Sebadoh's most focused album, originally released in 1994, is given a deluxe 2xCD reissue with added singles and outtakes.

Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]

This Bakesale reissue is actually part of Lou Barlow's second unexpected reunion of the last decade. The first, of course, was his thought-it-would-never-happen rapprochement with longtime estranged partner J. Mascis in Dinosaur Jr. And then Sebadoh, the one-man-project turned full-blown band, found its second and best-loved line-up coming together again late last decade. The early Sebadoh records were purposefully fuzzy, mumbly things, full of raw pop yearning that was sometimes pretty hard to make out through all the hiss and crackle. Though they were key documents in the rise of lo-fi as a distinct movement in 1990s American indie, it's probably not coincidental that the word "weed" appeared prominently in several of the band's early releases, which often literally sound like the product of a baked mind and a four-track, flip-flopping between silliness and vein-opening.
As Sebadoh became more of a democracy, the clashing urges of the various songwriters (Barlow, bassist Jason Loewenstein, second guitarist Eric Gaffney, who left before Bakesale) turned the full-band's first few records into sometimes frustrating (the CD skip button was made for these sort of jumbles) and sometimes beguiling (they had a real way with an anthemic pop-punk hook when they wanted to) collisions of styles. Pure indie-pop instincts fought with an urge toward experimental cassette tape fucking around. Bouncy power-chord jams rubbed up against shameless acoustic mopery. By Bakesale in 1994, they'd already written a couple of undeniable anthems with "Gimme Indie Rock" and "Brand New Love", the latter an instant-classic covered by peers like Superchunk in what seemed like seconds after it's release. But Bakesale was the first Sebadoh album where the power-chords and anthems seemed to win out. It was, and remains, their most focused and purely pleasurable record.
The early- and mid-90s were great years for albums that brought punk's two-minute punchiness together with the earnest relationship laments that briefly defined that slippery terrain known as indie rock. And Bakesale is one of the era's best. If it's got fewer romance-gone-wrong epics than Superchunk's Foolish and lacks the emphatic guitar-snarl of Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle, it combines bits of both tendencies into 15 songs that rarely outstay their welcome. Unlike Sebadoh's scattershot early albums, it works as a brief, memorable whole. The band probably wasn't trying to make a statement-- that sort of ran counter to the whole aesthetic back then-- but by tightening up and aiming for clarity, they managed one anyway. "Feels good just to bitch about it," from "Magnet's Coil", is one of those lines that defines a certain part of early indie's appeal, where kids-like-you kvetched about their foibles and fears in an unpretentious way. But the album's frantic pace, where even the slow songs feel like urgent expulsions of heartbreak, defines the other side of indie's appeal. At its best, all that emoting was delivered with a healthy shot of energy that felt necessary given the sluggish tempos of alt-rock radio at the time.
Bakesale sounds a little brighter on this remaster, though this isn't an album where you're really looking for crisp and distinct-in-the-mix instrumental interplay. Its opening three-song blast, all tumbling drums and jittery-but-beefy noise-pop guitar, is an obvious attempt to grab the attention of a new generation of kids who'd sprang up to embrace feelings-and-feedback. But even the somber stuff, like the "Not a Friend" to "Dreams" run early on, features strong, clear hooks instead of burying things in murk. This isn't to say the album is clean, at least not in the way indie records routinely are these days. But it's also not "lo-fi" in the indistinct or noise-obliterated way we've come to know. Without sacrificing the music's rough edges, the band was up enough on its hook-game that "Rebound" briefly hung around modern rock radio, Barlow's first unexpected minor-league hit until Folk Implosion's "Natural One" became the really unexpected hit a few years later.
So Bakesale itself remains a strong and lovable essay on 90s indie's charms. But what of the expected and extensive bonus material? Well, in bearing-down to make a no-filler album, it's pretty clear that Sebadoh's goof-off and boo-hoo sides went into the singles, EPs, and ancillary material from the same era. Tunes (using the word very loosely) like "MOR Backlash", "Foreground", and "Drumstick Jumble" sound like the "wacky" bedroom sound-collage filler they would have been if they'd been included on Bakesale, and acoustic demo takes of "Not a Friend" and "Mystery Man" prove how quickly charming sensitivity can give way to unfortunate sad-sack territory when you strip away the electric oomph of the album versions. (Though the acoustic "Magnet's Coil" and "Rebound" prove they could hit you without any amplification.) Despite a few strong songs like "Punching Myself in the Face Repeatedly, Publicly" and "Sing Something/Plate of Hatred" that can almost stand with the album's best, these Bakesale add-ons will mostly be of value to those who loved Sebadoh's first few years of all-over-the-place wildness, but it's not as if their second-disc inclusion can dull the parent album's punch.


Whether the motivations stem from a Derrideian desire to transform our monsters into pets, a post-feminist\n\ need to latch ...

Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Whether the motivations stem from a Derrideian desire to transform our monsters into pets, a post-feminist need to latch onto a lost sense of dominant masculinity, the streets' unquenchable thirst for heroes, or simply a quest for a compelling urban narrative, hip-hop's obsession with the gangsta has dominated the genre for more than a decade. It has resulted in political pundits-- many, it must be noted, with latently racist agendas-- dismissing the entire culture as violent, misogynistic, and ultimately destructive. Stylistically, gangsta is a mesh of Cinema Verite and action blockbusters, where the grime and moral ambivalence of the crack trade clash with the unmitigated bravado of playa anthems. At its best, gangsta delves into these contradictions-- the pull between community and wealth, morality and survival-- with a deftness and wit alternately charming and horrifying.
Unfortunately, Get Rich or Die Tryin' rarely reaches these pinnacles; for most of the album's duration, 50 wallows in the genre's clichés. The wit is sparse, the details are slim, and the threats are hollow. This isn't as much a moral quarrel as it is one of thematic development. Biggie came with the soul, Pac came with the charisma, L. had the wit, and Nas had the words. But, with the exception of a few quality verses sprinkled here and there, 50 strikes as a parody of these masters, and does little on his debut to establish a persona of his own. He doesn't delve into the character of the gangsta any deeper than the prosaism he spits, and while he obviously has an excellent vocal cadence and a finely tuned ear, his lyrics lack the textured imagery and dexterity of themes necessary to sustain interest over the course of a full album.
In perhaps his biggest misstep, 50 Cent eschews a world inhabited by real people doing real shit for most of Get Rich, instead relying on generalized threats, proclamations of invincibility, and calls for pussy. Even the threats and declarations, bereft of the violent, pull-no-punches absolutism of Big L.'s early horrorcore, seem sanitized for Middle America. To put it bluntly, 50's rap sounds cold and mechanical, as though he were paralyzed by the pressures of hype or the prospect of his album being used as evidence against him in his trial for alleged weapons possession; the album sees him alternately declaring that he cares/doesn't care whether the D.A. hears these tracks.
Yet, for all the flaws in 50 Cent's persona, Get Rich or Die Tryin' isn't without its redeeming qualities. For one, the album offers a handful of great singles (obviously: "In Da Club", "Wanksta"), anchored by his distinctive, rolling drawl. Loping beats and Caribbean Casios adorn "P.I.M.P." while 50 flosses that misogynistic swagger; trigger-happy snares and organ punches cry out from the Dre-produced highlight "Heat". Yet, none of the tracks touch his appearance on 1999's In Too Deep soundtrack-- even while its fish-in-a-barrel attacks on virtually every platinum-selling artist of the last five years smacked of Eminem strategies, "How to Rob (An Industry Nigga)" factored heavily into the anticipation surrounding Get Rich, offering a glimpse of the juggernaut he might become.
In the meantime, the production work remains Get Rich's strong suit, boasting contributions from Sha Money XL, Megahertz, Rockwilder, Kon Artis, and both Eminem's and Dr. Dre's crews. Dre's team drops four tracks, each supreme examples of the raw ingenuity and virtuosity that, beyond the killer rhymes, made 2001 such a visceral, addictive party record. He also proves that, though rarely as experimental as Timbaland or as self-consciously high-tech as the Neptunes, he can still drop a hit to rival either of them, and with half as many layers. The bounce on "In Da Club" is straight-up irresistible, Dre at both his minimalist best and most deceptively infectious.
Still, 50 just isn't quite there yet. Had he offered more tracks that showcased his talents quite as tangibly as "How to Rob (An Industry Nigga)" alongside the massive radio hits bumping from every inner-city Escalade, Get Rich or Die Tryin' very well might have been the landmark achievement it's being touted as. But as his character presently lacks the dynamism and depth required for that elusive gangsta magnetism that's a prerequisite for notoriety, 50 goes down as simply a decent MC with a wrenching back story, whose potential landed him a gig with the world's dopest beatmakers and the hype machine that shot the Great White Way into the pop culture stratosphere.


The London artist’s surprising second album pivots from twinkly, futuristic electro-pop to nostalgic guitar anthems for the bummer generation.

R.Y.C.

