The debut from Guns N' Roses was a watershed moment in '80s rock that chronicled every vice of Los Angeles led by the lye-voiced Axl Rose and a legendary, switchblade-sharp band.

Appetite for Destruction

The video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Appetite for Destruction’s mission statement, mirrors the journey that an unsuspecting listener might take during their first spin through Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut. A fresh-faced, 25-year-old Axl Rose, so country that he’s got a long stalk of wheat between his teeth, gets off a bus and enters a landscape that screams “bad side of town”; neon lights flash darkly, a shady guy perched on the corner approaches him, black-stockinged legs catch Axl’s eye. Cut to a similarly dank club where, with the aid of Aqua Net, Axl and the rest of Guns N’ Roses are barreling through the track, while TVs flicker into A Clockwork Orange-style fantasia about the bad news lurking all around.
The electric opening notes, played with sputtering enthusiasm by lead guitarist Slash, only hint at the terror that’s coming; Axl’s under-his-breath “Oh my god” cranks up the tension; and then, aided by Steven Adler’s lightly swinging drums and backing vocals that recall a demon choir, the full horror is exposed—a world where every vice is for sale depending on your mood for indulgence and your tolerance for sin. The chugging breakdown, which culminates in Axl’s shrieked “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna diiiieeeeeaagghghhhhhghghghgh,” is “Tubular Bells” through a Marshall stack, a horror movie in miniature for anyone who thought the rock’n’roll lifestyle was all fun and games.
Amid the bumper crop of records from ’80s bands who graduated from Sunset Strip clubs to MTV’s newly minted  “Headbangers Ball”—the self-titled debuts from glam brats Faster Pussycat and biker-bloozers L.A. Guns—Appetite stood out for how absolutely harsh it got, its chronicles of the wild life in Los Angeles plainly stated by the lye-voiced Axl while his bandmates bobbed and thrashed. The Los Angeles portrayed on Appetite inverts the ideal of Randy Newman’s ever-lovable metropolis, turning it into a place where the then-in-vogue term “drug war” meant fighting with the spectre of heroin (aka “Mr. Brownstone”), where trickle-down economics meant buying cheap hooch on the last scraps of credit, and where paranoid fantasies were always justified. Women were beautiful and you could even put the ones with less utility in their place every so often. It was the jungle, baby, and you were gonna die.
Appetite for Destruction didn’t only stand out because of its storm of bad vibes, although that sure helped. The band’s stew of influences—caustic punk, sinewy funk, Aerosmith, the Stones—helped make it a switchblade-sharp statement of intent. “In the last year, I’ve spent over $1,300 on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that,” Axl told the UK music magazine Sounds in 1987, and while Mike Clink’s economical production doesn’t have the gloss of Wham!’s Make It Big, studying influences beyond the glammed-up bills at the Troubadour  played a large part in the band’s sound.
From the their grimy photo shoots that became Metal Edge pinups to their candid discussions of how they survived before hitting it big (“Strippers were our main source of income. They’d pay for booze, sometimes you could eat...” Slash told Rolling Stone), Guns N’ Roses were often portrayed as a clouded mass of debauchery with insatiable needs to simultaneously consume and destroy. “We are just being ourselves, but at the same time, these ’bad boy’ images tend to sell,” Axl told SPIN in 1988. Slash told Melody Maker something similar that same year: “We’re not mean, we’re not nasty, we’re decent people. We’re just out for a good time, like five teenagers on the loose.”
The Parents Music Resource Center panic that took hold in the mid-’80s helped fuel GNR’s reputation as “bad boys.” The band were open about their vices on record and in interviews, but their wide-ranging appeal, despite the cluck-clucking of reactionary critics, wasn’t merely the result of them wearing their indulgences on their sleeves. They had shrewd ears and wide-ranging influences, resulting in a sound that used bouncing-ball grooves with punk’s economy that vibrated with paranoia and antipathy yet could (very occasionally) settle into romantic bliss. Bassist Duff McKagan came from the Seattle punk scene, drumming for the legendary hyper-power-poppers Fastbacks; he and drummer Steven Adler would hone their rhythm-section camaraderie by listening to Cameo and Prince LPs. Slash, the London-born son of a costumer who designed for Bowie, decided to pick up the guitar when he heard Aerosmith’s 1975 opus Rocks, telling Guitar World that the album’s “drunken, chemically induced powerhouse sound just sold me and changed me forever.” Izzy Stradlin, the band’s chief songwriter who’d escaped Indiana with Axl, had a Charlie Watts air about him, being the coolest guy in the room while he laid down riffs from which Slash’s solos could take flight.
“Welcome to the Jungle,” the album’s opener, is followed by “It’s So Easy”—one of the greatest one-two punches in rock history. A snarling chronicle of the void at the center of any Dionysian orgy, it’s powered by Adler’s butterfly-bee drumming and riffs that sound like they’ve been turned into pistons. The lessons in funk taken by Adler and McKagan make the album’s most harrowing moments roll out of the speakers all throughout—the shimmying that underlies the rancid takedown of a cleaned-up bad girl on “My Michelle,” the musical portrayal of the “West Coast struttin’” by the blotto protagonist of “Nightrain.” Axl’s scorched-earth upper register is at key times doubled not just by his bandmates, but by a low-pitched version of his own voice—detailing that adds another edge to the group’s dystopian reveries.
Even with Appetite’s thick layers of grime, its path to mainstream success was shoved along by songs that reflected a bit of Southern California sunshine. “Sweet Child O’Mine” was the album’s big hit, a mushy love song set aloft by Slash’s thick arpeggiating (which, as he told Rolling Stone, was a “goofy personal exercise” overheard by Axl, who decided to write lyrics to it ) and Axl’s doe-eyed lyrics. It’s not all light-hearted—his initially muttered, eventually yelped, “Where do we go? Where do we go now?” that peppers the bridge reveals his ever-present search for more as the song resolves in a minor key.
The album’s most triumphant moment is the Jock-Jam-in-waiting “Paradise City,” a fever-dream anthem where green grass and lovely women abound, where everyone’s so cheerful that no one will give you shit if you add a synthesizer to the mix. The main riff is one of those so-simple-it’s-criminal melodies that get arenas shaking; when it double-times at the song’s end, with Slash freaking out on a solo and Axl pleading to be taken haaaawwoooooommmmeeee, it’s an invitation to exhume the toxins of the mean streets and the meaner drugs and the even meaner people and to just thrash away their residue.
Like most CD-era albums, Appetite has its lesser tracks, but even songs that feel like filler have odd filigrees that set them apart from their peers’ padding. “Anything Goes,” in which a horned-up Axl gets ready to get freaky, opens with Slash laying down an abstract psych-jazz solo and closes with a thrashing rework of the song’s central riff; “Think About You” is a fairly boilerplate love song elevated by beaded-curtain counterpoint guitars on its winsome chorus. “You’re Crazy,” which would later get a stripped-down treatment on the band’s stopgap 1988 LP G N’ R Lies, is a ball of paranoia made even more frantic by the guitars lagging ever so slightly behind its manic pace.
But “Rocket Queen,” the album’s closer, is a brilliant study in contrasts that still unnerves. It’s a mini-epic that hinted at the more sprawling aesthetic Axl and his bandmates would adopt on 1991’s Use Your Illusion diptych. (Those records contained the ruminative “November Rain” and the crystalline “Don’t Cry,” ones that the band had been workshopping since their earliest days as Hollywood Rose, and that were deemed inappropriate for Appetite.) It’s petulant, carnal, and romantic all at once. It famously incorporates a female orgasm recorded in their studio, with the woman’s cries and shudders folding into Slash’s guitar pyrotechnics, leaping into a yelp alongside the guitar. Its first half chugs and seethes while Axl goes over his bad side in detail—he’s seen it all, dined at elaborate buffets and came away still hungry, schooled himself in the art of manipulation. He is, in short, a bad dude…until he’s redeemed by the song’s second half, all windswept balladry that allows Axl to engage in a little street-corner whoa-oh-oh-ing. “All I ever wanted…was for you to know that I care,” he croons, an exclamation point proffered by the band in unison.
It’s a surprising closing sentiment for an album so drenched in fear and loathing. But taken of a piece with the band members’ declarations that despite the hard living they were just five guys out to have a good time, it also shows how Guns N’ Roses’ early outlook was as animated not just by its members’ heady stew of influences. Perhaps all that wanton consumption could lead to a place of contentment that offered more than the comfort offered by the Midwest, more than the neon-lit debauchery of clubs’ back rooms—a wandering through the jungle that would open up into paradise.


The rapper’s latest album is a clear mid-career apex that shoves his always outlandish style into territories further afield than ever before.

