On her fifth solo album, the New York musician both evolves as a singer-songwriter and grows in confidence, addressing heavy emotional themes with candor and grace.

The Big Freeze

Laura Stevenson has been a solo artist for over a decade, but only now, with her fifth album, does she truly sound like one. The New York musician’s career began in the DIY ska-punk band Bomb the Music Industry! before she peeled off to write her own material, often with friends rallying behind her in her backing band, the Cans. But after releasing the indie-pop record Cocksure, in 2015, she got married, bought a house, and adopted a dog. It’s within these domestic comforts that Stevenson found the courage to confront her demons after years of lyrically hinting at them. The result is The Big Freeze, a record where Stevenson makes her voice and guitar the focus, basks in minimal orchestration, and dissects her past in hopes that she can, finally, detach herself from its grasp.
Ironically, Stevenson sounds her most professional and polished when scrambling to make things work. Lacking the money to book a proper studio, she trekked to her childhood home in Long Island to record—a bold decision, given that her relationship with her mother is complicated at best—and later added violin and upright bass in her newly purchased home, days after closing the deal. It was life coming full circle, her prepubescent memories contrasting with adult strides. Though these songs came together after four years of intermittent writing, the arrangements were fleshed out in real time while recording; a jazz-rooted drummer added percussion and a cellist who could play by ear mirrored Stevenson as she sang her the string parts. Through this process, Stevenson used piano, guitar, cello, and French horn to cushion her cascading vocals on songs like opener “Lay Back, Arms Out” and the colossal “Low Slow.” It makes Stevenson’s personable songwriting sound massive by, counterintuitively, scaling the volume back.
If the vocal runs on The Big Freeze highlight Stevenson’s growth as a singer, then the transparency of her lyrics underlines her confidence as a person. While she’s no stranger to mining difficult memories, Stevenson digs deeper than ever before on The Big Freeze, as if unafraid of the potential avalanche it could dislodge. On its surface, the album focuses on the emotional complexity of relationships. It’s her exploration of loneliness and depression, though, that sees Stevenson grow as a singer-songwriter. “You are burdened by only your dangerous mind,” she sings regretfully on “Hum,” sounding more akin to Jason Molina than she did Rilo Kiley on Wheel. On “Big Deep V2,” she belts so clearly that you can practically hear the double-tracked harmonies fill every room in her mother’s house. Even as she steadies herself for the mundanities of her thirties in “Living Room, NY,” she’s content to point out her biggest flaws. Stevenson is a tour guide in her own museum of self-reckoning.
Stevenson tackles her biggest problem—self-harm, mainly through chronic skin-picking—on “Value Inn” and “Dermatillomania” with grace. On the former, each pluck of the electric guitar
hangs in the air like icicles. The latter, as the only upbeat number on the album, feels like an obvious metaphor for how people hide their scars. Maybe it’s because of the fluidity of these song structures, or how saddened Stevenson sounds while singing them, but her vulnerability feels like a physical presence in the songs. After completing them, Stevenson says she expected a sudden healing, as if her struggle with self-harm would evaporate because it was finally acknowledged explicitly instead of discreetly. It didn’t, of course, but for a moment, during the blissed-out instrumental ending of “Dermatillomania,” it’s tempting to believe it did.
A decade after making her solo debut, Stevenson has found her sweet spot as a singer-songwriter. The emotionally barbed storytelling, stripped-down delivery, and orchestral flair weave together symbiotically, a testament to how far Stevenson has come as a musical autodidact. Above all, it’s her voice that makes The Big Freeze such a raw, therapeutic listen. When she repeats the heart-wrenching declaration “I am honest” throughout “Big Deep V2,” it feels like an attempt to make peace with herself after a lifetime of being at war, an offer she can’t quite accept. No wonder being a singer-songwriter is scarier on your own.


Reminiscent of Fuck Buttons or Black Dice, Philly's David Harms combines heavily repetitive rhythms with noisy, thickly textured loops.

Strange Gods

For something so simply designed and constructed, the music of Philadelphia's David Harms-- aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed-- is pretty tricky. Harms uses only effects pedals and a mixer to make rhythms so repetitive they suggest artistic OCD. But within those parameters, he also creates impressively diverse textures. As his mono-beats roll forward, he piles on layers of gritty, tactile sound, the sonic equivalent of a character in the video game Katamari Damacy gathering sticky debris with his growing ball.
In the process, Harms evokes big-beat dance, abstract IDM, harsh noise, psych-rock, even death metal, all while sticking to his simple A/B rhythms. Which is probably why Dan Deacon, another artist with a knack for mixing abstraction and structure, told Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms "is my favorite performer right now. He is the master of his domain. More human than human."
Strange Gods definitely sounds both fleshy and mechanistic, both monotonous and body-moving. It's as if Harms grafted the squall of Prurient or John Wiese onto the pound of Aphex Twin or Mouse on Mars (that is, if they made their beats without synths or drum machines). You could also shorthand Mincemeat or Tenspeeed as a more extreme version of Black Dice or Fuck Buttons, but Harms' purism sets him apart. The first beat he picks is the one he's sticking with, and he doesn't seem to care much if you stick with it, too. Sometimes it even sounds like he wants to outlast you.
That's definitely the case on Strange Gods' longest tracks, such as the relentlessly bouncy "Hulot", the cuttingly metallic "Points and Lines", and the buzzsaw warp of "Throw Hands". Throughout these marathons, the rhythms can get swallowed by the bulging sounds-- distortion, feedback, a high-pitched din akin to a brutal metal guitar solo. But inevitably the beat returns, stronger and more repetitive than ever. Such stubbornness may seem tedious, but there's something indelibly hypnotic about the way Harms slowly changes the sonic envelope around his oscillations. It's like watching time-lapse footage of a city skyline, as the changing light and motion color the buildings but never erase their immovable presence.
Whether or not that sounds like fun, it's hard to imagine being turned off by Strange Gods, since Harms always cuts his noise with a beat that's easy to hang onto. When he lets that beat take over, like during the catchy first half of "Padre Iscand (Colonization)", you can easily picture him performing inside the kind of ecstatic crowd circles that Deacon often attracts. But don't count on it-- my guess is that Harms is less interested in attracting fans than finding a personal nirvana inside his endless repetitions.


The Brazilian pianist brings his dazzling polyrhythms—plus guests like Jeff Parker and Brandee Younger—to an album that fuses jazz, avant-garde composition, and indigenous Amazonian influences.

Y’Y

Like the tropicalistas of the 1960s, Amaro Freitas believes in the sophistication of traditional Brazilian music. Hailing from the northeastern city of Recife—a regional neighbor of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso’s Salvador—he combines the rural sounds of his native region with the cosmopolitan flash of Río de Janeiro. Since making his debut in 2016 with Sangue Negro, Freitas has incorporated the rhythms of rumba and baião with hard bop attitude and an elegant formalism closer to Bach than Bahia. Y’Y, his latest, was inspired in part by a trip to Manaus, a city of two million deep in the Amazon. The only real musical connection the album has to Freitas’ previous work is his presence on the keys. Gone is the urbane small-ensemble jazz of 2018’s Rasif and 2021’s more adventurous Sankofa, replaced with humid, spacious music that moves from tranquility to cacophony with remarkable ease.
Freitas’ polyrhythmic playing—simultaneously unpsooling different cadences in each hand—is at once lacy and delicate, thumping and propulsive; “it’s as though my left hand is Africa and my right hand is Europe,” he recently told The New York Times. On Y’Y, he finds new ways to apply that philosophy to his arrangements. On “Uira (Encantada da Água) - Vida e cura,” he plays a prepared piano whose muted strings transform the notes into stipples of percussion, more like a tabla than a conventional keyboard instrument, while the feathery filigree of a second, untreated piano seems to float across the top. A bassline reminiscent of Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz paces around an anxious plucked figure in “Dança dos Martelos,” and as Freitas begins to merge the two patterns, he bangs on the lower octaves, which rattle with prepared shells. Throughout, he applies little trills and plays riffs that feel palindromic, phasing with the left hand while the right hand is still sprinkling pixie dust. Tidiness and precision have always been some of his greatest strengths, and it’s thrilling to hear him complicate his own tendency toward order.
While these experiments move Y’Y farther from jazz and closer to the spirit of both indigenous Amazonian music and the avant-garde classical realm, Freitas engages in lively conversations with a series of guests in the album’s second half, bringing to mind the open world of McCoy Tyner’s Extensions. He simmers Jeff Parker’s stately guitar into a red-eyed, late-night groove in “Mar de Cirandeiras,” while in “Gloriosa,” he brings Brandee Younger’s harp glissandos down to earth with a single note that pings over and over.
The album’s best moments happen when Freitas matches moods with Shabaka Hutchings. The flautist takes the lead on the album’s title track, his popping rhythm grounded by the sound of his breath as he winds around Freitas’ rattling bass notes. Hutchings announced that he was swapping his saxophone for the flute less than a year ago, but the solo he delivers here would be extraordinary from even a seasoned pro—it’s technically stunning and emotionally open-ended, lilting from loneliness into grace. When Freitas finds a few gospel chords and places them at Hutchings’ back near the end of the run, the relieved sense of companionability only amplifies the ache at the song’s center. Later, backed by drummer Hamid Drake on “Encantados,” Freitas and Hutchings generate something like pure kinetic atmosphere, mist that jolts in the wake of someone moving past.
On Y’Y, Freitas’ vision for decolonized Brazilian jazz isn’t a nostalgic or sentimental view of an edenic Amazon before the Portuguese. It’s a look into a future in which the wounds of the colonial era—including the impulse to cut and snip the fabric of Brazilian music to fit North American and European forms—have healed into scars that are faint, but still visible. Like John Coltrane, Freitas has learned how to approach his compositions with the same confident, wildly adventurous spirit he brings to his instrument. In doing so, he’s left behind some of the accessibility of his early records, but in its place, he’s forged something transcendent.


