Dan Snaith’s latest is as sly and layered as ever, but he finds ways to be more direct with his songwriting. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.

Suddenly

Over the past decade, Caribou has been whittling down his music. Dan Snaith’s songs were once a constant swirl of brightly colored baubles, as pleasingly jumbled as the view through a kaleidoscope. With 2010’s Swim, the muddle began coming into focus. The melodies were brighter, the beats more direct. Things got sharper still on 2014’s Our Love, which filtered the pleasures and anxieties of domesticity through the prism of house music at its most ebullient. That simple title spoke to Snaith’s growing interest in getting at the essence of things. The emotions he was grappling with were complicated—in interviews, he spoke eloquently about the trials of marriage and fatherhood—but he had a way of framing messy feelings in bold strokes. The album’s biggest song, “Can’t Do Without You,” featured few lyrics save its titular refrain, repeated over and over, turning its ambiguous double negative into a mantra-like affirmation.
Suddenly is more stylistically varied than Our Love or Swim, but it’s also the most direct that Snaith has sounded. Many of its standout songs are just two or three minutes long, perfect models of pop economy. The anthems are punchier: The dusty boom-bap of “Home” is the platonic ideal of a rare-groove edit, “Never Come Back” the epitome of a piano-house barnstormer. There’s nothing generic about even his most exacting genre studies: A Caribou song will always sound first and foremost like a Caribou song, thanks in part to Snaith’s distinctive falsetto, which graces every song here. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.
Snaith’s beat-making has gotten more adventurous, too. He flits between rock, trap, UK garage, disco, and more, sometimes touching on two or three styles in the course of a single song. His drums are sharp and every hi-hat and cowbell is rendered in crisp hi-def and seems to hover in mid-air, like a 3D image. In this heady precision, Suddenly can be an almost dizzying listen. Caribou’s music has never leaped from the speakers quite the way it does here.
That outward clarity masks the growth in Caribou’s songwriting. Snaith has rarely been a strictly autobiographical lyricist, but not all of Our Love’s tales were as elegant as “Can’t Do Without You”. He has said that he’s the kind of person who might not know the lyrics to his favorite song, and on Our Love, you could tell. The lyrics felt more like placeholders, cue points where listeners might project their own more detailed experiences. Suddenly follows a period of turmoil in his extended family—a string of death, divorce, and other assorted shrapnel that falls within the blast radius of middle age—and, coincidentally or no, his writing has improved greatly. The stories he’s telling feel more substantial, as does his ability to assume the voices of a wider cast of characters. He still has a hard time resisting the pull of an easy couplet; the album is peppered with rhymes like “know” and “grow,” “in the past” and “here to last.” But he tends to use his voice as just another source of tone color. It is, truly, a lovely instrument, as limpid and azure as the photograph of water on the album’s cover.
Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer. There’s a marvelous moment in the opening “Sister,” in which the synthesizer detunes by just a few cents, almost imperceptibly, just enough to change the temperature in the room. “Like I Loved You” features a rippling jazz-guitar solo from Colin Fisher, the album’s only guest musician, that rolls like marbles on the deck of a boat.
In “Sunny’s Time,” tape-warp effects give the song’s central piano melody the texture of shirred silk, while a gruff hip-hop sample is chopped to ribbons and filtered in a way that accentuates the grain of the rapper’s voice, which is rendered all but unintelligible. It’s a fresh, surprising choice: Producers have been cribbing funk breaks like the one Snaith grabs for “Home” for decades. But by zeroing in on that gravelly vocal texture, “Sunny’s Time” gives Suddenly the feel of being in conversation with mainstream popular music—or eavesdropping on it, anyway.
Listen through enough times, and you may think you hear more songs than are listed on the sleeve. Time and again, songs feint left in their final minute or two. “New Jade,” a kind of psychedelic, maximalist R&B, suddenly flips into a gothic snippet of synth and flanged guitar, like something off the Cure’s 1980 album Seventeen Seconds. The chunky soul of “Home” gives way to fingerpicked folk guitar. And “Lime,” a jazzy house tune in the vein of Theo Parrish, abruptly stops and cuts to a much slower sample of Black Soul’s “The Sphynx,” a dirge-like meditation from 1975. This collage-like construction most likely reflects the way the record came together: Snaith has said that in the five years since Our Love, he amassed an archive of 900 loops and sketches, the products of his daily studio practice. The stragglers that seem to have snuck in here, under cover of the completed songs, are a big part of the record’s charm: They enliven the mood and keep things moving.
All these trap doors sometimes give the impression that there’s another album hiding in the shadows of Suddenly, like those vinyl records that have a secret track carved between the grooves of another song. It can be tempting to wonder what that hypothetical album might have sounded like, and where Snaith might have wandered had he given free rein to his experimental instincts. The mood throughout is so sweet, the harmonies so reassuringly consonant, that I occasionally long for a little more discord. In paring back, it sometimes feels like Snaith is holding back; I miss the occasional overload of Swim, where Caribou’s newfound discipline gave way to his psychedelic second nature, and it felt as if the tape couldn’t take all the input that he was throwing at it.
Suddenly, in contrast, is almost all business—with a few salient exceptions, the most moving of which comes right at the end. Album closer “Cloud Song” begins as a meditation for voice and unaccompanied synth, but it builds and builds—layers accruing, waveforms morphing, harmonies slipping out of tune. “I’m broken, so tired of crying/Just hold me close to you,” he sings, as a flood of frequencies gushes forth from his electronics. In this brief moment, all the control of the previous 40-odd minutes is washed away. Witnessing Snaith in full command of his talents is gratifying. But this moment where it all threatens to fall apart is what makes his music feel not just relatable but consequential.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Offering an unparalleled collection of fresh talent, the rise of Ron Morelli's Long Island Electrical System is one of the most significant and encouraging developments in American underground electronic music in years. This sprawling 2xCD label compilation is a bewitching collection of underground dance, experimental, and analog ephemera.

Various Artists: L.I.E.S. Presents: American Noise

L.I.E.S. Presents: American Noise

Implicit in the rise of the local, the handcrafted, and the artisanal is a sense of modesty, that things that were sourced and made locally are to be enjoyed locally. It's in this sense that American Noise, a compilation from the bubbling Long Island Electrical System (L.I.E.S.) label, feels like a shot across the bow. An obelisk of a title attached to a bewitching collection of underground dance, experimental, and analog ephemera, American Noise trumpets the breadth and creativity that Ron Morelli's upstart label has championed during its first two-plus years.
You could be forgiven for not having heard of L.I.E.S.. The New York imprint operates quickly and quietly, releasing singles and EPs on limited-run vinyl (but not always), replete with mysterious stamped labels, some of which are already quite rare. L.I.E.S.'s reach and reputation has outstripped its modest existence, and collector-allure is only a partial explanation. Influential European stores like Berlin's Hardwax have championed the label, and there is a fervor surrounding Morelli & co. that, frankly, few if any American labels have generated in the last decade. To speak plainly, the rise of L.I.E.S. is one of the most significant and encouraging developments in American underground electronic music in years.
Is it deserving of the attention? American Noise will not bash your skull in with newness. The styles it spans will be familiar to followers of electronic and experimental music. The music is held together by a sense of craft and a pervasive menace that ties the music to conjurers like Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never. What makes L.I.E.S. special, what makes it more than simply another boutique underground label, is its frenetic pace and Morelli's uncanny ability to unearth heretofore unknown producers to place alongside slightly more established names like Maxmillion Dunbar and Xosar (Dutch workaholic Legowelt is the label's weightiest name).
It is an unparalleled collection of fresh talent: for the last two years it's basically been possible to blindly dig the L.I.E.S. crate and unearth something really good. That L.I.E.S. has managed this without tapping into any zeitgeist sound or scene-- the label's offerings span house, electro, kraut, and noise among others-- is all the more impressive. These contributions range from the cauldron-black psychedelia of Jahiliyya Fields to the tipsy motorik of Torn Hawk. House classicist Delroy Edwards and Bookworms-- whose shimmering odyssey "African Rhythms" goes toe-to-toe with Daphni's remix of "Ne Noya" for the best use of an African vocal sample in a loaded year-- are just two artists who released their first-ever works for L.I.E.S. in 2012. Then there's "Journey I." by Unknown Artist, 12 unspooling minutes of pickled funk, possibly the finest example of the intersection between noise and dance music on the label. If there's been little speculation about who the hell these artists are, it's because it's a lot more fun to imagine Morellli having access to some heretofore unknown mine of talent.
It's instructive that one of L.I.E.S.'s best tracks is attributed to an anonymous producer. Central to the popularity of L.I.E.S. is its mythology. There's a secret clubhouse feel to the label, a sense that this is music made and presented the right way, or the old way, or at least in a way that is shielded from the constant deluge of novelty and bullshit that normally accompanies discovering a hot scene. That the music has been so uniformly good-- and that the label has cultivated this feeling naturally-- means this is a fun bonus and not some vague fetishistic moralizing.
Ultimately the only disappointing thing about American Noise is that it can't benefit from the evocative, imagination-stoking intrigue of the label's physical products. It's a 2xCD label compilation, not a message in a bottle. Mixing classics with some fresh productions, though, does give the label's output a sense of uniformity, and helps define "American noise" as basically anything that can result from someone sitting down with a synthesizer and a drum machine. It's a big, vague idea that is harnessed by L.I.E.S.'s comparative smallness. So if American Noise pulls the curtain back some, it's only because this music is simply too good not to share, which is presumably the impetus for the label existing in the first place. Come for the unearthed classics, stay for the next transmission from Morelli's mystic jam generator.


The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and longtime indie-rock journeyman John Petkovic team up on a graceless, unsubtle pastiche of rock’n’roll indulgence.

