The sense of control Margaret Chardiet wields over her nasty, fire-breathing music provides a sense of structure that makes this very out-there music easy to grasp for those outside of noise music circles. Her work is marked by a push-and-push-harder tension between pummeling rhythms, swaths of power-electronics static, and her impressive, chilling howl.

Bestial Burden

Around this time last year, Margaret Chardiet almost died. Days before the noise artist was supposed to go on her first European tour, doctors discovered a cyst so large it almost brought on organ failure. The subsequent surgery and healing process was long and intense. During the weeks of bed rest, a dying man lay next to her in the hospital, crying out for his daughter to join his side. For whatever reason, she never showed up.
In the rearview, Chardiet’s situation sounds like hell, and so does her latest album as Pharmakon, Bestial Burden. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, she described the theme of her second LP for Brooklyn-based label Sacred Bones as “[a] desire to show the body as a lump of flesh and cells that mutate and fail you and betray you—this very banal, unimportant, grotesque aspect of ourselves.” It’s a grim focus on the corporeal, a lens that Chardiet has projected her nightmarish music through before; on last year’s Abandon, the roaring final track was gruesomely titled “Crawling on Bruised Knees”, the cover art a shot of Chardiet’s lower torso covered in maggots. On the cover of Bestial Burden, she literally turns the inside outwards, with grisly-looking butcher’s-shop organs placed accordingly on her upper torso and chicken talons glued to her fingers.
Musically, Bestial Burden is a considerable step forwards for Chardiet, a feat that’s more impressive when considering that the genre she works in doesn’t necessarily call for artistic growth. Before releasing Abandon, Chardiet established her presence with a run of small-press releases similar to many noise musicians past and present, so that record wasn’t so much her debut as it was an introduction to a somewhat wider audience. If the depth-charge blasts of Abandon showcased an exciting emerging voice in experimental music, Bestial Burden elevates Chardiet to an even more accomplished plane. The sense of control that she wields over this nasty, fire-breathing music—a push-and-push-harder tension between pummeling rhythms, swaths of power-electronics static, and her impressive, chilling howl—provides a sense of structure that makes this very out-there music easy to grasp for those outside of noise music circles.
Still, chaos reigns on Bestial Burden, an album that sounds like anything but a safe space to inhabit. Chardiet’s steadier focus on rhythm provides a sound structure nonetheless annihilated by jet-engine roars, bursts of mechanical heat, and ear-bleeding screeches. Paradoxically, the harshest and most alienating moments on Bestial Burden arrive when the record is at its quietest: album opener “Vacuum” practically serves as a portal into the record’s landscape, as Chardiet’s vocal hyperventilation is backed by a undulating fuzzy drone that rubs against the ears like a drill to the teeth. “Primitive Struggle” lays wet, heaving coughs over a heartbeat-like rhythm that eventually grows to an insistent thud, bleeding beautifully into the death-march stomp of “Autoimmune”. By turning the human body’s failures into rhythmic tools at her disposal, Chardiet has created the truest form of body horror.
Fittingly, her voice is the album's most expressive instrument, at times recalling black metal’s pitchless burn. While her vocal approach on Abandon came across as sprawling and freeform in its presentation, Chardiet takes the shape of a menacing furnace on Bestial Burden, giving off blasts of heat and steam that are deeply felt even as they recede into the darkness. In the aforementioned interview, Chardiet groused about the reception her difficult music receives: “When I put that out to someone and the only thing they can say is, ‘Oh look, it’s a girl screaming,’ I want to fucking kill them because I’m literally pouring my heart and soul out, being so vulnerable.” On Bestial Burden, her voice casts jagged, threatening shadows, but on a record that concerns itself with bodily disintegration, Chardiet’s forcefulness is a necessary human constant.
Her most surprising performance arrives on the album’s closing title track, seven minutes of pulsing tones that culminates in tangled noise and mutated vocal strangulation. Before “Bestial Burden”’s satisfyingly destructive conclusion, though, Chardiet expresses herself in a way that stands apart from the rest of the six-track record; her voice sways and swerves with disorienting clarity, sounding almost psychedelic with every half-spoken dispatch. Chardiet has played it straight previously when it comes to her vocals—her cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”, featured on Sacred Bones’ 2013 compilation Todo Muere Vol 4, was surprisingly faithful to the original—but the wavy, near-meditative form of “Bestial Burden” is, at least for those who just arrived to the Pharmakon party a year ago, unexplored territory. As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains.


The team-up between two West Coast rappers suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts.

Kommunity Service

There are times on *Kommunity Service—*which pairs the Compton-bred YG with Mozzy, the dizzyingly prolific rapper from Sacramento—that the duo sounds wonderfully intertwined: finishing one another’s thoughts on hooks, sharing space in verses, Mozzy’s voice coiled around YG’s doubled ad-libs. Taut at its start and frustratingly indistinct near its middle, the album suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts.
Kommunity Service runs just 28 minutes, and its songs take the same shape in miniature. With one exception, they’re in full swing within 10 seconds, and none reach the three-and-a-half minute mark. And so, when the album works—as on its far superior front half—it evokes the same feelings as a smart, seedy DJ set (its release is well-timed to nationwide strip club reopenings.) This is never truer than at the very beginning, when a quick four-count gives way to an audacious flip of “Wanksta” and Mozzy interpolating 50 Cent’s flow. And G Herbo’s inclusion on the subsequent song, “Dangerous,” is especially shrewd: The Chicago rapper works so well at faster tempos that his vocal alone seems to propel the record forward.
Despite its brevity and that breathless opening run, the album is poorly paced. The Herbo feature is followed soon after by the slinking “MAD,” which features Young M.A and seems handmade for the New Yorker, down to its slightly lower BPM, and “Vibe With You,” with Ty Dolla $ign vocals silky enough to soften a YG verse that boils down, very literally, to “I fuck with you.” That trio of collaborations, plus the “Wanksta” flip and the irresistibly sinister “Bompton to Oak Park,” comprise the A-side and are diminished severely by what follows: a sullen cut plagued by a regrettable A Boogie hook; Tyga on his bottle service autopilot; and a posse cut where all five rappers operate on shootaround half-speed.
That losing streak is finally snapped by the penultimate track, “Bite Down,” the one here that sounds most like it was pulled from Mozzy’s hard drive. It has all the hallmarks of his best work: melancholy major-key piano, a verse that lurches from the spiritual to the uncomfortably corporeal, mid-period 2Pac without the world domination bent. The song, complete with Mozzy’s charming, slightly atonal hook, is superb despite a YG verse that is merely OK; a mild disappointment considering that some of YG’s best writing comes when it sounds as if he’s trying to slot neatly onto Mozzy albums. In fact, while the production frequently reminds more of Mozzy’s LPs than YG’s Def Jam affairs, there is little of the paranoia that the latter so often mine to chilling effect, and which would seem to be squarely in Mozzy’s wheelhouse.
It is almost never wise to draw too many conclusions from a record’s cover—in this instance a wonderful recreation of one of the posters for Belly, the 1998 movie that stars Nas and DMX. But there are echos: the contemporaries and creative equals with wildly disparate national profiles, whose public personas would suggest music far different from one another’s but who are actually at their best when orbiting the other’s supposed territory. While Kommunity Service only hints at what a true synthesis of those artists could be, at times the implication is enough.

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Of all Jakub Alexander's pursuits and side projects, his work as "low level" ambient act Heathered Pearls is designed to give him a break from his personal anxieties. While tension clearly fed into Loyal, it doesn't give much back out, dealing instead in gentle mood shifts that crystallize over the course of the record.

Loyal

Jakub Alexander does a lot of different things, which is probably why he's so stressed out. He founded "electronically made music" label Moodgadget, performs A&R for Ghostly International, curates the music selection on graphic artist Scott Hansen's (a.k.a. Tycho) art and lifestyle blog ISO50, and records and performs as a DJ and musician under his own name and several others. As Heathered Pearls, the Polish-born musician recently released his full-length debut Loyal, a low level (his preferred term for "ambient", which he associates with the decidedly less hip-sounding "pure mood") album designed "as a mental break from my personal anxieties." And Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.
It's surprising, then, that Alexander practically mandates hooks in the music of the artists he signs to Moodgadget. When discussing the label's recent compilation Expanse at Low Levels with Percussion Lab, he gave some advice to aspiring electronic artists: "If you got a hook and you can write a song and keep it at two-and-a-half minutes long, and I want to hear it over and over, that's going to make me want to email you back." Like most ambient or low-level music-- Tim Hecker's touchstone Ravedeath, 1972, Laurie Spiegel's machine music, and electronic pioneers like Otto Luening-- Loyal is devoid of those hooks in the traditional sense, the tension and release that evokes the visceral reaction of wanting to hear something again and again.
Listening to "Ringing Temple", the album's echoing, urgently polyrhythmic centerpiece that probably draws the most from Alexander's other work as a DJ alongside slow-motion disco outfit Worst Friends and Matthew Dear, there seemed nothing that could have emerged as a hook over its two-and-a-half minutes. Once I watched a teaser video for the song, however, I got it. I played the 45 seconds of geometrically spiraling incandescence over and over again. The visual, which looked a lot like the type of graphic art that saturates ISO50, activated certain pleasure centers that the song's steady repetition hadn't; the experience changed the way I heard much of the album afterward. In that respect, Loyal is similar to Hansen's work, which traffics similar principles of music as a means to aesthetics.
In his review of Tycho's Dive, Joe Colly said the album's downfall was its lack of tension. The same can be said of Loyal: even though the tension and release of Alexander's emotional struggles is part and parcel of the record, the album as a whole is meant to function as a reprieve from his anxiety. "Beach Shelter", which pulses with a low-range that threatens to engulf the track in an abyss of noise, and "Lower Dome", sparkling with synthesizers that might soundtrack interstitial plotting scenes in an 80s heist film, are vaguely disquieting. Still, they find their antitheses in the sweet relief of droning micro-permutations on the six-minute "Raising Our Ashes", and the similar, appropriately named "Docile Touch". Because these mood swings happen over the course of the album, however, they lack the urgency that characterizes a sought-after hook, which would give the album more presence.
That's not to say Loyal would benefit from instant gratification; rather definition. For the last song on the album, veteran Dutch producer Markus Guentner remixes "Lower Dome" to allow a glimpse into what the record might have sounded like if Alexander brought more of his Worst Friends disco sensibility to the table. (According to Heathered Pearls' page on Ghostly International's site, Alexander "always comes back to disco.") Guentner drops in a softly ticking house beat like something weighing on your mind, steadily increasing it in volume, dropping it out, and bringing it back with variegated beats, all with an acute sense of timing. It's not much, but it sharpens the synthesized drift and gives the song more of a purpose and destination. Plus, it's just more fun. And that might be the best way to alleviate stress.


