After last year's prison stint-- not to mention the disappointing rock experiment Rebirth and various underwhelming stop-gap releases-- Lil Wayne finally attempts to reassert his hip-hop supremacy with Tha Carter IV.

Tha Carter IV

A lot of rappers show a lot of love for Lil Wayne on his new album. "Thanks for giving us a whole 'nother classic with Tha Carter IV," huffs Busta Rhymes. "It's important that you are more than welcome to Tha Carter IV, and y'all enjoy it," advises André 3000. "Cash Money is the company and Weezy the boss," reiterates Wayne's fellow ex-con Shyne. And it's Drake who provides the record's most impassioned verse about his mentor's 2010 prison stint for criminal gun possession: "Rikers Island on this flow, eight months for that pistol/ But at least they had some bad bitches workin' in that shit hole." The man born Dwayne Carter never needed to be propped up like this before. During his Untouchable Era-- from the December 2005 release of Tha Carter II through 2008's Tha Carter III, with several classic mixtapes in between-- Wayne was The Best Rapper Alive because he said he was, and then rhymed his brain off to prove it. He doesn't claim that world-beating title once on Tha Carter IV. And no one else claims it for him.
We accepted last year's duo of disappointments-- the aggravated rock turn Rebirth and the unfocused stop-gap collection I Am Not a Human Being-- because they were mere anomalies or appetizers. This summer's Sorry 4 the Wait mixtape was passable, but slight compared to previous off-label bounties like Dedication 2, Da Drought 3, or No Ceilings. So while there hasn't been much recorded evidence to support Wayne's hip-hop supremacy over the last three years, Tha Carter IV was always going to be the true test. As such, it's the rapper's most unfulfilling and worrisome move in a long while.
Almost everything about Wayne is relaxed, regurgitated, or regressing here. Most noticeable is his slowed-down flow, perhaps a capitulation to the booming arenas he now plays to regularly, where intelligibility often trumps quick wit. But whereas the only permanent aspect of Wayne's cadence used to be its shiftiness, his delivery has slackened, severely deadening his ferociousness in the process. The falloff is made more apparent by a couple of guest shots from two of rap's most exuberant fast talkers, Busta Rhymes and Kansas City cult hero Tech N9ne. It's as if Wayne dispatched the pair to provide the dexterity he won't (or can't) come up with himself anymore.
On "Interlude", Tech N9ne and an oddly uncredited André 3000 reel off two of the album's best verses, perfectly setting up its star for a clean-up finale. But Wayne never shows on that track, or the star-studded "Outro", as if he'd rather play curator than be the focus of some of the highlights on his own album. His trepidation is understandable considering how Drake and Rick Ross easily overshadow him on recent singles "She Will" and "John", respectively. In fact, one of Wayne's more spirited moments on the album comes when he forgoes a third verse on "She Will" and just hollers and mugs behind Drake's hook instead; he just sounds excited to be in the background.
After an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money. Because after you've been "so motherfuckin' high, I can eat a star," as he claimed on Da Drought 3, being "so high, I get star-struck" just doesn't pack the same oomph. Elsewhere, he's found a new love for the type of faux-profundity he rarely had time or patience for before. "I'm searching for today, instead I found tomorrow/ And I put that shit right back like, 'I'll see what I find tomorrow,'" he blankly philosophizes on "Nightmares of the Bottom", itself a downgrade of Tha Carter III's brilliantly soulful "Let the Beat Build". Once joyously freewheeling, Tha Carter series has gotten to the point where it comes with its own hip-hop tropes and rules: a combination of East Coast lyricism, West Coast violence, and a distinctly Southern rhythm and flair. That singular formula has served Wayne well in the past, but some of this album's most enjoyable moments do away with it altogether.
The squelching T-Pain duet "How to Hate" is a paradoxically gorgeous kiss-off that finds the pair heart-worn and a bit pissed. "She used to always say, fuck my niggas/ And when I went to jail, she fucked my niggas, well..." laments Wayne in a coaxing purr. As usual, T-Pain plays a permanent resident of the friend zone, while Wayne lashes out in the most charming way possible; the track makes you wish the rumored T-Wayne project would actually get off the ground. Even softer is that song's R&B rejoinder, "How to Love", Wayne's most mature song to date. And while it's a little jarring to hear the guy behind "Lollipop" and so many Gremlins references attempt a legitimate grown-up ballad, the 28 year old's tough love feels earned. Without a fierce beat or screaming guitars backing him, Wayne's sing-rap croak is caught out there on the track, and it results in one of the few Carter IV performances that doesn't sound like a canned retread.
Recently, Lil Wayne spoke out on the topic of retirement. "I want to become a better father and a better man to my woman, and those things take time," he told MTV. "And time takes away from [music]. So the honest answer to that [retirement] question is, I don't know. Maybe so." Even back in his hallowed heyday, on Dedication 2, he had retirement on his mind. "My career is my life, so I could never retire out, even when I stop rapping," he said in an interlude. "Hopefully, I'm known for something different-- not different, but known for something else, also." It's a nice thought. And, after all, this album's uncharacteristic R&B anomalies stand out most. While Tha Carter IV isn't the first indication that Wayne's finest verses are behind him, it is the most glaring. Still, he seems smart enough to know that for every Jay-Z there are scores of rappers-- including several guests on this very album-- trying to relive past glories on a daily basis. Wayne has floated the notion that Tha Carter IV could be his last album. The threat makes sense.

Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment


The industrial noise-punk duo Deli Girls’ I Don’t Know How to Be Happy is a vengeance document built on industrial mutant rage.

Deli Girls: I Don’t Know How to Be Happy

I Don’t Know How to Be Happy

There is a truism that the best revenge is a life well-lived, and maybe that works eventually, but before that there is another necessary step—a violence, a purge. Deli Girls’ second record with New York-based Sweat Equity, I Don’t Know How to Be Happy, is a vengeance document built on industrial mutant rage. Their rogues’ gallery, named without deflection, includes cops, hypocrites, fascists, and apologists. This alone is not unusual—in 2019 we know who our enemies are. The truly celebratory part is how it all unfolds.
Deli Girls is only two people—Danny Orlowski on vocals and Tommi Kelly on machines, but on record they are legion. In “I’d Rather Die,” Kelly layers on cyber-noir synths then drops in distorted-to-oblivion beats that crunch like combat boots on broken glass. Orlowski’s shredded vocals and weaponized hysterics come in from all points of the mix.  The Deli Girls world has always been a claustrophobic one, but where their 2017 record Evidence was played through in one or two takes like a live show, Happy is more intentionally constructed, with dense overdubs that make it all the more immersive.
For the most part, these are dance tracks. When performed live, they often stir up revelatory mosh pits in which Orlowski thrashes. Brooklyn punk shows aren’t known for their dancing, but in a devoted underground populated by artists such as Dreamcrusher, Machine Girl, Show Me the Body, and SIGNAL, bodies still collide. In the crucial queer text and AIDS memoir Close to the Knives, honored last year in a Whitney retrospective, David Wojnarowicz raged against the expectation of civility in the face of constant state-sanctioned violence, and attending a noise-punk show in Brooklyn at the moment can feel like a collective exorcism, an opportunity to discharge some of this ubiquitous anxiety. The legion, after all, exists. And in the “Hey Mickey”-meets-“Bank Head” claps on the intro to “Abortion,” or the off-kilter pulse anchoring the kinetic “Officer,” or the pinball timpani on “Peg,” there is an implicit invite to join up.
Kelly grew up on video game music and Nine Inch Nails and, in that legacy, composes each song a little like a showdown in a dystopian action-shooter. “Shut Up” sounds wholly like a final boss battle, complete with Mortal Kombat acid pit dripping sounds, rolling war drums, and samples from Unreal Tournament deadpanning “excellent” and “you have lost the lead.” (Kelly and Orlowski are also both frequent collaborators on the absurdist desktop webseries Comp USA Live, located somewhere in the same aesthetic ouroboros of Y2K/retro/future/tech/media/anxiety as Ryan Trecartin or Molly Soda’s work.)
Orlowski revels in their own villainy, leaning into a deranged cackle on “Here We Go Again” or “It Must Be So Nice,” volleying between whimpers and barks on “Money,” or unleashing ragged metal scream-growls on “Abortion.” As with Kelly’s samples, their extensive vox repertoire is used percussively, turning indictments like “I got my hand in my pocket/You got me?/You scared?” or “I see you and I heard you/Nothing stops me from deserting” into sick grooves.
Where Evidence delved into more autobiographical elements, Happy is committed to the attack. Songs are built around refrains like “put your money where your mouth is” or “shut up about the end of the world,” refusing narrative. But whether you’re kicking an aggressive person out of the show space or asserting your rights to law enforcement, it bears remembering that any excess words can be used against you—the surest course of action is to repeat what you need to say and stand firm. There is no playing devil’s advocate with a mantra.


Domino reissues the indie rock classic, adding an 18-track bonus CD and new liner notes. Released the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind, this album perfectly nailed the mussed, cynical, love-struck vibe of early-90s cassette-trading zinesters, and it still sounds fresh and remarkable today.