Akron, Ohio

Over the past decade, Patrick Carney has cemented himself as the rhythmic core of the Black Keys. While Dan Auerbach ambled outward with woolly, blues-tinged guitar riffs, Carney’s muscular pummeling rooted the songs with leaden precision. In the band’s current spell of quiet, he’s teamed up with John Petkovic, an alumnus of Guided by Voices, Death of Samantha, Sweet Apple, and Cobra Verde, to form a new project called Sad Planets. The two bonded over their love for music and mutual hometown of Akron, Ohio; together, one might suppose, the two could fashion a record that capably paired their grittier bona fides with the polish of seasoned professionals. But the pair’s debut LP, Akron, Ohio, is a gummy, overwrought mess, an insult to both its namesake and, quite possibly, rock music as a whole.
It’s hard to understand how two musicians whose résumés bear some degree of cool-rock-dude credibility managed to make such a clunker; then again, the project reeks of runaway self-indulgence. The songs on Akron, Ohio are garish, graceless, and unsubtle; at the same time, the record has an uncanny-valley-like blandness, as if an exceptionally horny bot processed a thousand hours of stuff labeled “rock music” and spat out its own attempt. Neither of the men are strong vocalists, not even in the Oberst-esque category of “bad singer but it works.” Petkovic sounds pained as he sings—not emotionally, but as if he were in serious physical distress during the recording process. When he and Carney duet on “Not of This World” and “Yesterday Girls,” it feels like a musical version of two dudes cornering a guest on their amateur podcast.
Petkovic and Carney seem desperate to transmit the idea that Akron, Ohio is a Real Rock’n’Roll Record, Damn It, yet the result is an unrepentant caricature of the genre. Their electric-guitar flexes are flaccid; occasional synths get the gleeful treatment of a kid’s new toy. The masturbatory two-minute denouement of “Bad Cells” features lackluster guitar solos that seem to exist with the sole purpose of taking up space. “Want You to Want You” follows the blueprint of an upbeat adult-alternative hit, breaking up punchy verses full of nothingness with a breezy chorus stuffed with elongated vowels, and topping it off with a gear-shift key change at the end. Though most of the songs hover around the radio-friendly sweet spot of three and a half minutes, they all seem to last an eternity. (The lines that open the album’s first track—“I just landed here/But it feels like a year ago”—make for an unfortunate self-own.) Even featured guest J Mascis, Petkovic’s Sweet Apple bandmate, does little to save the opening snoozefest.
More importantly, speaking as a woman who dates men and swoons at plenty of corny love songs: The unsexy enticements that Petkovic and Carney offer make me want to curl up and die. The songs’ primary themes revolve around wanting, nay, needing to be near a partner; to find a deeper connection with said lover despite struggling to see or hear them clearly. But their cringing attempts at come-ons make it clear that it’s the singers, and not the objects of their affection, who are to blame for their woes. In “(Falling into the Arms of A) Refugee,” Petkovic compares his infidelity to—can you guess? In “Heaven’s Devils,” there’s a line about eyes “wrapped in tender skin” that would be much better if it were about the Pale Man creature from Pan’s Labyrinth. And what woman doesn’t love being called a “helpless baby,” as on closer “Disappearing”? Surely these two adult men have interacted with real human women before, right? They make it disturbingly hard to tell.
With Akron, Ohio, Carney and Petkovic seem to be doing their best to gorge themselves on schlock-rock’s indulgences. The band’s press materials indicate that Akron, Ohio exists as a result of two good buddies hanging around the studio and seeing where the spirit takes them. But to insist that the rest of the world needs to hear their wankery is an assertion of rampant egomania, a condition they share with plenty of out-of-touch male musicians. Even in their failures, their efforts are not outstanding. Sad Planets are the latest curdled dregs of a trope that spoiled long ago.


The Iowa black metal quartet’s debut explores the mystery of the deep seas with shapeshifting, dynamic songwriting.

The Abyssal Plain

The opening guitar riffs of “Counterillumination” slither like a predator stalking prey. Named after the camouflaging ability of animals in the mesopelagic zone—the ocean layer where light becomes increasingly scarce—the track sets a foreboding tone for Iowa quartet Dryad to explore darker territory. Since debuting in 2017, the band has made dynamic black metal that screeches and pummels, but their debut album aims to terrify. The labyrinthine music of The Abyssal Plain is inspired by the animals and geological features in the 36,000 feet of water beneath us, and the band matches the mystery of its subject matter with unwieldy songs that teem with life.
Drummer Oliver Weilein kickstarts “Bottomfeeder” with four hits of the snare. An onslaught of rapturous noise rushes in, led by the searing guitars and dual vocals of Claire “Claw” Nuñez and Grimmtooth: The former’s screams are more traditionally black metal, piercing like shrapnel; the latter delivers deep, brooding growls. The band rounds out the clamor with a chiming ride cymbal, sustained guitar chords, and a quiet synth organ. Midsong, Nuñez lets out a resounding scream that pans across the left and right channels, as if rupturing the space for blast beats to enter, but soon everything fades into serene ambience. With each opportunity to catch your breath, the eventual body blows land harder.
Since their early EPs, Dryad have grown more adept at guiding their songs in unexpected directions. On “Brine Pool Aberration,” lumbering death metal riffs morph into black metal tremolos. Dryad’s seamless tempo and stylistic changes make traditional black metal characteristics feel elastic. “Pompeii Worm” begins with the record’s prettiest passage: a gentle unfolding of detuned guitars and choral synths. The band gradually revs up the tempo, adding tumbling drums and barked vocals, and then a flashy guitar solo as a well-earned moment of grandeur.
While Dryad have always hinted at their lofty ambition, the full-length format gives the band space to experiment. “Raptures of the Deep” is a dungeon synth piece with eerie microtonalities, while the cryptic interlude “Hadal”—named for the deepest ocean zone—glows with the spooky charm of classic John Carpenter soundtracks. “Chimera Monstrosa” is the band’s first lo-fi fantasy instrumental, with glistening keys that flit above a faint drumbeat and diaphanous guitar strums. A chintzy piano paints these waters as both mystical and arcane, an idea cemented with “A Nagging Thought,” where carnivalesque synths and a haunted, pitch-shifted sample close the album in an extended gothic reverie.
The music on The Abyssal Plain speaks to both the allure and fear inherent to the uncharted ocean. These twinned ideas befit a band with two vocalists, and their interplay is at its best when Nuñez and Grimmtooth strike as a team. On “Trenches,” the record’s most overwhelming track, they deliver repeated declarations against helplessness: “Although I’m alone/Inside my mind/The light in my head/It will serve as my guide.” Even if you tune out their words and surrender to the snarling sound, the overdriven guitars and propulsive beat telegraph their fiery determination. In creating these treacherous worlds, Dryad have modeled a way to survive our own.


The Icelandic group celebrates the 20th anniversary of its third album with an expanded edition. Sung entirely in the made-up language of Hopelandic, it sounds as sumptuous and suggestive as ever.

( ) 20th Anniversary Edition

It’s not unusual for vocalists to make up gibberish to fit to a melody or a rhythm while workshopping a song. Sigur Rós’ masterstroke was to stop there and, more crucially, to dub their jabberwocky Vonlenska, or “Hopelandic” in English, putting a world-building veneer on what was essentially Icelandic babytalk. This isn’t, like, Dothraki—Hopelandic has no vocabulary, orthography, or grammar; it uses intuitive phonemes for liberating expression, not limiting description. But with shrewdness cloaked in naivete, Sigur Rós concretized the metaphor that they were writing their own musical language. And in the metaphorical sense, as the orchestral post-rock band that defines the rest, they did.
Sigur Rós dabbled in Hopelandic on Ágætis byrjun, their breakout second album. A hit in Iceland in 1999, it spread globally over the next two years via re-release on FatCat, a memorable sync in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, and the shiny new Web 2.0. It was greeted as both the last great record of the 20th century and the first vital one of the 21st, a prophecy borne out by its long diffusion, both directly and as a stylistic influence, through the new millennium’s increasingly edgeless landscape of music, entertainment, and advertising. It seems that there was no occasion that could not be elevated by luxurious folds and piles of bowed electric guitar; simple, sonorous orchestration; and Jónsi’s warm, teary, falsetto-prone tenor.
When they turned to Hopelandic in full on their expectation-laden third record, in 2002, it was but one tone in a deceptive ring of repudiation, as if they were giving their moment the cold shoulder. Instead of going to a fancy studio, they recorded in an empty swimming pool, and while the album came out sounding as upholstered and overwhelming as its predecessor, it was also sparser and sterner, and it lingered in more complicated moods. It had no traditional singles. The songs—all either long or very long—were untitled. Whereas the cover of Ágætis byrjun had been full of presence—a baby alien angel in utero, sure, but still—( ) portrayed an absence, a pair of empty, cut-out parentheses that gave it an ad hoc name.
Like many things about Sigur Rós, the Hopelandic conceit should be desperately corny. But it conveys unaccountable levels of banked power, stupefying beauty, and personal meaning for the listener, not despite but because it is untethered from authorial meaning. It generously furnishes palatial sets where we can play out our own stories, fill in our own poetry, doodle in the blank CD booklet, and post our own lyrics on the band’s website. There’s even a glimmer of something that Sigur Rós are not known for: humor, in that the language’s nonsensical nature made no difference to their new legions of English-speaking fans. But none of these gestures were about diffidence. On the contrary, it was evidence of the band’s intense belief in itself—and in listeners, who, entrusted with a blank, beautiful thought to use as they wished, rose to the effortless challenge in droves.
Last week, for its 20th anniversary, ( ) was reissued in a remastered edition with bonus tracks. It comes amid a spate of renewed activity for the band, which long lay dormant until it returned with a Nordic opera in 2020, just a raven’s feather too early for the Edda-based wave of Sandmen and Northmen and Odin-knows-what-all men to come. Reunited with prodigal keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson—who joined for Ágætis byrjun, helped professionalize the self-taught band, and left in 2012—they’re on a world tour, with a new album slated for next year.
Underlining its stature in Sigur Rós’ catalog, ( ) features heavily in their current setlist, and they say that its pounding, cresting, 12-minute finale, “Untitled #8,” has closed all of their shows since it was written. It was their first record with drummer Orri Páll Dýrason, who stayed in the band until he was accused of sexual assault in 2018. It also features Sveinsson; Georg Holm’s bass, keyboard, and glockenspiel; the string quartet Amiina; and Jónsi at the center, his voice a lonely candle leading through a dim, reverberating cathedral, his guitar the huge and dancing shadows it throws upon the walls.
The record was shaped in two halves, first light, then dark, but even the light is draped with heavy penumbra, to the pleasure of those who find Sigur Rós’ fearlessness of treacle both indispensable and sometimes cloying. More an awakening than a mere beginning, “Untitled #1” is a crepuscular piano hymn bathed in soft organ tones and yowling harmonies from which any trace of sourness has been charcoal-filtered out. The second track is mottled and eerie, and only with the third—which, with about 35 million Spotify streams, is the most popular song on the album by far—do we finally hear an undiluted example of the childlike, Yuletide splendor that made them famous.
Often, ( ) hints at a darker, more difficult Sigur Rós while remaining impeccably easy to listen to—especially the fifth track, which is saturnine and arcane, with Jónsi’s consoling candle now like an oily torch revealing inscriptions on obsidian. This side of the band initiates the second half of the record, where most of the bonus material comes from. In addition to the three tracks of the numinous non-album piece “Untitled #9,” which have long been available online, there are demo versions of the sixth, seventh, and eighth songs. (A forthcoming physical edition will include further bonuses, for better or worse.) These kinds of extras are obligatory for the artist and easily passed over by the listener, which is recommended here, because they’re kind of detrimental.
There is something intensely beside the point, even perverse, about listening to Sigur Rós demos. Their music’s magic lies in how it comes to us so polished and perfect, after all those murky, unruly sounds have been soothed and smoothed by producers and engineers until each one seems impossibly close and larger than life. Yet here’s “Untitled #6” without its crucial scratchy guitar tone, and “#7” with shakier time and an earlier ascent. None of it seems very revealing or flattering, and hearing Jónsi’s voice without its finery is markedly illusion-breaking. Who wants to see Santa’s belly in a plain undershirt? But that deliberate concession to the market is the only way in which ( ) has lost any of its cloudy, mirrored shine. The thing about made-up language is that it always keeps finding new things to say.


