The New Orleans bounce icon takes a victory lap on her long-awaited second album, one of the most effective party-starting records of the year.

Central City

After over a decade in the spotlight, Big Freedia has become a sneakily unstoppable force. Following years of hard work on the New Orleans circuit, leading to a long-running reality series and her debut album, 2014’s Just Be Free, Freedia appeared on Beyoncé’s “Formation” in 2016 and kicked off a spate of successful, high-profile collabs. Now having been sampled on two No. 1 hits (“Break My Soul,” “Nice for What”) and released a couple of hit-or-miss EPs to fill the gap, Freedia takes a welcome victory lap with Central City, her long-awaited second album. Full of bass-heavy beats, idiosyncratic guest stars, and booming rally cries that extol the virtues of ass-shaking and self-empowerment, it’s easily one of the most effective party-starting records of the year.
Central City is a livewire ode to New Orleans, its title referencing a working-class neighborhood in the 11th Ward that has been home to plenty of musical luminaries, from jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden to hip-hop mogul Master P. Here, Freedia pays tribute to the people and culture that raised her. Over a springy synth and chanted backing vocals on “Life Lessons,” Freedia speaks to how her mother instilled her with the confidence she carries today: “Big Freedia, big Freddie, big heart of gold/I was a choir girl and a mama’s boy,” she raps, “The whole 3rd Ward, they knew my voice… Mama gave ya Freedia, now the whole world blessed.” During the late highlight “NOLA Babies,” she captures the city’s irrepressible spirit with breakneck tempo shifts, record scratches, and air horns. By the end, breathless from the song’s pace, she tosses off an ad-libbed question you’ve already learned the answer to: “And these hoes wanna know what’s going on with the NOLA baby?”
Freedia branches out more than ever, switching between classic bounce and the occasional hard-nosed, industrial grind, often within the same song. The unpredictability gives Central City a sense of constant motion; both the stomping opener “Central City Freestyle” and hip-thrusting “Throw It Back” are bound to go off during live shows, with hairpin melodic turns, thundering handclaps, and call-and-response verses delivered with the precision of a drill sergeant. The more serrated Freedia’s music gets, the more engrossing it becomes: “Pop That” employs an irresistible blend of pitch-shifted vocals, ominous horror movie-style keys, and enveloping bass. On “Bigfoot,” one of her most thrilling shit-talking songs yet, she dips down to a menacing growl while evoking big-drop-era Skrillex. The album is a dizzying collage that’s in service of Freedia having an excellent time; that she stops halfway through for an interlude that remixes the Pepto Bismol jingle only corroborates her playful, anything-goes approach.
Central City reaffirms Freedia’s easy rapport with disparate artists. Oakland rapper Kamaiyah smoothly counterbalances Freedia’s swagger on the ticking “Big Tyme,” while the balmy “$100 Bill” emphasizes feeling opulent in every facet of your life with the help of a honeyed chorus from Ciara and a run of increasingly excellent punch lines. (“Looking like a jet!” Freedia commands, “Gas me up!”). Even Freedia’s more surprising choices work in her favor: R&B legend Faith Evans matches her bravado on the sauntering “Bitch You Want,” brushing each “I’m not to be fucked with” with the featherlight touch of a great ’90s throwback. On “El Niño,” Freedia organizes her most bizarre hometown team-up yet, enlisting Lil Wayne and teacher-turned-rapper Boyfriend for a stadium-sized song built around ridiculous hooks (“I’m about to go El Niño,” “This bitch about to be gone with the wind”) that somehow still win you over.
Like the rest of Central City’s highs, it speaks to her expansive curatorial vision and towering charisma. Though bounce still provides the bedrock for the album’s delights, she expands on the rattling genre in ways that stretch its possibilities. It’s easy to picture the unflappable “Pop That” and closer “Voodoo Magic,” with its celebratory horns and thumping drums courtesy of New Orleans eight-piece the Soul Rebels, providing the soundtrack to countless Pride and Mardi Gras events to come. Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.


On their new five-song EP, Nashville ruffians Diarrhea Planet offer no shortage of boot-and-rally solos and opportunities for downing freshly keyed beers. But once you cut through the tangled fretwork and all those gang choruses, there's a quiet ambition at work here.

Diarrhea Planet: Aliens in the Outfield EP

Aliens in the Outfield EP

Two songs into Aliens in the Outfield—the latest EP from Nashville ruffians Diarrhea Planet—and Brent Toler is feeling himself: "Why are you chumming with the high class," he asks a young woman of his acquaintance, when "you could be getting with a badass?" One song over, drummer Casey Weissbuch's locked himself in the bathroom, where he's enjoying a few minutes to himself in full view of the mirror. On name alone, it's hard to say just how seriously a person should be taking a band like Diarrhea Planet; and even harder, when they're spitting comically awful game, touting the well-documented virtues of self-love, or trying to cram four guitar solos into two-and-a-half minutes. Still, listening to Aliens in the Outfield, you get the distinct impression that, if nobody else is going to take Diarrhea Planet seriously, they may just have to take up the task themselves. Fear not, DP loyal: the five-song Aliens contains no shortage of boot-and-rally solos, nor opportunities for downing freshly keyed beers. But once you cut through the tangled fretwork and all those gang choruses, there's a quiet ambition at work here, which finds Diarrhea Planet stretching out song lengths and dipping into a darker mood or two.
Recorded with Justin Francis (Anti-Flag, Kenny Rogers), Aliens is Diarrhea Planet's first release since 2013's sophomore LP I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Francis helps DP maintain a bit more control over the inevitable chaos that arises when you've got four guitars, three singers, and—in Weissbuch—a drummer with roughly seven arms. Not that Aliens is an especially polished recording; tempos still fly forward, and vocals still take a note or two to find their pitch. But, with a little more separation between all those moving parts, DP's frequently squashed studio sound is getting closer to approaching the sweat-spattered energy of their can't-miss live shows.
Chorus-dodging opener "Heat Wave" is a blur, barreling through a couple Jordan Smith verses, a bridge-to-nowhere from the sweet-voiced Emmett Miller, and at least one barnburning solo. "Heat Wave" feels a bit grafted together by spare parts, getting by purely on forward motion; Smith's slippery verse melody and Miller's starry-eyed interlude are no match for the solo jammed between them, and the general apathy at the heart of the lyrics ("I don't give a shit/ And I know that you don't care") don't exactly help the song linger long past the fadeout. Highlight "Platinum Girls" sets Toler's "Two Princes" routine up with a lively little melody or three; atop a melody this blithely catchy, a line like the eternally eager Toler's "though I could never be your nice guy/ I'd proudly be your 20-times-a-night guy" manages, in its fumbling sort of way, to endear.
"Bamboo Curtain" doesn't limit its self-examination to matters of the flesh; Weissbuch's stolen moment finds him "washing away all [his] crazy shit that [he] can't deal with" alongside wads of used Kleenex. While the song's slantwards melody and flickers of neon guitar recall Weezer's Pinkerton-era lonerism, live staple "Spooners" goes for Japandroids-style communal catharsis: "it's all about the drugs, money, power, and getting off," Smith yells, adding "and getting fucked up when you can't get your point across." Between the extended intro, the false ending, and the wordless chorus, the restless "Spooners" seems too busy getting from one place to another to actually settle into the business of being a song for more than a few seconds at a time. So it goes with closer "Peg Daddy", which rides a lengthy post-rock buildup into a yearning chorus; the anticipation's nice, but the song it eventually settles on is your standard-issue existential drama, hinging awkwardly on a slapdash metaphor full of crashing waves and mental prisons.
The uptick in ambition all these take-offs and landings inject into DP's music is certainly admirable, but the execution's not always so dazzling; every one of these songs would do well to push the chorus further forward, not to delay the inevitable by throwing another twinkling guitar on the pile. And between the rough-around-the-edges presentation and the ripcord song structures, there's a certain unfixed quality to these five tracks; you get the feeling, listening to Aliens in the Outfield, that these tunes—spirited, albeit spotty—still haven't quite come to full fruition, that they'll be at their best on some Tuesday night in Omaha, not here as presented on record. And, for whatever it's worth, the more serious notes they've attempted to fold into these songs simply can't match the easy charms of an old chestnut like "Ghost With a Boner". But the real issue with Aliens in the Outfield isn't so much unrealized ambitions or misguided stabs at something like maturity. As with every other DP record before it, it's this: it'll do in a pinch, but up against that beastly live show, the play-at-home version's just no match for the real thing.


The Philadelphia musician Charles Cohen, who's in his late sixties, plays a Buchla Music Easel, an arcane synthesizer built in limited quantities in the 1970s. He is primarily a performer and an improviser, not a recording artist, but Brother I Prove You Wrong is all-new work, and it reflects the lessons he has learned from years of live performance.

