A new box set documents the riveting story of Toronto soul singer and transgender music pioneer Jackie Shane. Hers are songs laced with pain but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession.

Any Other Way

Jackie Shane was born in Nashville in 1940, where she grew up with her mother, grandfather, and a grandmother who sang “moaning” sad songs as she cleaned the house. Spirituals and blues poured out of their radio by day; at night Jackie tried on her mother’s lipstick and rouge. A pre-puberty Jackie sang high soprano in the choir but later tuned into the ragged, brokenhearted lament of B.B. King’s “Worry, Worry, Worry.” By age 13, she stopped wiping off her mother’s rouge before she walked out the door. As she’d later declare, “I was born a woman in this body.”
By the mid-1960s, in her adopted city of Toronto, the singer had amassed her own following of Jackie Shane wannabes: impeccably made-up transvestites outfitted in glam suits who lined up around the block to see her shows. On posters and fliers, the adjective that would most frequently precede Jackie Shane’s name was “fabulous.” It is this period that is captured—with the raw, vital crackle of a performer at her peak—on Any Other Way, a 25-song double-album set just out from Numero Group. Shane cut the best material of her life in a scorching live 1967 session allegedly inspired by James Brown: Live at the Apollo, included here, that features some of her transformative covers of now-classic soul songs. Any Other Way also includes a half-dozen 45s, a handful of unearthed tracks, and extensive liner notes by Canadian music writer Rob Bowman, who contributes a riveting biography. It’s a worthy treatment for the resurrection of the voice of a trans woman who the world perhaps wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge on her own terms the first time around.
Akin to the recently departed Charles Bradley, Jackie’s songs are laced with an acknowledgment of suffering but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession. Hers is a story stoked by years of deep communion with music and an adventurous adolescence consorting with gamblers, hucksters, and performing in a traveling carnival. Like James Brown, her music is irrefutably dance-inducing. Like Tina Turner, she channeled trauma into triumph. Like Little Richard, she grew up multiple kinds of other in the Jim Crow South: black and gay—for both of them, a fluid, evolving term—and in her case, trans. Little Richard is Shane’s true kindred spirit. One of the first songs Shane sang as a teenager was his “Lucille,” winning a talent show for her rendition of the singer’s cathartic yowl. Shane would eventually study under Little Richard and his band the Upsetters.
But in the early ’70s, at a point in her career when most singers of her talent would have catapulted into fame, Shane disappeared from the public eye. She refused an offer to work with Funkadelic and previously turned down potential deals with Motown and Atlantic. In fact, she retired from music completely, stirring up rumors among her fans of her whereabouts and her possible demise. Fifty years later, Shane is living in Nashville, a recluse from the music world. But she was coaxed out of hiding for this first Jackie Shane–sanctioned release.
“Sticks and Stones,” the opening cut on the album, is an uproarious rebuttal ostensibly delivered to small-minded bullies “tryin’ to break us up.” “I’ve been abused! Deep down in my hearrrrrrrrttt,” Shane sings, punctuating her delivery with a miniature James Brown caterwaul. By the song’s end, she’s already transformed that pain into an unabashed declaration: “I’ve been abused!/...But I love ya.” A couple of songs into Any Other Way, you will very likely have begun to push your furniture to the edges of the room to clear space for a dance floor—to move to the dark, downbeat groove of “Comin’ Down,” or her powerhouse covers of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and “Money (That’s What I Want).”
It is impossible not to wonder why we are just hearing these songs in 2017. Was Jackie right to hide them until now? Would Atlantic and Motown have steered her in Top-40-engineered, watered-down ways? Her poppier tunes, like the eminently catchy “In My Tenement,” have the instant, infectious grab of a classic Ronettes or Shangri-Las hit—but they feel thinner, by comparison, to the full-hearted, soul-bearing weight of songs like “Cruel Cruel World.” As Jackie told it, she didn’t even know what a tenement was. Shane’s talents are better given over to her rendition of “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” most famously recorded by Ben E. King and Aretha Franklin; in her hands it’s a ruthless, ruminative, chill-inducing song, summoning sorrow and strength.
Any Other Way’s title song was written by Stax Records musician William Bell, and it feels of a piece with the Memphis label. Lyrically, “Any Other Way” is a song about a broken heart trying to seem tough: “But when you see my baby/Here is what you say/Tell her I wouldn't have it /Any other way.” When it roars out of Shane’s throat, the tune becomes larger still, a fearless song about being true to yourself. “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay,” Shane sang, without needing to add emphasis. On its own terms, “Any Other Way” is Shane’s “I’m Coming Out”—her “Express Yourself,” her “Born This Way”—without the pop or torchy histrionics that prop up latter-day anthems. It draws instead from the pain embedded in its narrative, on the power of its horn line and chorus of backup singers. Released on Sue Records, best known for early-’60s albums by Ike and Tina Turner, “Any Other Way” was a hit on Shane’s home turf, reaching #124 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” listing.
Onstage, Jackie didn’t have the flash and swivel of Tina Turner or James Brown. Her own moves, to hear her bandmates tell it, were subtle, nuanced, a perfect foil to the frenetic charge of her music and a reminder of the deeper places from which it originated. Meanwhile, Jackie went into a kind of trance, perhaps called back to the inner pull of the gospel songs on her grandparents’ radio.
But the discovery of these Jackie Shane recordings now feels electric—the sound of a singer who explores the full range of both male and female expression, a transformative definition of what it means to make soul music. Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again. She teases out the midsection of “Money” with an extended sermon that culminates in yet another galvanizing affirmation that could bend to sexuality, race, or otherness in general: “You know what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing. As long as you don’t force your will and your way on anybody else, live your life because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy.” Preach.


Scarcely free of his teenage years, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst has attempted to create a mature, cohesive concept album of ...

Fevers and Mirrors

Scarcely free of his teenage years, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst has attempted to create a mature, cohesive concept album of sorts. He has shot for the moon, but skids to a halt on the ground, hindered by young wings. Granted, I'm 20. He's 20. Far be it from me to criticize the efforts of those my age based solely on our greenness, but as my grandmother would say, Oberst's eyes are a lot bigger than his stomach.
Fevers and Mirrors is home to the sophomoric musical meanderings of a young songwriter who seems to take himself far too seriously. This doesn't mean that the music is that bad, only that it's marred by its own overzealous nature. Quite the contrary, there are a few gems hidden in the niches of this album. "The Calendar Hung Itself..." is an intense piece which grinds along to an addictive Latin guitar strumming pattern. On "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh," Oberst makes an old chord progression seem new with a strong acoustic hook and nicely executed instrumentation from a vibraphone and slide guitar. However, the album as a whole fails in several departments.
What in particular are these fatal flaws that plague Bright Eyes? Let's begin with Oberst's voice. Initially, he seems wracked with intense emotion. But listen closer. His voice has one setting: unsteady quaver. He sounds hypothermic. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "When the Curious Girl Realizes She is Under Glass," where the effect is so extreme that it becomes absolutely ridiculous, not to mention unnerving.
So much of what passes for emotional and intellectual depth on this album is blatantly contrived nonsense. This would never have been so terribly obvious had he not placed a gut-wrenchingly ludicrous staged radio interview with himself at the end of "An Attempt to Tip the Scales." I simply cannot stress enough what a maddeningly self-indulgent mass of pseudo-depth this section of the album falls into. In this sickening chunk of narcissism, Oberst makes a laughable attempt to prove to his listeners that he is of a penetratingly deep intelligence by spouting strings of stale aphorisms that pass for rich understanding amongst those reluctant to have original thought. Not only this, but the mock interviewer actually interrupts Oberst to tell him how brilliant the album is. On the actual record he says this. I hate to sound haughty, but I have honestly never witnessed such tasteless, ostentatious self-promotion on an album by anyone. It must be heard to be believed.
On a strictly musical level, Bright Eyes has his definitive moments but struggles with originality for the majority of the record. "Something Vague" showcases one of the most abused chord progressions in existence with little variation on what's already been done. "The Movement of a Hand" sounds suspiciously like an Eels song. And in a sign of lackluster songwriting, far too many of the songs on Fevers and Mirrors fall victim to the predictability problem of vocals following the bassline at all times. "A Scale, A Mirror, and Those Indifferent Clocks," "Arienette," and "The Center of the World" are all paradigm cases of this trait despite being pleasant enough songs.
In most places, Fevers and Mirrors makes for an interesting listen considering its flaws. The instrumentation is diverse and tastefully orchestrated by the large cast, and it's clear that a great deal of thought and talent has been contributed to its making. Unfortunately, the album is also contrived and makes too blatant an effort to convince the listener of Oberst's tragic wisdom. It's a record that can be enjoyable in select places and definitely shows signs of potential, yet falls victim to mediocrity when held against the work of truly developed musicians. Oberst is in the early stages of developing a talent that will likely take some years to fully mature. When it does, I look forward eagerly to the result. For the time being, he's a far cry from excellent.


Ramona Gonzalez digs back into the ’90s to find the right R&B moods for her latest album as Nite Jewel, her most focused work yet with many nods to new jack swing and Janet Jackson.