III

Released the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind, Sebadoh's III-- along with Pavement's 1992 album Slanted & Enchanted-- functioned as my preferred scattershot post-adolescent soundtrack. Sebadoh's third, at that time most "polished" album, isn't as universally influential as Nirvana's watershed; for cassette-trading zinesters like my teenage self, though, the scrubby Massachusetts trio nailed a perfect mussed, undeniably cynical, love-struck vibe.
Hardly a lifer, I jumped ship after Lou Barlow's foil Eric Gaffney quit in 1994 before the release of 1994's Bakesale. The "classic lineup" fell apart with the departure of that bong-cracked noisemaker; as a result, Barlow's ballads felt too sugary and, well, ordinary. That's what makes III so great: Firmly entrenched in the band's fragmentary, boom-hiss salad days, the 23 tracks strike a ragamuffin balance between the two songwriters and collaborators at their idiosyncratic prime. That history's been mapped thoroughly, but in 1991, part of the appeal sprouted from a certain mystery. The unknowability's gone; still, reissued with an 18-track bonus CD and new liner notes written by the band, the original indie masterpiece hasn't aged a bit.
Hitting the record bins after The Freed Man and Weed Forestin', III added bassist/drummer/third vocalist/middle man Jason Loewenstein, solidifying the band's prime formation. Song-wise, Barlow was still smarting about his unceremonious firing from Dinosaur Jr.-- along with his anxious relationship with on-off girlfriend and future wife, Kathleen Billus. Accordingly, his best songs call out Mascis ("The Freed Pig"'s insistently angular guitar jab) and/or pine for/praise his lady (the gorgeous "Kath"). Gaffney, on the other hand, displays a darker vibe, documenting his fucked-up family life ("As The World Dies, The Eyes of God Grow Bigger", with his dad fried on liquid LSD, young Eric's head hitting concrete, grandma getting stoned), "Violet Execution", and "Scars, Four Eyes" (co-written with Barlow). Even the covers-- the Minutemen's "Sickles and Hammers" and a warped rendition of Johnny Mathis' "Wonderful, Wonderful"-- comfortably snuggle into the grainy, duct-tapped landscape. There are some Loewenstein-penned stinkers (see "Smoke a Bowl") and average bits (the country jangle of "Black-Haired Girl"), but the lows are so fucked up and indulgent, they become an integral part of its imperfect charm. If you remove one, the structure topples.
I remember seeing Sebadoh live at Maxwell's in Hoboken right around the release of III. Barlow had a big-ass pimple on his cheek, his guitar was held in parts by tape, and he was peddling Sebadoh shirts he'd made with magic markers. Between songs, he bent down and pressed play on a boom-box, launching pre-recorded salvos (including a "three is the magic number" sample): "Turning personal vendetta and small-minded revenge tactics into eventual cult status. The only man in the world who truly appreciated the genius of the Swans, Lou Barlow," "Sebadoh, featuring that guy who played bass in Soul Asylum," "another evening of oppressive noodling," "metaphorically pissing in your mouth," and "Your postmodern folk-core saviors, Sebadoh." These one-liners and non-sequiturs are available on the reissues bonus CD, as a track called "Showtape '91". I approached Barlow at that same show and asked him some dumb teenager question about Mascis and he sorta told me to fuck off.
Today, I miss that snotty, anti-PR indie-- it was both the piss and romanticism that made Sebadoh vital. Once Barlow got over Mascis (see Dinosaur Jr. reunion tour) and tied the knot the band felt hollow. Fifteen years ago, his bile was best, most humorously encapsulated on "Gimme Indie Rock". Beyond its right-on satire, if you changed the dates around a bit, it offered a musical biography of just about everyone I knew at the time: "Started back in '83/ Started seeing things differently / Hardcore wasn't doing it for me no more/ Started smoking pot, thought things sounded better slow..." Then comes the gallery of in-scene disses: "Cracking jokes like a Thurston Moore/ Pedal hopping like a Dinosaur J.../ Taking inspiration from Hüsker Dü/ It's a new generation of electric white boy blues." That fight song, along with the four other songs that joined it on a 1991 7", appear on the bonus CD with a four-track demo of "The Freed Pig", a super flanged almost throat-sung "Stars For Eyes", and a 2004 "Violet Execution" remix.
Reviewing an album that functioned as such a personal watershed obviously presents the opportunity for nostalgia-induced hyperbole, but even after taking a step back from III it still deserves every last bit of praise. Sebadoh followed this effort with other fine moments; nowhere else did they so perfectly meld rickety folk, tin-can guitar, Shrimper-style ambiance, feedbacking "power sludge," eccentric compositional constructions, carcinogenic hooks, and poetic sincerity. Over the years since its release, the "I'm just me! Listen to me! A whole all-American original!" mantra that surfaces amid the trembly acoustic boom of "Downnmind" has become more than just tongue-in-cheek tomfoolery: Even if Lou, Eric, and Jason didn't know it at the time, those stoner fucks created something essential. I haven't heard anything like it since.


After her much-loved Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape collaboration with Diplo, and a series of delays, the debut album from London-via-Sri Lanka club artist M.I.A. proves worth the wait.

Arular

Arular was first expected to be released in late 2004, but instead M.I.A. gave half of its vocals away to Diplo's Piracy Funds Backlash mixtape, which married her London Sri Lankan patois to music from New York, Rio, and Kingston. The mix highlighted her big-tent approach to global rhythms and Now Sounds, an M.O. that was cemented when she professed her love for hip-hop crew the Diplomats and rap's spiritual cousins, grime, baile funk, dancehall, and reggaeton in The New York Times. Faster than you can say "galang-alang-alang," M.I.A. became the one-woman embodiment of what to some is great about the contemporary pop music landscape. All that's left is for M.I.A. to draft Seba as producer and that voice that name-stamps dancehall tracks like a heavily drugged, vocoded Just Blaze as MC: "M.I.A. on... Bionic Ras... Baile Funk... Forward Riddim..."
This transglobal express isn't new, of course: Young Jamaicans have been combining the best of U.S. hip-hop and UK dance culture for years, American rap producers seem addicted to the sub-continent, grime is actually lobbing singles into the UK top 40, and Nigeria is threatening to become the new hip-hop hot spot. "From ghetto to ghetto, backyard to yard, taking it transglobal on the aboveground, because that's where the people are," Hyperdub's Sterling Clover said of this trend a few years ago. At the time he was talking about bhangra and the Indian influences on hip-hop, but he could just as easily have been talking about dancehall or grime or baile funk. And when it comes to M.I.A., you can practically talk about all of them at once.
Unlike most musical tailors, neither she nor her mixtape partner Diplo is afraid to let the seams show. Rather than hiding up the ass of cratedigging culture, they relish sharing the spotlight with and revealing their sources, with M.I.A. dropping names in NYC broadsheets and Diplo opening two-way routes between Philly and the favelas rather than stashing all the best dubplates for himself. Northern Soul is probably turning over in its grave.
If the two are interested in creating a dialogue between different artists and sounds, they're also more than happy to allow listeners to eavesdrop, whether they're improvising (Piracy) or well-rehearsed (Arular, Favela on Blast). M.I.A.'s freedom-through-homelessness is shared by other artists (most notably dj/Rupture) but not by many of the source sounds found on her records, most of which are fiercely regional. Where Rupture's name suggests a destruction of the borders between scenes, cultures, and nations, his methods-- which include healthy doses of splatter beats and breakcore-- can also seem violently deconstructionist. M.I.A's moniker, on the other hand, appropriately suggests rootlessness. She's not exploring subcultures so much as visiting them, grabbing souvenirs and laying them out on acetate: The favela trumpet on "Bucky Done Gone", the London slang of "Galang", the disco sample on "Sunshowers", the steel drums of "Bingo", the electro-fueled vocal edits of "Hombre".
M.I.A.'s detractors claim her flirtations with terrorism and revolutionary politics reveal the biggest case of sufferer's envy since Joe Strummer but little depth of thought. But if the latter is true, so what? An in-depth examination of demonizing The Other, the relationship between the West and developing nations, or the need to empathize with one's enemies would likely make for a pretty crappy pop song. An argument can and has been made that her political lip service is unique enough to get those topics onto your tongue or into your brain, prodding listeners to at least examine them. Some might find that off-putting, but pop music that reflects uncomfortable realities and is packaged in this sonic collage beats the hell out of 1980s left-wing hand wringing from Bragg or Bono or Biafra.
And when it comes down to it, that "sonic collage" is still what's important here. With all the column inches and message board posts arguing about whether M.I.A. is an opportunist or a clever contextualist, genuine or a fraud, full of good intentions or no specific intentions at all, the closest thing to a truism about Arular is that it's a taut, invigorating distillation of the world's most thrilling music; a celebration of contradictions and aural globalization that recasts the tag "world music" as the ultimate in communicative pop rather than a symbol of condescending piety.


Following two volumes of roots renditions of his own songs, the shapeshifting country musician returns with a bluegrass concept album about love among the legends of the Kentucky frontier.