Charles Cohen: Brother I Prove You Wrong

Brother I Prove You Wrong

People don't tend to think much about gestures when considering electronic music—that is, hands, and the shapes they carve. Think, for a moment, of a rock guitarist or a jazz saxophonist or a classical pianist. Your mental picture probably involves the splay of their fingers, the angle of their backs, the tilt of their heads. But electronic music is largely disembodied. Imagine a studio, and you'll probably think of someone hunched over a computer keyboard; imagine a live performance and you'll probably think of the same thing.
For the Philadelphia electronic musician Charles Cohen, though, the gesture is everything, even if the gesture itself—flicking a switch, twisting a knob, quickly reconnecting a patch cable—is utilitarian rather than expressive. His instrument of choice is a Buchla Music Easel, an arcane synthesizer built in limited quantities in the '70s. Where the evolution of electronic instruments has been, in large part, an arms race of bells and whistles, the Easel's biggest selling points are its limitations. It does without a traditional piano keyboard in favor of a touch keyboard, which forces the performer to search for modes that go beyond the typical 12-tone chromatic scale. More strikingly, the Easel features only a single oscillator, which means that it's capable of just one sound at a time. The tradeoff is the many possibilities the instrument offers for modulating and manipulating sound in real time. As Cohen explained at a workshop during the CTM Festival last year, "All the action in the Easel is in control. That's sort of a Buchla concept: complicated control over simple sounds, as opposed to many other instruments, where you have very, very complex sounds but only simple control."
Cohen, who is in his late sixties, has been at it long enough to have become a proper virtuoso on the Easel. He is primarily a performer and an improviser, not a recording artist. Two years ago, Rabih Beaini's Morphine label released a decade's worth of Cohen's experiments in a series of LPs that were eventually collected in the double-disc anthology, A Retrospective. But Brother I Prove You Wrong is all-new work, recorded specifically at Beaini's behest, and it reflects the lessons he has learned from years of live performance on the Easel. Whereas many of Cohen's earlier pieces had been made with the use of multi-tracked tape, the Brother tracks were all recorded using just the Buchla and a delay unit, and mostly done in single takes.
It is a curious sound, both spindly and sinewy all at once. In place of long, held tones, the music tends to proceed like a succession of water droplets. The careening blips bring to mind fireflies in a dark cavern or the orbits of subatomic particles; like atoms, the music consists primarily of empty space. The album begins, with "Cloud Hands", as if assembling itself out of nothingness, as arrhythmic whippoorwill trills gradually settle into a gentle contrapuntal pattern that feels, briefly, almost Baroque. The hypnotic "Sacred Mountain" chugs ahead at 85 beats per minute, with a steady 4/4 pulse and an ascending arpeggio that spins like a water wheel. It might almost be techno, and so might "The Boy and the Snake Dance", which, once it materializes out of the mist and locks into a regular tempo, brings to mind the pinging dissonance of Robert Hood.
As spare as the music may be, it's hard to believe that just one instrument is in play, particularly given the way that Cohen uses his sequencer and delay unit to create layers. "Formation of Matter" features sludgy bass formations shrouded in metallic echo; it feels like moving through a fog of iron fillings. The air is heavy with the memory of bells—all tail, no peal—and gossiping modems. In "Beirut", a dubby bassline reminiscent of Pole paces beneath a rapid-fire battery of ring-mod tones. The illusion of fullness is overwhelming.
Cohen has said that he begins his performances by picking up where he last left off, and a similar sense of continuity runs through Brother. Some tracks are explicitly interconnected: In "Visitors of the Sacred Mountain", a faint echo of the previous track's main motif percolates deep in the mix, almost out of earshot, shrouded in brittle, crystalline chirps, like the cries of frozen birds. Mostly, though, the through line makes itself felt in the way Cohen's single-oscillator synth morphs across the course of the album.
It is in constant motion. Otherwise repetitive arpeggios dodge and feint around their indicated paths, ululating pitches rise and fall, and the music's timbre is as mutable as a bead of quicksilver. It sometimes feels like you're listening to the inner life of a dial tone. As it happens, the mind/body duality appears in "Mankind and Mannequins", a groaning, gurgling piece accompanied by a surrealist, spoken-word vignette that asks what the thoughts of a rock and a mannequin might sound like. It is a static scene, a scene of stillness, yet the sound is restless—indicative, perhaps, of the motion inside these apparently inanimate objects. The rock lies inert, the mannequin's hand is crooked just so. But the atoms that comprise the sound of their thoughts are a nonstop swirl.


The solo guitarist’s latest album on the prolific Flower Room label is subtly progressive. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still.

Everlasting Spring

If the word “stream” hadn’t been so normalized by how everyone listens to music these days, it would be exactly the perfect word to describe Matt LaJoie’s new album. In both its effect and its creation, the gorgeous new Everlasting Spring is streaming. The music feels like an afternoon by a slow-moving creek, surface reflections peacefully changing with the light. Across four one-take improvisations on 10-string acoustic guitar run through a delay loop pedal and reverb, LaJoie’s extended pieces ripple and cascade, grow intricate, and thin out again.
As co-proprietors of Brunswick, Maine-based Flower Room Records, either LaJoie or his partner Ash Brooks have been participants in each of 39 releases they’ve put out since 2017. Between the custom cassettes based on star charts and Bandcamp shots depicting tapes next to crystals, it’s tempting to fold LaJoie and Flower Room’s output into some corner of the New Age revival. But not only does LaJoie display commanding technique on Everlasting Spring, he also evolves his creative voice. There’s nothing raw or folkie about Everlasting Spring—it might be more accurate to file LaJoie’s solo playing under American Progressivist.
There is a lightness of step behind LaJoie’s loops. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. During the 13-and-half-minute “Showers Over Birch Point,” LaJoie plays in several modes at once to create the sensation of multiple currents. Occasional muted notes on the bass strings make slow ambient bursts of rhythm, mid-range harmonic dots follow at their own pace, and LaJoie solos gently on the highest strings. All accumulate to keep the piece in motion. The 16-minute album-closing “River’s Breadth” is slightly more minimalist, building to a quiet conclusion, in which LaJoie juggles two lead lines, one fast, one slow, each gorgeous.
In part because of the improvised nature of the music, and in part because of Flower Room’s prolific release schedule, there is the sense that one could wander away from the label and new records would just spring eternal without ears to hear them. Dipping further back into the Flower Room’s catalog, LaJoie’s earlier solo releases over the past two-plus years do sound like the same mood altered slightly, depending on the weather. But that underlying source, LaJoie, is the core of these ever-changing permutations throughout the rest of the Flower Room catalog. And while Everlasting Spring is atmospheric, it’s not necessarily background music. It’s proper foreground company, an album to hang out with and fill the room like any other. As blissed-out as Flower Room’s total output is, it changes session by session, moving somewhere between mountain and ocean, with a long way yet to go.


Tim Cohen wrote the songs for River of Souls with backup singers in mind. He’s said the only thing that separates his Magic Trick material from his work with the Fresh & Onlys are the two bands’ personnel, but this breezy collection is all about beauty and sheen.

River of Souls

Backup singers can really impact the DNA of a song, and not always for the better. Take Lefty Frizzell’s 1950 classic “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”. In its original format, it was a bare bones country standard typical of the Grand Ole Opry’s golden age: fiddle, pedal steel, Lefty’s voice, and not much else. Then, in 1959, he released a new, re-recorded version of the song on The One and Only Lefty Frizzell. It sounded overtly glossy thanks in part to a saccharine choir of backup vocalists. The additional voices added needless commercial sheen, only serving to mar and obscure the original’s charm.
Tim Cohen wrote the songs from River of Souls with backup singers in mind. He’s said that the only thing that separates his Magic Trick material from his work with the Fresh & Onlys are the two bands’ personnel. And he’s not overstuffing his latest album with a full chorus; he works with two female vocalists: Noelle Cahill and Alicia Vanden Heuvel. They provide this album’s primary appeal—Cohen’s baritone counterbalanced by two soft female voices. Sure, he could’ve handed “The Store” over to Wymond Miles, Kyle Gibson, and Shayde Sartin, but by using Cahill and Heuvel’s voices instead, the song’s guitar-centric momentum is somewhat softened. And ultimately, this is a very soft, easily handled album. The idea isn’t to add rough edges; just beauty and sheen.
The lead guitars on the album provided by Tom Heyman often stay clear of any raw, ragged garage punk sounds in favor of a tone more similar to Mark Knopfler’s. There are tambourines and unassuming melodies. As Cohen sings “Come Inside”, the backup vocalists come through with a mild, warm echo. This music is meant to be pleasant and palatable, so with that songwriting goal in mind, the additional voices are well-suited to the material.
But for an album that’s already plenty smooth, Cohen goes all in with his lyrics. The album title River of Souls does nothing to steer the listener away from the words “adult contemporary.” It’s close enough in name to Billy Joel’s 1993 album River of Dreams and is the name of a 1993 Dan Fogelberg album. And the song’s messages consistently lean toward the theatrical. On “You Have to Do”, over a languid organ and some “doo-wahhh” harmonies, Cohen offers a bunch of “wisdom” regarding how a man should keep a woman happy. It plays almost like a scene in a mid-20th century musical: A man, intimidated by his love for a woman, asks his wise friend/brother/father for advice. Then, the savvy narrator (Cohen) sings about how his friend should take action, and of course, two women wander into the frame just in time to sing some well-placed harmonies over his instructions.
With buoyant synths on “Salvation”, with Cohen’s soft moan and the echoing harmonica of “Beloved One”, River of Souls is breezy listening. Right when things start to get a little more bold with the soulful stomp, harmonies, and horns of “My World”, the song dissipates into a puddle of meandering guitars that aim for freeform but wind up feeling more like hotel lobby music. “We like pretty girls,” Cahill and Heuvel airily sing on “Crazy Teeth” over a continuous mid-tempo shuffle that would feel aesthetically appropriate in a transitional “riding from one town to the next” scene of an old western movie. It’s not a cool sounding album by any stretch, but even in the canon of dad rock, it doesn’t stand up. The songs become repetitive, and though the harmonies are well-crafted and the melodies are lovely, there aren’t enough moments that demand attention. After a while, all the sounds on River of Souls run together, a little bland and verging on formless.


A newly released date from the pianist’s 2016 European tour toggles between dizzyingly athletic avant-garde jazz, foot-stomping ragtime, and a few tender standards.

Munich 2016

Keith Jarrett approaches the piano the way a star athlete courts the ball—it’s a full-body experience, marked by sweat, facial spasms, and an inability to remain still. Jarrett’s improvisational solo concerts have been characterized by this level of physicality since he began performing professionally in the 1960s, and more than half a century hasn’t hampered his game. We may not be able to see Jarrett’s piano acrobatics while listening to his newly released live recording Munich 2016, but his enthusiasm and vigor are palpable. Recorded on the final night of a European tour, Munich 2016 provides a snapshot of the piano legend in his seventies: energetic, spontaneous, and inventive as ever.
Munich 2016 was recorded at the Philharmonie in the titular German city, home to Jarrett’s longtime label ECM. The acoustics are pristine, and while the room can be heard, the presence of the audience is largely absent from the tape—a good thing, considering Jarrett’s history of walking off stage due to people coughing, sneezing, or producing any combination of involuntary bodily functions. Fortunately for the listener, Jarrett does not police his own: He is so exhilarated by the music that he cannot stop himself from stomping, shouting, and humming off-key throughout the 12-part improvisational suite.
There are three primary styles that shape the pieces on Munich 16: lyricism, the blues, and dizzying avant-garde jazz. “Part I” belongs to the latter camp. With a runtime of over 13 minutes, it is the record’s longest piece, and it undergoes the most drastic temperature shifts—like watching time-lapse footage of the four seasons. There is no breathing space in the piece, and while Jarrett’s right hand spends time tumbling across the higher keys, it is the constant, ominous bass thump that grabs you by the throat and keeps you still. “Part VII” is from a similar school, a brief but daring piece that clocks in at just under two minutes. It is the only track that acknowledges the audience; we hear a quick rip of applause before Jarrett launches into a fearless polyrhythmic composition. Perhaps it is Munich 16’s shortest offering because it is the most exhausting to play.
Jarrett frequently alternates between styles on Munich 16, creating a dynamic sequence that doesn’t wear out any one particular method. “Part IX” is a spirited 12-bar blues, the steady structure of which allows Jarrett to solo wildly with his right hand. The dry keys seem to trip over each other, but Jarrett is too in control to let them drop completely. His atonal groans somehow function as a grounding force for the swift stunt work of his digits. “Part IV” is another blues entry, and perhaps the album’s most jovial track—a foot-stomping ragtime that calls to mind Ramsey Lewis Trio and Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts compositions.
Jarrett relieves the ear with soft, melodic passages throughout Munich 16, including the final three songs: interpretations of standards “Answer Me My Love,” “It’s a Lonesome Old Town,” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Jarrett’s grunts are absent from these last three movements, and his spare and tender playing conjures a closeness to the listener, as if you’re lying beneath the belly of his instrument. “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” is the most striking, a woozy nocturne that is so sad, its soft and sweet notes seem to sour as they linger in the air. In the last 15 minutes, Jarrett strips everything back, leaving plenty of space to interpret these beloved songs with the same reverence paid by Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and countless others. On Munich 16, Jarrett’s talent and ingenuity are self-evident—and so is his passion for the music that shaped him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Showcasing the darker, noisier side of Ron Morelli’s industrial-electronics label, this collection creates a cohesive whole out of jagged contrasts.

