This 4xCD box set collects the four albums that Wolfgang Voigt has created under his Gas moniker-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1998's Königsforst, and 2000's Pop-- and collectively they represent a wondrous high point in the history of electronic music.

Nah Und Fern

In 2000, the final album from German producer Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, Pop, finished in the #12 position in Pitchfork's Top 20 albums of the year. Suffice to say that this website was a much smaller operation then, and there were far fewer writers; collectively, we also only had time for so much experimental electronic music. "IDM" as an idea still had plenty of currency, but many of the records falling under that banner were specialty items, something one would put on in a very specific time and place. And there were lots of them. In this landscape, when experimental electronic music was going in a hundred different directions at once-- considering only Gas' label, the Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, you had the jagged sound of disrupted technology in Oval, the boldly politicized field recordings of Ultra Red, the filmic breakcore of Alec Empire, along with a smattering of post-rock and industrial-- Gas was something we could all agree on.
Wide appeal-- even amongst upstart music critics-- isn't something one would expect from this project. When working as Gas in the second half of the 1990s, Voigt's tracks usually featured an unflinching kick-drum pulsing at a mid-tempo BPM-- sometimes ping-ponging across the soundfield or encrusted with burrs of syncopation-- and they typically featured samples of stern and ominous Western classical music. The string and horn drones were sourced from vinyl and proud of it, with the corresponding pops and crackles figuring prominently in the mix. The Gas sound, so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, seemed somewhat monochrome and tightly focused at the time. It was easy to come away with the idea that the project was an exercise in Fall-like consistency-- "Always different, always the same," as John Peel said about the latter. But it's clear now that each record was its own discrete chamber in Voigt's overall construction. The evidence is here, on this 4xCD box set, which collects the albums proper-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1999's Königsforst, and 2000's Pop (missing is the 1995 Modern EP as well as a couple of stray tracks)-- into a single set. These records have been out of print for years-- I saw a copy of Zauberberg going for $270 on Amazon not long ago-- but those refusing to pay outlandish prices have been handsomely rewarded. Gas in many ways sounds even more wondrous now, and certainly more wide-ranging.
The self-titled debut, originally released in 1996, is perhaps the most beautiful entry in the catalog. The rich, shimmery drones seem less earth-bound and heavy relative to what would come later; rather than evoking a dense, mossy arboreal feel-- Voigt has frequently acknowledged the sights and sounds of Germany's Black Forest as an inspiration-- Gas brings to mind images of a clear night sky, as pin-pricks of twinkling guitar samples, trails of distortion that swirl like a starry cloud dispersing into the void, and the bassy string tones all meet in a vast open space designed for contemplation. Though Gas is in some ways the most conventional of the project's records, with moments easily relatable to trends in post-acid house ambient, it also marks Voigt as a producer with a rare ear for texture.
The following year's Zauberberg was the solidification of quintessential Gas aesthetic. While overall the darkest and bleakest of these offerings, Zauberberg opens and closes with the deeply spiritual and uplifting organ drones one can imagine leaking from the cracked stained glass windows of a massive cathedral somewhere in the Bavarian Alps. Sandwiched between these drifting moments of blissful surrender are grim meditations on the physicality of tension. The bass drum throbs between the speakers, less a heartbeat than the icy, unremitting march of time, while Voigt's most dissonant string samples tug everything down into the black soil. It's a shopworn observation among Gas observers to say that the music on the individual albums closely mirrors the images record covers, but Zauberberg is as dark and menacing as the noir picture of red branches in darkness featured on its front.
Beginning precisely where Zauberberg leaves off, with rumbling strings and an unblinking kick, Königsforst eventually takes things to a far more complicated place. Where Gas had previously been defined by the sense of endlessness-- insistent repetition, lengthy tracks that could conceivably go on forever, a consistent mood-- Königsforst experiments with development, moving through timbres and emotional sensations with a definable dramatic arc. The album looks back and forward simultaneously as Voigt seems to be probing the limits of what the project could be. The same starry backward guitar bit that first appeared on the third track of the debut returns on the fourth track here, now yoked to a subtle double-time kick-drum that gives a sense of blood-rushing excitement. Then the album culminates in the 15-minute fifth track, an Escher-like climb through samples of orchestral horns that change almost imperceptibly with each passing bar, moving from a firm, almost militaristic growl to welcoming, optimistic swoon by the track's end. The beatless drone that closes is another masterpiece, one that hints at massive left-turn to come on 2000's Pop; Königsforst on its own is essentially perfect.
Pop is the best known and most admired of these discs, and it provides an obvious entry point. Which is somewhat ironic, since it's also the most divergent by a huge margin. Had it come out under another name, it would have been difficult to know that this was a Gas record at all. The first three tracks offer three subtly different views of the same sound-field, a warm, wet place populated with bubbles, fizz, and hisses, along with keyboard drones and the sort of basslines Angelo Badalamenti used in "Twin Peaks" to suggest a rural idyll whose dark secrets were yet to be revealed. Had the record continued to explore this one direction, it might have been understood as a contemporary variation on the new age meditation record, something listeners would return to in order to chill out and "center" and so on. But Voigt had something else in mind. By the fourth track he's returned the steady kick to the mix, and braided the percussion with a clanging repetitive bell that one imagines the Field's Axel Willner found inspiring. As the beats disappear for two tracks the album inflates with anxiety and dread until, with the return for the 15-minute closer, we're immersed in one of the most nervous-- bordering on malicious-- Gas tracks of all.
By this point, it seems, Voigt had said what he wanted to say with Gas and was ready to move onto something else, like helping to turn the Kompakt label he runs with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape into one of electronic music's premier imprints. Four Gas albums in five years turned out to be quite a lot to chew on; this phase of his career is comparable to Brian Eno's instrumental music between, say, his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting, and 1978's Music for Airports. More than anyone since Eno with the exception of Aphex Twin, Wolfgang Voigt was able to reimagine how ambient music could transform space. But he did so in a grounded, accessible manner. There's something primal and intuitive about this stuff; as heady electronic music goes, it's like a loaf of hearty dark bread, an easy-to-grasp but deceptively intricate musical world with a strong sense of-- to stretch the metaphor-- nourishment. Wolfgang Voigt's musical interests have led him to create stark dancefloor minimalism, playful house, and trance-inducing dub-techno; but Gas was the name he gave to music that was foremost about immersive space. This is music you can lose yourself in; see you in four or five hours.


Trippie Redd’s sprawling album is designed to show his versatility, but it’s not nearly wild enough to distract from its lack of coherent ideas.

To illustrate his chameleonic talents, the young Ohio rapper Trippie Redd has scheduled a slate of new albums: a rock record with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, and an as-yet-to-be-explained project that proposes to show off an “unknown” side of him. But first comes !, which he’s specifically described as “versatile music.” The plan is to prove there isn’t anything he can’t do. In his quest to be master of all, he falls woefully short.
Redd says ! is an abbreviation for “immortal” and an homage to his late frenemy XXXTentacion’s album ?. Where X aimed for lo-fi emo-rap turned pop, Trippie is wholly without a target. He shoots from the hip in all directions with several misfires. EDM-smeared pop, woozy R&B, soul-rap, and melodic trap are touched on with nothing to tie these disparate threads together. The face-tatted howler leans heavily into his menacing TR666 alter ego, flipping back and forth between his signature lovesick persona and playing the nihilistic gangster. Between these poles, songs touch on being true to oneself at all costs, but these half-baked lessons land flat since Redd himself doesn’t really have an identity, musical or otherwise.
Like many in his class of SoundCloud stars, Trippie defines himself by his melodies. He cites KISS and Nirvana as influences, and his songs are predicated on him finding a tune and then freestyling the lyrics. Most of what happens here couldn’t even realistically be considered rapping, which he might argue is further proof of his flexibility, but it diminishes the impact of his songs. His ! verses are dull and unimaginative on top of being restrictive in form. Tune in at any point and you’ll likely get a fumbled string of nonsense bars. “Tryna sink my damn thoughts with these trees/Like a bible open when I spread her legs like the seas,” he raps on a song called “Lil Wayne.” (There is no mention of the rapper and it isn’t indebted to him, stylistically or otherwise.) Redd gets out-barred by a seemingly non-committal Playboi Carti name-dropping a half-dozen brands in his baby voice. Redd wants the listener to believe him virtuosic, but he barely comes off as capable.
! was advertised to his fans as the more profound of two upcoming projects, which isn’t hard when the other one is called Mobile Suit Pussy. “I just have random spurts of wanting to record but I always want it to mean something; I always want it to be deep,” he told MIC/LINE. “I don’t want to just be doing shit blindly.” But listening to this album, you’d think the exact opposite were true. No Trippie Redd song could ever actually be described as “deep”—the most thoughtful ones are less philosophical than any one of Lil B’s Based Freestyles—but these, in particular, are jumbled and digressive and witless. He has claimed “Snake Skin” is about suicide prevention, and maybe it really is in some hyper-surreal dadaist way, but then, on the very next song, he raps, “Y’all all need to change, man y’all need some help/And if you can’t, on God, nigga kill yourself.” He is constantly contradicting himself. Nothing means anything.
If nothing else, the exclamation of the title is in line with how Trippie Redd often performs; a cry of anger or pain that feels like an interjection. At his most effective, on “Mac 10” and “Immortal,” he harnesses that power. The most enjoyable moments feel like controlled chaos. Redd’s songs used to be looser and more free-flowing. He does at least sound more composed. That’s to his credit as a person but it’s not to his advantage as an artist.


Montreal-based art-punk band Ought’s debut is an endearing and electrifying album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure, but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to constructive use.

