John Ross leads his band through a richly detailed and expectedly sentimental album that wrestles with all the life and death that exists in the midst of a cancer diagnosis.

ILYSM

John Ross, the lead singer of the New York-based Wild Pink, was writing songs for the follow-up to 2021’s A Billion Little Lights when his doctor told him he had cancer. He was only 34. Ross thought about pausing the project, but his doctor advised him to keep writing and recording: Better to focus on something other than the tumors clinging to his lymph nodes. Heeding the advice, Ross wrote through two surgeries, countless medical appointments, and what surely was a terrifying season of fear and instability. The effects of that decision reverberate through Wild Pink’s new album, ILYSM—a record that, in its sensitive yet raucous intensity, mimics the destabilizing experience of bodily demise.
Tragedies like an unexpected diagnosis or the loss of a loved one can rob you of all your confident and clever opinions about the world—the kind that Wild Pink’s early albums were chock-full of—and reduce you to big, simple emotions: sad, scared, grateful, awestruck. Ross is in the thick of these emotions on the opener, “Cahooting the Multiverse”—a twinkling, full-band ballad with lyrics that a high school senior might pick for his yearbook quote. “It’s not how hard you try, it’s what you’re all about,” sings Ross at his most bearably earnest. It’s a stark and sappy departure from earlier Wild Pink tracks like “Oversharers Anonymous,” in which Ross’ tender voice brilliantly contrasts with the song’s scathing critique of social media.
There’s an expected sentimental undercurrent on ILYSM, especially in the album’s many references to animal life. There’s a “deer underneath the apple tree,” a “lone wolf out in the Rockies,” a “dog that heard thunder, shaking in a crate” and lots of birds: “rare birds” that mate for life, birds that return with a song, a bird that Ross spotted “gliding through a wave that could kill her,” and the sound of birds chirping on album closer, “ICLYM.” (The acronym stands for “I couldn’t love you more.”) When one of these quaint creatures pops up alongside a heartfelt request for someone to “lay right here with me, because I love you so much,” what you get is an unsophisticated tribute like “Hold My Hand,” featuring Julien Baker. Lyrically speaking, the title track’s loving and detail-rich description about Ross’ wife heading out into the world after she tended to his needs all night is much more affecting.
Beyond the cloying optimism of the first couple songs is something much more gnarly and refreshing. “Hell Is Cold” is raw and sprawling, and its abrupt cut-off will leave you wondering if Ross simply flipped the power switch on the mixing board, perhaps choosing to dose ILYSM with a little bit of the unpredictability life had recently served him. The mid-album stunner, “See You Better Now,” is a galloping jam session that recalls the windswept melodies of A Billion Little Lights. And the six-minute “Sucking on the Birdshot” is a gutsy ride through anger, sadness, tenderness, and terror, led by a sinewy guitar solo from Dinasour Jr.’s J Mascis and accented with some of the dissonant fuzz heard on early tracks like “Broke On,” from Wild Pink’s self-titled debut.
Mascis is one of many incredible collaborators bringing an experimental edge to ILYSM. There’s also Yasmin Wiliams, who plays on “The Grass Widow” and Ryley Walker adds his playing to “Simple Glyphs.” Pianist David Moore’s elegant and versatile playing on “The Grass Widow in the Glass Window” is another highlight, even as it elegantly dissolves into the background to make room for another round of beautiful guitar solos.
Here, in all this gorgeous and complicated music, is the infinite wisdom Ross was aiming for in his songwriting. If only it were enough to counter some of the more schmaltzy production choices, like the upbeat, chanting chorus of “ILYSM,” which recalls Coldplay’s soaring hit “Fix You,” or the astral synths and echoey spoken-word intro of album closer “ICLYM,” which resembles any number of songs from U2’s sloganeering All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Both songs possess a sense of naivete and obviousness that simply wasn’t present on previous Wild Pink releases. It makes sense when you consider what Ross was going through while recording ILYSM; it’s a lot easier to swing for the fences with your chord progressions and pen cryptic lyrics when you aren’t dealing with something that strips the varnish off your life. But tragedy doesn’t necessarily beget subtlety, and the perspective you gain doesn’t always last. ILYSM isn’t a brilliant album, but it shines bright and it soothes an aching soul. In this case, that’s more than enough.


New York’s Dylan Scheer, who DJs and produces as Via App, specializes in channeling noise, chaos, and discomfort into tracks that still work on the dancefloor.

Sixth Stitch

In the constellation of small clubs, one-off dancefloors, disused industrial structures, abandoned basements, strange apartments, and wonderfully forlorn spaces that compose and incubate the New York dance scene in the last half-decade, Dylan Scheer, who DJs and produces as Via App, has emerged as one of the city’s most prodigious talents. If you’ve seen her behind the ones and twos at, say, Bossa Nova Civic Club in Brooklyn or Trans-Pecos in Queens, you’ll notice immediately that she prefers caustic and uncomfortable music, and her style is defined by a jitter and mercurial mixing that delightfully defies the streamlined logic of by-the-book techno. It’s the kind of DJing that befits the protean and defiant nature of New York’s dance scene. On her third studio album, Sixth Stitch, Scheer presents an ominous and decidedly gothic vision of club music.
Sixth Stitch is composed of 16 tracks, divided between a series of short interstitial instrumental sketches and more “traditional” dance songs. On her past releases, Scheer made tunes that existed outside of genre, tracks that could be playful and angry, filled with crunching noises and slippery bass lines. Her production was as unexpected as it was seemingly unfocused. Now, she shows a tighter vision, a sharpened sense of what she wants her music to do. Across the music on Sixth Stitch, she creates a creeping tactile sensation that generates a sordid sense of time and place. It is music that imagines the parts of a club that reside behind closed doors and shadowy corners.
In the album’s opening track “Far She,” Scheer lays out the newfound physicality of her music. The piece is haunted by a churning drone that sounds like a malfunctioning white noise machine or a broken appliance. After the noise has become somewhat hypnotizing, Scheer inverts the mood and introduces a percussive element that mimics the sound and feeling of someone banging on a closed door. Seconds later, there is more banging, as if a crowd is forming outside your bedroom. If you’re listening to this on headphones, alone in your apartment, her mix of sounds generates a distinct feeling of horror.
It’s not as if her music is totally predicated on discomfort, but she deploys a series of anxious and claustrophobic moments to make this album’s joyful moments even more pronounced and triumphant. In tracks like “Get in Line” she uses a gurgling collection of noise that’s drippy, wet, and muffled. When percussion starts to stabilize and she adds in a loop of sharp synths, it’s a pure relief, as if you’ve climbed out of a manhole to see the rest of the world. After minutes of nervousness tracks can become downright goofy, and the release of energy is potent.
Elsewhere, Scheer experiments with more cinematic sounds that seem to borrow from Flying Lotus or John Carpenter. In “Viasabel,” she loops a glittering array of keyboard flicks into something that could easily soundtrack a scene in a galactic cantina on a backwater planet. “Con Artist” presents a back-breaking version of jungle that would  be appropriate for the rave scene in the second Matrix movie. As daring as Scheer’s selection of sounds are, the sheer length of the album leads to long sections that seem shapeless or mired by wasted space. In songs like “Phantom Dictation,” about two minutes are spent playing around with all the different ways you could pass a simple drumline through a helium filter, and the momentum disappears.
Still, Sixth Stitch is a bit of a daredevil feat for this young producer. Few have her ability to turn bedlam into such an organized and effective music. Scheer has said in the past that she looks to DJs like Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom) as aesthetic forebears. Arca once said that Mines was the “king of painting through chaos.” Scheer seems to be angling for a title of her own.


After 2018’s prickly IRISIRI, the Queens experimental musician narrates a personal and artistic rebirth in spare songwriting fleshed out with acoustic guitar, strings, and turbulent sound collages.

Eartheater: Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin

Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin

The most jarring moment of Eartheater’s fifth album comes during “Volcano,” a sunken lament for misguided love. Alexandra Drewchin’s voice—her most versatile resource, often pushed to ethereal or guttural extremes—cuts through to declare: “I’m obsessed with this grain of salt/I’m fixated on a grain of sand.” With her voice unaffected, grounded in the alto section of her three-octave range, Drewchin, who often appears otherworldly in her music, almost sounds like a woman you might know. Firmly bound to themes of renewal and rebirth, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is a winning experiment in economy and earthiness from an artist previously known for ornament and excess.
The Queens-based artist’s first two albums were a snug fit on freaky electronics label Hausu Mountain. In 2015, both Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis emerged out of enchanted thickets of wyrd folk, fingerpicked guitar, softly throbbing synths, and Drewchin’s infinite cast of voices, from sighing banshee to vocal-fried mumble rapper. Coupled with an alluring backstory—a home-schooled musical prodigy raised on a horse farm, now ensconced in New York’s avant-garde art and dance scene—the whole package appeared sprinkled with psychoactive fairy dust. That version of Eartheater might have ended up making cerebral sideways pop for a label like 4AD or Sacred Bones, but three years later she joined Berlin’s PAN for the cold and prickly IRISIRI, a dissociative mix of techno, cloud rap, illbient beats, operatic wails, and post-Young Thug ad libs. In 2019 she strayed even further from the sylvan path as techno producers including New York’s AceMo pumped a dark electronic pulse through the self-released mixtape Trinity.
Each of those records extended Drewchin’s cinematic universe, her voice embodying an ever multiplying dramatis personae, her jump-cut arrangements catering to her infinite influences—a strategy that occasionally collapsed under its own ambition. On Phoenix, though, Drewchin forces the rainbow back in the prism, concentrating her vast range of identities and impulses into a unified beam. The songwriting is sharp and spare, and her lyrics are easier to decipher, less tangled in delirious wordplay. Acoustic guitar returns to the fore, sometimes fingerpicked in ripples, like an old Leonard Cohen ballad. Simple chord progressions are gilded by celestial strings from Spanish conservatory group Ensemble De Cámara, and harp and violin from Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of New York duo LEYA.
Some of the material was recorded last year for a theatrical collaboration with Brighton duo Semiconductor, whose audiovisual spectacle included stop-motion images of luminous crystals. Drewchin soundtracked the clips with shivering strings, heavy-metal bass blasts, the ching of an ice pick, and swings squeaking in the park; these turbulent sound collages act as interludes between the vocal-led songs on the album. The album itself came together during a 10-week stint at FUGA, an artist residency program in Zaragoza, Spain. The region’s rugged terrain finds its way into the strata of songs like “Volcano” and the logorrheic “Diamond in the Bedrock,” where Drewchin’s dense poetry is interrupted by Migos-ian syncopation (“Cut through the graves/Cut through the graves”), a technique she also employed on IRISIRI. But for the most part she eschews the proggy density of her earlier records in order to dig down to her core, open to whatever strange truths might be uncovered. “The meaning hasn’t come up yet,” she squeaks on “Below The Clavicle” over swelling strings; “it’s still under the surface.”
The phoenix is an ancient and familiar symbol of rebirth, a mythical creature born out of its own destruction. Drewchin adopts her new avatar with enthusiasm: She gets into character on the album’s sleeve with bony wings sprouting from her back and golden sparks shooting up to her ass cheeks—half thirst trap, half LARPer fantasy. The album’s opening lines, repeated on the final track, illuminate the theme: “The only way out of this is through/Cross my heart and hope to die beyond hope/I’ve seen the phoenix rise out of my ashes.”
What turmoil has spurred this renewal? Drewchin’s last few years have been dramatic: on top of the albums, tours, and commissions there’s been stolen gear, a hard drive failure, and the end of a long relationship. Moving on from the past is standard stuff for an album concept, but in her telling it sounds like she has cut the cord in order to commit herself totally to her art, happily self-partnered with her interior alter egos. Several songs seem to take place during a final tryst: “You and I don’t need to be more than just right now/But just right now could steal a lifetime/So I’m inclined to break away,” she warns. When she “falls into bed with you again” on “Fantasy Collision,” she likens the experience to a car crash–ouch–before “rising from the wreckage.”
Drewchin recently admitted to The Face that she thinks the album “teeters on corny,” acknowledging that getting too close to those delicate heartstrings tends to turn off the chin-stroking set: too simple, too emotional, too feminine, eww. But, she added, “I do also think that corny is adjacent to iconic.” The oldest, most elemental myths are often the most powerful, and the force of Phoenix, like its fiery namesake, stems from its simplicity.