The Chicago rock band turns in a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop.

Down in Heaven

Twin Peaks don’t seem like the sort of guys who would fork out $1,599 for tickets to the Desert Trip festival. But, given the chance, they’d surely hop the fence. Make all the “Oldchella” cracks you want—there are still a whole lot of young folk who bow before rock ‘n’ roll’s few remaining golden gods, and in three short years, Twin Peaks have proven themselves quick studies in the ways of tradition. In stark defiance of The Who’s “hope I die before I get old” edict, the relaxed, easy-going groove of Down in Heaven suggests this Chicago garage-rock outfit can’t wait to age.
Already, the band seems decades removed from their 2013 debut, Sunken, recorded when they were still teenagers and sounding very much like it—carefree, cocky, and sloppy. The follow-up, 2014’s Wild Onion, tightened up the songcraft, amped up their attack, and spit-shined the production, suggesting aspirations to follow fellow Chi-town miscreants The Orwells down the path of major-label patronage and late-night talk-show appearances. But with Down in Heaven, Twin Peaks have already initiated the rural retreat that most rock bands take only after succumbing to excess, holing themselves up in a friend’s northern Massachusetts studio-house and turning it into a veritable retirement home for early twenty-somethings. The result is a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop. Here, Twin Peaks aren’t so interested in being the life of party as documenting what happens outside of it: the awkward first kisses, the difficult break-up conversations, the sad walks home alone.
It’s a really good look for them. By toning down their sound, Twin Peaks are better able to amplify the sweet/sour tension between honey-voiced vocalists Cadien Lake James and Jack Dolan, and their more acid-tongued compatriot, Clay Frankel. But even as down ‘n’ out diatribes like “Cold Lips” wallow in cruel sentiment (to wit: “you ought to get yourself a shiny gold medal for being the coldest bitch I know”), Down in Heaven exudes a welcoming, wood-panelled warmth. But Twin Peaks take certain liberties with the past, weaving alternate histories into a sound that’s familiar yet peculiar. Their version of the Stones folds the raw blues of Beggars Banquet into the smooth, falsettoed soul of “Beast of Burden”; their definition of cool is equal parts Lou Reed and Tom Petty. And with the recruitment of keyboardist, Colin Croom, Twin Peaks acquire their own Benmont Tench, swaddling beautifully bruised ballads like “Holding Roses” in soothing Hammond tones or guiding the bouncing-ball rhythm of Dolan’s delightful “Getting Better” with playful piano rolls.
Twin Peaks still flash some swagger between their more sensitive moments, though in these cases, it’s harder to parse their personality from their source material: “Keep It Together” is essentially Big Star’s “Mod Lang” dipped in extra T. Rex glitter, while “Butterfly” loads up on Loaded, copping everything from Lou Reed’s streetwise sneer on “Head Held High” to the “ba ba bas” from “Who Loves the Sun” for good measure. While these songs reinforce a definition of garage-rock steeped in impetuous, middle-fingered attitude, Down in Heaven’s more revelatory slow songs remind us that the genre has always been an outlet for misfit romantics to express feelings they’d be too shy and embarrassed to say in person. In other words, it’s a music for neglected nice guys as much as boisterous bad boys. With Down in Heaven, Twin Peaks come off like a Black Lips that would rather drink apple juice instead of their own piss, and seem evermore willing to embrace the idea that they’re actually better at kiss-off ballads than kicked-out jams.


The 18-year-old UK singer-songwriter Declan McKenna has been called a voice of his generation. His major label debut is scattershot, though it includes a Rostam-helmed standout.

Declan McKenna: What Do You Think About the Car?

What Do You Think About the Car?

There’s been such a fuss about Declan McKenna, it’s tempting to wonder if folks were subconsciously confusing his name with the one on Elvis Costello’s birth certificate, Declan MacManus. In early 2015, when McKenna was barely 16, he was already being courted by numerous music-biz types. Later that year, brandishing a loop pedal and a red bandana, the floppy-haired bard won Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition. That contest’s previous winners aren’t household names, but McKenna was soon hailed as the voice of his generation.
McKenna had been uploading jazz-inflected, appealingly ramshackle guitar-pop for a couple of years, name-checking influences from Jeff Buckley to Bach. The song that vaulted him into the arms of the major labels was “Brazil,” which is most interesting for being written, when McKenna was 15, as a condemnation of FIFA then-president Sepp Blatter. The lyrics themselves weren’t so obvious, but they were evocative. McKenna’s pinched vocals, however, sounded like just about every UK indie bloke hype that has come over post-Libertines. Musically, with a twinkling riff over a shambolic four-chord progression, it was also pretty commonplace. Super catchy, though. Viewers of his 2016 solo performance on “Conan” wondered, wrongly but not unreasonably, if the melody was nicked from a song that they used to know.
“Brazil” is one of the best songs on McKenna’s major-label debut album, What Do You Think About the Car?, and also illustrates its shortcomings. Now 18 years old, McKenna really does sound like a voice of a generation (as Lena Dunham once put it). He’s an eloquent champion of progressive social causes who wore a “Give 17 Year Olds the Vote” T-shirt on “Jools Holland,” spars with TV villain Piers Morgan, and speaks out against sexism aimed at his female band members. He grapples with social issues in his lyrics, too. But those lyrics are often forgettably muddled. All this is generally backed by bland Bowie homages that further blur the lines between McKenna and any number of would-be British indie-vaders, from Jake Bugg, Tom Vek, and Jamie T to the Maccabees, the Kooks, and the Vaccines. There’s promise here, but it’s confused.
His message loses strength, in part, because he doesn’t fully commit to it. McKenna has nonchalantly skewered the generational-voice stuff as mere “sensationalism.” And yet the video for “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home,” written after the Bataclan attacks, begins with the voices of young people, talking about their g-g-generation—which they feel is “lost,” but also deeply concerned about racism, homophobia, sexism, and bullying. The song itself, a standout here, if a bit overblown in its Britpop grandeur and vague in its second-person indignation, could benefit from similar clarity.
James Ford, who produced all but two of the tracks, has plenty of experience with a McKenna-like vocal style in his great work across several Arctic Monkeys albums. But an uneasy conflict between ideological progressivism and sonic orthodoxy feels like it’s embedded in the songs. Opener “Humongous” builds up until it’s, well, humongous, but quirky riff aside, it’s not much more fun than when those Gen Xers in Oasis got similarly bloated. The subject matter is all critically important— “Paracetamol” was inspired by the suicide of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, “Bethlehem” grapples with religious hypocrisy, and “Isombard” depicts a FOX News-like TV host—but that isn’t necessarily evident without research. One of the standard lines on McKenna seems to be: He doesn’t just sing memorable songs, he’s also intelligent. I completely agree he’s intelligent. I’d like to remember more of his songs.
Unfortunately, but tellingly, the easiest-to-recall moments aren’t musical. They’re spoken-word snippets, where McKenna seems to be sending up his voice-of-the-youth rep by taking it very literally. What Do You Think About the Car? opens with the voices of children—McKenna’s sister asking the title phrase in audio from an old home movie, the four-year-old proto-troubadour chirping back cutely, “I think it’s really good and now I’m going to sing my new album now.” A track later, “Brazil” ends with a young boy’s voice from a popular meme. “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home” has a children’s choir and closes with one of its members laughing about not wanting to come home.
There are aspects of McKenna’s rise that can look weirdly puffed-up. His YouTube channel claimed the “Brazil” lyrics got him investigated by the FBI—a joke, he said when asked. Rumors spread that he’d been chased by an unbelievable 40 record labels—a misconstrued exaggeration, he has said, though the stat persists. Surprisingly, Columbia didn’t pack fidget spinners with the vinyl.
But that McKenna is far worthier of your time than Jake Bugg isn’t in doubt. McKenna happily gushes about musical free thinkers like St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens, and the most hopeful sign he might join their ranks is the finale, “Listen to Your Friends.” Co-written and produced by Rostam, it’s part country-pop lope, part artful cello shading. Calling for youth solidarity against atavistic forces of shallow ignorance, it’s trenchant, convincing, and stunning. McKenna concludes here, “Please trust in me.” Despite a scattershot and often lackluster first outing, he has at least earned that trust.


A key template for almost two decades of mainstream rock is reissued with a new mix, extra songs, and a DVD of the group's "MTV Unplugged" show.

