A synthesis of outerborough album rap, Five-Percenter ideology, and Southern Gothic interiority, the Memphis native’s latest album is a somber reflection on the place that made him.

Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror

Like anything else, underground rap scenes are subject to algorithmic gerrymandering. Upload a few loosies and SoundCloud will nudge you in the direction of your kin; the Venn diagram of Your Old Droog and Tha God Fahim’s Spotify listeners promises such synergy that collab tapes become imperative, geography and style be damned. There’s a sense of inevitability, of artists grappling for pieces of a diminishing pie, a concession that recommendation algos know rappers better than they know themselves.
Which makes more precious those rare anti-scene triumphs—Grief Pedigree and Haitian Body Odor, YEN and Private Stock—records by grown men who, having toiled in isolation and obscurity, emerge as full-fledged auteurs from shadowy corners of the internet. These albums are not indebted to individual cities or eras; their brilliance doesn’t translate to vinyl or visual media. They are vestiges of an earlier, slower internet, one where solitary travelers could not only find their own likeminded comrades, but in the process find themselves.
In the wake of Three 6 Mafia’s improbable Top 40 breakthrough, Memphis native Lukah tried his hand at crunk and became active in the city’s battle rap community. It wasn’t until 2018’s Chickenwire that Lukah, then approaching 30, settled upon an insular sound: less Southern, more Gothic. Around that time, a San Diego producer named Walz encountered his music online and began submitting beats unsolicited, fifteen of which Lukah selected for Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror.
Memphis rappers have long conceived of the city as a portal: in Three 6’s case, a portal to a mystical underworld; in 8Ball & MJG’s case, a portal to their smoked-out pimp fantasies. Although Why Look Up contains more on-the-ground reporting than the records of his forebears, Lukah derives symbolism by casting an impartial eye toward South Memphis. The weight of history bears upon his birthplace, where residents occupy the homes and fates of their ancestors. “What was once community met its own demolition/They ask why the guns and drugs? Destruction is our addiction,” he rhymes on “The Way to Damascus.” Why Look Up’s interrogation of Memphis is an inquiry into the Black community, undertaken as a case study in lieu of Nas and Kendrick’s survey methods.
Lukah favors commentary over self-examination, his rhetorical questions echoing like spectral voices in a William Styron interlude. “You ever had your reflection reply in conversation?” he asks on “Stygian”; one imagines the candlesticks in Scarface’s four-cornered room. On the penultimate song “Colored One,” the question is posed through another lens: “You ever had the ghost of your shadow follow your every step?” The shift in perspective is the difference between “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and “I Seen a Man Die”—the former is a man who fears death, the latter is a man who knows it intimately.
On “Glasshouses,” the boundaries between setting and character are blurred beyond recognition: “I’m from the side where education is no longer a vision/People don’t give a fuck, ‘cause we fill up their prisons/On my side we honor codes, but we don’t honor the isms/Where the brothers want better, but we lack the ambition.” Lukah is a blunt lyricist with combat-ready delivery, conveying his environs in a manner more experiential than visual. In true Southern Gothic fashion, the locales and their inhabitants define one another in equal measure.
Still, Why Look Up is an album of and from the internet, which allows Lukah to flit between diarist, torchbearer, and scholar. On “The Seine,” his vocals bear whiffs of Big K.R.I.T.’s muddy Panhandle declension, whereas “Luncheon on the Grass” recalls Shyheim and Freddie Foxxx’s Avirex-battened flows. There’s no logical or temporal reason Boldy James would appear on this record, but “Stigmata” is a pitch-perfect duet, Boldy’s preternatural cool permeating Lukah’s impeccably patterned syllables. “Ermine” pairs Lukah with Estee Nack, a flamboyant Dominican rapper from Massachusetts, and again the chemistry is immediate—these guys rap their asses off.
The project’s ambiance is reminiscent of Cormega’s The Realness and The True Meaning, early-2000s soliloquies that sound like they were composed in a bunker. Walz’s beats evoke Havoc’s disquiet with none of the Alchemist’s cute flourishes, a calm surface belying shark-infested depths. Shifty keyboard trills are weighted by domineering snares, punctuated with slight variations in tempo—the soupy layers of “Luncheon on the Grass,” the beat switches on “Immaculate Conception”—approaching the album’s final act. The muted arrangements are apt for Why Look Up’s somber reflection, even if Lukah’s more animated collaborators sound like they sped past their interstate exit.
The album’s linchpin is “Colored One,” which in context plays like a response to Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” the 2Pac-interpolating finale of To Pimp a Butterfly. The lyrics are at once descriptive and prescriptive, submitting a cautious autonomy where “Mortal Man” preaches solidarity: “Losing sleep at night, but then again, the god has never slept/And never asked for help, ‘cause Black men weren’t taught to self-reflect/Move through life cycles with traumas we’re expected to accept/Come fly in my shoes, and you’ll see why our ancestors wept.” Where “Mortal Man” closes with 2Pac predicting a race war, “Colored One” remains inward-facing. The final sound bite is Charlamagne tha God—himself a firebrand for the clickbait era—telling an interviewer, “I call myself tha God for a reason. I’m a Black man, and not even just a Black man. I’m God’s creation, God put me here to be something great.”
Why Look Up is a synthesis of outerborough album rap, Five-Percenter ideology, and Southern Gothic interiority. These are traditions that can only be received as articles of faith, and when Lukah retreats into the politics of self-reliance, he is the sentry of a precinct left to fend for itself. When push comes to shove, he knows what’s worth protecting.
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The composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran draws inspiration from John Cage’s “prepared piano,” extending the practice with electronic keyboards and melodic ingenuity.

Bloodroot

Working under the influence of John Cage’s music seems like a tough gig for a composer. Cage’s maxims about creativity have always been seductive in their revolutionary openness, which is why plenty of artists who don’t sound much like him have benefitted from his lectures and articles. But for those who draw specific assistance from his own sound production methods, the pitfalls are steep. Once any contemporary pianist starts putting metal bolts and scraps of plastic into a piano’s body, odds are they’re going to sound overly indebted to Cage, the father of the “prepared piano.” If you’re going to follow him down that particular route, you better be able to make your “prepared piano” sound distinct. On Bloodroot, the composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran clears this high bar with plenty of room to spare, thanks to two different kinds of insight: one technological in nature, the other more poetic.
In the first case, Moran expands the “prepared piano” into the electronic-keyboard realm. Moran’s acoustic instrument produces odd, flinty, or rattling timbres, similar to Cage’s. But by pre-recording some plucks and sweeps of the prepared piano's strings, Moran has created an electro-acoustic hybrid instrument that lets her layer various effects with disarming smoothness. While one hand is playing a percussive line on the acoustic piano, another hand can trigger playback of an e-bowed string’s silken drone, or else a harp-like string swoop. Other contemporary composers have used traditional pianos in tandem with sampling keyboards. But Moran’s application of the practice to the world of “prepared piano” is a smart extension of the practice. This recalls how Cage himself once approvingly quoted the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: “The past does not influence me; I influence it.”
Moran doesn’t always rely on technological savvy—she can flat-out compose, too. The album’s first two tracks find her performing all-acoustically. The opening miniature, “Iris,” unhurriedly allows pairs of notes or short arpeggiated figures to ring out. The sounds are delicate and unusual. After these individual pitches are established, Moran then serves up three stark, thick chords that combine some of those tones—while also adding in new notes from a lower octave. Inside a couple of minutes, a listener can start to trust that this composer-performer will use her unfamiliar tools to create richly dramatic arcs.
During “Celandine,” Moran’s melodic ingenuity shines. After a rising prepared-piano figure has wormed its way into your consciousness, the pianist allows gorgeous, mournful progressions to flower underneath that repetitive top line. When the harmony shifts, a listener gets to try out several new lenses on that same emotional field, before returning to the original view. (As a long tour over some forlorn emotional landscape, the track threatens to beat Radiohead at their own game.)
From there, Moran starts to let her sampling kit loose. “Freesia” begins with a fast-cycling motif that points toward the composer’s stated fascination with metal. A couple minutes later, Moran takes a hard aesthetic turn, courtesy of a sampled drone chord, which she then improvises over. Heard on this pinched-sounding piano, Moran’s patient, languid lines foster airs of mystery and ritual.
The most consistent pleasure on Bloodroot is listening for the ways these odd songs produce their unlikely hooks. The string-strums and tight clusters of augmented notes that open “Hyacinth” don’t initially commend themselves to long-term memory, but as stray lines emerge from the haze, the replay value of the composition becomes clear. Mastered by Krallice’s Colin Marston, the recordings on Bloodroot capture the textural diversity of Moran’s schemes. And in the end, the occasional similarity to Cage’s prepared piano doesn’t seem like the most important takeaway. The real news is that Moran can sound equally as free, and just as unencumbered by the weight of history, as her own idol.


The jazz multi-instrumentalist wants to unite the world in song. But his new album collapses the wide-ranging possibilities of global music into something for everyone and no one.