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This collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent's Annie Clark is largely concerned with human transformation. On the surface, these two have quite a few commonalities, but collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth.

David Byrne / St. Vincent: Love This Giant

Love This Giant

This past June, the first song we heard from David Byrne and St. Vincent's collaborative project was titled "Who".  With its firm acoustic strumming, clear delineation of two vocal parts, and repetition of the word "who?" at the beginning of each line, it recalled one of Byrne's best duets: his collaboration with Tejano pop star Selena on the slinky, slow-burning 1995 song "God's Child". Though not quite as moving (or danceable) as "Child", "Who" was an encouraging sign for the duo's Love This Giant project. St. Vincent's Annie Clark fit well amidst a few of Byrne's favorite tricks: lyrics doubling as a series of philosophical questions, a croony curiosity about the wider world, and an arrangement loaded with the brazen brass blurts (Clark's idea, actually) that Byrne first fell for via his Knee Plays album. A few months later, "Who" opens the duo's full-length album, which falls short of both the single's early promise, and the on-paper perfection of the pairing.
You could argue that David Byrne and Annie Clark collaborating on an album in 2012 is better framed by the question immediately asked of any such high-profile pairing: "Why?" On the surface, the two have quite a few commonalities. Both Byrne and Clark are equally fascinated by the theatricality of everyday life: the scripts and performances that drive our days and raise the stakes of our mundane interactions to the level of high drama or (for this duo) dark comedy. Both performers are known for their thousand-yard stares (compare the covers of Byrne's Feelings with St. Vincent's Actor) that suggest a quiet intensity merged with a playful approach to self-presentation.
More generally, much of the power of Clark's and Byrne's music relies on the tension between being trapped and letting go. The primary narrative arc of Talking Heads' legendary live concert Stop Making Sense sees the reluctantly public shut-in character of the jittery "Psycho Killer" gradually learn to embrace his eccentricities, leading to the effusive gospel of closer "Take Me to the River". In her five-plus years as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has set and broken pre-determined molds from every conceivable direction-- at her best, she can go from "Psycho Killer" to "River" in a single song. It makes sense, then, that much of Love This Giant is taken with the idea of human transformation, as evidenced by the album's prosthetically-enhanced cover art. On "The One Who Broke Your Heart", we hear of "the beautiful people" who "did some work on your face." Clark sings of the hopeful revelations of a gradual thawing process on "Ice Age". On "I Am an Ape", Byrne playfully reverse-engineers evolution.
But at the same time, collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth. Because they're so taken with the idiosyncrasies of others' behaviors and interactions, Byrne and Clark constantly run the risk of their music tipping over into obsessiveness, of living up to the lifeless caricatures they're ostensibly picking apart. Especially considering the expectations attending a project created by two kindred spirits with ideas and talent to spare, Love This Giant is a disappointment. With precious few exceptions, neither Clark nor Byrne seems willing to push the other into new musical territory that might contain revelations about either. The songs merely stand apart from life and dryly comment on its strangeness, while the arrangements-- most prominently featuring the work of several conservatory-level brass players-- are suffused with the sterility that always threatens long-distance collaborations.
"Dinner for Two" is representative in this regard. The narrator spends the song contemplating the sad fact that he's never able to enjoy a quiet, intimate time with his lover, because both are too busy with such nuisances as dinner parties with possibly famous authors milling about. The song's arid brass arrangement and bland percussion do it no favors (elsewhere on the album, John Congleton handles drum programming duties, and seems intent on dragging the music kicking and screaming into 2001). Later, there's "I Should Watch TV", which whooshes Byrne right past the clever engagement with popular culture that made a song like "Found a Job" such a quirky joy, and plops him straight into a self-important deconstruction of his own silly impulses. He's admitting that he really should watch more TV, because it would offer him insight into the minds of the nameless bodies he sees moving around himself everyday. But he resists, and instead sets off quoting Whitman's "Song of Myself" as if to convince himself of his own uniqueness.
As for St. Vincent, it's hard to imagine too many people discovering her through this collaboration, but either way, she's responsible for Giant's best moments. In her own way, she's downright soulful on the refrains of "Weekend in the Dust", a style that serves as a compelling counterpoint to the icy, aristocratic lilt she inhabits on the verses. Though "Ice Age" may not count among the highlights of Actor or Strange Mercy, it shows Clark's skill at shifting gears mid-song without disturbing the cargo, and at employing elements strategically-- here, *Giant'*s omnipresent (and stiflingly monochromatic) brass is mostly reduced to subtle color and minimalist chorus additions, until blooming during the song's well-earned coda. It's not exactly high praise, I know: Here are the two best songs on a strange flop of a high-profile collaboration. In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant. Byrne plays the wandering dilettante, content to transform his old ideas anew, while Clark upstages her mentor, convinced she still has a lot more to prove.


Manchester singer/guitarist Julie Campbell proves the post-punk revival isn't a spent force on this, her debut LP for Warp.

Nerve Up

It's one thing, in 2010, to release an album that owes a college-loan-sized debt to all sorts of post-punk touchstones; it's a totally different thing, however, when such an album-- a debut, no less-- earns the breathless praise of famed UK music journalist Paul Morley for that very quality. It takes something extraordinary to inspire someone that was there for the birth and ascendancy of Gang of Four and Wire and Public Image Limited and Joy Division and any other notable group from that scene to pen something like, "she might have been Fac 17/or she might have sung two shows with Section 25 and once met Blue Orchids around the back of a cinema showing Existenz." In other words, Morley's not just saying that LoneLady does a fine job mimicking her musical idols, but actually positions herself as a worthy peer to those very same groups.
Nerve Up is primarily the creation of singer/guitarist Julie Campbell, a native of Manchester who shows an uncanny ability to reinvigorate a sound that was seemingly beyond saving. When she slashes a pick across her guitar strings, there's no way to avoid using a word like "sharp" and "angular" in describing what emerges, and the way she sings-- agitated, clipped, in terse fragments-- perfectly complements those sounds. Campbell also employs a drum machine; it's presumably out of necessity, but the unerring precision of the backbeat does help maintain the sharpness of Nerve Up's edges. The combination of these elements gives the album a nervous, contagious energy that's evident the moment "If Not Now" starts, with Campbell furiously cycling through a two-note pattern on her guitar.
Most of the songs on Nerve Up follow the same template-- guitar chords are fired off, cryptic phrases are aired out ("sun threaten the horizon like a black sign"; "said a ghost is more solid than that"), and the drum machine hits it marks. Thankfully, Campbell finds enough wiggle room in this formula to keep things from stagnating-- where "If Not Now" and "Early the Haste Comes" hit the ground running, "Intuition" ass [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| umes a cocky and confident swagger [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| .
Thanks should also be directed to co-producer and former Laika member Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Stereolab). Fixsen adds the right amount of polish to these proceedings without overwhelming the songs-- accentuating the pish of a faux-cymbal here, adding some reverb to Campbell's voice there. These touches are so slight as to seem inconsequential, yet they prove to be invaluable. And sometimes the touches aren't so subtle-- a song like "Immaterial" with its charming lope and Campbell's keening vocals, would probably sound like a long lost 4AD gem (from the days of Throwing Muses and This Mortal Coil) without much trouble. The gauzy sheen that the track is given, however, is so reminiscent of that sound, it'd be hard for folks of a certain age (cough cough) to not imagine the accompanying (and undoubtedly awkward yet charming) video. I don't doubt that Fixsen also had a hand in giving the title track-- a funky pop earworm that lets Campbell stand toe-to-toe with Goldfrapp and Róisín Murphy-- a little something extra to make it truly pop.
And then, after nine tracks of this wonderful wall-to-wall skittishness, comes the album finale-- "Fear No More", a complete departure from what preceded it. It's a stark, spacious song that fills the void with a sepulchral guitar line, haunting background moans, what sounds like violin and balalaika, and Campbell singing about "the furious winter" and dreams of "fields, lonely and sweet, like Montana or Idaho." "Fear No More"'s pensive yearning, however, is of a piece with the more up-front restlessness that permeates the majority of Nerve Up. Hopefully, this type of maneuver is proof that LoneLady, having shown an astonishing ability to express her voice using the sounds of others, will work extra hard to make sure she doesn't repeat herself.