To be a young person in 2020 is to feel deeply lonely, politically distressed, and rattled with anxiety. It is also, perhaps as a result, to be obsessively nostalgic—for sitcoms, tracksuits, even old memes—clinging to memories and their soothing power. Mura Masa can testify to all of the above. The 23-year-old artist and producer born Alex Crossan recently told Zane Lowe that he spends “all his free time playing old video games, watching cartoons, and eating cereal, arrested development-style,” and revisiting the music that shaped his youth.
All this rearview mirror-gazing laid the foundation for Mura Masa’s sophomore album, R.Y.C. (Raw Youth Collage), a meta-commentary about Gen Z’s fixation with the past. The Guernsey native recycles the sounds that he grew up on—a mix of post-punk, Britpop, emo, and French house—and turns them into contemporary internet-kid anthems about surviving adolescence. It’s a surprising stylistic U-turn for Mura Masa, who is best known as a forward-thinking electronic-pop producer. His debut mixtape paired off-kilter beats with vaguely Japanese flutes and strings, and his first album pinned big voices like A$AP Rocky and Charli XCX into the futuristic corners of UK club music. In both, the songs were tinny and distorted, rich with negative space. R.Y.C., in contrast, is a concept-forward guitar album that explodes with sound and feeling. Taking cues from artists like Justin Vernon, Kevin Parker, and Damon Albarn, all multi-instrumentalists who front larger projects, Crossan takes on the roles of a band, playing guitar, drums, and bass, and singing on nearly every song.
Unlike on his last LP, where Crossan’s guests nearly overshadowed him, the featured artists here—mostly young, DIY, and British—fit neatly into his creative vision. They also drive home the point that R.Y.C. is neither a tribute record nor a wistful toast to the ’90s; in fact, it’s only loosely retrospective. The album’s strongest and most affecting moments, such as the Ellie Rowsell-assisted “Teenage Headache Dreams,” draw on sounds and textures from our recent memory to color a picture that’s unmistakably now.
The album unfolds like a tug-of-war between two coping mechanisms: yearning for the past or passivity against the future. Crossan illustrates this conflict by toggling between two moods: He’s hyperactive and all-caps on “Deal Wiv It,” featuring Slowthai, a yelping, rambunctious rant against gentrification and culture’s oppressively cyclical nature; he’s dazed and meditative on “Today (feat. Tirzah),” a warped, looping bedroom ballad that numbs in its repetition, mirroring the habitual dread of online life. Where R.Y.C. succeeds—and where Crossan reveals a real point of view—is in his ultimate rejection of these initial frameworks in favor of something more fluid, a hybrid space in which these sounds, stylings, and emotional responses work together.
This opens the field up for a few left turns. “In My Mind,” a psychedelic electro-folk song about distrusting your memory, gets submerged in a well of distorted synths and post-dubstep trembles. “Teenage Headache Dreams,” featuring Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, swings from soaring pleas to hushed recollections to a frenzied, electronic head rush. And “I Don’t Think I Can Do This Again,” at first a tender pop song with Clairo, suddenly veers underground when three iconic chords wave in the rave. (The sample was popularized by Basement Jaxx in 2001 but written by Gary Numan in 1979. Crossan, who has two autistic brothers, has said that Numan, an introverted songwriter with Asperger’s syndrome, is one of the artists he most identifies with.)
In the studio Crossan is less reserved, nudging genres and eras up against each other like he’s introducing friends at a party, highlighting what makes them unique while searching for common ground. In doing so, he generally avoids the elementary mawkishness of other recent emo-dance attempts (see: the Chainsmokers) and sometimes gives the featured artist new dimensions. Slowthai, already an invigorating rap force, sounds even fiercer in the fuzzy clutches of post-punk. Similarly, Rowsell’s natural melancholy morphs into heady hopefulness in the ecstatic glow of synth pop and electro.
Mura Masa occasionally trips on cliché and stumbles into pastiche. The platitudinous “Live Like We’re Dancing,” featuring Georgia, feels like an amateurish Robyn knock-off, and the disposable Ned Green interlude about his teenage girlfriend’s bedroom scans as a schmaltzy, faux-earnest play on listener emotion. On “vicarious living anthem,” Crossan disguises his feeble voice in a haze of fuzz and Auto-Tune but can’t escape his fatuous lyrics (“Everyone can be who they want to be!”), predictable guitar melodies, and juvenile overtones that feel contrived and stale. Nostalgia is most powerful when it takes us somewhere new.
“No Hope Generation,” the project’s snappy, sarcastic centerpiece, achieves this. Harnessing the bratty self-deprecation of late-’90s pop-punk and the anxious shuffle of drum’n’bass, Crossan sets off on a 2020 anxiety trip through Gen Z’s preferred methods of self-care: an endless scroll of memes and meds wrapped in safe, sunshiny arrangements. “Everybody do the no-hope generation/The new hip sensation craze sweeping the nation,” he sings archly, addressing generational depression like it’s making the rounds on TikTok. The implication isn’t that all this malaise doesn’t matter, but rather that, like viral dances, music trends, and precious youth, it won’t last. “I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed,” he insists suspiciously after asking for a bottle and gun. There’s something about the song’s casual angst and playful duplicitousness that feels the most like teendom—restless, reckless, fleeting.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Creedence Clearwater Revival’s improbable stardom with 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory.

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Cosmo’s Factory

Cosmo’s Factory

The four hirsute, sheepish men of Creedence Clearwater Revival were greeted as conquerors when they arrived in London in April 1970. From humble beginnings in suburban San Francisco, the quartet had ascended, in barely a year, to the absolute height of late-’60s rock stardom. They’d headlined Woodstock, released an ongoing run of multi-platinum albums and singles, and in 1969, did what seemed impossible at the time: They outsold the Beatles.
They looked hale and healthy, too, muscular but bashful dudes in Army surplus jackets and flannel shirts. They lacked any real group personality or public image beyond tough-guy smiles and ubiquitous hits. Meanwhile, the Beatles were looking lurid. Since 1968, the rumors were all about heroin and bitter interpersonal squabbles. Just as Creedence arrived to begin their first European tour, Paul McCartney released advance copies of his first solo album to the media alongside a “self-interview” that referred to his “break with the Beatles.” There was suddenly no one left to outsell.
For those next two weeks in April, Creedence did what they always did: played an unchanging set for one adoring audience after another, then refused encores. (Their shows were so consistent that they famously released a “Live at the Royal Albert Hall” record that was actually recorded in Oakland). This was John Fogerty’s policy, one of an increasing number of rules that he’d created to match his total control over their group’s songs, production, and finances. His bandmates—drummer Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, bassist Stu Cook, and Fogerty’s brother Tom on rhythm guitar—went home to the Bay Area with wonderful memories of their self-taught bashing ringing out in opera houses. But they also remembered standing just offstage, thousands of new fawning converts screaming for more, and their leader expending all his clout just to deprive them of that worship for some meaningless personal code.
That was Creedence Clearwater Revival in spring and summer of 1970, as they finished and released their fifth album, Cosmo’s Factory. They had started playing music together in middle school and had been slugging their way through a music career for more than a decade in various iterations. There was the studio session backing an over-the-hill doo-wop singer, the years with Tom on lead vocals, the costumed jangly years as the Golliwogs. Having now achieved hard-won but revelatory success, they were still plagued by the same stubborn-garbage, masculine hardwiring that they’d been carrying since adolescence. They were all raw nerves and personal vendettas but were operating musically like one four-limbed brain.
You must remember: Literally and figuratively, they were brothers. When you hear one of those songs, you know the ones—in Vietnam movies, The Big Lebowski, classic rock radio, your uncle’s radio by the grill—you’re hearing bone-deep, childhood-borne closeness and codependency. They learned how to play instruments together, how to cultivate a discerning musical taste, how to give their music that elusive, ineffable “in-between” that their bluesman and R&B heroes had. They started with squaresville garage-band dance-party stuff, then slowly absorbed Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Bakersfield country, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters. John Fogerty grew into his role as bandleader while Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and Berry Gordy were developing instantly recognizable musical brands. They had sounds as distinctive as Sun or Chess, which Fogerty also revered for their spareness and guitar tones. This was hardly in step with the psychedelic music that Creedence’s Bay Area peers were developing, but Fogerty was resolute. He was developing an entire aesthetic vision and the whole responsibility for enacting it rested on his brother and his schoolmates.
Cosmo’s Factory begins with the purest expression of those varied inspirations and pressures that the band ever recorded. “Ramble Tamble” has somehow escaped the kind of classic-rock canonization of “Black Dog” or “Baba O’Riley” as an epic album opener, but it stands tall among them. It opens with a jaunty country-funk riff that sounds almost like James Brown once the band kicks in, then they instantly switch gears into roaring double-time rockabilly. Fogerty’s guitar and howling vocals are both treated with the same ghostly slap-back effect that he’d borrowed from Sun and Chess.
He shout-sings one of his signature apocalyptic scenes, full of images of junk and ruin, like “Bad Moon Rising” but furious. Then the band slows down, Fogerty’s sketch of “mud in the water…bugs in the sugar” comes to a halt and is replaced with a slowly building space-rock squall unlike anything that Creedence, typically so earthbound, ever recorded. Then they dissolve that and rebuild the rockabilly section, where Fogerty returns to his angry-preacher routine. He’d written about specters and new dawns before,  but this was the first time that he’d conveyed the idea in music itself. “Ramble Tamble” sounds like a band fighting its way to find new horizons, new styles, all the way past language in the title.
Near the end of the record, the 11-minute take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” reverses the opening song’s sense of adventurousness, turning Motown’s sophisticated dance song into a droning, claustrophobic blues. The rest of Cosmo’s Factory is a hodge-podge, which was typical of Creedence’s full-lengths. Between the extended tracks and a handful of previously released hits like “Travelin’ Band” and “Long as I Can See The Light,” they included lively but inessential covers like “Ooby Dooby” and “Before You Accuse Me.” It’s not a statement record or some kind of grand step forward in the band’s evolution. It’s just an unpretentious collection of songs, named for their little San Francisco practice space and featuring one of the least affected album covers of the classic rock era. Somehow, in 1970, the year of Kent State, the My Lai massacre trial, and Let It Be, no album spent longer at No. 1 in the U.S. Creedence broke up within two years.
Their roiling interpersonal difficulties explain the brevity of Creedence’s success, but what accounts for its intensity? How did a band so far apart from their peers and so untrendy become the most popular group in America—and during a time of so much unrest? Creedence never wrote a love song, barely ever used vocal harmony, never employed guest musicians, and had a strict (and mutually agreed-upon) policy against alcohol and drug use during music-making. They were not exactly the face of late-’60s youth culture, but they were its most consistent soundtrack.
Those earlier iterations of the band were all relatively square—“a garage band, a little band” is how John Fogerty described them. It was his twin obsessions with recording technology and old blues that opened the band to new vistas. Starting with “Born on the Bayou,” on 1969’s Bayou Country, Fogerty summoned a mythic rock’n’roll South lyrically as well as musically: his songs were as spare and tight as Stax, whose records, along with Wilson’s and Spector’s, he studied like a scholar. But his words could bend toward Uncle Remus or the Book of Revelations. On Cosmo’s Factory, “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” is the former and “Run Through the Jungle” is the latter. “Back Door” paints a children’s-book scene of dancing animals, while “Jungle,” a staple of Vietnam movies, depicts a literal army of Satan.
Fogerty didn’t write from one clear vision for America; instead, he tried different visions on like hats, singing passionately about lazy riverboat days as well as societal collapse. Another Cosmo’s Factory standout, “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” depicts a storm that lasts generations, leaving widespread sadness and confusion. Moments of great civil unrest tend to refocus our view of the past—we see previously overlooked steps to destruction with renewed clarity. The Vietnam era spawned many pop acts with a deep sense of history, from the Band’s Faulknerian evocations to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s epochal bluegrass love-letter, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? But none had John Fogerty’s monastic understanding of pop record structure or his clear-eyed obsession with instrument separation.
They had notable album tracks throughout their career, but Creedence were a singles band, where Fogerty’s fussy, learned vision was best-expressed and his sidemen showed themselves of highest musical sensitivity. Listen to the way they push and pull Fogerty throughout “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” following his solo as much as prodding it on. The simple gallop of “Ooby Dooby” is just marvelous from the first note, while “Long as I Can See the Light” stands as one of Creedence’s most powerful ballads and soulful, nuanced band performances. Clifford’s bass drum alone makes the song sound heartbreaking.
So it almost seems silly to ask why Creedence—and Cosmo’s Factory—were so popular as the country burned. They played ’70s rock with the emotional intensity of early R&B and the workaholic tightness of the Muscle Shoals or Dixie Flyers bands. They defined the early years of album rock, but their background was in the single format. For all their aww-shucks media personalities, their sound was flexible enough to be fun, angry, sorrowful, or worried. They were a band that could match the sweaty, crowded emotional tenor of America at war, and they could please anyone but themselves.