Ten: Deluxe Edition

Ten may be classic rock today, but it's easy to underestimate how radical Pearl Jam sounded back in 1991, even with Nirvana ascendant. After several long years of hair metal dominance, here was a band that could jam stadium-large, texture their sound darkly and densely, and explode the blues-rock template. Here was a frontman with an entirely new stage presence, whose voice strained hard for sincerity and whose songwriting expressed grave self-reckoning without resorting to easy sentiments or self-glorifying choruses. Against the odds-- as well as against the band's wishes, apparently-- their debut became a phenomenon, an alt-rock figurehead as crucial as Nevermind in ushering in and defining the parameters for mainstream rock. Vedder's self-doubts ran as deep as Cobain's, but he expressed them bluntly and directly rather than poetically and obscurely. Oh and also, he's still alive.
Deeply invested in the cathartic possibilities of punk and classic rock, Pearl Jam seemingly made music as a form of self-therapy, an idea that took hold with nearly a decade of alt-rock acts to come. The band is routinely blamed for the self-gratifying Stone Temple Pilots, Creeds, and Nicklebacks that followed Ten, but the band naturally never set out to remake rock music in its own image. Suspicious of the hedonism of the arena rock that preceded them, Pearl Jam were a solemn band, and Ten sounds nothing if not entirely serious about animating Vedder's self-doubts. At times, it's a bit overwrought ("I don't question our existence/ I just question our modern needs"), but the earnestness with which Vedder sang and the band played these songs belies the decade's reputation as a period of pervasive irony. Ultimately, the 1990s wouldn't have been so bad if Pearl Jam's followers hadn't aped their self-seriousness so relentlessly.
Nevertheless, Ten remains impressive and occasionally moving 18 years later, even gentrified with a shiny reissue. The public perception of the album is watered down thanks mainly to the excision of "Alive", "Jeremy", and "Even Flow" as singles. The latter two may be the album's least remarkable tracks: "Jeremy" is the most pat Freudian psychodrama on an album full of them, and "Evenflow" romanticizes homelessness as spiritually transcendent. But "Alive" remains potent not only because Vedder touches on some seriously transgressive shit here (dead fathers, hints at incest, survivor guilt), but mostly because the band rock the hell out of that coda.
Today, Ten lives and dies by its album tracks, and while there are a few clunkers, most are pretty ballsy in their disdain for expectations. Granted, as a new band with few realistic prospects for the kind of success they quickly achieved, Pearl Jam were working with a very different set of expectations than the ones retroactively assigned to them. On songs like "Once", with its insistent breakdowns, and "Black", with strangely dramatic vocalizations, there's a hardscrabble dynamic that the band would be unable to capture on subsequent releases. "Why Go" is ferocious in its outrage, with Vedder delivering his most pained vocals, and Stone Gossard and Mike McCready match him on every song, translating Vedder's howls into messy, edge-of-the-precipice solos and paint-peeling riffs like the one that anchors "Deep".
In addition to the original album as produced by Rick Parashar and mixed by Tim Palmer, the new reissue includes a second disc, titled Ten Redux, that includes a new mix by Brendan O'Brien. A few of these new versions appeared on 2004's best-of Rearviewmirror, and O'Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam on most of their subsequent albums, brings Vedder's ad libs to the forefront, sharpens some of the guitar riffs, and generally cleans up the murkiness. Sounding like 2005 rather than 1991, Ten Redux misses the point: The album's murkiness was one of its chief attractions, its flawed spontaneity feeding the songs' of-the-moment intensity. Ultimately, these new versions have less to do with Pearl Jam's music than with O'Brien's superfandom.
Ten Redux closes with a paltry six bonus tracks. "2,000 Mile Blues" is atrocious Jimi worship, "Evil Little Goat" is Vedder's best Jim Morrison impersonation, and neither "Breath" (here retitled "Breath and a Scream") nor "State of Love and Trust" sound as vital here as they did on the Singles soundtrack. These tracks are obviously intended not to overlap with 2003's Lost Dogs: Rarities and B-Sides, but flipsides like "Dirty Frank" and "Yellow Ledbetter" were surprisingly popular satellites orbiting Ten, played often on radio stations that didn't typically delve that deep into any artist's catalog and shouted at concerts by fans who weren't that fanatic. Their absence limits the reissue, creating an incomplete portrait of the band in its earliest days.
Ten deserved better than Ten Redux and the paltry bonus tracks. Fortunately, the reissue also includes a DVD of Pearl Jam's 1992 performance on "MTV Unplugged". The fashions are of course dated (nice fuzzy hat, Jeff Ament) and Vedder's stool-bound intensity can be fairly ridiculous, but the DVD is a useful and entertaining document of their intense live sets. Thanks to the tight rhythms of drummer Dave Abbruzzese and bass player Ament, the songs lose little of their momentum in this setting, which handily showcases the guitar interplay between Gossard and McCready. But this is Vedder's show-- a live, public debut for his idiosyncrasies. Taking the stage in a tight jacket and backwards baseball cap, he gradually unleashes himself during the show, first letting his hair down and then eventually losing the jacket. By show's end, he's balancing precariously on his stool and scrawling PRO CHOICE!!! on his arms with a Sharpie. Pearl Jam may have shunned the spotlight, but they were born showmen.


Julia Holter's first LP-- an album of distant, breathy voices; grainy sound collages; and heavy atmosphere with nearly no release-- is a record committed to itself as a project, one that calls to mind the arty, austere work of Laurie Anderson, Grouper, and Meredith Monk.

Tragedy

It's almost unfortunate that Tragedy-- an album of distant, breathy voices; grainy sound collages; and heavy atmosphere with nearly no release-- came out now, in late 2011, if for no other reason that it sounds so contemporary. Younger bands making cool underground music have become goth-curious for the first time in probably 20 years, and the tendency to filter all "pop" hooks through the funhouses mirrors of "avant-garde" production techniques is so commonplace that clarity-- a voice spared from way too much reverb, for example-- has become the exception instead of the rule. Tragedy-- Julia Holter's first full-length-- is one of "those records," but it's also more: more sonically detailed, more attentive to its compositions, and more clever and varied about its use of grayscale. Holter isn't just holding a Russian icon painting in the air and cranking the echo. In turn, it's a record with more integrity than a lot of its peers, a record committed to itself as a project but also exemplary as a summary of several trends in contemporary underground music now.
If "integrity" sounds like an old-fashioned argument, well, it is. Holter's work here rhymes not only with artists as disparate as Zola Jesus and Grouper (or even a bad-dream version of Julianna Barwick), but with the quasi-classical, quasi-medieval sounds of 4AD bands circa the mid-1980s or a tradition of adventurous female artists like Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk-- arty music that tends toward a kind of austere, asexual mystery.
Holter uses plenty of synthesizers, but also field recordings and percussion that sounds like rattling chains, a blend of sounds that register as obviously "unnatural" and ones that register as almost tactile. Long passages of the record have no beats or vocals, and some of the more song-oriented tracks-- "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art" or "So Lillies", for example-- are structured as ambient passages that seem like they're trying to organically slip into their "pop" moments, then slip out of them as the track comes to a close.
The result is that Tragedy is a continuous experience that I've enjoyed best front-to-back instead of in parts-- a strength for when you have time and patience, a weakness when you don't. (And there's no ambiguity, I don't think, that Holter wants it that way: The first track is called "Introduction", the fifth is called "Interlude", and the last is called "Tragedy Finale".) I first heard Holter's music a few years ago, when a friend played me Monika Enterprise's 4 Women No Cry compilation, and her contributions there were more contained and mixtape-able-- it's a mode I think she can work in but chooses not to here.
As a general rule, I try and avoid album concepts, especially when it gives the album weight it doesn't earn elsewhere. Tragedy, for example, is based on a 2,439-year-old Greek play by Euripedes-- just try and make it seem unimportant after that. Holter has made a dreamy, intense album that aligns with a variety of traditions but, like a lot of great contemporary music, synthesizes them in novel or at least artful ways.
What gets me about it most, though, is its atmosphere and consistency: Sounds I can't identify resonate in the background; drones underpin entire songs without ever intruding. Still, I know Holter has made this possible, and that's what makes me trust her-- that's what makes me acknowledge the album's integrity. Results with other listeners may vary, but one of my favorite moments of Tragedy is listening to the murmuring, disjointed voices fade out in the album's last 30 seconds: That's when I realize how unified it is, hanging like a storm cloud that barely opens up.


A Portuguese singer and a Spanish guitarist (and one-time Rosalía collaborator) pair up to translate fado icon Amália Rodrigues’ songs into subtly experimental contemporary forms.

Lina_Raül Refree

There’s something satisfyingly audacious about Lina_Raül Refree, the debut album from Portuguese singer Lina and one-time Rosalía collaborator Raül Refree. Lina’s ambitions for the project were “to do something different with fado,” brave enough given the genre’s cultural status in her homeland. To do so she recruited Refree, a Barcelona guitarist and fado newcomer, to cover songs associated with Amália Rodrigues, a singer so iconic that the Portuguese government declared three days of mourning when she died in October 1999.
Lina was attracted to Refree for his work on Rosalía’s debut album, Los Angeles, where he helped the Catalan singer tease a modern edge out of the traditional flamenco style. Lina felt that they could do something similar with fado, a goal they achieve here, albeit in a very different fashion. Los Angeles largely employed flamenco’s traditional acoustic guitar and vocal palette, experimenting instead with production and form; Lina_Raül Refree keeps the words and melodies of the source material intact but ditches fado’s bright acoustic guitars in favour of piano and analogue synths. In what is an admirably stubborn move, the acoustic guitar only turns up on the album’s final track, “Voz Amália De Nós,” a song originally recorded by António Variações using synths.
The production throughout is minimal to the point of austerity, creating an intimacy that feels like standing with the duo in a darkened room: “Ave Maria Fadista,” for example, uses just echoing piano chords and a hint of distortion. Yet there is still room for the two to give rein to their experimental instincts. “Destino” is haunted by the kind of synthesiser throb that suggests a nervous headache, while “Maldição” combines low organ drone with a faint synth arpeggio, lending the song a distinct air of disintegration. Drama comes in small musical quirks, from the touches of multi-tracked vocal on “Barco Negro” to the cute, two-fingered piano riff that leads “Cuidei que Tinha Morrido.”
Listeners steeped in Amália’s canonical work may balk at this approach but, to an outsider, the duo’s methods feel respectful, the production modestly taking its place behind the songs’ timeless melodies and Lina’s gorgeous vocals. The singer possesses a voice of fiercely intimate power and texture, capable within one brief musical phrase of tempting a bird to the windowsill and blowing the opera doors clean off, as in the show-stopping melodrama of “Quando eu era Pequenina.” The ghostly double tracking of Lina’s voice on “Fado Menor,” meanwhile, is a thing of wonder, two thin layers of sibilant vocal echoing tantalisingly out of phase, like a pair of rippled reflections on an otherwise still lake.
The songs’ melodies are equally potent. The Portuguese idea of saudade—a notion of longing that scholar Aubrey Bell defined, in his 1912 book In Portugal, as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist”—is closely linked to fado, and you can hear a kind of inexhaustible yearning in songs like “Gaivota” or “Quando eu era Pequenina,” piano chords crashing over your hopes like dirt on a coffin lid.
Ever since Rosalía hit big with El Mal Querer, the Spanish music industry has been hoping for an artist to follow in her wake, reinventing traditional music to a global audience. Lina_Raül Refree suggests they may have been looking too close to home. Lina and Rosalía don’t necessarily sound alike; fado and flamenco are worlds apart, after all. But their musical perspectives are similar: respectful but questioning, drawn to emotion and the grand gesture rather than generic convention. Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.


Elaborating on music he composed for the British TV series “Kiri,” the Warp Records mainstay vacillates between too-tasteful acoustic arrangements and abrasive provocation.