Eminent Domain

The full name of New York label L.I.E.S. is Long Island Electrical Systems. That might seem better suited to a utility company—until you hear the music coming out of it. Over a wide-ranging catalog of sputtering electronics, noise, and on-the-fritz club music, L.I.E.S. brings to mind Throbbing Gristle’s “industrial music for industrial people” slogan, right down to its well-oiled release schedule. A notable early showcase was the 2013 compilation Music for Shut-Ins—a fitting title for its dark, murky, hermetic take on electronic music. With the new Eminent Domain, a self-described collection of “subterranean American electronics,” L.I.E.S. drags some of the underground’s finest basement dwellers into the sunlight, and it’s one of the label’s best compilations yet.
Spread over three LPs and a bonus 7”, the sprawling Eminent Domain works well anywhere you might dive in, but label head Ron Morelli seems to take extra care in sequencing its 22 tracks. There’s a crazed logic in the way their prickly edges connect and clash. The compilation takes its time to open up with atmospheric early tracks like of Prisons’ “Tell Lie Visions,” a scene of choked keyboard torture, before JT Whitfield’s saw-blade synth jam “Bleak Speak” fully straps you in for the funhouse horrors to follow. With few recognizable names, you never quite know what surprises will pop out.
Minneapolis’ noise artist CBN is a great example. With only a few extremely limited-run cassettes, it’s hard to even obtain his work, but the stunning EBM workout “Who Has Time for Tears” may send you in search of more. The track’s propulsive drum machine and ghostly moans build over six relentless minutes before turning to bloody screams and noise that nearly sparkles in its harshness. For many, it will be a memorable introduction, but for Eminent Domain, it acts as another crucial cog, kicking off a seamless B-side as it gives way to FILTH’s prickly, agitated “Crucial Point” before Daniel Holt’s “Near the Window” provides a comedown of doom-laced synths. The three tracks work together to carve their side of the LP into its own unique corner; it’s not the only place on the compilation that this happens.
Los Angeles noise veteran Suzy Poling, aka Pod Blotz, offers another of Eminent Domain’s highlights with “Beyond the Body,” transforming her voice into a wounded electrical signal and threading it through blunt drumbeats and ethereal synths. It’s balanced by L.I.E.S. alum 51717’s “אדגמה”, which approaches ambient music and provides a midway breather, but also cleverly sets the listener up for fake-outs like Skander’s “Running Into Danger,” a blissful soundscape interrupted midway through by hellish percussion. The only genuine moment of peace is saved until the very last track: “The Swan King,” from Hospital Productions regular Lussuria. It all gives Eminent Domain a full-circle finish, making it both a brilliant collection of clashing parts and an organic whole all at once.


Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian lock themselves in a Cologne studio with an arsenal of synths and a mutual appreciation for the absurd; tongue-in-cheek krautrock hijinks ensue.

Ticket to Fame

Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian bond over shared anxieties like a pair of introverts at summer camp, unearthing every new inch of common ground with a sigh of relief and a much-needed dose of laughter. For Ticket to Fame, their first album as Decisive Pink, the two walled themselves off in a Cologne studio with an arsenal of synthesizers—“one of the Prophets, a modular, a Juno, a Jupiter, a Rodeo, a synth with a bee on it and some synth from the 1980s that Kate knew about,” Deradoorian recalls—and emerged with an album that plays like a road-trip scrapbook: a document of in-jokes, makeshift routines, and eureka moments that’s as bewilderingly insular as it is earnestly charming. From the temporary safety of their bubble, the experimental pop auteurs poke fun at life’s absurdities with the giddy energy of an acid trip cresting its peak.
Ticket to Fame is remarkably unified, stepping decisively on the gas and steering into bright, retro-futuristic synth pop; the duo sticks tightly to the kitschy ’80s sounds that NV so brilliantly engineered on 2020s Room for the Moon. The faux-marimba arpeggios  cutting through the frostbitten introspection of “What Where” sound like leftovers from a nature documentary on VHS, and the exuberantly funky post-disco stomp of “Dopamine” feels ripped out of an imaginary Tom Tom Club session, right down to the bleeping, dissonant synths sweeping across the song’s endearingly goofy breakdown.

Though NV is credited with handling the majority of the album’s production (Deradoorian, in turn, is the record’s principal lyricist), she keeps a loose grip behind the boards, allowing some of Deradoorian’s psychedelic krautrock inclinations to slip through. The results are mixed. On one end of the scale are the towering “Haffmilch Holiday” and the speedy, Harmonia-esque “Rodeo,” two perfect slices of Autobahn-ready motorik rock, begging to be taken on a highway test drive. On the other: “Interlude,” which simply runs a single arpeggio through every filter setting and tosses a bit of flute over it. Even more unfortunate is the similarly negligible ambient of “Dusk,” which maddeningly tosses away the chance to end the album on “Dopamine,” a high deserving of the name.

But Deradoorian shines as a lyricist, emboldened by NV to lighten up the moody, soul-searching mysticism of her past work with absurdist humor. Together, the two peel back the sociological layers masking their deepest desires and push each other toward a healthy wariness of all forces—political, technological, or chemical—that might lead them astray. Krautrock manifesto “Haffmilch Holiday” just wants to touch grass—dictators, gossips, and frappuccinos be damned. The sprightly “Ode to Boy” interpolates the core melody of Beethoven’s Ninth to undercut the nervous tension of a new crush. Is he more than just an “ordinary boy” or is she “throwing her heart into the wind?” The jury is out, but as they weave their voices through coda, the joke lands unexpectedly well. Hell is an automated customer service hotline in “Dopamine,” complete with Deradoorian reading out a hilarious, almost eerily realistic product list, anxiously searching for her next fix. “Giant googly eyes”? Sure, but “remote control centipede” just won’t cut it.
Tucked in the middle of the record, “Potato Tomato” feels like NV and Deradoorian have collectively snapped, falling victim to the cosmic joke themselves. The decision to include a track of NV and Deradoorian shouting increasingly ridiculous pronunciations of “potato” and “tomato” at each other initially struck me as an idea best left on the cutting-room floor. But as I sat with it, its white-hot ridiculousness cooled into a cypher for the album itself; a moment of unvarnished ridiculousness that exemplifies the duo’s determination to let the cabin fever of being trapped in the studio—or a body—strike a creative spark. When Deradoorian howls “Mommy!,” NV breaks out in laughter and so do I, submitting to the record’s delirium.


At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. His first album in five years finds the voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision.

Cardinal

At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. For most of his career, Jeck has used the record and the record player as both primary inspiration and chief instrument. He processes the static sounds archived on forgotten LPs, sampling and obfuscating the source material until it yields and blurs into new pieces. Though he uses little but effects pedals and processors to transmogrify the music, it can seem at times that Jeck physically warps the grooves themselves, turning concentric circles into Catherine wheels or paisley vectors or interconnected figure eights. If hip-hop’s architects sampled aging sounds to create their own modern world, Jeck uses many of the same tools to create an alternate, individual one that he then invites you to enter.
Jeck had been at this for decades when, 13 years ago, he seemed to find an enviable stride. Released between 2002 and 2008, a triptych of records—Stoke, 7, and Sand—turned his tests into solo turntable symphonies, fully formed compositions meant to be inhabited and analyzed. Jeck merged the audio on the records with the essence of the records, creating new music that popped and cracked beneath the charm of vinyl antiquity. The process seemed to break linear time by giving a universe of lost voices and performances new life at once. You, the listener, went away with Jeck and his record-store finds for a pleasant spell.
But on Cardinal, Jeck’s first new album in five years, that motion and those feelings have calcified a bit. The edges of his sources and samples have hardened, as though he’s confronting the harsh exigencies of the moment rather than escaping to the drift and peace of fantasy. The voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background here, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision. Brittle dins and soft tones, beautiful drones and static shocks participate in a theater of revolving reality and intentional violence.
Jeck indeed created Cardinal with turntables, a technique best heard here through the fractured loop that anchors "Broke Up" or the sunbaked wobble that defines "The Station View". These 13 tracks, however, often feel powered more by their accessories—"Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer," he lists—than the source records. There are jarring moments, as during the menacing "Brief" or the lurid "Called In", that suggest Jeck has suddenly slammed his palm against a distortion pedal, like some much younger noise lord gunning for the set’s climax. During "Saint Pancras", he seems to shake sleigh bells in the distance; pitted against the neon whirr of his electronics, the addition is strangely disconcerting, like a threat voiced from the lips of a longtime ally.
That is the prevailing sentiment of Cardinal, an album where Jeck’s general sense of wonder slips toward dystopian bewilderment. The move makes for a more fragmented listen than expected from Jeck, whose albums are typically immersive and enchanting. Still, the transition comes with unlikely rewards. Rendered in short spans that overlap until they form casual rhythms, the hovering bass and shredded treble of the terrific, terrifying "…bends the knee 1" recall the successes of the Haxan Cloak’s Excavation. During "Barrow in Furness (open thy hand wide)", Jeck slowly mutates a simple carousel melody until it becomes a dense web of ghastly oscillations, a little like Prurient’s electro phase. Yes, those are surprising references for a British sexagenarian with highbrow bona fides, but again, Jeck’s music has always recast the established world in a singular image. Does it come as any mystery that, now more than ever, he would conjure a setting as or more odious than our own?
Records are now in vogue in ways they’ve never been during Jeck's career. For decades, he repurposed a medium that seemed bound for obsolescence. At times, his use of the LP felt like a moral imperative, a valiant attempt to spin voices and ideas and forms that might be lost. But records, of course, have become such desirable commodities that it’s now difficult to have them made due to an overburdened market that once seemed destined for dismantling. It’s fitting, then, that this is one of the least turntable-centric albums of Jeck’s career, rendered so that you may be able to hear it all without guessing at the signal path at all. Rather than try to stake some here-first claim with vinyl or turn his past with it into new cachet or credibility, Jeck has used the turntable as a platform for exploring larger sounds and asking bigger questions. Cardinal is a break in his once clear direction, and it’s not his most cohesive album. But it is a logical and necessary leap for Jeck, who has always turned at oblique angles so as to reorder the sounds around him.