In a new archival collection, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, a fitting final chapter for an indescribably great band.

We Have Dozens of Titles

In a 1998 interview, David Grubbs once perfectly described the mysterious, impossible-sounding music he and Jim O’Rourke briefly conjured as Gastr Del Sol. “Every record saw us determined to create a different group with each song,” he said, capturing an amorphous quality running through their trio of perception-shattering albums, as well as the project’s initial debut as an entirely different group.
Grubbs started Gastr Del Sol in 1991 with Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire as an acoustic shift from their hardcore trio Bastro. Meanwhile, O’Rourke, emerging from the avant-garde music world, joined after one album just as Brown and McEntire were focusing on their own project Tortoise. Each album the duo made together—1994’s Crookt, Crackt or Fly, 1996’s Upgrade & Afterlife, and 1998’s swan song Camoufleur—feels like a classic of its era, but what many miss is how exciting, disorienting, and bizarre Gastr Del Sol could get on just a single, compilation track or the rare live performance. In the remarkable archival collection, We Have Dozens of Titles, Grubbs and O’Rourke shine a light on those obscure songs and oddities forming the shadow of an album that feels as rewarding as their main ones. Paired with recently discovered recordings of their final performance, it captures how this duo could feel so alive and unpredictable, across the span of a song or an entire discography, from a first rehearsal to a final show.
Listening to Gastr Del Sol’s music is like trying to grasp smoke. A soft piano chord, the hum of a harmonium, or a fingerpicked knot of John Fahey-inspired guitar might cast a sprawling shadow of musique concrète, erupt in guitar feedback by noise artist Kevin Drumm, or swoon into an orchestral sample from a ’50s monster movie like The Incredible Shrinking Man. In one breathtaking moment on “The Sea Uncertain,” from Upgrade & Afterlife, a whistling tea kettle and a screaming internet modem form a quiet duet.
Dozens begins with a work-in-progress, a live version of “The Seasons Reverse” found on unearthed recordings of the band’s final performance at the 1997 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Québec. While the version that would appear a year later on Camoufleur adds McEntire’s hypnotic polyrhythms, glitchy electronics from Oval’s Markus Popp, flourishes of steel drum, elastic cornet, and Grubbs’ jubilantly surreal wordplay, the song’s most miraculous twist is already fully formed live. Its dense guitar work spirals endlessly deeper until the pop of Grubbs’ strings is as big as exploding fireworks. And then, as O’Rourke sneaks a field recording into the mix, you realize there are fireworks. It’s a humbling, beautiful climax that’s suddenly interrupted by an inquisitive French voice, then O’Rourke’s stammering “Don’t worry, keep doing it! It’s a microphone…I’m recording you blowing off firecrackers…” The moment simply blows up in O’Rourke’s face as he desperately tries to explain and salvage things with the perturbed stranger he’s been recording, only offering further apologies that he can’t speak French. As a field recording it’s a stroke of genius—while simultaneously roasting themselves and field recordings.
That concert offers more surprises like “Ursus Artcos Wonderfilis” from the 1991 debut The Serpentine Similar, the sprawling “Onion Orange” from Grubbs’ debut solo album, and another Camoufleur stunner, “Blues Subtitled No Sense of Wonder,” which leans even harder into its piercing organ melody. Grubbs’ tender vocal performance (including the lyrics where this collection takes its title) isn’t present yet, but a warped TV-sampling interlude that never made the final cut provides a jarring delight.
While the studio recordings on Dozens have all technically been released somewhere, they find a far better home here together. “Quietly Approaching”—which initially appeared on a Red Hot charity release—shines as one of Gastr’s most mysterious pieces. Its ominous textures and chords hang in the air before a brass ensemble erupts midway. “At Night and At Night” is a highlight not only of the Grubbs/Brown/McEntire era, but of the nascent days of the legendary Chicago label, Drag City—its angular peaks originally fitting comfortably on the Hey Drag City comp alongside early Smog and Pavement.
It feels true to the project’s time-bending spirit that Dozens’ shortest and longest studio tracks are its two most memorable. “The Japanese Room at La Pagode,” off a split with the late Tony Conrad, captures two minutes of the duo’s most precise and fractured sounds, from the single-second crack of percussion and Grubbs’ soft piano leading to a cold vacuum of humming electronics. It lingers just to the point of discomfort before a blast of digital noise signals Grubbs’ gentle coda. Meanwhile, the 17-minute epic “The Harp on Factory Street,” originally released as a standalone, functions even better here as an album-within-an-album. Gastr bloom into a 10-piece band, building a towering dirge in the first half before growing so quiet you can hear the chairs creak.
People often get to Gastr Del Sol looking for “more” of something and find a band that sounds like nothing else. It’s why people collected these rarities over the years, chasing any scrap of sound they could from this strange, mysterious project. And it’s why the notoriously self-critical O’Rourke also once perfectly described Gastr Del Sol in a 2018 interview with Stereogum: “This is gonna sound weird, but we were fucking great.” More than 25 years later, O’Rourke and Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, closing off their beloved project as finely as a tape loop.


The Puerto Rican superproducer’s debut LP is a wellspring of new ideas for reggaeton. Even when the concepts don’t fully connect, he remains one of the genre’s most forward-thinking architects.

Data

In the early 2000s, Luny Tunes had the future of reggaeton in the palm of their hands. Mas Flow 2, the Dominican American production duo’s 2005 compilation album, spawned a series of classics. The scandalizing drama of Daddy Yankee and Wisin y Yandel’s “Mayor Que Yo” became a bachatón standard; the latter’s massive hit “Rakata” later received the Arca experimental treatment. A reference to Alexis & Fido’s “El Tiburón” (“The Shark”) on Bad Bunny’s “Safaera” would lead concertgoers to don shark costumes, anticipating the precise moment to answer the original song’s refrain (“Que me lleve el tiburón”) with a hip-thrusting new response: “¡Aqui llego tu tiburón!” Mas Flow 2 cleaved through the weeds of a rising genre, forging a path for future Latin artists and offering an eager fledgling producer the opportunity to get his feet wet.
After a year of tinkering with production software, Marcos Efraín Masís Fernández, a rock-, rap-, and anime-obsessed 15-year-old from Puerto Rico, was introduced to Luny Tunes through Nely el Arma Secreta, another foundational beatmaker on the island. Trembling in the presence of his idols, the teenage Fernández previewed a smidgen of the colossal original production that would become the intro to Mas Flow 2. Those audacious 58 seconds, jam-packed with dramatic synthesizers, battle-ready drum rolls, and bombastic strings, crowned Fernández as Luny Tunes’ official protégé: Tainy Tunes. They signed him to their legendary in-house production team immediately.
Over the past two decades, Tainy’s ability to synthesize old-school nostalgia into modern-day bangers has been a secret ingredient in the resurgence of urbano Latino. Today he is the premiere perreo vibe dealer, pushing beyond cookie-cutter Anglo pop crossovers and staying true to the genre’s defiant DNA. He’s produced for contemporary Latin megastars like Ozuna, J Balvin, Don Omar, Cardi B, Kali Uchis, and Selena Gomez. Without Tainy, Bad Bunny classics like “Safaera,” “Callaíta,” and “Yo Perreo Sola” would not exist. But because he is quite literally the best in the business, Tainy’s studio debut, Data, struggles to distinguish itself in his trailblazing discography. Over 19 tracks, Tainy shows off his wide-ranging taste and appetite for experimentation but struggles to balance the search for the next step in urbano’s evolution within the conceptual framework of an album.
The best reggaeton is magnetic, demanding that you surrender to the careful emotional interplay between production and lyrics, the playful addition of a Jaws sound effect, or clever onomatopoeia that riffs on the intrinsic melodic quality of Spanish. But from the moment Myke Towers concludes his verse on opener “Obstáculo” with a brag about Bitcoin, the tone of Data feels tacky and forced. Cinematic production flourishes—a robot voice, ceremonial drums, hymnal humming—all come as left turns. The contrived energy dulls many songs on the album, which Tainy describes as a “series of uploads that ultimately bring a cyborg named Sena to life.” With or without context, that narrative isn’t apparent until the final 10 seconds of closer “Sacrificio,” a cheesy, Rebelde-ready no-hook rap track that concludes with the sound of a woman gasping like she’s just been resuscitated. It feels as if Tainy decided to tape on a concept after the album was already complete.
Futuristic themes and sounds pepper the tracklist, but without correspondingly consistent musical innovation, Data’s claims of changing the game weigh down its true stabs at evolution. “Sci-Fi,” featuring Rauw Alejandro, sounds exactly like what you’d expect from his chrome-plated Saturno aesthetic. The ’80s influences on “Paranormal” are lukewarm despite Álvaro Díaz’s “siempre main character nunca NPC” jab. On “Volver,” the album’s biggest trust fall, Tainy brings in Four Tet and Skrillex, fusing their meandering electronics and subdued drum’n’bass with a reggaeton beat that doesn’t entirely mesh with Rauw’s verse. Even bringing Daddy Yankee out of retirement for a Feid and Sech-assisted single doesn’t hit like it should. With incessant mentions of a girl who hits the gym and takes hella selfies, “La Baby” evokes the soundtrack to a “day in the life” from Latina Corporate Baddie TikTok.
On many songs, Tainy attempts to add nuance to basic pop reggaeton by tacking on string and piano-led outros. “Buenos Aires” is a radio-ready track about partying and baecation, capped by a string section like a superfluous sprig of parsley. “En Visto” slaps some mandolins at the end of an average Ozuna cut. Tainy finally remedies this offense on “Me Jodi...” Arcángel’s sunset melodies about getting his girl back keep the song light and frothy, and when the last 40 seconds switch to an orchestral outro, Tainy sets up a moment to be transported by the song’s emotions. When the next track starts, the electronic pulse and steel drum of “Volver” echo the breezy essence that’s just been cooked up. When Tainy strings together disparate tastes with finesse, his compositional compass feels decipherable.
Thanks to its sheer volume, Data does contain a handful of gems. The six-minute posse cut “Pasiempre” nods to Tainy’s foundational work on X 100PRE, coaxing out a reluctant Trap Bunny for a surprise verse. Co-producer Arca’s glitchy contributions bend Tainy’s beat into an elastic band for Jhayco, Myke Towers, and Omar Courtz to bounce off, and her siren song on the bridge is a splash of cold water that prefaces the truest line Bunny’s spit in a while: “Soy ma’ grande que el trap” (“I’m much bigger than trap”). With three prominent Conejo Malo features, Data revives the classic sound of an artist whose legacy is now fused with Tainy’s own. Bunny imagines them as the reggaeton Kobe and Shaq, as if the two players ditched their feud to dominate urbano airwaves. The ’80s synth pop of “Mobaji Ghost” feels like wind through your hair, and “Lo Siento BB :/” could’ve easily worked on Un Verano Sin Ti. On other standouts like Wisin y Yandel’s ode to old-school perreo “Todavía,” the Marias and Young Miko’s sugary “Mañana,” and Chencho Corleone’s slow-wining interlude, nothing feels forced.
Data is the work of a producer with nothing to prove playing with every toy he owns at once. Instead of aiming for the charts, Tainy pushes each featured artist to explore uncharted perreo territory, presenting urbano music for the emo fans (“11 y Once”), the TikTok girlies (“La Baby”), and the old heads (“Todavía”) all in one place. Despite Data’s unnecessary embellishments and absent android, Tainy remains one of reggaeton’s most imaginative producers, anticipating trends and attempting kickflips within a genre that other producers would rather dilute for crossovers’ sake. On his debut, Tainy’s reggaeton isn’t merely aimed at turning up the party: It’s an ambitious attempt at rewiring reggaeton from the roots.