Sturgill Simpson: The Ballad of Dood and Juanita

The Ballad of Dood and Juanita

Sturgill Simpson does not do half measures. Almost a decade ago, following vagabond stints in the Navy, a railroad yard, and a Seattle IHOP, the Kentucky songwriter circumvented country music convention with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the kind of once-in-a-long-while reappraisal of the genre’s core values that only a lifetime outsider might dare make. Embracing new wave and honky-tonk, trading Jesus for DMT, Simpson’s masterpiece drew upon the maverick spirit of country’s bygone visionaries in order to give a complacent genre something beyond pickup trucks and watery domestics. It was vivid and urgent, an inspiring revelation. He chased its success with an organ-funked instruction manual for life and a grungy kiss-off to the music industry, so relentless it registered as the mannered Southern cousin of Eminem’s Kamikaze.
Then, amid COVID-19 lockdowns last year, Simpson again pivoted, recruiting a crackerjack, intergenerational crew of bluegrass musicians like Sierra Hull and Tim O’Brien to quickly record twin volumes of traditional renditions of his own songs. A quiet act of confident defiance, Cuttin’ Grass suggested that traditionalism to evolve could also be a form of subversion. The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, a bluegrass concept album recorded with the stunning group he has dubbed the Hillbilly Avengers, is an even more audacious salvo in Simpson’s back-to-the-roots campaign. By turns romantic, playful, sympathetic, and solemn, The Ballad of Dood and Juanita is a compelling update on American frontier mythmaking, delivered by a band good enough to push lovingly against genre conventions.
The premise of Dood and Juanita is a stock tale of hardscrabble settlers, as familiar as any classic Western. A half-Shawnee toughie, Dood is a wild child of Eastern Kentucky who delights in domesticity after meeting Juanita, “a good woman” who “calmed down the rage.” When she is abducted by the outlaw Seamus McClure, Dood (already shot by the hooligan) saddles up his mule and pursues Juanita, sights set on mortal vengeance. During the quest, his towering and steadfast mule, Shamrock, gets tired, while his trusty hound, Sam, dies. Saved by a band of Cherokees, Dood finally finds Juanita, gets her home, and kills McClure with a single shot (and then a tomahawk chop) from his Martin Meylin rifle, a gun so tied to the United States’ westward advance that Daniel Boone helped make it famous. Dood and Juanita is unequal parts love story, history lesson, and action-adventure tale, a cross as classic as the sounds around it.
Dood and Juanita works so well because Simpson sounds comfortable within this form and just beyond it. He harmonizes tenderly with his band above Stuart Duncan’s sweet fiddle line during “One in the Saddle, One on the Ground,” an ode to both mule and hound. “Played Out” is an exceptional bluegrass ballad about bearing impossible burdens. And Simpson reaches bluegrass’ nasal apogee during “Go in Peace,” his voice expressing the same anxiety as Scott Vestal’s restless banjo. For Simpson, this music is a return to terra firma, to land he knows innately.
Listen, though, for the tiny surprises—the wailing harmonica and bounding jaw harp during “Go in Peace,” the field recordings during “Played Out,” the background bells and absurdist harmonies of “Ol’ Dood (Part I).” They’re minutiae, sure, but they collectively suggest Simpson isn’t content just to pick and grin. The entire record, after all, hinges on an exquisite Latin love song, complete with a discursive solo by Willie Nelson. It’s the kind of modern bluegrass fantasy Simpson has not only the temerity to try but also the skills to accomplish.
Though the folk tale and the sound may seem antiquated, Simpson’s subtle choices of setting and circumstance resonate right now. Juanita goes missing in 1862 in Eastern Kentucky, then a coveted piece of Civil War real estate. Despite being a master of the state’s legendary long rifle, Dood, 33, has already walked away from the then-new conflict to settle at home with Juanita. He’s rejected the coal industry’s self-perpetuating system of labor penury for a quiet life of homesteader self-reliance, too. From the actual battle lines of our current politics to a new generation of coal strikes, these details comport with current headlines with an unsettling clarity. More important, these wrinkles reflect the actual depth and contradictions inherent in rural life, perennially reduced to a string of assumptive stereotypes. Named for Simpson’s late grandfather, Dood isn’t some ideologue; he’s just a country man looking for a quiet life. Simpson is speaking for his people here, telling the stories of Appalachia without the condescension of, say, J.D. Vance.
Simpson equivocates about the shape of his sounds to come—he told Rolling Stone that life as a bluegrass picker was his bona fide birthright, while he suggested to the BBC he’d essentially play whatever genre paid. Is this the legitimate beginning of his bluegrass career, or just another detour for a songwriter who has mapped his career with them? The Ballad of Dood and Juanita makes that question especially tantalizing, since Simpson seems hellbent on bending the ideas of whatever genre he momentarily chooses, no matter how cloistered it seems. Bluegrass has long benefited from a lineage of weirdo rebels. Simpson fits right in, even if he might one day slip right out.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On this new mini-LP, Best Coast return to the unmistakable elements that characterized the band when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. After the bland turn on The Only Place, Bethany Cosentino is back with propulsive melodies and simple lyrics about aimlessness and love.

Fade Away

Bethany Cosentino is 26 years old and watching the clock anxiously. On her band’s new mini-album, Fade Away, she’s often found monitoring the unsettling passage of time. “I don’t know who I am this year,” goes one song. “When did I wake up and suddenly my soul had grown so old?” she asks. “Last 30 seconds I’ll wait for him,” she sings, resigned and bitter. “You taught me that my heart would grow old.” And as if giving herself a pep talk to buffer the unease: “Life is short but so am I. What does it matter, anyway?” Over the span of three years and two full-lengths, Cosentino has achieved a rarefied sort of indie-rock success and its attendant stardom, but she’s still left asking the questions you ask once you realize adulthood is not the bed of enlightenment it’s advertised to be. What do I have to show for myself? Am I any smarter than I used to be? Why isn’t this getting easier? And literally: Who have I become?
Fade Away attempts to answer these questions in a single, satisfying way: by returning to the unmistakable elements that characterized Best Coast when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. She's back with propulsive melodies, a significant dose of reverb, repetition, and sticky, simple lyrics about aimlessness and the type of love that advances at a lackadaisical West Coast pace. The project is a return to form in the most literal of senses, too—it’s out on Cosentino’s new label, Jewel City, and at an unorthodox seven-song length, it has the scrappy, self-governed feel of her band’s early demos, albeit with a bit more polish. There are no name producers in the credits or songs that sound like jingles written for the Los Angeles Department of Tourism. Which is to say there’s nothing on Fade Away that would fit naturally on Best Coast’s slickly inert sophomore album, The Only Place, a record that boasted maturity but never really resonated.
But while it’s tempting to claim that Best Coast have reverted to a simple formula, or to think of Fade Away as an easy stopgap between The Only Place and the band’s next record, that’s not quite what’s happening, either. There are touches of sophistication across Fade Away that Best Coast haven’t been able to achieve until now, and Cosentino glides easily between shades of guitar-pop and chillier sounds. She seems as comfortable on a swooning ballad (“Fade Away”) as she does on a song that harnesses the frenetic sugar of Josie and the Pussycats (“This Lonely Morning”) or the gauzy whisper of Mazzy Star (“Baby I’m Crying”). She’s flexing her muscles as a songwriter, and she makes something that’s probably very difficult sound as though it comes easily to her.
The Cosentino who openly admits to struggle, or to not having figured it all out, then, is now relegated a familiar lyrical space. It can be easy to write her words off as too simplistic, too repetitive, or to dismiss them as retrograde in sentiment, but those qualities are what allow Best Coast to endure in a sea of acts with similar aesthetics. Cosentino is unafraid to fuss over the trivialities of plain old-fashioned love in a time when marriage has been described as the merging of brands. She’s ambivalent or confused about pretty much everything while everyone else’s tastes are codified to Likes. She has become reliably great at distilling a complex range of human emotion to basic sentences, and all of a sudden, the weed leaves and cats and cut-outs of the shape of California are merely kitschy insignias rather than overarching frameworks. "I won't change/ I'll stay the same," she sings on "I Wanna Know". While Cosentino is anxious to figure out who she’s become, Fade Away points to how strong she’s been all along.


Rising New York fixtures AceMo and MoMA Ready team up on a collaborative album that pays homage to the fast-and-loose aesthetics of ’90s underground dance music.

A New Dawn

The ’90s was a particularly fecund time on New York City dancefloors. The heyday of Todd Terry, Masters at Work, and imprints like Strictly Rhythm was a fount of ecstatic, pounding, and brazenly sample-heavy tracks. New NYC producers AceMo and MoMA Ready (Adrian Mojica and Wyatt Stevens, respectively) are actively inspired by that era of dance music, even thought they’re cognizant of working at a distance from it. “There’s been nobody to pass the torch to us since the mid-’90s,” Stevens recently told the zine Love Injection. “There’s a ginormous age gap between the last generation of Black and Latin music producers and the current generation.” But they have been so prolific, it’s as though they are intent upon filling the gap all by themselves. Since the beginning of 2019, the two have put out some 15 releases between them (not counting loosies like this bananas beatdown of an R&B classic).
After a house- and jungle-heavy EP last year, A New Dawn is AceMoMA’s first proper collaborative full-length. As on so much of their recent output, they work assuredly fast —even ludicrously so—as they fidget between house, acid, rave, breakcore, techno, and ’90s hip-hop. Beats gleefully push into the red and samples ride roughshod over programmed drums . But their confidence never wavers, and as raw as the 12-track set can get, every imperfect element sounds perfect. The bell-laced “The Elder Trance” contains both woozy ambient, destabilized by echo and delay, and whiplash-fast jungle, toggling between neutral and overdrive at a second’s notice.
“Rubber Band Man” is dramatic and dark, full of skin-prickling minor-key tones and claustrophobic atmosphere, with each menacing, blown-out kick and too-close woodblock clop making it feel like the walls are closing in on an unlit corridor. “Amen 2 Swing” sounds like a shout-out to the revered duo Mood II Swing: The first half is furious, coarsely chopping hi-hats and breakbeats; then they introduce a cartoonish rave keyboard line and knock the two elements together, making for a drunken anthem. “Disrupt the System” tops 144 BPM and still the two producers decide that’s not hectic enough, pouring all manner of alarm tones, claps, and laser effects into the slivers of space between the beats. Only the eponymous (and hilariously cheesy) vocal sample of “Start the Riot” and the repetitive, cut-to-ribbons chorus of “Breathe In” fail to make much of an impact.
The title track has all the makings of a 3 a.m. anthem (preferably at their unofficial home, Bossa Nova Civic Club). Gloriously fast and careening nearly out of control, it feels at once familiar and totally fresh. When the walloping kick bursts back in after an anxious, tingling build, it makes for a genuinely hands-up moment. AceMoMA connect back to their NYC forefathers (with nods to techno dons Derrick May and Jeff Mills), while also keeping a healthy disregard for the past, pushing ahead with palpable enthusiasm and energy. As Stevens explained in that same interview, “[As] brown people making dance music… we needed to create context for what we were doing. So we did.” Like the best moments of a night out, A New Dawn feels like instant history and an instant party.


Jessie Ware's sophomore LP finds the singer moving past the type of smoldering desire that borders just slightly on desperation, moving into the territory of real, messy love; accordingly, her vocal power facilitates this shift, which speaks to her impressive versatility in this stage of her career. Miguel, Dev Hynes, and others contribute.