More Than Any Other Day

Ought are a band from Montreal on Constellation Records, which is both the most obvious and most misleading thing you can say about them. For one, they’re not actually Montreal natives, or even Canadians—their collective passports list birthplaces as far-flung as New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, and Australia. Furthermore, their tetchy, talkative brand of art-punk makes them anomalies on a Constellation roster that, from the foundational releases of Godspeed You! Black Emperor to current franchise players like Colin Stetson, has mostly favored the abstract over the elemental. But this outsider’s vantage is precisely what makes Ought’s debut album, More Than Any Other Day, so endearing and electrifying. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure—brimming with feelings of disaffection and dislocation—but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to more positive, constructive use.
As legend has it, Ought came together at McGill University in 2012 during the “Printemps Erable”—i.e., the “Maple Spring,” when a push by the Quebec government to increase tuition fees across the province by 75 per cent prompted thousands of students to walk out of the classroom and into the streets for mass protests and school boycotts that lasted into the fall. For the members of Ought, it was an especially eye-opening experience, both as an immersion into Quebec’s proud tradition of civil unrest, and the celebratory, often musical form it can assume: the most enduring image of the 2012 movement is the sight of students and supporters dancing through neighbourhoods, banging on pots and pans in percussive protest. (A snippet of such a gathering can be heard in the dying moments of “Mladic” on Godspeed’s 2012 comeback release, Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend!)
Now, More Than Any Other Day contains absolutely no songs about Quebecois education policy or the rising cost of living for undergrads. However, over its eight tracks, Ought strive to recapture and inspire that same sense of anarchic abandon they witnessed on the streets on Montreal in 2012. To that end, they couldn’t have chosen a more emblematic album cover—not because, as some have pointed out, its image of hands clasped in a show of solidarity bears an uncanny resemblance to another debut album from an idealistic rock band, but because, as the liner notes reveal, that photo was found discarded atop a dumpster. Accordingly, More Than Other Day is Ought’s effort to ensure that the basic tenets of passion and commitment don’t get tossed aside amid a culture of instant gratification and distraction, and remind their hashtag activist generation of how it really feels to feel. This is a manifesto to write more manifestos.
And as singer/guitarist Tim Beeler convincingly illustrates throughout the record, the process of reconnecting with your inner iconoclast can be more potent than any drug. In the standout, Marquee Moon-lit ballad “Habit”, the addiction in question is to the act of expression itself, and the liberating/empowering sensation of getting something off your chest (even if the strung-out, string-screeched coda nods to a song about a different sort of habit). The almost-title-track “Today More Than Any Other Day” puts that transformative theory into even more explicit action: over a slowcore trickle, a dejected Beeler mutters the dispiriting line “we’re sinking deeper”—but then repeats those words over and over as the song accelerates until his ennui is reborn as exhilaration. And as the song hits its joyously frantic stride, even the prospect of going grocery shopping is elevated to a near-religious experience: “Today more than other day/ I am prepared/ To make the decision/ Between 2 per cent and whole milk,” Beeler shares, fully aware that the concept of choice in a late-capitalist economy is an inherently flawed one. But for him, even such small victories can provide one with the motivation to achieve much greater ones.
With his sardonic, conversational style and ticking-time-bomb outbursts, Beeler belongs to a lineage of brainiac-maniacs that span the likes of David Byrne and the Violent Femmes’ Gordan Gano to modern-day rant-rockers like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr. Likewise, the band’s sound encompasses myriad eras and permutations of proto- and post-punk: Velvet Underground drones (via the omnipersent hum of keyboardist Matt May), Feelies speed-jangle, daydreamy Sonic Youthian sprawl. And with the gritty grooves of “Pleasant Heart” and “Around Again”, bassist Ben Stidworthy and drummer Tim Keen display an amazingly deft, Fugazi-like facility with injecting a little funk into their punk without turning it into punk-funk.
But more so than any identifiable influence, More Than Any Other Day is ultimately defined by its unsettled, restless spirit; this is an album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart, with its simultaneous transmissions of joy and fear, discipline and chaos, comedy and tragedy. As Beeler spells it out in the album’s thrillingly combustible closer, “Gemini”: “I retain the right to be disgusted by life/ I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight.” Though born of a highly politicized protest movement, Ought aren’t telling you what to do with your life. They just want to make sure you live it.


On her second album, Xenia Rubinos negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be—particularly as a person of color—and incisively questions her place outside of those roles.

Black Terry Cat

Xenia Rubinos' vivid debut album, Magic Trix, drew from noise, punk, and soul, yet it was often described as “Latin music” on account of the Brooklyn songwriter's Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage. “I think that my culture plays into that because it's part of who I am,” she's said, “but I also don't think it's the totality of my work.” But for the follow-up, her newfound appreciation of hip-hop, rediscovering Erykah Badu, and creating against a backdrop of racist police brutality prompted Rubinos to consider the parameters of her identity. “You know where to put the brown girl when she's fuckin' it up,” she chants amid the gnashing synths of “See Them.” “Where you gonna put the brown girl now she's tearin' it up?”
Black Terry Cat is all about breaking beyond limitations. From mostly keys, drums, and bass, Rubinos and her small cohort bring a funky fluidity to the bright splatters of her debut, and forge a level of inventiveness comparable to Esperanza Spalding's recent epic, Emily's D+Evolution. On a day where nothing's going right, the bass and vocals on “Lonely Lover” spiral downwards, an elegant, defeated groove into the abyss. On songs like “Laugh Clown” and “Don't Wanna Be,” Rubinos is a brooding neo-soul singer, yet “Just Like I” is an exuberant but abrasive thrash (“with the same teeth, I smile, I bite you...”) that could be by Shellac if not for her loopy vocal trill.
Rubinos' magical voice gives each of these songs their own distinctive character and magnetism. Tonally, she's a little like St. Vincent's Annie Clark, with the smoky, inviting warmth of fine red wine, and is as adept at punk confrontation as R&B run-ons. Flickers of desperation color her soulful turn on “Don't Wanna Be,” about trying to get someone to love her, while she hops between consonants on the free-associating “I Won't Say,” which stalls on the piercing tone of an ECG flatline as she recites an extract from Abbey Lincoln's 1966 essay, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?”: “Whose hair is compulsively fried, whose skin is bleached, whose nose is ‘too big,’ whose mouth is too loud, whose butt is too broad, whose feet are too flat, whose face is too black?”
On Black Terry Cat, Rubinos poses more of her own provocative questions about how black and brown bodies are contained and valued. And none more so than on the incendiary “Mexican Chef,” a spiky skit about the discreet labor performed by the people of color that “raised America in place of its mom.” Rubinos counts the Latino employees in the back of New York's every restaurant, and the workers absolving others of undesirable jobs, assuring their comfort and assuaging their guilt. “Brown cleans your house, brown takes the trash, brown even wipes your grandaddy's ass,” she raps in a springy cadence, before delivering an even harder blow about the thanks they get for it. “Brown breaks his back, brown takes the flack, brown gets cut 'cos his papers are whack/Brown sits down, brown does frown, brown's up in a hospital gown/Brown has not, brown gets shot, brown got what he deserved 'cos he fought.” With its sharp percussion and infectious polemic, it's like M.I.A. signed to Daptone, which is to say that it's a total KO.
Whereas Magic Trix was heavy with playful imagery, Rubinos gets deep inside her psyche on Black Terry Cat, as she negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be, and questions her place outside of it. She rejects the hand that feeds and stabs on “Just Like I,” elasticizing her frustration as she details her dutiful adherence to the system. (“Every single day, living in the places you built for me.”) “How Strange It Is” is an outsider's take on life's arbitrary dividing lines, from time to borders, its curious French cabaret dissolving into nonsense. Amid the overdriven organs of “Right?”, she shoots down someone who shows her “all the things I'll never be,” and on the plainly gorgeous “Laugh Clown,” the mellow haze evoking classic Badu, Rubinos asks, “Ain't got no money, got no job/Got no kids, no country to live in: Who am I?”
But listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music. (The record's only real downsides are a few too many instrumental interludes.) On “See Them,” she rails, “Who are they to come tell me where I'm from and what is wrong?/We know you made up stories page by page, why you lie?” Drawing from so many musical diasporas and questioning the way that different existences intersect, Rubinos' second album is American music with a different story to tell.


The New York four-piece WALL evoke the tarnished, shouty clangor of Mission of Burma, Wire circa Pink Flag, Pylon, and an extremely misanthropic B-52s. The sharp lyrics often tackle the false identities necessary to survive 21st century New York.