L.A. dream-punks' second LP matches a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise with their sturdiest set of songs yet.

Everything in Between

Words like "accomplished" and "discipline" seem opposed to the very ideals on which punk was founded. But L.A. dream-punks No Age seek to straighten up and fly a little straighter on Everything in Between, tamping down their whiplash tempos, prying open their songs to let a little more air in, further settling into their frantic sound. Their songwriting's grown in leaps and bounds, evincing unexpected depth yet never shying from a satisfying detour. And their sound's become more balanced; hot blasts of dissonance have been turned into smoldering pockets of noise. Everything in Between is a grown-up, downright respectable record about the pitfalls of being a lifer with a 9 to 5, and the sound's matured along with their outlook. Less ferocious, more deliberate but in many ways more compelling, Everything in Between finds No Age matching a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise.
By this point, you probably know what goes into a No Age song: A scuzzy intro jumps face-first into a thrashabout hook, either jumping again into another firestorm or swelling to a swift end. On 2008's Nouns, they cut these ripcords through with huge, gorgeous clouds of sound. It worked beautifully at the LP level, but the songs themselves felt shot out of a cannon. They didn't always leave room for nuance.
Everything in Between fiinds a little space for everything. Randy Randall's guitar now buzzes and howls throughout these songs, providing them with a backbone rather than simply standing behind them and shoving. Dean Spunt's drums go from a wet thwack to a wild carnival stomp as the situation dictates, seeming to take on new forms as the LP progresses. Every tone, from Randall's guitar squeals to Spunt's impassioned shouts, feels treated, scuffed up, warped. But the sounds are more spectral, less squalid, a product of Randall's varying his guitar tones and the duo's embracing a few more patient tempos. Rather than stepping to one huge precipice at the edge of every song, they've made them more jagged, played up the inter [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| nal [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| tensions, and traded in one big thrill for a seemingly self-propelled series of precision blasts.
Structurally, Everything in Between doesn't shy far from the Nouns formula: Several hook-forward numbers anchor the front half, the floatier stuff mostly shows up around the two-thirds mark, and they close the thing out with a total banger. But the tunes themselves are longer and slightly more traditional (they actually liked a couple of these choruses enough to sing them twice), and the punk rock urgency of their past work's been tempered slightly by a more deliberate pace and Randall's trickier, rustier, less world-beating guitar riffage. It all calls to mind less straight-up SoCal punk and more rangy, roughhewn indie rock; there's flecks of Dinosaur Jr.'s lazy crunch in "Valley Hump Crash", plenty of Hüsker Dü's pop urgency in "Common Heat", enough Sonic Youth to go around everywhere. They've opened up their tone palette so much here, it's as though just about anything could be around the corner. The drone bits feel especially purposeful this time around; "Positive Amputation" has all the skyward motion of an Explosions in the Sky tune, and nearly every time they pull back into these sonic curlicues, the record seems to breathe. They've long felt like a hardcore band with excellent noise instincts, but Everything in Between is where you realize they're mostly a rock band with a ridiculously good ear for sound.
Tuning into No Age for Dean Spunt's lyrics has always seemed a bit of a fool's errand; his tales of youthful malaise are accurately but rarely vividly rendered, and besides, it's not always been easy to make him out through the din. Spunt's voice, though still occasionally inaudible, sits far higher in the mix here on Everything in Between, sticking his lyrics-- and his thin, pleading voice-- at the center of some of these songs. Spunt's still not exactly a masterful singer, and he's just shy of the pitch a time or two here. He's putting his voice to better use though, with a batch of lyrics that underscore the motivational appeals to action that have long hovered around the No Age project. If the record's got a thesis statement, it's somewhere in its first line: "One time is all I need to know my job's complete," Spunt notes, before proceeding with his most detailed, deliberate record yet. Despite the obvious care that went into it, Everything in Between's hewn-from-pure-noise songwriting still feels more like a ridiculously good run of happy accidents than anything resembling hard work-- and it's shot through with an unassuming left coast attitude that makes the record all the more ingratiating.
Everything in Between begins with a series of hits from Spunts' drums; it ends with fireworks. Not the big crash-boom city-spanners, nah; strictly bodega-special bottle rockets, popping along behind Spunt's drums in the chorus of "Chem Trails". It's sort of perfect; this is no lavish, decadent affair, no grab at some greater glory. This is a pair of friends getting together to make a truly compelling racket, and while the wildly successful Everything in Between is certainly cause for celebration, making some big scene would throw its balance off completely. Everything in Between certainly doesn't feel like some huge statement of purpose, some radical reinvention, some big move toward the mainstream; simply a sonically chameleonic, musically generous, seriously compelling record from a couple guys who've once again got all their pedals in a row.


Ryan Adams, part-time solo musician, full-time frontman of indie-country\n\ band Whiskeytown, is from North Carolina. As chance has it ...

Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams, part-time solo musician, full-time frontman of indie-country band Whiskeytown, is from North Carolina. As chance has it, I happen to be from North Carolina, too. Adams hails from a city you've probably never heard of, a little pit-stop on the way to the beach called Jacksonville. I've lived most of my life in a tin-shack of a town called Lumberton, only two hours from Jacksonville by highway. Both towns are small geographical afterthoughts, and about as "southern" as any place you're likely to find in modern-day America.
You have to understand, "southern" no longer means cotton fields, plantations and beautiful belles waiting to escort you to Big Daddy's formal ball. Still, despite all the changes history has brought us, three things remain true about the south:

It's boring here. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go.
The south is beautiful, all small towns and miles of lush, green fields.
It's where all the good music you've ever heard was born. Soul, rock, country, blues, all of 'em from south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In the south, the good music is like sunshine-- you just can't escape it. This is the place Ryan Adams and I both call home-- this boring, but melodic, pit of despair. So is it any wonder that Adams, a young man of only 27 years, is able to craft an album as stark and as enjoyably bleak as Heartbreaker?
Singing in a voice that's just filthy with despair, Adams delivers his first solo album with the practiced swagger and genuine hurt of a veteran country crooner. A startling 15-song masterpiece, Heartbreaker is a drinker's album, an ode to sadness that deals exclusively with all the dark and dirty corners of the human heart. It's music written in the language of loneliness, depression, and, above all, heartbreak, in all its varied forms. And it makes perfect sense that this should be Adams' first solo album, as-- aside from a couple of notable collaborations-- the material here is far too personal and focused to have been produced by anything but one man with one soul.
Heartbreaker shows Ryan Adams sweeping all of the clichés of mass- produced, "new country" under the rug and tapping into everything that makes genuine country music unique and beautiful: raw emotion, deep groove and clever storytelling. There are no simple, melodramatic, commercial-ready ballads here; the music is too deeply rooted in old-school country music, folk-rock songs and bluegrass jams to produce anything that predictable. With that musical philosophy firmly in place, it stands to reason that each track on the album is a gem, showcasing Adams' considerable songwriting ability and a way with words that most musicians would sell their spines to possess.
The record begins with the misleadingly upbeat "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)," a swinging bluegrass number that wouldn't sound out of place in a honky-tonk. But Adams gets to the business of bringing us down soon enough. When Adams sings, "I just want to die without you," on "Call Me on Your Way Back Home," orphans run out into the street and weep. For "Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)," Adams calls on the patron saints of sparse folk music and lyrical tomfoolery while channeling the troubadour vocals of early Bob Dylan to produce one of Heartbreaker's lighter, but better, tracks. Still, even this stylistic similarity is superficial, as the blood- and-guts of the song are all his own.
Adams continues his winning streak by making great use of a rare cameo by country-rock legend Emmylou Harris on "Oh My Sweet Carolina," as Harris' trademark falsetto blends beautifully with Adams' own rich vocals for a simple, affecting song about one man's longing to return home. "Come Pick Me Up," a track about a man struggling with a bad relationship and pining for his cheating girlfriend weighs in as the album's most affecting moment. Gluing crushing lyrics to undeniably catchy drum riffs, greasy guitar work and soulful harmonica playing, the song is five minutes and thirteen seconds of damn near perfect music.
There's nothing terribly complex or tricky about Heartbreaker. In fact, it's probably one of the simplest, most straightforward albums you'll hear all year. But this album wasn't written to be complex. It isn't electronica designed to tickle your cerebral cortex. It isn't music to figure out. It's music to feel to. It's music to drink alone to. And it's sadder than witnessing your grandmother's burial.
Heartbreaker is the soundtrack to the last ten minutes of any relationship you've ever watched crumble before your eyes. It's music for the ruined romantic in all of us. Usually, that little romantic simply sits quietly, tearfully watching everything disappear without so much as a single complaint. But on Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams has not only convinced that voice to speak, he's taught it to sing. The result is an album of astonishing musical proficiency, complete honesty and severe beauty.