World Music Radio

Jon Batiste has long been a household name, thanks in large part to his star-making turn as the affably hip bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. But last year’s surprise Grammy win for his 2021 album We Are catapulted him to a new level of fame and cultural relevance. That record’s hopeful message of community and shared humanity—set to a joyous blend of soul, jazz, funk, R&B, and hip-hop—offered an antidote to the emotional burnout of grappling with America’s festering socio-political fissures. Drawing from the rich cultural lineage of Black music as well as personal history—not only does Batiste come from New Orleans musical royalty, his grandfather was a union organizer—We Are’s fist-pumping positivity sounded vital and essential, even at its corniest.
Now Batiste wants to take his brand of musical activism international. For his sprawling new album, World Music Radio, he enlists a globe-spanning crew of collaborators for an ambitious experiment in planetary genre-blending. Their mission? To create pop music that so effortlessly transcends national, cultural, and genre barriers that it is, as the press release puts it, “meant for everyone.” If that sounds like the sort of money-printing holy grail modern music executives dream of, well, that’s because it sort of is. But for Batiste, it’s more about tapping into music’s power to find common ground between disparate—often divided—communities. If we can get kids in, say, Dhaka to jam to Latin trap and Catalonian folk, he seems to think, then maybe it will remind us that we are all, in the end, human.
So Batiste puts his extensive compositional chops—and his thick Rolodex—to work, blending his amorphous jazz-soul with timbres and rhythms from all across the world. Soaring gospel choirs sit comfortably alongside Latin drums; improvisational jazz and French spoken word share space with Michael Jackson-esque pop-funk; K-pop idols and Colombian pop stars trade bars over reggaeton beats. Batiste ties this musical mish-mash together with a familiar conceptual conceit: packaging the album’s 12 tracks as an all-night radio show, hosted and curated by alter ego Billy Bob Bo Bob, an interstellar DJ with a penchant for hokey aphorisms (“Be who you are… because everyone else is taken”).
When it works, Batiste’s cultural cross-pollination can be electrifying—as when the crescendoing organ of “Worship” segues seamlessly into propulsive Latin-tinged electro-funk. But far too often, especially when he strays away from sounds that have already made inroads at U.S. Top 40 (Latin trap, Afropop), it comes across as window dressing, as if the unfamiliarity of these sounds and textures can make up for the inherent blandness of the songwriting. All the undeniable virtuosity of Batiste—and the pop polish delivered by a production team that has worked with stars like Drake and Doja Cat—cannot distract from the record’s fatal conceptual flaw: the contradiction between its celebration of cultural difference and its overarching goal of proving that, at least on a musical level, we are all the same.
It’s an intuitive idea, and plenty of studies seem to offer support for the idea of music as a “universal language.” There are examples on a broader, socio-cultural level—say, a person’s ability to tell a piece of music apart from random sound, or gauge mood and tone (the link between minor chords and sadness, for example). But what lures us into creating complex webs of meanings and connections with a particular song or melody depends as much on who we are as it does on the music itself. It is our unique, diverse, fragmented selves—a lifetime’s collection of experiences, cultural inheritances, and learned responses. Music all over the world may have its shared characteristics—its universalities—but seeking a universal listener means losing other, distinguishing characteristics in turn.
In his attempt to create music that appeals to everyone, Batiste strips the disparate sounds and styles he borrows of the cultural contexts and specificities that make them so powerful. What’s left is just a layer of aestheticised sound, grafted onto a musical skeleton of unambiguously American pop lineage. In an interview with The New York Times, Batiste said that he aims to “expand the diameter of popular music.” But World Music Radio achieves the opposite, collapsing the wide-ranging possibilities of global music into the form of the American pop song. Batiste sands away all the rough edges that make encounters with truly “foreign” music so thrilling: alien melodic progressions that violate our learned expectations, the exhilarating wrong-ness of an unfamiliar rhythm, the sudden expansion of our imagination of cultural possibility.
You’ll find none of that on World Music Radio. Batiste’s idea of universal music is so averse to cultural specificity—except the Afro-American traditions he’s rooted in—that listening to it can feel like a sterile game of spot-the-style. This aversion extends to the lyrics too, though that might be a generous description for Batiste’s banal affirmations of kumbaya solidarity. “Speak to me nicely,” he pleads on tropical-pop-by-numbers cut “Raindance,” while the English-Spanish-Korean reggae-pop of “Be Who You Are”—featuring guest verses from JID, Camilo, and NewJeans—never escapes the drag of its painfully sincere titular exhortation. The nadir of this motivational-poster lyricism is hydro-homies anthem “Drink Water”—featuring Jon Bellion and Fireboy DML—with its insistent reminders to, you guessed it, drink water. When Batiste does get a little more specific—reminding us that he loves Black folks, white folks, Asians, Africans, Republicans, and Democrats on “Be Who You Are”—he betrays a perspective that, despite the grand one-world rhetoric, remains solidly American.
Unsurprisingly, it’s only when Batiste turns inward, toward the personal and the biographical, that World Music Radio finds solid ground. Piano ballad “Butterfly”—written for his wife Suleika Jaouad, who is recovering from a second battle with cancer—may be primo schmaltz, but it is elevated by the heart Batiste puts into it. Arena-sized love-rocker “Wherever You Are” similarly soars on the incandescent passion of his full-throated voice. There are too few displays of such engaged, emotional songwriting to make up for the album’s surfeit of awkwardly assembled clunkers: the high-budget Muzak of “Clair de Lune” (featuring, of all people, Kenny G), the inadvertently hilarious country-gospel of “Master Power,” the synth-cheese overload of the sickly sweet “Calling Your Name.”
On interlude “Goodbye, Billy Bob”—the album’s closing statement of sorts—Batiste’s galaxy-trotting griot says, “Love you even if I don’t know you.” Which is a lovely sentiment, really. But to love someone is to want to know them, to try and understand what makes them tick. To love a piece of music is to try to know the person who made it and the cultural, personal, and emotional contexts within which it was made, however imperfect and subjective that knowledge may be. It is that attempt at knowing—finding connections and commonalities with the part of themselves that an artist puts into their work—that really gives music its power to remind us of our shared humanity. Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.


The Japanese avant-rock trio pair on their latest release with famous dub producer Adrian Sherwood, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open.

#N/A

In the beginning, the Japanese avant-rockers Nisennenmondai made no secret of their influences. Tracks on 2004's Neji EP bore titles like "Pop Group," "This Heat," and "Sonic Youth," and for good reason. On guitar, drums, and bass, the trio whipped up a ferocious, muscular racket scarred with pockets of deep silence—a post-punk template shot through with the ghosts of dub and free noise.
Over the years, they've moved away from the prickly aggression of their early records and toward a sleeker, more measured form, one equally informed by Krautrock's steady burble and minimal techno's crosshatched textures. It's as if they started out brandishing a misshapen lump of scrap metal and have proceeded to hammer it out into a long, linear shape, perfectly proportioned. And I do mean long: Their tracks routinely run to 10 or 12 or 14 minutes, and they increasingly feel less like individual songs than outtakes of a single continuum. After touring their 2013 album N, they decided that the material's metronomic clatter had evolved enough that it merited a re-recording for a new release, N', in which it's not so much the songs that have changed as the air and the light around them. In its rigor and regularity, all of the trio's work this decade sounds like a tribute to Agnes Martin's grid drawings. It's the tiny variations within their repeated structures where the crucial differences happen, where life dwells. Nisennenmondai might be the world's most disciplined jam band.
Their new album, #N/A, proceeds directly from their last two. Its opening track, "#1," might as well be a continuation of N and N''s respective openers, "A" and "A'." It sounds like a teletype in a hurricane. But they're also stretching out and exploring new territory here. Where "#1" and "#5" are quickstepping as ever—somewhere near 150 BPM, a tempo that requires gargantuan feats of concentration and muscle control to rein in their tightly interlocking rhythms when they play live—they slow down slightly on "#2." At under four minutes long, "#3" is both one of the shortest songs they've done in ages and also the one that comes closest to approximating actual techno, with undulating drones that sound uncannily like Richie Hawtin and Steve Bug's ultra-minimal anthem "Low Blow," from 2002.
But there is an important shift on the new record: the addition of On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwood, the British producer and dub wizard, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open, from two dimensions into three or four. His addition helps them shift even further from the associations that usually cling to the typical rock-trio lineup—aside from Sayaka Himeno's diamond-tipped hi-hats, nothing here sounds like what it actually is. Masako Takada's guitar swerves between hollow drones and whippoorwilling trills and a porous, soft-hard spray like a sandblaster full of nail clippings. Yuri Zaikawa's bass is either pure rhythm or pure shadow. Together, they all sound like exploding clockworks, and even more so when Sherwood lassoes individual sounds and whips them to and fro.
Against the trio's unflinching sense of discipline, he represents something closer to chaos; to their ceaseless repetition he brings unpredictability. In "#5," gunshots ring out, and so does a typewriter bell; it's unclear what those sounds really are, or where they may have come from. Summoned or not, through the magic of dub, they simply appear. Sherwood's manipulations remain relatively restrained on the five studio cuts, but on two live tracks, he really goes to town, twisting delay knobs and reeling off serpentine licks that magnify the aberrations of the trio's straight-ahead groove. There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.


After an illness, Will Wiesenfeld channeled his pent-up frustrations and desires-- for escape, for artistic growth, for transformation, for death, for self-actualization-- into Obsidian, a significantly darker record than Cerulean.

