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 a teenage fever dream, the mainstream pop-punk debut of Avril Lavigne.

Let Go

Avril Lavigne’s origin story would be the perfect American fairytale if it wasn’t so undeniably Canadian. She grew up in Napanee, Ontario, a small town best known for its proximity to the country’s largest highway and its selection of fine truck stops. She sang Pentecostal hymns in her family’s church and performed in local productions of Godspell and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. It was little more than an average, provincial life.
When the nearest big-city country station held a singing contest, a 14-year-old Lavigne sent in a tape for a chance to sing with none other than Shania Twain, the Canadian country-pop superstar. Lavigne didn’t just acquit herself: She won the damn thing, which meant driving two-plus hours to the nation’s capital and belting Twain’s brassy 1993 hit “What Made You Say That” in front of a packed Ottawa hockey arena. At the time, Lavigne told Twain she wanted to be “a famous singer.”
Lavigne had no idea how quickly her dream would come true: Within a few years, she’d be sneering on the cover of Rolling Stone in a black tank top and a curt plaid skirt, winkingly labeled “the Britney slayer.” The onetime country-pop princess who performed hits by Faith Hill and Sarah McLachlan at an early record label audition had become a gleeful anarchist, a pop-punk supernova who skated through videos for hits like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi,” causing chaos in ratty T-shirts and neckties. She wasn’t disingenuous or calculating; she was a teenager, one whose formative experiences and changes in taste were taking place while she navigated the expectations that come with a major-label record deal. The reaction between Lavigne’s volatile energy and the music industry’s commercial imperative produced her 2002 debut Let Go, a rebuttal of Spears-Aguilerian pop—overtly sexual, vaguely urban, hyper-processed—churned out by the exact same kind of hit factory. It boasts a handful of genre-changing smashes and mood swings that’d put a high school sophomore to shame.
While Lavigne’s ascent from local radio contests to the top of the charts seems rapid in retrospect, her career took shape in fits and starts. Nine months after she appeared on stage with Twain, Cliff Fabri—the manager who shepherded her through the earliest phase of her career—watched her sing country karaoke in a Kingston, Ontario Chapters, the Canadian equivalent of being discovered in a college town’s Barnes & Noble. “I was thinking of her as another Sheryl Crow. They both had the same small-town roots,” Fabri told The New York Times in 2002. “Then I was thinking Fiona Apple, because of her independence. She definitely had attitude. So my line was Sheryl Crow meets Fiona Apple.”
By the summer of 2000, Lavigne was a known commodity within the small Canadian music industry, with executives driving up to Napanee to hear her sing in her parents’ basement. Lavigne spent that summer and fall heading back and forth between Napanee and Manhattan working on a development deal, and she was bold enough to ask her high school principal for course credit given the time she was spending in the studio. Within a few months, she’d accrued enough buzz to score an audition for L.A. Reid, then the president of Arista. A few hours after singing for Reid, Lavigne and her team were scooped up by a limo and whisked to the top of the World Trade Center to celebrate her lucrative, major-label record deal.
While Arista was prepared to invest significant time and money in Lavigne—Fabri told the Toronto Star she’d signed a two-album deal for over $1 million—she was struggling to find an appropriate sound. Inspiration didn’t strike until Lavigne traveled to Los Angeles in May 2001, where she worked with journeyman songwriter Clif Magness. The first song they wrote together was “Unwanted,” an angsty, crunchy statement of purpose that suggested Lavigne was more interested in meathead riffage than contemporary Nashville sparkle. (They also came up with roaring album opener “Losing Grip,” which beat Evanescence to the nu-metal-pop punch by a solid year.) Lavigne had finally settled on an aesthetic that satisfied her evolving taste, but her label was aghast that their new signee—still barely old enough to drive—was veering into heavy alt-rock. “Arista was drop-dead shit afraid that I would come out with a whole album that sounded like ‘Unwanted’ and ‘Losing Grip,’” Lavigne told Rolling Stone in March 2003. “I swear they wanted to drop me.”
When they sent her back into the studio, they paired her with Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards, and Scott Spock, a production team that worked together under the extremely aughts name the Matrix. “We’d been listening to the kind of stuff she had been doing—it had a Faith Hill kind of vibe,” said Christy in a 2006 interview. “As soon as she walked in the door we knew this was just wrong. This kid had melted toothbrushes up her arm, her hair was in braids and she wore black skater boots. She didn’t seem like the Faith Hill type.” They played Lavigne a song written in the style of her earlier demos, and she hated it. When they heard “Unwanted,” they scrapped their work and went back to the drawing board. Lavigne and the Matrix came together the very next day and wrote “Complicated,” the song that made her a teen icon.
The exact division of labor behind “Complicated” remains a point of contention. When Lavigne spoke to Rolling Stone in 2003, she insisted that she was the primary author; the Matrix argued that her contributions were far less substantial. “Avril would come in and sing a few melodies, change a word here or there,” Christy told Rolling Stone. “She came up with a couple of things in ‘Complicated,’ like, instead of ‘Take off your stupid clothes,’ she wanted it to say ‘preppy clothes.’” When asked to comment, L.A. Reid opted for poptimism through an executive’s lens. “If I’m looking for a single for an artist, I don’t care who writes it,” Reid told Rolling Stone.
No matter where the song falls on the authenticity spectrum, “Complicated” is the teenage state of mind: a hissing, bubbling cauldron of anger, confusion, naïveté, lust, paranoia, and desperation. It’s a moment in time where you’re childlike enough to beg for a simple explanation for everything and just mature enough to know there’s no such thing. (Maybe you’d neg a friend by saying, “Chill out, what you yelling for?” and then scream at the top of your lungs a few seconds later.) It’s a phase where you can barely understand your own behavior, let alone anyone else’s, and the quality that set Lavigne apart from peers like Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton—singer-songwriters mining the same musical and emotional terrain—was her ability to imbue her music with the thrill and terror of real teenhood.
The song echoes throughout the rest of Let Go: Lavigne’s need for clarity and authenticity, her struggle to find solid ground, her general distaste for the bourgeois tyranny of polo shirts. It also sounds incredible, in part because the Matrix understood that Lavigne could sing with enough defiance to camouflage their clear, starry-eyed pop melodies. After opening with some lazy record-scratching and the brightest, bluest chords this side of “Free Fallin’,” “Complicated” locks into a military structure: twinkling keyboards, tight drum loops, a teasing vocal hook that can still send a karaoke bar into a frenzy. Everyone involved knew it was a hit right away, and when Reid heard it he sent Lavigne back to the Matrix to bang out a dozen songs just like it.
Lavigne felt conflicted about her work with the Matrix—they ended up contributing five songs to Let Go, the same number as Magness—and was practically disowning it while Let Go was still flying off of store shelves. “I don’t feel like ‘Complicated’ represents me and my ability to write,” she confessed to Rolling Stone. “But without ‘Complicated,’ I bet you anything I wouldn’t have even sold a million records. The songs I did with the Matrix, yeah, they were good for my first record, but I don’t want to be that pop anymore.” She’d finally figured out what kind of music she wanted to make, only to be told it wasn’t meeting expectations. Being painted as another teen pop star fresh off the assembly line just added insult to injury.
Her sense of grievance aside, the songs Lavigne made with the Matrix are Let Go’s indisputable highlights, striking a perfect balance of scrappy attitude and radio-ready polish. Second single “Sk8er Boi” is Lavigne at her most pugnacious, snarling the chorus in tight harmony with herself over power chords that sound like they’ve been popped in the microwave until sizzling. It’s also the album’s most developed example of storytelling, though that isn’t saying much: A high school beauty queen can’t appreciate her local diamond in the rough, and she’s left to watch him rock out on MTV with a triumphant Lavigne by his side while she nurses her baby in suburban hell. It sounds like Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” as if written by a normal teenager instead of a precocious musical cyborg.
She took her first stab at a power ballad on “I’m With You,” a desperate, string-backed plea for companionship that sounds like a late-’90s Aerosmith B-side. And Let Go’s hidden gem is “Anything but Ordinary,” a coming-of-age anthem with a melody like pure spring water. (It’s also the one song on the album that tests your suspension of disbelief with its lyrics—listen and hear Lavigne describe the world as “A beautiful accident/Turbulent, succulent/Opulent, permanent” in the bridge.) L.A. Reid would’ve made it the album’s title track if Lavigne hadn’t intervened. She’d already been forced to subjugate her instincts. Couldn’t she just name the album?
Let Go’s phenomenal success—it’s been certified platinum seven times over in the U.S. alone—may not have single-handedly slayed Britney Spears, but it helped make room for songs reliant on alternative palettes. As the teen-pop stars of the late ’90s leaned into hip-hop, R&B, and electronic influences, Lavigne and her contemporaries filled the resulting vacuum with pop melodies and punk attitude. The Matrix quickly landed on a formula—clean, spiky riffs, punchy live drums, sparkling background atmospherics—that yielded minor hits for then-Disney icon Hilary Duff and indie legend Liz Phair, both making bids for mainstream success. It wasn’t long before up-and-coming stars like Duff, Ashlee Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan adapted the same formula. Lavigne spawned enough imitators for The Globe and Mail to put together “Pieces of Avril,” a 2004 trend piece cataloguing the would-be sk8er girls—Fefe Dobson! Katy Rose! Skye Sweetnam!—emerging in her wake. This wasn’t a phenomenon limited to female artists, either: Pop-punk boy bands like Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Yellowcard landed on the charts with slightly chunkier riffs and whiny, exasperated vocals.
Her influence continued to trickle down through the Disney talent pipeline—Hannah Montana wouldn’t exist without “Sk8er Boi” as a template—and even Taylor Swift, who ended up becoming the country-pop ingenue Arista thought they’d found with Lavigne. Lavigne herself earned a co-writing credit on “Breakaway,” the title track on Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 album of the same name. Of course, Breakaway is best remembered for “Since U Been Gone,” the song that launched Clarkson’s career, revitalized Max Martin’s, and quickly entered the contemporary pop canon. And while Martin and Dr. Luke have credited the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” for inspiration, it’s hard to imagine “Since U Been Gone” becoming a massive hit without Lavigne clearing the path.
Let Go is still rippling through the musical pond today: When asked about Lavigne for a Billboard cover story earlier this year, next-generation indie heavyweights like Soccer Mommy, Alex Lahey, and Snail Mail—who said “I just wanted to be her so badly”—credited her as a role model, a teenage girl whose stardom was built on videos spent trashing the mall and songs about guys who break your heart by smoking too much weed. And yet, since her debut, Lavigne has never struck gold in the same way, veering back and forth between surly post-grunge (2004’s sophomore effort Under My Skin) and songs like “Girlfriend,” a bratty 2007 collaboration with Dr. Luke that hit No. 1 but felt like a concession. Listening to later singles like “Here’s to Never Growing Up” and “17” feels like chewing pieces of dime-store bubblegum when you’re old enough to make your own appointments at the dentist.
Lavigne has spent the last few years fighting back from Lyme disease and navigating the end of her marriage to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger, and her impending pivot into Christian music—judging by recent single “Head Above Water,” her first in half a decade—is a full-circle return to her religious, small-town roots. Let Go is the foundation of her surprisingly considerable legacy. Her feelings about it might be, well, complicated: She’d grown up enough by its release to know it wasn’t the album she wanted to make, and she never quite escaped its shadow. But you can imagine her listening to Let Go like she’s flipping through a yearbook or watching some long-forgotten DVD from a high-school talent show. It feels like a true dispatch from the frontlines of a teenager’s brain: unsure of itself, inelegant and occasionally inane, crackling with nervous energy.


