include them here, but Weed Forestin' on its own is more than enough.
The first question people ask with lo-fi is whether it's a necessity or an aesthetic choice. For every artist saying, "If I could afford a real studio, I'd use one," there's another talking about the warmth and intimacy of the four-track cassette (or, more recently, the cheap microphone, cracked recording software, and reasonably expensive computer). People who've no choice but to record on inexpensive equipment carry with them an air of purity: They're presumably poor artists who, for one reason or another, are not given access to the means of production (think Daniel Johnston bouncing between dictaphone cassette machines in his brother's garage). Whereas producers making lo-fi by choice aestheticize the the warp, the break, and the hiss. Since we know that cheap recordings can mask mistakes, a certain amount of skepticism for those in the latter group is natural and healthy. But you're eventually confronted with a piece of music that either does something for you or doesn't. For me, modest as it is, Weed Forestin' still works wonders.


The Congolese American songwriter and guitarist’s debut EP winds in circles, tracing vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires.

Swim Team EP

Christelle Bofale plays the sort of guitar chords you could swim in. The Congolese American songwriter grew up immersed in the sounds of soukous, a rumba-inspired genre of dance music from the Congo. She first started writing songs on her father’s guitar when she was 13 years old. Now 22 and living in Austin, she uses her instrument to trace vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires. In its sumptuousness and delicacy, her debut EP Swim Team calls back to the way the Antlers float guitar lines through foggy air, or the ribboned arpeggios on Frank Ocean’s “Ivy.”
There are songs on Swim Team that soothe, letting the ear bathe in a warm glow even as Bofale describes intense pain. “I built a home for you/You tore it up,” she sings on “Love Lived Here Once,” her voice ringing through a sea of minor chords. The EP’s centerpiece “U Ouchea” grows slowly over seven and a half minutes, each new refrain bolstered by tighter, denser guitar lines. “I’m glowing with fear/I’m pregnant with fear/I’ve gotta get out of here,” Bofale sings, using the image of pregnancy to describe the toxicity that secretly attends so many romantic partnerships. A seemingly happy relationship can quietly harbor abuse; an externally tragic breakup can actually be a story of escape.
Swim Team treads the murky waters of violence disguised as love, and all the weird feelings that can emerge with such a relationship's destruction. “Origami Dreams,” the most straightforward pop-rock song, cruises along on a beat full of momentum and excitement. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry up,” Bofale sings at the chorus, as if impelling herself to get loose from all the history that’s weighing her down. She punctuates the refrain with a chain of notes on guitar that seem to point at some gleaming future, a place of calm and respite she's urging herself toward.
Healing from trauma generally isn’t a linear process. You don’t wake up a little better every day; some days you coil around yourself and collapse back into the sludge you're trying to escape. Bofale’s songs also wind in circles, reaching for peace and acceptance and then shrinking back into harsh reality. The way she plays guitar, layering chords on top of each other and sequencing them so they never quite seem to resolve, allows more than enough room for the complexity of her lyrics. She ends the record by repeating the words, “I am lost out here,” voice rising to a timbre that hangs between despair and thrill. She may be lost, but she is out here and not in there. In there, there's only suffocation. Out here, there are places she can go.


With a solo album of playfully retro punk songs, the Against Me! singer lets her hair down but never loses sight of the stakes.

Hole in My Head

It’s 2024, and the time for trans rage is nigh. Enter Laura Jane Grace. Since coming out a dozen years ago in Rolling Stone, followed by 2014’s blistering Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace has affirmed her place as a clarion of righteous anger, unwilling to tamp down a voice she can use against the world’s ills. On Hole in My Head, her second solo album, Grace wields this voice with precision-blade intensity, able to rage, mourn, and find respite in equal measure.
In a tidy 26 minutes, Hole in My Head weaves through the stripped-down style Grace explored on 2020’s Stay Alive and louder songs more akin to her work with Against Me!. None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each. The title track opens the record with a statement of purpose that nods to the singer’s facial feminization surgery, refusing to numb the world’s intensity as she yelps, “You could learn to feel less/That would be a real bore.” On “Dysphoria Hoodie,” Grace retreats into her most beloved protective armor, a worn-out sweatshirt that’s been around for decades. Though the song includes some of the album’s clunkier lyrics (“When it says Adidas on my chest/All day long I dream of sex”), Grace and her guitar amplify one another, sounding as strident as anything she could make with a band.
Where Stay Alive spoke to lockdown-induced isolation, these songs capture an enthusiastic, head-nodding euphoria that represents some of the most playful music Grace has ever made. “Birds Talk Too” rides a mid-tempo garage-rock groove as a stoned Grace imagines feathered friends “just having a good laugh” and jokes, “They don’t play Red Hot Chili Peppers in places like this!” The blown-out guitars on “Punk Rock in Basements” invite her to relive the ego-dissolving experience of being surrounded by a sweaty crowd: “Don’t it make you wonder if you’re following or leading?” she asks.
Hole in My Head is hardly a protest record. At its most easygoing, you hear Grace quieting the dysphoria and building the cozy hermit’s nest she conjures on “Tacos & Toast,” an acoustic ode to sipping coffee, getting high, and leaving unwanted baggage behind. But in today’s climate, Grace and other high-visibility trans people always draw the spotlight. There’s a responsibility there, one that Grace deftly cradles on “Cuffing Season,” the album’s centerpiece. An acoustic guitar rubber-bands around her voice, the chords tensing and then loosening. That voice, one that she’s refused to soften after coming out, always running the risk of transphobic backlash, rises and falls around some of her finest lyrics. “I wanna ghost ride the whip dysphoric and disassociated,” she snaps, bitterness in each note. By the time she sings, “You don’t have to like the truth to know it’s worth the cost,” the stakes are obvious: Whatever hell we might be hurtling toward, far worse is the misery of denying our responsibility to this life.


The 68-year-old guitar virtuoso compiled this understated set of solo recordings from a forgotten folder during downtime on tour. These casual experiments offer a fascinating peek into his creative mind.