Obsidian

Will Wiesenfeld wanted his second album as Baths to be nothing short of an out-of-body experience. While creating, producing, and performing Cerulean by himself may have been a declaration of independence at one point, he soon felt trapped and limited behind his MPDs, unable to fully connect with crowds, and mislabeled as a "DJ." More crucially, his physical frame was failing him. Last year, a debilitating bout with E. coli rendered him incapable of eating or getting out of bed, let alone creating new music. After slowly convalescing, he channeled all of these pent-up frustrations and desires-- for escape, for artistic growth, for transformation, for death, for self-actualization-- into Obsidian. And by doing so, he didn’t just create his second album. He made an evil twin.
While Obsidian maintains some aspects of Cerulean, namely, its lap-pop intimacy and Wiesenfeld's unsteady, quavering vocals, the shock is in hearing him make a complete heel turn, fearlessly operating like someone absolved of personal repercussion or culpability: He pursues every gnarly musical idea, every perverted lyric. Cerulean gave no indication as to how much range Wiesenfeld could cover working exclusively in purple and pitch black. Over the sickly, chain-gang lurch of “Worsening”, Wiesenfeld's weary recitations serve as both an introduction to his newly florid, morbid poetry, and Obsidian’s thesis statement-- “Birth was like a fat black tongue/ Dripping tar and dung and dye/ Slowly into my shivering eyes." As to be expected from someone whose body was recently powerless over the most basic functions, Wiesenfeld sees death in everything. Tall rock shelves and an overcast atmosphere are viewed as exits to the afterlife on “Miasma Sky”, an advance single that gave the impression that Baths’ idea of pop was a suicidal version of what the Postal Service do. He can’t prevent himself from being sucked into the ground as the molten, heavy metal banger “Earth Death” creates its own gravitational pull.
Throughout, the songs on Obsidian are physical in a literal sense, mimicking the human motion of the characters described therein. The collation of disparate layers on “Worsening” is simply astonishing, so many parts going in gawky, arrhythmic directions to form a fearsome, fluid whole. The illicit love affair on “Ironworks” moves to a limpid Satie-like piano figure of incapacitating beauty, containing all the sadness, longing, and tenderness the two feel for each other. Meanwhile, the stunning breadth of Obsidian becomes apparent as “Incompatible” skulks forward, non-quantized rhythms emphasizing the fumbled communication and resentments of an ice-cold relationship.
The physicality and darkness aren’t just borne out of a 24-year-old’s first brush with death. Obsidian is in some aspect a “grown up” record in that the characters find themselves in adult situations. But they aren’t mature by any means. In fact, the sexual conduct is fueled by as much nihilism as the apocalyptic conjuring. This is really where Obsidian feels less like a typical artistic “leap” than a bold leap of faith. Vocally, Wisenfeld was a bit player on Cerulean, and often would whisper sweet little love notes: “Please tell me you need me,” “I still smell you, distance aside.” On “Ironworks,” he likens himself to “Sweet swine/ In Victorian doorways/ In tempestuous foreplay,” and that’s as cute as things get.
Otherwise, it’s brutal stuff: anonymous sex is pursued and consummated in a manner as merciless and cold as the mechanical animal beat of “No Eyes”: “It is not a matter of if you mean it/ But it is only a matter of come and fuck me.” Even more unsettling is “Incompatible”, which is of a piece with “No Eyes”, the same poisonous self-seeking and carnal misconduct brought much closer to home. Wiesenfeld deftly sets the scene by utilizing the connotations embedded in the unflattering aspects of cohabitation-- a shared toilet seat, an unmade bed with “covers in divisive heaps.” From there on out, he plays a manipulative, abusive, loveless lover where the sexual demands (“Nights you roll over and introduce yourself/ Nurse this erection back to full health”) are somehow less cruel than the gutwrenching asides you might hear at the dinner table: “You don’t do anything with your life /I could prod your hurt all night.” While the narrator admits, “I was never poetic and I was never kind,” only half rings true for Wiesenfeld.
These wouldn’t be shocking lyrics within the catalogs of Xiu Xiu or Perfume Genius, who, if not peers, are certainly precedents for the immersive, ornate, and homoerotic songwriting Baths engages in here. But provocation is a main goal for Jamie Stewart and Mike Hadreas, who maintain deadly serious and combative personae on and off-record; they push buttons and boundaries, but in doing so, they allow their work and its subject matter to be considered “outsider art,” easily spotted and easily avoided. Though Wiesenfeld is very open and candid about his sexuality, the predominant image he’s cast is that of a constantly smiling, muttonchopped young man who gushes about anime and Skyrim on Twitter. In that sense, the gregarious and genial Wiesenfeld has created a more subversive work by getting uncomfortably close to pop, confronting closed minds with what they don’t want to believe-- that the supposedly impure or deviant behavior described in “No Eyes” or “Incompatible” or “Ironworks” isn’t relegated to any race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, that it can’t be simply ignored or pinned on the outwardly misanthropic. Whether it’s repressed or engaged with as powerfully as it is on Obsidian, the dark matter lives inside all of us. If you hear Obsidian and think, “I didn’t know he had it in him,” what sticks is how he makes you wonder if you have “it” in you as well.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Prodigy’s testosterone-fuelled U.S. invasion.

The Fat Of the Land

Before the turn of the millennium, a multiracial trio of British ravers topped the American charts with “Smack My Bitch Up,” a smash that, depending on your point of view, was either revolting or revolutionary. It was one part scatological genius Kool Keith of the legendary Ultramagnetic MCs; one part beloved SP-1200 sampler; one part Rage Against the Machine. The men responsible were the Prodigy, icons in their native England rave scene. The idea of a rave icon hadn’t really worked yet in America, in part because the movement of more or less anonymous producers rejecting the star system while taking drugged-up dancers on days-long trips didn’t easily fit into market capitalism. Clearly, there was potential in this electronic hedonism. But it would take a troll to make it pop.
Born in 1971, Liam Howlett grew up in the naff suburbs of Braintree, a county in Essex, a region still lampooned to this day. He cut his teeth on hip-hop: His first concert was Afrika Bambaataa and Word of Mouth at Wembley stadium. In 1986, he went to London, but after a disastrous run at a rap career, he returned to Braintree and like so many white men of his English generation, necked an E at a rave and found his path.
Howlett DJed parties throughout England’s fabled Second Summer of Love in 1988, when acid house and its culture of carefree hedonism took over the country. He spent the next year or two also learning to make music on a Roland W-30 Sampler Workstation and Moog Prodigy. One night, Howlett was DJing a beach party when a wanderer and rave regular named Keith Flint praised his set and asked for a mixtape; Howlett gave him one, and some demos. Since Flint’s upcoming trip to Thailand was canceled due to a bust for weed possession, he suggested Howlett form a band with him and his friend Leeroy Thornhill. Howlett had written the word “Prodigy” on that tape, as a boast or a tribute to his faithful Moog, or both. The name took.
At the time, a clutch of rave anthems had already sold well in the UK, but they sold better when turned into novelties. In 1991, the Prodigy arrived with their own lark, “Charly,” mixing standard hardcore piano riffs and a few sped-up rap staples with eerie samples from a 1973 PSA in which a treacly young boy is policed by an actual cat named Charly. Techno was getting harder and darker, with brutal offshoots like gabber gathering steam. This kind of cartoon rave was, well, fun, especially when heard in the throes of ecstasy.
But the novelty of “Charly” was tailed by copycats until there could be said to be an entire “toytown techno” scene, breakbeat-powered and helium-voiced. If you’re looking for what the Intelligent DanceMusic dudes categorized themselves against, it was this. The cat was an albatross around Howlett’s neck. Mixmag infamously put him on the cover holding a gun to his head above the words, “Did Charly kill rave?”
Undeterred, Howlett went on building tracks entirely by himself, culminating in a hit debut album, 1992’s Experience and its five hit singles. He followed it with a kaleidoscopic concept album, 1994’s Music for the Jilted Generation, which changed the channel from children’s television to the nightly news. Jilted was in part an attack against the UK’s muddled but malevolent Criminal Justice Act, which increased police power nationwide and, in a rave crackdown, sought to outlaw the playing of “repetitive beats.” Liner notes set the agenda—”How can the government stop young people having a good time? Fight this bollocks”—which was seconded by Les Edward’s interior spread, of a bunch of hippies with a giant sound system, flipping off the cops. Howlett spent months touring the album in America with a full-on rave spectacle, Flint and Thornhill and new MC Keith “Maxim Reality” Palmer in tow to hype the crowd.
American critics adored Jilted, but the growing number of domestic dance fans mostly didn’t. “The Prodigy’s full-dress tour (matching tracksuits and choreography) didn’t impress many U.S. rave kids, who wanted things stripped down,” writes Michaelango Matos in his comprehensive The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. Matos quotes one of them shrugging off Flint, who “runs around, makes weird faces, sticks out his tongue, and basically has an epileptic seizure.” Jilted didn’t even make the Billboard 200. But there was gold in those antics, just waiting to be mined.
The mid-’90s in America was a time of testeria, a masculinized panic at the small steps toward equality made by women, the LGBTQ community, and people of color. Men experienced even the threat of a slight slip in status like a slap to the face. In a 1993 essay for Newsweek called “White Male Paranoia,” the writer David Gates made their case: “Generations of white males judged women and minorities not by what they did but by what they were. Turnabout is fair play. White men are now beginning to say: only fair play is fair play.” Talk about a jilted generation.
Fin-de-siècle pop culture played along. Proto-incels mistook Chuck Palahniuk for Charles Atlas, as if Fight Club’s ironic exegesis of the closet were actually macho boosterism. “Friends” and “Seinfeld” lionized developmentally arrested males who chafed at the inconveniences of their white and almost entirely heterosexual world. Perhaps relatedly, there was a feeling that rock’n’roll, like straight white men, was in dire straits. After grunge, what was left for men and their guitars? Hip-hop took over as a force of cultural rebellion, and however brilliant and multi-faceted its examination of capitalism and power and race, women struggled to be heard. A woman wouldn’t top the Billboard Hip-Hop charts as part of a group until the Fugees in 1996; a woman wouldn’t do it herself until Foxy Brown in 1999.
Dance music was certainly male enough to make it in America, though it wasn’t exactly macho. Howlett abandoned the “U.S. rave kids” who thought they were poseurs and injected the poison of toxic masculinity. “Firestarter” arrived in March of 1996, announcing the debut of Keith Flint as frontman in a black and white video through which his charisma shown in Technicolor. He mugged and acted the fratboy fool, wearing a stars and stripes sweater, ball-bearing necklace, an inverted Mohawk, and some Alice Cooper eyeliner. If men couldn’t be kings, court jesters still got the mic.
”We’ve always said in interviews we didn’t want to be a techno band,” he told The Face in 1996. “We want to be an alternative dance band with energy….I wanted to make something more anarchic.” The end result was somehow less anarchic than his earlier work, but certainly more accessible. It was also unlike another next-big-thing, the Chemical Brothers, who had slowed back down rave’s hyperspeed breaks into rap tempos decorated with classic rock guitars like scarves across table lamps.
But Flint brought real chaos. “I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter,” he snarled, drunk on the Molotov mocktail of noise. His bad-boy schtick was about as dangerous as Bart Simpson, but then it had only been a few years since the first President Bush had called the “The Simpsons” a threat to the nation. Crucially, Flint invited the audience to join in the chant: “You’re a firestarter, twisted firestarter!” America accepted. England might have clutched their pearls over the dangers of pyromania—when the video aired on “Top of the Pops” the BBC received even more complaints than when the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie cursed their way into legend—but “Firestarter” launched a major-label bidding war won by Madonna. When her Maverick imprint released The Fat of the Land that summer, it debuted at the top of the charts.
Fat is an album of jock jams in JNCOs. “Breathe” rides a synth line like a surf guitar, with Maxim squealing and groaning lyrics like “psychosomatic, addict, insane,” over a beat that swings like a Red Hot Chili Pepper’s tube sock. “Climbatize” has the nerve to further inflate the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” adding a thrilling Incredible Bongo Band beat and cinematic atmospherics sourced from Egyptian Empire’s breakbeat classic “The Horn Track.” It’s a fun tribute; for all their rebellious posturing, Prodigy respected their dance music forefathers. And imitated their rock ones: “Narayan,” featuring the singer of Kula Shakur, is a slightly soggy take on Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s not surprising that The Face overheard Noel Gallagher praise Howlett as “the only credible songwriter in dance music.”
The album’s real highlight is “Mindfields,” a Jenga of drums that threatens to topple but instead just gets bigger and stronger and heavier. “Open up your head, feel the shell-shock,” Maxim commands. The kind of wobble that would return as dubstep just tenses and flexes at this moment in time, never quite dropping; the arrangement is a master class in dynamics, ready to explode.
What actually exploded was the album’s third single, “Smack My Bitch Up.” Maverick convinced the boys to take the word off the back cover, but Kmart and Walmart stopped selling the album anyway. Gloria Steinem called its lyrics “hate literature.” The newly woke Beastie Boys asked Prodigy not to play the song during their joint appearance at the Reading Festival. They refused, announcing from the stage with a pout, “We do what the fuck we want.” Jonas Åkerland’s video fanned the flames; a schlock treatment filmed in first-person, its cheap plot twist argued boys might be boys, but women can be, too. Still, MTV banned it and then caved to calls of censorship, airing an edited version late at night.
In his rave history Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds described with admiration their “apolitical update of punk offering post-grunge kids an aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.” But Prodigy were political, and not only because there’s no such thing as apolitical, or because Jilted raised its own flags. Fat was an attempt to make rave butch again, even though it never really had been in the first place. “Everyone really happy and on a good vibe and speaking to each other…I found it boring,” Howlett told SPIN in 1997. “I wanted to go out and be moody again.”
And you didn’t have to take Prodigy literally to take them seriously. “Change my pitch up/Smack my bitch up,” could be moodiness couched in misogyny; it could be castration anxiety; it could be the Ramones singing, “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat/oh yeah, oh yeah, uh-oh.” It wasn’t satire, a la Aphex Twin’s contemporaneous “Come to Daddy,” which inflated chauvinism until it burst. Flint was a troll: He was serious if you said he was joking and vice versa, all just to get under your skin.
Howlett’s response to all the fuss hinged on a dubious read of hip-hop and the timeless male privilege of faux idiocy. “Like with Public Enemy,” he told SPIN. “I'm not into what Chuck D was talking about. I liked it on a dumb level—the beats, the way his voice sounded. I wanted to hear Flavor Flav going, ‘Yeah, boyee!’ I wanted to hear the dumb aspects of his music, that's what I was into.”
”I have a philosophy,” Howlett prophesied in that SPIN article, “that our music works on a really dumb level, which is the level that most people understand.” Today, The Fat Of the Land is easy to swallow, even if mix of party-on and patriarchy leaves a strange taste in the mouth. As usual, Kim Deal knows the score. “Firestarter” was, after all, built on women’s work: that charmed and pissed-off “Hey!” throughout belonged to Anne Dudley, one of the virtuosos behind Art of Noise; the song’s raucous guitar line belonged to Deal, whose Breeders track “S.O.S.” birthed it. “Since I own, like, a quarter of [”Firestarter”]…I root for them since they used a song of mine,” she told the A.V. Club in 2009. “It’s like I’m in the biology club and they’re in the football team, you know?” With The Fat Of the Land, they packed the stadiums.


