Having recently gone through his country, psychedelic pop, and even ambient phases, the omnivorous EDM DJ turns his attention to house music on his first solo full-length in 18 years.

Diplo

Diplo has long branded himself as an agitator-entrepreneur, mining underground sounds to shake up for young, thump-thirsty ears. The ubiquitous producer makes no apologies for his chameleonic, appropriative approach. “Culture is meant to be fused,” he told The New Yorker. “It’s complicated, but I don’t fucking care.”
But what happens when the shake-up itself begins to feel stale? When fans want more than kitchen-sink collaborations and cross-cultural mash-ups? After a string of recent genre-jumping projects failed to leave a mark (his country, psychedelic pop, and ambient swings all felt half-hearted and formulaic, more like kitschy clickbait than genuine self-expression), it was time for Diplo to remind us why we started listening to him in the first place.
With his self-titled album–billed as the artist’s first solo electronic LP since 2004’s Florida–he returns to what he has said is his first love: house music. It should have been a slam dunk—glossy, commercial variations on the Chicago sound are dominating mainstream dance music, and Diplo is one of the few surviving EDM overlords who still has a full calendar of DJ gigs. (Say what you want about his catalog, the man knows how to rev up a room.) But Diplo is surprisingly low on innovation, adventure, and emotion. It feels less like a triumphal homecoming and more like another tourist trap. Lately, no matter where Diplo goes, it feels like he’s visiting.
The album is billed as “underground,” but don’t be fooled, bro; these are big names (Miguel, Leon Bridges, Lil Yachty) plugged into comfy frameworks geared toward casual listeners—most of the tracks hover in the FM sweet spot of three and a half minutes. Even Diplo admits he wasn’t diving very deep. “I made a bunch of pop songs and then dressed them up as dance records,” he told Billboard. “If you aren’t familiar with dance music, you can learn it [on this record] because I literally have everything on there for you.” Dance pop has evolved considerably in the last few years, with melodic deep house replacing EDM as the flashy, crossover sound. But Diplo, largely devoid of new ideas, feels disappointingly trendy, favoring quick-hit interpretations of whatever is selling right now. We should expect more from a producer of his stature, especially on his own genre turf. With Florida, he offered listeners a peek into a few deep, peculiar corners of underground music. Here, he piles everyone into the party bus and drives it to Times Square.
Because Diplo doesn’t think dance albums “work conceptually,” he approached this project like a mixtape or something you’d hear out at a club. But these sleek, polished cuts lack the spontaneous energy of a sweaty dancefloor. Instead, they unfold with eerie detachment, like a “House Party!” playlist left on shuffle. For an artist who thrives on perpetual reinvention, Diplo relies heavily on recycled concepts and safe, accessible arrangements. “Promises,” one of the album’s three Kareen Lomax team-ups, capitalizes on the success of 2021’s “Looking for Me” by once again laying her Tracy Chapman-esque vocals over lush, mid-tempo piano house. The Damian Lazarus/Jungle collaboration “Don’t Be Afraid” somehow doesn’t sound like either of them, and could instead be cut and pasted from emo-house duo Bob Moses. And “One by One,” a joint effort with Elderbook and the German duo Andhim, is a cocktail of mainstream dance-pop trends all swirled together: gooey beats, vaguely spiritual synths, and washed-out vocals that recall the easy breeziness of tropical house. Even the Lil Yachty collaboration “Humble” sounds generic and overeager, with beats that bump so hard they drown out everything except for the flicker of Auto-Tune.
Diplo has always drawn inspiration from his travels, and a few of these songs were sparked by recent trips to Burning Man and its sandy sister, Tulum, where the thump of dense, dusty tech-house is as ceaseless as the ocean waves. But neither scene is known for particularly mind-blowing music (ketamine, perhaps), and those predictable, melodramatic soundscapes creep onto this LP. He channels some of his transcendent experiences on wistful tracks like “Your Eyes” and “Make You Happy,” but outside the context of a sunrise bender, they feel vacant. If there is one consistent error Diplo makes throughout this record, it’s not putting more human emotion into the fold. If house is a feeling, it needs to be alive.
There are a few wins. The immersive progressive house track “Forget About Me (Nite Version),” co-produced with Durante and Aluna, achieves real feelings of suspense and release, the lone glimpse at rave music in an otherwise lighthearted LP. The bouncing blockbuster “On My Mind,” an almost cartoonish tribute to ’90s R&B-house, is genius in its sampling of “Steelo” by the girl group 702; when paired with Jocelyn Brown’s climbing “ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh,” it’s the sort of massive deep-house banger that can change the temperature of a party in an instant.
But the track that gets closest to house music’s sensual, kinetic core is the tantalizing Seth Troxler team-up “Waiting For You (feat. Desire).” A tunnel of prickly synths, high-pitched coos, and shuffling rhythms designed to glue your feet to the dancefloor, it’s the only song that carries real, physical tension. When her breathy soprano morphs into a pleading whisper (“I’m sick, I’m sick/Lock the door, bury the key”), the only thing to do is close your eyes and surrender. It’s too bad the rest of the LP doesn’t concern itself more with the unspoken intimacy of the club experience, or with house music as a vehicle for human connection. Rather than nourish that friction and vulnerability, these songs feel passionless and removed—full of sparkle but missing anything like a soul.


The rowdy and promising debut from this London septet is further evidence of the London jazz scene’s vitality.

Blume

The loud and energetic septet Nérija is just the latest formidable voice to emerge from London’s jazz scene. In the last few years, the city has produced some of the most vital players in improvised music, including drummer Moses Boyd, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, and tuba player Theon Cross, all of whom draw on influences as disparate as grime and Afrobeat. Now, Nérija has entered the discussion with Blume, a collection of earthy, atmospheric, and danceable tracks. Although it folds in sounds from all over the world, there is a distinct sense of terroir—you get the sense that this music could only have come from London.
The group—including tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, trombonist Rosie Turton, guitarist Shirley Tetteh, drummer Lizy Exell, and bassist Rio Kai—play all across the city in various configurations. They have released one promising EP, but the 10 original compositions on Blume stand apart. The players have a familiar rapport that still allows room for risk, and the music thrums with tension while never losing the reggae and funk bits that remind you this is club music at heart.
The horn lineup puts forth gritty, layered voicings that give the septet the air of a big band. The first track, “Nascence,” feels like it could have emerged from a horn-heavy Blue Note album circa 1965—Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock, perhaps. Then the rhythm section enters with a stuttering cadence rather than a swing feel, throwing you off balance. Mid-album tune “EU (Emotionally Unavailable)” begins with just the rhythm section of Tetteh, Exell and Kai; settling into a heavy, rock-ish vamp, deep and satisfying, they sound like they could plausibly produce a fine album of their own.
Nérija bill themselves as a collective, not a group, and they leave plenty of room for individual voices to shine. Garcia, whose excellent debut Nubya’s 5ive was released in 2017, blows sultry, fluid lines as well as thick, repeated phrases that bring to mind a jam-band saxophonist crossed with Coltrane. Maurice-Grey and Turton are both loose and smeary players, roughing up the music’s finer edges. Kinoshi is a dexterous improviser, as on “Swift,” but still makes room for long tones that give her solos emotional depth. Exell, a master of funk, makes great use of her drum kit, with a gluey snare, a resonant bass drum, and dark, chunky cymbals. Kai’s lines hold everything loosely in place.
Tetteh emerges as the album’s unexpected star. The absence of another chordal instrument like the piano gives the guitarist room to stretch out when it comes to melody, harmony and texture. Her rhythmic accompaniment is tight and in the pocket, but often gets weird and spacey, sounding like a mixture of Nile Rodgers and Mary Halvorson. Her improvisations—particularly on “Riverfest” and “Partner Girlfriend Lover,” which she wrote—are superb, crisply stated, and engaging. Tetteh—who also sings on her solo project, Nardeydey—has one of the most distinct voices on the album, and that’s saying quite a bit. At its best, Blume is a testament to the rich aesthetic diversity of London’s jazz scene.

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A new box set, collecting four albums released between 1983 and 1986, is a fascinating look at the early stages of an underrated UK post-punk act.

