The first proper LP from Equiknoxx is a clear step forward for the Kingston-based digital dancehall duo. Its textures leap from the speakers; the sound design is more vivid than ever.

Colón Man

Despite the avant-garde tag that’s sometimes affixed to Equiknoxx’s distinctive brand of digital dancehall—and despite the fact that both of their albums have been released on Demdike Stare’s deeply left-field DDS imprint, where their labelmates are artists like Mica Levi, Shinichi Atobe, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley—the collective and its crew of collaborators are not reggae outsiders. Based in Kingston, they are deeply enmeshed in Jamaica’s vast production machine. Over the years, Equiknoxx—which currently consists of producers Gavin Blair (Gavsborg), Bobby Blackbird, and Jordan Chung (Time Cow), and the vocalists Shanique Marie and Kemikal—have supplied beats for Ward 21, Busy Signal, and Beenie Man, among others, with credits going back to at least 2005. Still, when they came through with their debut album, late last year, they largely eschewed vocals in favor of spacious, spidery instrumentals, the better to highlight their unusual lattice of staccato beats, mercurial bleeps, and evocative sound effects.
The new record, Colón Man, is billed as their “debut LP proper,” presumably because last year’s Bird Sound Power largely comprised previously released tracks going back to 2009, while the new one was made in a concentrated creative burst earlier this year. But Colón Man is clearly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Save for a few vocal samples used more for tone color than lyrical signification, it’s entirely instrumental, and its textures leap from the speakers with clinical precision—dry, airless, and charged with electricity, a kind of rock-paper-scissors game between silica packet, vacuum sealer, and anti-static brush.
But Colón Man is also a clear step forward. The sound design is more vivid than ever: laser-zap kick drums, underwater gongs, crinkled Mylar, and wooden thwacks so tactile you can practically feel the wood grain beneath your fingertips. It often sounds as if they’ve raided a Foley artist’s storage locker and made off with armloads of noise-making gewgaws: doorbells, birdcalls, tin cans, maybe a leaf blower or two. In “Definitely Not Something Offensive,” a churning loop wheezes like an engine struggling to turn over; in “Enter a Raffle Win a Falafel,” the rattle of a cassette tape being jiggled in its tray rubs up against pitched-down pinball-bumper pings and the duo’s signature eagle screech. (Those titles, meanwhile—other standouts include “Your Ears Are Not Very Small” and “Kareece Put Some Thread in a Zip Lock”—are excellent encapsulations of their surrealistic vision, in which found sounds take on larger-than-life properties.)
Rhythmically, their loosey-goosey approach to syncopation takes after producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes, artists who understand the difference a millisecond can make. Their tracks move with an immaculately shuddering, flexing sense of swing, and their beats often feel like (and probably are) the products of pure accident, with loops of incidental clatter layered to create wild polyrhythms, alternately bumptious and slinky. There’s an even more direct link to Steven “Lenky” Marsden, the creator of the “Diwali” riddim, and other dancehall producers who worked with a similar set of sounds and textures—simultaneously springy, brittle, and buzzing—enshrined on the 2001 Mo Wax compilation Now Thing.
If some of Bird Sound Power’s more linear instrumentals occasionally wanted for a vocal, the new tunes are entirely self-sufficient. A skilled vocalist could probably find a way to insert him- or herself into their porous weave, but why would you want them to? A voice would only distract from the scintillating interplay of contrasting timbres. No matter how dense their collages become, no two sounds ever occupy the same space or fulfill the same function. Just try to parse the different elements of “Heathen Emissaries From the Dens of Babylon”: wooden rattle, ghostly lowing, bells, basso bleep, vinyl back-scratch, each one occupying its own patch of the spectrum, all as tightly bound together as atomic particles.
What might be most impressive about these songs is how deeply abstracted they are, without losing an iota of gut-level appeal. “A World of Welsh” is essentially an opportunity to prove how many different shades of shimmer there are in the world. There’s nothing like a melody, or even conventional musical notes; it’s all incidental sound, as impossible to hum as it is difficult to resist. Pull one piece out, and the whole thing would collapse—but put together, the force it exerts is remarkable. They do occasionally avail themselves of more traditional synthesizer sounds, but very little is of an obviously musical bent. Only Equiknoxx would take melodica player Addis Pablo—son of Augustus Pablo, arguably the instrument’s most famous player—and turn his contributions into an array of squiggles that are all but unrecognizable as a product of the breath-driven keyboard instrument. In “Enter a Raffle Win a Falafel,” a momentary explosion of dub delay serves mainly to highlight how little they depend upon echo, normally a staple of reggae. Equiknoxx’s environments, in contrast, are as exacting as anechoic chambers. Instead of turning to delay as a way of filling up space, Equiknoxx make every sound count. Nothing is wasted and nothing is unwelcome, and every waveform earns its place in the transporting and immaculate final mixdown.


Just as they did with dub icons The Congos, Sun Araw collaborate with New Age icon Laraaji on the hazy, welcoming* Professional Sunflow. *

Laraaji / Sun Araw: Professional Sunflow

Professional Sunflow

After starting Sun Araw by himself eight years ago, Cameron Stallones has guided the project through stylistic transformations, lineup iterations, and name variations. But his music has always had a core of jammy dub and hazy New Age. So since Stallones has already worked with some legends of dub—vocal duo the Congos, with whom Sun Araw collaborated on 2012’s excellent *Icon Give Thank—*it’s perhaps inevitable that he’d do the same with a New Age icon.
It’s hard to think of a better candidate for such a gig than Laraaji. Since he first gained renown for his contribution to Brian Eno’s early 80’s Ambient series, the artist born Edward Larry Gordon has made music that’s sold in the New Age section but continually pushes and expands that genre. His ability to glide between sounds and moods—both with his innovative zither playing and his meditative singing—makes him well-equipped for musical partnership, something Stallones has proven adept at too. And both artists are great at creating sonic space, making their music welcoming to voices as big as their own.
As the first recorded product of their recent meetings, Professional Sunflow does indeed see Laraaji and Sun Araw (here the duo of Stallones and long time partner Alex Gray) happily assimilating their respective styles. The results will be familiar to fans of either artist: slow, patient music in which Laraaji hums wordless prayers over Stallone’s looping guitar and Gray’s rattling electronics. In fact, at times *Professional Sunflow *is a little too familiar. There aren't a ton of magical moments like the peaks that emerged on Icon Give Thank. But the music is still entrancing.
Lately Sun Araw’s sound has leaned toward microscopically minimal, and that continues during parts of Professional Sunflow. The album comprises two half-hour live performances split across four sides of vinyl, and each half opens so sparsely you might wonder if something got erased. But eventually both pieces—one recorded in Germany, the other in Switzerland—escalate. In “Liepzig,” a bassy rhythm inspires key Laraaji exhortations, even as it settles into a comfortable groove. More exciting is part two of “Laussane,” whose steady beat provokes a web of keyboard and zither accents, veering into a psych jam not far from Can or Träd, Gräs och Stenar.
The similarity to those communal ensembles indicates how familial *Professional Sunflow *sounds. Everything flows together snugly, and the congenial symbiosis can be remarkably hypnotic. But you might find yourself wishing that decorum had been periodically abandoned for something wilder. Still, such deviations might have sounded forced, and what *Professional Sunflow *lacks in a-ha moments, it makes up for in patient wisdom—and in the potential that this partnership will continue long enough to naturally generate bigger eruptions.


On her torrential second album, Kristin Hayter creates a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

Caligula

Eight minutes into her torrential second album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter lets out a thundering, apocalyptic scream: “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep [...] I let it consume me,” she cries. Her voice is so ugly and shredded and maniacal and alive that it creates a witness of anyone who hears it. It is the sound of trauma, that which is by definition intolerable, and Hayter traverses its most upsetting depths on behalf of survivors, including herself. With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.
From renaissance paintings to murder ballads and beyond, feminist revenge has charged art to cathartic ends—envisioning a world in which women do not only demand justice but see it through, in their work, by any means necessary. Caligula embodies that insurrectionary fury. Working with members of The Body, Uniform, Full of Hell, and others, Hayter crafts a 66-minute world ablaze with contempt for man, which, though divided into 11 all-caps tracks—with such imposing titles as “I AM THE BEAST,” “IF THE POISON WON’T TAKE YOU MY DOGS WILL,” and “SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT”—plays out like one continuous, epic composition. More than songs, they feel like a succession of enraged suites, each one a threat, an intervention, an act of solidarity.
Lingua Ignota sparks fantasies of demonic avant-opera icon Diamanda Galás joining with industrial-metal titans Godflesh to create a horror soundtrack, or Maria Callas in hell. Her goal seems to be to deconstruct and destabilize, to discomfit. She situates death growls and strangulated vocalizations amidst orchestral strings, choral singing, and chimes—like a hex on the whole social order. “Everything burns down around me,” she sings with incantatory grandeur on “MAY FAILURE BE YOUR NOOSE,” atop the incendiary counterpoint of Uniform’s Michael Berdan.
Near the beginning of Caligula, Hayter beckons Satan to come to her side, to “fortify me”—things get darker from there. Her invocation recalls Galás’ own definition of the devil in 1991. “When a witch is about to be burned on a ladder in flames, who can she call upon?” Galás asked in the book Angry Women. “I call that person ‘Satan.’” Hayter summons this original insurgent on behalf of a society that rarely believes embattled women. “How do I break you before you break me?” she seethes on “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR.” The savage “SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT” culminates in her disarming, boiled-over prayer to “Kill them all/Kill them all/Kill them all.” For her enemies, she wishes, “May your foes be many/May your days be few.” Unsparing would be a way to put it. Caligula wants abusers dead.
Occasionally, Hayter breaks into fragments of traditional melody and balladeering, but it is never long before she incinerates them. And though she draws on the embittered atmospheres and theater of metal, Caligula’s unwieldy, behemoth-like sprawl practically laughs at the concept of riffs. Hayter said it was her goal to “recontextualize that phallocentric format for people who need it,” and she crafts a sound that, if not feminine, feels decidedly unmale, and crucially vulnerable. The solemn highlight “FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWER’D CROWN,” for one, finds Hayter singing of how “the bitter blood of many foes sustains me” with a low, chilling resolve. She pushes her voice into unsettling gurgles before declaring, with shocking clarity, “I have learned that all men are brothers/And brothers only love each other,” like an ornate rewriting of the Jenny Holzer maxim “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore.”
On Caligula’s closing track, in a final turn, Hayter quotes the poet Frank O’Hara: “All I want is boundless love.” The line is from his 1957 collection Meditations in an Emergency, but Haytner undercuts it with her own devastating experience: “All I know is violence.” This brutal ending reminds us that if Caligula is too taxing to bear, that’s because it is a work of realism. When Hayter calls herself “the butcher of the world [...] throatslitter of the world” on a cold-blooded hymn titled “FUCKING DEATHDEALER,” I think of the artist Artmisia Gentileschi, a protégé of Caravaggio, who was tortured in court in 1612 after she opened a case against her rapist. Gentileschi spent the rest of her career painting depictions of violence against men. Women have been seeking this revenge forever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Cocteau Twins' fifth and sixth albums are seeing deluxe vinyl reissues this week. These two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band. And pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here.