On his new nine-song EP Venis, the Drake-cosigned Toronto singer Ramriddlz displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women, one spectacular embarrassment at a time.

Venis

The ascendant buzz of Toronto singer Ramriddlz is a testament to the enduring magnetism of his city's current chief cultural ambassador, Drake. In a little over a year, Ram went from total obscurity as a graphic design student to consultation with Drake's manager and OVO Sound co-founder Oliver El-Khatib, thanks to "Sweeterman," a horned-up jingle about convincing a girl to smoke weed with him. The song is a summer breeze, comforting waves of keys ebbing and cresting as Ram mumbles clumsy come-ons through a thicket of AutoTune. Drake, ever the eagle-eyed revisionist, scrubbed the teenage-pothead chaff off the lyric sheet and presented "Sweeterman" as a straightforward bedroom jam for the inaugural edition of his Beats 1 OVO Sound Radio show. Ramriddlz soldiered on without his signature song, releasing a marginally well-received EP called P2P —"Pussy Too Pink," natch—to capitalize on the sudden windfall of media attention.
Ramriddlz has returned this month with a new nine-song project called Venis, and like P2P, which arrived with a suggestively vaginal kaleidoscope of a rose as artwork, the cover art here—a digital rendering of a juicy peach in water—relays exactly where this kid's head is. Venis is full of gooey bedroom talk, delivered in an affected patois that combines humid dancehall temptation and plaintive Toronto sound malaise. In capable hands, this is a platinum combination, but Ramriddlz is hammy, amateurish, and touristic in his approach. His lines are forced and leaden. In "Play" alone, there are three clunkers that rank among the year's worst. ("You said I'm cheesy and you lactose," "Let's get wavy by the ocean," "I'm rolling and I'm getting stoned / Baby I'm a rolling stoner.") Another song called "Baeby" actually petitions for oral sex with a withering "Hakuna matata."
Venis displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women one spectacular embarrassment at a time, but just as exasperating as the lyrics, which are somehow even more bantamweight than "Sweeterman," is Ram's shaky grasp on melody. On the low end, he employs a soothing Drake-ish croon, the same one being run into obsolescence by scores of adopters around Toronto and beyond. It's Venis' saving grace on highlights "Left, Right" and "Bodmon," cuts where the singer leans back as his producers carry him to the hooks. But these peaks are too often offset by the shrill bleat at the other end of his register, a grating wobbly tone processed within an inch of humanity by pitch-correcting software, one assumes, because Ram can't quite nail the actual notes. When he sails up an octave in the second verse of the single "Hey Mr. RamRod" to ask a girl to let him in the "kitty kat," it sounds like he's trying to strangle one instead.
Ramriddlz doesn't bring much to Venis that any number of other singers couldn't, provided the right strains of bud and shamelessness. The real treat, then, is the music tasked with washing out his voice, shared between "Sweeterman" maestro Jaegen, Hoodie Allen collaborator RJF, and 1Mind. Together, they bring a respect for the architecture of modern dancehall that their singer can't quite hack. Where these songs float, it is because of the ultralight sonics underfoot, not the unsure fake patois over top. 1Mind's soaring "Baeby" airlifts Ram by way of a pulsating groove not even a string of bad puns and fake Jadakiss ad libs can quell. "Venis" pulls a dizzying hard left into downcast house in its last minute as the singer prattles on, Auto Tune so thick he may as well be another synth in the mix. Really, this is a producer's project.
How much this music successfully entertains is directly rooted in how easily the center attraction can be tuned out, because on Venis, Ramriddlz's shtick wears gratingly thin. Though there are moments when he locks into his production and fires off easy hooks and turns of phrase, a numbingly foolish lyric pops up every couple lines. The aim is slackness, the more adroitly sexual end of the dancehall spectrum, but by and large, this stuff isn't sexy, unless Ram's promise of semen that tastes like Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce sounds like a good time. If Ramriddlz is going to last beyond the quick, bright heat of a choice Drake cosign, it'll be by honing songwriting smarts to match the lush production he lucked into. Venis volleys between the vapid and the bizarre in search of the absurdist magic of "Sweeterman," when what was really needed was refinement.


The UK duo’s ambitious second album has an alluring and unclassifiable sound. Rarely has a hybrid of new wave and experimental electronic music led to such an introspective place.

EXPORT

The elements of EXPORT sound familiar, but the way they have been put together is anything but. Because the album draws from deeply rooted subgenres like dub techno, gabber, shoegaze, and post-punk, it could have been simply a record collector’s ultimate fetish object, but its ambitions extend far beyond ticking off the boxes of yesterday’s niche sounds. RAP’s Thomas Bush and Guy Gormley have joined sounds and ideas generally thought to be incompatible in ways that fundamentally deepen the mystery of each one.
The effect the UK duo achieve is neither explicitly futuristic nor obviously retro. Its path slices through the sooty gloom of Margaret Thatcher’s early reign and the hangar-like raves of Rotterdam a decade later, yet it sounds explicitly now, even though it doesn’t sound much like any other electronic music being made at the moment. And although EXPORT draws energy from momentous youth movements of yore and is shot through with field-recorded scraps of contemporary city life, it feels less like an album about communal experience than a record informed by life under headphones.
That RAP are not well known deepens the intrigue. So does their name. Cut loose from its most obvious connotation, it floats untethered from meaning, like a word you’ve repeated so long it begins to sound like nonsense. The available information about the group (which is not much) pales against the moving, enigmatic qualities of the music itself—like the way a searching piano etude collapses into a what might be a smartphone recording of roosting birds, or a gentle folktronic ballad is cut short by the oppressive din of public transport.
But there are breadcrumbs scattered throughout the duo’s catalog that lead to this singular achievement. Bush—a visual artist whose work has encompassed typography, stone engraving, and baking—released a strange, morose album of lopsided synth pop last year in which, depending on how you squinted, you might also detect strains of post-rock, goth, or African music. Gormley, a photographer and curator, has the lengthier discography. As Enchante, he has been putting out dance 12"s since 2011, steadily developing a woolly style of left-field house. As a co-founder of Jolly Discs, the label behind EXPORT, he has also had a hand in most of the label’s records, cycling through a handful of ideas with a small set of collaborators. Along the way, this insular crew’s often inscrutable aesthetic has morphed and drifted, but it snaps sharply into focus here, even if it remains difficult to name.
RAP’s debut album, 2015’s Let’s Get Serious, felt largely like a pastiche of early-’80s synth pop, but EXPORT is unique. The album’s sullen opening chords sketch out a dub-techno feel but offer little indication of how far and how quickly the album will travel. Over 34 minutes, its eight tracks flow almost like a DJ set. “Baptism,” the opening song, steadily gathers force, whipping clanging chords and trap snares into a pensive whirlwind that builds and builds. “Ruin” picks up the pile-driving beat and wraps it in a strange, eerily bright melody that sounds like Seefeel tackling medieval folk. The bass drum falls away for a while, but the rave-tested pulse returns for “No Mixer,” in which steel-drum synths play unabashed trance melodies over a bass drum that lands with the weight of a medicine ball. Caught between proto-techno and post-everything, these songs have a dizzying way of collapsing eras together.
If that were all there was to EXPORT, it would be plenty, but what makes the album truly exceptional are the duo’s vocals, sung in an untutored baritone. There’s an uncanny resemblance to vintage new wave that contributes to the music’s strangeness: Heard without context, you might wonder if these are old songs that were decades before their time. The lyrics are less important than the simple sound of their voices—flat and smooth, like stones at the bottom of a river. In “Young Persuasion,” their gnomic commands (“Veer away from tradition/Turn away for an act of young persuasion”) mirror the agile bassline’s rise and fall; in “Static,” their call-and-response refrain takes on the quality of an internal dialogue, rounding out the melancholy depths of their sound.
That interiority defines the album. This is hardly the first record in recent memory to combine post-punk influences with contemporary electronic production, but what distinguishes EXPORT is the way RAP use their unlikely fusion as a way of accessing untapped feelings: Rarely have beats like these led to such an introspective place. The closing “NSEW Ravers” is a bittersweet blend of house beats and indie guitars that sounds a little like Hot Chip filtered through Burial’s nostalgic gaze. “To the north, south, east, west/All I ever wanted was a bit of perspective,” they sing, their voices layered and low, and then the hi-hats peter out and the keyboards die away, leaving us with another audio snapshot captured on a handheld recorder: steady footsteps, barking dogs, and wind whipping across the surface of the microphone. It’s not entirely clear where we have ended up, but, looking back over a landscape entirely of their own invention, it’s a hell of a view.