Aethiopes

Rapper billy woods attacked his 2012 album History Will Absolve Me from the mindset that it could be the curtain call on his career. If the project failed, the Fidel Castro-invoking title would serve as a final message to an industry that rejected him, and he’d disappear into New York’s abandoned subway tunnels, never to be heard from again. A perennial figure in the city’s alt-rap scene, woods had been defined by his association with Cannibal Ox’s Vordul Mega and as half of Super Chron Flight Brothers, alongside Privilege. But woods didn’t become an underground king as he’d hoped and seemed destined to be just another Gotham rapper who fell out of orbit.
Then with help from what was by that point an ailing rap blogosphere, History Will Absolve Me achieved cult classic status. woods seized the opportunity to forge a reputation as one of the fiercest rappers in New York, and Backwoodz Studioz, the label he founded in 2002, became a kingdom for outsiders and alternative thinkers who didn’t fit in anywhere else on the rap landscape. Earlier this month, the label released a 10-year anniversary edition of the still-chilling History Will Absolve Me, calling it the album that single-handedly kept its lights on. In its wake is Aethiopes, a clear mid-career apex that shoves woods’ always outlandish style into territories further afield than ever before.
It’s not easy to pull a maverick like woods further into the mire, certainly not after the sorcerous brilliance of last year’s Haram. Required is a collaborator draped in enchantments and silk; an eclectic crate digger who shares his phosphorescent tendencies. Fortunately, there is Preservation, a selective producer two decades deep in the game whose previous lives have seen him serve as Yasiin Bey’s tour DJ, join forces with Ka for the disorienting Days With Dr. Yen Lo, and record an album composed entirely of samples unearthed in Hong Kong. With Preservation behind the boards on every track, Aethiopes skids across eras, countries, and cultures. It begins with “Asylum” and the swirling sounds of piano keys, delicate guitars, and snaking brass riffs that appear sourced from old North East Africa or Middle Eastern music. The song follows woods as he assumes the role of a boy living under the cloud of battling parents within a gated residence, watching the unusual activities of a new neighbor with Hitchcockian obsession.
A lyricist whose hieroglyphics typically require work to crack, woods often writes from shifting perspectives, weaving in poignant imagery, strange motifs, and seemingly personal elements. On “Protoevangelium,” he gives details about a party in Chinatown spent smoking cigars and spotting Julius Erving. woods has always rapped with unbreakable forward movement—flowing in long sentences, never dwelling too long on any syllable—that lends itself well to storytelling. But these days, he finds the pocket a little better, seemingly more mindful about running over margins or bumping up against beats.
Preservation’s instrumentals are minimalist, with samples not always arranged in solid, repeating loops, but instead feel like they’re floating around the room. “The Doldrums” deploys a small number of slow-moving elements—twangy fret play, bassy hammer-ons—to form a dusty beat that summons feelings of the cinematic Wild West. Similarly, the Sergio Leone-evoking “Christine” includes some before-the-bullets-fly tension, the vinyl hissing like rain as woods plays a high plains drifter in a dirty trench coat. Then there’s the doom march of “Sauvage,” featuring guest verses from Boldy James and Gabe ’Nandez. The steady beep resembles a life support machine, ramping up the sense of anxiety as woods raps about kids caught up in bad situations: a boy entering 11th grade having already beaten a case for shooting a violent uncle; parents who are forced to kick their child out of the family home before the house is shot up. “NYNEX” sets out a bleak vision for the future with flashes of harmonica that sound like music from a hobo living in dystopia.
The Backwoodz ethos has attracted a million Def Jux comparisons, which aren’t inaccurate but perhaps outdated. Whereas El Producto and his company heaved 1990s brass knuckles New York rap as subterranean as it would go, Backwoodz’ can feel totally adrift of time or linearity. It’s a crew that refuses to glance backwards—in 2022, there are no obvious analogs to Backwoodz. Still, it’s exciting to hear woods join forces with El-P and Breeze Brewin of Juggaknots, a veteran of another sadly perished independent rap institute in Fondle ‘Em, on “Heavy Water.” On this crossover episode, the trio share the mic like it’s a game of pass the parcel: El-P expresses confusion at Google Chrome, and woods calls himself the “multiverse Benzino,” a hilarious reference to one of rap’s most unpalatable villains of the 2000s.
The album’s final stretch encapsulates its elaborate brilliance. On “Remorseless,” Preservation lines up the otherworldly Moog sounds while woods delivers a broad benediction on the lessons he’s learned over the years; closer “Smith + Cross” is built around a piercing guitar sample that lends it an appropriately epic feel. You can picture woods standing at a new zenith. As it turns out, it wasn’t history that absolved him but his own grand aspirations, belatedly recognized in his own time.


Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs:Ohia singer-songwriter takes a few steps away from his recent full, collaborative sound.

Jason Molina: Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go

Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go

Like Bill Murray, Demi Moore, and Pac-Man, Jason Molina has a thing about ghosts. In the singer-songwriter's lyric vocabulary, "ghost" ranks alongside "moon" and "blues" in the top three most-used nouns, and in 2000 he named an album recorded under his previous guise, Songs:Ohia, Ghost Tropic. But Molina's phantasm fetish goes beyond linguistics; often, when his songs, voice, and production are at their best, Molina even begins to sound like a ghost, a reasonable approximation of what folk music from beyond the grave would resemble.
Molina's recent incarnation as the frontman of the southern-fried Magnolia Electric Co. has moved him away from that obsession, as despite the frequent use of the word "ghost," spectral visitations don't usually come with slide-guitar solos. Since the retirement of the Songs:Ohia alias, Molina's records have become more and more crowded, a progression away from his sparse, vacant beginnings to a more full and collaborative sound. Let Me Go3, on the other hand, represents a visit back to those alone-in-the-studio early days, and in doing so restores the haunted to his house.
Or maybe I should say "haunted mansion." While most folk singers go automatically to a production style that screams intimate, aiming to sound like they're sitting right next to you on the couch playing their songs, Molina's solo work emphasizes space-- you might be in the same room, but he's on the other side of an empty great hall. Rather than whispering in your ear, his voice is all about projection, surrounding you on all sides with thousand-mile echo on "It's Easier Now" and "Some Things Never Try", proving again and again that meager instrumentation doesn't have to sound diminutive and cozy.
In their paradoxically rich emptiness, many of the songs on Let Me Go don't settle for simple guitar-and-singing either, with Molina adding touches of piano and wheezing pump organ to "It Costs You Nothing", and a tortoise-speed drum-machine murmur to the album's final three tracks. Meanwhile, analog hiss fills every available nook and cranny, with occasional creaks and studio clatter that will thoroughly freak out anyone who dares listen on headphones in an empty apartment. Dynamics aren't ignored either, as after eight tracks of post-storm hush Molina abruptly pulls out the electric guitar on the final song, tuned to an awful clanging tone and blurting out shockingly loud string-bending notes in between verses.
But any successful ghost knows that it's not just the medium that's important in a good haunting, it's also the message. Molina once again proves himself the master of the opening line, from the thick imagery of the very commencement of the album ("Behind these eyes/ A desert spirit/ Sea serpent heart/ Inside a sunken ship") to apocalyptic weather forecasts ("The dark outside the world/ I think it looks like rain") to eerie, desperate paranoia ("Something must've happened to both of us"). The two songs with repetitive titles (the title track and "Get Out Get Out Get Out") come off especially ghostly, the perseverance only strengthening their purpose as either urgent warnings or longings for release, which presumably are the priorities of most spectral beings.
So is Let Me Go the long-awaited return to world's end folk supremacy for Molina, a retreat from the Crazy Horse fantasy camp of Magnolia Electric Co.? Probably not, given that its release is timed almost simultaneous to another Magnolia record, and the fact that Molina continues to only rarely play shows without the protective layer of a full band. But for fans missing the pause-in-the-thunderstorm pregnant solitude of Songs:Ohia, Let Me Go will get you that fix you've been craving, a teasingly short half-hour reminder of his old persona. Impersonating the paranormal must be an exhausting task, but at least Molina is willing to give us a brief haunting for old time's sake.


The Chilean American musician’s third album this year is a nominal successor to 2015’s ambient film score Pomegranates, but where that album sprawled, Telas is taut and exhaustively balanced.

Telas

Nicolás Jaar’s 2020 output so far amounts to three albums which, at first glance, have little to do with one another. First, he released a new collection under the alias Against All Logic, his Beyoncé-and-Kanye-sampling dance project, which clanged into the world like a soundtrack to the last party before February turned to March. Then the pandemic shuttered clubs and Jaar unveiled Cenizas, the long-awaited successor to his most overtly personal records, 2011’s Space Is Only Noise and 2016’s Sirens. Cenizas was a surprise: When it arrived, most of us had only been in quarantine for a few weeks, but Jaar’s prescient music sounded withdrawn and cautionary, using drawn-out ambient passages to explore an expansive sense of solitude. He may be putting out albums faster than we can get haircuts, but the 30-year-old nonetheless suggests Thoreau contemplating at Walden Pond, an artist in lockdown for reasons of conviction rather than contagion.
Months have passed and while COVID-19 continues to rage in the Americas, the Chilean American producer gives us Telas, a record in which he continues to explore solitude. Telas is the nominal successor to his 2015 film score Pomegranates, made in the vein of an ambient musician. But while Pomegranates was sprawling, Telas is a taut, exhaustively balanced work, although its four long songs add up to an hour of music. In the context of Jaar’s busy year, it signifies a continued blurring of his various roles—DJ, ambient craftsman, distinctive vocalist with an electronic toolkit—and the album’s deliberate structure and ominous mood indicate that Jaar can make direct, even political statements without sung lyrics or speech samples.
The record begins with one of the blown-out horns that Jaar has been favoring recently, accompanied by percussion performed on wooden and metal instruments built by artists Anna Ippolito and Marzio Zorio. We’ve heard Jaar use custom-built devices before, on Cenizas and the latest Against All Logic record. Here, the objects—which have both a harsh metallic ping and a dull, quick decay—suggest ancient sounds, dusted and polished to seem startling and new. The rest of opener “Telahora” and its follow-up, “Telencima,” never command the listener’s entire attention, but they’re full of symmetrical passages, calls that wait minutes before they hear responses, and phrases that sound transposed from melodic to rhythmic instruments. Jaar has mastered the art of changing his stems mid-line, turning strings into bells and back again. One of Telas’ joys is the way he shifts his sonics fluidly and frequently, without the gridded template of a danceable beat.
The record’s understatement eventually builds to a striking climax near the end of the third song: a bass clarinet, treated heavily to sound like an arpeggiated synth. It’s the most forceful moment on an album that remains effortlessly elusive, as well as an anomaly that seems endless in its reference: It suggests both the build-ups essential to dance music and the prog-rock influences that slide under the surface of Jaar’s sensibility. Jaar has discussed his love for Pink Floyd in the past, and even on a record as far afield from traditional songwriting as he’s ever ventured, their presence occasionally looms.
The last track, “Telallás,” is all denouement after Jaar’s proggy woodwind playing, but it keeps us oriented by employing more repetitive musical phrases than the album’s ponderous middle section. It’s a fitting conclusion to a record by an artist who, 12 years into his career, has little to prove about his range or ability. Telas is not a culmination for Jaar, even if it brings his ambient strains closer than ever to the more crowd-pleasing facets of his work. It suggests, instead, that his various guises were always working toward a common aim—as though all he had to do was lead us to the other end of his studio and pull the tarp off something he’s been laboring over, and suddenly every piece in the room seems like an indispensable part of a whole body of work.

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The adventurous New York label that helped to define the sound of early-1980s left-field dance music celebrates its 30th with a comp.