Cocteau Twins: Blue Bell Knoll/Heaven or Las Vegas

Blue Bell Knoll/Heaven or Las Vegas

It’s impossible to make out most of the lyrics on the title track to the Cocteau Twins’ 1990 album, Heaven or Las Vegas. Over Robin Guthrie’s shimmery, shivery guitar strum, singer Elizabeth Fraser bends her notes into mysterious shapes. She coos and squawks, mews and barks, murmurs and wails, as though singing in a new language. One minute she sounds like an opera singer, the next like a mother baby-talking to her new daughter. The effect can be dizzying, and the illegibility of her performance only makes it more, not less, human. Yet, a few words do stand out, primarily that title phrase: “Heaven or Las Vegas.” The Cocteau Twins’ music has always sounded otherworldly, and their many fans would certainly describe it—and rightly so—as heavenly.
But Las Vegas? It stands out as an odd, jarring reference. Their fantastical music would seem to brook nothing quite so earthly, so garish, so thisworldly as Sin City, which hauls unlikely baggage into “Heaven or Las Vegas”: gambling, corruption, tacky tourism, and cheesy crooning. But if we forget everything we know about the city and reduce Las Vegas to its atomic elements—millions upon billions of lights—perhaps we might see heaven in the radiance. This is essentially how the Cocteau Twins’ music works: Fraser’s voice doesn’t behave the way a pop singer’s voice typically behaves, nor does Guthrie’s guitar deliver the usual melody or rhythm. Along with bass player/keyboardist Simon Raymonde, whose contributions shouldn’t be discounted, they found new ways to use old instruments in the 1980s, in the process devising a unique and wholly beguiling sound. If punk had chased beauty instead of glorious ugliness, if goth had emphasized light rather than fetishize darkness, those movements might have sounded like the Cocteau Twins, who had contemporaries but no real peers. Somehow, there is immense aggression and subversion in the sheer loveliness of this music, which makes it more than just art for art’s sake.
Most people in America, however, didn’t know any of this in the 1980s, as the decade was almost over before the band officially released any music in the States. Ever since Guthrie and Fraser had shown up on 4AD Records’ doorstep like orphaned goths in 1982, the Scots quickly developed both a sound and an audience in the UK, culminating in the 1984 album Treasure, which was the first to truly capture the wildness of Fraser’s vocals and Guthrie’s ambitiously skewed arrangements. By the late '80s, they were successful enough to play increasingly cavernous London venues, to build their own 24-track studio, to rent practice space in Pete Townshend’s building. There was also friction between Fraser and Guthrie, who had been a couple throughout the life of the Cocteau Twins. Due to the pressure of the business and especially to Guthrie’s rampant drug abuse, their marriage was fraying. But they still made beautiful music together, and they signed a deal with Capitol Records to distribute their fifth album, 1988’s Blue Bell Knoll, in America.
That album is one of two getting a deluxe vinyl reissue this week via 4AD. It’s certainly a pivotal album in their career, but not necessarily one of their best. Did the Cocteau Twins tame some of their wilder elements for American audiences? Or did the prospect of reaching a whole new continent of ears even enter their minds when they recorded these songs? Blue Bell Knoll sounds minimalist, workmanlike at times, never quite matching the rapturous invention of Treasure. It’s their airiest, cottoniest album, with an enticing use of space on the production but with hooks that sound oddly restrained. As a result, it can sound as monochromatic as its album cover.
On the other hand, its general dismissal by critics and fans as a lesser Cocteau Twins album may have less to do with the album itself and more to do with the fact that it is bookended by better and more ecstatically creative works. There are moments of disarming beauty on Blue Bell Knoll—the melting keyboards on “Cico Buff”, the lush vocal layering of “Athol-Brose”, the shooting-stars opening of “A Kissed Out Red Floatboat”, Raymonde’s syncopated bass trudge of “The Itchy Glowblo Blow”, the whatever that is at the end of “Spooning Good Singing Gum” (I think it might be a herd of lovelorn goats playing saxophones). But the standout is “Carolyn’s Fingers”, which would become the Cocteau Twins’ first American single. The band never utilized its rhythm section to better effect: Against Guthrie’s crisp guitar line, that churning momentum pushes Fraser’s vocals to greater and greater heights, her unexpected swoops and eloquently rolled consonants creating a bewildering indie-pop aria.
Even as the band soared commercially and creatively, personally they suffered. Between the release of Blue Bell Knoll and the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas, Fraser gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, yet Guthrie remained deep in the throes of drug addiction, which made him paranoid and angry. Raymonde mourned the death of his father. Suddenly the stakes for the Cocteau Twins seemed impossibly high. “Fraser named the album Heaven or Las Vegas [as] a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice,” Martin Aston writes in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, implying that the band was close to imploding.
Instead, they turned all that turmoil and uncertainty into the best album of their career. Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on “Cherry-Coloured Funk”. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” descends into silence. If Blue Bell Knoll is spare and ambient, Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent. Tellingly, some lyrics bubble up to the surface, often loaded with personal meaning: “cherry,” “perfection,” “burn this madhouse down.” On a song called “Pitch the Baby”, ostensibly written for—or at least sung to—the couple’s infant daughter, Fraser repeats, “I’m so happy to care for you, I only want to love you,” as a sweet lullaby. We may not always be able to understand her lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven or Las Vegas, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft.
What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes. That succinctness may have something to do with Raymonde’s increasing role in the group. His bass playing, especially on “Pitch the Baby” and “Fotzepolitic”, not only adds to the texture and, yes, the groove of the music, but also gingerly anchors these songs: He prevents them from flying off into the ether, but never lets them grow rigid or staid. The result is an album that perfectly balances ambition with accessibility. Together, these two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the Cocteau Twins as first and foremost a pop band, and pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here.


In accordance with his label’s ethos, the Fool’s Gold co-founder connects the dots between the hip-hop and dance worlds on a space-themed record that bounces from rap to rave to electro.

UFO

Fool’s Gold Records has forged its reputation on an ability to connect distant corners of the hip-hop and dance worlds. The brainchild of A-Trak and Nick Catchdubs, the Brooklyn-based indie boasts a discography that gleefully places New York City house icon Todd Terry next to Danny Brown’s charismatically caterwauled rap theatrics, and successfully follows Kid Sister’s spunky hip-house revival moves with Kid Cudi’s lilting sing-song delivery. It’s a DJ-focused mentality that spotlights common ground between artists rather than segregating sounds. Catchdubs’ latest addition to the Fool’s Gold vault runs with a space-age theme that promises interplanetary genre-hopping kicks and nods to the usual mix of influences associated with his label. But beyond a smattering of standout cuts, there’s a frustrating feeling that half the passenger list didn’t make it on board before takeoff.
Early on, MC Nasty Nigel from New York City rap troupe World’s Fair blesses “Ecstasy Hot Line.” The pairing smartly captures the Fool’s Gold ethos: Though the group originally broke through with an update of indie rap icons Company Flow’s “8 Steps to Perfection,” World’s Fair’s last album featured a drum’n’bass-infused track (“Elvis’ Flowers”) that paid homage to DJ nights they hosted at now-shuttered venue Elvis Guesthouse. Catchdubs serves up nuanced production for Nigel, who floats over lush waves of woozy synths and casts himself as both “the third Chemical Brother” and “a baby from the ’90s—I still blame it all on Rudy, bro.” The production teases that it’s about to erupt at various points, but Catchdubs keeps the sonic backdrop low key, allowing Nigel’s voice and punchlines to provide the thrills.
“Pick Up Yaself” conveys similar synergy by virtue of an amped-up vocal hook by Metric Man from dancehall duo Fire Alarm. The song triggers energetic rave synths reminiscent of a ’90s Dreamscape party, but it’s always the arrival of the gruff vocal refrain that provides the intense highs. Elsewhere on UFO, outings featuring FATHERDUDE and former Rapture singer Mattie Safer, plus Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, provide an equally heady buzz. But navigating to these highlights involves traversing through a gamut of instrumental tracks that sap the album’s momentum, making for a stony journey.
There’s a hollowness about these instrumentals, which comprise the majority of the project, that makes them feel more like interludes or beat sketches than fully formed songs. They seem not so much stripped down as missing something; it’s a feeling magnified when sequenced after songs starring the compelling guest voices. Tellingly, when the rare use of a vocal sample kicks in on “UFO Style,” the spark returns. The phrase “I’m higher than a UFO” is cut up over production that’s an evocative mix of futuristic and eerie. It brings to mind ’80s electro workouts from the Knights of the Turntables and the Willesden Dodgers; the addition of vocals adds just the right amount of texture, giving the listener something to latch on to. But then it’s gone, and the album ambles back into more ambient drift with final tracks “Eyeball” and “Arp Flex.” UFO starts out promising bright cosmic thrills, but a fuller supporting crew might have helped to commandeer the vessel to more exciting outposts.