Tough Love

On Jessie Ware’s second album, Tough Love, there’s a deeply weird song that could potentially infiltrate the mainstream—not in spite of its sonic alien quality, but because of it. “Keep On Lying” sounds like a gospel choir singing atop a chintzy keyboard stuck on the "bossa nova" setting, yet it's easy to picture "So You Think You Can Dance" hopefuls popping-and-locking to it. This delicate balance is lightning-bolt brilliance that may not even strike once in a career for most artists, but Jessie Ware has made the balance appear effortless several times already in her young career, a talented pop vocalist who projects an interesting taste in music and a canny know-how in regards to the up-and-coming electronic producers she chooses to work with.
Ware's musical vision revolves around genuine curation and experimentation when it comes to sounds that don't appear as often in today's pop music landscape. Sure, there's plenty of divas who have embraced their quirky sides, from Kylie Minogue’s Impossible Princess to Madonna’s Ray of Light to Katy Perry’s two-minute preoccupation with 1990s dance-pop vocalist CeCe Peniston last year. But rarely does a major-label pop singer sound as tasteful as Ware does, especially while avoiding the sleepy trappings of Adult Contemporary. At its best, Ware's music sounds truly exciting without sounding as if it's trying too hard to come across that way, and as such Tough Love isn’t packed with explicit experimentation. Following her excellent 2012 debut Devotion, Ware is engaging with a variety of genres that stand to introduce her to new, different listeners with ears tuned to the mainstream. Some of these songs, like the midtempo disco banger “Want Your Feeling” or the xx-smacking “Sweetest Song”, properly fit Ware rather than coming across as the singer playing dress-up.
On the other end of the spectrum, top-40's hobbit du jour Ed Sheeran plays a key role with a co-writing credit on the swooning acoustic ballad “Say You Love Me”, a soulful and catchy number that nonetheless doesn't exactly reinvent the pop-music wheel. That's a fine enough standard for many singers who are not Ware, but her past work has suggested that she's better than that. The same could be said of the album’s most clichéd lyrical moment, the BenZel-produced “Champagne Kisses”, which sounds more like a Miguel B-side than the two Tough Love songs the R&B singer actually contributed to—namely, the mushy “You & I (Forever)” and sexting-my-exes anthem “Kind Of...Sometimes…Maybe”, the latter of which functions as the album's highlight.
Part of the increased variety on Tough Love stems from a more diverse array of collaborators, from producer Emile Haynie (Eminem, Lana Del Rey) to Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes; it's also due to a wider emotional range of lyrical themes, as well as an increased show of confidence on Ware’s part. Her music has moved past exuding the type of smoldering desire that borders just slightly on desperation, moving into the territory of real, messy love; accordingly, her vocal power throughout the album facilitates this shift, which speaks to her impressive versatility in this stage of her career. You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.


As they devoted more time to the studio, the Beatles' individual voices and confidence continued to grow, resulting in the sonic landmark Revolver.

Revolver

Like any band, the Beatles' recording career was often altered, even pushed forward, as much by external factors as their own creative impulses. The group's competitive drive had them, at times, working to match or best Bob Dylan or Brian Wilson; their drug use greatly colored the musical outlook of John Lennon and George Harrison in particular; and the death of former manager Brian Epstein ushered in a period of distracting and poor business choices and opened the door for individuals such as the celebrity guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Yoko Ono, and businessman Allen Klein to penetrate, alter, and, some would say, disintegrate their inner circle.
The most important of these external shifts in the Beatles narrative, however, was a series of changes that allowed them to morph into a studio band. The chain of events that ushered in the band's changing approach to studio music began before Rubber Soul, but the results didn't come into full fruition until Revolver, a 35-minute LP that took 300 hours of studio time to create-- roughly three times the amount allotted to Rubber Soul, and an astronomical amount for a record in 1966.
Longtime Beatles producer George Martin, justifiably upset that EMI refused to give him a raise on the back of his extraordinarily profitable work with the Beatles, quit his post with the label in August 1965. Martin used his clout to create his own company, and the group and producer used theirs to effectively camp out at Abbey Road Studios for whatever length of time suited them rather than being forced to comply to the rigid and economically sound schedules demanded by labels at the time. The Beatles could now work both in and out of the studio, taking full advantage of new advancements in sound recording that allowed them to reflect upon and tinker with their work, explore new instruments and studio trickery, and refine their music by solving problems when they arose.
This new approach not only greatly altered their work environment, but drove the Beatles to value the flexibility of emerging technology. They also cashed in some of their commercial capital to abandon the mentally and physically sapping practice of touring-- and the glad-handing and public relations requirements that went with it. Exceptionalism became the watchword for the band, and it responded by using its freedom to push forward its art and, by extension, the whole of pop music. Musically, then, the Beatles began to craft dense, experimental works; lyrically, they matched that ambition, maturing pop from the stuff of teen dreams to a more serious pursuit that actively reflected and shaped the times in which its creators lived.
Revolver was also the first record in which the impression of the Beatles as a holistic gang was disrupted. The group had taken three months off prior to Revolver-- easily its longest break since the start of its recording career-- and each band member went his own separate way after years of moving around the world as a unit. Even without the break, it's possible that the group would continue to explore individual concerns: After starting to do just that on Rubber Soul, it was only natural that the Beatles wished to continue to highlight their individual strengths on its follow-up, and they did by listing each song's lead singer on the record sleeve.
The first, surprisingly, was George Harrison, who kicks off the record with another stab at politics on "Taxman", and then later offers philosophical musings on "I Want to Tell You" and the Indian-flavored "Love You To". Over the next year or two, Harrison's guitar played a more background role in the group's recordings-- fortuitously, then, that time also corresponded with the years in which the Beatles were pleased to bunker down in the studio and most explore the dynamic tension between their individual interests and their final stretch of camaraderie and mutual respect.
Lennon's primary interest throughout much of this time was himself, something that continued throughout his career-- he was always suspicious, even dismissive, of Paul McCartney's character songs, but once he and Yoko Ono joined forces, her Fluxus-rooted belief in art-as-subjectivity became orthodoxy in his mind. Lennon's early explorations of self and mind that began on Rubber Soul continued on Revolver, as the suburbanite spent much of his time at home indulging his zest for the exploratory powers of LSD. He contributes five songs to Revolver, and, indeed, each is concerned with drugs, the creative mind, a suspicion of the outside world, or all three.
Each is also uniformly wonderful, and together they provide a tapestry of Lennon's burgeoning art-pop, which, along with Martin's inventive arrangements and playful effects, would peak the next year with the triumphs of "I Am the Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "A Day in the Life". The gauzy "I'm Only Sleeping" and rollicking 1-2 of "She Said She Said" and "And Your Bird Can Sing" aren't nearly as demonstrative as the songs he'd write in their wake-- as a result each remains oddly underrated-- but they function as some of Lennon's most purely satisfying pop songs.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" is another thing entirely. While "Doctor Robert" or "She Said She Said" touched on drug culture playfully or privately, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was a full-on attempt to recreate the immersive experience of LSD-- complete with lyrics borrowed from Timothy Leary's *Tibetan Book of the Dead-*inspired writings. Remarkably, though, much of it due to Martin's experimental production, tape loops, and musique concrète-inspired backdrop, the song is lively and giddy instead of self-serious or preachy. Even Martin's primitive psychedelia could have been thudding and ponderous, and yet more than four decades later the entire thing seems less a clear product of its time than not only most art or experimental rock, but most Beatles records as well.
Despite that triumph, however, Revolver was McCartney's maturation record as much as Rubber Soul was for Lennon. While Harrison was learning at the feet of sitar master Ravi Shankar and Lennon was navigating heavy use of psychotropic drugs, McCartney was refining his compositional chops by exploring classical music, training an eye for detail and subtlety in his lyrics, and embracing the orchestral work of Brian Wilson.
McCartney's optimism and populism resulted in the most demonstrative songs he created for Revolver-- the brassy "Good Day Sunshine" (which delightfully toes the line between schmaltz and heartwarming) and "Got to Get You Into My Life", and the children's music staple "Yellow Submarine", an inventive and charming track too often derided as camp. (It's also an early indication that it would be McCartney who would hold tightest to the impression of the group as a unit-- the image of the band all living together here was, for the first time in years, untrue.)
The understated qualities of McCartney's lyrics began to be misconstrued as simplistic in his ballads, but he provides three of his best here: "For No One", all the more affecting because it's slight and difficult to grasp, "Here, There and Everywhere", a model of sepia-toned sentimentality, and "Eleanor Rigby", which in its own way was as groundbreaking and revolutionary as "Tomorrow Never Knows". Virtually a short story set to music, "Rigby" and its interwoven descriptions of lonely people was and is a desolate and altogether mature setting for a pop song.
Revolver in the end is the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence. The Beatles had been transformed into a group not beholden to the expectations of their label or bosses, but fully calling the shots-- recording at their own pace, releasing records at a less-demanding clip, abandoning the showmanship of live performance. Lesser talents or a less-motivated group of people may have shrunk from the challenge, but here the Beatles took upon the task of redefining what was expected from popular music. Lest we forget it, the original flashpoint of Beatlemania remains the most influential and revolutionary period in the Beatles career, but the creative high points of 1966-67 aren't far behind. It's worth remembering as well that what had been demanded or expected from them as entertainers and popular musicians was something they'd challenged from their first cheeky, flippant interview, but just a few years later they were no longer mere anomalies within the world of pop, no longer potential fads; they were avatars for a transformative cultural movement.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


The duo’s wild-eyed genre mishmash covers chiptune’d pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song.

1000 gecs

If you're the type to take pleasure in connecting dots across the overwhelmingly scattered trends of 2010s digital music culture, then 100 gecs are right up your alley. Production and songwriting duo Dylan Brady and Laura Les—hailing from Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively—make abrasive, maximalist pop music that isn’t so much indefinable as it is endlessly identifiable, cross-sectioning myriad mainstream-leaning and definitively underground music released over the last decade. Nothing they’re doing is new, per se, but the way in which they do it feels fresh and appealingly unique.
PC Music’s arch, conceptualist cyber-pop is an easy reference point, as are the crunchy, compressed headbangers that Sleigh Bells pumped out in their prime; at times, 100 gecs sound like Visible Cloaks producing for Charli XCX (fittingly, Brady’s already turned in an official remix for the latter’s Lizzo-assisted single “Blame It on Your Love”). The duo’s most defiantly ear-bleeding moments recall the bass-shaking abrasions of XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me!”—but they also bring a sense of cocked-eyebrow playfulness shared with storied Swedish indie label Sincerely Yours, especially the dearly missed Situationist pop act the Tough Alliance. If that sounds like a lot, wait until you get a load of 1000 gecs, one of the year's most fascinating, exhilarating experimental pop albums.
There’s no better title for this thing than 1000 gecs, which references both the group’s charming self-titled 2017 debut and their sheer multiple-atop-multiple audaciousness. The album’s singles to date—the pulsing, cavity-inducing “Money Machine” and “800db Cloud”’s drop-dotted miserabilia—both conclude in washes of coruscating noise and death-metal thrashing; “I Need Help Immediately” is a sounds-of-the-studio collage in which the most recognizable melodic line sounds like an inverted McDonald’s jingle. The style and attitude of hip-hop is pervasive, but that barely encapsulates 100 gecs’ wild-eyed genre mishmash, which covers chiptuned pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song.
Brady and Les are musical fabulists, but 1000 gecs surprisingly rewards close listening when it comes to lyrical content, too. Though the opening line of “Money Machine”—“Hey, you lil’ piss baby”—scans as pure chest-puffing braggadocio, it also contains one of the most appealingly strange taunts in recent memory: “You talk a lotta big game/For someone with such a small truck.” “Stupid Horse” is the catchiest song about the dangers of racetrack betting since the Hold Steady’s “Chips Ahoy!,” doubling as a hilarious evocation of financial hedonism and a touching tale of animal liberation. “Ringtone,” 1000 gecs’ clearest-eyed selection, details intimacy in the age of group chats before its sweet sentiment curdles like milk left out on the counter: “Used to love that ringtone when you called me/Now it makes me sick.”
1000 gecs saw release in May on Brady’s Dog Show label, and the duo is currently affiliated with Diplo’s always-trending Mad Decent imprint as well. But they’re not for everyone, and that might be an understatement. Brady and Les’ ability to turn on various sonic and thematic dimes—to describe a loving exchange between two long-distance paramours one minute and brag about being addicted to Monster Energy drinks the next—can be disorienting. Even at their most accessible, 100 gecs sound like a bunch of fireworks stuffed into a fax machine, or human beings singing in the key of dial-up. They traffic in pure and uncut absurdity, but even their most outrageous moments radiate a strange sincerity—the kind that could only come from two denizens of a perpetually logged-on generation.