Various Artists: Ze 30: Ze Records Story 1979-2009

Ze 30: Ze Records Story 1979-2009

An almost-teacher growing up in the Bronx during the 1960s starts making disco records influenced by 30s jazz and Caribbean calypso during the mid-70s. A Harvard dropout and Village Voice theater critic is coerced by her boyfriend, heir to a British maternity-goods empire, to record some music. The suggestion is seconded by a Parisian punk-shop owner then new to New York. The song is called "Disco Clone", a brittle dance track by a hot woman about how all the hot women at the clubs look exactly the same, but that shouldn't stop boys from wanting to bed them. It's funny-- it's a disco track, but a disco track that ridicules and defiles the image of disco.
Later, the dropout's record is produced by the almost-teacher, who has taken to wearing zoot suits. She calls him an "ice-cream soda," which is supposed to be an insult. Along the way, they're joined by a saxophonist who punches his audience members in the face, and a couple of friends from suburban Detroit who record abstract funk with beat poetry over it. This all happens in the span of about four years, during which Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban of Ze Records-- and August Darnell, Cristina, James Chance and Was (Not Was)-- change the shape of music around them. Very New York.
The records released on Ze at the dawn of the 80s wouldn't have had a comfortable home elsewhere. August Darnell, the almost-teacher (he earned a Master's in English with the intention of joining the vocation, but music intervened), had some success with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, but wanted more freedom-- freedom he got as Ze's in-house producer and with his new project, Kid Creole and the Coconuts. James Chance and the Contortions made violent, anti-musical rock that people were calling "no wave," but Ze invited him to record disco-- a chance he jumped at, presumably because it would enable him to piss off the fans he had accidentally earned trying to piss people off.
Some of the label's singles were fairly straight disco with a flair for theater-- "Deputy of Love", for example, by Darnell's friends Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band. Others, like Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out," were songs only familiar when broken into discrete parts-- a disembodied string melody, the purr of a woman's voice, hippie poetry, UFO sound effects making casual visits, Latin percussion. But together? Unpalatable to everyone-- too glamorous and dance-oriented for the punks to buy, too freakish to ever work consistently at mainstream clubs or at Puerto Rican block parties on the Lower East Side. When it came time for the label to issue a compilation in 1981, they called it Mutant Disco.
Listening to Ze 30, compiled by Ze's Michel Esteban and Strut Records' Quinton Scott, you might think that Ze was a pretty good label instead of a great one. You would be misled. It certainly isn't the fault of the misfits who recorded all this fearless, cockeyed music, but Ze 30 is a confused baby. About half the cuts are obvious and half are obscure, raising the question of just who Strut and Ze were aiming at with this thing. After several listens, my guess is two-fold: Long-time fans and first time listeners. Naturally, they hit the woods.
Complaints: I don't need to hear Alan Vega of Suicide performing rockabilly. Material and Nona Hendyx's "Bustin' Out" definitely belongs here, but the extended version is a waste of space. I'm glad for James Chance's "Roving Eye"-- "Contort Yourself" is, in the realm of 80s art-rock compilations, overrated and overexposed, which is funny considering that most people would probably find it unlistenable. Casino Music's cover of "The Beat Goes On" makes me very uncomfortable, which is more a statement of fact than a complaint. Selections for some of the label's biggest artists-- including Cristina, Was (Not Was), and Kid Creole-- feel like second choices, and while the songs are great, their inclusion feels problematic if the compilation really is being marketed as "the one Ze Records album you need to own."
But with access to a catalog as deep and frequently innovative as Ze's, "failure" is an accident of the mouth, a word with no meaning. The selections here do support Ze's reputation. They illustrate, in bullet points, not only what made the label special, but what made them influential to artists like the Chromatics, LCD Soundsystem, even M.I.A. (whose "Sunshowers" takes its name and hook from a Dr. Buzzard/August Darnell song). Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Hard-Boiled Babe" is practically dubstep-- so unprecedented that it's hard not to wonder what they were thinking while making it. On nearly every track, rules are broken, boundaries are stretched and pushed back into other territories.
(As an aside for people who might buy this but would want to supplement it with other tracks, here are some suggestions: Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out"; Cristina's "Disco Clone"; Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Funky Stuff" or "Lady O K'pele"; Kid Creole's "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy"; Coati Mundi's "Me No Pop I"-- all songs I'd put on a single-disc compilation of the label, all available through Ze's own digital shop, eMusic, or iTunes.)
The current musical moment isn't a particularly great time to reissue this material. There's no particularly great time to be a brave weirdo. Or, it's always a great time. Mutant Disco, unfortunately, is out of print (though available through digital retailers). Ze 30 is a decent substitution, and is accompanied by great notes rife with first-person accounts of the label's history.
When Suicide went into the studio with the Cars' Ric Ocasek, Ze co-founder Michael Zilkha hoped they'd record something like Donna Summer's chilly, momentous "I Feel Love", a track that re-imagined what disco could do without abandoning it. The duo recorded "Dream Baby Dream", an insistent tick-tock of drum machines and glockenspiels offset by the moans of Alan Vega, who does a good impression of someone who has just taken a bad fall. A song by a band that hadn't found a venue they couldn't get kicked out of, sung by a frontman who used to take to the audience swinging a bike chain. A band that, three years earlier, had recorded a ten-minute long exercise in horrific screaming called "Frankie Teardrop". And a couple of label heads thought they could squeeze a dance hit out of them.


Hey Mr Ferryman is Mark Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story.

Hey Mr Ferryman

So much of Mark Eitzel’s music exists in spite of itself. Sung in a husky register between a whisper and a croon, his songs are filled with characters willing themselves to disappear, transmitting from a translucent state between existence and nothingness. At the beginning of his last album, 2012’s Don’t Be a Stranger, a woman approached Eitzel to say, “I love you, but you’re dead,” a six-word phrase that sums up the tension in Eitzel’s body of work, both in his seminal band American Music Club and throughout his fruitful solo career. His songs don’t confront mortality; they drift in and out if it like subway stops.
So when the reaper himself comes to take Eitzel away in “The Last Ten Years,” the opening number of his latest album Hey Mr Ferryman, Eitzel is not particularly bothered. As he begins his descent to the netherworld, he’s actually more concerned that they get his drink order right: “So, mister ferryman,” he sings over a smooth, lite-rock groove, “Do you party where you’re from?” While Mark Eitzel’s songs have always been stately, with his moody fingerpicking standing as one of the saddest, most immediately identifiable sounds in indie rock, they’ve never been so ornate. The eleven tracks on Hey Mr Ferryman are adorned with codas and false-endings, strings and bells, backing vocals and auxiliary percussion. If Don’t Be a Stranger, with its stark ballads and haunting production, felt like a vulnerable return-to-form, this is the moment where the stakes heighten and the urgency increases: the Skeleton Tree to Stranger’s Push the Sky Away.
All the production on Ferryman might seem over-the-top (more than one song ends with an on-the-knees-at-the-edge-of-the-stage guitar solo), if his lyrics weren’t so crushing. In a standout track called “In My Role as a Professional Singer and Ham,” Eitzel wails in the chorus, “When you look at me, I look away.” It’s a sentiment that’s often rung true for Eitzel. For all his years as a working songwriter—with even a major label deal thrown in the mix for a little bit in the ’90s—he’s never armed himself for a proper breakthrough: his work always felt too quiet, too insular, too strange. But on Ferryman, Eitzel is staring right back out at you. Notice in that line in “My Role” how he holds out the second syllable of “away” to make sure he’s got your attention (while also making the self-deprecating song title feel a little less ironic). In this context, the orchestration feels less ornamental and more like a reflection of Eitzel’s own confidence and catharsis.
As always, Eitzel populates Ferryman with a myriad of stories and characters, taking the focus off of himself and onto his word choice and the thematic links between songs. Sometimes, he takes on a literal character, like in the Joni Mitchell-style showbiz tragicomedy “Mr Humphries” or the repurposed folklore of “La Llorona.” Other times, he uses his subjects as a foil for his own fatalistic tendencies. “An Answer” is one of Eitzel’s finest love songs and one that finds him questioning his entire belief system: “You make me want to stick around and find if there’s an answer,” he sings. It’s crucial that he doesn’t say, “You make me believe that there’s an answer”—it’s still a Mark Eitzel song, after all. But the idea that someone can open him up to the possibility of permanence feels like a revelation.
That sentiment forms the underlying message of Ferryman—that optimism doesn’t necessarily mean knowing that things will be okay, but simply having a reason to wait and find out if they could be. It’s Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story. “If that was death, it’s not so bad,” Eitzel sings in “An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slot,” from the perspective of a dead woman haunting her gambling-addict widow. Visiting him in the hotel where she died, she leaves him with a pithy message: “The El Cortez still welcomes me/Guess if you die on their floor, the drinks are all free.” After all, Eitzel implies, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel is just another way to look on the bright side.


Neko Case’s remarkable new album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You is an exorcism of a dark period of her life, and her most plainly autobiographical album to date. It also could be the most potent record of her career.

Neko Case: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight...