This Melbourne band alternates the pop literacy of the Go-Betweens and the rambunctious energy of the Easybeats with the roaring punk propulsion of Royal Headache.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Talk Tight

Talk Tight

Talk Tight, the debut by the Melbourne quintet Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, is presented as a “mini-LP”: seven rip-roaring tracks that move by their own logic, any one of which could be a single and all of which leave you wanting more in the best way possible. The group’s revolving team of singers and songwriters (everybody but the drummer takes a turn on the mic) chronicle knotty relationships and winding road trips, but taken together, these songs are after something more public than personal. Asked by the blog Triple J Unearthed what inspires the band, singer-guitarist Fran Keaney hinted at their music’s true subject: “It’s going to sound all at once lame, wanky and vague but: Australia? As in the concept of Australia. What it was, What it is…”
There are too many qualifiers in that response to believe he’s taking the piss on a question that’s impossible to answer. And on Talk Tight, the band evokes certain aspects of Australia in the sunbaked surf-pop guitar licks and taut punk momentum, both carefree and a little cautious and therefore perfect for a country that’s home to this fucking thing. Listening to these seven tunes, you can easily trace a national lineage: the relentlessness of Radio Birdman, the pop literacy of the Go-Betweens, the rambunctious energy of the Easybeats, and the belief—shared with Courtney Barnett—that guitars are not just crucial to the message but might very well be the message themselves.
Even in Melbourne, which seems to produce more great guitar bands per capita than any other city in the world, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever stand out for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note. This is a band that thrives on contradiction and duality, pitting opposing urges against each other. To describe their own sound, the members coined the term “tough pop/soft punk,” which is apt as a label as well as a refusal to pare themselves down to any one particular thing.
As that awkward name suggests, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever often sound like they’re in fact two different bands. There’s the group behind midtempo opener “Wither With You,” which falls squarely in the “tough pop” category. In this mode, each instrument contributes to a swirl of melody and the guitars chime and ramble as Tom Russo chronicles the strained dissolution of a relationship: “Oh your pretty face is curling up in anger,” he sings, in a tone that might deepen rather than defuse her fury. “Just keep in mind, my darling, I did it all for you.” Keeping it from sounding bitter is the nimble rhythm section, the genial snap of Marcel Tussie’s drums and Joe Russo’s loping bassline. Here and on “Tender Is the Neck,” the group foreground mood over momentum, establishing an autumnal ambience that underscores the bittersweet reminiscence of the lyrics.
The band’s other mode is to play at the punk end of the Aussie spectrum, closer to Royal Headache or Eddy Current Suppression Ring. The tempos quicken noticeably, with half-shouted vocals and guitars that fight not for the lead but for the rhythm parts. Tussie and Russo chug along diligently, as though timekeeping were the true rock star’s responsibility. You hear it in songs like “Wide Eyes,” a fierce travelogue that explodes with tightly coiled jangle and angsty wanderlust. They might be too soft to trash a club, but the Blackouts ably wring the last bit of tension from the skeletal “Clean Slate,” with its intricate curlicue riffs and fidgety call-and-response.
The great trick of Talk Tight is how Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever find the overlap between those conflicting pop and punk impulses. Even at their fiercest they’re happy romantics (“You run the bath, and I’ll warm the pasta, girl”) as well as sensualists (“Your hair stands up when I kiss the back of your neck”), qualities that seem rare in any band. Rarer still is their precarious balance of idealism and realism, which defines the closer, “Career,” about a friend who traded his rebellion and defiance for “a silk tie and an ’09 Ford.” It might sound dismissive and taunting if Russo and Keaney didn’t sound half-tempted themselves. They’re wise to the compromises that accrue with the years, but they’d rather stay on the road, rumbling through Australia and beyond like a tidal wave obliterating every coast.


Channeling jazz, kosmische, and prog, the Radiohead offshoot’s second album burrows deeper into their strangely enchanting appeal.

Wall of Eyes

As far back as 2009, Jonny Greenwood was fed up with the faff of the world’s most studious stadium band. “He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work,” Thom Yorke said that year. Despite the guitarist and composer’s impatience, he was prone to obsessing over what Yorke called the “extra things”: the sly strings and choked squeals that thread razor wire into Radiohead’s pillowed luxury. “‘Come on, we need some wrong notes,’ he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em,” Yorke joked.
But never have we heard Greenwood quite like this. On Wall of Eyes, the second album from the Smile, his hostile harmonies and expediency in the studio nudge the trio somewhere new; it is his most exciting and volatile performance since In Rainbows. No time for their usual effortful cohesion: Producer Sam Petts-Davies resolves to stress, not conceal, the eclecticism of Yorke and Greenwood’s songs, while drummer Tom Skinner squirrels around making nests in their inhospitable time signatures. After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.
More than anything on A Light for Attracting Attention, the Beatlesy “Friend of a Friend” and riotous “Bending Hectic” present contrasting spectacles of the Smile’s allure. The former draws inspiration from lockdown footage of Italians uniting in song on their balconies; the coda juxtaposes that pandemic solidarity against the elites’ response. “All of that money, where did it go?/In somebody’s pocket, a friend of a friend,” Yorke laments, invoking the COVID cronyism of Britain’s Conservative Party. But the tune is divine, even hummable—his deftest lunge for your heartstrings since unshelving “True Love Waits.”
At the other extreme, “Bending Hectic” indulges Yorke’s time-honored passion for calamitous automobile events—in this case the last moments of a public figure, apparently disgraced, who vows to drive off the Italian mountainside. The band plays the car-crash suicide ballad as a brilliantly twisted love song: Such is the narrator’s hubris that, when an orchestral crescendo signals the plunge, and Greenwood’s lustrous string bends transmute into tire squeals, we hear the infernal crusade as a valorous final act.
Across the album, Greenwood’s haywire guitars and arrangements veer between Can’s warehouse expressionism and Robert Wyatt’s alien-abducted folk fusion, conspiring with the live production and convulsive rhythms to save his bandmate from his more ponderous impulses. Yorke’s ethereal vocal register has long been his calling card and his crutch, tested to dizzying effect on the verses of “Climbing Up the Walls” before taking root on The King of Limbs. These days, he is split between warring impulses to command a song or spritz it with ghostly vapor. But even his weaker spells enchant, and Wall of Eyes opens with two irresistible slow burners: the wintry bossa nova title track, where he murmurs about digital surveillance and sedation (“You will go behind a wall of eyes/Of your own device/Is that still you with the hollow eyes?”), and “Teleharmonic,” from the “All I Need” school of fraught narrators caught in whirlpool synths, clinging to love like a life preserver.
By sequencing the two foggiest songs up front, the album lulls you into a trance. Then Greenwood’s guitar, coaxed from the sidelines, electrifies the nerve center on “Read the Room” and “Under Our Pillows,” an alt-rock suite of clanking-piston hooks and motorik finales. When the tension lifts with a music-box melody or swell of London Contemporary Orchestra strings, the songs have surprised us twice: first by forestalling expectations of beauty, then by providing it anyway.
The second side’s tour-de-luxe falters only on “I Quit,” one of those Smile songs that perhaps suffers from Greenwood’s desire to release records “90 percent as good [that] come out twice as often.” Where the arresting closer “You Know Me!” evolves Yorke’s paranoid balladry, “I Quit” is the discount “Codex” or “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor”: intoxicating as ever but without the final revelation—the sense of dawn penetrating some murky underworld—that tilts those Radiohead songs into the sublime.
After decades refining, refusing, and reformulating the Radiohead sound, Yorke and Greenwood seem emboldened to stop resisting—to loosen up and let their songwriting impulses absorb whatever happens to be on their stereo that day. Wall of Eyes gives center stage to jazz, kosmische, prog—aesthetic signposts and satellite genres usually kept in the more established band’s wings. The Smile, though stranger and wilder, more comfortably fit in the omnivorous art-rock tradition.
Greenwood’s fusion of refinement and insurrection echoes that of his beloved pianist Glenn Gould, who once made a nice observation about the pioneering modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg: “Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.” As Radiohead defied rock convention, so the Smile cannot help but defy Radiohead. Yet defiance, Gould suggests, is the lifeblood of tradition. To defy classicism or rock or a cherished old band may finally preserve their sanctity. The defied thing endures—and then, if we are lucky, defiance provokes it to react.


Lil B's newest is a 34-track opus that demands several sessions to take in. It's the latest proof that he hasn't finished telling us his peculiar story.

