Beyoncé’s historic Coachella set is preserved as a stunning live album that captures an artist at her peak, flexing her catalog and shining a light on the genius of Black artists that came before her.

Homecoming: The Live Album

Six solo albums in, six years after the surprise release of her self-titled album, three years after the groundbreaking Lemonade, one year after the rap album she delivered with her husband, and we’re starting to get it. We’re starting to understand Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as a musician with unparalleled range, depth, and power: acknowledging her rapperly talents, her breathless musical ambition, her ear and eye for synthesis and abiding love for Black culture. With the release of Homecoming: The Live Album, the 40-track companion to her headlining sets from last year’s Coachella released as a documentary film with Netflix, we glimpse the artist at work during her peak—in voice, physicality, and confidence—reimagining and remixing her own catalog, decentering herself to shine a light on her influences and foundations.
#Beychella redefined what was possible for a music festival. On stage, over 200 bodies undulated in unison but miraculously, every body moved in its own way. They filled out a set of risers constructed into a pyramid, built to look like the bleachers of a football stadium at a Black college or university. Filling the structure was an orchestra that included a drumline and a full brass band that introduced themselves with the steady refrain of the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.” Male dancers stood in a trembling line like Black fraternity pledges, female dancers dressed as majorettes, background singers formed a choir of unified sound and movement, folding their bodies into Beyoncé’s intricately aggressive choreography.
It was an old-fashioned revue, a cacophony of talent. It was a defiant celebration of complex, diasporic Blackness. Woven into Beyoncé’s performance was a genealogy that hat-tipped the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, and James Weldon Johnson. I was home on the couch when I saw a grainy live stream of the first weekend’s show, dazzled, mouth agape, proud: Here was Beyoncé practicing Black studies in front of a broad audience, digging into the long, living archive of Black ephemera. The Netflix film gives you the performances as Beyoncé wanted them seen, with close-ups of bedazzled costumes and their pastel colors worn by bodies of all sizes. You see the sweat of rehearsals and Beyoncé’s exacting physical regimen to get herself back into performing shape after the 2017 birth of her twins. You see the underlying ethos that guides her work in the form of quotes and music cited from the poets, writers, and artists like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, who conjured worlds that demanded and centered an abundant, fecund Blackness.
Homecoming is an important document of those performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity. We hear, for example, Kelly Rowland’s feathery soprano during the three-song suite of Destiny’s Child hits; it allows us to linger for a moment on the group’s legendary chemistry and three-part harmonies. Homecoming doesn’t stand on its own as an album experience separate from the film. It probably doesn’t need to. Beyoncé and her sister Solange increasingly rely on visuals to paint a fully embodied and populated vision that includes music. Homecoming, an accompaniment to a concert film, feels as if it wasn’t ever meant to be experienced in isolation. Still, it could be one of Beyoncé’s most important releases for how it illuminates both her past and her future.
Beyoncé’s core musical vocabulary is the rhythm and bounce of a tune. She’s a classicist who believes in a song’s structure—choruses, bridges, meticulous verses, extended vamps, key changes. Her uptempo songs like “Crazy in Love,” “Countdown,” and “Love on Top” are some of the most inventive, dexterous pop and R&B music of the past couple of decades. For nearly the entire 110 minutes, she isolates these adrenaline-spiking cuts, amplifying their kinetic energy with marching-band arrangements. The extended version of B’Day’s 2006 single “Get Me Bodied” is a highlight here, as is 2005’s “Check on It.” Both are supercharged booty thumpers, more than a decade old that sound newly baptized in the world of Homecoming: the clarion calls of trumpets and whoomps of sousaphones, the foot-stomping on the risers and the off-mic “ayys” of the dancers that are sprinkled throughout. The arrangements amplify the relationship Beyoncé’s music has to the inherently percussive body.
Still, Beyoncé’s a singer first, and it’s thrilling to hear her full-throated, low-end brassiness with so much clarity. She’s still got the flexibility to play in her upper ranges, but the musicality at the bottom of her range, where she belts the early notes of the rare ballad in this collection, “I Care,” is stunning. She growls through Lemonade cuts like “Sorry” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but also whispers and coos through the early notes of “Partition.”
The recorded versions of Homecoming’s interludes and transitions draw out the Black pop musical history Beyoncé cites and interpolates. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and “Swag Surfin” are important moments, but so are those when she employs TRU’s “I’m Bout’ It, Bout It” UGK’s “Something Good”—regional classics of the Black South. She doubles down on her archival work, her career-long project of interpreting Black music and big-upping Black Houston and Black Louisiana. (The only new piece of music on Homecoming is a bonus studio cover of Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly’s 1981 “Before I Let Go,” an evergreen Black jam that gets every generation moving.) The moments feel like nods to the audience she so deliberately centers. The film captures this phenomenon of a mutual, pointed gaze with its frequent close-ups of Black audience members, who were few and far between at the actual shows. Her rapport with the crowd is loose, filled with “I see you’s” that are left in the recording and further punctuate that Beyoncé was hoping to make a specific statement to a specific group of people.
The album sounds communal, like a revival meeting in a small, sweaty tent that leaves you lifted and fortified. It’s as much about Beyoncé as it is about the people who made her and the people who sustain her. As I was listening, my upstairs neighbors, two young Black women, were also listening at full volume. My friend in Miami was texting me hot takes, while my sister, who’d attended the show on the second weekend, was tweeting about how much the white people in the audience seemed to just not get it. Every Beyoncé event is a gospel you want to tell somebody about, but this one doubles down on this feeling of communion. She’s singing songs you already know, and connecting them to other songs you remember, too. She’s drawing on her past, looking back, but also looking squarely back at us.
Black women and rock’n’roll pioneers like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Etta James, and contemporary queens of rhythmic music like Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott have not received sufficient credit for their innovations. Beyoncé, famously, was the first Black woman headliner of the nearly 20-year-old festival. In a space where she was not obviously welcome, she made an enduring impression. A home. Then she made it about something other than herself. She brought an entire lineage into the room.
Within a few months of each other, both Knowles sisters released projects that reimagined home as a soulful Black utopia, rooted in the best of its abundant past but queerer, more holistic, self-aware, embodied, and feminist than before. Homecoming is a wondrous, rapturous collage that reveals how Beyoncé has made a career of playing, dipping, and diving in the “great pool of Black genius”: the genius of her forebears, her contemporaries, and her own. For her entire life, she’s brought the mainstream over to her. Where will we all go next?


Featuring lightweight lyrics and moody melodies, the latest mixtape from the Atlanta rapper is a solid entry point to his revamped style.

Pop It Don’t Stop It

At first, Johnny Cinco was a beneficiary of the powerful Atlanta rap machine, then he got lost within it. Around 2013, he recorded a somewhat typical early 2010s ATL turn up joint, “They Gave the Wrong Young Nigga Money,” that lit up the city’s famed strip club Magic City, scoring him a record deal with the original iteration of Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas’ Atlanta-based imprint, Quality Control. Led by Migos, the label quickly became a hub for hot Atlanta upstarts, but the financial disappointment of the trio’s debut album in 2015 forced Coach K and P back to the drawing board. Ultimately they decided to trim down the roster, and one of those cuts was Johnny Cinco, who has been operating in the independent shadows of Atlanta ever since.
This might sound like the story of a rapper screwed by the industry, but I don’t entirely believe that’s the case. Johnny Cinco’s music at that time was fine but unremarkable–he simply laid a slightly narcotized melodic delivery over the trendy sound of the moment. In the last couple of years, though, beginning with his 2020 mixtape Hood Drake, his sound has bloomed behind moody vocals that have become more melodic and ATL trap production featuring lush R&B brushstrokes.
His latest tape Pop It Don’t Stop It is a solid entry point to his revamped style. Centered around a cool vibe, it takes the form of a hazy blur of sing-raps. A continuous stream of lightweight lyrics reflect this laid back mood. “Lotta losses hell it come with it/Lotta sacrifices made me who I am, ain’t nothin’ to this,” raps Cinco like he’s mid-shrug on the opening line of “Don’t Think We Lying.” It’s lifestyle rap that’s not problem free; he gets stressed out, and sometimes things don’t go as planned. On “No More Talking” he’s living large, but sounds bored of it. Over a Roy Ayers sample drowned out by the rattling hi-hats on the title track, he gives vague lines different shades of emotion with tiny melodic tweaks.
Because the mixtape’s sound and themes are so repetitive, it occasionally feels slight. On “Never Average,” his vocals slip into a dull robotic register, and on “Baffled,” his weak lyrics don’t sustain a more stripped down approach. But since all the songs are so short and breezy, the lackluster ones fly by innocuously.
This consistency in sound and themes are also what gives the tape its atmosphere; Cinco’s mantra seems to be I’ve been through some shit and I’m still here chilling. The song that best represents that is “Rags to Riches,” a piano-driven joint with sputtering drums, where every line feels delivered with a sigh of relief: “I’ve been ballin’ way too long, this shit here don’t make no sense.” He feels like a regular dude. Nearly a decade in, Johnny Cinco has found his niche in lowkey, grounded lifestyle raps.


Two albums—one a collection of luminous ambient textures and club grooves, the other an eclectic set of experiments from over 20 years ago—illustrate Kieran Hebden’s range and creative development.