Though 40 years have passed between albums, roots reggae legend Max Romeo's latest picks up right where the classic Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced War Ina Babylon left off.

Horror Zone

If you’ve not heard Max Romeo’s 1976 classic Lee “Scratch” Perry produced War Ina Babylon, please do so before taking a listen to Horror Zone. It will clearly demonstrate that this is not a comeback album. Though it has been 40 years, this record is simply picking up where *War *left off: an exhilarating collection of roots and reggae. Romeo, he of more than two dozen albums and countless singles—the most famous of which being the Jay Z-sampled “Chase the Devil”—has been making and performing music in Jamaica and around the world for half a century, and that same number of years could be applied to many of the contributing artists on this record as well as the equipment used to make the thing.
To capture just the right feel, the recording process required the use of Boyle’s Rolling Lion Studio, in pure 1970s Black-Ark style. And for those who are interested in the ins and outs of equipment, the liner notes indicate just what types of compressors, consoles, and mics were used to capture these songs that were tracked live—just as was done nearly 50 years ago. Three veterans of Lee Perry’s Upsetters anchor the album in the era: Saxophonist Glen Da Costa, trombonist Vin Gordon, and keyboard stalwart Robbie Lyn. Da Costa and Gordon are also veterans of the famous Alpha Boys’ School as well as Bob Marley’s band. On top of all this, famed artist Tony Wright, who has worked with artists from the Ramones to the Meters to Marley, was called on to paint the cover—he’d painted the image for War Ina Babylon.
In addition to all this attention to historical detail is the fact that each tune is as pointed lyrically and as full musically as any album from the period many call reggae’s golden era. Kicking off with Romeo asking the question “What if I tell you that the world is in trouble?,” the whole of the record provides examples of this trouble and lays bare many of the causes and effects of corruption, colonialism and ongoing war.
Each of the nine songs on the record has an accompanying deep, heavy dub version that clearly demonstrates both inspiration and involvement of Scratch (and he’s credited for vocals and classic effects on three of the dubs). The echo of guitar on the “What If Version,” for instance, seems to let the song breathe, filling in spaces with delay and dings of a xylophone that sounds more like the ring of a distant toy piano. It’s playful and haunting at the same time.
This collection actually started out as a Kickstarter project by British producer Daniel Boyle. Boyle had more than a little success back in 2013 with a Kickstarter that made Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Back on the Controls possible. Not only was that record also recorded in the same studio with all the vintage gear, but it was nominated for a Grammy. Given the equal attention to every detail on Horror Zone, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Romeo/Boyle connection would lead to a repeat. Horror Zone demonstrates that there is a reason roots and culture sounds remain strong, and that in troubled times we need conscious voices more than ever. Who better to comment than the man who offered to “chase the devil out of earth?”
CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this review, Horror Zone was incorrectly referred to as Horror Show.


Lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic, this L.A. band's debut has commercial prospects-- it shows a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists.

The Airborne Toxic Event: The Airborne Toxic Event

The Airborne Toxic Event

I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flasgship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way-- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion.
It's no surprise that many are betting the house on the Airborne Toxic Event-- their debut album is lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic. Their name is even a transparent DeLillo reference, and every one of the 10 tracks sounds like it can be preceded with radio chatter. The Airborne Toxic Event have done their homework. But unless you're a certain French duo, homework rarely results in good pop music, and The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality; while the sound most outsiders attribute to Los Angeles has been marginalized to Metal Skool and the average customer at the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center, TATE embodies the Hollywood ideal of paying lip service to the innovations of mavericks while trying to figure out how to reduce it to formula.
Throughout, the Airborne Toxic Event show a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists, but aren't able to convey what made those much-lauded recods emotionally resonant. Can't convert unthinkable tragedy into cathartic, absolutely alive music like Arcade Fire? Just steal the drum pattern from "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"? Can't connect with the listener with the same fourth-wall busting intimacy as Bright Eyes? That's when you trot out the run-on sentences and get all tremulous when you mean it, man. And that's just the first song. Not privy to the Strokes' accidental poetry and concise songwriting? Get a distorted microphone. Want a hit as big as "Mr. Brightside", but take yourself too seriously to conjure a semblance of juicy melodrama? Grab a half-assed disco beat and boom, you're now ready to write the limpdicked cuckold behind "Does This Mean You're Moving On?"
And while it's understandable that a debut should owe such enormous debts, what really rankles is the unrelenting entitlement that assumes cred via sonic proximity-- it's the musical equivalent of showing up to a bar with a bad fake ID and throwing a hissy-fit when you get carded. While lead singer Mikel Jollett can alternately sound like Paul Banks, Win Butler, Conor Oberst, or Matt Berninger, what ties the LP together is quite possibly the most unlikeable lyric book of the year, rife with empty dramatic signifiers, AA/BB simplicity, and casual misogyny. If Social Distortion did Bruce Springsteen instead of callow Johnny Cash fan fic, you might get the lock-limbed anti-rock of "Gasoline", but my god-- "We were only 17/ We were holding back our screams/ Like we tore it from the pages of some lipstick magazine." Before you can comprehend just how clichéd and yet somehow meaningless that line is, by the next hook he's replaced "screams" with "dreams" and "lipstick" with "girlie," before he's "only 21 [and] not having any fun." Then something about "bullets from a gun."
If only that were the low point. It pains me to pan "Sometime Around Midnight" on concept alone because, man, we've all been there. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: There's a club if you'd like to go...except maybe when you go home and cry and want to die, and it reduces you to putting your thoughts on paper in rhyme form. The next morning, you thank god no one's seen it but you. The Airborne Toxic Event aren't so private, alas. As the ill-fated narrator sees his ladyfriend in a "white dress" "holding a tonic like a cross" while "a piano plays a melancholy soundtrack to her smile" (what bars do these guys go to?). He imagines holding her naked "like two perfect circles entwined." After five minutes pass, she leaves with "some man you don't know" and then your friends look at you "like you've seen a ghost." There's a possibility this is just a po-mo exercise, writing a song about writing a song about how some girl not wanting to fuck you is some sort of epic human calamity, but judging by the out-of-nowhere string section that opens the thing for the first minute, I doubt these guys are playing. It begins a stunning about-face that finds the band spending the rest of the record trying to be Jimmy Eat World.
In a way, The Airborne Toxic Event is something of a landmark record: This represents a tipping point where you almost wish Funeral or Turn on the Bright Lights or Is This It? never happened as long as it spared you from horrible imitations like this one, often sounding more inspired by market research than actual inspiration. Congrats, Pitchfork reader-- the Airborne Toxic Event thinks you're a demographic.


Everyone in hip-hop roots for Atlanta rapper Key! His summery follow-up to last year’s break-out 777 offers more evidence why.

SO EMOTIONAL

Underground star Key! has a reputation as a rap trendsetter, championing talent like iLoveMakonnen, 21 Savage, and Playboi Carti early on in their careers. The 28-year-old is also known for his experimental and pioneering flows and adlibs, both delivered with insane ease. He was at his best on last year’s 777, his break-out collab with Kenny Beats. It’s an album that is a triumphant victory lap, navigating the unpredictable highs and lows encountered on his journey to adulthood. On the brief but substantial new release SO EMOTIONAL, he comfortably sticks to the fundamentals that have carried him through his career while leaning into a poppier pocket, and it works brilliantly.
The ability to sound at home on virtually any beat or production style is core to Key!’s artistry. His gut-hitting, honest bars sound just as at home on the scrappy, melody-driven cuts of his days with cult Atlanta rap outfit Two-9 and early solo tapes, as he does on the sparse-sounding 2014 cuts that exposed him to larger audiences, like the OG Maco collaboration “U Guessed It” and his guest verse on Father’s “Look At Wrist.”
On SO EMOTIONAL, the versatile rapper gets deep and let’s loose. A whirlwind, its eight tracks are super fun, as he raps through the extremes of romantic desire. By tapping a few different producers, he’s able to deftly hop in and out of different sonic realms in a tight space with signature ease.
The playful and anthemic opener “MOTHERLESS CHILD”, which showcases him flexing the high reaches of his singing voice, would be a welcome and actually cool replacement for play at a major sports event, with its catchy and sing-a-long hook of “We want what we want/We want it now.” “WHY” laments a taunting lover while sounding like the surprise contender for radio-ready poolside-pop-punk hit of the summer. Produced by Key!’s longtime collaborator TrapMoneyBenny (who’s now best known as one of the producers of Drake’s “In My Feelings”), it highlights the growth and versatility of two of the foremost soundcrafters of the first Soundcloud rap era.
The gloomy but urgent “YES OR NO” is an earnest pondering on where he and a love interest stand, that gets super real super fast, “I gotta love me/So I can love you.” Project stand-out “FALL HARD” is a banger reminiscent of an amusement park theme song on which an anguished Key! stretches words over cute video game-y synths to mirror the feeling of falling, and blasts the heart rate of the project up a notch. Through this track, produced by Philadelphia’s Oogie Mane of the quietly rising Working on Dying collective, and the spaced-out and spooky “HARD SOFT,” produced by Atlanta-via-Baltimore producer 14GOLDS, Key! reinforces that he’s still got his ear on the pulse of what sounds are bubbling.
Ultimately, at 19 minutes, the project is a travel-sized highlight reel and re-affirmation of Key!’s versatility in this moment of his career, and is a blast to listen to all the way through. It’s the kind of tape that has you choosing a new favorite song every few listens. Over the years, Key! has earned the title of rap’s unsung hero, and with 777, was able to step into high gear to prove that he’s your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper for a reason. Through SO EMOTIONAL, he solidifies he’s still tapped into that energy creatively and is continuing to innovate and set new blueprints for all that popular rap can be today. And by simultaneously communicating the distinct highs and lows of love so viscerally, he created one of the best summer love/summer heartbreak soundtracks of the year.