Blawan and Pariah’s hardware-centric techno duo returns with its debut album, trading some of the distortion of early releases for a funkier, slipperier sound that still bangs.

Grapefruit Regret

Karenn’s Grapefruit Regret is not designed for home listening. There’s no grand concept at work; the LP’s title literally stems from an unfortunate breakfast order. There are no ambient sketches, no cross-genre experiments, no high-profile guest appearances. This is a confident, no-nonsense affair: eight tracks of machine techno squarely focused on the dancefloor.
Although this is their debut album as a duo, Karenn’s Jamie Roberts (aka Blawan) and Arthur Cayzer (aka Pariah) have been playing together for nearly a decade. Both are products of the fertile post-dubstep scene of the late 2000s and early 2010s, in which the sounds of the UK’s hardcore continuum intermingled with house, techno, and R&B, giving rise to artists like James Blake, Floating Points, and Joy Orbison. But Roberts quickly diverted from his peers. In both his solo work and with Karenn, he embraced a particularly British strain of dark, industrial-leaning techno championed by acts like Surgeon and Sandwell District.
From the beginning, Karenn have been rooted in live performance, gradually sharpening their sound and taming their small fleet of gear. Early Karenn efforts, while banging, were also endearingly crude: Grotty creations like “Auflen Whip” sounded like they’d been forged by a blacksmith. Stark, raw, and largely devoid of funk, the music was full of static, hiss, rattling drums, and distorted synths; the duo’s lack of polish was part of its charm, and Karenn’s music tickled both machine fetishists and techno fans with an itch to get rowdy on the dancefloor.
In recent years, however, Karenn has turned down the volume. Following a single 2014 EP on their She Works the Long Nights label, they stopped releasing records. The studio break seems particularly prescient in retrospect; they pressed pause just as electronic music was becoming overrun with dark, industrial-flavored techno soundalikes. Even Karenn, who continued to perform live, noticed the shift; speaking recently to The Quietus, Roberts observed, “Things got quite aggressive over the last couple of years, so bro-y."
Karenn’s return in 2019 has been comparatively lighthearted. They’re still making serious techno, but some of the darkness has been stripped out, and the music’s presentation has been downright silly at times. Kind of Green, the duo’s first release in five years, was announced as “five slices of pudding for your pet fowl.” Since then, Karenn have released Voam Club Archive Volume 1, a collection of tunes extracted from live recordings, and now Grapefruit Regret, recorded this summer in Berlin. In the span of less than a year, Karenn—a project that some assumed might never produce another record—have become downright prolific.
Grapefruit Regret might be the cleanest thing they’ve ever done. While analog crunch is still a part of their palette, it’s no longer one of the music’s defining features. “Lemon Dribble” opens the album with little more than bristling static and a moodily winding bassline; the kick drum is distorted, but once it drops, the track becomes a focused—and surprisingly groovy—techno exercise. No one is going to confuse them with Derrick May or Underground Resistance, but Karenn’s sound has gotten funkier, and a lot less harrowing than it used to be.
The change suits the duo, and explains how a track like “Strawbs”—which ups the tempo to a galloping 150 BPM—can feel so lithe. At that speed, a lot of techno begins to either sound cartoonish or feel like an unrelenting juggernaut, but “Strawbs” is positively bouncy, its wriggly rhythms offset by airy, meditative pads. “Peel Me Easy” takes a similar tack, reflecting Karenn’s newfound willingness to add a bit of color.
Karenn fans looking for techno screamers won’t come away disappointed. “Kumquat” is an unrelenting face melter, its bleeping synths almost joyously insistent. “Crush the Mushrooms” is similarly manic, but it’s also one of the more irreverent tracks on the LP, employing crunchy, almost robotic synths that sound like a warped take on Daft Punk. Even the gloomy closer “Taste Yourself,” easily the LP’s most contemplative track, is optimized for the dancefloor. It’s unlikely that anyone, Karenn fans included, will repeatedly consume the album from start to finish; it’s just not that kind of record. But the two producers are doing something special together, and Grapefruit Regret reflects their confidence after nearly a decade in action. They may have taken their time to get here, but it’s clear from the way they’ve loosened up that Roberts and Cayzer are moving forward in exactly the manner that they see fit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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No longer content with merely capturing the sound of four wildly talented musicians in a room together, the Australian “future soul” group transforms on their vibrant and psychedelic third album.

Mood Valiant

The Australian quartet Hiatus Kaiyote are hyper-professional players,  prone to the type of musical indulgences most appreciated by audiences of tuition-paying jazz performance majors. Luckily, they also have a knack for breezy neo-soul that is as inviting as it is impressive. At the center of their sound is guitarist and R&B vocalist Nai Palm, and the success of Hiatus Kaiyote songs depends on the way her bandmates accompany her singular, heroic voice. At their best, particularly on stage, they accentuate her melodies with propulsive, inventive rhythms. But in the studio, they have struggled to sound equally compelling. The performances on Nai Palm’s 2017 solo debut, Needle Paw, only underlined this issue. With her accompaniment stripped to just acoustic guitar and vocals, she sounded freer.
On Mood Valiant, Hiatus Kaiyote creeps closer to a unity of virtuosity and feeling. No longer content with merely capturing the sound of four wildly talented musicians in a room together, they transform into something more expansive and psychedelic. The fundamentals of their sound—like the twinkling Rhodes electric piano that shows up in the brief and tender “Sip Into Something Soft”—are still present. But the band soon ventures into new territory. On “Chivalry Is Not Dead,” keyboardist Simon Mavin juggles synths that creak and yawn. Bassist Paul Bender and drummer Perrin Moss are characteristically locked in, guiding us through kaleidoscopic sounds. In the hookier moments, Hiatus Kaiyote sound like songwriters and performers in equal measure, living up to their self-appointed genre of “future soul”: husky, cyberpunk R&B, with Nai Palm’s molten voice at its core.
This is the first Hiatus Kaiyote album that doesn’t sound like merely a recorded live set; you can hear them using the studio to expand their vision of what the band can be. It is the most vibrant they’ve ever sounded on record. In several winning moments, they introduce string arrangements from Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, bringing a regal spirit to lead single “Get Sun” and the piano ballad “Stone or Lavender.” On the riotous, mid-album highlight “All the Words We Don’t Say,” Hiatus Kaiyote are in their bag. The precision and intensity of the music veers toward dubstep, with a grinding half-time lurch punctuated by Moss’ massive kick drum.
For all the dynamism of their music, Hiatus Kaiyote have only a couple of lyrical moods: sultry or ecstatic. Nai Palm is an endearingly stoney lyricist, and, sure enough, she starts off “Chivalry Is Not Dead” with an erotic verse that sounds like it was inspired by a blazed viewing of a nature documentary: “If I were a leopard slug,” she sings, “I would reach out with the blue rose of ours, wrapping myself around you.” Digging more deeply into these feelings—not to mention the genderfucked reproductive practices they imply—could be a worthy next step. But even when she pares down her lyrics to simple paeans of love, lust, and devotion, her voice animates the words with pathos and meaning. On their best album yet, Hiatus Kaiyote shine by building an architecture around these emotions, coming alive when they allow themselves to be more than just a great band.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their most engaged album in a quarter-century, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan find that familiar sounds can offer several new ways forward.