Bringing roller-disco synth-pop out of mothballs gives the UK duo their most entertaining album since electro-glam juggernaut Supernature.

Head First

Yup, another wardrobe change. Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have always valued style along with song, and on most of the fifth Goldfrapp album, Head First, pink spandex turns out to be a great look. Bringing 1980s roller-disco synth-pop motifs out of mothballs has given the UK duo their most immediately entertaining album since 2005 electro-glam juggernaut Supernature. The only problem: They fail to give each song a face as memorable as the overall album's Jane Fonda workout-video get-up.
Good thing Goldfrapp do spectacle like few else. No less a glamor lover than Adam Lambert was quoted recently saying he had wanted to work with the group for his debut, but couldn't because they were already busy with Christina Aguilera-- not exactly pop's dowdiest persona herself. Whether in the clown robes and animal masks of Goldfrapp's expert live shows, or the sharp-edged sound design of an eclectic discography, they treat pop as a form of not just communication, but presentation.
With sunny Van Halen synth tones, Xanadu-era Olivia Newton John optimism, and galloping Giorgio Moroder basslines, Head First marks as dramatic a shift from 2008's disappointing Seventh Tree as that album's moodily atmospheric folk did from the fembot stomp of Goldfrapp's prior two LPs (or those from the John Barry-soaked trip-hop of 2000 debut Felt Mountain). Alison's voice is still commanding, gaining a bit of Stevie Nicks huskiness while staying versatile enough to rise to a glassy peal or drop to a suggestive purr. So, too, are Gregory's electronics, from the fist-pumping opening trio of songs to the krautrock seduction and wordless vocal ambience on the second half.
First single "Rocket" shows Head First at its best, but it's also a reminder of where some of the other songs fall short. When Alison exhorts, "I've got a rocket/ You're going on it," the potential double entendre is obvious. This isn't a come-on, though; with suspicions about "how she got in the door uninvited" and a decisive "you're never coming back," it's a lot closer to a kiss-off. (Although not available on the album, Richard X's powerhouse remix is even better.)
Still, beyond "Rocket", few of the songs here are melodically or lyrically catchy enough to attain anything like the the popularity of the 80s songs they'll remind you of-- or of Goldfrapp's past highlights. An exception is "Hunt", which approaches the bedside intimacy of Beach House or White Hinterland through gorgeously breathy space disco. Another is "Shiny and Warm", full of Suicide-seeking synths and icy sensuality. Alas, a nine-song album doesn't leave much room for error. Goldfrapp remain excellent in the studio-- any future work they do for Aguilera or anyone else (they also recently scored the soundtrack for John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy) deserves watching-- and there's plenty of highly stylized fun to be had here. Just don't expect to remember many of the details when it's all over. You might be the best-dressed person at 80s dance night, but if there's nothing particularly noteworthy about you otherwise, nobody's going to recognize you out of costume.


Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is Madonna's link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop, including Timbaland, the Neptunes, Kanye West, and Justin Timberlake.

Hard Candy

Madonna is coming home: Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is her link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop. Five songs with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, six with Pharrell Williams, one with Williams and Kanye West. The best, this line-up announces, need to work with the best. But lead single "4 Minutes" doesn't sound like the best working with the best: It sounds complacent, like a pop supergroup high-fivin' each other.
The "4 Minutes" marching band rhythm-riff may be Timbaland's strongest idea on the album but the performers seem happy to let it do the work. He keeps shouting for "Mad-DON-nuh!" but she's a guest on her own track, singing from the margins of what might as well be a Timberlake outtake. Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album. Partly he's a victim of his own ubiquity-- we know his tricks by now: the interlocking rhythmic hooks on his upbeat tracks, the bubbling claustrophobia on his ballads. "Devil Wouldn't Recognise You" is the third time-- at least-- that he's written "Cry Me a River", right down to the moody rainstorm breakdown and thunderclaps. But his less-typical productions don't all work well here either: "Dance 2Night" aspires to 80s funk slickness but lumbers where it should cruise.
The 1980s, specifically Madonna's 80s, haunt Hard Candy: It's been touted as a return to the spirit and sound of her earliest work, but her voice and delivery have changed too much for the comparison to hold. Her vocal training and singing lessons in the 90s broadened her range but she's never sounded as hungry since, and her phrasing on Hard Candy is frequently dreadful-- words so evenly spaced and emphasized that it sounds like she's reading aloud to a class. Or teaching you the choruses: You won't get "Miles Away" out of your head in a hurry but that's less to do with its quality than the didactic way she delivers it. Her biggest misstep is "Heartbeat"-- lyrics deliberately reminiscent of "Into the Groove" but sung so detached you might as well be at a Madonna Studies lecture.
The record's better tracks are, unsurprisingly, those where Madonna sounds more engaged. Second single "Give It to Me" has her delivering an imperious lesson on success and survival-- "Show me a record and I'll break it/ I can go on and on"-- over Hard Candy's most urgent tune, hard-pushing electro-ska whose keyboards break up trying to keep pace. Closing track "Voices" is gorgeously gothic orchestral synth-pop that she seems to relax and revel in. Centerpiece "She's Not Me" is a stirring piece of turf-defense, prowling between Chic-era disco and modern pop-house as Madonna slaps down a rival. It's taut and cold, easily Hard Candy's most emotionally compelling moment.
"She's Not Me" smoothly lays out Madonna's credentials: Twenty-five years at the top of the game. She doesn't reinvent pop; she defines it. Her strengths have always been her authority, and her smart sense of who to work with and when. So even if it's a summary of where pop's at rather than where it's going, Hard Candy should still be excellent. After all, if you're not going to do your best work for Madonna, who are you going to do it for? But after listening, the question's still open-- nobody involved in Hard Candy is anywhere near their creative peak.


Nineties heads know Chicago’s Jamie Hodge for his leftfield productions on Plus 8 and Source. Sifting through his old DATs, Demdike Stare came up with a grip of vintage ambient-techno abstractions.

Diagonals

Despite the name, Demdike Stare’s DDS is no vanity label: Since 2009, they’ve used the platform to release not only their own albums and mixtapes but also the work of other artists with singular sensibilities. There have been avant-dancehall burners from Equiknoxx, dispatches from the outer reaches of Mica Levi’s soundworlds, two typically oddball sides of Jim O’Rourke. The label’s greatest feat so far might be facilitating the return of Shinichi Atobe’s ineffable techno, but this summer DDS has also guided the re-entry of Chicago’s Born Under a Rhyming Planet. Diagonals is somehow a belated debut album, greatest hits compilation, and mixtape of re-edits, all at once. Whatever it is, it’s a welcome return.
Chicago’s Jamie Hodge spent his teenage years fiddling with electronics, hanging out with Gastr del Sol as they made early recordings, and raving ’til dawn. The story goes that he made his mom take a long detour through Windsor, Ontario, while touring prospective colleges back East; his mom waited in the car while he knocked on Richie Hawtin’s front door, played him some demos, and secured a release on Hawtin’s influential Plus 8 label. That EP, 1993’s Digital:Hell/Analog:Heaven, is among the label’s finest. It’s also the only thing Hodge released under that name for nearly three decades. Meanwhile, he made himself a fixture of Chicago’s post-rock/experimental jazz scene. Around the turn of the millennium, as members of the groups Conjoint and Studio Pankow, he and David Moufang, aka Move D, put out a few fine records that bleep and swing.
For Diagonals, DDS dug into Hodge’s hard drives and came up with 14 tracks. Some, they apparently re-edited; others appear untouched. Almost to a one, they stun. And if they mostly sound like their respective moments—the mid-’90s fragmentation of Detroit techno into electronica, and subsequent early-2000s defragmentation into minimal techno—they also remind listeners of Hodge’s prodigious delicacy and sense of balance. Despite bearing the hallmarks of the era, they still sound timeless.
The brief ambient “Intro” readies ears before drifting into a pair of the album’s longer tracks. “Siemansdamm” stretches out unsteadily, a little tentatively. But there’s a clarity to the melody, and the bass boom always arrives on time, if rarely when one expects. “Handley” gurgles with analog bubbles that burst into refreshing sprays of rims and claps before sinking deep into the mix to form channels. And “Traffic” puts Detroit techno up on blocks, with a grating ping that spins its wheels while the undercarriage collapses. Each sounds like a lost classic that could have appeared on Warp or Clear or Mille Plateaux back in the day—because, of course, they are.
Other producers might have stretched miniatures like “Intermission” and “Skyway” into epics, but Hodge keeps them at 90 seconds or so. Sketches have their own dignity. If Bootsy Collins turned bass strings into rubber bands, “Trampoline” turns the frequencies into a rubber mat that offers a bounce less dizzying than its drop. Despite its wildly specific title, the ambient clanging of “Hot Nachos with Cheese, Cappuccino, Calling Cards” is vague, perhaps, but fully realized. “Menthol” and the lengthier “Fete” blow through with a particularly Windy City kind of noir, breezy like mid-period Tortoise but swapping out his famous neighbors’ candlelit vibe for flickering neon.
Longer tracks don’t overstay. “Hyperreal” constructs a rickety glitch to fence in pools of eerie sighs, thick pads of synth, and some theremin-esque incantations. This has been a sound of the future for decades now; it may still be. With an organ cutting through buzzing, hissing billows like a hand through a cloud of summer mosquitos and gnats, “Avenue” slaps. The true swoon of the set, though, is “Interstate,” a long run of cresting frequencies approaching the top and bottom of human hearing. The tones slowly doppler and pan; about halfway through, they splinter and crunch. The simple drama really takes you somewhere. It could be the fertile ground between Chicago and Detroit, or Sheffield and Cologne. But Diagonals suggests that Hodge, like the best of his DDS cohort, might be in an orbit all his own.


Gleaming with ambient intent, melodic classicism, and clean lines, this 1996 classic bridges the gap between Detroit techno and Tangerine Dream.

