Once perennial underdogs and now Mercury Prize winners, Elbow release their first album as a commercial and not just critical force.

Build a Rocket Boys!

Elbow had already been together for nearly a decade when their debut album, Asleep in the Back, dropped in 2001. Unhip even among the unhip bands vying to become the "next Radiohead," playing the underdog worked out well for Elbow-- both at the start and over the span of three critically acclaimed and modestly successful records. After 2008's The Seldom Seen Kid took home the Mercury Prize, Elbow earned platinum status in Britain. Even in the U.S., "Grounds for Divorce" and "One Day Like This" have shown up on TV (even if you were looking at George Clooney the whole time). So what happens now that more people have expectations of Elbow?
A good part of what makes Elbow so beloved is they've always felt impervious to either trends or expectations. Singer Guy Garvey even admitted recently his life isn't providing grist for his typical lyrical gloom. Instead, on Build a Rocket Boys!, the band finds itself camping out in its childhood hometown and reminiscing about days gone by. If that sounds like a return to much-beloved Asleep in the Back closer "Scattered Black & Whites" or Leaders of the Free World's "Station Approach", that's true thematically. The gorgeous "Lippy Kids" harkens back to the Talk Talk spirituals of their early work, but what's remarkable about it is the totality of its lyrical warmth. Garvey avoids lionizing a specific time period, instead offering an empathetic survey of the banality and confusion of childhood-- two features of it that you never seem to outgrow.
But sonically, Elbow continue down the narrow corridor they've established in recent years-- immaculately recorded and stripping away nearly every bit of ethereal studio magic. (It's hard to remember that they used to make records people could conceivably get high to.) It only sounds like rock music when they're going out of their way to announce it as such, as on stomping lead single "Neat Little Rows".
But more than ever, Elbow are hitching their fortunes to their lead singer, and with that, Rocket is by a large margin their quietest record to date, the closest thing to a Garvey solo album we've heard. That's in the quite literal sense: a rhythm section that could always be relied on for crucial texture and propulsion goes missing for large stretches of time. Still, putting Garvey's charmingly tattered burr at the center is a wise move; it's rangy, warm, and no longer making any bones about its resemblance to Peter Gabriel.
But there's a sneaky risk to it, since what has troubled Elbow from the beginning is that while Garvey is a phenomenal vocalist and wordsmith, the dots don't always connect to form memorable songs. That's particularly glaring during Build a Rocket's pokey midsection, which abates melodically and hangs on to Garvey's redolent lyrics for dear life. On the other side, for a band who's often held up to an alternative to Coldplay's more bombastic healing powers, Elbow's never met a gospel choir they didn't think could boost an anthem up to the rafters. But unlike the overblown "With Love", "Open Arms" rings true, a celebration that no one's beyond the convalescent power of the conditional love that one's family or hometown can offer.
"Open Arms" in particular makes the case that the missteps and borderline mawkish sentiments of Build a Rocket Boys! can be attributed to the degree of difficulty involved with making grown-up music about youth without resorting to smugness, sensationalism or pandering. It's no slight to say the record's distinguishing quality is the one Elbow has had since the beginning, an honest humanity that's imperfect but can be appreciated if you live with it.


Full of gleaming exteriors, the latest album from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is essentially a solo outing from frontman Kip Berman, who was on the brink of fatherhood when he wrote it.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Echo of Pleasure

The Echo of Pleasure

A whole lot of life happened to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman in the run-up to his fourth LP, The Echo of Pleasure. He got married in 2014, shortly after the release of that year’s Days of Abandon. And much of Pleasure was recorded just at the onset of Berman’s wife’s third trimester, the point at which shit tends to get particularly real. From the initial rush to the all-too-familiar crash, the Pains have spent the better part of a decade charting the highs and lows of young love. But Berman, like many of us, isn’t quite so young anymore. What happens when all the love in your life is no longer as fleeting as a three-minute pop tune? Echo of Pleasure tries to get to the heart of the matter.
Helmed again by Days of Abandon producer Andy Savours, Echo of Pleasure is largely a Berman solo joint. As on Abandon, the great Jen Goma of A Sunny Day in Glasgow is Berman’s closest foil, providing the prismatic backing harmonies and taking another star turn at lead on glimmering late-LP highlight “So True.” The sound of Pleasure is a click or two lusher and more grandiose than the simple and sure hand Savours brought to Abandon. Berman and Savours weave twinkling keyboards and some surprisingly slippery drumwork into an iridescent, instantly familiar synth pop that trades the relative economy of Abandon for a decked out Sadie Hawkins dance dazzle. While a couple new wrinkles have emerged—“The Garret” rides a buckled groove that shares more than a little something with early R.E.M.—Pleasure largely drapes the rippling Johnny Marr-isms of Abandon in a bevy of Psychedelic Furs, a meticulous, bigger-ticket sound that pushes Berman ever further from the bedroom-born urgency of his earliest work.
Playing spot-the-influence here has lost some of the luster it’s had in the past. Berman’s not only swapped out his earlier, geekier forebears for more perennial favorites—less Bunnygrunt, more Bunnymen—but his songwriting has calcified to the point where, no matter how many keyboards he layers on, he mostly sounds like himself. In many ways, he’s a changed man on Pleasure: less concerned with the things he doesn’t have, more concerned with holding onto the things he does, or soon will. The ineffable combo of anxiety and joy that accompanies late-stage pregnancy is written directly into the DNA of these tunes.
Berman has never been one to telegraph his every move. Lyrically, he opts instead for a kind of emotional skywriting, drawing out feelings big enough to cover just about everybody. But these songs are devotionals, re-dedications to something larger than himself. Berman retains a flair for the dramatic—“I wanted to die with you” is a fairly typical chorus—but there’s a longview here that’s a very different look from the pie-eyed, gin-soaked kid chronicling all that young adult friction.
While each Pains album has seen a fairly seismic shift in sound—from the blush-of-youth urgency of their debut to the towering bubblegrunge of Belong—Berman’s way with melody hasn’t changed much. The guy’s always known just how to punch up a chorus, how to deck out an instrumental coda, the kind of songwriting nuts’n’bolts plenty of his peers never quite mastered. Pleasure lays the extended outros, glowing keyboards, and intricate background harmonies on fairly thick, but the song pretty much remains the same. Among all these gleaming exteriors, Berman occasionally loses something in the glare; overlong and sickly sweet, mid-LP trifle “When I Dance With You” is the record’s only real stinker. Pleasure’s onslaught of surface pleasures aren’t quite enough to fully rescue the title track from its laborious chorus, or to pull “The Cure for Death” from its warmed-over you-know-who worship.
Echo of Pleasure could be the last Pains LP; Berman wasn’t even sure he’d get this one in the can. If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling. Maybe Berman’s got a mid-fatherhood return like Double Fantasy in him some years down the road, when his kid’s a little older, and they can look back at this album and be proud of what they made together.


On an independently released 30-minute EP, Angel Marcloid slightly recalibrates her uber-maximalist sound to be both lighter and heavier at its extreme poles.

Fire-Toolz: I will not use the body’s eyes today. EP

A casual stroll through the Fire-Toolz’s catalog can induce vertigo. Each song flirts with unabashed forays into disparate genres—extreme metal, IDM, jazz fusion—changing course before you can get a handle on exactly what is happening. Just as you begin to enjoy your newfound affinity for industrial screamo or what sounds like a melted Windham Hill LP played backwards (or both at the same time), producer Angel Marcloid flips the radio dial. It’s like that old saw: “If you don’t like a Fire-Toolz song, just wait five seconds.”
The secret is in these transgressions: Fire-Toolz’s blasphemous potion composed of glitchy breakcore mashed into airy new age synth sections, Marcloid howling underneath the profanity of a fretless bass guitar, decked in corpse paint and burning down a church designed by Lisa Frank. None of it should work, and yet Fire-Toolz has enjoyed a growing legion of fans and near-universal critical acclaim.
After 2021’s brilliant, expansive double album Eternal Home, it was difficult to imagine that Fire-Toolz had any room to grow, like Marcloid had engineered a sandbox-style video game and stuffed its world’s edges with crystalline pyramids and rainbow slime waterfalls. But instead of going bigger, on Fire-Toolz’s new, independently released EP, I will not use the body’s eyes today., Marcloid recalibrates the sound to be both lighter and heavier at its extreme poles.
The EP’s centerpiece is “Soda Lake With Game Genie,” which Marcloid has freely acknowledged is an outlier on the record. Opening with a twinkling piano and clean vocals that would slot in nicely in an early edition of NOW That’s What I Call Music, the song evolves into what sounds like Dystopia re-recording Gaucho. A soloing guitar echoing a shiny sax line seems ripped from the theme song of a mid-’90s WB sitcom. “To stretch out my soul like a fawn in the face of fear until I compress my tears into a heavenly waterfall,” Marcloid growls. That’s the vast expanse above Marcloid’s world, dripping with despair.
On “A Moon in the Morning,” we’re underground. Marcloid demonically screeches over a wave of ambient drone that smacks against a wall of harsh noise, about “the soft bed of infinity” and “the feeling of chewing on dirt.” But there’s hope and rebirth buried beneath. “Gardeners, pull up my weeds and feed them to me like embodiment would,” she invokes. “Create a high & rooted world.” Fire-Toolz is once again triumphant in Marcloid’s unusual contexts and stark dichotomies.
Though four of the EP’s seven tracks are instrumental, Marcloid mines deeper into the unholy instrument that is her voice. Locked into screamo mode on Eternal Home and previous Fire-Toolz releases, I will not use the body’s eyes today. sees Marcloid executing a speedrun through extreme metal. There's high-pitched, lo-fi USBM shrieks; guttural goregrind growls; and the glitchy, grating banshee screams of industrial metal, and that’s just on “Vedic Software ~ Wet Interfacing.”
A sequential imbalance is what holds Fire-Toolz back on I will not use the body’s eyes today, though, as the four instrumentals dilute the sheer power of the seven-track EP. “Air For Breakfast: She Is Safe & So Am I,” which begins as dreamy, cloud-floating techno and abruptly shifts to a nightmare of glitches and oozing drones, stands out. Elsewhere, Marcloid’s missing voice, masterfully utilized on the other three tracks, aches like a phantom limb. Still, within each instrumental are dozens of fantastic and strange micro-genre moments—a single strum of a shoegaze-y guitar that melts away or one measure of frenetic Agoraphobic Nosebleed double-bass—folded into tiny pockets and together forming, at the very least, lush and vivid soundscapes. Demanding repeat voyages, the EP is deep listening for those who believe in hidden worlds.
I will not use the body’s eyes today. never quite reaches the high bar set by its predecessor. As a standalone document, it’s a minor work by a major artist. But ingested holistically among the worlds Fire-Toolz has already constructed, it’s the promise of infinity at Marcloid’s fingertips.