The rising Nigerian singer is on the vanguard of the hybrid “Afro-life” sound and his latest album is the peak of his vision so far, a melodious, detailed, and effortless album of feel-good pop and R&B.

APOLLO

Apollo, one of the most complex characters of Greek mythology, is recognized as the Olympian god of light, truth, prophecy, poetry, healing, and music. His motives are anchored by three emotions: pride, lust, and loss. So is Fireboy DML. But on his second album, APOLLO, the Nigerian singer-songwriter vows to aim high, without going full Icarus. “How human am I to think myself a god?” Fireboy says on the project’s preamble. The music itself begins with his bold declaration: “I be king.”
In this moment of popular Nigerian music awash with divergent styles—from more traditional music like highlife, to reggae, hip-hop, to the more modern Afro-fusion, alté, and the mainstream Afrobeats—Fireboy doesn’t put himself into one category; he rests at the intersection of R&B, pop, Afrobeats, and alté. It’s the self-described “Afro-life” sound from his 2018 breakout song “Jealous”; ambient, relatable, everyday-life music. APOLLO comes on the heels of Burna Boy’s Twice as Tall, in which Burna reasserts his status as the premier African giant standing firmly atop the scene, both in the states and overseas. While the Afro-fusion star leads social and political-leaning conversations bridging the Black diaspora with his music, Fireboy isn’t as much a part of that exchange. Instead, he’s situated in a separate class of artists, not making overt statements with his music and not dominating the mainstream either, but pushing the new vanguard of Afropop.
In a lineup of current Afropop singers, Fireboy stands alongside the fluid, trap-leaning rapper-singer Rema, the young crooner Joeboy of Mr Eazi’s Empawa Africa label, and rising star Oxlade. Fireboy adds to the pantheon of loverboy languish, singing mostly about unrequited affection, delightful and depressing dalliances, and love that wanes just like summer heat on August nights. APOLLO takes the load off the heaviness of now. Fireboy excels at extracting the allure in the mundane, with his sincere and sober musings on life and himself.
The album features familiar and fresh production from previous collaborators Pheelz, Type A, iamBeatz, and P.Prime, as well as a feature verse from Nigerian hip-hop heavyweight and APOLLO executive producer Olamide, who has a knack for discovering and developing new talent. Fireboy’s tried-and-true formula blends the old and the new, like when Afropop veteran and reliable hitmaker Wande Coal shows up on APOLLO. Fireboy is a disciple of Coal in ingenuity and style, and his vocals complement his predecessor’s signature falsetto on “Spell” as he leans into Coal’s mastery of melody for a pleasant cross-generational connection.
Like any young artist culling from creative movements on the ground and across the internet, Fireboy plucks from a cornucopia of influences. With Afro-life, he tinctures his chameleonic R&B with subtle hints of pop, Afrobeats, and dance music, producing a cocktail of R&B whether he intends to or not. “Tattoo” is his most sensual song to date, reminiscent of the sweet soulfulness of Miguel’s 2010 debut, All I Want Is You. The bright horns and slick production on “Favourite Song” aim for the groove of Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones’ bubbly boogie music.
There is minimal range in his simplified style of songwriting. “God Only Knows” is guided by chants and a few trite one-liners, but the celestial, grandiose production thankfully overshadows its shortcomings. Olamide makes an appearance with his mentee on “Afar,” a solid and smooth track anchored by the hook, “Make them dey love me from afar.” What sounds rudimentary on first listen soon becomes catchy melodies that linger on the lips. Fireboy’s lyrics are so uncomplicated that they become unforgettable.
“I’m not tryna be the number one,” Fireboy sings on “Airplane Mode.” “So many legends dey, I’m just tryna be another one.” The declarations of defiance throughout the project are more charming than thundering. He isn’t so much the flash of lightning as a soft power, the quiet after the storm. At times, the album’s sentimentality may sound overwrought, but at its core, APOLLO is easy, exciting, and earnest. It’s what feel-good music sounds like as it becomes increasingly difficult to feel good; it’s soothing in a palliative way. APOLLO is not grand or abstract enough to qualify as escapism. Instead, Fireboy stays grounded, shooting the breeze, limning the simplicities of romance and life.

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The official debut from the young digicore producer and songwriter is riveting, a shapeshifting emo-electronic record that sounds like new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss.

Frailty

Editor’s Note: Jane Remover came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022. This review is presented as it was originally published in 2021 and uses their prior artist name and pronouns.

Within the first few moments of “your clothes,” off dltzk’s debut album Frailty, a chugging guitar riff seems to melt down and remold as a synth. Under the hood of its frayed emo and shoegaze, Frailty is full of these small, shimmering details that reveal themselves like Easter eggs in a role-playing game. This is a vast, shapeshifting record that, like its predecessor Teen Week, redefines the parameters of “digicore” by pulling the young New Jersey producer and songwriter’s instincts into new territory. It’s guitar music created by a Skrillex and Porter Robinson obsessive, a snowscape of reds and oranges. Inside the more writerly songs, you can sense that producer-brain, the meticulous tinkerer aiming to smack your pleasure centers with critical hits. It’s easily some of the most ambitious work to have sprung from this nascent online scene to date.
In the world of internet music, histories are scrawled quickly and genres cycle like the seasons. Even though dltzk’s EP Teen Week only came out in February, it’s already been hailed by fans as an important work of digicore—not least because digicore was still searching for a definitive record. You could make the case for a shortlist of essential singles, and maybe 1000 gecs and Bladee’s Icedancer as sacred texts. But Teen Week charted a path forward. It rattled with youthful chaos and argued for digicore as a high-stakes, immersive art form with plenty more ground to cover. Some stretches traded the hard breakbeats for soft, 16-bit passages with pensively sung lyrics about the kind of stuff a Zoomer in high school struggles with: comparing themself to their peers, feeling unwelcome at home, passing days in quarantine staring at a phone.
Frailty follows the intuition of those slower, more forlorn moments, particularly Teen Week’s grungy outro “seventeen.” Its opening track, “goldfish,” is a “Nikes”-level curveball—pure, no-frills emo that centers dltzk’s vocal. This mode isn’t exactly unique, but it works well with the album’s fuzzy mixing and their writing, which longs for someone through suburban memories of Six Flags and tree forts.
But thinking about the individual songs on Frailty betrays the album’s form. Frailty functions like a fluid substance and its tracks blur together with seamless transitions. dltzk approaches emo through the lens of EDM and dubstep, evoking the rise-and-fall, deceptive buildups, and stomach-turning drops accompanied by digital explosions and bit-crushed screams. These genres blend into and inform each other in adventurous ways, like the soaring culmination of “search party,” wherein a massive guitar intermittently cuts out like a DJ mashing the volume slider at a rave.
Despite its somber themes and textures, there’s room to dance on nearly every song. For how serious Teek Week and Frailty come off, dltzk isn’t some doomer teen; their defining moment of the year may be inventing a glorious microgenre of shitposty Jersey club mashups called dariacore. That absurd style creeps in occasionally, like the mini-malfunction in the middle of “kodak moment.” And it’s easy to get lost in the electronic hailstorms that pepper the devastating “movies for guys,” which dunks 2009 Top 40 in liquid nitrogen before abandoning that idea entirely, matching the complicated feelings dltzk has for a crush who won’t accept them for who they are.
On the flip side, the emo haze of this record shrouds everything in mist. The electronics on the devastating “champ” feel small and cold, a soundtrack to dltzk shivering, lying in the snow. They remind me of the pastoral, Pokémon-like blips and bloops that dltzk toyed with on Teen Week. In fact, between songs like “champ,” “how to lie” and “let’s go home,” a certain listener might find comfort and nostalgia in Frailty’s JRPG coziness.
Maybe dltzk’s forays into this genre sound staid, even downright bad at times. But Frailty sounds less like cosplay than new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss. Since its emergence from the churn of SoundCloud, digicore has continually faced an ontological question: What exactly is it? Is it a scene? A genre? Is it rap? Hyperpop? With Frailty, dltzk argues that digicore is a methodology, a way of understanding new forms with an existing toolkit. The closest comparison may be Porter Robinson’s 2014 album Worlds, which applied the language of dance music to synth-pop. But where that album was born from exhaustion with festival EDM, Frailty is less cynical. It sounds like a teenager peeking through new doors, uncovering new modes of expression, discovering themself and their sound.