Dream Box

First popularized by Chicago jazz singer Judy Roberts and recently resurrected on a compilation of obscure yacht-rock gems, Russ Long’s 1982 composition “Never Was Love” is a fascinating document of its time: as catchy and evocative as anything on Silk Degrees but played with a sophistication that suggests a smoky after-hours club as much as a crowded disco. Hearing these kinds of lost classics tends to invite a litany of questions: What happened to the mysterious figure behind its heartbroken words? What kept its songwriter from catching on beyond their regional scene?
Or if you’re Pat Metheny, you might ask: What would this sound like stripped down to just two sad, solitary electric guitars? The 68-year-old virtuoso’s rendition is a highlight on Dream Box, an understated set of new solo recordings that he compiled during downtime on tour buses and in hotel rooms around the world. On the road last year, Metheny sorted through a folder on his computer where he had stored these casual, off-hours experiments: cover songs, jazz standards, and new melodies captured as soon as they occurred to him. In the liner notes, Metheny describes the songs as “moments in time” more than proper compositions. “I have almost no memory of having recorded most of them,” he admits. “They just kind of showed up.”
For an artist whose name has become synonymous with sleek, smooth hyper-technicality—your guitar teacher’s favorite guitarist—Metheny remains underrated for his unending drive to experiment and challenge himself. While his feathery style on the fretboard remains as distinctive as his robust and permanently windswept mane, no two of his records involve quite the same approach, whether that means finding new collaborators, new instrumentation, or on releases like Dream Box, new ways to channel his creative process.
Like 1994’s Thurston Moore-approved noise excursion Zero Tolerance for Silence and 2003’s mournful, acoustic set One Quiet Night, Dream Box is the type of album Metheny makes when he doesn’t realize he’s making an album. Accordingly it drifts, retreats, and grounds itself mostly with negative space. Many of the songs feature just one guitar part, which he then accentuates with an overdubbed, improvised accompaniment. Favoring minor keys and loose sketches of melody, Metheny embraces the scattered, jetlagged genesis. This is music made for late nights and bleary eyes, wistful and half-awake.
The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting. After an introduction of electric guitar against chiming, slightly dissonant acoustic chords, the gorgeous “Ole & Gard” swiftly finds its feet and cycles through various settings to return to a recurring bluesy refrain. “From the Mountains” is more formless but just as memorable, navigating its eight-minute runtime with a dreamy sense of focus: The effect is like watching the sun rise over an unfamiliar city, new contours filling in as the light starts to spread.
The cover choices are equally distinctive, from his misty take on the bossa-nova standard “Morning of the Carnival” to the vinyl-only rendition of Miles Davis and Bill Evans’ classic “Blue in Green.” And then there’s “Never Was Love,” a moody, propulsive interpretation that best encapsulates the album’s inspiration. Metheny has covered the song once before, contributing it to a compilation released after Russ Long’s death in 2006. The two share a home state of Missouri and played in a group together early in Metheny’s career, before their paths verged dramatically. One late night on the road, he might have been thinking about the strange journey he has taken, from a young prodigy accompanying Joni Mitchell to the closest thing jazz guitar has to an arena rock star all the way up to the present day, when he got to his hotel room, put on his headphones, listened back to some demos, and heard the beginnings of a story he had yet to tell.


The debut album from the rising country artist aspires for universality but fares best when highlighting her singular voice and defiance of the status quo.

Remember Her Name

Country singer Mickey Guyton has billed her debut as a closing chapter rather than an introduction: “Remember Her Name is a culmination of the last 10 years of my life in Nashville,” she explained. This is a crucial distinction for the rising songwriter, who has spent the past decade in a sort of Music Row purgatory. While it’s common for aspiring country artists to find their careers stalled out on the road to widespread recognition, Guyton has faced a disproportionately long time in limbo as a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white industry. Though she signed to Universal in 2011 and released a minor hit in 2015’s “Better Than You Left Me,” it took another five years before Guyton would even have the chance to record a proper full-length.
The timing of Guyton’s rise within the country music mainstream during the past year-and-a-half isn’t necessarily a coincidence. Last summer’s George Floyd protests were a rude awakening for the industry, highlighting its long history of racial exclusion just as the genre had been enjoying several years of uninterrupted pop and hip-hop crossover success. In the midst of Nashville’s fumbling attempts at course correction, Guyton appeared onstage at the ACM Awards in September 2020 to sing “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?,” a striking ballad that speaks plainly to the lack of opportunities for Black girls and women in the U.S. It was a landmark moment, even if Guyton has long been skeptical of these kinds of opportunities: “I look back in my career, and I was a token in so many different ways,” she told the New Yorker this year, when asked about the performance. “I remember there would be corporate events where—in order to make the company look good—who did they have front and center as one of the artists they’re excited about?”
Guyton’s unique ability to speak to the injustices she has faced, both in and outside the industry, informs many of Remember Her Name’s strongest moments. “My daddy worked day and night/For an old house and a used car,” she sings on “Black Like Me.” “Just to live that good life/It shouldn’t be twice as hard.” Her voice, which carries a hint of her Texas upbringing, has the same unwavering warmth of hitmakers like Carrie Underwood, bringing power and patience to songs that are likely to make country’s old guard bristle. On “Do You Really Wanna Know,” she sings about therapy, recovering from alcoholism, and learning to resent small-talk niceties. “If I tell you the truth, will your heart be big enough to hold it?” she asks, knowing that even in a genre that prides itself on plainspoken honesty, her perspective could present a barrier to entry.
Despite Guyton’s singular point of view, Remember Her Name strives for universality, and the more upbeat moments play with the same genre conventions that once ensnared her. “Rosé” is a winking subversion of the classic beer-and-whiskey country drinking tune—“You can call it what you want,” she admits in the chorus, “but everybody loves a good cliché”—while “Smoke,” produced by pre-1989 Taylor Swift collaborator Nathan Chapman, is a rare success in the marriage of trap beats with banjo and pedal steel. Guyton partners with Chapman again for the triumphant “Higher,” where the pop-rock bravado that bolstered early Swift songs like “Sparks Fly” and “Fearless” now serves as a pedestal for Guyton and a full gospel choir. It’s pure stadium-concert serotonin, destined to become a staple at her live shows.
Remember Her Name falters when it sticks to the status quo—namely, the bland country-pop production that has come to dominate radio airwaves. The cosmic guitar plucks and vaporous piano chords of the title track are meant to serve as an inspirational opener, but the abstract lyrics on overcoming adversity could be sung by anyone. The same slickness permeates the snappy “Different” and wedding-playlist-friendly “Dancing in the Living Room.” While some may feel empowered by these songs’ accessibility, they dilute the specificity that makes the rest of the album so striking. As country music continues to grapple with its racial reckoning, Guyton has had no qualms about calling her white peers’ complacency to task, and it’s a relief that her defiance has carried over into the music. At its best, Remember Her Name captures her steadfastness and grace in equal measure.

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Mike Hadreas' third album as Perfume Genius is Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. Portishead's Adrian Utley and PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish contribute.

