On the Rave Cave EP, Andrew Hung (one half of the duo Fuck Buttons) revisits his fascination with cheap, pared-down tools. In this case, that makes replacing the intense polish of the duo’s most recent album Slow Focus with music programmed on a Game Boy.

Rave Cave EP

Andrew Hung, one-half of the duo Fuck Buttons, takes a step back on the Rave Cave EP. In place of the intense polish of the duo’s most recent album, Slow Focus, Hung offers a brief look at the way his mind works when faced with a vastly pared-down set of tools—in this case, a Game Boy. (Though as he has said, that choice was simply a convenient solution to the dearth of portable, easy-to-manipulate gear during Fuck Buttons’ last tour.)
Writing music on an obsolete gaming tool probably seems hopelessly antiquarian to some (especially if you grew up with the DS) but the uninhibited, high-strung music Hung wrings from it feels fresh. There’s nothing here of the magnitude of their massive Tarot Sport centerpiece "Olympians", or the protracted leer of Slow Focus. The biggest and brightest moment is the irrepressible glitch-fest "Korea Town", a gorgeous tide of bleeps and bloops, with romantically wafting strings laid on thick on top.
The EP’s other two tracks are harder-edged, built on heavily metronomic beats with just enough swing to stick. They’re also nowhere near as pretty: The propulsive, bull-headed stomp "The Plane" is stippled with sharp, abrasive sound effects, pushing the rough equipment to an aggressive extreme. Hung also shows a punkish sense of humor, adding in an almost comically seasick warble partway through "Fables". All three songs sound like a loose extension of the unconventional methodology that’s driven Hung and Fuck Buttons bandmate Benjamin John Power’s collaborative jamming.
The EP also benefits from a handmade quality, one that you certainly wouldn’t find on a Fuck Buttons album at this point. Hung and Powers have often worked with cheap equipment, from karaoke machines to children's toys, though they've shown an increasing focus on sound quality as the scale of their work has increased. Here, Hung's unvarnished approach serves to highlight themes that repeatedly creep into his work—an underlying affinity for gear-grinding industrial sounds; a focus on process over a specific end result. In that sense, it's a welcome refresher.


On his deeply expressive new album, Canadian producer Dylan Khotin-Foote uses humble materials to broaden the outlines of ambient music and make them feel fresh again.

New Tab

Dylan Khotin-Foote’s debut album, 2014’s Hello World, remains a highlight of the so-called lo-fi house revival of the past few years, in which the application of a faint patina of wear has put a fresh spin on relatively straightforward club constructions. A little bit like the “antiqued” furniture at Restoration Hardware, the technique can be gimmicky, and a little bit of scuffing goes a long way. But on songs like “Hello World” and “Ghost Story,” Khotin’s scratchy drum machines and pastel-toned synth melodies came out as polished and tactile as the contents of a rock tumbler; his distortion yielded super-saturated sounds that were berry-rich and bursting with tone. The record was right at home on Vancouver’s 1080p label, although the imprint’s prolific release schedule also meant that it was easy for the album to get lost in the shuffle. That’s too bad, because it’s a fair bet that at least a few of the hundreds of thousands of people who have checked out Ross From Friends and DJ Boring on YouTube would be equally thrilled with Khotin’s misty-eyed house miniatures.
On New Tab, the Canadian producer’s instincts still lead him to sounds so bright and optimistic that they scan as almost naïve. This time, though, he largely forgoes house beats in favor of ambient music’s placid swirl. It’s a breezy, uncomplicated record; with its rich colors and simple recurring patterns, it’s reminiscent of a packet full of pearl-finish snapshots of the sky or the ocean, each one a brand-new treatise on the meaning of blue. The album title might indicate vaporwave’s hermetic perspective, but Khotin’s music actually suggests a wide-open embrace of the world outside. It’s laced with rumbling trains, running water, and ribbiting frogs; synthesizers glisten like dewdrops, and delay piles up like streaked contrails.
These are mostly static vistas; they don’t much develop or evolve. But Khotin imbues them with just enough movement to keep them engaging. In “Canada Line,” slow-attack pads come on like a freight train heard through the veil of sleep. In “Wheeler Road,” the edges of his chords break like the surface of a whitecapped lake. A slow, deliberate conga pattern stirs the waters of “Dialogue 6,” while in “Something Is Happening to Me,” a stuck delay pedal creates the illusion of energy waves rippling into infinity. Occasionally, he relies on scraps of found audio to draw his vignettes into focus: In “Dotty,” scavenged answering-machine tapes sneak us into an unknown woman’s living room, to surprisingly bittersweet effect.
The album builds gradually up to its final three songs, at which point Khotin subtly changes up the music’s intensity, adding skeletal beats back into his squishy ambient soundscapes. If much of New Tab recalls Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, the album’s final stretch sounds like a tribute to ’90s IDM acts like Plaid and Arovane. “New Window” pivots back and forth like a lawn sprinkler, its beat rigid against the rainbow spray of its digital synths; “Health Pack” evokes the choppy moves of Gescom’s rose-tinted B-boy fixations. The best of the beat-heavy trio is “Fever Loop,” which plays a slow-motion breakbeat against burbling bubbles and piano-house keys hammered into a fine gold leaf. Like the rest of the album, it is an unassuming piece of work that casts a powerful spell. Using humble materials, Khotin has created a deeply expressive and surprisingly affecting album, one that takes the broad outlines of ambient music and makes them feel fresh again.


The latest compilation from Young Thug’s YSL label is packed with appearances from rap’s biggest stars, though its flamboyant host seems content to take a backseat.

Young Thug / Gunna / Young Stoner Life: Slime Language 2

Slime Language 2

In 2016, Young Thug received a dressing-down on national television, at the hands of his then-mentor and label boss, Lyor Cohen. “You just record so many songs and leave them like little orphans out there,” Cohen snapped, during a meeting that was filmed for the CNBC show “Follow the Leader”. Cohen had a point. Thug had been recording at a furious pace, as leak dumps of hundreds of tracks revealed. And yet, the announcement of his debut album failed to stick, much like his short-lived name changes. A steady stream of mixtapes showed an artist who was evolving at a pace that was hard to comprehend and who didn’t always care for details like editing and sequencing. His innovations in songwriting and vocal delivery were pushing rap forward, but it was difficult to imagine Young Thug ever becoming an elder statesman—if anything, he seemed like a shooting star that we were lucky to have witnessed at all.
In hindsight, 2019’s So Much Fun looks like a turning point in Thug’s career. It stands as his most focused and consistent release since the mid-career masterpiece Barter 6. So Much Fun was also the first time we’d seen Thug standing still; it’s hard to point to something on the album that he hadn’t done before. What was new was the way that Thug ceded so many of that album’s big moments to his mentees Gunna and Lil Baby, both of whom have arguably become even better-known than Thug among younger listeners. Slime Language 2 expands on that approach: here Thug comfortably rubs shoulders with superstars, peers, influences, and descendants, serving as the glue that holds these songs together while rarely commanding the spotlight. He feels a bit like Jay Gatsby here: the guests are glamorous and the trappings of the party are opulent, but the host is content to recede into the background.
Still, a party’s a party, and much like with the previous installment, the aspiration here is clearly to provide an hour of breezy songs designed to go off during the summer. Surely a few of these will. "Solid" feels by turns like a Drake song, a Gunna song and a Thug song, each rapper fully commanding the shifting, distant beat. Lil Uzi Vert draws a line in the sand between himself and his elusive host by infusing "Proud of You" with a gracious, wide-eyed sincerity (he also coins the term “Smithstoneian”). In one of his first high-profile appearances since his release from a New York state prison, Rowdy Rebel stomps all over the horn-filled fanfare of "Came and Saw," which feels like a sequel to Thug and Gunna’s hit “Hot.” It's telling that "Superstar" is one of the weirdest songs on here thanks to an appearance from Thug’s direct antecedent, Future: the trap legend reaches for notes out of his range and coos in a singsong cadence over what sounds like kazoos while Thug just coasts comfortably.
So many of Thug’s verses and hooks here feel that way—competent and tuneful, if not quite memorable. Even the thrills feel a bit second-hand: we’ve heard better “mac and cheese” puns from Thug before and it was more convincing the last time he told us he felt something in his chromosome. There are a few noteworthy moments, like the way he enunciates the word “slatty,” as if his mouth is full of crushed ice, or how his verse on “My City Remix” (a remix of YTB Trench’s “My City”), swerves from “Federales looking but they can't find the body” to “Tryna see my kids every day because it's healthy” in the space of just a few bars. But by and large, Thug hangs back and lets his signees and guests shine. Both Gunna and Lil Baby sound like rappers in their prime; Thug’s on-again-off-again fiancée Karlae is beginning to sound like a genuine talent; Thug’s sister Dolly is downright menacing on “Reckless”; and Thug’s latest sibling to take up music, his brother, Unfoonk, sounds poised to become a gravel-throated crooner in the mold of Ty Dolla $ign.
Ultimately, Slime Language 2 is a label compilation and the usual caveats apply: it’s far too long, the back half is padded out with a few throwaways (“GFU,” “Como Te Llama”) and hardly anyone is showing up with their best material. That said, Slime Language 2 succeeds as a survey of how pervasive Thug’s influence has become. Young Thug may not be much of a presence on the album but his sound is all over these songs. It’s in the way that stars like Uzi, Future and Travis Scott approach melody, the kinds of hooks and ad-libs that rappers pin to these twinkling beats, and most clearly, in the way that the YSL signees move. After a full decade spent at rap’s vanguard, Young Thug seems content to step back and admire the landscape he shaped. You can’t say he didn’t earn it.

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Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and neo-country leader Cortney Tidwell pay tribute to her parents' semi-obscure label, Chart Records.