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The Irish modern-rock producer, best known for his work on records by U2, Snow Patrol, and Kasabian, opts for an idiosyncratic electronic melange featuring a surprising roster of guests.

The Jacknife Lee

Jacknife Lee’s discography has historically moved in two very different directions. His production credits for acts like U2 and Snow Patrol display a penchant for self-serious adult-contemporary rock; like the nu-metal mashups of Missy Elliott and Eminem that brought him notoriety around the turn of the century, his solo music has aimed for far lower stakes, looping trite lyrics (“I like it/I like it, yeah”; “I really love it and it’s making me money”) over uninspired big beat. On The Jacknife Lee, the Irish producer shows us a third way, taking ideas he had deemed “too odd” for other projects and realizing them with the help of a diverse, international group of artists. The results feel like a release of pent-up energy after years of melancholy modern-rock production.
A world away from his Kasabian and Two Door Cinema Club commissions, The Jacknife Lee trades modern rock for a melange of rap, R&B, alt rock, dance punk, and global pop. Most of Lee’s guests here are far less famous than the artists he typically works with. Ghanaian-Australian singer Genesis Owusu’s voice shape-shifts over rumbling bass on opener “Flutter”; on “Hit the Bell,”  Toronto rapper Haviah Mighty punctuates an ethereal melody sung by Merge signee Sneaks. All the songs feel like genuine partnerships in which Lee provides a lavish framework for other artists to excel.
Lee does best when he leaves his comfort zone to create something completely new alongside his guests. Muthoni Drummer Queen commands “Sisa Wabaya,” in which the Kenyan rapper’s bilingual boasting (the title translates as “We are the bad ones” in Swahili) is accentuated by clipped bass and overdriven percussion. “Firewalls,” with Petite Noir, is constantly shifting, trading slow-burning atmospheres for stranger elements—guttural vocal samples, filtered breakbeats. There’s a winning sense of restlessness to these productions, as though Lee were always on the search for a new noise to insert, another genre to reference.
The higher profile the artists, the more predictable (and consequently, weaker) the songs often are. Aloe Blacc feels out of place, and his lovelorn “I Gave You Everything” doesn’t match the innovative qualities of the rest of the album. “Made It Weird” marks swaggering new territory for Open Mike Eagle, but he’s written more compelling anxiety-focused songs before. And a handful of songs are too slick for the mood they’re trying to convey. The defiant lyrics of “I’m Getting Tired” lose some of their power over a backing track—already too similar to Lee’s big-beat solo work—that previously served as Apple keynote background music.
The Jacknife Lee improves in proportion to its risk. Veteran adult-alternative acts don’t often have it in them to be as eccentric as Lee can be here, no matter how ambitious they get. There are fans to please, radio singles to push, Grey’s Anatomy syncs to land. But, guided by his long-standing instinct for combining disparate elements, Lee has found new freedom in letting other voices have the spotlight.

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On his new album, the verbose rapper’s fascination with creatures widens into a cosmology, resulting in the most joyous album he’s ever made.

Spirit World Field Guide

Aesop Rock loves critters. Since his conscious turn toward storytelling on None Shall Pass, he’s become quite the zoologist, using pigs, crows, and his pet cat, among other animals, as muses. His fixation runs so deep that when he isn’t observing creatures directly, they’re still in his peripheral vision: He partners with Homeboy Sandman as Lice; his second album with longtime collaborator Rob Sonic was titled Bestiary; a Dali-esque dinosaur skeleton graces the cover of Skelethon. On Spirit World Field Guide, this fascination with creatures widens into a cosmology. Animals no longer play bit parts in Aesop Rock’s intricate tapestries; they are the omphalos, a turn that leans into Aesop’s wearied misanthropy and softens it. This is the most joyous album he’s ever made.
Presented as a travelogue of the “spirit world,” a realm composed of occult and biological oddities, Spirit World Field Guide flips Aesop’s trademark anxiety on its head. Instead of retreating into his addled, overactive brain, he plunges into the “unwavering otherness” of the spirit world like an intrepid adventurer. His observations from the alternate planes of existence are surreal and psychedelic, from the “billion bats exploding out a mountain cave” on “Sleeper Car” to the loyal tentacles “in every corner of heck” on “Holy Waterfall.” Rapped with verve, every detail is delivered with a lysergic pop or an eldritch crackle, animals and action verbs smashed together like chimeras. Aesop has always been a vivid and imagistic rapper, but here his writing brims with wonder. “I leave an awkward conversation like a cow to the saucer/Inspire a thousand Our Fathers, people start calling their priests/ “We’ve never seen a man so vehemently drawn to the beast!” he says with a wink on “Crystal Sword.”
One of his favorite life forms is himself, whom he renders with morbid clarity. Alongside Ishmael Butler and Kool Keith, Aesop is one of the few veteran rappers for whom aging is an experience and not a challenge. Instead of fighting his mortality, he dissects it. “1 to 10,” an ode to his ailing back, features the darkly humorous and human bar, “Rate your pain level on a scale from 1 to 10/I said “‘Well, doc I tell ya, it feel like I lost a friend.’” If you can't relate to that line now, you will. “Dog at the Door” is a tug-o-war between paranoia and composure, both emotions making his imagination run wild as he tries to identify an unexpected noise outside his house. “Maybe it’s a trap,” he repeats as his lineup of suspects grows more elaborate. He sounds like the spooked geezer he knows himself to be.
Sometimes the pain doesn’t warrant a punchline. “Faking normal has worn me down,” he raps with weariness on “Boot Soup,” one of many moments where he lifts the curtain. “I shouldn’t even be here,” he assesses on “Kodokushi,” the Japanese word for the grim phenomenon of dead people being discovered long after their time of death. These blips of candor lack the emotional punch of similar moments on The Impossible Kid, where Aesop would build to and wind into his disclosures rather than shunt them into one-liners and asides. But even in passing, these confessions convey the heavy undertow of Aesop’s vision quest. His survey of the spirit world is clearly in service of enduring the flesh. In animals he seems to spy an undaunted sense of purpose. “A rat’s a rat/It scatters/That’s like it’s magic power,” he says with admiration on “Salt.”
Producing has recently become Aesop’s second magic power. He’s been a producer as long as he’s been a rapper, contributing beats to all his records, and producing his last two records in full. Although aesthetically Spirit World Field Guide draws on his standard mix of electric guitar, laser synths, and crisp drums, he’s never before been such a commanding presence behind the boards. The beats here are the best of his career, full of torque and life. “Attaboy” flickers between squelchy boom bap and leisurely funk. The scuzzy guitar chords on “Gauze” rev up Aesop’s flows. The goofy, percolating wub-wub on “Crystal Sword” accents his RPG-inspired misadventures. These zany backdrops amplify his writing, selling the complete otherness of the spirit world.
Spirit World Field Guide wears its concept loosely. As seen on Miss Anthropocene, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, and There is No Year, music about death and oblivion is often macroscopic, zooming out into a birds-eye view. Aesop does the inverse, sticking his head into the soil like an ostrich and conversing with the bugs and roots. His bizarro yarns are certainly eccentric and meticulous, but they’re always anchored by his fascination with the material and tactile: old, decaying bodies; gross smells; odd aches. By presenting the great beyond as a marvel rather than a horror, he makes it less unwieldy, and perhaps even appealing. “Why am I here if it isn’t effectively cutting the hellions out of me, huh?” he asks on “Gauze.” He’s talking about the real world.

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The New York musician’s trance-inducing studies for drums and voice, breath and heartbeat, are laid bare as the sources of all expression.

Respires

If the voice is the original instrument, as the experimental singer and composer Joan La Barbara once posited, Ka Baird’s Respires retreats into breath itself. Here, in trance-inducing studies for drums and voice, breath and heartbeat are laid bare as the sources of all expression. The New York musician’s often wordless vocalizations are cushioned by audible lungfuls of air; ritualistic incantations come in a lattice of hissing and huffing. What is normally silent becomes as palpable as a heavy sigh on a winter’s day. Even Baird’s instrument of choice, the flute, is itself a kind of breath incarnate, the edges of its tone wispy and diffuse. It’s a reminder that sound is just stirred air, a disturbance of the invisible. If that sounds almost mystical, well, so does she: On Respires, her chanted mantras often sound like she is snatching phantoms out of the very ether.
“Pulse,” which opens the album, is exactly as promised: steady loops of hiccupping phonemes laid over a bright drone; it might be a diagram of the electrical current coursing through the central nervous system. Every now and then, an eruption of sibilance rushes forth, like steam from a subway grate, and the music takes on an even more otherworldly character. “Symanimagenic” deploys similar elements to even more dramatic ends: Nervous flute runs dart and dive above hand drums while Baird’s digitally processed voice channels bullfrogs, snakes, and jaguars, a one-woman rainforest chorus. “Azha” is made principally from interwoven flute loops that have been re-pitched and made strange, like bird calls of some undiscovered species.
The centerpiece of the album’s first half is “Teaching Lodge of the Arrows.” A gong strikes, setting the meditative scene for multiple instances of shape-shifting: Baird’s flute is a flock of butterflies, her voice a volley of obsidian-tipped projectiles. Stylistically, it is part free jazz and part operatic aria. She uses the tension between repetition and moments of rupture to tap into an ecstatic dimension, as though speaking in tongues. And then, some invisible peak having been reached, the whole thing plateaus into seven minutes of coruscating drone.
The album’s second half is more percussive, but just as intense, layering animalistic chattering sounds and the occasional recognizable word (“Walking,” she intones in the eponymous song, as though willing herself into motion) over insistent hand drumming that draws a direct line between contemporary dance music—the beat of “The Orion Arm” sounds almost like early Chicago house—and the kinds of rhythms that humans have used to make contact with the divine since time immemorial.
On stage at Krakow’s Unsound festival earlier this month, the ritualistic aspect of Baird’s music was unmistakable. Spitting into the microphone, pouring rapid-fire flute riffs into her sampler, it seemed less like she was performing songs than channeling spirits. Pacing forward and back, crouching down, even at one point getting down on all fours, she seemed like a person possessed, answering to a private muse. That kind of energy isn’t easy to replicate on record, but Respires comes remarkably close. This is heady music with a physical presence: an intensely private communion with some unnameable, unknowable other, translated into a force you can feel in your bones.