The Detroit Escalator Company: Soundtrack [313]

Soundtrack [313]

The elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun, the poetic swirl of the Messier 94 spiral galaxy, and the elegant curve of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird—these are the images beamed into the megacosm by Soundtrack [313], the 1996 debut album from Neil Ollivierra, aka the Detroit Escalator Company. It is a record that gleams with ambient intent, melodic classicism, and clean lines, bridging the gap between Detroit techno and vintage Tangerine Dream.
As the name suggests, Ollivierra hails from the Motor City, where he once worked at the center of the city’s techno scene as the promoter of legendary club the Music Institute. But Soundtrack [313], now re-released with bonus tracks, is far from the frantic propulsion of an underground after-hours party. Instead, Ollivierra specializes in a pearly clean and galaxy-deep blend of ambience that brings to mind fellow Detroit producer Carl Craig’s beatless excursions, the far-out electronic strands of 1970s kosmische, or the more relaxed side of early IDM acts like B12—all synth sweeps, chiming melodies, and faintly hissing percussion.
At its best, there is something perfectly poised about Soundtrack [313], an innate balance that suggests all is well in the universe. There is not a great deal to songs like “Abstract Forward Movement” or “Force,” both of which appear towards the start of this rather front-loaded album, but what there is is basically perfect. “Force,” in particular, is astonishingly complete in its minimalistic sound: Over nine minutes, the song uses little more than echoing hi-hats, astral synth swoops, and a couple of simple chord patterns whose hesitant evolution drives the song’s unhurried and rather melancholic progression. But this handful of sounds seems to expand to fill both time and space, as satisfyingly absolute as a Mark Rothko painting in good light.
“Abstract Forward Movement,” meanwhile, has a whiff of Manuel Göttsching’s minimalist electronic classic E2-E4 to it, as a gorgeously wistful central riff tumbles around, minimally supported by the faintest hint of percussion. At times like these, the half-speed mastering process that has been used for the Soundtrack [313] reissue sounds less like an audiophile indulgence and more like the restoration work that sharpens the faded colors of a Renaissance masterpiece. (The reissue’s six rather anonymous bonus tracks, where the constituent parts add up to less than their sum total, are considerably less essential.)
There is something very powerful about the confident, profound simplicity of the music on Soundtrack [313], like being confronted by the mysterious structural perfection of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The modest melodic cycle in “DELTA” has an emotional pull that transcends its limited musical scope, while the two harmonic ideas that coalesce on “Gratiot” have the structural solidity of the double helix in a DNA molecule. That this song ends in a kind of collapsed breakbeat shows the links between Soundtrack [313] and the work of early IDM pioneers like the Black Dog and Aphex Twin, who were finding inspiration in the UK’s hardcore raves, while the field recordings of street chatter that join the songs on the second half of the LP give Soundtrack [313] a fleeting metropolitan warmth among the deep-space vibes.
Neil Ollivierra’s roots in the urban steel of Detroit techno and melodic proclivities make Soundtrack [313] feel atypical in 2022, when ambient music is dominated by drones, fuzz, and fear on one side and hippy-dippy New Age wellness on another. But there is a sense of brilliant infinitude to Soundtrack [313] that makes it impervious to the demands of time. Soundtrack [313] is removed, rather than outdated, a musical guiding light beamed in from a more benevolent place.


The Argentinian electro-acoustic composer has been exploring hidden worlds of sound since the 1960s; these three pieces, all from the 21st century, showcase her playful side.

Huellas Entreveradas

For years, perhaps only the most attentive of musique-concrète listeners might have come across Beatriz Ferreyra’s name tucked away on obscure compilations. The Argentinian composer worked closely with Groupe de Recherches Musicales founder Pierre Schaeffer and served as technician on some of his 1960s compositions, but it was only when the illuminating Recollection GRM label reissued selections from her archive in 2015 that Ferreyra’s sound world came into crystalline focus for a wider audience. The rediscovery placed her alongside other belatedly appreciated female electronic composers, including Delia Derbyshire, Laurie Spiegel, and fellow GRM alum Eliane Radigue, whose pioneering work was just as invigorating as that of their more famous male colleagues. Ferreyra, now 82, has maintained her singular vision well into the 21st century.
Huellas Entreveradas collects three distinct sound works created between 2001 and 2018. Much like her mentor Schaeffer, Ferreyra is an exhaustive explorer of the smallest of sounds, continually unveiling new worlds tucked inside the briefest of moments. In the previously unreleased 1978 piece “Echos,” recently issued by the Room40 label, she utilized her late niece’s breaths and murmurs to create a profound meditation on our mortality. Here, Ferreyra’s detailed approach takes a playful—but no less intimate—turn. Across the 11 minutes of “La Baballe du Chien-Chien à la Mé-Mère,” Ferreyra turns canine growls, the patter of slippered feet, and rubber-ball bounces into a surreal composition, zooming in like an electron microscope to reveal alien topographies in the most quotidian of noises. The title translates loosely as “Mommy’s Little Doggy’s Little Ball,” suggesting the loving gibberish that people use to communicate with their beloved pets. It’s a bewildering exercise in abstraction that’s also endearing and deeply strange, like watching someone hold a long conversation with their pet, then feed it a treat out of their own mouth.
The longest and the most recent piece here, “Huellas Entreveradas” (“Intertwined Footsteps”) takes cues from landmark works of her venerated former colleagues, like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang Der Jünglinge” and Iannis Xenakis’ “Diamorphoses.” It’s crafted from voice, flute, and percussion, though she strips them of their timbral familiarity and makes them into raw, startling sound. Ferreyra juxtaposes an expert sense of craft with childlike wonder throughout; the high frequencies of the flute flutter and whip about the stereo field like sparrows, only to plunge the listener into cavernous, rumbling bass tones. For nearly 15 minutes, Ferreyra guides us from the upper stratosphere down into subterranean depths and back up again, a journey that she describes in the liner notes as being like a “hike through an unknown landscape.” At the 11-minute mark, when the sounds of traffic emerge, it gives the sensation of a long-traveled nature trail suddenly opening up onto a paved road.
A four-minute homage to her GRM colleague Bernard Parmegiani closes out the album. Playfully mistranslating the title of his 1977 opus Dedans Dehors (Inside Outside) as “Deux Dents Dehors” (roughly translating as “two buck teeth”), it’s about as close as high-minded electroacoustic music gets to the dizziness of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Snippets of a bright, chirpy voice and marimba (cue an animated galloping horse) get transubstantiated into more ethereal forms before toggling back toward the giddy and antic. Whether working on a scale immersive or succinct, Ferreyra’s philosophy utilizes her oblique source material to deliver a tangible emotional payoff.


Gucci Mane’s latest protégé, a smooth-talking rapper with a nonchalant charm, steps into the spotlight after a streak of well-liked mixtapes.

Rich Hood

If you were making a random stage name generator for Atlanta rappers, Hoodrich Pablo Juan, with its suggestions of street bona fides and kingpins past, might sound like the type of output you design backwards from. But Hoodrich Pablo is a real guy—late 20s, born in New Jersey and raised in Atlanta—and he’s not posturing at all. Instead, he’s one of the best real-time mirrors into his city’s rap scene, a raspy-baritoned boaster who raps simply, often in triplets, and with a light-footed nonchalance. After a year of bubbling hits (“We Dont Luv Em”) and mixtapes that put him in a steadily growing spotlight, Hoodrich Pablo is poised to go even bigger in 2018.
Rich Hood is the second project he’s released since signing to Gucci Mane’s 1017 Eskimo label, and comes just a few months after last fall’s well-designed Designer Drugz 3, whose title and release strategy implied a fluid transition from mixtapes to albums. Hoodrich Pablo is not unlike his label boss in blurring the lines between the two formats, for better and worse. They both favor a fast-moving, stream-of-conscious release style that may ultimately make that a moot distinction. So while Rich Hood sounds a lot like the mixtape series its artist is trying to graduate from, that’s hardly a flaw.
The beats here are empty and rattling, to varied effect. On “Flawless,” with its atmospheric synths and booming bells, that sound feels sinister; on “Faygo Creame,” it comes across playful, rambunctious, almost bouncy. Pablo is an emcee who can engage a conversation endlessly without running out of things to say—or at least, one who doesn’t mind saying the same thing twice. As a result, many of his songs seem to bleed together. But then he’ll rap something unexpectedly goofy that sticks, like a threat to “put a hole in your head like a dolphin” (a memorable image, even if Juicy J said it first) or hit you with a quippy, extravagant non-sequitur, like “Drop off a bale in a pickup truck/Givenchy’s are very particular.” (More often he’ll share a clunker and make it sound slick: “Got powers like I’m Austin,” he shrugs on “Flawless.”) He’s obsessed with calling his weed “gelato” and often raps like he’s talking out a thought out for the first time. “The fuck you lookin’ at? Oh, that’s a fan,” he muses on “Walk Thru.”
Unfortunately, some of the songs are so poorly mixed as to render them missed opportunities. “Ball Like a Bitch” sounds like a shell of a beat, more rough draft than intentionally minimalist. “Homisquad,” by comparison, sounds like a fully-fledged hit played through a phone line.  Elsewhere, songs like “Menace to Society” end with long stretches of overlooked silence. (Tellingly, the SoundCloud version doesn’t suffer this fate—it’s only on the big streaming sites, suggesting a SoundCloud mixtape sloppily ported over.) Still, there are enough polished tracks like the disquieting “1017 Ways,” which features a slurred but nimble verse from Lil Jay Brown, to pick up the slack as possible hits and vital Atlanta correspondence.
On Rich Hood, the A-listers who turned Hoodrich Pablo’s last album into a cameo showcase are mostly gone. With the exception of Lil Yachty’s appearance on “Street Punk,” the album casts Pablo as the center of attention, this time with his own tagalong crew of up-and-comers—by now he’s tapped deeply enough into Atlanta trap to open up his own faucet for the sound. It’s a role he comes to naturally, perpetually in the pocket and never at a loss for words.


On their fourth collaboration, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid sound more in-tune with one another than ever before.