It feels quaint to think of the days when people called Neko Case a country singer; she has spent the past decade moving towards a sound that makes genre descriptions seem as confining and anachronistic as corsets. Case got her start playing drums in Vancouver punk bands. Then at some point, thankfully, someone convinced her that she could sing. Even italicized, that word feels inadequate to describe the meteorological event that takes place when Neko Case opens her mouth. Case has a moonbeam for a voice: imposing in timbre, opalescent in tone, and always surprising in its sheer force.
Case’s earliest records (the first two were billed as Neko Case & Her Boyfriends), were collections of country standards and spirited but generically twangy originals (representative title: "Honky Tonk Hiccups"). But once she broke off on her own and started writing her own material, beginning with 2002’s bleakly stirring Blacklisted, two seemingly contradictory things happened. The first is that her music became increasingly more pop-oriented, owing in part to her collaborations with Canadian rockers the Sadies and a side gig as the resident siren in one of the best power-pop bands of the last decade, the New Pornographers. The other is that her music became darkly, magnificently weird. All of Case’s subsequent solo records have a surreal, untamed quality about them, thanks to her unusual taste in protagonists (tornados, female prisoners, man-eating tigers) and the idiosyncratic grit of her songwriting voice. "If I puked up some sonnets," she sings in one of the most quotable verses of her endlessly quotable new album, "Would you call me a miracle?" It’s a fair question, coming from an uncompromising artist whose career has unfurled like a sprawling, unruly piece of free verse.
After the release of her last record, 2009’s Middle Cyclone, though, Case weathered a rough patch. She lost her grandmother (with whom she was close), and then both of her parents (with whom she was not), and as a result-- something she’s begun to talk about in interviews for this record-- sunk into a depression. "It was physically debilitating," she told The Guardian recently. "You’re just in this murk. And you’re with other humans but you lose all your human skills and it’s just like you’re in this plastic bag and you can’t quite connect with people." Case’s remarkable new album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You is an exorcism of this dark period of her life-- and also her most plainly autobiographical album yet. It is to Case’s discography what 2005's The Sunset Tree was to the Mountain Goats’: a seasoned songwriter known for evocative portraits of fictional characters finally turning that gimlet eye in on itself. The result is the most potent album of her career.
The Worse Things Get is made of the same metal as Middle Cyclone, but fashioned into a much sharper object. The languid, mid-tempo ballads that occasionally made Cyclone sag have been replaced by songs that are shorter, tighter, and more cutting. Not a single one overstays its welcome, from the bracing, minimal self-help credo "Afraid" to the wistful "Calling Cards", a quietly devastating tale of long-suffering long-distance longing. "We’ll all be together, even when we’re not together," Case's voice swells, finally landing on a bittersweet image that rings out long after the song fades: "I’ve got calling cards from 20 years ago."
The evolution between these two records is most striking, though, when the tempo revs up. When it first came out, the punchy lead-off single "Man" sounded like a retread of Cyclone’s caustically poppy "People Got A Lotta Nerve" ("I’m a man, man, man/ Man, man, man-eater"), but within the context of the record (or even more obviously, if you play the two back to back) the earlier song can’t hold a candle to it-- "Man" is bottled lightning. M. Ward’s buzzsaw lead guitar rages like a feral creature in a too-small cage, which, Case’s seething, unbridled vocal point out, is exactly what it feels like to be imprisoned in the impossible expectations of femininity. "I’m a man/ That's what you raised me to be," she taunts like a shit-talking prizefighter. "Fat-fingered bullies were no match for me/ I still taste them in my teeth."
Case’s songs have long played fast and loose with gender roles and often star bold women ("We’ve got a lady pilot," she announced memorably on Blacklisted, "Not afraid to die!"), but at the same time they reject simple, hollow for-my-ladies sloganeering in favor of more complicated truths. The “strong, independent woman” is a cliché that society often paints in black and white, but Case’s take on the subject is a portrait of innumerable grays. In a Neko Case song, freedom, strength and womanhood are all statements punctuated by question marks rather than exclamation points. But whenever The Worse Things Get risks getting too conceptual, a casual, mildly self-deprecating humor always brings these songs back down to earth. "I was surprised when you called me a lady," she sings on "I’m From No Where", a subdued, acoustic comedown following "Man", "'Cause I’m still not so sure that’s what I wanna be." It might sound like a grand, abstract statement, but her logic's totally reasonable: "I remember the 80s/ And I remember its puffy sleeves."
It’s an emotionally wrenching record throughout, but The Worse Things Get is at its most devastating when it takes up motherhood. Animated by rattling percussion and an arrangement that chatters like a dense forest, the opener "Wild Creatures" has an intrepid air about it ("I’m not fighting for your freedom/ I am fighting to be wild") until it ends on a minor-key revelation: "There’s no mother’s hands to quiet me." This particular absence hovers constantly in the ether of The Worse Things Get, until it finally bubbles over on the stunning a capella centerpiece "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu". It’s a bold move and perhaps the most polarizing song she’s ever released; Case usually dresses her subjects up in magical realism and poetic turns of phrase, but she’s never worn her heart on her sleeve as plainly as she does here. The song tells the story of a mother Case saw screaming at a child in an airport in Hawaii-- "Get the fuck away from me!/ Why don’t you ever shut up?"-- and as she sings them she slathers the mother’s words in reverb, the echo poignantly suggesting ripple effects they’ll have on the kid’s psyche. "Honolulu" hits like a shot to the gut. Case writes the song as an open letter to the neglected child ("Don’t you ever shut up, kid/ Please have your say") and amidst the arrangement’s negative space, her voice is a thick blanket in the shivering cold.
And that’s the most impressive thing about The Worse Things Get: though it’s a record that looks at topics like depression and parental neglect square in the teeth, its overall tone is one of resilience. The penultimate track, "Where Did I Leave That Fire" begins with a sparse, post-rock arrangement but eventually gathers into a triumphant and surprisingly comic midtempo ballad about mojo returned. But the true victory lap is "Ragtime", a rousing blast of "Crimson and Clover"-esque pop that serves up hard-won hope and plenty of mantras for carrying on. "I’ll reveal myself invincible soon," Case sings, as a parade’s worth of brass swells around her in agreement.
Somehow, The Worse Things Get is Case’s tightest record and also her strangest. With its off-kilter arrangements and eccentric turns of phrase, it’s a world unto itself. If it has any contemporaries, they’re records like Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel… or Cat Power’s Sun-- the works of artists for whom “maturity” has not meant putting out that fire that Case sings so evocatively about chasing.


This new LP from psych-folk guitar hero Ben Chasny is his warmest, most accessible release yet. Its supporting cast of avant-rock all-stars includes Damon & Naomi, Ryley Walker, and Circuit Des Yeux.

Six Organs of Admittance: Burning the Threshold

Burning the Threshold

For nearly 20 years now, Ben Chasny has been releasing a steady stream of records as Six Organs of Admittance, playing with other bands (Comets on Fire, Rangda) and participating in countless one-off collaborations. But 2015 found the psych-folk guitar hero embarking on a different kind of touring. The two Six Organs album he issued that year—Hexadic and Hexadic II—weren’t just complementary electric/acoustic riffs on the same material. They were also veritable display models for a new, open-source model of composition that Chasny had developed, through specially notated and arranged playing cards. Explaining the concept—known as the Hexadic system—required Chasny to write an accompanying book, issue his own line of cards, draft up diagrams, and maintain an extensive section of related resources on his website. And for added clarity, he even hosted a series of lectures on the subject.
But as much as the Hexadic project seemed to announce a new phase in Chasny’s career, its sheer scope and complexity has, for now at least, had the opposite effect—that is, it’s prompted Chasny to pursue simpler pleasures in his music. With Burning the Threshold, he reverts to the acoustic idyll last heard on 2011’s Asleep on the Floodplain. However, where that melodically-focused record could drift off into oscillating 12-minute odysseys, the new album puts a premium on clarity and concision. Quite simply, this is the warmest, most welcoming, and accessible album in Six Organs’ canon—which may come as a disappointment to fans who prefer Chasny’s more extreme excursions. But for those who first encountered Chasny alongside Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom in 2004-era New Weird America magazine features, and haven’t kept up with his prolific pace, this is the perfect place to rediscover his mesmerizing musicianship and sublime songcraft.
Chasny wrote Burning the Threshold while working on a musical based on the life of Wallace Stevens, and the though the two projects aren’t directly related, the poet’s magic realist approach shaped the album’s thematic framework. Like his participatory approach to promoting Hexadic, Chasny has a way of translating weighty, obtuse ideas from science and theology into pure, easily relatable messaging. On “Things As They Are,” Chasny invokes Stevens’ necessary-angel archetype to meditate on the relationship between natural wonder and human progress. On “Adoration Song,” he becomes possibly the first indie rock artist to namedrop French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in song when he intones, “our friend Gaston says we’re made of lines,” before channeling that sentiment into a jubilant chorus. Over vigorous open-chord strums, he exhorts, “Rise up now!/So Sun softly speaks/Adoration comes from our softened beaks,” transforming the song into an oblique protest anthem at a time when the very concept of compassion feels like it’s under attack by the powers that be.
Though it ranks among Chasny’s most gentle records, Burning the Threshold nonetheless accommodates a large supporting cast of avant-rock all stars who lend these intimately scaled songs a greater dimension. The gorgeous “Under Fixed Stars” takes the hushed intro to the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” and spins it out into a mantra, with Damon & Naomi’s hypnotic hums swaddling some of Chasny’s most tender lyrics to date (“I kept your letters inside my sleeve/Between my heart and my hand they breathe”). The instrumental “Around the Axis,” by contrast, sees Chasny squaring off against finger-picking phenom Ryley Walker in a left channel/right channel duel, their tense, tangled interplay blurring the line between harmony and discord. And in the album’s lone act of aggression, “Taken by Ascent,” Chasny busts out his electric to shred overtop a taut, Chris Corsano-powered groove, with haunting guest vocals from Haley Fohr (a.k.a. Circuit Des Yeux) intensifying the song’s ominous thrust.
But that proves to be a fleeting black-could intrusion on an album that otherwise brims with sunrise-summoning optimism, where every glistening guitar pluck seems to shake off the morning dew. Beyond the Threshold hits its rapturous peak on “St. Eustace,” which resembles a Zeppelin III folk jam given a kosmische spin courtesy of Cooper Crain’s splendorous synth drones. The song is named for the second-century Roman warrior who gave himself over to Christianity after seeing a vision of a crucifix hovering between the antlers of the deer he was hunting. Likewise, Beyond the Threshold is a means to coax ecstatic experiences from everyday occurrences—whether through communion with God or just a bottle of Jager.


With his career in a statistical downfall, the L.A. rapper and his inferiority complex return for another round.

L.A.X.