On his debut solo album, the Toronto artist formerly known as Mustafa the Poet confronts grief and dispossession over understated production with folk-music overtones.

When Smoke Rises

When Smoke Rises is Mustafa Ahmed’s first full-length album as a solo artist, but it’s just the latest volume in his growing library of dispatches from Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood. Ahmed, a founding member of rap collective Halal Gang, used to be known as Mustafa the Poet, having gained recognition for his earnest spoken-word verse at just 12 years old. These days, he is tight with Drake and FKA twigs; he’s narrated a Valentino ad and written songs for Usher and Camila Cabello. But the topics that marked his poetry as a young teen—violence, death, grief—have remained constant in his artistic output, and they stay central on When Smoke Rises, named in honor of Smoke Dawg, a fellow Halal Gang member who was murdered in 2018.
With subject matter like a still-recent death, the journey from poetry to pop music can be treacherous; the medium necessarily requires Ahmed to polish his stories until they’re glossy enough for radio play and A&R meetings. Thankfully, he has a knack for it. When Smoke Rises deftly translates Ahmed’s poetry to melody without blunting the truth of the narratives at its core. The music is delicate: Ahmed’s singing voice is bassy and warm, and soft acoustic instruments adorn the understated production. The nylon-stringed guitars and piano of beatmaker Frank Dukes’ celestial lo-fi lend a sense of eternality. Elsewhere, submarine synths from Jamie xx and fellow folk futurist James Blake evoke the gnawing immediacy of loss. The vacillation between the two moods is a worthy imitation of the seesaw of grief between abstract and all too real.
Where Smoke Dawg’s death is a source of steady hurt, the gentrification of Regent Park is the insult added to the injury. On opener “Stay Alive,” Ahmed sings to a friend, “All of these traps and all of these street signs/None of them will be yours or mine.” The song’s video, which depicts Ahmed and his friends in front of Regent Park housing projects, highlights the nest of surveillance cameras above them, underscoring their lack of ownership over their home. The theme reappears in the Sampha-assisted “Capo,” where Ahmed sings, “This place isn’t ours anymore.” Dispossession is a conspirator with violence; both threaten his friends’ well-being, freedom, and very survival. In response, Ahmed promises to remember: “I’ll be your empire,” he sings, and disseminates his friends’ memories to the airwaves to live a thousand lives.
Many of Ahmed’s most heartfelt verses are directed to his community. On opener “Stay Alive,” he sings to the soldier with a “bottle of lean and a gun in [his] jeans,” assuring him, “I care about you, fam.” For most of When Smoke Rises, Ahmed assumes a standpoint of absolute devotion. On “What About Heaven,” he trembles at the question, “What if you’re not forgiven?,” and on “Separate,” he cries, “I’m too young to feel this pain.” But even when giving voice to these more private, vulnerable feelings, the album’s folk aesthetic gives his words the aura of fable.
Ahmed seems to bristle at his own image as the poet in a crew of rappers: On an Instagram Live last December, he said, “I’ve never in my life claimed to be anti-violent.” He resents the halo that comes with being a young Black man celebrated by polite society—the attention is grating at best, and at worst threatens to uphold the same prejudices that visit misery upon his community. When Smoke Rises does share many of the aesthetic hallmarks of a modern rap album, with samples and Drake-ish voicemail interludes. But the choice to build it around folk music’s tropes is an innovative way of avoiding the “conscious” stereotype, notorious in hip-hop for a moralizing impulse that tends to hollow out its messages. (In an interview with Pitchfork, Ahmed said pointedly, “All the backpack rap culture, I was never a fan of that.”) When Smoke Rises reasserts the sincerity that brought Ahmed stardom: He needs little more than his voice to captivate.


On his first album in almost seven years, the Toronto artist uses ambient pop to craft a masterful, dreamlike world where songs luxuriate for 24 minutes and Dan Bejar shows up to sing about Paris.

In Another Life

For nearly 20 years, Sandro Perri has been cultivating his own genreless brand of futurism. Across many aliases, records, and collaborations, he has zagged from spacious electronic music to Tropicália-flecked folk to avant experimentation to slyly expansive post-rock, like a Canadian Arthur Russell or Jim O’Rourke. He studied jazz in college but only lasted a few semesters, and his subsequent work sketches the form of an improvisational spirit eager to twist out of the shackles of musical tradition. To that end, In Another Life is visionary in both content and form: The first half is filled by the 24-minute title track, while the flipside offers three versions of the same basic song, but with different singers, lyrics, and moods. Both sides are slow and pleasingly repetitious, quiet rebukes of the mania of modern life.
This album comes seven years after Perri’s last solo LP, and “In Another Life” makes it sound like he’s spent every waking minute of that time crossed-legged on a mountaintop, contemplating his utopia. As he sings in verse after verse, hewing to a consistent melody and cadence, like a zen blues, this is a place where there is “nothing to have, no reason to fight.” Where children can play after dark without worry; where intelligence and worth aren’t measured by typical tests; where there is “no position, ladder, or pit.” Egos are fully sublimated. This is a place where album reviews and ranked lists are likely frowned upon too; “What use grafting sport to art?” Perri asks, his voice oozing a calm, casual righteousness.
But these are not demands—he would never be so bold. They are more like wishful affirmations, the wise words of a seeker trying to articulate what a virtuous society could look like. Perri’s dream of a perfect world is as seductive as it is impossible, and “In Another Life” proposes a utopia that falls in line with the ones dreamed up by so many other philosophers and artists—except with a lot more looping synthesizer sequences and yawning guitars.
There’s infinity—and tragedy—in this very long song. It doesn’t really rise or fall. Instead, it luxuriates in its own endlessness, like a koi pond encased in mirrors. For nearly half an hour, its lowkey throb acts as a cocoon from the outside world, from human nature, from the horrors of 2018. There are elements that essentially repeat for the entire track, and elements that pop in for a minute to check out the view and then go away, shutting the door softly as they leave. In some ways, “In Another Life” doubles as a stealth life hack—close your eyes and listen and let the world melt. Then you remember the title and snap out of it. This is another life, after all. Not the here and now. In the song’s unwavering rhythm and cadence is an admission of defeat: We’ve imagined idylls before and we will imagine them again in perpetuity—that is, utopias only exist in dreams that never come true.
Side B brings the lofty philosophies down to a more grounded version of paradise: Paris. “Everybody’s Paris” is presented in three incarnations, allowing Perri, André Ethier (one-time frontman for garage rockers the Deadly Snakes), and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar to wander through the streets of their very own French capital. The melodies remain constant throughout each take, and the chords feel familiar, but the instrumentation is tweaked, and each singer is allowed their own unique perspective. It’s like a Mad Libs for sage Canadian art rockers.
Perri’s version continues with the casual enlightenment, as he trembles out abstract aphorisms over an ambient smear of synth, organ, sax, and strings: “When everyone’s a piece in everybody’s chain/There’s right in losing and at least that much in gain.” Ethier’s “Everybody’s Paris” is more twee, nearing the innocence of children’s music, with the singer emphasizing the universality of the song’s title. His weathered voice is like a bear hug from an old friend as he lists quotidian details that connect us: washing dishes, holding hands, smelling flowers. Bongos and flutes are brought in to bolster the levity, and it all recalls the bittersweet musings of Paul Simon. Even if you’ve never heard of André Ethier, you get a decent sense of his pragmatic, humanistic worldview.
The same sort of reveal happens with Dan Bejar, though, as any Destroyer fan would guess, his viewpoint reads more like a dark comedy. Atop fretless bass and Perri’s meandering guitar, Bejar conjures a Paris where every citizen “wants to be a cat,” “haunts a haunted house,” and has a cigarette dangling from their lip just so. His is a city of mystique—it could kill you just as well as it could lead you to life-changing love, maybe on the same day. Bejar ends the song, and album, by descending from his perch at the top of the Eiffel Tower and offering an apology: “Everybody’s Paris, along the river Seine/Swore I would never do this to you again.” The words could be directed to a loved one, or to the listener, or to the entire human race. Because, behind every brand of utopia, there are wrongs, regrets, and the hope that, next time, we can get it right.

Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country


On the follow-up to last year’s Erotic Probiotic 2, the Baltimore musician continues to twist the sounds of ’80s dream pop and R&B into a strange, heartfelt picture of a world on the brink.

Catching Chickens EP

The rapturous response to Marcus Brown’s debut album as Nourished by Time, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, has come to look more like destiny. After years of odd jobs, false starts, and aborted artistic experiments, the Baltimore native and Berklee College of Music alum spent COVID holed up in his parents’ basement concocting a new sound, blithely unconcerned about what the world might think. Armed with Ableton, electric guitar, and a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer, Brown blended dream pop, ’80s R&B, deep house, electro-funk, hip-hop, and Baltimore club in daring, original ways while expressing socialist ideas and spiritual concerns in an earnest, naked baritone redolent of the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan and Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. It’s difficult to fathom the record as a debut; it has the timeworn air of an album that took years to make—and the fast-and-free ethos of a practiced savant finally willing to let it fly.
Since Erotic Probiotic 2’s release last spring, Brown has landed loads of new fans, critical acclaim, cross-the-pond tour dates, and a freshly inked deal with XL Recordings, though he’s become skeptical of such conventional measures of success. “This is now an extension of my labor,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s another version of working at Whole Foods, just, like, a lot cooler.” Nourished by Time’s latest EP, Catching Chickens, expands upon Erotic Probiotic 2’s sprawling, singular universe while also hinting at new sounds, shapes, and textures he might explore down the road. As ever, incisive political insights and poignant emotions shine through the mutant genre melds, reaffirming the sneakily transgressive nature of Brown’s approach to pop.
At its best, Catching Chickens subverts playful, exuberant moods with biting social commentary. On opener “Hell of a Ride,” Brown laments the ills of late-stage capitalism over ’80s dance euphoria: “Children stuck in the matrix/They know when it’s fiction/Young, breathing in them toxins/Used to have a third place now they got no options.” After the chorus (“the red, the blue, and even the white… never felt like mine”), the song dissolves into hollow guitars and warbling synths, sketching an ambiguous sonic picture of what societal collapse might feel like: terrifying yet cathartic, isolating yet inspiring. Lead single “Hand on Me” bops with stretchy synths and vocal harmonies, detailing a forlorn yet impassioned love—romantic or otherwise—that’s both comforting and psychosis-inducing. These songs reflect Brown’s uncanny ability to couch complex subject matter in delightful DIY pop. He never strains to mesh form with content; instead, the two are always inextricably and effortlessly linked.
Brown also adds a few dimensions to his sound. “Poisoned-Soaked” is a spacy shoegaze anthem sopped with Nourished by Time hallmarks like lo-fi drum machine and retro synth melodies. On bluesy ballad “Romance in Me,” Brown sings with the intimacy of an unobserved shower performance, his voice soaring beyond its natural range. It’s the rare Nourished by Time song that feels openly nostalgic, yet even this throwback soul feels like a welcome innovation for an artist rewriting the world in his own fashion—seeking transcendence, faith, and beauty as the systems around him wilt into smithereens.


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 a foundational new age album from 1975, an alluring, slightly fried soundscape channeled directly to its composer from an inter-dimensional entity named Vista.