Real High

It’s easy enough to figure out dates and events from the distant past, but it’s near impossible to understand what it felt like to be alive then. Geographer David Lowenthal has a succinct way of describing this: “The past is a foreign country.” In her work under the nom de pop Nite Jewel, Ramona Gonzalez has always explored the past like a sensory historian, writing songs that use the familiar elements of sweet-as-acid synth-pop and late-night infomercial house without directly imitating them. On Real High, her latest album, she asks a pressing question: Does it actually seem like the world is getting worse, or did the ’90s just feel fun because the club hits were so damn good?
Gonzalez’s previous albums walked the line between sweet-as-acid pop and late-night infomercial house, as seen through the fog of memory. On last year’s Liquid Cool, she returned to hazy throwback lo-fi after a label-led foray into more direct pop and a multi-year hiatus. This time, her sights are set on a specific cultural touchstone: Janet Jackson’s 1993 album janet. She’s not the first to mine Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ new jack swing for modern inspiration, but she has the chops to back it up.
The tracks on Real High tend to start with a Mooged-out bass line and layer keys and tinkling drum fills on top—the basic new jack swing template that took over R&B in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But Gonzalez uses the repetition to circumvent expectations for how pop songs are supposed to work. The songs have verses and choruses, but rarely bridges. “Had to Let Me Go,” one of many variations on the theme of exploring what a real high should feel like, does this to great effect. Her croon is very Janet, but the song gets its momentum and emotional arc from the development of different keyboards and the deployment of percussive effects. A less generous reading of this song—and much of Nite Jewel’s oeuvre—is that they sound like demos a producer would shop around before he got a star attached. But this album makes the case that the architecture of this style of songwriting is strong enough that it should stand on its own.
The marquee tracks are the ones that move away from these genre experiments into a more idiosyncratic approach. Danceable cuts like “The Answer” and “I Don’t Know” feel contemporary because production stretches beyond ’90s touchpoints. A guest appearance from Bay Area rapper (and E-40’s son) Droop-E transforms “R We Talking Long” into trap music. On the title track, she tries to take the prototypical R&B ballad and using her tools to make it feel vital. Even though the emotional stakes are pretty low—“I’m looking for a real high and a real low/Isn’t that the way love goes?,” in another nod to Janet—it’s profound enough in its obvious simplicity to keep your attention on why you’re actually listening to the song: a druggy, lugubrious dance, not a life lesson.
The word “nostalgia” was originally coined to describe the mental ailment of extreme homesickness in the 17th century. After immigrating to a new country, a person would become lethargic and waste away. In the era before planes, trains, and automobiles, once you left home, you were probably never going back. Now that the past can be accessed fairly easily, that sad nostalgia doesn’t make as much sense to us. By putting old sounds into different contexts, Nite Jewel’s albums work as an exploration of a happier nostalgia. Because she takes a specific sound as her point of departure this time around, Real High is her most focused work yet.


The Australian quartet both epitomizes and transcends the indie-pop aesthetic on an album that balances lighthearted wordplay with serious political commentary.

I’m Terry

Good indie pop is tricky to pull off. Go in too hard and the music can turn precious or juvenile, but keep your distance and you risk coming off cynical, as if you’re making fun of your own music. To sound breezy and effortless, you have to strike a delicate balance—and Australian quartet Terry have become highly adept at threading that needle. Throughout the ten songs on their third album, I’m Terry, they display a healthy sense of humor without ever undermining themselves.
Terry’s way of avoiding excessive earnestness is more about absurdity than apology. Take “The Whip,” whose lyrics read as pure wordplay: “The whip of wealth/The whipper wheels/The whipper feels it’s fine.” But the music is so sharp and energetic, the song ends up sounding more like an exhilarating workout than a Lewis Carroll verse. Even more invigorating is “For the Field,” a punk-leaning sprint in which singers Al Montfort and Amy Hill indulge a fondness for alliteration: “Filthy neds fill the field/Filthy frames for the fakes/Filth for phonies filth for filth.”
For all its playfulness, I’m Terry steers clear of cartoonish inanity. Many songs touch on serious themes, but without flattening the band’s ideas into slogans. “Crimes” plays with repetitive rhymes and rhythmic consonance to make a case against the penal system. Terry find an ever bigger target on “Under Reign”: their home country. Over a climbing melody, Hill and Xanthe Waite proclaim, “This is bleak/This is A-U-S.”
Terry’s ability to balance humor and seriousness matches their openness to just about every kind of sound associated with homemade indie pop. They’re equally comfortable opening I’m Terry with the nursery rhyme feel of “Carpe Diem,” pushing out jangly guitars on “Jane Roe,” and melting a retro, doo-wop-style chorus into the austere jaunt of “Oh Helen.” Even though their songs are pretty simple, Terry have keen ears for texture, layering in a range of tones and tempos that make the album unpredictable enough to encourage multiple listens. The deftness with which they subtly shift sounds from track to track is an object lesson in the undersung richness and diversity of the indie pop aesthetic.
As familiar as the music on I’m Terry will sound to anyone who’s followed indie music over the past three decades, they pull together so many different strands from that era that the result is too distinctive to simply be filed away with a particular genre. They also have a knack for making their idiosyncratic songs so catchy as to feel universal, a rare talent they share with global comrades including New York’s Palberta  and London’s Shopping. Even the band’s own conspicuously generic self-presentation (their first two albums are titled Terry HQ and Remember Terry) suggests a disinclination to subsume their music to any larger label. From now on, we can call their style simply “Terry pop.”


The Pope of Mope moves to Rome and becomes revitalized; with help from producer Tony Visconti, he explores rapturous self-torment with more passion and power than he's possessed in years.

Ringleader of the Tormentors

"I am a living sign," Morrissey sings on "Vicar in a Tutu", from the Smiths' 1986 apex, The Queen Is Dead. If the words evoke Morrissey's dual personae as myth and mythmaker, their religious overtones are a subtle reminder that he's also a never-quite-recovering Catholic. Though his 1990s relocation to Los Angeles, the sunny center of 20th century glamour, elicited little surprise, his recent move to Rome seems even more natural: There, the Pope of Mope can reel around the fountain of both Occidental culture and inexpiable guilt.
From humdrum towns to giddy London, from Sunset Boulevard to the Eternal City, this living sign signifies, first and foremost, himself. Ringleader of the Tormentors is a new Morrissey album, not a new Morrissey; attempts to wring autobiographical revelations from its lyrics are easy, but ultimately futile. Accusations of self-parody, after losing their sting sometime around "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", remain apt but, in Morrissey's case, often irrelevant. On his eighth solo album, the enigmatic warbler again sounds contradictory notes on love, death, the divine, and the despised. All that's really changed are his collaborators-- Ennio Morricone, T. Rex/Bowie producer Tony Visconti, guitarist/co-songwriter Jesse Tobias-- who trade the televised-car-chase production of 2004 comeback You Are The Quarry for a sound more akin to the glam-rock crunch of Your Arsenal.
Rapturous self-torment-- particularly the chasm between love's possibility and its unrealized fulfillment-- was always the defining condition of the Morrissey experience. For Morrissey's narrators, love and death are two levels of the same double-decker bus-- a theme made explicit on lead single "You Have Killed Me", a strapping rocker reminiscent of "Irish Blood, English Heart". With Hammond organ syncope and Morricone strings, trembling ballad "Dear God, Please Help Me" likens lust to "explosive kegs between my legs," while decorous torch song "I'll Never Be Anyone's Hero Now" places "my one true love...under the ground." As Moz idol Oscar Wilde put it, "Each man kills the thing he loves." Moz's interests were eloquently foreshadowed by another Catholic artist, Jean Genet, whose 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers laces its gay protagonist's exaltation of a beautiful male murderer with references to the Church. Likewise, Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ isn't just about homoerotic S&M.
The famous mind/body dichotomy from "Still Ill" tellingly neglects the soul, but Morrissey still can't escape what he's called "inbuilt guilt." Even "Dear God, Please Help Me", Moz's most emotionally beguiling song in years, grows ambivalent at the moment inattentive critics have cited as the singer's coming-out: When Morrissey sings, "Dear God, did this kind of thing happen to you?/ Now I'm spreading your legs/ With mine in between/ Dear God, if I could I would help you," is he addressing a lover, or a loving deity? On "You Have Killed Me", which contains some of this infamous celibate's most candidly sexual lines since Meat Is Murder-era B-side "Stretch Out and Wait" (or at least YATQ's "Come Back to Camden"), the man who ostentatiously forgave Jesus two years ago "for all the desire He placed in me" slyly concludes, "There is no point saying this again/ But I forgive you."
Even when contemplating mortality, Morrissey remains enamored of youth. A children's choir guests on multiple tracks, including fast-paced single candidate "The Youngest Was the Most Loved". Their immature voices bestow hair-raising pathos upon a refrain almost too self-evidently jejune for the middle-aged Moz to sing alone: "There is no such thing in life as normal." The choir returns for "The Father Who Must Be Killed", an equally energetic knife-attack on a stern stepfather, which ends in eerie laughter. Elsewhere, Morrissey marks the passing of time more keenly, with even more overt auto-plagiarisms. "It's the same old S.O.S.," he concedes amid the Roman rain, midtempo groove, and orchestral crescendos of the epic "Life Is a Pigsty". "Even now in the final hour of my life/ I'm falling in love again," he adds, subtly acknowledging that love is not as new to his music as recent press has implied.
Morrissey's poignancy, in his best solo work as in his vivid Smiths prime-- what critic Simon Reynolds once called "a piercing beauty, or a sweet ache"-- often inflames the exhilarating terror of loneliness just as it elevates the sensations of love through comparison with Moz's unrequitable romantic perfections. The complicated gender roles, the ubiquitous allusions, the games of irony, art, and style serve equally to ignite a listener's curiosity. Ringleader of the Tormentors is, rather than the now-anticipated letdown, another fitting heir to that legacy. The living sign again: "This one is different, because it's us."


The manic, unclassifiable Glasgow producer's overstuffed, expertly curated contribution to the BBC's Essential Mix program pulls together threads from across the musical spectrum.