Compton is Dr. Dre's first record in 16 years, following news that his long-awaited Detox has been scrapped. Billed as a soundtrack to coincide with the new N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, the album finds him sounding charged-up, relevant, and coming to terms with his career for himself, not others.

Compton

Dr. Dre has been holed away for a worrying amount of time. A few years ago, he released a pair of singles ostensibly linked to his since-abandoned third album, Detox, and they were dire. "I Need a Doctor", in particular, was awkward and clunky, and it seemed as though Dre was straining too hard to perfect his comeback. He only re-emerged from the shadows in the name of Aftermath's latter-day luminary, Kendrick Lamar, who appeared to be energizing the elder statesman. But even Dre's surprise appearance on Lamar's major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012 felt disjointed, providing more reason to fret over the producer's impending solo return.
News that Dre had scrapped Detox entirely was confirmed alongside the announcement of this new album. Years of build-up washed away in the cancellation. It must have been a unique catharsis, purging an undeliverable hype with something tangible finally in hand. Compton isn't a bait-and-switch. If anything, the album is undersold by its billing as a soundtrack, a tag that misleads how well it stands on its own originality. Dre claims the recording was inspired by the set of Straight Outta Compton, the just-released biopic about N.W.A., and for a guy who's been helplessly coddling music in private for years, Compton ended up being a bit of a rush job. And yet, that haste helps the album sound more of-the-moment and free-flowing. For the first time in more than a decade, Dre's inspiration met up with a corporate deadline, and you can see the appeal for him: an opportunity to bundle his final record with a blockbuster movie about his career's origins. In that way, he's toying with the bookends of his career, polishing the story of his come-up while coming to terms with how to step away for good.
Dre has been here before, of course, years removed from a game-changer with an entire industry's eyes trained on him, wondering, "How might he do it again?" But he's less invested in building a comeback narrative on Compton than he was on 2001. Instead, the album finds Dre coming to terms with his career for himself, not others.
If there's a surprise here, it's that Dre, a 50-year-old near-billionaire long suspected of drifting out of touch, sounds charged-up, nimble, and relevant. Dre has always relied on other rappers and producers for inspiration and his own legacy is tied up in showcasing talent, lifting and rearranging it for his own cause. On Compton he's taken the approach and doubled down, and while the album is frequently personal, it's also communal, pushing his own voice towards the margins in favor of other vocalists. The first raps we hear on the album are delivered by King Mez, a Raleigh native who, alongside Justus, the least known of the album's features, appears to have helped Dre with the bulk of his lyric writing. (Either one or both of them are credited on all but one of Dre's vocal tracks.) When Dre comes in on verse two of the sweeping opener "Talk About It", he brags about his unopened Eminem royalty checks and jokes about buying the state of California. It's a reminder that Dre is the richest hip-hop artist ever, but he actually seems more interested in pinning down and framing his influence than bragging about his bank account.
"Genocide" is the earliest and clearest standout, carrying one of two showstopping Kendrick Lamar appearances, who bends and stretches his voice to the limits he encountered on To Pimp a Butterfly. The song is also the first instance on the album of Dre sounding completely unlike himself. To be sure, he's always been an obvious conduit as a rapper, unashamedly channeling the flow and cadence of his ghostwriters, but here he's adopted a delivery that spills out in bursts, his register is higher, and he's snarling; it's not the only place on Compton that Dre's rapping is both impressively light-footed and almost unrecognizable.
Musically, the album is a reminder that Dre's palette and appetite for sound has always been eclectic, and rather than retread, we hear him pushing into new territory. At one moment, he's sampling an obscure modern funk band from Italy (for "One Shot One Kill") and the next, lifting a guitar riff from a random Turkish psychedelic burner. Throughout, session musicians polish out the edges, and Dre continues to lean on live keys and bass to fill out chunky bottom ends.
Dre's quietest and most stalwart collaborator behind the boards on Compton is Focus…, son of Chic bassist Bernard Edwards and a longtime Aftermath in-house guy. (Focus… ditched the label in 2009 after spending years on end piling music into the Detox dump. He returned a few years later, working directly alongside Dre.) If Focus… is the easily overlooked workhorse—he contributes keys and bass as well as frequent co-production credits—higher-profile appearances from the likes of DJ Premier and DJ Dahi inflect Dre's music with their personalities. Primo's offering comes in the form of "Animals", impressively billed as the first-ever Premier and Dre collaboration. (Russian producer BMB SpaceKid programmed drums, which carry the best of the Gang Starr producer's fingerprints.) The song is also the most politically pressing on the album and nearly 30 years after "Fuck Tha Police" we hear desperation in place of rage. Anderson .Paak, a young multi-talent from Los Angeles who's all over Compton, finds his star turn here. (The song originally belonged to him and Premier.) Still, Dre's verse is powerful, a member of the one percent grappling with racism and the depressingly consistent anguish of being Black in America. "Why the fuck are they after me?" he booms, "Maybe 'cause I'm a bastard, or maybe 'cause of the way my hair grow naturally."
The cast of musicians employed on Compton is as varied as ever, but some of the most dramatic displays come from the legends. On "One Shot One Kill" Snoop Dogg rekindles an agitated menace that he seemed to have lost more than a decade ago. Xzibit and Cold 187um dip into a perfect stride over the meandering "Loose Cannons". The Game, for the first time since The Documentary, sounds like he deserved that original Dre co-sign, owning his original identity instead of falling into chameleonic flow-stealing. "Deep Water" is the most dynamic and brooding cut, a moment where everyone's contributions click into place. Anderson .Paak's performance as a drowning man is upsetting and uncomfortable, while Kendrick Lamar appears to be throwing Drake subliminals—and enlisting Dre in doing so. His verse is so overspilling with genius technicality that it's hard to dwell in any one place.
Part of the trouble in anticipating a new Dre album, then, has been a difficulty in framing our expectations. Hip-hop has been evolving around Dr. Dre for decades: He injected the type of ambitious orchestration into the genre that helped it modernize in the '90s, cannibalizing and assimilating everything around it. On his previous classics he showed us that new things were possible, a magic that's available only so many times in one life. Compton doesn't have the same breathtaking power, but it's excellent nonetheless, and more complicated and jarring than we could have known to hope for. The biggest and most immediately recognizable accomplishments here are basic: Dre is doing more than just fitting in or harking back, and both of those inclinations together were the real nail biters surrounding his new music anyway. Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.


Produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists, this compilation explores the many shades of heartbreak in current pop.

Late Night Feelings

The artist Audrey Wollen, best known as the creator of Sad Girl Theory, has long argued for the radical potential of feminine sorrow. Rather than weakness to be purged, Wollen sees a sturdy foundation for collective action. “Feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is really hard, one of the hardest things there is,” Wollen said, in a 2015 interview. “Our sadness is actually a very appropriate and informed reaction.”
Something of Wollen’s principles surface in Late Night Feelings, a collection of 13 songs produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists. Ronson has described these tunes as “sad bangers;” contributor Camila Cabello called them “emo bops sung by girls about love and heartbreak.” And while the prevailing mood is, indeed, sadness, the record makes for a finely shaded portrayal of that feeling. In a pop landscape at present awash in sad girls, Late Night Feelings lands several notches below the profundity of Lorde’s feral manifesto and several notches above Bebe Rexha’s disjointed smash of yesteryear, “I’m A Mess.” Never nihilistic, never narcissistic, the women of Late Night Feelings understand sadness as a vital conduit for solidarity and self-expression.
It’s not a knock on Ronson to say that the project succeeds, in large part, because of how little it sounds like his work. His distinctive production hallmarks—the neo-soul of Amy Winehouse, the sticky bounce of “Uptown Funk”—are largely absent, save for brief, restrained doses. The women on this record are diverse in terms of race and orientation, their target audiences, and their places in the music industry. For the most part, Ronson seems content to remain seated at the boards, allowing the unique strengths of each vocalist to inform the music.
A long stretch of the album is commanded by YEBBA, who proves conclusively, across three tracks, that she has the range, darling. Her daring vocals leap from near-Joanna Newsom falsetto to sultry, guttural contralto. Her delivery defies convention, particularly on “When U Went Away,” where she makes a glorious, expressive meal of a lyric as simple as “I’m gonna be alright.” Another highlight is “Why Hide,” an understated ballad from tremendous talent Diana Gordon. Gordon, a Beyoncé co-writer whose 2011 debut album as Wynter Gordon flew under the public radar, has been waiting and working for a breakthrough for a number of years. May this track be her first step toward ubiquity.
Lykke Li, no stranger to Sad Girl Theory, gives game performances on the title track and the penultimate “2AM,” lending nuanced perspective to narratives of unrequited love and emotional manipulation. She calls the uncaring cad of her affection to account, demanding better from him, never understating or excusing the damage he causes. Her anger, her sadness, even her tendency to fall for uncaring cads—all of these are stated plainly, and none of them lay the blame at her own feet. A similar ethic courses through Angel Olsen’s “True Blue”: heartbreak as reasonable, justified reaction to cruelty. In her delivery, Olsen’s voice becomes a damning, pointing finger: “I ran to you, and you know why.”
Not every song on Late Night Feelings can rival these peaks, but even at its lower points, the album is refreshingly candid. “Find U Again,” performed and co-written by Cabello, is wildly endearing for the sheer, unapologetic 22-year-old-ness of its perspective. “This crush is kind of crushing me,” she sings, and follows the line with: “I do therapy at least twice a week.” The lyric is no less effective for its clumsiness, an honest expression of anguish that resists the urge to slap a pretty, poetic bow on weeping on the sofa in a psychotherapist’s office. Even “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” a Miley Cyrus contribution that aims to recapture the magic of her “Jolene” cover, is a cut above her middling recent history. Though much of the song dips into pop cliché unmoored from context, a brief reference to a “burning house” with “nothing left” is a jarring reminder of Cyrus’s real, aching vulnerability: her house really did burn down in the Woolsey Fire; she really did lose her home.
Cyrus recently starred in an episode of “Black Mirror,” playing a pop star clad in cotton-candy colors who retreated, miserable, to her grand piano in the early hours of the morning to pen acoustic numbers about being, despite all her rage, still just a rat in a cage. The episode was laughably out of touch in its portrayal of the plight of the modern pop star, in large part because pop does, increasingly, take the sadness of girls seriously. It’s hard to imagine pap like “On a Roll” taking root in an era where Beyoncé makes history by narrating her honest feelings of worthlessness in the aftermath of infidelity, or Billie Eilish dominates the charts by vomiting tarantulas. Late Night Feelings is not the first recent record to treat the sadness of women as a healthy response to all manner of hurt. It is, however, a worthy entry in this still-developing pop pantheon, authentic and honest in its rendering of many shades of feminine sorrow.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The debut album from the Nigerian-American sisters in VanJess is a captivating fusion of 1990s R&B with contemporary electronic touches; its defining feature is the sisters’ uncanny synchronicity.