NYC

The recent Four Tet EP Ringer not only revealed Kieran Hebden to be a surprisingly dexterous techno producer, but also found him making an asset out of his greatest liability. For all the cosmic wonder he can evoke by placing electronics against naturalistic backdrops, Hebden has often gotten himsef stuck in ruts, even if just for a few moments here and there. In part, that's the fate of an improviser, but it's exacerbated by samplers and machines that can be slow to respond to Hebden's shifts, however smartly they're triggered. In improvised music, it's one thing to sound like you're in transition and another thing to actually be in transition.
None of that mattered on Ringer, thanks in part to techno's formalist grounding. But it matters a lot on NYC, the fourth album made by Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid. Ringer's functional dance-music accepts, even privileges, the kind of ruts that have tripped up Hebden in the past; NYC, meanwhile, puts them to work in settings that serve different purposes. On the duo's earlier albums, Hebden and Reid occasionally sounded like they were only barely aware of what the other was doing or might stand to do next. On NYC, they sound much more conscious and sympathetic.
"Lyman Place" starts the album with an unvarying few-note bass-line set against the sound of a jet engine rising in long, slow takes. It sounds like something Miles Davis would have done in the 1970s, and Hebden's relative understatedness helps set off Reid's drumming-- circular, splashy, coyly shrouded by the shimmer of persistent cymbals. "1st & 1st" follows with a fit of funk built around a guitar sample that Hebden makes sound twitchy, like a signal from a world away.
It sounds as if Hebden made a strategic decision to do less on this album, which heightens the impact when he does make a move. Reid benefits greatly from the space to breathe-- much of his drumming on the duo's other records sounds comparatively crowded and confused by how to connect with Hebden. And Hebden himself shows off a new sense of always being in the right place at the right time, without getting caught out in between. He hasn't lost any of the polyglot record-collector drive that has made Four Tet matter from the start: NYC wanders through spells informed by melodica-strewn dub, shoegaze rock, weird folk, and of course the clattering sense of purpose at work in free-jazz. But Hebden sounds considerably more easy-going now, like he's taking time to listen in to what comes out as it happens all around him.


Mount Eerie's first studio album features a laissez-faire production that allows former Microphones leader Phil Elverum's vocals to float to the top of the mix.

No Flashlight

No Flashlight, Mount Eerie's first studio album, comes with a huge poster/map/Farmer's Almanac thing, which is meant to help explain the music and look pretty doing so. It isn't the first time Phil Elverum, the band's inscrutable leader, has written an album with grandiose narrative threads and laid them out in liner notes. Mount Eerie, his last record as Microphones, tackled-- in language that was difficult despite its puerile concision-- the Sun, Solar System, and Universe, plus ol' Mount Eerie herself.
But while that record came with an attractive but relatively modest fold-out poster (all black ink printed on diaphanous wax paper), No Flashlight's visual companion is a freaking atlas, complete with beatific photographs and Elverum's wobbly prose. Window-dressing on an epic scale, its inclusion sends the message that understanding is required to access enjoyment.
No Flashlight is the most musically undistinguished Elverum-related project to date, including Microphones' intractable early albums and Mount Eerie's shoddily-recorded live and tour-only material. The album's laissez-faire production fails to anchor its quaint, melody-allergic songs. In turn, Elverum's retiring vocals float to the top, which is a horrible place for them. It's a textural trainwreck that sabotages the music before one can even focus on lyrics or guitar lines. So the distraction of an expository outpouring makes sense.
Demanding listener input-- as Elverum does here by not-so-subtly inviting us to ponder him-- isn't a bad thing. But courting ears with such esoteric hooey is disingenuous and annoying. Elverum used to be able to hide his most solipsistic moments behind ambitious music; he now makes boring music that is premised on his persona and the explanation thereof. This is theoretical music in a whole 'nother sense: Largely untechnical and musically staid, the meaning lies not in the notes, not in the colossal liner spread, and not even really in the words, which are feebly expository and largely unsatisfying. The value, we are led to believe, lies somewhere apart from the music.
Elverum sings in an quietly anguished voice-- like a cult leader, it's only as powerful as what he puts behind it. Here, Elverum's a lone sojourner; Mount Eerie's gray performances put the diffident singer cruelly in the foreground, where he founders.
Has his voice changed? Hardly. Coy, lethargic, and almost drunkenly tuneless, this is the same guy from Microphones. Only now he has nowhere to hide. On "The Glow," pt. 2, his former band's penultimate and best album, Elverum wrapped inner-sanctum ruminations in warm, whooshing instrumentals, rich in assertive melodies. No Flashlight is comparatively ascetic. Melodies are sparse but the music isn't quite minimal. Opener "I Know No One" subdues a plaintive guitar line in accordion swell and excessive, frequently mic-clipping percussion. Unaccessorized, the six-string would sound brilliant-- a counterpoint to Elverum's ugly-beautiful vox-- but the line is swallowed up.
On "How?", notes cluster in disorganized spurts, while the 1st Mt. Eerie Tabernacle Hummers fill the voids with their closed-lip sounds. "Stop Singing" opens beautifully-- flashes of guitar tussle with clarinet vapors, evoking an unlikely forebear: Talk Talk. But it's just an intro, soon to be supplanted by a bass/drums vamp that dispenses with lo-fi's anchoring warmth, keeping the shabbiness.
Elverum previously espoused a very un-singer/songwriterly preference for sound over persona. But No Flashlight is quick to dispel any confusion around its focus. "I Know No One" drops the mission statement bombshell: "Knowing no one understands these songs/ I try to sing them clearer/ Even though no one has ever asked, 'What does Mount Eerie mean?'". The best tracks are those on which he's mollified: by Glow-sized guitar wash and skittish drums on "The Moan", or gusty tuba and a second-line beat on "The Universe Is Shown".
I revisited my Microphones LPs, which I haven't spun regularly for a couple years, to see if evolving tastes, globalization, or something else isn't to blame for my indifference to Mount Eerie. Verdict? "The Glow," pt. 2 is still fantastic; It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water still very good; and Mt. Eerie still trippy as hell. If the forthcoming Singers is any indication, Mount Eerie got some moxy in 'em yet. But your enjoyment of No Flashlight will depend on your interest in Phil Elverum, and whether or not you've the patience to wade through this sonic tub-full of Jonestown juice. Once you find him, he's just as fetchingly impossible. But when the pleasure is this conditional, it becomes fuzzy what all the fuss is over.


The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album is a trilogy-completing, podcast-augmented three-part intergalactic techno-libertarian rock drama!

ATUM

No one can accuse William Patrick Corgan of skimping on lore. He’s produced reams of it as a bandmate, interviewee, blogger, Infowars guest, wrestling impresario, and tea-shop proprietor. His musical output with the Smashing Pumpkins is also lore-heavy, albeit haphazard: The band’s album discography has both a Vol. 1 without a Vol. 2 and a II without a I. That II, however, was a turning point for the Pumpkins, as Corgan (a notoriously prolific writer whose B-sides have shipped platinum) began setting formats and concepts loose upon each other. A singles campaign became an album; an album became “an album within an album”; that outermost album became an abandoned project. With ATUM: A Rock Opera in Three Acts, Corgan raises the stakes. He’s pitched it as the third in a retconned trilogy of concept albums that began with 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and continued with 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.
Corgan’s previous attempts to cast Mellon and Machina as something more than good-to-magnificent alt-rock albums—he once teased Mellon Collie as The Wall for Gen Xers, and recruited professional animators and amateur sleuths to flesh out the story of Machina—were, in wrestling terms, a work. But on ATUM (pronounced, maddeningly, like the season) he sells the storyline like never before. The cover art suggests a space-rock album illustrated by Roger Dean; the stuffy subtitle places it in the distinguished lineage of Corgan’s beloved Savatage. Over 33 songs and two-plus hours, he presents the saga of Shiny, a has-been rocker (and incarnation of a character known on Machina as Glass, and on Mellon Collie as Zero) exiled into space for unspecified thoughtcrimes. As Shiny makes his unexpected return to Earth, a cadre of admirers and hackers desperately tries to remind the public of his significance, while the perfidious ruling class schemes to co-opt him for its own ends.
The full story is sketched out in ATUM’s “lyric handbook,” but throughout this album’s protracted rollout (Part I was released in November, Part II in January), Corgan has been recapping the narrative on his debut podcast. Thirty-Three combines buzzy guests like Willow Smith and the voice of Roger Rabbit with Corgan’s Twitter Blue-grade takes on current events. When discussing ATUM with his solicitous co-hosts—both employees of the Corgan-owned National Wrestling Alliance—Corgan lavished far more attention on the text than the compositions.
All that extracurricular effort is necessary, because almost none of the narrative makes it to the actual recording. Even the larger plot points—or just the characters—of Corgan’s techno-libertarian saga are submerged at a level below subtext. Always inclined toward quaint turns of phrase, he’s reached a syntactical point of no return. His couplets scan like palindromes extracted from Coheed and Cambria lyrics. “In parried odes to thy mountains/The spirit of us was pungent laughter,” he declares on “Intergalactic.” On the squelchy, plaintive “Night Waves,” he muses, “Are we null at keel/Where mistakes appeal?” Oh shit, are we?
The result is a rock opera that coasts on vibes. Sometimes that vibe is simply Muse, as on the bombastic, backing vocalist-heavy “Empires” or “That Which Animates the Spirit.” Other times, it is unexpectedly peculiar. “Hooray!” is squelchy high-plains Hi-NRG, replete with Syndrum hits and an organ tone I last encountered on the Carrie Cleveland reissue. Within the story of ATUM, it’s performed by an animatronic band in a shuttered amusement park. (Discussing the song on the podcast, one of Corgan’s co-hosts asked him—in all innocence—“Is there a part of you that had an experience at an amusement park?”) The song is followed by the yearning synth-pop of “The Gold Mask,” which successfully lashes Future Islands to the delay effect from “I Ran (So Far Away)”. Doomy power ballad “The Culling” rides a slide guitar solo into a three-way conversation between Moog, soaring wordless vocals, and some of Jimmy Chamberlin’s most dramatic drumming.
Chamberlin gets his best opportunities to show out during ATUM’s final act, the set’s proggiest. The pace slows; the songs creep past the five-minute mark. It feels like Corgan and company are savoring their stroll to the finish, or maybe straining to leave a good impression. But this section stretches more than it soars and relies on invocation as a dramatic effect. There’s something fascinating, I suppose, in Corgan hollering “Zero! Zero! Zero!” like it’s a Saturday-morning superhero cartoon theme. But what do we get out of him whining “Glory glory, hallelujah”? Or “Agnus Dei”? (For fans of Pumpkins pronunciation, we get a “deus ex machina” sung like do sex machine.) It’s a relief when they invoke “Zero” as a song instead of a callback: There’s as much fun to be had in the oompah thrash of “Harmageddon” or the sighing groove metal of “In Lieu of Failure” as in the transparently goofy “Hooray!”
The stylistic flexes are enjoyable, but the bulk of ATUM is aimed squarely at modern rock radio. If you’re familiar with 2020’s CYR, you know the drill: streamlined synth-rock, only this time Chamberlin’s not platooning with an 808. Even so, the formula produces pleasures. Chamberlin stomps around Corgan’s sequencer on “Neophyte,” turning the singer’s rueful trudge into a disco strut. It’s almost as bold a choice as Corgan pronouncing the phrase “Philistine or Elohim” so it doesn’t rhyme. Penultimate track “Spellbinding” resolves the meter-shifting dream-pop pulse of its verses with a fist-pumping power pop chorus. “Take me away/I’m going to find you!” Corgan cries, trailed by a nice little .38 Special twin-guitar sting. “To the Grays” plays like a keening, synth-spangled take on “Dancing in the Dark”: The snare sound is more wack and there are a couple more references to burning fields of cosmic space. But the nervy pulse is there, and so is the romanticism, which is the true echo of the Pumpkins’ older work.
ATUM doesn’t necessarily suffer by comparison to past albums. Its highs are more modest. The ferocity is long gone. (At the end of the saga, having riled up allies and enemies alike, Shiny yeets himself back into space.) But in its own ponderous way, it is generous. And anyway, comparisons to past albums are kind of a Smashing Pumpkins trademark: Corgan has already announced that the band’s next project will be a “straight up rock’n’roll record” in the vein of Siamese Dream and, um, Mellon Collie. Perhaps the release of a fully realized—if obliquely written—rock opera has freed him from the gravitational pull of conceptualism. That, more than anything, would guarantee ATUM’s place in Smashing Pumpkins lore.


