Drawing on UK dance music, experimental R&B, and hip-hop, this remix album to the London saxophonist’s kaleidoscopic jazz record expands on the eclectic universe of the original.

Source ⧺ We Move

After years of dance music borrowing from jazz, in the late 2010s UK jazz musicians decided to return the favor, with albums from Kamaal Williams, Moses Boyd et al. drawing from UK garage, jungle, broken beat, house, R&B, afrobeats and more in search of a new jazz swing. In this context, Source ⧺ We Move feels like a logical next step for London saxophonist Nubya Garcia after the success of her 2020 debut album Source, a modern jazz record of kaleidoscopic musical ambition. Garcia called Source “a definite ode to musical history,” with the album taking in influences from Colombian cumbia, reggae, calypso, and modern dance music to create a vision of jazz that was both historic in scope and modern in feel.
On Source ⧺ We Move, Garcia has invited musicians from the worlds of hip hop (DJ Harrison), experimental R&B (KeiyaA, Georgia Anne Muldrow), broken beat (Kaidi Tatham), house (Suricata) and South American fusion (Dengue Dengue Dengue) to remix tracks from her debut, alongside jazz musicians Nala Sinephro and Moses Boyd, with the “We Move” suffix reflecting the new album’s embrace of dance beats. And yet, on the whole, Source ⧺ We Move is less an overhaul of Garcia’s work than a spotlight on existing musical ideas. Dengue Dengue Dengue’s take on “Source,” for example, lasers in on the reggae groove that pins down the album version, while DJ Harrison teases out the hip hop cadence that underlies “The Message Continues”.
Source ⧺ We Move’s weaker tracks can feel rather reductive when compared to the original album’s cornucopia of ideas. Georgia Anne Muldrow’s remix of “Boundless Beings” is pretty fine, in and of itself, but the decision to decimate Akenya’s bewitching vocal leaves the remix looking underfed. Suricata’s late-night house remake of “La cumbia me está llamando” (ft. La Perla), meanwhile, is too strait-laced compared to the original’s spirited and rather raw Afro-Caribbean slink. A couple of other songs—the Blvck Spvde remix of “Inner Game” and Nala Sinephro’s take on “Together Is a Beautiful Place To Be”—go too far the other way in their search for answers. Both are captivating and very inventive pieces of music but it is hard to see what, exactly, they have taken from their Source material.
Between these extremes, Source ⧺ We Move really takes off when the remixers match Source’s wild inspiration with metamorphic insight of their own. Two of the best remixes come from artists close to the UK jazz scene: Kaidi Tatham, a legend of the West London broken beat sound, with its syncopated rhythms and heavy jazz influences, transforms “La cumbia me está llamando” into an idiosyncratic dance-floor bomb, adding ductile bass, Roy Ayers chords, and a wonderfully sharp drum rhythm; while Moses Boyd makes “Pace” into a live drum & bass beast, like Roni Size & Reprazent with added creases ironed in. Chicago songwriter KeiyaA’s “Stand With Each Other” is another highlight, rearranging the original song according to a new internal logic, where R&B, rough electronica and jazz collide, the three pillars eventually dovetailing in a gorgeous chord sequence that breezes down halfway in.
More than a remix album, then, Source ⧺ We Move is like an expansion pack to Source’s electric, eclectic universe, opening up paths and byways that shed new light on Garcia’s work while staying true to her vision; a modular musical adventure that is best enjoyed in context.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Madvillainy, one of the most anticipated releases in underground rap history, happens to parallel one of the most anticipated arrivals…

Madvillainy

Madvillainy, one of the most anticipated releases in underground rap history, happens to parallel one of the most anticipated arrivals in comic book history: the short-lived Amalgam Comics label. As the name implied, the Amalgam Universe brought together the two most dominant and popular comic factions—Marvel and DC—and all of their respective characters, styles and quirks. The long-awaited collaboration between producer/emcees Madlib and MF Doom, Madvillainy is the Infinity Gauntlet of rap, a tense mainstream-meets-indie, avant-meets-antique melee that, as the opening sample suggests, plays on a “seminal connection that audiences can relate their experience in life with the villains and their dastardly doings.”
“MADVILLAIN: RETARDED HARD COPY”
In November 2002, Otis Jackson Jr. (aka Madlib) went south to Brazil on business. For the trip, he compiled two mix CDs of beats and unfinished tracks: one stored his collaborations with Detroit’s Jay Dee; the second held work with Brooklyn’s Daniel Dumile (aka MF Doom). As a true testament to both fidelity’s fragility and the power of file-sharing, both discs leaked a few months later, giving birth to a logical buzz, but more importantly, heightening expectations to impossible heights; these demos were pretty fucking tight. If “Peeyano Keys” and “Powerball #5” were just rough drafts, what could be expected of the completed project?
Undoubtedly, Madlib and Doom felt the pressure. The leak seemed to be a huge kick in the ass, especially for Madlib, who in the past few years has been garnering the reputation of being brilliant and prolific, but distracted: His Blunted in the Bomb Shelter mix (rumored to have been concocted in less than a day), Blue Note-sampling Shades of Blue, and even the Jaylib collaboration are fresh, but sloppy and often unfocused. Madvillainy is anything but: The samples are smart and never played-out, and the production and rhymes reveal a determined sense of cooperation, as Doom spouts off his most brilliant lyrical change-ups and production-conscious playoffs.
“Wild guess, you can say he stay sedated.”
One of the noticeable differences between the unauthorized promo and the final burn of the album is a change in vocal tone from Doom, which has shifting from an excited, measured performance to a slower, scratchier and ultimately better-suited delivery, considering Madlib’s low-key, bass-oriented production. Some people take the new chilled delivery as somehow inferior to the old incarnation, but taken in context, the album benefits from the re-recording, particularly in cases were Doom re-arranges couplets to optimize his punchlines (“Meat Grinder”) or adds new lines altogether (“Figaro”).
“Your first and last step to playing yourself like accordion.”
Doom’s acknowledgement of Madlib’s accordion sample (the same one Daedelus used on 2002’s Invention) is the most obvious instance of Madvillainy’s lyrics/production integrity, but the album is chock full of them. For a collaboration which the duo has described as something “like a telepathy thing. There wasn’t a lot of talking,” Madlib and Doom, proponents of two distinctive hip-hop styles, are of one unusually strong mind.
“Mad plays the bass like the race card.”
The axis of Madvillainy is Otis Jackson Jr.’s production. While Doom’s entire career has been shadowed by consistently strong production efforts, never has such chemistry developed between him and another beatmaker. From the unbelievable Castlevania-meets-Rocky & Bullwinkle piano chase music of “Supervillain Theme” to the shifting keyboard jazz suite of “Great Day” to the dark chamber bass, timbales and jump-cut ukulele plucks of “Meat Grinder,” Madlib proves himself as much more than just a loop digger, topping his best work on Quasimoto’s The Unseen with an album of consistently incredible beat work. And it isn’t just the beats that make the partnership work so well: The character of his vocal samples and the smoothness of his song-to-song segues make this album individual to the styles of both artists—a difference that puts this pairing far ahead of similarly talented teams like RJD2 and Blueprint’s Soul Position.
“Don’t make me have to pound his tin crown face in.”
Both Doom’s and Madlib’s myriad aliases make sparkling cameo appearances on Madvillainy, most notably on “America’s Most Blunted,” in which Madlib bickers with alter-ego Quasimoto, and on “Fancy Clown,” which features Dumile as Viktor Vaughn. Here, Vaughn steams on an ex-girlfriend’s unfaithfulness—but she’s cheating with Metalface, another Dumile alias. It’s a brilliant conceit, and perhaps makes “Fancy Clown” hip-hop’s first schizophrenic self-diss track.
“Hey you: Don’t touch the mic like it's AIDS on it.”
Okay, so maybe that’s a little harsh. Although the guest appearances from the Stones Throw massive are Jackson Jr.’s take on label-based self-aggrandizement, they never disrupt the album’s flow, and never say anything too stupid (Medaphoar even garners a laugh on “Raid” with, “My niggas take ‘no’ like Kobe”). Still, it helps that these extraneous verses are few and far between; most listeners would likely have preferred an additional Doom cut instead, or at least an appearance from Doom’s Monsta Island Czars.
“Spit so many verses, sometimes my jaw twitches/One thing this party could use is more… booze.”
When much of the underground often aspires to Truth and Something Bigger, Madlib and Doom have always seemed content to be quirky through and through, lightly roasting themselves and subverting the genre itself to brilliant effect. Like in the above quote from “Great Day”: The rhyme’s pattern and rap’s topical stereotype demands the word “bitches,” yet Doom hilariously says “booze” instead. Or on “Money Folder,” in which Doom starts off, “Don’t mind me, I won’t just rhyme lightly off of two or three Heinies,” but flips beers to babes midway: “And boy was they fine, G: One black, one Spanish, one Chi-nee.”
“The best emcee with no chain ya ever heard.”
Madvillainy is inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip-hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots. Madlib and Doom are individually at their most refined here, and together, they’ve created one of the most exciting blockbuster alliances in the underground to date. Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, undie, or otherwise.


Berlin's FILM Recordings offers a new recording of two golden-era works by the minimalist masters, reimagined and modernized.