The Wasted Years

Glass Records, the London-based label created in 1981 by musician Dave Barker, was home to an unusually motley collection of pop and rock acts. Some were castaways from defunct bands (David J. of goth originators Bauhaus and Nikki Sudden of cheeky experimentalists Swell Maps signed to the imprint after their respective projects crumbled in the early ’80s), others were new artists like synthpop outfit In Embrace and the psychedelic preachers Spacemen 3. No one artist sounded much like the rest of the roster; what seemed to connect them was a cavalier indifference to their potential commercial prospects.
No artist in the Glass stable exemplified this spirit better than the Jazz Butcher, a project led by Pat Fish (real name: Patrick Huntrods), a singer/songwriter from Northampton, England, who, at the time, was cobbling together lo-fi demos in his bedroom using a cheap tape deck. The band signed to Glass in 1982 and went on to release a quartet of albums and a smattering of singles that experimented freely with dubby pop, jazzy rambles sung in French, tumbledown rockabilly, and fuzzed-out rock.
That stylistic range fit well within the electrifying, unsettled post-punk aesthetic of the time, but somehow the Jazz Butcher hasn’t been canonized in the manner of many of its contemporaries. That could change with the reissue campaign that Fire Records recently launched, starting with The Wasted Years, a multi-disc set compiling the group’s first four LPs for Glass. Shaggy and often uneven as the records are, together they provide a fascinating spotlight on how Fish’s songwriting evolved from spirited insouciance into mature introspection.
The Jazz Butcher’s progression was steep and fast. Separated by only four years, the albums that bookend this collection‚ 1983’s In Bath of Bacon and 1986’s Distressed Gentlefolk‚ share plenty of the same DNA, but feel miles apart. On the debut, Fish has yet to shake off the sensibilities of the bedroom demos that got him a record deal. “It’s really just the sound of a few mates failing to take seriously the fact that they’ve got an LP to make,” he has said. That’s a little dismissive to the music he was making at the time, an appealing jangle-pop minimalism akin to Tracey Thorn’s early band Marine Girls, with small spurts of virtuosity from guitarists Max Eider and M.K. Daley. But Fish’s comment does jibe with his boyish lyrical concerns on Bacon, which include food poisoning, a hotel for sasquatches (“Bigfoot see a neon sign/Bigfoot reach for his credit card”), and “Girls Who Keep Goldfish.”
Those interests stay pretty much the same on the follow-up, 1984’s A Scandal in Bohemia—it’s the music that improves markedly. By this point, the Jazz Butcher was a full-fledged band, with Fish and Eider joined by David J. on bass and drummer Owen Jones. These seasoned musicians, and the guiding presence of producer John A. Rivers, give the music a new verve on the wobbly sea-shanty folk of “My Desert” and the winking garage-rocker “Caroline Wheeler’s Birthday Present.”
The Jazz Butcher’s final two releases on Glass set the stage for the rest of Fish’s career to date. The wonderful 1985 mini-LP Sex and Travel retains a loose, playful approach to guitar pop, while Fish’s lyrics become more focused and sharp, whether exploring his romantic troubles as heard on “Only a Rumour” and the bitter “Walk With the Devil,” or the insanity of the Cold War (“President Reagan’s Birthday Present”).
Gentlefolk completes his transformation into a fully-formed songwriter. Credited to the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy (with like-minded friend of the band Felix Ray replacing David J), the record boasts some of Fish’s finest material: “Still in the Kitchen” is a devastating glimpse into a depressive mind (“Be lonely/You’re already all alone anyway”), while the smoldering “Angels” balances the agony of heartbreak with gratitude at the support of his loved ones. Fish diminishes the impact a bit by mixing in Jonathan Richman-like goofs like “Domestic Animal” and “Big Bad Thing,” but even those moments are presented with wit and a welcoming smile.
In the years that followed, Fish would only get better. He would soon leave Glass for Creation Records, a label with far more clout and the money to support his creative growth. Their relationship resulted in some of his most commercially-successful efforts—his 1988 cover of the ’60s pop classic “Spooky” gave him his best-ever position in the UK indie charts—and a crystallizing of his persona as a sensitive freak who pours his heart out to a female companion with the same fervor that he imagines, say, contracting the bubonic plague. (The high point: 1993’s Waiting for the Love Bus is a frothy delight, with Fish at his most lovestruck and giddy.)
The Wasted Years, despite its sardonic title, is a worthwhile look back at the path he took to get to those heights. While it’s not a complete document of the band’s start—this set ignores standalone singles and b-sides from this era, like a rollicking cover of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”—it sets the table for a three-decade-plus journey that continues to surprise, confound, and satisfy.


First released on Gruff Rhys' label, the debut from this Cardiff singer/songwriter buries the pop hooks and lets her freak-folk flag fly.

Me Oh My

Wales is used to being overlooked. Seven centuries of English occupation will do that. Almost 15 years after Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Catatonia, and Manic Street Preachers drew attention to their tiny country's music scene, newer Welsh artists like Race Horses and the Joy Formidable are plugging along amid considerably less media fanfare. Now add Cate Le Bon to that list, with a bullet.
On her debut album, the Cardiff-based singer/songwriter introduces a beguiling, idiosyncratic voice almost designed not to call attention to itself. No relation to Duran Duran star Simon, Le Bon is probably best known for her fembot guest spot on "I Lust U", from Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys's Neon Neon project a couple of years ago. Yet on Me Oh My-- first released via Rhys's fledgling Irony Bored label last fall, and finally for sale in the U.S. this month-- she buries her pop hooks like the childhood animals that gave the album its working title, Pet Deaths, and lets her freak-folk flag fly half-mast instead.
Me Oh My is an understated work, but by no means an underwhelming one. Le Bon's coolly enunciated vocals, resembling an earthier Nico or an eerier Victoria Bergsman, are the biggest draw. But the "Pale Blue Eyes" twang of "Sad Sad Feet" ("Baby, I'm headed for the black") or recession-era Neil Young of "Shoeing the Bone" ("These are hard times to fall in love") should earn enough repeat listens for the rest of the songs to reveal themselves. Accompanied by members of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Le Bon elsewhere updates the 1970s Welsh psych-folk reveries and fuzztone free-for-alls that Rhys has ably documented on his Welsh Rare Beat compilations. If side two opener "Terror of the Man" is a rare droney snoozer, rough-hewn details such as the retro-futurist synths on the title track help make up the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| difference. "I fought the night and the night fought me," Le Bon sings. The night wins, of course. But, on a modest scale, so do we.


Steve Earle’s excellent new album marks a much-welcomed return to country music. He sounds more energized and powerful than he has in years.

Steve Earle & the Dukes: So You Wannabe an Outlaw

So You Wannabe an Outlaw

Steve Earle is a staunch traditionalist who has always somehow been ahead of his time. In the 1970s, he ran away from home for Nashville, and he ended up appearing in the documentary Heartworn Highways—barely 20 years old—looking up to the masters as he honed his craft. In the 1980s, as country music was getting glossier, he was taking inspiration from Born in the U.S.A. and getting grittier. In the 1990s, he was fresh out of jail, singing songs about the hard lessons he’d learned and spinning stark tales of sobriety into new standards. Lately, Earle’s been on a prolific streak, releasing new albums at a fiery pace while serving as a spiritual godfather for country’s current renaissance. He embodies an artistic ideal for young artists attempting to maintain their authenticity while continuing to evolve. In other words, it was only a matter of time before the genre caught up with him.
On the opening track of his excellent new album, Earle decides to let you in on some of his secrets. “So you wanna be an outlaw, buddy take it from me,” he sings with a snarl. “This living on the highway ain’t everything it’s supposed to be.” It’s a warning, but it’s also a pretty alluring invitation, signaling Earle’s return to country music following his 2015 blues album Terraplane and last year’s folksy
collaboration with Shawn Colvin. For the second verse, he brings in Willie Nelson to take the lead, coaxing a growly, near-indecipherable delivery from one of country’s most amiable voices. Pedal steel and winding guitars roar behind them, exquisitely produced to sound like a bargain-bin record blasting from an old turntable, with all the grit reflected in their pipes.
Such is our introduction to So You Wannabe an Outlaw, an album dominated by simple pleasures. But it’s more than just a pleasant throwback: Earle sounds more energized and powerful than he has in years. In the roaring fireman’s anthem “The Firebreak Line,” he sounds particularly pissed off; when he tells you, “Ed Pulaski is a friend of mine,” you might worry that you somehow offended him by suggesting otherwise. In “If Mama Coulda Seen Me,” he effectively sneezes out the entire scope of outlaw country in one succinct sentence: “If my mama coulda seen me in this prison she’d’a cried but she cain’t.” Best of all is “Fixin’ to Die,” a pulverizing rocker that feels like the intro to “When the Levee Breaks” spread throughout an entire country song. During these tracks, Earle sounds not just comfortable within the genre’s limitations, but thrilled at the prospect of telling new stories within them.
The album’s second half slows down a bit, but it maintains the focus on songcraft and mood. Coming off her own recent career-best, Miranda Lambert joins Earle for the deceptively sunny-sounding co-write “This Is How It Ends.” The album’s gnarly production is used to great effect here, tying their voice together like ex-lovers reminiscing over a bittersweet phone call. The fact that both songwriters have gone through their own highly publicized divorces in the last few years only elevates the drama. “You Broke My Heart” mines similar territory but finds its rhythm in the boozey balladry of Phases and Stages-era Willie, with Earle delivering his lyrics more lazily, like he’s rocking back and forth on his porch with a bottle of whiskey.
Being a music scholar like Earle isn’t necessary to enjoy these songs, but it certainly helps. Earle—who also hosts a show on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel, for which this album might serve as a living advertisement—imbues his songs with a dizzying number of homages and allusions. On the deluxe edition of the album, there’s even a suite of classic country covers that segues naturally from the closing notes of “Goodbye Michelangelo,” Earle’s touching tribute to the late Guy Clark. Atop the heartland power-pop of “Sunset Highway,” Earle shouts out Darkness on the Edge of Town and muses about a melody he heard about in a “dream, or was it a song.” It’s emblematic of the album’s motivating principle, that the key to succeeding in country music isn’t just by studying the past: it’s by living it.


This 10th-anniversary collection gathers loose tracks from the band’s first four years, as they explored disparate genres and song structures amid the bedlam.

Hated: 2008-2011

“This group is an open forum for anything,” the Men’s Nick Chiericozzi told Pitchfork in a 2012 interview. At the time, the singer/guitarist was speaking to the stylistic eclecticism of the band’s third album, Open Your Heart, the record where the Brooklyn quartet first embraced the idea that the most punk thing a punk band can do is not sound “punk.” They had added a permanent lap steel player; before long, they were making records in the woods and hiring horn sections. While they’re not immune to the odd noisy regression these days, the band’s 2018 album, Drift, presents another open forum, floating between goth-soul serenades and psych-folk serenity.
If the Men were once like a dilapidated house refurbished into an artfully designed living space, then the 10th-anniversary retrospective, Hated: 2008–2011, documents the period where they were still mired in black mold and choking on dust. Its 17 tracks come from a variety of sources—demo tapes, 7"s, an EP, and, quite possibly, live-bootleg cassettes found garbled in an old dictaphone—and all sit somewhere on the spectrum between lo-fi and no-fi. The feral feeling is enhanced by the presence of Chris Hansell, the fearsome bassist who shared lead-screamer duties with Chiericozzi and (then-drummer/eventual second guitarist) Mark Perro; his serial-killer stare embodied the era’s aggression.
On Hansell-led ragers like “Ailment” and “Twist the Knife,” the Men stewed in the venom and self-loathing paranoia of My War-era Black Flag. Meanwhile, the anti-internet rant “Digital Age” finds Chiericozzi repeating the song’s lone, Tinder-prophesying lyric—“How do you make love in a digital age/There’s no way”—until he reaches Lemmy-like hoarseness. But even in their most violent state, the Men were never ones for circle-pit stomps. They were always trying to harness their attack into a sustained motorik roar, like amateur pilots attempting to a steady a plummeting airplane. It’s easy to hear tracks like “Hated” and the instrumental burner “Impish” as angry, ugly music, but you sense joyous abandon, too. The band shift between one-chord patterns in search of the ur-riff, hammering at it until maddening repetition becomes hypnotic bliss.
“Throughout my whole life, I’ve always been trying to understand songwriting,” Perro said in an interview with Noisey earlier this year. “I’ve always wanted to write songs in a very traditional sense.” You can hear that process take root on Hated, albeit in a counter-intuitive fashion. Where songwriters typically start with a basic melody before figuring out the arrangement, these recordings capture a band committed to building a cinder-block foundation before adding ornamentation. A handful of these tracks amount to little more than tentative genre experiments as basic as their titles, like the droning Indian-psych doodle “Free Sitar” or the tossed-off twang of “Cowboy Song,” a tease for later songs that may appeal to actual cowboys. But where the cover of The Breakaways jangle-punk nugget “Walking Out on Love” betrays the Men’s latent power-pop affinities, the ragged, Replacements-like rendition of Devo’s “Gates of Steel,” the gorgeously blurred “Saucy,” and the dramatic thrust of “Wasted” feel like dry runs for the more affecting songcraft that would fully flourish on Open Your Heart.
Just prior to that album’s release, Hansell parted ways with the band, symbolically severing the Men from their hardcore roots and liberating Perro and Chiericozzi to fully indulge their burgeoning classic-rock fetishes. But as Hated proves, even when the Men were blowing out eardrums and PAs in the dingiest DIY dives back in the late 2000s, they were already fueled by a restless spirit and striving for an emotional connection that could cut through the noise.