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The Atlanta rapper has promised an unprecedented sound, but this overlong, monochromatic LP juggles a handful of shopworn topics and recycles gimmicks, flows, and ideas.

If Looks Could Kill

Ask any 16-year-old who uses their mom’s credit card to buy Rick Owens what they’ve been listening to lately, and they’ll tell you the same thing: Destroy Lonely is the future. After working under the radar for a few years, the Playboi Carti protégé with the gleaming yet guttural voice broke through with last year’s NOSTYLIST. Like all the hottest new rappers, the 21-year-old Atlanta native has incited both millennial hate and zoomer worship, spawned a genre of type beats, and has Redditors investigating what brand of fork he uses. Everyone is watching his voice, his style, and his sound, which has allegedly already inspired a legion of clones.
Hyping his new album If Looks Could Kill in an interview, Lonely said it would be nothing like NOSTYLIST, which was exhilarating but flooded with so many sparkling beats—imagine Crystal Castles’ glitchy electronica fused with wonky rage-rap mayhem and flecks of dream-pop psychedelia—that they sometimes blended together. Expectations for If Looks Could Kill grew after he dropped its titular single, a rush of venomous guitar and feathery drawls that teased a shadowy, manic mood for the project. Sadly, the 26-track LP is overlong and haphazard, offering only tantalizing glimpses of the album that might have been.
Like his last record, there’s only one feature, his labelmate Ken Car$on; beyond that, Lone’s alone for 25 songs, circling the same handful of topics: drugs, drip, cash, anxiety, women, stunting. Where the similarly copious Yeat leavens and enlivens his megadumps with chaotic vocal spasms and bizarrely catchy chants, Lonely’s hooks are so hookless they smear into the verses. Strangely, his vocals are frequently muted and wispy compared to the last record, whose beaming, electric energy on songs like “NOSTYLIST” slashed through the monotony. The beats, many of which his longtime collaborator Clayco had a hand in, copy-paste the same pattern for three or four minutes without any intriguing switch-ups. The most striking shift is the addition of a muddy, distorted exterior and doomy, dirge-like guitars, but they often sound generic, like Lonely heard Carti’s extended “Narcissist” tour intros and thought they were hard. Lonely has spoken emphatically about wanting to make music so new it’s like nothing ever done before, but a lot of these songs recycle structural gimmicks, flows, themes, and sounds.
The album’s bloated shape and suffocating insularity make it easy to miss its redeeming qualities. One of Lonely’s biggest draws has always been the moon-white shimmer of his voice, often so Auto-Tuned that it sounds like he’s gurgling La Croix, and the way he strafes around and against the rhythm, evoking elastic, frenetic rappers like Carti, Future, and the late Lil Keed. Sometimes he raps in straight lines like he’s skating on ice; elsewhere he pogoes in and out of focus, like when he adopts a punchy bunny-hop flow for part of the “fly sht” hook.
Among the surfeit of bargain-bin, Destroy Lonely-type beats, some genuinely weird, jolting, wildly drunk instrumentals stick out, showing that Lonely’s killer ear for the unusual hasn’t fully faded. Clayco and Y3’s “came in wit” crushes a serrated synth into a slow-mo haze of reverb and dissonance, with a stretched-out freeze sound effect that brings to mind Krxxk’s producer tag. “right now" and “how u feel?” are a couple where the infernal blaze of gothic guitar really enhances his voice. Esko, Carter Bryson, Glasear, ssor.t, and Clayco’s “safety (interlude)” buries acoustic guitar in a dust storm of distortion and drums as Lonely whimpers and rambles about paying for his safety, working for his riches, and switching up his fashion. At nearly six minutes and with only one minor deviation (a flashy volume swivel near the end), it underscores how much more exciting these songs could be if the structures were actually fluid and anarchic.
If you try diving deep into Destroy Lonely lore, you’ll quickly realize how little there is to be found. Like his Opium sibling Ken, Lonely’s aesthetic and musical raison d’etre seem to be based on a hazy idea of being “different”—like how he chose to be homeschooled because he thought he was too ahead of his school classmates. It’s a familiar pose: the self-selected “outcast” who prefers darker colors and tries to cultivate a mystique around himself, who identifies with antiheroes like Batman and believes the art he’s making is incomparable to anything else. Lonely’s music has always radiated a fashion-killer cool and pristine effortlessness, but the dampened vocals and amorphously uneventful beats on If Looks Could Kill are a new level of aloof. The neon joy of his past music is lost in these songs, resulting in an album that’s monochromatic and myopic, a vacuum of formulaic beats and flexes with the odd flicker of genuine creativity.


Boards of Canada’s 1998 album is a beat-music touchstone, a record that took the previous decade of home-listening electronic music and essentially perfected it. This reissue offers a chance for a fresh look.

Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children

Music Has the Right to Children

Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children.
Earlier this month, Warp Records reissued Music Has the Right to Children worldwide, adding the bonus track "Happy Cycling" (which we Americans with our Matador-licensed copies have always known as the album closer) and redesigning the cover art as a foldout digipak. It's always a bit strange when an album is reissued when it has not, in any sense, ever gone away. How could we possibly have forgotten about Music Has the Right to Children when the sound Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin created here is still the predominant inspiration in IDM? And yet, here we are, new package and new marketing push. Even so, six years after its original release is as good as any time to look into why Music Has the Right to Children has resonated so strongly.
Boards of Canada's sound was not wholly original. Seeds of it can be found in Eno, Aphex Twin (in a big way), The Orb, and all over the home listening electronic scene that sprang up in the wake of Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation. Boards used drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords were typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo. Properly speaking, they invented nothing.
And yet, the parts had never come together quite like this. The first thing to note is that Music Has the Right revealed Boards of Canada to be geniuses with texture, where god is in the details. The incredibly simple melody of the short "Bocuma" becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man's place in the universe through subtle pitchshifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on "An Eagle in Your Mind" is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off. The long history of the electric piano was nothing but a lead-in to the tone Boards used on "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", the perfect evocation of a happy walk through the woods in an altered state. Every IDM artist since has at least once labored over their modular unit to get a patch that sounds like one of the many brilliant sounds found here.
Boards of Canada had released some singles and two EPs previous to this record's release, material which showed that they'd already developed their sound. But with Music Has the Right to Children, the duo set out to make a proper album, and approached the album from a rock perspective, carefully mixing and editing the track sequence, while drafting interludes and tightly restricting the palette. You aren't likely to hear more subtly effective layering of sounds on any electronic record in the last 10 years: Music Has the Right to Children is as unified and complete they come. Here, Boards of Canada set their sights on a small set of moods and characteristics-- innocence, apprehension, wonder, mystery-- and probed every possibility in minute detail.
What's it all about, then? "Childhood" is the usual answer, but that's not as easy a connection as it seems on the surface. The giggling voices of kids that crop up are a sure giveaway, as are the song titles ("Rue the Whirl", "Happy "Cycling"), but Music Has the Right to Children avoids the twinkling music box melodies that Múm has been coasting on for a while now. Boards managed to evoke childhood without seeming cute or twee. It's childhood not as it's lived but as we grown-ups remember it, at least those of us with less-than-fond recollections. The shades of darkness and undercurrents of tension (qualities which came further to the fore on 2002's Geogaddi) accurately reflect the confusion of a time that cannot be neatly summed up with any one feeling or emotion.
When you discover that Boards of Canada took their name came from an organization committed to educational film, the overriding idea of their project clicks immediately into place. I've no memories of the National Film Board of Canada but I remember tapes with narration and incidental music accompanying filmstrips, tapes that were always damaged from age and overuse on poorly maintained equipment. The warbly pitch and warped voices mirrored the anxiety that came with the "carefree" days of being a kid and living subjugated to others. Boards of Canada tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking West and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Music Has the Right to Children reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that.


Much like director Ridley Scott has with the film, composer Vangelis has frequently overseen the tweaking of Blade Runner's score, and here he adds a second disc of unreleased material and again effortlessly evokes the seamy underbelly of a futuristic megapolis.

Vangelis: Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary

Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary

Ridley Scott's future-noir Blade Runner turned 25 last year, and to commemorate the landmark, the director unveiled yet another tweak with Final Cut. Since its 1982 release, the film has gone back to the editing room a number of times-- for separate U.S. and European theatrical releases, as well as an unauthorized Director's Cut. Scott released his own Director's Cut in 1992 that removed the voice-over by protagonist Rick Deckard, and also suggested he was-- gasp-- a replicant. With Final Cut, Scott seems to have settled on the story he wanted to tell: No voice-over, re-inserted footage, scrubbed-up sound, and another possible change regarding Deckard.
Greek composer Vangelis's Golden Globe-nominated Blade Runner score has taken a similarly ephemeral path. The first version released of the film's soundtrack wasn't even done by Vangelis, but consisted of adaptations from the New American Orchestra that Scott disparagingly calls "muzak." Vangelis himself didn't release his version of the soundtrack until 1994, and his version included a number of "inspired by" pieces, but paradoxically left out a big portion of his score. For the 25th Anniversary edition, much of that missing music is finally released.
The 1994 version of the soundtrack appears here in its entirety on the first disc, finally getting remaster treatment after the questionable sound quality of the original release. Vangelis's enduring classics like "Love Theme" and "Memories of Green" have never sounded clearer or more timeless: stunning synthesized counterpoint to the bleak, noirish landscape of Scott's 2019 Los Angeles. Certainly not as iconic as the title theme to Chariots of Fire, and not as busy or sunny as his late-70s sequencer-driven albums like Spiral and China, Vangelis's score nevertheless effortlessly evokes the seamy underbelly of a futuristic megapolis.
The unreleased material of the second disc is the second treat offered by this re-issue. The disc includes classic works like the piece accompanying Dr. Tyrell's death and the theme to Deckard and replicant Roy Batty's duel. Vangelis organizes the disc much like his original, setting up loose transitions between works and letting themes wash in and out with little discernable chronology. These pieces are of no less quality than the original soundtrack pieces, but they fit more into the background. These stylized impressions are certainly some of the most ambient works in Vangelis's decidedly ambient score. One of two bonus tracks, "Desolation Path", appeared in the unauthorized Director's Cut but is given wide release for the first time, and its stark, cathartic synth may just be the best new material.
Given the much-discussed nature of Blade Runner, it's a little confusing that Vangelis tacked on a whole disc of new compositions and didn't just release the entire score. The works on the third disc are certainly fine on their own, a nice return by Vangelis to the synthesized new age that he doesn't compose much anymore. The work on this disc sounds dated at times, and sort-of purposelessly includes muffled spoken-word performances from the likes of Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, and Roman Polanski. Is it really necessary to include, as Vangelis does on "No Expectation Boulevard", actual dialogue of Ridley Scott discussing the Final Cut project?
Little details like this are inexplicably slapdash. There are no liner notes from the composer himself, and only a page of exposition from Scott. The greatest surprise is the unedited main title theme wasn't included. Still, it's a major improvement over a soundtrack that has been, like the film, a narrative in flux. We're a little more certain now of Vangelis's desolate near-future vision, rooted in his ambient and new age roots but rarely sounding like a product of its time. Too bad it's not quite The Final Score we all were waiting for.