Too Bright

The first line on Perfume Genius' third album, Too Bright, is a basic observation, one we've heard a million times in songs: "I can see for miles." Mike Hadreas, the Seattle songwriter behind the project, sings it over a spare piano, something that won't surprise people familiar with his music. The sentiment, though, is a bit unexpected: Hadreas has made a habit of writing powerful, intimate, and sometimes introverted songs that look closely at his inner life, warts and all, and at the inner lives of the people around him. These words find him peering outward.
The rest of the lyric finds Hadreas acknowledging the cliché, and averting his eyes: "I can see for miles/ The same old line/ No thanks/ I decline." What he sees is an "Angel just above the grid/ Open, smiling, reaching," but he rejects it. Later he uses the line again, on the raucous "Grid", with the same decision to look away. At that point, though, "There is no angel/ Above the grid." It's been replaced by "A diamond/ Swallowed and shit/ Then swallowed again." He adds: "At least we know where it's been."
All of this is important to consider because Too Bright is, by far, Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. It's also about personalizing your experience, and rejecting the clichés placed on it by outsiders. As Hadreas has explained, "A lot of these songs are me trying to claim some power in situations that would typically depress or alienate or victimize me...I've seen faces of blank terror when I walk by. Sometimes from seemingly strong, macho dudes—somehow my presence confuses and ultimately scares them. There is a strange power to it that I've only recently begun to understand and embrace."
Too Bright follows 2012's excellent Put Your Back N 2 It, a quiet record that offered variations on a central sound; sonically, Hadreas pushes things much further here. He recorded Too Bright with previous collaborator Ali Chant and Portishead's Adrian Utley, who also played bass and synth. Additionally, PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish plays drums on a number of tracks that, fittingly, are reminiscent of fuzzed-out Harvey songs. There are still elemental, stripped-down moments, but the sound is generally denser and weirder. For the first time in Hadreas' career, he's giving equal time to the textures as he is with his words. That said, his vocals are more muscular, too, more clear and naked-sounding. His voice takes on a shape-shifting quality on Too Bright, sometimes warping into odd, ambient shapes; on the finger-snapping "Fool", his powerful falsetto sounds like it could fill a cathedral and then crack it in half.
"Queen" features heavy, fuzzed bass along with synthesized vocal choirs and rhythmic oomph backing the great, cocky line, "No family is safe, when I sashay." The frenetic, fucked-up "Grid", with immense banshee howls, horns, and repetitious, burly bass is reminiscent of Swans (the video, on the other hand, resembles Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" as done by David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona). On "I'm a Mother", Hadreas performs muffled, creepy falsetto that sounds like Antony whispering beneath a pillow. The title track is a ballad with piano and Hadreas' crystalline voice, mixing in chiming clarinet, synth washes, and escalating ghost choirs; "Longpig" possesses a booming '80s synth line, ricocheting handclaps, and violent burts and blooms with lines about burying meat for mama. As on Put Your Back, there's a sock-hop quality to many of these songs, especially the closer "All Along", but the structure is toyed with and flayed, shifting on a dime.
The approach to writing lyrics here is more elliptical and mysterious, too. There isn't the same kind of fleshed-out narrative storytelling found on previous highlights "Mr. Peterson" or "Dark Parts". These tracks often zero in on overall textures, but this doesn't mean the lyrics aren't nakedly intimate. "I wear my body like a rotted peach/ You can have it if you handle the stink," he sings on "My Body". On "Queen", he tosses out and reinscribes gay stereotypes: "Don't you know your Queen?/ Ripped, heaving/ Flowers bloom at my feet/ Don't you know your Queen?/ Cracked, peeling/ Riddled with disease."
There are brilliant insights and images that reveal themselves over multiple listens. On "Fool", he makes a dress, lays it out on "the couch you bought," then bleeds out on that couch in one version and dances in another. He finds power in being able to hold the hand of the man he loves, no longer needing to keep secrets: "I carry their names, the secret shapes/ An aching braid around my heart/ Traced in the park, an outline I chalk." And, as he sings on the closing track, "All Along", "I don't need your love/ I don't need you to understand/ I need you to listen."
He's also shifted his look to match his new sound. In the past, Hadreas donned cozy sweaters and black hoodies; on the golden cover of Too Bright he looks buffed and polished, and in recent videos he's wearing smart suits and designer clothes with colorful splashes of makeup. He's always had a knack for the quietly devastating; there was his basic, simply shot, romantic, and playful video for Put Your Back's "Hood", with the beefy gay porn star Arpad Miklos (who committed suicide a year after the clip), and Hadreas and his mother climbing into a tree at the end of "Dark Parts", a song in part about her being molested by her grandfather. Here, he finds a way to maintain that personal feel while strutting down a board room table in high heels.
Hadreas' sexuality is obviously a huge part of his work, but he's above all a human—one who's spoken about battling addiction and sickness and sadness, and one who possesses the ability to write about it in a way that feels universal. A huge part of what makes the work so strong is the generous human spirit that bleeds into it, and Too Bright is the best example to date of the lengths he goes to confront his fears and demons. These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation.


On this highlight from the Nyege Nyege Tapes label, Bamba Pana takes a more abrasive approach to Tanzanian singeli music: drilling synths and tinny drum machines played at impossibly fast speeds.