On her full-length debut, the Tamil Swiss singer and rapper presents a lively and ambitious blend of R&B, rap, and Tamil folk.

Santhosam

Like so many in the South Asian diaspora, 37-year-old Tamil Swiss singer and rapper Priya Ragu is hungry for art that speaks to the complexity of our experiences. She has said that there’s no single theme to her new album, Santhosam, which touches on topics as varied as combating familial pressure, craving a vacation, and contesting police brutality. But throughout her career, her work has centered around her desire to express her perspective as the child of Sri Lankan refugees and to reach other South Asian listeners in the process. She called her debut mixtape damnshestamil. She wears saris with T-shirts in performances, sings in her mother tongue, and dedicates a song on the new album to her grandmother (a common gesture among South Asian diasporic artists). In her music, she pulls equally from R&B, rap, and Tamil folk, creating a blend she calls “Ragu-wavy.”
“Ragu-wavy” pairs the boisterous production of Santigold and fellow Tamil diasporic artist M.I.A. with the adroit vocal stylings of Snoh Aalegra or Sade. Ragu is also a student of the Tamil music she grew up hearing at home: She specifically draws from kuthu, a fast-paced, drum-forward type of folk music found in Kollywood (Tamil-language cinema) films and sampled by M.I.A. The bombastic arrangements of tracks like “Escape” and “Adalam Va!” convey the self-determined optimism suggested by the title Santhosam (Happiness), whether Ragu is singing about a burgeoning relationship or urging us to hold onto our faith. She sounds confident and dexterous when she raps in Tamil, as in the chorus of audacious self-love anthem “Power,” where she hopscotches defiantly over cascading violin and synth.
Album closer “Mani Osai,” which Ragu wrote with her father and brother, makes her mastery of South Asian musical traditions especially clear. Gentle tabla and humming synth establish a slow-moving ambient river while violin swells, golden bansuri notes, and layered vocals that sound right out of an A. R. Rahman composition flutter like confetti. Ragu sings patiently and warmly in Tamil, delivering her most affecting vocal performance on the record.
As she builds her vision for South Asian diasporic pop, Ragu looks to an earlier generation of Black American artists for inspiration. She cites Lauryn Hill, Stevie Wonder, and Brandy as influences and draws on elements of R&B and rap. The most political track on the album, “Black Goose,” was written amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement to honor George Floyd’s life. There’s a long history of Asian musicians allying themselves in solidarity with Black artists; Ragu specifically identifies a connection between the Black Lives Matter movement and her family’s history surviving the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. But by invoking anti-Black oppression in the first person—“Officer don’t shoot, I got so much shit to do,” she sings in the chorus—she winds up conflating racialized experiences in a way that feels vague and appropriative rather than supportive.
At times Ragu’s songwriting can feel like a missed opportunity to know her better. The Afrobeats-inflected “Hit the Bucket” is a laundry list of flexes interwoven with a directive to dance. Quotables like “Melanin dream with a hella mean sheen” and “Don diva fold my hands like Shiva” edge close to a “representation matters” genre of feel-good art that celebrates the signifiers of identity without exploring what it is they signify. On “Vacation,” Ragu dreams of slowing down, healing, and turning off her phone, generic sentiments that could hang beside a “Live Laugh Love” plaque.
The best South Asian diasporic art is a balm for an enduring sense of placelessness. It is rooted in a deep familiarity with disparate cultures and artistic traditions yet requires a willingness to innovate something new. Ragu offers her most memorable portrait of this experience on “School Me Like That,” where she contrasts the expectations of her family and workplace with the urgency of her own dreams. (The song follows a message in Tamil from her grandmother asking her to get married.) “How can I stay awake for somebody else dream when/I got so much life in me that I should be living?” she asks. Music and message coalesce in words that capture both where she comes from and where she wants to go. Santhosam could use more songs with this level of intentionality—songs that reach beyond proclamations of self-love or dancefloor hedonism to meet the richness and complexity of Ragu’s sound and aesthetic.


No Life For Me, a team-up release between Nathan Williams of Wavves and Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, is the most effortless music either has produced in years. It ultimately serves as proof of how easy it is for both Baldi and Williams to write good songs and also the care it takes to make them great.

No Life For Me

It's an algorithmic dream date: Google "Cloud Nothings" or "Wavves" and in each case the other band is one of the top entries in the "people also search" field. The overlap is inevitable: two critically acclaimed indie rock bands that actually rock, ones that qualify as pop and punk but somehow not pop-punk. Yet, Wavves X Cloud Nothings represents a sudden intersection after the two artists have spent the past five years aiming in opposite directions. Dylan Baldi wants esteemed producers to act like P90x coaches, helping him shed the flabby baggage of his earliest recording for something meaner, leaner, and shredded, whereas Nathan Williams employs them like high-end makeup artists. You'd have to go back to 2009 for the last time Wavves and Cloud Nothings were functionally similar, or No Life For Me can save you the trouble.
Before the turn of the decade, both bands were solo projects manufacturing confectionary nuggets about being young, bitter and bored, wrapped in metallic hiss—the equivalent of eating chocolates without removing the foil. There's no obvious reason for either Baldi or Williams to be nostalgic for this period, as their careers have continued to evolve and prosper along with their music. Maybe they're eager to revisit a time when their every move wasn't subject to scrutiny, though slapping both of their highly recognizable brands on the cover doesn't exactly lower expectations, despite the modest rollout.
Still, this album is the most effortless music either has produced in years, which ultimately serves as proof of how easy it is for both Baldi and Williams to write good songs and also the care it takes to make them great. There are solid hooks scattered all over No Life For Me, and they sound like they could've been knocked out in five minutes—each melodic note notches in the expected place over thrumming power chords and steady drums. The seven proper tracks are all opportunities to parse the fine difference between urgency and immediacy: much of No Life For Me happened without much noticeable struggle, but did it need to happen?
In the end, "Wavves X Cloud Nothings" manages to be misleading on numerous levels. It implies a full partnership or at least participation from both bands—this is essentially "Wavves feat. Dylan Baldi", as it calls on Nathan's brother Joel as a producer and his drummer Brian Hill, who is not Jayson Gerycz. Hill is a fine drummer but he's not one of the few plus-value drummers in rock music, a guy who can singlehandedly change a band's trajectory and take a song from an 8 to a 10. This might've reflected more on Baldi than Hill had the dreamy, drumless closer "Nothing Hurts" not been the LP's highlight. However, "Come Down" and the title track are essentially Cloud Nothings deep cuts with a solid rhythm section that never pushes against Baldi's vocals, never threatens any kind of chaos. It's possible Hill could've provided these things had No Life For Me been the result of more protracted sessions, but you might come out of this record thinking Gerycz is somehow still underrated.
Moreover, the nominal "X" implies a factorial relationship between the two acts—maybe this could've been a muscling up of Wavves' wiry surf-and-skate physique or the achromatic bleakness of Attack on Memory or Here and Nowhere Else given a suntan. Tilt that "X" 45 degrees and you've got a more accurate formula: This is more an example of addition, two artists with very similar writing styles piling on top of each other.
In fact, Williams and Baldi are virtually indistinguishable emotionally or sonically here. The same themes of intransigence, ennui, and self-pity that serve as the basis for nearly every one of their previous songs is shuffled and endlessly reworded, Wavves and Cloud Nothings lyrics turned into magnetic poetry tiles grabbed out of a bag. Their blunt admissions never sound insincere despite being shared and workshopped, just pro forma—"I'm such a fucking mess/ Don't know at all how it's gonna go," "I feel it open up around me." "Sometimes, you'll find nothing ever comes down."
Looking at the most recent, productive relationships between established songwriting entities—Run the Jewels, FFS, for example—there's a provision of contrast, a clear quid pro quo where each party has something the other wants or needs. Whether or not there's chemistry between Baldi and Williams, there's no volatility. They don't even sound like they're having fun: the bummer attitude was a given, but neither is inspired to go beyond their own sonic boundaries, nor is there any sign of friendly one-upmanship, no indication that a truly great idea from these sessions wouldn't be tucked away for private usage. That wouldn't be much of an issue had this partnership reflected its low-key creative process by having Wavves X Cloud Nothings go by a different name or having the results given away as a freebie or just a lark. But No Life For Me is a 21-minute record with two instrumentals that costs $10—the same price you could pay for Attack on Memory or King of the Beach. Which is to say that Wavves X Cloud Nothings didn't need to result in a good album to justify its existence, but No Life For Me did.


Gavin Russom, once teamed with Delia Gonzalez, goes his own way on his heavily nostalgic debut DFA album as Black Meteoric Star.

