Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Toots and the Maytals’ 1975 classic, which captured the country soul of roots reggae at its creative peak.

Funky Kingston

After a shuffling drum intro, a steady groove invites us to let down our guards and open our ears. With another drum roll, the band pivots to the “one-drop,” Jamaica’s reigning rhythm since the ska days. The kick drum and rimshot anchor the backbeat, often emphasized by an organ stab, while the bass moves a simple, sinuous pattern and the rhythm guitar chops chords between each beat. To heighten our appreciation of this interlocking ensemble texture, the instruments are panned across the stereo field, the lead guitar plucking a lightly bluesy, bubbling counterpoint across the room from the steady offbeat skank.
Centered in the mix, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert begins to preach in terms downhome and direct, in a Jamaican country brogue plain enough for all to understand. Sleep won’t come. The rent is too high. Your brother can’t find a dollar, and neither can I. Time tough. In a sly inversion of hip slang, everything is out of sight, but not in a good way—life is so hard even the basics seem out of reach. Today is judgment day, so let us pray and all join in a rising refrain of higher and higher. But this isn’t about spiritual transcendence or ganja-fueled meditation. What’s getting higher is the cost of living. It’s 1974, and the future is unclear. Yet somehow this group playing secular church music in rubbery sync, with chapel-ready backup harmonies and a lead singer in the throes of ecstasy, lift the song itself up to show that deliverance is possible if we band together.
“Time Tough” immediately frames Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston as a wry testament to the shared circumstances of the black and working-class masses. It registers the depth of struggle, while offering grounds for celebrating the ways life can and does go on. As its title reveals, the album courted an international audience by nodding to what was then the latest form of black musical currency, a suggestion Toots received from Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, who was impressed by the unlikely crossover success of “Funky Nassau” (1971) by Bahamas-based band The Beginning of the End. Funky was a style Jamaican artists like Toots were proud to pull off with unique swagger.
After all, if funk registered an earthy embrace of grit and sweat, Kingston had that in spades. And if funk’s minimalist syncopation of soul mirrored a shift in the Civil Rights movement from liberal reforms to militant demands, reggae was similarly emerging as rebel music, an insurgent expression of Jamaica’s urbanizing, disenfranchised masses—black and proud and loud. Inspired by the strides and styles of their African American brethren and sistren, reggae represented a bottom-up cultural turn in Jamaican music and society, as the Jamaican people voted with their feet to dance along in diaspora rather than have their national culture dictated from above by Eurocentric local elites. Consequently, reggae’s ongoing relationship with American pop is part of what has made it legible for foreign audiences, even when they interpret it on their own terms. An early review of Funky Kingston called it “Jamaican rock’n’roll.”
Almost half a century later, in the shadow of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and other luminaries, it can be hard to appreciate the impact of Toots and the Maytals as reggae found itself on the verge of worldwide exposure. By the early 1970s, the group had earned their place among the cream of the crop, having won over Jamaican audiences for a decade beginning in the ska era, continuing through rocksteady, and helping to cement yet another turn in style and nomenclature in 1968 with their local hit “Do the Reggay.” The Maytals won the annual national Festival Song Competition three times, including the inaugural year of 1966 with the anthemic and much-versioned “Bam Bam.” The Festival’s mission was to cultivate patriotic pride in Jamaican culture, and Toots knew how to ring that bell.
Toots’ churchy, country upbringing was key to shaping his nationally resonant voice, but it was also central to his appeal abroad. Before moving to Kingston as a young man, Toots grew up in May Pen, Clarendon, a parish to the west of Kingston and part of the large swath of the island Jamaicans refer to as “country” (as in, anything outside of “town”). Learning to sing in what he described to journalist David Katz as “a clapping church,” the son of two Seventh Day Adventist preachers honed his voice like so many soul-singer counterparts in the U.S. At 13, Toots moved to Trench Town, the same downtown Kingston community that fostered Bob Marley. His prowess was quickly recognized by a couple local boys, Ralphus “Raleigh” Gordon and Nathaniel “Jerry” Matthias, and they formed a vocal trio named after Toots’ hometown. The Maytals’ early recordings and performances in 1963 and ’64 reveal a clear debt to the gospel quartet, their songs closer to revivalist hymns than Brill Building confections or bawdy blues. The trio recorded for such premier producers as Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Prince Buster, but unsatisfied with the financial side of these ventures, they moved from studio to studio, eventually striking up a thriving partnership with producer Leslie Kong of Beverley’s Records, the label he named after his wife.
An 18-month jail sentence for what Toots insists was a trumped-up charge temporarily derailed the Maytals just as the hot new sound of rocksteady—slower, groovier songs played by smaller, more electric ensembles—began to eclipse ska’s jazz-age pomp. Upon his release in 1968, the group reconvened and recorded a song about Toots’ imprisonment for Kong, “54-46 (That’s My Number),” which quickly became the Maytals’ biggest hit. Their success continued over the next few years, and when it was time to cast The Harder They Come, the 1972 cult-favorite film and breakthrough soundtrack that introduced the U.S. counterculture to a new wave of Jamaican music, the Maytals were an obvious choice. The trio steals a scene in the film, singing in the studio as the star-struck country-boy protagonist played by Jimmy Cliff looks on, and two of the dance hall favorites they recorded with Kong in 1969, “Sweet and Dandy” and “Pressure Drop,” were standouts on the soundtrack. In a documentary about Toots, label exec Chris Blackwell describes him as “easily the biggest act in Jamaica” prior to the rise of Bob Marley. As with Marley’s international success, and the aesthetic calculus made to market him abroad, Blackwell looms large in the story of Funky Kingston.
Blackwell signed the Maytals as they were riding reggae’s cresting wave, and as with Marley, he used his marketing savvy to expand the genre’s beachhead overseas. In addition to presenting the music on long-playing albums—not a common format in Jamaica’s single-driven market—he also remixed and overdubbed recordings to make them more sonically familiar to audiences accustomed to rock and pop, and he re-branded his biggest acts through rock’s established lead-man imagery. Under Blackwell’s direction, the Wailers became Bob Marley and the Wailers while the Maytals were recrowned Toots and the Maytals. They were less a group than a vocal trio sutured to the house band at Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sounds studio: Toots, Raleigh, and Jerry, and a group of players called the Beverley’s All-Stars would go on to play together for decades.
Initially, Blackwell focused on the UK, a market where Jamaican artists like Millie Small and Desmond Dekker scored crossover pop hits in the 1960s, and where the Windrush generation had built a sound system culture to locally “broadcast” Jamaica’s latest hits. Under his Dragon Records imprint, a collaboration with Dynamic Sounds, Blackwell pushed two albums by Toots and the Maytals to the UK market: 1973’s Funky Kingston and 1974’s In the Dark. Sensing an opportunity in the U.S., Blackwell repackaged these recordings—along with 1969’s “Pressure Drop” for good measure—for a 1975 Mango/Island release that aimed to introduce Toots and the Maytals to the wider international audience quickly warming up to the sound of his country and countrymen. The Mango version of Funky Kingston was widely hailed by music critics as a remarkable achievement for reggae. Lester Bangs called it “perfection” in Stereo Review, and the album narrowly missed the top 10 in the Village Voice’s 1975 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, edged out by the Who by a single point. (To promote the album, Blackwell sent Toots and the Maytals on tour with the Who, as well as the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne.) Hot on the heels of The Harder They Come (1972) and Marley’s Catch a Fire (1973), Funky Kingston captured the group—and reggae—at a creative peak and offered another strategy for marketing Jamaican music to the wider world: letting it be itself.
While Bob Marley’s music has succeeded in defining reggae through its massive popularity and influence, his best-known albums are less reflective of the core Jamaican sound at the time. Marley’s first album for Island, Catch a Fire (1973), was extensively re-recorded, remixed, and overdubbed in London. Under Blackwell’s direction, the rougher, darker sound of the Wailers’ Kingston-made multitracks were filtered, brightened, and adorned with Muscle Shoals blues licks and au courant clavinets. Verses were excised to make room for Clapton-esque guitar solos, the lower frequencies of Marley’s voice rolled off to set it apart from all the mid-range clutter. Funky Kingston may have been conceived by Blackwell to target the same overseas audiences, but it differs markedly in this regard. The most Blackwell seems to have meddled is by overdubbing occasional soul-style horns from the Sons of Jungle band, a group of Ghanaian musicians based in London. In contrast to the effects-laden dub approach then taking hold among more experimental reggae producers, or the over-the-top multitracking in the world of rock and pop, the audio engineering on Funky Kingston is meant to be invisible.
This lack of aesthetic intervention seems all the more remarkable given how Funky Kingston is so musically invested in genre outreach. Proof of concept and point of pride, the title track offers the clearest example. Built around a one-chord bassline that would make Bootsy Collins grin, “Funky Kingston” carefully balances soul and funk with a solid foundation of one-drop drums and a steady offbeat skank from the piano and rhythm guitar. Eventually, the group indulges in a lightly pedantic James Brown-style breakdown, as Toots brings the instruments back in one by one: “Let me hear your funky guitar … now reggae.” There’s even a guitar solo, though it hardly approaches the blues-rock pyrotechnics that, say, Wayne Perkins added to Marley’s “Concrete Jungle.” The sax here, as with the other horn overdubs on the album, feels gratuitous, but it fits enough to fly. A fusion-forward experiment that could have fallen flat, the song manages to transcend gimmick by mining common ground.
While Funky Kingston is often as cosmopolitan as Marley’s music, it is also more local in character and address. Toots’ sound is grounded in a rural Jamaican sensibility that runs parallel to other sites in the diaspora shaped by similar historical forces: legacies of slavery and colonialism, rural peasantry and urban migration, Afro-Christian approaches to worship, music, and dance. While the son of two preachers from May Pen enjoyed a certain privileged access to Jamaica’s “country soul,” as Charles Hughes might put it, Toots also admired such country-soul brethren as Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown, all of whom he names as favorites. We might hear these godfathers of soul, however, less as novel influences Toots sought to emulate than as kindred contemporaries rooted in the same Afro-Christian traditions that encourage the spontaneous expression of sacred experience. In this musical communion, individuals develop distinctive voices that can sing along with others but still be heard as apart, producing an audible texture of integrative, community engagement. Like so many of his American peers and idols, Toots developed his broadly resonant voice in this sacred context, a medium for collective sentiment, drawing on the powers of fervor and faith, falsetto and distortion, ad-libbed interjection, wordless groans, and other sympathetic vibrations.
Toots’ original, downhome hymns all have this character, of course, but his ability to be heard as an individual among the broader collective comes into starkest relief on Funky Kingston when he turns to cover songs. On “Louie Louie,” Toots and company bring an old I-IV-V cha-cha-chá back to the Caribbean, crisping up the Kingsmen’s sloppy rock version by re-infusing some of the staccato polyrhythms that initially inspired Richard Berry to rewrite a local hit by L.A.’s biggest Latin band. For his customized version of John Denver’s “Country Roads (Take Me Home),” Toots makes the song his own by resetting it in “West Jamaica,” seasoning with gospel interjections, and making a foreign “country” song seem utterly at home in the Jamaican countryside. Jackie Jackson adds a little oom-pah to his bassline, but otherwise, the band fully transforms the song into an easy-skanking one-drop.
For all the nods to soul, funk, rock, and country—references that local audiences would have taken in stride as part of the modern Jamaican soundscape—Funky Kingston nevertheless sounds like an authentic, unadulterated expression of Toots’ and Jamaica’s country soul. With even greater hindsight, the album seems far more prophetic for Jamaica’s lane in the global mainstream than Marley’s exceptional reach. Despite being conceived as a sales pitch, Funky Kingston is, like the best Jamaican crossovers, full of songs geared first and foremost toward Jamaican listeners and local sound systems. From 1980 forward, as roots reggae gave ground to a next-generation style even more locally focused and coded—soon to be known simply as dancehall, after its primary site—the Jamaican artists, from Yellowman to Vybz Kartel, who have enjoyed the warmest embrace abroad have been those who, for all their winking nods to foreign musical kinfolk, insist on pleasing funky Kingston first.