Parallel / 871

For the past few years, if you wanted to discuss one of the most mysterious projects in electronic music, your best bet was to copy/paste. Beginning in 2017, someone started uploading music under the alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ—a bewildering string of glyphs that, as far as anyone can tell, appears to be gibberish. Between 2017 and 2020, six digital releases appeared, all featuring titles rendered in dingbats type that sometimes spilled down the page like rogue MySpace code, running roughshod over the digital hedgerows of Spotify’s walled garden. The alias was widely understood to be an alter ego of Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. He had first alerted listeners to the project by adding one of its songs to his ever-growing Spotify playlist; the music sounded like him, too, with bell-tone shrapnel and digitally frayed harp scattered over punchy breakbeats and downy beds of ambient tone. Some listeners discovered early on that a few of these cryptic tracks were in fact deep cuts from Four Tet’s catalog; then, last May, the project’s sixth release contained songs that Hebden had included in a now-deleted SoundCloud dump the month before. With Parallel, one of a pair of new albums that Hebden surprise-released on December 24 and 25, he officially brings some of that mystery material back into the Four Tet fold.
Five of Parallel’s untitled tracks previously turned up on various ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ releases, and in some ways the surprise ends there. As was the case with last year’s Sixteen Oceans, most of these tracks represent Hebden’s mastery of the Four Tet sound more than they do an attempt to break out of his wheelhouse. That’s no knock against them: “Parallel 2,” from 2018’s / ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑, is as potent a distillation of Hebden’s unique style as you could ask for. Though the elements are familiar—plucked strings, handcrafted breakbeats, sunset radiance—the results are unusually effortless, with a gliding feel evocative of the ambient techno of the 1990s. “Parallel 4,” from 2019’s ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(ƟӨ)ʃ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡ ꐑ(ཀ ඊູ ఠీੂ೧ູ࿃ूੂ✧ළඕั࿃ूੂ࿃ूੂੂ࿃ूੂළඕั✧ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ɵੂ≢࿃ूੂ೧ູఠీੂ ඊູཀ ꐑ(ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(ƟӨ)ʃ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡, reflects Hebden’s longstanding fascination with the syncopated rhythms of UK garage; arraying ribbon-like vocal cut-ups and chiming synths over a booming, crackling groove, it’s at once wistful and ecstatic, expressing emotions that aren’t easily defined or contained. And “Parallel 8,” which turned up in last April’s SoundCloud dump as “128 Oceans” and then reappeared a month later on ooo　̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ 　oʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(　؞ৢ؞ؙؖ⁽⁾˜ัิีึื์๎้็๋๊⦁0　̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ 　ఠీੂ೧ູ࿃ूੂ, is a stunning hybrid of dub techno and deep house, as polished a club track as Hebden has ever made. Sixteen Oceans’ polish sometimes robbed the music of its energy, but “Parallel 8,” lush and verdant, breathes like a living thing.
Parallel’s most remarkable track is its epic opener, a meditative synthesizer etude. Longer even than either of the two side-long pieces comprising 2015’s Morning/Evening, the nearly 27-minute piece consists mostly of a single synthesizer pattern that slowly morphs in tone and timbre as it goes through its paces. For extended stretches, it burbles quietly away in the background, breaking through to the fore only when its tempo shifts or volume rises. Emotionally, it’s a blank slate: It might sound sad if you’re feeling down, or centering when you’re at peace. Six minutes before the end, it dissolves into pure drone, until a high, clear voice emerges from the shadows, singing something like a melismatic hybrid of R&B and Indian raga—a warm, cleansing finale. The album’s final two tracks also experiment with ambient music, massaging birdsong and meandering piano into off-the-cuff pieces that feel both low-key and low-stakes, but also pretty representative of where Hebden is as an artist these days: direct, unguarded, and determined to follow his own muse.
Like Parallel, 871 arrived without advance notice. On Spotify, it appears under Hebden’s 00110100 01010100 alias, as did 2013’s 0181. That album collected unreleased songs from between 1997 and 2001; 871 ventures further back, to the period between 1995 and 1997. Unlike 0181, which took the form of a 38-minute mixtape full of stops and starts, the new record is presented as a collection of serially numbered standalone tracks, but the material here is stranger. There are blasts of overdriven electric guitar, effects-pedal experiments steeped in line noise, and even a folk song played on hard-panned acoustic guitars. At the time, Hebden was still playing in Fridge; he wouldn’t release the first Four Tet EP until 1998. There are glimmers of the palette that would come to define Four Tet’s work, but mostly these pieces show the influence of the decade’s mischievously experimental spirit. Track 5 smolders like Flying Saucer Attack remixing GAS; the breakbeats and ringing guitars of track 18 have an unmistakable shoegaze feel. One song even sounds a little like a rudimentary take on DJ Shadow—and, in the process, offers a glimpse of the beat-oriented work that would take shape on 1999’s Dialogue and 2001’s Pause. Several of the most interesting cuts suggest that, like many of his ’90s peers, Hebden was listening to a lot of Neu! and BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and translating those signals into chugging pulses wreathed in squealing oscillators. The highlight is track 10, a nine-minute excursion in swollen low end and buzzing drones that sounds like it could have come from the 1995 compilation Macro Dub Infection, the era’s pivotal collision of ambient, post-rock, and dub.
Listeners who were familiar with this terrain in the ’90s—Other Music regulars, subscribers to The Wire—may find 871 a welcome flashback to a moment in left-field music where anything felt possible and almost nothing was set in stone. Fans of Four Tet’s sleeker work may be taken aback by the roughness of these pieces. But, combined with the most exploratory moments of Parallel, 871 fleshes out a wide-angled portrait of Hebden’s creative practice. It’s been years since he played by industry rules; he puts out what he wants, when he wants, under whatever name (or alphabet) suits his whim. These two sprawling, unpredictable albums, released just nine months after the carefully constructed Sixteen Oceans, validate Hebden’s trust in his instincts. At its best, Four Tet’s music thrives on immediacy, honesty, and candor, and these records have it in spades.

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Returning with a new band assembled via open auditions, Billy Corgan's first album in five years under the Smashing Pumpkins name finds him recapturing some of his inspiration.

Oceania

You will not tell Billy Corgan what to do. The Smashing Pumpkins leader's two-decade career has been wildly erratic, full of potholes and detours, but this ironclad rule has remained. "I was into Black Sabbath and it just wasn't cool, but I didn't give a shit: My band was going to sound like Black Sabbath because I fucking wanted it to and I didn't give a shit what some idiot fuck thought," he spat at Julianne Shepherd 2005, apropos of nothing, around the release of his solo album The Future Embrace. The quote, with its fascinating blend of indomitable will and boiling spite, is pure Corgan. For better or for worse, this energy is his fuel: He will reach transcendence, goddammit, with or without you.
The last few years have borne sad witness to this worldview's inevitable end point. When Jimmy Chamberlin, the band's lone remaining original member, departed in 2009, saying only, "I can no longer commit all of my energy into something that I don't fully possess," Corgan became the last one standing. His announcement that he would be keeping the Pumpkins name and recruiting new members was hardly surprising. The Pumpkins had always been Corgan's dream, after all, the other members mere action figures recruited for its realization. Even the ridiculous band name, which the other members wore with the ease of an ugly sweater hand-picked by their mom, was a remnant of Corgan's boyhood vision. "The name of the band is a stupid name, a dumb bad joke and a bad idea, OK?" original bassist D'arcy Wretzky snapped to the Washington Post back in 1993. "Billy named the band before there even was a band. He was like, 'I'm gonna have a band and it's gonna be called this.'"
Now, Corgan has surrounded himself with a new crew, one presumably more excited to be sporting the team jersey. Mike Byrne (drums), Nicole Fiorentino (bass), and Jeff Schroeder (guitar) were assembled via "It could be you!" open auditions: Nineteen-year-old Byrne, for example, was a freshman at the Berklee School of Music when Corgan recruited him. This crew is charged with the unenviable task of making the first record since 2007's Zeitgeist to bear the Smashing Pumpkins name. Given the conditions, they do the best job possible.
In terms of sheer sound, Oceania hits its mark: It succeeds, at least, in seeming Pumpkins-y. The towering slab of guitars, the sense of hurtling forward motion, the alt-rock-meets-Les Mis sweep, are present, and help make Oceania Corgan's most worthwhile work in years. Opener "Quasar" features plenty of pile-driving riffing, and you can hear the new members working overtime to justify their spots: Byrne's drums have some of the fluid propulsion of Chamberlin's, and Schroeder's leads are ear-catching but unshowy. When Corgan's thin, keening voice enters over the mass of sound, you believe, for a moment or two.
But the songs themselves lack the soaring melodies Corgan used to grace them with, and his voice is a little rougher, coarser. The arrangements suffer from a whiff of generic, corporate-rock slickness. Would that this record actually had some of the thick-caked doom of the Sabbath records Corgan built his tower out of. The entire album, meanwhile, suffers from rote, obvious lyrics, which lean heavy on the "I'm always on your side"/ "Everything I want is free"/ "There's a sun that shines in me" School-of-Rock madlibs approach.
It's also difficult not to notice he's repeating himself: The introductory riff to "Quasar" is nearly identical to that of "Cherub Rock". The power ballad "The Celestials" recalls "Disarm", while the open-hearted, dramatic plea at the center of "Violet Rays" ("I'll leave with anyone this night/ And I'll kiss anyone tonight") is an almost-direct quote from Mellon Collie's "In the Arms of Sleep". "Pale Horse" echoes the chord progression of "Thru the Eyes of Ruby". This is the classic Pumpkins sound, but an echo of itself; its spirit is somehow enervated.
What you do hear on Oceania is a reawakening of Corgan's ambitions. The album feels bigger and covers more ground than anything he's done in a decade: There are neon electronic interludes, folk-rock breakdowns, songs that morph from wintry ballads to grim rock stomps. "Pinwheels" starts with a flitting-hummingbird synth line, layers of droning cello, and George Harrison-style guitar before collapsing into a lovely folk-rock breakdown with softened, cascading female background vocals. Uptempo rocker "The Chimera" has an infectious chorus, and the title track churns darkly through multiple sections without losing momentum.
Oceania is reportedly only the middle section of a larger, looming 44-song epic bearing the Terry-Brooks-fantasy-series title Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. It's exhausting to imagine this record sitting inside something three times its length. But Corgan thinks only in epics-- double albums, boxed sets that come in suitcase packaging-- and this generosity is the upside of his world-conquering ambition. Corgan made Oceania available with no advance copies or radio singles, an attempt to preserve the pre-digital "everyone all at once" album experience he fondly remembers. This gesture, like many of Corgan's, combines astronomical rock-star hubris with a kind of weird largesse: He very badly wants to give his audience something enormous, undeniable, and life-changing.
But this impulse has a dark side. Like Corgan recording countless vocal takes of "Zero" and grading them with a series of check marks. Or recording all of Siamese Dream's bass parts because he could complete them in fewer takes. Corgan used to be able to absolve his personal failings in rock'n'roll, but rock'n'roll can only do so much. His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness. "I'm all by myself/ As I've always felt," Corgan sang, on Siamese Dream's "Soma", surrounded by his bandmates and newly ascendant. "I'm alone, so alone, but better than I ever was," he sings, sadly, on Oceania's title track, surrounded by a hired-via-contest crew of strangers. You can always be more alone.


Brooklyn trio Parlor Walls subvert the dichotomy between rock and jazz. They approach aggression with an agility that’s rare no matter the style of music.