God's Father

Even if you don't believe Lil B's produced a second of worthwhile rap music, you have to admire his warped career, which continues, in its Drunken-Master stagger, to take him to improbable new places. His impact on rap is already such that if he disappeared tomorrow, he would linger in the cultural bloodstream. But somehow, he endures: He's like Swee'Pea from a Popeye cartoon, crawling over gnashing gears while we clutch our heads and watch. God's Father, which came out last week, is the latest proof that he hasn't finished telling us his peculiar story, and that somehow, even after untold terabytes of #based music, he's still finding out new ways to tell it.
The first thing you'll notice after porting God's Father into your iTunes is that it's long. Ludicrously so, in a way that defies any sense of what an "album" is, or how one plays. It is a face-whitening amount of Lil B to contend with in a single sitting; at 34 tracks, it demands several sessions to even take in. (It took me three days, in 10- to 12-song chunks.) It doesn't feel "sequenced" in any noticeable way. Like Lil B, it just keeps going. Also as with Lil B, I have only the fuzziest idea how it sprang into existence. After years of listening to his music, I still have zero sense of how his creative decisions are made, or not made: Does he take time recording his punched-in overdubs? Does he know the order of any of his tracklists? Has he ever done a second take in his life?
With the atrocious stuff, of course, the added mystery is: "Did he even listen to this? And good lord, why am I?" The good news, with God's Father, is that even at its ridiculous length, I never found myself asking this question. It's probably his most immersive single release-- or album, or mixtape, or emanation, or whatever-- in a year and a half, better than both BasedGod Velli and *I'*m Gay. Lil B's consistency relies as much on monkeys-and-typewriters statistics as it does on luck, timing, and inspiration. With God's Father, the breezes are blowing favorably.
He has always found ear-catching beats from unlikely corners, and over the course of God's Father, he raps over whole crates of dollar-store vinyl: We get pan flutes, strings, and choirs; electro funk, 1980s R&B, and Yanni pianos; gospel soul, new age synthesizers, doctor's-office jazz fusion. Individual moments stick out: "Flowers Rise" is one of his prettiest beats in ages, a wisp of synth twirling miles in empty space above an ominous pool of warped noises. "SF Mission Music" rolls out the sepia-tinted Pete Rock piano chords. "Flash" is a skewed take on rap's Lex Luger obsession, trademark synth sweep, ticking hi-hats and all. Over the course of the album, it runs together into one gently mind-expanding blob. This isn't a rap mixtape; it's an amniotic tank.
As for his rapping, those who insist he's a "bad rapper" certainly don't lack evidence. I could pluck 11 or 12 mortifying lines from this tape alone to argue their case for them. But that would miss a larger point about Lil B's music: its use, its proper context. His lyrics rarely accomplish what traditional rap lyrics do, but you can learn a lot about how good rapping works, it turns out, from listening to Lil B, in a way that you cannot from listening to more traditional rappers.
Listening to him work out what kind of beat he's rapping on, for example, what kind of mood it suggests and how he can add to it, is fascinating. "Normal" rappers do this all the time, commenting on the vibe of the track as it rolls out ("this shit feel like a movie!" "this that 1970s heroin flow") getting themselves, and you, in the proper mind frame. But Lil B is especially good at it; in fact, sometimes listening to Lil B do this is the whole song. Menacing minor key pianos on "Breath Slow"? "Ahhhh let me out this motherfucking caaaaage!," he screams. A refracted prism of synth streaming in on "I Ain't Neva Won"? "You see that light up there? Oh yeah, that's just so beautiful." It's a bit like watching a group of little kids dance to music they're hearing for the first time: Is this dark music? Should I make my scary face?
Hearing him drop a line of thought and pivot abruptly into new territory a beat or two later is also absorbingly odd: "Even Eminem known Lil B crazy/ I wanna see how you... [pause] situations/ Duct tape ya click, ain't no way for escapin," he says on "God's Father". He leaves gaps, presumably to be punched in later, in the otherwise fairly dense rhyme pattern of "Buss Em 4 Points"'s second verse. This is how raps generally come together before the microphone is turned on, or while the song is being hashed out before entering the studio, but it is not the way rap listeners are accustomed to engaging with it. If you like thinking about language as unfinished stuff, Lil B's music will play upon rarely visited parts of your listening brain.
It doesn't hurt that he has a genuine way with words, a knack for memorable phrasing. "Man you gotta fuck a mother, and it's real still...," he says on "Be a Star". Talk about an unfinished thought! "I don't eat that pussy, man, on the dancefloor, man," he says on "Go Dumb Tonight". Sounds reasonable. On "Flowers Rise" he offers what might be the most hilariously #based lyric of his career: "I'm so lonely on this pony riding over the sunlight." Pick any stretch of God's Father, and you will be mowed over with quotable phrases. It's like being showered with fortune cookies.
"Man, I just got some deep-ass thoughts," he says, on the aptly titled "Deep Ass Thoughts". The irony is that he doesn't, or if he does, he declines to share them. But he recreates the feeling of having deep-ass thoughts-- dazed wonder, disorientation-- and then encourages you to have your own. It's the same sort of service he provides on a song called "Real Hip Hop 2012", which is a reference to East Coast hip-hop more than an East Coast hip-hop song. It's an odd, abstracted sort of music, and it will never be for everybody. But Lil B knows who his music is for: "This for everybody that/ They think so hard, man they thoughts be so deep/ And don't nobody believe 'em/ But I believe you."


On a short but charming four-song EP, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter expands on the laid-back R&B of her 2022 breakout album, finding new frames for easygoing songs about love’s ups and downs.

Talking to the Wind

On UMI’s 2022 debut, Forest in the City, the Seattle-born singer-songwriter’s vibey keys, soothing guitars, and layered harmonies cast a warm glow. Her lyrics, whether about failed relationships or fresh infatuations, have a charming, relatable ease; her laid-back neo-soul feels as soft and refreshing as grass coated in early-morning dew. To tee up her forthcoming sophomore album—and following “wherever u r,” a lovestruck ballad featuring BTS member V last month—UMI put together talking to the wind, a mellow stopgap EP that recalls Forest in the City’s highlights while occasionally branching out into new territory.
UMI balances both bravado and vulnerability in these four succinct love songs. It’s a short EP, with no track stretching past three minutes, but that’s all the time she needs to tease out conflicting emotions. On the seductive highlight “not necessarily,” she turns her attention to a lover lacking in commitment but rich in tempting lust. “She said, ‘Am I in the mood?’” UMI sings in a chatty cadence over new-age pads and a hopscotching triplet beat, playfully capturing the ambivalence of intimacy: “‘Nope, not necessarily/But I could do it for you.’” By the time she beckons to “come here so we can act like a fool,” she sounds more wistful than the come-on might suggest, tapping into the dissonance of wanting someone who’s bad for you. She continues to explore contradictory feelings on the closer “SHOW ME OUT,” a more conventional R&B song that pinpoints a head-spinning moment of reckless love over crisp hi-hats and heavy bass. Its singsong chorus—“Baby, can you show me out?/Buy me things to brag about?”—offers a vision of moneyed romance that her lilting delivery makes sound altogether dreamy.
One of the breezier tracks isn’t as successful. The jaunty, low-key disco strut of opener “why dont we go” grows monotonous even in its brief runtime; for a song about letting go and living your best life, it’s flat and curiously anonymous. UMI sounds better on the fluttering ballad “happy im,” where a fingerpicked guitar line, whistles, and loping drums guide verses sung in both English and Japanese into a free fall toward romance. Though a few lines verge upon being platitudes (“Happy I’m growing with you/Happier knowing it’s you”), she elevates the material with buoyant vocal delivery that recalls Tinashe at her tenderest. When she reaches up to her falsetto in the song’s yearning chorus, it easily replicates the head rush she’s describing.
The EP is over almost as soon as it gets going, yet in little more than 10 minutes, UMI offers plenty of beguiling vocal switch-ups and intriguing wrinkles to her easy-going sound. She’s carving out her own subdued lane, wistful and carefree at once.


Light in the Attic's new compilation pieces together a non-geographical scene that really cohered only in hindsight, the collection's effusive engagement with a wide range of materials and perspectives successfully binding these disparate artists together.

Country Funk 1969-1975

"I wanna dedicate this song to the three cities that I had the pleasure of recording this tune in. Give a listen and you'll hear 'em." That's Dale Hawkins introducing "L.A. Memphis Tyler Texas," the heraldic lead-off track on Light in the Attic's new compilation, Country Funk 19691-1975. Those cities are an awfully long way from each other, but Hawkins' song makes up the miles with its feisty Bluff City horns, gritty Texas guitars, and glitzy Hollywood groove. Geography is crucial to understanding the hazy genre called country funk, which was neither an organized scene nor a simple mix of country and funk. There was no central label or venue around which its practitioners congregated, and the compilation suggests that there were no rules either. Instead, these tracks are points on a map, representing nearly every corner of America and seemingly endless musical possibilities.
"L.A. Memphis Tyler Texas" makes a perfect introduction to Country Funk because it announces a new way of thinking about country music: In the late 1960s and especially in the early 1970s, country was breaking out of its native spaces and spreading nationwide. Its roots were in Tennessee and Texas, but it had business to take care of in New York, Detroit, and points west. Immediately following Hawkins' fanfare is John Randolph Marr's "Hello L.A., Bye-Bye Birmingham", a picaresque about a songwriter seeking out fame and fortune. Proving a poignant third act is Johnny Adams' "Georgia Morning Dew", about living in L.A. but missing home. These three songs map out territory well beyond the bayou and the holler, leaving behind the downhome and celebrating the worldly.
This is no accident of sequencing: As country expanded from a niche market and into the mainstream, it was also expanding economically, socially, racially. You had stars like Johnny Paycheck, whose earnest voice and solid songwriting transcended novelty; you had Robert Altman's Nashville, a local epic pitched somewhere between condescending and admiring; you had country stars hosting televised variety shows and starring in series about truck drivers and movies about cowboys (long after the heyday of Gene Autry and Tex Ritter). Not only was country music selling to more listeners than ever, but around the time of the bicentennial, it was becoming identified as something truly and broadly American rather than just a curious regional style.
Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions. There are fading stars trying to keep up with the kids (yes, that Bob Darin), cross-genre oddballs (Jim Ford), also- and never-rans (Dennis the Fox), session musicians boot-scooting into the spotlight (Cherokee), and even a few country superstars (Tony Joe White). It's a lot for one 70-minute album to contain, especially considering country funk may have only really existed as a cohesive category in hindsight. Fortunately, the impetus of Country Funk isn't historical accuracy or even critical rehabilitation. Instead, it intends primarily to be a badass playlist, an alt-universe Nuggets that flirts with kitsch but crams its tracklist with unexpected ideas and flourishes, unlikely filigrees of grit and invention. Even something as potentially campy as Dennis the Fox's "Piledriver" transcends silliness and just rocks imaginatively, with its driving drumbeat, insinuating groove, and those lost, confused, sexy backing vocals.
Along with this worldlier version of country music came a new attitude toward the stock characters of the genre. "Piledriver" is a trucker anthem, but the kick is, its subject isn't your typical burly cowboy but a "piledrivin', mean mothertrucker of a girl." More pointedly, Mac Davis, a session musician turned solo artist, sings "Lucas Was a Redneck" with no little disgust, taking a stereotype that other artists have lionized-- he's dressed like Johnny Cash's "Country Boy," bears some resemblance to Merle Haggard's "Okee from Muskogee"-- and condemning him as a drunkard and a bigot who will leave only hate and shame when he dies.
Country funk turned out to be a surprisingly broad scene, such as it was, and Country Funk isn't just full of white guys. Bobbie Gentry's "He Made a Woman Out of Me" rewrites "Son of a Preacher Man" and somehow manages to intensify both the sweaty sexuality and the bittersweet reminiscence. Gentry was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own material, and her signature mix of swampy R&B rhythms and lush soul vocals shows just how elastic the term "country" could become. I'd also say that she is perhaps the most underrated singer of the era, country or otherwise, and by way of argument would point you to "Niki Hoeky" or "Fancy" or really anything off Ode to Billie Joe.
Country Funk ends with Georgia R&B guitarist Johnny Jenkins' mighty cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" (which Beck famously sampled on "Loser"). Jenkins is backed by the Allman Brothers, and the multiracial unit creates an ungodly and unrelenting jam that reminds you of something very important: While this music occupies an intriguing place in pop history, it is first and foremost exciting to listen to. There's a kick in hearing the slinky drums on Bobby Charles' otherwise laidback "Street People" or endtimes vocals on Link Wray's "Fire and Brimstone". More than any genre or style, that sense of effusive engagement with such a wide range of materials and perspectives binds these artists together, no matter how disparate their background or their music. "It just goes to show ya," Hawkins himself exclaims, "You can take the soul pickers out of the country, but you can't take the soul out of the pickers."