Steve Reich / Terry Riley: Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1

Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1

The 1970s was Steve Reich’s decade; although he had already completed groundbreaking phase pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and Violin Phase by the end of the ‘60s, the ten-year run that followed was something else entirely. Starting with Drumming in 1971, moving through the epochal Music for 18 Musicians and passing into the early ’80s with the beautiful Tehillim, Reich married his early structural innovations to a singular, aqueous melodicism that rocketed him out of the downtown NY avant-garde into as close to the mainstream as it is possible for a modern composer to be.
Six Pianos—written in between Drumming and 18 Musicians and released to accompany the show-stealing Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ—is a solid fan favorite, a lovely piece of music that fits perfectly between the larger, more definitive works. Once you know what to expect from the composer, Reich’s work from this era does exactly what it says on the box: there are six pianos, playing overlapping developments and variations on deceptively simple melodic figures for the piece's duration. Development will happen, but in a such a supple fashion you will be hard pressed to remember what was different between the start of the piece and its conclusion. Everything has shifted, yet nothing has changed.
Something similar can be said for the various recordings of Reich’s work. One sinks into the music so easily that different iterations can seem only incrementally distinct from each other. This new LP issued by Berlin’s FILM Recordings reprises a recent performance by an ensemble featuring, among others, members of chamber-techno upstarts Brandt Brauer Frick and promises “Six Pianos the way it should be looked at in 2016.” To achieve this, each player recorded their individual part alone, in separate studios, later combining the layers into a unified whole. The result offers a distinct perspective on Pianos, though perhaps not an improvement.
Reich’s music is quintessentially New York, with precise, percolating rhythms and a subtle melancholy evoking nothing more than the simple pleasures of darting through a hectic Manhattan on a crisp autumn afternoon. Part of the joy of his larger ensemble works is the lush crowding of instruments, with different voices smearing together, suddenly poking out before receding back into the mix. On this recording, however, each line is rendered with stunning clarity and separation. It’s a move that’s in line with the times, with ensembles like So Percussion and Alarm Will Sound offering virtuosic updates of classic pieces, and makes for an intriguing listen. The clockwork qualities of Reich’s music are brought to the front, and you can focus immediately on any part you like, letting the rest move around you.
However, some of the richness and emotion that make this work so enduring are dulled in favor of a tidy tastefulness. In their youth, minimalist composers had to fight hard against lazy attempts to classify their work as New Age, and the players here seem determined to emphasize the elemental rigor of the piece. But although Reich was never utopian in his goals, he was also unafraid of drawing human pathos out from his looping melodies.
The B-side is a rendition of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study #1 that goes further in its modern updates. Riley’s original score is written in billowing, hippie chicken scratch and reads more like a brain teaser than a piece of music: “The two kinds of figures interlock and are repeated in this fashion until one of the hands selects another figure… combine any figure from lines 2-6 with continuum figure 1… if any figure from lines 8-10 is played in the alignment of continuum figure 7… it may be combined with other figures from lines 8-10.” And so on. Ensemble member Gregor Schwellenbach performed the piece solo and put together the final mix with assistance from engineer Lukas Vogel, who added delays and reverbs. The work, open to interpretation, here becomes a series of tight, consonant piano runs that double over each other in dizzying spirals. An early work of Riley’s, Study #1 laid the groundwork for his iconic A Rainbow in Curved Air and subsequent masterpieces like Persian Surgery Dervishes. Intuitive, often darkly psychedelic explorations of textures and loops performed during druggy “all night flights,” these pieces presaged techno by over a decade. Now an ensemble with roots in modern club music has returned to the source material, and though you would never confuse this record for a DJ tool, you can hear a familial bond.
Back in 1999, Nonesuch released the Reich Remixed compilation, where a splashy array of electronic producers were invited to explore his back catalogue. A case has always been made for Reich’s relationship to minimal dance music, but aside from the obvious use of repetition that both share, I’ve never seen it, and the compilation struck me as a ham-fisted attempt to gussy up his image for a new generation. This LP is something else entirely. As electronic production has become the new normal and generations upon generations of producers continue to stretch the possibilities of dance music, techno has itself become an elder statesman's genre. Festivals like CTM and Unsound have made their name juxtaposing DIY electronics, touring DJs, loner ambient composers and new music ensembles, and left-of-center artists like Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, and Lee Gamble regularly shuttle between the club and the art world. This LP serves as a worthy and timely addition to the composers’ catalogues, but after finishing this version of Six Pianos, I found myself reaching for my beat up copy of Reich’s 1986 re-orchestration for marimbas. And when it was done, I reached for it again.


Ahmed Gallab has spent the last six years slowly refining the scope of his music. The one-time contributor to both Yeasayer and Caribou returns here with an album that seamlessly mixes Afropop and off-kilter electronic sounds.

Mean Love

Ahmed Gallab has spent the last six years slowly refining and reducing the scope of his music. When the Sudanese sometimes-session musician started on his own as Sinkane, his work resembled the rustling, windswept breeze of post-rock—2008 debut Color Voice and the following year’s self-titled effort could’ve been easily mistaken for the sprawling instrumental work coming out of Chicago in the late ‘90s. But as he vacuumed up more sonic influences, the music contracted. Mars from 2012, Sinkane’s breakout effort, was an appealing mix of Afropop rhythms and dance music’s slinkier tendencies, as Gallab restrained his leg-stretching tendencies with pop-focused structures that nonetheless possessed a jammy feel. His latest, Mean Love, is his most direct and concise collection of songs yet, distilling his compositional talents and reining in any attendant looseness.
This overall trajectory isn’t dissimilar to that of the band he’s most known for contributing to, Brooklyn aesthetes Yeasayer, who made a name with distinctly proggy, expansive-sounding music before whittling down their rougher edges. But while Yeasayer have experienced a creative decline in their search for a simpler expression, Gallab continues to improve his sense of songcraft. Earlier this year, he acted as musical director for ATOMIC BOMB! The Music of William Onyeabor, a celebration of the Nigerian synth-pop pioneer that included contributions from David Byrne, Devonté Hynes, and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, among others. On Mean Love, Gallab exudes a similar sense of adventurousness, and he liberally wields Afropop influences with confidence; the cascading horns and easy, continuous beat of “New Name” resemble the hypnotic ebullience of luminaries like Tony Allen and Fela Kuti poured into a small-scale mold.
Showcasing a stylistic restlessness that works in Gallab’s favor, Mean Love’s try-anything spirit is sometimes reminiscent of the electro-pop of Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick, with Gallab’s smooth professionalism replacing Bundick’s good-natured amateurishness. More favorably, Gallab’s pleasing upper vocal register and genre-bending tendencies recall Dan Snaith, the mastermind behind the influence-inhaling Caribou project (Gallab was a live drummer for Caribou for a time) who’s proved a master in creating pop music that’s emotive, brainy, and brawny. Snaith’s airy voice tends to float over the music, and Gallab similarly hovers over the slow drumbeat and jettisoned synths of “Son”, the album’s lyrical high point. "Son" finds its creator ruminating on familial pressures and the eternal conundrum of finding a place within one’s point of geographical origin: “There’s a pressure to being your eldest/ There’s such pressure to make you the proudest...I will not forget where I came from.”
Elsewhere, Gallab tackles slow-moving funk, spaced-out psychedelic pop, and peppy tropicalia with confidence. His creative malleability is impressive, even if the results don’t always excite; in particular, a few cuts on the album’s back half (the languid title track, “Galley Boys”, the twangy closer “Omdurman”) take on countrified shapes with brushes of slide guitar, a stylistic turn that is structurally sound but not as engaging as Mean Love’s other genre excursions. It seems almost unfair, though, to criticize Gallab for the minor crime of engaging with a sound that’s not as inherently interesting as what he’s proven capable of elsewhere, as Mean Love cements his reputation as a capable musical wanderer willing to engage with a variety of sounds.


"I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey & The Deaf Aids."
\n\n\ ...Or some such convoluted story. All these years ...