Silk Canvas

Jessica and Ivana Nwokike, the Nigerian-American sisters behind the R&B duo VanJess, are unusually in tune with one another. Born just a year apart, the two women look almost like twins, and they seem to read each other’s minds when they sing; their sound is so cohesive, their harmonies so fluid, that it’s impossible to imagine one without the other. Their sensual, confident, and, at its smoky best, near-perfect R&B is the clear work not only of years of practice, but a singular bond. They know how to play off one another. Ivana, with a deep, rounded voice that can cut across a song like a thunderclap, usually sings lead, while Jessica, whose lighter, scratchier voice recalls TLC’s T-Boz, injects personality and flair. When they’re in sync, they seamlessly share verses with a hairflip and a sultry smirk. It’s easy to imagine the two women as girls, putting on shows for family members in their living room, patiently waiting to grow up.
Silk Canvas, the duo’s debut album, is a cohesive and mature collection of R&B that takes its time developing its songs—the project’s throbbing production molds itself around the sisters’ vocals like magma. When it works, and it works often, the songs on Silk Canvas flawlessly incorporate the harmonizing R&B of Groove Theory, the wailing house of Crystal Waters, the effervescent bounce of Disclosure, and the vocal synergy of the sisters themselves to create some of the most compelling, hybrid R&B of the last few years.
Two of the best tracks on the album, the singles “Control Me” and “Addicted,” come courtesy of IAMNOBODI, the Soulection-affiliated wizard who provides layered, body-rolling beats for the sisters to sing love songs over. “Control Me” blends pounding drums, hazy synths, and a lilting Portuguese vocal sample into a hypnotic potion perfectly suited for VanJess—you can almost see the two sisters emerging from a smoke-filled club late at night and into the warm, summer air. Ivana steals the show, her voice dripping with yearning: “Yeah he callin’ but I hear no sound/Feel you only when you not around.” On the even sexier “Addicted,” the desire practically leaks out from the beat, which, with its stop-and-go drums and subtle chord modulations, is pure Aaliyah. Yet VanJess manage to avoid cheap ’90s imitation on the strength of their chemistry and sudden flow switches; there’s a feeling in every VanJess song that something unexpected is around the corner.
Two other singles, the soul-warming, Masego-featuring “Touch the Floor” and the dancefloor-ready, GoldLink-assisted “Through Enough,” prove that the sisters are more than capable of expanding beyond downtempo R&B and into electro-soul. The best of the upbeat offerings, “Another Lover,” is produced by Kaytranada, whose soul claps, shakers, and trademark pulsing synths propel VanJess’ vocals to house-music heights. It’s an ideal pairing—Kaytra’s (inevitable) drop is accompanied by a defiant Ivana belting: “Yes I’m angry and in pain/But know what? I can find/Another lover!”
Silk Canvas is as much a soundtrack as an album: It’s a playlist for a sticky summer night on a friend’s rooftop, a project committed to setting the scene more than controlling it. As a result, the sisters’ lyrics work more toward creating a vibe than actually saying anything of weight, hovering instead around standard treatments of lust, heartbreak, and toasting the good life. Their voices carry enough personality that it usually doesn’t matter, but the album’s closing third lags a bit due to sonic and lyrical fatigue. Save for “Easy,” the final four tracks are B-side retreads of better songs on the album, with “Best Believe,” an overproduced, shockingly ungroovy pop track, standing out as Silk Canvas’ one true miss.
Still, the sisters wield enough magic to make Silk Canvas a success: a surefooted proclamation of sensuality, musicality, and sisterly love that can hold its own with the best of new-wave R&B. “I have played and haven’t always won/Every guard will stay up,” Ivana sings on “Through Enough,” a momentarily slip of vulnerability. But then Jessica joins in and the moment is gone, inhaled by the sisters’ Teflon-strong harmonies and stinging confidence. For now, VanJess are letting us see what they want us to see, saving their deeper selves for each other’s eyes only. Luckily, the small glimpse we’ve been given is more than enough to hold us over until the next.


Ashley Monroe is a country singer with a peripatetic career: She has worked with Jack White in the Raconteurs, with Wanda Jackson, and belongs to the trio Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. She follows up her strong 2013 comeback LP Like a Rose with another collection of songs that hint at pop but remain rooted in classic country traditions.

The Blade

In retrospect, it was inevitable that Ashley Monroe would re-record "Has Anybody Ever Told You?" The song has been in her repertoire for nearly a decade, and has long been her signature tune. She first recorded it back in the late '00s, when she was an upstart from Knoxville and when Nashville had even less time for young female singer-songwriters than it does now. Monroe had signed to Sony, which in a no-faith vote had released her debut, 2009's Satisfied, digitally instead of physically. Soon, she would be on her own again.
Many artists might have simply disappeared, but Monroe simply switched her career GPS to take her down less-traveled industry routes: performing on the Ten Out of Tenn tour in 2009 (which featured ten emerging singer-songwriters from the Volunteer State), recording an EP with Trent Dabbs, working with Jack White on a Raconteurs single and a Wanda Jackson album, and forming a supergroup called the Pistol Annies with friends Angaleena Presley and Miranda Lambert. So, by the time she re-signed with a major, Monroe had re-established herself as a cult commodity in Nashville, and her ascendency looked certain. In 2013, she released what amounts to a comeback, Like a Rose, one of the best country albums of this decade.
The history of "Has Anybody Ever Told You?" also shows how Monroe's conception of country music has remained constant throughout all the professional twists and turns. Her original was spare and direct, with as few instruments as possible to get the point across, but the version on her new album The Blade is fuller and denser. It sounds made by someone with many more resources at her disposal, yet it retains its stateliness, its essential intimacy. Even with more musicians involved, Monroe makes the song sound like a whispered exchange between the listener and herself—less a profession of desire than a reassuring embrace.
The old song fits perfectly on the new album, which is less about the vagaries of relationships than the trauma of their aftermath. As such, it may not have the immediacy of Like a Rose, which was all about finding and asserting your identity both professionally and personally. Yet The Blade has its own specific character, its own set of concerns, even if it does take Monroe a few songs to settle into the album. Opener "On to Something Good" is a statement of unflinching optimism by an artist who might have succumbed to bitterness ages ago. The title track hinges on a devastating break-up metaphor: "You caught it by the handle, and I caught it by the blade." Rather than belt that line, Monroe wisely dials it back, sounding like she is already getting on with living with the hurt.
The theme of The Blade isn't the wound, but the salve. As such, some listeners new to country music—enticed by the success of recent efforts by Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, and Presley—might write off songs like "Weight of the Load" and "From Time to Time" as platitudes, the kind you might find on sympathy cards. Country, however, does these sentiments better than most genres, and the best country makes extroversion sound compassionate and humane. When Monroe is singing about her own travails, as she does on the upbeat "Winning Streak" (which is actually about losing) or the satisfyingly dark "Dixie", she manages to convey a very specific and detailed perspective, to suggest a very real human being within the song.
Like so many country albums, especially recent ones by Monroe's friend and bandmate Miranda Lambert, The Blade could be stronger if it was more streamlined and sequenced with some kind of overarching narrative in mind, but that's almost beside the point when the album sounds so damn good. Once again Monroe worked with Vince Gill and veteran engineer Justin Niebank, and together they hint at pop directions while never abandoning classic country traditions. This is country music for headphones, intricate and inventive and endlessly detailed. A looped beat opens "From Time to Time" with a rigid meter, but it loosens up gradually until it recalls something recorded decades ago at Muscle Shoals. On "Winning Streak" Monroe is joined by what sounds like the ghosts of the Ray Conniff Singers, egging her on toward disaster. And perhaps that's the secret to Monroe's longevity in a cutthroat business where radio rules and women are dismissed as "tomatoes": Digging in its past, she still finds sneaky ways to point towards country's future.


The New York singer’s smoldering, sophisticated songs get a little more cosmic while retaining their characteristic wit and charm.