Invariable Heartache

Chart Records is a bit of obscure Nashville history, notorious to those who dig through the crates at Grimey's but largely unregarded by those outside the city limits. Founded by Gary Walker in 1962 and purchased by local businessman Slim Williamson in 1964, it was the temporary home of established acts like Junior Samples and Red Sovine, but the emphasis was squarely on young talent with crossover potential, including its biggest success story, Lynn Anderson. Most of its roster might not ring a bell these days, mush less a cash register, but Chart was certainly a label of its moment, when country was entertaining the notion of pop.
One Chart artist, a Miss Nashville runner-up named Connie Eaton, married Williamson's son, and they had a daughter named Cortney (now Tidwell), who grew up to become a country singer herself. Nearly half a century after Chart's founding, she is paying tribute to the family business with an album of primarily Chart covers, most of them duets with Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner. Both represent the seedy Nashville underbelly of local artists actually paying heed to local history, and fittingly, the idea for this collaboration originated on stage at the Basement, where the two sang an impromptu Don Williams cover together.
Like the best Nashville duos, their voices are very different yet suit each other well. Wagner's is an eccentric take on a cowboy croon, which makes the weird psych-folk-country anthem "Penetration" more than simply a novelty, while Tidwell's is a robust, breathy version of a traditional starlet, which can sell the delicate quaver of "A Special Day" as well as the epic hurt of weeper "Who's Gonna Love Me Now". Both communicate with equal ease the regret and invariable heartache of these tunes, especially when they're trading verses. They have chemistry, which illuminates the rollicking "Pickin' Wild Mountain Berries" even as it makes solo numbers like "April's Fool" (him) and "Yours Forever" (her) a bit wan by comparison.
The material is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Invariable Heartache. There's a startling wit to these songs, not only in the unexpected title phrase sung in the first line of "Incredibly Lonely" but also in the coy wink of "I Can't Sleep With You", which goes, "I can't sleep with you... I can't sleep with you... on my mind." It's not hard to imagine any of these songs becoming hits in the 1960s, nestling alongside Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" or Eddy Arnold's "Make the World Go Away". Recruiting a skeleton crew from Lambchop as their backing band, Tidwell and Wagner don't try to re-create the classic sound of Chart Records, with all their strings and bells and whistles, nor do they try to update the songs to today's particular pop-country sound. Instead, Invariable Heartache sounds more like one of Lambchop's more countrified records, which is to say the music is both lush and minimal, the sound of so many musicians giving themselves over completely to the song. It's a gateway album to Chart's back catalog, as well as to an adventurous era in Nashville history.


The legends of ’90s alt-rock have reunited only to bring this puzzling, indecisive husk of an album into the world.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun.

The Smashing Pumpkins have reunited—mostly. They are playing sold-out reunion dates—mostly. And, to hear frontman Billy Corgan, guitarist James Iha, and drummer Jimmy  Chamberlin say it, at least they are getting along. Mostly. If you grew up loving the Smashing Pumpkins—say, if you purchased a suitcase full of Corgan’s B-sides in your youth, voluntarily parting with money to listen to something called “Pastichio Medley” —and wish to retain faint, vestigial warm feelings regarding their reunion, then please walk away, briskly, from Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. There is nothing for you here. There is, in fact, almost nothing here at all.
In the annals of ’90s bands that have reunited to thrust a new album into the void where inspiration used to be: Shiny might contain the least imagination, the least personality, the least effort, the least love. There is nothing firm to hold onto in any of the album’s mid-tempo rock songs—“See love, see time/See death, see life/See tears, See bright/See day from night,” Corgan drones on “Travels.” Neither Corgan nor the song surrounding him tries any harder—just, death, love, tears, bright, day, night. Then Corgan repeats “It’s where I belong” a few times to fill the spot where a chorus is meant to go and the song clicks off like a light in an empty kitchen.
This kind of terminal vacancy has spread like blight in Corgan’s songwriting—2014’s Monuments to an Elegy had a similar woolly blankness, a self-erasing anonymity that seemed to proceed from the assumption that if Corgan stood as still as possible, maybe no one would notice him on the radio and kick him off. For someone who basically landed a hangar full of his wildly outsized ambitions in the middle of the pop charts in the mid-’90s, it is depressing to witness. At least Monuments had the oddity “Drums + Fife,” a little fillip featured the titular instruments and something like a statement of purpose: “I will bang this drum til my dying day.” Not as catchy as “The world is a vampire,” and no one was going to roar when he played it live, but it still sounded as if Corgan was telling stories to himself and for our benefit.
On Shiny, by contrast, there is no songwriting to speak of, and during its barren, 31 minutes you cannot hear a single decision being made. The opener “Knights of Malta” evokes Imagine Dragons—booming piano chords, a few vacant “whoa-oh-ohs.” “We’re gonna ride that rainbow,” Corgan sings, crooning to the terrestrial rock radio station of his dreams. Corgan’s big pop songs used to be full of sly subversions—the glittering hints of self-harm in “Today,” the surreal “zipper blues” and poured cement  in “1979.” By contrast, lead single “Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts)” feels mercilessly whittled down from a more interesting song—the ticked eighth notes uncannily resemble a group of people counting the seconds before they can walk away from each other.
The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent. Corgan’s lyrics scan as if they have been translated into numerical code and back into words again: “I’ve seen enough/It’s all undone/Tis the secret of the Irishman,” he mumbles on “With Sympathy.” “When doldrums age in platinum/ I’ve a starship you can use,” he offers on “Knights of Malta.” How does a wishing tree run dry?” Corgan asks on “Alienation,” a query about as meaningful as “Are we human or are we dancer?” and six-thousand times less memorable.
The final two songs perk up, slightly, perhaps because they sense the end is near. Corgan reaches for higher notes on the chorus melody of “With Sympathy,” giving a little push to the song’s sagging frame. “Seek and You Shall Destroy” picks up the tempo and brings an actual riff to the proceedings; you can hear Jimmy Chamberlin’s pulse quicken as he is finally allowed to let loose with some of the fluid, propulsive fills that gave classic Pumpkins songs their velocity. But otherwise, Shiny is an album-shaped unit with nothing inside, and the only thing I know for certain is that nobody cares about it, least of all its creators.


The final album from the mercurial post-punk project offers a wellspring of quotable surrealism, showing the substance and self-definition of the late Pat Fish.

The Jazz Butcher: The Highest in the Land

The Highest in the Land

While he was making his final album as the Jazz Butcher, Pat Fish knew he was going to die. According to people close to him, he’d managed to outrace cancer, but decades of pint-hoisting good times were catching up with him. He passed away last October at age 64. But one remarkable thing about The Highest in the Land is how little morbidity encumbers it. On the contrary, it positively brims with life. Even when Fish stares down death in the dub-rock countdown “Time,” it’s with the same old gleam in his eye and dodge in his step.
“Fishy go to Heaven, get along, get along,” he drawls, rakish and sarcastic, rushing toward “a pit of Council lime.” But most of the other lyrics are acid pronouncements tangled in exuberant wordplay. The verses excoriate lithium mining and privatized jails, but the pre-choruses are stuffed with nearly nonsense lists of shapely words: luminous, leguminous, salubrious, lugubrious. Part giddy fuck-you-I’m-out to an England he’d suffered from Thatcher to Brexit, part psychedelic experience with a rhyming dictionary, “Time” is all Fish. In other words, this cockeyed memento mori is just another great Butch tune on another great Butch record: irascible, inscrutable, delectable, irreducible.
Irreducible, yes, but to start somewhere: What if the punk-folk protester Billy Bragg fell under the nihilistic spell of the Velvet Underground instead of the messianic one of the Clash? Fish—who was born on the same day in 1957 as Bragg, also less than 100 miles from London—was the living answer to this hypothetical question and many others. His was a cold-war leftist politics through a glass darkly, a Philip K. Dick allusion he probably would have liked, as someone who paid homage to Thomas Pynchon and Harlan Ellison and was admired by the occult comics guru Alan Moore. Even his most comical, outrageous songs were drawn with fine lines of wealth and class, and his most polemical moments were obscured by non sequiturs of incomparable chewiness. Most of all, he thrived on bloodletting observations of the human dramedy in all its vapid cupidity and ordinary beauty.
A native of Northampton, in the East Midlands, Fish either formed or became the Jazz Butcher, depending on how you look at it, while studying philosophy at Oxford. It started as a persona for his precocious, playful adventures in home-recording, and it retained that conceptual flavor as it flourished into a band with a revolving moniker (The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, The Jazz Butcher and His Sikkorskis from Hell) and lineup, which was rooted by members like guitarist Max Eider but also berthed Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom and the bassist David J, when he was between Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.
In the ’80s and early ’90s, the Jazz Butcher’s many albums for the British indies Glass and Creation Records (recommended entry points are Sex and Travel or Big Planet Scarey Planet) displayed a variety that’s bewildering even by UK post-punk standards: twee jangle-pop, Dixieland jazz, arch agit-punk, romantic new wave, country blues, surf-rock, Merseybeat, sophisti-pop, lounge music, Mediterranean wedding songs, on and on. Fish loved soul, Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, and above all, John Cale—sturdy, classic ’60s things. The surplus he extrapolated from them indicates a true eccentric original. Yet he makes it all whole by sheer force of songcraft, flaunting an innate gift for drizzling charismatic melodies on spare, resourceful arrangements in any style.
The Jazz Butcher’s recordings thinned away after 1995, and were mostly out of print and forgotten until Fire Records began a series of reissues about seven years ago. It was around then that Fish, Eider, and other trusted bandmates began working on The Highest in the Land, where they sound startlingly fresh after a decade away. Though done up in the usual power-clashing genres, the songs are mainly either ballads that spill into rants (“Never Give Up,” with very different production and the end lopped off, could pass for a minor Coldplay hit) or vice versa. They call to mind a pleasure dome of fetching, unrelated references: the demotic prowess of Jens Lekman, the melodic immediacy of the Lucksmiths, the wry dandyism of XTC, the dialectical swoon of Stars, and of course, the curdled cool of Cale.
Whether the style is antic, enervated country-and-western (“Running on Fumes”) or dreamy electric soul (“Goodnight Sweetheart”), the music is kept clean and spacious so Fish can fit all his wonderful words inside. He is a wellspring of quotable surrealism. Taste an impenetrable couplet like “The black-crested ape of Boo Yang Shang, sing like a theremin, walk like a man.” Feel the cryptic gut-punch of a question like “Tiny cans of Coke for free—is that what you chose over me?” Another song begins, “I got this fish from Genghis Khan,” which has to rival “Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room” in the pantheon of perfectly weird opening lines.
Fish never had qualms about referencing people we couldn’t possibly be expected to know about, and he preserved this intimate, local aesthetic to the end. It starts immediately with “Melanie Hargreaves’ Father’s Jaguar,” a slinky jazz-cat number in which a tale of young love divided by wealth ends in merry anti-capitalist flames. An additional layer of mystery exists for the non-British listener, who easily infers that Formby must be posh and an East Midlands accent must not be, but who might need to look up things like gammons and Children of the Stones. But no amount of googling can pierce “The Highest in the Land,” a portentous desert blues about Genghis Khan and apes and whatever Boo Yang Shang is, although apparently the “Black Raoul” who Fish chants about is known to hardcore fans as his cat. The song is vividly personal to a riddling degree, and it seems significant that it, rather than one of the more outspoken tracks, provided the album’s title.
As densely English as Fish’s music is, he had an anti-isolationist vision of the country, with a sensibility that spanned Europe and profound musical influence from North America. “Sea Madness,” a pastoral folk tune with warm, tired horns, is a tribute to a legendary figure on the local Northampton music scene, an immigrant from Istanbul called Turkish George. “Sebastian’s Medication” seems to have Brexiters in its sights when Fish dresses down the gammons “pining for some ill-defined imaginary nation, antecedents they would struggle to name.”
As soon as this clear statement comes into view, Fish dances away from it, invoking the right’s favorite shibboleth of “political correctness gone mad.” He liked to keep himself just out of frame, unpinned to any didactic point of view. Inasmuch as The Highest in the Land is a winning globalist view from the provinces, it is not concerned with progressive lip service. “Any moment now, somebody’s going to say ‘toxic,’ that’s assured,” Fish sings on “Running on Fumes.” “Yes, ’cause people love to talk that way, but people only ever made me bored.” His misanthropy is comprehensive, unmalicious, and countered by empathy and sentimentality. “I never really identified with the ‘social commentator’ thing, any more than I did with the asinine ‘Monty Python of rock’ label with which some deaf people tried to saddle us back in the ’80,” he said in a 2020 interview. But The Highest in the Land, a just and honest headstone, captures the substance and self-definition of a singular songwriter where words and labels fail.