Inter-Dimensional Music

It’s a typical scene in Marin County, the affluent expanse north of San Francisco where countless hippies settled down after the Summer of Love. Iasos leans on a deck railing as a bountiful Northern California landscape sweeps behind his lanky frame and Bob Ross perm. A trombone and mute rest beside him. Every now and then the man lets out a high-pitched giggle, not unlike Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus: appropriate given that the film spoke of Mozart’s talent as divine, and this man is steadfastly convinced that the music in his head was beamed there by an angelic, inter-dimensional entity named Vista. “I feel honored that I’m working with him,” he titters, elated as a Rolling Stone on his way back from a session with Muddy Waters.
Iasos is being interviewed for a 1979 documentary by students at Marin College, four years after his debut, Inter-Dimensional Music, one of the first albums to pair new age philosophy with the glittering, celestial style of music that would soon come to bear the same name. The term initially referred to a set of unrelated movements that believed in a coming new age of spiritual enlightenment and human development—influenced by various Eastern philosophies, turn-of-the-century spiritual ideas like Theosophy, and 1950s UFO religions—many of which gained traction among the post-hippie milieu that had recently migrated to Marin. If you can sit through the Iasos interview without your eyes glazing over, you’ll hear a lot of these threads converge.
Even his best friends never learned his real name, which was not made public until after his death last year. Those friends recall a happy and jocular man who wasn’t always easy to meet on an earthly plane of conversation. “Let's put it this way,” said one friend decades later. “I cannot imagine anybody less likely to come to a Super Bowl party than Iasos.”
Iasos was born in 1947 in Greece to Jewish parents. His father was the only one on his side of the family to survive the Holocaust. When Iasos was four, his family moved to upstate New York, where he eventually attended Cornell University, playing in a bossa nova group called the Nova Shadow Quartet. Around this time, he started hearing what he called “paradise music” in his head, whose origin he could not trace and which he lacked the means to realize. After consulting with a psychic, he decided the music came from Vista, the Elohim of the Fifth Ray, whom he compared in interviews throughout his life to an “older brother.”
Jettisoning his initial plan to go to grad school and study anthropology, Iasos moved across the country to Berkeley, California, then found a houseboat in Sausalito, on the same harbor that inspired Otis Redding to write “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” He became an active figure in the local scene: his early credits include flute on the debut album by the Grateful Dead-affiliated Rowan Brothers and chimes on the self-titled album by singer-songwriter Pamela Polland. But he remained focused on the sounds he was hearing in his head. Living off cans of beans and borrowing what equipment he needed to document these transmissions from the higher realm, he jury-rigged a crude home studio and recorded what would become Inter-Dimensional Music.
Though Iasos claimed steadfastly that this music came to him from on high, he did reluctantly admit a few earthly influences: Debussy, Ravel, Jimi Hendrix, exotica great Martin Denny. The early-’70s Bay Area where he worked was a hub for music unbound by rhythm, home to the San Francisco Tape Music Center and the Mills College music program that boasted faculty like Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath—music that had trickled down from the academic avant-garde into more accessible, rock-adjacent forms like German kosmische and Brian Eno’s earliest ambient works. Iasos never cited any of these artists as influences, but his music fit naturally within this zeitgeist.
Stephen Hill, a Bay Area DJ who established the Hearts of Space radio show in 1973 to broadcast what he broadly called “contemplative music,” claims the new age genre was one of the first made possible by home recording. Before it became clear in the late ’70s and early ’80s that there was a market for this music, musicians had to record and release it themselves. Most of the genre’s earliest gems are private-press and small-batch oddities. Recorded on a reel-to-reel, Inter-Dimensional Music has an alluring, slightly fried quality. It sounds faded and corroded, very distant from the sources of its sounds, as if it’s traveled a long way to reach us.
This is insubstantial music by design, evocative of flickering phenomena like flames and shooting stars. From the opening comet-whoosh of “Libra Sunrise,” the album makes clear its almost single-minded pursuit of transcendent beauty. Save for “The Bubble Massage,” a proto-ASMR submersion into aqueous sound, there is almost no low end to speak of. It exists in the same register as birdsong, the voices of children, as Iasos’ curious Mozartean laugh. While ambient music often works at a glacial pace, this music leaps through the air, free from gravity.
Iasos loves slide guitar, which allows him to create incredible sweeps and gentle flutters. The flute, instrument of his childhood, dances freely, conjuring images of satyrs wreathed in laurels. (Vista is not the only god Iasos has worked with; he claims to have received a musical scale from Pan.) The piano does not sound real at all—it’s pearly, warped, slightly too lustrous, a memory of a piano. All these elements combine on “Lueena Coast,” the album’s most stunning track, which opens with scattered piano arpeggios and leaps into grand pirouettes of flute. Iasos’ voice can be faintly heard in the background, mouthing syllables through a thick sheet of reverb.
Avian whoops and titters abound in the margins of Inter-Dimensional Music, making explicit Iasos’ debt to Martin Denny’s exotica records of the 1950s, which used birdsong to put American listeners in the mind of some faraway tropical isle. “Lanua Cove,” available only on the original vinyl pressing, centers a conspicuously Denny-like vibraphone; though a distant, aqueous cymbal gives it some interest, it’s easier to think of tiki bars than transcendence while listening.
“Osiris Bull-Man & Elephant Walk,” a cartoonish approximation of “Ancient Egyptian” music, is the track that’s aged the worst. Iasos’ claim that these pseudo-Arabic scales implied a connection with the age of the pharaohs made clear his music was not immune to the infantilizing streak of exoticism that persists in new age, rooted in the idea that non-Western cultures and spiritualities are more in touch with some fundamental truth about the universe. It’s only thanks to the soupy mix and production grit that “Osiris” actually manages to sound a bit ancient, weathered by time and dust; once the ersatz Eastern melodies fade out, it meanders its way into a surprisingly strong psych-rock groove that’s the only audible instance of Iasos’ influence from Hendrix.
Inter-Dimensional Music doesn’t ever really sound like divine music. It sounds like a human’s approximation of divine music using the limited tools at their disposal. That’s what makes it undeniably cheesy at times, and also what makes it work. It’s a strange thing to say about music so outwardly languid, but it also feels urgent, as if this person was doing their damnedest to transcribe the cosmic music in their mind before it flickered out. The influences from the likes of Debussy and Denny, then, could be interpreted as Iasos’ way of filling in the gaps. Even his chintzy imitations of nature, like the water sounds on “The Bubble Massage” or the canned birdsong effects all over the album, have a hyperreal quality that’s spookier and more alluring than a pristine field recording would’ve been.
Iasos initially released Inter-Dimensional Music in a limited-run vinyl pressing, then quickly followed it up in 1976 with a tape version that included the seven-minute “Rainbow Canyon.” The version on streaming is the Japanese CD repress from 2005; this release combines most of the earlier versions in an hour of music but excludes “Lanua Cove,” still not available digitally. There’s no definitive version of Inter-Dimensional Music; the music’s haphazard presentation across different documents feels true to its visionary origin.
Inter-Dimensional Music came out a full half decade before the market for new age music was established. Precedents like Paul Horn’s Inside, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and Irv Teibel’s Environments had sold a lot of copies, but by explicitly presenting his music within a new age philosophical cosmos, Iasos pointed towards the intertwining of beatless, contemplative music and alternative spiritual practice that would hold the key to the music’s eventual commercial breakthrough. Albums like Inter-Dimensional Music and Steven Halpern’s 1975 Spectrum Suite, which featured Iasos and was presented as an aid for chakra-aligned healing, spent years sitting in alternative bookstores and healing shops before it became clear there was a formidable audience for this kind of music. In the 1980s, new age went mainstream: NPR picked up Hearts of Space for national syndication in 1983; the Grammys created an award for the genre in ’87; the new age label Windham Hill raked in tens of millions in sales.
Iasos never cashed in on the new age boom. Either unwilling or unable to make the same leap to Grammy considerations and gold certifications as his friend and collaborator Halpern, he continued to live in Marin, putting out classics like Angelic Music and Elixir but protecting his real name and personal life and performing only intermittently. He earned some infamy from a 1989 study at Plymouth State University, which suggested that “The Angels of Comfort” from Angelic Music, along with selections from Brian Eno and Jonn Serrie, sounded like what patients heard during near-death experiences. And he kept on recording whatever paradise music was still in his head, with results ranging from the stunning (Jeweled Space) to the terrifically strange (Bora Bora 2000, which alternates long synth meditations with synthesized tiki-lounge tracks just south of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell). He spent the last few years of his life in Maui, where he died in January.
Inter-Dimensional Music might have remained a historical footnote if not for the enthusiasm of American experimentalists 30 years later. In the 2000s and 2010s, a crop of underground artists took inspiration from early new age and synthesizer music, and by 2012, Iasos was playing venues in Bushwick to noiseniks like Emeralds’ Mark McGuire. A year later his music appeared on I Am The Center, the Light in the Attic compilation that kicked off the new age revival in earnest. The Celestial Soul Portrait compilation on Numero Group is a solid survey of his work; featuring a sepia slice-of-life photo on the cover rather than the garish temples-and-rainbows imagery Iasos himself loved, it endears itself to listeners like those in the Bushwick crowd: crate-diggers and musical omnivores who may have no investment in new age concepts beyond their appreciation for the music.
New age, once anathema for anyone who considered themselves a savvy music fan, has come thoroughly back around. It’s hard to begrudge people for turning to music with a focus on positivity and healing in a time when the world looks like it’s ending. Speaking from his idyllic deck in Marin, Iasos spoke of a “cosmic push,” an imminent age of human spiritual and artistic growth brought on by beings like Vista. It seems harder than ever to imagine humanity discovering a collective selfless good—something that would allow the reversal of climate change, perhaps, and keep the lush California landscape around him from catching fire. Yet Iasos insisted throughout his life that such a transformative event was right around the corner. The songs on Inter-Dimensional Music sparkle with the promise of this new world, however distant.


Yoni Wolf's prog-rap project is rejuvenated, and Moh Lhean is a bracing, clear-eyed album that still sounds uniquely like WHY?. It's the most strangely beautiful thing Wolf's made in years.

Moh Lhean

The end of WHY? had never been too far from Yoni Wolf’s thoughts. On 2008’s Alopecia, Wolf brought his finest album to a peak by confessing to “coffin rehearsal” and ended it with his neck in a telephone cord noose. He repeated the trick on Mumps, etc.’s closer “As a Card,” and it felt like a grim confirmation of WHY?’s suicide note—Wolf spent most of it airing out his most noxious personal baggage and speaking about his “rap career” like a job from which he was begging to get fired so he wouldn’t have to quit. With nothing left to burn—himself included—Wolf commissioned WHY? fans for inspiration and wrote about their social media pages on Golden Tickets. Four years later, there isn’t a lot of fight left in WHY?—and yet, the project sounds completely rejuvenated for that very reason on Moh Lhean.
The remarkable thing about WHY? is that they neither needed a return to form nor a total reinvention. To the same degree Mumps, etc. turned Wolf’s strengths—excessive candor, a keen ear for melody—into indefensible liabilities, Moh Lhean expands on the quiet inventiveness of Alopecia’s less-heralded companion album Eskimo Snow. Previously, “post-rock” just meant “hip-hop” for WHY?, but they took on the late-’90s Chicago sense of the term on Eskimo Snow, favoring neatly layered guitars, mallet percussion, mixed time signatures, and exquisite production values alongside Wolf’s layering of obtuse metaphors and lurid self-disclosure.
If the genre-agnosticism of WHY? is no longer novel, it’s still stunningly unique. The arrangements are dazzling in their coherence, especially given the diversity of instrumentation and textures whizzing throughout. The most striking aspect of Moh Lhean is how beautiful it is, even more so since this is their first self-produced album since 2003’s Oaklandazulasylum, one of the definitive documents of the Anticon’s confrontational prog-hop. But Moh Lhean is built to withstand any live show where the triggers and synths malfunction. Acoustic guitar plays a surprising leading role in songs that could be covered as a sturdy blues (“This Ole King”), steely folk (“The Water”) and a straight-up power ballad (“George Washington”).
Unlike the pointedly organic Eskimo Snow, Moh Lhean contrasts all of its lush sounds with brash drum programming that mimics the ungainly motion of the human body, shifting in and out of rhythm with intricate math-rock layering or juddering non-quantized beats. Of course, these are the kind of playing fields where Wolf’s unconventional vocals best operate. Though he’s long proven capable of carrying a tune, Wolf’s still no one’s idea of a pretty vocalist. His imperfections—the odd timbral grain of his high notes, his taste for self-deprecation (“I’d be white, weak and blind/the opposite of oxen”)—provide the edge even though Moh Lhean is anything but belligerent.
Wolf underwent a non-specific “health scare” during the past few years and calls Moh Lhean a “breakup album.” No longer psychosexual neuroses personified, Wolf exhibits a kind of post-traumatic calm, using situations as an opportunity to reflect on how to love and be present. Moh Lhean is rife with scenes that raise the possibility of WHY? having been a covert emo band all along—watching shooting stars in the parking lot, writing love letters from the road, sitting in a boat with his brother after a hospital trip. Past albums relied on the shock value of confession for payoff, but Wolf trusts the emotional contours of his delivery to express the state of being in a moment across in concise, affecting phrases like “This one thing,/There is no other,” or, “I’m on fire,” or, “I’ve got to submit to whatever it is in control.”
Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points—two of its ten tracks are interludes no more than a few seconds, the second of which serves as a preface to “George Washington”: “I wrote a song called ‘The Longing Is All’ instead of calling you/I’d hoped that’d solve me.” Such a line would’ve sounded like an admission of defeat on Mumps, etc., which didn’t lack for lyrics that ruminated on the futility of music. But on Moh Lhean, it’s indicative of a promising new outlook. With his health and his band fully recovered, Wolf is starting to realize what matters with the clarity of someone who’s seen a glimpse of the beyond.