The Austin quintet’s debut fuses grimy post-punk, agit-jazz, and warped disco into a unique, oblique, and cheeky sound of their own.

Strange Burden

Thom Waddill, frontman of Austin rock quintet Font, summons his lyrics in semi-conscious fits of instinct. Dream recall and automatic writing; scrawled poems and nonsensical muttering. Waddill seems to live among towers of haphazardly stacked pages—Cormac McCarthy essays and dog-eared Dostoevskys—clipping from them like a scissor-happy kid. The angular, polyrhythmic outbursts from his bandmates are just as reflexive, often built from the drums up during improvisatory practice sessions. On their debut album, Strange Burden, Font fuse grimy post-punk guitar, combustive percussion, and blazing synth riffs, committing roughly three years of evolving live sets to tape. They lose nothing in the process. Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.
Font is populated by multi-taskers; most members dart between strings, synthesizer, or a sampling pad at any given moment. During gigs, bassist Roman Parnell and guitarist Anthony Laurence swap machinery with Waddill at the front of the stage, while Font’s two drummers, Jack Owens and Logan Wagner, dish out dueling rhythms in the back. Wagner stands while performing, and of course, also plays a sampler. This kind of dexterity only aids Font’s teeming arrangements, which dissect and reanimate a pile of hyphenated genres. But trying to identify Font’s music is a slippery business; post-punk, art-rock, dance-punk, noise-pop…they are all accurate but insufficient descriptors.
Font have been pretty up front about their influences: Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and Radiohead have all been name-checked. But they are also channeling the warped disco of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, James Chance’s agit-jazz, and prog fuckery à la Squid and Black Midi. Font’s earliest singles are stirring and pushy. “Sentence I” is a twisted punk sermon spurred by Parnell’s elastic bass licks and Wagner’s thwacked cowbell. On “It,” Waddill contorts his voice between breathy yelps and ragged shouts, as Laurence’s guitar screeches like a circular saw gnawing through steel. The song is an early instance of Waddill’s absurdist humor:
It comes through the body
It opens the door
It crawls up my leg while my mom’s at the store
It insults my dad
It calls out for God
It suns on the deck with abandon
This faceless “It” is at first menacing, suggesting some kind of hostile, inhuman species. But the sudden swerve into a grocery store, and then a porch chair where “It” tans “with abandon,” feel like cockeyed portraits of the mundane. Most of Font’s songs modulate tension in this way, and Waddill is keen to conjure hyper-specific, mismatched visuals—as if he’s playing a solo round of Exquisite Corpse.
Waddill is fascinated with surreal and precise imagery, but many of his lyrics celebrate the pure musicality of words. On “The Golden Calf,” which lurches from downtempo ’90s alt to throbbing industrial, he sings of “breastlike curtains sagging burdens earthbound,” “fingering velour handbags,” and “asbestos in the narthex.” He has an innate grasp of poetic language. Slant rhymes and clashing consonants seem to spill out of him without sounding overworked. He manipulates his voice with similar ease—it can sound as taut and clean as platinum thread, or frayed like the edges of a wind-battered flier.
Clocking in under 30 minutes, Strange Burden is perfectly paced and sequenced, maintaining its charge as Font adjust their intensity. Amid the jittery beats and processed grit is “Looking At Engines,” a sneaky power ballad that could be sold to the 1975. Just picture the irreverent Matty Healy belting the song’s funniest line: “Your father eating peach pits like they were smaller peaches/He’s never seen the snow and I don’t think he knows what teal is.” It’s another taste of Waddill’s potent brevity. We have a small amount of strange information, but can easily inspect the character’s pores and fingernails.
But the crown jewel of Strange Burden is lead single “Hey Kekulé,” with its pulsing disco keys and crossfire percussion. Waddill penned the lyrics after reading Cormac McCarthy’s essay on the German chemist August Kekulé, who discovered the ring-shaped molecular structure of the chemical benzene when he dreamt of a snake eating its own tail. McCarthy’s piece examines the subconscious and its pesky habit of communicating in cryptic symbols. But Font flourish in this murky realm, and they are thrilled to receive all of the odd creatures that crawl out of it.


The Super Furry Animals frontman has always been political, but he’s never sounded as spiteful as he does on this satirical portrait of the United States in 2018.

Babelsberg

“God! Show me magic!” Gruff Rhys screamed on the first song of the first Super Furry Animals album, and 22 years later he’s still waiting patiently. Even as his band of psych-rock shapeshifters waded through all manner of global epidemics—pollution, war, technology overload, evangelicalism, and, um, vampire bats—he never lost his grace, sense of humor, or faith in the underdog. While the Furries have been on pause for much of the current decade, Rhys has continued juggling absurdity and profundity, albeit with a more delicate touch, as a solo artist. But the ceaseless stream of bad political news that flooded the past couple of years tested even this eternal optimist’s mettle. And when he wasn’t contemplating the doomsday clock, he had to keep an eye on the actual one: He recorded his new album, Babelsberg, in a Bristol studio that was set to be demolished for condo redevelopment.
On his previous solo effort, 2014’s American Interior, Rhys embarked on a musical road trip across the Midwest, retracing the footsteps of an 18th-century ancestor who ventured stateside in search of a mythic Welsh-speaking indigenous tribe. Babelsberg is another journey through the American landscape, but it forsakes speculative history to survey the nation’s current condition. Lyrically speaking, the album features some of the most sobering, spiteful songwriting of Rhys’ career, with little of his trademark whimsy to cut through the black-sky mood. If its omnipresent, string-swaddled arrangements (courtesy of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales) initially feel like a soothing antidote to the bleak subject matter, they also serve an equally provocative purpose.
After all, the plush, countrypolitan sound they create is evocative of the bygone America to which so many MAGA-hat ideologues desperately want to revert. With Babelsberg, Rhys effectively delivers that crowd a flaming pile of dog shit encased in a rhinestone-studded jewelry box. The messenger arrives in the form of “Frontier Man,” the kind of smooth, harmony-rich cowpoke serenade you could imagine raising the curtains at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968. But when Rhys croons, “On the frontier of delusion/I’m your foremost frontier man,” he invokes the all-American outlaw archetype less as a model of valor and independence than as an example of pigheaded persistence in the face of contrary evidence.
Just as “Frontier Man” savors the friction between its medium and its message, much of Babelsberg lays on the symphonic opulence to conjure the shaky-handed unease of our times: After barreling out of the gates with a frantic gallop, “Oh Dear!” free-falls into the orchestra pit as Rhys shouts out the ominous title like a drowning victim begging for a life preserver. “Architecture of Amnesia,” meanwhile, uses its chamber-prog grandeur as a cudgel, with Rhys mounting a war march against “bigots” who hide behind the “blue birds” of social media to spew their hate. But even the album’s prettiest, most serene moments simmer with external tensions. “Drones in the City” is a gorgeous ambient ballad that has Rhys ruminating on the ambiguous meaning of “drones” and how their connotations—annoying remote-controlled gizmo vs. stealth killing machine—differ depending on where you are in the world. But in its final minute, the song’s burbling bassline accelerates as though it’s about to flatline, briefly transforming the album’s most splendorous song into its most anxious.
For all its lavish instrumentation and weighty subtext, however, Babelsberg never overwhelms Rhys’ preternatural gift for writing swoon-worthy melodies. “Limited Edition Heart” and “Negative Vibes” are among the finest, most impassioned songs he’s ever crafted—defiant soft-rock salvos that position a warm embrace as armor against the world crumbling around us. And if we are truly doomed, Rhys offers the grim reassurance that we’re too narcissistic to notice. Atop the chipper, ivory-tickling saunter of “Selfies in the Sunset,” Rhys and guest vocalist Lily Cole sardonically serenade each other about posing for a few last snaps in front of a “blazing red” mushroom-cloud backdrop, milking the apocalypse for Instagram likes. In the unsettled universe of Babelsberg, this is the way the world ends—not with a bang but a self-satisfied finger tap.


More Blueprint 2 than Blueprint, Jay-Z's latest is actually closer to Kingdom Come than either of those others. Unfortunately.