The 23-year-old Atlanta singer’s slow-groove R&B plays out like a telenovela, feeling irresistibly fresh, messy, and human.

Over It

Summer Walker’s slow-groove R&B sounds like it was conceived in the parking lot of an Atlanta strip club. Slow and sultry, it shifts from anger to love to frustration in a heartbeat, like she’s both the angel and the devil on your shoulder. The 23-year-old Atlanta singer hardly does interviews, and when she does, it’s like she’s being held against her will, mumbling with an emotionless stare and her hood up. That shyness disappears on records, where her voice is big yet gentle, and the tales pour out.
At her best, Summer Walker’s stories play out like a telenovela. On “Me,” a moody track in the middle of her debut album, Over It, she’s heartbroken and unsure how to react, so she runs through her options: not care, or be petty and send him a single-word text. Instead, she checks her purse, then the trunk of her car, and pulls out a gun. “I would never shoot you, baby/Maybe just wave it around,” she sings in a sweet but defeated tone. It’s relatable melodrama for some, maybe a cautionary tale for others.
But Walker’s detail is just as rich in the moments that come directly before she reaches her breaking point. “Playing Games” addresses the lame dudes that continue to take her passion for granted, only showing affection in private and refusing to acknowledge their relationship on Instagram. The A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie-assisted “Stretch You Out” shows that frustration beginning to bubble over. “You never wanna clean up/And you talk to me like shit/And you handle me too rough/And, at the end of the day you got the nerve to bring up that bitch,” she sings. Like much of Over It, both tracks feature production from her current love interest and executive producer London on da Track (“Drunk Dialing...LODT” is dedicated to him), who energizes her lovestruck ballads for the social media era with his signature ATL bounce.
Occasionally she steers into blander territory, like the well-written but  sleepy “Fun Girl,” but a rotating collection of R&B’s most toxic crooners keeps the energy level high. On “Like It,” Walker is infatuated, while Atlanta’s 6LACK only has sex on his mind. She blames herself for her failed relationships on “Just Might,” her duet with PARTYNEXTDOOR (“I just might be a ho”), while the OVO signee plays the cheating boyfriend with every excuse. The pettiness reaches an apex on “I’ll Kill You,” when she vows “I’ll go to hell or jail about you boy” next to Jhené Aiko, like the final scene of a twisted revenge thriller.
Like many of her current R&B peers, Walker is working through her obsession with ’90s R&B. “Body” flips 702’s “Get It Together,” and “Come Thru,” both samples and features Usher. Otherwise, her writing is irresistibly fresh. Whether she has on love goggles or is shaking up her boyfriend by pointing a gun at him—out of love, of course—it’s part of what makes Summer Walker feel like a real person, making the real misguided decisions that happen when you’re over it, or telling yourself that you are.


The UK DJ and producer taps the depths of his record collection in a gorgeous, moody mix that runs through ambient, jazz, psych pop, and vintage soul.

Late Night Tales

Listeners consistently underwhelmed by streaming algorithms could do worse than to follow Sam Shepherd, better known as Floating Points. From his globetrotting show on NTS Radio and his roving You’re a Melody DJ nights to the hidden gems he lovingly reissues on his label Melodies International, Shepherd is an enthusiastic sharer of the delectable selections he unearths: rare gospel, soul, jazz, droney minimalism, tropicalismo, folk, and plenty of music that eludes easy identification.
So tapping Floating Points to curate the latest edition of Late Night Tales—a series in which selectors show off the hidden depths of their record collections—is a great pairing. Shepherd takes the opportunity to float through an unhurried selection of ruminative, crepuscular music for the wee hours. Unlike his good friend Four Tet’s own eclectic contribution to the series, Floating Points keeps the mood consistent. Few selections move faster than a resting heartbeat, but they nevertheless feel dramatic. Despite staring-at-a-candle zone-outs from Kara-Lis Coverdale and Sarah Davachi, the mix isn’t made for falling to sleep. Instead, each track—the spiderweb fragility of Carlos Walker’s “Via Láctea,” nine minutes of zero-gravity bliss from ECM trio Azimuth—is perfectly suited to inspire sweet reveries.
And since it’s Floating Points, you can either geek out over Discogs’ asking price of some of these selections or find exquisite, arcane sonic details to get lost in. One listen might yield the way something as simple as the ride cymbal can sound across three consecutive selections: It’s an understated timekeeper on the dreamy psych pop of the Rationals’ “Glowin’,” turns urgent amid the otherwise restrained orchestral movements of William S. Fischer’s “Chains,” and becomes stately and swinging in the hands of drummer Max Roach on “Equipoise.” On another pass through the set, you might find yourself lost in reverb: Sweet & Innocent’s “Express Your Love” sounds like it’s transmitting from a distant planet. Listen close to the anti-war soul of Bobby Wright’s self-released 1974 song “Blood of an American,” recently reissued by Melodies International, and you can hear his lips smack as he leans toward the microphone.
That Floating Points’ mix trades primarily in rare grooves is a given. Beyond the gorgeousness of each selection, something even more unusual surfaces in the lyrics. Sweet & Innocent sing of wanting emotional vulnerability in their men, and the Defaulters stress the importance of humility on “Gentle Man”—two traits hard enough to find in the world, much less in pop music. Listen close and darker sentiments arise: The Defaulters fret about having enough food to eat. The Rationals sing, “Don’t commit suicide/You got to keep on glowin’.” And Wright, who lost one of his bandmates to the fighting in Vietnam, sings of soldiers’ blood being “poured out over you,” his hushed voice a harrowing indictment of the war. Moments like these make the case that, as vital as it is to have music to drift off to, it’s equally crucial that the music has something meaningful to say.


After a run of concept albums, Will Sheff's literate indie rock project returns with a collection of unrelated songs united by the dense production.