Let It Be... Naked

"I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey & The Deaf Aids."
...Or some such convoluted story. All these years after the fact, what is clear is that The Beatles were special mainly because they were dedicated to producing things nobody else could. These songs, the band's persona, the stances they took and lessons learned in front of the camera weren't just the exploits of a popular band, but live memoirs of the spiritual, artistic and disciplined Ideal. For each word written and photo taken of all manner of celebrities, they are still arguably the only group of musicians worth talking about with the same significance as any world leader or religious icon you care to name-- at least in the West. Bigger than Jesus? All you need is love, and there is nothing I could write about them that isn't a cliché a hundred times over.
Because of this, most folks with a half a brain refuse to write about them in the same boundless way fans and journalists did in the 60s. I suppose this is a wise choice; after all, I'm about as interested in sifting through their complete story right now as I am in reading the dictionary cover-to-cover. Sure, it's "important," if music and people and getting swept up in a minor revolution of love and change is important, but it's too fucking much. Collectively, The Beatles had so many ideas, made so much music, affected so many people, inspired so much good (and bad) that they were necessarily bigger than life. Thus, we're necessarily stuck with tackling this stuff bit by bit. It's a story of looking at things under a microscope, taking things slowly and trying to remember why we were so interested in the first place; it's a story of uncovering some small kernel of their legacy and watching it wind its way back to the center. Everything worthwhile gets back eventually.
"Phase one in which Doris gets her oats."
Paul McCartney is a smug, charmless fuck. Ahem: "The great thing now about the remixed versions is that, with today's technology, they sound better than ever." If he had any humility, he'd insert a joke about receiving a bonus CD of outtakes when you ordered now; let's see some testimonials from satisfied customers as they pump their Beatles-themed parties, and claim, "Listening to this stuff brings back so many memories!" If his reasons for bringing you the "real" Let It Be seem cribbed from an infomercial, one can hardly fault his timing. George Harrison did, in fact, sign off on this release before his death, but given that he actually quit the band during the original sessions, one can only hope McCartney is reaping all his karmic just desserts for this "naked" edition.
In January 1969, about six weeks after The White Album was released, the band more-or-less agreed that their next project would involve being filmed as they performed their music. Well, at least they agreed they should be filmed; or, they had certainly been open to the idea of all being in the same place at the same time, working on music, possibly making a movie (but "no movies," as Harrison protested) and maybe eventually playing live somewhere in an Arabic desert. Or France. Or maybe on the rooftop of their studios. Oh, and, "Any of us can do separate things as well and that way it also preserves The Beatles bit." Hmm, but, "What we're doing is still rehearsing and we'll get it together." "We'll collect our thoughts and you collect yours."
The sessions and rehearsals that eventually produced the original issue of Let It Be have been rightfully documented as disorganized and tension-filled. After spending a month being filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who they'd already worked with on videos for "Hey Jude" and "Revolution", among others) as they rehearsed new material, and having put so much sound to tape that no one could be bothered to sift through it all when the time came to deliver an actual product, the band, realizing their defeat, handed it all off to engineer Glyn Johns and moved on to their next project. One original idea for these sessions was merely to be filmed performing songs from The White Album; another was that they should get back to their roots of performing raving rock 'n' roll in front of an audience. Typically, The Beatles' ideas and ambitions far outreached what they could possibly have achieved on their own-- and for the first time since they'd been together, most of them were too tired, distracted or otherwise uninspired to make sure all those ridiculous ideas actually materialized.
Johns compiled his version of what the record should be: studio chatter, adlibs, many rough takes of new songs and even off-the-cuff covers. He was chosen because of his work with The Rolling Stones, but only too soon discovered that his new employers operated differently. Even after several modifications and release dates, his compilation was rejected. The tapes were shelved until the band agreed to let legendary producer Phil Spector have a go at squeezing a good record out of them. It should be noted that while The Beatles were only too happy to rid themselves of the burden of Let It Be, they were working with George Martin on Abbey Road in exactly the same way they always had: If perfectionism and pride were forgotten in the winter of '69, apparently they could make amends on a "proper" LP. Of course, when the band actually heard what Spector had produced, they balked (well, most of the time, depending on who was arguing with who). Nevertheless, Let It Be was released in January 1970, after Abbey Road, and despite considerable differences of opinion on its "greatness" at the time, it has become yet another canonical set of Beatle music.
So what did Spector produce? First, he added a couple of songs, including an old throwaway by Lennon called "Across the Universe", which was originally from 1968 and had recently been released on a charity compilation called No One's Gonna Change Our World. Secondly, he beefed up some of the rather sparse arrangements with ersatz orchestral and choral parts-- much to the fury of McCartney after hearing his "The Long and Winding Road" turned into a Hallmark commercial. Never mind that Spector had at least given the band a releasable record, including managing to turn a minute-and-a-half Harrison song fragment into "I Me Mine". Given McCartney's famed disgust over the resulting LP, his enthusiasm to issue his idea of how this music should sound shouldn't surprise anyone. Let It Be... Naked is a remixed, resequenced presentation of the most maligned Beatles album, and for better or for worse, will wrap no loose ends whatsoever.
"Don't Let Me Down"
The best news about this record is that the songs themselves have not changed much in 33 years. Those of you who love "Across the Universe" and "Two of Us" for their elegant simplicity and overwhelming beauty will be happy to know they haven't changed, even if these performances are not the ones to which we've become accustomed. By the same token, I don't think I can ever love "The Long and Winding Road"; sure, the choirs were a bit much, but then, McCartney didn't really need them to lay on some pretty thick drama. In any case, once over the initial shock of the new song order, Naked will seem very familiar to fans.
The sound is perfect, of course. If anything, Naked serves as a great argument for a project to remaster all of the original Beatle albums. Producers Paul Hicks, Guy Massey and Allan Rouse have done an excellent job cleaning up whatever warts were on the original tapes, and presenting these songs in a fresh way without resorting to making them sound overly "modern." They've also somehow found a way to make McCartney play in tune, so I can only be grateful for that.
Now I must ask: Why? In 2003, there are few people clamoring for an alternate version of Let It Be, and those that are have almost certainly discovered the myriad bootlegs offering every possible combination of halfway-finished covers and studio banter. There is Beatle music yet to be released that should be: My pick would have been a legit issue of their sessions at George's house playing The White Album songs unplugged before recording them. This is music that lends a considerably different light to their music than any remix ever could, and also has the advantage of not being horrifically over-analyzed for the past 30 years. Conversely, Naked is really only interesting as a mild curio, for fighting the boots and for the strangeness of reading a lecture on the wrongs of music-sharing placed within the cover of a Beatles record.
"Riffs are the only thing that will help all of us."
So then, the tunes. To my ears, "Get Back" and "For You Blue" are unchanged. The difference is that "Get Back" now leads off the record, and "For You Blue" is slotted third, suggesting McCartney thinks more of it than Spector did. Likewise, "I Me Mine" features the same familiar Harrison vocals and guitar lines, but is completely stripped of the cinematic Spector backing arrangement. "The Long and Winding Road" also seems mostly the same, minus the orchestra and choir. However, listening more closely, I'm sure this is a different performance; McCartney's vocal wavers slightly and Billy Preston's organ solo gives it a subtle, soulful feel, reminiscent of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (one of McCartney's favorite songs). However, what's immediately noticeable is the marked clarity of all of these songs. Ringo's hi-hat is crisp, Harrison's Leslie'd asides are in plain sight, rather than being buried by excitable sopranos.
Lennon's "Don't Let Me Down" wasn't on the original LP but was rehearsed at the same sessions. The band performs it here more uptempo than on the released "Get Back" B-side, and generally more ragged-- as is to be expected, given that this was pulled from their famous rooftop performance. Lennon lets loose with some wailing falsetto near the end, and even though they weren't the tightest outfit ever to play, few can deny the contagious enthusiasm they mustered onstage. "I've Got a Feeling" and "One After 909" are also pulled from the roof concert, and are similarly raw. Still, they're hardly bad recordings and I wonder why the band was so reluctant to release them at the time.
The tracks that struck me most on Naked were "Let It Be" and "Across the Universe". The former because it seems very much improved with this remix; the Harrison guitar solo is new, so this is likely a different version than was released originally, and the hymnal-esque backing vocals are gorgeously placed across the aural plane in the mix. These are the kinds of changes that make Naked an interesting listen for longtime fans, and raise the question of the powers that be possibly issuing a full-length project of Beatles remixes wherein drastic changes are made to songs without the obligation of placing the project alongside the rest of their proper LPs, as if this is the way they were "meant" to be. That said, "Across the Universe" is the same (slowed-down) vocal and guitar from Let It Be, but with more reverb and soft sitar-like sounds. Though there's already a beautiful, lesser-known version of this track available (an elaborate George Martin-produced studio version with a background children's choir and bird chirps), this take eclipses the already beautiful original Let It Be version as the second-best performance of the song.
Let It Be... Naked also comes with a second disc entitled Fly on the Wall, consisting of several short fragments of studio conversation and song rehearsals, amounting to approximately 21 minutes of bonus material. This disc will doubtless be fascinating to fans, and in particular the snippets of John performing a very early version of "Imagine" (here referenced as "John's Piano Piece"), and a short, striking version of Harrison's "All Things Must Pass", obviously influenced by his time spent with Bob Dylan and The Band in America the previous year. However, given that the entire two-disc set runs less than an hour, I wonder why it wasn't condensed to a single disc. Furthermore, if a 21-minute outtakes collection deserves its own bonus disc, why not expand this material to fill the rest of the CD? Apparently, releasing two versions of Let It Be make more sense to the remaining Beatles than giving fans something new.
"Let It Be"
Ultimately, Naked is not essential. Unlike scattered moments in the Anthology series, this music, though immaculately presented, doesn't really expand on either the music of Let It Be, or The Beatles' legacy. At this point, I'm not sure many people are prepared to accept a new take on the band anyway, but I might at least be happy knowing they didn't take me for a raving completist. And yet, I stood in line for this, just like millions of other like-minded fans will, merely for the chance to hear some small kernel leading me back to the reason I started listening in the first place. The albums will always be there, and the legend will forever be imprinted on the hearts of anyone believing in the affirming power of their music. In the end, regardless of what I write, this is The Beatles, and you already know what that means.


With 43 tracks spread over two discs, the latest deluxe version from the Beasties catalog suffers from some of the same lack of editing as the original did.

Beastie Boys: Hello Nasty [Deluxe Edition]

Hello Nasty [Deluxe Edition]