The Blueprint 3

Who's been responsible for The Blueprint 3's biggest PR boost thus far: Kanye West or Rihanna? Timbaland or Drake? Um, LeBron James? According to our RSS, the answer would appear to be Ed Droste. Now, a few years ago, a YouTube of Jay-Z swaying lazily to "Ready, Able" might've been a "gotcha" moment worthy of the Summer Jam Screen, but in 2009, the buzz it's generated is either a huge breakthrough for the hip-hop/indie conversation or a sign that seeing Jigga in the same room as Grizzly Bear is more exciting than hearing him on the same song as any of the all-stars that populate The Blueprint 3: After all, The Blueprint 3 is so certainly Jay-Z's weakest solo album, you'll be tempted to wonder if Kingdom Come was somehow underrated.
While "30 Something" and "Beach Chair" might stand as some of the most smug hip-hop ever committed to tape, they at least came from a real place, which illustrated the "curse" Jay so often speaks of: Nearly all of his LP's are concept albums about the state of his career, but in the 21st century, he's needed some sort of external boost to make it work, whether it's announcing his dominance of New York, his retirement, or the ability to play fast and loose with Frank Lucas' biography. Maybe it's just the timing, but like any recent MTV VMA's, Blueprint 3 generates its event-ness from a stubborn belief in its own ability to be an event. As such, most of it finds Jay-Z dealing in contradictory impulses-- to remind listeners of his unparalleled success in the rap game, but just as often, imploring everyone to stop thinking about his unparalleled success and get on some ill-defined "next shit."
Honest question-- did Kanye West pull an inside job on Big Brother here? I mean, he gets all the good lines on "Run This Town" and getting Jay to follow his punchdrunk, slouchy flow on "Hate" has to be the result of some bar bet. But it isn't a matter of Kanye fronting him bad beats as much as a state of mind, the sort of maniacal need for approval that often humanizes Kanye but just makes Jay-Z sound insecure and whiny (see: most of The Blueprint 2). "Niggas want my old shit/ Buy my old album," he sneers in "On to the Next One" over a hyperactive Swizz Beatz track that indicates Jay's not the only one trying to sum up his entire career within the span of four minutes. But "Thank You", "Reminder", and "So Ambitious" all go to great lengths to reiterate accomplishments that we've heard dozens of time, but without naming names, they ultimately feel toothless considering his detractors in 2009's rap game are almost incapable of being taken seriously.
But even as Jay attempts to flow futuristic on self-explanatory tracks like "Off That", "Already Home", and "A Star Is Born", he never allows any sort of torch-passing moments-- without the credits, you'd almost completely forget actual Future of Rap guys like J. Cole, Kid Cudi, and Drake even made it to the studio. The last of which is numbingly non-committal salutation to the past 10 years of hip-hop royalty with all the insight of an Encarta entry-- yeah, Eminem was a white guy and he still got respect. Those were the times, right?
We can wrangle with the moral implications of Jay-Z making a track like "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" when the very next song on Blueprint 3 has Rihanna (to say nothing of whoever's on the hook for "Reminder"), but the singles actually gain a sort of halo effect for their familiarity, or at least giving Jay some sort of topical construct. Elsewhere, there's just such a weird vibe-- Jay-Z still sounds like himself, but for someone whose lyrics become the lingua franca of the hip-hop community for months after any of his releases, he goes vast stretches of time without saying anything remotely memorable. He's in Kingdom Come autopilot here, "get me out of these 16 bars" clock-punching intermittently spiked with chuckle-worthy rich rapper rhetoric ("nowadays I eat quail/ I'll probably never see jail"), pulled-from-People namedrops ("no I'm not a Jonas," plus a Bernie Madoff reference that we won't get into), and a "downward dog" coke rap that even Clipse might think twice about.
Even stranger is how it invokes the title of the original Blueprint (not to mention an aborted attempt to opportunistically recall its release date), but bears no sonic resemblance to it at all. Timbaland clearly wasn't bringing his A-game here ("Reminder" and the dumbfounding "Venus vs. Mars" are phoned-in from his uninspired mid-decade valley), but the other big names, even Kanye, follow suit with the most middling futurism 2004 had to offer, or the kind of Vegas schmaltz that make all those Sinatra at the opera lines uncomfortably trenchant-- the piledriver hooks of "Run This Town" and "Empire State of Mind" are content to annoy their way to ubiquity, but the cheesed-out synths of "So Ambitious" clearly demonstrates the difference between "ft. Pharrell" and "produced by the Neptunes."
I guess we should've brought up "Young Forever" earlier, and the answer to your question is "Alphaville, not Rod Stewart," and done completely straight-faced by Mr. Hudson. So menopausal and trite that it makes "Beach Chair" sound like "Streets Is Watching", Jay-Z rounds out Blueprint 3 with a gaggle of self-help bromides-- "just a picture perfect day that lasts a whole lifetime/ And it never ends because all we have to do is hit rewind." It's only passable as next-level reverse psychology, inspiring a demand of another Jay-Z album in spite of how godawful Blueprint 3 is, just as long as "Young Forever" isn't the last song we hear from him.
But in the end, Jay-Z's probably right about his claim this year that hip-hop could learn a thing or two from indie rock, even if he's purposefully vague about what that actually means. Should rappers start booking studio time with, like, Nico Muhly? Well, there's always Late Registration. Talk a good game about making "experimental albums," like Jay's doing already? 808s & Heartbreak. Is Jay-Z really the kind of guy who should be telling rappers to think differently about building a fanbase when his only mixtape was created to sell a shoe? Because from its roster of producers and guest spots to its elaborate marketing, Blueprint 3 is the kind of stuck-on-stupid, event-driven money pit that proves while Jay-Z's at a point where he's got no one to answer to but himself, he's still capable of an entire hour of failing to take his own advice.


Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey lives in the haze. His Sun Go Nova is freewheeling and exciting, the kind of hip-hop that breathes.

Sun Go Nova

It’s hard to reconcile our dependence on the sun with the fact that it will one day kill us. That day is not likely to be tomorrow, or the next day, or even a billion years from now. But even from a safe distance, knowing the sun, the fulcrum of life as we know it, will end life, is quite the headtrip. On Sun Go Nova, Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey is unfazed. Breezy, calm, and nonlinear, the brief collection skitters between the cosmic, the mundane, and the absurd with levity.
Recorded during the same sessions as last year’s Buy Muy Drugs, Vessey’s manic collaboration with Chicago producer Azarias, Sun Go Nova is just as scatterbrained and wide-swinging. On “Zzzzz” Vessey uses his “counterfeit money phone” to make prank calls, threatens politicians that misuse tax money, and confronts a lover for sending too many texts. On “SunGoNova” he thanks JAY-Z for explaining the risks of selling drugs and discloses his lady’s preferred pasta dish (pad thai). Buy Muy Drugs wove such oddball minutia into a prickly, acerbic satire; Sun Go Nova relishes their lack of connection.
Vessey’s always been at ease rattling off non-sequiturs, and on Sun Go Nova his rapping itself is free-wheeling. His verse on “SunGoNova” zigs from baby babble, to double-time raps, to sing-song chants. His opening verse on “Zzzzz” is interrupted by a fuzzy ad-lib that morphs into a hazy, shouted refrain. There’s a sense of freedom in all this spasming. In the past, Vessey’s anxiety raps filled his music with unresolvable tension. Even when joking or outright trolling, he could come across as grave. Here he achieves catharsis, his freeform flows easing him into bliss. “The sun went nova when we was sleep,” he deadpans on “Sellout.” He sounds relieved.
Part of this relief is cooked into the record. The project is divided into two volumes. The first volume, produced by Earl Sweatshirt and Knxwledge, is a swamp of diced soul loops, dulled drums, and foggy chords. The arrangements are dense and feverish. Sounds are packed tight, melted down, and soaked in filters. Instead of rapping inside the crags and pockets of this teeming morass, Vessey orbits around it, using its warmth to forge his own rhythms, like a planet fostering life from a star’s light. Midway through the record, Vessey floats off entirely. The second volume is a rap-less, self-produced beat tape. Relative to Earl and Knxwledge, Vessey’s compositions are airy and porous; the drums strike cleanly, the samples breathe. His beats can jitter just as much as his raps, but the effect is similarly cathartic. “Halal Avocado Toast” shifts from a breezy tropical swing to a snappy bounce without fuss. “Quiet Storm Jam” casually hops from bass-heavy thump to a caramelized sample of Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter.” No beat goes unheard.
The persistent aloofness of Sun Go Nova sometimes blurs into triviality. Even if it’s considered a looser, sunnier counterpoint to the acidic dread of Buy Muy Drugs, the lack of narrative and structure give the songs an unfinished feel. There’s no indication that his streams of conscious couldn’t have been whittled into coherence or that his beats couldn’t have been scaled up into something more robust. Freedom isn’t aimlessness. Still, there’s something relatable about Vessey’s restless self-indulgence. Why not live a little? The sun is going to kill us, after all.


Now a legitimate star, Wiz Khalifa offers a free mixtape named for his high school that attempts to reclaim what he sees as his.

Taylor Allderdice

Before releasing this mixtape, Wiz Khalifa sent something of an apology letter to his fans. "When I made Kush and Orange Juice, I listened to it and knew I had created a genre that would change music," he wrote. "The mistake I made on Rolling Papers was thinking it was time to move on from that genre and not knowing that it had impacted people so much…creatively [it] wasn't my best work."
The gist was that Khalifa had gone too far into pop-rap with his major label debut and sacrificed the kicked-back stoner vibe that first got him wide attention. Concurrent with this were other artists-- from psychedelic producers like Spaceghostpurpp to au courant rap crews like A$AP and Main Attraktionz, basically the whole "cloud rap" or "trillwave" movement, whatever you want to call it-- who had since ran with a similar style. Taylor Allderdice, named for Khalifa's high school, is the rapper attempting to reclaim what he sees as his.
There are a few logical flaws in this argument. For one, while Kush and Orange Juice did crystallize the Taylor Gang aesthetic and help trailblaze the mixtape-to-commercial-success model for others, Khalifa was hardly the first guy to leisurely rap about weed. The list of cannabis-obsessed MCs is long and you don't have to look far to find a Wiz precursor. (See: Devin the Dude.) Also, Rolling Papers was actually pretty good. Yes, the record did nosedive into B.o.B.-esque cheese in the second half, but the front end contained some of Wiz's strongest material-- "The Race", "Hopes and Dreams", "On My Level".
To some degree, it's disappointing to see Khalifa shrugging off the strides he made on Rolling Papers and choosing regression over creative advancement. Taylor Allderdice is basically Kush and Orange Juice 2. The flip side is that there's still gas left in this tank, in part because the guy still loves weed and is still good at rapping about it. Marijuana is his muse, his raison d’être. Like Curren$y, Khalifa rarely leaves his comfort zone, but can create variety within self-imposed limits. Over humid tracks by various producers (in-house Taylor Gang beatmaker Sledgren oversees, the aforementioned Spaceghostpurrp contributes a beat), he weaves raspy bars and singsong choruses into pleasant, low-stakes party jams.
Obviously life has changed a lot for Khalifa in the two years since Kush and Orange Juice was released. He's a legitimate star now with a tabloid-fodder fiancee in Amber Rose and presumably lots more money. Weirdly there's not much acknowledgment of these seemingly big transitions. Every now and again, he lets go of a ruminative line ("Still rollin' weed on my XXL, only difference is that's me on the cover" or "Room full of expensive bags, still all the shit on the floor/ But that's just how you live when your wife's a model"), but mostly he seems determined to prove he's the Same Old Dude. If the album has a thesis statement, it's this couplet from "Never Been": "In my jacuzzi, roll another doobie/ See what's newest on Netflix, order another movie."
Where he does get personal is during a recorded interview with MTV News correspondent Rob Markman that's broken up and threaded throughout the album. It's annoying for several reasons. Almost every song ends with a clip of the two guys talking, thus breaking up any groove you may establish. Two, Khalifa actually burps at least twice during these segments. (I realize this mixtape comes at no cost to the listener, but this is pushing it even for free shit.) Third and most important, it seems remarkably lazy for an artist to rely on a conversation with a random guy to express the themes, ideas, and frustrations he wants to get across. That's what the songs are supposed to be for.
It feels like this is the central problem with Khalifa right now. He seems either unwilling or incapable to share the personal details, the other aspects of his persona that would give him extra dimension as a rapper. It's not a dealbreaker on this particular tape because a) it doesn’t carry the weight of a major release and b) these songs for the most part sound good, but it should be cause for concern for his fans going forward. Songs about pot are fine, they have their place, but he's reached the level of popularity that it's reasonable to expect something more.