I Am Very Far

I Am Very Far is ostensibly Okkervil River's first non-concept album in eight years. After Down the River of Golden Dreams in 2003, the Austin-based group released two sets of linked records: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix both re-imagined Tim Hardin's title song as a phantasmagorical rock'n'roll cautionary tale, full of goat-headed men and hearts literally made of stone. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins played like two installments of a dark tour diary, deconstructing old rock myths and scrawling out new ones. Together, these four albums revealed frontman Will Sheff as one of indie rock's most ambitious thinkers: a romantic anti-romantic weighing highly literate lyrics against an endlessly bleak worldview.
For all its bluster, however, 2008's The Stand Ins suggested Sheff's large-scale ideas were yielding diminishing returns. It was an impressive run that explored the edges of indie-rock songwriting and distinguished Okkervil River from so many of their peers, but it's refreshing that I Am Very Far is a collection of songs-as-statements rather than a collection-of-songs as statement. These 11 tracks sound more like stand-alone efforts rather than pieces of a larger puzzle, even if they do revisit and expound on many of Sheff's pet themes. The thundering war stomp of "The Valley"-- which opens the album like a pre-ritual incantation-- soundtracks a journey through "the valley of the rock'n'roll dead," which may be Sheff's idea of a summer festival. On "Hanging From a Hit", he's saved from the abyss by an earworm, then listens as his married lover describes her marriage: "I'm too much mine without him," she says of her husband. "I limp from life."
These songs may be less grounded in familiar settings and predicaments than previous efforts, and therefore a bit more oblique, but lines like those quoted above can be hooks in themselves-- as catchy and sharp as choruses, sticking in your mind as you decode their ambiguities. As a result, Sheff's songs never truly sound settled but remain lively and prickly, especially as various images repeat throughout the album, motifs instead of concepts that suture these songs together. There's a throat in every track, either cut and open or bound to be cut: "A slit throat makes a note like a raw winter wind," he sings on "The Valley", adding to its visceral energy. Of course Jagjaguwar is releasing a small chapbook of lyrics as a promo item and part of the deluxe vinyl edition.
More remarkably, however, I Am Very Far manages to put Sheff's lyrics and the band's music on equal footing, creating a monolithic sound whose density resembles the thick block of prose-poem text in the chapbook. Perhaps emboldened by his work on Roky Erickson's last album, Sheff produced this record himself, recording in short, intense sessions around the country rather than taking advantage of an extended studio stay. That tactic worked well for their previous albums, but I Am Very Far benefits form the piecemeal approach, which allows Sheff to give each song a distinctive personality and creates a strong dynamic in the sequencing. "We Need a Myth" shifts from subtle exotica to towering orchestral rock, while "Hanging From a Hit" dissembles it with a quiet dancehall piano, a trumpet solo recorded form out on the boardwalk, and low, lovely gospel harmonies, which are perhaps warmer and more sympathetic for being wordless.
Sheff favors a towering wall of sound on almost every song, in most cases doubling the instruments in the line-up (two drummers, two piano players, etc.) and layering full takes on top of each other. With a density that can be a bit impenetrable and with a heaviness that Okkervil River have only gestured to in the past, I Am Very Far lags in the middle with the staircase-to-nowhere crescendo of "White Shadow Waltz" and the rambling "We Need a Myth". Sheff recovers with the gut-punch combination of the tense "Show Yourself" and "Your Past Life as a Blast", a surprisingly affecting paean to a wandering brother (perhaps a sequel to "A Favor", from 2004's Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP). I Am Very Far closes with "The Rise", which is constructed around a call-and-response Sheff performs with himself-- a literal doubling borne out of the lyrical themes. The oboe-and-strings orchestration recalls the lush easy listening of the Carpenters, but Okkervil River put it in service to lyrics about forest fires, wounded stags, and the utter loneliness of death. Even so, it comes as a relief that the song doesn't end with a big, fiery finale. Instead, the band lets "The Rise" fray apart on its own, a quiet conclusion to a lyrically and musically feisty album.


Warm Leatherette, Grace Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus.

Warm Leatherette

Few human beings have so fully embodied the notion of a “singular artist” more so than Grace Jones. In the annals of pop music and fashion, there has simply never been anyone else on earth quite like her—strong, severe, and otherworldly in every way, Jones has blazed a trail through popular culture over the past four decades that remains unrivaled in terms of boldfaced originality. Warm Leatherette, Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. Having spent the ’70s essentially exploding the fashion world as a model for Wilhemina and serving as muse for the likes of Yves St. Laurent and Helmut Newton, Jones’ career as a musician was still something of a novelty. Her first three albums—Portfolio, Fame, and Muse—were fun but somewhat facile, cover-filled reflections of the druggy hedonism of the disco era, which itself was already on the wane. For someone whose very image was seen as somehow deeply transgressive, Jones’ music had not yet caught up. So it was that, while stepping into the 1980s, Jones sought about drastic change and creative rebirth. In doing so, her next body of work would also reflect the blossoming radicalism of pop’s new wave—music that would upend the staid conventions of nightlife, feminist politics, and tired ideas about sexuality.
Released in May of 1980, Warm Leatherette was the first release in what is known as Jones’ Compass Point Trilogy. Recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, the album finds Jones working alongside Island Records’ then president, Chris Blackwell, and producer Alex Sadkin. Her backing band—which she would lovingly describe as “the united nations in the studio’’—included Sly and Robbie as her rhythm section, as well as a crack team of session musicians that involved keyboardist Wally Badarou, guitarists, Mikey “Mao” Chung and Barry “White” Reynolds, and percussionist Uziah “Sticky” Thompson. Dubbed the Compass Point All Stars, this crew of ace musicians would go on to provide chill vibes for everyone from Tom Tom Club to Joe Cocker, but it was the group’s groundbreaking work with Grace Jones—and the dubby, Caribbean aesthetic they immersed her with—that would make for some of the most defining music of her career. Stripped of disco’s goofier affectations, Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.
Of the three records that Jones recorded at Compass Point, it would ultimately be 1981’s Nightclubbing that would rightly go down as the stone cold classic, but Warm Leatherette, while perhaps not as pioneering, still sets a high mark in terms of both inventiveness and musicality. Of the album’s eight tracks, seven are covers, though the material covered couldn’t ostensibly be more schizophrenic. Songs by the Pretenders (“Private Life”), the Marvelettes (“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”), Tom Petty (who actually contributed an additional verse for Jones to sing on her version of “Breakdown”), and Roxy Music (“Love Is the Drug”) all get reworked here, with mostly excellent results. The album opens with Jones’ take on the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”—a J.G. Ballard inspired narrative about sex as car crash that, in Jones’ hands, manages the weird feat of being both abjectly funky and oddly frightening. It’s a trope that carries throughout the record, with Jones’ unmistakable sing/speak imbuing every track with an intense gravitas—equal parts self-assurance and menace. Leatherette’s most defining characteristic is the way that the power dynamics in these songs are neatly subverted, particularly in regards to the songs that were previously sung by men. “Love Is the Drug” loses its original blasé chicness to become something entirely more urgent and potently literal, while Jones’ take on “Breakdown” deflates the somewhat creepy male-delivered directive of the original (“Breakdown, go ahead and give it to me”) and replaces it with something altogether more empowered. Hearing Jones purr the lyric, “I'm not afraid of you running away/Honey, I’ve got the feeling you won’t” the line becomes more than a simple observation, it carries the weight of an implied threat.
The album track that most compellingly predicts the genius to come on Nightclubbing is Jones’ take on the Pretenders’ “Private Life.” The original, which served as Chrissie Hynde’s punk-informed take on reggae, is perfect fodder for Jones, who ratchets up the drama in the lyrics and turns the whole thing into fine art. “Yes, your marriage is a tragedy,” she growls, “But it’s not my concern/I’m very superficial/I hate anything official.” The spectral dub provided by the Compass Point All Stars points in the direction of Nightclubbing’s best tracks and the “My Jamaican Guy” swagger of 1985’s Island Life. What sells the song so effectively is not necessarily the power of Jones’ voice, but rather the power of Grace Jones herself. As she would go on to prove in later efforts, it was the monolithic force of her personality—imperious, feral, queer in the truest sense of the word—that would make these songs so compelling. She is, to put it simply, impossible to ignore.
In regards to this particular reissue, the extras provided on the two-disc set are nice but hardly essential. Mostly we just get “long versions,” “single versions,” and the occasional “dub versions” of the existing album tracks, none of which stray too far from the originals— other than that they are much longer. (Still, hearing eight-minute long, tripped out versions of “Private Life” and “Love is the Drug” is hardly a bad thing). One of the reissue’s best treats, however, is the inclusion of Jones’ fantastically demented cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” presented here in three different versions. It might have been deemed too weird to be included on the album at the time, but you’d be hard pressed to find another recorded document that so thoroughly exhibits Grace Jones’ particular form of genius. Originally released as a B-side to “Private Life” in 1980, “Control” is gloriously unhinged. Taking the liberty of changing the lyrics to first person, Jones transforms the song from a document of unraveling into a statement of defiance: “To the voice that told her when and where to act/She said, I’ve lost control.” Ironically, even in a song about losing your shit completely, Grace Jones is always the one in calling the shots.


Recorded last summer in Brooklyn, this kinetic live album collects new politically-charged songs from the British art-punk O.G.s—a call to arms for all those pushing against the tides of modern life.

Existentialism

Back in 1987, the ROIR label released a tape called New York—one of many rather roughshod titles from the then-cassette-only New York outpost. The quasi-legit collection almost sounded like a bootleg, the kind of thing that would be traded in dubs from fan to fan. New York was the only live Mekons album ever in-print (though it was reissued in 2001 as New York: On the Road 86-87). That changes now with Existentialism.
Similarly, Existentialism also often sounds like a boot, but that’s a deliberate artistic decision. It was reportedly recorded around a single microphone at the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook, Brooklyn. At times, the rhythms overwhelm, yet this isn’t precisely a record that rocks. The Mekons long ago began weaving in elements of American country and British folk, threading it through the nervy art-punk at their core, a maneuver that only gains resonance as the band slides into middle age; it’s defiance that has turned into a credo. Older they may be, but they’re restless, and when Existentialism was recorded in the summer of 2015, the songs were as new to the band as they were to the audience. The Mekons chose to cut the songs not long after composition, a move that only underscores the urgency behind the project.
Despite the haste, there are no stumbles on Existentialism, though there is rawness. The group is too good to let things careen out of control, but they’re smart enough to play upon the suggestion that things could. Certainly, this adds passion to the performance; it’s the sound of a great band creating great noise. The album pushes levels into the red, but sometimes it suggests more sonic detail than could be achieved from one mic. There’s little separation in the harmonies, and plenty of midrange smear, but instruments pop to the forefront.
Beneath the racket, there are ideas—some expanded upon in an accompanying 96-page book and the Mekonception video that documents the whole shebang—but they’re impossible to ignore in the songs themselves. Images of terror, upheaval, and loss float through the words. Turmoil bubbles to the surface on “Fear and Beer,” a pub singalong for the age of Brexit, but “1848 Now!” makes allusions to revolution past, one of several sly nods to history. The best musical tip of the hat is how “The Cell” plays with the melody of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” without ever following its contours.
Politics and tradition are nothing new to the Mekons, but what makes Existentialism resonate is that it’s an album of the moment, for the moment. As an aural document, it’s kinetic and crackling, a live recording that captures the excitement of a concert. As a complete piece, it says something powerful; it’s a call to arms for old punks, unrepentant artists, and assorted freaks, all pushing against the tides of modern life. It’s the Mekons and friends and family gathering together in a small room, shouting songs of protest and singing sad melodies, realizing there’s strength in being together, even if their numbers are dwindling.


With its mix of rustic lullabies and blown-out rockers, the Men’s eighth album is the work of a proudly counter-intuitive band pushing to new extremes.