Reality used to be a friend of Game; these days, he's better off with its close cousin, perception. Statistically, his short but eventful career is in a freefall-- his sophomore album, Doctor's Advocate, sold several million fewer copies than its predecessor, The Document**ary, his first feature film (Waist Deep) couldn't even be enjoyed ironically, and I've never seen his Converse Hurricane shoe in stores, let alone in public. And I live in L.A. Yet, the perception is that he's riding a head of artistic steam into L.A.X. due to, as Pitchfork contributor Jayson Greene put it, shedding the impression that he's one of the least interesting rappers to ever go platinum. Where he was once reverent of anyone in hip-hop that had been in the same room as a record deal, the Game soon alienated nearly everyone responsible for The Document's success-- as far as role-playing goes, unstable psycho was infinitely more entertaining than name-dropping money pit.
The problem is, self-immolation is an artistic ideal that doesn't leave much of an exit strategy, and once the dud singles and release dates started piling up for L.A.X., Game was left to do his A.J. Soprano routine in magazines, unable to handle his daddy issues and at times threatening to kill other people or himself. The perception of Doctor's Advocate as career suicide made it a voyeuristic pleasure for the message-board rubberneckers Game actively courts. That inferiority complex and desperate need for approval keeps L.A.X. surprisingly entertaining even though there are far more weak tracks on it than good ones.
Still, it's difficult to keep seeing him as a loose cannon ("Hated on so much/ Passion of Christ need a sequel," he raps) when most of his adversaries respond to his beefs by completely ignoring him, and when nearly every viable hip-hop artist (plus Travis Barker) makes a guest spot here. Obviously, a lot of those spots are late-90s-style padding: If DMX's performance on the intro and outro are any indication, his gospel-rap ambitions should result in the comedy record of the year, and while Tha Carter III has sold 25,000 copies in the time it takes to read this paragraph, the beyond-hideous hook of "woe is Game" weepie "My Life" suggests Lil Wayne's too in hock to buy an autotuner that can work at full capacity.
Befitting someone who, to be honest, is still learning on the job, Game continues to improve although there are certain handicaps that he'll never overcome-- he compares himself to Chris Paul ("I never dribble out of bounds"), but he's more like Shaq trying to run a fastbreak. There's something almost endearing about the confidence he has in his lumbering flow (watch him try a double-time spit on "L.A.X. Files" or lope triplets on "Cali Sunshine") and limited ability to create on the fly, but really, you just brace yourself and hope no one gets seriously injured. His similes can still be painfully awkward ("flow like oregano"?), his boasts more idiot than savant ("Word to Martha Stewart/ If I can park a Buick/ I can flip a Brinks truck/ I've got the heart to do it"), and he relies on variants of "fuck" to fill up syllables to the point where charging money for a clean version is a "fuck you" in itself. At least he only threatens to break into Dr. Dre's house once.
For better or worse, his increasing confidence has allowed him to aim for concepts beyond the usual talk of how dangerous California is, trading darts with Raekwon and making a bilious rainmaker with Cool & Dre that rejiggers "She Works Hard for the Money" into Game's very own "Push It to the Limit". But then you get idea tracks like "Never Say Goodbye", which is rapped from the perspective of 2Pac, Biggie and Eazy-E right before their deaths; the "One More Chance" karaoke in the middle portion is probably the most embarrassing thing Game will ever do in his career, which is saying something. But at least that seems like a noble failure-- no matter how much better Game gets on the mic, he'll never record a decent love song or stop trying. His bullish voice, however, sounds more convincing talking about Ice Cube's Lethal Injection than anything with the faintest hint of eroticism-- not even David Tyree would vouch for "beautiful as an Eli Manning pass" as a viable pickup line.
After Ludacris effortlessly sasses up "Ya Heard" like Game never could, he laments the attention given to Kanye and Weezy before asking, "Y'all act like y'all don't hear me spit/ Like selling 7 million records ain't shit". It's an absurd boast but it's a canny move to align himself as a peer of those two as opposed to an adversary-- the hundreds of barbs Game threw at 50 Cent had a fraction of the impact Wayne and Kanye exerted by speaking the only language Curtis understands: record sales. But the Game may have at least unloosened the screws for G-Unit's epic collapse. Relatively, he's won Round 3 by making his third straight album that's better than it has any right to be-- but the fact that the Game can make perfectly uncompelling competence sound like victory is proof that he's a master thespian of hip-hop theater. Waist Deep notwithstanding.


It would be easy to dismiss most of Blonde Redhead's output as a triumph of style over substance. Purveyors ...

Blonde Redhead: Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons

Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons

It would be easy to dismiss most of Blonde Redhead's output as a triumph of style over substance. Purveyors of all things avant-garde and chic in the NYC indie underground, the group's hipness quotient is horribly precious. Comprised of Japanese vocalist/guitarist Kazu Makino and Italian twins Amedeo (vocals/guitar) and Simone Pace (drums), Blonde Redhead's self-consciously arty clang has made me wish I was a hip "no-wave" New Yorker rather than an mere enthusiast of this band's works.
Blonde Redhead's biggest detractors focus on the group's uncanny resemblance to Sonic Youth. But while Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons won't exactly silence such suggestions, it does seem to move conscientiously away from the influences that have marred the group's previous work. The title itself makes plain Blonde Redhead's musical M.O.: they've tempered their indulgences somewhat, and begun focusing on integrating hooks and feeling into their cavalcade of ringing guitars and propulsive percussion. It doesn't quite qualify as a pop album, but it definitely serves as their warmest and most accessible record yet.
Perhaps the presence of Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto behind the boards has had something to do with this progression. This album is as much an advancement over Blonde Redhead's similarly Picciotto-produced 1998 LP, In an Expression of the Inexpressible, as Expression was over 1997's Fake Can Be Just as Good. Songs like "Melody of Certain Three" maintain the band's archetype while strengthening their grasp of dynamics-- Simone still pounds the drums in a murderous rage, but also leaves room here for some welcome tempo change.
More surprising is "Loved Despite of Great Faults," certainly the closest the group has come to writing a full-fledged love song. Amedeo's accented delivery of lines like, "You will move with me/ We will stay still/ And words will move around us," connect moreso than Kazu's typically orgasmic vocalizations. Kazu is thankfully more restrained here without reducing her vocal contributions, the finest of which is "This is Not." Easily one of the most puzzling tracks the group has recorded, "This is Not" brings to mind what an unlikely collaboration between Blonde Redhead and the Magnetic Fields might sound like.
While not necessarily distinguishing themselves immeasurably from setting and influence, Blonde Redhead have begun to produce music that evades such nets. The potential evidenced on Melody easily outdoes the band's previous outings and hints at a full flowering of their work in the near future. After all this time, the band are progressively figuring it out. So, rather than musing ponderously on life in the elegantly wasted East Coast Babylon, I can finally appreciate what it is Blonde Redhead are doing and expect them to continue doing better.


Despite the ramblings of armchair philosophers and fanatical pseudo-luddites, a computer is not a cold, inherently impersonal entity. Unlike more ...

Jim O’Rourke: I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4

Despite the ramblings of armchair philosophers and fanatical pseudo-luddites, a computer is not a cold, inherently impersonal entity. Unlike more utilitarian electronic items (calculators, microwaves, etc), computers can be endowed by their owners with a sometimes startling degree of personality. Countless hours of work are often put into creating a computer that bears the characteristics of its owner, or at least the characteristics that its owner wants it to possess.
And yet, many people still seem to be reluctant to acknowledge that something warm, organic, and truly personal can emerge from the silicon belly of a Powerbook-- especially when it comes to music. Journalists have been going on for ages about some pieces of wood, molded metal, and a few electromagnets being an extension of the penis. What's so different about the concept of a laptop being an extension of the laptop? No, a computer can't be physically smacked around like a guitar or a set of drums, but its nearly limitless potential for the creation and manipulation of sound makes it a perfect medium for uniquely personal music.
I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 is a collection of three tracks performed by Jim O'Rourke on his laptop computer in New York, Osaka, and Tokyo. Given the nature of these performances, the record inhabits that squishy gray area somewhere between a composition and an improvisation. Since this is the first time these songs have been released, it's impossible to know how much of the album is premeditated.
The results of O'Rourke's half-improvisations are absolutely stunning. I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 is comprised of sounds too intricate and complex to be the product of spontaneous experimentation. But unlike many albums consisting of such sounds, this album moves at the speed of human thought, developing in a subtle, methodical, yet never cold and technical manner. Changes happen slowly enough that you can fully take in every nuance, yet nothing ever seems obvious.
"I'm Happy" opens the record with nondescript glitchy sine waves playing a sparse, quiet pattern. That pattern swells to a buzzing mass of sound so dense that it seems to comprise a single melodic entity. Gradually, O'Rourke manipulates this one central sonic pillar, adding sounds that vary slightly in melody and timbre. And somehow, he manages to keep "I'm Happy" dense enough to be completely enveloping, while still open enough to be noticeably transformed by every one of its individual voices. About halfway through the track, a series of subtle melodic changes and the addition of a humming bass drone drastically alter the character of the song, though the elements comprising remain largely unchanged.
Though "I'm Happy" fades out with a few moments of dark ambience, the following track, "And I'm Singing," showcases a more playful side of O'Rourke's laptop. Opening with the stuttered sounds of a timer and chime, "And I'm Singing" then sees him using looped keyboards and synthesized sounds to create what could best be described as a single fragment of a gorgeous melody frozen in time. Strange, ambiguous percussive sounds create a controlled cacophony, until the song metamorphoses into a minimalistic arrangement of clean and distorted synthesized blips. A single array of melodies is repeated, developing so slowly that it can barely be noticed. It then flows seamlessly into what could be the album's finest moment: a progression of odd, ambiguous sounds backed by distorted sine waves and acoustic guitar. Like its predecessor, "And I'm Singing" ends with a brief period of subdued ambience.
Whereas "I'm Happy" and " And I'm Singing" often use a flurry of individual sounds to create the illusion tranquility, "And a 1, 2, 3, 4" is much more sparse, allowing the listener to focus more closely on every sound O'Rourke uses. And the sounds themselves are utterly gorgeous-- subtly manipulated strings that quiver and pulsate in slow, sweeping gestures, constantly arranging themselves into new harmonic patterns. As more voices are added, these patterns become more complex and more regular until the end of the song, at which point O'Rourke gently deconstructs the layers of sound that have been building for over fifteen minutes with the introduction of new, thoroughly engaging sounds that function almost like a screen behind which the song can dismantle itself.
Indeed, I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4, despite its somewhat ridiculous title and its digital origins, is a startlingly personal, affecting album, drawing as much on the fragile melodicism of folk music as the technical manipulation of minimalism. And considering the strength of the bond that can develop between a man and his machine, this record may be O'Rourke's most direct statement to date.


Cursive and the Good Life frontman again effectively takes his music to the edge of emotional catastrophe.