Essential Mix

Many young producers are ditching the minimalistic beats and hollow, gray dub textures that dominated dance trends for much of the last decade in favor of something bigger, brighter, louder, greater, and all around more, more, more. For these maximalist-minded artists, traditional melodic structures are never enough: Why not have six synths playing three melodies out of step with each other, and throw a cluster of guitar and drum solos in there, too? It's a trend that parallels rapid advancements for both digital production and consumption. It's also the perfect soundtrack for a current generation who live (and, sometimes, dance) on the internet. In terms of scope and notability, these producers run the gamut from big-box (Skrillex, Rusko, Dillon Francis) and small-scale (Lunice, Damu, the cross-continental Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew).
Over the last year, Glasgow's Russell Whyte, aka Rustie, has been a key figure in this loose movement due to his ingenuity and raw talent. While likeminded fellow Glaswegian and Warp labelmate Hudson Mohawke offers a colorful take on disparate strains of hip-hop and R&B, Rustie's manic, overstuffed work defies categorization. It's dubstep, it's hair metal, it's jazz fusion, it's pop played at 140 bpm, it's the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack, it's classical music filtered through the bombast of Southern hip-hop's grandest moments-- all of which could be happening either separately or all at once.
Both of his official releases for Warp, 2010's Sunburst EP and last year's singular Glass Swords, sound something like being locked inside an arcade that's harnessing its electricity from the sun. Glass Swords is way too much fun to listen to, like overdosing on sugar-- but it's a lot to take in, too, and perhaps best enjoyed in controlled doses for potential motion-sickness victims.
That potential for sonic overload might make some listeners feel trepidation when approaching Rustie's contribution to the BBC's long-running Essential Mix program. As is Essential Mix protocol, Rustie's mix runs just a little under two hours, which will prove a mind-boggler of a listen for many. But though it nearly triples Glass Swords' running time, it's also, weirdly, more compulsively listenable. If you have two hours to spare, take the plunge and find choon after gob-smacking choon. And if you got shit to do, that's fine-- just jump to any random point, listen for a bit, and leave wherever you like.
Though it seems like all his fingers are on 10 different buttons at once, Rustie's Essential Mix is several cuts above because of how expertly paced and curated it is. The wide variety of material culled for this mix-- much of it unreleased-- can be divided into three large categories: dreamy, gold-glistened synth bangers, the type of bass-rattling beat workouts that shake fillings out of teeth, and a selection of R&B and hip-hop both new and not-too-new that's accompanied by Rustie's distinctive production touch.
He drops a ton of his own new material too, work ranging from a-thousand-sunsets gorgeous ("Reflector") to the type of flaming-keyboard workouts that he seemingly pulls off in his sleep ("Cat Nip", "Frazzle", "Ooompa"). Rustie's stuff wows, but he's willing to cede the floor to other euphoric up-and-comers, from Dorian Concept's fat, juicy synth-walloped remix of Cid Rim's "JazzJazzJazz", to Lone's latest slice of beatific rave revivalism, "Dream Ache", to "R U Ready", a cooking dance-worthy slice of head-fuckery courtesy of Hudson Mohawke and Lunice's promising TNGHT project.
Tracks arrive with the expected chaotic abandon but the flow is what makes the set work, from the gorgeous, sighing "VIP" version of Rustie's own Glass Swords cut "City Star" that breaks up a particularly dark and clubby run, to Rick Ross's titanic "The World Is Ours" steamrolling through the mix's opening minutes, flattening the awesome ostentatiousness that preceded it. The whole thing breathes evenly, which gives Rustie plenty of space to go wild elsewhere. Everything's a sound effect with this guy-- wolf noises, stoned exhortations, 8-bit video game samples, creepy helium vocal samples, Trapaholics mixtape drops, creepy giggling, and Kanye West, whose presence on this thing is exactly as "HANH?!?"-filled and fitting as you'd expect it to be.
Kanye shows up twice on Rustie's Essential Mix: once in vocal form, on your favorite weed carrier's weed carrier Big Sean's "Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay", and once behind the decks on his recently circulated remix of Cassie's "King of Hearts". Both sound better here than they do isolated-- the latter's aided greatly when paired up with the Glass Swords highlight "Hover Traps", but the former's low-end oddball charm is given new life here, a previously mediocre tune that's finally found a home. Within 24 hours of when this Essential Mix went to air, Kanye's new single with 2 Chainz, Pusha-T, and Big Sean, "Mercy", also dropped-- which featured an "additional instruments" credit given to Hudson Mohawke. Kanye's interest in this new maximal wave of electronic music makes a lot of sense-- why wouldn't the guy who loves The Biggest Things want to work with young guns that are just as sonically greedy?
On a more genre-wide level, though, Rustie's Essential Mix draws a line tying electro-maximalism's pilled-up attitude and modern hip-hop's own druggy eccentricities. The yo-yo hook behind A$AP Twelvy's "Our World" fits in so perfectly that the line between where it ends and Rustie's own "Eyezz" begins to blur, while Wiz Khalifa's "Guilty Conscience", which appears  in the middle of the mix's closing third of Rustie-contributed explosives, provides one of the set's more glassy-eyed moments. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the appearance of Destiny's Child's 1999 single "Get on the Bus", featuring a start-snap production job from Timbaland that sounds so "now," it serves as a bittersweet reminder of how ahead of the game this guy was at his prime. The fact that almost all of the hip-hop and R&B cuts that appear on this mix remain untouched, yet still contribute greatly to its uniformity, speaks greatly to the texturally varied sonic patchwork that Rustie's weaved here, comparable to DJ /rupture's Uproot in its functionality as a primer for different sounds existent and being made all over the world-- as well as a killer party playlist, too.
Rustie clearly values an off-the-moment sort of chaos, the idea that it's possible to travel from point A to point B and make a thousand zig-zag pinball-machine detours along the way. That's how a lot of people live these days. As a snapshot of a young artist seizing a moment to offer an overview of a scene, Rustie's Essential Mix is the most perfectly taken picture. As a pure, positive, party-hardy mega-statement on digital (and music) culture's total stimulus overload, it's a joyously fun trip.


On Interpol's first album in four years—and first without Carlos D—there’s nothing that touches the band’s creative peak, but it's still a step up from their 2010 self-titled record. El Pintor’s best songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts.

El Pintor

When Interpol went out on their first tour behind their 2002 album Turn on the Bright Lights, Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard imparted some prophetic advice for drummer Sam Fogarino at an Ohio stop: “Don’t sell more than 50,000 records or you’re in trouble.” Nine years later, the album was certified Gold by the RIAA—that’s 500,000 units sold in the U.S.—and trouble has, indeed, followed the band since their star-making debut. Look past the questionable lyrics and behind-the-scenes debauchery, and it becomes clear that Interpol have been victims of unreasonable expectations. As with many pop cultural events that have taken place in the last 13 years, 9/11 plays a role, as Turn on the Bright Lights’ dark, impeccably styled catharsis took on an accidental resonance, despite being written before that cataclysmic day. With its iridescent glow and empathetic hook (“New York cares”), album centerpiece “NYC” carried a specific weight; around 9/11's tenth anniversary, Suede’s Brett Anderson professed a love for the song, and Michael Stipe covered it with R.E.M. in 2003, all of which suggested that Interpol should be considered a Serious Band.
The 12 years following Turn on the Bright Lights’ release, however, have only proven that looking to Interpol for profundity makes as much sense as installing a diving board in a kiddie pool. If we’re being real, the band’s ankle-deep tendencies started with Bright Lights, and that’s not necessarily an insult: like many bands surfing the new-rock wave at the time, Interpol turned shallowness into a kind of goofy virtue, the sonic equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors. There was, and still is, nothing inherently original about what they were doing—Peter Hook cheekily applied to be the band’s bassist in 2010, only to be rejected—but in a musical climate jam-packed with call-backs to rock’s past, Interpol were, in their own way, innovators. They took the sonic template for one of the most serious bands of all time and applied it to tales of white lines, late nights, and hetero-male woes that made “Entourage” look like The Joy Luck Club. In 2014, this is called “trolling”; in 2002, it simply sounded like a good time.
The years passed, and it became clear that Interpol’s talents could be listed on one hand, which was, again, not initially a bad thing. Antics from 2004 lacked the enveloping, cohesive atmosphere that made Turn on the Bright Lights such a striking debut, but the songs were definitely there. In 2007, Interpol did away away with the pesky, ill-fitting notions of “indie” (which the band only represented in sound, similar to how the term is still occasionally bandied about in the UK music press) by sensibly, and briefly, making the major-label leap to Capitol; the resulting record from that partnership, Our Love to Admire, is typically pinpointed as the moment Interpol started their steep, steady decline.
The chilly reception Our Love to Admire received at the time now seems a little unfair, and possibly the result of cultural fatigue; 2007, after all, was certainly not 2002, and Interpol’s stubborn refusal to show any progress after five years of visibility was a sign to many that the band’s slavish unoriginality was growing stale. In reality, Our Love to Admire represents Interpol at their most Interpol-iest—streamlined songwriting, crystal-clear production, lyrics directly referencing cocaine, a song called “No I in Threesome”—and if it’s not their best album, it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than what followed. The swaggering melodrama and shiny-suit dark pop of Our Love to Admire was, more so than ever for Interpol, redolent of bands from the ‘80s; this time, though, they approached the modern-day equivalent of Duran Duran’s empty-headed brilliance, a fitting full-circle since Carlos Dengler was known to wear a Duran Duran T-shirt during rehearsals for Bright Lights.
Regardless, Our Love to Admire was not a commercial leap, and so Interpol entered a new decade with a return to their old bosses at Matador and their fourth, self-titled album. Easily the band’s worst record to date, Interpol was bereft of hooks, choruses, and other elements that make listening to music enjoyable. Four years later, they've all but disowned the record, judging by their set lists. So it’s understandable to approach the band’s fifth album in 12 years, El Pintor, with suspicion. The album’s title means “the painter” in Spanish, but it’s also an anagram for the band’s name, and the similarities to its predecessor don’t end there: as with Interpol, this new one’s 10 songs long, self-produced, with studio vet Alan Moulder handling mixing duties. The phrase “approach with caution” comes to mind.
El Pintor isn’t “more of the same” in one specific way: it’s Interpol’s first album without Dengler on bass, following his departure in 2010; although Dave Pajo served as his replacement on the tour promoting Interpol, the band’s a trio now, with frontman Paul Banks taking on four-string duties. Dengler’s absence is felt not least by the people in the band; Fogarino recently admitted to NME that Dengler’s talents were “a huge part of [Interpol’s] sound...You couldn’t take that away.” But El Pintor sounds like the work of a band revitalized, for the moment at least. There’s considerable energy in these songs, with just enough melodic smarts for El Pintor to rank as the fourth-best Interpol album—a dubious achievement, sure, but the failure of Interpol makes even that surprising.
There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak, but any of El Pintor’s songs could hang with Interpol’s strongest deep cuts. With a red-herring of an opening that resembles the stately Antics opener “Next Exit”, “All the Rage Back Home” is the strongest up-tempo Interpol single since Our Love to Admire’s “The Heinrich Maneuver”, propelled by Fogarino’s jet-engine drumming and a chorus delivered by Banks, in his distinctive whine, that sounds as wistful as it does festival-ready. The tricky licks of “My Desire” fondly recall Our Love to Admire’s “All Fired Up”, while album highlight “Anywhere” cannily fuses the patient urgency of Bright Lights’ “Obstacle 1” and the proclamatory riffs of Antics’ “C’mere”.
If you’re starting to notice a trend here, then the ultimate failing of El Pintor is apparent: this is the sound of a band feeding on its past, a move that counters the bloodlessness of Interpol with a formula that is as moderately effective as it is uninspired. The slow, elegant majesty of “My Blue Supreme” is a re-trod of Our Love to Admire’s chiming “Rest My Chemistry”, the insistent throb of “Ancient Ways” essentially resembles Antics’ “Not Even Jail” rejiggered slightly, and so on.
The sole surprising moment arrives two-thirds of the way into “Ancient Ways”, when Banks breaks into a brief falsetto that shatters even Randy Jackson’s definition of “pitchy”; it’s quite possibly the most embarrassing thing Banks has ever done on record, and we’re talking about a guy who once sang the lyric “You’re so young/ Like a daisy in my lazy eye” with serious conviction. Lyrically, Banks has long been a punching bag, but his middle-school-poetry approach has grown endearing over time—and it’s also all but vanished from this decade of the band’s work. The most memorable lyric Interpol provided was when, in a bit of unintentional hilarity, Banks moaned “I’m a nice guy” on album opener “Success”; here, it’s on “My Blue Supreme”, in the form of the telling pre-chorus utterance “Only one in a hundred make it/ We fake until there’s nothing to fake.”
These lines could be interpreted a few ways—a commentary on the stylishness that Interpol once so exuded, a self-castigation of the band’s own derivative tendencies—but it could also be seen as a statement of survival. Circa Antics, the major-label-subsidiary market was flooded with Interpol soundalikes that ranged from not-bad to not-terrible to flat-out-awful; they sounded like copies of copies, and by the time the major-label system sunk their claws into the real thing, the whole thing resembled an endless series of funhouse mirrors. With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts, but taking into account what came before, it’s a miracle that Interpol still exist in this capacity at all.