The Connecticut DIY duo struggles to shed their influences on this newly remastered and reissued record, yet they still manage to bring a unique virtuosity and vitality to downcast guitar pop.

Last Room

Coming up in the Connecticut DIY scene, Jarett Denner and Dan Poppa lacked community. They made friends online or with out-of-town bands passing through on tour, their local scene too stagnant to support their ambitions. The pair began performing as waveform* while still in high school, writing and recording hushed acoustic sketches from their bedrooms. Their early work reeked of their idols, namely Alex G, who they both clearly admire; it’s impossible to ignore the uncanny similarities between waveform*’s 2018 album library with Alex G’s Trick and DSU—the pitch-shifted vocals, the sparse guitar strums, the vague one-word song titles. Denner and Poppa expanded their range on 2019’s Shooting Star, elevating their withdrawn minimalism into melodic guitar pop that evoked acts like Hovvdy and Sparklehorse. On their newly remastered and reissued album Last Room, waveform* further explore the boundaries of indie rock without ever quite settling into a cogent identity of their own.
Last Room’s strongest moments are spackled with soothing guitar and sullen melodies, a sense of longing and despair simmering below the surface. “Miner’s Lullaby” repeats a haunting line—“you’re trying to fall inside”—over an American Football-esque riff and a slowly disintegrating drum loop. On “Favorite Song,” Denner’s flat, wistful voice slinks across slide guitar and grand piano, crooning lyrics so specific and pitch-perfect they feel plucked straight from his subconscious: “I want to hear you complain about things/I want to hear you play video games.” waveform*’s music aches with immediacy and desire, their best songs locating the gray area between wanting to get out of bed and wanting to press your face into a pillow.
The duo’s songwriting doesn’t always possess an appropriate heft, though. Teen romance, bad fathers, unrequited love—these topics can certainly be rendered with profundity, but without the proper details they can read like one-dimensional diary entries. Take horrorcore ballad “Book of Curse,” for example, in which Poppa mutters, “I might love her/She made me sad/Yeah, she hurt me.” It’s a song like no other in their catalog—eerie and unsettling, a blend of Nick Cave and Lil Peep. But the song never fully clicks into focus; the experimentation feels like experimentation, the emotions immaterial.
Throughout the album, waveform* are determined to escape their heads but unable to do so. Even on the record’s more upbeat songs, like “Blue Disaster,” the duo sinks into solipsism: “I'm a winner when I'm all alone/I've gone years never finding home.” There’s little reprieve from this solitude, no dramatic arc to alleviate the suffering. The album’s lone moment of catharsis arrives on “Hello Goodbye,” a song Denner says is about “struggling with sexuality.” With a twang remnant of Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Denner gives a remarkable vocal performance, his stirring falsetto offering a sense of release. He’s still in his head, but he’s intent on moving outward and telling someone else how he feels, no matter how painful the excavation may be.
In an interview from last year, waveform* were asked what place or feeling they thought their music embodied. “I guess to me it couldn't really be pinpointed to anything specific,” Poppa said. “Hopefully being in the forest temple from Ocarina of Time or something,” added Denner. It’s telling that, even to them, their sound is rudderless, breezy enough to belong anywhere or niche enough to play in a Nintendo 64 game. While Last Room succeeds in bringing virtuosity and vitality to a certain strain of downcast rock, its lack of direction prevents waveform* from homing in on a sound truly unburdened by their predecessors.
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Former Tussle member Alexis Georgopoulos reinvents himself as the architect of an early 1970s throwback to a time when electronics seemed warm, friendly, natural, perhaps inevitable, and above all optimistic.

In Light

Alexis Georgopoulos, the sole member of Arp, used to be in the instrumental funk outfit Tussle. His former band, who are still going strong, made their name channeling the lean, driving sound of early 1980s New York outfits like Liquid Liquid and ESG; Arp, though a very different animal, is just as heavily indebted to the music of a specific time and place. The most obvious inspiration for this project is West Germany in the first half of the 70s, when the artistically inclined kids born around the time of WWII began to hit their stride creatively. Think early Kraftwerk on Phillips, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream; though each has a hugely varied body of work, all were electronic music pioneers with their eyes and ears trained on the future.
To Georgopoulos' credit, In Light doesn't come across as a retro exercise so much as an attempt to capture a certain spirit. Titles allude to his forbearers (hard to see a track called "St. Tropez" without thinking of Pink Floyd's 1971 LP Meddle, "Premonition of the Sculptor Steiner" references a Werner Herzog film and, by extension, an accompanying Popol Vuh score) and vintage synths abound, but the overall mood doesn't feel overly tethered to the era. What Georgopoulos capturers most of the age is an approach to sound that made electronics seem warm, friendly, natural, perhaps inevitable, and above all optimistic.
The post-moonshot days of the early 70s-- like the 50s and the 90s-- were a time when it seemed as though technology might save us yet. In Light reflects a grounded, idealistic mindset; the music is not especially psychedelic, and clarity is prized over drugginess. The percolating "Potentialities" is the spaciest track, its fat, sequenced bass made for either stargazing or a show at the planetarium, but it still has an innocent cast. Even further in this direction is the clean, bright pulse of "St. Tropez", which brings to mind Raymond Scott trying to engineer the ultimate aural environment in which to raise babies. Only the 15-minute drone piece "Odyssey (For Bas Jan Ader)", its midrange-heavy synths burred with distortion, flirts with an unsettling atmosphere, but even here it's more a sense of anticipation than dread. All tracks are simple, effective, and easy to grasp, letting a few elements and subtle changes do loads of work.
Most subtle of all is "The Rising Sun", which is perhaps the best example of Georgopoulos hearing the music of the past in a fresh way. Sometimes overlooked in discussion of the kosmisch pioneers is that they unwittingly invented new age. These acts weren't above teasing out a pure mood piece, something placid and meditative that was unashamedly in tune with Aquarian-age spirituality. "The Rising Sun", built with resonant piano clusters that seem to tumble down waterfall-style and a soothing whistle-like tone that brings to mind Florian Schneider's flute, strikes me as sort of brave in its delicacy. It flirts with a sphere of music many consider verboten and then, eventually, Georgopoulos brings through a bassy drone to shake up the calm and give the track some bite. The track's free use of acoustic instruments and familiar textures shows a pragmatic side also in evidence back in the day. Georgopoulos has a very specific vibe in mind for Arp, and he uses whatever works; though a small, simple record on the one hand, In Light, on its own terms, is a big success.


Following a debut steeped in generational aimlessness, the Brooklyn band’s second album thrives on a combination of rock extroversion and frontman John Ross’ hard-won and tenuous new optimism.