The Dirty Three drummer and expansive guitarist collaborate on a freely improvised album that glows with ease.

Jim White / Marisa Anderson: The Quickening

The Quickening

The Quickening opens with an ecstatic swirl of Jim White’s drums and Marisa Anderson’s electric guitar before the pair quickly settles into a trancelike rumble. They sustain this conversational euphoria over the following 10 improvised tracks, with nary a “solo” to be found, while homing in on each other’s frequencies. No matter where the pair travels on this unpredictable set, they do so in intimate dialogue. Anderson and White make for sympathetic collaborators, and their first album together glows with ease.
The Quickening shifts freely between moods and modes, but Anderson and White never sound like they are jamming aimlessly; each piece is a window opened onto a self-contained universe. On “Last Days,” Jim White lays out a lurching, ominous march rhythm while Anderson paints a blasted landscape. On “Diver,” Anderson coaxes an elegant bloom of drone into a conflagration of melody over White’s almost-invisible tom-tom accents and brushed cymbals.
For Anderson, the album represents a breakthrough. Over the years, she’s stretched her vocabulary from the spare blues-folk of her early work to 2018’s astounding Cloud Corner, which was filled with mountain ghosts, empty spaces, and occasional humming keyboards. Anderson contributed to Portland’s Evolutionary Jass Band for years, where her guitar and sitar were subsumed into the larger free ensemble. But The Quickening is unlike anything in her discography, and with it she uncovers a new landscape of possibilities.
Veteran Dirty Three percussion hero Jim White drums the way rain catches the surface as the rain shifts, except that White controls where every drop lands. Especially on the pair of nylon-string acoustic numbers (“The Lucky” and “The Quickening”), White’s powerful sense of flowing no-time works in elegant tandem with Anderson’s phrasing, joining to create a unified third voice that is neither exactly rhythmic nor melodic.
That third voice is the most ecstatic feature The Quickening has to offer. It is music as a frozen moment, a precarious combination of energies and ephemeralities and economies. To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her second solo record, Gabrielle Herbst relishes pushing her voice to its limit.

Empty Me

On her second album as GABI, Gabrielle Herbst strains to linger on notes at the very upper edge of her range. Her soprano frays when she pushes it to its limits, but rather than treat that visceral wavering as a symptom of failure, she relishes it. While the New York singer’s debut, 2015’s Sympathy, treated the voice as a single element in an electroacoustic toolkit, its follow-up, Empty Me, distinguishes Herbst’s vocals for their fragility. Herbst is a skilled composer with classical training who chooses not to write vocal melodies that would showcase her voice’s power. She’s not interested in making it bend to her will. Instead, she busies herself in the space where the voice falters, where it’s in danger of breaking. She can showcase more vulnerability there and Empty Me, a more intimate work than Sympathy, thrives where it’s vulnerable.
Sympathy felt like a mannered exercise in finding common ground between offbeat electronic and contemporary classical music. Empty Me swings more pop: Its songs are shorter and more devotional, less focused on broad compositional experiments and more intrigued by the pop song's ability to excavate the delicate machinations of human affection. Any track on Empty Me sounds like it might shatter at a moment’s notice, and that’s the point—so could love between two people.
Slow, gentle arrangements carry Herbst’s voice through the record. Acoustic instruments, like flutes played by Laura Cox and viola by Jacob Falby, blur together with Steve Hauschildt’s synthesized contributions. Often, Herbst’s vocals serve as their own accompaniment: On “Lets Not Exist,” she layers wordless, breathy syllables that work like woodwinds beneath the main vocal track. “Boom Boom Kiki,” the album’s most alert and playful track, lets a vocal loop act as percussion. These confident, functional uses of voice contrast with the voice Herbst uses to sing her lyrics, which often spins out of orbit. She loses breath control on the words “couldn’t breathe” during “Sleep,” as if she needed to prove her desperation in the moment. On “Until the End,” her voice spikes high on the words “love you,” then fades to a whisper for much of the remaining lyrics, as though their importance paled in comparison, as though they were already being forgotten.
Most pop songs are sung as if they were documents of a moment long past, memories reignited and embellished for an audience. On Empty Me, Herbst sings as though the moments she’s capturing were slipping through her fingers in the present, as if she had to snare them with her voice to prove they were ever real. She treats dreams of weddings in a field of sunflowers (“Wild Sunflowers”) with the same breathlessness as instant infatuation with an unfamiliar face (“Falling for a Stranger”). It can be hard to linger long inside these songs because they sound ephemeral by design. They take the form of pop songs, but abandon the style’s blunt wallop—they don’t mean to catch in the ear and demand repeat listens.
Empty Me refuses to distill sensation into a lucid melody. It chases the difficulty of grasping fleeting emotions as they pass through the body. Love seems from the outside almost to be a formal impossibility. How can you be sure of your communion with another person when your deepest inner workings remain a mystery? It’s unthinkable, and it happens all the time. With its uncertainty, its wild faith, and its holes worn bare, Empty Me dares to imagine what a love song might sound like in the terrifying, honest moment.


Mariah Carey's 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past.

Mariah Carey: Me. I Am Mariah...the Elusive Chanteuse

Me. I Am Mariah...the Elusive Chanteuse

Every pop star must, at some point, confront career mortality. For some, the end comes suddenly and without warning, while others experience a slow, bewildering decline into mediocrity. After two decades of nearly uninterrupted chart dominance, one figures that Mariah Carey has spent some of the last year dwelling on the end of her reign. Her 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The rollout for I Am Mariah kicked off in earnest almost two years ago with a single called "Triumphant (Get 'Em)", and three other singles followed—one of which, "The Art of Letting Go," has been relegated to bonus track status—with only the strummy, Miguel-powered "#Beautiful" climbing up the charts. But even that song peaked outside the top 10 of the Billboard's Hot 100, which is basically unheard of for a major single from a Mariah Carey album.
Yet, despite the circumstances, I Am Mariah is not an album that sounds desperate. It makes an argument for Mariah letting pop stardom come as it does— or doesn't—and the record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past. She is not Jennifer Lopez or Madonna, leaving smudged fingerprints on the zeitgeist; I Am Mariah does not bend toward the whims of the radio. The album sounds exactly, defiantly like Mariah, acknowledging her place in the pop ecosystem both implicitly and explicitly without chomping at the bit.
The album was executive produced by Jermaine Dupri and Bryan-Michael Cox, a duo who helped jumpstart Mariah's career the first time it flagged. It was Dupri and Carey who wrote "We Belong Together", the impossibly huge smash that reestablished Mariah as a pop titan in 2005, the last time she risked fading away. Cox pitched in on "Shake It Off," the breezy summer follow-up that cemented that status. On I Am Mariah, the three of them circle back to the ethos of The Emancipation of Mimi—the album that held those songs—using classic, stately R&B as a sort of gold-threaded cocoon.
That's not to say that I Am Mariah is reductive; on the contrary, the record pares her sound down to its essence while simultaneously subtly expanding its parameters. Two tracks feature contributions by James "Big Jim" Wright—also a holdover from the Emancipation era—and those songs are ballads that weave the slurred organs of gospel into the album. "Cry." opens the record with Mariah's vocals suspended over a soft cloud of pianos; though she sings about angels' tears in typically dramatic fashion, the track highlights her ability to strike a vocal balance between restraint and power. "One More Try", a faithful and fantastic cover of the George Michael song, pushes the track from the mist of the '80s into the filtered sunlight of church, giving it a glow while still retaining its throbbing ache.
The Dupri and Cox cut "You Don't Know What to Do" is a straight up disco song with rippling guitars and strings that swoop down like birds. (As always, it's best to ignore Wale here.) The song recalls her untouchable roller-rink jams like "Heartbreaker" and "Fantasy" while also feeling like a logical extension of post-Pharrell disco revivalism. This trio of tracks are the implicit acknowledgement of her age: gospel and disco are traditionally genres where middle-aged women can thrive, and Mariah—a legendarily strong voice—fits in unsurprisingly well. There are a few tracks that don't work—"Heavenly (No Ways Tired/Can't Give Up Now)" hauls in an over-the-top choir, and the Q-Tip-produced "Meteorite" is a gloopy scoop of Cher schmaltz—but largely, the record finds Mariah easily settling into what could be her post-pop phase.
And yet, I Am Mariah is definitely not post-pop. The album's other major collaborator is the G.O.O.D. Music secret weapon Hit-Boy, who helms three of the album's strongest tracks. "Thirsty" is a bleepy take-off of "Niggas in Paris", but his style meshes well with Mariah's: she can carry a club track, obviously, but the chorus here is an ethereal puff that melts his signature icy minimalism. "Money ($ * / ..)" clips a greasy horn riff into a loop you could imagine hearing on today's pop radio, but Mariah floats over it gracefully. These tracks, along with the washed-out Mike WiLL Made It elegy "Faded," show that Mariah can still conversate with pop music, even if pop music doesn't talk back.
Still, the two best tracks on I Am Mariah make more explicit references to time passed. "Supernatural" features "Ms. Monroe & Mr. Moroccan Scott Cannon a.k.a Roc 'N Roe", which is Mariah's very theatrical way of saying "my kids". The ballad, a Dupri and Cox number, has a beat that approximates a baby's mobile and a constant stream of coos from the twins themselves. The backdrop puts her newfound motherhood to the forefront, as Mariah delivers the album's most heartfelt devotional and its most astonishing, acrobatic vocal performance.
The true highlight is the Hit-Boy-assisted "Dedicated", built on a loop of Inspectah Deck rapping "carry like Mariah" on "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'". The song opens with dialogue between Mariah and longtime rap executive Steve Stoute about nostalgia. She sings about a long-lost love—"I'll just sit right here and sing that good old school shit to ya"—before referencing Eric B. and the Wu and interpolating Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh. The song is wistful, with a streak of melancholy, but it's also upbeat, and has the glimmer of indulgent memory. "Oh, baby, you know," she sings, her voice falling like a feather. "All that love-making we did, boy, it was so real, I wanna feel that again." Surrounded by the chatter of old friends and older beats, she's rarely sounded as comfortable.


Newly reissued to include the storied demo sessions, Harry Nilsson’s soundtrack to Robert Altman’s 1980 film is a mind-meld of two artists, a mournful little under-appreciated classic.