Rangda is a trio composed of avant-garde guitarists Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny alongside drummer Chris Corsano. Each of their records features riff-heavy, tightly packed instrumental rock tunes with moments of abandon, and on The Heretic's Bargain they are as precise and wild as they've ever been.

The Heretic's Bargain

Chaos and order are the poles that Rangda swings between, but order usually wins. On each of their three albums, the trio of guitarists Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny and drummer Chris Corsano have hewn to a basic pattern: several compact tunes combining riff-heavy instrumental rock with moments of abandon, plus one lengthier piece that ventures farther out. Their latest, The Heretic’s Bargain, begins laser-precise: "To Melt the Moon" is a gnarled coil of twisting guitar lines and shuffling rhythm, with Bishop threading needles and Chasny chasing him through rolling peaks and valleys. Two quicker tunes follow with more spot-on, tightrope-walking riffs, and you can hear them testing how short and sharp they can go without losing their chaos-around-the-corner edge. Much of that balance stems from Bishop’s guitar lines, which are equal parts surf-rock and Middle Eastern mysticism: Some of these tracks evoke Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet after a marathon Sublime Frequencies listening session.
The wheels loosen up toward the end of The Heretic’s Bargain, with two tracks that feel more improvised and impulsive. But these are not one-shot jams tossed off to fill an album’s length. The 19-minute closer "Mondays Are Free at the Hermetic Museum" is a thoughtful journey across a vast guitar-rock desert that’s as much about patience and deliberation as the rest of The Heretic’s Bargain is about speed and accuracy.
It’s interesting to compare "Mondays" to the long pieces on previous Rangda albums, "Plain of Jars" (from 2010’s False Flag) and "Silver Nile" (from 2013’s Formerly Extinct). There are big similarities: all three songs unfurl slowly and meditate on a melodic figure until it becomes its own universe. But the fleet and pointed riff at the center of "Mondays" would have easily fit onto one of the shorter tracks. As Bishop and Chasny lock together and push that riff into abstraction, they come close to fusing their two sides, precision and abandon. That makes The Heretic’s Bargain their most cohesive record to date, and suggests that it will likely be bested on that count by the next one.


Melodic sing-alongs, fuzz-guitar riffs-- Weezer are going back to basics, making music that sounds for (but also often by) 13-year-olds.

Raditude

Right now, psychiatrists are feverishly debating over what to include in the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the DSM-V, the psych bible. Among the syndromes those experts may decide whether to include in the latest edition is Peter Pan Syndrome, adults who long for youth so powerfully they begin to act like eternal children. Think Michael Jackson, who in naming his ranch Neverland, certainly invited the diagnosis.
But most people with Peter Pan Syndrome regress to pre-pubertal life, an age before the complications of responsibility and sexuality. So what do we call what Rivers Cuomo has? The Weezer frontman seems to be stuck in an eternal puberty, forever 13-- confused, horny, hyperbolic, obsessed with brand names. It's a characteristic that has always been at the heart of Weezer, from "In the Garage" onward. But it's never been more concentrated than on Raditude, which, from its goofy name and cover art to its Mountain Dew-jacked sound and melodramatic lyrics, is designed to hit 13-year-old boys directly on target.
And Cuomo is damned good at getting inside the frightening mind of a teenage boy. "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" is a perfect title for a song about awkward courtship, and the fact that the narrator takes his date to Best Buy (teenage Mecca) before a home viewing of Titanic is pinpoint detail. Echoes of "In the Garage" turn up in, well, "In the Mall", written by drummer Patrick Wilson but sold by Cuomo emphatically chronicling the cruising circuit of elevator-to-escalator-to-elevator. Elsewhere on Raditude, Cuomo whines about going to work, pressures girls into third base, parrots hip-hop slang, escapes into ridiculous fantasy, and on bonus track "Get Me Some" portrays the teenage experience in four words: "Right now/ Everything sucks."
Of course, these journal scrawls are backed largely by power-pop-- what else could it be? Cuomo proved for all time with the first two Weezer records (and fleetingly since) that he's a master of the genre, popping out melodic sing-alongs and fuzz-guitar riffs, and Raditude largely goes back to those basics. "Let It All Hang Out" is a song about celebrating the weekend and forgetting your troubles and sounds like the song you would play to do exactly that. The peppy (if a bit on the creepy side) "I'm Your Daddy", made with Britney and Miley collaborator Dr. Luke, justly turns the table on rock-borrowing pop like "Since U Been Gone". All together, it sounds like the first record ever written with the goal expressly in mind of being kick-ass to play on Rock Band. The departures from that formula are harder to stomach, particularly the Bollywood-drenched Hallmark card "Love Is the Answer", which is absolutely awful.
I still get hate mail for saying Make Believe was so bad that it retroactively ruined the Blue Album and Pinkerton, and I still believe it-- "Beverly Hills" was the sound of a band that had learned to do as little as possible to write a hit. But Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV. But the record's teen-boy empowerment message doesn't have much to offer anyone over 13 years old. Perhaps the proper fictional character to reference isn't Peter Pan, but Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson from Dazed and Confused-- we all get older, Rivers Cuomo stays the same age.


On this sparkling reissue of an early career highlight, the act that billed itself as “the most fucked-up country band in Nashville” revels in the ecstasy of influence.