Poaa

At first glance, Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes is representative of a widespread phenomenon of small labels across Africa and the African diaspora surfacing local sounds for a global public. Launched in 2016 with Disco Vumbi’s Boutiq Electroniq, an EP of chakacha and benga fusions titled in tribute to a club night at the center of Kampala’s underground electronic scene, Nyege Nyege Tapes might be compared to Gqom Oh!, an imprint dedicated to Durban, South Africa’s percussive gqom sound, or Lisbon’s Príncipe, a laboratory for a nascent mix of Afro-Lusophone styles known as batida.
But from the beginning, Nyege Nyege Tapes has cast a wider net than some of its peers, with a regional, pan-stylistic focus that reaches across East Africa (and beyond). Otim Alpha’s Gulu City Anthems reimagined traditional Larakaraka wedding songs for an all-electronic context, not unlike what Omar Souleyman did for Syrian dabke; the Los Angeles producer Riddlore’s Afromutations melded field recordings from his three-month residency in Uganda with hip-hop and club beats. A recent anthology of the mbira master Ekuka Morris Sirikiti’s radio broadcasts envisioned the thumb piano as something like an accidental cousin to Western strains of noise music. With the Sounds of Sisso compilation, the label turned its focus to the Sisso studio in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where a group of producers is building upon the rapid-fire sound known as singeli, pushing short loops of tightly syncopated keyboards and percussion to a stuttering, hyper-speed blur.
Bamba Pana (born Jumanne Ramadhani Zegge) is part of the Sisso collective, and his take on the music as heard here may be even more extreme than the sound showcased on the compilation. Singeli itself is not an underground style; rooted in poor communities, it has become a major force in Tanzanian pop music. Despite the breakneck tempos, sticky synths and Auto-Tuned choruses keep the mood light; singeli videos, some of which have a million views or more, offer a mix of aspirationalist flash, astonishing dance moves, and even the occasional dab. But Zegge takes an edgier approach, highlighting abrasive textures that are a world away from the comparatively dulcet sound of Msaga Sumu, the self-proclaimed “king of singeli.” Bamba Pana’s cadences are relentless, with the tempo often hovering at warp speed; the knotty, skipping rhythms have a way of making the pulse feel even faster. And the needling electronic tones and bright, faintly dissonant keys only heighten the intensity of the experience, like a dose of laughing gas that makes the whine of the dentist’s drill that much more shrill.
Opener “Agaba Kibati” barrels along at 160-odd beats per minute, roughly analogous with footwork or drum ‘n’ bass tempo, with drum-machine congas, shakers, and woodblocks bouncing atop tinny synth stabs. It sounds a little like a Casio preset with the tempo fader pushed all the way up—an effect that faintly recalls the Dominican Republic’s speedy mambo de calle (or merengue de calle) sound—and a helium-tinged MC reinforces the sense that the playback speed is wrong. But the minute-long intro is just a warm-up: With “Biti Three,” we plunge into a bewildering, quadruple-time fugue state strafed with garish synths and sped-up yelps, hurtling ahead at more than 200 beats per minute. At that speed, the results sound more like a fragment of EDM that’s been sped up dangerously fast and then looped almost without variation or dynamics for nearly six minutes. It’s such an extreme proposition—so unrelenting, so in your face—that it makes the “deconstructed trance” of Lorenzo Senni and his peers look almost tame in comparison.
Most of the rest of the album cruises at that same dizzy altitude, though the palette varies with each track. “Baria” rolls out comparatively placid marimba phrases over jagged keys and rolling percussion, sounding like an Awesome Tapes From Africa cassette played back with a finger on the fast-forward button; “Jpiya” incorporates synthesized funk horns; and the shuddering “Kusini” combines a loping, batida-like groove with North African trills and a squealing synth effect straight out of Daniel Bell’s minimal-techno playbook. The tracks that feel most successful tend to be the most complex ones, which go zig-zagging unpredictably through different rhythms, melodies, and sound sets, often changing course with no prior warning.
One song, “Linga Linga,” is included in both instrumental and vocal versions, and there’s no doubt that the one featuring the Tanzanian rapper Makaveli is a lot more fun to listen to: His nimble delivery brings some much-needed dynamism to a beat that’s about as flexible as a diving board. Still, when confronted with a sound this unusual, it can be hard to know how to judge it in the first place: Does the brick-in-the-face overload of “Biti Three” represent a lack of dynamics, or is that unyielding onslaught the whole point of the thing? The closing “Poaa Bama Rmx” is flat-out mind-boggling, arraying stuttering vocal samples over loops so hyperactive they feel cartoonish. One wonders if, a generation or two down the line, these beats will simply sound normal, the way a once-radical genre like jungle does to many people today. Is this the sound of the future or is popular music’s quest for speed reaching the point of absurdity? Even at its most haywire, Bamba Pana’s music is so utterly joyful, it’s hard not to get swept up in its momentum.


An album as good as *Ghosts of the Great Highway* should never go out of print. But the world's not a fair place, as our parents constantly remind us. In the interval between the album's original street date in 2003 and its deluxe reissue in 2007-- a relatively short span for a reissue-- Sun Kil Moon's former label, Jetset Records, let the album fall into limbo. During that same interval, however, frontman Mark Kozelek started his own boutique label, Caldo Verde, which has already produced a handful of releases, including Sun Kil Moon's notorious Modest Mouse covers album and Kozelek's

Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of the Great Highway

Ghosts of the Great Highway

An album as good as Ghosts of the Great Highway should never go out of print. But the world's not a fair place, as our parents constantly remind us. In the interval between the album's original street date in 2003 and its deluxe reissue in 2007-- a relatively short span for a reissue-- Sun Kil Moon's former label, Jetset Records, let the album fall into limbo. During that same interval, however, frontman Mark Kozelek started his own boutique label, Caldo Verde, which has already produced a handful of releases, including Sun Kil Moon's notorious Modest Mouse covers album and Kozelek's Little Drummer Boy Live. Considering these factors, this reissue seems almost inevitable, an act of survival instead of a mere moneymaker or legacygrabber.
Ghosts continues-- even fine-tunes-- the work Kozelek did with his former band, the Red House Painters. These songs are virtuously stoic Americana-- all shimmery guitars, measured tempos, malevolent moods, and wandering melodies. His voice, then as now, sounds like Neil Young's, especially in the effortlessness with which he hits the high notes then returns to a lower, earthier texture. But Kozelek possesses a steady imperturbability that Young, with his soul-music background, eschewed. As the title suggests, Ghosts is a travelogue of sorts, speeding through the Midwest and the West; in this sense, it's the male equivalent to Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, especially in the imperfect mirroring of physical terrain and emotional geography. Bruised masculinity is the album's central theme, however, evident in odes to boxers, matadors, serial killers, and musicians, all of whom inhabit the same lonely stretch of road.
The album opens with "Glenn Tipton", a nod to the Judas Priest guitarist. That the song is finally revealed to be delivered from the point of view of a serial killer is a quiet shock: Kozelek's carefully detailed songwriting makes the narrator not just familiar, but sympathetic. The revelation takes the song away from the confessional and into the raconteurish, where the album remains for nine more uniformly strong tracks. Tying everything together is a trilogy about dead boxers, beginning with "Salvador Sanchez" and ending with "Pancho Villa". In the middle is the 14-minute "Duk Koo Kim", which sprawls furtively for several rounds, its guitars bobbing and weaving gracefully and noisily (the song's subject necessarily conjures Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini", about the boxer who killed Kim in the ring). Kozelek approaches these pugilists-- and all his characters-- like he's Raymond Carver, parsing the details until he finds the one that makes them real.
Typically, it's the musical details that do just that. The band Kozelek assembled for Ghosts-- Anthony Koutsos (Red House Painters), Tim Mooney (American Music Club), and Geoff Stanfield (Black Lab), along with a few guests-- ably but subtly bolster his lyrics and vocals, generating a steady clip that never flags. Tempos rarely vary between or even within songs, and the guitars find a spectral riff and settle down with it, repeating it with gentle relentlessness that needles the characters and refracts the melodies. The result is an album as hypnotic as highway divider lines whizzing past.
Neglecting demos or earlier works, the six-track bonus EP is notable mostly for showing how easily Kozelek translated these songs from electric to acoustic settings. These alternate or radio readings of "Carry Me Ohio", "Salvador Sanchez", and "Gentle Moon" aren't too far removed from their originals, despite having only Kozelek's voice in common. This testifies to the flexibility of his songwriting and the adaptability of his performances, and yet it all adds up to a pretty lackluster EP, offering no specific insight into the songs' development before or after the album. The remaining bonus tracks consist of an unreleased instrumental similar to "Sí, Paloma" and two versions of the same Leonard Bernstein cover. Fortunately, Kozelek has better luck with "Somewhere" than with any of Isaac Brock's tunes, transforming it from a staged number into a despairing ballad... twice. They're the twin highlights of a skippable EP, but that mild disappointment is considerably assuaged by the fact that Ghosts is back in print.