The L.A. transplant's Kompakt debut LP collects 12 tech-house instrumentals, which can act as a form of comedown comfort food.

Parabolas

It's surprising that John Tejada hasn't hooked up with Kompakt before. The twitchy grooves of Parabolas, the L.A. transplant's debut LP for the Cologne, Germany-based label, fit right into founder Wolfgang Voigt's minimal techno aesthetic. What binds Tejada's eclectic decade-plus of work is an approach where it seems like every instrumental tweak and glitch has been studiously labored over for great stretches of time. Parabolas feels that way, too. It's a collection of 12 tech-house instrumentals, pitched somewhere between the visceral punch of classic Detroit techno and the headphone-oriented approach of 1990s electronica like Black Dog Production's Bytes and Autechre's Incunabula.
That's some daunting company to keep, but Tejada has the skills to transform his pilfering into something greater than the sum of its influences. Opener "Farther and Fainter" is a case in point. The opening bars initially sound like they're pushing into the kind of densely packed prettiness Aphex Twin was obsessing over on Selected Ambient Works 85–92. But then the deadened bass drum beat kicks in, joined by a series of bell-like samples, and the song stretches to a close via low-end synth noise wrapped around a fading hi-hat. Blanketed in a pensive quality that most bedroom techno shares, the track is a good indication of what to expect from much of Parabolas, which essentially acts like a form of comedown comfort food.
Occasionally Tejada strays close to a full-on ambient sound ("The Dream", "The Honest Man"), but for the most part Parobalas is deliberately stunted at birth. Tracks like "Subdivided" juxtapose zesty synth rolls with stabs of murky bass and rarely deviate from that path. Occasionally the trance-like state Tejada favors can be a little monotonous, but he usually works in unexpected twists just before the music settles into a rut. For example, a few corkscrewing samples light up "Timeless Space", while "The Living Night" tempers its house-y piano stabs by heading somewhere far darker and then frittering into ambience.
The doomy tone that briefly surfaces in "The Living Night" recurs across much of Parabolas' later tracks, neatly contrasting with the airy material that opened the album. On "Unstable Condition", Tejada even heads close to the kind of relentless downer vibe LFO toyed with on "Tied Up" albeit with all the dissonance scraped away to fit with this record's late-night mood. The convergence of light and dark helps make Parobalas work well as a self-contained piece, while the album's sense of focus elevates it above some of Tejada's typical lurches in style.


A breezy Drake dance album sounds great in concept, but the half-measure house beats and lackluster songwriting keep it from really popping off.

Honestly, Nevermind

Drake’s songwriting hits a particular sweet spot when he chooses narcissism over self-awareness. It’s led to arguably his most defining trait: the incredibly specific and memorable Drakeisms, which are sometimes delivered with the belief that they’re profound—making them unintentionally funny, too. Think of the melodramatic and self-loathing details that fill up Take Care (“I think I’m addicted to naked pictures/And sittin’ talkin’ ’bout bitches that we almost had”); the batshit diatribe at the end of “Diamonds Dancing”; the mafioso myth making on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (“I order that Alfredo Pasta/Then eat in the kitchen like I’m in the mafia”). Even on Views, his most self-serious album, his ego is so goosed up that surely he must know how ridiculous he sounds. But maybe not.
In recent years, Drake’s growing desire to be in on the joke has made his writing way less exciting. That’s how we ended up with the failure-to-launch “Toosie Slide” viral dance challenge, the desperation of 2021’s Certified Lover Boy, and now the up-and-down nature of his newest album Honestly, Nevermind. The album threads styles like house and Baltimore and Jersey club into his moody, washed-out foundation. It sounds refreshingly different from any other Drake album, and he brings back his go-to trick of legitimizing trend-hopping by recruiting genre heavyweights into his orbit: South African DJ Black Coffee and chameleonic electronic producer Carnage (under his house alias Gordo) both have major contributions to the production. It’s light and breezy, and the songs flow right into each other like a DJ mix, not unlike 2017’s More Life. All this should work, but it feels a little empty for one glaring reason: Drake’s writing lacks its former zest.
Honestly, Nevermind’s most memorable line isn’t actually on the album. In a weepy Apple Music note that accompanied the release, he wrote, “I can’t remember the last time someone put they phone down, looked me in the eyes and asked my current insight on the times.” It is hilarious—a level of self-obsession and delusion missing on the record. On “Calling My Name,” where a pulsing house beat does all the work, Drake talks about lost love with details that amount to, “You’re my water, my refresher/Take off your clothes, relieve pressure.” When he’s not saying anything worthwhile, you tend to zoom in on his singing, but his voice is too one-note to carry the load. Similarly on the 40-produced “Down Hill,” his lyrics about heartbreak are full of banalities. In the past, his genre-bouncing, even if watered-down, was made singular through his writing. Without that, you’re left with a flattened version of a superior, pre-existing sound.
This is an upbeat, all vibes Drake album that works far better in concept than execution. Black Coffee’s looming presence is the catalyst, as the DJ/producer’s deep house feel gives the album a swing even when Drake’s vocal performances don’t deserve it. “Texts Go Green” is a good time, driven by the throbbing percussion and soothing keys, though Drake’s flat melodies make him feel out of his depth. He’s more comfortable on “Falling Back,” where his cracking falsetto is infectious and the wispy, ambient atmosphere of the beat hooks you like that early summer moment when you first smell a lit grill.
The best songs happen when Drake gets zapped with the defibrillator—specifically “Massive,” where his voice melts into the changing tempos, bright synths, and the stabbing drums. Carnage, who’s credited on “Massive,” is no emissary of the dancefloor; at times his smoothed-out take on the style is wooden, lacking the quirks and sporadic bursts of better club music. But then again, he has a hand in the bouncy highlight “Sticky.” For one of two times on the record, Drake returns to rapping, and he sounds that much more motivated as he speaks in French, talks about ditching the Met Gala because he couldn’t bring D-Block, and raps in full pseudo tough guy mode. Why isn’t he having this much fun all the time?
The truth is it’s hard to build a connection with music that’s this closed off. Drake’s music has become increasingly impersonalized, like he’s slotting into a rotating shift of roles. Up to IYRTITL there was a sense that you could create some sort of sketch of his life in your head, but now the details are too purposefully vague and cloudy. This isn’t some plea for bars about fatherhood over house beats, but the details and imperfections of his lyrics once made him feel like a real person instead of just a moodboard. It’s as if the goal of Honestly, Nevermind is anonymity—inoffensively, sort of fun music that simmers in the background all summer and beyond. That’s the opposite of what the appeal of Drake’s music has been for nearly 15 years, where it was like he wholeheartedly believed the world revolved around his trust issues and breakups. Unfortunately, Drake is the rare pop star who sounds better when he doesn’t think about anyone but himself.


The Norwegian duo sets out to honor their forebears in electronic music, but they end up falling back on derivative, uninspired clichés.

Profound Mysteries II

Whether you love, hate, or feel profoundly indifferent to the plundering sound of Röyksopp’s seventh studio album, Profound Mysteries II, you certainly can’t say they didn’t warn us. In the run-up to the album’s release, the Norwegian duo’s Svein Berge fessed up to the “blatant” and “heavy references” on the second installment of the Profound Mysteries series, which he said are a tribute to key influences, like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Italo disco, and 1990s UK rave. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this direction. We might call it the Beyoncé rule: most people will accept artists making music that borrows heavily from their forefathers, as long as they acknowledge the debt and produce something that adds to the canon. Röyksopp fly over this first hurdle on Profound Mysteries II, but they falter on the second.
However open Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland might be about their inspirations, it is hard to imagine a circumstance in which a sentient listener would choose the clunky rhyme schemes and silver-polished rave pop of “Unity” over Meat Beat Manifesto’s evergreen hardcore belter “Radio Babylon,” which it references in the drums and clipped vocal sample. It’s also unlikely that they’d prefer the awkwardly rehashed low-cal techno of “Control” over Adamski and Seal’s house classic “Killer,” whose stately keyboard tones it commandeers. The heroically mopey melody of “Sorry,” featuring the ANOHNI-lite croon of Jamie Irrepressible, suggests Depeche Mode, but with all the deviant sex removed by deed poll.
Disappointing as this is, these three songs resemble 1970s Stevie Wonder in their invention and style compared to the trio of chill-out clichés that close Profound Mysteries II. “Remembering the Departed” bets the farm on the kind of forlorn, piano-scale banalities that wan boys used to play at parties in the days before Tinder. “Tell Him,” which features one of two appearances by Norwegian vocalist Susanne Sundfør, is a string-led plod, containing lyrics that write emotional checks the music can’t cash. “Some Resolve” is a vast sentimental soufflé; it flops when it comes out of the oven, the electro-prog layering doing little to disguise a boring chord sequence.
This is a shame, because at their best, Röyksopp were never about empty tropes. Their debut album, Melody A.M., transcended well-worn, chilled-out electronica with fantastically bendy melodic textures and unusual vocal guests, including Norwegian softie Erlend Øye. Then their collaborative mini album with Robyn, 2014’s Do It Again, revealed the duo as inventive and empathetic producers of electronic pop, flexing their trademark synth melodies just enough to allow the Swedish pop star’s vocals to shine. The best moments on Profound Mysteries II come when Röyksopp run truer to themselves than to their influences. The crunchy trip-hop drums and melodic curlicues of opener “Denimclad Baboons” sound like a nod to “Eple,” their sparkling second single, whose apple-fresh sound garnered 1,001 TV appearances and ad placements in the early 2000s. “Oh, Lover” has the opulent Nordic melancholy of Röyksopp’s best pop collaborations, combining dilatory synth, chugging disco groove, and Susanne Sundfør’s wind-swept vocals; the result is like weeping away your heartbreak in a chic Norwegian aparthotel.
Profound Mysteries is designed as a particularly grandiose project. The first installment arrived in April of this year, and all 20 tracks across the two releases have corresponding video and digital visualizers, part of Profound Mysteries’ “expanded creative universe.” You can understand why Röyksopp wanted to make such a grandstanding move after declaring themselves done with album releases back in 2014. But in shooting for Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, they may have ended up with Chinese Democracy: an over-long, repetitive record whose derivative—and only occasionally inspired—second volume makes a compelling case for less is more.