Black Meteoric Star: Black Meteoric Star

Black Meteoric Star

All but the brashest dance music carries at least a whiff of cosmic consciousness, a belief that the right combination of repetitive beats and unknown variables can plot a course to crack the stratosphere. But that transcendental urge is rarely so explicitly articulated as on Gavin Russom's self-titled album as Black Meteoric Star. The album is, in many ways, a direct extension of the smoldering freakouts of Days of Mars, a 2005 album Russom recorded with Delia Gonzalez. There, they harnessed a battery of vintage and home-built synthesizers to create their own version of classic ambient music-- liquid, evolving, nominally "beatless," but imbued with unmistakable pulses cycling at different speeds. You could trace its sounds and ideas to electronic and compositional pioneers such as Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, Steve Reich, Pete Namlook, and Carl Craig, but the obviousness of the lineage never stood in the way of the music's immediate, visceral qualities.
On Black Meteoric Star, Russom takes the duo's obsessive pursuits and applies them to the well-worn conventions of classic house and techno. Marked by simple, contrapuntal synthesizer arpeggios and jittery drum machine patterns, the music at first recalls the humid, shorted-wire minimalism of pioneering house and acid; it's not surprising to hear Russom namecheck Chicago's TRAX label and some of its artists in an interview with London's FACT magazine.
Sounds evocative of classic machines like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and TR-707 Rhythm Composer contribute to the vintage feel. Hallmarks of original house productions-- woodblocks, tambourines, hi-hats-- are now deeply rooted tropes, but Russom doesn't get tangled up in his piety. (The current vogue for intoning phrases like "house music" or "Detroit" over generically shoomping chords and congas is blissfully absent here.) He flirts with funk, but Black Meteoric Star isn't much interested in the humor or sensuality that animated Chicago's mid-80s house musicians. Instead of Robert Armani or Phuture's needling minimalism, he tends to a maximalist, sprawling psychedelia.
Ultimately, what Russom draws from his analog dance-music forebears has more to do with process than sound. Early house music derived much of its curious charge from the constraints its producers faced. Mothered by necessity, they made do with obsolete, bargain-basement instruments, often turning them on their ear and perverting their intended uses; they arranged in step time and recorded live, with none of the cut-and-paste convenience available in contemporary audio software. Russom likewise sticks to an all-analog setup combining vintage synthesizers and drum machines with more obscure boxes of his own invention; he records live in single takes. This necessitates a strict economy of means: the music is stripped down to only as many elements as can be reasonably manipulated in real time. His tracks batter a handful of ideas over and over again, with most of the variation a result of twisting filters and tweaking envelopes. But where TRAX emphasized the negative space that yawned in between the notes, Russom uses distortion and delay to smear his sounds into something corroded and verging on the limits of control. On "World Eater", there's at least one point where the beat audibly slips, most likely the result of his machines' wonky, loose-leashed timekeeping. (Synchronizing jerry-rigged circuitry like this, without the controlling hand of MIDI pushing things forward, is a notoriously dodgy affair.)
It's not as jarring as you'd think-- only a DJ in mid-mix would likely notice the slippage. But it's a reminder that Black Meteoric Star comes at "dance music" with an outsider's perspective. This stuff is worlds away from contemporary house and techno's relentless professionalism, perfect timekeeping, and pristine compression. The tracks are abuzz with line noise; the first four tracks bleed warm, tubelike distortion, while the final two sound like they were recorded live to a room mic, one possibly draped in milk-soaked cloth. That's part of the music's appeal, and also one of its ironies: At a time when the "democratizing" effect of music software has led to a glut of functional, professionally competent but imaginatively bankrupt music, the insistence upon a lo-fi aesthetic-- or better, ethic-- becomes something like a badge of honor, an auteur's protest.
Doth Russom protest too much? Maybe. The music doesn't always measure up to its conceptual ambitions. "Death Tunnel", one of the album's shortest tracks, barely merits its 378 seconds, and makes a self-defeating opener for the album. The rhythm plods, its eighth-note hi-hats cutting awkwardly into mushy arpeggios. And as intriguing as the basement-inventor backstory is, all that hand soldering sometimes makes you wish for more. In an interview with TheFader.com, Russom explains that he built his own machines because they allow him to do things that aren't possible with commercially available gear, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the music itself. The drum patches are familiar from a thousand recordings; far more radical sounds have been conjured by synthesists with modular systems or even over-the-counter analog gear. And I'll admit to a slight resentment of the fact that the DFA imprimatur assures Russom the kind of press that any number of artists who have long worked in a similar idiom (Mark Verbos, Ra-X, Legowelt, Unit Moebius, Giorgio Gigli, Donato Dozzy, even Omar S, and many of them more skilled and engrossing than BMS) will never enjoy. But in Russom's defense, he's not trying to re-invent the wheel, just forge his own from the materials.
Something about Black Meteoric Star sucks you in, undeniably. A year ago, I was skeptical about the first four tracks I heard, longer versions of four included here; my doubts didn't abate when hearing the finished album. But after an initial near-dismissal, I found myself coming back to the record again and again, then searching for interviews with the artist to find out exactly what motivated these strange analog hailstorms, which worry away at their material with obsessive determination. All six tracks are suffused with high drama; there's something almost tectonic about them, the way rocky patterns are shoved aside by colliding plates of sound, overtones flying off like sparks in hot ash.
It's clenched, anxious music, but there's something profoundly relaxing about it. Depending upon your state of mind, it hunches in the background like a cushion of white noise, or, turned up loud, heaves the horizontal axis on high-- a vision of the dance floor as space elevator. It's no coincidence that the strongest tracks here are the longest ones (though the six-minute barrage of "Dominatron" is as forcefully evil as its title would suggest). The slack, toe-scuffingly funky "World Eater" and the grinding "Anthem" are both 10-minute samples of infinity. At 14 minutes long, "Dreamcatcher" dares to attempt more ambitious structures, juggling drum tracks and piling up counterpoints into a honeyed churn. And the andante "Dawn", sounding like the soundtrack for underwater breakdancing, turns 18 and a half minutes into a spaced-out blink of an eye.
That kind of expansive vision is nothing new in dance music, of course; if anything, it's becoming routine, in the wake of quarter-hour anthems from the likes of Ricardo Villalobos and Lindstrøm. But I get the sense that Russom's neverending sequences come from listening to the world around him: specifically, the days-long club culture of Berlin, where he lives now. These intense, sustained workouts are as spiritually inclined as the most gospel-infused "spiritual house," just in different ways; they're reaching for the void that turns the dance floor inside out. (The irony is that you'd be hard-pressed to hear any of these tracks served up on Berlin's minimal smorgasbord, which recycles house music's watered-down tropes like a sushi restaurant serves up limp tuna on its endless conveyor belt.)
It's true that there's something a little bit precious about it all-- for instance, the fact that Russom once performed the project as part of a collaboration with the multi-media artists Assume Vivid Astro Focus that featured costumes, balloons, laser, and video projections. (In video clips of the performance, the balloons are a reminder of David Mancuso's Loft, while the projections and dancers more mundanely recall, well, just about any mainstream club from the Meatpacking District to Mitte.) But why shouldn't Russom at least try to do something special with his presentation-- especially when coming from the spectacle-shy world of indie rock? "Projecting a 'fantasy environment' is important to me when I make dance music," Russom told FACT. "It's something I do half-consciously, imagining the place where the music would fit ideally or what people would be wearing, etc. Like, 'What is the world that this belongs in?' It's quite sad that the dance floor is disappearing from the cultural landscape. It's a very important place." Russom may come from a house outsider's background, but just like he and Gonzalez got ambient, I think he gets dance culture. Black Meteoric Star is a spiritual thing, a body thing; a cheeky thief and a generous giver. It's a long night out and a longer walk home, mind abuzz, ears ringing.


This raucous, epic live album compiles several nights' worth of shows at the Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium, where Titus Andronicus celebrated the release of 2015's The Most Lamentable Tragedy.

Titus Andronicus: S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera

S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera

No band in the past decade has worked harder to reassert the notion that rock ‘n’ roll is capital-I Important than Titus Andronicus. Everything they do is powered by the belief that listening to rock ‘n’ roll can save your life and that playing it can save the lives of others. To ensure that transformative tradition carries over to future generations, they've resorted to the most extreme measures—epic narrative concept albums, encyclopedic cover-song selections, relentless touring, 9,000-word essays on The Replacements.  If their records can overwhelm, it’s not due to their length, but because their commitment to hitting you on all levels—physical, emotional, visceral, lyrical, spiritual—never wavers. And while those aren’t the sort of qualities that guarantee stardom in the 21st-century, the least Titus Andronicus can do is make their home base in a roughshod Brooklyn DIY space, call it Shea Stadium, and get treated like The Beatles every night.
This Shea Stadium was, naturally, where Titus Andronicus stationed themselves last July to celebrate the release of their 2015 triple-album rock opera, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, and ringleader Patrick Stickles’ 30th birthday. But it was also a moment for the band to take stock of their remarkable 10-year run to date and reconnect with old friends and heroes over the course of five sold-out shows at the venue. Judging from the setlists and sweat-soaked footage, they looked like truly special events, with each show boasting a uniquely epic, career-spanning repertoire dotted with the deepest of deep cuts and rare experiments (like performing the various installments of their “No Future” song cycle in sequential order). And that’s to say nothing of the karaoke-bar procession of covers—Springsteen, the Stones, Weezer, Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” hell, even the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”—they attempted with guests like Ted Leo and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. The Shea Stadium residency yielded precisely the sort of freewheeling, one-of-a-kind shows that deserve a proper live-album document—one that could serve as both a greatest-hits overview of Titus’ expansive catalogue and a portrait of their extended community. Sort of like a Last Waltz without the sense of impending demise.
Alas,* S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera* harbors no such aspirations. Rather, the album is essentially a single-platter sampler of highlights from The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a record so dense, it features an actual intermission. Ten of S+@dium Rock’s 11 tracks are taken from that record, or constitute variations thereof; the exception is album outtake “69 Stones,” a weight-bearing drifter’s lament that—true to the band’s penchant for rock-referential puns—also happens to resemble the sort of country-honked serenade that’d be right at home on Let It Bleed.
Taken as a whole, S+@dium Rock ultimately feels less like a document of an historic homecoming event and more like the sort of bonus material that comprises the extra disc of a deluxe reissue. Beyond the lamentable lack of covers and guest appearances (one-night-only elements that would greatly enhance the sense of occasion), this set sacrifices Titus’ most crucial quality: their sense of carefully plotted momentum, which has always made navigating their sprawling albums feel less like a slog and more like riding an expertly engineered rollercoaster. The album is tripped up by patchy pacing from the outset: just as we’re thrust into the thick of the pit with the exhilarating opening rip through “Dimed Out”, an awkward, mid-banter fade-out leads us to an extended riff on “Lonely Boy”, the sort of limb-loosened jam that makes more sense as a mid-set breather.
But if S+@dium Rock’s intent is simply to strip away TMLT’s imposing conceptual framework and present Titus as a populist party band, then mission accomplished. For all their intimations of depression and prescription-pill dependency, songs like “I Lost My Mind (+@)” and “Fatal Flaw” were meant to be shouted back by drunken, dehydrated crowds smushed up against the stage in a claustrophobically humid, low-ceilinged room. And S+@dium Rock ’s more fluid second half—which showcases an uninterrupted six-song stretch—also retrofits some of TMLT’s more meditative songs to better suit the raucous atmosphere: The piano-ballad reverie “No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming” is transformed into a raging, amped-up shanty, while the album’s squeezebox-wheezing last gasp, “Stable Boy,” is dramatically reborn as a last call–summoning climax. And that, in turn, sets up the closing “Stranded (On Our Own),” a veritable remix of the TMLT rave-up “Stranded (On My Own)” that strip-mines the latter’s last line (“I thought that you and me were really get along”) and repeats it with manic, mantric abandon.
In these moments of inspired de/reconstruction, S+@dium Rock brings to mind the Who circa Live at Leeds, another raw retort to a grandiose rock opera.  But as that last song fades out, you can hear Stickles say, “it’s getting to be that time folks…”—suggesting that we just heard wasn’t the grand finale, but merely a set-up for even greater moments yet to come.The best live albums make you feel like you were there, and this one is hardly lacking for vicarious thrills. But by revealing the seams of its selective setlist, S+@dium Rock also oddly emphasizes what we missed.