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Decades into Mavis Staples' storied career, she remains a force to be reckoned with. Her latest release is a four-song EP with Son Little: two originals and two new versions of songs long associated with the Staple Singers.

Your Good Fortune EP

Few singers of Mavis Staples' era have managed to stay as prolific or as relevant; Bettye LaVette comes in a close second, Aretha isn’t even in the race. A pop-gospel lifer who started singing in public when she was barely a teenager, she enjoyed massive success in the '60s and '70s as the mightiest voice in the Staple Singers and as an avatar of post-Civil Rights optimism. Even after a few decades in the wilderness (during which she made a string of fine, yet largely overlooked solo albums, including one produced by Prince), she experienced a resurgence in the new century with a string of albums that updated her message first to the Bush era and next to the age of Obama. She has recorded two (three if you count Pops Staples’ posthumous Don’t Lose This) excellent albums with Jeff Tweedy, one of which—2010’s *You Are Not Alone—*won a Grammy for Best Americana Album. Decades into her storied career, she remains a force to be reckoned with.
Her latest release is a four-song EP with Son Little: two originals and two new versions of songs long associated with the Staple Singers. The man born Aaron Livingston has only a single solo EP to his name, last year’s under-the-radar Things I Forgot, but he is better known for his collaborations with the Roots (that’s him singing on Undun) and RJD2 (the duo record under the name Icebird). Stylistically, he inhabits buffer zones between genres and traditions: a little bit of blues and old-school R&B, but with a strong grounding in hip-hop. Little produced Staples’ latest EP, wrote two of these four songs, and played most of the instruments, and he comes across like a man who can’t quite believe he’s working with someone of Staples’ stature.
"Why did you spend all your good fortune on me?" Mavis sings on the opening track, drawing out that first syllable gravely and letting that final pronoun fade quickly and humbly. The song echoes the gospel sentiments she has been preaching all her life, and the melodic cadence of the verses are perfectly suited to her delivery. Little produces "Your Good Fortune" to gently update or at least comment on the Staples sound: His guitar playing obviously mimics Pops’ signature tone. It’s a powerful performance by both singer and producer, yet ultimately it doesn’t sound like Little wrote it for Mavis. Instead, it sounds like he wrote it to her.
Little wisely keeps the arrangements straightforward, backing Staples with only a few instruments: guitar, bass, looped drums (or drums that sound looped), and a keyboard flourish every once in a while. Instead of spare, however, the songs occasionally sound crowded, as though the music is closing in on Staples. That can be intriguing on "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", a cover of the Staple Singers’ cover of the Blind Lemon Jefferson tune, which conveys the song title's grim finality. "Wish I Had Answered", however, sounds a bit choked, never quite hitting the groove that handclaps and tambourine are meant to suggest.
Pops wrote "Wish I Had Answered" in the 1960s, years before the Staples would reach the peak of their popularity, and Mavis sings his words as though threading a life’s worth of spiritual regret into three minutes. Not only has her voice gained power with age, but her sheer presence, as a living reminder of pop's social conscience, is commanding. She is a living reminder of the idea that musicians have a great responsibility to the world.
That much comes through on Little’s second original, the righteous "Fight", on which Mavis surveys a range of social ills and invites us to help her solve them. She may not be talking specifically about RFRA, income inequality, or Black Lives Matter, but it’s impossible to hear the song in 2015 and not think of these and other pressing issues. "Talking about Jesus but you treat people dead wrong," she declares in that voice that exudes moral authority and spiritual generosity. "Freedom and justice, they ain’t your playthings." Seldom has she sounded so accusing or so scolding, as though she can’t believe she has to keep telling us all to treat each other with respect and dignity. It takes her a bit outside her comfort zone, which is exciting for an artist of any age and makes the promise of a longer collaboration with Son Little sound particularly glorious.


This Latin-tinged electro-folk project takes a rustic turn with intriguing results.

Canta Lechuza

Roberto Lange makes Latin-tinged electro-folk music under the name Helado Negro (Spanish for "black ice cream") and a recent stint the woods of Connecticut seems to have had a curious impact on his music. Most of Canta Lechuza (which translates as "Owl Singing"), the second full-length offering from the Helado Negro moniker, feels like something of a one-man vacation. The compositions conjure images of lantern-lit patio parties and lightly narcotized comet-gazing, with less focus on the folkier aspects that shaped his debut, Awe Owe.
From the outside looking in, Canta Lechuza shares something with Destroyer's latest LP, Kaputt. Like the latter record, Canta Lechuza finds an artist ignoring his established pastoral leanings while sailing into smoother waters in a style that touches on kitsch. But instead of Bejar's ornate, romantic bluster, Lange is more interested in negative space, noise, and subtlety-- starry-eyed crooning, celestial background textures, and slinky rhythms crafted around bass plinks and plunks that seem to have been stolen from some Barcelona nightclub and slowed to a crawl.
But back to all that noise. Lange is clearly in the mood to experiment, letting more traditional instruments take a backseat while he fiddles with electronic equipment, peppering nearly every track with whirs, burrs, clicks, and clacks. He occasionally takes time to build distinct grooves from all these little pieces ("Cenar en La Manana"), but more often than not, his fiddling is distracting. It's such a pleasure getting wrapped up in the dreamy ethers of a song like "Lechuguilla", you can't help but feel a bit slighted by the fact that Lange didn't choose to dial it back a bit.
Not all of the experimentation is quite so invasive. This is, after all, a record that was composed in the wilds, and Lange's ability to channel his surroundings affords Canta Lechuza an important transportive quality. "El Oeste" concludes with a serrated swell that recalls a summer thunderstorm, while "Calculas" features lightning bug synth flashes. Best of all are the heavily processed blurts on "Oreja De Arena", which provide Lange with what sounds like a belching bullfrog as a backup singer. When Lange goes with the flow and allows elements like this to permeate his music, Canta Lechuza is at its best.


Celebrating the true first chapter in an often brilliant career, David Bowie's second studio album is reissued, complete with a 15-track bonus disc.

David Bowie: Space Oddity [40th Anniversary Edition]

Space Oddity [40th Anniversary Edition]

Through the 1970s, David Bowie built his legend on a parade of changing persona and shrewd stylistic shifts. But his initial, late-1960s forays into the music industry illustrate that there's a fine line between "chameleonic" and "indecisive"-- in his early years, Bowie tried make his name variously as a mod bluesman, a traditional folksinger, an Anthony Newley-schooled theatrical raconteur and, on his 1967 self-titled debut, a music-hall dandy. Ironically, it was a song seemingly most susceptible to a brief, novelty-tune shelf life that would prove to be his first enduring work: the 1969 single "Space Oddity", which, of course, riffed on the similarly titled Stanley Kubrick blockbuster of the day, and was fortuitously timed to court a space-crazed populace still abuzz from that summer's lunar landing.
The ploy didn't quite pay off-- though the "Space Oddity" single cracked the UK Top 5, the sophomore album on which it appeared flopped, as the efforts to establish the David Bowie brand resulted in a confusing release strategy. His UK label, Phillips, issued the album in Britain as David Bowie (making it his second self-titled album), while his U.S. benefactors at Mercury christened it with a title that begged to have it relegated to the folk-section cut-out bin: Man of Words/Man of Music. But rather than prompt another career about-face, the album's prog-folk hymnals (complete with guest keyboard wizardry from Rick Wakeman of Yes) helped point the way to the artful glam-rock that would make Bowie a superstar-- upon which he would reissue the album in 1972 and rename it after its most famous song.
As such, this 40th-anniversary reissue of Space Oddity does not so much commemorate a great album-- it doesn't even rank among Bowie's 10 best-- but rather the true first chapter in an often brilliant career (not to mention the dawn of Bowie's fruitful collaborative relationship with producer Tony Visconti). Tellingly, the title track has opened pretty much every Bowie greatest-hits compilation of note, and rightfully so-- not only does its still-thrilling rocket-launch structure anticipate Bowie's own supernova ascent, the song's themes of splendid isolation and uncertain futurism would prove ever-present motifs in his work up through 1980's Scary Monsters. But if the song dramatically reinvents Bowie as a sci-fi folkie-- serving as the middle-man between late-60s hippie idealism and early-70s disillusionment-- with few exceptions, the rest of Space Oddity isn't quite as eager to thrust forth into the great unknown.
Instead, we hear a young dude who's still back home with his Beatles and his Stones (see: the perfunctory "Hey Jude" group-chorus coda of "Memory of a Free Festival" for the former; the extended blues boogie of "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" for the latter), with a well-worn copy of Love's Forever Changes close at hand-- all that's missing from the mellotronic psych-folk serenade "An Occasional Dream" is an Arthur Lee co-write credit. So amid these stately surroundings, side-one closer "Cygnet Committee" stands out not just by virtue of its nine-minute length, but for its strident disavowal of hippie platitudes ("[we] stoned the poor on slogans such as 'Wish you could hear!' 'Love is all we need!' 'Kick out the jams!' 'Kick out your mother!'"); likewise, Bowie's voice overpowers the song's languid folk-rock sway as if it were a shackle, introducing his signature technique of intensifying and accelerating his delivery to break free of the verses' pre-established cadences. It's the birth of the classic David Bowie Affectation-- the one that's been embraced/lampooned by everyone from the Frogs and Ween and Destroyer to Flight of the Conchords-- making "Cygnet Committee" as important a breakthrough for Bowie as Space Oddity's more celebrated title track.
Comparatively, Space Oddity's other epic set pieces-- the over-orchestrated fable "The Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud" and hippie-dream requiem "Memory of a Free Festival"-- are too baroque in their presentation to fully transcend the status of time-capsule curios. But they're still historically significant for introducing Bowie's future foil Mick Ronson, who makes an uncredited appearance on the former, while contributing some six-string muscle to the improved, two-part single version of "Free Festival", included on this set's 15-track bonus disc.
A handful of these rarities have surfaced previously-- namely on the 1989 Sound+Vision box set, the 1990 CD reissue of Space Oddity and the 2000 Bowie on the Beeb radio-sessions compilation-- and the set feels excessively padded with (not-so) alternate mixes. But taken together, they illuminate the rapidity of Bowie's evolution between the album's conception and its promotion, from an embryonic demo version of "Space Oddity" (sung in a higher register and different meter) to the superior, stripped-down versions of "An Occasional Dream" and "Freecloud", the Marc Bolan-backed single version of eventual Aladdin Sane track "The Prettiest Star" and the proto-Spiders From Mars swagger of "London Bye Ta-Ta". And throughout it all, Bowie even found the time to learn another language, cutting a lyrically revised Italian version of "Space Oddity" ("Ragazza Solo, Ragazza Sola") to compete with a wave of successful cover versions in Italy. It 's hardly the most flattering portrait of a man who would go on to sell the world, but still a quaint keepsake from a time when he was just trying to blag his way through mainland Europe.