It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years ...

The Glow, Pt. 2

It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years and years with I Love Yous and You Are So Beautifuls, the most direct way of expressing images of love and beauty have pretty much lost all impact. Melodic tricks can wear thin just as easily. Hooks are all well and good, but when you've seen a hook enough times, you know not to bite.
Perhaps the problem is that most pop music doesn't put enough faith in the listener. Everything must be laid out in the most obvious of terms, and eventually, that obviousness obscures whatever the music originally intended to convey. If you want to invoke the quiet beauty of the ocean, for example, you can write a pop song that says, "Hey, the ocean is really beautiful," or you can try to come up with a sonic approximation of that beauty.
It's a huge undertaking to attempt to capture something so visual in a song. But for Phil Elvrum, it seems to be second nature. The Glow Pt. 2, the follow-up to last year's gorgeous brainmelt It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water, captures the sea, the sky, and the mountains in a sonic panorama that seems to live without beginning or end. A sprawling, swirling composition that is both as varied and as consistent as the landscape itself, The Glow Pt. 2 exceeds even its predecessor in capturing the simultaneous wrath and fragility of nature. And sounding really, really cool.
Like It Was Hot's "The Pull" before it, "I Want Wind to Blow" opens with subtle manipulations of acoustic guitars across stereo channels. There's an amazing sense of open space to the track as overtones from a low, rhythmic rumble, and from the stereo acoustic guitars, create a wash of barely audible noise floating through the mid-frequencies. "I Want Wind to Blow," like a good portion of The Glow Pt. 2, uses repetition and understatement to transform itself from a simple song into a landscape.
And as with any landscape, the way the songs on The Glow Pt. 2 are perceived greatly affects the impact of the record. This album simply must be listened to on headphones. Hearing the record on regular speakers is like staring at the Grand Canyon through a Viewmaster. The illusion of depth is weak at best, and easily broken. With headphones, the sounds contained within the record absolutely come to life, bouncing and slithering from ear to ear. The use of stereo panning is as integral a part of the disc as the melodies and instrumentation.
With this stereo enhancement, parts of The Glow Pt. 2 are absolutely breathtaking. And perhaps the single most breathtaking song on the album is its title track, which may or may not be a thematic follow-up to "The Glow," the 11-minute-long centerpiece of It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water. Opening with blasts of fuzzy guitar and massive drums, "The Glow Pt. 2" segues somewhat abruptly into another segment of stereo acoustic guitars, before giving way to a drop-dead gorgeous wash of multitracked organs. On top of this, Elvrum lets loose what could be the most striking lyrics he's ever penned: "I faced death. I went in with my arms swinging. But I heard my own breath and had to face that I'm still living. I'm still flesh. I hold on to awful feelings. I'm not dead... My chest still draws breath. I hold it. I'm buoyant. There's no end." Elvrum delivers these lyrics in a melodic stream-of-consciousness style that's structured enough to be musically riveting, but loose enough to sound spontaneous and sincere. As the last words of the song fade, the swell of organs segues into a trebly acoustic guitar and hi-hat section highly reminiscent of early Modest Mouse.
Nowhere on this album are there short, straightforward pop songs like It Was Hot's cover of Eric's Trip "Sand" or "Karl Blau." Instead, the record ebbs and flows gracefully between fragile acoustic numbers like "Headless Horseman," and overpowering swells of noise, with all points in between represented. The flow between songs on The Glow Pt. 2 is absolutely flawless-- the album functions as one giant piece of music as well as it does a collection of songs. Themes of flesh and blood, water and wood, and life and death permeate the record, connecting well enough to create a sense of something greater without beating you over the head with its concept.
Ultimately, The Glow Pt. 2 is the sound of one man working through a changing landscape-- a single voice challenging its surroundings while also accepting that it's powerless to alter them. The disc ends with a throbbing heartbeat, the most basic sign of life having braved through the stormy trek that precedes it. The Glow Pt. 2 is unpredictable, volatile, vibrant, terrifying, and comforting. The Glow Pt. 2 is alive.


On her first solo album, Giant Drag singer Annie Hardy fills every song with palpable grief. It is a brave, angry, and mournful album that captures the manic energy of her musical past.

Rules

The first image most people saw of Annie Hardy was a striking one: A young woman in a striped polo with her lips slightly upturned, holding a steak knife poised over her thigh. It was the cover image for her band Giant Drag’s 2005 debut Hearts and Unicorns, and that idea, the innocent with murderous intent, was a pretty good reflection of what you would find inside the jewel case. Twelve years on, the same the woman looking into the camera in 2017 wears darker lipstick, more elaborate outfits, and a world-weary demeanor. Rules, her first solo album, captures the manic energy that made Giant Drag so exhilarating while infusing it with more depth.
About five years ago, at 30, Hardy’s years as a rock hellion had dimmed; Because her relationship with her partner Robert Paulson was stable, she gave up music. Quickly, it all unraveled. Seventeen days after her son Silvio was born, he died of SIDS. About a year later, Paulson died of a drug overdose. The trauma of such a loss often incapacitating: they’re gone, so there isn’t much you can do.
In need of a release, Hardy gravitated back to her guitar after Silvio’s death, and the songs she wrote coalesced into a project after Robert’s. Her grief is palpable here, but Rules doesn’t bob in the wake of tragedy, it is as angry as it is mournful. Part of this is due to her distinctive voice: equal parts Loretta Lynn and Lydia Lunch, her sultry caterwaul is severely emotional. In angry moments, she can scream a lyric; in somber ones, her voice cracks timorously. On “Shadow Mode,” the record’s centerpiece of rage, she does both when she delivers this couplet: “I scream like a willow out on the shore/‘Where is this man? He comes no more!’” The line is simple enough to serve as a vehicle for pure sensation.
The punk of some of her backing musicians populates the margins; crashing like Dan Bolles of the Germs on the drums or boozy like Stephen McBean’s Pink Mountaintops. But due to her songwriting, the organs and the riffs, the songs are more like country torch songs than punk per se. Country funk-influenced first single “Want” transforms a pretty standard pop trope (“I want my baby back”) into a pendulous primal yelp for her child. She walks a line between naive simplicity and ambiguous spirituality.
Like the blues music her songs recall, an undertone of gospel sneaks through, and it’s probably the biggest departure from her work with Giant Drag. More than a few songs sound like hymnals you can imagine hearing in a very alternative church. This interest in spirituality culminates on the song “Jesus Loves Me,” a thin ballad, like the Velvet Underground, that features a tender violin line from That Dog’s Petra Haden. The song concerns a skeptic’s favorite argument, the idea that Jesus loves everyone but most people’s lives are pretty awful. At its climax, she yelps “Revelations 3:19,” perhaps the strangest implication of bible verse since Stone Cold Steve Austin took on John 3:16. The verse reads, in the King James, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.” She’s sorry for the things she’s done, but she's aware that it’s not really her fault.
Out of unspeakable grief, Annie Hardy made a seriously profound album while holding onto her peculiarities. Even the silence between the songs is impressive. Its most haunting refrain is a “But it’s all right” she repeats throughout “Mockingbird,” one of the songs that refers directly to her son’s death. It’s difficult to believe, but on Rules she does the unimaginable job of turning that rotten fruit into dark wine.


The German producer Brian Müller has a preternatural feel for the dancefloor, and his latest is a shining hybrid of breakbeats and ambient textures, making it one of the best dance records of the year.