Opposites

When the Bad Plus made their major label debut with These Are the Vistas in 2003, they generated heaps of praise for their supposed ability to capture a rock band’s energy in a jazz trio format. But their hamfisted mistranslations of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Iron Man” were hardly revelatory. Between, say, the Lounge Lizards in the late ’80s up through to Neneh Cherry’s 2012 collaboration with Swedish-Norweigan saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s trio the Thing, you can point to dozens of artists who have subverted or even nullified the dichotomy between jazz and rock. Brooklyn trio Parlor Walls sit in this lineage.
On their first full-length, Opposites, Parlor Walls convey urgency with a forcefulness that’s both convincing and sophisticated. Like the Thing, core members Alyse Lamb and Chris Mulligan use repetitive phrases that speak directly to the gut—“riffs,” for all intents and purposes. But where the Thing’s meaty sound verges on street tough (in a good way), Parlor Walls approach aggression with an agility that’s rare no matter what style of music you look at.
Frontwoman Lamb’s guitar sounds as if it was run through a classic Fender Twin-style amp, a reverb-heavy tone that instantly evokes early rock’n’roll and rockabilly/surf twang. But the makeup of her chords has little in common with those forms. Even as Lamb slashes and wails with her guitar strings, her playing hovers at the music’s outer edges, creating a cavernous ambience for Mulligan’s synth parts, which essentially perform the same function as a bass guitar. Mulligan’s drums tumble with the steady clang of a cement mixer—they’re loud, assertive, and colorful—but it’s his synth parts that actually drive the music and sustain its foundational groove. Meanwhile, nimble saxophonist Kate Mohanty plays a role akin to a rock guitarist’s, supplying the most hummable licks in tandem with Mulligan’s synth lines.
Likeminded groups like Denmark’s Selvhenter and England’s Get the Blessing have shown over the past decade that it’s still possible to uncover new shades of darkness by using jazz instrumentation in unconventional ways. Parlor Walls follow suit with Opposites and, in the process, lend new definition to the term “heavy.” Even without vocals, the album’s mood would stand out, but Lamb’s singing adds weight to the tension and intensifies what the other instruments are doing like a lit match held inches away from a puddle of gasoline.
A multifaceted vocalist, Lamb tends to be highly tuneful and dextrous. Still, her phrasing lands somewhere between taunting and alarm, and there are moments where she channels the spitfire edge of riot grrrl-era punk. She matches her vocals with appropriately complex lyrics that can be read a number of ways. Her verses percolate with obvious references to emotional ruptures, but she stops short of spelling them out. Her images pack a punch nevertheless: “Cover me/To my knees/Keep me warm/Put me at ease/But you only feed me when you’re full,” she sings on “Cover Me.” Imagine having amnesia and speaking to someone who, you infer, has a bone to pick with you. At times, that’s what this album feels like.
Meanwhile, the guitar and sax flit like moving shadows cast by strobing red and blue siren lights outside your window. All of these elements combine to create a sinister vibe that rides the line between pleasant and imposing. On “Play Opposites,” Lamb asks, “Hey, why don’t we go/And play opposites?/Burn it to the ground/There ain’t nothing left.” And on “Hesitation,” she sings, “Come through, I’ll leave my light on/Rearrange my shapes/We can imagine partition/Then see it all fall away.” Lamb probably wasn’t referring to the supposed “partition” between jazz and rock, but it’s just as well that we let it fall away. Other bands have given us reason to do the same for years, but that doesn’t make Opposites any less extraordinary.


The London baroque-rock band's sophomore album-- produced by Ben Allen (Merriweather Post Pavilion, Halcyon Digest)-- finds the group aspiring to darker and difficult territory.

Rooms Filled With Light

I'm glad the term "charm offensive" exists because otherwise I'd be at a loss to find a concise way to pinpoint why it's so hard to fully endorse Rooms Filled With Light, a record of bells-and-whistles baroque-rock that superficially has nothing wrong with it. On the follow-up to 2009's sleeper hit Reservoir, Fanfarlo bring forth songs that are capably performed, professionally produced, and have the kind of perky melodies and implied optimism that would suggest the London quintet get along really well with each other. I'd have no reason to dissuade you from Rooms Filled With Light if time and money weren't limited resources in determining whether a record was worth a listen*.* Which is sort of the problem: None of this can counter that Rooms Filled With Light most often feels "good" only because it's "not bad," existing at the center of a galaxy of bands used as exemplars of "boring indie," but only serving as a mirror that reveals their idiosyncracies, where Fanfarlo simply have good intentions and risk aversion.
Strange then, since Fanfarlo seem to aspire to darker and difficult territory than Reservoir, a record whose success ultimately felt like the result of new Arcade Fire and Beirut albums' being only theoretical at that time. They trade po-faced folkiness for influences of distinguished new wave haircuts and the production touch of Ben Allen, who of course helmed Merriweather Post Pavilion and Halcyon Digest, but more relevantly, a shockingly vital album from former UK bantamweights Bombay Bicycle Club. Though minor cosmetic changes, they result in Rooms Filled With Light's playing out as the sonic equivalent of deciding to major in Economics, mildly ambitious, but ultimately pragmatic about having a set path to success. This strategy pays off in the subtly ingratiating first half: "Deconstruction" is "angular" done by squares, its new romantic pulse and wobbly surf guitar chords never shaking it too far from its sweet, *Neon Bible-*lite center. Likewise, Fanfarlo usually like to ease into their hooks, so the hearty chorus of "Lenslife" is a genuine surprise in its urge to stand up and be counted while "Tunguska" ekes into Dexys territory with its woozy saxophone arrangements and spirited harmonies.
But as Room Filled With Lights crosses a Peanuts-styled piano interlude ("Everything Turns") into a Side B of songs as familiar and interchangeable as their titles ("Feathers", "Bones", "Dig"), you just come away thinking that the demand for fussy orchestral indie of this type is constant, whereas Fanfarlo are simply supply. From where does the love of Fanfarlo spring when Rooms Filled With Light never shoots for the power of populism nor something wholly individual? The cracked-whip cadence Simon Balthazar employs over the staccato violins on "Replicate" and "Tightrope" is too similar to Win Butler to not be a distraction, especially since he can't commit to sounding truly unhinged or making bold declarations rather than pat musings ("We have a better chance on paper/ So we catalog our lives"). So when Balthazar pleas to "break it up into pieces/ Throw away what we don't understand" on "Deconstruction", the conservatism of the latter half rings more true despite a propulsive, downstroked bassline. Meanwhile on "Feathers", Balthazar repeats, "It is the same/ And the river is the siren/ And the rock before the time you washed up feeling nothing at all," enough to suggest he meant it as a singalong, but it fails to generate urgency. That, and the song piggybacks the same exact melody as Neon Indian's decidedly roustabout "Terminally Chill".
Look, I know this kind of stuff is easy to dismiss as lame prima facie, especially if you can't possibly imagine perfectly reasonable listeners who don't need to go to SXSW to have confidence in their opinion that a dude tapping at a sampler while standing perfectly still is bullshit most of the time. And I agree with Larry Fitzmaurice's assessment from the festival that it's important to have music you "like" rather than the false binary of "this rules" and "this sucks." But it seems to me that you seek out music you love, whereas likable music simply finds you. And so Rooms Filled With Light is friendly and nondescript, but so are the vast majority of the people you unconsciously encounter on a daily basis-- Rooms Filled With Lights is Jenny from a couple of cubicles over who wears cool shoes and watches "30 Rock", it's the guy who always nods hello when taking the treadmill next to you on Thursdays, it's the waiter at your local coffee spot who doesn't conduct himself like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth. Do they make things more pleasant? Sure, and I wouldn't rush to turn off the radio if "Deconstruction" came up either. But would you voluntarily spend 45 minutes with these people? Why haven't you?


On his first project under his DJ Blackpower alias, the Bronx rapper’s beats grow colder and his lyrics become more heartfelt as he continues to grieve the loss of his mother.

dj blackpower: BLP 2020 “King of the Night” EP

BLP 2020 “King of the Night” EP

MIKE’s music is centered around grief and the healing that comes after. His rich voice, captivating and full of emotion, has become one of his greatest assets as a rapper, keeping you attuned to his even most gut-wrenching songs. BLP 2020 “king of the night” is the first project to be released under his producer alias dj blackpower. In a follow-up to the excellent Weight of the World, the Bronx rapper’s beats grow colder and his lyrics become more heartfelt as he continues to grieve the loss of his mother.
It’s no secret that MIKE is a talented producer. Outside of his own projects, he’s supported AKAI SOLO and Mavi with his soulful loops as well. MIKE whittles samples down to only their most essential bits; original songs and speeches are nearly unrecognizable in their new pitch-warped and chopped-up forms. BLP 2020 is entirely self-produced, aside from “Marge Simpson” and “rootin4?,” which feature BSTFRND and keiyaA, respectively, as co-producers. When MIKE’s words begin to press down on you, the beats start to feel heavier. When he asks “All that hoping ain’t ya hands tired/What’s the culprit, is it angst, pride,” on “bad News,” the pitched-down vocal loop and drums crackle beneath his gravelly baritone.
With a runtime of 16 minutes, BLP 2020 is one of MIKE’s shortest projects to date, but that’s by design. MIKE’s work is meant to be replayed. You’re rewarded for listening closely and trying to unpack his most complex bars. But nothing stings quite like the times he makes it all too clear. “My armor ain’t fit for mourning, the wind make my face ache,” MIKE defeatedly says on “Piercing thru the Night.” It sounds like he’s choking up, trying to hold back tears. MIKE’s control of tone is remarkable: His groggy delivery on “Marge Simpson” and the clear-headed, even tone of “Mhm!” feels like two completely different rappers.
Even when it seems like MIKE’s barely keeping his head above water, he always finds his way back to the surface. “My papa think he know the stress I give him hollow truth/The sorrow beatin’ on your head, you drink the sorrel juice,” he confidently raps over the cheery strings of “Sorrel Juice,” one of the few moments on the EP that approaches an emotional breakthrough. That feeling is abruptly cut short in the transition to “STAY HUNTING,” which represents an immediate return to a bleakness that matches the rest of the project. The EP closes with the somber “haha-haHAAA!,” which shares a sample with “fortune teller,” a loosie from earlier this year. It’s the kind of self-referencing nod only an obsessive fan would catch.
Even as the production on BLP 2020 ventures into darker territory, MIKE’s powerful expressions of joy and growth shine bright. In the years since his breakthrough mixtape, May God Bless Your Hustle, MIKE’s songwriting has only gotten tighter, while the world described in his music seems grimmer. BLP 2020 seems like it might only be a short rest stop for MIKE as he works through his most distressing thoughts — it isn’t meant to stand next to a fully fleshed-out project like Tears of Joy. But MIKE shows that he can still find new ways to express his vulnerability as he grows older. There’s nothing in his way anymore.