Career-spanning comp that the former Voidoids leader and Neon Boys, Heartbreakers, and Dim Stars member himself claims should be "his only album."

Richard Hell: Spurts: The Richard Hell Story

Spurts: The Richard Hell Story

Take a look at the cover of Spurts, with Richard Hell leaning forward and mugging like some collaborative product between Malcolm MacLaren and Franz Oz (though his distinctive style predated both), looking defiant and probably a little strung out on something. Flip it over: There's Hell almost 30 years later, hair grown out and dyed, face filled out, looking over his shoulder through tinted glasses at three decades of music, mistakes, band breakups, and at least one certifiably classic document of the CBGB's punk scene, Blank Generation.
Spurts is not the first time Hell has compiled his own material. He collected the odds-and-sods R.I.P. when he ditched music to pursue writing in 1984; it was later expanded and repackaged as Time-- inexplicably omitting "Blank Generation" on both occasions. This time, the package features interview-style liner notes between Hell and critics Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell giving background info on every track, and includes Hell's material with Dim Stars, recorded in the early 1990s with Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming. Hell himself claims this compilation should be "his only album," a definitive release that would "cut straight through" like any album would.
The Neon Boys were a precursor to the band Television; Hell was kicked out before they recorded their first album under the new name, but he was magnanimous enough to include two Neon Boys tracks at the start of the disc (not to mention close it with a live version of "Blank Generation" as played by Television). The preliminary version of "Love Comes in Spurts" had music written by Television's Tom Verlaine, and has next to no resemblance to the version on Blank Generation. But Hell's remix shows no signs of a bruised ego, pushing the guitars way up and his vocals down, serving the song well. The Stones-like fury of the rhythm guitar is well captured, and Verlaine's brief-but-inspired ascending lines can be felt in the back of your teeth.
From Hell's time with Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, he only includes the cream of the crop, "Chinese Rocks". Instead, the lion's share of Spurts leans on the Voidoids' Blank Generation and Destiny Street records. The Blank Generation work has aged best, coupling punk fury with eccentric delivery and rhythm that's not afraid to swing. It also features some inspired anti-guitar hero moments from the inestimable Robert Quine on "Liars Beware" and "Love Comes in Spurts". Destiny Street would show a slightly poppier and more contemplative side to the band, though "Kid With a Replaceable Head" is infectiously sinister and "Time" and "Ignore That Door" show Hell's songwriting growing more frank and direct.
Hell returned to recording in 1992 with a Dim Stars EP preceding one proper album. The songs chosen here mostly sound like jam sessions, like the two-chord "Dim Stars Theme", over which Geffen-era Thurston Moore scrawls recklessly while staying within the lines, bending the compositions but not breaking them, keeping a foothold for Hell's lyrics. "Monkey" is Hell at his most forthright, and the distorted guitars in the background seem incongruous with the popping clean chords and his newfound tenderness ("I swear I held my own hand pretending it was yours").
Spurts includes one more late-era compilation track from the Voidoids, "Oh", and two previously unreleased tracks, the Dennis Cooper-inspired "She'll Be Coming", which combines drum loops, Eastern tones, and a forced hillbilly accent, and the aforementioned Television of performance of "Blank Generation". The first side of Spurts is a righteous blast of indignant punk, and the second half indulges in some experimentation, some mood pieces, and some glances at hard-earned maturity. The best of his many compilations, and certainly the best place to start for the unfamiliar, Spurts flows as well as any original album. People still listen to those, right?


The Fuck Buttons co-founder fills his latest solo album with familiar, quavering synth-pop, less concerned with exploring feelings than expressing what he’s feeling deeply.

Deliverance

As a member of Fuck Buttons, the dearly departed electronic noise duo, Andrew Hung helped elevate the experiential over the emotional, imagining Olympian feats of speed and strength far beyond anything that would be considered “relatable.” And in the past decade, Hung’s most celebrated projects—whether in pop or film—bear witness to someone else’s transformation rather than centering himself. The compact synth-pop of Hung’s solo work has offered a quiet counterpoint to his collaborations, and his third album, Deliverance, makes the loudest pronouncement of the project’s modest aims: Meet Andrew Hung, he’s just One of the Guys.
Granted, Deliverance will suffice for anyone trying to catch a contact buzz from the recent 10-year anniversary of Slow Focus. If Fuck Buttons songs were Decepticons—imposing, awesome, bent on destruction—then Hung’s solo work reimagines the same materials in their more familiar, useful modes of planes, boomboxes, or cars. Putting aside his reputation for circuit bending and synth corruption, the mere song titles of “Changes,” “Soldier,” or “Love Is” are truth in advertising, at least in revealing that Hung is wholly uninterested in artifice as a lyricist. “The world has turned and left me in the dark/I feel so lonely now,” he howls on “Don’t Believe Me Now,” its adolescent angst believable if only because Deliverance aspires to only the most formative, gateway synth-pop.
But while Hung’s songcraft has gotten sharper and more streamlined since 2017’s Realisationship, his naked voice is more jarring than anything he fed through a modded-out Playskool mic on Street Horrrsing. Prone to holding a tune like a live eel, Hung sings in a quaver more emo than emotive, less concerned with exploring feelings than with expressing that he’s feeling it deeply. While Hung knows how to let it rip on a chorus, his intensity often modulates at random, conflicting with underlying sentiment and drawing far too much attention to first-rhyme-best-rhyme lyrics like, “It’s like a window into shame/Changes with the rain/It’s hidden from the place I blame.” Or, the chorus on opener “Ocean Mouth,” “The fear I feel is a turning wheel/It’s a bitter taste.”
Regardless of the honesty that this approach brings to Hung’s DIY intentions, Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay—Kele Okereke, Yannis Philappakis, Ed MacFarlane. Or hell, even Robert Smith, as most of the lyrics could pass for the placeholders for the Cure’s 21st-century music; indeed, Deliverance gives us a song called “Never Be the Same,” whereas an official version of the Cure’s “It Can Never Be the Same” has been promised since 2016. Of course, Robert Smith is Robert Smith. Hung—he’s still just One of the Guys.


The overlooked Brit-rock stars reissue their sophomore album on its 17th anniversary. It’s easy to say underappreciated bands were ahead of their time, but Six by Seven were totally of their time.