Memento Mori

Depeche Mode had nearly finished their fourth full decade and 14th full-length before a Martin Gore-Dave Gahan cowrite finally made an album. That was “You Move,” a throbbing bit of tossed-off electro pop nestled near the center of 2017’s Spirit, a political quagmire of topical indignation. Amid that sloganeering, “You Move” was not an entirely auspicious debut, notable mostly for how it framed Gahan and Gore’s threadbare relationship. During those sessions, third member and interstitial glue, Andy Fletcher, had to be physically removed from the studio so his more famous former chums could freely vent. “If you give me something you and I can play,” Gahan soon taunted on their song together. “Let me ring your bell.”
The pair’s second cowrite, though, feels less like an obligation or a marriage-counseling exercise than the dawn of a new dynamic. “Wagging Tongue” arrives early into Memento Mori, the band’s most engaged album in more than two decades, Gore’s sunbeam sequencers a perfect foil for his golden-voice goth. It’s an elliptical tale of risk, alienation, and—slowly, unsteadily, improbably—renewal. “I won’t be persuaded,” they sing together near the end, Gore’s harmony as wavy as his totemic golden hair. “Kiss your doubts goodbye.”
The doubts that Memento Mori would even exist were enormous. Just before the trio reconvened in Gore’s Santa Barbara studio (and only after Gahan overcame his entrenched reluctance to reconvene at all), Fletcher died suddenly at home in London, the primary vessel from his heart having ripped apart. Fletcher, only 60, had been the band’s indispensable “vibe tech,” the oil inside its hot engine. Though he didn’t write or really even play, Fletcher served as the intermediary for the often acrimonious pair who did, especially when Gahan began itching to put songs of his own on Depeche Mode’s Gore-penned albums. Without him, they wondered, could they function without falling apart? “We kind of had to…  really decide, are we going to finish?” Gore recently told MOJO. “Or do we carry on?” They chose the latter, finding new ways to work together, if not discovering altogether new sounds.
This darkness and doubt—always Depeche Mode’s perpetually renewing lifeblood—permeate Memento Mori’s best songs. Opener “My Cosmos Is Mine” unspools over a mosaic of shattered static and cryospheric synths. In elegant Scott Walker finery, Gahan aces the role of the narrator who’d rather be lied to than given more bad news. There’s a whiff of The Wall’s politics here, especially when chants of “No war!” arrive, but its animating question is symptomatic of grief itself: How much more can you handle, mortal? “Don’t stare at my soul,” Gahan sings, as steady and loaded as the serpent waiting to strike. “I swear it is fine.”
That croon returns for closer “Speak to Me,” a gorgeous bit of Gahan-shaped melancholia that begins like some beatific church hymn but exits beneath a barrage of cursed noise. It’s a devoted love song hamstrung by self-loathing, Gahan worried he’s not good enough for anyone but himself. Along with the mid-album Nick Cave-and-a-drum-machine fever dream “Caroline’s Monkey,” these frames hold Memento Mori in a sort of permanent pallor. This record is more concerned with surviving than succeeding—ironic, then, that this brooding triptych is as new and open-ended as Depeche Mode have sounded this century.
But Depeche Mode became superstars by lighting up the dark, by turning individual despair or nihilism into sing-alongs to be shared. They try that here, with a separate trio that winks at their crowning achievements, albeit indirectly. “People Are Good” and “Never Let Me Go” not only share the first half of their titles with two of Depeche Mode’s most titanic hits but also their anthemic ambitions. Ebullient, danceable, and deeply disappointed, “People Are Good” is the confession of a recovering pessimist realizing maybe he was right, that our very nature ensures our doom. The swift and slicing “Never Let Me Go” swivels on the brand of anxious guitar hook that’s long been the band’s secret weapon. It underscores the facade of neurotic self-confidence Gahan offers so well, begging for love while pretending he is already love incarnate.
The Gore-Gahan cowrite isn’t the only collaboration here. Gore wrote a third of the album with Psychedelic Furs whiz Richard Butler, introducing a new vulnerability to Depeche Mode’s long-hermetic world. (For his part, Gahan wrote with the touring band, producer James Ford, and engineer Marta Salogni, an intriguing sound artist herself.) The pair’s work on “Ghosts Again”—the first single, the first time Depeche Mode have neared the sound of a real hit in many years—convinced Gahan that returning to the fold was worth the bother. It is deliciously unfussy, its fluorescent keys and four-on-the-floor insistence giving Gahan space for a little carpe diem proselytizing, clear of the chaos. It somehow finds the crossroads of Katy Perry’s “Firework” and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” then shoots up its own signal flare for the living.
That is, alas, as close as Memento Mori gets to a smash, to reaching one of those undeniable highs that seeps into your psyche by merely existing, à la “Just Can’t Get Enough.” This is absolutely Depeche Mode at their best since Ultra, but there’s probably nothing here that introduces them to an entirely new audience, unlike Ultra. Still, “Soul with Me” is the only true miss, less mid-album fermata than full-on slog: a slow dance of shuffling drums, tremolo guitars, and elementary end-rhyme. Its maudlin sense of self-pity runs counter to the unlikely endurance tale that is Memento Mori, an album that almost died with Fletcher in London.
After more than 40 years, it is astonishing and redeeming how rarely Depeche Mode have been embarrassing. Yes, they’re a quarter-century removed from their last megahits, but they’ve never deigned to the menial tasks of senescence—cruise ships, state fairs, full-album tours. Rather than play it safe and demure when neo-Nazi droog Richard Spencer claimed Depeche Mode for the right, Gahan went all in, dubbing him “a very educated cunt … the scariest kind of all.” They’ve suffered addiction, abdication, near-death, and, now, death itself, but they’ve never made a truly awful record by chasing trends they’d already missed. For all their dependable despair, Depeche Mode thrive more on persistence and self-respect.
Memento Mori is, ultimately, a manifestation of both. Rather than end with a friend’s death and, consequently, a relatively forgettable album beset by personnel issues, Gahan and Gore chose to get closer and try again. Memento Mori is not the hooded masterpiece of Music for the Masses or the hits cache of Violator. But it does signal that there are new ways yet for Gahan and Gore to at least approach their old magic. Given their peak-and-valley past, perhaps that’s old news. In the end, as Gore wrote and Gahan sang in 1982, maybe people are basically the same.


I'd like to begin this review by congratulating Tindersticks on making it for over a decade with the same ...

Can Our Love...

I'd like to begin this review by congratulating Tindersticks on making it for over a decade with the same six members. Most bands don't even make it the full ten years, much less with all members intact. I've been trying to think of other bands who have done it and after a few minutes of staring around at my record collection, Fugazi, Radiohead, and REM are the only names I've come up with, and even REM doesn't have Bill Berry anymore.
Aside from those, you have revolving doors like Yes and Fleetwood Mac, both of whom have had over twenty members over the years, and short-lived outfits like the Sex Pistols, who couldn't stay together long enough to complete their first US tour. So, it's a testament to the strength of the band that Tindersticks are still at it after all these years, democratically crafting some of the best music in Britain. And it's equally impressive that their quality has hardly suffered at all in the process.
The music of Tindersticks has changed a lot in the last few years, absorbing 70's soul into their signature gutter ballads, and dropping the "melo" prefix from the drama. Gone are the 70 minute-plus double-albums and ear-rattling dissonance that characterized their early music, replaced instead by concise, slow-core R&B; with an inky black center. Still, it would impossible to mistake this for any other band, and old fans will likely be delighted with what they hear.
The opener, "Dying Slowly," is the most direct musical link to the band's past, recalling the string-drenched pining of their third album, Curtains. Stuart Staples' murky baritone calls out the refrain, "This dying slowly/ It seemed better than shooting myself," with characteristic exhaustion. The strings swell and subside like the conversation in a crowded bar. It's an elegant introduction to an album that finds Tindersticks further embracing the soul influences they first toyed with on 1999's Simple Pleasure.
A case in point is the title track, a bubbling stew of wah-wah guitars, Hammond organ and passionate vocals that plays like Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" at half-speed, only with Here, My Dear sentiments in the lyrics. Even after all this time, Stuart Staples can't seem to win at the game of love.
"Sweet Release," the album's eight-minute centerpiece, follows, displaying the band's uncanny ability to play an extremely long song and make it feel too short. Dickon Hinchliffe's violin swirls around Staples' molasses-thick vocal and David Boulter's gorgeous organ lines, as the twelve-member string section comments from the wings. It makes for a song that easily lives up to its title.
Part of what makes Tindersticks so easy to connect to is the way they manage to make even the most minute suffering and pain seem universal. When Staples sighs, he's sighing with you, and when he says "I," it could be anybody who's ever been through a messy breakup or felt the sting of rejection. And that's why his plea of "Don't ever get tired of waiting for me" on "Don't Ever Get Tired" hits a nerve-- everyone needs someone they can depend on, and Staples just wants it to be the woman he loves.
"People Keep Comin' Around," a duet between Staples and Hinchliffe, offers perhaps a little insight into why Tindersticks have been able to last so long-- all six members are genuinely unselfish musicians. Bassist Mark Colwill and drummer Alasdair Macaulay lay down a relaxed but funky groove as Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser lay back, playing only when necessary. Hinchliffe's higher octave is animated, but never hogs the spotlight, letting the band ride the groove, while Hinchliffe's rich string and horn arrangements fill in the gaps. It's telling that the band offers equal billing to the string and horn players in the album credits, acknowledging their contributions as equal to the end result.
In fact, the only faltering point on the entire album actually comes when Staples strikes out on his own for the puzzling "Tricklin'," a two-minute vocal round with minimalist organ accompaniment that doesn't really serve as much more than filler. But when the whole band is engaged, the results are frequently stunning, and always engaging.
The final twist on Can Our Love... comes with the closer, "Chilitetime," where, for once, hope seems to be the order of the day. "She has my love/ She needs something more/ But time is mine," Staples sings as Hinchliffe's violin cries out behind him. And that's where the ellipsis in the album title comes in, I think. It leaves the thought "Can our love..." incomplete and allows you draw your own conclusions. While things are definitely bad, there may yet be a way out.
Despite the open-ended nature of its sentiments, "Chilitetime" pulls the album to a strong close, effectively capping this latest journey through the dark folds of the brain and the heart. At 45 minutes, Can Our Love... is Tindersticks' most concise album yet, and it sacrifices nothing in content. Eight songs may not seem like much for a full album, but it's all this band needs to make a fully rewarding listen that only gets richer the more you visit.


Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of Paddy McAloon’s idiosyncratic journey as a pop songwriter.

Prefab Sprout: Swoon / From Langley Park to Memphis / Jordan: The Comeback / A Life of Surprises