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The North Carolina producer L'Orange's latest project finds him collaborating with Kool Keith. One of its charms is hearing L'Orange adapt his sound to fit the mercurial Kool Keith's style, who seems to be floating through the music, then going silent as it swirls around him.

Kool Keith / L'Orange: Time? Astonishing!

Time? Astonishing!

The North Carolina producer L'Orange has spent the last few years slowly building a signature sound, rooted in the past yet wholly his own. You can trace a line between his MPC rips of vinyl back to Madlib's zonked-out tapestries on Madvillainy, and Daedelus' surrealist lounge music for The Weather. But over the past few years, and especially in 2015 through projects like The Night Took Us In Like Family (the latter made with L.A. rapper Jeremiah Jae), the man who bears the same name as Gilbert Bécaud's 1964 French chanson has cobbled something unique. On his best work, he stacks his snatches of vocals into something approaching a narrative, adding bebop and exotica tones and keeping rhythmic tension from slumping.
His second project this year finds him collaborating with Kool Keith on Time? Astonishing! Structurally, it's an adventure, heavy on vague metaphysics and B-movie ramblings about space travel. One of its charms is hearing L'Orange adapt his sound to fit the mercurial Kool Keith's style. He abandons the ornamental quirkiness of The Night in favor of yearning melodies, like the melancholy guitar loop of "Twenty Fifty Three", or the choral harmony and dusty jazz piano od "Meanwhile Back Home". The vocal samples are still there, though. On "This New World", he layers "underwater" effects onto a snippet of Flavor Flav asking, "What goes on?" and makes it resemble an outtake from Parliament's "Aqua Boogie".
As for Mr. Keith, listeners will note parallels to his vaunted Dr. Octagonecologyst, especially when it comes to the bludgeoning, Automator-inspired bass thump of "Dr. Bipolar". However, Time might hew closer to Keith's criminally underrated 2006 collaboration with Tom C, Project Polaroid, which also found him speaking in a halting delivery, underlining the weight of his words. Here, it seems as if he's floating through the music, then going silent as it swirls around him. His restrained performance pays the most dividends on "The Wanderer", where he bends together incongruent images in his familiar Bronx drawl: "The structure of combat is like Wrestlemania contracts/ Genetics make the eye contact/ Shaggy mister boom back denim/ I have nothing to prove in slacks." Then there's his bizarre battle rap on "I Need Out of This World": "Come again if you're a male with a fitted wearing a toupee/ I can get you an inside job wearing daishikis."
Keith's deliberate opacity and "upper-class penmanship" is trailed by a panoply of guests. On "The Traveler", he drops a tantalizing verse—"See the cerebrum, how fast I'm passin'"—and then cedes the spotlight to J-Live, who "disappear like I never here." Mr. Lif hijacks "Twenty Fifty Three" with Boston-accented super-scientifical madness. Open Mike Eagle tackles "Meanwhile, Back Home" alone, with Keith nowhere to be heard. Blu, MC Paul Barman (of all people), and MindsOne—individually, they range from serviceable to splendid. But cumulatively, they distract from the chemistry between the album's two main performers. Then again, perhaps Kool Keith and L'Orange are satisfied with conjuring a mood of amusingly hallucinatory hip-hop that lasts just over 30 minutes, and then evaporates like a pleasurable high. Whether it will be remembered as Time passes remains to be seen.


The young English singer and songwriter’s funk-inspired synth pop is appealingly goofy, but too often, he sounds caught in a bland impersonation act of his own making.

A Day in a Yellow Beat

Since age 17, George van den Broek has performed goofy bedroom pop as Yellow Days. Now a 21-year-old Surrey resident with an endearingly discomfiting rattail-esque hairdo, van den Broek exudes self-assured, weird-band-teacher energy. “What I say goes, because that’s how it should work. I’m the artist, man,” he told Vice in 2018. A Day in a Yellow Beat, his third album and first for Sony/RCA in North America, is the tonal equivalent of those wooden “This Way to the Beach” signs that a certain kind of mom hangs in her kitchen: sunny but a bit contrived.
“Intro/Be Free” makes the album’s funky, ’70s aspirations explicit, placing a sample of Yellow Days’ hero, Ray Charles, lamenting the sameness of modern pop musicians over a wry-but-rosy synth line. It’s a sweet introduction, and a good example of what makes Yellow Days appealing—he’s self-aware and doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, a classically charming combination. But charm alone isn’t enough to make good music, and too often on A Day in a Yellow Beat, Yellow Days sounds caught in a bland impersonation act of his own making.
Although his sensitivity to mental health and commitment to creating “upbeat existential millennial crisis music” lands him in the contemporary bedroom-pop category, Yellow Days pays clear homage to Black R&B and funk icons. There’s a little Marvin Gaye in his vocal delivery, some sense that his production is what you might hear if you ran Funkadelic through Google Translate. He’s quick to credit his references, but A Day in a Yellow Beat lacks the corresponding vision and feeling. These songs gesture at depression in a broad way, occasionally urging you to be free, carry on, and believe in the good of the world. At some points, the lyrics are so one-dimensional that it’s difficult to distinguish them from the most saccharine radio pop. “I want you to stay/Please don’t go,” Yellow Days croons over and over amid the celestial reverberations of “You,” a song too uninteresting to justify lazy writing.
Still, there are some satisfying, earworm-y moments. On “Who’s There,” guest vocals by Shirley Jones of the R&B trio the Jones Girls create a smooth surface that contrasts the sultry inkinesss of Yellow Days’ musings. “Keep Yourself Alive” has a nice whine to it, like a sputtering pickup truck persevering towards the sunset—it’s happy and honeyed, urging you to enjoy yourself and “keep it alive.” Yellow Days is at his best in his most joyous moments, like on “The Curse” or “Be Free,” where a clear love for performance reverberates off of confident, emotive vocals.
But it’s not enough to tip the balance of the album from imitation to innovation. There’s no question that van den Broek is an energetic and capable musician, but those qualities feel irrelevant when they show up in songs that might appear on a bad Shuggie Otis covers album. Anyone can make music that sounds like soul, but not all music has one.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In a vaporous swirl of voice and emotions, Massachusetts songwriter Woodson Black asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed?

Violence in a Quiet Mind

You don’t need to pore over the lyrics or backstory of Haux’s Violence in a Quiet Mind to grasp that it’s about depression. It’s right there in Woodson Black’s high, hushed voice, which quakes with swallowed sobs. It’s in his disorienting arrangements—the guitar too close, the drums and synths too far away, constructing a world in which everything intrudes but nothing can be touched. It’s in the persistent unease that haunts his gentle songs, and how even their crescendos suggest a filament flaring brightest the moment before it burns out.
Of course, it’s also in the lyrics, which teem with solitudes and stings as Black reviews painful childhood memories through the lens of lasting vulnerability they instilled. “You’ll never be safe, you’ll never be whole,” he admonishes on “Hold On,” wrenching the syllables through the tiniest aperture of breath. Then, over the course of a subdued but captivating album, he sets out to prove himself wrong. Violence in a Quiet Mind deals with death, addiction and generational trauma, yet it feels uplifting, not depressing. It asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed?
Black, who lives in the Berkshires, grew up in rural Massachusetts. His previous work as Haux consists of two EPs, where his R&B-flecked indie electro-pop was easy enough to situate among The xx and Active Child. But Violence in a Quiet Mind is harder to pin down. It has something of the Antlers’ fragile pageantry, of Mas Ysa’s mottled glow, of Bon Iver’s digital forestry. If you remember when Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart made small, harrowing, beautiful songs like “Fabulous Muscles,” then Black might be his benevolent twin. But such comparisons only touch on the immersive, subtle sound that Black has developed with producers Jamie Macneal and Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman).
Most of the songs are built around close-mic’d acoustic guitar figures, which Black clads in gauzy synths as if he’s dressing a wound. The guitars are plain but rich in character, emphasizing a woody tone and the texture of calluses scraping ridged strings. They serve as material facts for Black to cling to in the vaporous swirl of his voice and emotions. Sparse percussion, provided by Dean Sharenow and Joe Montague, steals in discreetly if at all, while Bartlett’s piano picks a broken path through the shifting patterns of light and shadow. The quiet intensity is never broken, lending small fluctuations large effects, yet Black nudges all this focused stasis toward change, which depression makes a synonym for relief.
When Violence begins with “Hold On,” it’s like all Black can muster is miles of reverb and wisps of music, tenuously held together with stray pins of desperation and will. The next few songs fill out the interior definition, and halfway through, the album hits a new stride. On “Heavy,” probably the crowd-pleaser—you can already hear him doing it solo for encores—the bass and percussion, no longer subterranean rumbles and gusts, slip into a pocket with some swing and romance. The Rhye vibes develop further via the propulsive dream-folk of “Craving,” which flourishes into “Eight,” a lovely duet with Rosie Carney that evokes long-shut curtains being thrown open.
Music can be many kinds of medicine: analgesic, anesthetic, emetic. But even as it soothes, Violence in a Quiet Mind is more concerned with demonstrating how it feels to get better. It takes patience, attention, and self-awareness, qualities Black’s music amply displays. As he pours his tempests into chipped ceramic songs, we can identify with being small, delicate vessels with large, volatile contents, and whether or not we connect with Black’s personal story, we can all use his incantation of forgiveness on the insinuating “Killer” for our purposes. It turns out music can heal, in a way—as a lifeline through and a tally of the work it takes to heal yourself.

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One of the last revival-style emo bands standing sings about boredom and getting older on their frankly audacious second album.