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 masterful chamber-pop of XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking and the fraught story behind the bucolic songs.

Skylarking

Late one morning in 1986, Todd Rundgren awoke at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood to ominous news: A space shuttle had disintegrated in the stratosphere, killing the entire crew on live TV. The same morning, he received a message from the British wing of Virgin Records, concerning a wily pop band from rural England. In the label’s view, XTC were in dire need of a no-nonsense producer, arranger, and authority figure, preferably all in one—somebody with an American touch and a hint of the madcap and... well, how did his schedule look?
Rundgren’s appointment secured the savvy pairing of two brilliant and doomed minds. Between the anglophile producer and songsmith Andy Partridge were a thousand common interests and one great chasm that would subsume egos and tear up the studio floorboards. The rift did not concern taste or etiquette so much as—how else to put it—vibe: In one corner, the shaggy-haired, acid-frazzled Philadelphian whose passive-aggression belies a loose, honky-tonk approach to life; in the other, a three-piece reputed for 1) turning down their record label’s cocaine and 2) crafting technically brilliant pop. It was a match made in some 5-star hotel-lobby hell, and the calamity of it all enriches every second of Skylarking.
Rundgren was optimistic about working with XTC. A few years earlier, he had caught the Swindon group in their element, twisting from off-brand punk toward whip-smart new wave. Soon after, in 1982, Partridge suddenly quit touring, suffering from valium withdrawal and on-stage panic attacks. He announced XTC would join the ranks of Steely Dan and late-phase Beatles as a studio outfit—a commercial disaster, to nobody’s surprise. Singles flopped, fans lost faith, and before the year was up, the group shrank to a trio when drummer Terry Chambers stormed out for good during a rehearsal.
But by 1985, Partridge, at least, believed XTC were in the form of their lives. Though recent LPs Mummer and The Big Express lacked a hit to follow 1982’s “Senses Working Overtime,” the frontman’s studio indulgence (and bossiness) finally had free rein, even as the band entered free-fall. A parachute opened when the Dukes of Stratosphear, their cartoonish side project, released a period-psychedelia EP that briskly outsold the previous XTC record.
Virgin hoped an American producer would collar the firebrand and hammer the new album into the transatlantic mold of U2 and Simple Minds—a notion that, like almost everything involving the label, Partridge found laughable. Consider the demos: Back-garden symphonies like “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Season Cycle,” among his ripest compositions to date. Fellow songwriter Colin Moulding, inspired by his move to the ancient Celtic settlement of Marlborough Downs, was clomping down the same path, composing pastorals like “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” from sampled lathes and thrums of pagan folk. If anything, Partridge reasoned, the album would be their most English ever.
Caught between a quixotic artiste and a label tapping its watch, Rundgren was diplomatic. Who was he, a producer extraordinaire whose second home was a spacecraft-style recording bunker, to mock a studio fiend like Partridge? Hatching a plan, he accepted Virgin’s $150,000 fee and quickly discarded dozens of the band’s demos, assembling a tracklist around a concept of his own. The song cycle would plot a lifetime over the course of a day: daybreak in “Summer’s Cauldron,” then a suite of infatuation, heartbreak, marriage, temptation, and existential reckoning that concludes—on “Dying” and “Sacrificial Bonfire”—in the dead of night.
All this was news to the band. To Partridge, it was virtually treasonous. The 32-year-old was still on the mend from a 14-year addiction to valium prescribed for erratic school behavior,  and had landed in an enlightenment phase, philosophizing over nature and “questioning things deeper: God, existence—the chewier questions,” he later said. The transformation in his lyrics was undeniable; and his voice, once a rabid yelp, had softened into serene hysteria, like a rescue puppy outgrowing its trauma. Despite their media portrayal as backwater bumpkins, XTC were brewing a new identity—something a star producer would surely dilute.
Partridge’s bandmates felt differently. Guitarist Dave Gregory, a Rundgren superfan, was thrilled, and the docile Moulding—by now immune to Partridge’s arm-twisting—sided with Virgin, reasoning they all had mouths to feed. If only to humor them, Partridge held his nose and acquiesced.
At his Utopia studio in the Catskills, Rundgren insisted on recording the songs in order, so sessions commenced with “Summer’s Cauldron.” His fingerprints are instantly visible: Skylarking opens in the nervous charge of dawn amid dog barks and crickets. As Rundgren’s melodica smears sunlight across the horizon, Partridge swans in from the wings and belts out a Broadway-sized croon, duetting with the lazy arc of a Moulding bassline. Just as the song builds to fever pitch, the producer plays his ace, scooping you out of “Summer’s Cauldron” with the summer’s-breeze strings of “Grass,” Moulding’s ode to al-fresco romance. A dreamy riff plays off his West Country burr, fizzles and dies like something unsaid.
Beneath Skylarking’s twin sunrise, optimism was dimming. It’s hard to pinpoint when hell broke loose, but within a few days the studio had descended into extravagant pettiness. Partridge says Rundgren had sarcasm down to “an extremely cruel art,” mocking everything from his lyrics to his trousers; when the singer flubbed a vocal take, he impatiently offered to record him a guide track. Partridge, in turn, deemed Rundgren’s keyboard skills “incredibly primitive,” nicknaming him Old Banana Fingers. Whenever the producer hulked toward the studio, weary and long-faced, the band had taken to jamming the “Munsters” theme tune.
One flustered night, Partridge gathered his bandmates. “I’m thinking of knocking the album on the head,” he confessed. “It’s like having two Hitlers in the same bunker.”
As war raged, the sessions remained a spring of wonder. Moulding, a psych-pop reformist, came into his own with songs like “The Meeting Place,” reflecting Swindon’s rituals and industry in gorgeous stained glass. Partridge specialized in the melodic trapdoor, establishing awkward patterns and flooding your serotonin receptors at unexpected moments. The lyrics are just chewy enough to distract from each incoming sugar rush, creating endless replay value. (“Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” he quips wonderfully in “Season Cycle.”) Themes and images trespass between songs, from the vaudevillian pomp of “Ballet for a Rainy Day” into the melodramatic “1000 Umbrellas,” whose Dave Gregory string arrangement makes heartbreak seem an ancient, noble fate.
In all this, Skylarking expresses a comic, cosmic apprehension of the natural world—not the banal site of ready-made tranquility but the arena of psychedelia, godliness, and permanence. Partridge and Moulding grew up on the border between urban and rural Swindon, ever ready to abandon the cinema of smalltown life, hop a fence, and explore a fantasyland of wildlife. Their formative years account for two XTC archetypes: the put-upon breadwinner and the serene observer of nature. That contrast—as much as Partridge and Moulding’s divergence—is a crux of the band’s character.
Part of the tension with Rundgren was that his pastoral concept snubbed Partridge’s trademark social commentaries. Though his politics were fuzzy, the songwriter took pride in penning morality plays that skewered Middle England’s delusions of grandeur, sending up the bootlicking class that was then rallied behind Margaret Thatcher.
Before parlaying that skill into songs like the anti-fascist operetta “No Thugs in Our House,” young Partridge had been famed for caricaturing schoolteachers, and it was this hobby that established creativity as his lifeline: initially to distract bullies, then simply to show off, drumming up attention he lacked at home. Though Partridge’s father played in a Navy skiffle band, his periods of absence and violence afforded little investment in his son’s artistic pursuits; his mother, whose mental health struggles led to electro-shock therapy, dished out verbal abuse and often sent Partridge to stay with other families, giving him “no sense of permanence about anything,” he explained in the book Complicated Game. Music and satire were pillars of Partridge’s identity that Rundgren would threaten to demolish.
The songwriter’s roots in social antagonism deepened in his teens, which he spent pottering between oddball bands in a tasseled suede jacket, observing Swindon’s social and cultural trends from afar. XTC missed the 1976 punk rush because he had a job as a window dresser in a Victorian emporium. While the band had contemporaries in Elvis Costello and Robyn Hitchcock, the late-’70s new wave stopped short of welcoming Leonard Bernstein nostalgists.
Assembling the Skylarking tracklist, Rundgren had shot down all but one addition to the band’s catalog of smalltown vignettes. To his credit, it may be their very best. Grounded by a snare that sounds airlifted in from a quarry, “Earn Enough for Us” spins a power-pop yarn pitting love against the material restrictions of poverty: “So you’re saying that we’re gonna be three/Now, a father’s what I’ll be,” Partridge sings between snakes-and-ladders hooks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so proud, but the belt’s already tight/I’ll get another job at night...”
Despite rankling Partridge, Skylarking’s departure from sociology frees space for wildcards like “That’s Really Super, Supergirl,” a reject that Rundgren rescued, sped up, and made garish. His funhouse keys and a helter-skelter bassline lean into the lyrics’ comics-nerd pathos, Partridge sarcastically commending a girlfriend who presumes to ditch him for his own good. On tape, it came out as a burbling blast of Disneyfied pop. Partridge was horrified.
“Could you play it a bit tighter?” he yelled, exasperated, as Rundgren perched behind the keyboard.
“That was good enough!” the producer replied.
Rundgren was gallivanting about like a ludicrous child savant—one moment darkly inscrutable, the next digging out cobwebbed keyboards and swaggering into the light. While Partridge fumed, Moulding and Gregory wrestled with their own frustrations. A month into recording, relocating to San Francisco for overdubs failed to heal rifts cleaved between the trio years earlier. During bass sessions for “Earn Enough for Us,” Moulding briefly quit the band, collateral damage in a Rundgren-Partridge power struggle that was now crescendoing. At one point, says the producer, Partridge fantasized aloud about plunging an axe into his head.
Occasional stabs at communication worked miracles. Rundgren’s ability to brandish spectacular arrangements from his back pocket freed the band to reinvent songs on the spot. On a whim, he flipped a dirge called “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul” into something fancy and louche; the recorded version saunters like a Scott Walker Bond theme. Partridge was justifiably wary of Rundgren’s exhibitionism, but in the wonderland of Skylarking, where Moulding’s bucolic songs are right at home, it is Partridge’s—bedecked in half-drunk keys and Vegas suave—that astonish.
For a while, Partridge feared the completed album was ruined. He lambasted “Herr Rundgren” in the press and, as usual, fought bitterly with the label—but this time, with roles reversed, it was Virgin selling him on his music’s merit. As Skylarking awaited its fate, he and Moulding sulked in his Swindon loft and, on a giant board spread across the floor, set about re-enacting the great battles of 18th Century Europe.
Lead single “Grass” bombed in the UK, and the album stalled at No. 90—a death sentence even by their commercial standards, albeit grim vindication for Partridge. But in America, a one-time single contender demoted to a B-side was making hay. On college radio, “Dear God” had sparked a moral panic: its narrator, griping with an absent god, appalled Bible Belt Christians and prompted a bomb threat to a Florida radio station. Everyone else seemed to love it. In a sheepish U-turn, the band’s American label, Geffen, smuggled the track onto the U.S. release of Skylarking. Over six months, the album outsold XTC’s entire prior catalog three times over.
For all “Dear God”’s histrionic conviction, Partridge remains skeptical of his biggest hit, a pedantic screed that itches with a trite, secular holiness of its own. As a college-rock time capsule, it’s delightful; as for its moral import, Partridge was spitballing more soulful takes with interviewers. “If you can create Heaven for yourself without creating Hell for somebody else, fine,” he told the fanzine Limelight. “Try and create Heaven for somebody else as well, but don’t create Hell for anyone, ’cos that’s less than animal.”
Partridge had finally earned the cachet to pursue a better contract with Virgin. But negotiations faltered and, after two more albums, the band went on strike, eventually winning the right to release elsewhere in 1997. Partridge never lost his air of thwarted ambition, drifting into the future for which he seemed destined: tinkering away in his home studio, mostly free of expectations and interlopers. (That includes Moulding, who stepped back from XTC in 2006, effectively ending the group.) Among his arsenal of guitars, Partridge now keeps company with a legion of toy soldiers, battle-prepped and awaiting its master’s command.
In Skylarking’s immanent grace, you sense the perverse chemistry of warmongers relishing a battlefield bloodbath. A sweet photo from the sessions catches their repressed innocence: Gregory, Rundgren, and Partridge in fleeting unity, mouths agape, serenely piping out vowel sounds. Here you have Skylarking’s ideal form: three adult boys accidentally in their thirties, pooling harmonies for Partridge to plunge into, like something beautiful shot from the sky.