Cassandra Jenkins: My Light, My Destroyer

My Light, My Destroyer

In March 2022, Cassandra Jenkins was laid up with COVID at a Homewood Suites in Aurora, Illinois, drowning her sorrows in Wayne’s World while her tour bus drove on without her. It was a terrible time to get sick. Not long before, the lifelong musician had been ready to give up music altogether—or at least jettison hopes of ever making a real career of it—when her second album, 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, unexpectedly connected with fans and critics. Now, quarantined in her hotel room, her mind spinning with worst-case scenarios, she began writing a song to keep anxiety at bay. “You know I’m gonna keep at this thing if it kills me/And it kills me,” she sang, in an early version of what would eventually become “Aurora, IL,” one of the standouts from her new album, My Light, My Destroyer. Determination and its flip side, desperation, are nothing new in Jenkins’ work. (“Give yourself a few years… None of them like you, dear,” she sang wryly on her solo debut, Play Till You Win.) But here, they take on almost cosmic dimensions, providing the backdrop to some of her most revelatory—and carefully rendered—songwriting yet.
“Desperation,” in fact, is the sixth word we hear on the whole record, in an opening line in which Jenkins tells us, in no uncertain terms, just how desperate she is. She recounts an existential search, nonspecific yet unmistakably real. As she reaches a climax in her quest, she sings, “And I felt my arms rise light as feathers,” her alto warmly reassuring over a sweet approximation of Van Dyke Parks-esque ’60s pop. But everything gossamer suddenly turns hard and brittle: “And the clock hit me like a hammer/And my eyes rolled back like porcelain/And the breeze cooled me like aspirin/And I cried.” You can practically feel each one of the objects she invokes beneath your fingertips.
The album is peppered with similarly dazzling images and unexpected counterpoints. In the slippery heartland rock of “Aurora, IL,” her sickbed spell leads her gaze upward, to planes crisscrossing the sky, and then even higher, to a vision of William Shatner circling the planet, weightless in one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets. Shatner weeps upon re-entry. Juxtaposed against this, she spins humdrum worry (“How long can I stare at the ceiling/Before it kills me?” goes the line in the final version) into a meditation on the precarity of the human condition.
She’s also just plain funny. Jenkins has always had a sneaky sense of humor—look no further than her fondness for unexplained Easter eggs. (After her debut album ended with “Halley,” a song about the comet, she slipped “Hailey,” a tribute to her friend Hailey Benton Gates, the actor/journalist/model, into the penultimate slot on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; the new album closes with a lilting instrumental outro called “Hayley.”) On “Clams Casino,” a smoldering rave-up about loneliness inspired by her grandmother’s death, she contemplates leaving the hotel bar and driving out to the ocean, leading to an unexpected punchline. “I heard someone order the Clams Casino,” she sings. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They said, ‘I dunno.’” It’s a joke so anticlimactic, you can almost imagine Stephen Wright intoning it in his trademark deadpan. Yet there’s tenderness here, too—the empathy of someone who knows what it feels like to be let down in a moment of need.
Once loosely rooted in Americana-tinged indie, Jenkins stretched herself on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, experimenting with ambient jazz. Here, she pushes further into a switchbacking sequence of interstitial instrumentals and collaged field recordings. Some of these feel central to her themes: “Betelgeuse” captures a moment in which Jenkins and her mother, a science teacher, go star-gazing, pointing out Orion and the Moon. Her mother’s enthusiasm is infectious, and the feeling of looking up at the vastness of space, awed by the sprawl of all of those tiny pinpricks of light, will be familiar to anyone who has ever rolled out a sleeping bag in their suburban backyard. The collages don’t always work; “Attente Téléphonique,” a meandering spoken-word fragment in French, breaks up the flow of the album’s final third. But it’s nonetheless gratifying to hear Jenkins loosening up and pushing beyond the signposts she’s previously established for her sound—no more so than in “Petco,” a song about loneliness and regret (like so many on this album!) set to molten guitar tones that summon ’90s alt-rock and, particularly, the clean-lined pop-grunge of the Breeders. It’s an audacious shift in tone, but, thanks in part to her collaborators, it works beautifully. If only all grunge pastiches felt so natural and so fun.
Like “The Ramble,” her previous album’s closing song, “Only One” highlights Jenkins’ facility for understated sophistipop; she’s a masterfully silky interpreter of hurt, a canny channeler of failed love in the softest possible tones. But the album’s very best song is its most atypical. “Delphinium Blue” is mostly synths—per the credits, a dream lineup of Korg Poly 800, Yamaha CS15, Roland JX-03, Roland Alpha Juno, and more, plus a little fretless bass, from Spencer Zahn, to keep the whole thing well-oiled. It’s an unusually distilled sound, as though all of those keyboards had been fed, via a slow drip, into a clear liquid in a clear tube. Jenkins’ writing is equally concentrated. “I saw I missed your call/Sorry for not picking up/I got the job/At the flower shop,” she sings in the song’s first four lines. But if desperation—which is nothing but a particularly unruly form of desire—is the backdrop of the album, here she keeps that want coolly in check. Drop by drop, she fills in just enough details to complete the picture of her determined protagonist, who intones motivational mantras to herself in a soft, meditative purr: “Chin up/Stay on task/Wash the windows/Count the cash.” Jenkins has never wielded a more finely tipped pen than when she offers us the image of night falling “like thorns/Off the roses,” or her protagonist methodically snipping stems, keeping cool in the walk-in. Over a backdrop that sounds like Enya scoring a David Lynch film, Jenkins paints an exquisitely detailed picture of desire and control. Scissors in hand, eyes fixed on the fogged glass, she keeps the tumult of unchecked emotion at bay.
Correction: A previous version of this review misstated the proprietor of the space rocket. It was Jeff Bezos, not Elon Musk.


The pop-punk band’s six-track follow-up to last year’s Morbid Stuff invites listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it.

This Place Sucks Ass EP

This virus has taken so much from us, not least of all my right to break my nose in the pit at a PUP show. Way back in February, when COVID-19 was still just a scary headline to scroll past, I wanted, desperately, to hit their set in Peterborough, a small town outside of Toronto. (All the members of PUP hail from Hogtown, as do I.) But the last Greyhound back to the city would leave the station long before the show’s conclusion: a one-two punch, usually, of “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP;” unmissable. Because I couldn’t afford an Airbnb, and because my efforts to arrange a carpool via r/puptheband proved fruitless, in the end, I threw up my hands. “Oh, well,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll play more hometown shows this year.”
Eight months on, as I write this review, perched at my kitchen table in the apartment I’ve not left in seven months, I wish I’d made Peterborough work. This is the very intentional irony in the title of This Place Sucks Ass, a six-track follow-up to last year’s excellent Morbid Stuff, composed largely of outtakes from PUP’s recording sessions for that album. “This place sucks ass” was something the band used to say “as a joke a million times on tour,” says frontman Stefan Babcock, whether they were performing in “Lethbridge, Alberta or New York City.” Like many of you, I’ve been yearning this year for any show, anywhere, no matter how much the place sucks ass.
I especially miss pits. I miss tossing my body into a sweat-slick crowd of other bodies, inviting harm instead of hiding all year from it. On these new songs, PUP emphasize the ways pain demands to be felt. In the past, the band offered a simple solution to the agony caused by drugs and alcohol: more drugs and alcohol. This time around, there’s no such numbing. On opening ragers “Rot” and “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock confronts his body in vivid, tangible terms: blood spilling, hives swelling, tissue turning green. There are no chemical solutions in these songs, whether licit (“I took the medicine, it wasn’t working”) or otherwise. Hell, in the chorus of “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock sings “way too stoned” like it’s a bad thing. These songs are acutely aware of physical pain. They invite listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it. It’s a remarkable shift for a band whose previous therapeutic suggestions involved going “numb, and losing feeling” before barreling ramsquaddled down the Don Valley Parkway at 180 kilometers per hour.
Drunk and disorderly conduct still pops up on This Place Sucks Ass, but it’s tempered now by a newfound conscience and a commitment to recovery. Reeling from a break-up on “Nothing Changes,” Babcock requests “a quiet lull, some books, and alcohol,” before promising to “begin again” in the morning. Though the weary chorus complains that “nothing changes, no, nothing ever changes,” echoing the sentiment of 2016’s “Familiar Patterns,” it’s very evident that something has changed. Four years ago, an average evening looked like “knocking back Jell-O shooters till I puked in the kitchen;” these days, he makes do with a glass of wine and a good book. The stunning closer “Edmonton” does see our hero returning to old, bad habits—hunched drunk over a urinal, awash in guilt over missing friends’ birthdays “and a couple of funerals.” Here, though, the regret feels useful. The song flies by, a “Full Blown Meltdown”-esque rager condensed to a mere seventy seconds, but it has the quality of a man stepping outside of himself and floating through a moment frozen in time. He looks at his bandmates on the stage, feels searing guilt for “singing songs about killing them,” and mourns a friend whose “body… is still warm in the ground.”
PUP is beloved for diaristic songs about venting anger in unhealthy, dangerous, and even violent ways. These struggles have not disappeared now that they’ve earned a couple of Polaris nods and dived off some big stages and played the hits for adorable head-banging puppets on Canadian children’s television. Babcock sings movingly, in “Rot,” of his ongoing struggle with self-loathing, despite all the listeners who look up to him, who sing his lyrics back to him at shows. He rehearses an acceptance speech, delivering a superb, sneering, “I wanna thank the Academy,” but wonders privately whether he even deserves recognition, whether he’s not just full of shit. If the record feels like PUP’s most forward-looking, optimistic music ever, it may be an attempt to reckon with this new role-model status. There is an honest wish, in their cover of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180,” to imagine a future where “something good happens.” The weak nihilism of “Nothing Changes” doesn’t even survive to the end of its chorus: “Even if the wait is long, and all the words are wrong/Put the recorder on, and I’ll begin again.” They sound like they’re about five seconds from hollering about orcas. If The Dream is Over dramatized the one-step-forward-five-steps-back reality of recovery, and Morbid Stuff rejected the practice of reveling in sadness, This Place Sucks Ass is a dispatch from beyond the moment of catharsis, after the floodgates have closed, sucking down shitty instant coffee in the back row of your 20th or 30th AA meeting.
Really, though, all of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it. Before the term was bastardized by roommates who never fill up the fucking Brita, “emotional labor” described the work of managing emotion in the low-wage service sector. There is something truly soul-killing about earning five bucks an hour to grin into the face of a shrieking Karen, to not even wince as the spittle flies out of her mouth and paints your face. Conversely, there is freedom in being forthright about your feelings, ridding yourself of any requirement to slap on a smile while your whole world crumbles. If you can rise to your feet and declare proudly that this place sucks ass, you’ve taken the first step toward creating a place that sucks less ass.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On paper, pairing recent Young Money signees Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug together for a 84-minute release seems like a half-baked idea. Along with label head Birdman, though, the duo have put together one of the finest mixtapes of the year.