Dog Bless

There are albums that use their opening remarks to savagely waylay the listener with the grand scope and vision of what they’re about to experience. Gulfer’s second full-length, Dog Bless, is the opposite of all that, if you take Vincent Ford at his word. “I’m not going out/I’m staying right here in my basement/I’m just gonna chill and maybe write a song about it,” are the first lines he sings on “Secret Stuff.” The Montreal quartet spends the next half-hour discussing boredom, growing older, and whether writing songs about boredom and growing older will ever amount to much of anything. Sometimes they add some beer-buzzed group harmonies, and their jittery melodies are often punctuated by a flurry of two-handed tapping or the rhythm section making as many stutter-steps and backflips as many times as possible while staying in 4/4. All of which underlines the real point Ford is making on “Secret Stuff”: Gulfer is one of the last revival-style (aka “2011”) emo bands standing, and their frankly audacious and righteous belief is that this form of music is something you can spend a lifetime growing into and growing old with.
The emotional tenor of Dog Bless is of a piece with Gulfer’s previous work, honoring the genre’s tradition of communicating with itself. “I never thought I’d be so tired at my age,” Ford sang on the 2013 EP Transcendals, and five years later, “Secret Stuff” pledges, “I’ll stay the same old man.” On “Jurassic Spark,” another song from that 2013 EP, he admitted, “It’s just fun being bored and high/I still enjoy to be ignored sometimes.” This time around, though, that nonchalant quality has the potential to curdle into stubbornness and shame: “I’m stuck in the house/I’m always high/The bottom line is, ‘amaze me again,’” he sings on “Fading.”
Gulfer have said that “Fading” was inspired by watching elderly men play bocce and smoke cigarettes in the park, as satisfied as anyone could be about their station in life. Dog Bless strives towards that level of self-acceptance, while struggling to find the beauty and humor in servicing a cult audience after a span of time in which many promising bands completed their entire career arcs. Phrases like “I sometimes recall that no one gives a shit,” “Whatever it takes to be alive,” and “We got annoyed by everyone” are vented and repeated until they transmogrify into inside jokes.
As suggested by the theme of “Doglife,” three years of your twenties can feel seven times as long, and where Gulfer’s earlier work could get by on sheer energy, Dog Bless manages to show its work without feeling overdone. “Doglife” and “Baseball” have moments that could have been repurposed as foolproof hooks, but the band would rather not. The memories those songs speak on are meant to be fleeting, overpowering, and unexpected.
And of course bands in this realm tend to be short-lived. Even beyond the emotional and physical intensity, this kind of music is often just a tough sell outside of house shows: Typically, there’s too much math, not enough heart, too much tapping, not enough riffs, too much yelping, not enough tunes. Gulfer’s genre has never once been considered cool. But they’ve stuck with a variant of indie rock that sublimates that self-doubt without undermining itself, perfectly suited to soundtrack the mental push and pull of advancing age. They’re good at alternately embracing stasis and rejecting it, trying to will something exciting into existence and being OK if the process doesn’t bring results—the three interludes of melancholy chillwave synths are called “Blessed.”
All these thematic depths are more or less summed up in that first verse of “Secret Stuff,” especially in the way Ford says it. Every time he sings the word “I,” it’s in that corrugated-but-not-metal melodic scream that’s served as emo’s version of the millennial whoop or vocal fry as a genre identifier. (I dunno, the Kinsella Croak?) Yeah, he’s saying “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I”, but it’s meant to be doubled and tripled until it means something broader, closer to “we.”
It’s the kind of sound that re-emerged when Gulfer was first getting started, when, as one of Ford’s peers has put it, “Everything went back into the basement.” (Another musician from this scene described it as “Really bad, wussy emo rock 10 years after it was relevant.”) The self-deprecation inherent in those statements courses throughout Dog Bless, but so does the love. When Ford sings “Secret Stuff,” it’s a tribute to Gulfer themselves, and also the fallen in Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, Hightide Hotel, the Brave Little Abacus, Marietta, the Clippers, Everyone Everywhere, Joie de Vivre, Donovan Wolfington, You Blew It!, and countless others who sparkled and faded so records like this one could live.


With a newly pared down sound, Austra’s latest synth-pop record concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political.” But it is essentially optimistic, and presents solutions.

Future Politics

The past year has seen a wider move towards the genre of “tiny utopias”: small, invented idylls that, unlike the colossal world reconfigurations common in speculative fiction, are built to human scale. Whether polemic or meditative, they share a vision: a world better than our own and also within reach. It is, of course, obvious why one might want this now, might long to crawl out of this orange apocalypse and into a utopia. Art might not, as the myth goes, get better during bleak times, but bleak times do make people cling harder to the art they’ve got.
Electronic artist Katie Stelmanis has always made political art, blatantly or subtly, from her time with riot grrl band Galaxy to her more muted project, Austra. But since 2013’s Olympia, politics have gotten more, well, urgent. Stelmanis is Canadian and wrote Future Politics before the election results and before fascism started winning, but the album’s Inauguration Day release is now looming, inescapable subtext. “I was kind of worried it wouldn’t be something that people would be interested in, or connect to... [but it’s] become more relevant than I could’ve ever imagined,” she told CBC.
Future Politics doesn’t depart from Austra’s sound so much as filter it. Stelmanis’ band, and its sound, are pared down, producing straightforward, minimal music akin to club artists like Marie Davidson or Kate Wax, or perhaps Björk’s electronic work. Even Stelmanis’ voice, capable of great force, sounds less operatic than deliberately hollowed-out, as in the tentative melodies of “Beyond a Mortal” and “Gaia” or the collapsing coloratura of “I’m a Monster.”
Austra fills the extra space by surfacing the themes formerly held in the band’s subtext, though occasionally stated, like Olympia’s “I Don't Care (I’m a Man).” While writing this album, Stelmanis was into science fiction and political manifestos—in particular, the Accelerationist Manifesto and Marge Piercy’s canonical Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel whose utopian visions reach its main character amid abuse and institutional detention. “It needed to have a purpose other than just my own ego,” Stelmanis said. And while Future Politics isn’t impersonal—throughout it runs an undercurrent of loss, partly the result of personal and professional departures in Stelmanis’ life—the album concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political,” the slow parallel rot of self-contained depression and political turmoil. When the definition of disordered thinking resembles, so closely and measurably, a world increasingly disordered and unmoored from fact, what do you even do? How do you think? How do you begin to conceive a way out?
It’s fitting that the first track of the album is a question: “What if we were alive?” Stelmanis sings over synth pads and unsettled chords, like closing credits for a bittersweet ending. “Freepower,” like its near-namesake, presents a twitchy, unsettled mix and a plea for the personal. The title track is a driving sequencer track shaped like an anthem, but gets only as far as a battle cry: “future politics.” There’s still mourning in the present to get past, after all, and the midsection of the album dwells upon it. “I’m a Monster” begins like the bridge of a club track, the sort with tears-on-the-dancefloor and throbbing backing vocals, but where that track would provide release, there’s only hollowness: “I don’t feel nothing anymore.” “Gaia” dwells upon loss as well; the track most reminiscent of Björk, it’s like a cut from a less optimistic Biophilia, where the environment’s full of more death than life.
Despite all this, Future Politics is essentially an optimistic album, and presents solutions. First: self-care is important. “Deep Thought,” a minute-long, a cappella harp palpitation at the end of the record, is reminiscent of dream pop or chillout, or even ASMR—soothing genres. Second: make connections. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to write in a major key,” Stelmanis said (partly in jest) while touring Olympia, but “I Love You More Than You Love Yourself” accomplishes this musically and metaphorically, taking an idea last seen in dull dance backfill and turning it into an ode to redemptive love. “Utopia” has the album’s lushest arrangement, a whirlwind of chiming trance synths, cheery octaves and airy background vocals, and its most indomitably romantic lyric: “I only want to hold your hand my own damn life/I can picture a place where everyone feels it too.” It’s got the highest notes and most triumphant melodies of the album. It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair.


Far from the accessible pop record it's been touted as, the iconoclastic singer's latest outing rarely revisits the celebratory spirit of its first single, despite welcome guest spots from Timbaland, Antony, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, and Konono No. 1, among others.

Volta

If you wanted to find the last time Björk really let her hair down on a record, you'd have to look all the way back to 1995's Post. From "Army of Me" (its video found her driving a tank and wearing gold teeth) to "It's Oh So Quiet" to "I Miss You", that record sired some of the most vibrant songs of her career. It's a side of her we've only caught in brief glimpses ever since.  In the course of moving back to Iceland after a letter bomb scare in 1997, engaging in psychological warfare with Lars Von Trier on the set of 2000's oppressively bleak Dancer in the Dark, falling in love with Matthew Barney in 2001, giving birth to her second child in 2002, and of course, just getting older, Björk's output has become increasingly austere and inward-looking. The unhinged, mischievous screamers that were once her calling card are now mostly a thing of the past, replaced by songs that more closely resemble holy moments than sing-alongs.
But in her pre-game interviews for Volta, Björk hinted that it might finally be time to flip the switch back. "All I wanted for this album was to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up," she told Pitchfork-- one of a handful of interviews to feature descriptors like "fun" and "poppy" and "accessible." Disappointingly, it turns out that Timbaland and the Technicolor artwork were red herrings-- Volta is not Björk's pop record. Figuring out what it is, actually, is a much more difficult task; where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.
Its emptiness is doubly disappointing when considering the caliber of guest performers involved. In addition to Timbaland, Volta features Antony Hegarty (of & the Johnsons fame), improv drummer Chris Corsano, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, Konono No. 1, Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, and a 10-piece Icelandic brass band. Some of that guestlist goes wasted; Chippendale is banished to slow-build purgatory on the brooding Antony duet "The Dull Flame of Desire", while Konono No. 1 are reduced to fighting for space with 37 other elements in the already overstuffed "Earth Intruders". Even Timbaland's contributions feel oddly apathetic; aside from "Earth Intruders", which pales in comparison to any Timbaland/Björk collaboration you'd hear in your head, neither of his other productions bear much of his imprint at all. With its distorted, squelching rhythms, "Innocence" sounds, ironically, more like the work of longtime collaborator Mark Bell, and "Hope"s scampering percussion and spindly kora lines, while interesting, are marred by an atrocious lyric about terrorism: "What's the lesser of two evils?/ If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant/ Manages to kill her target or not?"
For a record ostensibly about tribalism and reconnecting with our animal sides, much of Volta plods. Insulated with samples of running water, long, mournful horns, and gently plucked pipa, "I See Who You Are" is a tranquil lullaby without much of a melody at all. "Vertebrae by Vertebrae" rests on a looped horn sample not far from Peter Thomas' "Bolero on the Moon Rocks" (sampled by Pulp on "This Is Hardcore"), but  Björk can't take it anywhere, instead filling its five minutes with runs from her catalog of preferred vocal shorthand scribbles. On the heels of those two songs, the rhythmless "Pneumonia"-- which finds Björk utterly adrift melodically-- is an even harder sell.
There are, of course, a handful of lovely parts as well. While I have problems with the way "Earth Intruders" sounds-- muddy, clunky, overcompressed, and not nearly as aerodynamic as you'd expect a Björk/Timbaland track to sound-- its charm comes through with time. With lyrics pulled from a Russian poem made popular by Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (how's that for pop!) and regal, curling horns reminiscent of the crescendoing strings in Henryk Gorecki's 3rd Symphony (uh, ditto), the 7½-minute Björk/Antony duet "The Dull Flame of Desire" is a darkly elegant setpiece that beautifully showcases both voices. Ultimately, though, it's the industrial jackhammering of "Declare Independence" that steals the show. Built around a wriggling synth lead, some brash EQing, and white-hot swaths of digital noise, it's a gloriously messy few minutes-- one of her most transcendent tracks to date.
In the end, though, those golden moments are too few and far between, and the slow, unfurling, lingering moments too long. If the critical and fan response to this album reflects that of the fascinatingly eccentric (but largely maligned) Medúlla, I'll be curious to see how she responds. Until then, Volta is mostly proof that Björk is as fallible as the messy, unpredictable humanity she celebrates, and that even her definition of "pop" is avant-garde.