Even more so than career high-point Paul's Boutique, Hello Nasty tries to squeeze in every interesting record, old or new, that passed through the Beastie Boys' orbit at its time of recording. So why is one album considered a masterpiece while the other belongs in the bottom end of the band's catalog, just above the tedious instrumental EPs and second-rate hardcore? For one thing, Hello Nasty lacks the energy of almost every other Beasties album. It's got all these sounds to work with, that little-bit-of-everything agglomeration that characterized the late-1990s underground's listening habits: electro, drum'n'bass, lounge, folk, turntablism, tropicalia, dub. Basically anything you'd find in the collection of a given member of Tortoise. But the further the album strays from straight-up hip-hop, the less excited it sounds to do anything with these new influences.
That makes it sound like a chore, and it is, albeit intermittently. At 22 tracks, Hello Nasty is less boundary-pushing, carefully collaged risk-taking than the excess that comes from unlimited home studio time and no fear of mercenary label owners or turncoat audiences. "Song for the Man" is the first real evidence of the trio's slide into overextended, self-satisfied slackness. When you take the kitchen-sink approach to making an album, you better make damn sure you bring your A-game to each idea you try. It's not like the Beasties lacked the chops or wit to turn "Song for the Man" into something worth listening to. And there's nothing wrong with froth for frat boys, provided there's a hook. But this little-too-laid-back hip-hop lite is barely a song. Even the Beastie's post-Paul's instrumental funk noodles had more bite.
It sounds all the weaker coming from a band whose prime draw was a exuberance, even mania. Sounding lazy rather than effortless or playful is a bad look for any band-- especially when you've previously prided yourself on proving a don't-give-a-fuck-attitude is compatible with hardcore studio experimentation and pop savvy. If the Beasties anticipated so much of the cut-and-paste hip-hop sound on Paul's Boutique, then why does their contribution to the downtempo glut, passably whimsical instrumental interlude "Sneakin' Out the Hospital", sound less like elders schooling their disciples than three aging magpies trying to keep up with the Ninja Tunes and Mo' Waxes?
Elsewhere, the Beasties fall into the usual traps that beset smart dudes with wide ears, a lot of heart, and plenty of industry clout: go-nowhere studio trickery (murky mumblefest "Flowin' Prose"); eye-rolling heart-on-sleeve earnestness (MCA channeling George Harrison's high guru era on "I Don't Know"); and of course your standard case of guest star-itis. If you can make it through the starstruck Boys' inability to reign in Lee "Scratch" Perry's ramblings on "Dr. Lee, PhD", well, you've got a stronger stomach for superstars kowtowing to their heroes than I do.
The good bits tend to stick to what the Beasties do best-- hyperactive rhyme-lobbing with more bad puns than a MAD magazine sub-editor and a brain-melting overload of one pop-cult ref after another-- with a pre-millennium dancefloor sheen. Thankfully pre-millennium dancefloors-- some of them, at least-- were increasingly in thrall to the recycled rigidity of old-school electro. So you get the Beasties keeping current by referencing the sounds that reared them when they were hip-hop obsessed hardcore kids. Unsurprisingly, the Boys rarely fumble when playing with a sound they'd been loving and perfecting over a decade.
It was also-- lest we forget-- the era of dunderheaded big beat and jungle's last gasp of crowd-pleasing jump-up dumbness. The Beasties were clearly trawling New York's import bins in the months before they laid down Hello Nasty, making the live-from-London remixes of tracks like Fatboy Slim's rework of "Body Movin'" (included on the bonus disc) almost superfluous. The original album tracks have all of the club-centric subgenres' antic energy, plus plenty of trademark Beasties stupid-unto-genius wordplay to make them more than dance comp filler. Ad-Rock rhyming, "I'm the king of Boggle/ There is none higher" with "quagmire" tends dangerously close to both being show-offy and plain cringeworthy. But I'm smiling as I roll my eyes, so I guess he wins.
Elsewhere things get odder, less predictable in the good way. "The Negotiation Limerick File" and "Electrify" don't fit the party-hard schema, but they're good reminders of the sonic diversity of the era's not-quite-mainstream hip-hop. And "Three MC's and One DJ", where Mix Master Mike offers a late-1990s turntablism master-class handily condensed to the length of a single, makes me long for that brief moment when Wire-reading avant-heads shared common ground with straight-up b-boys, the pleasure principle of hip-hop colliding with a noise head's preference for abstract expressionism.
The length of the bonus disc nearly rivals the original's length (21 tracks to the parent album's 22) and contains mostly cutting-room excerpts and drag-assy alternate mixes. Oh boy, an even more meandering "dub mix" of "Dr. Lee, PhD"! There are plenty of short snippets of heavy, kitschy jams where the Beasties indulge their love for the muddy, slo-mo funk of the mid-70s. Get ready for a lot of blaxploitation-in-two-minutes-or-less like "Dirty Dog" and "Aunt Jackie Poom Poom Delicious". As far as the bonus instrumentals go, only the porn-ready mystical mumbo-jumbo minimalism of "The Drone" and the pensive quasi-rock of "Creepin'" justify running the tape past two minutes. And the bulk of the remixes by other artists are inessential, save the stop-and-go stutter-funk Colleone and Webb's "Intergalactic", compelling because it never quite seems to gel with the original.
For an album already in need of a stern editor's hand, the bonus disc just reinforces the impression that the Hello Nasty-era Beasties were bursting with interesting starting points they never bothered to see to completion. I remember loving Hello Nasty at the time in part because it was so much, even the undercooked bits and gimpy hippie schlock. Hell, there were still plenty of tracks left to justify the sticker shock of the just-prior-to-MP3s new CD. But it's hard hearing the positives in such a shapeless mush of half-formed sorta-songs with the weary ears of the post-iTunes playlist compiler. Let alone bothering to pay for it again in full. As an object in itself, we've got the album we've got, and that means assessing the whole unshapely mass/mess, the of-the-moment experiments with the actual tunes worth keeping a decade-plus later. And that whole, less a glorious mess than the exhausting sort, is the least essential Beasties disc until we hit the new millennium.


The Indiana singer-songwriter brings his seductive falsetto and clever production touches to a short, sweet debut EP of bedroom pop and throwback soul.

Stereo EP

Omar Apollo taught himself to sing and play guitar the true millennial way: using YouTube videos as a guide. The Chicano singer-songwriter and producer grew up in Hobart, Indiana, and got his start at the end of 2016, when he was still a teenager, with a string of SoundCloud loosies: a brew of bedroom pop and slinky R&B that offered proof of a natural-born talent. Stereo, his debut EP, is a cross-cultural pleasure trip that further builds out those early ideas, showcasing a colorful palette that glides across genres and eras.
The title track offers a preview of Apollo’s most alluring qualities: dreamy guitar-driven production, soothing vocals that slip seamlessly between Spanish and English, and a lovesick pen. He avoids banality by reshaping each element from track to track; electric bounce on one, acoustic slow burn the next. No matter how forlorn the lyrics, Apollo’s consistently honeyed sound attracts the ear. “Erase” would be a run-of-the-mill breakup ballad if not for the way it feels more sentimental than bitter, like he knows the relationship hasn’t yet reached the end of the road. He pleads his case in warm tones over tremolo guitar and a crisp drum groove, impassioned but not stricken.
Similarly, when he sings, “Got into some bad love, now my heart’s a mess,” on closer “Amor Malo” (“Bad Love”), he doesn’t sound nearly as regretful as it looks on paper. Adoration seeps from his voice, which makes it all the more convincing; he’d likely do it all over again if he could. But Stereo isn’t simply dulcet crooning. On the disco-inspired “Hijo de Su Madre,” he slips between rapping and a glistening higher register. He brings the funk on “Ignorin,” with a little help from a squelching guitar and playful drums. His staccato falsetto‚ a clear callback to Prince’s style, creates a sharp contrast to the rest of the song’s suavity.
Even with a deep bag of tricks to pull from, he’s at his most striking when he goes back to the basics. The EP’s centerpiece, “Ugotme,” is the only one of his original singles reprised here; with nearly two million plays on Spotify, it remains his most popular song to date. It’s not hard to see why: Apollo’s buttery vocals and bluesy guitar make for a sublime combination befitting the enamored lyrics. Like most of his songs, it’s short and sweet, smoldering for a fulfilling but far-too-quick two minutes. But this one sticks with you much longer, tapping into something that is familiar and comforting—an old soul operating in a new time.
That Apollo folds pieces of his heritage into the mix further sweetens the deal, as popular music (like the nation itself) continues to reckon with the visibility afforded to brown people. The stakes may be higher for Apollo, who is a first-generation Mexican-American, but Stereo is a breeze that promises romance even in heartbreak. As a debut, it’s an abridged but still effective introduction to a triple threat of an artist with plenty to offer.


The Brooklyn-based producer, vocalist, and drummer underlines her frosty club cuts and wordless, tranquil interludes with a message of dissent.

acts of rebellion

The underlying theme of Ela Minus’ music is the idea that resistance grows from everyday practices. There are whispers of this across her meticulously crafted debut full-length acts of rebellion, but it’s Minus’ intricate production that commands the most attention. She is both a skilled craftsman and a learned composer: After years of playing in an emo band in her native Colombia, she trained as a jazz drummer at Berklee, where she also learned to design and build synthesizers. Though Minus wrote, produced, engineered, and recorded acts of rebellion at her Brooklyn home, these songs were made for the dark corners of a coldwave disco.
Minus alternates between club cuts and wordless, tranquil interludes, front-loading her most aerobic tracks and leaving more contemplative music for the cooldown. Her technical knowledge is especially evident in the album’s lush instrumentals: Opener “N19 5NF” is glittery and dizzying, like staring at the stars while spinning around too fast; “let them have the internet” stretches out like mechanized whale song through a sea of static. In these nonverbal passages, Minus produces canvases more rich and emotive than some of the realities she sings of.
The album’s most propsulive entries come in the three-song suite of “they told us it was hard, but they were wrong,” “el cielo no es de nadie,” and “megapunk,” which embroider four-on-the-floor beats with clattering percussion, distant breaths, and buzzing synthesizers. “they told us” and “megapunk” are overtly tied to her mission statement: “I want people to feel like they have the power to change the world,” she recently told Pitchfork, suggesting that such change often starts from small acts. Minus has also said that she writes her lyrics (which are sung in English and Spanish) after the music is completed, often relying on unedited improvisation. This process may account for some of the ambiguity in “megapunk” and “they told us,” which approach the topic of dissent in broad, pared-back vocabulary. From “megapunk”:

We can’t seem to find
A reason to stay quiet
We’re afraid we’ll run out of time
To stand up for our rights
We can’t seem to find
Any peace of mind
As much as we try
There’s no way out, but fight

Minus is well-intended, but it’s hard to peek through these platitudes to find what she’s passionate about. The music is layered and driving and a little bit frosty, and the words don’t stoke a particularly visceral or emotional reaction. The kinetic reaction is undeniable—Minus is more than adept at crafting dance music. But is dancing to this music rebellion enough, or is there more to discuss?
On the album’s second half, Minus looks inward, and when she draws from life’s everyday scenes her songs become far more nuanced. On “dominique,” she describes a haze of nocturnal living: spending too much time alone, sleeping well into the evening, and surviving on coffee and liquor. Her voice is breathy and light—a timbre she maintains throughout the album, but one particularly suited to the lone narrator wandering through the wee hours. “The world is made for those who sleep at night,” she speculates over a bittersweet melody that sounds like New Order noir. It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.
acts of rebellion examines the quiet, intimate moments of life as well as concepts that are vast and difficult to convey. Minus approaches both with rich and sophisticated electronic music; it may not be outwardly provocative, but it serves as a place to process initial visions of resistance, those that existed in her private space as she wrote these songs. Perhaps that is a kind of everyday change—acts of rebellion are sometimes dreamt up in your room, but they’re rarely completed there.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Detroit rapper teams up with the Missouri producer on a muted album that plays out like a nostalgic travelogue. Despite his laid-back delivery, James’ verses burble with conflict and regret.