Each record from Dull Tools, the imprint run by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts, seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations. The Brooklyn post-punk outfit Pill is no exception. Across the EP's five tracks, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos.

Pill EP

Recordings are often free and readily available in 2015, but that doesn't make it any easier to find the good stuff. A young band's stellar new record might be streaming for free on Bandcamp somewhere, but it's easily lost. Finding vital underground music often requires a resourceful middle person—usually, someone who goes to a lot of shows and owns an inordinate number of zines and tapes. It's to Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts' credit, for example, that bands like Beth Israel, Yuppies, and Eaters found an audience online. Each record on his label Dull Tools seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations.
True to the label's reputation, the Brooklyn band Pill prove slippery to pin down on their debut EP. Post-punk is implied in Veronica Torres' deadpan vocals and Jon Campolo's echoing guitar clack, but Ben Jaffe's saxophone scrambles the signal. Sometimes, his melodies recall Steve Mackay's foundation work on "Fun House", and elsewhere, he detours into skronking freakouts à la Pharoah Sanders or Colin Stetson. There are circuit-bent electronics and blasts of noise, dour monotone vocals sung in unison and all-out screams. Across the EP's five tracks, which were produced by Andy Chugg of the art punks Pop. 1280, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos.
While Jaffe's sax is a fascinating wild card, Torres' lyrics are the heart of this music. She targets seemingly innocuous moments in a relationship, peeling back the facade of domestic bliss and exposing ugly truths in shouted blurts. "Personality Flaw" depicts a couple who initially appeared compatible, but now are locked in a war of wills where nobody wants to compromise. "TV Wedding" explores how technology glosses over real-life despair. On "Hotline", Torres playacts the role of a "California blonde" in a one-sided conversation that's clearly predatory in nature. ("Oh, you wanna touch me where?/ Oh no, I'm younger than that!") The narratives are sometimes abstract and symbolic, but Torres' phrasing has a way of cutting through the haze. On "Psychic Nipple", after several lines alluding to entitlement, she delivers the devastating clincher "Privilege is a warm body that loves you."
This is where Pill showcase what they're capable of—they are loose with form, they pack in a lot of ideas, and they successfully deliver an emotionally complex narrative where joy is accompanied by an impossible-to-ignore undercurrent of danger. The band's debut outing is enigmatic—a Dull Tools record through and through—but it's also well crafted, full of stellar performances and unflinching lyrics. Not bad for a band's first recordings.


Solange Knowles curates the soundtrack to the critically lauded HBO comedy “Insecure.” The 16 songs, mostly by or about women and almost exclusively by black artists, effortlessly mix R&B and rap.

Various Artists: Insecure (Music From the HBO Original Series)

In the pilot episode of “Insecure,” the critically lauded HBO comedy series created by Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore, Rae’s eponymous character Issa is at a crossroads. She’s in a stable but stale relationship, and the occasion of her 29th birthday has her wondering if she’s wasting time on a romance that’s heading nowhere. Issa decides to take her best friend Molly, who’s also feeling unlucky in love after a streak of failed flings, to an open mic night in hopes of setting her up with someone new—but secretly to reconnect with an ex-boyfriend. Before long, egged on by said ex, Issa winds up on the stage rapping about “Broken Pussy,” a term that she coined to explain Molly’s recent poor run of form (“Maybe it’s really rough, maybe it’s had enough.”)
The resulting cheesy freestyle, set to the tune of Kelis’ twinkly 2006 hit “Bossy,” makes the cut as the second song on Insecure (Music From the HBO Original Series). Its placement injects a welcome dose of Issa’s personality (both fictional and real—Rae wrote the song with Wilmore) into the soundtrack, while acting as the skeleton key to understanding the rest of the selection; back on the small screen, “Broken Pussy” costs Molly the attention of a potential love interest and leads to a big fight between the two, but they reconcile easily by the end of the episode. The show “Insecure” excels at tracing the professional and affective tribulations of young black adults in L.A., but it stands apart for its depiction of the unbreakable black female friendship at the heart of the story.
Insecure (Music from the HBO Original Series) celebrates this dynamic with 16 songs: mostly by or about women, almost exclusively by black artists. Arkansas-native Kari Faux kicks things off with “No Small Talk,” an anthem for the self-possessed, recorded previously for her 2014 EP Laugh Now, Die Later. A ringing phone blends in with a hard-hitting drum pattern to buoy Faux’s cool-but-confident delivery, replete with nods to Pimp C and 2 Chainz: “Three cellphones and I still don’t ever text ‘em/Catch me out in public and you know I’m flexin’.” Faux makes another appearance on “Top Down” assisted by Brooklyn MC Leikeli47, whose cadence recalls that of fellow New Yorker Amil. The song, a bouncy electropop composition about riding around in a drop top feeling like a million bucks, was commissioned for the first season finale.
Much of the soundtrack appeared across “Insecure”’s 8 episodes to date, curated by the show’s eminent musical consultant Solange Knowles, who knows a thing or two about elucidating the black female experience on wax to dazzling effect. The feel-good anthems give way to songs that address a range of romantic entanglements. “Girl,” a standout track from the Internet’s 2015 album Ego Death, is expertly reimagined as an electric-guitar-driven ode to the feminine by SoCal ensemble 1500 or Nothin. Guordan Banks switches between the high and low register over a slick bassline on “Keep You in Mind,” a call for moving past the coy stages of flirtation onto something more serious.
Although Faux’s “Top Down” is the only original song on Insecure, the rest were chosen carefully to illuminate the main characters’ tastes and animate the world that they inhabit, situated for the most part in predominantly black South L.A. neighborhoods like Leimert Park and Baldwin Hills. This is achieved by featuring either the work of local artists, like the 1500 or the Internet themselves (“Just Sayin/I Tried”), or songs that evoke a similar sense of place, like the sunny strings of “Palm Trees” by D.C. rapper GoldLink.
Considered independently from the influences of the show, the “Insecure” soundtrack works as a seamless collection of hip-hop, soul and R&B. The list of performers runs the gamut from established artists like D’Angelo (“Sugah Daddy”) and Thundercat (“Heartbreaks + Setbacks”) to emerging talents like TT the Artist (“Lavish”) and Banks, who claimed his first Billboard #1 with “Keep You in Mind” last summer. In recent months, the well-timed placement of a song in a new TV series has taken on renewed importance as a means for new artists to raise their profile. “Insecure” was already renewed for a second season and while the protagonists’ fate is surely the highest priority for fans, a chance to devour the forthcoming score can’t be too far behind.


A diverse array of musicians reinterpret a standout from the Italian synthesizer composer’s 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, but only a handful recreate the metaphysical wonder of her work.

Fantas Variations

Caterina Barbieri recently recruited a diverse array of musicians from around the world to reinterpret “Fantas,” a bracing 10-minute composition from her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation. The piece, which opens with wispy synths that give way to glowing orbs of sound that dart about in interlocking shapes, is engrossing in the same way watching an incoming storm can be; it provokes constant anticipation, the complex swirl impossible to take in all at once.
Barbieri’s music reflects a longstanding interest in the tension between the mechanical and the emotional, how one can blur or melt into the other. It’s a quality that many of the contributors here miss, and Fantas Variations loses the metaphysical wonder of her work. The collection is split between musicians arranging the piece for various instruments and electronic musicians attempting to translate the piece for the dancefloor. Though each artist accentuates something unique, there is something lost in nearly every single adaptation.
Several of the most compelling arrangements on Fantas Variations are the ones that stray furthest from the original. Saxophonist Bendik Giske hypnotic version zeroes in on one specific, repetitive pattern and gradually builds on top of it, the clicking sound of the keys audible on top of distant, wordless vocals. Kali Malone’s arrangement for two organs does away with hyperspeed counterpoint, molding the basic chord progression into her characteristically slow-motion slabs of sound.
While these, as well as Evelyn Saylor’s adaptation for four voices, use “Fantas” as a jumping-off point, others, including electric guitarist Walter Zenetti and producer Carlo Maria (who recreates the piece using Roland TR-808 and MC-202 units), offer flattened adaptations that sound imitative in comparison. On the other end of the spectrum are jarring, awkward remixes by the typically brilliant Nyege Nyege affiliate Jay Mitta and LA-based producer Baseck, both of whom dial up the BPM and end up obliterating the piece’s nuance and delicacy.
The album ends with “Fantas Morbida,” an abbreviated, sparse variation for solo piano by Kara-Lis Coverdale. It boils the piece down to its essence, a pensive melodic line that glides over an open, syncopated arpeggio, reminiscent of the gorgeous piano interludes on Aphex Twin’s Drukqs. After nearly an hour of variations on the same theme, hearing that refrain laid bare feels like a rebirth, finally bringing the piece’s emotional impact into focus. The mechanics of the piano are simpler than those of the synthesizer, the human behind the music more immediately apparent. It’s a reminder that even when aided by machines and algorithms, human minds and human emotions give music meaning and power.