The California pedal steel guitarist makes inventive use of space and place on a quietly mournful album where lost forests and shuttered venues endure in intangible anonymity.

The Cinder Grove

Depending on the hands and feet of the beholder, a pedal steel guitar can be an instrument of ecstatic heavenly worship or honky-tonk hellraising—or both. A pedal steel is a paintbrush, a tool for filling wide-open spaces with sagebrush and starlight. In any form, pedal-steel music often suggests a sense of weightless drift, a honeyed suspension of gravity as a player glides a stout, shiny little tone bar over electrified strings.
Following several albums focused on fingerpicked guitar, Chuck Johnson turned his attention toward the pedal steel on 2017’s liquidy Balsams. He’s spent the intervening years applying it in other realms, building duets with Marielle Jakobsons in Saariselka and cutting a record with synth-and-bass-clarinet duo Golden Retriever. He approached his newest solo project, The Cinder Grove, hoping to explore spaces and memory, spiraling through more ambiguous realms with less concrete thematic associations. The record stretches deeper into a pool of contemplative, ambient-leaning pedal-steel records that’s expanded significantly since Balsams.
Based in Oakland, California, Johnson makes inventive use of both space and place on The Cinder Grove. He developed his own digital toolkit for the project, culling echo and reverb effects from performance recordings he’d made in Oakland DIY spaces since rendered defunct by capitalism and other disasters. But Johnson’s processing techniques aren’t one-to-one recreations of a pedal steel played in various rooms. They’re impossible to untangle from other effects, from the notes themselves, and from another treatment designed to simulate the “reverberation of a redwood forest.” The Cinder Grove embeds sense memories, walls and trees enduring in intangible anonymity.
These five elongated pieces feel more mournful than Johnson’s other pedal-steel work, though they rarely stray from a sublime sense of calm. “Red Branch Bell” is the most elegiac, with cello, violin, and viola parts bringing a somber complement to Johnson’s steel-and-synth foundation. The long, slow notes feel as though each is helping draw out the next. When the track fractures around its halfway point, quiet electronic feedback connects with mildly dissonant layers that lie together like hazy memories. But “The Laurel,” which lifts upward with the ease of clouds clearing from the sky, offers relief.
Playing to the pedal steel’s strengths of subtlety, The Cinder Grove’s mood slides toward grief without any hard signaling. The restorative serenity of Balsams may have transmitted a sense that “everything’s going to be alright,” but The Cinder Grove acknowledges that sometimes it isn’t. Losing a creative space isn’t simply losing a set of walls and floor, it’s the collapse of an entire little universe. On the way to “Red Branch Bell,” Johnson wanders through soundscapes that explore voids without over-emphasizing their darkness. Sadness feels almost effervescent as “Constellation” floats by with cosmic dreaminess, while silvery ripples balance with lower drifts on “Seritony.” The modulating notes that open “Raz-de-Marée” are the record’s only demanding tones, sweeping like a lighthouse beam through the fog before slipping into full pedal-steel cascades.
Though loss is The Cinder Grove’s central theme, the album carries with it a tacit reminder that devastation doesn’t always mean total destruction. The worst fires reduce everything to ash. But cinders aren’t quite so far gone: Something combustible is left behind. They’re the smallest surviving pieces, unlikely fragments of hope. Like a pedal steel ringing out another clear, sterling note, they offer the promise of redemption.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The French indie rock stalwarts’ fun and fizzy seventh album rejuvenates a proven formula while protecting its true feelings behind glass.

Alpha Zulu

How does a band as definitively springy as Phoenix find inspiration? When the French quartet released their debut more than 20 years ago, their meticulous production and candy-sweet hooks seemed dually primed for festival stages and dimly lit cocktail bars. Before the breakout success of 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Phoenix were that band your indie-head friend said should be huge, man—and when they got huge, headlining Coachella and lending their hit “1901” to a Cadillac commercial, your friend still rode for them. Phoenix hasn’t had to risk artistic integrity for mainstream appeal or reinvent their style to remain relevant—their ebullient, effortless pop-rock is enduringly of-the-moment, sophisticated enough to appease purists and safe enough to appear in a lingerie advertisement.
Six albums and a couple decades in, though, it’s fair to wonder if Phoenix’s trusted formula can spark the flame it once did. While 2017’s Ti Amo featured all their familiar flourishes—buzzy bass, bubblegum synth, pleasure-packed choruses—the record felt stale, stuffed with empty calories. How many more times could Thomas Mars chant a sing-along hook that really resonated, or noodle a riff that hit like the ones on Wolfgang? On the band’s seventh studio album, Alpha Zulu, Phoenix’s euphoric synth rock sounds as good as it ever has, the songs gushing with renewed enthusiasm and glittery production. They occasionally color outside the lines of their standard style, but mostly they stick to the script—they know what works, so why change now? Though emotionally distant and structurally predictable, Alpha Zulu’s a fun, fizzy record that’ll undoubtedly find a home on strobe-lit dancefloors across the world.
Writing and recording amid COVID-19 lockdowns, Phoenix didn’t want Alpha Zulu to be defined as their pandemic album. Driven by “the possibility of playing [the album] live someday,” they made songs destined for jam-packed crowds and expensive light shows, work that will slot seamlessly into their existing setlist of hits. No new song is likely to inspire more fervor on the road than the Ezra Koenig-assisted “Tonight,” the band’s best song since Wolfgang. Coursing with punchy percussion and bright, shuddering guitars, “Tonight” evokes a bygone era when Vampire Weekend and Phoenix were at the forefront of a new wave of innovative, idiosyncratic guitar pop; Mars and Koenig sound like a pair of cool dads reliving their glory days. The fun continues on the club-ready “All Eyes on Me,” where Mars delivers one of the album’s most memorable hooks over muscular bass, pulsing synths, EDM risers, and tinkly harpsichord. Even when the writing contains traces of melancholy, Alpha Zulu is nothing if not a good time.
As is typical for a Phoenix record, the lyrics are tertiary to the sticky melodies and lustrous production. It’s not that the writing is vapid; Mars has always been more of a mood generator than a storyteller, conveying tension and emotion through small, cryptic details and fluttery vocal cadences. Alpha Zulu has no discernible raison d’être, just glimmers of vulnerability that burst into view when you least expect them. Take “Artefact,” where Mars croons an incisive line about marital inertia: “I’m looking for an artifact/A piece of me that’s still intact…What part of me can still attract you?” If you squint hard enough, Alpha Zulu seems to be about reestablishing connection in a post-lockdown world, whether that be connection with ourselves, our partners, or the strangers we scream with at concerts. Yet I found myself craving more songs like “Artefact,” moments where Phoenix wed their precise songcraft with more legible meaning. Otherwise, the deluge of chanting hooks—like the ones on the title track or “The Only One”—start to deflate into gibberish.
Phoenix recorded much of Alpha Zulu at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a wing of the Louvre and a place whose “eerie and a little bit dystopian” energy invigorated the group’s creative process, according to Mars. In interviews, the band recalls the strangeness of performing beside medieval paintings and Napoleon’s throne. And after a while, the songs on Alpha Zulu begin to mimic the experience of observing objects in a museum—you can admire all you want, but please don’t touch. Just look at the album centerpiece “Winter Solstice”: Over a four-on-the-floor kick and neon-sheathed synths, Mars sings about finding it “hard to connect” with others amid limitless technological distractions. The sugary downtempo drops offer a brief respite from Mars’ gloomy demeanor, but the sentiment feels mostly gestural. When the song ends, the worries fade and we’re welcomed into another sun-streaked gallery, nodding and muttering “wow” while suppressing a yawn.


The Philadelphia emo trio’s debut EP packs in a career’s worth of evolution, pulling from ’90s Midwest twinkle, Guitar Hero shredding, and the online angst of an emergent fifth wave.