With saucy charm and ruthless takedowns, motor-mouthed Brooklyn rapper Cakes Da Killa claims center stage on a collaborative EP of house bangers with producer Proper Villains.

Cakes da Killa / Proper Villains: Muvaland EP

Muvaland EP

Cakes da Killa knows there’s nothing more lethal than a deep cut swiftly dealt. The Brooklyn rapper is a master of unrelenting flows and skewering affronts, made all the more ruthless by his razor’s-edge humor. On the new EP Muvaland, Cakes teams up with New York producer Proper Villains, whose vigorous house beats don’t rival Cakes’ intensity so much as egg him on. The music is pumping, primed for Cakes’ motor-mouthed takedowns. His endless digs—at squares, lesser MCs, and unworthy beaus—are served at top speed, but it’s Cakes’ saucy charm that makes them land just right.
Muvaland clocks in at a trim 14 minutes, including two clipped interludes. Cakes’ takes are so spicy that the first song starts with a sizzle, a high hiss that precedes the spitfire sax licks, aluminum high-hats, and circular French touch bassline of “In Da House.” Cakes bounces through, asserting dominance in the art of playful insults. “How you never gettin’ fucked but keep a stick up your butt?” he asks. Forget kicking a man while he’s down—Cakes will dance all over the sucker.
“Don Dada” elevates Cakes’ knack for provocation. Easily Muvaland’s best track, it’s a turbocharged banger with the same ecstatic, scrappy energy as “212”-era Azealia Banks. Buoyed by Proper Villains’ crisp hip-house, Cakes growls, snarls, and snaps—and still manages to enunciate every sharpened consonant. He dethrones MCs with “flows softer than marshmallows and goose feathers” and razes skanks with the EP’s most memorable line: “All you dick riders on my body like vultures/You did it for the clout, I did it for the culture.” Filthy, joyful, and fearless, “Don Dada” captures every facet of Cakes’ style.
Hercules and Love Affair alum Nomi Ruiz joins for “ICU,” Muvaland’s most blissed-out offering, a late-night club cut that doubles as a mating call. Cakes rattles off dedications and instructions, as if beckoning a boy across the dancefloor. Ruiz plays wingman and jumps in on the insatiable hook: “Ooh baby don’t ya just stand there, I know you like what you see/Paws pressed all over my body.” The final line is a succession of “de dee dees” more satisfying than they have any right to be: In a record packed with syllables, these nonverbal ones communicate the most pleasure.
Muvaland came together in the first weeks of lockdown, when Cakes and Proper Villains found themselves in need of creative collaboration. Proper Villains supplied the beats, and Cakes laid down the entire EP in the span of one afternoon—a testament to the speed and precision of all Cakes’ records, as well as his arresting freestyles. Present circumstances are hardly ideal for club music, but Muvaland bangs on with searing beats and scalding verses. Cakes decks himself in pink lace and diamonds, tosses off the haters riding his ass “tighter than True Religions,” and becomes the only rapper to successfully rhyme “quarantine” with “guillotine.” It’s a 14-minute flex parade leading straight to the throne.

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This out-rock supergroup featuring Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and Chris Corsano doesn't disappoint.

False Flag

The question of what to release first is a dilemma for any new group, but especially so when the individual members already have recognizable styles. They can test the waters with a quick, don't-hold-us-to-this EP, or roll the full-length dice and hope their sound stands up without pinning them down. Rangda-- the trio of guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano-- have figured out a way to do both. False Flag is like two three-song EPs checker-boarded into one stellar album. Each odd-numbered track offers improvised blare, while the evens are all structured songs. That division may seem pretty Jekyll/Hyde, but False Flag never feels like play-acting. Together only half a year, Rangda is already making music that sounds both fully developed and open-ended.
Which means that the trio's noisier leanings are just as drenched in thought and interaction as their melodic side. Their all-out improvisations could have easily sounded like weekend workouts, but intense concentration and muscular effort course through these escalating jams. Most impressive is the telepathy between Bishop and Chasny. On opener "Waldorf Hysteria", their racing chords have a rhyming quality, as if the pair were playing catch with a ball of noise. Corsano fares just as well. His cascading drumming on "Fist Family" is so entrancing, it locks the guitars like charmed snakes into long, humming tones.
Snake charming and other Eastern rituals factor in everything Bishop does, and there are traces of his worldly influences throughout False Flag (the band name comes from a Balinese demon queen). But those influences are never played up as exotic or grafted on like a fake accent. Raga-ish guitar figures are mostly just hinted at, and the ritualistic breaks in "Serrated Edges" are as natural as those in the best Sun City Girls blasts. In fact, the most intriguing influences here are Western. "Bull Lore" sounds like Earth's dusty twang mixed with the hypnosis of the Beatles' "Because", while the soft "Sarcophagi" evokes the halting minimalism of Loren Connors.
False Flag ends with a blissful vista called "Plain of Jars", perhaps the closest thing here to a Six Organs/Sun City hybrid. Again, Western influences poke through, particularly the drifting, we've-got-all-night excursions of Sonic Youth's "Rain on Tin", Neil Young's "Down by the River", and Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun". But what's most striking about "Plain of Jars" is how much shorter it feels than its 15-minute length. Close your eyes and you can practically see all the different paths Rangda might have trekked down were they not restricted by the confines of a recording. The same is true of False Flag as a whole-- its fertile sounds suggest a wide-open future for a band that hopefully has a long life planned.


Da' Nic is a new five-song EP meant as a warm-up for the forthcoming Dime Trap, which will be the first album T.I. will record under his original TIP nickname. Though it's a short release, Da' Nic is a strong record from one of the better rappers we have these days and a breath of fresh air from a guy who was treading the path of "reality show dad" just a few years back.

Da' Nic EP

Here is your weekly reminder of time's unending march: 2016 marks 15 years of music from Clifford "T.I." Harris. Since 2001, the Atlanta rap icon has been churning out hits—be they of the "mixtape street classic" or "mainstream feat. Rihanna" variety—and thanks to those hits, he has resisted a slow fade into obscurity. In fact, he has packed his dance card to the gills, what with his recent appearance in Marvel's Ant-Man and the usual busywork that a globe-trotting, "Blurred Lines" appearing, Iggy Azalea co-signing (and then disowning) Grand Hustle label head has to slog through. While his hardcore fans remain supportive (did you know that T.I. has never had an album that didn't sell at least 250,000 copies?) it wouldn't really shock anyone if he decided to phone it in as an artist by now.
In recent interviews though, Harris is adamant on returning to his old ways and Da' Nic, the new five-song EP meant as a warm-up for the forthcoming Dime Trap, showcases this shift effortlessly. Trap will be the first album Harris will record under his original TIP nickname, which he eschewed for T.I. way back when in order to avoid confusion with Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. As a release, Da' Nic isn't going to pacify any longing you might have for Trap-A-Holics voice REAL TRAP SHIT, but it's a strong record from one of the better rappers we have these days and a breath of fresh air from a guy who was treading the path of "reality show dad" just a few years back. If the last few T.I. releases have sounded complicated and unnecessarily heavy, Da' Nic sounds like the guy most of us met on 2003's Trap Muzik finally heading back to his old neighborhood to sit on the porch and talk some shit.
Like many others, T.I. has occasionally fallen beneath the weight of the Major Label Rolodex. (Just because you can put Usher or Chris Brown on a song doesn't mean you should, dig?) On Da' Nic there's only one feature: The London on Da Track-produced toe-tapper "Peanut Butter and Jelly", which features guest verses from "Young" rappers both new (Thug) and old (Dro).
More than anything, this record sounds like the work of a seasoned veteran who's annoyed that everyone isn't giving him his dues as a good rapper. Even on his most bloated releases—2007's T.I. vs. T.I.P being the best example—count on T.I. for at least one moment where he showcases his ability to ramp up his verses when he even senses that people are sleeping on him. On Da' Nic, that moment is "Ain't Gonna See It Coming"  ("No, I'm not that old nigga think that he run it/ And talkin' bout what he did back in the day/ I'm just as vicious as ever, I'm brilliant and clever and still 'bout that action today"). It's refreshing to hear him serve notice.
Let's be honest: While the EP is a welcome return to form, it's still five songs. You aren't going to find hidden treasure here. However, for those who have said they want the old T.I. back—the Lil' Flip- and Shawty Lo-obliterating King of the South who spit acid when he wasn't making the girls dance, all while wearing a Braves fitted cocked on his head at an angle that doesn't make any logical sense—Da' Nic promises some hope for his upcoming The Dime Trap.