Kiri Variations

Seasoned electronic music producer Chris Clark sounds like a man in need of a change on Kiri Variations. In the run-up to the release of his 10th album he praised acoustic instruments as “an antidote to frictionless digital music” and advocated for an “anti-muso” approach, sounding exhausted with both electronic timbres and conventional musicality.
The album started life as the score to the British TV series “Kiri,” a commission Clark has credited with inspiring new approaches in his productions. This may explain why the Warp Records veteran has swapped out his habitual synthesizers in favor of piano, harpsichord, strings, and voice, topped with a light sprinkling of electronics. Rather than sounding refreshed, though, Kiri Variations comes across as a labored work that can be both interesting and listenable but rarely at the same time.
Weighing in on the side of intrigue is “Kiri’s Glee,” which resembles an aural rendering of a not particularly inspired piece of naive art, its tasteful string plucks interrupted by a recorder line that is deliberately out of tune. This may provide useful color within the television show, which centers on the abduction of nine-year-old Kiri Akindele, but here  the effect on the listener is nails-on-the-blackboard annoying, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. “Cannibal Homecoming” walks a similar path, its opening minute marked by a vocal buzzing around, high-pitched and infuriatingly out of key, like a late-night mosquito attack when you’re dozing off to sleep.
The self-explanatory “Simple Homecoming Loop” is quite the opposite: a tasteful mixture of piano, strings, and electronics that circles around harmlessly, adding little to the tradition of piano mood pieces that Erik Satie would have considered revolutionary before shuffling off this mortal coil in 1925. You’ve heard this kind of thing before, many times: the kind of prettified sketch that AI algorithms will be knocking off en masse for Spotify dinner playlists by 2030.
It doesn’t help that the album’s palette is so limited. Even the more experimental songs on Kiri Variations tend to be built upon the same wispily tasteful blocks of acoustic and electronic sounds, with the mid-album duo of “Flask/Abyss” and “Tobi Thwarted” so similar in their airy ambience you could barely fit a licked cigarette paper between them.
Occasionally, Clark does nail the mixture of engaging and effective to create moments of itching disquiet that merit repeat listening. “Forebode Knocker” is genuinely troubling, an unsettling vocal loop infecting the instrumentation around it so that it curdles out of tune before your ears, while “Yarraville Bird Phone” has unexpected melodic leaps that send a delicious shiver up the spine.
But it’s not enough. Kiri Variations feels like an album that has lost its way: a soundtrack (though most of the music never appeared on the show) that shoots for terror but settles for unease; an “anti-muso” work that is far too conventionally musical. Clark compares the album to Roald Dahl’s short stories for its alleged witchy feel. But Dahl was never, ever dull.


In part two of a trilogy of releases focused on “capitalist semiotic pollution,” the UK producer juggles abrasive club-music tropes with field recordings and ominous scraps of advertising.

Exhaust EP

There’s a line on Lee Gamble’s Exhaust that really gets under the skin. It pops up on “Naja,” named for a genus of venomous snakes better known as cobras. Against a backdrop of spa-time sounds, an emotionally blank but texturally fried voice says, “You can breathe, forgive yourself, and move on.” It calls to mind online privacy notifications, issued in accordance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, that assume the expectant stance of a playground bully making the lunch-money rounds: “Accept and move on.” In other words: This is just the way things are now.
Exhaust can’t accept, won’t accept. The prevailing tenor of the UK artist’s new album is a deep-seated frustration with the paralyzing effect of late capitalism. It’s something that Gamble snarkily signposts with digitally voiced statements throughout the record’s eight tracks. They include “Look around, look around/We sell perfumes and cosmetics for £1…” on opener “CREAM,” and “I am so excited to help you pick out your next luxury vehicle,” delivered in an ASMR-like whisper at the beginning of “Shards” before the track breaks out into machine-gun snares and the satisfyingly gruff tongue twisters of a ragga MC. “Glue” employs a similar play, setting up a somewhat placid scene—the chatter of what sounds like an outdoor market offset by birdsong—only to raze it with a synth as subtle as a pneumatic drill. Abrasive drums and an alienated rave vocal sample complete the track’s disquieting portrait of metropolitan life.
In the release notes, Gamble references “the semioblitz,” a term coined by the late critic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. A portmanteau of “semiotics” and “blitz,” Fisher used it in a blog post to describe the “capitalist semiotic pollution” that swirled around the London 2012 Olympic Games. The primary function of the semioblitz, explained Fisher, “is to make it seem that capital’s involvement is a precondition for culture as such.” Gamble—who is exploring the impact of the semioblitz across three releases, of which Exhaust is the second—extends its meaning to reflect “the aggressive onslaught of visual and sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces.”
It’s not hard to draw comparisons with James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual, which addressed a similar theme from a different angle. While Ferraro handled the sonics of our newly augmented reality with glee, Gamble uses the musical languages he has been steeped in for decades to critique the pace, temperament, and manipulative objectives of our interlocking online and offline existences. On “Envenom,” he erratically channel-hops through rave, techno, and breaks in a high-speed, contextless tour through dance-music history. In the last 30 seconds, a ringing bell, like the kind found on old-fashioned shop counters, serves as a subconscious reminder of how seamlessly corporations subsume subculture. The consumerist FOMO of “CREAM” (“these prices are only for today”) is not as effective as it could be, however; the vocals are too heavy-handed, and the intro’s siren and broken glass are overplayed tropes.
While there are moments on Exhaust that are pleasurable (the arcade-game grime of “Switches,” for example, or the unpredictable collage of “Saccades”), the album’s overwhelming sense of frustration often makes it a difficult listen. Of course, as Gamble alluded to in conversation with Simon Reynolds, that wasn’t without intention: “‘Brexit was happening, Trump was happening, and I was like, Am I now supposed to make an ambient record for everyone to just zone out?’ he says. ‘In these times, making music about escapism would be a cop out.’”
What I hear above all else when I listen to Exhaust is an exasperation with music as product. The emotion of the liberating anthems that Reynolds is nostalgic for has been co-opted time and time again. What’s more, as Liz Pelly has so incisively detailed in her reporting on both Spotify and Sofar Sounds, venture capitalists have played a big part in softening the edges of our experience of music, turning themselves into the stars in the process. If the most widely available music is also the most easily digestible, then it is no wonder that artists like Gamble are so keen to grapple with music’s purpose beyond entertainment—to be an art form in fierce dialogue with the present.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Joe Budden's latest album, produced almost entirely by AraabMUZIK, offers a concentrated dose of his usual fare: complex lyrical raps, bitter contempt for current hip-hop, and a list of grievances.

Rage & the Machine

Joe Budden has defined himself as an intensely emotional tough guy who has never stopped putting everything out there, but the New Jersey rapper’s best music has frequently cut inward. Throughout his Mood Muzik mixtape-series-turned-brand, Budden has picked at and peeled away his depression, addiction, and the many embarrassments he’s collected as an eager public figure. When he’s down, he opens up.
In many ways Budden is an under-acknowledged trailblazer of hip-hop’s 21st century relationship with the Internet, ahead of his time in living for and through the web as much as alongside it. He nurtured his online fans before it was an obvious play, earning and grooming a cult following of lyric-obsessed hip-hop heads, some of whom prize his legitimate emo leanings, and some who just love bars.
On his new album, Rage & the Machine, Budden’s music is less moody but as densely lyrical as ever. His raps have long leaned on the preferred devices of the competitive lyricism he exemplifies: puns, metaphors, clever topicality. “I used to drive around the tunnel in a Lexus with a snub/Before Power 105 was sneaking breakfast in the club,” he raps on “Uncle Joe,” a track that plays on his preferred trope of bitter contempt for the current state of hip-hop.
The record is produced almost entirely by the Providence beatmaker AraabMUZIK, a 27-year-old whose pyrotechnic pad-smashing earned him viral YouTube fame as an MPC whiz. AraabMUZIK, whose given name is Abraham Orellana, has been generously collaborative and experimental, producing for the Diplomats and many others in a meandering career. Unfortunately, Rage & the Machine skips over Orellana’s most interesting inclinations—forward-looking fusions of electronic, dance, and street hip-hop—in favor of his most traditional ones, an unfortunate fit for Budden’s reductionist New York rap nostalgia.
AraabMUZIK isn’t the type to dwell on a beat, and has established a formula of programming drums that is both finicky and mechanical. On a song like “Flex,” a conspicuous lead single that features Fabolous and Tory Lanez, he piles drum sounds onto each other expertly before haphazardly triggering a sample atop. With a breathless, high-word-count approach to lyricism, Budden benefits from the boxed-in nature of AraabMUZIK percussion, which give him a wall to push against. “Forget” is one of the best bits of matchmaking, a short, verse-only ramble on a boom bap 2.0 beat that lets both artists play to their talents. “I Gotta Ask” is a committed Jay Z homage; instead of an Annie number, !llmind flips a Sondheim stage song into similarly whimsical territory. Budden adopts Jay’s cadence to run down his preferred list of boasts and persistent complaints.
Elsewhere, some songs arrive a little late to the party in borrowed clothes. “I Wanna Know” samples a Manhattans loop which was also the thrust of a standout Madlib beat on Freddie Gibbs’ 2014 breakout album Piñata. Sample recycling might not be the faux pas it once was in hip-hop—Madlib himself wasn’t the first to pull this record—but AraabMUZIK’s simple chop and pitch-up make it feel like a blatant beatjack. On a separate song, a separate infraction: “Time for Work” has a hook sung by Emanny that he must have written while listening to Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ’Em,” because the melody is all but the same. More generally, Budden has struggled with making catchy songs and this album carries a couple clunkers with gawky hooks.
To the rapper’s credit, Rage & the Machine is one of his more accessible records, less emotionally insular than usual, but perhaps a little cold for that reason. It’s not a redesign as much as a measured refinement. There’s a fan service aspect to Budden’s music by now that hinges on his fixed audience. “What you expecting from me?/Why else you checking for me?,” the singer Jazzy wonders on a track called “By Law.” If you’re listening to a Joe Budden album in 2016, you probably already know what you’re in for.


The longtime Tortoise bassist picks up lead guitar on his solo debut, a wayward instrumental expedition with a poker-faced sense of humor.