Even in its brevity, the Montreal four-piece art-rock band stage a foray into something more instinctive and assured.

FICTION EP

Suuns’ music sounds so twisted and squashed because it is usually the product of several competing influences. Guitars repeat like arpeggiated keyboards, crisp percussion jostles for space with drum machines, and vocals snarl and quaver like synthesizers. The frontman for the Montreal four-piece, Ben Shemie, once said, “I like this idea of pressure,” which is evident on their latest EP. Hyper-compressed lead vocals and instrumentation repel each other, with each element blooming and reducing like blobs of oil in water.
Fiction is clearly a direct descendent of Felt, Suuns’ 2018 studio album; “Death” even reuses part of “Moonbeams,” Felt’s penultimate song. However, the EP deepens and develops the band’s themes of dissociated helplessness introduced back in 2018. The songs here are underlaid with nervy, roiling sheets of babbling feedback. Austere arrangements are overlaid with warped electronics and distorted vocals, like if Gustav Klimt’s “Golden Phase” paintings were able to manufacture a car. Clearly defined, geometric images foreground muted backdrops in a way that gives a strange sense of physical perspective. Suuns tap into a specific mood: It’s not hazy, but faded.
With all but one song clocking in at around three minutes, the EP is, naturally, brief. However, it never feels insubstantial because the sound of the whole thing is so spectacular. The digitized vocal treatment is one of the most striking elements here. Though present on Felt, it’s now inescapable. Shemie’s melodies can feel improvisational to the point of being atonal, but occasionally a gorgeous pop cadence plops out. There’s such a focus on distorting the voice that the effects seem to direct Shemie’s voice rather than the other way round. It gives the feeling as if it has a life of its own.
Although the noisy, avant-rock EP feels dislocated from reality in a musical sense, Suuns end on a note of political anxiety. “Trouble Every Day” is a spoken-word piece lifted from a Frank Zappa lyric, backed by crashing jazz drums and a squalling guitar line. Originally written in 1965, the lyrics “I’m not Black but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white” and references to “cops out on the street” are eerily prescient.
In the past, Suuns’ world has felt insular and meticulous. They make cold, brutal music with song titles like “Paralyser” and “Control.” Fiction disturbs this categorization. Of course, it’s tempting to want more, more clearly-defined songs, more beats, more aggression, more of that sublime bweebeebewboo guitar line; there are only two straight-up-and-down songs here while the rest feel like sketches. The abstract seethe of “Breathe” is barely more than one looped refrain, all ticker-tape snares and slack metallic string sounds. However, Fiction is still a marker for the noise-rock stalwarts: a foray into something more instinctive and assured.

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The jazz drummer and producer’s hypnotic double album is culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes that he’s layered and spliced together into something wholly new and radically communal.

Universal Beings

In the final moments of Universal Beings—at the end of a radiant hour and a half of polymorphic pulse and atmospheric shimmer—Makaya McCraven breaks a blissful silence with a practical question. “You guys got all that?” he asks, presumably addressing the mobile recording crew set up in a garage behind a house in Los Angeles.
McCraven, a drummer and producer with an alchemist’s touch, and Jeff Parker, a guitarist possessed of similar magic, have just glided through the impromptu dreamscape that will provide this album with a title track. They’re crowded into that garage with a handful of peers, including saxophonist Josh Johnson and violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. At face value, McCraven’s question feels like routine studio patter. By including it on the album, he extends his check-in to the listener, with a tone at once solicitous and roguish. You guys got all that?
There’s a lot to unpack in Universal Beings, the latest and most deeply assured in a series of releases under the rubric McCraven likes to call “organic beat music.” Recorded not only in Los Angeles but also in New York, Chicago, and London—four metro areas shaping the contour of improvised music, now as ever—the album transmits at a coolly utopian frequency. Informed by ambient and hip-hop protocols as well as state-of-the-art jazz hyperfluency, it suggests both the spark of discovery and the sheen of an obsessively sculptured art object.
McCraven, who has spent the last decade in Chicago, began developing this model several years ago. His second album—In the Moment, released on International Anthem in 2015—was its first proper manifestation. A hypnotic double album culled from a year’s worth of gig tapes, it took shape through a painstaking process of digital looping, layering and splicing, like an Ableton software-enabled successor to Teo Macero’s machinations with Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew.
There’s an ascendant generation of jazz drummers who understand hip-hop production from the inside, and have been working to melt the edges. Chris Dave, a D’Angelo confrere and emeritus member of the Robert Glasper Experiment, recently released a long-awaited album with his group the Drumhedz. Karriem Riggins has put out two albums of beat-driven instrumentals, including last year’s Headnod Suite; he’s a member of August Greene, alongside Glasper and Common. A brilliant array of other figures—from Eric Harland to Justin Brown to Jamire Williams to Louis Cole—marks this multiphase skillset as not just a vogue style but a new reality.
What sets McCraven apart is twofold. For one thing, he builds his tracks on the basis of live performance, typically with a bare minimum of premeditated music. In the Moment established this working method, which yielded two subsequent mixtapes: Highly Rare, in 2017, and Where We Come From (CHICAGOxLONDON Mixtape), earlier this year. The spontaneous-composition mode gives McCraven a wealth of raw material to work with, including the dimensions of a room. One reason these tracks never feel cold or sterile is because they exude a sense of place.
Which leads us to McCraven’s second insight: the lasting power of communion. Producing tracks, making beats—it can often be the most insular form of music-making, no more tactile or social than writing code. But the collaborative energies on Universal Beings are pervasive and tangible. Taking in this music, you get the impression that every contributor has a stake in the outcome, post-production tinkering or no. And with that stake comes a tacit understanding: This music subsumes even the boldest solo heroics within a collectivist whole.
McCraven convened a different crew in each of his four host cities, so it isn’t just the environs that change from one section to the next. (In the deluxe double-vinyl release, each session takes up one side of an LP: New York on side 1, Chicago on side 2, then London and L.A.) The shift from one locale to the next is subtle, because of a certain unity of purpose—and, surely, the careful work of streamlining all of this material into a coherent form.
The New York crew, recorded in Ridgewood, Queens last summer, features harpist Brandee Younger, cellist Tomeka Reid, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and bassist Dezron Douglas. On a track called “Young Genius,” they begin with the looking-through-a-smudged-glass feeling of a vintage J Dilla track, all loopy rhythm and harp twinkle, before the beat snaps into focus. Then, suddenly, McCraven and Douglas are swinging à la Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, setting up one of the album’s few conventional solo turns, by Ross. It’s as if an entire range of rhythmic approaches has been compressed into a slippery five and a half minutes.
A few other pieces on the album feel similarly packed with incident. “Suite Haus,” from the London session, has Nubya Garcia on tenor saxophone, Ashley Henry on Fender Rhodes, and Daniel Casimir on bass. It feels like a fully formed composition, with an arc and mood and a set of motifs. As the title implies, it also gestures toward house music, with McCraven’s beat shapeshifting in subtle yet perceptible ways. Garcia is obviously deep in her element here, owning the track without ever pushing into the red.
Her fellow British tenor hero, Shabaka Hutchings, turns up on the Chicago side, alongside Tomeka Reid, and bassist Junius Paul. The scrappiest and most cathartic of the four sessions, it includes some flamethrower-expressive Hutchings in the middle of “Prosperity’s Fear,” the stretch on the album that veers closest to freeform abstraction. But this unit also foregrounds groove: “Inner Flight” serves notice that McCraven draws rhythmic mojo from Tony Allen as well as Tony Williams. And the concussive tumble of “Atlantic Black” maintains its sense of form largely because of Reid, one of this album’s MVPs.
This shouldn’t need to be said, but it probably does: Every one of McCraven’s bands finds a central place for a woman. This is notable mainly in light of a contemporary scene—at the convergence of jazz, R&B and hip-hop—that can still so often resemble a boy’s club. One track from the L.A. session, “Butterss’s,” is a showcase for bassist Anna Butterss, who exerts her authority from the ground up and the inside, rather than up top or out front.
That inner-workings ideal is central to any understanding of McCraven’s larger project, and one reason Universal Beings is likely to make more intuitive sense to a crate-digger than to a jazz loyalist. The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.
And to that end, the occasional interpolation of musician banter feels deeper than filler. On “Brighter Days Beginning,” the penultimate track, McCraven and his L.A. cohort spend some time trading philosophical reflections—about the responsibility of the individual in a society, and the power of a collective, and the corrupting influence of corporate media. “We’re universal beings,” someone says, sparking appreciative laughter. It’s a quip with high-minded connotations, and McCraven makes sure the rest of the album sets it up as dawning truth.


Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne draws heavily from Sun Kil Moon's Among the Leaves, and underpins the conflict in Kozelek's gratitude toward his fans-- whose support has led him into a lonely life of touring. In that respect, Like Rats, a new set of covers, may be considered a peace offering.