Mercy

The music of the Men is defined by perpetual unrest, impulsive 180s, and an insistence on questioning assumptions. That quality has only become more entrenched in recent years: Where they spent the first half of the 2010s gradually drifting from the left to the right of the dial, 2018’s Drift ricocheted from industrial stompers to psych-folk hymns like some random sampler CD that’s glue-gunned to a pricey imported British music periodical. With each grab-bag of a record, it’s become clearer that the Men’s attraction to aesthetic chaos is motivated by a desire for inner peace, a musical analog to the process of cutting through the noise of modern life. The group’s eighth album in 10 years, Mercy, is arguably the clearest articulation of that mission: If the Men started out as a murderous post-hardcore band with latent classic-rock affinities, they’re now a frazzled country-rock act trying to control their periodic lapses into aggression.
Like Drift, Mercy is an album of wild stylistic shifts, though it’s plotted along a more predictable course. And while this band can still flex its punk muscle when it wants to, the Men are writing better songs in more serene settings these days. With its binary mix of rustic lullabies and blown-out rockers, Mercy feels like a spiritual companion to 2013’s New Moon, the record where the Men’s mellower inclinations first came to the fore. And like that album’s genteel introduction, “Open the Door,” Mercy’s “Cool Water” welcomes you in with a pastoral serenade that functions as a balm. “I’m a pool of sweat, a canyon of regret, this bottle is my only friend,” Nick Chiericozzi sings, and when the song’s chorus mantra takes over three minutes in, it feels like a baptism.
With its air of redemption, “Cool Water” is the rare opening track that would make an equally effective closer—an expression of hard-won salvation that usually follows a period of struggle. But the Men have always been proudly counter-intuitive, so they follow the record’s most comforting song with its most demanding. Though it shares the preceding track’s gospel-inspired imagery, “Wading in Dirty Water” is a 10-minute acid-blues workout that feels excerpted from an even longer piece—when the song fades in, it sounds as though the band have been riding its groove for hours already. Once they’ve proven they can out-choogle a Canned Heat cover band, they push the track into a more spectral space with a blast of discordant guitar.
After erecting these two distinct poles, the Men spend the rest of Mercy bouncing between them. This is the first Men record to feature Chiericozzi singing lead on every song, easing the sense of whiplash between the finger-pickin’ outlaw yarn “Call the Dr.” and the adrenalized rave-up “Breeze” (which outfits the blatant Buzzcocks love of 2012’s “Open Your Heart” with a liberal quote of Golden Earring’s ’70s classic “Radar Love”). And while he’s always seemed like more of a sentimental traditionalist compared to his usual foil, Mark Perro, Chiericozzi pushes the Men to new extremes of simplicity and vulnerability on ballads like “Fallin’ Thru” and the title track, filling the open spaces in their skeletal piano and acoustic arrangements with his resonant rasp.
But though the Men may be circling back to the roots/rager axis they orbited in the mid-2010s, they’re still punching into uncharted territory. Nothing in the band’s eclectic catalog can prepare you for “Children All Over the World,” a synthy fist-pumper that sounds like it should accompany the training montage in a Reagan-era sports flick. (Only a freakish, squealing guitar solo reminds you that this is a band recording for Sacred Bones in 2020 and not Chrysalis Records in 1985.) Yet even this garish anomaly betrays a certain consistency in transgressive spirit: If the Men’s earlier output showed how noisy garage-punk could be molded into accessible anthems, now they’re demonstrating how slick, ’80s-styled corporate rock can be repackaged as an underground DIY oddity.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their second project, the group’s hazy R&B sounds pristine and precise, but the care and craft stop short of their lyrics.

The Juice Vol. II

The theme of pop in 2019 seems to be stripping it all down to shiny exoskeletons. Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey” hums up the global charts. Shaed’s sleek “Trampoline” is the zenith of Spotifycore—Zayn just hopped on the remix. Enter Emotional Oranges, an anonymous group making oozy, drifting R&B. They refused to state how many performers were in the group until their first tour sold out; then, two singers performed in masks, revealing at least the number of primary vocalists. They’re well-connected in the music industry, serving as writers, producers, and A&Rs for other projects, and they seem to have calculated the catchy, lo-fi haze that succeeds on streaming. On their second project, The Juice: Volume II, their smokey bass and throbbing beats sound pristine and precise. But the care and craft stop short of their lyrics. This is an album made to sing along to, with words embarrassing to sing out loud.
As a production exercise, “Your Best Friend Is a Hater” is stunning: sparse guitar, creamy layered vocals. But the lyrics read like petty tweets from 2012. “Your best friend is a hater, and you’re a hater too,” they croon, attempting to wrench out a meaningful statement. “My swagger is my dagger.” Cringey descriptions of sex squelch throughout the compact, eight-track album. “Let me lick and taste it,” they intone on “Don’t Be Lazy,” imploring a woman to “take it” and “go down.” Another brags, “My baby likes to get me off,” a lazy and obvious throwaway layered over immaculate beats. The shyest track, “Heal My Desires,” is also the weakest, as they chant the title over wilting chords. The sex sounds terrible, but that isn’t the problem; it’s the constant bludgeon of dull words over the shimmering sound that makes listening to the album so frustrating.
To their credit, the group surpasses the curse of most streaming bait: spitting out the same shade of song over and over. On The Juice: Volume II, they prove they can handle “Songs About Jane”-era Maroon 5 acoustics just as well as synth-drenched R&B. Each song is dissolving but discernible: a computerized beep-heavy track bleeds into a curling hip hop song. Slow guitars melt into sped-up synths. “Just Like You,” is a bouncy romp about masturbation, while “Sundays,” a response to a friend’s divorce, unfurls like a yawn. There is an emotional center somewhere in this music, rippling out in glinting chords and sighs, but the group struggles to articulate it. The mood is clear; its roots are not.
Just two releases into their trajectory as a band, Emotional Oranges are so certain of becoming famous that they’ve stayed anonymous in order to preserve their “normal lives” out of the public eye. “We’re going to be the biggest band in the world,” they’ve said. They might achieve that title through raw metrics, shooting across streaming services and then manifesting on your “Discover Weekly” once every three months. They’ll slump into ubiquity on playlists you’ll hear in a coffee shop or at the bar. But even if you listen closely, you won’t know who they are.


Five years in the making, the UK band’s debut accomplishes something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously.

caroline

An earnest belief in a better tomorrow didn’t seem quite as radical when caroline formed in 2017. Like a lot of people that year, guitarist and vocalist Casper Hughes was inspired by a nascent counterinsurgence of activism by people who’d previously participated in politics from the sidelines. As several band members canvassed for Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom’s general election, Hughes channeled his cautious optimism for a more equitable future into the lyrics to “Good morning (red).”
Five years later, it’s the second song on caroline’s self-titled debut and, as with much recent pop culture, runs the risk of being tied to its era, either too specific or too naive to resonate in a time of increasingly immediate terror. While the lyrics of “Good morning (red)” haven’t changed, Hughes’ performance has adjusted to a new context. When he shouts, “Can I be happy in this world? We’ll have to change it, it doesn’t suit us,” it’s more desperate, a demand rather than a question. Words are sparse on caroline, but that indomitable, communal spirit courses throughout, accomplishing something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously.
If caroline’s hopeful tenor puts them at odds with the political climate, it’s done just as much to set them apart from their presumptive peers. Released by Rough Trade and later remixed by black midi producer John “Spud” Murphy, caroline’s 2020 debut single “Dark blue” established a loose affiliation with the UK’s burgeoning post-punk scene while actively contradicting its stylistic tropes. Contrary to the anxious, monological Fall fanfic that collages absurdities and abstractions until they register as “commentary on modern existence” or whatever, “Dark blue” provoked vast, elemental emotions without being overt about which ones, a towering cumulus that hovers for nearly seven minutes and never breaks.
In the two years since, about half of caroline has been released in some form. Similar to Black Country, New Road’s For the first time, it’s as much a compilation as a debut, an imposed deadline for a band accustomed to constant tinkering. The sequencing is vaguely chronological, with the first half reflecting a more accessible, “triumphant emo” version of caroline. “Dark blue” and “Good morning (red)” have been in development since the group’s origins as a duo in 2017: guitars still play legible chords and tangled arpeggios, countable rhythms are dictated by a standard drum set, and languid vocal melodies sound composed rather than improvised. Taken together, “Dark blue” and “Good morning (red)” are like an album within an album, so complementary and complete that they threaten to overshadow everything that follows. The former’s simmering tension gives way to a bleary vulnerability, a hangover slowly transforming to a flicker of hope for the day ahead. One repeats a mantra of “I want it all,” the other aches for serenity. If caroline had tried to sustain this emotional pitch for the entire album, it might have come off as manipulative, too self-consciously cinematic.
But caroline take a molecular-gastronomy approach to both sweeping post-rock and weeping Midwest emo, toying with structure, arrangement, and texture. As it progresses, caroline becomes a daring document of its creators’ process, maintaining just enough convention to draw attention to the way their atypical presentation defies it. Looser compositions like “Engine (eavesdropping)” are the result of endless studio hours obsessing over the imperfections captured within improvisation, contact mics, and room sound. caroline would rather let a track collapse before they resort to a stock post-rock crescendo. Having only recently solidified their eight-person lineup, they’re still exploring the correlation between their strengths and interests. Of the four interlude-length tracks, the most compelling is “desperately,” a solo showcase for cellist and vocalist Jasper Llewellyn, whose earthy and operatic quaver evokes a virtuoso moonlighting as a shepherd; it’s an instrument all the more devastating for its scarcity throughout caroline. Meanwhile, the longest interlude, “zilch,” is two minutes of what sounds like someone trying to cut rusted guitar strings with a dull knife. The choice to include something so willfully challenging feels more like a philosophical point than a purely musical one.
My best guess is that it’s intended to demystify the album itself, or at least to honor the ugly mistakes and tedious workshopping that accompany the creation of even the most miraculous pieces of recorded music. “zilch” segues into a nine-minute finale called “Natural death,” which recalls the most mesmerizingly static compositions of the Microphones (who selected the group as an opener for their UK shows in late 2021). caroline have clearly absorbed lessons from Phil Elverum’s studio explorations: They share a belief in expressing the awesome power and fallibility of nature through analog decay, repetition, and minimalist drone played at concussive volumes. Small gestures matter in music this exploratory and sometimes there’s only so much you can capture within the music itself. Even caroline’s studio version of “Skydiving onto the library roof” might not be the definitive one: In the “Pool #2” rendition, the entire thing moves not on the two-note motif that runs throughout its entirety, but a small nod by Hughes that indicates when it repeats; the rest of the band responds as if in a private language. In this small, unspoken moment, caroline’s ideals as a “collective” extend beyond simply having a lot of band members. Theirs is a higher-minded definition of the term, a group whose fidelity to their own logic and laws approaches the utopian.
Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that John “Spud” Murphy produced “Dark blue”; in fact, he remixed the track for the album.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dean Ween's solo debut is missing the sincerity and surrealism of Ween, but its bizarre chaos feels like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend.