Featuring Skrillex, Rick Ross, Grimes, Kehlani, Lil Wayne, and many (many) others, the Suicide Squad OST feels as grim and stapled-together as the movie.

Various Artists: Suicide Squad: The Album

Suicide Squad: The Album

John Ostrander began publishing the modern *Suicide Squad *series in May 1987, two months after Ronald Reagan broadcast his fatherly confusion about all that money sent to Nicaragua’s Contras. Gathering second-rate supervillains for a covert-ops team was both a reaction to the cynical politics of the era and an editorial necessity—you can show Captain Boomerang committing atrocities Batman never could. Movie soundtracks often feel similarly calculated: Some antiheroes get coerced into serving their government, and others form an unlikely partnership for the *Spawn *OST. You have an excuse to bury your worst material, or an opportunity to reconsider it. Following in the tradition of Judgment Night and Blade II, the *Suicide Squad *album tries to bring musical strangers to happy disagreement.
The affection holds, for a moment. If Skrillex had a secret origin, it would probably involve rock, techno and rap pooling in mutant coils at some point during the late ’90s, so pairing him up with Rick Ross for “Purple Lamborghini” is almost intuitive. And Ross sounds more energetic than he has in a while, the bass clawing down to his lowest frequencies. “Sucker for Pain” is credited to “Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa & Imagine Dragons w/Logic & Ty Dolla $ign ft. X Ambassadors,” a gloriously generic pileup of royalty negotiations featuring Dragon man Dan Reynolds moaning: “I wanna chain you up, I wanna tie you down/I’m a slave to your game.” That’s just called being a switch.
The best contributions here go to approximate extremes. The R&B singer Kehlani delivers lyrics as measured intimacies, and on “Gangsta” her voice slows to a mantra: “You got me hanging from the ceiling,” her high notes sounding both captivated and frustrated. With its whispered taunts, its guitars testing the constant drum machine like a blade, “Medieval Warfare” is Grimes’ most direct attempt to salvage the aesthetic of nu-metal. Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie has the voice to bring off “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that also encourages their cover’s reverence (for a moment I wondered whether the backing vocals were sampled from the original). The pleasure of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is its indifference to anybody else’s notions of taste, brandishing worthy historical references as preposterous camp, giving the metalheads pseudo-opera. Meticulously recreating that feels somewhat misguided, like annotating a joke.
According to anonymous-but-entertaining reports, Warner executives panicked after the first *Suicide Squad *teaser blew up online—instead of that hyper-saturated splatter, the actual film consisted of interchangeable paramilitary types looking drab in the rain. They hired back the trailer company to help with a different parallel cut, using familiar music cues to staple the final hybrid together. Listening to the *Suicide Squad *soundtrack resembles that experience, minus most of the hits. What you find is portentous covers, gun effects borrowed from a Joker toy, and Twenty One Pilots, a band whose singer addresses the microphone like his loyal pet rat. They don’t even rise from irritating to villainous, unless you have the misfortune of programming a modern-rock radio station.
The presence of Eminem’s “Without Me” is telling: Once a wrecker of civilization, now the bully who couldn’t even go after ‘NSync collectively. *Suicide Squad *wants to show you around its twisted mind so badly you would think the mortgage just defaulted. The earlier Batman films reckoned with far more vivid forms of ugliness, whether the brutalist pandemonium that Tim Burton and Anton Furst devised or Joel Schumacher’s daubs of neon, but then they also had reference points beyond existing nerd media. (And *Batman Forever *had “Kiss From a Rose.”) The new superhero universe is a cosmos of templates, endlessly elaborating on itself—which makes a soundtrack like Suicide Squad like the background music in a PowerPoint.


A timely reissue of this prescient Midwest emo band’s back catalog—including their second and best album—shows how they transformed sadness into searching euphoria.

Look Now Look Again

Rainer Maria met as 21-year-olds in a college poetry class; their feverish romanticism only spun out from there. Formed in 1995 at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, the trio—singer and bassist Caithlin De Marrais, singer and guitarist Kaia Fischer, drummer William Kuehn—named themselves after Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet with an acute understanding of sadness and its powers. As the textual glimmer of Midwest emo was taking shape, Rainer Maria’s particular approach to its artful expressiveness was especially thoughtful, searching, melodic, and diffuse. “Someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad,” Rilke wrote, an essential truth that Rainer Maria the band seemed to innately understand more than most of their emo peers. Sadness could be a means of becoming, of transformation, a way forward.
Released in 1999, Rainer Maria’s second and best album, Look Now Look Again, is the sound of three artists collectively undertaking the profound task of self-possession. Newly re-pressed to vinyl alongside the rest of Rainer Maria’s full-lengths, this barebones reissue includes only its glowing music. Still, the timing is auspicious: Look Now Look Again is one of the greatest albums of emo’s revered second wave, and it is evermore relevant as women’s vulnerability has become the center of independent rock at large. In 1999, Rainer Maria were more punk than American Football, more graceful than Braid—both eventual label- and tourmates. They were more feminine, in membership and feeling, than anything in emo’s history. “Centrifuge” refers, by name, to progesterone.
At 35 minutes that feel half as long, Look Now Look Again is viscerally engulfing. Open-tuned guitars evoke pastel shades. Sensitive drumming swells from a wisp to a crash in every chorus. De Marrais and Fischer turn shouts into conversations, their voices creating the achingly beautiful friction that comes with making fire from sticks. When they locate mountainous hooks, they push to the centers of them, carving their way to their raw cores and sewing their screams to the sky.
Rainer Maria had been a band for four years by the time they released Look Now; De Marrais and Fischer had been a couple just as long. “Most of the songs are about our relationship,” De Marrais admitted to SPIN, casting its narratives of fraying romance into stark relief. But De Marrais and Fischer also sing of electricity and sunsets, of driving with the windows down, of making out and tea. The catharsis of their momentous breakdowns drown out any twee preciousness. At times, their brash emo harmonies sound less like the Promise Ring’s blown-out gang vocals than Sleater-Kinney’s ecstatic entanglements on the iconic “One More Hour”—that is, if those ex-lovers were still trying to hold the pieces together. “And I’m certain, if I drive into those trees/It would make less of a mess/Than you’ve made of me,” De Marrais sings on “Broken Radio,” a definitive emo moment.
This bookish trio seemed to know and express feelings the way the Earth knows seasons. Look Now’s tectonic first two tracks made that clear. “Rise” winds open in slow, concentric circles, as its elliptical lyrics hint at the intuitive process of discerning when one is ready for something. De Marrais sings of prematurely picking “carnations” and “skinny daisies,” and the lyrics translate the spark of a new beginning: “I’m laying in the soil/Is it time for me to rise?” The song ends with chiming bells, as if marking an epiphany in motion. “Planetary,” meanwhile, pours down with the feeling of a colossal unknown, of wanting something more beyond the horizon, beyond yourself. De Marrais quietly describes this splendor—“The skyline is two gazes long”—while the song crawls and then bursts into bracing euphoria. Rainer Maria narrate the psychic fireworks that happen while you’re figuring out who you are and where you want to be.
The infatuated tenor of Look Now Look Again peaks with the record’s tender climax, “The Reason the Night Is Long,” which contains as enormous a hook as Rainer Maria ever found. It’s like Cummings or O’Hara in its dazzling ease: “Oh the reason the night is long/Is very simple,” goes its glittering refrain, a sentence that is left to hang gorgeously until their blistering shout that “Nothing I can do with you is wrong” crisscrosses it in the chorus. The song was written when Fischer left De Marrais alone, working a night job translating German insurance policies. It evokes the physicality of desire, of insides twisting. Rainer Maria were dreamers and romantics in a way that, especially here, still feels timeless.
In his 2003 history Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, writer Andy Greenwald passingly refers to Rainer Maria as “kinda-sorta emo.” That ambivalence is telling. Perhaps Greenwald glossed over Rainer Maria because women’s plaintive vulnerability is not shocking in our culture, even if it has been repulsed by men since Joni Mitchell’s Blue in 1971. As Rainer Maria continued, they indeed became more aligned with indie rock broadly, even moving to Brooklyn in late 1999. But Look Now Look Again remains an undeniable classic of a time when emo broadcasted an ethic of intelligence.
Should its title be taken literally, Look Now Look Again is a fitting directive in 2018. Rainer Maria and this emo masterpiece set a precedent for bands including Rilo Kiley (who once opened for them on tour), Camp Cope (who have received no shortage of comparisons), and even Paramore (whose “Franklin” is clearly indebted to their sound). During “The Reason the Night Is Long,” Fischer sang, “Maybe this dim time is just twilight.” The line is about lovers, of course, but it could also apply to artists who were more ahead of their time than they could have known. Rainer Maria have arrived at their magic hour.


NYC singer Ian Isiah's The Love Champion features beats that would turn Tricky Stewart's head, guest spots from Le1f and Mykki Blanco, and charismatic vocals drowned in AutoTune. Backed by producers like Sinjin Hawke, Brenmar, and ShyGuy, it's hard not to see parallels with Kelela's Cut 4 Me.