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On their fourteenth studio album, thrash legends Kreator give us more of the same jackhammer style they built the band's name on—only without quite as much personality or edge.

Gods of Violence

Kreator’s 1985 debut Endless Pain arrived two years after Metallica fired thrash metal's first shot with *Kill 'Em All—*something of an eternity in the formative stages of a genre. Kreator immediately stood out, though, with their static-y guitars, frontman/guitarist Mille Petrozza's inimitable bark, and drummer Jürgen “Ventor” Reil’s distinct combination of precision and primal savagery. So it didn’t take long for the German thrash outfit to gain ground on their elite predecessors with landmark albums like 1989’s Extreme Aggression, 1990’s Coma of Souls, and 1992’s Renewal.
Of course, if you measure the energy level of those titles next to their new album Gods of Violence, there’s just no comparison. By the same token, it would be too easy to dismiss the band’s latter-day work as just an excuse to tour. After a run of four experimental, industrial-tinged albums in the ’90s, Kreator re-dedicated themselves to straight thrash on 2001’s Violent Revolution—a move that might have signified a surrender to heritage-act status if the band hadn’t sounded so revitalized at the time.
Some of that vitality was on display as recently as last year’s Violence Unleashed EP, but Gods of Violence suggests that it might be time for another shake-up. The band’s fourteenth full-length, Gods of Violence does contain some noteworthy deviations from form. Album opener “Apocalypticon,” an orchestral piece courtesy of Fleshgod Apocalypse members Francesco Paoli and Francesco Ferrini, bears more than a passing resemblance to both the Star Wars theme and the “Mars” movement of Holst’s iconic suite The Planets.
Bagpipes appear on the Celtic-flavored “Hail to the Hordes,” while the title track intro features a solo from a 12 year-old harpist. And, for better or worse, the bright melody in the chorus section of “Totalitarian Terror” wouldn’t sound out of place in the hands of pop-punk acts like Against Me! or Anti-Flag. Mostly, though, Petrozza and Reil give us more of the same jackhammer style they built the band’s name on—only without quite as much personality or edge. Case in point: the verse riff on “Totalitarian Terror,” which sees Petrozza coming dangerously close to re-treading Slayer when Slayer have been most guilty of re-treading themselves.
At times, Gods of Violence plays like an unresolved tug of war between quintessential Kreator and grandiose symphonic metal—often in the same song. If you like both styles, you can expect to be in hog heaven. But if you prefer one over the other, you're left to skip over certain sections of songs. “Army of Storms,” for example, hearkens back to signature riffs from the back-catalog staples “Betrayer” and “Renewal” in the verse but then abruptly switches to an operatic chorus. In general, when Gods of Violence hews towards outsized melody, it feels watered-down rather than stretched out.
Lyrically, Gods of Violence suffers in a similar way. Perhaps more than any other genre, part of the job requirement of being a heavy metal musician is the ability to come up with song titles and lyrics that look badass scrawled across the pages of high schoolers’ notebooks. If we ranked bands based on that criterion, Kreator would surely land near the top of the list. For the last 30-plus years, Petrozza has penned gem after lyrical gem, amassing a string of fist-waving catchphrases that rival anyone in metal. So it’s no surprise that Petrozza doesn’t disappoint on Gods of Violence.
Petrozza has a way of distilling a song’s chorus down to a punchline he delivers in single syllables, as if he wanted to ensure that even a child or non-English speaker could imagine a bouncing dot in their heads as they follow along. You have to be willing to indulge a little boneheadedness to get behind classic back-catalog nuggets like “Time/to/raise/your/flag/of/hate” and “Un-/der/the/gui-/llo-/tine.” But a trademark Kreator chorus makes it irresistible to sing along. You haven't lived, for example, until you’ve sung the titular chorus of the new song “Satan Is Real” at an inappropriate volume in a setting where you’re bound to raise eyebrows.(Attention ad execs: this is the song you need for your seitan ad!)
That said, despite Petrozza’s gift for communicating directly to the angsty teenager at the core of every metalhead’s soul, his subject matter speaks to a thoughtful way of observing the world. Petrozza also has a knack for using his words to convey the opposite of what they seem to indicate on first (or even second) glance. The new material exemplifies this technique: For Petrozza, Satan is a fictitious concept that becomes “real” because people invest it with belief. “Death Becomes My Light,” meanwhile, doesn’t glamorize death in stereotypically “metal” fashion but instead looks at dying through the lens of a near-death experience. And the title track, with its chorus of “we shall kill,” is actually a life-affirming call to evolve past (and thus “kill”) antiquated modes of thinking that no longer serve humanity’s forward progress.
Petrozza even delves into utopian reverie with “Hail to the Hordes”—basically a heavy metal buddy anthem that offers solace and solidarity as “the failed, the outcasts... carry each other through the darkest moments in life.” But this wouldn’t be a Kreator album if it didn’t go to dark places. Originally conceived as a concept album rooted in Greek mythology, Gods of Violence frames modern warfare as a remnant of an ancient evil that has resided in the psyche for as long as our species has existed. Petrozza’s original idea was to present our predilection for viciousness as something that was “born” into our world after the gods decided to have an orgy.
It’s a rich premise—unfortunately, Petrozza doesn’t flesh it out very much in the actual songs. Gods of Violence could have used more of Petrozza’s warped take. He has renounced the audacious moves the band made during its experimental period, but at least those moves were charged with a sense of creative risk. After several albums’ worth of proving they can still recapture their classic sound, it’s high time Kreator took more risks, come what may. They’ve earned the right.


This 19-song, 2xCD compilation features uneven remixes of songs from The King of Limbs by artists like Caribou, SBTRKT, Jamie xx, and Four Tet.

TKOL RMX 1234567

Radiohead has a reputation for studio perfectionism and have been known to tinker with arrangements for years on tour, but they've rarely delivered an album as obsessive as The King of Limbs. Their most single-minded record, TKOL is an itchy and restless foray into making songs out of almost nothing except whizzing bits of rhythm. Even accounting for the brief dip into balladry toward the end, bands don't generally come up with something this uniformly dense and tense by tweaking over multiple sessions. But as longtime students of Can's Holger Czukay, Radiohead also know that fevered and compulsive-sounding records can be the product of painstaking editing, stitching multiple takes into one bristling rush.
Little of the band's careful detail work, or their general sense of passion, makes it onto TKOL RMX 1234567, a listenable but ultimately bloodless collection of remixes of songs from The King of Limbs. Whether intimidated by the thought of reinterpreting a band renowned for experimentation or unsure how to take apart and reassemble the band's tightly-wound recent material, too many of these 19 artists seem content to settle for bland beauty, or simply apply their usual sonic tricks without pushing themselves in the slightest.
The highlights are the tracks that take TKOL's joy in rhythm to new places. Acclaimed UK neo-rave producer Lone turns out a typically brilliant take on "Feral" that somehow keeps the original percussion pattern intact while recasting it as an early-1990s ambient house record, giving us TKOL RMX's most bizarrely enjoyable image: Radiohead gone to Ibiza. Pearson Sound, the alter-ego of dubstep progenitor and Hessle Audio label head Ramadanman, pulls a fantastic bait-and-switch, opening with an extended drone intro that shifts into a punchy mix of early Detroit techno and jagged jungle breaks. These two, along with a small handful of other acts-- Anstam squeezing drama from just a handful of skeletal drum patterns, SBTRKT recasting Thom Yorke as a forlorn garage diva, Caribou returning to his roots as a left-field beatmaker-- are fearless enough to recreate the feeling of TKOL in a new form. And a few do get by on sheer loveliness alone, like Four Tet spinning "Separator" into an old-school IDM lullaby.
But a far greater number of these remixes flatten out the complexity of TKOL's grooves in favor of commonplace arrangements. Instead of Radiohead's pinpoint editing, we get generically "wonky" takes on house and techno filled with stuttering drums and formless synth goo, whether aggressive like Blawan's take on "Bloom" or shoegaze-lite like Nathan Fake doing "Morning Mr Magpie". And some of the most touted names fail to deliver the craft we've come to expect from them: On his "Bloom" rework, Jamie xx ditches his minimalist gloom-funk for gauzy, forgettable ambience. More ethereal or abstract remixes of such anxious music could have been interesting, but few seem up to the task here, instead doling out placid and perfectly pleasant background noise.
For a while, until its complex grooves revealed the songs beneath, I dismissed TKOL as a brave but opaque attempt to remake Radiohead as just individual components in a roiling rhythm machine. In other words, it seemed like the perfect Radiohead album for remixing. Who would better understand that everything-is-rhythm impulse than dance music producers? If anything, wouldn't they take it further, make it wilder, go funkier?
The lack of rhythmic invention here could be forgiven if most of TKOL RMX displayed any kind of invention. Failing to match TKOL's peculiar vibe-- aggressive rhythms made out of dainty bits of digital detritus, robotically repetitive yet humanly off-kilter, parched thickets of drumming graced with fleeting moments of melodic relief -- is one thing. Failing to replace it with anything that similarly rewards listening deeper and harder is quite another.