The Deaner Album

Ween famously broke up in 2012 after Aaron Freeman told Rolling Stone—but not his bandmate Mickey Melchiondo—that he needed time to convalesce after a drug-related breakdown. This marked the first time since 1984 that the two childhood friends would ostensibly retire their alter egos, Gene and Dean Ween, for their civilian names. While Freeman made it to the other side of that dark period with a baptismally purgative album, Melchiondo remained the same technically gifted clown in all his endeavors. Now, this consistent energy extends to his solo debut with the Dean Ween Group, the first invocation of his original band on an album since its dissolution and recent reinstatement. And in its ambitious genre hopping and sometimes-hilarious-sometimes-cringeworthy childishness, *The Deaner Album *is the closest thing to a proper Ween album in a decade.
Much like Ween’s early output—think God Ween Satan: The Oneness through Chocolate and Cheese—The Deaner Album is a collagist pursuit that simultaneously honors and apes the various styles it probes. “Mercedes Benz” experiments with the funky lurch of Parliament-Funkadelic, while “Shwartze Pete” celebrates Les Paul with the legend’s nasally, vintage guitar noodling. Lead track “Dickie Betts,” an instrumental highlight, is an improvisational southern rock tribute to the former Allman Brothers Band guitarist, and maybe even a self-referential nod to the guitarist’s leap from second to first in command.
Most noticeably, however, The Deaner Album intuitively echoes songs that have populated Ween’s variegated discography, something that seems inevitable given the band’s self-perpetuating mythology—their “brownness.” The arena-primed “Garry” sounds like if Chocolate and Cheese’s “A Tear for Eddie” was reconfigured as a Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad, while “Gum,” a truly grating listening experience during which Melchiondo lists kinds of gum, is a close cousin to “Candi” and borrows the disquieting triangle jabs of “Spinal Meningitis.” And of course, this wouldn’t be a Ween-peripheral record without a shit reference so “Doo Doo Chasers” checks that box and ends the record on a particularly brown note, much the way “Poop Ship Destroyer” concludes Pure Guava.
Puerile antics are seemingly foundational to what made Ween so great, but really it was the band’s delicate balance of sincerity and irreverent surrealism. This had everything to do with the dynamic between Gene and Dean, the former a more philosophically minded, if outlandish, songwriter, the latter the brash, instrumental wonk. So even though Dean’s album features guest appearances from the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood, and punk drummer Chuck Treece, The Deaner Album lacks a fundamental humaneness and veers toward uncouth, guitar face-inducing force.
This pays dividends for the bar-rock and instrumental tracks on this record, but a lot of the lyrics and imagery can be ham-fisted (“Charlie Brown” is a song about being unlucky, for example), and in one case, crudely misogynistic. “Tammy” is a seedy tale whose chorus details using the song’s namesake as a sexual object and then murdering her with a shotgun: “Tammy, bring me my Shammy/So I can clean my shotgun and bury you below.” Ween occasionally made forays into politically incorrect territory, but Deaner’s latest entry isn’t so much funny as it is straightforwardly unnerving.
The comedic and lyrical height of this record, however, belongs to “Exercise Man,” which paints a plainspoken portrait of a “fucking douchebag exercise man,” who works out every day even though he will “die at 57 of a heart attack.” It is a really quick, blunt song about the futility of constructive behavior and boasts the description: “He uses the weight room at the Motel 6,” which should have been a punchline about Drake’s softness three years ago. It’s aware that it’s aggro and is brutally funny. And perhaps that is the small magic of The Deaner Album: it makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.


Concentrating hours of freeform takes into the baggy shape of 11 songs, My Morning Jacket’s ninth LP achieves the dubious goal of nailing a “jam band album” on the first try.

My Morning Jacket

After nearly 15 years, what My Morning Jacket really needed was a vacation. Their glorious studio albums and transcendent live shows sustained a marathoner’s high, never showing signs of Jim James’ battered back, heart, and spirit until it all came pouring out on 2015’s dour The Waterfall. The promised quickie sequel finally arrived last July as a pandemic surprise amid solo projects and side gigs, doing little to quell speculation of a hiatus. But My Morning Jacket were saved by a relatively uneventful few years; they were ready to endure the treadmill of recording and touring, so long as they got to determine its pace and incline. A band that self-titles its ninth album has committed to some serious introspection and My Morning Jacket all but admits they had been living a lie: For two grueling decades, they thrived in the jam-band ecosystem without being a band that actually jams.
Upending their creative process and concentrating hours upon hours of freeform takes into the baggy shape of 11 songs, My Morning Jacket achieves the dubious goal of nailing a “jam band album” on the first try. At least in the way that fans of Phish, moe., or String Cheese Incident typically understand their faves’ studio LPs: existing in a netherworld between “songs” and “jams” until achieving actualization in a live setting. The ProTools cut-and-paste yields some interesting experiments; if the chopped-and-screwed coda of “Complex” doesn’t redeem a placeholder chorus in search of a melody or lyric (“Hey, you get what you pay for/Hey, what are you waiting for”), at least it’s novel. If the jarring key change and extended guitar wig-out during the midsection of “In Color” doesn’t feel earned, at least it’s a break from James’ going on for seven minutes about how prejudice and discrimination is actually quite bad. “There’s more to life than just black and white/So many shades in between…and I wish everyone could agree,” he sighs, belaboring a point with which nearly all his listeners likely already agree.
James is hardly alone as an artist writing with a greater sense of political urgency since 2016 while struggling to manifest good intentions as something worth singing. The sneaky humor, evocative phrasing, and peanut butter pudding surprises of the past have been swapped for deeply felt and completely superficial slogans he might just have easily spotted on a bumper sticker on the 101 on the way to the studio. At his most innocuous, the incessantly repeated hooks of “Lucky to Be Alive” and “Love Love Love” are Peloton for the soul: “The more you give, yeah/The more you get, yeah/Now tell it to the world!,” James belts over pedal-pushing funk-pop, completely in earnest. But while the anti-tech bromides of opener “Regularly Scheduled Programming” wouldn’t have been out of place on his 2018 solo album Uniform Distortion, its accusatory tone reads tone-deaf now. “Screen time addiction/Replacin’ real life and love,” James carps, but how many of us really had a choice these past two years?
In press releases and interviews, James discusses the societal ills in his lyrics with passion and sincerity; for example, he describes America’s malls as teen indoctrination camps for consumerism and colonialism. “It’s like this strange in-between place for when you can’t quite be part of the world yet—and on top of that there’s the horror of the mall and how much of what’s sold there is made through slave labor,” he explains. I’m not sure if anyone could successfully extrapolate those sentiments into a nine-minute prog odyssey without going full-on Muse, and James doesn’t help his cause by opening “The Devil’s in the Details” with a reference to the season finale of Stranger Things. Never once altering its inert melodic motif, the song unfolds a litany of clichés (“I practice what they preach/The apple don’t fall far from the tree”) that mostly fill up the margins, except for the one in the title, which contradicts the entire premise that the devil’s in the most obvious things: capitalism, war profiteering, and…uh, Sephora.
Say what you will about My Morning Jacket’s enduring commitment to seeing their most dubious and whimsical ideas to fruition—they definitely achieved what they set out to do. But “The Devil’s in the Details” isn’t a lark. It’s My Morning Jacket’s centerpiece, even its proof of concept, and lays bare the gap between the album’s ambition and execution. Despite working for the first time without an outside producer and replicating the same painstaking tape-editing process that Miles Davis and Can used to change the course of pop history, My Morning Jacket is their least adventurous album yet. When they riff, they’re squarely within a July 4th classic rock block; when they vamp, it’s the fog-lit, psychedelic soul that’s invigorated their most recent work. In either form, they occasionally hint at their soaring, festival-ready populism, heady instrumental exploration, or fluency with the American songbook, but never the fusion that once came so organically. Even James’ vocals feel siloed off from his bandmates, coated by a flange effect that gives the luscious guitar tones an aluminum aftertaste. For all its hype about a refreshed outlook, My Morning Jacket slouches towards its conclusion, leaving the all-too-familiar feeling of needing a vacation from a vacation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Brooklyn indie rock institution’s seventh album is as joyous and rousing as their best efforts.