Yolk in the Fur

By the end of 2017, Wild Pink’s self-titled debut was being celebrated as one of the year’s overlooked gems. This designation would’ve had the ring of faint praise if the band’s music hadn’t sounded like it was made to be stumbled upon. John Ross sang fully formed, footnoted sentences at a conversational volume. The hooks never gave you a hard sell—they were just phrases that rattled around on repeat, lodging themselves in your short-term memory. Wild Pink could kick up enough distortion to get loud, occasionally even bordering on rude, but Ross’ pose remained the same, staring off into the distance amid the ambient clatter of New York City. Listening to him sing felt like eavesdropping on someone muttering something to himself that he should’ve said an hour ago.
It’s an approach that puts a lot of faith in the listener, and the album yielded a substantial return on whatever that audience invested. But Wild Pink ultimately came across like a conversation Ross preferred to keep to himself. Yolk in the Fur can’t wait to share it.
Lead single “Lake Erie” is at once the most polished and pyrotechnic Wild Pink song to date—and it’s where Ross sounds most beholden to his professed influences. As he tells it, those heroes are Tom Petty and Jackson Browne, but in 2018, indie-rock fans are sure to think of the War on Drugs first. This connection is the first real narrative hook that's emerged for a band that's been tough to classify; in the past, Wild Pink were most often compared to pre-“O.C.” Death Cab, which is to say that they don’t exactly share the punk aesthetics of their more celebrated Tiny Engines labelmates like the Hotelier. And while they live in Brooklyn, they’re not really of it; they didn’t come up in any particular local scene.
For better or worse, the band’s crowd-pleasing new combination of brassy acoustics, bleary pedal steel, and rigid beats on “Lake Erie” means that the heartland synth rock tag has already stuck, even if it barely applies to the rest of Yolk. Aside from the slow-motion windmill strums of the title track, few elements of the release scan as “classic rock.” Instead, Ross’ nimble acoustic fingerpicking evokes John Fahey, and his searching solos harken back to the indie anti-guitar heroism that typified Wild Pink’s earlier work. The biggest riff on the album comes from a vintage synth on “There Is a Ledger” that strobes and squawks like a toy UFO.
Wild Pink also avoid the grand gestures that make the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile, and Amen Dunes among the few guitar-centered acts that have won over the Vibe Generation. Damon McMahon and Adam Granduciel can transmute “regular dude” into a kind of aura, a brand that calls back to performers like Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp—rock stars who seemed down-to-earth compared with Bret Michaels and David Lee Roth, with voices as gritty as distressed denim and dried cornhusks to distract from the wealthy lives they led. Ross, on the other hand, never sounds like anything but an actual regular dude, strolling through the suburbs, running into acquaintances, and tapping mundane thoughts into his cell phone as he walks.
That stream of consciousness doesn’t include as many wisecracks on Yolk as it did on Wild Pink. But nods to mobster bars, “boomers with hepatitis,” Kim Carnes, and “Edelweiss”provide hyper-specific grounding for vague, hopeful mantras: “Love is better than anything else”; “You have a heart like a star.” The band’s debut was written when Ross was, as he put it, “super pessimistic for a lot of good reasons.” By the time it was released, in February 2017, Wild Pink spoke to the previous year’s sense of generational aimlessness rather than the culturally inflamed present. But on Yolk’s florid Cocteau Twins homage “Jewels Drossed in the Runoff,” Ross sings, “There’s nothing worse than pretending that you don’t actually care”—and the album takes that advice to heart, connecting Wild Pink’s “active rock” extroversion with their frontman’s hard-won and tenuous new optimism.
On opening track “Burger Hill,” Ross draws out the last word of the lyric “I woke up too fast from a dream” long enough to capture the liminal, confused state the song’s harp-like guitar figures suggest, of feeling a connection with the smoke and the breeze and everything else that will soon fade out of existence. Mark Kozelek fans who wish he’d start writing songs again must be dreaming of something like this, a track whose starlit slowcore is a balm for the hopelessly melancholy, an idyllic “prenatal slow globe” and a “world untouched and set free/The way it was meant to be.”
This is a much different world from the one Ross sees on “Lake Erie,” in which he watches a cleanup crew erase a roadside disaster. It isn’t a grand, metaphorical gambit like Springsteen’s “Wreck on the Highway,” where life hangs in the balance. An IRL crisis soon gives way to a URL one (“Meanwhile people on Tumblr unpack their neuroses/And all you ever wanted was the one you love the most not to suddenly leave”), and the song reveals its true intent: It’s not a rebranding of Wild Pink, but a rejoinder to the apocalyptic discourse that drives our everyday existence—we all know how this is going to end, so why not find freedom in the uncertainty? Ross sings “I hope we find peace” eight times at the end of “There Is a Ledger,” before a line that will reappear on “All Some Frenchman’s Joke” to become Yolk in the Fur’s final lyric: “I don’t know what happens next.” Repeated this way, the expression of uncertainty becomes a mantra of acceptance that spans the length of the album.


The cryptic YouTuber’s new album is the first to fully embrace the upsetting qualities of her video works, folding elements of nu-metal and grindcore into her seasick melange.

I Disagree

Since the very beginning, there has been a darkness buried in Poppy’s heart. It’s there in the earliest videos uploaded to her mysterious YouTube channel back in 2014, in which the character—portrayed by an actress and musician named Moriah Pereira—performed simple tasks against a white background, occasionally delivering surrealist monologues. Her very first video featured her eating cotton candy in a way that might feel familiar to fans of ASMR videos: Her lips smack, her throat rumbles, she makes satisfied “ahhs,” but something’s off about the whole thing. Audio and image are out of sync; nothing sounds quite like you expect it to.
It was an unsettling beginning, and in the ensuing years, she’s only plunged further into uncomfortable territory. One of her early popular videos, for example, features her staring into the camera as she teaches the viewer how to load a handgun. In another, she makes explicit reference to one of 4chan’s most notoriously noxious message boards. Unlike a lot of people who have set about parodying the strangeness of influencer culture, she and her collaborators—chief among them the director and producer Titanic Sinclair—have seemed uniquely attuned to the surreal perversity that lurks in the shadowy underbelly of YouTube culture. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some of the platform’s more unsavory figures have been outspoken fans of hers. She’s fluent in the lingua franca of the internet’s darkest parts.
The music attributed to Poppy over the years hasn’t always mirrored this side of her work. Her first album was a collection of wheezy ambient compositions self-consciously designed to “help facilitate a full night of sleep” and made, she says, with guidance from doctors who study sleep at Washington University. She’s made several albums’ worth of sugary bangers for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and a sci-fi synth soundtrack to a graphic novel. But her new album I Disagree is her first to fully follow through on the upsetting qualities of her video works, adding the grim aesthetics and curdled riffing of nu-metal, grindcore, and industrial noise to the seasick melange of her music.
The record’s opening track, “Concrete,” is typical of her approach here. After an air-raid siren, she whispers about wanting to be buried alive, covered in concrete and turned “into a street,” before launching into a series of proggy vignettes. There’s a section that sounds like the Body’s sludgy electro-metal, a paisley pop chorus that’d be at home on a Kinks record, and a series of gurgly riffs that’d rank among Slipknot’s grossest, all before culminating in what sounds like an arena crowd chanting her name, followed by a coda that sparkles like “Blank Space.” Like, say, 100 gecs or the recent Grimes singles, part of the joy in I Disagree comes in how overwhelming it is. No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise.
Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic. “Bloodmoney” castigates hypocrites and evil men who hide behind the banner of religion. “Don’t Go Outside” evokes the imagery of biblical plagues, with frogs falling from the sky. The title track explicitly welcomes the end of the world, assuring, “We’ll be safe and sound when it all burns down.” None of the situations she explores are especially specific, but it’s striking—as the world burns and nuclear war once more feels like a distinct possibility—to hear a reminder that chaos can be cleansing, that calamity is the first step to starting all over again and building something new.


On their latest collaboration with director Alex Garland, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury craft an unsettling vocal-driven score to match the creepy idyll of Men.

Ben Salisbury / Geoff Barrow: Men (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury have proven themselves to be masterful architects of slickly intricate cinematic scores. Their abilities emerge from their complementary talents: Barrow is famous for his distinctively sullen and sultry percussion-laden sounds (most notably with Portishead), while Salisbury is an Emmy-nominated television and film composer, deftly attuned to the structural cues necessary for any score’s skeleton. Their first formal collaboration on DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega City One was audacious, glistening with Vangelis-influenced analog synths and roaring with the heightened dimensions of the Judge Dredd comics from which it was adapted. Their work on this score introduced the duo to Alex Garland, who wrote and produced 2012’s Dredd, and would enlist Barrow and Salisbury to score his directorial debut, Ex Machina.
Their collaboration has continued through 2018’s Annihilation, the 2020 television series Devs, and now, Garland’s latest movie, Men. Unlike the complex sci-fi worlds of Ex Machina or Annihilation, the world of Men is plainly ordinary. It’s set in the English countryside, where Harper (Jessie Buckley) retreats after her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) falls from their home to his death. Was it an accident or suicide? Harper does not know. Nonetheless, she finds herself weighed by the shackles of guilt. After strange men—all of whom appear to resemble her odd landlord Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear)—begin to stalk her, the idyll quickly unravels.
With this score, Barrow and Salisbury’s intention is to dramatize the familiar, such that even ordinariness—the comfort of the home, a sympathetic glance from a stranger, or the sway of leaves—becomes disquieting. To do so, Barrow and Salisbury focus on the voice. It is one thing to speak, and another to be heard, and whenever Harper tries to express her discomfort within her new setting, she’s quickly brushed aside. Likewise, Barrow and Salisbury’s score heavily involves manipulated vocals that climb to seemingly dolorous stretches of pain throughout. They rise to screechy, hysterical heights, and fall to lamenting, unsettling lows. These vocals are desolate, as if trying to push against the condemnation of incredulity. They, like Harper, scream—but who listens?
Harper confides to a priest that she feels “haunted” by the ghost of her husband. “Haunted” also describes this score, which forms around the negative space of silence. Like Men—sparsely populated, save for Harper and these few creepy men—Barrow and Salisbury’s score strays away from formal complexity. Vocals and instrumentation begin isolated, then layer—but before anything becomes too intricate, the score sputters back into the vacuum of silence, beginning anew. Even the most anguished howls fade just as they had begun: like wisps. “Runaway / Crash” begins with a four-note riff which then combines with a simple synth melody, ascending rapidly in intensity, before a sudden stop.
The second—and shortest—track, “A Country Walk,” provides a gasp of optimism, opening with bright pipe organ chords. The organ is a nod to the church, and to the dimension of pain Harper feels: so deep, so implacable, that it feels divinely wrought. “A Country Walk” captures Harper at the beginning of Men, witnessing the lushness of the countryside, and hopeful that she might escape James’ lingering memory. But as the increasingly damned bellows on Barrow and Salisbury’s score express, escaping one’s past isn’t so easy.
Earlier on in the movie, Harper stands before a tunnel and sings a note. The tunnel somehow echoes her voice back perfectly. While they use Harper’s literal echo in the film in “Runaway / Crash,” Barrow and Salisbury also use the echo as a generative structure. Anxiety in this score is etched, like many frantic echoes, in short riffs and repetitiousness. On tracks like “Tunnel Escape” and “Fuck This,” these echo-like structures distort into into what sounds like the adrenaline-soaked throb of a heart trapped in a nightmare.
For Harper, that nightmare is voicelessness. She spends the film screaming: in church, underneath water, watching James plummet to his death outside her window. Even so, we don’t hear her screams—in the film, they’re usually muted. But Barrow and Salisbury’s score screams for her. Tucked into the final seconds of “Birth,” the final track, are plaintive two-note echoes that descend, as if resigning to their fate of damnation. Even if we hear Harper, it’s too late.


On the second half of their paired EPs, the Toronto collective settles into comfortable territory that soon proves stale.