With her latest batch of unreleased freestyles and loosies, the Houston rapper reminds the world that breathless raps are her foundation.

Megan Thee Stallion: Something for Thee Hotties

Something for Thee Hotties

Before she became one of the biggest rappers on the planet, Megan Thee Stallion was best known for her freestyles. The Houston rapper’s mother performed under the name Holly-Wood and passed the bug down to Megan at a young age, even bringing an infant Meg to recording sessions instead of leaving her at daycare. Megan began writing her own raps at 14, and by the time she was a freshman at Prairie View A&M University, she was chomping at the bit to let them loose. Two victories at on-campus cyphers in 2013 eventually turned into a flood of freestyle videos on social media, all of which centered her sex-positive gangster persona and sharp technical skill that, by 2018, had legends like rapper-producer Q-Tip desperate to help her sign a record deal.
Since her breakout mixtape, 2018’s Tina Snow, Meg has spent the last three years proving her early supporters right. Her latest project, Something for Thee Hotties, is a pointed attempt to continue feeding that titular fanbase, bringing a handful of recent freestyles and unreleased songs to streaming services for the first time. Hotties couldn’t come with lower stakes, which makes the quality of most of these loosies and B-sides all the more impressive.
The tradeoff for lower stakes is always more room to breathe artistically, but as much as Megan relishes in her victories, she isn’t afraid to remind fans of the beef and adversity she’s shouldered. She sneak-disses her alleged shooter Tory Lanez on 2020’s “Megan Monday Freestyle” and memorializes her mother on “Southside Forever Freestyle,” released earlier this year. Starting with these moments makes Juicy J’s acknowledgment of her Popeyes deal and other ventures on “Trippy Skit” hit even harder, recontextualized as winking snapshots in this new sequence. But once Megan is done rubbing sand in haters’ eyes with the first batch of freestyles, the road opens up and Hotties shifts fully into mixtape mode. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly about raps, raps, raps.
She doesn’t deviate from any of her usual subjects—pimp shit, money talk, stunting regardless of how much anyone loves or hates her, the occasional anime reference—and that doesn’t dilute her never-ending power and finesse. “Megan’s Piano” features vintage Meg bars (“Big ass stack in this purse so/these niggas gon’ work/and I’m holding this glock in my Birkin”) over an uncharacteristically minimal Lil Ju beat, nothing but stabbing piano and a bouncy bassline. She plows through beats reminiscent of early-2000s New York (“I ain’t a gold digger, but what the fuck I look like/fuckin’ broke niggas?” she raps on “All of It”) and some that sound like 2021 interpretations of blaxploitation theme songs (“Kitty Kat”). The run of tracks from “Megan’s Piano” to “Pipe Up” has the buzzy energy of a marathon studio session, and a good number of them—particularly “Eat It,” “Kitty Kat,” and “Opposite Day”—wouldn’t sound out of place on any of her most recent projects.
The details littered throughout Something for Thee Hotties amplify the project’s sense of fun. References both contemporary and dated turn songs into guessing games about when they were made—she mentions her recent Nike deal on “Megan’s Piano” and the soon-to-be-divorced Kimye on “Bae Goals.” Texas rap legends Bun B and Paul Wall each get space to heap praise onto Houston’s current star player in recorded voice messages, cementing her legacy as a hometown hero.
On the surface, Hotties is little more than a data dump and an excuse to attach extremely popular freestyles to the DSP milking apparatus. But its tone is too light and loose, and Megan’s raps are too polished and fierce for that criticism to hold. With no ceiling for her celebrity in sight, she’s reminding the world that breathless raps are her foundation.

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Alright, this is how it is. You don't know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the ...

Take Me to Your Leader

Alright, this is how it is. You don't know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the summer. Shit, of this whole foul, corporate-owned, Republican-approved year of our lord, two thousand and three. What MF Doom can do is on par with anyone you can name off the top of your clever, underground noggin', and he most likely does it better. Never mind that his re-entry into the game, Operation: Doomsday, was a masterstroke of genre-shaming samples and beats that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Kool Keith's otherworldly approach to hip-hop (while keeping in touch with the asphalt, and digging a little deeper, one finger on the trigger and the other checking the TV Guide for B-movies on cable). Heads will be discovering that album for the next ten years, and it'll still sound fresh. So: What to do when you've dropped a classic and carved your name in granite after returning to the scene?
First step is to smoke trees, and catch up on your monster movies.
Using the same lo-fi, direct-from-the-VCR dubbing he used to narrate the rise and fall of the iron-faced ruler of Latveria on Doomsday, MF lies out the mythos of King Geedorah over the course of Take Me to Your Leader, drafting an outline of the rubbery behemoth's exploits (it doesn't quite qualify as a concept album), then uses it as a guide to piece together some of the most jaw-droppingly, neck-twistingly, brain-meltingly inspired cuts this side of Q-Bert's Wave Twisters. "Monster Zero" is the epicenter of that approach, a cut-n-paste narration of Geedorah's arrival on planet Earth via visitors from the future, backed by a languid soul loop and distorted, bizarrely syncopated snares; the monster in question-- a mutated, irradiated, three-headed fucker who once terrorized the inhabitants of Planet X-- is namechecked and invoked throughout Take Me to Your Leader, and a few of the guest emcees hide behind the monikers of other Godzilla friends and foes to cement the theme.
The King Geedorah project, unlike Doom's recent outing as Viktor Vaughn, finds MF almost exclusively behind the boards, comfortable with rocking the SP1200 and letting others turn out the mic. Only two tracks feature Doom rhyming, but at least one of them is an album highlight: Along with Mr. Fantastik's GZA-by-way-of Humpty Hump delivery and a sleazy, greasy blues guitar, Doom pushes "Anti-Matter" straight to the top of the heap. Even without Doom's verbal skills, the roster here lives up to Metal Fingers standards, with nary a wack emcee in sight (compare that to a record like Peanut Butter Wolf's My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, which featured a few lightweights in the pack). Kurious (billed here as Biolante) sets the bar high on "Fastlane" with an unflappable and confident delivery that fits in amazingly well with the squealing guitar riff that forms the track's hook. In a rare moment of introspection, Hassan Chop does some ruminating on past mistakes and lost friends in "I Wonder", and it's to his credit that the song is affecting without tripping headlong into melodramatic cliché.
"Next Level" throws another curveball, eschewing Doom's taste in bizarre source material with a sultry, piano-laced jazz groove that hearkens back to early 90s fixtures A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde, complimented by lyrics from Lil Sci ("I got a gift called/ Hip-hop prophecy/ 2003/ The year of the jiggy emcee"), Stahhr and ID 4 Winds that bring a smooth Black Star flavor to the proceedings. Gigan takes the prize for delivery, though. "Krazy World" finds him delivering couplets at a cross-country runner's pace like Jack Kerouac with a dutchie in his back pocket: "Check it, playin' em/ Bungle them chumps till I abolish 'em/ Been doin' it since double-oh-one with five dollars/ We be sparklin' in a Siegfried shirt/ With wide collars." Just as Prince Paul pulled quite a crew together for A Prince Among Thieves, MF has enlisted some strong soldiers here, heads that don't find his expansive vinyl universe intimidating.
Kutmasta Kurt and Madlib aside, I haven't heard anyone lace a track like Doom. Take one listen to the Quincy Jones soul loops on "Krazy World" or the indelible Motown strings backing Hassan Chop on "I Wonder" and I think you'll agree. The sharp spacescape of "Lockjaw" is straight out of Fantastic Planet, right down to the hokey 70s science fiction flourishes and theremin frequencies. And most of the album cuts do double duty, breaking ground in the disjointed rhythm department ("No Snakes Alive"), while bridging the gap between the sci-fi themes of King Geedorah and Doom's established jazz tastes ("Fazers", "Next Level"). The beatboxing on "The Fine Print"? Don't get me started. And when an emcee just won't do, Doom enlists the aid of his crates and the wheels of steel to get his message across. Besides "Monster Zero"-- which is more a silly-as-shit audio collage anyway-- Doom applies his cut/paste technique to "One Smart Nigger", exploring racism and linguistic symbolism by letting his wax do the talking. The effect should have emcees checking their notebooks before they attempt another "socially conscious" verse.
Take Me to Your Leader will excite you in a way most hip-hop projects just aren't able: It's not straining for credibility nor putting effort into being revelatory; it just is. Everyone involved got their kicks making this record, and the enthusiasm drips off the jewel case. Like Bobbitto Garcia says: "Create and share with the world." In the album's press release over at Big Dada, MF says: "You should listen to the album for what it is and not expect it to be like the average 'rap' stuff you're probably used to... a blend of ill lyrics and instrumentals. To me, it's way iller than any of the wack shit out now." And not like you'd expect a chef to say his dishes taste like shit, but this time the horse's mouth speaks the absolute truth.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this review contained a phrase that did not meet current editorial standards and has been removed.