Harry Nilsson: Popeye: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

In the 1970s, Robert Evans seemed invincible. The studio impresario had ushered Chinatown, The Godfather, and Rosemary’s Baby into existence, changing what counted as a major studio film and shifting the culture of Hollywood in the process. He had conquered art; he had conquered commerce. But then he dreamed of a live-action Popeye musical and he discovered he could not conquer Robert Altman.
Altman was in the middle of a widely acknowledged slump when he took up Evans’ invitation to direct Popeye. It had been a few years and a few flops since Nashville, but he didn’t approach the project meekly. First, he flew everyone—cast, crew, and an orchestra of musicians—to the island of Malta to build an entire small town, which would serve as the set. He filled this money pit with a very Altman-esque menagerie of characters: Half the dialogue was obscured by someone else talking, an Altman quirk that Evans probably wished he would tone down for the multiplexes. And then there was Robin Williams, in his first studio picture, looking like a community-theater Quasimodo, mumbling malapropisms with one eye closed and half his mouth shut.
Oh, and Harry Nilsson was hired to write the tunes.
By 1980, Nilsson’s career was similar to Altman’s: a brilliant and once-promising voice floundering in a new decade. When Nilsson was tapped to write the score for the Popeye film, he was nine years away from his Grammy-winning triumph Nilsson Schmilsson and at least six years into an uninterrupted self-destructive slide: He had already burned out his voice screaming drunkenly into a microphone with John Lennon for the 1974 album Pussy Cats and recorded a series of slipshod albums that hit his sterling reputation like a series of hocked loogies. In the eyes of the music industry, he was a great talent gone to seed, and Evans and Altman were warned multiple times against giving him gainful employment.
What’s remarkable in revisiting the soundtrack, reissued with Nilsson’s own demos, is just what a mind-meld Nilsson and Altman had at this moment, in this mournful little under-appreciated classic. They were spiritual cousins, drawn to the sort of lives that were looked on with pity and bewilderment by others—Altman with his succession of frustrated, squinty-eyed antiheroes, and Nilsson with the befuddled souls in his songs, the people who used to “dance until a quarter to ten” but now sat seething in their cars during deadening morning commutes.
The soundtrack Nilsson wrote for Popeye is a mangy patchwork, and like the film, it begs to be underestimated. Many of the songs play out like napkins with the titles written on them, the lyrics meant to be filled in later, and some of them feel like echoes from Nilsson’s more illustrious past: “Sweethaven” sounds quite a bit like a rewriting of “Everything’s Got ‘Em” from his 1971 concept album The Point!, which also memorializes a quaint town trapped in amber. They are ditties more than songs, full of small phrases that rattle around maddeningly—”Everything is food, food, food,” chants the chorus of “Everything is Food,” until the words lose meaning, while Bluto song “I’m Mean” doesn’t really go beyond the title.
And yet, taken together with the film, they are slyly perfect. The souls of Sweethaven are beaten down by the forces governing them, small-minded and bickering and fearful, and the production design, by Wolf Kroeger, turned the town into a sprawling tapestry where everything is filmed at a picture-book distance. Nilsson’s albums also teemed with whimsical creatures that all happened to be him, a chorus of backing vocals that chattered and “do-wacka-do’ed,” and the Popeye songs feel written for characters that behave more like cawing penny-arcade machines than humans: In an early dinner scene, when Popeye arrives at the Oyls’ house, Olive’s father demands “you owe me an apology” six times in three minutes.
The repetitions in the movie and in the songs underline the characters’ sense of limited horizons and options. Preparing glumly for her engagement party to the hirsute bully Bluto, Olive Oyl hunches despondent in a nightie while her friends giggle around her, reluctantly ticking off the good qualities of her husband-to-be in the song “He’s Large.” What she comes up with: “He’s large….tall…large…and he’s mine.” That’s all she’s got, so that’s pretty much all she sings.
Nilsson loved a good, dark joke, and the movie is full of them. There’s another throwaway moment in an early scene when Altman makes slapstick out of a drunkard’s delirium tremens as he tries to down a shot of brown stuff first thing in the morning. It’s bracingly dark and it also feels like pure Nilsson, who wore the shabby cheer of the career alcoholic lightly and well. The lowered expectations and disappointment suited him, somehow. Maybe they reminded him of something close-minded in humanity, or reinforced his sense of solidarity with the middle people, the sorts who expected to be disappointed by life without quite knowing how to bear it.
The heart and soul of both the movie and soundtrack is “He Needs Me,” a mooning song that latched onto the brain of Paul Thomas Anderson, who included it in 2002 Punch Drunk Love, another movie about lonely, stumbling adults. The song is deceptively simple, sending a lazy melody staggering up a chromatic scale, tangling its feet dreamily on the 4/4 rhythm. It’s a simple whistled tune, a song you could play with one hand on the piano, but it never quite lands on the beat in the same way twice. In her iconic performance, Shelley Duvall does a loose-limbed, silent-film comedian dance, nearly tripping over her big cartoon boots and barely scraping the underside of the high notes as she twirls—it is a kind of underlings’ transcendence, performed beneath moonlight with no one to snicker at it.
”This is page 97, Bob, when Popeye and Olive fall in love,” Nilsson explains over a drum machine on the demos, included here in their first official release (they’ve been passed around by Nilsson fanatics for years). His voice is ragged, still pockmarked from his ruptured vocal cord, and a lot of the notes are hollowed out from his once-golden instrument. But they are an intimate glance into the cathedral of his songwriting mind at a time when people had begun treating him like a condemned building. He calls out instructions to Van Dyke Parks, who is helping with the instrumentation. There are two versions of “He Needs Me” on the demo disc, one by Nilsson and one by Duvall, who sounds nervous in the booth. “Good,” Nilsson chuckles fondly to her as she reaches, uncertain, for the first high note. Over nine minutes, she finds her way around the melody, while Nilsson guides her breathing and comes in behind her. It is a fascinating, alternate-universe peek into Nilsson as a Svengali producer, the kind of role Richard Perry played for him on Nilsson Schmilsson.
There are also a few songs the second disc that didn’t make the final cut of the film: “Everybody’s Got To Eat,” a rueful song for the character Wimpy, sung by the actor Paul Dooley who played him. And “Din We,” a languorous ballad with bruise-ripe Nelson Riddle-style strings. They are eloquent testaments to the enormity of Nilsson’s talent and gift, even as he seemed to be actively smothering it with his own albums. Perhaps Altman brought it out of him. The strange, divisive cult classic they made remains a paean to the stubborn power of sheer waywardness: Whistle your own tune loudly enough, and you might derail the ambitions of a titan.


Tacocat's third album loses some of the brightness that helped make their pointed cultural critiques sound so impossibly fun.

Lost Time

The third album by Tacocat starts with a clean garage-rock tribute to discerning "X-Files" lead "Dana Katherine Scully." It's typical for the Seattle four-piece, who mix songs about their love of pop culture—they just did the theme to the "Powerpuff Girls" reboot—with tirades about periods, pervs, and the patriarchy. Released in 2014, Tacocat's NVM riffed on IM slang for "never mind," a reference to the city's most famous sons, and essentially mocked how far we'd veered from Kurt Cobain's future-female ideals. Its vibrant spirit ran on the kind of energy you'd only otherwise get from chugging a giant sports drink before egging someone's house.
Lost Time (another "X-Files" reference) delves into some of the same subject matter. "FDP" is an SOS from the first day of lead singer Emily Nokes' period, "Plan A, Plan B" mocks the wrongheaded GOP idea that women use the morning-after pill as contraceptive, and "Talk" sounds a little like fellow Pacific Northwester Laura Veirs reincarnated as a frustrated millennial, wishing she and her friends would ditch their iPhones for living room dance parties. "Men Explain Things to Me" takes its name from the Rebecca Solnit essay that popularized the term "mansplaining." "Though I know all about the words you're spitting out, the floor is yours without a doubt," Nokes sings, her typically sharp tongue cutting some blowhard down to size.
They also widen the net, in terms of inspiration. "I Love Seattle" references "The Really Big One," a New Yorker article about the earthquake that will destroy much of the coastal Northwest. There's nowhere else they'd rather be, but admit, "at least no-one's pretending like that would even be bad." The highlight of Lost Time is "I Hate the Weekend," which explains their ambivalence about Seattle falling into the Pacific. In a melody Jenny Lewis wouldn't be ashamed to stick on her recent records, Nokes paints an incisive portrait of how tech bros haven't just whitewashed the city's thriving culture ("paint the rainbow shades of beige"), but terrorize the streets when they "cut loose" at weekends. "Got a hall pass from your job just to act like a fucking slob," they sing, filled with catchy disdain.
And that kind of fire is what Lost Time sorely needs more of. There's no question that many of Lost Time's lyrics are funny, but the attitude that fueled NVM feels crushed. In both the vocal delivery and the driving guitars, the vibe is damper, the color somewhat drained. Sometimes the fruit hangs a little low: "The Internet" is a straight-strummer about trolls. With that in mind, it's unsurprising that the peppier songs here are the ones about the things you do for pleasure and pleasure alone. Lost Time's most inventive song, "Horse Grrls," is a fully enthused stop-start shredder about equestrian obsessives: "They know the different breeds of all their favorite steeds!" And "Night Swimming," too, is lovely—a splashy, beatific jam about breaking into a lake at night, where the only rule is, "You can bring a boombox, but you can't play R.E.M." The final song, "Leisure Bees," is ambitious and engaging, shifting between Beach Boys-indebted harmonies, girl-group coos, and shaggy nostalgic jams.
It makes sense that the record starts with an ode to Scully, whose artful eye-rolls have become the internet's go-to meme in the face of the men who plague your @-replies. Tacocat have always approached feminism from a point of fun rather than anger, but inevitably, when bros keep bro-ing and your city's falling apart, and nothing ever seems to change, it's gonna get hard to see the funny side. It feels like perpetuating all that bullshit to even call them on it: U**gh, I can't believe you can no longer laugh at these things for my entertainment. They sound as weary as anyone would.