Sorry for the Late Reply features 10 remixes by Amsterdam producer Marco Sterk, known as Young Marco. The tracks throughout are sterling, but don’t sound fussy, and it's the rare remix album that actually hangs together as an end-to-end listen.

Young Marco: Sorry for the Late Reply: Various Remixes for Various Reasons

Back before he began releasing his own singles and remixing others as Young Marco, Amsterdam’s Marco Sterk was gainfully employed by Rush Hour, the city’s vital record store/ dance music distribution hub/reissue imprint. Perhaps it stems from his handling of the label’s archival overviews—of such unheralded electronic music producers ranging from Anthony "Shake" Shakir to the Burrell Brothers to Daniel Wang—but Young Marco has absorbed their sense of craft. It’s understated yet undeniable, and in a few short years he’s racked up a good deal of remix work.
Ten of these remixes are compiled as Sorry for the Late Reply, its title no doubt a nod to the hectic touring schedules of most in-demand DJs/ producers (when I spoke to him last year, Sterk had recorded in Bali, toured the West Coast with Jamie xx, and was about to do more club dates in Europe). No doubt some of these remixes were done on the fly, but each submission sounds as if Marco missed its deadline to finesse a small detail and make each track land just right.
The remix that kicks off the set is the one that’s traveled the furthest, Michael Ozone’s "Hetrotopia," thanks to its inclusion on a Boomkat comp, a Ben UFO mix, and on John Talabot’s DJ-Kicks. Marco takes the queasy, anxious arpeggio of the original and shoots it through with sunlight and a sense of ease. The beat sways between bubbling acid and a touch of hand drum, shot through with echoing jungle cries and a voice sneering: "Freaks come out at night." The cheap Casio underpinning Heatsick gets paired with a swinging drum and hi-hat figure on "Dream Tennis," giving the stiffness of the original a bit more bend.
For most of the set, Young Marco prefers subtle builds, simmering drum programming, and playful recasts of his source material, with only a stomping track like Causa’s "Alji" serving as a peak-hour track. Otherwise, Late Reply will get the most work for building up sets or else easing things down at the end of the night (the shimmering downtempo take on Tony G’s "Simple Dreams" is an album stand-out). If "tropical house" weren’t already a cringeworthy subgenre, I might try to use it to describe Marco’s ability to add lilting island rhythmic patterns to house’s grid.
Regardless, it’s when he’s working with decidedly non-electronic material that Marco’s eclectic handiwork shines. Take two curious remixes, of mop-topped Dutchman troubadour Jacco Gardner and of Cameroonian musician/author Francis Bebey. Gardner’s wistful "The End of August" shades into Hot Chip/Kindness territory in Marco’s hands. It gets a rhythmic nudge in the form of a wispy conga pattern and hissing drum machine, Gardner’s gentle voice garlanded by blips that swoop down like swallows. Marco doesn’t bear down too hard on the track, but keeps it light on its feet. For Bebey’s quaint and charming "The Coffee Cola Song," Marco takes a brief pip of Francis Bebey’s nose flute and makes it into something as effervescent as the title suggests, the drums and pads underneath hiccupping about the track. The tracks throughout are sterling but don’t sound fussy, and for the range of artists represented, Marco’s sensibilities shine throughout, making for that rare remix album that actually hangs together as an end-to-end listen.


The home-recording savant stitches together micro-epics into a sprawling expanse that feels both intimate and grand.

Yves Jarvis: The Same but by Different Means

The Same but by Different Means

Over the past five years, the Montreal-based Jean-Sebastian Audet has amassed a considerable body of work, one where the conventional laws and logic of songwriting don’t apply and where the end goal is less a musical experience than a metaphysical one. An obsessive home-recording savant since his early teens, Audet (now 22) has said his goal is to record a song per day. That said, he’s less a writer than a sculptor, forever picking away at the monolithic mass of musical ideas in his mind. He’s as enamored with process as with results, letting us marvel at the little pieces he’s chipped off along the way.
The Same but by Different Means is the first album Audet has released under the name Yves Jarvis, but it is by no means a debut or reset. Rather, it’s the natural next step in the journey he initiated as Un Blonde. In three short years, Un Blonde gradually mutated from the clanging, cavernous post-punk of 2014’s Tenet to the sublime psych-folk psalms of 2016’s Good Will Come to You, with the latter record earning him a placement on Canada’s Polaris Music Prize long list and, subsequently, an American deal with Anti-.
But rather than use that profile boost as an opportunity to streamline his sound, Audet is doubling down on his wandering DIY aesthetic. His albums have become more expansive as the tunes become much shorter, and with The Same but by Different Means, he stitches his micro-songs and abbreviated epics into a sprawling opus that’s as comforting as it is uncompromising.
Audet has said the color schemes of his album covers reflect the sound of the records, and The Same but by Different Means is Audet’s interpretation of blue and all its famous connotations. But sadness isn’t the feeling that overcomes you as you settle into the opening “To Say That Is Easy,” a gauzy piano ballad that, just as it seems on the verge of decay, is set blissfully adrift on a soothing organ line and shuffling beat. In this case, “blue” assumes a more oceanic quality—of flotation and immersion, of recognizing your humble standing amidst the vastness of the world.
Audet paid his dues as a busker, and no matter what form his music has taken, he’s continued to embrace simplicity and intimacy, while favoring a field-recording ambience that often sees wind sounds, chirping birds, droning insects, and passing cars serving as his de facto backing band. The aptly titled The Same but by Different Means draws from a wider instrumental palette than Audet’s previous work, positioning him in the insular tradition of SMiLE-era Brian Wilson, Sly Stone circa-There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and early ‘70s Stevie Wonder and Todd Rundgren. But the new album retains the otherworldly aura and environmental influences of its predecessors, foregrounding the tactility of his instruments as if the sounds were being made right next to you.
The Same but by Different Means is surprisingly seamless for a 22-track record. Like a Ouija board session, each track here feels part of a collective effort to access a realm outside our own. Sometimes, it leads to sustained moments of connection, like the radiant tropicalia sunshower of “Curtain of Rain.” At others, it yields sudden, surprising moments of rapture, like the beautiful melancholic chorus of “Hard to Say Bye.” Even the briefest snippets can feel like statements: “Constant Change” is a 30-second a capella hymn whose only decipherable lyric is its repeated title.  However, as Audet manipulates the tape to sound like a scratching record, it’s transformed into a meta-commentary on the chaos of modern life and the desire to slow down and stop the world from spinning off its axis.
Tellingly, the phrase “constant change” keeps popping up, and The Same but by Different Means can be seen as Audet’s attempt to come to terms with it. The album charts his quest for inner peace in real time, whether Audet is confessing to his own creative stagnation amid the slow-motion psych soul of “Nothing New” or pondering his place in the world on the church-organ confessional “Talking or Listening?” But with the closer, “The Truth,” he finds sanctuary. Stretching out its acoustic idyll for eight enchanting minutes, the song buries Audet’s muttered spoken-word vocals just below the surface, as an encroaching symphony of sampled TV sounds threatens to drown him out. It’s like a dream where you can’t quite make out the details, but it is peaceful, not unnerving. Perhaps finding serenity means surrendering your will to understand the world around you. For Audet, and maybe for us, it’s enough to calmly coexist within it.


Choosing a single high point from Prince’s glorious run in the ’80s is impossible, but Sign o’ the Times surely stands as his most complex and varied statement.