Compro

Revivalism and dance culture aren’t a great match. Obsessing over the past feels misguided in a scene whose stated mission has always been to shake loose the future. In the early ’10s, a variety of producers started releasing music that toyed with the conventions of old-school drum and bass. Some tracks felt inspired, while others skimmed the surface of the sound without adding much. For a young talent like Munich producer Bryan Müller (aka Skee Mask), a challenge emerged: how to engage with the beloved, vast ’90s dance canon of hardcore music, Amen breaks, and ambient techno, without resorting to facile nostalgia.
The best Skee Mask songs do exactly this; they don’t sound quite like anything else. Müller’s use of both analog and digital tools creates a raw hybrid energy. Throughout his latest album Compro, drums land with a spongy bounce, while pads exude rich notes of fungal modular squelch. The combination lends much of the album an organic texture that, in the vein of classic Aphex Twin records, hints at technology from an ancient future—one born of a great cataclysm of the past.
Compro is Müller’s second full-length for Ilian Tape, the German label which has become known for using techno as a jumping off point for incorporating breakbeats. After several releases under the name SCNTST, Müller put out his debut Serum EP on Ilian Tape in 2014 under a new, secret moniker: Skee Mask. Ostensibly a dub techno release, it incorporated slivers of breakbeat, which Müller would expand on for Skee Mask’s excellent 2016 debut LP, Shred. By then, breakbeat mania had moved into some of techno’s most rarefied spaces, and Shred captured intersecting trends, becoming one of the year’s breakout releases for clubgoers of many stripes.
Compro enriches, refines, and expands upon his entire aesthetic which he’s been honing since he started producing as a 17-year-old. Müller has a rare gift for ambient interludes, which can often feel gratuitous on full-length dance records. The album’s calmer moments are important to its whole biochemistry: “Cerroverb,” for instance, starts with an inhalation, a drawn breath gathering oxygen to burn. Wet flapping noises evoke something scaly hooked up to electrodes in a vat, a biological power source, like the fleshy chimeras in Cronenberg’s eXistenz. Tesla coils and solar arrays hum somewhere out of sight. Guitar notes reverberate in the air like sparking wires pulled taut by a pneumatic winch. “Cerroverb” is the sound of Skee Mask charging up.
Perhaps Compro’s most revealing predecessor is The Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind, a bug-eyed 1995 classic by hardcore hero Marc Royal under his alias T.Power that embedded labyrinthine breakbeats within wooly ambient passages and acid freakouts. Nowhere is this more obvious than the three-song stretch at the album’s center. “Soundboy Ext.” takes off like a windsurfer with a solar sail. Towering pads evoke interstellar winds rendered with warm analog grain, as if the Hubble Telescope shot footage on 35-millimeter. The drums don’t feel like they’re driving the track. Instead, they seem to be sliding off the pads, carving down the crest of a particle wave. The break twists through precise filters and shifts, course adjustments by an onboard AI charting a trajectory between star systems.
If “Soundboy Ext.” endorses graceful high-tech optimism, “Dial 274,” paints a thrilling narrative about the opposite. It starts with an alarm, then a Reese bassline starts growling. Lasers squeal, metal shrieks. Containment has failed: Radioactive goo leaks from the reactor. Only the breakbeat maintains its loop, spinning off like a rogue washing machine. Scything jets of sound capture slow-motion infrastructural collapse. The Reese hiccups and spits liquid metal. Then the atonal magma is shot through with jeweled synth shafts, patches of sky seen through a caved-in roof.
You finally roll to a stop and open your eyes. The camera pans up: “VLI” is a weightless drone shot, surveying acres of devastation. It’s just a pulsing tone and a few incandescent pads. But it captures something essential about post-apocalyptic solitude. A cloud of dust hangs over the rubble, sliced into shards by forest light. It’s the logical conclusion to a suite of music that perhaps mirrors Müller’s prediction for the next few centuries of life on Earth: technological confidence leads to a staggering wipe-out, and finally, post-human peace.
Compro continues with a few tunes that feel like an homage to some beloved influences including vintage Blue Note anthems like Peshay’s “Sunrise” and Soichi Terada’s 1996 odyssey “Mt. Ambient vs Spasm.” They’re beautiful, if a bit familiar. But then Skee Mask displays something unexpected, especially for a Bavarian techno act: a sense of humor. “Muk FM” opens with a sample of a stentorian radio announcer discussing Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga in German. The sample warps and fades, giving way to an electro onslaught. It’s a sharp riff about how silly and beautiful our pop culture moment might look to a far-future trash heap sifter, like Wall-E dancing to his VHS of Hello, Dolly!
Despite Compro’s wild tonal variations and interludes, Müller never takes his eyes off the incentives and demands of club music. This record’s emotional valence—between collapse and grace, unity and emptiness—will resonate with anyone who's ever caught an unexpected sunrise in a concrete room. Yet his depth and clarity of vision resists formula. Making music “to get lost in” is overrated—Compro takes you somewhere new.


The trumpeter and composer’s 1977 solo debut, reissued on remastered vinyl, retains its uncanny narcotic power and elemental beauty decades on.

Vernal Equinox

When Jon Hassell coined the term “Fourth World” to describe his work, he fabricated a musical universe that new artists still call home. Melding the work of minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley with non-Western folk, avant-garde classical and electronic, and early-’70s electric Miles Davis, the trumpeter and composer arrived more or less fully formed in 1977 with his solo debut Vernal Equinox. Originally released on Lovely Music, the label most famous for putting out the music of experimental composer-performer Robert Ashley, Vernal Equinox condensed everything Hassell had to offer the avant-garde of the late ‘70s in a petri dish. Despite his future decades of evolution, there is an uncanny narcotic power and elemental beauty to that first record, which is now being reissued on remastered vinyl and CD by Hassell’s Ndeya records imprint.
Before releasing his album, Hassell studied for three years with the Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. With his queasy and heavily manipulated trumpet figures, Hassell hoped to evoke the microtonal quality of Nath’s singing, but from the beginning, Hassell was careful to set his music apart from any discrete tradition. The record’s traditional folk instruments come from South Africa, South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The tambourine-like kanjira is the sole Indian instrument, turned to granular static by electronic processing (“Hex”). On opener “Toucan Ocean,” Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos introduces the primary rhythmic element on the album—the conga—in its first moments, keeping time with a lengthy, repeated rhythmic pattern and a simple shaker. Hassell’s ensemble introduces electric piano chords, grainy samples of ocean waves, and other effects to gradually build intensity.
”Toucan Ocean” is the only song on the album to which you can reasonably nod your head. Hassell’s music often feels propulsive, but its rhythmic architecture is deceptively fluid and unstable. On most tracks, flurries of percussion—sometimes acoustic, sometimes blurs of digital noise—cluster together into little pockets of free time and chaos. Instead of providing the music’s rhythmic backbone, the album’s percussionists create ambient sounds that match the music’s scrambled synth motifs and samples in importance. Texture becomes its own organizational principle; a slew of disparate elements combine to form one gently vibrating mass.
Hassell’s trumpet is at the center of everything, as bent out of recognition as everything else. His elaborate effects chains create speech-like sounds, and his tone often becomes overwhelmed by the sound of his breath. On heavily processed tracks like “Hex” and “Viva Shona,” ping-ponging electronic dots and dashes nearly crowd him out of the mix. However, both “Blues Nile” and the album’s main event—the 21-minute long title track—distill Hassell’s artistry to its most fundamental elements: percussion, drone, and trumpet. He embellishes one or two notes insistently, creating tiny, detuned flutters that evoke a call to prayer for a non-existent religion. The simplicity and intimacy of these compositions is unusual in Hassell’s catalog.
Hassell would dig into the more pop-friendly implications of his world-music-like experiments on his Earthquake Island album of the following year. His ensuing collaborations with Brian Eno (who contributes liner notes to this reissue), Peter Gabriel, and David Sylvian in the ‘80s would demonstrate how well Hassell’s style slotted in with other mini-movements in the electronic and art-rock music world. His discography of the ’90s and ’00s would evince restraint and control. But no other entry in Hassell’s catalog has Vernal Equinox’s sense of excitement and discovery, palpable with the introduction of each brilliant new sound.


Strokes singer makes his solo bow with a record of post-millennial synth-pop.

Julian Casablancas: Phrazes for the Young

Phrazes for the Young

In 2002, the Strokes played their song "Take It or Leave It" on "The Late Show With David Letterman". The performance was so incredible it almost seems unfair. In it, a 23-year old Julian Casablancas manhandled his mic stand, eyed the camera with a hypnotic mix of rage and anxiety, and tugged at his jacket as if he was about to burst. At one point, Casablancas swatted his mic down and left the stage in a huff only to return exactly as guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. wrapped up a brief solo. Chaos; control. At the end of the song, the singer tripped, completely wiped out in the middle of the stage, and somehow ended up even cooler for it. The "Letterman" blitz showed the Strokes at full tilt-- a rock band that set the pace for what a rock band should look, sound, and feel like in a new millennium.
In 2009, a 31-year-old Julian Casablancas played his solo song "11th Dimension" with a band that wasn't the Strokes on "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien". The performance just seemed unfair. In it, the singer had no mic stand, eyed the camera as if he were scared and/or lost, and hunched through some of the song like he was trying to hide himself. At one point, he awkwardly pretended to roll some dice. During an atrocious circus-organ solo, Casablancas just idled in the middle of the stage. There was no chance of him falling over because he barely moved.
Perhaps it's unfair to gauge Casablancas against his younger self, but this is a star whose entire currency is based on a youthful brand of Lower East Side punk rebellion that's too cool to actually rebel. Considering the uncertain future of the Strokes-- "a band is a good way to break up a friendship," said Casablancas in a recent interview-- and the fact that the group's last album, 2006's First Impressions of Earth, was something of a shit sandwich, there's more riding on the singer's solo bow than he'd probably like to admit.
Phrazes for the Young is a jumble of contradictions. The music and artwork is steeped in 1970s and 1980s tropes yet also vaguely futuristic. The words are apocalyptic, depressing, and sometimes worthy of a zen self-help manual, and while there are only eight songs, this thing seems to go on forever. The "Conan" performance was not a momentary blunder-- this album is overstuffed with production do-dads, yet disappointingly devoid of anything coming close to the sort of tossed-off brilliance this guy used to come up with during an afternoon nap.
The title of Phrazes for the Young was based on a series of Oscar Wilde one-liners called Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. Among the witticisms are gems like, "Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness," and "In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential." But instead of continuing with Wilde's flighty "words of wisdom," Casablancas takes the "from on high" elder statesman attitude but ditches any and all traces of humor. So we get a batch of anti-pleasure, anti-happiness parables that are often too sincere for their own good.
Opener "Out of the Blue" has Casablancas reeling off a list of downers-- sadness, bitterness, anger, vengeance-- before settling with premature nostalgia: "All that I can do is sing a song of faded glory," he admits. Meanwhile, "Left & Right in the Dark" is even more dire as the singer offers lines like, "We're in a race against time, and time might be winning," before imploring the world at large (or is it himself?) to "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" Here's another Wilde phrase worth re-reading: "Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness."
Produced by Jason Lader (Rilo Kiley, Maroon 5) and Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes), the album is comically slick and bouncy when it's not offering five-minute industrial-synth clusterfucks ("River of Brakelights") or slow-motion dirges ("Tourist"). Broken free of the stylistic constraints that come with the Strokes, Casablancas makes the classic rookie solo mistake of stuffing his songs with everything in the studio while never stepping back and realizing that a six-minute, country-synth historical lament in honor of Manhattan's Ludlow St. may be a few twangy guitar solos and plodding hooks too much.
The record fares best when channeling Cyndi Lauper or the Eurythmics while keeping the tempo close to jumpy. Offstage, "11th Dimension" pumps along with endearing silliness, even if Casablancas claims he's stuck "on the frozen surface of a fireball" on the track. And the gorgeous electro ballad "Glass" finds something lovely amidst a world sadly insulated by bulletproof windows.
The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over-- nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion-- it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece. At their best, the Strokes had no trouble adding spontaneity to their meticulously arranged pop-rock songs. Phrazes leaves no room for such spur-of-the-moments. And, when coupled with Casablancas' often-suffocating, old-timer sentiments, the record allows itself only brief glimmers of life. "The ages live in history through their anachronisms," wrote Wilde in his Phrases and Philosophies. And, at this rate, this one-time wunderkind risks becoming little more than an emblem of the past if he can't figure out how to harness the present once again.