Raekwon assembles a crew, claims they're on his level, and "presents" their debut LP. Turns out he was mistaken about their quality.

Polluted Water

It's hard to question someone's judgement when they've been responsible for a pretty good run of quality material, especially when he's giving some shine to his friends. Raekwon hasn't had the extended streak of holy-shit greatness that fellow Wu-Tang members Ghostface and GZA have, but he started a legacy with Only Built 4 Cuban Linx-- a coke-rap catalyst so widely revered that people are still fiending for the long-delayed sequel-- and if later solo records Immobilarity and The Lex Diamond Story aren't nearly as acclaimed, they're at least good enough to keep the Chef from staining his rep. So when he says in interviews that the Ice Water crew are on his level, another dynasty, that no big-name stars would be seen collaborating with them if they weren't real on some level...shit, he had enough faith in these dudes to mentor them, tutor them, even let 'em share a name with one of the sickest tracks from Cuban Linx; better give him benefit of the doubt.
Don't strain yourself too hard, because the doubt will set in about four tracks in to Polluted Water. Ice Water has kicked around Staten Island spitting thug raps for a while, with one of the members, Raekwon's longtime friend Polite, having ricocheted through assorted Wu-family offshoots. Polite could've theoretically joined the Wu at the beginning if he wasn't in prison at the time the group was formed, but he went on to pay dues in American Cream Team and an early version of Ghostface Killah's Theodore Unit, so he's got some mileage. It's easy to recognize Polite amongst the other members of Ice Water, not necessarily because of his voice-- which is authoritative in a fairly indistinct way-- but because he's the member that isn't in over his head.
The other three MCs debuted on The Lex Diamond Story and proved to be less memorable than the skit where the dude gets killed by chimpanzees. They've hardly improved here: Stomach starts hitching for breath by the end of his verses, apparently a sign that dumb punchlines ("They said I'm wylin'/ Plus I'm from the Island, somethin' like Gilligan") and uncreative threats ("I'm spittin' ammunition, now your man is missin'/ And your body gets found by an old man fishin'") can be a heftier workout than previously thought. The crew is rounded out by Paulie Caskets and Donnie Cash, who go by the helpful abbreviations P.C. and D.C. (as if they weren't interchangeable enough) and generally jockey for position as to who can spend more time being an indistinct third-verse tough guy. (P.C. at least gets points for his what-the-fuck ambush-job verse in "Click Click": "Everybody in the spot thought that I was a chick, I played it so cool/ Sippin' a martini with a wig on.")
And they rarely have anything illuminating to say: Ice Water have exact same hey-didja-remember-when BDP/Kane/MC Shan rap nostalgia as everyone else ("Hip-Hop Tribute"), the same complaints about golddiggers ("Love Don't Cost [A Thing]"), the same I-push-weight swagger (the entire middle third of the album). Their ordinariness is thrown into greater relief when the guests come filing in, Raekwon himself chief among them. Rae's got seven guest spots on a 17-track album, and he's consistently good, not just compared to the headliners but in keeping with his typical material; when he spits status raps on "Do It Big" alongside a grimy Busta Rhymes or cases a joint in "Click Click", it lends weight to an overlong record that desperately needs it.
But it's impossible to pin everything that goes wrong during this album on Ice Water themselves. The production is scattershot and almost uniformly irritating, with the soulful, Marvin Gaye-derived "Mercy Me" and the grindhouse funk of "Let's Get It" the closest the album comes to any sort of Wu atmosphere. Everything else sounds like mercenary club music, indecisive as to whether it wants to be Dirty South or thugged-out NYC. Most of the production pushes towards straight-up annoyance (re "I'm a Boss": Oh, so that's why some people hate Rick Ross) when, like the quarter-assed g-funk of "Actin' Fly" or the tinkly Jim Henson's G-Unit Babies non-bump of "Gangsta", it isn't busy being too perfunctory to even register as anything other than a half-step above a click track. Still, while you can't blame all the bad beats and the lyrical dullness on Raekwon himself, it's pretty obvious that Ice Water's mentor still has a whole lot of lessons to teach them.


The Berlin producer is unafraid to throw a wrench into her steady grooves, and her latest disregards clubland’s status quo for more imaginative terrain.

Face to Phase

The most interesting dance music right now isn’t coming from house and techno; it’s happening in the margins, where producers are unafraid to fuck up a steady groove every now and then. Where mainstream house and techno (and their standard-issue “underground” variants) are concerned with getting everything just right—the right EQ on the drums, the right compression on the bass, the right number of bars leading up to the climax—the really interesting stuff right now takes its pleasure from getting the right things deliciously wrong.
The UK label Don’t Be Afraid is helping lead this charge leftward. Even its clubbiest records are wobbly and moth-eaten, and with artists like Karen Gwyer, one of its most unpredictable talents, it has blazed new trails into the unknown. The debut album from the Berlin producer rRoxymore continues that trajectory: The French-born artist has spent the past decade crafting an increasingly idiosyncratic take on classic club styles, wrapping unvarnished drum machines in analog squelch and treating dance music’s most cherished rules with blithe disregard. Her early single “Wheel of Fortune” slows precipitously halfway through, threatening to derail any DJ who might be attempting to mix the record. On Face to Phase, she gives her experimental tendencies free rein.
Face to Phase is still plenty forceful, and even danceable in places: “Passages,” which kicks the album into full gear following a dreamy ambient intro, wields its broken rhythm with serious strength, its burly kick drums landing like blows to the sternum; “Forward Flamingo,” which follows, boasts the kind of skulking, mysterious groove you could imagine hearing from a Lena Willikens set. Throughout, the music has all the hallmarks of sci-fi intrigue—shimmering Detroit pads, eerie chromatic progressions, Theremin-like tremolo squeals—with none of the self-consciously retro affect that’s customary in electronic music. The label says that most of the album was produced “in the box”—that is, primarily on the computer. So while it may sometimes sound analog, she’s clearly not much concerned with repeating old glories.
Even at its most powerful, the music seems less interested in forward motion than in carving out space for exploration—the freedom to try out a knotty drum groove or an unusually iridescent palette—and then move on without looking back. By track four, “Energy Points,” which drizzles soft marimbas over irradiated background noise, dance music’s touchstones are beginning to dissolve. “Someone Else’s Memory” hints at the shakuhachi intro of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” before launching into a stern, industrial march and then dropping the beat out just as abruptly, as though led by an absent-minded drum major. By the closing “What’s the Plan,” the slow-motion beats have succumbed to fatal enervation, stumbling and falling back into the glistening ooze.
That might not sound like it’s supposed to be exciting, but it is; not many artists are this willing to short-circuit dancefloor function in the service of more idiosyncratic ends. It all adds up to an unusually expressive album, one that disregards clubland’s status quo in favor of far more imaginative terrain. The opening track, “Home Is Where the Music Is,” sets out to map that territory: a beatless synthesizer fantasia as tender and moving as a piano ballad, it sounds like old certainties being melted for scrap and turned into something new.


After last year’s Tommy EP, the South London electronic musician turns her abstracted sound collages to more pointedly cathartic ends: complex music that brims with conflicting emotions.

cc EP

The South London electronic musician Klein is clearly comfortable playing roles. Her 2016 EP Lagata was written from the perspective of “a Nigerian ruler from a fictional film,” while in February she wrote, directed, and scored a “fantasy musical” at London’s ICA. cc, Klein’s third EP, sees her step away from this role-playing in favor of something more personal: Klein calls cc a “come-of-age record, with the classic teenage spirals,” that was “written about myself to myself.” What emerges is a hugely poignant work that explores the emotional depths of life, death, and growing up.
Whereas last year’s Tommy EP for Hyperdub was thick with bewildering abstraction, cc often feels like one of the saddest records you will hear, refracting the raw sound of sorrow through digital production. The harrowing “apologise” samples Heather Donahue’s snot-flecked apology monologue from The Blair Witch Project, her jerky, tear-laden breath forming a scratchy rhythmic loop that sits under torturous repetitions of Donahue’s mea culpa and builds to a howling climax of gasps and machine rhythms. Like the iconic scene from which the sample is taken, the effect is devastating, an overspill of unadulterated emotion that transcends its origins as a piece of consumable culture.
This anguish is prolonged by “last chance,” which follows. Like many of the songs on Tommy, “last chance” is based on a brilliant vocal riff, the kind of catchy melodic motif you could imagine adorning a mainstream pop hit. But here Klein focuses in on the desperation with laser intensity, as the riff’s refrain of “I can’t take it” is chopped, degraded, and pitched-shifted into a ghoulish chorus that bobs up and down in the mix like an abandoned boat at sea. The production here is similar to Tommy, but where that record was thick as tar, cc ’s individual sounds are largely distinguishable, even within the music’s soupy swirl.
Sad as those these two songs might be, cc is nothing so straightforward as a record of misery. Moments of emotional ambiguity are scattered throughout the EP’s seven tracks, many of them linked to the idea of childhood. Opener “collect” features the American artist/poet Diamond Stingily relating memories from her family over eerie synth chords and harp trills. This creates a pungently bittersweet atmosphere, as tales of her brother at three years old give way to reflections on growing pains and death. “stop” even skirts the edge of happiness, marrying what sounds like children cheering to wonky drum rhythms that nod to house and rock music, a rare appearance for conventional percussion sounds on this EP.
Meanwhile, “explay” is not so much downhearted as furiously despondent. In what might be cc’s most unusual moment, the song combines a fairly conventional rap cadence, with lyrics that explore rage and despair (“All the bitches want to talk to me yeah...Fuck this guy, I don't give a damn, I just want my mum”) delivered over a musical backing that resembles a demented fairground carousel. The two elements operate in largely unrelated musical worlds, bound together by Klein’s brilliant musical obstinacy.
This combination may sound abstruse and unwelcoming on paper, but Klein delivers the last line with a laugh that sums up the record's endearing emotional complexity. cc is a brilliant work of labyrinthine twists and turns—of production trickery, degraded melody, and abstraction. But it is one where emotion always trumps musical craft. There is sadness here, but it is woven into complex parcels of emotions, where melancholy gives way to anger, which gives way to humor and joy. That makes cc not just personal, but also overwhelmingly human.