VMAK<KOMBZ<<<DUGLAS<<6NDR7<<<

Douglas McCombs has spent much of his career crafting shapes in the shadows of his music, even on projects where he’s been a leader. As the longtime bassist of Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, as well as the face of his rotating-collaborator vehicle Brokeback and one-third of his new trio Black Duck alongside Charles Rumback and Bill MacKay, the bassist and guitarist specializes in pulling fundamental strings while generally lingering outside the foreground. On his first solo album under his own name, VMAK<KOMBZ<<<DUGLAS<<6NDR7>>> (its busy title was pulled from one of McCombs’ many international visas), he steps into that foreground with a wayward instrumental expedition that sacrifices none of the string-pulling.
VMAK doesn’t fall into any typical solo-debut buckets. It’s no grand, renewed statement of purpose, nor a stripped-down, personally revealing dispatch from the heart. It doesn’t sound painstakingly composed; it’s completely instrumental with a fair share of improvisation; and it features friends who have collaborated plenty with McCombs over the years, including Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake (for whom McCombs has toured as bassist) and James Elkington. In its spontaneous spirit, if not always its sound, VMAK slots comfortably alongside most of McCombs’ catalog.
Where VMAK stands apart is in how it isolates and magnifies McCombs, who mostly sticks to lead guitar here. He steps into this role like a head chef with the whole kitchen to himself, eager to play around and experiment, but also to refine. VMAK is three tracks long—the first and last account for over 30 of the album’s 34 minutes—but feels more like five or six distinct ideas. He cooks up something sweet, something bitter, something bland but curious. The point isn’t to be instantly, familiarly appetizing, but McCombs makes sure to include a couple of immediately delicious bites in between the less savory, just-trying-stuff ones.
Like any courteous host, McCombs gives fair warning with the very first notes on his electric. He barges into opener “Two to Coolness” with a distorted belch of guitar squall, and away we go. There’s some deliberate humor to his greeting, yet you picture him performing it stone-faced; for McCombs, heedlessness in the creative process can be the spice of life. He blends the noise into some inspired ambling that finds space between a 1980s cop drama and a peaceful solo writing session in an empty garage. As Prekop and Calexico’s John Convertino—on modular sequencer and drums, respectively—join for some staggered, lurching tip-toes over the melodic final few minutes, the track’s tone completes a full about-face. McCombs’ love for distractions and pivots then finds a fresh outlet in the short and sweet, morning-dew acoustic guitar solo of the second track, “Green Crown’s Step,” which strolls with gentle confidence and little predictability to its route.
McCombs likes to manipulate time and pacing like this, in addition to tones and moods, and he takes it furthest on closer “To Whose Falls Shallows.” Here, an extra-long buildup of sparse, dull solo notes over faint drones breaks into an irresistibly warm and panoramic groove, where the album comes to a rest. While McCombs mimics feeling around in the dark for the song’s first two-thirds, Elkington sneaks onto his drum kit and ever so gradually raises the lights until the players arrive at the finale, where McCombs patiently climbs some arpeggios in triplets while Elkington casually keeps him to a beat and adds some just-right percussive accents. As McCombs completes his solo explorations on VMAK, the music carries him back to his long-perfected sweet spot: as a critical cog in a machine of guitar-centered magic, reading the room for just the right moments.


Sigur Rós' new album Kveikur is their first without founding member and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinnson, a record reacting to the impossible standards set by their groundbreaking early work by exposing their gnarled roots and demonic impulses.

Kveikur

Sigur Rós’ relationship with their peers is about as one-sided as it gets: metal bands namedrop them as proof that they can be pretty, pop acts do the same to show an interest beyond verses and choruses. They serve a touchstone for electronic producers interested in apparitional mystery and their music gets placed in movies when directors are looking for a shortcut to beatific beauty. Conversely, with the exception of the Animal Collective-styled “Gobbledigook,” not one Sigur Rós song has suggested a contemporary outside influence. But they'd become trapped by their singularity: By 2008’s gluttonously orchestrated Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, they appeared stuck in an escalating arms race with their past work and on last year’s Valtari, Sigur Rós didn’t feel like a human entity anymore, just a collection of textural signifiers that confirmed their critics’ view of them as credible New Age.
Valtari sounded like a dead end, and it did turn out to be the end of Sigur Rós as we knew them. After the breakup rumors subsided, the band lost keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson and signed with a new label. Returning with unexpected speed and unprecedented vitality, Kveikur is the big payback; a bracing record of pummeling post-rock, eerie hauntology and concentrated pop splendor, Sigur Rós finally acknowledge their impact by beating all of their acolytes at their own game.
That Kveikur translates to “candlewick” and phonetically sounds like “quake” is appropriate, as Sigur Rós’ seventh album is their most explosive and action-packed. Perhaps it’s to compensate for the departure of Sveinsson, or maybe bassist Georg Holm and drummer Orri Páll Dýrason are just tired of getting 0% of the credit over the past decade and a half. Either way, Kveikur is defined by its rhythm section, even as it wisely repositions Jónsi's inimitable vocals as the focus, back where they belong after being used as mostly texture on Valtari.
After the ambient bubble bath of Valtari, the deep drum hits within the first minute of “Brennisteinn” disrupt Sigur Rós’ artistic stasis like a cannonball; the heavy metal churn takes on a metaphorical and symbolic aspect, as if signifying Sigur Rós’ transformation from an inanimate object into a vengeful, destructive Decepticon. From there on out, Sigur Rós are fully committed to stress testing their sound. Whenever the distorted bass lunges on the title track, it sounds like it’s trying to drill oil from the ocean floor. The feedback shrieks throughout “Brennisteinn" feel elegant and sleek rather than abrasive, like fine cutlery on black marble instead of nails on a chalkboard. “Hrafntinna” is a metal song in a literal sense, composed of fractured cymbals, sonorous brass, the whinny of horsehair on steel guitar strings; over its six minutes, there’s a filmic, storytelling quality that shows Jónsi could and should be doing soundtrack work for movies with more heft than We Bought A Zoo.
But Sigur Rós always had the frame for heavy metal muscle-- let’s not forget this is a band who makes 10-minute songs with elfin vocals from a guy who wears a fringed jacket and plays his guitar with a cello bow. For all their ethereal beauty, Agaetis Byrjun and ( ) are heavy records. This isn’t Sigur Rós all of a sudden donning Viking helmets and playing out dry-ice fantasies like Robert Plant in The Song Remains the Same-- Think of it along the lines of Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest or Portishead’s Third without the attendant hype-stoking hiatus, reacting to the impossible standards set by their groundbreaking early work (as well as a reputation for being chillout fare), by exposing their gnarled roots and demonic impulses.
For example, what if the distended howl of Agaetis Byrjun was distilled into the percussive clatter of Takk’s “Gong” and concentrated shoegaze swirl of “Með blóðnasir”? It might produce something like “Ísjaki", where Dýrason's drums continuously push Jónsi’s call and response vocals to new ecstatic spaces between disco pleasure and black metal pain. Combine the electronic-pop momentum of Jónsi’s Go with the imperial marches of Með suð of and the result is the “Rafstraumur", a reminder that Sigur Rós can still go goosebump-for-goosebump with M83 and Coldplay if they so choose.
It’s one thing for a complete sonic overhaul to be necessary, but what stands out about Kveikur is how natural it feels. As opposed to a rebranding, this is Sigur Rós internally reconstituted, where the biggest addition isn’t distorted guitars or huge drums or Jónsi going full tilt. More than sounds, this is an integration of new verbs and actions, as Sigur Rós pummel, rage, wail and assert, asking hard questions of themselves. What if they could harness their power to convey immediate anger instead of patient catharsis, as a soundtrack for lifting weights instead of zoning out? Jónsi’s vocals will always bear an extraterrestrial shimmer, but why can’t he play the avenging archangel rather than a friendly ghost? After 15 years of evoking Iceland's gorgeous, volcanic terrain and woodsprite legends, why not reflect the endless winters, cratered economy and the frightening suicide rate?
Even if it doesn’t have the same cultivated mystery or incapacitating demands of Agaetis Byrjun or ( ), Kveikur is every bit a return to form, tapping into its predecessors’ bottomless emotional wellspring for a Sigur Rós album that can be listened to casually or intensely, a collection that works as effectively as a spiritual experience and pop music, the essence of their overwhelming, widescreen grandeur conveyed with the immediacy of a 50-minute rock record.


Like early-'00s bands like Asobi Seksu, Serena-Maneesh, or Mahogany, Pinkshinyultrablast are rooted in shoegaze while maintaining a basis in electronic noise. The effect is like getting showered with a firehose pumping spangly glitter.

Grandfeathered

With the possible exception of Godsmack, no band name is more indicative of a main influence than Pinkshinyultrablast. It was previously the title of the third LP by Astrobrite, a continuation of the similarly, evocatively named lovesliescrushing, projects that approached shoegaze while maintaining a basis in electronic noise—other "truth in advertising" Astrobrite releases include Whitenoise Superstar and Supercrush. It’s a style far more obtuse than the guitar-pop model that spawned genre titans like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, which also means it’s never as overexposed. In fact, more than a decade after the original Pinkshinyultrablast, this style sounded entirely novel on the Russian band’s striking 2014 debut Everything Else Matters. On Grandfeathered, Pinkshinyultrablast sought to go further toward the margins—noisier, more electronic, more dense, simply more. And yet, they became something much closer to a guitar-pop band in the process, their primary and really only objective to overwhelm.
In a literal sense, Pinkshinyultrablast’s self-described "thunder pop"/"kung-fu-gaze" is sensational and impressive: the effect is entirely based on hitting a few particular pleasure centers. And every time, Pinkshinyultrablast hits them with such force that the name becomes almost stupidly obvious. It’s the equivalent of getting showered with a firehose pumping spangly glitter.
From a certain angle, Pinkshinyultrablast are a pop band, just one that believes that pop music should work on a subliminal level. The bold hip-hop beat and sleek loops that push "Initial" could pass for Chvrches’ laser-light anthems passed through audio and visual lo-res filters to the point of total abstraction. When they present themselves as a rock band, they’re a much heavier one than on Everything Else Matters. The heaving guitar riffs on "Glow Vastly" reimagine the Joy Formidable’s alt-gaze colossus "Whirring" if it only consisted of its final two minutes. "I Catch You Napping" and "Kiddy Pool Dreams" maintain the propulsive rhythms of the previous record while subjecting them to a torrential downpour of distortion, similar to mid-2k bands Asobi Seksu, Serena-Maneesh, or Mahogany who served as shoegaze torchbearers during a lull for the genre. (And if those names mean anything to you, Grandfeathered is required listening.)
While the sound on Grandfeathered is deep, it often feels impenetrable rather than multilayered. Lyubov Soloveva has a genre-appropriate voice that isn’t especially distinctive—high, diaphanous, taking on sing-song cadences to signify a chorus. Their most fitting contemporary peer A Sunny Day in Glasgow are by far the funniest band to ever get tagged as shoegaze, imbuing their music with a unique playfulness, and there are countless options for guitar bands who take things in the opposite direction, but Pinkshinyultrablast never manages to express a personality. The rapturous cooing delivers on the promise on song titles like "Glow Vastly," "Comet Marbles," and "Kiddy Pool Dreams," but not much else. Surely, Grandfeathered is impressive, but the first impression tends to be the only one it makes.


The Berlin producer is a master of negative space and biomechanical sound, lacing her uneasy compositions with voices that excavate images of unceasing loneliness and longing.