Sign o’ the Times

In 1987, Prince Rogers Nelson was in transition. He’d disbanded the Revolution, the band that had backed him since Purple Rain. He’d toyed with doing a collaborative album with Revolution members Wendy & Lisa, but also abandoned that. He’d put a lot of time into crafting a record around an alter ego called Camille, whose tracks were recorded with his voice pitched to sound even more womanly than his trademark falsetto. But that too had stalled.
The album he released on March 31, 1987 was a Prince solo record that, like his 1980 artistic breakthrough Dirty Mind and his two earlier albums, was essentially a one-man-band recording which relied heavily on the LinnDrum, various samplers, and his remarkable aptitude on every instrument under the sun. Of the 16 songs on Sign o’ the Times, only three have co-writers, and save for one track (“It’s Going to Be a Beautiful Night”), outside musical accompaniment is slight. In a sense, Prince’s major musical collaborator at this point was his engineer Susan Rogers, who recorded him at different studios in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Paris.
But unlike his earlier solo efforts, Sign o’ the Times wasn’t a record by an ambitious kid trying to make impression. At 28, Prince had already made himself into a pop superstar  (and movie star too), and he easily sold out arenas. In one sense, he had nothing to prove. Yet Sign o’ the Times is the most varied, accomplished record of his prime 1980s period, a testament to the range of his gifts and the bold artistic ambition that gave his music shape.
Part of Prince’s drive was that he was keenly aware that hip-hop was rising up and shifting the sound of music. Rap was entering its “golden age,” and its mix of gritty storytelling and dope beats had to be reckoned with. (Michael Jackson would release Bad, his own answer to hip-hop, six months later.) So the title cut, with Prince’s commentary on the issues of the day (“a big disease with a little name,” mentions of crack and gang violence) and minimalist Run-DMC-styled production, made clear that Prince had his ear to the street. The song functions as Prince’s version of “The Message,” and, as crazy as that sounds, it works.
Prince wasn’t just wrestling with fresh energy from the streets on Sign o’ the Times, but with the twin pillars of carnality and spirituality that had defined his career and that of black popular music for decades. For this Minneapolis native, it wasn’t so much a battle between sin and salvation, as it was how the warring desires could become one, synthesized through innovative arrangements, seductive yet fraught lyrics, and that remarkable voice.
“Forever in My Life,” for example, has the sincere melody of early Sly and the Family Stone. It sounds ready made for optimistic sing-a-longs. At first, you think it’s a simple love song, but there’s a devotional quality (“You are my savior/You are my life”) that makes it a chant of piety. At the same time, songs like “Hot Thing” and “It” are aggressively sexual, but in the context of the electronic, oddly-pitched sounds around the words, they seem more like the search for human connection and transcendence rather than a roll in the hay.
The album’s two ballads, “Slow Love” (co-written by singer-songwriter Carol Davis) and “Adore,” are both showcases for Prince’s vocal prowess. The man was an encyclopedia of vocal styles, able to croon like a 1950s pop star on the nostalgic “Slow Love” and do ’60s soul style on “Adore.” Though equally adept at showy vocal riffs and screaming in tune, Prince’s lower, cooler register seems to express his truest self.
Prince’s ability to move between genres made him a unique musical chameleon with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney his only peers at the highest levels of pop. While he was often compared to Wonder, especially early in his career, it’s the ex-Beatle who seemed to have the most enduring influence. McCartney’s story-song sketches on The White Album helped define his career. For Prince, they were just one of many tools. His whimsical profiles of an odd elementary school classmate (“Starfish & Coffee”) and a quirky lover with the name of a celebrated New Yorker writer (“The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”) are lovely stories supported by surreal sounds and beats, suggesting you are on psychedelic journey through Prince’s memories.
Sign o’ the Times is difficult to grapple with because there’s so much going on in each track. The up-tempo “Play in the Sunshine” drops in jazz fusion riffs and choral voices just when you think its winding down. “The Cross” starts as a mournful song of devotion to Christ with acoustic guitar and sitar before exploding into a huge rock anthem with military drums and fuzz guitar. “Play in the Sunshine” opens with the sound of kids at play, becomes a rockabilly song, transitions midway into a guitar showcase, and then, with a marimba, a different drum pattern, and cleverly arranged backing voices, it ends a musical world away from where it began.
“Housequake” is, perhaps, the most obvious songs on the album, a funk jam that would have been a hit single if he’d allowed it to be released as such. But the care of the track’s construction belies any shallow analysis. It starts with a cartoony voice (maybe a Camille reference), a synthesized drum heavy with echo, then adds bass, keyboard stabs, and rhythm guitar. The synth drum and snare drum merge while there’s a double-beat on the kick. Live horns come it and the bass line moves as there’s both a synth bass keyboard and a live bass doing playing different lines. Various backing vocals float in and out with Prince doing his James Brown impersonation as singer/MC. Compared to the simple loops of your average club banger, “Housequake” is a symphony of syncopation. The beat moves even as it grooves.
Because Prince played and recorded the album using now-vintage late ’80s technology there are moments when certain sounds, particularly the drums, are clearly of their era. But these sonic distractions don’t last as the scope of the songs, the musicianship, and overall arrangements are just too glorious to nitpick. Sign o’ the Times is a double album made with a restlessness that never allows it to settle into complacency or formula. It’s a soundtrack to a highly charged and specific period, for both Prince and his listeners. I remember partying to “Housequake” in the summer of ’87, laughing along with “Starfish & Coffee,” and playing “Adore” for my girlfriend when it was time to get busy. All these years later, it’s still a vibrant thing, the product of a great artist at the height of his powers.


Led by the nimble 18-year-old rapper Wiki, the N.Y. four-piece come from a hardcore background and are aesthetically guided by early-90s New York hip hop. Their debut EP for XL is mostly a case of untapped potential.

Wiki93 EP

The ability to rap really quickly is a privileged skill in hip-hop, and mostly with good reason. Too often, though, rap fans get stuck in the pursuit of being dazzled, of being reminded why rappers can rap and we (often) can't. Ratking, a four-piece rap group from New York, is led by the 18-year-old Wiki, whose "Wikispeaks" single from earlier this year made minor waves across the web. Wiki, as he's likely been told countless times, sounds remarkably like a young Eminem when he raps, and his taut, elastic flow means he can actually do a pretty good homage. It's that flow that is his (and the band's) calling card, but the flair is mostly a distraction laid over the top of their Wiki93 EP, which reveals a group of kids still searching for something to say.
The idea of having "something to say," is itself a distorted one in hip-hop-- "something" doesn't always have to be life-altering truths. But having an identifiable point-of-view is almost always crucial to becoming a worthwhile rapper and to catching on with an audience. Ratking are nipping at the heels of a loose constellation of rap groups-- Odd Future, Death Grips, Joey Bada$$' Pro Era-- that have caught on in the last year or two by presenting new perspectives. Ratking come from a hardcore background (Wiki played Germs covers in high school) and are aesthetically guided by early-90s New York rap, but they have yet to progress beyond the facade of teen male angst.
Even Odd Future, fellow skate-rappers who may be their most obvious peer in this regard, had quietly constructed a deeply nihilistic world unto itself. Wiki93 is for teenage punks, too, but there's nothing at the core of the EP that illuminates the inspirations of Wiki and fellow MC Hak. Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, for instance, bonded over their missing fathers, and that pain was unavoidable in their music. In Joey Bada$$ you can see an old soul, one who has absorbed old beats and rhyme schemes and comes at his music from a place of love. With Ratking, you catch snatches of images-- kids scrawling graffiti, jumping subway turnstiles, running from cops-- but there is nothing deeper. Wiki raps about things that kids do, but what's the significance?
There is still some potential here, though. Ratking, four kids that call themselves "mutts"  and are into punk, early-90s rap and Cam'ron equally, seem like a zeitgeist rap group in some sense, and in that they have an untapped power waiting to be harnessed. There is also an obvious level of talent: Wiki's ability to rap well from a technical perspective almost works against him, but it's still a dazzling skill that could one day be put to good use.
There are also the beats on the album, cooked up by producers Sporting Life and Ramon. They are built from the ground up with hard boom-bap drums, but they attack with an aggressiveness and noise that sprouts from the group's roots in hardcore and punk. There is no dissonance, though, no skronk; they are beats made to be rapped over, but without a nod to the lived-in warmth and old crackle of typical 90s-revival productions.
"To every mother with a stroller, eyeing me when I roll up/ Know your kid's gonna be just like me when he grows up," Wiki raps on "Pretty Picture" and in many cases it's probably be true. But Ratking are a group that are a very long way away from turning that into a rallying cry, from not just embodying disaffected teen rebels but speaking for them. Being able to really connect with that fanbase-- the one that turned the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Odd Future into heroes-- doesn't come easily, and it can't be papered over with a nice flow.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the UK duo’s striking 1988 debut, full of noise and bliss and darkness, a crucial document of dream pop.