On the deluxe version of its debut full-length, the trio struggles to find a middle ground between treacly verses and the bubbly pop-rap they’re known for.

grouptherapy.: The ADDENDUM - i was mature for my age, but i was still a child

California trio grouptherapy. is a product of a particular model of young stardom. Growing up, Tyrel J. “TJOnline” Williams and Coy “SWIM” Stewart appeared on every network and streaming service, from Disney Channel to Nickelodeon to Netflix. Around the same time, Jadagrace featured in 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, had her own TV show, and signed a major-label record deal, all before she started high school. In another era, they might’ve been forced into an ensemble by executives looking to milk the cable-TV-to-pop-star pipeline that birthed Miley Cyrus or Zendaya. Instead, the self-described artist collective first became friends on the audition circuit as kids, bonding over a love for music that pushed them away from the unforgiving and dangerous world of child acting (not that the music industry is much better). grouptherapy. began as three Black misfits making music for themselves and now they’re bringing their genre-straddling music to the world on their terms. There’s a wide-eyed fascination with every sound they dabble in; they sound like giddy theater kids after their first experience with a Tyler, the Creator or BROCKHAMPTON album.
That isn’t to say grouptherapy.’s members are lacking in skill. Their flows are malleable and energetic, but even their best songs have a summer-camp-talent-show quality to them. Take “American Psycho,” the second track on their debut album i was mature for my age, but i was still a child. Over reverb-drenched guitars and Jada’s background growls, TJ and SWIM vent about mental health issues, the corrupting power of money, and being bullied for being Black and queer. What’s supposed to be honest and raw instead feels overly earnest and chintzy. TJ’s verse in particular sounds like a rejected draft from the Saturation III sessions: “I hate niggas ’cause the niggas hate me right on back/I hate hoes ’cause they never wanna see me relax/And it’s not a ho in the sense of having a pussy/But tryna pull the pussy outta me, tryna challenge me.” mature, and its deluxe edition THE ADDENDUM, struggle to find a middle ground between treacly writing and the bubbly pop-rap they’ve made their name on.
The most notable change from earlier projects is a more expansive ear for beats. Both 2020’s there goes the neighborhood and 2022’s Truth Be Told had more uniform production aesthetics, but mature speeds through so many different styles of rap, it often feels overwhelming. Looking for bars over melancholy piano, cribbed straight from the Saba playbook? “smiles :)” has you covered. What about pastiches of Beyoncé’s “PURE/HONEY” or the deadpan hilarity of Rio Da Yung OG-style Michigan street rap? Try “Lightspeed ~>” or TJ’s closing verse on “Nasty.” There are attempts at drum’n’bass (“HOT!”), boom-bap (“Help Pt. 2”), and pluggnB (“GT.”), which strain to illustrate grouptherapy.’s versatility. It’s all serviceable, polished, and competently performed, but it often doesn’t stick; the stuff that does just leaves you wanting more of the trio’s eccentricities, as opposed to what’s currently on their playlist. Outside of critiques of consumer culture that frequently veer toward the contradictory (stating that the impulse to flex “isn’t healthy” on “Help Pt. 1” before claiming to speak “billion-dollar banter” two tracks later on “FUNKFEST”), there’s little that’s refreshing here. We’re left with formless variety, ideas with no spine fusing them together.
Still, grouptherapy.’s enthusiasm can be infectious from time to time, especially on the songs where they cut loose and just bar out. The peppy sing-raps on “thatsmycheck.” and the Memphis crunk-style chants that power the hook for “DYSBF!” help their respective songs crackle and pop (Jada’s fiery verse on “thatsmycheck.” is also one of the funniest and most amped on the album.) This energy goes further on ADDENDUM’s seven extra songs, which are generally less self-serious. Tracks like “Home Alone” and “thank u so much” are breezy and effortless, the trio’s personalities popping as they trade jokes and off-kilter flexes about not having taken the SATs. These details are way more endearing than moments like “still alive,” which sullies the delicate immersion into the group’s backstories with plodding keyboards and vocal harmonies that even Chance the Rapper would find too syrupy. grouptherapy.’s current sound isn’t sprawling in an Odd Future or Tierra Whack sense; it’s just unwieldy. With some more work, they could one day find themselves on similarly hallowed ground as their various influences. For now, they still have some growing up to do.


The Florida rapper’s latest project is uneven and less measured than he’s been in the past. The moments of transparency are overshadowed by disingenuous storytelling and colorless punch lines.

Project Baby 2

Since Kodak Black emerged as a prodigious talent at the front of the new rap class, it’s been clear the only thing that could derail his run would be violence. That has largely held true: For every platinum hit or Top 5 charting album, there’s been a corresponding arrest and prison stint, all overshadowed by a felony charge of sexual battery. The pall cast by these charges (and sometimes petty misbehavior) hangs over each new Kodak release. He was in prison when Lil B.I.G. Pac came out, and a probation violation postponed his tour earlier this year. But these crimes haven’t stifled the momentum of the 20-year-old rapper, who, despite controversy, is more popular than ever. He is an introspective MC who dwells on personal tragedies, and his music delves deep into miscreancy, the kinds for which he stands accused or convicted of committing.
His latest mixtape, Project Baby 2, is less measured than he’s been in the past and plays against his strengths. The project is an uneven collection of love songs and self-gratifying ego-boosters that seek to depict a troubled romantic and workhorse snared by street life. But he comes off as disingenuous on a bloated release of limp ballads and his most colorless punch lines.
So much of Kodak’s most evocative writing requires a cold self-analysis and wise-for-his-age world-weariness, but here he only turns his piercing gaze toward those he believes have wronged him, and walls himself off to avoid any maturation in the process. “Everybody tellin’ me I need to change/But then y’all gon’ complain when a nigga change/Bossed up you sayin’ lately he ain’t been the same/Fuck it y’all just wanna hate me anyways,” he raps on “Unexplainable.” The mixtape paints a portrait of an obstinate youngster unwilling to really be held accountable for his actions. Which is especially troubling considering not just his many ongoing run-ins with the law but his tiresome, outspoken homophobia and all-around unrelenting insensitiveness. In his world, he’s the victim: No one is worthy of his trust, while he’s merely misunderstood.
There are always conversations about separating the art from the artist with releases like this, the idea being that art exists free from the restrictions of its creator. But how much separation can there be when Kodak enlists fellow alleged abuser XXXtentacion for “Roll in Peace,” and X proceeds to rap, “Last time I wifed a bitch she told the world I beat her, huh/When they locked Lil Kodak up, my nigga I couldn’t believe it, huh.” These two aren’t just unapologetic, they’re apathetic. And it’s hard to listen to Kodak—who's accused of punching a female bartender and committing acts of sexual violence—rap something like, “Shawty love for me to choke her when I’m in that pussy” or “I can’t be killing bitches, getting blood on my Givenchys,” or “Now she give me head whenever I knock her head off.” These moments are cringe-worthy and disturbing. There is cognitive dissonance, in this case particularly, in enjoying such flagrant showings of sadistic misogyny.
Even putting aside these tone-deaf bits, Project Baby 2 is the most inconsistent Kodak project since he first broke out with “No Flockin.” Nineteen tracks spread the good bars too thin, and his storytelling and scene-setting have regressed, particularly on “Built My Legacy” and “You Do That Shit.” Punches come less often and carry less weight. More off-brand cuts like “First Love” and “Need a Break” expose the most grating aspects of his squawking drawl, which can become a yowl when he pushes the limits of his singing voice.
But at his best, Kodak can be a disarming orator and there are flashes of this transparency on Project Baby 2. “I be too quick reachin’ out for my gun/I hope my son don’t turn out to be a thug/I know that gangster shit run in his blood,” he raps on “Change My Ways,” later adding, “I need to change my surroundings/I’m tryna be a little calmer/I can’t go back to the bottom.” These hopes for a better present for himself and future for his son are raw and gripping. Then there the songs that deliver snapshots of the things that make him a versatile performer. The ghostly “Don’t Wanna Breathe” is intoxicating, slurred take on a star-crossed romance. His heaving cadences propel syllables into downbeats on “Up Late.” But his clearest moment of self-awareness comes on standout “Misunderstood”: “Did so much dirt I wonder how I still be gettin’ any blessings.” This contradiction stands at the core of the conflict in listening to him.


Taking influence from the rock music of the early 1980s, the experimental guitarist settles into the role of a traditional frontman on a sharp, guest-heavy new record.

Evolution Here We Come

Like John Cale before him, guitarist and composer Chris Forsyth has evolved along a multifaceted trajectory, expanding his toolkit with each new record. Where his earlier albums relied on intricate, almost hallucinatory, instrumental explorations, 2019’s All Time Present redirected his electric improvisations into a more structured song-based format.  All Time Present encapsulated Forsyth’s love for straightforward rock’n’roll, the logical continuation of his career-long journey from the noise folk of Peeesseye, through the technical art rock of his Solar Motel band, toward a new solo sound that felt equally at home in the studio or on stage.
On his latest album, Evolution Here We Come, Forsyth dials in his unique fusion of tightly constructed instrumental rock and the avant-garde. If All Time Present leaned on the swirling sounds of late 1960s and early ’70s psychedelia, Evolution Here We Come embraces the solid state distortion and lightly phased effects of the early ’80s. For these seven sharp, efficient tracks, Forsyth enlisted a band equipped to complement his vision: Tortoise’s Doug McCombs introduces the record with a pillowy, thumping bassline that’s quickly recontextualized by drummer Ryan Jewell. Sun Ra disciple and Philadelphia experimental music veteran Marshall Allen also appears, floating over the fray with electronic fragments reminiscent of his mentor’s Minimoog improvisations.
Co-produced by Darkside’s Dave Harrington, the album embraces an immersive, underwater sound that stands out in Forsyth’s catalog. His belief in the endless possibilities of his primary instrument remains consistent, and here, he collaborates with several guitarists who help expand his repertoire. Alongside Garcia Peoples’ Tom Malach, Bill Nace contributes a sizzling and buzzing accompaniment (listed in the credits as “Metal Machine Tashigoto”) on “Experimental & Professional,” while Nick Millevoi plays lap steel on a standout cover of Richard Thompson’s “You’re Going to Need Somebody.” Both guest performances feel like abstractions of Forsyth’s style on guitar, respectively tapping into the instrument’s noisier potential and its quieter, pastoral ambience.
The most daring appearance on the record, however, is Forsyth’s own turn as a frontman. On “You’re Going to Need Somebody,” he stands squarely and proudly in front of the microphone. Accompanied by husband-and-wife vocalists Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon, he summons ghosts of early ’80s Lou Reed or Tom Verlaine, artists whose work he has always been better at conjuring through his instrumental performances. Swapping their detached sneers for a warm, heartfelt tone, he gives his strongest vocal performance to date. As Forsyth ventures into new territory, he’s found a way to bring his influences along for the ride.


The Mexican duo’s first album in five years applies their customary virtuoso fusion of classical guitar and contemporary rock to six short originals and a 19-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.”