At first, Paddy McAloon thought he had to invent his own chords to write songs. As a result, the earliest music by his band Prefab Sprout can sound comical and haywire, like a jazz band entertaining themselves at a cocktail party before the guests arrive. As McAloon continued refining his voice, he earned comparisons to Elvis Costello and Steely Dan, but his heroes were people like Michael Jackson and Prince, Stephen Sondheim and George Gershwin. He dreamed of writing songs that the whole world could sing along to—but he wanted to do it his own way.
Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of his journey as a pop songwriter. The series comprises the band’s 1984 debut Swoon, 1988’s commercial peak From Langley Park to Memphis, 1990’s double album Jordan: The Comeback, and 1992’s The Best of Prefab Sprout: A Life of Surprises. These reissues—which feature subtly improved artwork and sharp remasters from McAloon and his brother Martin—leave out but orbit around Steve McQueen, their 1985 masterpiece that remains the ideal entry point to their catalog. It was a breakthrough for the band members, marking their first collaboration with producer Thomas Dolby, whose playful, surreal touch helped define their characteristic sound. Dolby even helped curate that album’s tracklist, choosing songs from a stockpile that McAloon had amassed since forming the band with Martin in County Durham, England in the late ’70s.
Several of those songs predated Swoon, their scrappy debut, whose post-punk edge would be abandoned for a smoother, more sophisticated sound. While Swoon was unrepresentative of the band that Prefab Sprout would become, it set the template for how they’d navigate the pop world. The brothers were joined by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Wendy Smith, who accompanied McAloon for wordless refrains and non-sequitur exclamations that took pleasure in twisting expectations. McAloon was beginning to write eloquently about heartbreak and adulthood (“Cruel,” “Elegance”) but he was also having a blast addressing questions that most songwriters might find trivial: What is the life of a celebrity chessmaster? When was the last time you played basketball?
After Swoon and the critical acclaim that followed Steve McQueen, the band recorded and shelved a quieter follow-up (Protest Songs, eventually released in 1989) before setting off to make something that capitalized on their newfound momentum. At the time of its release, the cinematic From Langley Park to Memphis was largely overshadowed by its first two tracks: the semi-novelty hit “The King of Rock and Roll” (which arrived with a fittingly absurd music video) and the Springsteen-referencing “Cars and Girls.” As a one-two punch, they rightfully stand among Prefab Sprout’s most recognizable songs, and the rest of the record is just as catchy and complex.
McAloon was now penning his own version of standards (“Nightingales”), reverb-coated alt-rock anthems (“The Golden Calf”), and dramatic singalongs that could find a second life on Broadway (“Hey Manhattan”). His writing favored narrators in sad, autumnal stages: “All my lazy teenage boasts are now high precision ghosts/And they’re coming ‘round the tracks to haunt me,” go the opening lyrics to “The King of Rock and Roll,” imagining the life of an older touring musician, every night singing the same meaningless words that he wrote decades ago. And yet the music sounds colorful and hopeful and alive—everything seems to sparkle, right down to the glossy band photo on the album cover.
With that photo, lovingly filtered here to look slightly more artful, the band signaled that they were pivoting away from their underground beginnings. Released at a time when American indie bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were beginning to make bids for larger audiences, McAloon was making a similar leap, even if he still preferred staying out of the spotlight. While his songs were newly poised for radio and MTV, he remained wary of fame, setting on a reclusive path that would span the rest of his career. “This isn’t meant to sound snobbish,” he told Melody Maker at the time, “but I’ve never felt a part of any community… I don’t go out and look for like-minded people and I’ve never found anyone on the planet who fits the bill.” From Langley Park remains the band’s closest brush to stardom, but McAloon kept finding new ways to push himself.
On Jordan: The Comeback, the most ambitious Prefab Sprout album and one of their greatest, McAloon created his own mythological world to blend into. The cast of characters are drawn from the Bible (including star turns from Michael the Archangel, Satan, and God himself) as well as rock history. A suite of songs in the middle of the album imagines Elvis Presley, having faked his death and retreated to the desert, dreaming of the perfect comeback song to launch his next act. McAloon, meanwhile, was also searching for the follow-up for his own biggest hits. “Wild Horses” is a romantic fantasy whose sleek arrangement still sounds fresh, while “The Ice Maiden” offers one of the most memorable lyrics in his songbook: “Death is a small price for heaven.” It was a comeback album obsessed with comebacks, from rebound relationships to resurrections. Less commercially successful than Langley but just as rewarding, it’s a work so layered that, decades on, it still seems to hold new secrets.
When it came time to compile Prefab Sprout’s career highs into an album-length primer, A Life of Surprises didn’t quite capture the full picture. The picks from Jordan are less meaningful stripped of the album’s purposeful sequencing, while the one selection from Swoon sounds jarringly out of place in the non-chronological tracklist. Not to mention, “Bonny,” a stunner from Steve McQueen, is nowhere to be found. What the set does provide, however, are two essential non-album cuts that lend fitting closure to this era of the band’s career. The glittery, pulsing single “If You Don’t Love Me” would later be reimagined as a piano ballad by Kylie Minogue, bringing McAloon’s unlikely pop dreams to reality. But it’s “The Sound of Crying” that really shows how far he had come, pairing one of his most gorgeous melodies to a strange, brilliant vision of the world in flux. “Sometimes I think that God is working to a plan,” he sings, his voice breathier and softer with age. “And other times I’m sure that he is improvising.” Lamenting a chaotic universe, he casts a higher power in his own image: obsessive and inscrutable, observing us from somewhere that he can’t be reached, and searching for a tune.

Buy: Rough Trade (Swoon) (From Langley Park to Memphis) (Jordan: The Comeback) (A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout)
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With a stacked guest list, the 23-year-old singer’s latest mixtape showcases his curatorial instincts even as it cruises through a familiar landscape of soft, shapeless R&B.

Scenic Drive

Khalid crooned his way to the Billboard charts by insisting just how chill he is. He wants to talk; he wants you to “come and vibe”; his music is shapeless and innocuous, mild enough to blend into any top-hits playlist. A Khalid album is low-stakes by definition. His latest project, Scenic Drive, sets expectations even lower: This is a tape, he proclaims, setting the scene with a gauzy intro that spins the radio dial between snippets of his past hits and ends with Alicia Keys assuring, “We’re here tonight to provide the vibes.” It’s a flimsy premise, one that Khalid and a bevy of featured artists—nine guests in 29 minutes!—fulfill with soft, stolid R&B. The music is lush and low-key, slipping out of your headphones before you even realize it’s playing.
Scenic Drive is a concept record, and Khalid goes all in on driving metaphors, murmuring about roads and back seats and Lamborghinis. The theme is less architecture and more, as Khalid might say, a mood; the songs meander, Khalid’s voice undulating in layers over sparse, twinkling beats. It’s hard to pinpoint the slippery subtext or to find deeper meaning in a line like, “I’m the one you need to be around, ’cause I won’t bring you down.” Sometimes, just being is the whole plot: On “Present,” Khalid asks a love interest for permission to “be present,” winding his way through pick-up lines that sound like they could’ve been generated by a meditation app. But you don’t listen to a Khalid song to parse it closely.
On the more interesting songs, Khalid glides to the background as another artist draws the spotlight. The singer QUIN commands the chorus on “Brand New,” trading raspy verses with Khalid over plush pulses of guitar. Ari Lennox and Smino take over the title track while Khalid harmonizes, “Give me a feeling.” The Drake-adjacent producer-singer duo Majid Jordan swirls a hint of tropical house into “Open”; rapper J.I.D adds texture to the otherwise bland, boy-band-inspired “All I Feel Is Rain.” You get little wisps of Khalid, reminders of his presence—a gravely hum, an earnest introductory platitude (“Gotta live in the moment,” he sings on “Retrograde”). But it’s his curatorial instincts that are most prominent in the selection of guests and the way he meshes them into the squishy soundscape.
There’s no gravity to Khalid’s songs, sonically or thematically; even when he approaches the idea of heartbreak, it’s from a careful distance, or quickly and tidily resolved. This default sunniness is part of what fueled his rise in pop, but after four projects in the past five years, it would be refreshing to hear him take a risk. He no longer writes so explicitly about youth as he did in 2017 with “Young Dumb & Broke,” but he hasn’t matured as a singer or lyricist, either. Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.

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Alongside a roster of guest vocalists including Jennifer Castle and Meg Remy, the psychedelic Toronto outfit allows their exploratory and pop-focused impulses to work in tandem.

Self Help

On their 2019 debut album, Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble named one of their instrumentals “You Can Build a Palace, or You Can Please People”—a title that speaks to the ever-fraught tension between capitalism and socialism in the current geopolitical landscape, but also to the aesthetic tug-of-war playing out within the band itself. Founded by Max Turnbull —the avant-rock chameleon formerly known as Slim Twig, and the creative and matrimonial partner of U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy—Badge Époque Ensemble was originally an outlet for him and his fellow Toronto DIY veterans to indulge their love of acid rock, funk, jazz, prog, and other early-’70s record-collector subgenres. At the same time, they’ve shown themselves to be, if not pop-friendly, then at least pop-conscious, whether packing complex compositions into tidy four-minute packages or using classic-rock touchstones as a jumping-off point into the great beyond.
But on their third release in just over a year, Badge Époque Ensemble refuse to choose between free-form psychedelic explorations and pop pleasures. With Self Help, they prove they can have it both ways, by allowing their experimental and melodic tendencies to work more in tandem rather than in opposition. Each of the group’s previous records has featured a vocal cameo, but here they’ve assembled a veritable Toronto dream team of lead singers that includes Remy and indie-folk enigma Jennifer Castle alongside returning collaborators Dorothea Paas and James Baley (who also delivered the disco-tinged hook on U.S. Girls’ 2018 single “Pearly Gates”).
Collectively, their presence transforms Badge Époque Ensemble from the sort of group that would’ve gotten played on an overnight pirate-radio broadcast in 1971 to one that could’ve conceivably snuck onto an AM station’s Top 40 countdown. And with the singers in tow, Badge Époque tap into the spiritual uplift and righteous activism coursing through popular music at the time. “Sing a Silent Gospel” is a gorgeous swirl of Fender Rhodes chords, Ethio-jazz sax melodies, and conga fury that’s anchored by Remy and Paas’ alternating vocals. And when the song transitions into an elaborate instrumental passage halfway through, it doesn’t so much drift away from its sturdy melodic foundation as fortify it, with the band eventually locking into a climactic circular progression that acquires cyclonic force. Baley’s street-soul empowerment anthem “Unity (It’s Up to You)” slides even more fluidly between formalism and freedom, with guitarist Chris Bezant intuitively using the singer’s extended high note as a launchpad into a wah-wahed solo as if he were finishing his sentence.
But where these songs feel like extensions of Badge Époque Ensemble’s sound, centerpiece track “Just Space for Light” is the kind of move that would’ve been hard to imagine this band attempting a year ago. Guided by Alia O’Brien’s elegant flute lines, the song begins as a windchimed, candlelit quiet-storm stunner, with Castle seizing the spotlight as if she were performing on a primetime awards-show telecast. And while the song’s sudden shift into an acid-funk groove feels jarring at first, Castle retains her calming presence throughout, guiding you safely through its twists and turns.
Despite the focus on melody, Self Help still affords Badge Époque Ensemble plenty of space to stretch out and freak out. The 10-minute “Birds Fly Through Ancient Ruins” is a creeping exercise in desert-scorched dub that turns downright apocalyptic near its climax, as if the landscape were being covered in ice. In response, the closing instrumental “Extinct Commune” triggers the slow thaw. As a solo-piano showcase for Turnbull, the track is Self Help’s extreme outlier, landing somewhere between an early-‘70s Elton John demo and after-hours jazz-bar improvisation. Yet in its own subtle way, it soundly reaffirms the album’s mission, blurring the line between pop classicism and free exploration until they’re one and the same.