WALL EP

So far, there's not much to know about New York four-piece WALL. Bassist Elizabeth Skadden was in Finally Punk, guitarist Vince McClelland in Keepsies. Singer/guitarist Sam York has modeled for Terry Richardson. Wharf Cat is releasing their self-titled debut EP, which was produced by Parquet Courts' Austin Brown. They have given no interviews and maintain no social media profiles—just a single monochrome homepage. Maybe they're being secretive in that faintly annoying blogs-circa-2010 fashion, but maybe it's just that they're brand new. May the period that they're not beholden to the Internet and being asked crap questions about being girls (and one boy) in a band last as long as possible.
The context for their music, however, suggests itself immediately—a tarnished, shouty clangor that recalls Mission of Burma, Wire circa Pink Flag, Pylon, and an extremely misanthropic B-52s, all anchored by Vanessa Gomez's brisk drumming. York's lyrics often tackle the false identities necessary to survive 21st century New York, and it's hard not to hear a new band making this kind of crucible-forged post-punk as its own kind of costume: Is slavish adherence to a 30-year-old template really the best way to rail against the expectations of the modern age? That aside, WALL are innovative students.
For one, they're funny: "Big black suits dressed as little white lies/ Fresh baked bread keeps the pigs well fed," York blares on "Cuban Cigars," a jab at the whelps of Wall Street. A few verses later, she abandons her severe incantations for a mocking sing-song that evokes Kathleen Hanna. Her delivery on closer "Milk," a smokier song than its brittle predecessors, echoes Kim Gordon's soft disaffection as she observes how, "The sky opened up/ Milk poured out." That is, until the kicker, where she sounds like Mark E. Smith after a few hours on Tumblr. "Two-thousand feline mistresses!/ Laying all over the cobblestone!"
The appearance of these insubordinate sunbathing animals in the lyrics fits the absurdist streak that gives the EP much of its appeal, though its most exciting moment comes as York succumbs to the city's pressures. "Fit the Part" finds her flitting between the different roles she plays throughout the course of the day, and as the pressure mounts, so does the pace; from a stiff, spidery lumber to a rushed run-on, and a flooring white-hot tirade of panic and empty self-assurances. "My blood's the same I know it is/ Just the exterior changes/ Shedding layers as I race to the next task/ Looking in the mirror to the face of a stranger/ Know the heart but not the face and I/ Gotta fit the part/ Gotta fit the part to get the part," York rattles off, as if trying to grab hold of a lightning bolt.
If where WALL are coming from is entirely apparent, where they're going isn't, thanks to these adrenaline surges and hectic rhythmic swerves. There's no color to their music, and little fluidity, yet in their intense fits and starts, they develop a compelling effect that has the magnetism of good melody, even in its near-total absence. "Last Date" is the simplest song here—another tirade of words so staccato that it's hard to discern the lyrics about being crushed by the weight of someone else. While the guitar is high and insistent, York and Skadden sing in sour, mismatched harmonies. Without really altering their resolutely monotone delivery, they seem to burrow deeper into the earth. In tricks like these, WALL wriggle out from the under the weight of history.


Originally released in 1971, this monumental work in experimental music is reissued for Record Store Day, preserving the debut of a visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer.

Key

In the 1990s, when director Jean-Luc Godard started getting wilder with his sound design, he sampled excerpts of Meredith Monk’s ululating vocal performances in films like Nouvelle Vague. The vocal ensemble she has led for decades keeps drawing crowds at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival. In recent years, Monk’s orchestral music has been championed by the St. Louis Symphony. Monk remains a powerful figure in American art, and her twin legacies as visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer have long seemed secure.
Her reputation continues to grow thanks to new touring stage-shows and albums like 2016’s On Behalf of Nature (which started as a dramatic piece and was later adapted into a recording). As a veteran of New York’s famed late-’60s underground, Monk has achieved a rare distinction—her recent work tends to get more attention than the music she made in her breakthrough, bohemian decade. In a reissue-mad culture that can wilt from the task of keeping up with experimentalists, later in their careers, this is no small thing. Though it does mean that the first records are still there to be rediscovered.
In 1971, Monk released her first album, Key, on the Los Angeles-based imprint Increase Records. Before too long, the original issue went out of print. Key was subsequently reissued on LP (and then CD) by Mimi Johnson’s Lovely Music. For 2017’s Record Store Day, Tompkins Square has licensed the album from Lovely to make Key’s first new vinyl pressing in decades. Its first two tracks are still mind-blowers. The a cappella opener, “Porch,” showed how much variety Monk could wring from a single vocal hook—thanks to her many vocal production styles. In the space of a couple minutes, the singer switches from brash, nasally sounds to more vulnerable, weepy expressions.
“Understreet” follows this with a repetitive keyboard line, which blares from Monk’s electric organ. This punching figure creates steady support for an even stranger vocal part. The title of this piece makes for one of the rare, discernible words you can hear in Monk’s often-abstract vocals. At first, she stretches out enunciations of “understreet” via keening, edgy timbres: a different sort of subterranean, homesick blues. Then, without warning, Monk shows off a jarring purity, reeling off a fast series of straight-tone, staccato notes. Compared with the song’s initial approach, these pitches dance with a renewed lease on pleasure. In a few short minutes, Monk creates multiple new sound-worlds, writing distinct kinds of folk music for the different populations within them.
From the beginning, Monk conceived of her work in multimedia terms, often linking her 16mm films and live music performance in installation art settings. Her description of Key as a work of “invisible theater” is bolstered not just by the dramatic nature of her performances, but by a variety of interludes. At the end of “Understreet,” the sound of feet exiting from a stage dispels the sense that you’re listening to a traditional album. A series of abstract monologues—all with the title “Vision” (and voiced by Monk colleagues Lanny Harrison and Mark Berger)—feels like the work of some modernized Greek chorus.
Side A concludes with “Fat Stream,” an early example of what would come to be a standing feature in this artist’s catalog: the Monk lullaby. Over organ chords and a steady drone note, Monk sings some gorgeous lines full of comfort—while at other points, she bends select tones in ways that vibrate madly against the keyboard music. On Side B, Key’s final two tracks also introduce new elements. The overdubbed “Change” features a crew of “companion voices” (including Fluxus artist Dick Higgins). And “Dungeon” thrums along with a steady percussive part that results in a spooky close for the album.
The new Tompkins Square vinyl reissue preserves the sense of warmth—as well as some of the original distortion—that previous reissues have displayed. This new release also has a more sharply rendered cover, offering a view of Monk in one of her early stage getups. But if you can’t track down one of the limited RSD-vinyl editions, don’t fret: the Lovely CD continues to offer a sterling version of this same important music. When Monk recorded these pieces, she was still a few years away from the perfection of Dolmen Music, or the sumptuousness of her later opera, Atlas. But she was already a force of experimental nature.


A sprawling new box set full of demos and alternate takes suggests a dazzling array of paths the Chicago group might have taken on their masterpiece.

Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Super Deluxe Edition)

There’s an alternate universe where Wilco released their fourth album on Warner/Reprise as planned, got good reviews, landed on a few year-end lists, toured slightly bigger venues, and that’s it. They continued being a midlevel rock band rather than one of the most revered rock bands of the 21st century, which is what they did in our universe. And there’s another plane of existence where they broke up before that fourth album was even released, where both Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett became casualties of the pills they were popping in the studio. That means there’s also a world where Son Volt became the foremost chroniclers of modern American life.
In retrospect, everything about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels astonishingly precarious. It’s an album that inspires endless what-ifs: What if it hadn’t been very good, or what if it had been extremely good but not in a way that captured the imaginations of so many listeners? What if Jim O’Rourke had been too busy to take Tweedy’s phone call and never connected them with Glenn Kotche or mixed the final album? What if Nonesuch had passed on the record, robbing us of the satisfying narrative that Wilco made Warner pay for the album twice? What if streaming it on their website had depleted sales rather than boosted them? What if a national tragedy hadn’t immediately given the music more gravity and relevance than even Wilco could have dreamed? Every hypothetical represents a new universe, a new world of possibilities.
But we live in this world, where all those decisions and actions aligned to make Yankee Hotel Foxtrot one of the defining rock albums of the 2000s. Twenty years along, we get this curious reissue, which provides evidence that Wilco have been thinking about all those what-ifs and possible Wilcoverses, too. When they boxed up their previous two albums, the band reveled in its fraught relationship with pop music as both profession and obsession, and it presented those albums as self-contained three-act plays: writing the songs and making demos, recording and assembling the final tracklist, and finally touring the album and letting the music live on its own. The Yankee Hotel Foxtrot anniversary set, however—in particular the massive 11xLP version—rejects that dramatic structure. Instead of presenting a story of gestation, birth, and life, the band offers alternatives: the album as it might have been, the album as it almost was, the album as it exists on different planes.
On the deluxe editions, Wilco have arranged all the usual demos and outtakes and radio interviews and live performances into different albums representing different sets of possibilities and outcomes, each with its own evocative title. There’s American Aquarium, rawer and weirder yet still mired in the pop palette of Summerteeth. There’s Here Comes Everybody, darker and slightly more caustic. There’s Lonely in the Deep End, which sounds like they’ve opened the door to an overstuffed closet: a tumble and crash of ideas. These iterations aren’t merely points on a timeline leading to a familiar destination; the creative process was far too messy for such a neat trajectory. Instead, they demonstrate that nothing about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was ever settled, not even its title. Even elements of the more modest 7xLP set (which includes the American Aquarium version) and 2xLP release (which presents the familiar songs in remastered form) gesture toward the album’s mutability.
It’s a fascinating idea, especially for this album in particular, given how thoroughly and painstakingly the band pored over every song, every lyric, every note. “Kamera” sounds especially shaky, each version a completely different snapshot of the same vista. On American Aquarium it opens with a dramatic drum fanfare that plainly recalls Phil Spector, before launching into a measured gallop. It’s all build, no payoff. They deleted everything and started fresh on Here Comes Everybody, with keyboards like a barrelhouse harpsichord and a more insistent beat that taunts Tweedy. And then there’s the version on The Unified Theory of Everything that replaces it all with a fuzzed-out guitar and has Tweedy singing like he’s fronting that local band from “Heavy Metal Drummer.” What would have happened if the band had stopped with one of them instead of reinventing the song a few more times?
That precariousness once clung to the album, which is perhaps why it was greeted with such enthusiasm, and even reverence, 20 years ago. The band was splintering, with longtime drummer Ken Coomer unceremoniously dismissed and Bennett playing a bigger role. There were new faces (Kotche, O’Rourke) and new challenges, most of which had to do with drugs. On some level we must have understood that the record came unfathomably close to not existing, at least not in this form, and the music on our version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot conveys that sense of almost wasn’t. We’re fortunate in this universe, because Wilco found a way to make their dogged explorations enhance rather than obscure the humanity in these songs. It’s a bleak album, certainly. When Tweedy sings about getting money out of an ATM to buy “Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes” (does anyone sell lit cigarettes?), the moment still sounds like a monumental sigh. When he sings about watching a heavy metal band take the stage “on the landing in the summer,” the memory still resonates with warmth and wonder. And when he sings about assassining down the avenue, it’s still just as confounding as ever. (Hearing him sing “I assassinate the avenue” on the American Aquarium version of the song doesn’t clear anything up.)
All of these different iterations of the same thing coalesce into a bold statement of uncertainty, a clear-headed portrayal of confusion, a joyful depiction of despair—all contradictions that make the music more relatable, more immersive, more malleable. This anniversary set is also a reminder that the album has become more settled over time, thanks to Sam Jones’ documentary, Greg Kot’s book, Tweedy’s book, and countless reviews, profiles, and interviews. It has become familiar, perhaps comfortingly so—a reminder of a time in America that in retrospect appears quaintly fucked up. The Sound Opinions interview, recorded just after 9/11, is not only a compelling artifact, but a demonstration of how Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was already out of the band’s control. There’s a very specific weariness in Tweedy’s voice that’ll be familiar to anyone who lived through that day, and Wilco play these songs on air like they no longer recognize the things they’ve created. This anniversary box set pushes the album back off its axis. The music wobbles again, reminding us that unease and confusion were its most relatable aspects.
If Being There understood rock to be a fool’s errand and if Summerteeth presented rock as a fool’s consolation, then our Yankee Hotel Foxtrot shows how we fools (not just Tweedy, but you and me, too) desperately want music to reflect the world back to us. Even in those magical moments when a pop song does offer us a glimpse of something larger, it’s never enough. We want it to order the world, to make everything make sense, to throw senseless tragedies into reassuring relief. Music can’t do that. The world—not just this one, but each of the infinite other what-if worlds—is too gloriously, damnably messy for one band or one album or one song to capture. The world thwarts art, yet it’s all we have so we make do. That kernel of sadness and frustration persists in every universe and in every version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.