The 22-year-old pop songwriter’s debut captures the onslaught of young-adult emotion, longing for a state of being where noise and confusion are replaced by certainty and clarity.

girl in red: if i could make it go quiet

if i could make it go quiet

A few years ago, a Norwegian teenager named Marie Ulven ran into a problem: She fell in love with a friend. Ulven, who had picked up the guitar a few years prior, naturally decided to write a song about it. “i wanna be your girlfriend,” Ulven’s first single under the name girl in red, bristles with self-confidence and desire. “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips,” she sang with a lovesick warble and a hearty strum. In the end, the romance was unrequited and the track’s Bandcamp page offers a word to the wise: “don’t fall in love with a straight girl.”
After Ulven uploaded “i wanna be your girlfriend” to the internet in 2018, she developed a loyal following who were drawn to her honesty about queerness, depression, and anxiety. If these topics were once seen as taboo, Ulven approached them as unexceptional. “I’m just out here being a [expletive] normal human being, falling in love and writing a song about it, just like that other straight girl writing a song about love,” she explained to The New York Times. The phrase “Do you listen to Girl in Red” even became a code that helped queer TikTokers find community.
girl in red’s full-length debut, if i could make it go quiet, continues down this path of candor and self-examination. But Ulven, now 22, has moved away from the lo-fi indie pop that defined her early recordings to play with a wider palette. Like Billie Eilish’s 2019 debut, if i could make it go quiet boasts a refreshingly short credits list. Ulven is the sole songwriter and she co-produced every track alongside Matias Téllez; Eilish’s older brother Finneas is the only guest. Rather than signing to a major label, Ulven released the album through AWAL, a distribution service that allows artists to retain ownership of their masters (the company was recently acquired by Sony).
if i could make it go quiet longs for a state of being where the noise and confusion clogging Ulven’s head and heart are replaced by certainty and clarity. But in reality, her self-destructive thoughts bubble beneath the surface until they combust. On opener “Serotonin,” Ulven reels off a list of uncontrollable impulses and violent intrusive thoughts, “Like cutting my hands off/Like jumping in front of a bus.” The production, courtesy of Finneas, is maximalist, throwing together blown-out guitars, hyperspeed drums, and EDM drops; Ulven speak-raps a verse before her words dissolve into gibberish. This barrage is borderline aggravating—but to be a teenager, which Ulven was when she started creating these songs, is to feel everything at once, and “Serotonin” deftly captures that sensory overload. At the chorus, when Ulven identifies her problem as a chemical imbalance, the song bursts into clarity.
Ulven spends a good chunk of if i could make it go quiet digging into relationships, and all the ways she inflicts and absorbs damage. “Did You Come?” borrows “Serotonin”’s riff as it seethes with infidelity and betrayal. “Was she good?/Just what you liked?/Did you come?/How many times?/Tell the truth,” she demands, before thinking better of it: “Wait, never mind.” “You Stupid Bitch”—here a term of endearment—is a mosh pit-ready plea for someone to recognize their own self-worth, while the sophistipop track “Midnight Love” takes the perspective of a long-exploited lover finally standing up for herself. On the chipper piano number “hornylovesickmess,” Ulven gazes at her own face on a billboard in Times Square and ponders how quickly her life has changed.
The album’s first half leans on pop-punk angst, but it soon opens up to reveal a softer side, with sparse R&B production. “Rue,” a tribute of sorts to the Euphoria character who struggles with drug addiction and her mental health, arrives from the bottom of a depressive abyss. As she acknowledges the loved ones who have patiently cared for her, she chooses to fight her way towards a healthier state. “Apartment 402,” which embraces softly rippling synths, is cut with an image of evocative stillness: a despondent Ulven on the floor of her bedroom, at eye level with specks of dust illuminated by sunlight. Though Ulven’s production acumen is impressive, it sometimes feels as if these flourishes are embellishing one-note ideas.
While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential. In the album’s final moments, Ulven seems to finally tamp down all her inner noise and find some levity. On “I’ll Call You Mine,” she illustrates a freewheeling vision of joy: speeding around in a car, fits of giggles in the warmth of summer, allowing herself to be open to happiness. It’s a nice daydream, Ulven acknowledges, one that is “too good to last.” But it’s a place that she can hold in her heart and return to in the darkest of times.

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After a year chock full of amazing West African 1970s reissues, the classic and crucial Nigeria 70 comp is reissued.

Various Artists: Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970’s Funky Lagos

Last year was a disorienting, somewhat disconnected time if you were looking for any kind of lucid pop music narrative, but one thing was for sure in 2008: All you had to do was wait a month or so, and you'd get the chance to hear yet another entry in an incredible influx of compilations, reissues, and revivals of the music of West Africa in the 1970s. There was Soundway's (so far) three-part Nigeria Special series, which gathered a bountiful collection of highlife, Afrobeat, funk, rock, and disco, and they followed it up with the eye-opening Sir Victor Uwaifo compilation Guitar Boy Superstar. Germany's freshly-minted Analog Africa label assembled a number of incredible highlife/funk/psych songs from Togo and Benin under the title African Scream Contest, then put together the staggering Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou highlight reel The Vodoun Effect: Funk and Sato from Benin's Obscure Label. And amidst all of this, Fela Kuti's son Seun reunited with his father's band Egypt 80 to record his debut full-length Many Things, taking the Afrobeat revival one step further by creating one of the genre's best new records of the last 25 years. All that, and Strut's ceaselessly entertaining Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump, too-- that's a ridiculously bountiful collection of music.
But even amidst all those releases, Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump isn't an afterthought-- it is, after all, the followup to one of the most crucial Afrobeat comps, 2001's Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970's Funky Lagos. The original Nigeria 70 was released four years after Fela Kuti's death and in the midst of a renewed interest in Afrobeat-- Femi Kuti's Fight to Win enlisted Mos Def and Common in a hip hop crossover bid, and Antibalas was really starting to pick up steam-- so it served as one of the most contextually important collections of the genre as it stood in its original heyday. With this reissue, it still holds that status: Nigeria 70 assembles a potent collection of names that were already famous among aficionados of African music (Fela; Tony Allen; King Sunny Ade), augments them with lesser-known musicians that those aficionados would also likely enjoy, and subsequently captures a cross-section of Nigerian culture that covers that country's adaptations of nearly everything that was going on in black music at the time.
Nigeria 70 starts with Monomono's "Loma Da Nigbehin", where the groove is stepped up, the rhythm guitar emphasized, the percussion denser yet livelier, the horn and organ solos heavier-- all developments created in the wake of Fela's revolution in militant funk. Afrobeat in that familiar vein is widely covered here, both inside and outside of the Kalakuta Republic. Two of Fela's greatest Africa '70-era recordings appear in "Upside Down" and "Jeun Ko Ku (Chop 'n' Quench)",  while Afrobeat's rhythmic architect and Africa '70 alumnus Tony Allen is represented by his glimmering 1980 recording "No Discrimination".  And many of the highlights from less-famous musicians-- Peter King's "Shango"; Orlando Julius Ekemode's "Alo Mi Alo"; Afro Cult Foundation's "The Quest"-- take Kuti's sounds and tweak them playfully until they become a bit more concise or abstract.
But what makes Nigeria 70 particularly compelling is its sonic diversity. Anyone expecting two and a half hours of music that sounds directly informed by Fela might be surprised to find out just how many musicians saw his music as a starting point than the sum of their sound. There's nods to psychedelic rock, both heavily fuzzed-out (Ofo & the Black Company's stomping, wailing "Allah Wakbarr") and Deadhead-friendly mellow (BLO's eerily beautiful reverie "Chant to Mother Earth"). A few forays into the late 1970s and early 80s note a disco influence that informs cuts like Joni Haastrup's 1977 song "Greetings" and Shina Williams & His African Percussionists' 1984 electro-funk workout "Agboju Logun" without removing their Afrobeat backbone. And if you're wondering how Parliament-Funkadelic was received in Nigeria, William Onyeabor's 1978 anti-imperialist synthesizer opus "Better Change Your Mind" is an intriguing hint. You could while away some time trying to figure out just how much or how little of it came from black music in America, and how much of black music in America actually owed to these sounds in the first place-- as cross-cultural development of pop music goes, the Nigerian sound is fascinatingly tangled. And now, even after the West African reissue glut of 2008, Nigeria 70 still sounds illuminating.