The Game of Monogamy

"Self-absorbed" isn't how you typically describe good art, or good people for that matter, but Tim Kasher has made a nice career for himself as an exception to that rule. Whether in the guise of Cursive's caustic, thrashing emo or the perpetually evolving Good Life's intimate confessionals, Kasher and the central figure in his songs have often seemed like the same guy: someone all too aware of his own flaws but almost entirely unsympathetic; someone condemned to doomed relationships who'd likely still be miserable without anyone else's help. As he states on The Game of Monogamy's "Strays", "writers are selfish, writers are egotists/ I'm afraid I'm as bad as it gets"-- and that's this record's love song.
After Kasher's 2003-04 career peak (Cursive's The Ugly Organ, the Good Life's Album of the Year), his musical horizons and themes broadened. And although Kasher had proven to be a master of self-immolation, when tackling Big Topics, his flame only burned lukewarm. As the title of The Game of Monogamy indicates, Kasher's back in his wheelhouse of pain, rendering married life in such suffocating and punishing terms that even the most militant Proposition-8 opponent will think, "we're fighting for this?" It's probably the most typically "Kasher" theme possible, but musically it also serves as a compendium that reconciles his two main projects. Awkward Baskin-Robbins/ sexual dissatisfaction metaphor aside, "Cold Love" is Kasher at his most power-pop, with the sarcastically neurotic "Bad, Bad Dreams" not far behind. On the other end, the delicate acoustic picking on "Strays" makes it sound like a heartbreaker, even if the wearied contentment of finding love amidst lost souls is the closest he gets to happiness. Between those two poles are the bandcamp orchestration you've come to expect from Saddle Creek-- the upbeat brass pomp of "I'm Afraid I'm Gonna Die Here" comes off as totally sarcastic considering its lyrical misery, while the strings of "There Must Be Something I've Lost" throw Kasher even deeper into despair.
Even so, as with most of Kasher's work, the main draws of Monogamy aren't really musical-- words always get prominence over melody. Simply put, if you get a spark out of idealizing your romantic failures by doing things like drunkenly Googling ex-girlfriends (as he does in great detail on "There Must Be Something I've Lost"), listening to Monogamy as a whole is like dousing yourself in gasoline. There's little poetry in Kasher's poisonous lyrics, he barely even bothers to rhyme them, and he'll ignore meter altogether if it means getting the last word in. But his directness can prove to be a bandage-ripping rush that gets the core of feelings that are repressed only to reveal themselves uglier than ever. "I am a grown man/ How did this happen? People are gonna start expecting more from me," is the first line Kasher sorta-sings and from there on out, it's something like if Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was written by Grinderman, middle-class, middle-age anxiety filtered through a prism of psychosexual panic.
As cathartic as it can be, a big reason that Kasher's never pitched a perfect game can be chalked up to how the accumulative effect of his unyielding cynicism feels like self-fulfilling prophecy: Though "No Fireworks" is the ninth song on Monogamy, by that point, it feels like the 10th song about how committing yourself to one person will inevitably result in an unsatisfying sex life. Still, if you want to take yourself to the edge of emotional catastrophe while maintaining a safe distance, Kasher's got the best shit in town: I'm always hesitant to use the term "guilty pleasure," but I'll stop short and suggest that the pleasure that Monogamy provides is at the very least unhealthy, a controlled substance that packs less buzz with each use and that Saddle Creek should at least have put a warning on saying "do not combine with alcohol or listen to while operating within heavy relationships."


This brisk, summery, inarguably fun EP features Quavo, Travis Scott, and Jidenna gliding atop the trio’s tropical big-tent beats, which coincide with the all-too familiar riddims of Top 10 radio.

Know No Better EP

Who better to thrive in our island-obsessed pop multiverse than Diplo? A decade after he and Switch produced M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” the tropical collage favored by the duo, who officially became Major Lazer in 2009, dominates the airwaves. Acts as disparate as Daddy Yankee, Ed Sheeran, and the Chainsmokers share the Top 10, indulging in mid-tempo riddims and stadium-worthy hooks that take cues from dancehall.
Switch departed in 2011, but Major Lazer endures. Diplo and his new accomplices Walshy Fire and Jillionaire traded in any hint of countercultural signifiers for pop’s big tent and a collection of of-the-moment co-stars on its 2015 album Peace is the Mission. Know No Better, a new EP, released with little warning last week*,* mines similar territory*. *The first two tracks alone feature Quavo, Sean Paul, Travis Scott, J. Balvin and Camila Cabello—add the Major Lazer trio and that’s the kind of dizzying star-power on which *Fast and the Furious *franchises are founded.
Those initial two songs, along with a third, “Particula,” are the highlights on this brisk clubby delight of an EP, which doesn’t quite clear the 20-minute mark. Each has a standout section; on the title track, it’s Travis Scott, gleefully surfing a thumping bouncy-castle of a 4/4 beat in his opening verses. Balvin adds real feeling to the bridge of his feature “Buscando Huellas” the strongest overall song on the EP. And the Afrobeat-influenced “Particula” features the catchiest hook, thanks to the Nigerian vocalist Ice Prince and some nicely timed synths.
Mix and match those three sections and you might have a candidate for the song of the summer. But consigned to their separate slots, they serve as mere scene-setters on tracks that convey only mood and nothing more. All three songs are conceptually bankrupt, lacking even the simplest sentiments to coax listeners to return. That might help explain why the rappers here seem so adrift: Quavo, Sean Paul, and Jidenna slide by in near-anonymity, unable to hinge their verses on even the thinnest outcropping of meaning.
Still, no listener in a summery state of mind would object to the three openers, nor to “Sua Cara,” a too-short samba-influenced ballad featuring the Brazilian singer Anitta, whose thin, pretty voice may remind American listeners of the Nina Sky twins. It’s the heavier, more club-ready songs—“Jump” and the soca cut “Front of the Line” —that fall entirely flat, lacking the jots of inspiration that collaborators are able to provide elsewhere.
Diplo’s appropriator-in-chief act notwithstanding, it’s possible that the American producer simply has his hands in too many pots. In a recent interview on Beats One, he enthusiastically described the many projects he has in the works—a collaboration with Mark Ronson, another, rap-themed EP under his own name, a full Major Lazer album coming in the fall—while habitually forgetting who it was that he was actually working with. An eye for emerging talent has always served Major Lazer in good stead, but relying on features can only get an act so far, even in the most welcoming of pop environments. And as fun as it is at times, *Know No Better *doubles as a testament to the result of spreading a handful of good ideas too thin.


Without sacrificing any of the technical virtuosity, the pair of Tennesseans have made THREE* *their most personal collection to date. They turn street voyeurism and psychic panic into a triumph.

Starlito / Don Trip: Step Brothers THREE

Step Brothers THREE

About forty minutes into Step Brothers THREE, on the somber “Just Want It All,” Don Trip raps: “All I know is the truth, and I pour it all in my lines/Looking for more of my kind, Lito was all I could find.” Lito, of course, is Starlito, Trip’s collaborator of six years and one of the only working rappers who can match him bar for bar, threat for threat. Their work together over three full-length records and some stray shots is an alchemic blend of technique and confession; each has pushed the other to write the best, most incisive material of his career. Without sacrificing any of the technical virtuosity, the pair of Tennesseans has made THREE their most personal collection to date.
Lito and Trip—from Nashville and Memphis, respectively—are rapper’s rappers, but they write as if they need to get out of the booth and attend to real life as soon as possible. (Later in the same verse from “Just Want It All,” Trip laments his sister’s jealousy over the car he bought his mother, makes sure his kitchen is fully stocked with pans, then takes friends fishing to keep them out of prison.) In the middle of “The 13th Amendment Song,” Starlito even sets a hard deadline: “Ain’t it ironic that they lock us up for playing with keys?/Save your receipts, ‘cause freedom ain’t free, and lawyers ain’t cheap/And I know—I got court on the 18th.” Whatever the opposite of escapism is, that’s Step Brothers THREE.
Both rappers were run through the industry ringer earlier in their careers, but they smartly avoid casting themselves as virtuous outsiders to a vacuous mainstream. Instead, they tunnel deep into their own worlds, their own psyches (Starlito, from “What I Gotta Do”: “I ain’t watch the news since they shot at me”). Instead of turning solipsistic, you get writers who reveal themselves through their interactions with others—Trip obsessing over his kids’ seatbelts, Lito weighing the risk-reward in lying to a woman who’s already lost her trust in him.
On a purely aesthetic level, Lito and Trip are uniquely well-suited for a duo. The former’s voice is lower, gruffer, where the latter brightens songs and gives them a buoyancy that they might otherwise be missing. The writing itself is almost telepathically in sync, but the vocal approaches give the impression that the step brothers are approaching the truth from opposite sides. (They’ve leveraged this to chilling effect in the past: “Caesar and Brutus,” from Step Brothers TWO, pits Lito and Trip as blood rivals.) On the closer “Untitled No Hook,” you’re left with the distinct feeling that each rapper gets something different out of the pursuit, which in turn makes a song like “3rd 2nd Chance” all the more affecting.
And yet, while each rapper is prone to introspection, and while listening to Step Brothers THREE frequently feels voyeuristic, the album opens with an exaltation. “Yeah 5X” is full of infidelity and deposition testimony and trunks stuffed with shrink-wrapped bricks. At one point, Trip raps, “My nigga beat a murder trial, to us that’s called triumph.” That’s what this record (and really, the whole collaboration) is: a triumph. Don Trip and Starlito’s music is bursting with the sort of low-level psychic panic that’s just below the surface in nearly everybody. They navigate that—and suspicious lovers, predatory record executives, would-be assailants, and so on—and come out the other side with vivid, virtuosic rap music. What could be more triumphant?


The rapper-producer’s third album answers the exhaustion of contemporary life online by stripping down and buttoning up, yielding a newly disciplined take on his trademark deep house.