Mettavolution

The story of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s big break almost sounds made up. In 2006, a year in which “thrash metal / instrumental flamenco / acoustic covers” was something you might actually have seen on the MySpace page of a band trying to steal a second glance with facetious tags, the duo emerged delivering a genuine fusion of all those things with dead-serious eyes and the bona fides to back it up. Their self-titled second studio album from that year—complete with covers of Metallica and Led Zeppelin standards—debuted at No. 1 in Ireland, where they’d been living, busking, and refining their two-classical-guitar m.o. after several years stalling out in Mexico’s metal scene. The names below them on that week’s top ten were certainly no jokes: Kelly Clarkson, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Gorillaz, Johnny Cash.
As they began playing increasingly big stages—all the way up the White House—Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero remained loyal to the equation that helped get them there. Their albums have followed concepts—dedicating each song on 11:11 to one of their musical influences; doing the same for late historical figures on 9 Dead Alive; making a band-backed album with Area 52—but it’s a safe bet that they’ll never abandon their audience by, say, banishing classical guitars, or discontinuing the tributes. Mettavolution, which devotes its second half to a movement-for-movement cover of Pink Floyd’s 24-minute epic “Echoes,” is their first new album in five years and a humble addition to the one-of-a-kind house that they’ve kept for over 10 years.
The most glaring downside to their approach here is that there’s simply not that much original material, especially for the duo’s first release since 2014. With six shorter songs leading up to the Floyd finale, it feels more like an EP with a jackpot of a bonus track—not least of all because each half contrasts so starkly with the other. The first grits its teeth and charges forward: The crunching “Terracentric” and the blurrily agile lines on “Witness Tree” move like hand-cranked cars on a slotted track, wound up by Sanchez and Quintero’s extremely athletic wrists and then turned loose. The dance break “Cumbé” and its slower-breathing follower “Electric Soul” simmer down a bit and lay out their chemistry more simply, to warmer and more pleasant effect, but the dominant energy in part one is fast, heavy, and relentlessly precise.
“Echoes,” meanwhile, re-examines the original with a magnifying glass on texture. While Floyd had a bigger, more amplified setup from which to survey outer space, Rodrigo y Gabriela cleverly and resourcefully get small. Two-thirds of the way through the song (which, on Floyd’s Meddle, also occupied the second half of the album), it rests, suspended. For about two minutes here, Sanchez and Quintero offer some of their most impressive musicianship on the whole record: anti-shredding, actively resisting their signature instincts and thoroughly clearing the air. You can hear every tiny sound they make, down to the friction from each contour of their fingertips as they lightly skim up and down the nylon strings.
Very few groups could pull off a single cover song for 50 percent of an LP without seeming at least a little creatively complacent. But for Rodrigo y Gabriela, interpretation is a founding virtue. In fact, it has always comprised about half of their process—whether in playing covers, honoring another artist’s body of work, or just filtering one generations-old style of music through the language of another. Mettavolution reassures that for as long as they’re around, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be echoing their influences as only they can.


Melina Duterte is a San Francisco musician who performs as Jay Som. She plays every instrument on her album Turn Into, a kaleidoscopic collection of dream pop touching on multiple moods.

Turn Into

2016 has been a surreal and absurd year for most, but what a whirlwind it must have been for Melina Duterte. The San Francisco musician who performs as Jay Som (a moniker meaning “Victory Moon” and pulled from a baby name generator a la Childish Gambino) toured with Mitski and Japanese Breakfast, released a 7” on Fat Possum, opened for Peter Bjorn and John, signed to Polyvinyl, and has been working on a debut LP. This flurry of activity is largely the result of a tipsy decision made on Thanksgiving 2015, when Duterte spontaneously dropped a nine-track collection of “unfinished and finished songs” onto Bandcamp under the name Untitled. “It was completely unplanned,” Duterte told Rookie. “I didn’t even think about the track listing or the album artwork or the order of songs. I have a ton of these songs, and from them I picked nine.”
That these tracks, later retitled as Turn Into, are technically demos is essential to understanding why the collection has been re-released twice, first by Top Shelf and later by Polyvinyl. Each track is a deeply polished offering that reflects Duterte’s past musical experience and forecasts her promising future. She grew up playing the trumpet and planned to attend a conservatory program after high school to pursue her love of jazz. Instead, after realizing that she wanted to continue songwriting, she enrolled at community college to study music production and recording. She turned her bedroom into a studio, even removing the bed to install a drum set and puttered around with the tracks that would become Turn Into. She plays every instrument on the album, a feat that may remind some of Alex G’s home recordings, in addition to mixing and mastering.
Turn Into kicks off with “Peach Boy,” a kaleidoscopic dream-pop number featuring lush vocals and elastic wah-wah guitar effects (appropriately, considering Duterte’s history, early wah pedals were called “Clyde McCoy”s after the jazz trumpeter). Clouds move in for “Ghost” and the daydreaming melodies turn gloomy as Duterte confronts her fears. “Being scared is a huge theme of the album,” Duterte told San Francisco’s KQED, and even its most upbeat, these songs contain undercurrents of anxiety. There are moments on the album where you can feel her audibly pushing against these restraints, like on “Next to Me,” when she calls out “I’m waiting too long I’ve had it I want to scream/And fuck being patient I’m fragile I’m not weak” before disappearing back into the squall.
Turn Into clouds into melancholy during its middle third. “Drown” resembles My Bloody Valentine at their most mellow or Mazzy Star at their murkiest. “Our Red Door” and “Unlimited Touch” feature woozy, extended instrumental swirls that invite you to drift with them.  “Why I Say No” and “SLOW” wend slowly back into warmer territory before pale sunlight of the title track pokes through. The slinky guitars and wistful vocals recall Death Cab’s “Your Heart Is an Empty Room,” and confirms that Jay Som is a multifaceted project, capable of painting in multiple shades.


In the fourth volume of a proposed 12-part suite, the saxophonist fuses free jazz and folk spirituals into an ecstatic confrontation with American history at its darkest.

Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis

Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis

Time has no steady rhythm, despite what a clock insists. Matana Roberts, who might agree, saw how the tempo of history seemed to move irregularly through both her own memory and the national one: how choice points seemed to speed up, wane, cut, coda, and hold; how nostalgia coddled, unsettled, blurred, and muzzled moments. “The past: It sits there,” she said in a 2016 interview, pausing to savor a delicious silence, “but it moves.”
Roberts is one of those artists permanently disturbed by the wing of a single, broad muse—here the muse being America, boiled in its own blood, disquiet, mettle, and hate. Her self-appointed task across a projected 12-part album suite of what can unsatisfyingly be bucketed as free-jazz (but in reality is more like historical fiction accompanied by a loud bouquet of horns, ouds, and vibraphones) is akin to what essayist Elizabeth Hardwick selects as her lodestar on the first page of her best, wooziest, and final work, Sleepless Nights. “This is what I have decided to do with my life,” she writes. “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life.” Like Hardwick, Roberts has a firm sense of purpose and a fabulist’s impulse, beginning with a vision of the past—on this album, memories of a young woman whose parents were killed by the Klan, a story loaned to her by her Memphis-born grandmother—and using it as kindling to cannon a hailstorm of paean and shrapnel.
History, as it often does, crashes in with savagery. Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis is like the other three extant Coin Coins inasmuch as it’s marked by a tumbling of psychic and cosmic ephemera, allowing free improv, folk spirituals, and guttural yawps from throat and sax to mimic the beatitude of a woman’s disguises, passions, and dignity against the thrashings of circumstance. This effort, however, feels firmer, and more fulgid. In this sharper focus, Roberts’ subtractions have an additive effect: Whereas Coin Coin Chapters One, Two, and Three approach women as platforms by which to explode outward into sound, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis focuses more tightly on myth-making by channeling the protagonist in a broadly narrative form. We learn of her father, of her grandmother, of her prayers for safety, and watch Roberts narrate as a vessel for her spiritspeak.
Both the pieces that utilize her voice—which is most satisfying in a tranced-out, babble-as-hymnal mode—and those that are voiceless somehow summon the sensation that she and her band have swallowed their instruments so as to transcend them. Roberts’ saxophone in the prologue, “Jewels of the Sky: Inscription”—which capitalizes on the horn’s capacity to blare like what one imagines the sun might sound like if it were played (low, eruptive, juicy)—is divine noodling, astral magma. The epilogue, “How Bright They Shine,” ends on deep, reedy emissions like dispatches from a satellite stuck in time and orbit.
Space feels grounded in Roberts’ work, though. Mirages of Chicago’s free-jazz heroes—of which Roberts is now resolutely one—mist through inescapably, but so does the city of Memphis. To call upon Memphis as a signifier of place and time is a choice that irresistibly forces images of its past to projectile into the present: the stuff of Sun and Stax, the Southern rag, Three 6 Mafia, Johnny Cash, the blues. This isn’t to say that she sounds directly reminiscent of them, but instead assumes herself as part of a cultural lineage devoted to confronting the darkness, the grimness, the apocrypha of the South. She summons the same dramatic tensions that surface when staring at a Confederate statue still erect in 2019.
At the substrate, Roberts’ work is that of a woman in thrall to the legacies of family and history, but so sensitive to the sharp pains and violent rearrangements of a national consciousness that she needs to experience them instrumentally, which is to say, through her body. In a recent interview with The Quietus, Roberts devotes a large part of her conversation to a fascination with the idea of moving through water as experienced by indigineous and African-American bodies during the transatlantic slave trade. “The way in which free divers use their lungs is something I’m very curious about as a saxophonist,” she says of deep-sea diving without an oxygen tank, a new hobby. “I do a lot of the breathwork that I learned in my saxophone practice now.” That phrase—breathwork—sums the brio and intensity of Roberts’ vision. It should come as no surprise that respiration and inspiration come from the same Latin root, spir: ‘‘to breathe.” The force of Roberts’ breath—first through the saxophone, all endurance and fits and starts; then through time, inflated and vivified—makes bold how much the retelling of history is a necessary game of survival—an ongoing, fluid act of resuscitating the dead.
Toward the end of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick closes in on her own memory-remaking with a lapidary line that may as well have come from a chorus in the middle of Memphis: “The weak have the purest sense of history.” It takes no effort to imagine Roberts chanting it in one of her fugue states, reaching crescendo as she stacks the words like a highway pile-up: The weak have the purest sense of history; the weak havethepurestsense of history, theweakhavethepurestsenseofhistory… Roberts’ history-making is impure in a literal, fundamental way—that is, part patchwork, part arch composure, part sacrament—but it’s all extremely real. What she does here, and what she will continue to do, is allow her body’s blood to beat loudly enough so that it matches the irregular rhythms of the past. She inhales and exhales life into memory so as to make it new—or, maybe more accurately, she affords history the brief freedom to breathe.