A badly needed remaster of this landmark LP sounds even fresher than it did 20 years ago-- and thanks to Sony there are now loads of expensive ways to hear it.

The Stone Roses

Surly, sullen and fearsomely confident in shaggy hair and baggy jeans, frontman Ian Brown declared on the Stone Roses' eponymous album, "I am the resurrection and I am the light," connecting with a nation of acid-house damaged kids eager to believe in something. As it happens, Brown's arrogance was misplaced and the band's rock stardom a lot shorter-lived than anyone expected. The Stone Roses made a stunning debut, then bled out in a slow agony of contractual disputes, internal discord, and, eventually, public indifference (though their sophomore release and swan song, Second Coming, is nowhere near as bad as people say). More prosaic than drugs or young death, this trifecta killed a career that now essentially consists of just one great record.
But the story of The Stone Roses is really a tale of two records, divided by an ocean. As Sony (which now owns original label Silvertone) rolls out a remastered version in celebration of the album's 20th anniversary, Brits wrestle with what's become a cultural crucible. When a record's aura or associations, rather than its content, begins dominating discussions-- especially when a nation routinely votes it one of rock history's best-- clothing-deprived-emperor jive usually isn't far behind. And the fact that the former idols have had the bad grace to survive into their forties and release a string of middling yet well-promoted solo albums hasn't boosted the The Stone Roses' reputation at home.
We Americans are relatively unencumbered (though it'll be fun to see if Nevermind incites as much hair-tearing when it hits 20 in two years). The Roses, and the "Madchester" scene with which they were loosely associated, never translated to the U.S. beyond modern rock radio and late-night MTV. They also failed to hugely impact an underground hostile to anything that implied feet were made for more than propping up a body so it could sip beer and look bored. Many prominent American critics didn't champion the Roses, either. "What do [the Stone Roses] do that the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield didn't do better in 1967?" Robert Christgau wondered in The Village Voice, typifying the Boomer establishment's predictable position on a band of GenXers cheeky enough to remind them, "the past was yours, but the future's mine."
To answer Christgau's question, what the Stone Roses did better was marry smart psychedelic pop to dance grooves in an incredibly accessible and powerful way that appealed both to rock and rave fans, lovers of hooks and beats, punks and people who actually welcomed 10-minute guitar solos. If influence matters, the album influenced scores of other bands, including Spiritualized, Primal Scream (which bassist Mani joined after the Roses collapsed), the Manic Street Preachers, the Beta Band, the Libertines, and, as the Gallagher brothers have never missed an opportunity to assert, Oasis. And unlike most of the Madchester bands, the Roses weren't only about a sound, a vibe, or a scene. They owned a clutch of insanely catchy, emotionally nuanced, lyrically astute songs about love, lust, youth, and raging ambition that didn't require a historical context to understand or embrace. Exploding the false dichotomy of album band/singles band, The Stone Roses is a logical, cohesive album made up of incredible stand-alone songs.
To wit, "She Bangs the Drums", "Waterfall", "Made of Stone", "(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister", and "Fool's Gold" (a later single that was appended to the original U.S. release and, unlike fellow longtime U.S. add-on "Elephant Stone", reappears on the reissue), would make stellar radio hits in any decade. Brown's vocals, guitarist John Squire's intricate fingerwork and mighty riffs, and rhythm section Mani and Reni's sly, lockstepping grooves, are a textbook case of the whole far exceeding its components. Even "Elizabeth, My Dear", a notorious monarchy smackdown set to "Scarborough Faire"'s half-millennium-old melody, was ballsy then and remains deliciously tart today.
But queen-bashing and other acts of symbolic resistance aside ("Bye Bye Badman" and Squire's abstract expressionist cover art reference the 1968 student protests that uprooted France's political and cultural establishments), The Stone Roses isn't a radical, or even particularly progressive, work: From its verse-chorus-verses, to its meticulous overdubs and careful sequencing, to its revival-- however cleverly repurposed-- of hoary old rock myths ("I don't have to sell my soul/ He's already in me"), the album is a slick production designed for maximum market penetration. And for something that signaled a generational handoff, it's awfully invested in the previous generation's specious valorization of The Album, not to mention the hippie values inscribed in psychedelia (on this point at least, Christgau was correct).
Nobody, therefore, need be put out by Sony's splashy remarketing campaign. The 20th anniversary edition is available in four formats, from a standard single CD or vinyl set to a $120 "collector's" box of four discs, four vinyl LPs, and such extras as signed prints of Squire's artwork, a lemon-shaped USB, wallpaper, and ringtones. I can't recommend dipping into your rent money to buy that thing, but $30 for the elegantly designed deluxe edition, which includes the remastered album, a disc of demos, a DVD with live footage and videos (most of which are lame pastiches of said live footage), and a booklet of band member reminiscences, seems fair to fans. Largely lacking the funk that snuck into the studio, the demos are still a phenomenal bunch of tunes (including some that didn't make final cut) that should finally put to rest rumors that the Roses were nobodies who came out of nowhere. The demos also officially confirm that, left to his own devices, Brown sings about as well as you do on a shit-faced midnight karaoke dare. But hey, he cleans up nicely. In fact, Brown's brooding, beautiful self-harmonies on the album may be one of producer John Leckie's finest achievements.
Leckie teamed up with Brown to remaster the LP, which, produced at the tail-end of the vinyl era, lacked some range at the low end and suffered from its tin-timbred late-80s drum sound, among other issues. Now, the infamous bassline that opens "I Wanna Be Adored" has an even more thrilling anticipatory deep-earth rumble; instead of slaps, "She Bangs the Drums"' beats pack actual punches; and the originally muddy textures of a song like "Made of Stone" are brighter and broader-spectrumed, with crisp chiming guitars and lustrous basslines. The record industry has whipped itself into a frenzy of last-ditch, cash-grabbing CD reissues lately, but the original Stone Roses actually merited a sound overhaul. And the results are brilliant, further supporting the case for classic album status-- if support's needed.


The long-awaited second album from the Last Shadow Puppets  is a lavish California confection, with strings by Owen Pallett. Like Zayn Malik's Mind of Mine, it makes very clear that frontmen Alex Turner and Miles Kane are sexy men with sexy lives having lots of sexy sex with their sexy girlfriends.