What Another Man Spills

“Visit the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, TN.” That short, direct advertisement has appeared in the packaging of almost every Lambchop full-length, but it’s perhaps most prominent on 1998’s What Another Man Spills, where it appears on the front cover. Barely noticeable on the translucent vellum of the original CD, the words are unmissable on the new LP reissue. It’s an odd exhortation, as Lambchop do not sound much like any country band past or present. Frontman Kurt Wagner has said that the message was “a way of emphasizing that this was a band from Nashville and they are of this place and in a way it would remind people of our Nashville-ness and our ties of being from here.”
Lambchop have had a weird relationship with both the city and the country genre ever since they proclaimed themselves “the most fucked-up country band in Nashville.” They incorporate pedal steel, guitars that sound like Chet Atkins and Glen Campbell, even sophisticated string arrangements that look backwards to the more urbane Nashville Sound of the 1960s. But Wagner sings with no definable twang, and his subject matter only occasionally dovetails with that of mainstream country radio. So it sounds like a joke, the idea of Lambchop as a country band: If you lived in Nashville, what other kind of band could you possibly be?
Spills was released at a moment when Nashville represented something awful and fake and calculated to the roots-rock weirdos who subscribed to No Depression. (“Fuck this town!” goes the Robbie Fulks anthem from 1997.) Proudly identifying with the capital of country music was subversive and perhaps even self-deprecating in the late 1990s, never mind that Wagner evinced no knowledge of mainstream country. He genuinely loved those old, forgotten records, preferring Jim Nabors to your indie rock saviors and accepting how out of touch that made him look.
Building on the dense, lustrous, yet still punk-indebted sound of 1997’s Thriller, What Another Man Spills does two things that ought to be oppositional, if not downright irreconcilable: First, Lambchop set themselves up as something resembling a real band, as opposed to a loose assortment of day laborers, music-biz civilians, and whoever else happened to show up to record on a given day. Second, they blow that band to smithereens. “It was a big step toward our acting and sounding something more akin to a professional music entity in both sound recording and the approach to the songs we were making,” Wagner writes in the new liner notes. Loose and gangly, with an air of why-the-hell-not experimentation in every song, the album nonetheless sounds more determined, more focused, more professional than anything else they’d done so far.
Much of that has to do with Mark Nevers, a longtime band member who had stepped into the role of producer. He booked sessions around Nashville during studios’ weekend off-hours, securing a better rate to make a more expensive-sounding album. To say that Spills has a rich, lush, variegated sound would be an understatement: Especially on this new LP, remastered from the original DAT tapes, the music sounds so good that you get distracted by certain elements: that deep, lovely guitar that interrupts opener “Interrupted”; that tectonic bass saxophone on “King of Nothing Never”; the trembling marimba on “Scamper” (inspired, reportedly, by Wagner’s job as a floor sander). If this is indeed country music, then it’s built on the refined sounds associated with Owen Bradley and Chart Records, not the slick hat acts or even the alt-country insurgents of the era. It’s museum country rather than mainstream or alt.
Even as they settle into this newfound professionalism and cement the Lambchop sound, they work to explode that sound, constantly nudging at its boundaries and sometimes pushing aggressively against them. Along with the graceful smears of pedal steel, there are string arrangements all but quoted from old Blaxploitation soundtracks. The rhythm section is tight in its approximation of funk, and occasionally Wagner breaks into a laryngitic falsetto. As its title implies, this is a covers-heavy album, but instead of Little Jimmy Dickens or George Jones, Lambchop tackle Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love (Lover Song)” and “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long” by the underrated Stax artist Frederick Knight. There’s none of the distance or detachment in these covers that, in the ’90s, could mask a fear of failure; Lambchop embrace these songs and the traditions they represent unreservedly, as though Mayfield’s superfly orchestrations were a big-city cousin to hillbilly music.
In fact, one of the best moments on Spills comes halfway through “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long,” when Wagner delivers Knight’s spoken-word overture: “Yes, I’ve been lonely. You never know the real meaning of peace and harmony. Yeah.” Perhaps because the cover was recorded during a decade so closely associated with irony, that interlude has the feel of a high-wire guitar solo, where one wrong note might bring everything to a screeching halt. But Wagner never betrays a smirk. This is an album about love—romantic love, sure, but mostly musical love. Lambchop emerge on this record as a band that reaches out into the world, that collects what another man spills and makes something new and warm out of it. This is an album about the joy of influence, not the burden.
As such, the music is encoded with the trappings of this phase in the band's history—not only what they were listening to in the late ’90s, but most of all who they were associating with. To repay Yo La Tengo for taking them out on tour, Lambchop cover “It’s Not Alright,” by James McNew’s side project Dump. The album art is courtesy of Vic Chesnutt, who also plays on a few songs; Lambchop had recently backed the Athens singer-songwriter on his sixth album, The Salesman & Bernadette.  And they reinterpret two songs by F.M. Cornog, a.k.a. East River Pipe, who had just become their Merge labelmate. There’s a bleary majesty to “Life #2,” especially when the pedal steel scissors through the chorus, and “King of Nothing Never” brings rambunctious energy to match a self-loathing so fantastical that it becomes a kind of self-love. Together, they comprise an advertisement akin to the one for the Country Music Hall of Fame: Listen to East River Pipe.
In 2018, the closing track plays like an unintentional eulogy. “Theme to ’The Neil Miller Show,’” by bass player Marc Trovillion, has a boisterous party vibe similar to the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger.” Someone keeps shouting for the band to get their asses into the studio and play the song, enjoying it so much that he calls everybody back in for one last pass through the coda: “C’mon man, let’s get down!” Perhaps because of his songwriting credit, and definitely because of his prominent bassline, I always pictured Trovillion as that ringleader. It’s a lovely and lively moment, all the more poignant five years after Trovillion’s death, and it speaks to why all of these people are making music together in the first place: Call it country or fucked-up country or whatever, but there’s a invigorating sense of camaraderie in these songs, a palpable joy in creation, and an excitement to find out what’s over that next musical hill.


For his latest psychedelic pop record, Michael Collins enlisted Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood, and members of the Mac DeMarco band, among others. It’s Collins’ most focused effort yet.

The End of Comedy

The band names that Michael Collins chooses for his dazed pop projects function as tests of faith. He’s operated under the monikers Run DMT and Salvia Plath, made surreal soul and funk as half of Silk Rhodes, and his latest record comes as Drugdealer. Each choice has been a little goofy and somewhat dumb. But these words are also imbued with the pupil-dilated honesty that comes when you dabble with the sort of mind-expanding substances he’s nodding to. There’s always been more to it than just grinning jokes: the names are bellwethers that let you know if you’ll relate to Collins’ perspective, not indicators of the quality or content of the songs themselves. If people detest the names, Collins said in a 2013 interview, “they probably won’t really like the songs, and that’s just a-ok with me.”
Despite the name, Collins is framing this Drugdealer effort as a new beginning. The title—The End of Comedy—can be read as a way of buttoning up the past, moving onward to sweetness and sincerity. But that is, in a sense, what he’s been doing all along. Hidden underneath titles like Bong Voyage, One Hitter Wonders, and Get Ripped or Die Trying is a serious songwriter who’s more in touch with the world around him than his jokes suggest.
Now that Collins has a few extra sets of hands around, that’s highlighted even further. Ariel Pink, Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, members of Mac DeMarco’s live band, and the Montreal freaks in Sheer Agony all turn up over the course of The End of Comedy’s 11 tracks. They smooth out some of Collins’ stranger—and occasionally, more grating—tendencies. There’s no rambly spoken word pieces about DMT trips or distended drone works. Instead, there’s things like “Suddenly,” a slowly unravelling pop song about joy, newness, and unexpected realizations. The lyrics—sung by Mering—are loose and abstract, but after meandering in the dark a bit, she sees the rise of the morning sun, and with it comes a wave of comfort: “Now I feel like I’m home again.” Even its lyrics are delirious and psychedelic. It’s the sort of song Collins has been writing, or trying to write, over his whole career, but delivered in a much more clear-headed way.
That lucidity becomes the defining characteristic of The End of Comedy. There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled—two relatively hi-fi works by Collins’ standards. Previously, Collins has fogged his more produced recordings with dizzy arrangements, but now he’s able to turn even the lazily strummed acoustics and heavy-lidded slide work of “Easy to Forget” into something purposeful. Ariel Pink, also operating in his surprisingly sincere mode, pens an ode to confusion and amnesia, but Collins breathes life into it, stopping and starting the instrumental in ways that propel what should be a stoned, slippery song.
Comedy, in fact, is not necessarily gone. Collins still takes time to use a convoluted metaphor about rolling spliffs during the heatwave plod of “Sea of Nothing.” But what surrounds the peculiar humor is carefully considered in a way that few of his recordings have been. Collins’ work has always had this potential—the untamed electric energy of synapses pushed past their usual operating capacity. Now, with a little help from his friends, he’s finally able to shape and direct it. He’s taken a step back, and instead of aiming for a laugh, a smile will do.


The NYC disco-house revival group Escort return with their sophomore effort. It's leaner, cleaner and less funky than their self-titled debut, with the full band lending weight and warmth to the perfect period synths. They also offer a sharp cover of St. Vincent's "Actor Out of Work".

Animal Nature

On their second studio record Animal Nature, Escort’s leaders Dan Balis and Eugene Cho continue the Studio 54-esque party that began with their 2011 self-titled debut. Back in the early 2000s, Balis and Cho met at Vassar College and began making house singles as a duo. Years later, they added vocalist Adeline Michèle, and a 17-piece live band to the mix at their shows. Animal Nature isn’t a huge departure from their debut; the production is cleaner, and there’s a bit less funk in the mix. This is a more polished, less-DIY affair than 2011’s debut, something you can see even in the cover artwork: on their self-titled, Michèle goofed off in a parking lot, but 2015 Escort seems to have found its brand identity, and it looks alluring in neon.
On Animal Nature’s ten new songs and nine remixes, Escort finds its footing in a post-disco phase.  Title track "Animal Nature" doesn’t disprove the many allusions to Daft Punk the band has gotten over the years, but it also brings to mind parallels to LCD Soundsystem’s "Get Innocuous!" The lyrics don’t make sense—"Stand up, stand up bang your drum, we are the barbarians"Michèlechants throughout "Barbarians" like a Vietnam War song—but they don’t have to, because the production quality remains at the forefront for Escort. A cohesive, well-produced R&B-infused disco album is no easy or small feat, but Escort keep their focus sharp and momentum pumping, with the full band lending weight and warmth to the perfect period synths.
They’ve moved from funk disco into a late ‘70s disco/early ‘80s synth phase, blurring genre lines.They throw in a few welcome curveballs: covering St. Vincent’s Annie Clark is an ambitious gambit, but Michèle’s penchant for theatrical singing over scattered chiptune beats fit right in with Clark’s aesthetic on "Actor Out of Work."  It keeps the brittle, plasticine quality of the original while scaling it up for club dancefloors. These moments are welcome, as there isn’t always  a ton to distinguish them from other, similar acts working in the always-crowded ‘70s-saturated house and disco music field. By the end of Animal Nature, Escort proves it’s gotten craftier and has found a bit more clarity, and they hit a nostalgic sweet spot that will never grow old.


The indie rock perennials return with yet another accomplished album, again reminding us why they're among the most consistently rewarding bands of our time.