The Love Champion

Underground electronic music artists used to admire the futuristic finesse of modern R&B from a distance, making endless bootleg edits of tracks to fit into their DJ sets. More and more, though, they're getting in on the game themselves. Hotly-tipped NYC label UNO and heretofore unknown singer Ian Isiah are the next entrants, with a mixtape full of beats that'd turn Tricky Stewart's head and charismatic vocals drowned in AutoTune. Backed up by a host of well-loved producers like Sinjin Hawke, Brenmar, and ShyGuy, it's hard not to see parallels with Kelela's Cut 4 Me. Isiah is another relatively new singer finding his personality in music cribbed from a thriving underground he's long been associated with (in this case, loosely, NYC's GHE20 G0THIK crew). Lacking Kelela's smouldering personality and her clever songwriting, Isiah instead resorts to a loving pastiche of artists like The-Dream and Trey Songz—which, when it works, is hard to deny.
The first we heard from Isiah was April's stark ballad "Mindfuck", but that one didn't predict the brittle AutoTune-core of The Love Champion. Subtlety evidently isn't part of Isiah's vocabulary, and it's difficult to gauge how self-aware he is of his own absurdity. Chanting "pop that juicy on me" like a mantra on "Sweat", he sounds too earnest to be joking. Thankfully for him, that earnestness ends up his saving grace—his honey-hued voice manages to elevate most of his cringe-worthy phrases. When he croons "trippin on the x/ makin' sweet sex" over a near-silent backdrop on "Private Party", it's more sensual than its blunt language should be able to get across. But then not even he can save the awful "Dynamite", a mess of a song centred around trills of "booty, booty/ you a cutie" that feel like they were flown in from the bridge of a different track.
Isiah finds a sweet spot with AutoTune on Love Champion that's gently experimental without descending into Lil Wayne-esque blubbery, though it could still get on your nerves if you're not one for its inhuman tones. The way he cascades and layers his vocals on tracks like "Showtime" or the stunning ballad "So High" is surprisingly bewitching, like an art in itself. Not to mention that he's a capable singer on his own, mining an entirely different vibe than Future's warbly emo-rap—but like that rapper and his hordes of imitators, the plugin also gives those ballads an alien, almost otherworldly tin. His battle cry "I just wanna be high with you" sounds almost transcendent here.
As much as Isiah relies on his trusty studio helper, however, The Love Champion leans even harder on his cast of producer friends, who offer up a gently progressive selection of beats that sway and dip perfectly with his voice. Sometimes it's hard to tell to who's supposed to be the star—more often than not he's given a prime amount of space for his elaborate countermelodies, but a slinky Sinjin Hawke percussion drop or Brenmar break is never that far behind. UNO's secret weapon Gobby even shows up on the gorgeously gossamer title track, one of the relentlessly weird producer's prettiest productions.
It's the lesser-known Shy Guy who stands out above the rest. His "That Body" struts with all the easy gliding bombast of a Just Blaze track, has Isiah's most effortless vocals and is even blessed with an unusually effusive (albeit brief) Mykki Blanco verse. The rapper's throaty voice cuts right through Isiah's computerized croon, and with guest spots from him and Le1f, you can tell that Isiah keeps interesting company. His own art still seems content to revel in precedent rather than break down boundaries, however. With endearing but bordering-on-self-parody lyrics, lush production, and a high-pitched voice, Isiah lives in the shadow of The-Dream much like The-Dream lives in the shadow of R. Kelly. But unlike our beloved Terius, Isiah has yet to find his own voice. If nothing else Love Champion, marks a solid starting point rather a true takeoff.


On Diarrhea Planet's third album, arena-rock ambition clashes with D.I.Y. scuzz–and a vocalist coup may be in order.

Turn to Gold

When asked recently about Diarrhea Planet’s ambitions for their new album, guitarist Jordan Smith fantasized about a Grammy win, saying it would be "the biggest practical joke on the music industry of all time." Whether or not that’s really his dream, it comes at a pivotal moment for his cringe-inducingly named band. At a certain point in the telling of a long joke, the audience needs to know the punchline–so when will Diarrhea Planet reveal theirs?
On their third record, Turn to Gold, it feels like either the band has taken their schtick too far or their commitment to it hasn’t gone far enough. Here we find the group—a stellar and gleefully cheesy live act—trawling much of the same hair-metal and pop-punk territory they covered on their last EP and second album, I*’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams*, albeit with shinier production.
Though the songwriting is largely similar to Diarrhea Planet's past efforts, their ambitions do appear to have grown somewhat, particularly on the album’s bookend tracks; the instrumental intro “Hard Style” sets a brawny rock tone, nodding to such heart-on-sleeve punk peers as the Dropkick Murphys and Titus Andronicus. The closer, “Headband,” clocking in at nearly eight minutes, is a proper send-‘em-to-bed colossus of multiple parts, tempos, and tones, and is more experimental and sophisticated than anything else on the record. While it lacks some of the easy melodies found elsewhere Turn to Gold, its depth suggests the band may actually have a goal beyond taking the piss.
Another standout is the lovely, Ted Leo-esque “Bob Dylan’s Grandma”—a heart-pounding song about adolescence and musicianship that rings more pure than anything they’ve done before. There’s a not-so-subtle reason it sounds better than everything else on Turn to Gold: it’s sung by guitarist Emmett Miller, who has a natural pop-punk yawp. It’s the only track that doesn't feature the band’s two main singers, Smith and Brent Toler, whose thin voices and limited ranges are deficient for the type of over-the-top instrumental pyrotechnics the group favors. Hearing them front such otherwise flamboyant music is like pairing a vintage Gucci dress with a pair of old Birkenstocks.
The true intentions of Diarrhea Planet remain as murky as ever on Turn to Gold. If the band wants to be a slick, proudly ridiculous arena-rock band, as the record hints, why not go all-in like their predecessors The Darkness and recruit a truly talented vocalist like Justin Hawkins? (Hey, even Mark Hoppus would do.) Or, if they want to keep the shambolic D.I.Y. energy they began with, why don’t they take the production back toward something rougher, looser?
It’s easy to imagine that when Diarrhea Planet are onstage in their screaming, sweating glory, all of this matters much less to them, because that’s the medium they thrive in. (Grateful Dead fans will surely recognize this argument of “but they’re so much better live, man!”) And if Diarrhea Planet’s goal is just to be a memorable, messily great live band, they’re well on their way. But if they want their records to live on, they need to decide what they're trying to achieve, and figure out how to deliver it more effectively offstage.


The latest from the experimental producer/songwriter dives into the warrens of memory and trauma with a collection of anxiety-ridden and often beautiful vignettes.

Talk to You Soon

The music of Sam Ray’s Ricky Eat Acid project has always elicited a kind of déjà vu. Whether it’s his journal-entry song titles or the way his music sounds like field recordings of a mental thunderstorm, the experimental producer/songwriter tricks you into thinking you are hearing extracted elements of your own past. Describing the inspiration of a mix he curated in 2014, Ray mentioned his fascination with a “paranoid, summer-y feeling that something familiar isn’t as familiar as it looks at first glance.” Though his sizable discography has often mined regret and retrospection, Talk to You Soon is the most severe account of an emotional haunting. It explores the idea of how personal upheaval perverts both memory and the comfort of nostalgia.
There is a strange paradox about the way we remember things. As Israeli neuroscientist Yadin Dudai explained it on a 2007 episode of Radiolab: “If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more likely you are to change it. So, if you never use your memory, it is secured.” Such is the way that Ray explores this fixation of the past. On several songs, lyrics are cast as repeated chants that assume different meanings from their first utterance to their final. Where “Nice to See You” transforms from robotic to sincere with its eponymous phrase, “This Is as Close to Heaven as I Get” degrades from blissful to sinister over the course of a dozen repetitions of the song’s titular statement. The beautiful, far-too-short midpoint of the record, “Know,” interpolates the unfinished clause “Before I know you” into various phrases, including the forlorn “It seems to me, that you’d be happier/Before I know you.” By playing with these repetitions, *Talk to You Soon *asks at what point does gazing inward turn from self-reflection to distortion.
While Ray’s previous Ricky LP, Three Love Songs, was an ambient record indebted to the KLF’s warped field recordings, Talk to You Soon feels more like impressionistic vignettes about the disparate feelings born out of trauma. From the moment the swirls of “‘hey’” introduce a dizzying volatility, complete with string arrangements from Owen Pallett, there is a nagging sense of discord. It’s the sonic equivalent of when someone says, “Hi, how are you?” and you say “Good!” even though you are moments from a nervous breakdown. The rest of the album roils on from there, and even if we are temporarily distracted by IDM-indebted beats or palliative synth glows, anxiety always looms in the margins.
Ray’s piano playing has much to do with *Talk to You Soon’s *unraveling nerves. On “Spinning About Under the Bright Light in Bliss,” a gentle swell abruptly turns to percussive jabs. The underlying progression remains, but it is beleaguered by shrill notes as though Ray’s left and right hands are at war. “In the Grocery Store,” with its spectral melody, sounds impossibly distant from its mundane namesake and more akin to the title theme of The Exorcist. It’s these discrepancies that remind us that the world inside your head and the one you inhabit can be so unaware of each other. It doesn’t matter if you are in a supermarket, or fucking, or even having a good day—your mind can rebel at any moment.
The closest Talk to You Soon comes to a complete psychotic break is the anarchic “As We Speak,” which features abrasive screaming from LA-based post-metal outfit Wreck and Reference. Unlike the unnerving electronics that whirred before, this track is a melting point of hoarse howling, crashing drums, and the wailing of an alarm siren. The acute panic attack lasts for a minute before yielding to an adrenalized heartbeat and veering into nervous percussive twitches. This moment is so abrasive, so intense, that the remainder of the album feels exhausted from its own introspection.
Though maybe that’s the point Ray is trying to make here. Nominally, the final two tracks, “On a Good Day” and “‘ok’,” suggest that perhaps we have finally reached some calm after emotional tumult, but their languor recalls the dreary effects of overthinking. Can there be any respite for someone who lives so thoroughly inside their own mind, who is prone to over-analyzing and distorting the past? Although Ricky Eat Acid excels in making supernaturally empathetic music, these final moments of Talk to You Soon are especially isolating, a final warning to the listener that when gazing inward becomes pathological, it casts an endless pall.