69

One evening in 1985, the Cocteau Twins made a rare television appearance. Awash in a tangerine glow while performing their song “Pink Orange Red” off that year’s Tiny Dynamine EP, the group emitted an otherworldly aura. While they played, Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala were stationed in front of their respective televisions across London. The two young friends called each other up immediately after the segment ended, blown away by the performance. They dug the music, especially Robin Guthrie’s swirling guitar and the band’s use of a tape machine instead of a drummer, but the pair was more galvanized by what the Cocteau Twins symbolized: boundless creative freedom. Soon enough, Tambala and Ayuli purchased an electric guitar, a drum machine, and some pedals and began experimenting. The illusion that being a musician required expensive gear and formal training crumbled away.
As the story goes, at a party soon after, someone asked Tambala how he and Ayuli, a copywriter at the acclaimed ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, knew each other. Perhaps a little high, Tambala jokingly said that they were in a band together, one which was “a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Cocteau Twins, a bit Miles Davis, a bit Joni Mitchell.” The band name, he explained, was similarly cobbled together from disparate influences: “A.R.” came from the bandmates’ first initials, “Kane” nodded to Citizen Kane, and the mark of Cain as described in Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian. But say it out loud and one word looms: arcane.
Tambala’s semi-fictional origin story quickly snowballed and A.R. Kane signed to the London record label One Little Independent (formerly One Little Indian). The band’s first single did not enter into the world quietly. Its vivid title—“You Push a Knife Into My Womb (When You’re Sad)”—was censored down to simply the parenthetical. With its screeching wall of guitar feedback, simplistic drum beat, and swooning girl-group harmonies, “When You’re Sad” garnered comparison to the Jesus and Mary Chain, who had released their masterpiece Psychocandy the previous year. Whether or not A.R. Kane were influenced directly by the Reid brothers’ noise-rock, they weren’t planning on lingering in that sound much longer. “...We can’t say we’re impressed by any of these shambling bands,” they told Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds. “The shambling sound is very trimmed, somehow.” As indicated by the single’s woozy B-side “Haunting,” A.R. Kane was aiming for something far more expansive.
Tambala and Ayuli had spent the past decade creating a shared lexicon that directly shaped the music they created together. Friends since their primary school days, they were both children of immigrants: Ayuli’s family emigrated from Nigeria; Tambala’s father came from Malawi. Growing up in Stratford, East London, the pair “were always outsiders” but “oozed African confidence and a degree of arrogance—we ruled,” Tambala later recalled. As teenagers, Ayuli was drawn to dub music and Tambala leaned towards soul and jazz-funk, but they inhaled all the sounds of London from house to post-punk to hip-hop.
Later, when journalists asked about influences, A.R. Kane never mentioned whatever indie band was on the cover of NME. Instead, they cited the fusion rock band Weather Report, the Brazilian trio Azymuth, dub-punkers Basement 5, and Mr. Feedback himself, Jimi Hendrix. But one specific inspiration kept arising: “The only person we listen to is Miles Davis,” Ayuli once said. “We’re not jazz musicians, but we’ve got a jazz attitude, if you like.” Ayuli and Tambala were conduits, absorbing, filtering, reinterpreting the world through their own means.
In 1987, A.R. Kane hopped over to 4AD, which was then home to similarly ambitious groups like Pixies, This Mortal Coil, and their beloved Cocteau Twins. Working alongside Guthrie, they released the Lollita EP, whose three tracks wander further into haunted psychedelia. With song titles like “Sad-Masochism Is a Must” and artwork by fashion photographer Juergen Teller of a nude woman with a knife behind her back, the EP was unabashedly fascinated with sex, love, madness, and violence. In the final minutes of “Butterfly Collector,” the abrasive shoegaze cocktail explodes into shrapnel; at shows, the blasts of feedback sent audiences scurrying to the exits.
While signed to 4AD, A.R. Kane teamed up with their label mates Colourbox under the name M|A|R|R|S. The two groups almost immediately ran into creative differences and in the end, the partnership produced a double A-side with just the slightest hints of cross-pollination. Colourbox’s sample-heavy acid house number, “Pump Up the Volume,” quietly featured Ayuli and Tambala’s guitars while A.R. Kane’s contribution, “Anitina,” included Coulourbox’s drum programming. To the shock of everyone involved, “Pump Up the Volume” skyrocketed to the top of the UK charts, becoming 4AD’s first No. 1 song.
It was in the wake of this strange and unexpected success that A.R. Kane recorded their debut album, 69. Now signed to Rough Trade, Ayuli and Tambala decided to forgo the professional studios where they had recorded with producers like Guthrie. Instead, they built out a space in Ayuli’s mother’s basement; rather than recalibrate their ambitions to fit a predetermined system, they constructed their own playground from scratch. Left to their own devices, with occasional assistance from producer Ray Shulman, A.R. Kane had complete freedom.
They would coin a new term to loosely describe their music: dream pop. “DREAMPOP,” as they explained in an article around the release of 69, “is a whole new concept which we think of as pure hooks, pure pop tunes with a little harsh melodic accompaniment.” Dreaming, the duo agreed, was “crucial” to their work, and they aimed to emulate an ethereality that could just as easily become nightmarish. The band used tape echo to make every song on the self-produced 69 feel just out of reach, like your memory struggling to grasp the last wisp of a dream before it slips away. In the vein of dub pioneers like Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, they reimagined their equipment’s logical endpoints, bending, sampling, manipulating, stretching, filtering, distorting, and reversing every idea. The duo combined all these parts and then, drawing on their intertwined intuition—they were two halves of a whole, yin and yang, 69—skimmed away the fat until a song emerged.
A.R. Kane recognized the ecstatic potential of noise, that when they cranked their guitars all the way up until every individual element melded into a singular void of sound, new doors might open. “We want our music to be a rush of things coming at you through the speakers, so many that the mind doesn’t have time to assimilate them and manage them,” Tambala told Reynolds. “It should be like a baby being confronted with a rattle for the first time, seeing it as it is, without preconceptions.” That’s certainly the experience of “Baby Milk Snatcher,” whose title alludes to oral sex, breastfeeding, and Margaret Thatcher. Touching on glitchy trip-hop, lethargic psychedelia, and carnal post-punk, it sounds thrillingly lawless.
69 is difficult to pin down; dream pop naturally begets dream logic. After opening with the unexpectedly jangly “Crazy Blue” and “Suicide Kiss,” the album descends into the distant, lethargic caverns of “Scab” and “Sulliday.” These last two songs sound like they were recorded in a basement where two human bodies were the only sources of warmth. Meanwhile, “Dizzy” counters an elegant Arthur Russell-esque cello melody with a faraway shout that sounds like a ghoul’s last rally as it gets sucked down a drain.
Then there’s a song like “Spermwhale Trip Over” whose trippy haze is best summarized by the central verse: “Here in my LSDream/Things are always what they seem.” All the while, the faint groove acts like a guideline leading a diver through an underwater cave. The staggering late album  centerpiece “The Sun Falls Into the Sea” seems to come from an entirely different planet. “An ambition for us would be for people to have dreams in which our music was the soundtrack,” Ayuli said to Reynolds back in 1987. Dreams are limitless realms of new realities and 69, with its ambition, fascination with flaws, and ability to embrace both darkness and bliss, aims to capture it all.
In the summer of 2020, as demonstrations against systemic racism surged throughout the United States, an infographic titled “Tracing Black Influence in Shoegaze” appeared on my Instagram feed, asserting A.R. Kane’s role as pioneers of a sound almost exclusively credited to white men (and the occasional afterthought of a willowy white gal). A.R. Kane’s music traveled far beyond the walls of shoegaze and they never quite identified with the “indie” bands, but the point was correct: A.R. Kane forged their own path and that legacy can be heard in groups like the Veldt, Slowdive, and Flying Saucer Attack. During the years that A.R. Kane were active, the pair did not speak in-depth about their racial identity or role as figureheads for those who did not see themselves reflected in an indie scene (they were, to be fair, willfully esoteric about pretty much everything). But, as Ayuli said in a 1999 interview, “We were a force of ideas. We helped to get rid of stereotypes. In the ’80s black men were doing soul, reggae or rap, not psychedelic dream rock. We opened doors for bands to be more experimental.” Similarly, in 2012, Tambala pushed back on the notion that the band’s existence might be seen as shocking: “Don’t know why they’d be surprised by our music; negroes invented rock music, dance music, and free jazz and psychedelia. At least that’s what mama says.”

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Busta Rhymes is back with a new tape of unheard material. The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) doesn’t exactly herald the return of Peak Busta or even Good Busta—in fact, it does the opposite.

Busta Rhymes: The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation)

When Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip released "Thank You," a rap relay featuring Kanye West and Lil Wayne, it fueled speculation that the two might be working on a project together, something those entrenched in New York rap’s history had been pining for. What we got instead was The Abstract and the Dragon, a mixtape that turned out to be a chill way to revisit the pair’s enviable chemistry and friendship but not much else.
Two years later, Busta Rhymes is back with a new tape of unheard material, this time without Q-Tip. The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) doesn’t exactly herald the return of Peak Busta or even Good Busta—in fact, it does the opposite. The raps are mostly uninspired and sometimes they don’t even make sense ("My money long, thicker than a waffle," on "God’s Plan"; "I’m Def Leppard and I ain’t tryna hear the noise," on "Choose a Side"). When they do communicate, the thoughts and observations are unbearably generic, the kind of bars a rap generator might cough up. And on top of all that, Busta packs his words into the husks of worn tracks that somehow escaped the first Obama term.
Many of these B-sides sound years old—songs recorded for alternate purposes that were at one point or another shelved and never should’ve seen the light of day. For starters, there’s a guest appearance from long-forgotten R&B singer J. Holiday on a song ironically titled "Hits for Days." When Styles P and Jadakiss do their usual back-and-forth on "Respect My Conglomerate 2," a sequel to the 2009 Busta song of the same name, there’s a reference to the bank Wachovia, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo in 2008. Some other songs feel like relics from a bygone era, especially "Real Niggas," which reeks of Lex Luger "MC Hammer"-like trap opulence with big, dramatic chamber orchestration (and a Rick Ross feature to boot). "UFC (Tap-Out)" reunites Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane, a dated pairing given their contentious recent history and Gucci’s overlapping prison stint.
Whether or not these songs actually are old isn’t the issue—rappers put album throwaways on mixtapes all the time, and some of these releases exist to serve that exact purpose. The issue is that this particular batch feels old. These throwaways are stale, and to present them to rap fans as some sort of gesture of good faith on Christmas Day seems like a cheap trick.
If you manage to hang in for a bit, The Return of the Dragon isn’t without its moments: Chance the Rapper’s lengthy verse on "Hello" is a barn burner ("I know contracts are like handcuffs/ I know combat when it’s hand to hand or with handguns/ I know answers, I know man to man, can’t stand us/ I know exactly how you wanna brand us"), the cathedral organ tenor of the choir-backed, Mary J. Blige-featuring "Your Loss" is heavy and evocative, and there’s a vintage Raekwon showing on the gritty outro to "Watch How You Move." On "Tonight," a horn-heavy funk gem from the Pharrell archives, Sean Paul lathers his signature patois yelps over a pounding bass, and the sensory experience is a pleasant blast from the past. But the shoehorned-in Busta verses sound labored, especially when his words are heard outside of densely packed double-time raps.
There are flashes where Busta Rhymes’ juking, stutter-step flow, which can burst into an elastic double-time on a whim, is sharp and reminiscent of his best performances. The BJ the Chicago Kid-featuring "In the Streets," which carries a pair of MF DOOM verses to its credit, is highlighted by one of the strongest Busta verses in recent memory. "We Home," which reunites Leaders of the New School with fantastic results, is one of the few instances of unadulterated bliss. But these are momentary reprieves from a slog of tiresome listens. Busta Rhymes will forever be known for one of the most fluid deliveries in the genre’s history, but this rap giant is slowing and his wit seems to be dulling. "Ain’t nothing changed, I’m still the Goliath of this rap shit," he spits on "Hits for Days." Someone should remind him how that fable ends.