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The pop star returns with a restrained, slightly scattered, but emotionally generous album that cycles through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another.

eternal sunshine

As Ariana Grande rounded out the final year of her charmed and tumultuous 20s, it would have been more than enough for her to simply reflect on the previous decade. Taken together, the whole supercut of her meteoric rise, milestone achievements, high-profile relationships, confrontations with angels and demons, and widely heralded moments of grace under fire, would have provided Grande with more than enough material for a capstone album. But as her Saturn returned, and the much-referenced astrological event came to pass, Grande was forced to face down some of her most personally challenging news cycles to date. Since 2020’s Positions, Grande married discreetly and divorced publicly, began production on the movie adaptation of the musical Wicked, and sparked a new romance (and almost immediate controversy) with her co-star, Ethan Slater, Broadway’s very own Spongebob Squarepants.
Grande’s career has been presented to us as a chain of successive breakthroughs, whether making a full-throated bid for pop glory (My Everything), persevering through almost unthinkable degrees of heartbreak (Sweetener), or fully embracing her adult sensuality (Positions). Like Taylor Swift, the singer has been able to maintain a mass following by time-stamping each era with different boyfriends, makeovers, and most crucially: lending the decisive final word to all the back-biting and petty gossip. On eternal sunshine, Grande takes a widely publicized moment of personal upheaval and chisels it into the a-ha! moment of her discography. Loosely billed as a “concept record” about her divorce and the personal revelations her Saturn return inspired, sunshine is a slightly scattered, but emotionally generous collection of music that cycles compassionately through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another.
Drawing inspiration from the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a surreal romantic comedy in which people can elect to have unwanted memories erased as a form of therapy—Grande concerns herself with the residual feelings and tortured thoughts that linger long after a breakup. Over an understated guitar strum and faux-romantic strings on “intro (end of the world)”, she introduces the record’s central theme by immediately ripping into a series of blunt, rapid-fire questions: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?/Aren’t you really supposed to know that shit?/Feel it in your bones and own that shit?” She announces her breakup moments later with the Studio 54 strut of “bye,” but the song’s triumphant kiss-off almost immediately doubles back on itself with dislodged memories, delayed anguish, and brutal recriminations on the following tracks.
As a “concept record,” eternal sunshine isn’t nearly as cohesive of a divorce record as, say, Adele’s 30, but Grande smuggles in some interesting threads regardless. The meta-narrative of the public and media as her fickle and unappreciative lovers is a subtext that runs throughout eternal sunshine, with “yes, and?” as the most full-throated clapback against parasocial mouthbreathers speculating on her private life. Grande clearly relishes her ability to twist the knife as a songwriter. Some of her most shocking and funny lines come through as she plays up the spectacle of her divorce for all its horror: seemingly referring to her marriage as a “situationship” (“don’t wanna break up again)”, alluding to cheating (“eternal sunshine”), flagrantly spreading disinformation (“true story”), and finally providing us with the gorgeous couplet “Your business is yours and mine is mine/Why do you care so much whose **** I ride?” It’s to her credit, that she’s not only lived up vocally to the initial Mariah comparisons, but has a strain of surreal humor and outright weirdness that informs so much of her music.
During a production lull on Wicked brought on by the SAG strike, Grande flew to New York and reassembled her usual cast of collaborators including Max Martin, Shintaro Yasuda, and Ilya Salmanzadeh, albeit with the notable absence of her longtime songwriting partners, Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét. The record is split between the pillowy, mid-tempo R&B that we’ve come to expect from Ari and some interesting but shaky left turns. The leak and subsequent TikTok virality of her song “Fantasize” inspired Grande to release her own take on ornate Y2K production with “the boy is mine,” an excellent, precision-engineered track with stuttering, flashy synths that leave enough atmosphere for her voice to soar. Other genre flourishes are less successful. The orchestral disco of “bye” feels one-dimensional set against the mirror ball radiance of her voice and the alt-rock strum of “imperfect for you” suggests we’re getting an anthem but barely crests above a lullaby.
In contrast to Positions, where Grande flaunted the full extent of her range with whistle notes and filigreed melisma on nearly every track, eternal sunshine is an exercise in restraint. Apart from the scorching R&B fireworks of “true story,” there is very little outright belting on display, but her talent as an arranger shines with some absolutely gorgeous harmonies across the board. On songs like the title track and “we can’t be friends,” Grande adopts an aching tone that’s reminiscent of her heroine, Imogen Heap, communicating both a bruised strength and highlighting her underappreciated ability to convey more subtle colors with her voice. The latter track’s knockoff Robyn beat wouldn’t be as nearly as affecting without Grande’s gorgeously wounded performance, and what she makes out of “Know that you made me/I don’t like how you paint me, yet I’m still here hanging,” as if she were being pierced by her ex’s misunderstanding in real time.
Grande’s lyrics don’t always rise to the sophistication of her vocals, she occasionally settles for stock phrases (“I’ll play the villain if you need me to”) or scrambles for syllables (on “don’t wanna break up again” she rhymes “codependency” with “therapy”). Between Monét and Parx’s absence, her newfound enunciation, and the more obviously canned Max Martin instrumentals, a less generous interpretation would be to wonder if the limits of her songwriting didn’t constrain the more vocal pyrotechnics. But taken from another angle, it’s interesting to regard her choices as a step toward becoming a fundamentally different kind of singer. In an interview with Zach Sang, Grande emphasized the importance of distinguishing between herself as a person and a pop star, and this more subdued, less showy register could very well be the ticket, a carefully considered adaptation for protecting her hard-won sense of self.


After two relatively tame records for Blue Note, the fearless guitar innovator renews his focus on the atonal and edgy with an ambitious, astonishing work.

The Nels Cline Singers: Share the Wealth

Share the Wealth

Although the veteran jazz and rock guitarist has long been celebrated for his fearless exploration, Nels Cline has a traditionalist streak, too. Perhaps it was the weight of the label’s history, but his first two records for Blue Note were two of the most conventional of his long career. His take on a romantic standards album, 2016’s Lovers, found him channeling his inner Bill Evans and Jim Hall, while 2018’s Currents, Constellations, with his dual-guitar quartet Nels Cline 4, offered more freeform improvisations yet eased off on the pedals and electronics that enable Cline’s more hallucinatory vamps.
Both were skillful records, the work of a prodigy living up to his reputation. But depending on what you seek out a Nels Cline record for, they were also both a little tame. For his third album for Blue Note, Share the Wealth, Cline offers a more comprehensive summation of his tastes, with renewed emphasis on the atonal and edgy. Cline has always saved some of his wildest fusions for the Nels Cline Singers, an ensemble he’s led since before he joined Wilco and earned the adoration of a wider pool of indie rock fans, and for these sessions he doubled the size of that trio, welcoming keyboardist Brian Marsella, percussionist Cyro Baptista and saxophonist Skerik — all assertive players who aren’t shy about redirecting these pieces.
Cline’s reverence for Blue Note’s history remains, and at its most lyrical, the set conjures echoes of the label’s ’60s post-bop releases, thanks in good part to the addition of Skerik’s tenor sax. But mostly the ensemble is interested in coloring outside the lines, and they play for impact as often as they do for grace. “Spiral” opens the record with a heady raga, bruised purple by Skerik’s convulsive sax. Cline’s coppery guitars take on a tinge of post-rock on “Beam/Spiral,” and that piece crescendos like a post-rock song, too, breaking open to reveal the album’s most jubilant refrain. “Princess Phone” and “The Pleather Patrol” recall the thick, shambolic grooves of Cline’s sometimes collaborators Medeski, Martin and Wood.
Cline had never gigged with this six-piece iteration of the Singers before, and his original plans for these sessions were to splice them into an experimental collage. It turns out there was no need: The players built in so many dramatic pivots, twists and breaks that they didn’t have to pipe them in after the fact. The 17-minute centerpiece “Stump The Panel” plays out as a series of skronky, off-balance movements that approximate the kind of sharp edits that Teo Macero patched into On the Corner. It peaks halfway through with a spacey, trip-hop drum breakdown, then closes with a naked metal riff, a jagged edge at odds with Cline’s usually meticulously tuned guitars.
Even for a Cline record, Share the Wealth’s scope is astonishing. Like many of his albums, it’s a big work, running 80 minutes, but it’s long because it needs to be—packed any tighter, these songs would be too busy, the flood of ideas too harried. For all their audacity and hunger to dazzle and surprise, Cline’s ensemble never forgets to let even the album’s showiest pieces breathe.

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On their first joint album, the veteran producer’s relaxed tempos and the San Francisco rapper’s coolheaded flows slide together with easy fluidity.