Birdman / Young Thug / Rich Homie Quan: Tha Tour Part 1

Tha Tour Part 1

On paper, pairing recent Young Money signees Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug together for an 84-minute release seems like a half-baked idea. Though both rappers roots’ orginate in the variegated modern Atlanta rap scene, Quan is a rapper who rides the beat like Adrien Broner rides a speedbag, while the shape-shifting Thug is brilliant—future-sounding in the sense that no one on earth sounds like Young Thug—but unquantifiable. Though they’ve already got one totally great, totally anthemic single together, ”Lifestyle”,  there was no guarantee that the arrangement would hold up over 20 songs that feature little else but Thug, Quan, and occasionally Birdman.
Luckily, Daddy knows best, and Tha Tour Part 1 is one of the year’s best tapes, a tape that exudes the electric chemistry between Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan for the great majority of its runtime. Though Rich Homie can play the role of a bruiser, he has a deft ear for melody, and the points where he locks in harmonically with Thug—”Tell Em (Lies)” is perhaps the best example—feel magical. Given that his counterpart is wont to do his own thing, Quan finds a way to match him stride for stride and Quan’s versatility leads to a number of standout features.
Thug, for his part, is coming off a string of loose hits that showcase just how much good will has buoyed the young, strange Atlantan whose swag is best described as “singular.” Bouncing off of Quan on Tha Tour Part 1, that groundswell of goodwill feels like a tidal wave, a rush that takes you to a new plateau for both artists, and especially for Thug. Most of Young Thug’s releases to this point have a good number of songs that feel unfinished, or sound like sketches that haven’t quite found their true form. Thanks to some truly confusing label drama, finding out when, where, or how a given Young Thug song was recorded is a confounding task. With respect to his breakout tape 1017 Thug, then, Thug’s approach has never been as polished and effective as it sounds on Tha Tour Part 1. Even though it’s still tough to figure out what Thug is talking about—”CREW CUT! CREW CUT!” he yells on “Flava”, about his preferred t-shirt style—never has his Vine-loop flow sounded so awesome.
This is 84 minutes of mixtape-rapping released by two dudes who have lucrative label deals in place, so naturally, there’s points where this release drags. Songs like “Throw Your Hood Up” dribble past the five-minute mark and come across as like experiments with delivery (“Scabies on your babiieeessss,” sings Thug), but when they strike the balance—”730”, “Tell Em (Lies)”, “Givenchy”, “I Know It”—it’s the stuff of vivid dreams. Operating over London on da Track’s bed of snappy, energetic-but-slightly-warped trap, Quan and Thug are basically the Larry Johnson/Priest Holmes backfield of rap, and they know it.
Birdman’s involvement on Tha Tour Part 1 is comparatively spare but serves an important purpose—to stamp the two latest stars of his stable with his invaluable seal. Young Thug is making the music that many imagined Lil Wayne could make, and it makes perfect sense that Birdman has thrown his weight behind what is probably the best free mixtape offered for download in 2014.


Glasgow producer sounds both richer and more restless, serving up pitched-up hip-hop, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies.

Butter

Showcasing his stuttering spin on hip-hop beats, 23-year-old Glaswegian producer Ross Birchard, who records as Hudson Mohawke, demonstrates no shortage of ideas and energy on Butter. Like the album's neon-scorched cover, which includes hawks with mohawks, he doesn't do restraint or subtlety. "Joy Fantastic" has to be the true over-the-top cartoon moment of the already wired debut album. Preceded by a silly skit featuring two kids whispering about escaping to a magic land, the track of sinewy, bulbous beats features vocalist Olivier Daysoul laying down some fantasyland pap that makes Fonzworth Bentley sound like a thug. He also deadpans "You can swim the Minnetonka," dropping the last word like Dave Chappelle imitating the Purple One. An amusing aside on an overly precious track, it might also obliquely suggest where Mohawke is going with this electronic carnival.
He gets both richer and more restless with Butter, aiming to inject more soul into his skewered style while still fidgeting through pitched-up, Premier-inspired beats, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies. Hudson Mohawke already has a track record of refracting hip-hop and R&B through his own neon-colored prism. Between the re-imagined jams on the Oops EP, the Polyfolk Dance EP-- the latter named after a track by prog-rock violinist Jean-Luc Ponty-- and various singles and remixes, he's helped position his LuckyMe crew and the Wireblock label at the forefront of a multi-city axis of boundary-pushing producers. And new tracks like "No One Could Ever", which rolls out with dull snare taps and sped-up vocal snippets, would make fertile ground for a freestyle.
Butter overflows with these kind of neon-tinted beats, almost tropical in the way they suggest warmth and sunshine (see "Rising 5"), and deliriously happy. A teenage DMC champ, Mohawke made some initial forays into producing as a teenager by messing with the Music 2000 program on his Playstation, and it's clear video game tones and quick-cuts form a large portion of his musical vocabulary. Melody lines aren't just bright, they're blinding, buoyant, and sometimes verge on child-like. So high they sound pitch-shifted, the tracks still manage an unsteady swagger and would fit in well with Alexander Nut's recent Rinse mix. "FUSE" glides between pitches, tweaked to massive effect despite a lack of bass. "ZOo00OOm" blends bleeps, waves of bass, and what sounds like a beat boxer with a facial tic. "Shower Melody" soars on a virtuostic, screaming guitar riff while "Gluetooth" slowly bumps, chipmunk vocal chirping over a steady low-end march. His collaborations with Dam-Funk, especially "Tell Me What You Want From Me", are a bit more slinky, but the overall sheen is hard to escape.
His wobbling, histrionic beats can also showcase his propensity for going over the top. Like a child on a sugar high, he dives into ideas-- short tracks like "Twistclip Loop" and "3.30"-- and doesn't always follow through, taking multiple directions at once and occasionally dropping under-developed tracks, which flash and quickly fizzle without much resolution. While the album has been in the works for a while, Butter suggests he's moving at a rather frenetic pace. By the time the closer "Black N Red" rolls around, another bombast of tinny keyboards and chipmunk vocals, it's not contagious, it's overkill. Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.


The follow-up to the New York lyricist’s Def Jam debut is a stripped-back canvas for his searing, lived-in stories. His vision is clearer than ever.

Memoirs in Armour

When Sage Elsesser first started anonymously self-releasing his music, listening to him felt like pressing an ear against a bedroom door, eavesdropping on a troubled man and his muffled prayers. Considering the community he’d sprouted from—fashionable Fairfax kids, skateboards in one hand and sponsorships in the other—his affect was markedly sober, a bare-bones hush that foregrounded little more than pen and paper, rhymes and loops. Since then, each of his albums as Navy Blue has been a study in self-interrogation, reckoning with the things closest to his conscience: family, spirituality, and the voices of his ancestors. All the while, his sound has been steadily evolving from the sparse, confessional-booth digs of his earliest days, branching out to accommodate his expanding worldview. Gradually, the microphone hum has faded, along with the scratchiness of the loops and the grainy languor of those grand piano swells: By last year’s Ways of Knowing, it didn’t sound like we were stealing secrets through a closed door anymore. Navy Blue was presenting a fully-produced snapshot of someone who had grown up.
For all its existential baggage, this growth made Navy’s fourth LP feel like a cornerstone of his saga, a glimpse of how he could rap with more than just a distant snare in his headphones. Few moments passed where he was alone—there was constantly a fellow vocalist, a seductive melody, or an ornate live-band arrangement to keep him warm in the dusk of his turmoil. (“I can’t do this shit on my own,” he sang on “Freehold,” and it sounded like it.) Scaling back these accouterments makes Memoirs in Armour, his first release since being dropped by Def Jam, equally raw and rewarding. In a minimal record that elevates his voice, he ventures back into dusty early-career closets, commanding the no-frills confines he once found his footing in. Stripped-down as the music may be, his words carry more than enough weight to fill out the room. On Memoirs, he doesn’t seem nearly as interested in selling soundscapes as sitting us down and telling us difficult stories.
Although Navy is rarely preachy, his raps can leave you wondering whether you’re going to hell. Part of this is the sheer mass, the brooding existential glare, of the matters he reckons with: the circularity of life, the looming specter of death, the cathartic gratitude that threads these things together. These are hefty subjects in their own right, though Navy’s message is fortified by his disposition, the steely cadence he’s long wielded to synthesize his heaviest burdens. Stern and unflappable, he spends Memoirs staring you in the eye, daring you to avert your gaze. Fittingly, there’s only one track here (“Running Sand”) that eases his onslaught with something close to a chorus; even then, he’s grim, as if reading his lyrics from a crystal ball: “Conceived, you born, you live, you die/My mama said don’t rush it, I can’t function with my pride.” He’s right—it isn’t pride that lines his voice, but reverent longing, stripping the walls of his past selves then studying the debris.
Memoirs in Armour draws from a deep bullpen of guest producers, including the soulful Budgie (“Take Heed”), who worked extensively on Ways of Knowing, and Chuck Strangers (“Boulder”), who shares Navy’s meditative East Coast stomping grounds. For all the prowess they pack on their own, it’s compelling to see them take a backseat, parting the Red Sea for the rugged prophet at center stage. It’s even more compelling to watch Navy navigate the dry earth. “Time Slips,” a jarring eulogy of his sullen past, opens with quite the candidate for Introspective Hip-Hop’s pledge of allegiance: “This is the first time somebody would ever say this on a rap song, but can you turn me down?” Somber as he may sound, his vision is as clear as ever. “Depression was the birth of Navy Blue,” he raps. “My message is to serve a greater you.” He’s talking to us, but he could just as well be talking to himself.
Correction: A previous version of this review stated that Navy Blue left Def Jam. It has been updated to reflect that he was dropped from Def Jam.