The Last Shadow Puppets: Everything You've Come to Expect

Everything You've Come to Expect

After the flammable tracksuits and leering interviews, it's easy to forget that in 2008, the Last Shadow Puppets were two shaggy-haired 22-year-olds sweetly in thrall to girls and Scott Walker. The Age of the Understatement was more ambitious than anything Alex Turner and Miles Kane had attempted before, but its lavish strings and Morricone twangs shrouded earnest devotion and no shortage of anxiety over paling in comparison to the next, more consummate lothario. "Please don't tell me, you don't have to, darling/ I can sense that he painted you a gushing sunset and slayed a few panthers in your defence," Turner sang on "Separate and Ever Deadly." By the final song, "Time Has Come Again," he found himself heartbroken and weeping in the street. This bold record was a cover for a severe case of imposter syndrome, which Kane evoked in a lovely turn of phrase on "Separate...": "Can't you see I'm the ghost in the wrong coat, biting butter and crumbs?"
Eight years on, the starting blocks are very different. Arctic Monkeys are five albums in, and Alex Turner could feasibly lay claim to being one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Miles Kane could feasibly lay claim to being friends with one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Both artists now live in L.A., and their long-awaited second album, Everything You've Come to Expect, is a lavish California confection, featuring a 29-piece orchestra recorded at Hollywood's storied United Recording, and arranged by Owen Pallett. His work here puts him on a par with Jean-Claude Vannier, the man behind Gainsbourg's ...Melody Nelson: The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. Dusty opener "Aviation" could be Calexico playing backing band to some tortured crooner; "Miracle Aligner" is a fever dream of the Replacements' "Swingin Party," while the title track turns French carousel organs into a captivating narcotic spiral. It's the perfect music for the Daniel Craig-era James Bond films: sophisticated, tortured—and with a weakness for temptation.
Like Zayn Malik's Mind of Mine, Everything You've Come to Expect makes very clear that Turner and Kane are sexy men with sexy lives having lots of sexy sex with their sexy girlfriends. The only difference between them is a seven-year age gap. Sometimes they still sound as awestruck as on their debut. On "She Does the Woods," ostensibly a song about shagging in the bushes, Turner is dazzled by the girl looming above him, behind her, "a spirograph of branches that dance on the breeze." There are numerous songs about fucking—"Just let me know when you want your socks knocking off," "Baby, we ought to fuck seven years of bad luck out the powder room mirror"—and, with grim inevitability, songs about how girls have fucked them over. "Bad Habits" truly establishes Kane as the Austin Powers to his mate's Bond, as he yelps over blood-red bolero that he "should've known, little girl, that you'd do me wrong."
By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in. "Gimme all your love so I can fill you up with hate," they ooze. One of the inspirations for Everything You've Come to Expect was Isaac Hayes' glorious Hot Buttered Soul, but that's not the first thing that comes to mind here. There's a scene in 1967's Bedazzled where Dudley Moore, as part of his deal with the devil, wishes to become a pop star so that girls will love him. Wish granted, he immediately finds himself eclipsed by his rival, played by Peter Cook, who has formed a band called Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations. Their deathless hit track, in hock to 1960s English psychedelia, goes, "I'm fickle, I'm cold, I'm shallow/ You fill me with inertia/ Don't get excited."
For a few years now, Turner has sported a well-greased quiff and an obscure attitude ("invoice me for the microphone"). You suspect he adopted the rock star posture as a protective mechanism to deal with his massive profile, while for Kane, every middle-aged dad's favorite Paul Weller substitute, it's a retrograde aspiration. They expose the dark side of their Faustian pact for fame and fortune towards the end of the record, where inspiration dims. "Pattern" sounds like the kind of orch-pop move that was often favored by Britpoppers to show that they were real artistes with longevity beyond the movement, and has similar subject matter—though Turner, no less a gifted lyricist than ever, manages to imbue the comedown with a little poetry, admitting, "I slip and I slide like a spider on an icicle."
He's at his most lugubrious and lizardy on "The Dream Synopsis," a silky string-laden number where he reminisces about flirting with a girl who worked in a kitchen, when the most danger going was getting caught kissing by the pans. Curiously, "The Bourne Identity" comes back to imposter syndrome, in a violin-heavy hero's lament peppered with plenty of great lyrics. Turner's got a "glass-bottomed ego," he's "the sequel you wanna see but you were kinda hoping they would never make," "haunted by the sweet smell of self-esteem." It's hard to think of more perfect descriptions of feeling insufficient. But Turner and Kane are so convincingly cocksure elsewhere, it's hard to feel too sorry for them. As the Last Shadow Puppets make abundantly clear on their second album, they made their own bed.


Tracked at Graceland in 1976, the recordings on this double-disc compilation show that Elvis never stopped believing in the power of music, that he never stopped searching for the right song to sing.

Elvis Presley: Way Down in the Jungle Room

Way Down in the Jungle Room

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, about a month after he released Moody Blue. Like so many Elvis records before it, Moody Blue wasn’t assembled with care: it indiscriminately blended new studio sides with live tracks, some dating as far back as 1974. Early in Presley’s career, his manager Colonel Tom Parker—the huckster who took Presley under his wing in ’56—realized there wasn't much of a margin in art. He chose to industrialize the making of Elvis’ music. Parker minimized studio time but maximized releases, hustling Presley into the studio for marathon sessions where he’d record enough material for upwards of three albums.
He instituted this practice not long after Elvis left the Army in 1960 and never abandoned it. Even the landmark *From Elvis in Memphis, *the 1969 record where Elvis reconnected with his muse, skimmed the surface of the Chips Moman-produced sessions at American Sound Studio. The rest of the recordings arrived months later as Back in Memphis, the studio portion of the double-LP *From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis—*a title so bewildering, it seems designed to confuse audiences. That word salad signals the utter indifference the Presley camp had toward presentation: the LPs were product, pure and simple.
Parker and RCA spent so little time considering the construction of these releases; their very shoddiness suggested Elvis himself didn’t care much for making music. That isn’t true. After he reasserted control of the songs he sang in 1968—not to mention how the music sounded—Presley never quite let go of the artistic reins, even if he did make concessions to both the marketplace and Parker’s business demands.
Presley’s artistry became obscured because his adoring fans would still snatch up tickets to live performances in Vegas and pick up LPs, never caring deeply about the content within. Decades of posthumous releases haven’t necessarily been kind to Presley, either. The sheer number of compilations have supported the notion that Elvis was merely a commodity to be sold. In the past few years, RCA/Legacy reconfigured Presley’s recordings according to session order, creating compilations that highlighted these concentrated bursts of energy. Way Down in the Jungle Room—a double disc set divided into a disc of master recordings and one of working renditions—is presumably the last of these. It focuses on the music Presley made primarily in February and October of 1976 at Graceland and doled out on 1976’s From Elvis Presley Boulevard,* Memphis*,* Tennessee*, and Moody Blue. “Way Down,” a funky but forgotten rocker, was the biggest hit from these sessions, peaking at 18. “Moody Blue,” a single that turned into a perennial on oldies radio, topped out only at 31.
The Jungle Room was the name given to the den adjacent to the kitchen in Graceland, Presley’s fabled Memphis home. The space earned its name due to its tacky Zebra-striped decor, kitsch that distracted from the fact that Elvis turned this room into a home recording studio early in 1976. At that time, Presley wanted to stick around Memphis due to health issues and a creeping domesticity. But by the mid-’70s, both American Sound Studio and Stax—where Presley recorded landmark sessions in the late ’60s and early ’70s, respectively—had shuttered, so he decided to dedicate a room in his mansion to music. Home studios were an indulgence befitting a superstar, but it also was cost effective, especially for a singer whose very career hinged on a trio of guys capturing lightning in a bottle at the tail end of a session.
Nothing on *Way Down in the Jungle Room *approaches the kineticism of Elvis’ first single, 1954’s “That’s Alright Mama,” the late-night throwaway that altered the course of American culture. But that’s a high bar to clear. Rather, the looseness on Way Down in the Jungle Room reveals just how much Presley learned from Sam Phillips, a producer who prized surprise over polish. Certainly, the master takes on Way Down in the Jungle Room are plenty slick, but their essence lies in the jams heard on the second disc—a collection where Elvis cracks wise with a group of musicians who would soon become his rhythm section, the TCB Band (“Taking Care of Business”), along with invited guests. He smirks, “You guys don’t deserve me on the very first part” on “Bitter They Are, Harder They Fall;” he commands, “Bring out the booze... grandma” just before launching into “Never Again.” It’s all with the intention of pushing his band toward renditions he can hear in his head.
These aren’t necessarily inventive—there’s not much that can be done to refresh the old Irish weeper “Danny Boy”—but sometimes they are. Take “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a Fred Rose tune popularized by Roy Acuff and Hank Williams but revived in a spare, sad version by Willie Nelson in 1975. Elvis trades melancholy for a slow-burning funk, not a million miles away from his deep soul rendition of “She Thinks I Still Care,” or how he turned Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” into a roadhouse lament. These aren’t straight covers; these are interpretations, the work of an intuitive, intelligent singer who knows how to bend a lyric to serve his style. They’re also the gateway to the rest of Way Down in the Jungle Room, showing that even at its corniest moments—and this music is often silly and overblown because, Dean Martin fan that he was, Elvis never could resist heightened emotions—Presley understood the mechanics of a song and how to heighten a performance for maximum effect.
At times he nodded toward mainstream trends. “Way Down” soars like a jetliner; “Moody Blue” co-opts every soft, hazy sound of AM pop in the mid-’70s. But the striking thing about Way Down in the Jungle Room is how it stays true to all the music Presley claimed as his own in ’68. Rockabilly isn’t heard much here—“For the Heart” has some swing, but nothing is breathless or reckless—still, there’s a clear, clean connection to the country, soul, and pop he blended in his ’68 comeback, just after he shook off the shackles of the soundtracks Parker imposed upon him. Perhaps there’s not an expansion of the sound, but there’s unquestionably a deepening of emotion, the sense that he’s a singer settling into his own bones. This maturity, this casual authority, is commanding. His performances often transcend the material, especially when schmaltz is infused with emotion: Neil Sedaka's “Solitaire” is given an operatic arrangement where Presley treats its broad lines like revelations.
Like Frank Sinatra, Elvis threw himself into his music. Whatever he had, whether it was spruced up soul or manicured mellowness, Elvis invests himself into the song he’s singing. That passion is what distinguishes Way Down in the Jungle Room from the LPs culled from the same sessions. Here, in this double disc set, it’s apparent Elvis never stopped believing in the power and redemption of music, that he never stopped searching for the right song to sing.


The Santa Barbara synthpop group Gardens & Villa are stuck in an existential funk. On their new album Music for Dogs, which features guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s, the band grapple with 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory.