Complacency EP

Almost as soon as emo’s fifth wave announced its existence, critics countered that it wasn’t real—this was not an actual, flesh-and-blood scene, but an online confabulation, as if any movement that coalesced throughout 2020 could be otherwise. Naturally, the primary qualities of this wave are the inevitable results of being Very Online: time and memory compressed to the point of near suffocation, high and low influences ever more tightly commingled, allegiances formed between acts with seemingly little in common besides mutual followers. Bands that predate 2017 are now cast as elder statesmen. The exuberant Philadelphia trio Johnny Football Hero is a quintessential product of this weird new era—named after a Nada Surf lyric, they lay claim to Sunny Day Real Estate and crabcore icons Attack! Attack! in the same sentence, describe Dogleg’s barely year-old Melee as an aspirational model, and cram a career’s worth of evolution into the six songs of Complacency.
Singles “Cap’n Oblivious (Deficit)” and “Sister Hellen” are fluent in contemporary online argot: separating the healthy expression of anger from internalized angst, rhyming “therapy” and “anxiety.” The commiseration of the group vocals makes the ascending melodies sound sarcastic, and the shifty song construction opens up side missions within verse-chorus structure. You might find yourself reflexively pounding on your desk or steering wheel, but Johnny Football Hero counterbalance the immediate familiarity of their sound with surprising and judicious flexing of technical chops. James McGill’s tenor emerges from the vocal dogpiles with scenery-chewing flair, reframing Johnny Football Hero as a band drawn as much to the musical theater roots of their MySpace-era favorites as the lineage of post-hardcore. There are nimble, hammer-and-pull leads and flurries of tapping that owe an inevitable tithe to American Football (“Aurora” all but quotes the “Never Meant” riff), but McGill’s technique is even more indebted to Guitar Hero as a gateway to mainstream shred.
Complacency sounds like a band realizing their confidence in real time: navigating the hairpin melodic turn before the chorus of “41,” figuring out who gets to pick up the extra percussion that turns “Cap’n Oblivious (Deficit)” into proof of the permeability between sasscore and dance-punk. It manifests even in the relative restraint of “Complacency, Pt. 1,” the sort of strangulated slow build that typically pops up around track five on a 1990s Midwest emo classic. At first, “Pt. 1” serves notice to Johnny Football Hero’s range, though not their ability to unify emo’s various waves, especially as it leads right back into “Sister Hellen” shouting down group therapy and underemployment. But soon after, “Complacency, Pt. 2” offers a more perfect union, rhyming “tomato, tomahto” with “La Villa Strangiato”—note that this isn’t one of Rush’s popular songs, but a 12-part suite subtitled “An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.”
Johnny Football Hero are happy to call themselves out on their dorkier impulses, happier to embrace them. This is their truest show of allegiance to the fifth wave—or, on a smaller scale, to their peers responsible for this July’s “DIY Super Bowl.” The Philadelphia emo scene’s first major post-lockdown gig inspired much shaky, heartwarming iPhone footage of virtual Emo Nite favorites like Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly and Ogbert the Nerd—bands whose very names read like a playful rebuke to unrequited bids for respectability. In that way, Johnny Football Hero is above all true to themselves: a band named after a hit single about the futility of trying to be popular.

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The 12-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the…

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

The 12-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the city’s attractions. Turner buildings, blossoming with neon network logos, lure Yellowjacket grads from the adjacent campus cluster with the sweet nectar of Powerpuff Girls money. Across the way, the Varsity serves grease between buns, communicating with an enigmatic fast food lexicon that rivals rhyming Cockneys. Tourists walk the overpass to the ghostly Olympic park, built on the graveyard of Techwood projects, in the shadows of Vick’s pastel dome. Hipsters and reluctant yuppies settle in the gentrified Five Points and Cabbagetown, giving their quaint subdivisions more verdant “___________ Park” monikers. And finally, there’s Turner Field, reverberating collective October sighs, before the highway splits back into its tributaries in East Point, the cultural fountainhead. The hip-hop id to New York’s ego: the home of Outkast.
Lauded retroactively in 2000, upon the release of Stankonia, for a formula that had been perfected by teenagers on 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast charged up the public with silly amounts of reserved anticipation for this double-disc marathon. Since dropping that debut nearly 10 years ago, Outkast’s singles have charted a steady incline of genre-defiance and pop virtuosity. But now, in the wake of the commercial and critical smash that yielded such classic tracks as “Ms. Jackson,” “B.O.B.,” and “So Fresh, So Clean,” Big Boi and André 3000 have, for the first time, chosen to work in separate corners, like Beatles after India. Here, on the resulting Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the two wander down the blacktop from East Point, each plotting their own distinct course: André, like I-85, shoots off to the airport and sky-high trips before dipping into the Mardi Gras marshes of New Orleans, while Big Boi rolls deep down I-75 into south Florida, home of booty bass and baby blue.
The consensus in rock circles had unfairly anticipated that The Love Below would reign supreme over Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx, since André was the one with the guitar in the fuzzy boots. As it turns out, his Prince-mimicking fusion looks a lot better on paper than it sounds in your ears. On too many songs, André repeats space-playboy choruses over repetitious, unfinished digifunk. As the brief orchestrated outro to “Pink and Blue” suggests, each track feels like it’s missing something—strings, guitars, harmonies, organic instruments, and, oh right: Big Boi. André does have his moment, though: “Hey Ya!” glitters and towers like the silver Westin hotel over an ’80s Atlanta skyline, blending Flaming Lips–like synth-bass and ebullient acoustic guitar with the rebellious joy of “Little Red Corvette”—and like all classic songs, it introduces new vernacular with a genius that transcends product placement. Even indymedia.org feeders will shout “Polaroid!” while miming spanking at this fall’s Not-Dog cookouts.
Of the few other tracks on The Love Below that come close to reaching “Hey Ya!”’s apex, the one that most succeeds is “Spread,” which showcases trumpets and piano weaving through a rubber bassline and scattering rimshots. Its chorus has André putting on his Camille voice, while the verses contain some of the only moments on the album in which he actually flows. When he does, he’s tight enough to pose the question of why he decided to cut back on rapping at all—particularly since, frankly, he ranks just above Pharrell Williams on the “brilliant but mosquito-throated crooner” list. Elsewhere, the quite literal “Dracula’s Wedding” boasts guest vocalist Kelis over whistling squelches, while Norah Jones’ lovely turn on the acoustic “Take Off Your Cool” hints at the true stylistic breadth André is capable of achieving. “Baby, take off your cool/I want to get to know you,” they both sing over plucks and strums. Heed your lyrics, André. (Except for that “become the master of your own bastion” nonsense.)
Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx coolly upstages its counterpart: Although it, too, provides the world with one earthshaking single, it differs from The Love Below in that it also manages to maintain a consistent level of brilliance and emotional complexity. Here, Big Boi effectively asserts himself as man who wants both a stripper pole in his home and his nostalgic place saved on the pew—“Unhappy” conveys that in its beat alone! Comparing the selection of Speakerboxxx to André’s limper Love Below, it’s clear who won this bet: machine-heavy, horn-driven funk stomps behind “Bowtie” and “The Rooster”; reverberating woodblocks (a trademark Outkast signifier since “Elevators”) starkly soundtrack pondering rhymes on “Knowing”; “Church” takes gospel into the 21st Century, accelerating aluminum Stevie Wonder disco-pop into Teutonic techno; propulsive kickdrums pump under drunken guitars, scratches, and a Jay-Z hook on the standout “Flip Flop Rock”; and “Ghettomusick”, the aforementioned earthshaking single, is, emotionally, a celebration and a lament, braggadocio and beatitudes. Musically, the record shifts from punk-cadenced, cellulite-quivering woofer booms to three-wheeled slow-jams and back before snake-charming with George Clinton keyboards.
Of course, there’s one department in which neither disc succeeds: Despite how forward-looking these albums can be, both members have failed to envision a future without skits and intros, which make up no less than 10 of the 39 tracks here. It’s one reason why Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, like no albums before, beg to be ripped, sieved and re-sequenced. Cutting out the dialog, along with The Love Below’s silicon-smooth, Rainbow Children–esque jazz and lulling middle-section, and Big Boi’s guest-laden, been-there street tracks, leaves one genius full-length that fits on a single disc.


The Chicago-based jazz guitarist and Tortoise member heads a loose-limbed quartet that also includes Sam Barsheshet, Chris Lopes, and Chad Taylor.

The Relatives

Although Jeff Parker is the one whose name is written in big letters out on the sidewalk blackboard, the Chicago-based jazz guitarist has always been savvy enough to recognize that-- in the words of De Niro-as-Capone-- nobody wins unless the team wins. As with his work in Tortoise and Isotope 217, Parker's playing as a bandleader is virtually egoless, and on The Relatives he remains steadfast in his willingness to temper and subordinate his instrument's voice in the broader interests of the group at large.
Such cooperative benevolence would seem misplaced if Parker hadn't the wherewithal to surround himself with such sympathetic players. Joining him here is his regular rhythm section of drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Chris Lopes (both of whom played on Parker's 2003 debut as headliner, Like-Coping) as well as Sam Barsheshet on Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer. Here, the quartet move in a loose-limbed, baggy lockstep, with each member given an equal place at the table. If you were to approach this album blindfolded, you might easily assume Taylor or Barsheshet to be the ringmaster, so humbly does Parker deliver his sparklingly clean, unfussy guitar contributions.
Significantly less abstract and more song-oriented than many of Parker's past recordings (particularly noise-laden improv experiments such as Out Trios, Vol. 2, his 2003 collaboration with Kevin Drumm and Michael Zerang), on The Relatives he also shares songwriting duties with his bandmates, as well as tackling an ambitious cover of Marvin Gaye's "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You". The album opens with the laidback swank of Taylor's "Istanbul", where Parker's breezy acoustic guitar and Barsheshet's organ laze about sunning themselves on the rocks, before the driving, almost Meters-like R&B; fusion of "Mannerisms" arrives to shake them from their idyll. The melodic riffling of Lopes' "Sea Change" explores some of the same dusky film noir shadows that Tortoise haunted early in their lifespan, while on the title track Barsheshet conjures up a shimmering, humid glaze from the keyboards in a manner that fondly recalls Herbie Hancock's Sextant.
Unfortunately, there are occasions when the group skirt dangerously close to the same easy-listening tar pits that have ensnared so many post-rock fusionists. When Lopes introduces a flute on the turtleneck-clad jazz-pop of "Beanstalk", you may fear that you've inadvertently stumbled across Anchorman's Ron Burgundy playing an after-hours set down at the supper club. Thankfully, however, such missteps are few, and over the bulk of The Relatives these musicians sound positively ecstatic to be playing with and for each other (if one is to trust the large number of animated hollers they give one another during the course of the album). If you grant them some attention, I expect you'll find their enthusiasm to be infectious.


The hybrid jazz supergroup featuring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, and more keeps it exquisitely sparse and supremely chill.