Refreshed and refocused after a three-year absence, Chicago hip-hop icon Common rebounds from 2002's disasterous psych- hop odyssey Electric Circus: Easily ranking with Resurrection and Like Water for Chocolate, Be stands among his best work to date.

Be

Notice Lonnie Lynn's expression on the cover of his new record. It's not a smirk or a simper or even a smile-- it's a full-on grin. Bathed in a golden hue, the image is an instant-vintage snapshot of the sincerity and canny idealism that has marked Common's 13-year hip-hop career. As other MCs fall by the conscious curbside due to nascent acting careers (Mos Def, Andre 3000) or misguided mainstream pleas (Talib Kweli, the Roots), this Chicago native rebounds from 2002's botched hip-hop-flower-child experiment Electric Circus with the help of fellow Windy City native Kanye West on Be, which comfortably ranks alongside Resurrection and Like Water for Chocolate as Common's best work to date.
The album introduces itself with a few somber, contemplative notes from an upright bass. Then the heavy strings awake from their slumber and start popping. A slurring analog keyboard line slides in. Juke joint piano begins to roll. "Yes," Common says with a resounding confidence that instantly placates any holdover Electric Circus worries. Elevated by the melodic burst of the quintessential West beat, Common proceeds to dole out his State of Urban America Address: "Bush pushin' lies/ Killers immortalized/ We got arms but won't reach for the skies." With no hook and a cold Chi-town setting where "drunk nights get remembered more than sober ones," Be's intro is inviting, stern, buoyant, and level-headed all at once, establishing a theme of restrained optimism.
It's deftly followed by the crack-a-lack street symphony "The Corner". "We write songs about wrong because it's hard to see right," Common intones, alongside his legendary heroes the Last Poets. Guided by the tenants of his classic hip-hop parable "I Used to Love H.E.R.", the wise MC is not preaching, just leisurely speaking, playing the world-weary yet still-hopeful ghetto documentarian. Still gazing into his daughter's eyes for inspiration as he did on Like Water for Chocolate's "The 6th Sense", Common, at the near-ancient hip-hop age of 33, refreshingly looks to generations both past and future for the answers to the big questions he's searching for on Be.
Nowadays, Common won't leave you slack-jawed at his meta-metaphor verbal gymnastics. His flow is slowed and smoothed out, with understated emphasis and emotion taking the place of young-buck flashiness. The lack of instant-gratification couplets may disappoint at first, but each verse's rewarding intricacies become more evident with multiple listens.
Sonically, Be is utterly listenable: With just 11 songs in 42 minutes (including Pop's rap), the record is as succinct as its title. Be's brevity is not only welcomed but almost iconoclastic. Making the album speed by even faster is the intrinsic sense of continuity provided by West and the like-minded J Dilla. The famed dropout's nine tracks feature his signature sound with slight unconventional arrangement twists and scratch-down turns that prevent dull uniformity: Instead of a third verse on the two-sided adulterous saga "Faithful", the song segues into a celestial duet with John Legend tethered to the hook while wily eccentric Bilal soars above with his melismatic vocal theatrics.
Once a pupil of Chicago producer No I.D., who helped construct Common's early boom-bap sound, West does his mentor proud on Be, exuberantly pushing his one-time lyrical foe to unleash superior oratory skills while cutting-and-pasting archaic soul samples from forgotten artists such as gospel-tinged loverman DJ Rogers ("Faithful") and familial funk group Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose ("Chi City"). Aside from the horn-laden "Real People", which nicks 70s organist Caesar Frazier's "Sweet Children" wholesale, West once again proves himself to be an inventive, natural talent behind the boards, as on "The Food," which flips the opening notes of Sam Cooke's "Nothing Can Change This Love" for its infectious piano loop.
There are no skippable songs on Be, but one decision disrupts the album's admirably consistent 68-degrees-in-the-shade vibe: The inclusion of the "Chappelle's Show" version of "The Food". Though the live take has an intensity missing on the studio version (released on vinyl last year), the Chappelle introduction and opening and closing applause pull the listener out of Be's palpable Southside surroundings. The album would have been better served by a redone studio take on the tune, which had the potential to be one of Be's finest.
Picayune flaws aside, the album's appeal stems from Common's passionate honesty. This invigorating trait means ballads like "Love Is..." and "It's Your World" don't melt into mush. The former sees him talking tender over a sinuous J Dilla beat that layers airy Marvin Gaye vocal samples atop each other to sublime effect. "Some say that I'm a dreamer because I talk about it often/ Seen the hardest nigga soften with his homey in a coffin," he says, admitting his romantic weaknesses while concurrently highlighting the inevitable downsides of such boundless affections. The latter features an unflinching, detailed narrative chronicling a downtrodden Midwestern prostitute's sympathetic plight: "I remember in high school, she had a passion to sing/ Now she see herself in her casket in dreams."
The woman's tale can be seen as a dreadful sequel to hip-hop's own plight in "I Used to Love H.E.R." More than a decade after that distillation of the pitfalls of the culture, hip-hop continues to relish in the violent and abusive tropes at an increasingly overt level. Still, Common lends power and self-worth to the character in "It's Your World", hoping she can use it to her advantage-- but also realizing her fate may be sealed. "She still wanna see California," he concludes. Whether she ever makes it is left lovingly, realistically unanswered.


Chief Keef's breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, and unrelenting, but the 16-year-old Chicago rapper's calm, dead-eyed delivery is its most unsettling and intriguing element.

Back From the Dead

The music of Chicago MC Chief Keef will sound intimately familiar to anyone that has heard a rap album or listened to the radio in the past few years. Back From the Dead, his breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, unrelenting, lurching, and undeniably the child of Waka Flocka Flame and producer Lex Luger's indelible Flockaveli. Considering Keef is 16 years old, you could almost use the world "child" literally. But for all its familiarity, the mixtape is noticeably alien, with the young Keef leaving behind Flocka's headbanging intensity for a delivery and presence that is unsettlingly calm and unemotional.
Back From the Dead likely refers to Keef's recently being released from prison, where he served a few weeks for allegedly firing a gun at Chicago police officers. But if you read the title more literally to mean that Keef is something like a zombie, it's maybe even more appropriate. Surrounded by beats from producer Young Chop that are stuffed with the sound of gunshots and Keef's choice ad-lib, "bang bang," he's close to stoic throughout, stalking expressionless through the streets. We usually think of this type of music as fight music or party music, and though Keef's singles certainly don't inspire people to stand and stare at each other, his dead-eyed delivery gives post-crunk music a decidedly new vibe, one that goes about threatening the listener not through aggression, but the chilling lack thereof.
The aggressive antisociality that fueled Flockaveli or the 2004 self-titled debut album from Atlanta teens Crime Mob is internalized and subsumed on Back From the Dead, and it's evident immediately on the lead-off track "Monster", where amongst a hail of bullets and rolling hi-hats Keef coolly raps, "We just do our thang, and the feds watching/ All we do is turn up, we some damn monsters." It continues from there-- on "My Niggas" he more or less talks his way through the chorus ("Please don't disrespect my niggas/ Cause we gon' squeeze a lot of fucking triggers") and on "Winnin'" he issues the album's most direct threat: "Fuck with my family, and you are finished." Neither the sentiment nor the wording is unfamiliar in the context of street rap, but Keef's laissez-faire approach to the type of things that most rappers seethe about has breathed new life into a sound that is still dominating rap despite a stretch of diminishing returns.
Keef's calling card is his innate laid-back aura, but the mixtape succeeds thanks to more than just that. For one, he may just have one of the most singular flows in rap, a bouncy cadence that often finds him trampolining on the last syllable of his lines. He displays this best on the single "I Don't Like", where he uses Young Chop's bass drum as a springboard to punctuate what may be the catchiest rap chorus of the year. Rappers such as Pusha T, Meek Mill, and Wiz Khalifa have all already taken to Twitter to shout out Keef's music, and it wouldn't be a surprise to hear his flow slowly infiltrate the rap world. Then there's Young Chop, who recently signed a publishing deal with Warner Bros., and with good reason. His beats are as musical as they are hellbent on destruction, and many of the tape's best songs ("I Don't Like", "Save That Shit") are driven by his melodic ear.
Keef is on the verge of becoming a very big deal, and Back From the Dead will serve as a visible reflection of both a city that has seen an obscene number of murders in 2012, and the sound that has been the backbone of rap music for years running. As sociology, the mixtape reinforces just how and why violence is rooted in underclass communities, and though Keef has already been blamed for its perpetuation, at the age of 16, he's still years away from fully understanding the context in which his music exists. As art, the tape shows that, despite continued oversaturation, the music that Waka hath wrought still has interesting places to go.