Buy: Rough Trade
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There will be big fun in town tonight as we cordially invite YOU (and one big booty guest) to bump ...

Do You Party?

There will be big fun in town tonight as we cordially invite YOU (and one big booty guest) to bump bump bump with us at the fabulous Romper Room Frisco for a night of hardbodies and soft pink truth - EGADS!!!~! Non-freaks: Proceed with wanton abandon and naked ambition.
...and now...
"Women"
...prepare...
"Booty"
...to board the mothership...
"I wish I was a..."
A R T Y dancefloor happenings in the name of Makeup and Love 2003.
P
R F werD \\w
O
Matmos'
O S
F T
Um...
N I P
K (truth)
---
L4D135 + ge(nder non-specific)nts: You shan't be disappointed in Wednesday evening's corral of events, featuring The Western cut-up Mr. Drew Daniel! Providing live deviancy via a slew of unrelated sexual incidents (aka the! finest! in! bass-dominated! entertainment!), tonight's master of ceremonies is prepared to offer you an incredible display of haute panache and dddisco flash. Fresh from a storied career as one-half of San Francisco's dashing e-lektronik outfit Matmos-- who themselves have delivered three long-form eclectic fineries of their own, e'en working with an Icelandic butterbird of some kind-- Mr. D. has trimmed the fat and now ventures beyond the mundane and into our house.
The Soft Pink Truth has already presented the world with two 12-inch samples of his manhood on the esteemed Matthew Herbert's Soundslike imprint, but Do You Party? is his first full-length outing. For the project, he's dragged along bongos from Mat-pal Martin Schmidt and the vox stylings of Blevin Blechdom. But rest assured, this is not "intelligent" dance music, nor is it a simple technological experiment-- it is truly a declaration of penetration, a celebration of gender confusion and ONE RED HOT JAM.
Do You Party? is an all-ages event, but attire is strictly adult (girls: that means no dresses). Mini-disco at one moment, electro-shocking the next, this party engorges the senses with only the Holiest four-on-the-floor. It is explicitly prohibited to remain still, and we are not "Soft on Crime". (4warning: Some moments may contain high percentages of European microhousing, especially ones that reference dead French composers.) (2x4warning: Others don't.)
Admission is absolutely nothing for: Girls, girls, girls, girls, women, yo ladies, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, women (I always thought that I knew), all the ladies across the globe, girls, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, girls, girls, (big booty) butt (bitches), Miss E., and anyone who wishes they were a lady. Check the guestlist if you have heretofore accepted [BOOTY] as your savior. There will be old-guard analog synths, a million and three one-second vocalists distilled to their most soulful essences, BASS, tastefully updated mutations of disco, ritualistic orgiastic ceremonies (time permitting), "a devastatingly funky house rhythm" and "staggering compositional talent and sampling virtuosity of the highest order." Strike a pose, there's nothing to it.
The particulars, then--
Time: Soon
Place: SF/Detroit/Köln
Girls: Ladies
Make Up: Lipstick, eyeliner, green, blue, comb hair, I WANNA MAKE IT GOOD 4 U
Smoking: "I'm not ready yet"
Dancing: You're wasting your time if you play this while sitting down. I'm serious, get the fuck up.
Melody: 7.3
Harmony: Vanity 6
Rhythm: 9.4
Blevin: 9.6
Drew Daniel: "I Want to Thank You"
Soundslike: Herbertwithasenseofhumor
Catering: Kid606, DAT Politics and I-Sound
Actual Food: Bump bump bump bump click BASS
Do You Party?: Yes
"Ciao, boys."


With slight changes in disposition and geography, the New York band’s seventh record strives toward a refreshed sound and outlook.

Interpol: The Other Side of Make-Believe

The Other Side of Make-Believe

After 25 years of fronting one of rock’s most recognizable brands, Paul Banks is not merely the vocalist for Interpol. He is Paul Banks, the Voice of Interpol, a character he has embodied with increasing panache. Maybe that’s always been the case, but especially since Interpol’s return to Matador cemented their status as an A-list cult band, Banks has slyly played on the reality that every one of their albums will be taken by a locked-in audience as a referendum on Interpol. I have to imagine a lyricist as self-aware and witty as Banks has read the tempered praise that has followed everything the band has done since 2007’s Our Love to Admire, and within the first couplet of The Other Side of Make-Believe, he has flexed mastery of this craft: “Still in shape, my methods refined,” he croons on “Toni,” a lyric that absolutely knows it’s going to included in just about every single review of their seventh album to speak to Interpol’s refreshed outlook and its modest success.
More important is the actual first line of The Other Side of Make-Believe: “Flame down the Pacific Highway.” Though nearly every one of their peers who was likewise deemed a quintessential New York rock artist in the 2000s has made their way to the West Coast, the concept of Interpol doing the same triggered some kind of mental 404 error. If not slumming in pornographic subways with shady butchers and catatonic sex toy love-joy divers, what would Paul Banks really be? “On the streets of Cozumel/Where the faces glow/I would gladly give my life to be there,” he replies on “Gran Hotel.” Granted, Interpol has achieved a godlike status in Mexico, but the change in disposition as well as geography is revolutionary for a band who’d otherwise only been capable of incremental sonic change.
Yet, like a massive cruise ship, only a few minor shifts in coordinates can eventually send them off course. “Toni” is the heretofore-inconceivable “Interpol California song,” swapping ambient synth washes for a plinking piano, slacking the eighth-note grid just the tiniest bit, allowing Banks’ voice to relax into a world-weary but satisfied tone. Even if the optimistic bent of The Other Side of Make-Believe is more implied than literal, “Toni” lets in enough sunshine and seabreeze for “Fables” to follow with what Banks calls Interpol’s first “summer jam.” I doubt they intended “Fables” to do battle for Hot 97 supremacy against Bad Bunny or Doja Cat, or even a pop song playing against type a la “Friday I’m in Love.” Nonetheless, it does tease out some of the influences that had been suppressed within Banks’ main gig: a love of boomin’ system hip-hop and the most memorable melody he’s penned in ages. Ironically, it sounds more in line with the kind of festival-topping indie rock that Dave Fridmann helped steward before he all but tanked the production of 2018’s Marauder.
Within these first two tracks, there’s a germ of something more intriguing than a return to form: a latter-day Interpol record where the spirit and the sound are finally in alignment. Though the fully-formed aura that Interpol projected into the elegiac atmosphere of post-9/11 New York City has been chipped away like a disintegration tape by dubious side projects, inessential studio albums, and a reconsideration of the indie culture that propped them up, they all have raised the opportunity for Interpol to take on a pathos of post-punk agitators easing into wisened, witty elder statesmanship—maybe like Nick Cave or, hell, By the Way-era Red Hot Chili Peppers. Banks does seem up for this task, repeatedly leveraging his reputation to sell lines that would be ridiculous coming from anyone else—rhyming the title of “Big Shot City” with “girl you lookin’ gritty,” “You’re truly erupting too hard/That’s why you’re a sizable god.”
But like so much of Interpol’s work since Our Love to Admire, the spark in The Other Side of Make-Believe is subsumed in a gray expanse of Interpol Music, which has largely remained undisturbed by a revolving cast of bassists, auteur producers, and the passage of 20 years. Alan Moulder and Flood are at least better suited to Interpol’s strengths than previous charges like Rich Costey and Fridmann. The duo’s work with the likes of Depeche Mode, Curve, and Nine Inch Nails are about one degree of separation from the band’s enduring influences. Though drummer Sam Fogarino claims Flood was trusted to “hyperbolize our best qualities,” he does so on an a la carte basis on songs that largely betray their origin written remotely in different parts of the world. Daniel Kessler’s sonic structures remain instantly identifiable and also interchangeable, a batch of “Interpol-type beats.” Though working at nearly the same tempo throughout The Other Side of Make Believe, Fogarino drops some much-needed math into the rhythms of “Greenwich” and “Into the Night,” though neither finds any kind of melodic footing. Too often, the trio sounds like they’re writing over or past each other instead of locking in.
Compared to the “refined methods” Banks describes in “Toni,” far less attention has been given to the meta self-evaluation on the closing “Go Easy (Palermo)”: “I’ll keep pushing forward/All the obstacles in my way have been falling.” Even if Turn on the Bright Lights still overshadows the majority of their work—and with its 20th anniversary months away, it will do so even more now—a band at Interpol’s stature mostly needs to talk a good game, assuring they’re still engaged enough to bring a good narrative and 20 or so minutes of new material to a career-spanning setlist. This is made clear by the most Paul Banks of Paul Banks lines on The Other Side of Make-Believe. “All along I was different/’Cuz my nature made me great,” he sings, leaving just enough time to raise the question of “is this guy for real?” And then, the punchline: “But not that great,” a nod from a wise band that knows its limitations.


In a 2014 session with the late Richard Swift, the Alabama sculptor and blues man builds on the foundation of American roots music, reshaping his influences into works that transcend genre.

National Freedom

Experimental blues man Lonnie Holley is one of America’s great alchemists. As a visual artist and sculptor, he treats found objects and household materials—rocking chairs, padlocks, a charred television—with their entire history in mind. He respects their past as functioning tools of the mundane, but honors their spiritual and philosophical value as vessels of memory. As a songwriter, the Alabama native similarly builds rich compositions on the foundation of American roots music, but reshapes them into works that are beyond genre. Like his sculptures fashioned from rudimentary components, his songs are often arranged rather simply on a handful of familiar instruments. On his new EP National Freedom—recorded in 2014 at the late Richard Swift’s studio of the same name—Holley invokes a mythical atmosphere from his very human surroundings.
Throughout National Freedom, Holley roams from searing blues to downtempo dub to freeform wanderings on piano. Nothing is particularly beholden to a traditional structure; instead, his compositions sound more like fever dreams of songs—streams of consciousness unimpeded by the architecture of the waking mind. The sparse “In It Too Deep” features just Holley’s voice and kalimba; the plucked instrument, made from a small wooden base and metal tines, sounds like a musical baby mobile twisting above a crib. “Just want to stick my hand out,” Holley sings, “to grab ahold to something extraordinary.” Holley’s philosophy revolves around “the beauty of noticing all,” and in this song he seems to be both the baby marvelling at the dangling mobile and the man who built the nursery all at once.
Opener “Crystal Doorknob” is more tethered to the earth, but it possesses a similar sense of wonder as “In It Too Deep” and its piano-based companion “So Many Rivers (The First Time).” While those tracks are airy and delicate, “Crystal Doorknob” is smeared with soil. Holley’s voice is gravelled, and Marshall Ruffin’s electric guitar sounds born of the swamplands. The loping, repetitive instrumentation supports Holley’s imagery: He recalls walking through a dense forest, where he stumbles upon an ornate door standing alone in the middle of it, without explanation. The door doesn’t lead anywhere, or solve any preexisting mystery. It’s just there, and that’s enough.
For all of Holley’s contented musings and observations—some of which sound downright Buddhist in their detachment—the best song on National Freedom is drowned in longing. On “Like Hell Broke Away,” Holley mourns lost love, singing the most anguished of blues ballads. His woman has left him, and he laments her on three multi-tracked vocal channels: He screeches incoherently, blubbers and growls, and accompanies himself with booming doo-wop backing vocals that sound like perfectly timed sobs. In addition to being the boldest, rawest entry on the EP, it is the richest, musically speaking. Holley commands a whirring Melatron, and Ben Sollee’s cello ups the drama. The synthesis of all these parts mimics the inferno of a fresh heartbreak—even if you can crawl out of the bubbling lava, it still takes a while for the fires to die and the smoke to clear. Unlike many of Holley’s songs, “Like Hell Broke Away” is rooted in an eminently relatable human experience, which might explain its strength. Like his sculptures, it takes the familiar and makes it beautifully strange.