Twenty years into her career, after a hiatus of more than a decade, the Chicago footwork producer finally releases her debut album, taking apart her hometown’s club genres and recombining them in captivatingly original ways.

Pariah

Many DJs in Chicago get started at a remarkably young age, and Jana Rush was just 10 when she first started mixing. Obsessed with Chicago’s house music stations, she called up WKKC 89.3 FM one day to ask how she could become a DJ. Her training began at those studios, where, under the guidance of local legend Jam Master K and the producer Gant-Man, she learned how to mix. By the time she was 13 she had started producing, and before she turned 18, she had already released a split 12” with ghetto house scion DJ Deeon and a solo record called Wicked. She counted Paul Johnson as a mentor and DJ Rashad as one of her peers, but the realities of making a living would take her away from music for more than a decade.
Pariah, Rush’s debut LP, arrives over 20 years since her first release, and in that time she’s been a firefighter, a CAT scan technician, and a chemical engineer at an oil refinery. Last year, she emerged from her hiatus to release the MPC 7635 EP, which introduced her particular take on footwork. Rather than the smoother, soul-infused style practiced by Rashad, RP Boo, and their cohort, her acrobatic drum programming and stark industrial atmospheres are more closely aligned with Jlin.
Where Rush differs from most of her peers is the decidedly drowsy nature of her version of footwork. All these songs move at characteristically rapid BPMs, but Rush’s production isn’t focused so much on speed as it is on atmosphere: A chunk of the tracks on Pariah are closer to very fast ambient than anything approaching dance music. Songs like “Divine,” “CPU,” and “Chill Mode” are shorn of anything more than a synthesizer, an unfussy vocal sample, and drumming. With those tools, she’s able to create seriously calming moments on Pariah, which particularly stand out in between the more furious pieces. The blistering, gabber-inspired rhythms of “No Fuks Given” and the appropriately titled “Frenetic Snare” are real workouts, and Rush is keen on offering some form of comedown.
While her label and the press have billed her album as a footwork record, Rush’s relationship with the genre, and with Chicago dance music in general, is much more fluid. Perhaps her most defining aspect as a producer is her ability to melt things down into their most concentrated forms—pulling out the pulse of acid house or the shuffle of jungle, for example—and marrying them together in her songs. Take “??? ??,” the album’s most confounding song. She builds the entire track from what sounds like a rusty pipe being played like a flute; its rinky-dink chords snake around languid drum rolls, church pianos, and a brass band.
Yet, as a result of the wide breadth of her style, the album can feel more or less shapeless, as each track flows into the next, trying new tricks and tropes on for size. “Break It,” the track that immediately follows “??? ??,” is a more classically inclined take on footwork and juke—just an increasingly speedy drum line cushioned by repetitions of the song’s title. Just a little later we get “Old Skool,” which, in line with its name, is retro house with soul samples and saxophones. But she’s such a studied and precise producer that even these more straightforward pieces are still arresting. As a result, Pariah, stylistically speaking, is more like a historical survey of dance music: Across its 12 tracks, Rush doesn’t so much break apart genre as reconstitute it in her own image.


With a joyous new album, the New York jazz-punk quartet responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Its follow-up EP lets their true feelings show.

Oh Yeah? / Brave Rats EP

Like a squad of beaming cheerleaders, New York quartet Sunwatchers spend much of their working lives cultivating pure joy. Especially on their fourth album, the devoutly playful Oh Yeah?, they deal in sax-and-guitar melodies so bright and rhythms so relentless they feel eternal. They pirouette through opener “Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay” with the gusto and precision of a professionally choreographed laser-light spectacle. Halfway through “Love Paste,” which lifts from a gleeful klezmer dance into an instrumental hook so big it could have belonged to Yes circa 1972, they shout “Whoo!” in gleeful unison. Hearing this sort of unbridled, earnest enthusiasm just feels good.
However radiant, though, Sunwatchers have forever ferried political messages of resistance and persistence. “Sunwatchers stand in solidarity with the dispossessed, impoverished, and embattled people of the world,” they broadcast on the cover of their second album, a credo they’ve repeated with every subsequent release. Their mascot—the Kool-Aid Man, absurdly clad in Braveheart body paint—lorded over Uncle Sam’s mutilated corpse on 2019’s Illegal Moves. They fantasize in interviews about making the music that destroys capitalism and vow in liner notes to “forge an atmosphere of radical empathy and acceptance.”
Sunwatchers’ rippling music works, then, much like American gospel or hardcore: It fights the power by flexing solidarity and responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Oh Yeah? is vivid and boisterous. Burrowing between chiptune’s glee and doom metal’s glumness, “Thee Worm Store” conjures images of a video-game hero barely escaping the clutches of a particularly baleful boss. “Brown Ice” feels like the score for a movie montage where ardent young revolutionaries make their final preparations to overthrow the government, gathering supplies and scheming by lamplight.
They’ve never been better than on “The Earthsized Thumb,” an extended anthem for overcoming the seemingly insurmountable. For the first 13 minutes, Sunwatchers repeat and revolve around a single bracing theme, circling it like an obstacle they can’t overcome. But then alto saxophonist Jeff Tobias has had enough. He screams into his horn like Sunwatchers’ inspiration Albert Ayler, his tone providing the call to arms. The band springs into action for the odyssey’s final quarter, beating the theme into submission with a synchronized assault. It’s impossible not to feel emboldened by it.
On Brave Rats—a subsequent six-track EP, consisting of alternate versions and live renditions of old favorites, plus a few catalog obscurities—Sunwatchers relax their guard, or at least the need to sound so triumphant. Yes, they erupt into a jubilant clatter during “Everybody Play!” and dance through Sonny Sharrock’s “Blind Willie” with the élan of Akron/Family during those fleeting moments when they seemed like the country’s next great jam band. But mostly, they allow the anxiety and pessimism they typically funnel into rapturous hooks and ecstatic waves of improvisation to stand alone. It’s like watching a seasoned pop star dazzle a sold-out arena, then collapse backstage and confess how they really feel.
“Sazx,” a rhythm-less duet for Tobias’ yearning horn and Jim McHugh’s jarring guitar, suggests a nightmare driven by a waking loop of self-doubt so extreme it haunts you in your sleep, too. Closer “Pedal One,” a scrap from an old soundtrack, pulses like Steve Reich slowed by Dilaudid, drugging the urban busyness of his work until it scans as dread. Even the magnetic hook and road-trip esprit of “Brave Rats” can’t camouflage the despair in Tobias’ brittle saxophone tone or the menacing keyboard notes that line the track like rusty razor blades.
The first several times I heard Oh Yeah?, I pined for something like one of the bummers on Brave Rats, a song that made clear the complex emotions and revolutionary urges at play. Sunwatchers have touched on that feeling in the past, particularly with Illegal Moves. But as the weeks passed and the world changed, the album’s sense of unfettered joy—of shouting down misery simply by playing together—became reassuring to revisit, a reminder of the energy a band and audience can share in a crowded concert hall. A studio album that moves with the delight of a live explosion, Oh Yeah? is even more welcome at a time when that kind of catharsis is temporarily out of stock.


On her first album of all original songs, the folk polyglot seeks livelier rhythms and vocal styles infused with jazz, country, and zydeco.

You’re the One

As much archivist as poet, Rhiannon Giddens has spent her prolific career “taking back the tools” of Black musical traditions, as scholar Francesca T. Royster writes in Black Country Music, in an effort to restore them to the American canon. Her classically trained voice and virtuosity on both minstrel and modern banjo have infused her stories—many of them historically rooted—with an urgency that pangs into the present. It’s work she has undertaken independently and collectively (with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Our Native Daughters, and through collaborative albums), and explored through multiple forms—song, ballet, opera. This boundless approach has earned Giddens a MacArthur “Genius” grant, a Pulitzer Prize, and two Grammys.
On You’re the One, Giddens’ first solo album in six years, she seems more interested in playing a variety of parts than fully inhabiting any one. Each song feels like a costume she dons for the duration of the track—and the changes are many. She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.
Across an album of entirely original tracks, Giddens seeks livelier rhythms and finds them in the zydeco-peppered “You Louisiana Man,” the country-blues stomp “Way Over Yonder” (co-written with Keb’ Mo’), and “Hen in the Foxhouse,” where heavy percussion and prowling melodic flourishes hang like a haze. More than accelerating the tempo, Giddens seems to delight in exploring different vocal styles. There’s an element of Bonnie Raitt on the bluesy “Foxhouse,” though near the end she nimbly jetés to a jazzy scat. Elsewhere, she channels the swaggering bravado of Big Maybelle on “You Put the Sugar in My Bowl” and the coiffed pining of Ella Fitzgerald on “Who Are You Dreaming Of.” On both, her voice warbles with the weight of desire.
Given the textural complexity Giddens achieved first with T Bone Burnett (on her solo debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn) and later with Dick Powell (on 2017’s striking Freedom Highway), the production on You’re the One feels a little too pristine. This time, Jack Splash (Alicia Keys, Solange, Valerie June) helmed the project, opting for overly polished choices that hem in Giddens’ performances. Soft strings and twinkling chimes entwine “Wrong Kind of Right,” turning the R&B lament into a middling affair, while an anodyne arrangement of guitar and drums make “If You Don’t Know How Sweet It Is” more orderly than the damning refusals Giddens issues to a badly behaved partner. The writing doesn’t help either. “I treated you like a king/Maybe that’s the reason/Soon enough you grew to think/That Christmas was all season,” Giddens sings, landing the line more like a half-hearted shove than the jab she intended.
There are signals of more interesting possibilities on “Yet to Be,” a propulsive jig featuring Jason Isbell. Its lyrics follow the love story between a Black woman and an Irish man, with Giddens’ and Isbell’s resonant voices braiding together into a physical force. Once their baby enters the narrative, the track shifts into the softest exhale, an airy flute soaring like their aspirations. “Yet to Be” shows Giddens at her best: allowing the musical textures to enliven and elaborate the story she’s telling, drawing on threads from the past to communicate a pressing immediacy that feels all her own.