Jade 玉观音

Pan Daijing has a keen ear for the vicissitudes of the human voice—the way it can commune or conflict with its environment, or how it can spark immediate, visceral sympathy and then plunge into revulsion with a choking throttle. Since the release of her 2017 debut LP Lack, the Berlin-based experimental artist has written and staged operatic works for upward of a dozen singers, constellating voice in the service of narrative, finding the edges where difference makes friction. In the studio, she laces her solo work with voices that beckon and spit, hinting at story and then submerging those hints in discomfiting electronic noise. She is a skillful collagist of biomechanical sound. On her second album, Jade 玉观音, Daijing breaches more intimate terrain, using the voice and its antagonists to excavate images of unceasing loneliness and deep, unruly need.
“I take my bath in the ocean/I can’t get out,” Daijing says in the closing moments of “Let 七月.” The couplet reveals the paradox of scale on which her work often plays. Within the span of a few words, she drifts upon the ocean’s inconceivable expanse and, at the same time, is crammed into a bathtub. An open horizon and a tight, windowless room collapse into a single scene. Inside it, Daijing luxuriates and is trapped. “Let 七月” offers something of an oasis from the album’s industrial scrapes and whines. Yet the terror and discombobulation central to Daijing’s work never quite ebbs. Even at their calmest and most curious, the voices she orchestrates don’t soothe. They fester; they salivate; they probe, rooting for more than what the surface offers. If the voices on Lack could feel abstracted, alien, the ones that appear on Jade 玉观音 venture direct address: “Did I ever need you too much?” Daijing asks on “The Goat 二月,” her murmur barely audible against an ominous synthesizer pulse. “If you ever leave, I’ll go with you.”
These spoken-word soliloquies carry the urgency of intolerable secrets, irritants that require indiscriminate purging. Throughout the album, strands of voice drape across instruments that sound just enough like they come out of a body that they take on an uncanny quality. A low, snarling stringed instrument seems to breathe on “Dictee 三月”; analog synthesizers chirp and burble alongside impromptu laughter and a brambly, computerized growl on “Tilt 四月”; a diaphragmatic bass tone stumbles and lurches through “Ran 乱.” Daijing delights in that confusion, the ear’s misrecognition of an instrument as another body, tortured to extremes and calling out.
Jade closes with the gutting “Moema, forever 九月,” a piece with uneasy Sprechgesang at its heart. “I forget her,” Daijing repeats against purring machine drone and intermittent piano strikes. Her voice arcs upward, as if she’s searching for a question mark. “Forget her face, forget her smell, forget her finger.” She is able so precisely to remember the things she forgets, to enumerate them. They pile up like keepsakes in a box. Her voice trudges on, strained to the point of breaking, but it does not break. The whirring environment sputters and stalls. The piano calls, insistent; a synthesizer wordlessly shrieks. Daijing, her voice shallow but steady, goes on forgetting, making a spectacle of the absence until there is no light left, until all that remains is loss.

Buy: Rough Trade
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One-time DFA disciple Armani XXXChange, working from a homemade studio in an apartment in Brooklyn, displays a keen ear for smart ways to mash regional and time-lost delicacies.

Yoyoyoyoyo

"It's party music." "No consequences." "Just ass-shaking shit." "Why you hating?" "Stop thinking so hard."
BULLETIN: Reports are circulating that Miami Bass paragon Luther "Uncle Luke" Campbell's filthy and amazing split box set, My Life and Freaky Times, featuring a soundtrack and a 2xCD spoken word audio-biography, has been delayed by retailers citing its content and lascivious packaging inappropriate. In other news, Spank Rock released Yoyoyoyoyo last month.
That's the hierarchy. Yoyoyoyoyo is one of the most precise and brilliantly produced albums of the year. One-time DFA disciple Armani XXXChange, working from a homemade studio in an apartment in Brooklyn, displays a keen ear for smart ways to mash regional and time-lost delicacies (H-Town Screw, B-More Club, Philly Soul, Miami bass, NYC Electro, 1980s dance pop, Samba, First Wave Freestyle, etc.). XXXChange uses dug-out bass, Space Invaders blips, and relentless 808s, among myriad sound effects, to enhance what can feel like sonic revolution. Each song uses a new sound to flex his skills, like the cheek-pop plucking on "What It Look Like" or the sped-up orchestral underbelly on "Coke & Wet". "Bump" has an accelerating cowbell and synth loop as tight and hilarious as anything on LCD Soundsystem's debut. His versatility is a gift, though it sometimes robs Spank Rock of any discernable individuality. Still, an album full of disconnected but adventurous beats is hardly grounds for failure. More troubling is the message.
Much has been made of MC Naeem Juwan's geographical history. Born in Baltimore, a move to Philadelphia reportedly informed his style, as have tutorials from noted Rawkus beatsmith Shawn J. Period. But Juwan's rap POV bears little resemblance to Mos Def or Talib Kweli, nor does it fit bass's garrulous charm or Baltimore Club's chant-heavy style. He's got a helium-laced voice and his patterns are intentionally manic, jumping around, off-beat-or-on, as if his point can't be made fast enough. Sometimes it's dazzling; mostly, it's frustrating. "Rick Rubin" is less about the producer, and more a questioning philosophical treatise ("Is it off-key?/ Is it just too hip?/ Is it out of touch or is it the touch?")-- Spank Rock doing his Rimbaud joint over stutter-clap, revealing one of many knowing winks on the album. He also raps about ass. A lot.
Moving bodies is as worthy a goal now as it was when Little Richard sang, "Good booty, if it don't fit, don't force it". But Spank Rock's unspoken nihilism-- or, more pointedly, chauvinism-- has been getting a pass. You may be thinking, "Rap writer comes down on innocuous, possibly ironic good-time MC for sexism, continues ignoring Interscope artist's crimes." Fair point. Amanda Blank hops on "Bump" for a verse that could out-nasty Lil' Kim on her worst day to balance things, if only for a song. It's just that when a group like Spank Rock achieves a certain status with tastemakers, so much of its ethos remains uncontested and unclear. The quotes above are some of the responses I've heard when attempting to engage in conversation about this album. I still can't tell how serious Juwan is when he says, "Ass-shaking competition champ, ooh that pussy gets damp, pump that-- pump that-- pump that amp." The image is clear. But is it sheer reportage? Fantasy? He's got jokes? No doubt he likes ass. Next to a domineering pro like Uncle Luke, though, Juwan comes off like a stepchild.
There's a fluid, unidentifiable hipster appeal to Spank Rock and Yoyoyoyoyo. Because they lack a true identity, they're as comfortable performing with Bun B or Devin the Dude as Man Man or Animal Collective. Existing in the Hollertronix quadrant-- a fun, strange cultural sphere occupied by the undeniably talented but suspiciously prominent Diplo, among others-- will get you criticized as vacant. There's nothing vacant about the dire sexuality chirped about here, it'd just be more useful if it could be more easily understood. The thrilling and immediate "Coke & Wet" is so raw, smacked by a sharp Moog and guitar-slink, that when Juwan oddly boasts through the chorus "Coke and wet, bitch/Guns, nigga, holla!" it sounds like it could be parody. On the other hand, closer "Screwville, USA" is as nostalgic and dramatic a Houston anthem as I've heard this year. And who knows if these dudes have even been to Texas.


In the spirit of work from Dipset and Bad Boy, Lil Wayne creates a clique record, and-- with Drake and Nicki Minaj on board-- pulls it off.

We Are Young Money

After recording a staggering amount of verses, hooks, and hallucinogenic hiccups for three-plus years, Lil Wayne topped-out with 2008's Tha Carter III, a success on every level imaginable. And then he basically took 2009 off-- relatively speaking, at least. He still grossed about $42 million in worldwide ticket sales, released two stellar mixtapes (Hottest Nigga Under the Sun and No Ceilings), and was the subject of one of the more fascinating music documentaries in recent memory, The Carter. (I'm just going to pretend to ignore his forever-delayed dalliance into mook-rock, Rebirth, for the time being.)
But without new tracks and features hitting the web every week, it did seem like Wayne was M.I.A. He had spoiled us. And that missing feeling tugged harder when he pled guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon in October, a blunder that could put him in a New York jail for a year starting next month, when he's due to be sentenced. These dire circumstances loom over We Are Young Money, the first album from Wayne's cobbled-together hip-hop clique-- can his pupils come close to filling the creative vacuum left by their frighteningly prodigious mentor? Crazily enough, a couple of them just might be able to pull it off.
Though Puff Daddy and the Family's pioneering 1997 boomtime opus No Way Out still boasts the greatest number of contributing stars-- Biggie, Mase, Lil' Kim, the L.O.X.-- when it comes to the single-ego-fueled-rap-crew-album genre, most of the time, side players have little chance of becoming anything but. Consider the sorry track record of Eminem's D-12, 50 Cent's G-Unit, Ludacris's Disturbing Tha Peace, or Young Jeezy's U.S.D.A. Even Jay-Z's most overt clique record, 2000's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia couldn't bolster main contributors Beanie Sigel and Memphis Bleek to much past staunch regional kudos. Last decade, Cam'ron was one of the more successful kingpins, with the 2003 album Diplomatic Immunity spawning semi-careers for Juelz Santana and Jim Jones before Dipset forgot why they were great and imploded. And while We Are Young Money undoubtedly marks a career high for most of Wayne's crew, there are two contributors who have an excellent chance of jumping out from behind their teacher's shadow.
Drake is already there. After smashing with lover-not-fighter anthem "Best I Ever Had" and sussing out the logical continuation of Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak sound with his So Far Gone mixtape last year, the singer/rapper's forthcoming major label debut LP is the uncontested Most Anticipated Hip-Hop Bow of 2010. And for good reason-- more than competitors like Kid Cudi and Wale, Drake has the sensitivity, wit, and commercial wherewithal to create the breakout album hip-hop fans longed for, and didn't get, in 2009. His encroaching stardom probably hurts We Are Young Money as an album-- he seems to be saving his signature Auto-Hooks for the solo LP-- but his four verses act as apt teasers, highlighted by a melodic and horny masterclass on "Every Girl" and an anchor lap on "Pass the Dutch", where he boasts: "I told you catch up, did you make a mil yet?/ I can't predict how many of 'em I can still get." Could be quite a few.
The other current YM bold face is 25-year-old Queens native Nicki Minaj. A vixen with outlandish curves and a flow that pings between valley girl sex goddess and cartoon thug, Minaj could probably carpet-bomb hip-hop mag covers no matter her skills on the mic. Thankfully, she's much more than a pair of boutique high heels and a dirty mouth-- in fact, with her five WAYM verses, Minaj is the most consistent (and consistently amusing) MC on the entire album. She's as outrageously raunchy as vintage Lil' Kim ("flow tighter than a dick in a butt") and as randomly hilarious as, um, Lil Wayne ("Switch my name, now I'm celebratin' Hanukkah/ Lewinsky, bitches, Young Money Monica/ I been hot since Hedgehog-- Sonic, the"). Like Drake, her 2009 mixtape, Beam Me Up Scotty, was a powerful opening salvo, and-- considering recent collaborations with Usher, Robin Thicke, and Mariah Carey-- Minaj has the potential to become the first new out-and-out female rap star in years.
In between appearances from Drake, Minaj, and Wayne-- who offers lukewarm verses and/or deranged-but-palatable Auto-Tune hooks on most tracks-- a slew of numbskulls, weirdos, and little kids sometimes make things interesting. On the bonehead front are Gudda Gudda, Mack Maine, and onetime Dipset pal Jae Millz, who show up a lot but have comically little to say. (Sample Mack Maine brain fizzle: "We on some other shit/ They on the same shit/ I'm Mack Maine/ I'm Mack Maine, bitch!") There's an awful singer (Atlanta-based Shannell), an awkward emo refugee (Tyga, who's the cousin of Gym Class Heroes leader Travis McCoy), and a couple of screechy voiced teens whose contributions are mercifully kept to a minimum. Along with its top tier talents, what keeps WAYM from slogging along is a stylistic diversity and a selection of beats that sometimes borders on phenomenal.
Unlike most rap crews, YM features artists from all across the continent and not just one regional enclave, so even when the lesser lights take over, at least they don't sound exactly like each other. Meanwhile, upstart producers Chase N. Cashe and Kane Beatz keep things moving sonically, whether it's CNC's baroque, Grizzly Bear-esque (!) beat for "New Shit" or Beatz's bright and haughty instrumental for the hit "Bedrock", which wouldn't sound out of place on a Wes Anderson hip-hop movie score (not to say that should ever exist, necessarily). But reliable Southern stalwart David Banner takes best beat honors with his absolutely-evil subwoofer mulcher "Streets Is Watchin'". It's a shining moment from an album that signals hope for Lil Wayne's collective enterprise even during his imminent state-sanctioned breather.

Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment


The Naarm, Australia-based duo draws upon its Black and Indigenous heritage to make visceral instrumental metal infused with unmistakable socio-political intent.

Systemic

Naarm duo Divide and Dissolve’s Indigenous identities are intrinsic to everything they do. Their name doubles as a call to dismantle hegemonic power structures (or, conversely, an acknowledgment of hegemony’s pernicious effects on Indigenous cultures). They bring up ancestral heritage and colonial violence in their interviews; their albums bear socio-political buzzwords like Gas Lit and Systemic as titles. Lacking all of that context, though, it’d be tough to pin down their grizzled, tectonic metal as inherently political. The instrumental duo is not, say, Sons of Kemet, who address the Black diaspora by playing it, gathering African polyrhythms, Caribbean fusion, and American R&B under their wide umbrella of global-minded jazz. Divide and Dissolve’s music is immediately visceral—you don’t need a syllabus to feel the passion dripping from their sludgy constructions—but learning where they’re coming from adds another dimension to their music.
Since 2017, Divide and Dissolve has comprised guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed and percussionist Sylvie Nehill (who is leaving the project’s live shows after her work on Systemic). Reed is Black and Cherokee, Nehill is Māori, and in a press release, Reed says the album is in “direct opposition” to “the goal of the colonial project” of “separat[ing] Indigenous people from their culture, their life force, their community, and their traditions.” As the word “systemic” suggests, this is a deep-rooted process, its tendrils entwined with every aspect of modern life. One possible reading of the album is that the only thing that’s going to shake those tethers loose is overwhelming, rattle-your-bones heaviness. The majority of Systemic’s 33-minute runtime is dominated by Reed’s lurching, slowly evolving riffs and Nehill’s thundering doom drumming—an elemental sound that harkens toward millennia-long power struggles, perhaps the Titans rising up from Tartarus and overthrowing the Greek gods.
Depending on your vantage point, Systemic can convey a vast spectrum of moods with its relatively narrow sound. Is it a joyous reclamation? A wailing lament? A call to action? I don’t think the specifics matter. Both musically and philosophically, Divide and Dissolve take a position that is blunt at face value but rich in its readings and interpretations.
Systemic is by far the band’s most structured work. All of Reed’s riffs feel of a piece: a gnarled forest of recurring themes that’s easy to miss for the trees. After a striking ambient intro beckons a false sense of security, their opening riff on “Blood Quantum” pulls the album into a thicket, and though you might catch glimpses of similar pathways midway through on songs like “Reproach” and “Indignation,” they all lead to different ends. It’s not a Dopesmoker-style rotation around a central motif, but it’s hypnotic in execution, a stunning mood captured in amber.
As with Gas Lit, Systemic’s maelstrom is tempered with softer sounds (namely Reed’s piano and harmonium and Nehill’s xylophone) as well as a spoken-word guest spot by the poet Minori Sanchiz-Fung on the song “Kingdom of Fear.” This track, a foreboding, humid interlude, distills the album’s central conflicts. “I have agony on my side, I have experts on violence, I have control of the tide,” whispers a personified shadow with clear parallels to real-world powers-the-be. Sanchiz-Fung, voice quivering but powerful in the face of such opposition, rebukes those forces: “Even in the kingdom of fear, the air murmurs with song through the streets. Joy remains wild. It has baffled the cage again. It has cut through the horror.”
Enjoying Divide and Dissolve doesn’t require mental gymnastics. The initial, gut-level response to Systemic’s crust-punk take on doom metal is more than enough to hold it aloft. But in engaging with its themes, then contemplating them on repeat listens, Systemic gains a depth that’s rare for a largely instrumental record. After a while, it seems as potent and unshakeable as the power structures it seeks to dismantle.


On his third and richest album, the English singer-songwriter probes the mysteries of childhood, family, and memory.

Milkteeth

English singer-songwriter Douglas Dare recorded his new album Milkteeth in Margate, an eccentric seaside town roughly 200 miles from his native Dorset, where he was raised on a dairy farm. Dare is currently based in London, but Milkteeth bears no trace of city life. Instead, it is filled with pastoral imagery from childhood. With subtle production from Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, Milkteeth stands apart from Dare’s previous, more conventional records. Here, he mines the mysteries of memory, family, and the ghosts of his hometown. Dare doesn’t find a concrete answer to any of them, but he arranges the remnants into gorgeous compositions that borrow from English folksong, baroque pop, and piano balladry.
Milkteeth is Dare’s third studio album, following 2014’s Whelm and 2016’s Aforger, both of which were hindered by their safe, electro-classical production and hemmed-in songwriting. Dare’s talents as a vocalist and composer have never been in question, but there seemed to be an invisible wall holding him back. On Milkteeth, Dare has managed to break free. He makes earthly experiences sound otherworldly, owing in part to Lindsay’s light touches and Dare’s autoharp, his new tool of choice.
On standout track “The Joy in Sarah’s Eyes,” Dare strums said autoharp while speaking to the phantom of a young girl. “Sarah, you were five years old/When the ceiling fell from its walls” he sings, as if guiding her through the halls of their childhood home. His voice crackles over a lattice of tambourine and spectral percussion as he asks, “Do you remember your height on the wall?/You’d be taller now with further to fall.” It’s not clear if Dare is recounting fact or fable, but his sense of loss is weighty as we imagine a crumbled structure marked by the height of a child who never lived to outgrow it.
Dare takes on the role of bard on Milkteeth, celebrating the wonders of childhood on “The Playground.” He likens youth to a luminous fairground, his voice riding a circular piano riff like a kid on a carousel over synthesizer arpeggios and pulses of horn. “Red Arrows” explores similar subject matter in a sparser presentation. Dare sings in the round about running with his mother up Denhay Hill, a grassy mound in Dorset. The song recalls traditional English folk music, updated with tasteful pangs of drone.
Milkteeth may be Dare’s most stripped-back album, but it is also his richest, a loose tapestry of memories both painful and cherished. In “Silly Games,” Dare recalls the loneliness of his rural upbringing. “Mother’s in the kitchen washing plates,” he sings. “Brother, cousin won’t play with me/Uncle, auntie they’re not free.” Dare’s solace, however, lies in an unnamed figure that is plenty willing to join him. The album is full of nebulous renderings like this, where we’re left to interpret Dare’s personal mythology. It makes Milkteeth feel suspended in time, more dream than recollection.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl, the third LP from the producer Ryan Lee West*,* is impossible to ignore and hard to forget.

Howl

Ryan Lee West felt moved to a brief outburst back in August. The Leicester-born, London-based producer who makes music as Rival Consoles tweeted in protest of the ongoing boom of deep house, asking artists to quit contributing to the genre, currently in vogue. "There's probably enough to last us till 2089," he wrote.
West's ire makes sense, if only because the music he makes as Rival Consoles feels diametrically opposed to the luxuriant, lengthy bath evoked by deep house. West is a musical engineer in the mold of luminaries like Aphex Twin and relative newcomers like Dave Harrington, and the soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening. You're always aware that any given composition is morphing, is in flux. Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl is impossible to ignore, and hard to forget.
That's partly because West so often feels comfortable disrupting his own patterns. "Afterglow" seems as if it's going to build on an early synth loop, but what at first seems like the track's foundation turns out to be its foyer: halfway in, and suddenly we're in an entirely new room, one that's louder, brighter, more expansive. Our understanding of his pieces broadens as they move through time, so that once they're nearly over we apprehend the entire structure as if by a drone camera hovering above.
That vivid view is studded with allusions: the title track makes extraordinary reference to trains and tunnels, and at times the dusky track "Pre" recalls the snaking sounds of a film projector. West has said that he's a fan of "sloppy things and rough things happening in music," but even the little blips and isotopes here feel as if they've been cast in concrete, accidents granted purpose. In contrast to the last two Rival Consoles LPs, Howl was largely forged from hardware (as opposed to digital technology), and the record's analogue origins would be obvious even if you knew nothing about its genesis.
West is a labelmate of Nils Frahm and, this year alone, has toured with Clark and Nosaj Thing. He shares with all three the instincts of a classical composer*.* Howl's closer, "Looming", is a six-and-a-half-minute mini-epic that reflects the depth of emotion that West says he poured into Howl. But the catharsis it induces comes as much from the musician's restraint and sense of composure as anything else. What isn't there is as important as what is.
West's grumbling about deep house might make him seem like a dinosaur. But he doesn't seem bothered by its existence; he's complaining about a surplus, and, like a true progressive, his momentary gripe stands as mere prelude to more concerted action. His music—rocky, spiky, warm, titanic—drives us to re-evaluate whether referring to someone as a dinosaur might not be quite as pejorative as we thought.