Popular Songs

Oh demon reliability! Oh demon longevity! These twin curses can plague any decades-old band in an age when careers are measured in months. Yo La Tengo can count themselves in the rare company of this group, elder statespeople operating in a genre where they're influence-grandparents. And alongside peers Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips, YLT have to operate under the bane of their own consistency at a time when the new and a compelling narrative are over-celebrated. All three of those bands have reached a steady state where reinvention is unnecessary: They're so frequently good they don't even get a redemption story. Hell, Wavves already is set up for one of those.
Fortunately, as Yo La Tengo celebrate a quarter-century of existence with Popular Songs, their twelfth album, there's still plenty to like without a PR push. The Yo La Tengo repertoire has expanded steadily over the years, and the genre experiments of years past have slowly assimilated into their creative process until it's hard to remember the mere Velvets-jacking indie pop band they once were. The easy way to draw fickle attention to your dozenth album would be a drastic makeover, but Yo La Tengo are wise enough to choose continuity over the easy angle. And as far flung as these dozen Popular Songs may be, any Yo La Tengo scholar can easily trace their DNA back through their discography.
Now, forget I said all that for a moment, as the opening track and single, "Here to Fall", is the exception to the rule. Nearly guitarless, with a menacing electric piano and cinematic strings lifted from an Isaac Hayes soundtrack, it's an ear-catcher for anyone expecting the same old same old. If there's an antecedent here, it's the treasured "Autumn Sweater", but beaten and wary and a little dangerous, Ira Kaplan refusing to play the kindly, reassuring grandfather: "I know you're worried/ I'm worried too."
But it's a darkness that quickly lifts. "Avalon or Someone Very Similar" is upper-register psychedelia, dreamy and chipper. And when the drony keyboards and hazed-out Georgia Hubley vocals combine on "By Two's", we're safely back on familiar ground-- in this case the late-night dream cycle of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, arguably the band's last unmitigated success.
Some will surely find the return trip to that well a welcome reprise, others a tired retread-- pick your side and know whether you will Enjoy This Album. Because there are more historical echoes here, particularly in how Yo La can crank out a fuzz-pop anthem ("Nothing to Hide") or fragile, vaguely-countrified indie pop ("When It's Dark", James McNew's "I'm on My Way") in their sleep. Fortunately, they don't phone it in on those tracks, and slip ‘em into I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One and most people wouldn't know the difference.
Elsewhere, the band indulges its expanded palette by riffing on Motown, funk, and organ-boogie (not sure how else to classify "Periodically Double or Triple"), as they've been doing off and on for most of the decade. For most bands, the costume-swapping would be a novelty act, but Yo La Tengo, who prove their cover-band chops every year on WFMU, have hung these sounds permanently in their closet by this point. "If It's True" is pure Funk Brothers karaoke complete with a spot-on bridge and AM-radio strings, but Hubley and Kaplan's back-and-forth duet is too adorable to nit-pick.
After nine tracks, the only thing missing would be the usual YLT epic, and well, the band doesn't disappoint. In an odd bit of sequencing, all the long tracks are clumped together at the end, forming a trilogy of nine-minute-plus jams with wildly varying results. "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven" is the only one that could have slipped into the front half of the album unnoticed, a gorgeously unspooling meditation that suits its ethereal title. But the stark acoustic riff that makes up most of "The Fireside" is interminable, and "And the Glitter Is Gone" is 16 minutes of the usual Kaplan noise-skronk that will tempt all but the most devoted YLT fans to cut the album short.
Thanks to whoever pushed them to the back, those missteps are easily ignored, leaving a 10-track record (of a more reasonable length) that can compete with anything since the band's heyday. It's easy to overlook the sound that's on display through the bulk of Popular Songs as more of the same, but it's also uniquely Yo La Tengo in a way that has taken 25 years to reach vintage status. Experience can be a crutch, an excuse to tread water in comfortable waters. But Popular Songs wears its age well, a calm but firm reminder of an indie rock perennial it's all too easy to take for granted.


When Porcelain Raft’s first singles started circulating in 2010, Mauro Remiddi distinguished himself with electronic pop that stood out for their craft as opposed to being mere conveyances of vibe. His new LP Permanent Signal presents a less resonant collection of similar ideas.

Permanent Signal

When Porcelain Raft’s first singles started circulating in 2010, Mauro Remiddi distinguished himself from the glut of similarly wavy electro-pop acts on numerous levels; for one thing, “Tip of Your Tongue” and "Dragonfly" stood out for their craft as opposed to being mere coneyances of vibe. You could also sense that he was a veteran songwriter and you’d be correct. While many of his peers were young men trying to cultivate mystery through anonymity, Remiddi was in his mid-30s and became more interesting with every revelation about his actual life experiences. A number of short-lived and far-flung musical projects took him around the globe and the Italian-born, London-based Remiddi created songs that were equally implaceable: they had shades of Swedish indie, UK bedsit and American lap-pop, and blurred the distinction between a guitar-toting singer/songwriter and a synth-pop artist. The inability to define Porcelain Raft contributed to the initial intrigue, but with his second LP in two years, Remiddi has cemented his sound; Permanent Signal is more or less more of the same, a mutual fatigue passed on from Porcelain Raft to the listener.
As Josh Love noted in our review of Porcelain Raft's 2012 debut Strange Weekend, Remiddi had a vocal connection-- if not a spiritual one-- with glam-rock space cadets of the past without overtly getting into interstellar role playing. Maybe we can chalk it up to the obligations that come with making a debut album and having to tour the thing, but Permanent Signal is more earthbound, Remiddi coming back down to terra firma but still communicating like a man slightly out of orbit. Members of the Antlers and Yuck contribute in ways that you can’t immediately spot without the credits, but you sense their presence in Permanent Signal’s overall demeanor, a sort of mundane, window-staring melancholy, even if highlight "The Way Out" was inspired by the incapacitating effect of Hurricane Sandy in his new home of Brooklyn.
Remiddi's abstract lyrics are shot through with a longing that never devolves into outright despair-- “If I think about it/ Just don’t get me started,” is the first line on the record and indicative of how candid, direct conversation is something that’s just out of reach. It makes Permanent Signal effective mood music, in that it sounds heartbroken or at least wistfully romantic, and Remiddi's own feelings never trample upon yours.
Consider opener “Think of the Ocean” as guidance for a means of surveying the record: it’s blue, moves in regular, steady tides and difficult to portion out into distinct territories. Hooks slowly reveal themselves, but are almost always instrumental and often referential.  “Cluster” employs a classic Cure trick, using descending guitar lines to make a major key melody draw tears like a minor one. Likewise, “I Lost Connection” is the musical and lyrical centerpiece of Permanent Signal, conveying its emotion not so much through his words but rather the slow rollout of major 7th piano chords, beautifully bright, wispy and touched with a dissonance that makes them sound sad anyway.
In one of the fleeting moments of pleasure, Remiddi breathes “This feeling is taking over/ The sky is made of blue," evocative, sweet nothings underscored by deep piano chords suggesting a house anthem about to break out. Instead, a steady kick drum pulses and eventually fades, a climax denied-- the name of the song, naturally enough, is “Minor Pleasure". Conversely, “The Way Out” and “It Ain’t Over” interrupt the liminal, waking dream spell with distorted, rumbling breakbeats. They aren’t distractions, but all the same, what are you supposed to make of an album operating under the auspices of pop that needs drum machines to provide the hooks?
At the very least, Permanent Signal proves Remiddi is still distinguishing himself from the long-forgotten also-rans that clogged many an MP3 blog three years back. Whereas most of them couldn’t transition from singles to albums at all, let alone cohesive ones, Porcelain Raft has become too adept at making cohesive, whole statements. Even if Strange Weekend achieved a similarly unified sound, if obvious singles didn’t stand out, key phrases did. And they've taken on a prophetic resonance, "Put Me to Sleep" being the least of them. Previously, Remiddi doubted the worth of conversation “Unless You Speak From Your Heart,"whereas “Think of the Ocean” finds him apologetically asking “If I could take off this mask/ Will you laugh at me?,” a concise epigram for a record whose consistency feels tentative rather than confident. Or, you could think of “Shapeless & Gone”, descriptive of the beatific state of Porcelain Raft’s earliest work and at the same time, an unintentional criticism of Permanent Signal’s lack of definition and presence.


Alongside Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray, and Zola Jesus, Glasser is in the upper tier of those making quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop.

Ring

Remember that eMusic Selected + Collected comp from back in early 2009? Basically a rundown of hot new acts at the time, turns out the thing was pretty farsighted-- more than a couple of the bands it featured (Girls, Salem) went on to find big audiences. It was also the first time many of us heard Cameron Mesirow aka Glasser, whose track "Apply" was one of the disc's standouts. Back then Glasser was a solo project-- just Mesirow singing over GarageBand beats-- but the song had a great mix of electronic drag and skyward pop, and showcased Mesirow's impressive vocal range.
Fast-forward almost two years later and it seems like the kind of music Glasser makes-- sort of quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop-- has become a lot more popular. On the indie side you've got Bat for Lashes (Glasser's closest sonic relative), Zola Jesus, and Fever Ray, as well as Florence and the Machine threatening to break big in the mainstream. So the timing's definitely right for Glasser's full-length, and with Ring she's enlisted the help of producers Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid to help flesh out her sound. Tracks are still based on Mesirow's early sketches, but now they've got more weight and sheen.
There isn't an easy descriptor for Glasser's sound-- she incorporates bits of tropical pop, tribal percussion, and a couple of different strains of electronic music. Her songs sidestep traditionally linear arrangements for a more open, circular approach-- they kind of swoosh around without pausing at verse-chorus intersections. Interesting as this is, the main draw of Mesirow's music is her voice-- warm and flexible, she can bend it to suit different moods and tempos. Ring's best tracks, like "Home" and "Glad", create space for her vocals to soar. In "Apply", which gets an update here, heavy tribal percussion and grinding synths give way to a sunny refrain where she just bursts into the upper register.
Mesirow's from California and comes from a family of artists, and her lyrics, which are sometimes vague and loosely metaphysical, bear the mark of a free spirit. To be honest, they can skew a tad squishy for me, but it's easy to overlook a line like, "What's real can be anywhere, so put your faith in me and we can be free," when it's sung so beautifully. Content-wise, the most interesting cut is "T", an ode to Mesirow's best friend, New York artist Tauba Auerbach. Presumably the two share a special bond, both getting a certain level of fame from their creativity, and it's about experiencing something only one other person you know can identify with.
Separate all of this from Ring and you're still left with a remarkably listenable album. People have compared Glasser to Björk but this isn't difficult music-- ultimately it feels more in line with loose, melodically generous records by Joni Mitchell or maybe even Feist. Granted, there's tons of sounds in this thing (in addition to the genre-blending are all sorts of orchestral and percussive touches) but Mesirow and her producers never let it become overwhelming. It's not an incredibly daring or cerebral record-- Ring is electic, beat-heavy, and easy to like. A sneakily confident debut that should please listeners at almost every turn.


On his first album for Exploding in Sound, this son of Palestinian refugees takes his humanistic blues-folk in a more energetic direction.