Enigmatic Society

Dinner Party offers incontrovertible proof that great music requires great restraint. The group comprises three of the most highly rated jazz musicians of modern times—saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist Robert Glasper and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin—plus North Carolina producer 9th Wonder, who all hide their collective light under a band name that is bland to the point of ridicule. The instrumentation on Enigmatic Society, meanwhile, is exquisitely sparse, stripped back to passing glances and musical breeze.
Their third album is a small step forward from their self-titled 2020 debut. The group’s roots still lie in ’70s soul, ’90s hip-hop and R&B, and jazz but they have further refined this mixture on Enigmatic Society, dampening down their sound to an airy velvet exhalation. If the album has anything as vulgar as a declaration of intent, it would be the intro to “Breathe,” in which singer Arin Ray invites us to come in and chill and “Don’t worry about it/You’ve had a long day/Just don’t say nothing/I’ve got your shift today” in what may be the most seductively functional 20 seconds of music you will hear all year.
Enigmatic Society shows that small, concentrated voices can resonate loudest. Album highlight “For Granted” uses a fragment of Glasper’s piano, a tiny lick of marine melancholy whose slender strokes draw the audience closer in. Elsewhere, the piano chord sequence on “Answered Prayer” is punctured by the slightest suggestion of soprano saxophone melody, and “Watts Renaissance” employs subtle modulations in the song’s bassline to tickle the listener’s senses, the power, in each case, drawn from masterful understatement.
For all of the group’s backgrounds in jazz, this is far from a jazz album. The subtle but passionate experimentalism of Blonde-era Frank Ocean feels like a point of reference on “Secure,” where a warped and rather murky clip of piano and voice plays off against a crisp vocal line, creating the refracted emotional tug of a singer baring his soul to a display of funhouse mirrors. “Can’t Go” samples Hall and Oates’ much misused “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” and the wobbling funk of “Watts Renaissance'' resembles a G-funk era track zoned out on valium and swimming-pool chlorine. It’s an ostensibly unusual set of references held together by a lightness of touch and fantastically disciplined songwriting. “Love Love”—essentially early D’Angelo in the suggestion of silk pajamas—manages to convey the redemptive purity of being in love in just five lines of lyrics, brushed drums, and a gently unwinding chord progression.
That Dinner Party can subsume their collective technique and knowledge is a sign of the group’s ego-free dedication. There are moments on Enigmatic Society when the individual instruments shine—the ecstatic saxophone trills on “Watts Renaissance,” or the oceanic sweep of the piano chords that roll open “Answered Prayer”—but they have the wisdom to put the good of the song first, to the extent that Washington and Glasper sometimes feel like absent friends on their own album. (The versatile Martin is ever present, with production credits on all nine of the album’s songs, while 9th Wonder contributes to four.) This makes Dinner Party land in the top percentile of supergroups, where the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.


A compilation from the prolific Water From Your Eyes songwriter offers an endearing tour through their introspective, constantly evolving body of work.

Thanks for Coming: You Haven’t Missed Much

You Haven’t Missed Much

Keeping up with Rachel Brown’s catalog can be overwhelming. In addition to their work as one half of the experimental indie-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, they’ve released 79 projects on Bandcamp since September 2012. You Haven’t Missed Much, Brown’s latest release under the name Thanks for Coming, is a welcome entry point. Akin to a greatest hits LP, the 14-track compilation spans all of Brown’s styles from twee, acoustic-led tunes to jangly bouts of distortion, including songs as old as 2015’s “Yr Kind of Cool” and as recent as 2022’s “Plagiarizer.” Like a retrospective exhibition of their creative process, it offers a flawed but endearing tour of Brown’s artistic growth and the lived-in charm of their songwriting.
Since Brown started releasing introspective indie-rock as Thanks for Coming just over a decade ago, the lineup has undergone several permutations, involving bassist and co-writer Linda Sherman, drummer and Water From Your Eyes bandmate Nate Amos, and more recent collaborators Charlie Dore-Young and Mike Kolb. Some of Brown’s most affecting material, however, is solitary. Originally included on 2022’s rachel jr., “My Name” is an exercise in gradual tension, building on a modulated bassline and a foreboding acoustic guitar. Although Brown layers in ambling percussion and synth pads, “My Name” fades like mist rising from a lake, never building to a climax and subtle enough to be overlooked.
On another solo recording, “U R Not Sick, Yr Electric,” Brown longs for the past and future simultaneously. “I’d give anything to go back to October,” goes their opening salvo, but by the next verse they’d “give anything to go right to November.” The compilation’s most poignant song, “Me, Missing You,” memorializes a relationship that’s failing purely due to shitty circumstances: “I know I’m hard to get a hold of/’Cause I’ve been held for far too long/But not long enough for the two of us.” Like Brown’s best lyrics, it’s a simple yet trenchant observation about lost love.
Given that You Haven’t Missed Much documents Brown’s work since high school, some of the inclusions feel underbaked. “Yr Kind of Cool” poses a series of repetitive questions (“Do you wanna touch my hair?” “Do you wanna make a joke?”) that yield little depth within the narrative of an age-inappropriate relationship. “Universe,” a song about romance in a computer simulation from 2018’s back at it again, could benefit from more thematic development. But even these weaker tracks provide context for Brown’s growth as a songwriter. Contrasting the typical concision and focus of a Thanks for Coming album, You Haven’t Missed Much plays like a mixtape from a friend eager to hear your thoughts. What it lacks in uniformity, it compensates for in warmth.


Composed for the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan, this 2011 performance showcases a band torn between its impulse to entertain and its personal mission to challenge.

11•11•11

In 2011 MGMT were still fresh into a risky rebrand. After selling a million copies of their debut Oracular Spectacular, one of the biggest albums of indie rock’s blockbuster era, they swiftly pruned their audience with 2010’s contentious Congratulations, a record alternatingly defended as misunderstood or derided as a cop out. It may be both. Faced with the impossibility of recreating their debut’s success, the duo got ahead of the narrative: They weren’t the band that couldn’t write another “Kids.” They were the band that didn’t want to.

It was against that background of disappointed fans and unconvinced critics that MGMT were commissioned to write an original composition to accompany the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of installation artist Maurizio Cattelan. Beneath a canopy of dozens of suspended sculptures, cat skeletons, and taxidermied horses, the duo performed this set of all-new music twice, first at the exhibit’s November 10 private opening, then at its public debut the following day. “The art exhibition is done in a completely original way, so it deserves music which is completely original,” the band said.

The optics certainly worked for a band telegraphing its turn from pop in favor of art. At the time, MGMT were trying to tie their of-the-moment electro-pop to a deeper tradition of psychedelia; a few weeks earlier they’d covered a Pink Floyd deep cut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and released a compilation of obscure psych music. And on their Guggenheim set, released 11 years later as the live album 11-11-11, they floated new ways to balance their melody-forward sensibilities with their artier, more exploratory instincts.
For a set intended for such a limited audience, there’s a lot of creativity here. At its most inspired, 11-11-11 teases what could have been a lost MGMT album, although in its mellower lulls and boxy acoustics the recording sounds more like what it is: background music for an art show. Generally the songs with vocals are the most formal. “Invocation” and “I Am Not Your Home” cast the oblique shadows of Radiohead, with Andrew VanWyngarden’s voice taking on shades of Thom Yorke’s alien sneer.

The set’s many instrumental pieces, meanwhile, frolic into sheer whimsy. “Forest Elf” plays like celestial on-hold music, while “Whistling Through the Graveyard” conjures old children’s Christmas music by way of circus calliopes and lost exotica records. There’s a generous amount of kitsch, which seems like an appropriate accompaniment for an exhibit of Cattelan, an artist whose work gestures toward the subversive but often scans as cartoonish caprice. The surf-country twang of “Under the Porch” could pass as the theme song to an imagined one-season 1960s Western.
11-11-11 inevitably takes on a different context than it would have if the band hadn’t waited over a decade to release it, since now we know how their arc played out. The duo’s most recent studio album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, marked a return to hook-forward pop fit for dance parties and after bars. As a record, it’s fine, but as a career move, it felt like a retreat. As taxing as MGMT’s left turns could be, they were never dull—they were one of the last big-ticket indie bands that took genuine risks. 11-11-11 invites nostalgia for when this band was still torn between its impulse to entertain and its personal mission to challenge.


Campfire Songs

I was driving around with my father, letting him prattle-- unprompted and unabated--about the good ol' days in the country: working on the farm, driving the tractor, drinking Big Red, listening to the radio wafting out into the open fields. Having spent most of his days dreaming of a place of his own out there, where he could sit on the screened porch on a summer night, playing cards, drinking cold beers, listening to old Willie Nelson wavering as his hand played out, it seemed to come true almost ten years ago, when he had his own ranch house. And yet, he finally confided to me that he had never, in all those years, drank a beer or played cards, much less sat out on the porch listening to Willie. It was one of the saddest admissions I ever heard from my old man.
I tried to be discreet when I listened to this Campfire Songs CD; I tried to make sure he was beyond earshot of this Animal Collective offshoot, as the vibrations would no doubt come to bear on all those dark, mosquito-filled evenings he missed. Recorded on somebody's porch in rural Maryland, Campfire Songs is supremely relaxed, intent on reveling in the blissful pastoralism longed for by Avey Tare and Geologist's "Good Country: (off of Danse Manatee), yet not by way of its tribal electronics and urban babble. Instead, we have awkwardly plucked strings and arrhythmic, strummed ellipses curving in and out of each other as they lay in the clearing, insects wandering through their hair as the leaves of the tambourine trees rustle on "Queen in my Pictures". The trio of voices, scarcely harmonized, creates a discernible motion, moving in and out of each other's throats, erecting a semblance of structure that stabilizes for a night, even if it's built on the flimsiest of timbres.
As they turn their meandering strums into "Doggy", Campfire Songs almost approach the eroding acoustic glow the Grifters tenaciously shone from Eureka, the embers burning low under the gray ash as the sounds of rain fall and hiss about their little circle. The flames slowly build back, fanned by banjo and mandolin, the sound billowing from smoky green sticks and crackling branches. Somewhere a plane circles, droning high overhead, revealing open space in the lo-fi recording.
"Two Corvettes" is more content to idle, absorbing the night air. Just when you think they're falling asleep, the acoustic guitars stumble back with a clenched rattling, their voices turning more animalistic, wailing just past the light of the fire. If the Oldham boys had clopped up in ostrich skin boots to Buzzy Linhart's loft space around 4am at Frank's to holler out "Come A Little Dog"-- still haunted by the coyote spirits that bellow up in the Hill Country-- they may as well have blazed over to this back porch instead. But when the Campfires start to channel "Taking Care of Business" while the katydids yammer in the distance, it hits you: these are city slickers out on a weekend trip.
These boys are taking Willie Nelso's golf balls and cracking them open, slowly unraveling the rubber band and nylon twine wrap until they arrive at the gooey gray center of it all, tentatively biting into the blue goop once dumped into Whiskey River. High on said toxins, they lose themselves in a drifting, imaginary suite, a patch of fantasy that made this city boy pine for a beautiful place out in the country.