Broken Social Scene: Let’s Try the After Vol. 2 EP

Let’s Try the After Vol. 2 EP

Twenty years after their conception, Toronto’s Broken Social Scene remind us that they’re not going anywhere. After the seven-year silence that resulted in 2017’s Hug of Thunder, the two-part Let’s Try the After comes as a sign of continuity. The project’s first half, released this February, was understood as a refreshing amuse-bouche, but Vol. 2 is more clumsily served. At their best, Broken Social Scene create intimate moments of restlessness, gradually building urgent percussion and layered vocals without sacrificing their versatility and love of detail. Here, the band’s signatures—propellant drums and fierce, lime-lit guitar solos—soon prove stale. Though it settles into comfortable territory, Vol. 2 ultimately feels purposeless and undercooked.
BSS co-founder Kevin Drew has explained that Let’s Try the After is about persevering to overcome life’s obstacles: “Sickness, suicide, uprise, love, death, betrayal, hurt, joy, sex, communication, battles and divisions… Let's just get to their after and start building again.” On Vol. 1, the vibrant instrumental “Remember Me Young” and the melancholic “1972” beautifully captured the thesis. But aside from their titles, there isn’t much cohesion between the two halves of Let’s Try the After. The only musical connection lies in their psych-rock instrumental openers. Vol. 1’s “The Sweet Sea” was sedate, while Vol. 2’s “Memory Lover” is energetic and propulsive; where the former made for an exciting prologue, the latter feels more like an interlude.
There are moments where their beloved innovation breaks through. Zigzagging synth lines and two separate guitar solos bring an easygoing revelry to “Can’t Find My Heart.” “Let’s Try the After” radiates ominous background noise: a low and blurry piano, hissing whispers, vibrant arcade game sounds, and a mournful horn crying in the distance. Splintering horns and clamorous drum hits bring closing track “Wrong Line” closest to the band’s past post-rock exuberance, yet in failing to confidently resolve the strangeness of Let’s Try the After, it makes for an unsatisfactory ending. “We got caught in the wrong line,” Drew sings, fading out into a void.
Across Vol. 2, BSS seem cognizant they’re lacking something—maybe a heart, a companion, or self-knowledge. “Big Couches” begins even-tempered, building to a hovering suspense peppered with jubilant horns, but there’s no burst of resolution. “Where did you go?/I can’t recognize this supposed to be,” Drew sings. His voice is awkwardly masked in Auto-Tune, furthering the sense of unrecognizability. Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost. “Tomorrow’s kind of a bitch/The kind of bitch you can believe,” a jaded Drew exclaims on the title track, a depressing (and infuriatingly sexist) finishing sentiment for a song ostensibly about entering uncharted territory.
There is a hunger apparent on Let’s Try the After Vol. 2. Whether in the roaring guitar solos or transcendent piano riffs, Broken Social Scene seem keen to fulfill the promise of a second half. But these songs are rarely strong enough to stand on their own. Though their familiar sound is warm and at times welcoming, it pales in comparison to the developed instrumental ferocity of the band’s past catalog. There’s no enthralling combustion to rival “Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)” or “7/4 (Shoreline),” no warm percussive bath like that of “Love and Mathematics.” Here, Broken Social Scene seem to have forgotten their gift for making the listener feel as if in the room, standing at a comfortable distance, in favor of awkward small talk with a stranger.


Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, Barter 6 is composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming. It argues that Young Thug's greatest asset all along was his uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together.

Barter 6

Young Thug is not into literalism. He thrives in gray areas, animated by the electricity generated by the tension of his own contradictions, and he never, ever offers a straightforward explanation. Look how he handled the most surreal rap beef of 2015 in a recent Instagram message to Lil Wayne. "This is my idol. I won’t ever in my life swap words with him," Thug pledged—days away from releasing his imminent debut album, Carter 6, a title hijacked from Wayne, whose own Carter V languished in Cash Money purgatory. But then, in closing: "Ha haaa," punctuated with a trollish tongue wag. Like most everything Thugger has done in the last year and a half, it made people confused: What kind of god-level shade was this? Is he taking any of this remotely seriously? And what in fuck’s sake is his endgame with this album, the name of which changed days before its release to Barter 6 after Wayne threatened to sue? Barter 6 was already the year’s most controversial rap album—or "retail mixtape," as if the distinction really matters—before it even dropped.
But Barter 6 has almost nothing to do with Lil Wayne, save its provocative title (which I’m saying is more Treachery of Images than aimless troll, anyway) and a handful of scattered lyrical shots. Idol or not, Thug hasn’t directly emulated Wayne since his debut tape, 2011’s I Came From Nothing. But he’s always seemed to delight in playful misdirection, quietly reveling in the chaos provoked by his mere existence, from the vaguely gender-bending fashions to the pet names for his friends. Thug seems to recognize the power of his own mystique, headline-grabbing yet somehow unknowable: "Every time I dress myself, I go muhfucking viral," he crows, bemused, on "Halftime". And on Barter 6, Thug yet again dodges any easy narrative. Far from a public idol-killing, or zany sideshow, it’s composed, patient, even subtle—an album neither fans nor detractors saw coming.
Over the course of his three-part I Came From Nothing tape series, Thug’s now-singular voice took shape. The projects often felt like extended stylistic experiments, ranging wildly in quality—but when inspiration struck, it sounded like nothing else coming out of his Atlanta hometown, from guileless outsider-pop ballads to completely unclassifiable vocal performance clinics. By 2013’s 1017 Thug, Thug’s "weirdness" had become an easy hook, a rapper who sang and hollered odes to lean and compared his jewelry to Pokémon. Early 2014 singles "Stoner" and "Danny Glover" plopped Thug on the threshold of the mainstream, and Rich Gang, the Birdman-conceived duo of Thug and kindred spirit Rich Homie Quan, spawned the radiant single "Lifestyle".
There is no "Lifestyle" on Barter 6, nor is it particularly "weird." Opening track "Constantly Hating" unfurls gently, its impressionistic Wheezy beat leaving space between bass tremors for Thug to explore.  There are hardly any big-name collaborators here: "Can’t Tell", with its T.I. and Boosie appearances, is the least integral track, despite its star power. It reflects none of the clamor of Thugger’s dramatic 2015. Instead, Barter 6 argues that his greatest asset all along was not his wackiness, his "outsider" status, or his surprising inner hitmaker—it’s not even his voice, or at least, not entirely. It’s Thug’s uncanny and singular way of piecing a song together, a skill he has doubled down on with this release: a way with vocal technique, melody, and detail-oriented composition that makes the bizarre seem approachable and the familiar feel new.
He plies those compositional talents here to the cohesive rap album, a format Thug had shown very little prior indication he was interested in at all. He treats the smallest compositional details with the care and craftsmanship of a chorus—everything here is a hook, from the ad-libs (a term that feels insufficient—Thug’s "ad-libs" are fully integrated into the song’s structure, to the point where we should probably just call them backing vocals) to the individual bars to the empty spaces. Barter 6 is not a world-conquering album; instead, it digs tunnels.
More than anything, Barter 6 feels like a 50-minute performance of what rap, as a form, can do: rap that need not transcend itself, towards High Art on one hand or commercial art on the other, in order to succeed in 2015. Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened. Take "Halftime", the most thrilling technical display here, on which Thug seamlessly snaps into a dozen different flows: casually extending the second syllable of "re-cy-cles" so that it threatens to throw the song off track entirely, pausing a beat, unleashing a quick guffaw, snapping back on beat. It's an almost-reckless balance-beam routine. He pauses only for an ingenious vocoder breakdown that melts his cries of "Havin’ the time of my muhfuckin’ liiiiiife" into semiotic ooze, suddenly giving the blood-red backdrop of the cover art an almost Lynchian cast, like the velveteen Black Lodge interior.
Every element exists for a reason, fitting like puzzle pieces into place over multiple listens: even the guest spots from presumable weed carriers like Duke (formerly MPA) and Yak Gotti put in work. Haunting, virtuosic final act "Just Might Be" gives Thug’s moments of silence the primacy of a hook: "That’s called breathing, that’s how you let that bitch breathe," he sighs after a verse of rapid-fire double-time, leading into a cathartic exhale that spans a full eight bars. This is the anti-"Let the Beat Build", on an album that’s the anti-Carter III.
And as for Thug’s widely-touted unintelligibility, Barter 6 argues that all we need to do is listen a bit more carefully: what may not be legible at first glance reveals itself patiently over time. In this sense, you are doing it wrong by asking Young Thug his thoughts on Ferguson point-blank, as one reporter did last fall. Thug bristled then, responding with what looked like apathy. But there is no ambiguity on "OD" when he cries, "RIP Mike Brown, fuck the cops" (nor was there, for that matter, on his gut-wrenching 2013 Trayvon Martin tribute). He will speak when he’s ready, and on his own terms: abstracted, maybe, but ultimately loud and clear.


Innocent Country is more reflective than Quelle Chris' previous work. He's trying to make sense of his inner thoughts, no matter how random or conflicted they may be.

Innocent Country

Detroit rapper Quelle Chris has developed a distinct persona over the last several years: He's the funny dude with whom you can laugh about smoking weed and sexual cardio. He's always clever, and his nasal pitch goes well with the hazy funk beats he creates. Yet his new album, Innocent Country, is ruminative in a way we've never heard before. Quelle's 2013 full-length, the breakout Ghost at the Finish Line, found the MC/producer assessing the indie grind; Innocent Country is the inner dialogue of a man trying to understand his logic, no matter how random it is.
Yet Quelle doesn't fully articulate his views here; instead he just muddles through them. In a good way, Innocent Country resembles early Slum Village: The music has a cassette-worthy hiss that solidifies the album's nostalgia, and Quelle—whose Bandcamp is full of low-key gems—doesn't speak directly to his listeners. He flubs lines and trails off in other places. It's shoegazing in a pure form; he's just talking it out, hoping you catch a line or two.
That's most prevalent on "Well Running Deep". It feels like Quelle is rapping alone to a mirror, reciting the words from his rhyme book and locking them into memory. "I barely eat, and barely sleep," he raps, "'cause when I sleep, I'm just reacquainted with mistakes and paths that are way gone." Beneath the humor are the regrets he first examined on "Loop Dreams", a Ghost standout produced by Chris Keys, who handles all the beats on Country. The sound is loosely built around dusty drum breaks, and sonically, Keys seems influenced by early '90s West Coast rap—Cypress Hill or the Alkaholiks.
The soundtrack moves between wistful and nonsensical moments, which leads to a strong alliance with Quelle who, across several projects, uses conversational flows of disconnected thoughts. He strings those meditations into effective one-liners that somehow stick, even if they don't make sense. Quelle's impact isn't so much in what he says, but how he says it—with a blunted, nonchalant tone that draws comparisons to Redman. There's no shortage of randomness on Country: "Murphy's Law", featuring Crown Nation collaborator Denmark Vessey, is carried by a lo-fi Dilla-inspired beat (think Slum Village's "Fantastic") where the two riff on whatever comes to mind: houses getting robbed, pork belly, stock trading, and hedge funds. The next song, "Drugfest TooThousandToo", is a show-of-hands survey for your favorite narcotics ("Y'all fuckin' with them shrooms?!... How 'bout the meth").
Druggy satire is Quelle's thing, but Innocent Country is equally refreshing when the rapper reflects. On "I Asked God", Quelle revisits some old demons while the music conveys sullen remoteness. Yesterday, he says, "everything was where it belonged, but something went wrong." Quelle wakes up, dusts himself off, and tries to move forward. Yet, for reasons he can't fathom, he simply cannot. "Maybe it's the drink, maybe need to put down the bottle, or maybe I'm drunk/ Maybe it's the weed, maybe stop hittin' them high notes, or maybe I'm skunked right now." On Innocent Country, Quelle asks these kinds of questions without getting clear answers. Certain revelations take time to appear.