Hahaha

Growing up in New York City during the ’80s as the son of Palestinian refugees, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yazan absorbed peace and justice as his core values through conversations with his parents and education at the United Nations International School. He’s spent the last few years putting those ideas into music, deconstructing how first-world privilege works in his barebones folk and blues-rock songs. It’s a sound and ethos that fits in well with the idiosyncratic indie championed by Exploding in Sound Records, where Yazan has recently found a home alongside peers like Pile and Bad History Month. On Hahaha, his third album and first on the label, he begins looking outward, both by trying to engage outsiders and by questioning his own motives.
Yazan has said he hopes to startle the complacent into action by shedding light on life problems big and small. It doesn’t get much smaller than “Cockroach,” a sweeping and boisterous rock ballad that trudges in time with his vocal trills. He wrote the song after a literal bug crawled through his practice space and someone squished it under their boot, leading to a moral spiral about the imbalance between the sanctity of human life and that of insects. Elsewhere, he calls out the false power of fear-mongering or, on the title track, laughs his way through shared anxiety while Pile drummer Kris Kuss takes a detour into ’60s psych. Even “The Star,” where Yazan imagines a world not driven by war, contradicts itself by employing heavy, Black Sabbath-inspired chords. For an album bent on spreading harmony and understanding, Hahaha feels delightfully manic.
That restless ambition winds up blurring many of the album’s details. All nine songs on Hahaha offer stacks of robust guitar and a disorderly splendour that at its best recalls Tom Waits, but too often they wander off as if caught up in their own optimistic high. “Do You Wanna Go?” embraces the openly gaudy appeal of shredding, but keeps pushing a fun guitar solo after it’s already gone far enough. The intentionally plunky number “Forgiveness Begins” offers a friendly reminder about self-forgiveness, but clumsily waltzes through a key change and extended outro that adds little benefit to the message or the melody.
This kind of emotional rambling fit on Yazan’s earlier records, where it was part of the complex blues-folk scenery. But when he tries to keep up with the rhythm-backed instrumentals of Hahaha, he ends up outshining his own points. Those stylistic differences are made obvious when Yazan pivots back to a more Americana-based approach: The message of “When I’m Gone,” about the importance of self-preservation when ending a relationship, is easy to absorb over its rolling roots guitar melody. The same is true for the love song “Ghost Blues,” a song so straightforward in its dark baritone storytelling that it could double as an homage to Bill Callahan.
Though its humanistic messages occasionally get lost in feeling, Hahaha captures Yazan’s gutsy, freewheeling positivity, and does it with enough energy to make you want to believe in what he preaches. At this album’s best, he brings his humbling practice of peace and acceptance to life in a harsh, scruffy, and very human sound.


On his first full-length as Dedekind Cut, the artist formerly known as Lee Bannon constructs an ambitious form of ambient music, reflecting the violence and anxiety pervading our atmosphere today.

$uccessor (ded004)

This summer, Dedekind Cut—the artist born Fred Warmsley, formerly known as Lee Bannon—began aggregating songs in a Spotify playlist titled “Ambient Essentials.” It’s an eclectic and personal collection of favorites within that wide-ranging umbrella: Julianna Barwick’s calm vocal loops, metallic harmonies by Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never, Laraaji’s glimmering New Age. Warmsley gives the impression of a dedicated listener; this mix felt less like a toolbox than a window into some music he’s used to make sense of the world.
As the prolific Warmsley has accumulated releases under his various monikers, his relationship with genre has shifted. He got his start producing instrumentals for Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era crew, serving as their touring DJ in 2012. His output has since progressed from industrial beat-driven instrumentals to blistering jungle and techno, most recently landing in an eerie, arrhythmic place. Since adopting the moniker Dedekind Cut last year, Warmsley has put out three EPs, most recently the cassette American Zen, which comprised four tracks’ worth of even-keeled, dread-tinged drone. On $uccessor, his first Dedekind full-length, this sound emerges notably more grandiose, and more sinister. Leading up to the album’s release, Warmsley tweeted: “The parts you find ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about [my] work as the Dedekind Cut will surely become its signature.”
Though “ugly” may be an overstatement, $uccessor is marked by the productive discomfort that accompanies such unabashed intensity. Whereas American Zen maintained a temperate pace, $uccessor isn’t afraid to crescendo or screech to a halt. This isn’t background music; it’s cinematic, full of movement. Most of all, it’s cavernous. The gently lapping, William Basinski-esque tones of opener “Descend from now” are swallowed 90 seconds in by strings and oceanic tape hiss. This gives way to “Instinct,” in which a fuzzy rhythm, layered beneath a pretty synth melody, builds to an urgent gallop. As Warmsley blends flat, chilly digital tones and analogue elements (including a field recording of birdsong), the disjuncture further pries open this sometimes uncomfortably vast sonic landscape. Warmsley deftly bridges his influences, braiding liquid futurism into the textural warmth of disintegrating tape loops.
There are moments when Warmsley loosens his compositional grip; tracks like “Fear in reverse” and “5ucc3550r” meander a bit, crackling and heaving without the insistence that characterizes much the rest of this release. But these slips into plotless quiet are among $uccessor’s most unsettling and purposeful moments. One review of March’s American Zen lamented that listeners “never find out what it’s trying to tell us”; asking Dedekind Cut to explain, however, seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the project’s vocabulary. A record can, of course, have a worldview without providing talking points.
$uccessor is undergirded by blackness: it was co-released by NON, the Chino Amobi-helmed collective of artists from Africa and its diaspora; its cover is Deana Lawson’s striking 2014 photograph Cowboys, of two young black men in jeans and chaps atop horses startled by the camera’s flash. As Dedekind Cut, Warmsley makes use of ambient tropes, but this album’s stakes are set far outside the boundaries of that genre. (In spirit and in sound, he’s perhaps better matched alongside his collaborators here, which include the protean likes of Amobi, Angel-Ho, and serpentwithfeet.) If ambient music—so often treated as a somehow ideologically neutral form, its canon overwhelmingly white, Western, and male—can be described as an atmospheric entity, it’s then deployed here to new, ambitious ends. Warmsley’s work is shot through with the violence, anxiety, and fracture that pervade our atmosphere today. But on tracks like the stunning “46:50,” which features muffled vocals from Active Child, an elegiac softness also reaches out to the listener, offering solace.
Warmsley has offered a remarkably expansive example of what these pliable forms can do. He seems winkingly aware, also, of the loaded nature of invoking a vast frontier. At a performance of $uccessor at New York’s Issue Project Room in October, old-school country music blasted as Warmsley walked onto the fog-filled stage, a curious counterpoint to the textural drone that followed. This, alongside Lawson’s Cowboys, points to a canny appropriation of the frontier narratives that have, I’d posit, quietly served as scaffolding for much of the Western experimental music canon. $uccessor marks a taking of the reins, so to speak, a direction that will hopefully continue to propel Dedekind Cut.


Beth Ditto’s second solo LP turned into a full-fledged Gossip comeback once her bandmates got involved. Rick Rubin captures the carefree vibes of old friends enjoying each other’s company.

Real Power

When Gossip announced their reunion last year, it looked like the Portland dance-punk trio had zipped into formation for the indie sleaze revival, the cultivators of its original aughts inspiration rightfully returning to their throne. But Gossip actually got back together in 2019, seven years after the band’s unexpected dissolution in 2012, when singer Beth Ditto returned to Rick Rubin’s home studio in Kauai to pen the follow-up to her debut solo album. Once she invited former bandmates Nathan Howdeshell to bounce ideas around with and Hannah Blilie to drum, those songwriting sessions turned collaborative quickly and, most promising of all, effortlessly. This was no longer a solo record; the band was back. “That’s the beauty of working with people you’ve known for so long,” Ditto told NME. “There’s no glamorous story, you just go: okay.”
In reuniting without explicit intentions or expectations, Gossip created a comeback album, Real Power, that sidesteps the feeling of trying on old clothes. There’s no pressure to once again soundtrack Skins’ teenage melodrama, dominate sticky clubs at 2 a.m., or hoist nonconformist anthems into the sky as a political statement. With no predetermined agenda guiding the album, Real Power plays like the jovial, carefree sound of friends enjoying each other’s company; they just happen to have instruments in hand.
Real Power slips into disco pop with a type of easygoing simplicity that begets happiness, even while Gossip address divorce, death, and isolation. Howdeshell and Blilie are to credit for that contradiction; the two continually lay down heavy grooves with a light touch, be it the sugar rush of “Edge of the Sun” or that gratuitous cowbell over slap bass on “Give It Up for Love.” Even when Ditto goes full diva belting out the title track, a glam anthem about Portland’s impassioned Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic, she radiates pride: “Head is in the clouds, I’m moving mountains/Do you feel what I feel?” The way the three of them gyrate in sync is the answer.
While modern-day peers are effectively updating the dance-punk sound through minimalist pop or trying too hard to emulate the rebellious partying that indie sleaze’s latter-day documentarians glorify, Gossip are looking beyond that altogether, instead emphasizing spontaneity and low-key beats. They dare you to dance to softer sounds, like a stripped-back bassline in the style of the xx on “Turn the Card” or the rakish fingersnaps pushed to the front of country redux “Peace and Quiet.” Early on, “Don’t Be Afraid” lays down a dub groove establishing mood better suited for smoking a joint on your friend’s couch than doing bumps in the club bathroom. While the songs on 2012’s A Joyful Noise often overstayed their runtimes, Real Power knows when to bail. On the sneaky standout “Light It Up,” Gossip craft a collective trance with mellow synths and dreamy guitar reverb that turn Ditto’s lyrics—“Start a fire/Let it rage/Burn it up/Watch it go down in flames”—into a meditation on rebirth and new beginnings.
Ditto has always been colorful, from self-dying her hair with Kool-Aid in childhood to picking palettes for her plus-sized clothing line in Vogue. As she settles into her forties, she’s discovered that one of the most direct ways to extend her confidence, both to herself and others, is with patience. When Howdeshell relocated to his childhood farm in Arkansas in 2015 and became a born-again Christian, Ditto—an atheist—felt like she’d lost a friend to his past, and she mourned a creative death; in time, however, she learned to accept it. Over the bare beat of “Tough,” Ditto reflects on what it means to have faith in readjusted perceptions: “You need a change, so make a change/We’ll figure out something.” Much of Real Power revels in the way those deep breaths help steady us. In the case of Ditto’s scrapped sophomore solo album, they’re also to thank for Gossip’s graceful return in Real Power.


The eccentric English songwriter and the prolific Finnish rock group collaborate for an album that routes ancient plant life into deeply human stories of toil, tragedy, and the afterlife.