Surfer Blood's latest seems to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.

Pythons

"Apologies, meet apologies," Surfer Blood's John Paul Pitts sings on "Demon Dance", the lead-off track from his band's second LP, Pythons. Pitts spends most of Pythons pleading, bargaining, rationalizing, trying to make some sense of an increasingly dire situation in any way he can. There's a longstanding tendency in pop music to read too much autobiography into lyrics. In Pythons' case, this kind of conflation's all but unavoidable; just before it was recorded, an altercation with his then-girlfriend lead to Pitts' arrest for domestic battery. Ultimately, no charges were filed, but as Pitts told Pitchfork, that same tumultuous relationship inspired many of Pythons' lyrics. Even before you hear one note, you may feel conflicted about it, and rightfully so. Truth be told, Pythons seem to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.
Produced by Gil Norton (Doolittle, Del Amitri), Pythons is a sleeker affair than 2010's bedroom-born Astro Coast and 2011's knotty Tarot Classics EP. With 10 lean songs in 32 minutes, there's hardly a second to waste, so Pythons largely dispenses with pageantry and heads straight for the stomp box. Instrumentally, Surfer Blood's reared-on-Pavement looseness proves hard to shake even on these no-nonsense melodies; guitars dive-bomb into choruses, hooks turn into group shout-alongs. This more focused approach occasionally causes slight tunnelvision, songs that seem to rise and fall in essentially the same fashion. There are exceptions, of course: "I Was Wrong" dips a toe into grunge, and the waltzy "Needles & Pins" harkens back to the Everly Brothers. But there's a satisfying simplicity in all those clean lines and bright-as-can-be hooks, a gleaming surface to bury the dark stuff under.
Pythons' musical confidence is not shared by its narrator. Pitts spends the record sounding one kind of despondent after another: he points fingers, apologizes profusely, hopes something will change, realizes it won't. He sounds stuck in place, his mind constantly reeling, his next move unclear. Pitts certainly seems sorry for something; "Gravity" sees him making apologies for "never stopping when we oughta," a line that both absorbs and assigns some of the blame for the shambolic romance described throughout. Pitts is quick to paint himself in an unflattering light: codependent, unstable, at fault. "Blair Witch" finds Pitts pleading, "I need love, but the more I see love, the more I need love," an unguarded statement that suggests Pitts is at least aware he's got some stuff to work on. "If I fell apart, would you stay?" he asks at one point, aware of the awfulness of the situation but still willing to keep going with it, consequences be damned.
It doesn't always work; "Say Yes to Me" and "Blair Witch" affix themselves to a couple of phrases-- "true blue" and "sour grapes", respectively-- they can't quite rescue from cliche. Whenever the music gets heavier-- the verses of "I Was Wrong", bits of "Slow Six"-- the lyrical self-flagellation and the muddy guitars congeal into a thick, momentum-halting sludge. The songwriting's fairly sturdy overall, but highlights are a little hard to come by; lead single "Weird Shapes." comes close, but there's really nothing here that'll knock the wind out of you quite like Astro Coast's "Swim". Pitts proves adept at conjuring the confusion and conflict of the last days of a troubled relationship, and-- probably wisely-- makes himself seem fairly unsympathetic in the process. But he's not always so great at fleshing out the person on the other end of the line, which leaves Pythons feeling trapped in Pitts' head, a spot where plenty of listeners won't want to spend much time.
When I heard about John Paul Pitts' arrest last summer, my first response, like that of many others, was a swift and decisive, "Fuck you." Even as more information has come to light, my feelings haven't changed much; Pitts maintains his innocence, and plea-and-pass might be enough for the Florida courts where forgiveness is concerned, but without hearing the other side of the story, I'm still not so sure. Pythons, seething with autobiography, doesn't make it easy to forget the circumstances around its creation, and separating the art from the artists here takes some serious doing; that score at the top of the page is for Pythons, not the people who made it. With Pythons out there, Pitts is going to have to get up there again and again and sing these songs, so full of hurt and confusion, penitence and longing. We'll never know completely what happened that night, but I sincerely hope Pitts never lets himself forget it. As long as he's out there singing "I Was Wrong", he probably never will.


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 Keyshia Cole’s 2005 debut, a scrapbook of too-real breakup anthems from a pivotal moment in R&B.

The Way It Is

Keyshia Cole has likely caught a boyfriend cheating a million times, but one particular indiscretion set her life in motion. It was 2002, and she was 21 years old, broke, running on pure instinct and faith. Fed up and feeling defeated, she packed her belongings and fled from her hometown of Oakland to Los Angeles on a whim. Within a few months, she’d gotten a demo track to A&M Records’ then-president Ron Fair and scored a label deal, unknowingly building a hero’s arc around her ex’s deceit.
Cole’s first two singles weren’t overtly messy. A Luther Vandross remake featuring Eve, “Never” was happy wedding-reception music featured on the soundtrack to Barbershop 2: Back in Business. The follow-up, “I Changed My Mind,” an upbeat termination letter for an ex, produced by a young and hungry Kanye West, brought Cole closer to success in a cluttered R&B scene, but it wasn’t a mainstream hit. A&M’s artist development exec, Michelle Thomas, suggested a more vengeful approach. How about a record where a pissed-off Cole considers cheating on an unfaithful, guilt-tripping partner who’d accused her of cheating?
“I Should Have Cheated” was Cole’s life story and, incidentally, the only song she didn’t write on her debut album, The Way It Is. Daron Jones of 112 produced the track and co-wrote it with bandmate Quinnes “Q” Parker, originally for another R&B singer-songwriter, Nivea. Fair later added spaghetti western-style harmonica and keys over soapy strings and landed a Top 40 hit that pushed sales for Cole’s debut from a meek 89,000 U.S. units in its first week to platinum in nine months. Of course, the subtext of the song was that Cole probably didn’t have the heart to retaliate. “I Should Have Cheated” was more of an emotional chess move than a winning strategy—something every R&B fangirl at the time wished they could say and actually mean.
That type of emotional warfare fit the mood of a new pop decade flooded with empowerment anthems from Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and Destiny’s Child. By the mid-2000s, “male-bashing” was a go-to, stereotypical label for women singing about stupid love. Released in June 2005, The Way It Is arrived amid an influx of suave soul stars like John Legend and Anthony Hamilton and upstarts like Chris Brown and Trey Songz who made sex-driven R&B. Mary J. Blige was deep in marital bliss by then, five months before releasing her seventh studio album The Breakthrough. Cole emerged at a time when the genre needed a fresh authority on heartbreak to speak to millennial women coping with hurt before the current golden age of therapy in pop culture.
More than just an avatar for pain, Cole saw herself as a voice for Black girls who could barely fathom love, let alone talk about it. The same week The Way It Is dropped, I interviewed for a dream job (which I didn’t get) and discovered my boyfriend of three years was in love with someone else. After a night of crying, I emailed a friend, writing dramatically: “I was so happy just a few days ago and now I don’t know what to do with him. I told him I never wanted to see him again.” She suggested I listen to Keyshia Cole.
Girls like Cole aren’t just repairing the damage of men in their lives but also dealing with family dynamics that lead them into broken relationships. “The girls I sing to is in the hood,” she said in a 2005 interview. “They’re in predicaments that I’m sure it’s hard to get through, to be focused and try to be in school and try to keep a job, try to keep their minds straight. Those are the types of girls that listen to me.”
Like Blige, Cole was never into smoke and mirrors. Unable to hide her discomfort, she often looked visibly over it (meaning everything) in interviews. As recently as last year, she apologized for showing up late to her Verzuz battle with Ashanti and seeming irked half the time. In fairness, back in 2005, the industry was expecting studied professionalism from a twentysomething with a history of abandonment who later said the attention she received from fans was a love she’d never felt.
Cole was born in Oakland and lived alone with her mom, Frankie Lons, who struggled with addiction in the ’80s when crack cocaine hit cities like Oakland hard. When Keyshia was a baby, her grandmother took her from Frankie and put her into the foster care system. Already traumatized at age 7, she turned to music as an outlet, forming a singing-rapping duo with a neighborhood friend. Then at 12, she met M.C. Hammer through her brother and started singing background vocals for the hometown star, who later introduced Cole to another icon and early mentor, 2Pac. Those industry connections fueled her ambitions, but Cole was stuck in Oakland, dropping out of high school at 17 and running away from her foster parents’ home to live with the same boyfriend whose infidelity compelled her to retreat to L.A.
Despite her media allergy throughout her career, Cole was hardly closed off about her life. Less than a year after releasing The Way It Is, she premiered a six-part BET reality series with the same title. Besides being a relic of an unglamorous era in realty television, the series offered a close-up view of how addiction destroys families, documenting Cole’s strained relationship with her mother, who became a beloved pop culture fixture in her own right before she died of a drug overdose in 2021.
Reality TV made it easier to root for Cole, whose upbringing inevitably shaped her views on love. That attitude and weariness allowed her to emote from a deeper, agonized place on The Way It Is. Over mutinous horn stabs on opener “(I Just Want It) To Be Over,” produced by Krucial Keys, she describes a cycle of frustration and rapture with the wrong guy. On records like “Thought You Had My Back,” a classic ballad of resentment where she’s in conflict with two confounding ideas (men and love), she sounds equally youthful and hardened.
The Way It Is was less emotionally expansive and more redemptive than an album like My Life, where Blige bravely spirals into the depths of depression. Cole’s debut is missing the contours of grief that could’ve helped her transcend into a more progressive R&B lane. Still, the record is a worthy entry in the canon of breakup albums, a category too often trivialized because the music appeals largely to young women who believe they’ve failed at finding a lasting romance.
Underneath its series of kiss-offs, The Way It Is is also deeply sensitive. The stringy ballad “Love” has the voice-cracking melodrama of a girl who thinks singing with all her heart might bring back the love she’s lost. “You’ve Changed” flips the weeping Just Blaze beat on Jay-Z’s lovesick manthem “Song Cry.” In response to Jay’s reluctant pathos, Cole interprets the dissolution from her perspective, suggesting that maybe money made him treat a woman differently. Cole’s songwriting is too cosmetic elsewhere, oversimplifying drama. The mid-tempo “Situations” is about being caught in a predictably tempting triangle. On “We Could Be,” she courts a crush with bare-minimum wooing, singing plainly: “If we could be friends, baby, it’d be all I need.” Lines like these connect only when you’re in the most impressionable stage of adolescence, aggrieved but still forming language around amateur feelings.
Cole’s debut is a bridge between unconventional old-soul singers like Blige and Erykah Badu and a new school of SZAs and Summer Walkers, whose generation is even more artfully ruthless in the dating arena. “I’m so mature, I got me a therapist,” SZA sings on her latest album, SOS, while fantasizing about killing an ex. Cole once explained this emotional logic on the premiere of her now-defunct talk show in 2019 (fittingly, her first guest was a boyfriend who’s now an ex). She argued that women today have turned reckless out of a sense of hopelessness, and after reaching a boiling point, she said, “We decided to just be a savage.”
An episode of Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is, which aired for three seasons, features Cole in a studio session with Diddy. While recording the hook to his Press Play single “Last Night,” he coaches the singer to put more stank on her vocals—aka “that conversational shit that you specialize in,” Diddy says, later telling Cole she’s “one of the greatest vocalists I’ve ever worked with.” It’s true that her voice is uniquely tuned to convey a pain rooted in years of adversity. The Way It Is showcased that she can go to those deeper places when she wants to. She just has to feel it.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