On his solo debut, the BADBADNOTGOOD member applies jazz instrumentation and technique to compositions that approach psychedelic rock and dream pop.

Anyhow

Anyhow, the solo debut from BADBADNOTGOOD multi-instrumentalist Leland Whitty, is like sleight of hand or a trick of the light. It’s a record that appears simultaneously small and ambitious, jazz and yet not. One one hand it’s a brief side project, featuring members of a shapeshifting jazz group known for these types of experiments; on the other, it builds on their previous releases without sounding like anything else in their catalog. You might compare it to Snoopy’s dog house or Doctor Who’s TARDIS, both famously bigger on the inside than out, full of psychedelic twists and turns as discombobulating as the Doctor’s time-traveling machine.
After working on several film scores (including the 2019 thriller Disappearance at Clifton Hill), Whitty wanted to make a record with a narrative focus. Anyhow emerged from voice notes and short loops that Leland, brother Lowell Whitty, and a trio of BADBADNOTGOOD bandmates past (Matthew Tavares) and present (Alexander Sowinski and Chester Hansen) built into full-formed songs. Leland plays the majority of instruments on the album, including guitar, flute, Wurlitzer, clarinet, violin, viola, saxophone, and synth. He also worked in a directorial role, guiding the collaborators to shift the songs’ rhythm and energy.
At times you can hear the little acorns of this album’s mighty oaks. “Svalbard” is built around a miniature flute loop that flutters in and out of focus like a bird on a misty morning. Anyhow isn’t particularly long (only 30 minutes) or laden with attention-grabbing features; its collaborators are subservient to the musical whole. But in its depth, tone, and quality it feels subtly epic, like a short film whose details linger in the imagination.
“Silver Rain” packs more imagination and melody into three cosmic, slightly discordant minutes than many albums manage in 40, its intimate, spooky detail reminiscent of Broadcast’s miniature epics or Caribou’s excursions into dream pop on Andorra. The song is a mosaic of soprano sax and flute, which wobble and break as if viewed under water against the brightened sunshine of an acoustic guitar. Serpentine chord changes, Hansen’s inquisitive bass, and a sprightly drum track from Sowinski reveal more depth on every listen. “Silver Rain” is so condensed it could easily triple its run time without overstaying its welcome, but there is something audacious about the way the song makes its point and gets out, with almost nothing in the way of repetition.
“Glass Moon” is similarly agile, refusing to sit still as it races through a mesmerizing series of chord changes, building brushed drums, upright bass, strings and saxophone to a surprisingly furious climax. “Awake” makes space for lustrous string arrangements; daubs of soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones; and a kaleidoscopic Rhodes piano solo, which Tavares delivers with economical dexterity. The title track illustrates the record’s chimerical feel: Lowell Whitty’s drums are so brilliantly loose it feels as if the whole album might drift away on a wave of beatific strings.
Like BADBADNOTGOOD, whose cross-disciplinary approach has produced collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Obongjayar, Whitty takes a wide-angle view of genre on Anyhow. His choice of instruments like brushed drums, saxophone, and upright bass evoke jazz, as do the songs’ expansive solos. But there is little swing to the album’s rhythms; the hazy, meditative musical layers Whitty constructs feel closer to psychedelic rock—an influence BADBADNOTGOOD have drawn upon in a more grandiose way, notably on 2021’s “Signal from the Noise”—or dream pop, which they haven’t. Anyhow stands out among the band’s array of releases and production work: Rarely have BADBADNOTGOOD sounded this tender, this quietly mystical.
From the self-deprecating shrug of a title to its brief run time, the aesthetic details of Anyhow suggest a musical trifle. But the reality is a work of profound detail, fascinating musical textures, melodic twists, and stylistic ambiguity that is more diamond dust than pocket lint.


Four years after an unexpected comeback LP, the Los Angeles country-punk veterans return with their final album. They sound vigorous and assured, finding fresh inspiration in familiar sounds.

Smoke & Fiction

Billed as the band’s final album, Smoke & Fiction is a fulfilling closing chapter for X, the pioneering band whose breakneck rhythms and turbo-charged rockabilly riffs came blazing out of Los Angeles’s nascent punk scene in the late 1970s. Forty-four years after their debut, 1980’s Los Angeles, the group sounds vigorous and assured, finding fresh inspiration in familiar sounds, emotions, and ideas.
Chaos was central to X’s appeal in the early days. The intertwined lead vocals of John Doe and Exene Cerevenka suggested that the one-time couple were embroiled in an ongoing argument; guitarist Billy Zoom added to the frenzy, though he never forgot the swing of early rock’n’roll, even when chasing after the velocity of the Ramones. Inherently empathetic to the needs of his singers, drummer D.J. Bonebrake provided a steady anchor—though he, too, could occasionally get caught up in the band’s feverish excitement.
The band thrived on tension, channeling interpersonal drama and clashes with the culture at large into a potent songbook that sustained them decades after they stopped writing new material. In 2020, following a succession of lineup changes, hiatuses, and reunions, the group unexpectedly returned with the sharp, lively ALPHABETLAND, its first album of new material from the original quartet in 35 years.
The focus and urgency of Smoke & Fiction makes ALPHABETLAND look like a dry run. Part of that stems from the palpable sense that the band can feel the clock ticking away. Frustrated that they were unable to tour ALPHABETLAND, which landed in the early days of the pandemic, and keenly aware of their advancing ages—Cervenka and Bonebrake are pushing 70, while Doe and Zoom are over that line—X chose to re-run the play one more time. Teaming again with producer Rob Schnapf, who also helmed ALPHABETLAND, X knocked out Smoke & Fiction in a few days this past January—a working band working in the method that suits them. (To underscore the impending sense of finality, they’ve dubbed their new tour the End Is Near.)
Clocking in at 28 minutes, roughly the same length as Los Angeles, Smoke & Fiction sounds as if X is drawing inspiration from its long history, purposefully recalling the kinetic rock’n’roll of the band’s early records for Slash. As Doe explained to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s not in our nature to reinvent things. We have a clear idea of who we are.” As robust as they sound, Doe’s and Cervenka’s voices show signs of wear, while the rhythms feel heavier than in the past, even when the tempos quicken. These elements lend natural grain to the music, adding depth to the tales of aging that riddle Smoke & Fiction.
Doe and Cervenka are fascinated by the passage of time, accepting the present while being cognizant that the old days don’t seem as far away as they actually are. Those yesterdays are explicitly celebrated in “Big Black X,” a joyous recollection of the band leaving decaying Hollywood for a life on the road, a journey that takes them from “A big black X on a white marquee” to “A tiny little x on a white marquee.” There’s the desire to “get in trouble again,” as the pair sings on “Sweet Til the Bitter End,” with the realization that they’re in the process of—as they put it in another song—“Winding Up the Time.” But the prospect of the end doesn’t haunt the band. Rather, they seize the chance to create a righteous noise one last time, still getting a kick from turning country two-step into punk, or adding dusty, cinematic accents to hard-bitten urban tales like "The Way It Is.”
Listening to Smoke & Fiction in the same sitting as Los Angeles or Wild Gift, the lasting impression isn’t how they’ve changed over the years, but how much of their original spark they’ve sustained. No longer frenetic or hungry, X have nevertheless maintained their intrinsic interpersonal chemistry, drawing strength from the way their voices collide with a relentless backbeat and three simple chords. It’s a simple yet powerful pleasure that gives Smoke & Fiction its kick, along with a surprisingly emotional resonance.


Four Organs and Phase Patterns come from a time when minimalist composer Steve Reich was in an obsessively scientific mode. They establish a new language, while arguing for their very right to exist.

Steve Reich: Four Organs / Phase Patterns

Four Organs / Phase Patterns

Unlike some other famous works by the minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, Four Organs is not the least bit soothing. It doesn’t murmur or churn; it squawks, sort of, digging into your nerves like a hangnail: “Stop, stop, I confess,” someone reportedly wailed at the work’s premiere. A concertgoer rapped her shoe on the stage at the same performance, like Khrushchev at the 1960 United Nations General Assembly. Reich described the scene years later with evident pleasure as a “riot.”
As a result, it acquired a reputation in Steve Reich’s canon. It is unloved, the black-sheep son that will never reap the adulation of Music for 18 Musicians or Different Trains. But the thing is, Reich designed it for discomfort. The whole piece consists of four Farfisa organs, hardly peaceful instruments, leaning on one long dominant eleventh chord. This chord, the dominant eleventh, is a “home” chord with bits and notes of other places lingering in it. It is inherently uneasy, rooted to the spot with one eye over its shoulder. Even if you’ve never looked at a page of written music in your life, you can just feel the tendons pulling in its harmonic makeup. Listening to this piece in headphones, with multiple Farfisas pulling at this one chord like dogs fighting over a sock, I sometimes had to remind myself to unclench my jaw.
This record, reissued by the San Francisco-based label Superior Viaduct, was originally released in 1970 by Shandar, a small French label that made an outsized impact on American musical modernism: in its decade-long existence, the imprint managed to release works by Albert Ayler, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and many others. Like any good champions of the musical avant-garde, they were eventually punished by fate: in 1979, a flood destroyed most of their original vinyl stock, effectively ending the enterprise.
But for a while, places like Shandar were safe harbor for then-misfits like Reich. The two pieces here, Four Organs and Phase Patterns, come from an era of Reich’s work when he was still in an obsessively scientific mode, boring down on a single capital-I Idea to extract from it whatever secrets might be unlocked from it. The idea here was his first big one, and the one that he remains most associated with: If you took two tones, set them apart from each other, and then moved them in and out of frequency incrementally, you could push open a gate of perception. The idea began with tape loops, but Reich soon moved it into live instrumentation, and then pushed its way into larger forces, where that original idea could be heard more as a whisper more than a shriek. Here, it is the work of four monomaniacally focused musicians: The Farfisas are played by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, joined by Arthur “Art” Bixler Murphy and Steve Chambers, while Jon Gibson supplies the steady maraca shakes.
These early works have a fierceness, a pointed urgency to them, the way that early works in new styles tend to: They are not only establishing a new language but also arguing for their very right to exist in the same breath. “Phase Patterns,” the second composition on this recording, has a similar feel: To layman ears, it might sound like the beginning of a long Ray Manzarek organ solo that caught a snag in a tree branch mid-ascent. It also might sound, to digital-age music fans, like an intentionally corrupted recording, something that had been spliced on a laptop. But that’s where the dizzy energy of these recordings come from: Behind these odd, irregular shapes are four musicians counting measures and beats as if their lives depended on it.
All of this makes the piece sound like torture, which of course it is not — it is a sensory challenge, the same way a deep massage can be. When the masseuse leans their elbow into the soft tissue under your shoulder blade, you groan but you don’t yelp; you trust that when they are done you will feel the benefits of the discomfort. So it is with your ears and mind and Four Organs. It is good to have your patience stretched, your senses tugged. Minimalism was often thought of as smooth churn, something to help regulate your breathing and help you zone out. But that’s only one function it serves; it can also tunnel deep into areas of your nervous system that other music doesn’t even think to aim for.