The Closer You Get

Six by Seven were but one of many British bands to carry the “next Radiohead” albatross in the late ’90s. Despite endorsements from tastemakers like Jools Holland and John Peel, their 1998 debut album, The Things We Make, didn’t yield a “Creep”-sized crossover. It did boast a pretty great “Stop Whispering” in the yearning “For You,” but the rest of the record wasn’t so eager to please, as it wrapped singer-guitarist Chris Olley’s plaintive melodicism in slow-roiling surges that owed more to the stalking gaits of post-rock than Britpop. That tension between their congenial and contrarian instincts likely scuttled Six by Seven’s chart potential, but on their follow-up album, the Nottingham band turned their frustrations and square-peg/round-hole relationship with popular culture into a badge of honor.
On the surface, the reappearance of The Closer You Get is an oddly timed archival project—rather than wait until next year to mark the 20th-anniversary of their debut album, Six by Seven are jumping the queue to do a 17th-anniversary deluxe vinyl repackaging of their second (complete with a bonus collection of Peel sessions). Though Olley rebooted the Six by Seven name in 2013 after a half decade hiatus, next month, he’ll be reforming with the band’s original line-up to perform The Closer You Get in its entirety at a couple of shows in the UK—a reunion spurred by group of fans who lobbied to make the album’s lead-off track “Eat Junk Become Junk” a party-crashing contender in the UK’s annual Christmas No. 1 sweepstakes back in 2015. But that stunt campaign speaks to a genuine need—The Closer You Get has resurfaced not out of knee-jerk nostalgia, but because it feels so vitally, viscerally now.
It’s common to say underappreciated bands were ahead of their time, but Six by Seven were totally of their time. It’s just that, in that brief post-Blair, pre-9/11 golden age, most people didn’t want to hear songs about unfettered consumerism, class conflict, media addiction, and social isolation. The Closer You Get resembles the kind of record Radiohead may have put out in 2000 had Thom Yorke chosen Mark E. Smith instead of Richard D. James as his spirit animal—an album for people who like the idea of Muse, but can’t stomach the pretension of the real one. Rather than attempt to make electronic music, Six by Seven filtered its influence through standard guitar-band instrumentation: the patient builds and trembling leads of their debut gave way to frenetic, skittering rhythms and tweaked-out distortion-pedal squalls, transforming the band from art-rock aesthetes to noise-punk preachers.
And in 17 years, Olley’s targets have only become more firmly entrenched. The lacerating invectives of “Eat Junk Become Junk” leave fresh wounds at a time when a trash-TV huckster has moved into the White House, and while “Sawn Off Metallica T-Shirt” may deal in white-trash caricature, its dirtbag protagonist’s delusions of grandeur (“Lenny Bruce Lee Marvin Gaye—I’ve got style, and I’m misunderstood!”) ring all too familiar in an era of toxic, #GHBTP-grade masculinity and #alternativefacts. (Though the two groups are aesthetic opposites, I wouldn’t be surprised if fellow Nottinghammers Sleaford Mods learned a few lessons in bile-spewing from this record.)
But as much as The Closer You Get unleashes Six by Seven’s latent aggression, there’s a part of Olley that’s holding out hope to commune with the masses—and for all its buckshot cultural critique, the album doesn’t sacrifice Olley’s flair for melancholy and impassioned appeals to the heart. The desperate sentiments of “New Year”—“give me something I can live for/Give me something to believe in”—come couched in a psych-pop sway before a string-swept chorus shoots the song skyward, while the fuzzed-out mid-album double shot of “Don’t Wanna Stop” and “Slab Square” burns like the sound of a band raging against the dying of the light.
By contrast, The Closer You Get’s tent-pole ballads—“England and a Broken Radio” and “100 and Something Foxhall Road”—are more like flickering, short-wicked candles that nonetheless illuminate a path out of the darkness. The former communicates its music-as-salvation message through mellow, Mogwai-esque atmospherics; the latter is both a love letter and farewell note—to an old flame, to Nottingham, to the possibility of happiness itself. As Olley’s more famous peers once wrote, “Don’t get sentimental/It always ends up drivel.” But what makes The Closer You Get more than just a delirious dive through modern life’s rubbish is Olley’s desire to forge an emotional connection with those who feel weighed down by it. And if that means occasionally getting sentimental, then, for Olley, it’s a risk worth taking.


For her latest creative venture Helen, Liz Harris of Grouper has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator simply named "Helen." Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane.

The Original Faces

Liz Harris' music thrives on liminality. Her canny blending of tape loops, field music, and psychedelia strands us somewhere both familiar and strange: Dusty old pianos, chirping frogs, and a defiantly beeping microwave counted as some of the most persistent instrumentation on her last album Ruins. Whether she's releasing new material as Grouper or collaborating with bluesmen and noise savants (Roy Montgomery, Xiu Xiu, and Tiny Vipers), Harris builds up immersive, perplexing landscapes, tearing it all down just as we're starting to figure out where, exactly, we are.
For her latest creative venture Helen, Harris has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator (more on her later). Despite its purported origins as a thrash band, Helen's sun-baked ambient lands somewhere between My Bloody Valentine's distorted bliss and Eternal Tapestry's psyched-out experiments. Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon, not unlike A Sunny Day in Glasgow's excellent Sea When Absent. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane.
Harris' distorted, manipulated vocals divulge their secrets slowly, after the melodic sweetness wears off.  She plays with our senses and expectations: Listeners must wade through a creaky, corrupted tape sample to reach the triumphant roar of opening track "Ryder"; when the drums finally kick in on the dreamlike "Pass Me By", it's with exaggerated, almost comic force, as though she's acknowledging our impatience. Her more nocturnal, funereal side informs the The Original Faces' best moments, particularly the achingly beautiful "Violet", which sounds like a memorial service being held 20 yards away from a Slowdive rehearsal.
The other noteworthy member of the band is the album's mysterious, unidentified backup vocalist, whose vocals sound uncannily similar to Harris but are credited separately to "Helen". Is she Grouper's alter ego? An unnamed surprise guest? The mythical Greek heroine, a symbol for unattainable, destructive perfection? These are solid guesses, but I'm partial to imagining her as a ghost, who materializes every so often to bestow the music with an otherworldly presence. "Helen"'s presence is tenuous; on cuts like "Right Outcome" and "City Breathing" her harmonies pierce the void to carry Harris' leads upward, while on "Covered in Shade" and "Allison", they're tucked away into the background. Considering the mythical connotations of Helen's namesake, her presence makes sense here as an extension of the album's interest in the divide between delicate beauty and all-consuming din.
Whatever else she does, "Helen" helps diversify the sound of The Original Faces and injects a youthful spirit into the solemn proceedings. Along with other traces of pop, like the jangly interludes "Motorcycle" and "City Breathing", she provides a respite from the surrounding gloom. These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.


The Virginia rapper’s latest is musically varied and vocally impressive, revealing an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting and drill closer to the core of his style.

It’s Almost Dry

Pusha T’s voice—snarling and crystalline, among the most distinctive in his generation—would be compelling if he were rapping on a click track. But after the Clipse, the duo he had formed with his brother Malice, disbanded, the Virginia Beach rapper’s early solo efforts were marred by production that often suffocated him. Records like 2011’s Fear of God II: Let Us Pray and 2013’s Wrath of Caine can get lost in the digital-maximalist wilderness. Though he’d navigated similar lanes nimbly in the past, Pusha was now drowned out by beats that were crowded in the most predictable, post-Lex Luger ways, some of which he even let lure him into conspicuously borrowed flows. He eventually shed this to find something meaner and radically spare; his most recent album, 2018’s seven-song, 21-minute Daytona, mirrors this minimalism in its very construction.
The other thing, aside from leanness, that “Numbers on the Board,” “Nosetalgia,” and “Untouchable” have in common with Daytona is that none of them are produced by the Neptunes. After handling the vast majority of Clipse’s studio albums, Pharrell and Chad Hugo were all but absent from Pusha’s solo work. Now Pharrell returns to produce more than half of It’s Almost Dry, Pusha’s first new record in nearly four years. It’s a musically varied and vocally impressive effort from an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting, drilling closer to the core of his style.
Clipse LPs were once conduits for the Neptunes’ most experimental rap beats; Pharrell’s work on It’s Almost Dry honors that legacy, leading Pusha into narcotized carnivals (“Call My Bluff”) and the climaxes of sci-fi thrillers (the naggingly eerie “Scrape It Off”). In fact, there’s a foreboding quality to all of the Pharrell beats here, from the opening suite of “Brambleton” and “Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,” where the former’s electronic bounce and latter’s freneticism make each other seem more sinister.
The rest of It’s Almost Dry is helmed by Kanye West, along with a few co-producers, most notably the New York veteran 88-Keys on lead single “Diet Coke.” Kanye’s beats are not as uniformly excellent as Pharrell’s: Closer “I Pray for You” is dragged down by pedestrian drums, and “Diet Coke” plays like paint-by-numbers Pusha. (The latter song is perhaps a victim of the hyper-clear mixes the rapper prefers; it sounds like a slightly sterile version of the grimier songs it attempts to evoke.) But the best Kanye is enrapturing. On first listen, the slight, Colonel Bagshot-sampling “Just So You Remember” reminded me of the Daytona finale “Infrared.” It’s actually closer to being a Ka song, so quiet that it’s barely there. “Dreamin’ of the Past,” which is built around Donny Hathaway’s recording of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” is the sort of song Kanye produced around the turn of the century: maddening at first for the obviousness of its sample flip, and then for its effectiveness. “Hear Me Clearly” sounds like the tail end of a nuclear winter.
The most thunderous beat from either producer is Pharrell’s “Neck & Wrist,” a lavalike midtempo track that would overwhelm most MCs. Instead, Pusha slips into lilting flows reminiscent of 50 Cent and G.O.O.D. Music signee Valee on the song’s verse and hook, respectively. On Daytona, he carried each song with robust performances that he played straight down the middle—often technically impressive, always appropriate for their songs. The beats on Dry simply require more finesse, leading to what’s far and away his most dextrous showing as a vocalist. Pusha feigns exhaustion on “Call My Bluff,” playfully syncopates the ends of bars on “Brambleton,” and maintains metronomic, even mathematical cadences on “Rock N Roll” and “Scrape It Off,” where not a syllable is out of place, but that precision does not come to dominate the songs.
A few months after Daytona’s release, Pusha flew to Berlin to speak at the Red Bull Music Academy. There, he leveled with a concert hall full of aspiring musicians: “If you want to talk about it, I really made variations of the same album for the past 20 years,” he said. “I know exactly who I’m talking to. I know exactly who my core is. I cater to that person. I don’t cater to anyone else.” On a writing level, this is largely true: Though Pusha has told some memorably unnerving anecdotes from his past, he is usually not writing full scenes—he arranges and rearranges shards of detail to create new iterations of familiar pulp. In other words, the currency of his style is execution, not experience.
All of which makes It’s Almost Dry’s opening song one of the most fascinating in Pusha’s catalog. “Brambleton” is an extended, mostly bemused response to Anthony “Geezy” Gonzalez, the former Clipse manager who served a eight-year sentence for running a $20 million drug ring in Virginia Beach, and who, in a 2020 VladTV interview, said that “95 percent” of Clipse’s rhymes were about his life. Inflammatory as Gonzalez’s interview was, Pusha’s rebuke of his claims is measured, even humble—“You would pay 16, I would pay 18” sounds more like forensic accounting than a blood feud—and wraps up tidily.
Pusha likes to lean on crime-movie tropes, but he invokes them with purpose. In some instances, this has the effect of making him seem extraordinarily unfazed by the world around him, as if the strongest response a life-and-death situation can trigger in him is a hazy memory of Carlito’s Way. But he is not willing or able to keep real life at bay forever. It’s Almost Dry’s second song, “Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,” is also its least verbose, with few lines longer than six words. In its chorus, Pusha calls himself “cocaine’s Dr. Seuss,” which is about as far as one can go toward lowering the stakes of whatever is said next. And still, two things bleed into its opening verse. First Pusha returns, obliquely, to Gonzalez’s claims, which he seemed to have settled on the prior song. “If I never sold dope for you,” he raps, “then you’re 95 percent of who?” Later in the same verse is this line of thinking:

AMGs on auto cruise
The wrist singing’ Auto-Tune
The dope game destroyed my youth
Now Kim Jones Dior my suits

It’s easy to imagine Pusha placing the third of those four lines there to accentuate the thrill and sheer unlikelihood of his wealth. But it has the opposite effect, making the clothes and cars seem like meager consolation prizes for decades spent dodging arrest and assassination. Like Pusha’s other work, It’s Almost Dry stops short of explicitly considering whether what he did—and what he went through—in his early life is justified by the payoff. But lurking at the edges are some regrets that he cannot outrun.