Coasting on the success of last year’s “Big Drip”—which finds new relevance now that the phrase “demon time” is trending—the Brooklyn drill rapper shows personality but lacks focus.

800 BC

Over the past few months, the phrase “demon time,” like so many pieces of localized language that eventually find their way online, has changed contexts. When Beyoncé graced the remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” last week, the term found its way into the updated song’s most quotable bar: “Hips TikTok when I dance/On that Demon Time, she might start an OnlyFans.” The line is a reference to the virtual stages of an Instagram Live strip club where, in the midst of quarantine, celebrities like the Weeknd and Kevin Durant have tuned in to watch performers. It’s also a phrase popularized by Toronto rapper Tory Lanez on his Quarantine Radio live streams, where the nudity on his “demon time” segments became so constant that Instagram shut it down. But this game of digital telephone first started last summer with Fivio Foreign, who might have meant something slightly more sinister when he said he was on “demon time” on his breakout song, “Big Drip.”
Over the past eight months, the Brooklyn rapper has proven himself to be an expert at, to reference another one of his favorite words, creating “viral” moments. Though he’s been releasing music since the early 2010s, his borough’s adoption of drill—an aggressive sound that has itself morphed in context, from its origins in Chicago to its outposts in London, Brooklyn, and even Sydney, Australia—has made way for Fivio’s punctuated rapping and dramatic ad-libs to cut through in his hometown and beyond.
800 BC, Fivio Foreign’s first full-length mixtape, is mostly a collection of his biggest musical moments so far. There’s “Big Drip,” the rowdy anthem that has been out for close to a year and also appeared on his 2019 Pain and Love EP; the “Big Drip” remix, with verses from Quavo and Lil Baby; and “Wetty,” a long-teased single that seemed destined to be the next hit song from the Brooklyn drill scene. “Wetty” succeeds for many of the same reasons “Big Drip” did. On the two songs, both produced by London’s AXL Beats, Fivio brings an unruly, contagious energy to even the simplest ad-libs. The song’s refrain, “I met lil’ mama in the deli/She was a wetty,” is regionally specific and original—it’s a couplet that couldn’t come from anywhere but New York, and anybody but Fivio Foreign.
Still, at eight songs, the project feels lazily thrown together, with mostly forgettable songs placed around these previously released, big-ticket singles. Even when he brings bigger names into his defined sound, the results are stagnant. The verses from Quavo and Lil Baby feel like an unnecessary addition to “Big Drip,” and Fivio’s hook on “Demons & Goblins,” a collaboration with Meek Mill, sounds like it was filled in with predictive text from his most commonly used words. Similarly, “Ambition,” a song with Bronx rapper Lil Tjay, the only track on the project that deviates from the standard drill drum pattern, presents a muted version of both rappers’ strengths. One notable exception is “Issa Vibe,” a solo song where Fivio skillfully switches between melodic flows, introducing a captivating alternative to his usual hoarseness.
Fivio Foreign has Beyoncé repurposing his phrases and Drake borrowing from his lexicon on a drill song, “Demons,” right alongside him. The Brooklyn rapper has channeled his entertaining personality into impactful singles, but he has yet to prove himself able to hold his concentration long enough to command an actual mixtape, or even hint at what a quality version of a fuller Fivio Foreign project might look like. Instead, at least for now, these big moments, and the way they travel up the pop-culture pipeline, are the only things that seem to stick.


No band shows more belief in punk rock as an agent of social change, but Beach Slang's punk is the apolitical kind where the right song can unshackle you from self-doubt and pity to get you out of the house and be a part of the world. Their shout-along full-length debut delivers on the promise of their early EPs.