On his third solo album in as many years, the wise and stoic singer-writer extolls the virtues of the sacred and the mundane.

YTI⅃AƎЯ

Over his last few albums, Bill Callahan has been pondering his role in the universe. Lover, father, son; marriage advocate, neighbor, cosmic tour guide. With each one he has edged closer towards some kind of essential purpose, embracing his sense of responsibility to his fellow man with a tentative joy, and radiating a euphoric humility about the idea that maybe there’s something even bigger out there. YTI⅃AƎЯ—rendered backwards like that—is Callahan’s third solo album in as many years (fourth if you count the impish covers album Blind Date Party with Bonnie “Prince” Billy), and you could interpret the 56-year-old songwriter’s newfound prolificacy as a desire to catalog every petal of his late blooming. As his family expands (he is now a father of two) and his marriage deepens, his roots grow longer and every second more precious. “I wrote this song in five and forever,” he sings on the uncommonly jaunty “Natural Information,” about boogying his infant daughter down the street, holding the moment and the lifetime that brought him here like some goofy sandal-wearing god spinning an orb in each hand.
Callahan specifically approached YTI⅃AƎЯ with the intention of rousing his listeners from our pandemic slumber and reacquainting us with life’s fundamentals: community, patience, deep feeling. It can be annoying, hearing someone extol the virtues of simplicity when times are anything but simple for most people, but Callahan—who we knew for decades as a dyspeptic, or someone doing a good impression of one—retains his irresistible convert’s zeal, one he wields to share the potency of fleeting beauty: Going “look, here” and letting us feel its weight. He watches his children hold hands on the dreamy “First Bird”—a rare moment of groundedness for his daughter, “because everybody wants to carry her around”; he lays on a rock and basks in the music of the spheres on “Planets,” which leaves him feeling as sparkling “as sudsy chrome/Renewed, ya know?/For a second season.” As with those images of buffed fenders and relieved castmates, he collapses the sacred and the mundane into his own particular kind of transcendence, one strengthened by an awareness of mortality: The gurney carrying his dying mother “screamed all down the hall/Just like a seagull screaming down the hall” on “Lily.” The shaggy, lightly noodling “Last One at the Party,” which might be about the late David Berman, makes the gnomic, yet somehow lovely promise: “If you were a house fire/I’d run back in for the cat.”
More than ever, the music reaches for transcendence too. These are Callahan’s most digressive and intuitive songs, and his finest work as a bandleader: guitarist Matt Kinsey, drummer Jim White, pianist Sarah Ann Phillips, and bassist Emmett Kelly at its core. The soothing “Planets” softly takes flight, reaching to echo that celestial resonance in softly shuddering electric guitar and a haze of cymbals; the conflict of dream-state and time’s lengthening shadow on “First Bird” prompt tender fanfares but then tense thickets of clarinet and guitar that wobble Callahan’s observations. Even the quietest songs teem with detail, which makes them feel alive. “I feel something coming on/A disease or a song,” he sings on “Everyway,” one of YTI⅃AƎЯ’s most grounded numbers and one of its most hyper-alert: a steady acoustic tumble that flickers with electric frequencies and barely perceptible cricket chirrups of guitar.
It yearns for the essential, even before Callahan explicitly articulates that aim. “And the wooden nickel we took/In the divorce of rider and course/Was by the book,” he sings later on that song, getting at one of YTI⅃AƎЯ’s main themes: the alienation of man from nature, and how they might be reunited. Callahan’s proposition is more metaphysical than straightforward prelapsarianism—think How to Do Nothing with a laid-back groove. In “Partition,” Callahan denounces “big pigs in a pile of shit and bones” who think they can buy enlightenment, and over the course of its driving, vigorous incantation, he urges us to: “Microdose!/Change your clothes!/Do what you’ve got to do …. To see the picture.” He practically vibrates as he does so, leaving you invigorated to wage your own quest for the sublime, whatever it may be. Though he doesn’t always land the pitch: “Natural Information” is a fun theme song for the virtues of the innate, but it’s so chipper—almost unsettlingly so, for anyone steeped in the Smog years—that it nearly lands in the territory of “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”
Callahan tempers his roving third eye with a less sparing lens on figures who are closed off to that sort of possibility, perceiving it as near enough the root of all evil. “Naked Souls” offers a comic sketch of basement-dwellers and keyboard warriors repelled by humanity—wearing their “shades that say ‘F-U’”—but then drives them out in a stormy climax of raging horns and communal singing, a bulwark against isolationism. The cool “Drainface” flashes with anger, seething against the patriarchal forces that appointed the kind of god that avenged cuckolding Adam by making “birth painful”; “Bowevil,” Callahan’s take on a traditional about warding off a harvest-chomping pest, scans as a rebuke of racists and xenophobes, though its wry, rumbling burr is too reminiscent of Apocalypse’s more stirringly ambiguous “America!,” or Gold Record’s entertainingly horrified “Protest Song,” to add much more than a dash of comedy.
YTI⅃AƎЯ reaches Callahan’s aims to reawaken something primal in his listener at its most diffuse—when it’s less a broadcast and more of a wavelength. The lazily lovely “Coyotes” is a domestic scene and a whole allegory. Callahan surveys his family on the porch while roaming dogs linger in the periphery—a little threat licking the edges of his perfect scene. In his sleeping hound, he sees the softening of the wild. In his family, he recognizes the pack mentality shared between man and beast. The only reading that wins out is Callahan’s deep, palpable contentment at the lot of it: “Yes I am your loverman,” he insists happily, again and again. That line aside, the sentiments on YTI⅃AƎЯ are less direct and specific than Callahan’s most openhearted love songs, such as Dream River’s “Small Plane,” which some listeners may lament the lack of; the melodies, too, are less emotionally leading and immediately satisfying. You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him.


The Skiffle Players is a ragtag outfit featuring Cass McCombs alongside members of Circles Around the Sun and the faded alt-country group Beachwood Sparks. Their enjoyably low-stakes debut LP captures the liberal, halfway-stoned spirit that’s demanded of musicians past thirty living in California.

Skifflin'

In September 2013, at the excellently named Mollusk Big Sur Jamboree, folk songwriter Cass McCombs played a one-off show with a ragtag outfit assembled from jam-rockers Circles Around the Sun and faded alt-country group Beachwood Sparks. Dubbed the McCombs Skiffle Players, the band playfully alloyed backwoods folk, lap-steel-infused country, and elaborate West Coast jams. The songs sprawled, the band clicked, and more shows followed, at some length. A 12-track set bootlegged last year clocked in at 100 minutes, and their debut LP, though half as long, captures the liberal, halfway-stoned spirit that’s demanded of musicians past thirty living in California.
Skifflin', an enjoyably low-stakes release, feels less like McCombs’ next frontier in tackling the Great American Folk Album than a leisurely sojourn. (Given the group's colorful press statement–"Peace to the spirits of the musicians who came before us and taught us the secret esoteric ways of skiffle!"–you sense an easy pace suits the rest of the band just fine.) McCombs has never been a predictable songwriter, but Skifflin’ frees him to explore pockets of early American innovation beyond the scope of his pared-back solo work. There’s a shamanistic dirge ("Skiffle Paperclip When Science Evolves"), a quirky jam interrupted by studio in-jokes ("Skiffle Strut"), two faithful trad-folk covers ("Omie Wise" and "Coo Coo Bird"), and a wild freight-train skiffle called "Railroadin' Some," narrated by an unhinged conductor who hollers myriad place names yet can't seem to settle on a destination.
Perhaps thanks to his peripatetic disposition, McCombs has a knack for silently invoking a character’s withheld details; he can be laconic, teasing, and morbid, sometimes simultaneously. Dreamy ballad "Always," the first immediately McCombsian song here, complicates honey-sweet lyrics with an undertone of ambiguous resignation. "All the way to your room/ Rising like a lost balloon ... All the way until the end/ You are my lover and my friend," he murmurs, before closing on a couplet that inexplicably haunts: "No one could ever say/ We didn’t take it all the way." "When the Title Was Wrote" is a perkier take on the McCombs staple, but it’s just as crafty. "Buddha is crucified/ Another misquote," he sings, a loaded riddle that is conspicuous on a record concerned with the interpretation and ownership of American tradition.
McCombs describes songwriting as a process of "uncovering" ancient song forms: Folk melodies and themes, he says, are couched in our cultural fabric, waiting to be found. You see something of that worldview in the detached way he observes his characters, as if wary of imposing his truth on theirs—a wilful outsider, even in worlds of his own creation. It makes sense, then, that on Skifflin’’s pair of folk standards—"Coo Coo Bird" (aka "The Cuckoo") and the murder ballad "Omie Wise"—he is in his element, inhabiting stories that have gone full circle, unearthed long ago from the cultural imagination and since returned to the realm of mythology. Skifflin’ is full of seemingly aimless excursions, but McCombs, far from needing direction, is just finding something larger than himself to get lost in.