This collection tells the full story of a Madchester band that’s never quite gotten its due, documenting tentative forays into acid house alongside tight, ’60s-inspired songwriting.

The Complete Singles

Back in the early ’90s, when Madchester was at its peak, Inspiral Carpets were perhaps best known for their “cool as fuck” T-shirts, which were essential wear for any young indie fan looking to annoy their parents. But the Inspiral Carpets were never really cool. They were from Oldham, for a start, a former textile town to the northeast of Manchester, and their sound leaned heavily on a very Northern English social realism, more Shelagh Delaney than Shaun Ryder.
The Stone Roses’ bank-busting return aside, the reputation of the Madchester groups has never really recovered from the critical mauling they received when shoegaze and grunge hit. Most of them are to be found playing retro festivals and small-ish gigs to aging British fans, without ever bothering to clamor for mainstream attention. So why should you care about The Complete Singles, the Inspiral Carpets’ third singles collection, on top of a 2003 greatest hits? The simple answer is that the Inspiral Carpets deserve so much more than the frenzy of middle-aged fans and moderately sized UK tour. From 1988’s “Keep the Circle Around” to 1994’s “I Want You,” featuring the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, the Inspiral Carpets were perhaps the best singles band of the Madchester era, cooking up three-minute tales of tear-jerking psychedelia in which a neat eye for lyrical detail met intricately arranged vocal harmonies and Clint Boon’s stirring organ melodies.
“This Is How It Feels,” their best-known song, has it all: a haunting Farfisa organ riff; a wonderfully compact opening couplet, which paints a depressingly relatable picture of domestic woe (“Husband don’t know what he’s done/Kids don’t know what’s wrong with Mum”); and a perfectly constructed chorus of interlocking vocal lines, which mesh together like an Oldham Beach Boys. Equally poignant is “Move,” a 1989 single with an exquisite chord sequence and one of Tom Hingley’s most heart-on-sleeve vocals, a perfectly English work of diffident emotional release that hits like the third pint of beer after your ex leaving. “Saturn Five” is the 1990s’ best ’60s garage single, hands down; “Dragging Me Down” swings from tragedy to ecstasy in four and a half minutes of cinematic drama; and “I Want You” gives an idea of what the Fall might have sounded like if Mark E. Smith had ceded an inch of control to a backing vocalist. True, the band’s quality control slipped when they reunited in 2011 with original singer Stephen Holt in lieu of Hingley, but the four singles from that era feel at home at the end of the record’s chronological history, while the appearance of punk poet John Cooper Clarke on “Let You Down” sounds charmingly inevitable, like the crowning act of a Manchester psych symposium.
These songs are readily available on other albums and playlists. But The Complete Singles comes into its own on the third CD of the set, where many of the band’s remixes are collected for the first time, alongside new mixes from the Go! Team and Martyn Walsh & Simon Lyon. The Inspiral Carpets may have been less steeped in dance music than many of their peers, but they weren’t oblivious to the rave madness around them: “Caravan,” from 1991, had a piano line that nodded to the triumphant plink-plonk of Italo house, and the band commissioned a significant number of remixes to fill out their 12" singles, many from local producers like Jon Dasilva or Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering. The hit rate among these is not particularly high—they often feel awkward, more an ill-matched game of exquisite corpse than a genuine meeting of minds—and it is probably more interesting to know that a pre-trance Paul van Dyk remixed the Inspiral Carpets than to actually listen to his leaden and rather cheap-sounding take on “Saturn 5.” The Go! Team, meanwhile, make the stately majesty of “This Is How It Feels” sound like an ungainly kids TV theme, with Hingley’s voice relegated to the bottom of a leather boot.
When the remixes do work, though, the results are enlightening, a trip to a Madchester time capsule where Farfisa organ soul meets bubbling house beats. Justin Robertson’s take on “Caravan” manages to be both utterly cosmic and totally Manchester, like Ibiza 1988 under gray Northern skies, using the original song’s piano to great effect over bubbling 303 and the suggestion of bongos. Mike Pickering & Paul Heard’s 12" mix of “Two Worlds Collide” is a charming mixture of dub basslines, distorted guitar, and house beats that lollop around with the fishtail-parka swagger of prime Liam Gallagher, while Sheffield bleep legends the Forgemasters’ mix of “Commercial Reign” rubs the song down to its tough industrial core. Inspiral Carpets never quite reach the gloriously seamless dance-rock fusion that Primal Scream achieved on Screamadelica, but they do sound very much at home on the dancefloor when in the embrace of a sympathetic talent.
Madchester’s role as a forward-looking musical force is sometimes missed by music fans outside of the UK, who see all the Byrds influences in the Stone Roses and none of the Mr. Fingers. The Inspiral Carpets had their retro moments, certainly, but they were never consumed by the past. This makes The Complete Singles the most accurate (and interesting) portrait of the group to date: crack songwriters with their shaggy bowl cuts tilted toward the past and Adidas trainers pointed tentatively toward the future.


The South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer is an expert navigator of the balancing act required to make great house music.

Once EP

To make house music is to walk a fine line between the template and the tangent—between all the things that make house music recognizable as such (the beat, the groove, the repetition) and the things that make a given track stand out across a long, foggy night beneath the disco ball. Peggy Gou has only been putting out music for a couple of years, but the South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer has already proven herself an expert navigator of that balancing act. The best Gou tracks take house music’s familiar form and splash it with color until it’s as splotchy as a tie-dyed piece of fabric. Take “Day Without Yesterday,” from a 2016 12” for London’s Phonica White label. The sound is familiar, with a rippling groove and lush chords that evoke canonical producers like Pépé Bradock and Maurice Fulton. But the sprightly walking bassline and trembling synth chords give the song ample character, ensuring that when you hear it on a dancefloor, mixed in with dozens of songs cut from similar cloth, you’re going to take notice. Likewise, in “Rose,” while her shouted invocations (“Like me! Like you! Like all of us!”) would normally take the spotlight in a club track, they pale alongside the many layers of bright synths and contrasting textures. It’s a clever bit of sleight-of-hand.
Once is Gou’s first new release in nearly a year and a half, and its three tracks mark a significant step forward. For one thing, this is the first time she’s sung on a record: On “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” the standout, she oscillates between murmuring and actual singing, and she sounds great. The spoken-word bits lie low in the mix, which has the effect of pulling the listener down to their level. (That she’s singing in Korean only adds an element of intrigue for anyone who doesn’t speak the language.) On the chorus, she adopts a lilting cadence that’s reminiscent of Brazilian popular music; her voice isn’t powerful, but she uses it well, and her sparingly multi-tracked harmonies add dusty color to a track that’s already bursting with vibraphones, jazz-inflected keyboards, and a squelchy hint of acid.
“Hundres Times” loses the vocals and digs into a clubbier, heads-down groove. The drums push forward with the intensity of a 1990s Prescription Records classic, while the track’s tonal center is a loose weave of elastic synth sounds and flickering accents. The arrangement is a model for how to keep things dynamic, teasing individual elements in and out of the mix. Gou’s longstanding fondness for Detroit is evident in the tune’s big, dramatic synth sweeps, and on the closing “Han Jan,” she flips her Motor City instincts into a springy electro jam. Electro is enjoying one of its periodic comebacks right now, with syncopated 808s adding rhythmic spice to many dancefloors more accustomed to house music’s four-on-the-floor thump. But “Han Jan” skips the sci-fi affect of so much contemporary electro and instead reconnects with the genre’s funk roots.
Here, the focus is primarily on the snapping drums and a rubbery bassline that recalls Metro Area’s brand of 1980s revivalism; the synths add a bit of watery background color, and Gou’s rapping feels almost textural. But once she gets to the chorus, the melody, muted as it is, snaps into focus. The hook (“You gotta do it right/Enjoy your life/You gotta do it right”) isn’t much more than dancefloor boilerplate. But it captures your attention, and it sticks with you. Clubs are swimming in indistinguishable tracks—that’s just part of club music. But Gou’s are anything but anonymous.


With an uncharacteristically somber tone, the Detroit rapper's sixth album is his most introspective and confessional work to date.