On their first album in nearly a decade, and following a wave of viral resurgence, the NYC avant-rock vets return with their warmest, most welcoming music yet.

Sit Down for Dinner

Over the past decade, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing veteran indie-rock acts enjoy a surprising surge in streams thanks to prime movie placements, sudden social-media virality, or inexplicable algorithmic voodoo. But the case of Blonde Redhead might be the strangest (with all due to respect to Galaxie 500). According to their Spotify stats, the New York trio’s most popular song by far—we’re talking a 65-million-stream margin—isn’t really a song at all. “For the Damaged Coda,” the closing track to 2000’s Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, is a wordless elaboration of the piano ballad “For the Damaged,” a haunting, seance-conjured apparition of a song that was pretty ghostly in the first place. But thanks to the Rick and Morty music-supervision department, “For the Damaged Coda” not only became a recurring theme on the Adult Swim series, but also the sort of heavily memed clip that’s spawned YouTube compilations and trap remixes.
There was a certain cruel irony in the fact a song that began as a time-killing lark—recorded by singer Kazu Makino while her twin-brother accomplices Amedeo and Simone Pace were sleeping at the studio—would become the defining work of a group that’s otherwise taken such a methodical approach to their craft. In the stellar seven-album run from 1995’s serrated self-titled debut to 2007’s shimmering shoegaze odyssey 23, Blonde Redhead had successfully pivoted from no-wave noisemakers to arthouse-indie auteurs, all while sustaining a highwire balance of melodic whimsy and needling tension. But that sort of frisson was in short supply on 2010’s Penny Sparkle and 2014’s Barragán, records that resembled mood boards of disparate sounds in search of songs, with little of the dramatic flair that powered the band’s previous transformations. In 2019, Makino released her first solo album, by which point Blonde Redhead had all but ground to a halt. Once the pandemic took hold, you could be forgiven for wondering if the band would still be standing on the other side of it. Arriving nine years on from their last full-length release, Sit Down for Dinner is the life-saving dose of CPR that gets this band’s oxygen flowing and blood pumping again.
While they differed in style and scope, this band’s signature works—Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Misery Is a Butterfly, and 23—were united by a policy of swift and total immersion: Each led with a striking opening track that immediately thrust you into the album’s distinct three-dimensional sound, making it feel like you’ve been dropped into a film already in progress. Sit Down for Dinner honors that tradition with “Snowman,” which sets a deceptively languid tone with gleaming acoustic guitars and Amedeo’s beautifully sighed serenade. But an insistent rhythmic pulse—powered by percussionist Mauro Refosco—punches holes through the sparkling surface, restoring the contrast between fine-china delicacy and dark-cloud distress at the core of this band’s most resonant work.
Sit Down for Dinner is a pandemic album through and through, from its protracted, piecemeal recording process—spanning several seasons, multiple studios, and at least two continents—to its overwhelming sense of restless stasis. With life suddenly on pause, Makino was drawn to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a meditation on her husband John Gregory Dunne’s fatal heart attack at their dining-room table in December 2003. In this light, the phrase Sit Down for Dinner is less an invitation than a threat, and the duality of the sentiment is manifest in Makino’s two-part title-track suite, a hypnotically wistful ballad that upshifts abruptly into an accelerated drum-machine workout. “Sit down for dinner/And the life as you know, it ends/No pity,” Makino sings, quoting Didion in a tone so matter-of-fact it sounds like a merciless taunt. But as she skates atop the song’s icy-electro rhythm, the line becomes more of a seize-the-day manifesto—death can come for you at any moment, so you might as well get your rocks off while you can.
Though it goes a long way to reinstating Blonde Redhead’s singular mystique and impressionistic aura, Sit Down for Dinner is distinguished by an easygoing melodicism that, even in its darkest lyrical depths, makes it the warmest and most welcoming record in the band’s catalog. Where this band’s albums typically reflect the multicultural mosaic and avant-garde pedigree of their New York homebase, the sublime, spectral folk-rock of “Not for Me” bathes itself in a breezy West Coast ocean mist that blurs the line between ’70s gold and ’80s dream-pop. And never before has this band attempted something as unabashedly blissful as “I Thought You Should Know,” a slow-burning gospel-delic hymn that greets you with open arms and leads you down the path that connects the Velvets to Mazzy Star.
But where these contributions from Amedeo favor a more direct, open-hearted approach, Makino’s voice remains an enigmatic and beguiling instrument, investing songs like “Kiss Her Kiss Her” and “Before” with equal doses of wonder and weariness. Tellingly, just as they did 23 years ago on Melody for Certain Damaged Lemons, Blonde Redhead close Sit Down for Dinner with another arresting quasi-instrumental, “Via Savona,” that showcases Makino’s echoing incantations, but this hardly feels like some calculated ploy to piggyback on those “Damaged Coda” clicks. Rather, “Via Savona” is an enveloping ambient symphony that, depending on your vantage, could be a sign of Blonde Redhead’s creative rebirth or a requiem for their possible demise. While in the midst of making this record back in 2020, Makino told an interviewer she expected it would be “probably the last album we make together.” She may have had a change of heart since then, but should that prediction prove correct, Sit Down for Dinner is the coda this band deserves.


The UK club producer explores the links between spiritual devotion and bodily release, delivering moments of catharsis in chopped breaks and ghostly vocals.

He Hymns

Around 15 years ago, a user named “airloaf” began uploading video clips of evangelical church services to YouTube. Picture flailing arms and rapturous uplift—swooning exorcisms, devotees collapsing, pastors with cordless mics and wild dance moves. The soundtrack to these extraordinary scenes? Only the ruffest, tuffest jump-up drum’n’bass. Thanks to some improbably tight syncing, the bootleg clips—titled “Baptazia: Super Sunday,” in a nod to the legendary Fantazia raves of the early ’90s—collided worlds in ways that provoked both laughter and awe. They also spoke to a deeper collective belief: of the rave scene as a place of communion, dance as spiritual connection, rudeboy MCs as modern-day preachers in the pulpit.
This blend of ideas is a well-tapped seam in dance music, and with He Hymns, Bristol-born producer LCY becomes the latest to transpose the worlds of hard dance and hardcore religion; they call their latest EP an attempt “to tie songs of worship into club tracks.” But LCY, whose rhythms are among the slipperiest in contemporary club music, fuses the two dimensions with a little more nuance—though no less punch and roll—than those tongue-in-cheek Baptazia vids.
These five tracks deal in themes of bodies and breakbeats, searching and spiritual release. LCY has been arranging flickering breaks and hi-def sound design around complex conceptual frameworks for a while. In 2021, Pulling Teeth introduced a fictional character—a hybrid of canine, human, and robot—and a “dystopian post-human world” called Ériu; 2022’s “Cherubim” was inspired by “parasitic angel-like creatures” in a surveillance state. He Hymns pulls short of sculpting a new universe, instead providing a songbook of sorts for imagined inhabitants.
The price of bodily devotion (“I don’t have much, but I give it to you/My eyes, my touch, I’ll give it to you,” runs the ghostly refrain of “Sora”) rubs up against a yearning for meaning: “Give me something to believe in,” goes “Believe.” These vocals are stripped and whittled, falling over brittle, staccato rhythms like curled metal shavings from a drill bit. But occasionally, things do get bogged down; the choppy “Bad Blood,” made of little more than stuttering vocals and splintered breaks, crumbles into a form that’s uncharacteristically aimless and unmoving.
Given the claustrophobic tenor of these tracks, it sounds like religion, for LCY, means stricture as much as scripture. He Hymns offers a route out, but not without a tussle: “Bad Blood” is spiny and oppressive, an iron maiden molded from sharp percussion and flat kicks; the 27-second title track, which acts as a sort of mid-EP interlude, sounds like being trapped in a nightclub bathroom stall, hurried whispers and muted organ licks leaking through the walls. But when LCY makes room for release—via a sumptuous post-jungle bassline on “Sora,” or on closer “Heartbreaker,” with its gamut of pitched stabs, looping coos, and artillery breaks—it arrives as pure catharsis. “Believe,” the highlight, is light and frothy as whisked egg whites. Ultimately, LCY reserves their reverence for the moody strains of UK club music. Church would certainly be more fun if it sounded like this.