Prog-metal's best band returns with a record that may be even better than its monumental Leviathan LP. Please welcome the new monsters of rock.

Blood Mountain

There's plenty afoot in the metal underground-- it's the mainstream version that desperately needs a new set of heroes. While junior-high faves Ozzy Osbourne, Guns n' Roses, and Metallica look like they could no longer eat the rich without gnawing on their own fatuous fingers, Mastodon are on the cusp of arena-sized success. The Atlanta quartet's already released two excellent full-lengths, 2002's Remission and 2004's Leviathan, as well as formative material in 2001's Lifesblood EP (which resurfaced earlier this year on Call of the Mastodon). If Blood Mountain, their brilliantly upsized and unrelenting third album, doesn't confirm their position as the greatest big-time metal crew on earth, I demand a state-by-state recount.
Anyone paying attention to heavy rock knows Leviathan is held in near-religious regard in metal circles-- it's an album that tops critical checklists and makes the kids shit their pants. I've spent a lot of time listening to Leviathan and the new record in tandem, and at first I couldn't believe it myself but... Blood Mountain may be even better. No, I'm not fucking with you. These 12 new tracks operate on a similar sonic level as their predecessors: Blood Mountain has the same producer, ex-Minus the Bear/current metal tweaker Matt Bayles, and though he obviously spent a lot more time layering substrata this time around, the recording's a lovely shade of dense.
Here, Mastodon's songwriting technique is refined, built upon, and doubled up, pushing the ingredients from their last album toward a more complex assault. It lands the band in totally fascinating realms: Leviathan's post-Remission exploratory impulse picked up and sharpened, with the entire band playing rich polyrhythms at a level that (for now) appears unsurpassable. I've heard shouts that the record's just too precise. Nope. Tech for tech's sake? How? Stranger yet, some have even written that Blood Mountain doesn't have hooks. It certainly does-- especially when those syrupy, psychedelic choruses and bridges feature increasingly stunning vocal performances by Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders, who've further developed as lyricists and howlers.
Leviathan left listeners reaching for Moby Dick, on which it was based. Now ditching those literary analogues, Blood Mountain moves from the white whale to the band's Ahab-sized vision-quest up a fabled peak. For it, the band has concocted a conceptual world-- and like any good game of Dungeons and Dragons its journey includes trials, blizzard-condition soul searching, cannibalism, and various beasts, including a half-sasquatch cyclops ("Circle of Cysquatch") and a monster constructed from various smaller, leafy creatures that, together, form a forest ("Colony of Birchmen"). It's a fantastical trek, and it allows the group to remain on an elemental theme-- Remission was fire, Leviathan water, and Blood Mountain is earth-- while glorying in their own Maiden-sized storytelling. Considering all the farting that takes place in the band's Workhorse Chronicles DVD, I'm afraid of what they'll do for wind.
Songwise, Mastodon break out of the gate with "The Wolf Is Loose", a showcase of rapid-fire technical skill and songwriting chops. As usual, the guitars jab and interweave, drummer Brann Dailor melts minds with his fills, and the switch between vocalists finds the lyrics jumping from gruff gut-checks ("The belly of the whale/ Refusal of return") to Sabbathian soul ("As the solider walks through the crimson side"). There are more compelling costume changes and time shifts than you can count-- and from there, it never lets up. Starting with Dailor, this time playing 50-gallon drums like an shadowy marching band, the hydra-fed "Crystal Skull" includes a blistering vocal assist from Neurosis' Scott Kelly. "Sleeping Giant" opens elegantly with a gloomy Isis nautical feel, before ripping into another slow psychedelic streak.
It's a taut, flaw-free opening triad, and looking beyond it, there isn't a dud in the bunch. Highlights? "Capillarian Crest" is mathy prog-metal that glides unrelentingly between whip-smart crescendos. "Circle of Cysquatch" tackles dark Meshuggah-esque thrashing and includes a bleak vocoder part. Jazz-fucking instrumental "Bladecatcher" layers Drive Like Jehu birdcalls over crunch and classical scale-riding. Guest vocalist Josh Homme adds trills to "Colony of Birchmen"'s dense fun-house mirror, providing the album's catchiest moment. The record's final few tracks are increasingly huge, culminating in the "Siberian Divide", in which our hero eats his own flesh when his mind is fucked by the Snow Queen. The Mars Volta-style intro had me nervous, but it's yet another perfect shapeshift between psych density and metal growl. And props where props are due: Cedric Bixler-Zavala contributes and actually adds an interesting vocal angle.
The one misstep? After the last track, following 17 minutes of silence, Homme stumbles over a supposedly self-penned fan letter to the band: "Dear Mastodon, my name is Joshua, I'm a big fan from Southern Cal. Really diggin' on your new scene. That's why I hope you don't mind when I got your new demos for your new CD, I had to sing parts on them and send them to you as a tribute," etc. Dorky, yeah, but giddy enough and easily overlooked. Plan: When you get to the final notes of "Pendulous Skin", press stop and start again.
The record's liners contain mountain-climber texts that add a great old school-sized aspect to Blood Mountain, but that trek to the snowy summit could also refer to Mastodon's ascension of the major label monolith. On the way, they may not have literally battled a cyclops or scored the crystal skull (though, guessing they found some okay weed), but they have returned to solid ground with their most awe-inspiring album to date. Please welcome the new monsters of rock.


Featuring members of Protomartyr and Preoccupations, the post-punk supergroup’s debut is refreshingly blunt and ambitious.

Bloodslide EP

In 2018, Protomartyr and Preoccupations, two of North America’s most reliable and forward-thinking post-punk bands, teamed for a split single. The gothic, reverb-heavy songs on Telemetry at Howe Bridge were exactly what you might expect from their collaboration. By comparison, the new supergroup Bloodslide—which features Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee, and vocalist AJ Lambert, the daughter of Nancy Sinatra—is nearly unrecognizable. Presented as a “multimedia art powerhouse,” their four-song EP and accompanying visuals explode with ambition while showcasing a grotesque, riveting blend of post-rock and shoegaze.
A far cry from the favored sounds of her collaborators, Lambert’s solo work has spanned from jazz standards to Spoon covers, and the theatricality of her voice is a surprising fit for this alien noise-rock project. Often, her presence tempers the brutality. On “Trap Door,” she sings with wrathful, operatic flair about “summer lies that started along like a dog.” The unsettling imagery of “Pica,” meanwhile, is thrown into the light with the frightening evenness of her delivery. As if reciting a spell, she chants of “ash in your gut,” “soap in your mouth,” and “chalk on the tip of your lips.”
The visual aspect of the EP also speaks to the group’s interest in exploring beyond their past work. The bold aesthetic, presented in a series of music videos and the accompanying artwork, is refreshingly blunt: cybergoth in a way that recalls Grimes as much as horror-punks Grave Pleasures, and conjuring the world of Resident Evil in the compulsive motion of its AR-integrated videos. Ahee’s textural experimentation takes a similarly wild approach. His previous collaborations already had a near-hyperactive range—from the woodwind section on Protomartyr’s Ultimate Success Today, to the DIY indie pop of Turn to Crime’s Down in the Basement, through the hypnagogic iciness on Matthew Dear’s Bunny. Here, he and Wallace create immense detail in every landscape, as in the brightly piercing, Interpol-like outro on “MVP” and the leaden electronic teeth of “Pica.”
Occasionally, the wall-of-sound experimentation can lean towards excess, and the momentum of the EP falters with the tempo of the closing Nancy Wilson cover, “How Glad I Am.” For all their ambition and cybernetic innovation, Bloodslide don’t seem interested in writing The Shape of Post-Punk to Come, or offering anything near a manifesto. The complexity and scale of their music instead comes from its intimacy: a shield from outside influence and expectations. They steep themselves in post-punk conventions only so they can more freely brush them away.

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The North Carolina trio’s fifth record show a softer side, but some moments yearn for their trademark snarkiness.

Spider Bags: Someday Everything Will Be Fine

Someday Everything Will Be Fine

Dan McGee’s obsession with the tragicomic predates his decade-long tenure as the frontman of the North Carolina trio Spider Bags. In the early 2000s, he launched a raucous punk band “with the most obnoxious name we could find”: DC Snipers. The band’s songs, like “All Humans Are Garbage” were accordingly provocative, but their knack for making self-loathing sound like a joyride carried over to Spider Bags as well, delivered in the form of grungy, countrified rock songs whose fervor amplified their absurdist messaging.
But the title of Spider Bags’ fifth full-length, Someday Everything Will Be Fine, signals a change. Throughout the album, McGee keeps himself partly rooted in angst and apathy, while, for the first time, also directly expounds on the healing powers of love. We witness a more holistic and honest McGee, but it often comes at the expense of his gallows humor and it renders his narratives a bit tepid. A handful of moments yearn for his trademark snarkiness: For all the morose talk of pills that can’t make a man care and children sleeping in hearses, the mid-tempo rocker “Burning Sand” takes the rancid air out of the album with its overly earnest mode. When McGee vows to “Crawl across the burning sand/If I could only be your man,” it lands as emotionally dull.
Fortunately, the group —which also includes drummer Rock Forbes, bassist Steve Oliva, and contributions from a cast of friends including Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles—compensates for the occasional frictionless lyric with some of their most impassioned roadhouse punk yet. Recorded to tape with a vintage Tascam 388 8-track, Someday drips with a loving sloppiness and a grimy sheen that was largely absent from their last album, 2014’s Frozen Letter. The blankets of distortion and rusted squawks of guitar convey the giddy familial air of a band that might still relish sleeping together on the studio floor during recording sessions. The sub-minute rush of “Cop Dream / Black Eye (True Story)” recalls DC Snipers’ elemental punk, complete with a sinewy guitar line straight out of the Pixies, and the band balances sentimentality with irreverence on “Reckless,” a hodgepodge of unused songs that begins as a crushing mass of atonal slop and goopy effects before pulling itself out if its own muck. “I wasn’t born...to give a fuck,” McGee yelps at the song’s apex before playing his full hand: his partner is the only balm that can soothe his own worst tendencies.
The album’s centerpiece is a glowing and revved-up cover of Charlie Rich’s 1977 country hit “Rollin With the Flow,” an ode to staying weird even as middle-age begs you to take the straight and narrow. It’s an intriguing statement from McGee, once a beer-drenched Peter Pan, who is now married with kids in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While he longs to keep one foot planted in Rich’s hedonism, he has instead landed on a lukewarm contentment that speaks to the album’s title. Love has saved Dan McGee, but as he and Spider Bags effectively remind us, it hasn’t killed his demons.