Music for Dogs

Gardens & Villa are a synthpop band stuck in an existential funk, and we have the Internet to blame. "[We’re] feeling too connected and yet at the end of the day, disconnected from everything/everyone," frontman Chris Lynch recently told Noisey, "feeling like our modern lives are starting to resemble a sci-fi world." At this point in their career, the L.A.-via-Santa Barbara group have managed to carve out a psych-ier niche to set them aside from, say, Phantogram, but they’ve got a synthpop reputation nonetheless. The conflict between technological innovation and organic artistry is a given in modern music, but for digitally-reliant acts like Gardens & Villa, the tug-of-war presents a identity crisis. On their new album Music for Dogs, the band grapple with these 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory.
Lynch and company have framed Music For Dogs as the playful, punkish cousin to last year’s similarly anxious Dunes, with guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s (the lush art-pop of Brian Eno and Roxy Music are the most obvious musical touchstones). Indeed, Music for Dogs sounds more kinetic than past efforts, thanks to the group's incorporation of light-footed, plunky pianos ("Express") and ever-so-mathy bridges ("Everybody"). At the same time, there’s a lukewarm quality to the jams (which, despite three- and four-minute runtimes, sound twice as long): the guitars are thin, the drum beats flimsy, the vocals frequently obfuscated by a droning synth or a similar effect. It’s as though Ben Folds attempted to create to Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets while under the influence of sleeping pills.
Considering their previous revelations regarding the album’s reactionary origins, it should come as no surprise that Gardens & Villa get more introspective on Music for Dogs. Crushing loneliness and urban ennui loom overhead like storm clouds—a compelling thematic juxtaposition against the manic singsongs of "Jubilee" and "Everybody". Frequently, these themes manifest in the form of dark, moody new wave. "Alone in the City" contextualizes a scene of Los Angelean longing in the terms of Tears for Fears, and "Maximize Results" sounds like Boy George having a panic attack.
Midway through the album on "General Research", Lynch turns the mirror on us, lamenting the various ways in which technology has torn art (and life, for that matter), asunder… or something like that. His lines are meant to scan as introspective and metaphorical, but clunkers like "Working for the blogs/ Searching for the savior/ Music for the malls" and "Vaporizing cigarettes/ Reverential productions/ Following down the rabbit hole" transmogrify any earnestness into hilarity. Gardens & Villa’s self-conscious, spindling attempts at regression and societal contemplation are admirable and occasionally catchy, but there are so many other albums*—Reflektor, Kid A*, even the oft-maligned, ahead-of-its-time *Metal Machine Music—*that navigate the intricacies of technology and society more compellingly and less heavy-handedly that you can’t help but write it off as another brick in the firewall.


Vacation, the second in a new series of mini-albums for the Ibiza-based International Feel label, is rich with Balearic textures: marimbas, choral synth pads, creamy soprano sax, acoustic guitars run through shimmering digital reverb. It takes cues from genre staples like Penguin Café Orchestra, Wally Badarou, and Sade.

On Vacation

CFCF's Michael Silver knows his way around a smart chord change and has a lovely voice, but he tends to work less as a songwriter than a collector of atmospheres. These can take a variety of forms: Last year's The Colours of Life took whimsical Balearic themes—rippling marimba, ringing electric guitar, New Age keys, pitter-pat CR-78 rhythms—and stretched them into a 40-minute mood piece. Exercises paid tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto's keyboard compositions, and Music for Objects projected Philip Glass' pulse minimalism through the lens of Japanese electronic musicians like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Joe Hisaishi.
Silver often gives his recordings themes linked to three-dimensional spaces and physical objects: Exercises was meant to evoke Brutalist architecture, and Music for Objects, inspired in part by Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes, took the form of impressionist renderings of everyday items—a bowl, a set of keys, a turnstile. He has a knack for flipping sound and space in counterintuitive ways: In 2010, he chopped and screwed a bunch of Quiet Storm R&B into the mixtape Slow R&B for Zellers Locations Canada-Wide (the title was a reference to a once-ubiquitous Canadian chain of discount department stores). What could have been a joke turned out to be a surprisingly effective (and narcotic) defamiliarization of the budget retail experience.
On Vacation, the second in a new series of mini-albums for the Ibiza-based International Feel label, comes with no explicit concept attached, but the title does a good job of capturing the balmy moods contained within. As on The Colours of Life, it favors moderate tempos and the sorts of sounds associated with José Padilla's sunset sessions at Café del Mar in the early 1990s: marimbas, choral synth pads, creamy soprano sax, acoustic guitars run through shimmering digital reverb. It takes cues from Balearic staples like Penguin Café Orchestra, Wally Badarou, and Sade; "Chasing," a gorgeous miniature for echoing guitars and accordion, is heavily indebted to the Durutti Column, while the accordion-led "Arto" pays tribute to the Japanese composer Seigen Ono. In "Vermont," which mixes acoustic guitars, faint piano, and understated synthesizers, I hear an echo of Joan Bibiloni, a Mallorcan fusion musician recently rediscovered by Amsterdam's Music From Memory label. "Pleasure Centre," on the other hand, doesn't sound far off from the slap bass and FM synths of Eric Serra's hit-or-miss soundtrack to Luc Besson's 1985 film Subway.
The album's profile is slight, with just eight songs totaling barely half an hour's running time; one of its most affecting tracks, the fretless bass and digital synth study "In the Courtyard," is over in just two minutes. It would be easy to detect the faint whiff of irony in the record's more honeyed tropes; we've been conditioned to think of many of these signifiers as being somehow compromised, given their long association with call-center hold music and sauna scenes on late-night cable. But Silver's pastiche has clearly been made with genuine appreciation for the sound of, say, clean-toned guitar run through voluminous reverb, or chunky slap bass framed by gossamer keys. These kinds of musical touchstones can't be easy to reproduce, given that many of them were made in million-dollar studios with period gear; the fidelity of his imitations is no small accomplishment. And even more to his credit is that the music is so emotionally satisfying.
Like any record-collector endeavor, the album is partly an exercise in revisionism—an attempt to take the best bits from an underrated tradition and excise the truly corny bits. Judging from the recent revival of all manner of smooth, fusion-heavy material once dubbed musica non grata, from New Age cassettes heavy on Yamaha DX7 sparkle to Phil Collins himself, we're enjoying a moment where taste is being rethought, and On Vacation plays an invaluable part in the ongoing battle to raze rockist shibboleths. A gorgeous, unassuming little record, it is Silver's most sophisticated virtual environment yet; disappear into it for a while, and you may come back with a newfound appreciation for sounds you once thought irredeemable—yes, even slap bass.


Following their excellent, sun-kissed 2010 EP Blooming Summer, the Montreal electro pop duo of Alexander Cowan and Braids' Raphaelle Standell-Preston release a chillier full-length focused on themes of disconnect, alienation, and independence.

Untogether

In 2010, Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Alexander Cowan spent a couple of months wandering around Central America, and when they came back they made an EP that sounded like an uncommonly lyrical "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay: eight songs of humid, sun-kissed, heart-on-its-cut-off-sleeve electro-pop. Of course, Blue Hawaii was not the only band on the beach in 2010, but Blooming Summer managed to sound like something unique. Standell-Preston's voice moved through these songs like a jellyfish, tumbling with such grace that its sudden sting came as a surprise. "I think about you thrusting into her," she sang on the best song "Blue Gowns", her voice full of anguished jealousy and self-reproach, "And I ask myself, how stupid can you get?" Blooming Summer captured the joys and fears of a new relationship (Standell-Preston and Cowan are a couple) with careful precision, but it also felt unassumingly excellent. Blooming Summer had a quiet release on then-very-niche label Arbutus; you can still download it on their Bandcamp for $1. Standell-Preston became better known for fronting the more guitar-driven band Braids, while Blue Hawaii seemed destined to be a side project little known to people outside the couple's friends in the Montreal DIY scene. Then, of course, that scene blew up.
Sudden, international attention is sometimes enough to make a tight-knit regional scene implode, but in the past few months a few other artists have risen to the occasion and started to fill out the spotlight that Grimes has shone on her home scene Montreal. Doldrums, the scrappy, sample-heavy project from junkyard dreamer Airick Woodhead, stepped up with Lesser Evil, a full-length debut full of soaring, dystopian party anthems, while brooding duo Majical Cloudz recently made the leap from Arbutus to indie-giant Matador on the heels of a strong, idea-packed EP. But there's a downside to this kind of opportunity; people move on.  "As friends grow past the Montreal scene and leave, there's a kind of falling apart there,” Cowan said in a recent FADER interview. When you listen to Blue Hawaii's first proper full-length, Untogether, this comment feels not like a diss to anybody in particular so much as a creative statement of purpose; it contextualizes the themes of disconnect, alienation and independence that coarse through Untogether. As Standell-Preston put it, "I think [making the record] was an attempt to find the glue as everything was drifting apart."
She was actually talking about her partnership with Cowan as much as her hometown. (Well, creatively speaking, not romantically-- they're still together.) In the three years since the cohesive Blooming Summer, they’ve ventured down slightly separate paths: Standell-Preston's taken a more new-agey route (experimenting with avant-garde make-up in performance; making small-talk about chakras in interviews) while Cowan spent some time absorbing EDM culture in Europe. But, true to its title, Untogether is less interested in blending all its competing enthusiasms together and more intent on emphasizing the space that separates them-- in that way at least, it's kind of the anti-Visions. Standell-Preston's vocals are routinely snipped, chopped and pasted back together like ransom notes, while Cowan steers the tracks with underlying trancelike rhythms. Untogether sometimes feels like a reaction against Blooming Summer's easy, inviting pop pleasures-- which is not necessarily a bad thing. At its most evocative, Untogether creates the eerie feeling of being the only person in a cavernous, strobe-lit club. Take the awesome two-part highlight "In Two"-- where the atmosphere's so diffuse and desolate that even a sudden intrusion of handclaps doesn't  feel like a moment of collectivity or unity. Instead, it only emphasizes the feeling of isolation: the claps sound distant, drifted in, and possibly made by ghosts.
"The other day, I had a beautiful thought," Standell-Preston sings on the closing track, "The Other Day", and then lets loose the most elegant-sounding DGAF in recent memory, "What if I didn’t care at all?" It's a freeing moment-- unclasping the pressures of the scene, the stress of communicating with another person, and all the other anxieties that have pulsed beneath the 10 songs that came before it. It's also a much-needed moment of repose. The problem with Untogether is that that Blue Hawaii occasionally get carried away with emphasizing and embracing disjointedness. Cowan's fingers are a little trigger happy, and so the subdued, gradually unfurling beauty of "The Other Day" hints at what might have happened had they given some of these songs a little more breathing room. Like the haunting single "Try To Be", "Day" feels like a moment of both restraint and unity-- Cowan's rippling arpeggios compliment (rather than interrupt) Standell-Preston's crystalline vocals. Blue Hawaii still bloom most vividly when they're working together.