Mark Kozelek: Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne/Like Rats

"So I spent all yesterday hanging out by myself," says Mark Kozelek between songs on his new live album. "Went out last night... by myself. Spent today... by myself. It's alright. I spend a lot of time by myself." This might be one of the more revealing moments on any Kozelek/Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters release: a complete and pointed dismissal of any romanticism that might still cling to the touring life. Rather than carouse around Melbourne or even see the sights, he admits, "I don't even know the name of the hotel I'm at. I just walked around the park, went to the 7-11, ate some nuts or something. I don't fucking know. I was bored out of my fucking mind."
That disappointment-- the unbridgeable rift between how you dream your life will go and how it actually turns out-- is the subject of Kozelek's most recent studio album, last year's harrowing, weirdly humorous Among the Leaves. Song after song bemoans the fate of a cult musician in his 40s, a songwriter's songwriter who has put 20 years into a career that has leveled out, who has won glowing reviews but has very little to show for it except his name on a marquee. 7-11s in Melbourne look just like 7-11s everywhere else; a bag of nuts can be the highlight of your day. Expressing his extreme weariness with the touring life, Kozelek sounds better than he has in years-- more engaged, more personable, more observant, and more willing to describe the world around him, even if it tends to end at the stage lights.
Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne may be his most substantial live album in ages. It draws heavily from Among the Leaves, and makes a worthy addendum to the studio recording because it places these songs in what sounds like their natural setting: a small club sparsely filled with adoring fans clapping politely even after Kozelek laments the lop-sided male: female ratio. There's a sobering gravity here, a weird black humor accentuated by the relatively short run time: 12 tracks instead of Among the Leaves' 17, coming in at a reasonable 60 minutes instead of 80.
Kozelek's guitar playing is precise and lovely, especially during the solo on "Heron Blue", and his voice retains its hangdog eloquence, effortlessly evoking his workaday loneliness on "Broken Wing" and the brutally candid "Track Number 8". Perhaps the standout on Phoenix, however, is the stage banter. Several of his previous live albums, including last year's On Tour, have excised his between-song ramblings, but they sound crucial to this set, a revealing counterpart to the songs. He exercises a sly humor that's at once gracious (commiserating with the staff who will lose their jobs when the Phoenix Public House closes) and biting (dedicating "The Moderately Talented Young Woman" to an audience member who describes herself as a musician and waitress).
There's a great, weird, tense moment when Kozelek considers the irony of a fan who loves his music so much that he downloads it illegally. "I'm trying to understand. So you live in Melbourne, Australia, and you bought my music off a Russian web site. Why? Why'd you do that?" Kozelek sounds both touched and offended. That's the central conflict on Among the Leaves, but it's even more pronounced on Live at Phoenix Public House: Kozelek is grateful for his fans' dedication over the years, but on some level he resents them for leading him into such a lonely life.
So maybe Like Rats is a peace offering. His previous covers albums have been fan favorites, presenting his melancholy takes on songs by AC/DC, John Denver, Low, and Stephen Sondheim, but this new collection may be his most varied and adventurous. The tracklist portrays a man with broad listening habits, who not only translates these songs into his own particular style but erases the distinctions between genres. "Time is Love", a silly concept song by Josh Turner, has the same rhythmic thrust as Ted Nugent's "Free-for-All", and the Descendents' "Silly Girl" proves just as melodic as the snappy "Right Back Where We Started From", the 1976 hit by UK singer Maxine Nightingale.
Just as he brings these songs into his realm, they expand his realm, forcing him to rethink how he uses his voice and guitar. He opens Genesis' "Carpet Crawlers" in lush a cappella, layering his vocals in a way that expresses a profound, possibly narcotized wonder at the little creatures around him, and the one-two punch of Bad Brains' "I" and Godflesh's "Like Rats" redirects his signature low-key sound to express something like outrage and anger-- a wholly new mode for Kozelek. On the other hand, Bruno Mars' "Young Girls" wryly comments on all the tales of obsessive female fans on Among the Leaves, and Kozelek turns the hook into a wistfully descending melody.
Any record that emphasizes variety will have a few tracks that fall just outside the artist's reach; not everything works quite so well, although that has more to do with song choice than execution. Despite his attempts to alter the melody, Kozelek's version of Danzig's "13" recalls Johnny Cash's similarly acoustic yet superior version, and he awkwardly truncates the Dayglo Abortions' "I Killed Mommy", as if he can't bring himself to sing some of the more extreme lyrics. While it does sound like the ultraviolent companion to Kozelek's understated serial killer rumination "Glenn Tipton" (which he revives on Live at Phoenix Public House), it ultimately sounds pointless and self-indulgent, intended perhaps to entertain himself more than his audience. But after so many bland hotels and anonymous convenience stores, who can blame him for making his own fun?


Beach House's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on their second record; they've simply cleaned up their sound, resulting in crisper, brighter, bolder songs that retain the Baltimore dream-pop duo's melodic sense and vibe of elegant decay.

Devotion

Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy.
For pristine pop, Beach House's self-titled 2006 debut was awfully raw: Legrand downplayed her classical piano and voice training in a humble negation of virtuosity. The organs sounded like something thick and coarse being pulled through a small, jagged opening; chord structures were simply suggestions; imperfections were kept intact. That balance of beauty and imprecision made inspired songs like "Saltwater", "Tokyo Witch", "Apple Orchard", and "Master of None" easy to fall in love with.
The duo's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on Devotion; they've simply cleaned up their act. These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris. "Gila" is a funeral on a sunny day; its shimmering organs are controlled, never bleeding chaotically as they did on the debut, and are complemented by frilly but steadfast guitar. "Turtle Island" reaffirms Beach House's preference for simple, skeletal percussion, but its dense melody is a marked advancement. The result of this pre-spring cleaning is that Devotion lacks some of the immediate highs of the first album-- you no longer get the sense of rooting for an embattled underdog-- but winds up consistently stronger.
Even though it's tidier and more streamlined, the music surrenders none of its autumnal charm, and there's still a sense of eavesdropping on a private, ongoing dialogue between Legrand and a ghost. Of course, we only get to hear her side of the story. As on the first album, which began with the words "Love you all the time, even though you're not mine," she favors second-person assertions that speak of self-effacement, dependence, and sinister dream-world conversations. "Your wish is my command," she intones on "Wedding Bell", becoming a genie in a puff of smoke. And on "Gila", she sings in a world-weary wheeze, "Man, you've got a lot of jokes to tell." But instead of the punch line, we get the sort of jarring shift that characterizes dreams: "So you throw your baby's banners down the well."
"Invite your sister into the garden," she drones on the wind-up waltz "You Came to Me", concurrently inviting us into the murky depths of her romantic consciousness. There's a sense of latent danger in the invitation, like a siren song luring us toward sharp clusters of rock. Portals into mysterious spaces pockmark Devotion; none of them promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand's devotion is a dungeon into which she tosses her own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return.


The dazzling third album from the stalwarts of Midwestern emo does away with the band’s self-mythology and takes bleary, bold steps toward a new dawn.

American Football: American Football (LP3)

American Football (LP3)

American Football have abandoned the dearly beloved house in Urbana, Ill. that graced the cover of their first two albums. That house became an avatar for youthful nostalgia, the band, and Midwest emo itself. Its replacement on the cover of the third American Football LP has an almost sinister beauty to it: a bloodshot sunrise, a creeping fog. The shot was taken about 10 minutes away in the town of Champaign and, from a certain vantage point, you might think it was the morning after the original house at 704 W. High Street was burnt to cinders. American Football might prefer it that way, as their dazzling third album does away with their self-mythology and takes bleary, bold steps toward a new dawn.
American Football (known colloquially as LP3, as all the band’s studio albums are self-titled) awakens with microscopic bell chimes and shudders of vibraphone as the seven minutes of “Silhouettes” swaddle the band’s guitar lattices in reverb and glitter-gray exhaust. It’s Steve Reich reincarnated as a tinny iPhone alarm on lead singer Mike Kinsella’s nightstand, going off after a sleepless night. “Oh, the muscle memory it must take to stay,” Kinsella sings, a sharp turn from the typical American Football song where ex-lovers wistfully stare into a Midwestern autumn sunset, or his work with the band Owen, where he’s staring down an Old Style at last call. And yet, a line like, “Tell me again what’s the allure of inconsequential love,” speaks to the pull of having at least felt something, an escape from the mundanity that creeps into any love of consequence.
LP3 explores the old emo adage “nothing feels good” and turns it into a kind of middle-age anhedonia. “Sensitivity deprived/I can’t feel a thing inside,” Kinsella sighs over skittering percussion and glossed harmonics. LP2, from 2016, was littered with first-thought-best-thought lyrics like these, Kinsella using his persona as Quintessential Emo Dad as a justification for his self-pity. But the title of “Uncomfortably Numb” is indicative of Kinsella’s newfound ability to wink and cry at the same time. He uses aging into his 40s to conceal a pathology so deep-rooted and repressed, it can only be understood as genetic: “I blamed my father in my youth/Now as a father, I blame the booze.”
This isn’t the only example of late-’90s Midwestern emo heroes gracefully transitioning themselves to fatherhood, but few can match the sonic evolution of American Football—with unheralded producer Jason Cupp once again rendering American Football in brilliant topographic detail, the album is an idealized form of music to test hi-fi speakers. Emo’s fractious rhythms and plaintive, untrained vocals are completely severed from its hardcore roots and bleed into shoegaze, post-rock, and minimalist jazz—genres that do vibes more than feelings.
Nearly every track on LP3 pushes out toward the five-minute mark, and where previous American Football songs were internal journeys, this album’s travel to new vistas in all directions. The flow of “Every Wave to Ever Rise” is languorous and asymmetrical like a tide pool before its outro descends into the same deep water as the Cure’s Disintegration, whereas the intro of “Doom in Full Bloom” dares to toe the vast oceans of Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The impact of recently inducted multi-instrumentalist Nate Kinsella is most noticeable on the rubbery backbone of “Every Wave to Ever Rise” and “I Can’t Feel You”’s thrumming motorik, but the wealth of textures he brings to LP3 warrants alternative superlative titles like the ones they used back in the late ’90s: The One With the Mellotron Flutes and Children’s Choir (“Heir Apparent”), The One With French Vocals (“Every Wave to Ever Rise”), The One With the Bass Breakdown and a 12-String (“I Can’t Feel You”).
The emo diplomacy of “Uncomfortably Numb,” featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams, is the biggest bombshell, as basically every emo band in 2019 sounds at least somewhat like American Football and/or Paramore. Williams would shatter the song immediately if she brought the wattage of Paramore’s best-known songs. Instead, she slowly and imperceptibly weaves into the second verse, a voice of conscience as Kinsella sinks deeper into despair. She tenderly tries to buoy him up during the bridge and takes over the third verse in a lower, dusky register completely unrecognizable as that of Hayley Williams, turning a duet between emo icons into a humble, heartbreaking exchange between lapsed lovers.
For the 15 years during which LP1 was the only American Football album, it was indie rock’s equivalent of Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise—a humble masterpiece of mixed emotions that offered affirmation to hopeless and skeptical romantics, believing in love at first sight while questioning whether it has to last forever to have meaning—did it really matter if they got back together again? And like Before Sunset, 2016’s LP2 capitalized on the sleeper success of its original with an outright sequel that traced the charming awkwardness of recoupling and trying to hit the familiar beats. Though hardly redundant or unnecessary, it felt a bit indulgent, too dictated by its relationship with its predecessor to establish a new narrative; Mike Kinsella himself admits it was basically fan service.
And the third act of each, LP3 and Linklater’s wonderful 2013 film Before Midnight, finds their leads in unexpectedly traditional roles: Jesse and Celine married with children, American Football as a regularly touring band that makes albums every three years instead of 17, all accessing a darker, deeper resonance than they ever envisioned during their immaculate conception. “I just want you home,” Williams pleads towards the end of “Uncomfortably Numb.” Maybe it’s a couple struggling in vain to believe their love is worth fighting for, maybe a wish for the kind of inconsequential, unforgettable romances of “Never Meant” or “The Summer Ends”? The latter is the reason fans make the pilgrimage to the house at 704 W. High Street, but American Football is clear about its intent from the beginning—they can go back home, but they’d rather trudge forward with the heaviest of hearts.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Johnny Cash’s 1994 comeback American Recordings.