Quaranta

As an artist in a genre where emerging stars are rarely old enough to drive, let alone drink, Danny Brown has always seemed self-conscious about his age. His breakout mixtape, XXX, was titled in part to reference his age at the time. His next album title was even less subtle. Quaranta—“40” in Italian but also, a near-homonym for “quarantine”—arrives as Brown enters his fourth decade, and he’s called it a “spiritual sequel to XXX.” That’s a bit misleading though, because Quaranta is a very different record. Across a number of solemn, lyric-heavy tracks, Brown catalogs his regrets and owns up to his personal failings. If XXX felt like a never-ending carousel of sex and drugs, Quaranta feels more like sitting in a therapist's office processing the fallout from a decade of rockstar living.
The last few years have given Brown a lot to unpack. A lifelong Detroiter, he relocated to Austin, Texas following a divorce; earlier this year he got sober after a stint in rehab. He wrote Quaranta during the initial wave of COVID lockdown and it sounds like it. Brown’s stance is isolated and reflective; he raps deliberately over sparse beats, his delivery more confessional than flamboyant. Where his previous albums approached similar topics (Old, in particular, attempted to reconcile Brown’s hedonistic lifestyle and traumatic childhood), the music and rapping were far more dynamic. On Quaranta, Brown’s acrobatic flows, ear for oddball beats, and dark sense of humor are in short supply.
Brown has always been equal parts traditionalist and insurgent. While he led a wave of internet-fluent rappers who crossed over into indie and EDM, his mastery of storytelling and technique betrayed his love of ’90s hip-hop. He leaned into those sounds on 2019’s uknowhatimsayin¿, which was executive-produced by Q-Tip, and goes further on Quaranta, often dropping the nasal honk and frantic delivery in favor of a lower register and slower tempos. He’s never sounded more distant from the current wave of psychedelic rap he influenced, a fact that’s equally evident in his lyrics. The subject matter here is heavy and personal, even by Danny Brown standards—few rappers have aired out this sort of dirty laundry on record. “Down Wit It” delves into heartbreak and addiction (“Now it’s all over, can’t stay sober/Deep in my depression, hoping I can get over”) while “Quaranta'” undercuts Brown’s image with a grim dose of reality: “Lost everything in pursuit of my dream/Pushed everyone away, now no one here but me.”
It’s commendable that Brown would rather make an album about what he’s going through than cater to what his audience expects—as he told us a decade ago, he has no intention of rapping about youthful exploits for the rest of his life. That said, Quaranta often fails to present these topics in compelling ways. On the more diaristic songs, the narratives aren’t as vivid, the rapping isn’t as nimble, and the songs lack momentum. It’s telling that on “Celibate,” the otherwise sedate MIKE easily scores the album’s best verse by injecting some verve into a song that’s otherwise inert. Brown attempts to widen his focus on “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation,” which enlists Kassa Overall for a drum-fill-heavy, Goodie Mob-referencing song about gentrification in Detroit. But the observations feel surface-level and pat (someone, please write a song about gentrification without mentioning Whole Foods). The subject matter lands just outside of Brown’s wheelhouse, and despite rapping in the first-person, he struggles to bring his usual color to the storytelling.
Not everything on Quaranta feels like a break from the past—there are a few glimpses of Brown’s old charisma. The proggy, Alchemist-produced lead single “Tantor” falls into a familiar trap: In picking something challenging to rap over, Brown ends up with a beat that feels clunky. Still, he manages to straddle the line, as he often has, between woke and gleefully ignorant (“It’s that Black Lives Matter, still sniff cocaine”). The beat for “Y.B.P” is a bit goofy and brings to mind early Insane Clown Posse but, as Brown knows well, ICP is a Detroit institution. The song is glowing with the personality and local color that’s missing from many of these songs (Bruiser Wolf hilariously sums up the state of Michigan thusly: “It’s hard to fit in the murder mitten like O.J.’s glove”). “Dark Sword Angel” is Quaranta’s best song and the only track that could easily slot into a noisy, industrial album like Atrocity Exhibition. Over a squelchy instrumental buttressed by live drums, Brown drops the sort of filthy punchlines he’s long been known for (“Tried to put my finger in her like a rotary phone/If I take her for a spin, she will never call home”). The song provides a much-needed jolt of energy and humor to an album that’s lacking in both.
On Quaranta, Danny Brown seems to be questioning his choices while plotting a path forward. And though it’s more compelling in theory than in practice, its meditative tone is a bold move coming from an artist known for giddy hedonism. Whether spending $70,000 on samples, dropping a heater with Purity Ring, or touring with Kitty, Brown has never been one to make safe choices and few rappers with his stellar track record would throw a curveball like this a decade into their career. There are a few hints that this experimentation might yet bear fruit, like the serene closing track, “Bass Jam,” where he sounds open-hearted and nostalgic. But those bright spots aren’t enough to lift the album out of its dour funk. Growth can be awkward, and for better or worse, Quaranta feels like an apt reflection of this process. Given how few rappers are given the opportunity to age gracefully, it still feels like a privilege to hear him work through it.


On their Sub Pop debut, LVL UP's more unhinged, existential bent gives a new weight to their songwriting.

Return to Love

The release of New York indie rock quartet LVL UP’s latest album Return to Love hinged on an ultimatum. After years toiling as linchpins in the city’s DIY scene, playing in a half dozen other scummy pop acts, and with half of the band running the small but influential label Double Double Whammy, they decided that they'd had enough. The rock project that Dave Benton and Mike Caridi launched with their college buds—drummer Greg Rutkin and bassist/singer Nick Corbo—would either have to get good enough to draw the attention of a bigger indie label (“Sub Pop, Merge, or Matador,” they said in a recent interview) or call it quits entirely.
As chance would have it, some Sub Pop employees caught a couple shows in the wake of the band’s cult-beloved 2014 record Hoodwink’d and decided to release their new album Return to Love. But happy endings aside, it’s hard not to read that do-or-die period into the relatable agitation of this record. For the first time, the trio of songwriters’ lyrics largely deal with existential turmoils rather than interpersonal ones. It’s as if the possibility of the band ending—or maybe just getting older—forced them to stop and think about bigger themes, to look at the sky and anxiously sputter what they see.
On album opener “Hidden Driver,” Benton meditates on the Biblical fall of man and the nature of God. Corbo considers the meaning of life while telling a creation myth of sorts on the closer “Naked in the River With the Creator.” Caridi processes a loved one’s trauma on “Pain” and offers the line, “I hope you grow old/And never find love” as both a withering send-off and a crippling suggestion that under the circumstances, nothing you can say will ever be enough. These are mammoth questions, the sorts of things that theologians, philosophers, and ethicists spend their whole lives puzzling over. And the decision to confront them, especially without offering easy answers, gives Return to Love a weight that past LVL UP efforts lacked.
The record’s also pushed forward by their three-songwriter lineup. Though their voices are sometimes hard to distinguish—particularly Corbo’s throaty mumble and Benton’s pinched moan—there’s a change in spirit between each one that lends a delightfully erratic energy to the whole effort. On the record’s B-side, Benton opens with the plodding “The Closing Door” before sulking through two of Corbo’s observational downers and then rapidly ratches the energy back up on Caridi’s “I,” which is as perilously caffeinated as anything in Royal Headache’s catalog. Hoodwink’d was a bit more unified both in tempo and tone, but the unhinged style works in favor of these songs. They’re singing about uncomfortable questions, it’s only fitting that the music should follow.
The general shape of Return to Love is familiar. Like the band’s earliest albums, it’s largely a guitar, bass, and drums-driven rock record that mines its song structures from the gold soundz of ’90s indie rock and their peers in the contemporary Northeastern indie rock scene. Even this agitated and disjointed album of existential bummer jams that follows a beloved pop album has precedents—think Dinosaur Jr.’s paranoid Bug after You’re Living All Over Me or Pavement’s Wowee Zowee after Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. But that’s part of what makes *Return to Love *so comforting, so satisfyingly unsatisfied. There’s a sense of possibility in the desperation. They’re just the latest to move these pieces around—to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle.


The Quebecois singer and guitarist transforms French and English folk ballads into songs where hoary tradition yields boldly contemporary sounds.

Mayday

Myriam Gendron’s Mayday marks the obvious evolution of a songwriter who cut her teeth busking Leonard Cohen songs in the Paris Metro, whose 2021 release Ma délire - songs of love, lost and found reimagined traditional Quebec folk songs. These are direct, grounded dispatches from the collective unconscious, melodies for sweeping floors or felling trees or mourning that might have existed forever. Between her 2014 debut, Not So Deep as a Well, where Gendron put Dorothy Parker’s poetry to music, and the new record, the Montreal-based artist has sharpened her set of timeworn tools: voice and guitar strings, as fleet and restless as a sparrow in her hands.
Gendron’s voice is earthy and unadorned, a Swiss Army knife that can cut stoic or wistful. One part Fairport Convention and one part Josephine Foster, her warble takes songs like “Look Down That Lonesome Road” and roots them even more deeply in folk tradition, yielding a sound that would be just as at home blaring from a gramophone as it would a forest clearing. Within one listen of a song like “Terres Brulées” (“Burnt Earth”), you can sing the melody back, as if retrieving it from a buried memory. Lyrically, these songs are soil-covered and windswept, sung alternately in English and French. “J’inventerai des aubes constellées d’hirondelles/J’écorcherai le froid tout gris qui nous appelle,” she sings (“I’ll invent dawns studded with swallows/I’ll scratch the cold gray that calls to us”). Later, on “Quand j’étais jeune et belle” (“When I was young and pretty”), she describes a lover soaked and chilled by the rain, who proposes they should marry under the branches of an oak.
But the record’s brightest moments happen when the traditional brushes against the hyper-modern, like a match against kindling. The electrified strumming of closer “Berceuse” collides spectacularly with the free-jazz screech of Zoh Amba’s saxophone, and Marisa Anderson’s riffs on “Long Way Home” electrify Gendron’s tale of being tossed asunder, alone on the ocean. Jim White’s fevered drumming on album highlight “Lully Lullay” reads like a restless mind tethered to a sturdy pair of feet, the push-pull between Gendron’s slow, steady refrain and the frenzied cymbals driving a compelling tension. Mayday’s best songs are unsettled and kinetic, living organisms in a state of flux. With roots in the traditional—“Lully Lullay” was inspired by the Appalachian variant of the 16th-century English “Coventry Carol,” for example—these tracks walk the tightrope between the deeply familiar and the abstract, suggesting lullabies with serrated edges. For “Berceuse,” that’s more literal—in French, Gendron sings “Go to sleep, my daughter,” before the freaky saxophone tugs us towards the surreal.
The track order dilutes some of this magic. Album opener “There Is No East or West,” a peripatetic acoustic melody, feels like a drawn-out preamble to the more compelling snap of “Long Way Home,” with its drums like a pulsing heart. Starting at such a low simmer before the second song’s cresting chorus—“Oh mother, other/Make my bed”—is a gamble, and it risks mislabeling an otherwise dynamic LP.
Yet like a devastating Dorothy Parker couplet, a 500-year old carol, or the opening bars of “Suzanne,” there are moments on Mayday that feel essential, plucked out of the ether as if they’ve always existed. These chimeras of the past and present illustrate what Gendron does best—digging up timeless sounds only to disrupt them, reenvisioning what’s timeless for this precise moment.


Omnivore Records' latest set of Townes Van Zandt reissues speaks to many different aspects of the Texan songwriter's appeal-- the earthy and direct Lone Star troubadour; the decorous, eccentric Cowboy Jack Clement productions-- all playing out the rootlessness, loneliness, senseless tragedy, and unending remorse that featured in his life.