The debut solo album from the Raincoats bassist is adventurous and collaborative and vibrant and furious.

I Play My Bass Loud

Gina Birch is frustrated with her friends, fuming at the neighbors, and spiteful of the in-crowd—but she saves her deepest and most abiding rage for the patriarchy. Birch unwittingly became a feminist icon in 1977 when she formed the Raincoats, a groundbreaking post-punk band who influenced Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, and the larger riot grrrl movement. Only when violinist Vicky Aspinall joined the group did Birch and co-founder Ana da Silva realize their project’s political power. “Vicky said, ‘You may not call yourselves feminists but what you’re doing is a feminist act. You’re doing, rather than being done to,’” Birch remembers. In a career spanning over four decades, Birch embraced this philosophy in an unending torrent of creativity as a musician, film director, and painter. I Play My Bass Loud, her debut solo album at age 67, is both a celebration of her status as a godmother of feminist rock and a furious protest against the persecution of women.
The album’s cover is a self-portrait of Birch from an art school Super 8 film in which she screamed directly into the camera lens for three minutes. She carried that spirit of dissent through her work in the Raincoats, the Hangovers, and the Gluts, but rarely has she been so forthcoming about the source of her indignation. “When you ask me if I’m a feminist/I say to hell with powerlessness, to hell with loneliness/Damn all those people putting women down,” she sings on the anthemic single “Feminist Song.” For all her outrage, Birch is aware of her role as a mentor to a younger generation of activists. On “Pussy Riot,” her tribute to the Russian collective, she reminds us, “We have to remember freedom’s not a given/It’s something to fight for every day/We have to remember it’s our duty to fight for those who’re still in chains.”
Birch kept the files for the songs that would become I Play My Bass Loud on her computer for years, occasionally adding vocal lines like an ongoing audio diary. The effect is of a conversation with herself: whispering, howling, dictating, and declaiming, sometimes repeating herself and sometimes adding commentary. Her voice doubles and triples and pans across the stereo field. “I Will Never Wear Stilettos,” a song that is as much about the threat of violence as it is about fashion, features a running monologue about footwear. “I’m not saying the city is a warzone/But can you run in them?” she asks and then answers herself with a list of shoes that are comfortable (and safe) for the streets. On “Big Mouth,” a witty reproof of gossip, Birch autotunes her voice high and low to turn herself into a whole group of feuding friends.
Despite its long, solitary genesis, I Play My Bass Loud is anything but a lonely bedroom-pop album. Birch recruited a host of collaborators to expand the palette, including Thurston Moore, whose feedback-drenched guitar animates the ’90s alt-rock jam “Wish I Was You,” and da Silva, whose monotron lends “Feminist Song” a spacy ambience. The producer Youth helped Birch find the final form for tracks like “I Am Rage,” a slow burner a la Jesus and Mary Chain that began as a spoken word piece.
For all its adventurousness, I Play My Bass Loud is fundamentally a bass album. Birch chose her instrument in the Raincoats because it seemed easier than guitar or drums, but she grew to love how the low end takes up space in genres like dub reggae. On this record, she calls attention to how women players have used the instrument to make space for themselves in rock music. The rollicking, feel-good title track features four women bassists—Shanne Bradley, Emily Elhaj, Helen McCookerybook, and Jane Crockford—in addition to Birch herself. On an album about oppression and injustice, the song is a welcome reminder of how art can change individual lives, if not the world. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder, what is my job?” she asks. Her answer joyfully affirms their collective freedom as artists and as women: “I play my bass loud!”


Philadelphia tweegazers keep up ambient-pop's ethereal flame, losing themselves in the trebly haze of early Creation Records, pop melodies barely shining through all the layers of noise.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal

Scribble Mural Comic Journal

A review of The Velvet Underground & Nico in Boston's first rockzine,  Vibrations, suggested listeners put themselves in the frame of mind they might assume for Indian music. Of course, the Velvet Underground's narcotic repetitions-- influenced by John Cale's association with minimalist composer La Monte Young-- struck the mainline for a new style of pop, similarly connected to raga's enveloping drone. Uh, maybe you've heard of Can, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, or My Bloody Valentine?
When listening to A Sunny Day in Glasgow, it's perhaps best to put yourself in the frame of mind you might assume for those bands, too. Sure, this brother-sister trio aren't in the same league, but they're one of several exciting young acts keeping up ambient-pop's ethereal flame (a few years after M83 and others put their electronic spin on Loveless swoon). Where Atlanta's Deerhunter echo the psych-rock meditations of Spacemen 3, these Philadelphia tweegazers lose themselves in the trebly haze of early Creation Records, pop melodies barely shining through all the layers of noise. Then they kill you with ramshackle C86 adorableness.
On Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day in Glasgowsculpt fluffy electronic textures, overdubbed funhouse-mirror guitars, and Kate-Bush-down-a-well vocals into a debut album that warps (and greatly improves upon) last year's self-released The Sunniest Day Ever EP. The project's founder, Ben Daniels of local "supergroup" King Kong Ding Dong, twists the sweetness in identical twins Lauren and Robin's voices into eerie new forms, whether off-kilter dial tones to open the thick-- and, hey, ringing-- "A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons", echoing raindrops on "Our Change Into Rain Is No Change at All (Talkin' 'bout Us)", or stereo-panning schoolgirl chants amid alien guitars on "C'Mon" . The sisters' soft breathiness is most, well, breathtaking on cosmopolitan teenage lament "The Horn Song", or with gliding guitar, pebbly beats, and a moonstruck melody on album highlight "5:15 Train".
Within A Sunny Day in Glasgow's aesthetic, their singing is less the point than the sonic environment they help create (for those gorgeous, submerged tunes!). So deceptively casual opener "Wake Up Pretty" dreams up the surreal-life dance party that is the ensuing "No. 6 Van Karman Street", and "Ghost in the Graveyard" begins with the pounding drums and background dissonance of an impassioned anthem by actual Glaswegians the Twilight Sad, then never develops into one. Meanwhile, "Panic Attacks Are What Make Me 'Me'" swells into a jingling alarum, shifting the details gradually enough to encourage what Eno called "perceptual drift," and then suddenly changing direction. Dizzy? No, dazzled.
As with Deerhunter's Cryptograms, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's debut becomes clearer as it nears an end. Album closer "The Best Summer Ever" at last distills the band's meteorological whorls into a psych-pop sunburst befitting its title. One of the band's older songs (it opened The Sunniest Day Ever EP) this track illustrates a notable divergence: While Deerhunter have moved toward tightly focused songs, the most recent recordings on Scribble Mural Comic Journal venture further into nuanced atmospherics. From a certain point of view, their journey is the same.


On their third album as a trio, the prog metal band refines their interplay and finds a sweet spot between technical precision and human flourish.

Parrhesia

Animals as Leaders began after the disbandment of guitarist Tosin Abasi’s prior band Reflux in 2006, when he was approached by heavy metal label Prosthetic about creating a solo project. A mostly self-trained guitarist—he picked up early skills by watching old hair metal instructional videos—Abasi only agreed to the proposal after taking a year to study at the Atlanta Institute of Music. When he was ready, he returned to the label with one condition: He wanted to include other perspectives besides his own. While Abasi recorded guitar and bass for Animals as Leaders’ self-titled 2009 debut, Misha Mansoor—engineer and founding member of prog metal band Periphery—programmed drums and synths. From the beginning, collaboration was key.
Animals as Leaders developed a reputation for mixing the precise rhythms and hi-fi crunch of djent metal with subtle flourishes of jazz and classical. Guitarist and engineer Javier Reyes joined shortly after the first album’s release, followed by drummer Matt Garstka in 2012, fulfilling Abasi and Mansoor’s initial vision for a trio (Mansoor, who occasionally still produces for the group, has been dubbed their “silent fourth member”). Parrhesia is their third album together since 2014, and their most unified work since that year’s The Joy of Motion. Their music is at its best when the trio taps into the soul and feeling within the exacting precision of their compositions, and if 2016’s The Madness of Many occasionally tipped the balance too far toward robotic technicality, Parrhesia readjusts its footing, finding a sweet spot between technical precision and human flourish.
The average Animals song can feel like hearing the soundtrack to a grungy sci-fi epic before you see the movie: waves of synthetic and organic sounds crash against each other with post-apocalyptic flair. Occasionally, the totality of the sound can overwhelm—the sheer amount of textures generated by just three musicians is as impressive and exhausting as a trip to the quantum realm. Parrhesia is still an assault on the senses, but Abasi, Reyes, and Garstka have refined their triple act so that their interplay pops in beguiling ways. Garstka’s drum patterns form a lattice with Abasi and Reyes’ hammered fretwork on standout “Gestaltzerfall” and “The Problem of Other Minds,” and all three streak across the twinkling synth arrangements on lead single “Monomyth.” Their dynamic sounds comfortable without feeling stale. On Parrhesia, the trio’s decade’s worth of camaraderie allows them to subtly prod at the foundations of djent with jazzy (“Red Miso”) and industrial (“Micro-Aggressions”) flourishes while still providing rhythms to keep necks bouncing.
Abasi and Reyes’ guitar work continues to be a marvel. Their 8-stringed arrangements are as flashy and technical as ever, but their relationship morphs from song to song. On “Monomyth” and closing track “Gordian Naught,” they’re dueling dragons jockeying for position in open skies; in the first third of “The Problem of Other Minds,” they play call-and-response with gossamer chords and rhythm. This kind of intricate highwire act is the group’s bread and butter, but it’s rarely been so unpredictable. That foundation is solidified by Garstka’s awe-inspiring work on the drumkit. One minute, his double-kick drum shots rattle like cannon fire across “Gestaltzerfall”; the next, snare and cymbal crashes accentuate the smooth notes of “Thoughts and Prayers.”
A sense of freedom and curiosity courses through Parrhesia. Animals as Leaders aren’t redefining the formula they’ve spent the last 13 years perfecting, but there’s a buzz to every distorted guitar lick and machine-gun drum roll that proves the trio is still pushing each other to new ground. The subtle markings of their growing bond—of their trust in each other’s skill and imagination—help to unearth the soul of their synthetic wonderland.