American Recordings

When people ask where my grandpa is from, he doesn’t name a town. He says he was born “across the river from Johnny Cash.”
There’s only one story my grandpa ever tells about his childhood. It’s 1955, in Arkansas, and he’s standing on his motorcycle, prying a bathroom window off the wall with a pocket knife and a screwdriver. He never got more than a fifth-grade education, but he’s breaking into a high school. He’s doing this because “I ain’t paying no two dollars for a concert.” The concert? Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Elvis, he’s pretty good, my grandpa recalls. He’s alright except for the foolish hip movements. But Johnny, he’s got presence.
He was there from day one, from the first day “Cry, Cry, Cry” got played on the radio. He bought every record. He knew every producer Johnny ever worked with, every sideman he ever played with, every man down and woman gone. He saw in Johnny not just the Southern man to emulate, but something close to a holy figure. Johnny Cash was the only infallible man on earth. Until 1994.
The popular story goes like this: It’s 1994 and Johnny Cash’s career is all but dead. It’s a ghost haunting Billy Graham crusades and the dinner theaters of Branson, Missouri. He spent the 1980s a lost soul, recording bad music (“The Chicken in Black”) and watching the embers of his career fly away into the night. But then Rick Rubin, a bearded and inscrutable mystic, a man known for producing hard rock and hip-hop, brings him back to life in a house overlooking the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California with a brilliant idea that no one had ever thought of before—put Johnny Cash in a living room, hand him a guitar, set up a microphone, ask him to play the songs he loves, not for anybody else, just for him.
Cash’s face lights up. He sings gutbucket songs about sin and redemption, and in the blink of an eye, Johnny Cash is himself again. He snaps out of his coma. He makes American Recordings, and all the critics love it. Hell, everybody loves it. He’s playing South by Southwest and Glastonbury and he’s on the road to becoming an eternal symbol of punk rock and anything that’s real, man, you know, authentic. Rubin is a miracle worker and he encourages Johnny Cash to make the best music of his life. This is the door Johnny Cash walks through to dethrone Hank Williams as the king of country music.
But the true story of American Recordings is messier than that. It’s true that Johnny Cash had it rough in the ’80s. Columbia didn’t know what to do with a legacy act from 1955 and reluctantly dropped him, then the label he went with afterward, Mercury, treated him like he didn’t exist. Nobody was hearing his albums. One possible reason is that the country music business in the ’80s was making some historically terrible shit because of Urban Cowboy, a John Travolta vehicle easily summarized as Saturday Night Fever in cowboy boots. For the first half of the decade, the prevailing style bent toward the slick, the saccharine, the easy-listening. This was an environment that had little room for Johnny Cash, who came from the pill-guzzling highway to hell that Sun Records paved.
But he had also been recording for decades, and his operating expenses were enormous. His distractibility was enormous. He was on and off pills, he had to play shows with the country supergroup the Highwaymen and he starred in a remake of the John Ford film Stagecoach and he was in his fifties and he had this thing going on with his jaw and, well, it happens.
Despite all this, and in defiance of conventional wisdom, his material in the ’80s wasn’t all bad. “The Chicken in Black” is the sound of a brain breaking, but if you dig a little, you find that he also sang songs by some of country and folk’s best songwriters, from Billy Joe Shaver to John Prine and Guy Clark. In 1983, one year after it came out, he covered Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” one of the toughest Springsteen songs to cover because of its ambiguous morality. It became one of the most artistically successful and satisfying covers of Cash’s entire career.
More accurately, the problem with his ’80s work was the lack of a rudder. His shows weren’t great, he had gotten corny, and nobody in the business was really advocating for him. He needed somebody to say, “You’re great, and your best work is ahead of you.” A Rocky without a Mickey, he spent too much time looking at his rearview mirror.
Luckily, new people were taking notice of Cash in the ’80s. New scenes, far away from Nashville. Nick Cave covered him on two albums in ’85 and ’86. In ’88, a British punk tribute to Cash called ’Til Things Are Brighter was released. It featured Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Marc Almond of Soft Cell, and Jon Langford of the Mekons. It caught the critical eye of NME and Cash loved it.
And in 1992, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, one of only a handful of country singers ever invited. And then in 1993, Bono asked him to record lead vocals for a song on the new U2 album. Fucking U2. Six-years-after-Joshua-Tree U2. And it wasn’t just any song, it was album closer “The Wanderer,” pure Johnny Cash fan fiction, a post-apocalyptic Christian epic that had only-Johnny-Cash-could-even-attempt-this lines like “I went out walking with a Bible and a gun.”
A Johnny Cash comeback felt like a very real possibility. One problem. Branson. Poor Johnny got entangled in a deal to build a $35 million tourist trap in Branson called “Cash Country” and a theater with his name on it that would be his home base for live shows. The deal went bust, construction problems, new investors came in, and it became the Wayne Newton Theatre. Cash still had to play a bunch of dates there even though he was off the project. He had no choice. The money was too good.
All this is in the back of his head when he plays the Rhythm Café in Santa Ana, California in February ’93, the last show before he heads back to Missouri. He can hear Branson, and it’s the sound of wolves. There’s only one relief, and it’s that Rick Rubin, Def Jam co-founder, producer of the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, wants to meet him after the show to make an album.
Cash is listening. He thinks Rubin wears clothes that “would have done a wino proud,” but he likes his individualism, and he knows that his own back is against the wall. So he goes to the hills above the Sunset Strip. He sits down in Rubin’s living room and plays songs that mean something to him, just him and his guitar, and Rubin rolls the tape. In three days, they’ve got north of 30 songs. Cowboy songs, folk songs, and old songs figure heavily. You know, songs about God, murder, trains, and everything else that makes America.
Some of these songs are originals that Cash has been protecting from the black hole down which Mercury sent his music. These lock-and-key songs are the best. “Drive On” is a look at the inhumanity of Vietnam, about the soldiers who see their buddies die and have to walk on anyway. The strong vocal performance and catchy melody sound subversive in a way Cash hadn’t in a long time, as though they’re covering up brutality and PTSD. “Like a Soldier,” a song about a man trying to find salvation and forgiveness after a hard journey and a lot of mistakes, has beautiful lyrics Cash was wise to hide from Mercury.

There are faces that come to me
In my darkest secret memory
Faces that I wish would not come back at all.