Townes Van Zandt: High, Low and in Between / The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt / Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions and Demos 1971-1972

There are literally hundreds of versions of “Pancho & Lefty” out there in the world. It’s Townes Van Zandt’s most popular tune by a good mile, an enigmatic tale of two outlaws on the run from the federales-- like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid if Robert Redford had shot Paul Newman in the back. The most popular version is by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, which hit Number One on the country charts in 1983. Emmylou Harris covered it, as did Steve Earle, Michael Hurley, and countless amateurs on YouTube. Just this past Record Store Day, Elizabeth Cook released a tender version on a b-side with Jason Isbell. It's taken that many people to even begin to figure out what exactly the song is about and how it works: Does it eulogize Pancho Villa, the notorious Mexican outlaw who reportedly had a friend named Lefty? If so, why does it not match up to the known details of his life? Is it an allegorical tale? A huckster’s hoax? A Mexican-American tall tale reduced to life-size proportions? Whatever it is, the song possesses a stark sadness as the lyrics recount not only the death of Pancho but also the last lonely days of Lefty. “Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true, but save a few for Lefty, too,” goes that last verse. “He just did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.”
Such powerful understatement was typical of Van Zandt, who preferred to insinuate emotions rather than state them outright. That approach put him (and other songwriters like him) at odds with the sentimentality of mainstream Nashville in the 1970s, when such artists as Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and even the Man in Black Himself, deep into his cornball phase, evoked the past in perfectly pastoral terms, as though rural poverty constituted paradise. Rootless and all but disowned by his oil-wealthy Texas family, Van Zandt was too much of a wanderer to indulge such nostalgia for simpler times. Instead, his songs address the present moment, whether implicitly or explicitly. That’s why so many people have read “Pancho & Lefty” as conceptual rather than actual: It’s so unconcerned with evoking a point in time that it becomes somehow timeless-- not merely relevant across decades, which it certainly has proved to be, but more interested in ideas rather than actual men. That’s what is meant when Van Zandt is described as “cosmic.”
There are two versions of “Pancho & Lefty” among the three new Van Zandt reissues from Omnivore Records, who hopefully have many more in the wings. Not only could the pair not be any more different from one another and still be the same song, but each version speaks to a different aspect of Van Zandt’s appeal. The first, from his 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, was produced by Cowboy Jack Clement, who fills the space in the song with strings, mariachi horns, and all manner of studio tricks. The second, an alternate mix on the 2xCD demos and alt-takes set Sunshine Boy, is minimal by comparison, with only a handful of live instruments accompanying Van Zandt. The only elements that connect them are his unpretentiously hangdog vocals and that wandering piano line that never finds a place to rest and so enacts the song’s outlaw existentialism.
Here are two sides of Van Zandt, as clearly distinguished as if by state lines. The full studio version is decorous and even a bit gaudy, as was Cowboy Jack’s peculiar style, but it’s also moody and cinematic, with those horns evoking a wide-open plain that’s either a desert or a void. Historically, it’s been too easy to dismiss this version, as many Townes fans disregard Clement’s studio ministrations as overwrought and overbearing. Even Van Zandt himself disowned the horns and strings, claiming they were added without his say-so. And yet, on “Pancho & Lefty” as throughout The Late Great, Clement’s production tends to be as eccentric as Van Zandt himself. The lackadaisical plod of his cover of Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin’” implies a Music Row absurdism bolstered by the pots-and-pans percussion and fuzzed-out guitar solo. The sci-fi experiment “Silver Ships of Andilar” is self-consciously grandiose, almost like Serge Gainsbourg drinking Shiner and munching kolaches, and ominous synths interrupt the crushing desperation of “Snow Don’t Fall”, a devastating memorial to his girlfriend, who was murdered while hitchhiking to a recording session. If The Late Great is overwrought, as even Colin Escott claims in the new liners, it’s always overwrought with great purpose and conceptual weight.
The alternate mix of “Pancho & Lefty”, advertised on the tracklist as “without strings and horns,” points to another facet of Van Zandt’s catalog, which jibes more easily and naturally with listeners’ understanding of the Lone Star troubadour. It’s earthier and more direct-- a very real and gritty story rather than a parable-- as the Texan ponders the deep ache of severed friendship, abrupt betrayal, and lifelong regret. Because these demos and alt-takes emphasize austere arrangements that push Van Zandt’s vocals to the forefront, Sunshine Boy may be the ideal point of entry for listeners intimidated by his decades-spanning catalog as well as by his reputation as the ultimate songwriter’s songwriter. It includes many of his best songs, including what may be the best version of “To Live Is to Fly”. The guitar picking is clear and immediate, the vocals more fluid in their phrasings, accentuating the song’s casual melody. Van Zandt considered it among his best compositions, and it’s not hard to see why: In addition to conveying a simple philosophy of existence as a journey to some unknown destination, it evokes the transience of life lived out on the road, culminating in a few verses that are as close to perfect as Van Zandt-- or any other country musician, for that matter-- ever got: “It’s goodbye to all my friends, it’s time to go again,” he sings with affecting stoicism. “But think of all the poetry and the pickin’ down the line.”
Sadly, it’s impossible to miss that the themes Van Zandt explored in his lyrics are themes that played out in his own life, which was defined by rootlessness, loneliness, senseless tragedy, and unending remorse. The songs on these three reissues-- which are so of a piece and of a moment that they may best be thought of as a single, very persuasive box set-- all share a sense of motion, of always passing people by: the life of a touring musician certainly, but also the days of a man unmoored in the American West. Van Zandt had brief careers in college and the Air Force, which were cut short by bouts of depression, alcoholism, and insulin shock therapy. Despite his reputation among his peers as an ace picker and songwriter, his recording career was a non-starter, interrupted by a 10-year absence during which he laid low and played roadhouses around Texas but rarely, if ever, entered a studio. The characters in these songs-- especially those who serve as stand-ins for Van Zandt himself-- are always on the verge of leaving wherever they are, although he manages to cut that melancholy with the optimism that their paths will cross again. “Well, goodbye friends, it’s time to close, everybody knows that’s the way it goes,” he sings on “You Are Not Needed Now”, which loses none of its evocative power for never being too specific about its subject. “Where was it you lived in case I’m ever there?”
That song appears twice on Sunshine Boy and once on High, Low & In Between, but the alternate take, which features a piano intro and a band that knows the absolute best time to come in, may actually be the definitive version of the song, with a hymnal directness and a stoicism in the face of endless farewells. If The Late, Great sharpens the cosmic cowboy orchestrations and Sunshine Boy winnows the songs to their barest essentials, then High, Low and in Between more than lives up to its title. Unsurprisingly, Van Zandt inhabits the in-between so comfortably that this becomes one of the best country-rock records ever made, full of humor (“No Deal”), heartache (“Greensboro Woman”), and commiseration  (“Highway Kind”). Softening that melancholy somewhat is a trio of country-gospel numbers that strike a celebratory note: “Two Hands” opens the album by explaining that his physical body makes possible spiritual salvation through music, while “Standin’” (a rearrangement of a traditional tune) suggests that his troubles extend well beyond his birth and death. In other words, his life is just an excerpt of a continuum of despair; the song itself is, cosmically, upbeat.


On the Ruby Suns' fourth album, they dive headlong into splashy chart pop before heading back to the surface just as quickly. The poppy moments are effusive and invigorated, although Christopher takes a sobering turn back to reality halfway through.

Christopher

Ryan McPhun admits within the first minute of the Ruby Suns' new album, Christopher, that he's always falling in love. It's hard to dispute, since he spends the rest of "Desert of Pop" enumerating ways to relate the feeling: He's "like a birthday boy, giddy and excited" over someone or something that hits him like "a single malt, pure agave tequila." The good stuff, y'know? But there's one line that doesn't sit quite right: "You are [a] cold glass of water in the desert of pop." I'm almost positive he's referencing pop music, but he does leave open the slightest possibility that it's a reference to soda. It sounds farfetched, but while "Desert of Pop" clearly describes being struck dumb by a singer, a song, or a combination of the two, why would McPhun describe pop as an arid wasteland when the spiffy synth hits and hi-NRG dance beats make it abundantly clear that the Ruby Suns want you to view Christopher as their entry into splashy chart pop? Maybe they're not sure either, as Christopher dives in headfirst and just as quickly heads back to the surface.
Perhaps McPhun feels self-conscious about this change of heart, as he confesses about his situation, "Anyone else would think I'm your cheerleader." While becoming a pop evangelist relatively late in life can generally be healthy, at least as an acknowledgement that wholly rejecting pop music can be just as narrow-minded as wholly accepting it, it's particularly dangerous in the hands of musicians who haven't really shown much of an ear for it previously. Most often, it just results in enthusiastic overcompensation; you can look to fellow Indie Class of 2008 overachievers Ra Ra Riot neglecting nearly all of their strengths to go electronic on their new LP, Beta Love, and hopefully this can be the last time we ever have to mention POP ETC.
While Christopher undoubtedly comes on strong, the Ruby Suns sound undeniably invigorated here. For one thing, they end up discovering new strengths, as this kind of effusive sound fits McPhun's extroverted (and occasionally cloying) lyrics, and his vocals turn out to be more melodically inclined than he's let on to this point. It also gives the Ruby Suns a sense of direction that was previously missing from the sunny, island-hopping indie pop sampler of Sea Lion and Fight Softly's hesitant purveyance of post-chillwave synth murk. After McPhun's opening devotional, the equally headspun "In Real Life" elaborates on a lyric from "Desert of Pop"-- and its sound as well, resulting in what feels like a smartly constructed medley. Having given himself over, McPhun admits, "Real life wasn't what I wanted/ What I wanted was a waste of time," opting instead for an untenable existence where you drink the days away, completely free from the worries of money. Far more common than the getaways evoked on Sea Lion, yet the escapism is every bit as intoxicating.
But from there on out, McPhun gets real with us-- in particular, "Kingfisher Call Me" shows empathy for a misunderstood friend suffering through what he calls a "psychological high school." The balance of Christopher is addressed to people suffering from very specific kinds of teen angst. "Dramatikk" resembles the starstruck and spangled balladry of Autre Ne Veut, and consoles a friend experiencing a breakup; as you could probably tell from the title "Futon Fortress", its narrator can't even get out of bed but appears to be okay with that. "Boy" is a pep talk ("Do you hide in your room/ Away from dad/ To revel in your baseball card collection?") and also a quasi revenge fantasy, assuring a lonely kid that his foes "will turn out losers in the end." It reads embarrassing, but these are the sort of unruly feelings that Capital-P pop helps people understand and even appreciate.
Yet the Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards, only roused by a strange key change during "Starlight" and when they bring out the defibrillators for the closer, "Heart Attack". The dissonance between the docile synth pop and unbridled urges maxes out on would-be cornerstone "Jump In". The title is once again a demonstrative one, as McPhun aspires to live a life free of fears and inhibitions, centering around the lyric, "When you reach the end of the world/ Don't wanna have no regrets." By the time it's over, he's asked about your underwear (really), got involved in a mutual striptease, written a letter to a crush, and sent it without proofreading. Christopher is certainly a welcome call to action from a band who could previously have been cast off as amiable roustabouts. The shame is that, from a musical standpoint, Christopher is too often a result of Ruby Suns failing to take their own advice.