Boldy James / Conductor Williams: Across the Tracks

Across the Tracks

A few years ago, superproducer and frequent Boldy James collaborator the Alchemist discovered that the rapper likes to write in cars. “Not even a moving vehicle,” Alchemist told Complex; “he’s just parked up with the lights on, and he gets his mind right.” That habit fits with the alert repose of the Detroiter’s ruminative drug rap. James’ music is still and relaxed, yet taut as a wound spring. At any moment, violence or emotion might erupt from the calm, like a parked vehicle charging into traffic.
Boldy’s meditations have become a cottage industry since 2020. Every few months, he’ll huddle up with a single producer—like Alchemist, Jay Versace, or Nicholas Craven—and emerge with another casually prismatic street chronicle. It’s shocking how seldom he repeats himself, even as his collaborators tap similar loop-based beats. Working with one producer seems to allow Boldy to zoom in on a particular moment in time—be it the aftermath of a devastating car crash or the stressful prologue to his rap career—and capture every racing thought. On Across the Tracks, a team-up with Missouri producer Conductor Williams, Boldy sifts through recollections of life on the road and on the grind. The album is a travelogue of memories, each song grasping at some distant locale or experience.
The title, which plays on producer Conductor Williams’ name, suits the music’s pensive and peripatetic mood. Conductor, one of the pillars of Griselda Records’ luxe and wavy sound, specializes in dreamy beats built around yawning samples, and this collection is his strongest. He seems to loll his samples rather than chop them, stretching sounds like taffy and then arranging drums and melodies around their elongated shapes. “Flying Trapeze Act” starts with a gorgeous vocal loop and bleeds into a star stream of percussion and chords that flicker in and out of focus as Boldy waxes about close calls. “Used to feel trapped in the ghetto, tryna to break free/On a 30-year run, I feel like an escapee,” he says with relief. Rappers often turn reflective and defiant on Conductor beats; his arrangements have the transportive sparkle of reveries.
As if daydreaming, Boldy spends Across the Tracks teetering between the past and the present. He is dazzlingly limber on standout “The Ol Switcharoo,” bouncing off the clomping downbeat as he recalls life on the go. “East, west, running back and forth tryna run his money up the long way/Stepped on it like a bunion, had a run-yun for the mun-yun/Sold more circles than some Funyuns, all eyes on me through the tollways,” he raps, stretching his words to fit the soothing beat’s languid cadence. His use of directions rather than specific places reinforces the feeling that he is never at rest.
Even when James does use proper nouns, his narratives are generally scrambled. Key motifs and throughlines become legible only through the subtle accretion of tiny details and tensions amid the slick flexes. Driving makes him antsy (“Touchin' down was a cakewalk, I was more nervous on the drive back”) and puts him at ease (“Backin’ Wraith out the garage, I'm through the stratosphere”). His first brick of cocaine, the “worst” one, marks him like a curse, but he boasts, “I just took that bitch to pound town” of a bundle he deems “Sexxy Red.” The FBI, which gets multiple mentions, makes him wary of unfamiliar cars. But also, the feds are just haters: “Whole Bureau know that a nigga high-profile.” There is no explicit payoff to these threads, but they add ballast to Boldy’s twisty verses, which can seem leisurely because of his laidback delivery but often burble with conflict and regret. Conductor’s use of wailing voices and snatches of dialogue accents the rapper’s frequent mentions of dead friends and old memories. James’ Detroit, like Vince Staples’ Long Beach and Ka’s Brownsville, is both a physical place and a spectral presence.
Despite this haunted dynamic, the album ends with an embrace of home. Closer “Stamps in the Middle,” set to fuzzy horn blasts and hazy drums that echo opener “Terms and Conditions,” casts Boldy’s arcing journey as prodigal. “Yeah, I sold drugs, but that ain't shit to be ashamеd about/I made it out unscathed, blocks so hot that you could sunbathe/Nеighborhood full of dead ends and one-ways,” he raps with pride. This bleak, claustrophobic image shouldn’t be charming, but his conviction, and Conductor’s sanguine beat, coat it in warmth.


Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) album in six years, and it documents a return to the elements for Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley.

Kannon

In 2008, Sunn O))) played a short series of duo concerts meant to acknowledge the band's modest, mimetic origins. Sunn O))) began as a tribute of sorts to Earth, the influential duo whose low, slow riffs and steadfast amplifier worship established the doom-metal mold that Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley were trying to fill anew. And for the first few years, that was the limit of the pair's output—lumbering riffs, played at a near-tectonic pace and deliriously high volumes.
During the next half-decade, however, Anderson and O'Malley evolved. They incorporated a constellation of metal, noise and experimental guests into a series of high-concept records—White1, White2, and Black One, each of which expanded the pair's personnel and possibilities.They staged high-profile, full-length collaborations with counterparts and heroes. They turned concerts in clubs and cathedrals alike into frame-shattering, wall-shaking temporary installations, where robes, fogs, and a shrine of their namesake amplifiers shaped a sort of heavy-metal happening. More than a 10-year anniversary, those 2008 shows represented chances to jettison the excess and prove that the anchoring idea—chords played so long and loud the listener heard every overtone and felt every subtle change—remained potent. The new art-metal masters wanted to show they could still get back to basics.
A year after those concerts, Sunn O))) issued Monoliths & Dimensions, an aptly named colossus that folded a horn section, a choir, a string section, a blown conch shell and black metal legend Attila Csihar speaking slowly into four pieces that were just ridiculous and divergent enough to work. In the years since, collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker have also pushed Anderson and O’Malley farther beyond the early, atavistic comforts of Earth. Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) since Monoliths & Dimensions, and it likewise documents a return to the elements for Anderson and O'Malley. Cut with a cast of familiar collaborators playing mere support roles to Anderson, O'Malley, and their amplifiers, Kannon reneges on that progression with a triptych of elegant yet underwhelming arcs and drones. It is typically loud. It is often pretty. It is, cumulatively, the first minor full-length studio album of Sunn O)))'s career.
There are, no doubt, many beautiful and bracing passages throughout Kannon. Few musicians can summon the same mix of patience, intensity, roar, and meticulousness as Anderson and O'Malley; it's wonderful to hear them interact in the pristine, refined acoustic setting offered by producer Randall Dunn. Near the midsection of "Kannon 1", the bass, guitar, Csihar's obscured voice, and a capillary of feedback lock into a perfect unison. Even delivered through headphones, the sound is somehow paralyzing and exhilarating, as though a team of masseurs has just found all the right pressure points. The playing is so careful and the recording so crisp that, during "Kannon 3", you can listen to chords and notes arrive one by one and track their slow disappearance into the din around them. It's like watching time-lapse footage of solitary raindrops forming a deep puddle.
But where Kannon exceeds as a collection of moments, it fails as both an album and an experience, especially given the general Sunn O))) scale. Brevity may be the only truly new idea the band incorporates here, as these three tracks just break the 33-minute mark. But Anderson and O'Malley don't seem to have squeezed the normal complications and layers into a tighter space so much as omitted them altogether. "Kannon 1" slowly gathers its riffs, pulling back the stage curtains for the subterranean rattle of an oddly subdued Csihar. "Kannon 2" begins with a wrestling match with a guitar that resolves in feedback and, again, introduces a familiar choir of incantatory voices, all surrounded by a wispy veil of electronic oscillations. The album's most unexpected instant actually comes at that song's end, when one massive, static bass note hangs still in the air. Percussion jostles beneath it, as though the enormous tone were rattling a household cupboard. Rather than explore the strange sound, Sunn O))) simply shut down the amps and discard it. And that's the problem, really: Kannon feels underdeveloped and rushed, like the start of a project that's been delivered prematurely.
Since the release of Monoliths & Dimensions, Anderson and O'Malley have taken very separate paths. Anderson has re-launched the blues'n'doom outfit Goatsnake and retooled his label, Southern Lord, for old-school hardcore, crusty metal, and crossover fare. O'Malley, on the other hand, started an improvisational band with Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi, scored a film, composed for an orchestra, performed a new Alvin Lucier work, and launched a label devoted to such interests. That tension has long been an animating, thrilling force for Sunn O))). On Kannon, though, Anderson and O'Malley have opted to avoid rather than embrace it, to find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it.


Four reissues of Funkadelic's essential, early-1970s Westbound Records releases.