The Hold Steady: Thrashing Thru the Passion

Thrashing Thru the Passion

At this point, new Hold Steady albums can no longer be taken for granted. After a proud run of six albums in 10 years, the one-time Brooklyn workhorses have settled into a more leisurely, part-time rhythm. Age has cut down their time on the road; they now prefer weekend residencies to touring (“More of our time together is spent playing and performing music than setting up and taking down gear, driving it to the next place, setting it up again,” they wrote in a Bandcamp post, sounding like parents newly aware of how precious their time is.) And as either a symptom or a cause of the band’s reduced availability, frontman Craig Finn has been dedicating more time than ever to his solo career. His latest effort, I Need a New War, dropped just this spring.
So Thrashing Thru the Passion is the first Hold Steady album in more than five years, which would have been cause for more ceremony if the band hadn’t deflated expectations by releasing most of it in advance. Half the songs on the album were released as digital singles over the last few years; a couple of others were shared after the LP was announced. The result is a new Hold Steady album that, at least for the band’s most dedicated fans, won’t feel very new.
And yet, despite coming from a band that seems to be winding down in many ways, Thrashing Thru The Passion is so alive and elated that, if not for Hold Steady’s well-documented track record, it could be mistaken for the work of a band just hitting its peak. It’s as joyous and rousing as the band’s best efforts, but also looser and utterly unforced. Unceasingly uplifting, it makes almost no effort to shake up the group’s usual triumph rock, yet short of a completely unexpected reinvention or some left-field new muse, it’s a best-case scenario for what a seventh Hold Steady record could have sounded like.
Passion is the band’s first LP with keyboardist Franz Nicolay since 2008’s Stay Positive, which could account for some of the renewed pep. But a just as likely explanation is the band’s relative absence. The Hold Steady’s act demands too much commitment and perspiration for them to keep cranking out full-length shots of it every 18 months without diminishing returns. And especially after the time away, it’s a treat being submerged in Finn’s snapshots of rock’n’roll’s underachieving outsiders once again. “Denver Haircut” introduces a guy who, even at new restaurants, always orders the usual just to see what they’ll bring him. On “Star 18,” it’s a dude who claims he used to play with Peter Tosh, but never mentions it again once Finn says, “Man, I don't believe you.” That track also includes one of Finn’s great state-of-the-band nuggets: “Hold Steady at the Comfort Inn/Mick Jagger’s at The Mandarin.”
Rest assured there are gems among the few unreleased tracks, too. “Blackout Sam,” with its Memphis horns, is the band’s take on Pleased to Meet Me-era Replacements, or the song equivalent of Lou Reed reassuringly drawing out the word “alright.” Those same horns drive “Traditional Village” to Blues Brothers revue-levels of razzle while Finn spitballs low-brow music theory: “Down at the rock’n’roll station they’re exhuming the bones/Maybe death’s just when you hang up the telephone? And the reason these people still listen to Zeppelin is it sounds really cool when you’re stoned.”
As always, Finn’s vision of rock’n’roll is at once an utterly unglamorous and completely romantic. The Hold Steady treat rock the way Penn & Teller treat magic: They deconstruct it, demystify it and expose it warts and all, but do so out of love and a belief that its behind-the-scenes machinations are every bit as beautiful and intriguing as the polished final product. Fifteen years after their debut, the Hold Steady are still passionately making the case that, while there may not be much dignity in rock’n’roll, that doesn’t make it any less noble of a pursuit.

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The London group dials up the psychedelia on its fourth album, swapping out retro-futurist tropes and avant-pop touchstones for uneasy atmospheres and narcotic languor.

Afternoon X

In the Odyssey, the lotus eaters existed on a small island, stuck in a dreamy stupor. They subsisted off the daze-inducing lotus fruit and spent their days consumed with narcotic pleasure. Vanishing Twin embrace a similar sense of hypnotic fantasy on their fourth album, Afternoon X. Their enveloping soundscapes sprawl out like a labyrinth; singer Cathy Lucas’ voice floats like a petal on a tranquil pond. Vanishing Twin’s previous albums, The Age of Immunology and Ookii Gekkou, drew easy comparisons to Stereolab’s surreal avant-pop and Sun Ra’s jazz futurism. But on Afternoon X, the group—formerly a quintet, now a trio—takes its psychedelic prog pop in an ethereal new direction, pursuing a meandering path between leisurely acoustic dream worlds and denser electronic composites, searching for a quiet moment before the next storm hits.
In line with Stereolab’s referential tendencies, Vanishing Twin blend diverse influences, from French yé-yé pop to kosmische rock, into playful, shape-shifting jams, and Lucas’ nonchalant voice channels an air of art-house nostalgia. But their music doesn’t completely live in the past, pairing lyrics about looming ecological disasters with light-hearted guitar riffs. On previous records, atmospheric analog synths imbued their work with bright, splotchy colors, while Valentina Magaletti’s precise, metronomic drumming provided the music’s sleek pulse. With cryptic, imagistic lyrics, they framed existential questions with breezy charm. Many of those elements remain on Afternoon X, but in service of less accessible music, leaving the hooks of their previous work behind.
Vanishing Twin slow down on Afternoon X, swapping out Magaletti’s snappy drumming for rumbles bubbling to the surface. The otherworldly samples scattered across past records play a more prominent role; field recordings of quotidian sounds—boat motors, bicycle wheels, radio static—flesh out the songs’ textures and rhythms. “You know, there’s all sorts of stuff out there in reality,” Magaletti said in a 2022 Quietus interview. The irregularity of these sounds—a sweet vocal refrain cut off by metallic beeps, or eerie, looping electronics punctuating chilled-out harmonies—reinforces the music’s unsettling qualities. Vanishing Twin make the most of that sense of disorientation; they build up a frame just to tear it down a second later. But there’s great excitement in that instability, as though you were wandering through the noise to find the answers with them. These structural shifts are particularly apparent on “The Down Below,” which unravels in multiple acts. It darts from droning sitars to stinging organs, peppered with jolting beats. The sonic jumble lends a haunting quality to Afternoon X, but its strange disjointness is more thrilling than offputting.
Even in its most obscure moments, Afternoon X embodies a lively sense of exploratory wonder. Drawing from a deep catalog of inspirations, Vanishing Twin have long made music for sharp-eared listeners. But with this album’s unpredictable forms, the trio moves confidently beyond its acuity for cultural synthesis, stepping into stranger, more scintillating territory where unexpected shifts and mercurial sounds are the standard. The beauty of Afternoon X lies in its unusual balance of chaos and calm.


The smooth and hypnotic tracks on the Queens-based producer’s new album share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk.

Mas Amable

DJ Python calls his music “deep reggaeton”: a fusion of reggaeton’s dembow rhythm with the ethereal electronics of ambient and classic IDM. Python—aka Brian Piñeyro, a New Yorker of Ecuadorean and Argentine extraction—spent part of his adolescence in Miami, where the ubiquitous reggaeton beat soundtracked a growing interest in his own Latinx heritage. Once he learned that his friend Anthony Naples, who runs the Incienso and Proibito labels, was a south Florida native, Piñeyro decided to make a reggaeton record for him, but one rooted in underground house and techno. The result was Python’s 2017 debut album, Dulce Compañia, which paired loping dembow cadences with wistful, watery synths; last year’s Derretirse ventured deeper into his imagined subgenre. He’s gotten a remarkable amount of mileage out of the marriage of the two styles, and on Mas Amable he breaks new ground by slowing the tempo further.
By virtually any metric, this is Python’s simplest record yet. All eight tracks share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk—and they’ve been seamlessly mixed together in the manner of a DJ set or a live electronic performance. In fact, it’s debatable whether these could even be classified as distinct songs, or whether they simply constitute one very long composition. It feels in many ways like a 48-minute single, the kind of thing that used to seem so audacious in Ricardo Villalobos’ hands. But there’s nothing audacious about Mas Amable. It’s smooth. Python’s music has always been hypnotic, but Mas Amable is particularly spellbinding, interweaving contrasting synth parts and percussion patterns so subtly that you’re barely aware of the changes.
The record begins with a beatless ambient introduction of gentle synth pads and soft, rainy rustling noises; the scene might be a distant forest clearing or just a backyard in Queens. There’s something appealing about the placelessness; the open-ended setting doesn’t impose a mood so much as invite you to project your own state of mind onto the scene. With the second track, “Pia,” the pensive atmospheres persist even as the drums kick in, tough and unadorned. For a time, the fog burns off, and wistful synths give way to sterner textures: scratchy, insect-like shakers and buzzing, bit-crushed croaks, like robotic frogs. Minimalist synth melodies evoke melancholy ’90s worksrecordings by Autechre, Boards of Canada, and Disjecta. Every so often, a forlorn whistle streaks through the frame, like a freight train in the dead of night.
The album’s desolate centerpiece, “ADMSDP,” is even more evocative of witching-hour loneliness. Everything falls silent except for the drums, making room for a spooky monologue from the poet LA Warman. “Where was the place where you felt OK?” she murmurs, her voice slow and low, evoking an ASMR video. “Go to this place.” As guided meditations go, it is both bleak and empathic. It’s OK to sleep the entire day, she tells us—to cry on the train, to think life has no meaning but suffering. “It’s OK to feel hopeless, because the world is hopeless. It’s OK to think about dying.”
It’s a striking moment, a strange fusion of death-metal nihilism with new-age textures and tropical rhythms, though it doesn’t last long: Soon she is urging us to reconnect with our bodies—“to feel how soft you are, how warm you are, how smooth your surfaces are.” As if in response, the music warms, too: rosy new chords rise in the mix, and the rhythm slackens, as though a pinched nerve had suddenly been massaged away. The remainder of the album is a gentle denouement, a return to the ambient overtones of the record’s introduction. That full-circle journey makes for a curious record: It doesn’t do much, yet it covers a surprising amount of ground. By stripping away everything extraneous, Piñeyro has further refined the sound of his invented genre. Deep reggaeton has never sounded deeper.


Heterocetera, the Berlin producer/DJ's third release in just over two years and his first for Tri Angle Records, is the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to techno. He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood.