On their first project in five years, Saba's crew sounds like a bunch of friends at the lunch table trying to out-rap each other for fun.

You Can't Sit With Us

“You can’t do this shit alone, you gon’ need a crew,” Saba posits on Pivot Gang’s “Mortal Kombat,” a sentiment as true in life as it is in rap. Just consult one of the many lettered rap fraternities: A$AP, YBN, OMB, etc. Saba has been building with his crew since 2012; rappers Joseph Chilliams, MFn Melo, and Frsh Waters and in-house producers daedaePIVOT and SqueakPIVOT, who are joined unofficially by multi-instrumentalist Daoud. On the cover for You Can’t Sit With Us, the crew’s debut album and first project in five years, they gather before a portrait of Pivot co-founder John Walt, who was killed in 2017. “Since *NSYNC broke up, I figured it’s our turn,” Chilliams raps, following Brockhampton’s lead. This project has the warmth of lifelong friends finding comfort in each other’s presence after tragedy.
Not that the music feels weighty or somber: The Pivot Gang album is full of good-natured, low-stakes sparring among playmates. Chicago compatriots and YCA alums Smino, Jean Deaux, Mick Jenkins, and Femdot tag along, as well as other like-minded out-of-towners Kari Faux, Benjamin Earl Turner, Sylvan LaCue. Together, they sound less like a crew than a like a bunch of friends at the lunch table trying to out-rap each other for fun.
Pivot is an ensemble with a pyramid structure: at the top is, obviously, Saba, not just the best rapper in the group but among the best rappers in his age bracket. He is the only one who appears on every song. Almost as active are Chilliams, Melo, and Frsh Waters. Chilliams’ similes don’t always track, but they’re hilarious nonetheless (“Sleeping on me is like fucking an assassin”); Melo sounds like a schoolteacher in search of the most perfectly lucid phrasing; Waters is the crew’s inner monologue, popping in to offer guidance or real talk (On “Bible”: I’m them thoughts when you get smoked up/Feel the world up on your shoulder”). The foundation of their outfit is the producer trio—daedae, Squeak, and Daoud—who, frankly, make everyone sound better. Things all clicked into place for Saba on CARE FOR ME, in part because of the gorgeous soundbeds that perfectly complemented his intricate, carefully spoken raps. Here, they build upon that sound, one they’ve been honing with loosies for the last few months.
Saba, for his part, is still projecting the messages of CARE FOR ME, sneaking lyrics like “I don’t wanna waste time, I don’t wanna Facetime/I wanna be where you are,” or “They might comment on your social/But they can’t love you, they don't know you” into his verses. But his album was a searing personal statement dedicated to a lost love one; he opens himself up to pleasure here. With amusement comes the leeway to attempt gnarlier, and also sillier, maneuvers in a safe space. His “Mortal Kombat” raps are lacernating in their precision, while his “Hero” flows lean heavily into intoned cadences that curl up at the ends before dissipating.
The best crew albums establish dynasties or rebuild them, spotlight minor members who make star turns, or are representative of a hyper specific rap epoch. You Can’t Sit With Us doesn’t do any of these things, but it avoids ephemerality because Pivot Gang have invested so much love and care into it. Everything about the album is thoughtfully put together, and it is at points funny, charming, playful, and pretty. Most of all, they move as a unit, not as Saba and Friends. “Carnival,” the only posse cut to feature all the Pivot rappers, presents each member, along with Benjamin Earl Turner and Sylvan LaCue, seamlessly as if on a conveyor belt. When they’re weaving in and out with Femdot in tow on “mathematics,” it’s like watching a highly skilled double dutch team; it’s probably inconsequential in the grander scheme, yet you can’t help but be awed by the synchronicity and timing.


German pianist/composer follows his excellent 2008 album, Ferndorf, with an album of chamber and piano pieces inspired by various locales.

Foreign Landscapes

Volker Bertelmann, the German pianist/composer who records as Hauschka, likes to keep things small. His instrumental sketches rarely exceed the five-minute mark, and they completely eschew "big" dramatic moments. At their best, they function like a series of a wistful, drifty postcards from some middle memory of places and things. This approach served his 2008 album Ferndorf well enough; an homage to his childhood village in Germany, it's charmingly naive and occasionally bittersweet, something you could imagine nicely scoring a sentimental coming-of-age film.
Foreign Landscapes takes Ferndorf's chronicling principle on the road. The album consists of pieces inspired by locations around the world, from New York City's Union Square to Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Like its predecessors, it is scored mostly for three or four chamber musicians and Hauschka's piano, which he lightly prepares, John Cage-style, by placing objects on the strings. A colorful travelogue concept could be ideal for the prepared piano's wilder possibilities: in the right hands, it can resemble a Chinese zither, or a gamelan ensemble, or a horde of buzzing locusts. But Hauschka's preparation serves only to make his piano sound slightly more toylike; the result is that on Foreign Landscapes, the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira and the Japanese city Kamogawa come off sounding like the same quaint, sleepy little 18th century village square.
There are fleeting moments of prettiness in all of Hauschka's work; he has a wonderful ear for evocative bits of sound. But when he fails to find anywhere convincing to steer them, they don't leave lasting marks. "Alexanderplatz" opens with a pungent gypsy violin scored by some bracingly sour woodwinds; in "Iron Shoes", a violin sings a lovely almost-quote from the second movement Dvořák's famous "American" string quartet. Rather than build on this, however, Hauschka falls back on the same sprightly, anonymous churn all of his pieces eventually succumb to.
As a result, it becomes kind of hard to know what to do with his music, exactly. It doesn't reward close attention, but it doesn't fade successfully into the background, either; his arrangements are too scrappy and jostling for that. The strings and woodwinds often just sort of rattle around each other like loose parts in a shoebox, jolting the music to the forefront without doing much to command it once there, and it can make for a maddening listening experience, like someone tapping you insistently on the shoulder only to stare at you blankly when you finally turn around.
The best moments come when the tootling woodwinds and strings disappear, and Hauschka just lays out a pretty piano melody. The drunken, faux-Rachmaninov sway of "Mount Hood" is the album's richest piece, and the only work that makes truly compelling use of John Cage's prepared-piano technique. What sounds like a combination of pins, screws, and ping-pong balls bounce up and down on the strings while Hauschka plays a mournful minor-key piano steeped in pedal haze. The rickety, groaning sounds that result add an ineffable layer of sadness: It evokes the image of a pair of ghosts dancing together slowly on a sunken ship. It is the exception to the rule, unfortunately, and Foreign Landscapes enters a deadly boring lull before its second half and never recovers. The result has the energy of a cup of tea slowly going tepid in the Sunday afternoon sun.


Cameron Graves, the pianist for Kamasi Washington and a founding member of the West Coast Get Down collective, makes his own searing mark with an enrapturing and assured solo album.

Planetary Prince

The collective known as the West Coast Get Down may have made its emphatic mark on the jazz world in 2015, but the bandmates have been honing their sound and approach for nearly two decades together in Los Angeles. They’ve put in their Gladwellian 10,000 hours, just not in New York or at Berklee.
If tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington—with his sprawling, uncompromising record The Epic—was the subject of the most column inches in 2015, this may be the year for some of his long-time collaborators like Cameron Graves, a beguiling pianist who just released Planetary Prince, his rousing debut as a bandleader. Fellow WCGD musicians Ryan Porter (trombone), Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner (bass), drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr., and Kamasi Washington (as a sideman) return for this set, with the addition of trumpeter Philip Dizack and Hadrien Feraud, another bassist, both of whom are immersed in the L.A. jazz scene.
It’s at once an addendum to The Epic and an extension. It was recorded during an eleven-hour session, and at 80 minutes it has the feel of a concept album, channeling Graves’ interest in astrology and The Urantia Book, the 2,000-page spiritual/science text of unknown provenance that served as inspiration for outré composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day opera “Licht.” (Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia also carried around copies in their rucksacks.)
The authorship of the music, though, is all Graves, who, it’s been reported, enjoys death metal and Chopin, hip-hop and prog rock, and has played with Jada Pinkett-Smith’s band Wicked Wisdom and pioneering fusion bassist Stanley Clarke. The eight tracks on the album reveal Graves’ influences, which seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. There are whiffs of McCoy Tyner, especially from his early- mid-’70s groups, Abdullah Ibrahim, and somehow Joe Sample, yet he doesn’t particularly sound like any of them.
As a youngster, Graves studied classical piano, which is apparent from the gorgeous opening bars of the first piece, “Satania Our Solar System,” before it quickly transitions into an uptempo fusion-esque romp with a charging back beat. In the subsequent title track, Graves, who plays acoustic throughout the set, bursts out in percussive form—he’s often thunderingly percussive, as in “The Lucifer Rebellion” later—and follows with a busy, jabbing solo. Washington, with his singular, bravura tone, soon joins and verges on obfuscating the material, but stays just on the right side of his ecstatic-expressionism. “Andromeda” shifts to a quieter side, or as quiet as the WCGD can get. Feraud, a Parisian, recalls Jaco Pastorius on an inspired electric bass solo, and Ronald Bruner—who also shimmers on “El Diablo”—coerces all sorts of vibrant colors out of just his cymbals. The theme, especially when played by the horns, has a dream-like touch, as if penned by Wayne Shorter.
On “Isle of Love,” the leader opens with vigor, before Kamasi returns for another towering solo. Graves takes us out softly and by himself, which is exactly how “Adam & Eve” begins. Kamasi lets loose one more time, but the three horns that finish the tune—and Porter’s trombone adds lovely texture here, as it did on The Epic—underscores the unselfishness that marks the work of the WCGD. “The End of Corporatism,” an uptempo piece, further captures the Collective’s (and Graves’) drive and spirit, one that is enraptured, assured, grandiose in moments, but never self-aggrandizing. Planetary Prince might not shift the tectonic plates the way *The Epic *did, but Graves, while earthly-bound, has his gaze set upward.