Funkadelic: Funkadelic / Free Your Mind / Maggot Brain / America Eats Its Young

Funkadelic, arguably the greatest "black rock" band ever...Actually, strike that, they are far and away the best black rock band ever. In fact, screw everything, they're one of the greatest rock bands period, up there with any classic rock dinosaur you care to name. And though it's tempting to launch an essay on the racism of rock radio-- or rock journalism for that matter-- I'll stick to the band. Even as they're revered as legends and purveyors of the some of the best funk of the 70s, I've read relatively few accounts on their greatness as a pure rock band. But they had it all: great players, great singers, a great look, a great concept, actual hits, great albums, great drugs, freaky sex, disputes over money-- everything Led Zeppelin (or Spinal Tap) taught us was necessary to make the world's greatest rock music.
They started small, backing up ringleader George Clinton's Parliaments in the late 60s. When Clinton got into arguments with his label Revilot over money and rights, he decided to start recording his backup band instead, using the original Parliaments singers (Clinton, Ray Davis, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins-- and come on, dude's name is "Fuzzy"-- Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas) as "guests." Guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, bassist Billy Nelson, drummer Tiki Fulwood, and eventually, master keyboardist Bernie Worrell were the band that would turn this fairly traditional soul group into the intense live act that wowed Detroit's Westbound Records head Armen Boladian. He signed them, and from the get-go, their music cut through genres and money bullshit like neither had ever existed. Never mind that half the band quit and came back again during recording sessions for their first record, Funkadelic was destined for greatness. Ace's reissues of the band's Westbound catalog is long overdue-- they sound a world better than the terribly mastered original CD pressings, and contain a wealth of bonus tracks, alternate mixes, and liner notes.
Funkadelic from 1970 was a bomb dropped all over rock and soul. No matter Hendrix, no matter James Brown, no matter the MC5, nobody had ever heard anything like this. This music was slower than sludge, dirtier than the "raw funk" Herb "Sparky" Sparkman talks about in "Music For My Mother". It was a great big fucking mess, and a lot of people didn't know what to make of it. I remember reading a Rolling Stone review from the time that ended with "who needs this shit?" and a writer from the Blues & Soul 'zine from a year later admitted, "Funkadelic has never been one of my favorite R&B; acts". Still, the record sold (peaking at #16 on the Soul LPs chart), and planted the seed of a cult worship that would balloon in the latter half of the decade, making the P-Funk enterprise the most successful soul act on the planet.
"Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" started out with the sound of Clinton's wet mouth and the best ever opening line for an album: "If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions." When the beat hits with Hazel's guitar line, there can be no doubt that Funkadelic were without peer as far as this stuff was concerned. This stuff-- hell, tunes like "Mommy" and "Good Old Music" are slams to the gut as powerful as anything Zep ever did, and with beats to spare. "Music For My Mother" is like a Southern myth, detailing a loner's travels through "Keep Runnin' Mississippi", hearing music he thought long dead, yet getting trapped by its sticky black allure. "What Is Soul?" drops more classic lines ("soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes," "Soul is chitlins foo young," "soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper") in seven minutes than most bands muster up in a career. Bonus tracks like the tight instrumental "As Good As I Can Feel" and several single versions of album cuts make this album one of the most indispensable of all indispensable Funkadelic records.
Even as Funkadelic was an inspired statement, it wasn't exactly a coherent one, especially as most of the band had quit and come back again during the recording sessions. Their second record, 1971's Free Your Mind was the first (of only two) records done by the core unit from start to finish-- albeit, according to Clinton, one recorded in the span of a single day, while everyone was tripping. Compared to the debut, it's a lot more "rock" and a little less "soul." The opening track "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow" was like a Sly Stone jam gone haywire, with fuzzed out guitar and bass, distorto-organ, and spoken, chanted or otherwise freaked vox appearing all over the mix. "Friday Night, August 14th", "Funky Dollar Bill", and "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You" were a bit tighter, and a lot harder. "Funky Dollar Bill" features another down-home-on-a-porch-and-an-amp-with-probably-some-pot-and-other-things guitar riff from Hazel and Clinton and company sounding completely fucked up and screaming out at you from the depths of the stereo on lines like "you don't buy a life, you live a life, a father learns much too late-- HE WAS A-NEVER HOME!!" "Euology and Light" is like a lysergic Lord's Prayer, replete with backwards choir. The bonus track "Fish, Chips and Sweat" is again reminiscent of Sly, but in his "Dance to the Music" guise, and is suitably celebratory, even as the mix distorts the tape.
And then they got serious: Maggot Brain, released in the July of the same year, is the peak of the Funkadelic experience. The songs jam harder, the way out stuff is way fucking out there. Seriously, how many dimensions is Hazel traveling through on the instrumental title cut? His 10-minute guitar soliloquy is a spiraling model of the blues filtered through a psychedelic lens, and almost single-handedly places him in a realm with Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton as one of the great classic rock guitarists. But it got better: "Super Stupid" was the tale of a dumbass junkie set to a tune Black Sabbath would have been proud of; "Hit It And Quit It" is a funk anthem where keyboardist Worrell gets his licks in and the beat turns around a dozen times before we hit the chorus; "Can You Get to That" is honest-to-whoever pop that showed Funkadelic could be serious from time to time, especially when it came to social commentary (and also featured Isaac Hayes' female background singers, giving it a classic soul sheen), and "Wars of Armageddon" (recently, wisely used by Optimo on the Psyche Out mix) is a knock-out-drag-down fight to the death between the world's best rhythm section and paranoid, psychedelic sound effects and crowd sounds. Maggot Brain was an explosive record, bursting at the seams with exactly the kind of larger than life sound a band called Funkadelic should have made.
Too bad most of the band left afterwards. Tiki Fulwood was fired due to drugs getting in the way of his reliability as a band member; Tawl Ross reportedly got into an "acid eating contest, then snorting some raw speed, before completely flipping out," per Billy Nelson, and has not performed professionally since; Nelson himself quit over a money dispute with Clinton, leaving only Hazel and Worrell from the original Funkadelic lineup. Drummer Tyrone Lampkin replaced Fulwood, while guitarist Gary Shider (who'd already played with the band on parts of Maggot Brain) came aboard to fill out the sound. However, a lot of folks would look at former JBs like Phelps and William "Bootsy" Collins additions as the most significant. Certainly, Bootsy's mark on the whole Parliafunkadelicmint thang would eventually be almost as strong as Clinton's.
Nevertheless, 1972's America Eats Its Young is a disparate, schizophrenic record. Despite Clinton's efforts to produce a record that would have a better chance at crossover appeal than the first three Funkadelic records, like many double LPs, there's simply too much material, and too many conflicting directions to really make this seem anything other than a Frankenstein production. Of course, it has its classics: "Loose Booty" and "A Joyful Process" are the two of the best pure funk songs the band ever did, while "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause", "Biological Speculation", "Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time", and "Miss Lucifer's Love" are great evidence of the band's strong pop bent even as their chosen subject matters could range from dark to disturbing to sci-fi. Tunes like "I Call My Baby Pussycat", "Balance", and "Philmore" even hark back to the more rock-oriented stuff of the first three records. However, it's hard to hear "We Hurt Too" (a maudlin ballad about the hidden tenderness of men) as anything but a joke, and the title track, similar to Maggot Brain's title cut, is a bit heavy on the huffing and panting. I think of this record as Funkadelic's White Album, containing too much great stuff to dismiss, but by almost anyone's standards, containing more than it needs.
From here on out, Funkadelic would devote increasingly more time to maintaining and expanding their appeal. Albums like Let's Take It to the Stage and Standing on the Verge of Getting It on (also reissued, along with Tales of Kidd Funkadelic) were considerably less freaked-out than the early stuff, but alongside Parliament's concurrent music, helped turn Clinton's empire into one of the biggest acts in music. Still, I'll always love their first records the most. Call me rockist if you will, there's just something undeniably awesome about a funk band blasting guitar jams and telling me about neurotic bitches who want to take over the universe.


The New York rapper reunites with his prodigal mentor, MF DOOM, and forges a new partnership with Kaytranada on his full-length solo debut.

Elevators: Act I & II

You probably know Bishop Nehru as the promising protégé to MF DOOM’s sinister sensei. He’s that New York kid with the looping flows, internal rhyme patterns, and taste for vintage East Coast beats that caught the ear of the masked supervillain. But hip-hop history teaches us that you rely on DOOM at your peril. With his mentor mostly off the grid since the release of NehruvianDOOM, their undercooked 2014 collaboration, Bishop has been searching for new direction. His short tenure on Nas’ Mass Appeal Records more or less came to nothing, while unconvincing attempts to stylistically mutate—as with the clunky sci-fi sounds of 2016’s Magic 19—have just underlined the need for more senior advisors.
His 2017 mixtape Emperor Nehru’s New Groove showcased an increasingly confident star, with Bishop rapping comfortably on everything from dusty, old-school loops to murkier modern sounds. Now, with the 21-year-old’s official solo debut, he’s throwing his machine fully into reverse and leaning toward the throwback New York style he made his name on.
Elevators: Act I & II’s 10 full tracks are split into two distinct halves: The first, subtitled “Ascension,” features fresh production from Kaytranada, while the second, “Free Falling,” reunites him with his prodigal father figure, DOOM. The idea seems to be that Nehru’s personality is similarly divided—the positivity versus the depravity. But the tangible differences between his mood, subject matter, and delivery on the two sets of tracks are so subtle that it’s hard to see this as a worthwhile concept.
It’s mostly down to the two beatmakers, then, to differentiate the record’s sides. The 25-year-old Kaytranada wasn't born yet when DOOM dropped his first album with KMD in 1991, but he’s still up to the challenge of making vintage beats that pick up where the Native Tongues school left off. Take “No Idea,” the best song on Side A: It’s not difficult to picture Q-Tip riding the symphonious sample. The lyrics are as personal as any Nehru has written, as he lays out the hardships he’s endured, covering bouts of depression, homelessness, and industry bullshit. “I walked through hell, now I’m inventin’ the heaven,” he raps triumphantly. The theme could easily come through as hackneyed, but the catharsis palpable in Nehru’s voice as he lays it all out there is undoubtedly moving.
DOOM’s contributions to Elevators: Act I & II suggest that his interest in the project was probably limited. As with NehruvianDOOM, a lot of these beats are old or have been recycled from other places. It’s a little disappointing that Nehru didn’t seek all-original instrumentation for his first solo studio LP, but these are still very good DOOM tracks. The zany laser gun sounds and boom-bap drums of “Again & Again” encapsulate the intersection of underground New York rap and Saturday morning cartoons that has long been the producer’s strongest realm.
Nehru raps well on these cuts. His flow is fluid on the cosmic squiggles of “Rollercoasting” and the smoky, jazz-saxophone-led “Rooftops.” But if the album’s second half is supposed to represent the brooding side of his personality, then the content feels way off. Where his tutor can be gloriously malicious on the mic, Nehru comes off as a schoolyard bully in comparison. One-liners such as “Like doctors with anorexia, my patience is thin,” from “Again & Again,” aren’t so much malevolent as they are silly. And the hooks throughout this section leave such little impression, he probably would have been better off taking DOOM’s lead and largely dispensing with the idea of a chorus.
In the press notes, Nehru calls this album his attempt at creating “a rap Pet Sounds.” But Elevators: Act I & II is just too thin, too lacking in both scope and lateral thinking to warrant comparison to the Beach Boys’ ambitious leap. Nehru’s significant talents are all on display, but it’s tough to thrive in such tight margins.


Forty years after the pastoral new age of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, the UK composer once again fuses chamber folk with rural field recordings, conjuring a vivid sense of place.