Rubin’s excited by all this, but he’s still looking for the Johnny Cash who committed a murder in Nevada just to see the life drain from an innocent man’s eyes. When Cash plays an updated version of the murder ballad “Delia’s Gone,” he finds him. It’s based on an old folk song, he’d recorded it before, but there’s new life in it now. The protagonist is not terribly penitent, and he describes his crime in vivid detail, how much he hated Delia, how he tied her up and grabbed his “sub-mo-sheen.” It’s a murder ballad where the sinner finds pleasure in his sin. It’s Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, not Johnny Cash at a Billy Graham crusade.
It’s a huge breakthrough, but Cash can’t stay because he has to do 40 dates at the Wayne Newton Theatre. Not even Edward Hopper could capture the alienation of Johnny Cash at seeing the buses of tourists and retirees showing up strictly for photo opportunities and trinkets, all while having to weather half-empty matinee shows and fight constant physical pain. This is the hell he’s trying to escape.
So when he comes back to L.A. in the summer of ’93, naturally he slams out two dozen more songs in a few days, because no way in hell is he going back to Branson. He does Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” and another Cash original, the salvation from the sin, “Redemption.” It’s a sanctified song about the power of the blood of Christ, and it grounds the album with an earnest devotion to God that every good Cash album needs. The story of sin cannot be told without the story of salvation.
You’d think this was conceived as an acoustic album, but after Cash finishes recording, Rubin experiments with adding instrumentation from Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Flea and Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. It doesn’t really take, and he decides he prefers the iconic idea of Johnny Cash alone with his guitar. He sends Cash off to the Viper Room to play an insanely exclusive solo show for approximately zero people who deserve to be there, gets a couple live cuts to finish off the sucker, and names the finished album after his own record label, American Recordings. Cash preferred Late and Alone. Too bad.
It doesn’t storm any charts after its release on April 26th, 1994, but Rolling Stone gives it five stars and raves about it. This is the mythic Johnny Cash, the tortured cowboy out on the prairie picking out “Oh Bury Me Not” in front of a campfire and seeing God on the horizon. Meanwhile, Nick Cave and U2 cohort Anton Corbijn makes a video for “Delia’s Gone” that gets actual MTV play. It stars Kate Moss and imagines Johnny Cash as Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. You don’t need to see “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his knuckles because you know it’s there.
While all this makes him seem cool, it doesn’t translate to sales. The album peaks at a humble No. 23 on the Billboard country charts, though it does reintroduce Johnny Cash to rock audiences, to people who may conceivably own a Nirvana album. And it works, and leads to better, and better-selling, music later.
Half the fun of American Recordings is knowing that it’s not the end of something, but the start of something. It sends him down a road that ends with him writing some of the best songs he’ll ever write and it nets him an immortality-cementing hit in 2002 with “Hurt.” Which, by the way, is unthinkable. To begin your career in 1955 and have a hit in 2002 is like starting out in 1971 and having a hit in 2018. Who the hell could even do that?
Well, Johnny Cash, but not Johnny Cash without Rick Rubin. The album is good, but more importantly, it’s a shrewd marketing idea. The triumphant rebirth of the man in black, a tortured soul who sings about killing and being forgiven for killing. It’s showbizzy, of course. No man can be as “authentic” as Johnny Cash without a pretty firm grasp of how to work his audience. He had to stare at the grimy lights of the Sunset Strip to be the ancient voice of the dirt he’s known as now. A mythic American artist must be created and curated and rebranded, and Rick Rubin was in the right place at the right time to help Cash get there. And Cash knew he had a choice between giving this his best shot or withering in Branson. It’s hard to deny he chose wisely.
In hindsight, the album is not the unqualified success it was made out to be in 1994. I firmly believe people wanted Johnny Cash to come back so bad that they willed this album into being what they wanted it to be. While “Delia’s Gone” captures the sinful giddiness of “Cocaine Blues,” while his original compositions are truly great Johnny Cash songs, and while the general mood of a frontier campfire is cool and transportive, there are weaknesses.
There’s the Danzig song, “Thirteen,” the first of many gimmicky alt-rock collaborations Rubin would prod Cash into doing. The lyrics read like they were written in 20 minutes, which they were. And Cash has a booming, powerful voice but one thing he doesn’t have is a lot of vocal nuance. So when he tries out Loudon Wainwright III’s satiric “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” the smartassery those lyrics demand never shows up. And “Down There by the Train,” a beautiful Tom Waits composition written specifically for Cash, a Baptist epic of redemption where even John Wilkes Booth can feel God’s grace, doesn’t quite work either. Maybe because it’s too long. Maybe he could have sung it quieter. Maybe it needs an organ.
The album’s real overarching problem is having Johnny Cash play guitar by himself with no accompaniment. While the man did innovative things with the guitar (the paper trick is cool, come on) and kept good rhythm, the fact is that he couldn’t play. This is an acoustic guitar album with almost no acoustic guitar on it. It sounds a cappella in places if you’re not paying close enough attention. His vocal power has to carry him wherever he goes, and there are some songs where that’s just not possible.
It’s a problem Cash and Rubin eventually solved by recruiting the Heartbreakers to play on pretty much every subsequent song Cash recorded, to lend momentum, dramatic shading, and emphasis to prop up Cash’s delivery. This album has no such fix, so it occasionally drags when you divorce it from its story, that Johnny Cash is back. It’s good, but now that Cash is gone, it’s no starting place to understand his work. If you want to understand his appeal, there’s still only one definitive starting place, and that’s the prison albums, where country, gospel and rockabilly get soaked in ethanol.
My grandpa never bought a Johnny Cash album after American Recordings. He didn’t like this album because it was the first time he ever heard Johnny Cash sound weak, and he didn’t want to hear that. It was a Johnny Cash my grandpa didn’t want to know existed, a Johnny Cash who could die soon. It sounded to him like a man revealing himself too much, being too vulnerable.
That generational divide is important. I have problems with every Johnny Cash album Rick Rubin produced, though I like all of them. Rick Rubin is a savvy marketer and a sporadically excellent producer but his cover suggestions were never as smart as he thought they were, and I don’t think the world needed to hear Johnny Cash cover Depeche Mode. But that mistake is probably the reason we have “Hurt” and “The Man Comes Around,” Cash’s definitive song about God, so on balance I look the other way.
American Recordings is flawed, and it’s not a masterpiece. Nearly a quarter-century on, it’s just a good Johnny Cash album. But it brought him back to the ground, and that was necessary. He was no longer Johnny Cash, towering celebrity. He was Johnny Cash, human being. His vulnerability, his fallibility, was relatable. He didn’t sound perfect, but he sounded like himself again. And he was comfortable being himself again. There are two dogs on the album cover. He named them Sin and Redemption.


Finally released in the U.S., this psych-folk 60s throwback is expanded to two disc with the addition of five previously unreleased tracks.

Ta Det Lugnt [Expanded Edition]

Despite the constant influx of catchphrase-coordinated marketing campaigns that would lead you to believe that life-affirming records are released daily, it's forever rare to stumble upon one as consistently mind-blowing and aesthetically far-reaching as Dungen's Ta Det Lugnt. Because of this scarcity, when such an unexpected (and immediate) discovery does take place, it's like being struck by indescribable melodic lightning: Unlike discs that warrant facile disses or mediocre passing grades, the countless reasons for its boundless successes remain ineffable and shadowy despite repeat late-night close-listening sessions.
Simply put, Dungen exhibit all the signs of legitimate, hard-won staying power. Ta Det Lugnt is an exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity that evokes Keith Moon's drum fills on The Who Sell Out, the wraiths of unsung bedroom psyche celebrants, and the acoustic sustain and harmonizing of The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday. Ta Det Lugnt feels less like a new release than some ancient tome, a fully formed masterpiece dropped unexpectedly on corduroy laps from some blue-brown sky. It's so aesthetically tight that even carbon dating insists that it could not be post-millennial.
To be sure, there's a major difference between retro and somehow embodying your parents' vintage zeitgeist: It's damn-near impossible to believe that the humming tubes, crackling drums, smoky backdrop, and complexly interwoven melodies on Ta Det Lugnt were birthed in a quick-fix iPod age. But perhaps even more impressive is that, despite the music's headiness and intricacy, its anachronistic results feel unusually effortless, earnest, and unpretentious: Dungen seem driven to this sound not for bloodless cred points, but out of a very sincere devotion to the music from a bygone era.
Accomplished beyond his years, 26-year-old Swedish multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes is the pin-up mastermind behind Dungen's vibrant polish. For the full duration of his third album's 13 bracing tracks, he perfectly inhabits-- and then expands upon-- his homeland's late-60s/early-70s acid-rock scene. Ta Det Lugnt particularly taps into the expansiveness of his Swedish psych predecessors, Parson Sound, while maintaining a murky rocker edge: Imagine that band colliding with The Kinks, or Amon Dl II with Olivia Tremor Control, or Comets on Fire with The Zombies on their way to Terrastock.
Interested in pushing pop glitter to its limits, Ejstes doesn't go as far afield into psych-pop cliches like chirping birds and hippie atmospherics as his elder brethren, but his equally vintage garage sound allows a definite space for ethereality in the form of funereal dew-drop strings, free jazz breakdowns, brief whiffs of AM radio tuning, flute minuets, lushly cascading pianos, prog time changes, florid medieval chimes, sky-melting freak outs, church organs, fuzz-guitar jousts, doubled mountain-top whistles, roaring six-string solos, and autumnal instrumental interludes. It's obvious his songs are painstakingly arranged with a sense of depth, gradations, and tonal three-dimensionality redolent of something as off the charts as Pet Sounds.
I said all of the above and more last year, and it still holds true. Hindsight and new layers of hype included, Ta Det Lugnt remains a consistently amazing album. Since my initial tongue-wagging Dungen's deservedly gone from limited distribution and whispered word-of-mouth to NME hyperbole and glowing write-ups in just about every community newspaper from the Philadelphia Daily News to San Francisco Weekly (and beyond). There's also been a rush to offer more sounds: A few months back came the generally misunderstood compilation 1999-2001, wherein Ejstes re-stitched early material into three lengthy soundscapes instead of presenting them in their original form, and now, of course, comes the U.S. re-release of the fire starter, Ta Det Lugnt.
Repackaged by NYC's Kemado Records (home of Elefant, Diamond Nights, and goofy Brooklyn loft crashers Cheeseburger), the album is as it was, but comes with an extra CD that includes five previously unreleased tracks, which will also eventually appear on Subliminal Sounds as a vinyl 12". As might be expected, the add-ons aren't as amazingly ordered or cohesive as the album proper, but they do pleasingly expand the Dungen oeuvre.
Of the five tracks, four are instrumental. Only the opener, "Tyst Minut", an outtake from the Ta Det Lugnt sessions, offers a new taste of Ejstes' Swedish. The sleepy mid-tempo four minutes open with crystalline strums, Nyquil vocalizations and chordal rings, then turn back into a semi-smoking singsong. The chorus picks things up a bit with accompanying guitar noodle and the bridge is a molasses solo that shifts into florid piano cascades. It's followed by "Jamna Plagor", an instrumental from 2003, notable for its interesting percussion sound (tinny, echoed hand drums?) and mid-song dissolve into a brief metagalactic interstices. Though enjoyable, it's nothing special.
More interesting are the three new recordings, "Sjutton", "Christopher", and "Badsang" ("Bathing Song"), which give a taste of Dungen yet-to-come. There's a free, loose feel honing in at points on improvisational jazz and/or Can's galvanic sweep. "Sjutton"'s pronounced flute and cocky shaker keep time while the rest of the band swaggers and staggers alongside cymbal crashes. The blistering "Christopher" is a two-minute showcase of sweaty, Hendrixian psychedelia, as well as a nod to dark-minded LSD trips everywhere. Closer "Badsang" sounds very much like something you and yours would plug into while frolicking with water nymphs in a sunny, dusky forest, though the vibrational Dr. Who halfway point does grow a little lizard-king creepy.
As increasingly de rigueur reviews cloud the water, it should be interesting to see if Dungen can one day top Ta Det Lugnt, or if album three proves a magically brilliant and unrepeatable accomplishment. Regardless, they seem to be taking the success in stride, showcasing more than a few positive-growth indicators including their emergence as a solid live band (and not simply an elaborate studio project), the decision to continue recording in Swedish, Ejstes' folk fiddle mastery, and the well-grounded, astute experimentation suggested in their newer work.