Information

Galcher Lustwerk has finally come in from the cold. After six years of moving like a silhouette across club floors, the New York producer is up to something far more conspicuous. Information, his third full-length (and first for Ghostly International), dispenses with the shadow play and arrives like a no-frills dispatch from the border region of burnout and sensory glut. Now, Lustwerk passes as old guard, and he’s at ease whenever his tracks are most on edge. The 12 compositions that make up Information have evolved his sensual, liquid style into one that distills the contradictory logics of the digital age—it’s tense, airless, and paranoid without losing an inch of his comic swagger or mischievous irony, a sensibility cultivated by bone-deep cultural exhaustion.
The unconstrained lushness of Lustwerk’s past productions has undergone austerity measures: He’s gutted the interiors of his hypnotic house, leaving behind only the raw materials as Information’s sonic architecture. Crisp live drum samples replace the excessively tweaked-out kicks and crushed snares of his early repertoire. While his mixes are often pushed into the red, Lustwerk has throttled back the voltage. Each track on Information sports shellacked surface tension, glossy and high-resolution.  The back-to-back sequencing of “I See a Dime” and “Another Story” quickly establishes this disciplined palette. On each track, sharpened hi-hats skip over tightened bongo patterns or clave bursts, clearing up space for new streams of information: sparse synths, moving like viscous tides strategically expanded by taut stereo delays.
Lustwerk devotees might need a moment to adjust to the unused square footage. Information, as a whole, finds definition in its heady ambiguity. The logic that guides his production works like a redacted document, the producer withholding key parcels of information (a verse, a key change, a new melody) for as long as he can get away with it. On “Been a Long Night,” a loose groove topped off with dizzy synth pads and glassy digital piano, Lustwerk holds off on introducing the song’s first verse until the three-minute mark. Once the flow cuts in—“Damn, just my type/Been a long night, yeah/It’s been a long night”—Lustwerk drops out one of the muddier synths, swapping it for a stern bassline that immediately sharpens the track’s focus.
No sound or detail on Information arrives without a censor’s level of scrutiny, or suspicion: Lustwerk as public information officer, dispensing his like an official statement. Even if it’s a bit, or the latest iteration of his persona, Lustwerk never breaks the self-serious pose. This consistency, while laudable, is double-edged: Information can be so in the cut that it leaves itself unable to make any sudden moves. It makes you miss the unpredictable zigs and zags of Lustwerk’s pre-Dark Bliss material, which was always trying to outrun our expectations.
Lustwerk is confronting them, rather. Instead of retreating into the hazy, nocturnal electronics that he perfected on 200% Galcher and Dark Bliss, or logging off entirely, he offers a bearable take on the fatigue collectively suffered by anyone plugged into modern information networks. The attrition of 24/7 connection is the theme that underpins Information. In a recent conversation with DJ Mag, Lustwerk explained his headspace:  “With this album especially, that there’s this undercurrent of being really, really burnt out,” he continues. “For the past two years, I was burnt out, all of the time. I’m almost... inoperable, you know.” There’s little daylight between that feeling and how he renders it on the album. “Information overload, man/Occupation overlord, man,” Lustwerk says on “Bit,” a deconstructed funk that moves like Fresh-era Sly and the Family Stone. At each of the album’s scene changes, Lustwerk’s wordplay keeps looping and interlocking around paranoid subtexts. Lustwerk, the avatar, the man, can’t seem to shake some all-seeing eye. A virutal chase sequence runs the distance of the album from “Another Story” (“Got my shoes on my feet/Got my cash got my keys out the door on the street/People following me get the fuck off my back/Go the fuck off the map”) to album closer “Speed” (“Running out of time/What’s it gonna be/Who you wanna be/Do you got some speed/Do you got control/Do you know your role”).
The burnt-out optics of Information would be fatalistic if not for Lustwerk’s ability to work in a fantasy headspace according to a warped set of coordinates. One of his boldest statements to date, “Cig Angel” isn’t cleanly located in the realm of hip-house or left-field R&B or dance music. It’s a sedated anthem few would have imagined Lustwerk producing, a love song for the pre-dawn. Nervous and quavering chords find relief in the track’s cool, restrained drums. Above the mix, Lustwerk’s oxidized voice whispers the word “angel”—a deliciously simple hook that will survive the obsolescence of electronic anthems similar to it. The fantasy of Information feels less like an attempt at creating cinematic ambience or cold, urban moods, and more like an investigation of the stretch between darkness of night and daybreak. Here, Lustwerk’s game is to see how long you can sustain something like the state the novelist William Gibson is said to have found his stories in—“Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking”—before dissolving into screens or restless slumber.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Though too scattered to stand alone, the various demos and remixes culled from Carrie & Lowell add new context and dimension to Sufjan Stevens’ masterful album.

The Greatest Gift

Despite its austerity, Sufjan Stevens’ 2015 album Carrie & Lowell aligns more neatly with its immediate predecessors—the synth phantasmagoria of The Age of Adz and the baroque pop odyssey of Illinois—than it does with the singer’s early chamber-folk. All that he learned in crafting those two epics he applied to the hushed reassembly of his grief after his mother’s death, plus a little extra, all-purpose sorrow to boot. Carrie & Lowell sounds cavernous, covered with nooks and fissures and intimate production details—the multi-tracking of Stevens’ worn, cracking voice, the barely audible sleigh bells sparkling across “Should Have Known Better” and the title track’s windswept coda. On the album’s companion anthology The Greatest Gift, Stevens opens a window onto the process of making and living with Carrie & Lowell, from its first tentative iPhone demos to the remixes performed onstage during its accompanying tour.
Unlike 2006’s The Avalanche, where Stevens culled B-sides from the 90-minute Illinois plus a few alternate versions of “Chicago,” The Greatest Gift focuses mostly on reframing songs from Carrie & Lowell. Only four tracks here are previously unheard, and it’s easy to see why they didn’t make the album’s cut. “Wallowa Lake Monster” explores the same complicated maternal relationship that haunts Carrie & Lowell through the childlike lens of an aquatic cryptid, which would have thrown an odd third element into the album’s cosmology of stark realism and Christianity. While lovely, “The Hidden River of My Life” taps back into that interminable whimsy—“Suppose the world was not informed by real estate or power lines,” Stevens muses two minutes before declaring himself a beaver—and both “City of Roses” and “The Greatest Gift” could fit right in with Stevens’ many hours of Christmas music.
The weary, spectral iPhone demos included here also shed some light into just how an album like Carrie & Lowell is born—in multiple, slow passes, with a lot of deliberation and labor between them. “John My Beloved,” sung into an iPhone mic, features lyrics that would later be tweaked: Stevens reads John for “some kind of stone” instead of “some kind of poem,” and there’s a “ring” and a “life-giving string” that feel a bit like stock objects from the Sufjan Stevens prop closet. In embryo form, “Carrie & Lowell” lacks that memorable coda, ending abruptly after the second verse. These unvarnished sketches hint at the way the entire album may have been written: not in a single outpouring but in halting bursts stifled by each song’s emotional weight.
The highlight of the collection is easily the remixes, which tease out the compact stems of the original songs and let them flourish in open, flowing space. Helado Negro helms two remixes, of “Death With Dignity” and “All of Me Wants All of You,” and the way he unwinds previously buried vocal harmonies is enough to make you want a full-blown, album-length collaboration between the two artists. Stevens’ own remix of “Drawn to the Blood” hews close enough to the version on Carrie & Lowell Live, but with crisper vocals, while Doveman’s gentle take on the 2015 tour single “Exploding Whale” lends as much gravitas as possible to a song that contains the words “epic fail.”
Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell. It’s easy enough to read albums, especially those as moving as Stevens’, as ironclad cultural objects, produced once and then immutable. The Greatest Gift contextualizes the work more as a living document. It exposes shadows of the album’s past and future, and for that, it’s exquisitely generous.


Savoy Motel recreate the sounds of the ’70s using the ’90s pastiche techniques of Beck, Ween and Royal Trux, compacting glam-rock, southern boogie, and Stax sax stabs into 8-bit videogame proportions.

Savoy Motel

On first glance, it’s easy to peg Savoy Motel as ’70s revivalists. Their logo is rendered in Shotgun font like the title card on some Saturday morning kids’ show; the Lichtenstein-style pop-art graphic of their debut album resembles a bargain-bin K-Tel comp of disco hits. And in their videos, the Nashville quartet come off as a cross between the Partridge family and Manson family, all vintage thrift-store duds and hypnotic blank stares. But on this first full-length, Savoy Motel aren’t so much recreating a moment from 40 years ago as heralding the 20-year nostalgia cycle for 20-year nostalgia cycles. They render the sounds of the ’70s using the ’90s pastiche techniques of Beck, Ween, and Royal Trux, compacting glam-rock, southern boogie, and Stax sax stabs into 8-bit videogame proportions.
Savoy Motel is something of a hybrid Tennessee garage-rock supergroup: bassist/vocalist Jeffrey Novak and drummer Jessica McFarland played together in raucous power-pop outfit Cheap Time; guitarists Dillon Watson and Mimi Galbierz slathered the fuzz on thick in Heavy Cream. But that in-the-red ethos is barely perceptible here—the wild abandon of their previous groups has been harnessed into vacuum-sealed pawn-shop pop is capable of inciting spontaneous line-dancing. The fetching first song on their debut doubles as Savoy Motel’s mission-statement slogan. With its staccato faux-brass jabs and cheerfully chintzy psych-funk groove, “Souvenir Shop Rock” does to ’70s pop signifiers what a snowglobe does to a city skyline: it both miniaturizes and exaggerates its features, closing itself off from the real world to create its own make-believe wonderland.
But in Savoy Motel’s case, the music’s hermetic dimensions amplify the bustling activity within them: the call-and-response interplay between singer Novak’s louche delivery and Galbierz and McFarland’s stoner-soul harmonies; the squelching sci-fi synths and drum-machine tics; and the squealing leads of Watson, a disciple from the Neil Hagerty school of avant-shredding. And while they shamelessly draw from the past, they shrewdly rearrange their source elements into curious combinations: “Doctor Cook” swaps out Marc Bolan’s top hat for a Stetson; “Mindless Blues” is Can’s “Halleluwah” if Damo Suzuki got elbowed out by ESG.
However, Savoy Motel's clever record-collector references and kitschy lo-tech dressing ultimately play supporting roles to the insidious, interlocking hooks and seductive swagger of songs like “Sorry People,” “Everyone Wants to Win,” and “Hot One.” Tellingly, the one concerted effort to unravel their tightly coiled aesthetic—on the nine-minute, maggot-brained slow jam “International Language”—proves to be the album’s least compelling moment, exposing the limitations of trying to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget. But while that track indulges Savoy Motel’s latent epic ambitions, the true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity.


Full of melodic singing and zig-zagging riffs, the new Mastodon LP reins-in the Atlanta metal band’s technical abilities without watering them down—though it smooths out some of their angular edges.