The Singing Places

Nothing excites Virginia Astley more than the familiar comforts of home. Not the late-’70s underground circuit where she got her start, playing gigs at seedy pubs as a member of the new-wave outfit Victims of Pleasure. Not the subsequent post-punk wave either, when she had the opportunity to record with titans like Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxsie and the Banshees. While on tour with the Teardrop Explodes in 1981, she played in a group called the Ravishing Beauties, contrasting the psychedelic assault of the headlining band with opulent melodic sweeps and her uniquely ghostly vocals. The Beauties never released a record (though they did record in John Peel’s BBC studios), but the music they made together laid the groundwork for the delicate soundscapes Astley would continue to explore in her solo career. Her debut album, 1983’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, came two years after the tour wrapped up, with a title that makes her preference for solitude abundantly clear.
Gardens was a work of pastoral theater that infused sprightly woodwinds and strings with recordings from the riverside village of Moulsford-on-Thames, looping bleating livestock and rushing streams into miniature dioramas of rustic life. It would remain the only record of its kind in Astley’s catalog for four decades as she explored new modes, incorporating song and poetry into her worlds. With her new album The Singing Places, she returns with another assemblage of field recordings and elegant acoustic arrangements. She’s finally revisiting the verdant garden of her imagination.
Astley collected sounds for The Singing Places in various locations around the upper bounds of the River Thames, which becomes more rural and sparsely populated the further it stretches away from the bustle of big cities. She said in a recent interview that she’s often struck by inspiration while on walks in the countryside; walking along the Thames is like turning the clock back to eons past. Centuries-old church bells ring out; rickety watermills creak as they revolve; Astley’s footsteps can occasionally be heard trodding well-worn pathways. There’s a sense that she’s enraptured by the history surrounding her as she passes through sites untouched by industrialization and weathered by the passage of time.
To accompany these recordings, Astley weaves languorous musical motifs that drift alongside them. In contrast to the more structured vignettes on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, The Singing Places is free and fluid, letting the gentle serenade of nature ring without interruption. Woodwinds join a choir of bird calls, then fall away against their sustained chirping. Strings swell into a lovely waltz, but never overwhelm the rippling of the river. It’s structured as one continuous, 27-minute piece, with each movement effortlessly flowing into the next, via some deft editing. It sounds like she is simply strolling from one idyllic scene to the next.
As the album begins to wind down, the birdsong heard at the start of the record creeps back into the foreground. Astley plays a lilting refrain on her piano, responding to the lively chatter from the treetops with a spirited song of her own. She gradually brings the music to a halt, ceding the record’s final moments to the chorus of an English country garden. The Singing Places reads like an aural map of Astley’s favorite spots; her playing guides your ear toward the beautiful music that was already there.


Hypnogogic pop maven explores his mysterious, hyper-referential 1980s sound on a new album and a recent vinyl reissue.

James Ferraro: Nightdolls with Hairspray / On Air

Nightdolls with Hairspray / On Air

Two years ago, David Keenan of The Wire coined the name "hypnagogic pop" for a strain of lo-fi, 1980s-centric psychedelia, or "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." Though Ariel Pink's AM-radio concoctions made him a godfather, Keenan placed James Ferraro-- previously known as part of the noise duo Skaters-- at the center of this "movement." In Keenan's article, Ferraro's first quote went like this: "I've always viewed my music as just sort of plugging into a matrix of human-alien culture, through plugging into a world broadcast of media entities that jump out of the screen and merge with life via people internalizing them as soundtracks for life temples."
Ferraro's music can be as confusing as that rambling proclamation. Yet there's a weird, hermetic kind of logic to both. Whatever a "life temple" might be, you can imagine it when you hear his mysterious, hyper-referential sound. He relies on samples, loops, and the textures and aura of 80s pop-- the kind heard on worn-out VHS tapes and glitchy video games. And he turns cheesy clichés-- preset keyboard melodies, phasey riffs, falsetto choruses-- into something hypnotic and almost cyber-spiritual, like a photocopy blurred by generations of reproduction until it becomes a Magic Eye painting.
Often, this approach can produce remarkably catchy music. Night Dolls with Hairspray in particular is filled with hooky gems. Its plunging bass lines, warped guitar riffs, and crooning vocals bounce around the stereo space like lasers in a hall of mirrors. Listening feels like peeking into the mind of a pop-culture-addled 80s teen-- an effect enhanced by lyrics about adolescent concerns sung in a pre-pubescent whine. Hissy, muffled, and oddly funny, Night Dolls can get pretty dizzying. Some might even find its sheen nauseating, much the way audiences left The Blair Witch Project more sick from the shaky camerawork than scared by the plot. But for anyone enchanted by Ariel Pink, there's lots to love in Ferraro's murky pop.
Just don't wait around for him to tone it down. More often, in the massive discography he's built, he turns the queasiness up to 11. In the resulting swamps of noise, ghosts of pop songs, movie soundtracks, TV ads, and other fleeting ephemera stew and rumble, but never quite break through the stubborn surface of his dense mix. That's the mode that Ferraro is in on On Air, first issued as a limited CD-R on Olde English Spelling Bee and recently pressed onto vinyl by Underwater Peoples. Here, he seems to man a black-hole radio station, mixing in surreal announcements and static-laden transitions. Snippets of melody and blasts of noise slam into each other, with single tracks often containing four or five chunks of what could be songs on their own. Maybe Ferraro's own trippy titles explain it best: "Electrocuted Hair", "New Waver From Hawaii Saturn", "Virtual Sumo Bubble Gum", "Cyber Shock Headtroplolis". Those could all be the names of Boredoms outtakes, and On Air's arty mess recalls that group as well as Yamantaka Eye's even nuttier Hanatarash.
Much the way that listening to a lot of Boredoms can alter your perception of what music is and how it works, making it through On Air is a bit of a brain-altering experience. By the end of it, you might understand Ferraro's Wire quote a little better, whether or not you can explain why. Plugging in, jumping out, merging with life-- on paper they sound like discarded New Age platitudes, but in the hands of James Ferraro, those ideas regain the electric charge of epiphany.


Wielding the moody beats and unflinching honesty of drill music, the Brooklyn rapper takes an intimate look into the oft-unseen realities of sex work and trans survival.

The Breakdown

Voguing—at least, the style now called “old way”—was popularized through performances by gay men, like those immortalized in Madonna’s 1990 video. Vogue fem, the style predominant today, could only have been created by trans women (known as “fem queens” in ballroom, the primarily Black and Latino scene where voguing emerged). This style of dance blends fastidiously feminine gestures with dramatic storytelling and bold, athletic feats. Ms. Boogie, an Afro-Latina rapper from Brooklyn who came up in the ballroom scene, similarly fuses softness with drama on The Breakdown, wielding the unflinching honesty of Brooklyn drill to depict a life that’s uniquely her own, yet intimately familiar to other trans women.
Ms. Boogie performed for years under a different name, releasing a debut album in 2014 and rising from the U.S. warehouse circuit to European tours. After publicly announcing her transition in 2018, she began brazenly breaking down her new reality on 2020 single “Fem Queen” featuring Trannilish (“Niggas love chicks with a dick/DMs just to prove it”) and rapping about the medicinal power of getting railed on 2021’s “Dickscipline.” Since then, she’s leveled up her operation—the new album launched with a slickly choreographed video—while the themes of her work have grown more complex. On The Breakdown, she meditates on success with a mixture of pride and ambivalence, backed by moody, muted production that lets her storytelling shine.
Most Brooklyn drill rappers are men, often recounting stories about dope dealing and violence. Ms. Boogie instead divulges the oft-unseen realities of sex work and dating DL (“down-low”) trans-attracted men. “I’m the plug and the drug,” she raps. “Streets is watching,” so she sends her man a black car and asks him to sign an NDA. Such tight-lipped business leaves little room for play: “I don’t need new friends/It’s a cold world, I need new Timbs,” go the bars on “Come Again,” a song whose braggadocious hook (like early-aughts Eve filtered through a codeine blunt) makes one long for more such catchy moments. But Ms. Boogie’s tale calls for a different sound.
Most of the album was produced by Minneapolis’s Boo Boo, aka M Jamison, who leverages her experience scoring films. The Breakdown’s melancholy synths and dreamy strings sound like rolling through dark city streets in the rain, somewhere between Blade Runner and the symphonic grit of Mos Def’s “Auditorium.” Producer El Joven leaves metallic fingerprints on “H20” and “Build Me Up,” whose funky beats echo the confrontational sound of New York’s queer underground. Ahya Simone’s harp weaves airy grace throughout the album, most gloriously on the closing track. (Jamison and Simone are also Black trans women; nearly every hand that touched the record, including its mixing engineer, belongs to a queer or trans person of color.)
On “Dazed & Confused,” the elevator climbs to the 47th floor en route to “Hustler,” a ballad made theatrical by Samir Robinson’s violin. Its narrator surveys her queendom and reflects on the life of Barbie, a departed ballroom niece. Then the clock strikes 2, the song breaks down, and the narrator leaves to meet her second client of the night. This arc is the album’s centerpiece, typifying its sound and message: A trans woman can triumph, and the high life might look glamorous, but her community remains in peril, and the hustle never stops.
With the exception of Cassius Cruz’s indispensable singing on “Hustler,” Ms. Boogie tends to outshine the album’s other vocalists. No verse hits like Trannilish’s on “Fem Queen,” and if “Come Again” is peak Eve, then it’s missing a Gwen. Many songs have similar vibes and structures; El Joven’s most seductive rhythmic experiments are relegated to the closing seconds of two later tracks. The focus is always on Ms. Boogie and her story, which she centers unapologetically. Oscillating between the DL and the deeply candid, she channels the bruised inner voice of someone who’s built a tough, if beautiful, exterior to survive. Rap need not be girly to be feminine, and on The Breakdown, Ms. Boogie takes off her mask without letting down her guard.


The duo Mood II Swing's productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions.