The Berlin-based electronic musician collages vinyl samples and field recordings into sensually inviting soundscapes infused with a powerful sense of mystery.

the hum of your veiled voice

Jake Muir’s sonic collages, made from vinyl samples and field recordings, pair pristine detail with a shadowy, secretive pulse. His 2018 album Lady’s Mantle was a foray into surf-pop plunderphonics, incorporating aquatic field recordings taken from expeditions in Iceland and California, but the hum of your veiled voice marks a shift in scenery. On his second release on Manchester’s sferic label, home also to experimental and lo-fi ambient from Space Afrika and Perila, Muir’s soundscapes channel the murmurs, whispers, and distant glimmers of the restless city night. They are an ode, he has said, to “gay bathhouses and spas, club back rooms and decadent boudoirs.”
Warping and layering his source material into fluid new shapes, Muir suggests fleeting glances and furtive encounters. His warm, fuzzy textures are both nostalgic and sensually inviting; they seem to open up a new space in the subconscious. The melting arcs in “fleeting touches” have a narcotic effect; the music falls in upon itself in droning loops and waves. Subtle hints of jazz piano on “reservoir of memory” are barely audible, yet the washed-out melodies seem to grow louder on a second listen. On “red as the print of a kiss” he marries dubbed-out synths with the sounds of nature, lovingly and carefully extended and manipulated.
Muir composed the hypnotic sounds on the hum of your veiled voice after relocating from Los Angeles to Berlin, and the effects of that move are perceptible in his drifting compositions. The fluid character of Muir’s collages emphasizes spatial shifts and transitory states of being; the unidentifiable crackles in “silent sailing” lead past the limits of perception. On Muir’s 2016 debut, Muara, his obsession with environmental found sounds led to a mood similar to the psychedelic forest scenes of GAS’s Pop. But here, his glimmering loops are infused with the decadence of a midnight cityscape. Elusive twinkling textures in “on occasions of this kind” mimic a kaleidoscope of street lights, while distant footsteps signal unidentified waltzes in the restless night. A powerful evocation of an imaginary nonplace, the hum of your veiled voice lies somewhere between the hum of the city and a faint memory, gently slipping beneath the surface of the conscious mind.

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The Avalanches return with their first new album in 16 years.

Wildflower

To listen to the Avalanches is to wrestle with time. The sample-rich music made by this group of Australian DJs makes you think about where its pieces come from, what those fragments meant to you then, and what they mean to you embedded into the group's finished songs. There’s nostalgia and loss ingrained in every bar, and you can sense the erratic movement of past, present, and future from the first listen.
Speaking of time, there’s also the fact that the Avalanches waited 16 years to follow up their debut album, 2000’s landmark Since I Left You. To be a fan of the Avalanches, you had to be patient. Some of the delay was to be expected. Their first record was said to have thousands of samples, but you never can tell with a figure like that—let’s just agree that it contained a lot. And working with samples means submitting yourself to a longer timetable. Because while Jarvis Cocker might pick up a guitar and write eight songs in two days, building music from other music means you have to do a lot of listening. Which means sampling artists spend a great deal of time engaged in the same activity as their audience—driving around with the radio on, poised by the turntable, dropping a needle, clicking around on YouTube, walking around with headphones. And there are no shortcuts. Throw in the usual long-delayed-album mix of bad equipment, poor health, perfectionism, and clearance issues, and who knows, maybe we’re lucky to get Wildflower, the first new Avalanches record in 16 years.
It’s a music business truism that every sample-heavy instrumental act will eventually work with guest vocalists. As satisfying as it can be to assemble new music from old pieces, every producer, deep down, eventually wants to make their own primary source. Wildflower’s guest vocalists—including Detroit rapper Danny Brown, Biz Markie, rap duo Camp Lo, Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, Chaz Bundick of Toro Y Moi, David Berman of Silver Jews, Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux/Black Bananas—are what set it apart from the first record. Since I Left You had huge swaths of constantly shifting sound, flowing as one epic suite, and it was often hard to know where one song ended and another began; almost half the songs on Wildflower are clearly set up to showcase a rapper or singer who have written something close to a proper song, so it’s a series of tentpole tracks joined by gorgeous instrumental interludes of the kind only the Avalanches can assemble.
At its best, Wildflower feels like an extension of Since I Left You, hewing close to its predecessor in terms of style, sound, approach, and texture—you would never mistake this for an album by anyone else. The Avalanches make music that’s open, welcoming, soft, gentle; the track construction is virtuosic, but it never wants to show off, and the beat-jacking never feels competitive. In addition to the found sounds, the album has a lot of new instrumentation, most of it presented to mix seamlessly with the samples. Film composer Jean-Michel Bernard adds orchestrations to a handful of tracks, upping the quotient of Disneyfied wonder. The general approach to production is classic Avalanches: AM Gold pop with its sweet strings bleeds into delicate disco with beats inspired by early hip-hop unpinning the whole, imbuing it with a kind of bookish innocence common to the world of indie pop. If the turntable-scratched choruses are gone, replaced by live people at a microphone, the sonic universe they exist in has, thankfully, changed very little.
On the whole, the indie pop songs are more successful than the tracks featuring rappers. “Colours,” the first Jonathan Donahue feature, sounds like a lost classic of psychedelic pop from a forgotten Elephant 6 offshoot, a lysergic mix of backward beats, warbly guitar, and wide-eyed vocals awed by the overpowering beauty of the world. The Toro Y Moi collaboration “If I Was a Folkstar” takes the same tape-stretched, sun-bleached feel and mixes it the kind of bouncy and playful disco beat Bundick has mastered in his own music. Jennifer Herrema usually speaks to us from behind a cloud of weary cynicism, but on “Stepkids” she sounds downright hopeful and maybe even happy, as she gets wistful over “a pack of smokes and a can of spray paint.” David Berman’s spoken-word turn on “Saturday Night Inside Out” sounds like something you might find on the back half of a weird forgotten singer/songwriter record from the ‘70s, which is perfect, and somewhere behind him are backing vocals from Father John Misty. The Avalanches have a knack for bringing all of these disparate voices into their world.
The tracks with rappers are a bit more mixed, but there are still great moments. Nostalgia works a bit differently in rap, and here and there a particular combination of beats and voice bring back a memory that didn’t necessarily need to be brought back. Most notable among these is lead single “Frankie Sinatra” featuring Danny Brown which, with its strained oompah beat and sing-song rap, reminded many of Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood,” a song few people who lived through that era feel compelled to relive now, to put it mildly. Biz Markie’s comic turn on “Noisy Eater” is also in danger of being too cute by half, but it gets over by sheer commitment to its evocation of childhood, sounding like some bent version of a Nickelodeon jingle. And Camp Lo’s explosive rhymes on “Because I’m Me” are brimming with joy.
The stable of vocalists underscores another way the Avalanches play with time: the guests are mostly members of Generation X, who arguably made their best music during the Bill Clinton era. Which, when combined with the fact that collage music built from dense samples is technique closely identified with the ‘90s, gives the album a weird funhouse-mirror quality. Nostalgia moves in 20-year cycles, which means the ‘90s sampling artists the Avalanches were inspired by were drawing from the ‘70s. So Wildflower’s references are doubled: the original music is sliced and diced and processed and filtered through a sensibility that emerged two decades later, and then that feeling is reflected once again into the present moment, two more decades later. The feeling can either be comforting or unsettling, depending on your angle of approach.
When Since I Left You arrived in 2000 it seemed less like the arrival of a new kind of pop than a bittersweet farewell to a decade that was coming to a close. The album mixed the technique and spirit of the Dust Brothers and transported it from the urban street to an open field far somewhere far from civilization, some place where everyone is dressed colorfully and they’re either on MDMA or they remember their days taking it fondly. The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades. Their work continues to mine a deceptively narrow emotional world—new love, childhood playfulness, wistful sadness, happy feelings of connection—but renders it better than just about any music ever made.
CORRECTION: Chaz Bundick’s surname was misspelt in an earlier version of this article.


Now is the time of year when people get sick. Know what? I'm sick. But before I bore you ...

Scope

Now is the time of year when people get sick. Know what? I'm sick. But before I bore you with another paragraph of self-pity, let me say that I'm getting better. The symptoms have been reduced to a full-body sweat, a feverish chill, a swirling nausea, lack of appetite and the occasional dry-heave vomit session.
This afternoon, as I lay on the couch watching a hypnotising episode of "Judge Mills Lane" (the one where the rich lady's dog, Buttercup, was mauled to death by this guy's Rottweilers), I thought, "What better way to cure my pain than by listening to the latest Thrill Jockey release? Ah, there it is!" My discman and headphones were being eaten by my fabulous $30 couch, and were stuffed under my pillow. Lying in the vicinity, Nobukazu Takemura's Scope.
I remember a few of Takemura's remixes-- most notably, his remix of Roni Size's "Brown Paper Bag." They're usually crazed experimentations that leave behind only a fragment of the original song. I can't wait to see what happens when Takemura's given free reign to record whatever he wants.
Drifting in and out of peaceful but fevered sleep, I listened with great ease to the five lengthy tracks. For the first half hour of Scope, I was lulled into an electric dreamland with bizarre mid-'80s special effects. But somewhere, I've heard this stuff before... the 22-minute opener, "On a Balloon," sounds, well, exactly like a track off Oval's Dok. Exactly. And following, the 13-minute-long "Kepler" sounded remarkably like Tortoise's "Ten Day Interval" or Ghost's "Daggma."
Suddenly, at "Taw," Scope's third track, I shot up, stunned. Was this communication between primitive R2D2-type androids? Either that or some wanky moog experiment. After nine minutes of seemingly random robot noise, I find myself fast asleep once again. "Icefall" again cops Oval's trademark skipping CD noise, but uses it to a create a different effect-- this time, the skipping noise is a beautiful ambient coldness and is organized rhythmically. So, like Oval, but with sort of a Windy and Carl feel. Scope closes with the strangely medievil sounds of "Tiddler," the album's shortest track. In as few words as possible: ending music for an old Nintendo game.
It seems like Takemura's primary talent is building upon what's already been created by other artists. His concepts are taken directly from other artists, but what he creates with his concepts is pure talent. Except on "Taw," which is jarring and unwelcome in this record's otherwise harmonious soundscape. Well, I gotta go take some Advil Cold & Sinus. Ugh...