Emperor of Sand

At least in certain respects, Mastodon’s Emperor of Sand might well be metal’s answer to Rush’s mainstream-conquering 1981 classic Moving Pictures. For its seventh studio outing, the Atlanta quartet reins-in its prodigious technical abilities without watering them down. As Metallica’s black album famously showed, this is no easy feat. Mastodon haven’t had an easy go of it either, but fans who thought 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun veered uncomfortably close to radio-friendly should give Emperor of Sand a chance.
That’s not to say this new album isn’t stuffed to the gills with melodic singing—you can expect to hear a bunch of these songs on commercial radio this summer. Opener “Sultan’s Curse,” for one, is a trademark Mastodon gallop that again shows guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds doing his best impression of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Second track “Show Yourself” starts out with a bouncy, almost danceable boogie-rock hook before reverting to one of Mastodon’s zig-zagging riffs. Be warned: If you see clean singing as a concession, you’re going to have issues with this album. And if you’re wary of returning Crack the Skye producer Brendan O’Brien—famous for helming ’90s blockbusters by Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots—you should know that, as usual, O’Brien smooths out some of the band’s angular edges. But unlike the last album, Emperor of Sand’s balance tips back to what Mastodon built a reputation on.
Over their first three proper full-lengths—2002’s Remission, 2004’s Leviathan, and 2006’s Blood Mountain—Mastodon flexed their chops almost like a sports team that had more to prove the more successful it got. By 2009’s Crack the Skye, a concept album that revisits Tsarist Russia via Stephen Hawking, Mastodon’s lyrics had grown as lofty as the music. At the same time, Crack the Skye contained hints that a more tempered approach was coming. The band’s three lead vocalists—Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and drummer Brann Dailor—began to exchange death metal howls for increasingly melodic singing. The transition to concise songs on 2011’s The Hunter might have come as a shock if you were a fan of the 13-minute rollercoaster suites that incorporated death, thrash, Southern, and traditional heavy metal. But the hooks had been lurking all along.
Nevertheless, if you’re partial to Mastodon’s longer, classical-influenced songs, you’re not going to see Emperor of Sand’s appeal—unless you zoom-out and take the album as one complete work. That’s not difficult to do now that Mastodon have finally mastered the art of writing 11 tracks that flow together as one. Like The Hunter and Once More ’Round the Sun, each of the songs on Emperor of Sand stands alone, musically speaking. But this time, the band took a page from Crack the Skye to spin an elaborate yarn about the passage of time, using sand as a metaphor for mortality but also as a window to set the story in the deserts of ancient Arabia. In true Mastodon fashion, the album’s protagonist attempts to communicate telepathically with African and Native American tribes in hopes that they’ll make it rain on his behalf.
The plot gets way, um, thicker than that, but suffice it to say the band leaves plenty of room to geek-out on the lyrics. More compellingly, Emperor of Sand marks the third Mastodon album directly inspired by a bandmember’s loss of a relative, in this case the untimely passing of guitarist Bill Kelliher’s mother. That Mastodon are capable of channeling personal tragedies into madcap sci-fi fantasy is impressive, but on Emperor of Sand they finally harness their musical ambitions as well.
Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice. Meanwhile, Dailor—never a drummer you could accuse of under-playing—doesn’t so much tone down his playing so much as shift between varying degrees of busy. It makes a tremendous difference, adding dynamics to what was once an endless flurry of fills and rolls.
During the bridge section of “Clandestiny,” an ascending Tony Banks-style synthesizer line stamps Dailor’s long-professed love of Genesis’ prog opus The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway onto Emperor of Sand’s sleeve. Unlike Genesis, however, Mastodon haven’t gone past the point of no return in pursuit of accessibility. If anything, Emperor of Sand proves the opposite. Musicians often rationalize losing their edge by talking about “maturity.” Mastodon can now feel free to use the word without lying to their fanbase.


Where Titus Andronicus once made great statements out of bloat, on their sixth album they do it with refreshing brevity.

An Obelisk

Patrick Stickles understands that it takes a gimmick to sell music these days, so he’s winkingly provided one. To tease their throat-grabbing new album An Obelisk, the band released a meta, 36-minute pilot for a sitcom called “STACKS” that satirizes the modern promotional cycle while simultaneously feeding it, following a barely fictionalized version of Stickles as he endures the indignities of the record industry. After the album’s first video flops, his label PR suggests manufacturing a viral dance challenge (“#TitusAndronicusChallenge or something like that?”). When he dismisses that idea, they suggest a pivot to synth pop. His day plays out in a sequence of deflating interactions that make the episode feel like a structural mirror of A Charlie Brown Christmas—both chronicle a melancholy idealist as they process the commercialization of something they cherish.
“STACKS” isn’t required viewing. The acting is stiff and the pacing is pokey, but it’s punctuated by moments of inspiration, especially a barroom cypher where Stickles throws down some surprisingly spirited raps about narrow-minded critics: “The last shit that I dropped was A Productive Cough/The media greeted it with a reductive scoff.” The relatively cold reception to 2018’s A Productive Cough can’t help but cast a shadow over An Obelisk and its gripes about the music industry (as Stickles testifies on opener “Just Like Ringing a Bell,” “They’re making a dirty fortune selling something that’s barely working, an inferior version of rock’n’roll or whatever else has touched your soul.”) But Stickles preemptively refutes any suggestion that An Obelisk’s rowdiness is a response to that record. It was always the plan to follow up that more acoustic album with a punk rock one, or so his sitcom insists in an interview with a condescending music journalist.
It’s just a happy coincidence, then, that the new record corrects much of what didn’t work about the last one. A Productive Cough felt more like a genre exercise than a passion project, and that’s true of An Obelisk, too, except this time the genre is a far better fit. Produced by Bob Mould and recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio, it’s the band’s shortest album (38 minutes) and by far their leanest (even 2012’s Local Business, which seemed streamlined at the time, was only stripped down in comparison to the Civil War epic it followed).
Where Titus Andronicus once made a statement out of bloat, here they do it with brevity. Two consecutive songs clock in at under a minute and a half, including the 68-second standout “On the Street.” With its “There’s too many police” rally cry, that song is Stickles’ most overt attempt to write an archetypal oi! anthem—and it really does sound like something anarcho-punks might have rioted to circa 1978—but the entire album is peppered with callbacks to punk’s glory years, from the “Clampdown” stop/starts of “Within the Gravitron” to the pint-raising Pogues breakdown of “Hey Ma.”
Though it isn’t as elaborately themed as Titus Andronicus’ most celebrated work, there’s an arc to An Obelisk. From an opening stretch that literally includes a song titled “(I Blame) Society,” Stickles gradually stops pointing fingers and begins interrogating himself, considering his own complicity in systems he abhors. “I say that I’m innocent but it isn’t true,” he fesses in a Johnny Rotten snarl on “Beneath the Boot.”
After exfoliating its sour facade, An Obelisk ends on a constructive note. In keeping with the record’s ’70s pub rock undertones, closer “Tumult Around the World” plays like Stickles’ own “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” an uplifting plea for empathy. “There’s tumult around the earth/But everywhere, there’s people dreaming and people holding on to hope,” he sings, abandoning cathartic punk sloganeering for earnestness and an implicit vow to be one of those people. His opinion of the music industry may not have improved any, but at least his view of humanity has.


A drummer and sound engineer with wide-ranging influences, the Franco-Ecuadorian producer constructs dancefloor rhythms that snap with feral intensity.

Self Oscillation EP

For the past seven years, Nicola Cruz has been primarily known for his fusions of electronic music and Andean folk. On early releases like 2015’s Prender el Alma, the Franco-Ecuadorian musician folded indigenous instruments like quena and charango into dubby, downbeat grooves. By 2019’s Siku, he was reaching beyond the South American cordillera, combining breathy flutes with diverse Latin American and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. “Maybe it’s an anthropological thing,” he said of his magpie tendencies. Though promoters and interviewers still tend to peg him to his initial reference points, his work has continued to absorb a broader range of influences; last year’s Subtropique EP for London’s Rhythm Section International label was taut, machine-driven club music, more Panorama Bar than pan flute.
Cruz returns to the UK label with the Self Oscillation EP, his hardest-hitting and most unpredictable release yet. Eschewing the chilled-out vibes of some of his early records, all six tracks are made for dancing. Cruz trained as both a drummer and a sound engineer, and it shows—his rhythms snap with feral intensity, and his drum sounds have uncommon bite. Sharpened hi-hats pierce glowering sub-bass; syncopated grooves are pulled as taut as a nylon slackline, for maximum elasticity.
If Cruz is an anthropologist, then Self Oscillation might be a study in dance music’s tribal allegiances. Almost every track suggests a hybrid of some heretofore undocumented cultural fusion. “Cadera” opens the record with soca rhythms punctuated by gravelly acid lines; chilly dissonance leaves a whiff of freezer burn wafting over an otherwise hot-blooded groove. Slow and skulking, “Residual Heat” pairs crisp dembow rhythms with airy vocal samples and laser zaps, splicing the “deep reggaetón” of DJ Python with the bleep techno of 1990s Sheffield.
Despite their frequently referential qualities, these songs resist being pinned down. The only track that feels like a genre study is “Surface Tension,” but the style that it evokes is the West London broken beat that flourished around the turn of the millennium—itself a dynamic hybrid of techno, breakbeats, garage, and hard-nosed funk. Spinning dubbed-out metallic accents around an incredibly funky breakbeat groove, the tune’s a dead ringer for the Y2K output of labels like 2000 Black, while lush chords underline the historical links between broken beat and Detroit techno-jazz.
Cruz rarely misses an opportunity to put a provocative wrinkle into the mix. Oddly truncated vocal loops—shades of vintage Herbert—are panned so that they seem to wrap around your head, triggering strange psychoacoustic effects. The drums are layered in such a way that they sound less like a single, cohesive kit and more like many different drummers reflected in the shards of a shattered mirror; every hit feels like a fragmentary glimpse into a different room, each one with its own acoustic properties.
Like the best dance music, these tracks exude a kind of controlled audacity. The staccato breakbeat and ostinato synth of “Self Oscillation” move with a cocky strut, like dark sunglasses and a leather jacket transposed straight to MIDI; the futuristic disco of “Neo Costeño” is saucy and insouciant, tailored for high-stepping moves and light-headed twirls. The closing cut is the most audacious of all: “Pulso Invisible” begins with springy, speedy dub percussion, stray noises tumbling like flotsam in the waves. Cruz, who tends to peg his releases to one of the four elements, has called Self Oscillation a water record, and you can hear that influence in the song’s liquid flux. But halfway through, a spiraling synth arpeggio comes swimming through the mix, and suddenly the seascape turns the color of ’90s trance, as though a tributary of classic Underworld had spilled into a stream of early-’00s dubstep. The unpredictable mixture is a measure of just how inventive Cruz can be: a surfer on the tide, letting the current carry him where it may.