Beach Slang: The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us

A few stats on Beach Slang’s glorious and galvanizing debut album: in less than a half hour, it provides 10 righteous bursts of punk rock boosterism. All of them speak of being fucked up, being a fuck-up, or some combination of both. In seven of those songs, James Alex sings the word "alive," in three others, he sings "young," and there's one song called "Young and Alive". Eight mention some kind of amplification—either turning yourself or the radio up. Oh, and the title is The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us, which sums it all up: some people get drunk and unite with other weirdos to listen to rock music as loud as possible because for them there's no better way to feel young and alive.
It’s the most passionate batch of love songs you’re liable to hear in 2015, and they’re all about a specifically anthemic form of punk rock. No band shows more belief in it as an agent of social change, but Beach Slang's is the apolitical kind where the right song can unshackle you from self-doubt and pity to get you out of the house and be a part of the world—go meet somebody, go to show that makes you forget about all of your very real problems. Its societal dynamics and terminology are anachronistic and a cynic could view them as willfully naive—the punks and cops are at odds throughout, but it’s mostly over noise ordinance and open container complaints.
For a record bursting with love for its audience, The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us is divisive by design. If you expect or demand rock bands to create some kind of distance from their work—via irony, cleverness, a desire to look cool—you are one of them and you won’t make it to the first time Alex commands you to pump up the volume on "Throwaways". But if you’ve been impatiently waiting for someone to break through the year of self-conscious indie rock, "I Break Guitars" and "Ride the Wild Haze" make you feel like you're part of Alex's "us." The album actually delivers on the title's promise and there’s really no other band trying to fill this crucial role right now, at least until Japandroids break their silence.
James Alex is 40, significantly older than the other three members of Beach Slang and about 15 years removed from his previous band’s disintegration. He doesn’t hide this fact, and it serves as the basis for The Things We Do’s centerpiece and outlier. "Too young to die, too late to die young," Alex sighs with superhuman earnestness over capoed acoustic guitar (and, since this is the ballad, cue the strings and pianos). It’s a lament from a guy who didn’t live fast or gloriously burn out when he had the chance, and feels like the proverbial old guy at the club even when he’s not at the club. Shoutalong, agenda-free punk rock is aggressively pushed to the margins on all levels in 2015, written off as the kind of music people are expected to outgrow. But what if this is the thing that still does it for you?
Well, then you’re one of Alex's us and your options are to either hide in your records and disengage from the stream of life or celebrate this music that saved your life by adding to it or honoring its intent. Originally appearing as a raw solo cut on a Philly-based benefit compilation, "Too Late to Die Young" was written after Beach Slang’s completely unexpected success and, as usual, there’s an utter lack of artifice and a confrontational vulnerability as Alex looks at the gathering crowd and realizes, "I swear right now, I’m alright." Thirty seconds earlier, he admits having been ready to give up and not 30 seconds later, he’s shouting, "The basement is alive and loud/ We’re alright now" on a song called "I Break Guitars". This is Alex and Beach Slang’s triumph, but he makes sure it’s big enough for all of us to share.


Swedish quartet make dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop that foregrounds ambiance and texture, as Tricky once did so well.

Machine Dreams

Throughout much of the past decade, dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop music has erred on the side of stark utility, reducing beats and hooks down to an elemental thud and grind. What tends to get lost in this sparsely arranged music, particularly when we're dealing with lesser artists and total hacks, is color and atmosphere. Without these things, songs can feel incredibly clinical and soulless-- throbbing grooves almost completely devoid of context. Little Dragon, a quartet from Gothenburg, Sweden, are not entirely removed from the electro and modern R&B influences of their time, but their arrangements make a point of foregrounding ambiance and texture. Whereas too many post-Timbaland, post-electroclash records can seem like sentences stripped of adjectives and proper nouns, the tones on the group's sophomore album Machine Dreams suggest complex emotions and vivid scenery with exquisite detail.
The emphasis on atmosphere is made clear from the very start of Machine Dreams, as album opener "A New" begins and ends with electronic drones, as if to bracket the song in ellipses like an unfinished thought. The subsequent song, "Looking Glass", is firmer, more beat-driven, but as much as its groove is steady, as a whole it seems to wander. Motion and physicality is strongly implied by the rhythm, but the leisurely pace and subtly shifting keyboard tones indicate changes in setting, evoking a sense that we're stumbling around lost in some strange, beautiful city. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, which goes off on the tangents of different rhythms into other textural zones, but maintains a feeling of searching around for something, whether it is a person, a destination, a state of mind, or the right words to express some ineffable thought.
Little Dragon's palette is broad enough to lend the album a rich, luscious sound, but specific enough to ground the work in a particular time and place, though the definition of both terms is left to the listener's imagination. Some of the songs, like "Looking Glass" and "My Step", sound like a 1980s version of the future, and owe a debt to the keyboard aesthetics of freestyle and Prince circa Sign 'O' the Times. Others, like the gorgeous ballad "Feather" and the claustrophobic "Thunder Love", bring to mind the dystopian sexiness of Tricky's early classics on Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension. Yukimi Nagano, the band's charismatic Swedish-Japanese vocalist, has a smokey yet agile voice, and it serves as the anchor of each song. She avoids melisma, but her phrasing is in the general wheelhouse of modern R&B, particularly British iterations of the genre. As with every other element of their sound, Nagano's voice places Little Dragon's music in a lineage of recognizable influences under a vague "urban" umbrella, but it all comes out just a bit off, which is to say, unexpected and original.
Machine Dreams is at once familiar and slightly alien, and the emotional center is both intuitively obvious and intentionally vague. Nagano is the type of writer and singer who lets her words roughly sketch out a feeling that she embellishes with her voice. This approach puts more faith in the unique effects of music-- there is no sense in being direct and literal when singing can convey the sort of nuance that is almost impossible to express in other forms of communication. The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates. That mood is slippery and hard to define, but that's not so much a problem as it is part of the appeal, as the band navigate the strange spaces between big, easily identifiable emotions.


Dead Can Dance's first new album together in 16 years finds Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard in fine form, seamlessly incorporing sounds from around the world. Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical and satisfying progression from the band's mid-90s albums.

Anastasis

Dead Can Dance, the long-running project of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, are inextricably linked to the 4AD that defined a different generation. Not the current one of Bon Iver or Grimes, but the one of Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil, and the Cocteau Twins-- 1980s art goth of a particular kind. But neither label nor their bands sought that tag. And since Dead Can Dance's music incorporated sounds from around the globe and across the centuries, the description seems particularly limiting. Anastasis, the duo's first new album together in 16 years (following a variety of solo works and collaborations as well as a retrospective 2005 tour), finds Dead Can Dance firmly in their comfort zone, at a time when neither Gerrard nor Perry should feel they have anything left to prove.
Dead Can Dance always avoided a curatorial or purist approach to global music, and that trend continues here. They're as open to new technologies and recording possibilities as they are to ancient instruments like the yangqin and the bodhrán, but they also eschew the collision of samples and beats that often defines other experimenters in the field. But over time, the influence of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard has reached far and wide. From Future Sound of London's early techno landmark "Papua New Guinea", which samples Gerrard's voice, to cover versions by bands such as arty metal types the Gathering and the more experimentalist impulses of recent bands like Prince Rama-- not to mention Gerrard's own now extensive work on a wide variety of film soundtracks -- Dead Can Dance's approach to sound has resonated widely.
Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical progression from the band's mid-90s albums as well as Brendan and Gerrard's respective solo work since. There's nothing here quite as jawdroppingly melodramatic or proclamatory as old classics such as "Anywhere Out of the World" or "Host of Seraphim", where Perry and Gerrard's vocal strengths were matched with the sense of vast spaces, agog and in awe. But Anastasis often comes close, especially with the concluding "Return of the She-King" and "All in Good Time". Gerrard's breathtaking vocal range remains strong, while Perry's deeper, ruminative voice still feels less like a singing brogue than a calm invocation of ancient knowledge.
The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned. Perry's forthright mysticism on songs like "Amnesia" and "All in Good Time" return to the origin of the band's name, the idea of awakening a greater consciousness. On strong opening "Children of the Sun", strings, crisp rolling drums, and elegant keyboards suggest an ancestral, courtly ritual, though lyrically Perry runs the risk of creating a naive paean to flower power. Yet it's precisely his controlled delivery and lack of irony-- even with a nursery-rhyme nodding couplet like "All the queen's horses and all the king's men/ Will never put these children back together again"-- that transforms the song into something with palpable force.
Gerrard's vocal ability is fully intact, and her instrument makes most singers seem limited, or at least unadventurous. The other key element in her singing-- employing glossolalia, substituting comprehensive language with a melodic, exploratory rapture conveyed by her range alone-- defines her lead performances in turn, first appearing to the full on "Anabasis", her rich warmth flowing across everything from strings that suggest Egyptian orchestras to electric guitar to, at one breathtaking moment, near silence.
There's a suffused steadiness that steers the album, but with time, the individual strengths of each song manifest; the slow vocal and instrumental raptures toward the conclusion of "Agape", the beguiling sway of "Opium", where Perry sings about being unable to choose a way forward. And "Return of the She-King", one of the band's very few duets, sums up the exact reason Dead Can Dance retain their appeal. It's the kind of impact and elegance that can be hard to put into words, but searching for a perfect expression is arguably exactly what Dead Can Dance have always strived to achieve. Here, they find it more often than not.