Strictly Mood II Swing

It's often said that dance music has a short shelf life—that once-novel sounds and techniques are eventually flattened by the technological steamroller that is Moore's Law. That's not necessarily true, though. If the retro fixations of the current century have told us anything—from electroclash's fascination with the early '80s to the recent revival of grime's bleepy fundamentals—it's that dance music's period-specific patinas are a big part of its enduring charm.
A new anthology of the duo Mood II Swing is, if anything, overdue. Their productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. Their unique sense of swing helped feed the slinky syncopations of UK garage around the turn of the millennium; more recently, the hypnotic and soulful aspects of their sound have influenced revivalist house music from the underground all the way to the top of the charts, from tunes like Jack J's "Thirstin'" to Duke Dumont's "Need U (100%)." The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions. Many sound uncannily current; the best sound timeless.
That Mood II Swing (consisting of Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone) established such an immediately recognizable style is all the more impressive for the fact that most of the time they were remixing other artists. Only 14 of the 33 songs here are originals; the rest are remixes for a diverse lot of pop and R&B acts whose names have mostly faded from view, like Kim English, Loni Clark, and Ultra Naté, whose career peak, 1997's "Free," was co-written with and produced by Mood II Swing. No matter who the credited performer is, though, a number of hallmarks remain constant throughout. The most obvious is the group's infectious and inimitable sense of the groove. Around steady kicks and hi-hats, regular as fence posts, snake vine-like figures dipping and bobbing in the breeze—shakers and congas, hiccupping accidentals and sidewinding basslines that turn even the most linear rhythms into controlled explosions of kinetic energy.
On a song like Doubleplusgood's "Conga Té (Mood II Swing 12" Mix)," you can hear the influence of hip-hop, particularly Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad: Every inch of the track is stuffed with elements until it all ignites like a sky full of fireworks. A typical Mood II Swing track is charged with so much friction, you expect sparks to fly, and that's particularly true when they indulge their fondness for busted and broken sounds. You can hear that in the distortion of BT's "Remember (Mood II Swing Remix)," in which the kick drum rattles like a shredded speaker cone, and the nervy squelch of the heavily filtered "Slippery Track," which rivals Matthew Herbert's most aggressively funky work of the period.
The compilation is split more or less evenly between vocal tracks and instrumentals or dub versions, and in the case of Eric Gadd's "The Right Way," which is presented in both versions, you can hear how differently the duo approached those two contexts. The vocal mix leaves the singer's whispery falsetto unadulterated, and the results sound a lot like early '90s R&B with a piano-house underpinning. (The vocalists they worked with tend to be soulful belters; your appreciation for the vocal side of their catalog will depend largely upon your fondness for that emphatic, melismatic style.) On the dub, though, Mood II Swing mute everything the singer does save for a plaintive looped cry. It's on these dub mixes and instrumental cuts where Mood II Swing's talents really shine: Just check "Do It Your Way," which takes a "Billie Jean"-like bassline and kits it out in flashing ride cymbals, slapback delay, and a liquid tone that sounds like a melancholy snippet of whale song. In these moments they're sultans of swirl, masters of the hypnotic groove, and as nuanced as anyone in dance music, then or now.


Shamir Bailey’s latest is a lo-fi set of interesting ideas that never quite gel. As ever, his soulful voice is the star, offering hints of sophistication and wonder.

Revelations

When Shamir Bailey returned only six short months ago with his second album, Hope, it signaled a drastic change in direction, sound, aesthetic—frankly, just about everything. The Las Vegas-born, Philadelphia-based songwriter had been previously lauded for his excellent debut, 2015’s Ratchet, an all-killer dance record filled to the brim with bubbly choruses and club-pop hooks. Hope was meant to wipe the slate clean, to rid Shamir of a persona he no longer felt represented him as a musician, and it did just that. The record, while uneven and imperfect, showed a side to Shamir that merely a few years earlier, no one would have dreamed existed. Exploring lo-fi bedroom pop, indie, experimental rock, and outsider music, Hope basically positioned Shamir as a new artist. With the total rejection of Ratchet, and splitting with his label and management, he was now free to make whatever kind of music he chose.
The main issue with Revelations, the follow-up to Hope, is that it fails to make good on that momentum. By its end, Shamir is in the same place he was at the end of Hope: a collection of introspective songs strummed directly into a four-track, a decent album full of interesting ideas that never quite jell. To be fair, Shamir has had a difficult few years. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder right after releasing Hope, his artistic process feels raw, real, and valid. Sometimes there’s no balm more soothing that disappearing into the dense feedback of a fuzzy rock song, and Revelations feels cathartic. Still, it’s frustrating that through the resulting haze, the songs don’t shine, and you’re left with a feeling of empty-handedness.
The setbacks are apparent from the album’s opening bars. “Games” begins with a plodding keyboard riff, repetitive and hypnotic, but teetering on clumsy. You can practically hear the wheels turning, Shamir’s fingers plonking on the keys. It’s that brand of lo-fi production that’s distracting—it should sound effortless, laissez-faire, but instead comes off as labored, which defeats the purpose. The song itself strives for a sort of extremely stripped-down Tori Amos atmosphere, the lyrics both passionately personal and endearingly colloquial. “I think you’re totally mean to the core/But I won’t blame you/I won’t shame you/But I can’t continue to play this game,” Shamir sings, his voice climbing and sliding across the simple melody. Like on most of the album’s tracks, Shamir’s voice is the star here, his instantly recognizable soulful tinge giving the song a hint of sophistication and wonder.
Other than his voice, there are other aspects of Revelations that carry some of the trademarks that made Shamir popular in the first place. His lyrics are biting and fun, spiked with clever wordplay and a bluntness that draws you into the emotions he’s describing. The lead single, “’90s Kids,” asks the listener to “Put a drink in the air for the college girls and boys/Paralyzing anxiety is just a chore.” Another single, “Straight Boys,” makes good use of Shamir’s tendency to speak directly to you while also barely recognizing he’s writing for an audience: “I always seem to let these straight boys ruin my life,” he reflects, not necessarily looking for an answer to the problem.
And there are glimpses where Shamir’s production does deliver satisfying, grungy guitar pop. “You Have a Song,” with its syrupy bassline and sandpaper guitars, recalls something the Deal twins would have bashed together in 1991. More than anything else on the record, “Blooming” is an uptempo indie-pop song that points to where Shamir could fulfill his talents in the long-term.
Until then, Ratchet remains the benchmark of Shamir’s career. Not because he wants to leave it behind, or because he’s not allowed to pursue his creativity however he sees fit, but because it’s his best work. No one is asking Shamir to release another pop record—it does not seem in the cards—but cutting himself off from his past doesn’t absolve him from creating a future that lives up to it. Largely, Revelations leaves us waiting for the subtly brilliant moments its title suggests.


The follow-up to Born to Die finds Lana Del Rey in ballad mode, finding new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs. Producer Dan Auerbach of Black Keys turns out to be the perfect creative partner.

Ultraviolence

Lana Del Rey, the creation of singer and songwriter Lizzy Grant, is all alone. She’s an utterly distinctive figure in popular music—not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely. Where her last full-length, the frequently terrible Born to Die, tried on different moods and looked at her character from a few angles, Ultraviolence finds one feeling—a seedy, desperate, hyper-romanticized sense of isolation and loss—and blows it up to drive-in screen proportions, saturating the color riding the blue crest of sadness for the better part of an hour. Whether or not you want to take this particular ride will largely depend on how much stock you put in “authenticity,” your tolerance for Del Rey’s vocal tics, and your reflexive response to her lyrics.
Creating a semi-fictional delivery system for your creative ideas is nothing new, but few have had Del Rey’s commitment to the idea—imagine Madonna sticking with Breathless Mahoney for multiple album cycles. This far in, after so many interviews and so much media attention, we don’t know all that much about Lana Del Rey, and we’re not sure what we’re told is real. She’s become a screen onto which we project our desire and/or our loathing. With Ultraviolence, Del Rey has found new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs.
Gone are annoying trifles like Born to Die’s “Carmen” and “Diet Mountain Dew”; in their place are slow, atmospheric songs filled with theatrical melancholy and a parade of women in trouble who mourn for men who treat them badly yet somehow remain irresistible. The lyrics are studded with her trademark iconography: “he hit me and it felt like a kiss”; “the sun also rises”; “talking about my generation”; a reference to “Sunset and Vine” and another to “strange weather.” But here she’s found the perfect musical vehicle for her vision. Ultraviolence sounds tragic and beautiful—darkly-shaded ballads are what she was created to make, and this album is nothing but, a Concept Album from a Concept Human.
The first section of the album is so gorgeous and rich, Ultraviolence at first seems better than it is. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who produced much of the record, turns out to be Del Rey's ideal creative partner, crafting lush walls of sound that evoke her favorite cultural era, a time when the prim and surface-level 1960s were just starting their slide into drug-fueled decadence. “Cruel World” is a six-minute dirge that 30 years ago might have been sung by Bonnie Tyler, its twangy guitars and thudding drums exploding at just the right moments. The title track’s gorgeous chorus dresses up a song where love and physical abuse are intertwined. Del Rey’s angelic interval leap on the chorus of “Shades of Cool” is a new addition to her small array of vocal effects, bringing to mind the faux-Asian sweep of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” mixed with the song that lured the prince in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. They’re songs that would make no sense if anyone else sang them. In this way, and a few others, she draws inspiration from rap music, broadcasting her obsessions and forcing you to engage with the persona first and the content of the songs second.
It’s an impressive opening shot, and there are a few moments in this sequence that make you want to sit back and say, “Hold on, is this for real?” But then comes “Brooklyn Baby”, a song that references Lou Reed, a rare jazz collection, feathers in hair, the “freedom land of the ’70s,” and “churning out novels like beat poetry on amphetamines.” Is Del Rey taking the piss, making fun of lifestyle accessories as a source of identity? Or is she celebrating these icons, the way she has so many others, reveling in the colorful tapestry that is American popular culture?
Turns out these are the wrong questions. When lines like these pop up on the record, I find myself chuckling, sometimes laughing out loud, which might seem odd on an album about sadness. But that says something about how strange Del Rey's music can be, and the internal coherence of the worlds she creates. These songs don’t ask you to respond in any particular way; they evoke heartbreak one moment and they’re ridiculous the next, and those qualities don’t cancel each other out. It’s entertainment, camp, and the ambiguity of it all, nurtured by the cool distance of Lana Del Rey’s image, is a huge part of the music’s appeal. Those who really hate what she’s about—and there are a lot of these people—look for something in music that she has no interest in providing. To enjoy what she does, you have to give yourself over to her media-saturated fantasy and put the everyday on hold, and you also have to lay aside pop radio’s typically sunny affirmations.
But this thing Lana Del Rey is going for isn’t easy to sustain, and it starts to go south during the back half of Ultraviolence. The album grows tiresome somewhere during the stretch where “Pretty When You Cry” leads to “Money Power Glory” and then on to “Fucked My Way Up to the Top”. The melodies are a little less interesting and, instead of melodramatic fables, she settles for button-pushing. It’s also wearying to spend this much time in the presence of this particular character. The masochism, the self-hatred, the drugs, the emotional world filtered through the tragic figures American teenagers are drawn to gets old. You can feel Lana Del Rey inching into territory where she’s daring you not to like her, and by the time you get to the Ultraviolence bonus track “Florida Kilos”, a Harmony Korine co-write that might as well be called Spring Breakers: The Audiobook, you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant. Still, it’d be wrong to overlook the many things Ultraviolence does well, and how sui generis Lana Del Rey is. She’s a pop music original full-stop, and there are not nearly enough of those around.