Machine Messiah skirts the line between metal and conventional “hard rock” more than anything in the Sepultura catalog.

Machine Messiah

When their endearingly amateurish debut EP Bestial Devastation came out in 1985, you'd have been out of your mind to think that Sepultura would make any kind of splash in their home country of Brazil, let alone go on to become an internationally recognized act. But within five years or so, that's exactly what happened. Originally focused on taking cues from their European and American idols like Metallica, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, and Kreator, Sepultura left an indelible mark on metal with 1993’s Chaos AD, a then-unprecedented fusion of heaviness with the native Latin rhythms the band had consciously avoided up to that point.
Sepultura plunged even further into unexplored realms with 1996’s Roots, a dense mish-mosh of thrash/groove/progressive/nu metal and hardcore loaded with Brazilian percussion and intercut with field recordings of the indigenous Xavante people of Brazil’s western interior. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, with the band's popularity at an all-time high, frontman Max Cavalera quit, leaving bad blood on both sides. In the 20 years since, Cavalera has basically stayed in a holding pattern, endlessly duplicating Roots’ mix of “exotic” flavors and brutish nu-metal riffs with his solo vehicle Soulfly. Meanwhile, Sepultura—who managed to keep Max’s brother Igor on drums for another 10 years—have never tired in their pursuit of new sounds.
While Max Cavalera’s departure made more headlines, Igor’s absence has arguably hurt the band more. For the last two Sepultura albums, the drum chair has been occupied by the far more technically proficient Eloy Casagrande. A fellow Brazilian, Casagrande fits right in with the unique, swaying cadence of Sepultura”s riffing. But his prodigious chops also tend to highlight the absence of Igor Cavalera’s intangible chemistry with guitarist Andreas Kisser. That said, Casagrande—a child prodigy who joined the band at the ripe old age of 20, when his bandmates were twice his age—gives the band a much-needed shot in the arm. and certainly isn't to blame for the spots where *Machine Messiah’*s energy lags.
From its inception, Sepultura’s career has traversed myriad sub-strains of metal, mostly with ease. Where some albums (1989’s Beneath the Remains, 2009’s A-Lex) stick to a uniform approach, others (Roots, 2001’s Nation) switch gears constantly. Machine Messiah falls in the latter category, but also skirts the line between metal and conventional “hard rock” more than anything in the Sepultura catalog. The band has downshifted to slower tempos and incorporated melodies before, but it’s typically been limber enough to accommodate them. This time, the variety sounds more confused than exploratory.
The instrumental “Iceberg Dances,” for example, starts off with a fairly stock thrash-core riff before morphing into a guitar-shredding workout that might have been better suited for an instructional video. It’s probably the first time in the band's history that Kisser, who is generally peerless when it comes to taste and feel, allows the music to take a backseat to the guitar. And in its noodly classical-influenced sections, you half-expect a cameo from gunslingers like Yngwie Malmsteen or Paul Gilbert of Racer X/Mr. Big. The song careens forward aimlessly, with a sped-up boogie-rock organ section clearly intended as a nod to late Deep Purple keyboardist Jon Lord. Kisser then flashes some of his (admittedly untouchable) classical guitar chops while Casagrande throws-in some Latin percussion. Fun as an exercise, “Iceberg Dances” might even be a marvel to watch the band play in person but it doesn’t gel and, worse, actually disrupts the album’s dystopian mood. It’s as if Sepultura hadn’t decided quite what kind of band they want to sound like.
Not all of the songs re-tread old ground: on "Phantom Self," a violin ensemble weaves a Tunisian scale through a northeastern Brazilian maracatu-style rhythm. Ironically, though, Machine Messiah proves that Sepultura don’t even have to be inventive to be rousing. On “I Am the Enemy,” the band still sounds vital playing in the straight-ahead hardcore style it’s employed a dozen times since 1993. Meanwhile, the simplistic snaking main riff of “Resistant Parasites” could have been made up by Beavis and Butt-Head, but it's arguably the most convincingly ominous tune on the record.
Like 2013’s relentlessly hard-charging The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, the lyrics on Machine Messiah lament the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the many threats it poses. When longtime frontman Derrick Green sings “You are human” at the conclusion of “I Am the Enemy,” it carries the weight of a plea even though he’s grunting. To his credit, Green delivers his most textured performance to date on Machine Messiah, stretching past his arsenal of barks, shrieks and growls to reach melodic heights worthy of the music's philosophical underpinnings. Throughout much of Machine Messiah, in fact, the band's anxiety is palpable. As we fast approach the point where machines might actually usurp us, it’s refreshing—even necessary—to hear Sepultura implore us to retain our humanity at all costs. Machine Messiah, though, is the rare Sepultura album where the vibe of the music doesn’t consistently match its central themes. Let’s hope they aren’t out of creative juice just yet; metal is better when this veteran, trailblazing band is operating at or near the peak of its powers.


Listening to Cat Power's The Covers Record is distracting me from the task at hand. I'm writing, but ...

The Covers Record

Listening to Cat Power's The Covers Record is distracting me from the task at hand. I'm writing, but I'm typing slowly under the album's spell. I'm also asking myself, "Isn't a 7.6 a bit high for a covers album?" Chan Marshall didn't write these songs-- I heard she didn't even practice them. She likely spent less than an afternoon in the studio. Sure, it's an endearing concept, but 7.6 for a "it's just me and my guitar and the fakebook from my brother's closet" kind of affair? Come on, Rockermann; let's be reasonable here.
This, of course, is not about reason, it's about a strange force called Cat Power. Cat Power tempts you to forgive the inconsistencies in her albums. And inexplicably, you won't feel like asking for your money back when Marshall fails to make it through 12 minutes of her $12 show. This bizarre Cat Power also charms an audience into responding "a little higher" when she nonchalantly asks if anyone in the room "knows a B." Cat Power has inspired tautological delusions in more than one skinny boy: "I understand her/ She is misunderstood by everyone/ Like me/ Thus, I understand her." To demonstrate this phenomenon, Matador has taken 12 songs and exposed them to Cat Power. The data was then collected on The Covers Record. Let's check out some of the results.
Chan sings: "When I'm drivin' in my car/ And that man comes on the radio/ And he's tellin' me more and more," but there's no trace of Mick-- or of the renowned chorus-- in this version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Marshall has put a blue cover over a red song, and it's one of the album's stronger tracks. The other standouts come when Chan doses sparse numbers heavily in Cat Power and makes them her own.
Imagine Chan Marshall sending herself, John Malkovich-style, through her own portal, and you have Marshall's cover of the Cat Power original, "In This Hole". The slow sadness of this version has its appeal, but it might have been more effective if the piano arpeggios were less prominent in the mix. It would shift the focus off the amateurish simplicity of the song and onto Marshall's vocals which seem fragile not because they're slight, but because her lyrics sound like they could snap under their own weight. That's what you paid the $12 for.
In the past, I've been wary of Velvets covers. This might be the product of a recurring nightmare about a Velvet Underground tribute album which includes Jewel performing "Afterhours", Belle & Sebastian doing "Sunday Morning", and Wolfie's take on "Black Angel's Death Song". So I was naturally hesitant when I noticed that Marshall covers "I Found a Reason" here. I mention this not to self-indulgently map out what is sacred to me, but to point out that Marshall traipses around on just about everybody's hallowed ground here and pulls it off masterfully.
Cat Power's cover of "I Found a Reason" might actually make you weep until Marshall comes back around to lick your wounds, all in under two minutes. You can call me a wuss or say it's because I'm a girl-- keep in mind that I didn't shed a tear at Saving Private Ryan, which some critic apparently called "wound-porn"-- but Cat Power's The Covers Record is the real deal, the embodiment of wound-porn. Buy it now; hide it under your mattress.


The 19-year-old rapper’s boisterous new EP projects greater confidence, but its juvenile boasts can leave something to be desired.

Playing W/ Fire EP

redveil used to daydream about future stardom in the middle of class. “Writing out this pain, nigga, that's the best solution, it's really all we got/I manifest this shit then watch it bloom like I'm on top,” the then-16-year-old rapper announced on his 2020 album Niagara—and his wishes seemed to be coming true after Niagara caught the attention of one of his inspirations Tyler, the Creator. On his 18th birthday, he released his breakthrough album, learn 2 swim, while preparing to tour with hip-hop veterans twice his age. learn 2 swim put the pandemonium of redveil’s teenage years on full display: On it, he tangled with growing pains and the pressure of newfound recognition, emerging ready for the next phase.
The Maryland rapper-producer’s boisterous new EP, playing w/ fire, walks back any hesitance that he might have faced. Opener “stuck” sounds like a homecoming king’s coronation, with blaring horns imitating a marching band; redveil whoops and hollers (“Bitch it’s up! Bitch it’s up! … And it’s stuck, bitch”) as a diva hits money notes like she’s belting the national anthem. The triumphant mood carries over to “giftbag,” a laidback pop-trap track in which redveil revels in his spoils and wards off suspects angling for a peek: “Nigga get off my dick/Then get out my gift bag,” he commands.
Often, the EP’s lyrics leave something to be desired. redveil’s taunts can seem juvenile: “I ain’t come in to chit chat/I been on hunt for chips,” he asserts, then continues, “Brody done lost his bitch/Nigga come get your lick back.” The plot’s all muddled here. Who is he brushing off? What’s a girl have to do with this? He rarely offers enough detail to elevate his boasts: While Tyler name-drops enough luxury brands that you’ll want to start planning a heist, redveil can’t even muster a Louis Vuitton reference, flexing on “captain” that he “just threw on this fashion for real.”
While the EP loses the concrete intimacy of redveil’s prior work, it reinforces his skill for arrangements. He amps up the BPM for a brighter and noisier palette, rocking out with JPEGMAFIA on “black enuff” as the hectic sound of clashing drums and detuned guitar pulls limbs in every direction. “captain” recreates the liveliness of a block party with its booming bass and rowdy chorus of voices. One of the EP’s highlights is the frenetic closer “pwf”: A robotic sample twitches in and out of place as redveil dismisses detractors trying to shit talk through screens (“Let them finger coils do what they do”). It delivers the best balance of flashiness and specificity, making the teenager sound less like a freshman.