Debut 4AD EP from the L.A. brothers and Prince acolytes turns out to be a maximalist grotesquerie of minimal sounds.

3 EP

We don't really know each other, but I'm gonna guess that you love Prince. Or, at a minimum, you respect the man even if he really hasn't done much worth a shit in the past 15 years or so. This shouldn't be a problem except there's probably no pop music figure of the past century whose universal acclaim is matched by an almost total inability of his acolytes to create proper homage. We come across respectable integrations of Bowie, Dylan, Lennon, and Brian Wilson, but-- especially amongst rock musicians who use the Purple One's legacy as their mainline to R&B-- the whole of his work is often distilled into a falsetto and a bunch of terrible sexual puns. Well, if Inc. prove anything on their 4AD debut EP 3, it's that you can plunder the lesser-known regions of his discography, boast impressive instrumental chops, and still be no better off than some hapless power trio trying to rip off "Little Red Corvette".
At its core, Inc. (formerly known as Teen Inc. during their particularly galling 2010 CMJ set) is comprised of Los Angeles-based brothers Daniel and Andrew Aged, both of whom are experienced session musicians. Which shows, not so much in the sense that 3 displays their virtuosity as much as their keytar-swinging live show, though there are plenty of geeky timestamps and frilly synth doodles. It's more in how its overcooked arrangements bear the mark of backup players overcompensating after finally getting ahold of the mixing console, and 3 turns out to be a maximalist grotesquerie of minimal sounds. "Heart Crimes" wanders around in search of a tune or even a beat for nearly five minutes while occasionally busying itself with Three 6 Mafia's 32nd-note hi-hats, vocal snippets that drift like paper bags in the wind, and synth slap-bass presets so offbeat they sound more like Spike Jones sound effects. This may not be particularly shocking, but mixing all of those elements turns out to be a total fucking disaster.
Slightly more successful are the two tracks that play with straightforward melody. At first glance, the arrhythmic hook of "Swear" ingratiates due to its own nagging repetition, but if you're steeped enough in the realm of 1980s radio pop to appreciate Inc.'s simulacra, odds are you'll eventually recognize it as a pretty brazen rip of "Sussudio". Not that there's anything inherently wrong with "Sussudio", but once that connection is made, it can never go back to being "Swear". "Millionairess" sounds like a way out of their own rut, or at least a chance to bat one-for-three, but they abandon its quick-hitting chorus for a mess of vocal mutations that barely acknowledge a slowly simmering New Jack Swing beat. Credit where it's due for trying to enter Zapp & Roger and Andre Cymone into the PBR&B conversation without being total ironists, but "Chromeo, except no fun at all" isn't what the game's been missing.


The debut full-length from the “Drew Barrymore” singer isn’t designed for conscious, focused listening. This is music for poolsides and basements.

Carnival

Bryce Vine describes himself as “OutKast and Blink-182 got drunk with the Gorillaz.” Perhaps a more apt comparison is KYLE taking bong hits with Dave Matthews Band, or Jason Mraz sniffing poppers with Doja Cat. At 31, Vine is at an unconventional age for frat-rap prominence. He established a fanbase nearly a decade ago, as a contestant on “The Glee Project,” a reality television show based off the Ryan Murphy high school drama. His real rise came with 2017’s “Drew Barrymore,” a swirl of neon synths that went platinum, possibly by being added to every “Chill Vibes” playlist in existence.
“Drew Barrymore” is the best song on Carnival, and the best encapsulation of Vine’s problems and promise. It leans into the grit that his other songs just wink at; when the computerized beeps and buzzes fall away in the chorus, a more muted drum and Bryce’s unfiltered rasp take over. But the words are inane: “You’re the next Drew Barry, and I want more,” he sings, taking pains to emphasize the wordplay. Glimpses at specificity slice through the bullshit. “Coffee on the Flintstone, jewelry on the ottoman,” he croons, before sliding into this portrait: “The TV hasn’t worked in ages/Probably got a shorted cable/Way too busy fucking on the sofa or the kitchen table.” It’s not poetry, but it conjures something akin to a real relationship.
Compare that to the album’s first song, “Classic and Perfect.” Gleaming piano chords and ra-ra handclaps almost beg you to ignore the lyrics, a cringey pastiche of Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, and One Direction. “You’ve got a mind and you’ve got a soul,” he chirps, sounding shocked. In “Drew Barrymore,” he sings the creepy line, “Baby let me in/’fore I get way too adamant about it.” This ignorance extends beyond women. “Factory Love,” an unconvincing strum-along ode to “pharmaceutical pleasure,” sounds like it was written by Googling drug lingo.
But Carnival isn’t designed for conscious, focused listening. It’s a mood-setting operation: a fog of layered vocals, splashes of trumpets, guitar licks that sound like an impromptu dorm-room jam session. Production flourishes are precise: a chime-like sound effect here, a splatter of drums there. This is music for poolsides and basements. Lyrics exist to fill a void in a vibe.
Vine strikes an odd tone in rap-adjacent music: not the melodic, death-consumed teenagers who sing their verses instead of speaking them, nor the buoyancy of Chance the Rapper, nor the sex and money flexes that clog SoundCloud. His stage name is short for “vinyl,” and many of his songs feel nostalgic for the stolid inertia of story-centered, good-times pop. He used to tour with Hoodie Allen, patron saint of frat boys turned rappers. He could very well continue on that path, doubling down on bad puns and frenetic drum loops, writing about objects with more clarity and grace than he writes about women. Or he could embrace Carnival’s rare moments of authenticity, and sharpen his music into something that sticks.