Since I Left You

Contrary to the beliefs of many middle-American supermarket-goers, not all samples are free. Just ask Vanilla Ice. When he "sampled" the bassline from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," he was faced with a multi-million dollar lawsuit, rather than a complementary napkin and toothpick. Sure, nobody bats an eye when copyright law takes some money out of the shiny, rhinestone-encrusted pockets of Rob Van Winkle or Puff Daddy, but as soon as lawsuits trip up avant-hoodlums like John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame, the concept of thievery-as-art becomes a hot topic, and the line between sampling and stealing becomes fiercely contended.
Given the fact that Since I Left You, the debut album from Aussie party animals the Avalanches, contains over 900 individual samples, it's pretty incredible that this thing got released in the first place. The fact that they sample everything from long-forgotten R&B; records to golf instructionals to Madonna's "Holiday" makes it even more impressive. But what really makes this album brilliant is not as much the volume or quality of the samples used as the way that they're employed. The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.
Much of the beauty of the opening title song and its accompanying track, "Stay Another Season," lies in the way that the Avalanches turn obvious sonic mismatches into something all their own. It's not too common that you'll hear a sample of a horse, a rastafarian singer, and an invitation to a Club Med disco all in the same song, but somehow it makes perfect sense under the masterful direction of the Avalanches.
Indeed, many of the most interesting moments on Since I Left You come with these mismatches. "A Different Feeling" sets horn blasts from 1974 against video game sounds from 1988-- the kind of bizarre pairing of classic soul with futuristic sounds that constitutes a substantial part of Avalanches magic. "Radio," which is slated for release as the band's next Australian single, centers around a mantra-like vocal sample, a thick disco bassline, and bits and pieces of filtered guitars and synthesizers.
Throughout Since I Left You, sampled vocals are used almost like percussion. But rather than utilizing the frenetic, intricate rhythms seen in most contemporary rap, the Avalanches repeat small vocal samples over and over again, melding them into their rump-rocking grooves. And while many of these songs rely heavily on the repetition of beats and samples, no single part of the record is allowed to stagnate. Something is always being mixed up-- a sample transposed up or down a few steps, a beat chopped up into little pieces and seamlessly restructured, an unexpected vocal sample popping up out of nowhere before being swallowed up by the massive sound the Avalanches have concocted.
Another key element of Since I Left You is the keen sense of humor the Avalanches display throughout. And "Frontier Psychiatrist," one of two singles already released from the album, is simply one of the funniest songs I've heard in ages. Relying on a heavy, Ninja Tune-style beat for backing, "Frontier Psychiatrist" busts out samples from 37 spoken word recordings, resulting in an oddball, hilarious pastiche of phrases like, "You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!" And some brilliant scratching on a sample of a parrot.
Though it contains many distinct songs and moods, Since I Left You is a remarkably coherent record on all fronts. Aside from the fact that the Avalanches achieve a certain uniform "sound" on this album, subtler elements come into play as well. Songs blend seamlessly into one another. Samples reappear from song to song. And the album's final cut, "Extra Kings," with its breezy flute and psychedelic swells of sound, puts a brilliant twist on the album's title track, fading out with that same chipmunky voice lamenting, "I've tried but I just can't get you/ Ever since the day I left you."
In releasing Since I Left You, the Avalanches have essentially brought hundreds of slabs of inanimate vinyl to life. Though it was no doubt meticulously constructed, this is an album brimming with spontaneity, joy, sadness, humor, reflection, and general human-ness. With its high fun factor and subtle traces of deeper emotion, Since I Left You is the perfect record for the party, and for the period of regret and recovery after the party.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a touchstone of Midwestern emo, the 1995 debut from Cap’n Jazz.

Cap’n Jazz: Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over

Shmap’n Shmazz

Growing up in the suburbs, you make formative bonds with people you might have almost nothing in common with. Most connections forged in high school—friendships, romances, career paths—don’t survive graduation. This includes Cap’n Jazz, a band that was created by two teenage brothers in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
Upon the release of their debut LP, they exploded and then imploded within the span of a few months. They had no obvious chemistry, no organizing artistic principles, nothing to suggest they took more than a minute to consider anything besides the songs they were making. These songs defined the shape of punk to come by not giving it any shape at all, by going in at least three different directions at once, and living out the main psychosomatic driver of Midwestern emo: brain and heart locked in a war for every last drop of warm blood in your body. The run-on title of their one and only album begs you to experience the music the way it was made: shout first, process later.
The original version of Cap’n Jazz featured the local high school’s star running back as the drummer. He quit to focus on football and a 12-year-old Mike Kinsella learned how to play a 16-piece drum set on the fly. “I was garbage, but it was hilarious,” he once joked. His older brother by three years, Tim, was a natural leader—in a 2017 documentary, his mother remembers him as a precocious elementary schooler, retelling the Immaculate Conception in journalistic language so crisp and charismatic that his teachers imagined a future where he’d become President of the United States. Though an acclaimed and prolific author, teacher, and musician, he’s also spent the past 20 years making almost entirely unintelligible records with Joan of Arc, one of the most consistently loathed bands in indie rock.
Buffalo Grove is an overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb—which would have made Latino guitarist Victor Villarreal an outcast by default, even putting aside his predilections for metal and dropping acid. He skipped the first practice but eventually showed up playing metal legend Randy Rhoads’ “Dee” for a band who’d written a number of songs with only two chords. The definitive lineup of Cap’n Jazz was rounded out by affable bassist Sam Zurick, and guitarist Davey Von Bohlen, who later achieved great success with the Promise Ring and Maritime and now spends most of his time focusing on his Milwaukee accounting practice.
“When Cap’n Jazz was, like, happening, we didn’t ever thought of ourselves as an emo band. Maybe they all called us an emo band, we were just like weirdo punk band,” Tim protests. His story checks out: Prior to making their first full-length, Cap’n Jazz released a handful of singles on compilations with extremely ’90s Midwestern punk names like How the Midwest Was Won, It’s a Punk Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand, and A Very Punk Christmas; the Kinsellas covered “Winter Wonderland” with their mother, and it inspired Chicago’s Screeching Weasel to call them the “crudiest [sic] and most pretentious band in Chicago.” The shorthand for Cap’n Jazz’s only album—Shmap’n Shmazz—is scrawled across the original CD version released by Man With Gun, a label that put out a total of three titles and might as well have been a private press.
Even today, Shmap’n Shmazz’s take on punk rock feels rootless, so imagine how it must’ve sounded in 1995. Up until that point, “emo” was in no danger of being a New York Times crossword clue—whether it referred to the literal “emotional hardcore” of Revolution Summer in 1985 Washington, D.C. to Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, which was released the previous year, emo aspired to a monastic degree of purity and intensity. “I said I bled in the arms of a girl I barely met,” or “My heart revealed my cause/I’m lying naked at your feet,” or “I dream to heal your wounds/But I bleed myself” are illustrative lyrics, where a wicked crush can only be consummated by supreme sacrifice to a higher power—no wonder this stuff played so well in church basements. Conversely, the first line in the opening track “Little League”—“Hey coffee eyes/You got me coughin’ up my cookie heart”—sorta expresses the same idea as Rites of Spring, Jawbreaker, and Sunny Day Real Estate but the unabashed goofy and tactile infatuation behind it was sacrilege.
Why “Little League” begins Shmap’n Shmazz by fading into a full sprint remains a mystery— maybe they thought it was one of the few cool production tricks they could afford or maybe they wanted to replicate what it must’ve felt like to anyone outside of the greater Chicagoland area in 1995: If you weren’t following them every step of the way, you’re already breathlessly trying to catch up. They did not take the baton from any identifiable predecessors and were only influenced by bands in their immediate vicinity. On “Yes, I Am Talking To You,” the line, “I’m dying to tell you I’m dying,” is attributed to Bob Nanna, Tim’s bandmate in the short-lived the Sky Corvair, who would later become the frontman of Braid.
According to Braid’s Chris Broach, he and Kinsella were in school competing for the same women while exchanging ideas that would define “Midwestern emo” in perpetuity: incomprehensible guitar interplay, bursts of surrealist and hyper-diaristic lyricism, unabashed about its girl-crazy impulses, and casting a critical eye to the heteronormativity that always crops up in any scene that values aggressive music. The most confrontational moment on Shmap’n Shmazz occurs on its most un-punk song; over fumbling flamenco picking, Tim intones “boys kissing boys,” without elaborating. “Oh Messy Life” struggles with awe and admonishment while considering the brazenness of men, whether telling of a “boldly bald” uncle who wore a hat when swimming (“I know there’s a lesson in there somewhere”), or “boys who smell like salami and boys who’ve never apologized”—if juvenile toxic masculinity had a smell, it would be salami.
Cap’n Jazz loved a great melody but they wouldn’t let that get in the way of their next batshit idea. While Villareal’s chops would fully flower in his later work, on Shmap’n Shmazz, it almost sounds like he’s bullying the Guitar World- side of himself; the classical flourishes of “Bluegrassish” are antagonistic when applied to a gainless electric guitar, while “Flashpoint: Catheter” creates a paralyzing unease with guitar strings getting tickle-tortured. Amick and Mike always come off like the guys who just wanted to be there for the party, but in the rare, brilliant moments where everyone sounds like they’re playing on the same beat—the stutter-steps of “Puddle Splashers” and “In the Clear”’s dive-bombing drop—Cap’n Jazz create a blueprint for any emo band that claimed math-rock and vice versa. And then there’s the moments where Tim realizes the smartest guy in the room is the class clown: stopping “In the Clear” midway to recite half of the alphabet. Or throwing a French horn solo into “Basil’s Kite” to bestow punk spirit on the least punk instrument.
Of course, the class clown is usually using humor to deflect something that can’t be shared without judgment. Both Tim and Villareal have said that Cap’n Jazz served as a release valve for their anxieties; the former called Cap’n Jazz “therapeutic” during a time when he was already in the grips of substance addiction. Tim has also spoken about traumatic moments in both his childhood home and church that festered unattended until he started going to therapy as an adult. The Kinsellas were raised by a doting mother and a father whose behavior wasn’t seen as alcoholic or abusive at the time, but it would take decades for his issues to be explored in non-illusory terms.
Given the way Cap’n Jazz dealt with their demons, maybe “emo” or “weirdo punk” isn’t as proper of a classification for Shmap’n Shmazz as “psychedelic rock.” Amick and Villareal were going to school on acid, and Tim supposedly wrote the album’s lyrics in one night while high on mushrooms. The music of Shmap’n Shmazz is pure release, and the experience felt more like a purge in every sense for Tim, projectiles of partially digested and transformed memories coming violently to the surface. Much of the record goes beyond the cleansing ritual of confession and catharsis, searching for something closer to transcendence.
On first exposure, Tim may as well be speaking in tongues. Sometimes it’s all too clear what he means, others, he stacks syllables for sheer sound. He sings of a “Ringwald haze,” evoking the era’s avatar for romantic aspiration, tangible but always just out of reach. But then, “We’re using judo like Bruce Lee,” which...your guess is as good as mine. But make no mistake, this is poetry, some of the most vivid and visceral to be documented anywhere in 1995, let alone shouted, spittled, and spewed on a punk rock record. (Freak-folk singer Devendra Banhart described Tim’s early work as comparable to Rimbaud or “going to the zoo on quaaludes, but all the other animals are on speed.”)
In retrospect, Tim unintentionally set the course for freaky folk artists from Jeff Mangum to Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan to Banhart himself, collapsing the time-space continuum, bundling sexual awakening and awkwardness, birth and death, intense pain and fleeting, incapacitating joy into a collage suspended in animation that one can point at and say—ah, youth.
On “Yes, I Am Talking to You,” a piggy bank serves as an indoctrination to merciless capitalism, an innocent’s first experience with money turning into a future where “hammy fat fingers pinch clammy cold coins.” But there’s also the sweetness of a butter cookie ring on the finger nibbled down to the knuckle, “peanuts and kiddie Molotov cocktails on a starved stomach on Sunday afternoons,” chasing kites, splashing puddles, and the awestruck feeling of getting out of Buffalo Grove, being engulfed by Chicago, itself dwarfed by a “Van Gogh sky.” On “Planet Shhh,” he responds to this paralyzing insignificance by throwing it back at its creator: “Hey God, I’ll pull you outta the sky and make you 14 again.”
When kids are still in the process of growing into their bodies, “a size-and-a-half ago shoe” rules the concept of time. Cap’n Jazz may have actually lasted about that long, but longevity doesn’t make for good punk rock legend. Better to be too beautiful, too doomed—suicide, drug addiction, irreconcilable “creative differences,” buckling under commercial pressure you never asked for. These are the things we use to convince us that certain forms of genius are divine, that they can be too much for a human to actually bear. From a certain angle, Cap’n Jazz fits that narrative.
As the band slept in their van after a show at Little Rock, Arkansas’ Das Yutes a Go-Go, Villareal was in the midst of an overdose, peeing all over himself. Tim woke up screaming and in a panic. They took Villareal to a nearby hospital and had a vote about whether to keep going. Like most high-school bands, the quintet gave this whole thing a shot because it seemed like fun. And like most high-school bands, Cap’n Jazz ended because the fun wasn’t enough to justify the hassle.
For all of its impact on post-hardcore, math-rock, and virtually every band that’s ever been called “Midwestern emo,” it’s fair to say that the one thing Cap’n Jazz did that went the furthest towards cementing their legacy is breaking up months after the release of Shmap’n Shmazz. Every project that has flowed from Cap’n Jazz ever since is part of a symbiotic feedback loop that amplifies the legend of Cap’n Jazz.
Tim Kinsella kept the most active, creating new permutations of the Cap’n Jazz lineup, collaborating with Angel Olsen, recored under the name Tim Kinsellas, and inspiring some of the most caustic album reviews of the early 21st-century with Joan of Arc’s astronomical pretensions. Mike never seemed to identify with punk rock to the same degree as Tim, and when he eventually went downstate to the University of Illinois, he stripped emo of its hardcore lineage and replaced it with post-rock and minimalist jazz on American Football, which eventually restoked the sibling rivalry by replacing Shmap’n Shmazz as the most influential album of the past decade’s “emo revival.” Cap’n Jazz have been called the “Emo Velvet Underground,” but that doesn’t quite work—I don’t know what became of the lucky few people who saw these guys live, but each of their members started like 50 other bands, all of whom created a new galaxy where Cap’n Jazz is the centrifugal Big Bang.
In the time since their break up in 1995, Cap’n Jazz reunited twice—the original lineup played a run of shows in 2010 and in 2017, when they were able to capitalize on their massive influence. This once seemed like an impossibility given Tim’s aversion to nostalgia and sentimentality; but according to Von Bohlen, the one thing that brought them together was the fear of losing “that emotional attachment where we feel like we could be defined for the rest of our musical lives by this one thing that happened in our teenage years.”
The truly breathtaking commitment of these shows indicated otherwise. At FYF last year, a 42-year old Tim whipped tambourines into the crowd, took his shirt off and unbuckled his belt, dove into the crowd, gave out his phone number, and let Devendra Banhart join them on stage to expand the “kitty cat” part of “Little League” for about three minutes. Compared to the hipper, more tasteful artists who would occupy that same stage for most of the weekend, it was Cap’n Jazz who seemed like the ones who tapped into an endlessly renewable spirit that exists outside themselves; you don’t have to live in your teenage emotions to get something out of them, and when one wave of fans feels like they’ve aged out, there’s another that needs more.


Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I\n ...

The Lemon of Pink

Has it really been fifteen months since I came across The Books? I remember clearly the first time I listened to Thought for Food. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my local laundromat, two loads in the washers, enjoying the shade underneath the green awning that hangs over the glass façade. Tucked into my shoulder bag I had a clutch of promo CDs that I dug out of my mailbox on the way over. My usual routine is to click through a track or two of each to get a sense of which records I want to listen to completely. After breezing through and discarding several records I've now forgotten, I snapped Thought for Food into the discman and listened straight through.
It was different-- that was clear right away-- but it was an easy listen. I put down whatever I was reading, settled into my plastic patio chair, and squinted through the sunlight at the Greek restaurant across the street, concentrating on what was coming through my headphones: the familiar sound of guitar and violin cut up and mixed with vocal samples. Thought for Food was easy to love but I realized that I'd have trouble describing what made it interesting. It was too simple, too subtle; there was too much space.
Now comes The Lemon of Pink. Having listened to The Books' debut god knows how many times since last summer and thoroughly absorbed its sound, the element of surprise has gone. In fact, the first time I heard the six-minute title suite that opens this album it seemed eerily familiar. In the first minute there's a repeating two-chord piano riff sourced from scratchy vinyl, a banjo, a collage of violin fragments, and a sample of a heavily accented woman intoning the nonsense phrase that gives the record its name. But then comes a surprise: naked, unprocessed vocals by a woman named Anne Doerner, far too modern sounding to be pulled from an old record.
Indeed, the most apparent difference between The Lemon of Pink and Thought for Food is this record's greater use of original vocals. The Books obviously have a lot of old records lying around, so it makes sense to insert a bit of structure into their finely wrought collages. Some of the vocals find their way into tracks that are essentially proper songs, others are cut and pasted into glitched-up melodic configurations. Doerner's contribution to the title track is one of the best examples of the former. Her cracked, bluesy purr fits well with The Books' solid American roots core, and the melody is spare and understated, wisely remaining one of many elements rather than becoming the prime focus of the song. There's so much breathing room here, and her voice fills it perfectly.
Books co-founder Nick Zammuto sings on several of the other tracks that play with song structure. "Don't Even Sing About It" is unusually dark and downcast, almost like an old Will Oldham dirge given The Books treatment, with unpredictable vocal samples cutting through the marching guitar plucking. "Get used to hanging if you hang long enough" is the sum total of the original lyrics, but it's the sort of cryptic splinter that suits this essentially fragmented music. "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" begins in typical Books fashion, with quick surges of crowd noise, vibraphone, guitar and bits of violin, but then the voice comes in, a flat sing-speak intoning Isaac Brockisms like "the mind has a mind of its own." I'm a little iffy on these two; where Thought for Food's "All Our Base Are Belong to Them" was weird and otherworldly, these vocal tracks fit neatly into the experimental indie rock landscape. Both are solid, but somehow the presence of this voice makes The Books sound just a little less special.
Contrast these more song-oriented bits with the sampled voice (I think it's Doerner's again) run through the shredder on "There Is No There". The various instruments and samples fold in and then start to swirl into an aural kaleidoscope, and then the vocals flutter past, too quick and broken for rational comprehension but emotionally clear as glass. You don't know what they're saying, but the feeling is immediate and intense. The power of "There Is No There" makes me think that at this point The Books still work best as collage artists, assembling odds and ends into new and affecting compositions.
The Lemon of Pink makes for an interesting contrast with Thought for Food, in part because the two records have so much in common. Several of this record's tracks that closely follow the Thought for Food template are even better than their forbears, with more dynamic range and a greater sense of development. The way the sample of a flight attendant from a Japanese airline forms the centerpiece of "Tokyo" is absolutely perfect, matching the editing brilliance of Thought for Food's "Aleatoric", and "Take Time" is one of the more epic 3\xBD-minute instrumentals you'll come across, building from quiet, simple samples into a joyous cluster of words and acoustic sound. The Lemon of Pink may sound a bit like this duo's debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.