Henki

Nobody writes about humanity—our hopes and dreams, obsessions and follies—quite like Richard Dawson. A singer and guitarist from Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England, Dawson works loosely in the folk tradition, though this hardly begins to explain the breadth and eccentricity of his songs. One minute you might find him singing a tale of alcoholic misadventure on a school trip; the next, venturing back to the early medieval kingdom of Bryneich, or hymning the lives of the poor souls packing parcels in an online retail warehouse. Truly, all human life is here.
Dawson has made a habit of pushing at the boundaries of his work, and his new album Henki is no different. At first glance you might think it’s not about people at all: Each of its seven tracks is named after a plant. Of course, that isn’t the whole story. The album is a collaboration with the Finnish group Circle, and the title is a Finnish word—Circle’s Jussi Lehtisalo says it translates as something like “spirit” or “ghost,” while acknowledging that its true meaning is hard to pin down.
Circle and Dawson made Henki in fits and starts. They first shared demos remotely, then met for in-person recording sessions at Pori on the Finnish coast, before finally completing the album remotely as Europe entered lockdown in spring 2020. This extended gestation seems to have worked in its favor. From its botanical theme, something magnificent takes shape: a suite of stories that deal with ancient history and deep time, touching on themes of human toil, tragedy, and the mysteries of the afterlife.
Dawson sings in a bold and unapologetic holler that sometimes scurries up into higher octaves unexpectedly. His guitar playing is equally distinctive: clanging chords dispensed with knotty dexterity. But where he really excels is as a storyteller, and Henki has some especially florid examples of the form. “Silene” is the true story of a 32,000-year-old seed buried by a squirrel, later plucked from the permafrost by Russian scientists, and finally germinated in a lab. “Ivy” relates the myth of the Greek god Dionysus, who granted King Midas his gold-creating powers.
The songs often lean hard into exposition—“Unfortunately the fungal cultures we brought with us/Have started to degrade,” Dawson sings on “Cooksonia.” But as the words fall from his lips, they take on the quality of parables, their dense narratives encouraging the listener to hunt within them in search of deeper meanings.
Now some 40 albums into their career, Circle’s take on various rock subgenres—prog, hard, glam, space, kraut—is performed with virtuoso technicality and camp extravagance, equal parts Neu! and Judas Priest. Most obviously, they give Dawson’s songs a sense of speed and scale. “Methuselah” races along in a power-metal charge, with rippling synthesizers and crashing thunder. A couple of minutes into “Ivy,” the guitars and drums lock into a motorik pulse, and the song only gets bigger from there, powered by a sense of unearthly propulsion. But Circle’s musicality also manifests in more textural ways. The 12-minute “Silphium” is adorned with decorative piano and sleek synths, and around its midpoint descends into an extended jazz-rock segment before dusting itself down for a final, triumphant reprise.
Death is everywhere on Henki, sometimes tragicomic. “Methuselah” is the tale of a man who sets out to find one of the world’s oldest trees, itself named after a preternaturally old biblical patriarch; the joke is, he can only prove he’s found it by chopping it down. Other times, death feels mysterious and unknowable: In “Lily,” a Newcastle hospital nurse recalls the paranormal events that have followed the passing of those in their care. “Black lights/Blooming in the doorway/Petals unfold around me,” muses Dawson, and Circle amp up the weirdness with eerie operatic chorusing.
In a catalog already noted for strangeness, Henki might be Richard Dawson’s strangest album to date. But his ideas are fertilized by these songs’ peculiar twists and turns; the more Dawson and Circle lean into their eccentricities, the more their music resonates. Whatever Dawson writes about, he’s really writing about people—the ways we choose to live our lives, and the strange and awful things that befall us along the way. Henki blows up these themes into widescreen, unfolding across continents, centuries, and even the afterlife. It feels profound, even as the true meaning of its songs—their Henki, if you will—slip through the fingers like air.

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The 32-year old ex-underground MC Sumach Ecks splits the difference between Western aggression, Eastern mysticism, and extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy. This free four-song EP is as unclassifiable as the rest of his material.

The 9th Inning EP

Gonjasufi invented intelligent demon music. The one-man boom began on last year's A Sufi and a Killer, where San Diego-bred Sumach Ecks split the difference between Western aggression, Eastern mysticism, and extraterrestrial idiosyncrasy. Even his stage name is a compound noun: half weed, half wisdom. All rolled up into a blunt, banshee wail.
Released on Warp, A Sufi and a Killer was both futuristic and primitive, a glass pyramid breaking under the weight of his psychedelic bombed squad: Flying Lotus, the Gaslamp Killer, and Mainframe. The evil spirit was summoned by a 32-year old ex-underground MC who found his sediment-strangled singing voice via Bikram Yoga, high grade chronic, and magic mushrooms. A biblically bearded original prone to Twitter jeremiads against the contemporary age of "LITTLE SAMBO AND HIS PACK OF DEVIL WORSHIPPING BARBIES." He routinely stresses love, understanding, and the violent overthrow of government-- a peace-seeking yogi who will slap the shit out of you for talking reckless. Some things are not supposed to be logical.
Based in "the Mojave," the desert-dwelling prophet dropped The 9th Inning EP last month. We owe the free, four-song collection's existence to an arrangement between Sufi and viral video/mixtape portal, Hydroshare. He gets paid for old tracks that had been infecting his hard drives since being first recorded several years ago. We get new music to hold us over until his mini-album MU.ZZ.LE drops in January.
From the first words of The 9th Inning, we're sucked into apocalypse. Industrial noises clank like robots led to the guillotine. John Carpenter synths ooze and "Demonchild" starts with Sufi croaking, "My mama says son/ Look what the world's coming to/ My mama was right/ The sun is colored blue." What makes Gonjasufi's music so singular is that voice, suspended somewhere between George Clinton, Tom Waits, and something that crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits-- prehistoric and warped from thousands of pounds of pressure.
"Eat Fish" finds Ecks hanging ectoplasmic hooks on boom-bap drums and raps from L.A. left-fielder Blu. The chorus' moral: "be rich, eat fish, and die." It's sage advice partially cribbed from the Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, and indeed, the spirit of Wu-Tang hangs heavy over this project. With its stripped down organ loops and dusted drums, "The Lows", sounds like a distant cousin to Gravediggaz and Tricky's The Hell EP. Opting to spit his tiger style raps, Sufi channels the unhinged delirium of Ol' Dirty Bastard. There are cold-blooded threats of "wandering eyes getting poked" and the difficulties of keeping oaths not to kill when there are "vampires walking around with smiles on their grill." Lest you think there is a clear father to his style, he calls on "savasana" for calm-- the corpse pose in yoga.
Nor can you define the title track. It's not quite rap, and even though it's partially sung, it's light years from R&B. Disembodied vocals coo in the background, and Sufi sounds like someone who attempted to conjure Nate Dogg at a séance and received a demented ghost from a nearby dimension. It's unclear whether he's singing or rapping, and that's the point. It's otherworldly and unclassifiable. Or as he chants about a former partner, "similarities in our style, but I took it from here. I took it from here." Enter the demon.


After almost a decade, the gorgeous voice of singer-songwriter Adam Torres remains the spotlight, but his songs have grown wider and more elemental.

Pearls to Swine

There’s a degree of would-be myth to Adam Torres’ backstory. He first gained some local notoriety as an undergraduate in Athens, Ohio in the middle of the ’00s, performing solo shows and playing guitar for indie-folk outfit Southeast Engine, heroes of that Ohio scene. In 2006, he self-released his first solo album at the age of 20, Nostra Nova, an album that developed a cult-classic status in the decade since, and a slightly greater visibility upon its reissue via Misra Records last year. While whispers slowly spread of this songwriter you’d never heard of, Torres himself was mostly absent in those ensuing ten years before returning with Pearls to Swine, his first full-fledged release since Nostra Nova.
All those years removed from *Nostra Nova *it sounds like he returned as a ghost. Torres spent some time volunteering in Ecuador before resettling to Austin, TX to earn his graduate degree and work to help improve the water quality of the Rio Grande, all while releasing a spate of lo-fi demos he recorded in his closet. On Pearls to Swine, his songs are earnest and full of yearning, yet still difficult to divine the concrete relatability that lives within. It transcends his humble Ohio roots, a work of startling beauty that sits in your head like a half-remembered dream: you keep returning to it, trying to approach it from different angles and catch the secrets you’re missing before they slip away into the haze.
Torres’ voice is without a doubt the thing he’s known for and will be remembered by. It has an unearthly quality. Throughout Pearls To Swine, he sings in a ruminative falsetto that is able to bend in directions that defy the shape and scope of the human form. In the album’s stunning opener, “Juniper Arms,” he begins in near-wordlessness, a place he coasts in and out of before occasionally dropping back down to earth for a bit of clarity. The song is about Albuquerque, where Torres was born, as well as Austin, where he lives, but the words “Juniper arms” are the only ones in focus during the chorus. It’s like Torres tries to wrap his arms around the idea of home while drifting around it just out of reach.
There are more traditional moments like “High Lonesome” and “Morning Rain,” moments where Torres remains front-and-center over finger-picked guitar parts, where you could hear him as a compromise between Neil Young’s ’70s broken-angel croon and Jeff Buckley’s celestial melodies. Then there are the counterpoints where he lets himself go to those otherworldly places, like when his voice and the strings meld into one unsettling current in “Daydream.” He has a way of crafting songs that lure you out with their beauty before revealing its underlying rage.
Though Torres’ gorgeous and idiosyncratic voice is a major selling point of* Pearls to Swine*, it’s bolstered by his meditations on the tangible experience, much of it derived from the life Torres lived between records. Just as the experiences that birthed Nostra Nova were inextricably rooted in small college-town circuits and in the music community in Athens, the new record feels at one with the Texas landscape. There’s a sweeping whine in the string drone of “Outlands,” like wind coursing across the Chihuahuan Desert. It feels like a return journey after traversing the desolation and spending the bulk of a decade removed from his calling.
That gives the penultimate track, “Mountain River,” a climactic tone with Torres singing “I’m trying to find my way back home” all before the epilogue of “City Limits.” A tension permeates these songs: Torres sounds road-weary, but also like he’s trying to grasp the wonder that’s still out there in America. It’s a tension that many artists working in some strain of contemporary Americana touch on, like those cosmic Americana troubadours Ryley Walker, Steve Gunn, and William Tyler. It won’t reproduce the same kind of direct, intimate engagement the once-unknown *Nostra Nova *did. But Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.