On her debut album, the rising Chicago DJ spins thrilling, multifaceted club music into a celebration of her Belizean heritage and trans identity.

Cyclorama

In the last couple of years, as a resident DJ at Chicago’s iconic Smartbar, Discwoman artist Ariel Zetina has become a beacon for the queer electronic underground. Playing trance-techno sets informed by her identity as a trans woman of Belizean descent, Zetina combines the rhythms of Garifuna folk genres punta and brukdown with Chicago house, hyperpop, bass music, and maximalist techno. Coming toward the end of a year in which she was nominated for DJ Mag’s “Breakthrough DJ” award, Zetina’s debut album, Cyclorama, is one of 2022’s most expansive techno records. Turning club music into a wide-ranging interrogation of queerness, Cyclorama is soft and hard in the same breath. Zetina combines just about every influence from her DJ sets into an animated, percussion-heavy art performance that pulls back the curtain on her life, centering her trans and Belizean identities every step of the way.
From start to finish, Cyclorama is a rollicking allegory of tropical fantasia and queer fantasy. Tracks like “Chasers” (a term for cis individuals who fetishize trans people), “Birdflight Tonite,” and “Smoke Machine” present queer dancefloor subtexts soaked with Caribbean-infused house rhythms, vocal samples, and breakbeat mutations. Despite its frequently euphoric energy, Cyclorama is grounded in a socio-political landscape in which trans women and nonbinary people, especially those of color, face far greater acts of gender-based violence, murder, and homelessness than any other members of the LGBT community. In carefully detailing the realities of trans women of color and their experiences, Zetina carves out a space of refuge within the album’s bright, reassuring sound. The Mia Arevalo collaboration “Gemstone,” for instance, is an uplifting anthem about self-esteem in a world that devalues and dehumanizes trans women’s livelihoods. “Gemstone” is jolted by its techno tempo, but its colorful array of synths offers a signal for hope amid fear. “Belleza no te preocupes/Don’t forget we all bleed,” she sings, delivering a heartfelt love letter to the dolls.
Cyclorama repeatedly addresses the power struggles trans subjects face in a cis-normative society, especially around sex. On “Have You Ever” (featuring Chicago producer and peer Cae Monāe), she repeats, “Daddy, have you ever been with a girl like me before/Do you want to touch me?” “Slab of Meat” unfolds like a nightmarish spoken-word vision of what it’s like to date, and be sexualised, as a trans woman. “Feeling like a slab of meat forgotten in the freezer/Are you gonna thaw me out? Or are you gonna leave me?/Throw me on the counter babe and pound me with a cleaver,” Zetina intones over thudding kick drums, her ominously processed voice growing more urgent as the track gains intensity. Picking up the playfully insightful thread running through Cyclorama, it’s a theatrical, spellbinding, and relentless confrontation with the id.
In theater, a cyclorama is a large curtain placed on the back wall of a stage, often intended to extend the background or replicate a sky. The nine tracks here suggest the kinds of projections that might be displayed on Zetina’s own personal cyclorama. Using today’s queer club sounds as the album’s foundation, Zetina draws on personal strife as a tool for transformative thinking. At its core, Cyclorama frames the joys of what might be called doll-mania: the frenetic yet euphoric rush of being a trans person equally dedicated to the ritual of the dancefloor, its people, and their place in the world after the set ends.


After decades of making music together, the two friends sit down to an unusual collaboration: a series of duets recorded on a single piano, in alternating takes.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story: 4 Hands

4 Hands

It was a dream come true when Ohio-based composer Tim Story met German experimental music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius in the 1980s. Story had long looked up to Roedelius’ groundbreaking work in kosmische group Cluster, whose sprawling sound influenced his own spacey music. The two would go on to collaborate on a series of albums, including 2002’s Lunz, 2008’s Inlandish, and 2019’s Lunz 3, which all feature electronics, and sometimes strings, that swirl around piano melodies. On 4 Hands, their latest effort, they’ve pared down their musical partnership into something more intimate: Both artists play the same grand piano, twining simple melodies into quietly contemplative songs that oscillate between heartfelt reminiscences and a playful lightness of spirit.
As its title suggests, the 11-track album explores the intimacy of the piano as written for four hands—in their case, not a typical duet formation, but two musicians playing one instrument in alternating takes. Roedelius and Story recorded their parts separately, improvising one on top of the other, but the album still sounds like a collaboration made in one moment. A stripped-down snapshot of the two musicians as they explore a variety of warm textures, their music is at once spontaneous and structured, phrases tumbling out and floating together with ease.
Most pieces on 4 Hands are built from patterns of rippling ostinato bass interwoven with delicate melodies. This structure often works well, like on opener “Nurzu,” whose title comes from a German phrase meaning, roughly, “Go ahead!” and builds on a series of arpeggios that blossom and recede as laid-back chords pulse on top. “Rever” works similarly, highlighting the interplay between rolled melodies that form a loose web of pensive sound. In these tracks, the duo’s goal comes into focus, but at other points, the music becomes easy to tune out—like “Bent Rhyme,” which features the same pattern of interlocking fragments but never latches on to a memorable melody.
The two artists make use of the entire piano on a few occasions, which gives the album much-needed motion. The piano has many parts to play with—some composers have been known to nestle metal objects among the piano’s strings, or pluck them, to explore new ways of making sound with the instrument. On 4 Hands, those extended techniques emerge with electric flair, offering distinctive new timbres that break up the sameness of the duo’s undulating sound. On “Seeweed,” plucks mix with rounded tones to make the piano sound three-dimensional, while on “Crisscrossing,” metallic sounds mix with traditional playing to form an intricate lattice. It’s here that the artists’ more experimental sides come out, showcasing subtle moments of exploration within an even-keeled palette.
But it’s 4 Hands’ intimacy that’s most compelling. The hidden meanings behind every song—one’s a tribute to their departed friend Harold Budd, others are inside jokes that we can only guess at—add to the overall feeling that 4 Hands is a celebration of friendship. They don’t need much more than a few notes sprinkled between a repeating bassline to convey the depth of their bond.


MaryLou Mayniel’s latest collection of hazy R&B is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing that lands in the safe space between accessible and experimental.

The Rite of May EP

Plenty of artists have made exciting music this decade by fusing crystalline, cutting-edge club music to melodies and rhythms rooted in R&B and pop. The same goes for the work of Marylou Mayniel, the French singer and producer who records as Oklou, whose music is almost scientifically midway between accessible and experimental. Her new EP, The Rite of May, is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing; when she posted a note about single “They Can’t Hear Me” on Facebook last month, she thanked Bok Bok, the head of the London experimental club label Night Slugs, for “turning a soft ballade into a shiny track.” That’s her zone: the space between soft and shiny.
The Rite of May’s thematic heft is tied up in its sound rather than its writing, which is often obscured by a slathered-on layer of Auto-Tune. Its four main tracks are broken up with two enigmatic interludes that sample Instagram stories and field recordings, and the descending motif that cracks open “Samuel” reappears sounding like JRPG soundtrack fodder on “Valley 2.” There’s clearly a vision at work, one that’s apparent even over just 20 minutes of material. This isn’t music that demands you take it seriously—Mayniel evokes the naïveté of childhood by sampling a clip of Cardi B stumbling on a deer outside her hotel room—but it encourages you to look for emotional resonance in its downcast melodies and near-future textures rather than its lyrics.
What you hear may bum you out: The Rite of May oozes loneliness. Mayniel has a great ear for space—the luminous melody at the core of “Samuel” dissipates like fog on a silver pond—but her music is rarely expansive or collaborative. It sounds like the product of late, silent nights in a bedroom with a laptop. The closest the EP gets to joy is “They Can’t Hear Me,” and that’s only because it alludes to the glistening maximalism of producers like Rustie in its second half; when you look past the glittering keyboards, you hear an android crying out for any kind of response. Mammoth closer “Friendless” is an extended exploration of how much it sucks when no one wants to hang out with you. The sense of disconnection is nearly overwhelming.
While there’s no denying The Rite of May’s coherence or concision, something about it leaves you a little cold. It’s not just the ice imagery spiked throughout “Friendless.” Mayniel has no trouble stringing a sticky vocal phrase together, but her penchant for digital obfuscation and vague, unintelligible writing makes it hard to connect with her as a presence. These songs aren’t direct or emotive enough to work as pure pop, but they don’t have the transgressiveness or daring to feel totally satisfying from an experimental perspective. That’s the thing about occupying the middle ground: it’s a safe space, but you don’t have the leverage you need to really turn the listener’s head.