Heterocetera EP

Last week, Cashmere Cat released an airy new track called "Adore", featuring Ariana Grande, that lifted some of the industrial clang and reverberation from the ballroom house anthem "The Ha Dance", by Masters at Work. It might be surprising to hear this piece of black, gay underground dance culture drift into Ariana Grande's sphere, but part of what draws major-label collaborators (Tinashe, Charli XCX and, now, Kanye West) into Cashmere Cat's orbit is his Tumblr-ready ear, which is where today’s aesthetic subcultures flourish.
"Ha" isn’t as immediately identifiable on the Cashmere Cat song as it is on Lotic’s "Heterocetera". On the title track from the Berlin-based producer/DJ, the source is more obvious (and maybe more expected, given that J’Kerian Morgan is black, gay and American) but also lovingly massaged, cajoled like Play-Doh, into something colorfully reverent. Lotic filets the iconic cascading modular synths, sending screaming wisps out onto the track before sinking slowly into a bubbling, steaming pit of sound. It’s pretty macabre except for a hollow dembow, which moves the scary story along at deceivingly pleasant pace.
Heterocetera might not be a happy recording, but that’s what makes the five-track collection so ambitious. This is Lotic’s third release in just over two years—his first for Tri Angle Records—and perhaps the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to clinical, after-hours techno. There are no overtures to pleasure, no simple hooks, entry points (save for the "Ha", if that does it for you) or clear parallels. The closest analogue to Lotic, at least energetically, might be fellow Texan Travi$ Scott, who makes a similar mess of genre—hip-hop, in Scott’s case—and also brings a gothic energy to club music.
So, imagine this: it's 4 a.m., and you're in a room lit by a single red light bulb in the corner, Lotic’s "Slay" lumbering to life on the system. There is no bassline anchoring the warm, atonal synth lines. Instead, patches of distortion rattle around the skeleton of the track, forming an indistinct textural scaffold of percussion. It sounds like something slowly moving closer to you, perhaps crying to itself. Suddenly, everything in the room—the sounds, the people, the red light—feel like they're closing in around you.
This is what Morgan does best: He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood. It's what so many other producers strive to do but can’t until they are far older than Morgan. A "Ha" sample might seem contrived to some, but he knows that, so he hacks away, letting its guts spill formlessly forth. His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil.


After handling production for Kendrick Lamar, Terrace Martin’s work as a bandleader comes into focus with quiet storm, R&B, and deep grooves that show the composer and instrumentalist making strides.

Terrace Martin Presents the Pollyseeds: Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1

Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1

Terrace Martin’s work on multiple Kendrick Lamar albums made him a part of any serious discussion about the art of production in modern rap. In the parallel dimension of contemporary jazz, he hasn’t experienced the same kind of breakout stardom, though he has been creating new packages for funk and fusion gifts that otherwise might sound rote or expected. The saxophonist makes it easy to spot his influences—including vocoder hooks styled after Zapp & Roger party anthems, or keyboards that specialize in G-funk timbres. But Martin can also mix those tones with warmly synthesized strings, or sizzling rock accents.
On 2016’s Velvet Portraits—the first album on his own imprint, Sounds of Crenshaw—Martin occasionally seemed to be fast-forwarding through his collection of favored textures. The initial seconds of that album presented a yearning, sincere-sounding acoustic piano line that was immediately disrupted by a studio production effect. The producer’s eagerness and roving intelligence were sometimes in tension with the chilled-out aims of his writing. Co-billed to the Pollyseeds (a band that the producer assembled), Martin’s new album breathes a bit more and shows the composer and instrumentalist making real strides.
On “You and Me,” a track that features lead vocals from Pollyseeds member Rose Gold, you can hear a touch of acoustic piano at the outset. But the arrangement’s easygoing quality is established by Gold’s graceful voice, a guitar line, and Martin’s own work on a Korg synth and an MPC sequencer. Three minutes into the track, the synth and the guitar pull back, leaving Gold’s seductive performance in a melodic partnership with the piano. Without exaggerating the decibel-level, the pivot registers as surprising—not a quality typically associated with quiet storm jams. Martin’s ability to make it work speaks to his twin skills as a pop producer and as an instrumentalist.
He’s built a great band, here, too. Rapper Chachi—sometimes known as Problem—sounds deeply at home in the laid-back bounce of “Intentions.” The emcee doesn’t commit the mistake of trying to make the track sound harder than it needs to be; his sing-song interludes and casual ad-libs give credence to the suave persona sketched by the song’s lyrics. “Believe” features vocalist Wyann Vaughn, as well as a sax section of Martin (on alto) and Kamasi Washington (on tenor). But the track’s instrumental honors could just as easily go to bassist Brandon Eugene Owens, who puts resonant, acoustic funk into support playing that’s just too good to stay in the background.
Martin doesn’t take a lot of solos on his various saxes, but when he does, they’re memorable. His playing on a collaboration with Robert Glasper, “Funny How Time Flies,” creeps into its final poses of exultation with a sly, patient poise that is fascinating. On soprano sax, Martin provides tender lines of blues melody during “Wake Up,” while accompanying the noir-ish pianism of Kenneth Crouch.
The moods evoked by Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1 can seem familiar: one track may conjure the body-moving funk of George Clinton, while the next brings to mind the vulnerable romance of a deserted bar room’s last call. But it’s still rare to hear those soulful comforts blended with this much ingenuity. Over time, the album’s subtle ambition becomes impossible to miss. When the emotional climax of “Feelings of the World” cuts off sharply, giving way to a reprise of the hook from an earlier track, Martin’s control of the overall structure starts to sound every bit as good as his beats and his solos.


My Morning Jacket have refused to remain creatively static, a decision that's helped them map a clear and wonderful upward trajectory over their first decade, but does them few favors on their baffling new album.

Evil Urges

In interviews, Jim James has said he doesn't want My Morning Jacket to remain creatively static, or become victim to the sort of bland-ification that befalls so many lesser groups that emerge through the jam and festival circuits. He's lived up to his end of the bargain: A clear and wonderful upward trajectory can be easily mapped over the band's first decade, as their fanbase and creative scope expanded with the crowds and lineups at Bonnaroo, a festival with which they'll forever be linked.
As they grew, they pared back indulgences (like the thick song lengths of It Still Moves) and allowed fresh ideas to infiltrate (the first third of Z) while retaining a sonic identity distinctive enough to influence legions of worthy followers. Their 2005 psych/prog wonder Z-- not so much their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as their The Soft Bulletin-- broke sharply with the Muscle Shoals might of Moves, but 2006's wonderful live double-album Okonokos re-framed and affirmed My Morning Jacket as what fans and critics had been saying since At Dawn: This is one of America's preeminent contemporary rock bands.
My Morning Jacket's latest album, Evil Urges, ends the mean streak the band's been on since 2000, and threatens to squander some of the widespread goodwill they've been steadily building along the way. There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed soft rock. Worse still is the band's decision to ignore the perfect past incarnations of James' Orbisonian tenor-- easily MMJ's most appealing component and one of the more breathtaking instruments in modern rock. At best, his voice is sorely underutilized here; at worst, it's mangled beyond recognition. After listening to Urges, I wonder if My Morning Jacket might just be satisfied following in the footsteps of labelmates Dave Matthews Band: nestling into a comfortable niche and aiming for the Starbucks carousel with rootsy New Age romanticism.
Any discussion of this record has to start with the eye-poppingly annoying "Highly Suspicious", a loud thud ending any chance Urges had to match the group's previous records. An attempt to merge the band's penchant for live quirkiness with James' long-simmering Prince fixation, the track sounds like My Morning Jacket's version of a Phish novelty. The song reduces James' voice to a grating squeak, which cowers in the presence of the obnoxious, caricatured chorus. Its libertarian undertones ("Wasting all your time on drama/ Could be solving real crime") sound like they could stretch to resonate with the hydroponic crowd or those who fret about warrantless wiretapping, but I cringe thinking of an entire amphitheatre singing along to "peanut-butter pudding surprise" unless they're at a Ween show.
At the moment, even a not-very-political band like My Morning Jacket can't resist using their biggest stage yet for a bit of message-driven oratory. James has said, "Evil Urges is about how all of these things that you've been told are evil really aren't, unless they're actually hurting something or somebody." Cool, but the title track, a lighter version of "Suspicious", neuters a righteous sentiment by burying it underneath a jammy funk pastiche. The simultaneously effortless and calculated "I'm Amazed" is breezy and naïve enough to trigger the unconscious sing-along reflex, but the refrain ("Where's the justice?") is ambiguous. Similarly, "Look at You" wastes a perfectly good pedal-steel on a goofy hybrid of the sensual and civic, praising "a fine citizen" as "such a glowing example of peace and glory," as if James were a state senator awarding citations to volunteers. "Sec Walkin'"s refrain of "demon eyes are watchin' everywhere" may address his existential angst at omnipresent security, but the song's Quaalude-smooth soul vibe-- for real, it's a Grover Washington sax solo away from the PA system at Von Maur-- make it seem more like he's content to just keep on truckin'.
Soft rock isn't an irredeemable genre category, and there are some pretty good singles that have been tagged with it. James and his band have professed their affection for such sensitivity in the past, on tracks like "I Will Sing You Songs," which successfully filtered a timid emotional tone within the band's own style. Not so much here. In a live context, prefaced with an extended ironic monologue, "Make It With You" is fun. On record, several times over, from a singer more accustomed to disguising his elliptical, oft-nonsensical lyrics with grain-silos full of reverb, it's incongruous and awkward. "Thank You Too!", with syrupy strings courtesy of arranger-to-the-stars David Campbell, is readymade for the bride and groom's slow dance (save the line "you really brought out the naked part"). The strings trill, dramatically rising and falling on the loner's fantasy "Librarian", as James quietly crushes on, and quietly stalks, the female behind the desk, turned on by her listening to "Karen of the Carpenters" on AM radio. It sounds like a very well-produced Dan Fogelberg song, until James drops "interweb" on us like a sack of dirty socks. Thankfully, there's no couplet about him texting her on his "Crackberry" lol.
Still, James' tender side also leads to Urges' best moments, which bookend the album. Nicely sequenced after the title track at the start of the record, "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 1" is the perfect sequel to Z's sly "It Beats 4 U", down to the songs' similarly insistent, live/synthetic drum patter, and the way they isolate James' voice in a chilly emotional purgatory, only to be cracked with passion: "I need a human by my side, untied" is vulnerability done right. James is smart enough to know when he's got something good, and he ends Urges with an eight-and-a-half minute dark disco reprise of "Touch Me", slowly taking shape as the solemn, steady "Smokin' From Shootin'" fades out. With its patient, synthetic gleam slithering around James' lusty hoodoo, "Touch Me, Pt. 2" is My Morning Jacket's Moroder moment, bringing a highly frustrating record to a close with the line "Oh, this feeling is wonderful/ Don't turn it off." If it hadn't been such an exhausting ride to get there, I might not want to.