Larry June  / The Alchemist: The Great Escape

The Great Escape

Larry June raps like he’s guiding a meditation, his voice rarely rising above a soothing monotone. In another timeline, the prolific San Francisco rapper might have been a self-help expert, using the power of mindfulness to help others manifest their goals. The flexes in his lyrics are often material, but just as important are the lines about drinking green juice and waking up early for a little walk. Scroll through the comments section of any of his YouTube videos, and you’ll find fans explaining how his music inspired them to start a business, eat healthier, or buy a nicer car. He’s smooth and charismatic, making music to soundtrack the uncomplicated pleasure of going for a drive on a sunny day.
June gravitates towards breezy, post-hyphy beats, so it was a bit of a head-scratcher when he hinted at forthcoming collaborations with The Alchemist back in 2021. For the past decade, Al’s been moving away from the hard-nosed, New York classicism of his early career into a trippier zone, slathering piano stabs and chopped samples with tape echo effects and creeping drones. He’s made incredible records with Roc Marciano, Boldy James, and Armand Hammer, none of which have the microdose-in-the-smoothie vibe that June has been perfecting. But The Great Escape, the pair’s new joint album, works astonishingly well. June’s laid-back approach helps Al settle into a less brooding mood. His production functions as both a complement and challenge, giving June’s unwavering chill a prestige rap sheen and eliciting some of his best performances.
The two mesh together so seamlessly, it’s hard to believe they were initially unsure of how to develop a common sound. In an interview with Rolling Stone from earlier this month, Al said he was a fan of June, but he was “kind of different…I was like, ‘I don’t know how we could find a bag.’” They connected through a mutual collaborator, the Los Angeles rapper Jay Worthy. When June hopped on the neon-lit easy listening number “Rainy Night in SF,” a song Al and Worthy were working on, it all clicked. The beats that Al supplies for The Great Escape are lush and hypnotic, full of acid jazz Rhodes pianos (“Art Talk”), muted funk guitars (“Summer Reign”), and cheesy lounge horns (“Solid Plan”). Al’s main talent—beyond an impeccable ear for samples—is his ability to fully inhabit a rapper’s world. For June, he keeps the tempos relaxed, the sounds luxurious, and the drums crisp, leaving plenty of space for his creative partner to stretch.
For all of June’s magnetism, he’s never been especially adventurous on the mic. He knows what works and sticks with it, placing phrases between beats like garden pavers. Still, June sounds invigorated on The Great Escape, toying with his delivery in unexpected ways. The subtle shifts in flow and enjambment reveal him to be a much more adept technician than his previous work has suggested. June only raps in his indoor voice, but the way he adopts a Phonte-like bounce on “Orange Village,” or cycles through tumbling internal rhymes on “Turkish Cotton,” gives his typically coolheaded style a welcome tension.
June peppers his bars with rich, evocative details, making his art feel like much more than lifestyle rap. He’ll easily spend $1,000 on candles or $500 on a salt shaker. His passion for cars goes beyond namechecking luxury automakers; he extends that appreciation for opulence to must-have accessories, like ceramic brakes and a push-button parking system. These moments feel immersive, setting him apart from other rappers whose entire brands rest on describing their wealth. Take Wiz Khalifa, who shows up on “What Happened to the World” without much to say, apart from the vague proclamation that he made so much “last week, [he] can’t speak on it.” Meanwhile, Larry brags about his money, but never comes off as hollow or sneering. He exudes a palpable sense of gratitude, rather than a spend-it-while-you-got-it nihilism; in the end, the approach makes him more interesting and relatable.
The Great Escape isn’t flawless; this is an album with a Big Sean verse, after all. The candlelit crooning of “Ocean Sounds” feels better suited to June’s last album, Spaceships on the Blade, which possessed a much more romantic sensibility. The beats on “What Happened to the World” and “Exito” are a little too similar, slightly slowing the album’s momentum. That said, the songs are still vivacious and frequently gorgeous. It’s a joy to hear these two expand their comfort zones into each other’s orbit, finding ways to both affirm and broaden what they do best.


The women in the Seattle pop punk group Chastity Belt met and formed in college, and their debut is sly and charming about college, and fresh-out-of-college concerns. No Regerts breathes some of the same untroubled air as the first Vampire Weekend album.

No Regerts

The women in the Seattle indie group Chastity Belt met and formed in college, and their debut is sly and charming about college, and fresh-out-of-college concerns-- how dumb the objects of your sexual desire can be; which parties suck, because of whom and what can be done about it; fucking and drugs, and how great and lousy both make you feel; the regressive fun to be had shouting the word "vagina." "Are we having fun?" lead singer Julia Shapiro asks repeatedly on "Seattle Party", and No Regerts is a great album by smart kids who are smart enough to understand how pressing that question is.
The vibe on No Regerts (the typo is intentional) is sprightly and relaxed. The members taught themselves their instruments, and you can hear uncertain hands and excellent, sophisticated ears in their playing. Lydia Lund's rhythm guitar is slightly hiccupy but confident; Gretchen Grimm's drumming is simple, but patient and sensitive and casually slack, like drumming is just one of several things she's doing at that moment. On "Black Sail" and "Seattle Party", her soft puff of a beat stretches the song out pleasingly in the center, like the band is all crowded in the middle of a trampoline.
No Regerts breathes some of the same untroubled air as the first Vampire Weekend album; it would sound excellent listened to from a pool raft. Lead singer Julia Shapiro has things on her mind, though, and her lyrics are often sharply humorous. Everything she says is so obnoxious, funny, and sad, but she's never mean: "Your tattoos are so deep/ They really make me think/ And your life has been so rough/ You've really been through so much," she deadpans on "Seattle Party". Her mockery is the gentle kind that actually might be aimed at drawing someone out: "If you dance, if you dance, the girls won't give you a chance/ you're a real cool guy, you won't look us in the eye," she teases. You get the sense the narrator wouldn't mind if the guy decided to start dancing.
You can hear the same goofily sarcastic warm spirit  in the politics-of-sport-fucking "James Dean",  ("Oh boy, when I fuck you, you make me feel like a prostitute/ yeah, when you fuck me, I make you feel just like James Dean.") And then sometimes she is gleefully puerile; there is a song called "Giant Vagina", and you suspect the chance to shout the chorus might the only reason the song exists. On "Nip Slip", she whispers the title like it's "Je T'aime", and then helpfully adds, "I can see your nips." There are silly moments on No Regerts that cut down on its replayability, but there are also dusky, gorgeous songs like "Black Sail" and "Happiness", which latch onto and hold a pink-skies melancholy for their running time. The album's slightness is part of its overall appeal, though. No Regerts sounds young and callow and smart and horny all at the same time. Playing it feels like a night out.


Blending electric guitars, beats, rock, and rap, DJ Shadow's new album finds him back in the mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption à la UNKLE's Psyence Fiction. Problem is, the particular music he draws from here in no way plays to his strengths.

DJ Shadow: The Less You Know, The Better

The Less You Know, The Better

Everyone is sick of hearing about how DJ Shadow will never top Endtroducing…, most of all Shadow himself. But what about those of us still holding the torch for Psyence Fiction, his insanely hyped, tragically flawed, and surprisingly enduring collaboration with James Lavelle as UNKLE? With hindsight, the buzz surrounding that release seems quaint, but it came along during a time when CD storage towers were still proudly manicured physical manifestations of their owner's listening habits. Meaning it was worth sitting through all 13 false endings of "Lonely Soul" and the wackest Beastie Boys verses ever put to wax because you certainly weren't getting peak performances from Kool G Rap, Badly Drawn Boy, and Thom Yorke on a single disc anywhere else. The good news then is that the bullishly titled The Less You Know, the Better finds Shadow back in that same mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption. Problem is, you'll think it's even better news if you've still got that same exact CD collection from 1998.
The Less You Know isn't really a record that has you asking "What was he thinking?" out of exasperation so much as genuine and concerned curiosity. After all, it's not like Shadow releases new music for any old reason. He puts out records sporadically and titles his albums like manifestos. And his collaborators seem to know they're not part of some tossed-off project-- even the singer-songwriter contributions here sound like they're deferentially acknowledging the boss. Like every DJ Shadow album, it's a statement of some sort.
But whether The Less You Know was intended to reestablish Shadow as a musician, as a producer, or even as someone with decent taste, he misfires on all counts. Judging from this year's I Gotta Rokk EP, you could assume he had traded his turntables in for guitars and then decided to buy the turntables back. But as deep as his understanding of beat-driven music is, he's got a total tin ear for rock proper, and as such, and The Less You Know plays like a DJ-Kicks curated by a particularly unadventurous KROQ jock. Bad enough that the palm-muted guitar chug of "Border Crossing" finds Shadow trying to recreate "She Watch Channel Zero!?" by getting his fingers dusty digging in crates of Godsmack records. But as worrying as the conceptual aspect is, the execution is inexcusably half-assed for someone of Shadow's sample-chopping acumen. It's simply a weak guitar sound, the sort of RAT Distortion lick you can hear at the nearest Sam Ash, and like many of the cuts here, there's a perfectly decent 20-second intro that gets looped into becoming the entire track.
But as an instrumental, I suppose it's worlds better than the acoustic-slappin' folk-n-beats combo "I've Been Trying"-- I envy those who hear it and can't immediately identify the Incubus song that sounds exactly like it (spoiler: "Drive"). You can call "Sad and Lonely" feminized blues haunted by CGI ghosts or whatever you choose; just know that Moby tired of it nearly a decade ago. All of which is just a long way to say that The Less You Know is the kind of forward-thinking excursion that inevitably donates its sole hip-hop track to Talib Kweli. Credit where it's due: at least he and Posdnuos resist the temptation to turn in "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in 2011", but over papery jazz-rap that could've been the softest track on any Soundbombing comp, the two kick the sort of polite, earnest, and flair-free 16s that come to them as effortlessly as college student union checks. The name of the track? "Stay the Course", of course.
Mind you, that's just the first half and before Shadow starts throwing out bleeding chum ostensibly meant to distract you from The Less You Know's deep-seated and fundamental problems. Take the 28-second pit stop of "Going Nowhere" ("slowly we are getting nowhere, and that is a pleasure") or the four minutes of Beat poetry that simply had to be included for comic relief or at least a preapproved mocking point for critics, a track called "Give Me Back the Nights". Funny thing about "Nights" is that it's actually the best thing here, a brief and haunted dub workout that earns a pretty cheap accolade of "cinematic," but at least achieves its intended purpose. It works far better than "Enemy Lines", five interminable minutes of watery flange guitars and a vague awareness of witch house, or "I Gotta Rokk", whose glammed-up monotony actually has less to do with T. Rex than it does with the likes of Propellerheads, Freestylers, Wiseguys, or any other big-beat late adapter who owes their ad royalties to the invention of the word "electronica."
He at least hasn't lost his ear for drums-- the actual sound of the percussion on The Less You Know is often fantastic, all kinds of crisp snares and satisfying crackle giving you the hope that some intrepid beatmaker might be able to salvage some of this for his own devices. But outside of a good drumbreak, what is Shadow actually bringing to the table here? Featuring Yukimi Nagano, "Scale It Back" is the kind of cosmopolitan electro-pop that could just as easily have been a B-side on the latest Little Dragon album. Unfortunately, the same applies to the Aqua Net stiffness of Tom Vek's Flock of Seagulls rip "Warning Call", which could've just as easily have been an A-side on his last album. Which raises the question: Why does he care about these songs, when they deign to say so little? Better yet, why does he think you should?
Perhaps you've noticed that the word "hyphy" hasn't been used up until now, which some might take as a sign that The Less You Know simply has to be better than The Outsider, his widely disliked excursion into Bay Area hip-hop that's aged about as well as, um, hyphy itself. But at least that showed some sort of interest in the contemporary, not to mention the balls to say he's moved on from Endtroducing.... And whether or not he's made one of the most influential electronic albums ever, I think Shadow has the right to be a working producer who doesn't have to show us how he feels about dubstep or Brainfeeder. After all, dude's on Verve, a label that certainly allows an artist the freedom to not give a shit about what the kids are into. But The Less You Know can't even be staunchly retro, or staunchly anything. Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century.