The UK producer's second album combines the open-field psychedelia of Cluster and Popul Vuh with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze, oscillating between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress.

The Inheritors

Around the release of his 2006 debut LP, The Idiots Are Winning, UK producer James Holden was asked by production magazine Future Music to list his top 10 pieces of gear. He's a space cadet in the interview, turning idly in a messy room. By my count he names eight items, three of which are stuffed animals, with a fourth being a shelf of children's action figures overlooking his computer. It's a performance by an artist who at the time was still trying to shake his reputation as a barely legal trance wunderkind/Britney Spears remixer: Holden had burst onto the scene in the late 90s with the kind of progressive tracks that fans still upload to YouTube accompanied by pictures of beaches and sunsets.
He probably wouldn't admit it, but Holden learned something from those early trance hits: go big or go home. It's an impulse he's honed even as he's backpedaled from his early recordings: see his skyscraping remix of Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink". Holden's second album, The Inheritors, is a raging bonfire of electro-acoustic composition. His kindling is the open-field psychedelia of groups like Cluster and Popol Vuh, with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze. Broken into 15 tracks but playing like a long, evolving piece, The Inheritors oscillates between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress. It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.
Holden takes advantage of that instrument-- essentially a bespoke synthesis engine adapted for each track, aided by software Holden writes himself-- by embracing its imprecision. He recorded his curdling circuitry live, capturing plenty of pots and divots in the process, which gives The Inheritors a savage and craggy feel. If Boards of Canada evoke the beauty and majesty of the rolling countryside, Holden is puts you in direct contact with it, forcing you to engage its uneven terrain and irregular placements. This comes through on tracks like "The Illuminations", on which pretty, circular patterns are interrupted by haphazard distortion and chords are held to the speaker's breaking point.
In most electronic music, the core elements-- drums, bassline, lead-- play well-defined roles and inhabit familiar sonic spaces. The Inheritors doesn't work like that. The rhythms and melodies come from odd places, sometimes switching roles during the course of a song. The title track, for example, is a hurricane of sound, sharp percussive hits fighting back a massive, distorted midrange assault. When Holden does break out traditional drum sounds-- during the climax of lead single "Renata" or "Delabole", for example-- they amplify the intensity, offering the gargled synth patterns something to spring from. The Inheritors comes to a head with "Gone Feral" and the title track, a sequence during which Holden unleashes his circuity and records the carnage. The hissing, buckling oscillations during this stretch wipe clean the careful pacing of tracks like "Inter-City 125" and "Rannoch Dawn". When he dials it down afterwards he has a sense of humor about it: "Some Respite".
It's difficult to describe the sound of The Inheritors without coming off like an analog apologist. But turn a track like "Blackpool Late Eightes"-- the penultimate and longest track, which acts as something of a victory lap-- up on a good system and you can feel its humming warmth, the air it browbeats around the room. You can imagine a shamanic Holden working amidst his machines, alternately reigning them in and provoking them. After dozens of listens, The Inheritors still feels like it could fall off the rails at any moment, that its wires could trip and the whole album devolve into a mess of feedback that will have you racing to unplug your speakers. Holden's ability to wrangle a complex synthesizer isn't unique; his ability to make that skill seem utterly necessary, is.


The singer/songwriter's third album, Janus, is a change-up. Kivel has generally been known for spare and hushed songs, with only a few instruments creating a ripple of distress in his lovely folk melodies. Many songs here are chaotic and noisy, however, disrupting his reveries with scribbles of atonal clamor.

Janus

With his first two LPs, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Matt Kivel established a unified mood. Both Double Exposure in 2013 and the next year's Days of Being Wild sounded hushed-yet-tense, with only a few instruments creating a ripple of distress in his lovely folk melodies. Even when he had a full band behind him, they still played quietly. Perhaps coincidentally, both albums featured spare covers: a few doodles of color dotting stark, white canvases. Both the visual and the musical emphasized negative space—blankness and silence—as all-encompassing, even menacing. In that regard, even before you hear it, Kivel’s third album, Janus, is a change-up. The cover is saturated in color, not merely garish but brashly figural in its depiction of a Capricorn sea goat. There is barely any white at all in the image, which ought to brace you for a sound that is similarly fuller, denser, bolder, more dissonant.
Kivel recorded these 10 songs in Glasgow with the Scottish singer/songwriter Alasdair Roberts producing and a small crew of local musicians backing him. Together, they emphasize friction and conflict. His songs are rigidly structured, full of deft guitar work and languid vocals that lull you a bit. Then the band comes in, sounding chaotic and noisy, disrupting his reveries with scribbles of atonal clamor. Kivel has worked with this kind of contrast before, but never quite as blatantly or as pointedly. It’s purposefully off-putting, even when it threatens to become predictable; you wait for the interruption in every song, whether it comes or not. "Violets" opens with him leading a small band and singing one of his strongest hooks, and you don’t even hear the instruments start ripping at the seams of the song until it ends violently. "Prime Meridian," on the other hand, never even lets you get comfortable before the arrangement falls apart, with only the insistent drums and the seasick drawl of a violin to hold it together.
Especially when they sound like they’re deteriorating, these arrangements complement and complicate Kivel’s guarded lyrics, whose fleeting images and cryptic turns of phrase address the lonely confusion of love and lust. When he confesses on the title track, "Even though I’ve known you for a long time/ I feel nothing close to comfort in you," Kivel might be lamenting the lack of intimacy, or is he celebrating a lover who never lets him settle into routine?
Perhaps the hardest to shake is "Jamie’s," which is a very different kind of song for Kivel. It’s ostensibly a story-song, very matter-of-fact in its phrasing and frank in its detail. It features the one protagonist who isn’t Kivel—in this case, a young woman struggling to define her sexual identity and break out of the strict roles she has been assigned by her parents and boyfriend. It’s a heady take on a subject that might be beyond most male singer/songwriter’s interests or abilities, and when Kivel reaches the wordless chorus, he’s interrupted by sharp stabs of distortion that sound like they come out of nowhere. It’s violent, even disturbing, recalling the staccato guitar effects on Radiohead’s "Creep" and verging on melodrama.
Perhaps that’s the entire point of the song. The protagonist, after all, is a teenager trying to attain some mastery over her own world, so it makes sense to underscore those overwhelming emotions as brashly as possible. It’s weirdly invigorating, especially since it shouldn’t really work at all. Janus is full of such gambits and experiments, most of which add a sense of risk to the proceedings. Even when everything falls apart—especially when it does—the sense of musical experimentation and exploration lend the album a burst of harsh, vivid color.


Like a half-forgotten dream, the English singer-songwriter’s combination of minimalist blues and free-floating jazz feels just out of reach.

What a Boost

Like slipping into cotton sheets, Rozi Plain’s music invites an immediate calm. Her songs, a combination of minimalist blues and free-floating jazz, are lucent and inquisitive. Plain comes by this effortless tranquility with extensive practice: A native of Winchester, England, she took up guitar at age 13, and as an art student in Bristol, joined Kate Stables’ jammy folk band This Is the Kit. Over the past 11 years, Plain has crafted three solo albums, moving from the intimate, unpolished indie-folk of 2008’s Inside Over Here to the cozy electronic embellishments and pop melodies of 2015’s Friend. Her latest album, What a Boost, is her most expansive and luxurious yet, proving her merit as a force of understatement.
Friend was the first full-length album to be recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre, a cherished space of the London jazz scene until it shuttered last year. Plain recorded the majority of What a Boost there prior to the closure, with the help of collaborators including the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Chris Cohen, folk musician Sam Amidon, Trash Kit’s Rachel Horwood, Joel Wästberg a.k.a. Sir Was, and fellow This Is the Kit member Jamie Whitby Coles. She’s in good company—together, they forge a sound that feels driven by a collective subconscious.
Opener “Inner Circle” is a steadied stroll into Plain’s nebulous thoughts, a path that’s built as it progresses. A lone guitar melody is accompanied by minimal percussion and saxophone; later, there’s fiddle and a creaking guitar that sounds muted by a palm as tuning forks create a tinny haze in the background. Plain's voice is silvered and smooth, radiating the tiniest halo of fuzz as her vocals overlap one another. “Inner circle, in a square/Finds a line all the time,” she sings, describing the geometrical relationship of the shapes. Or perhaps she’s referencing the idiom “squaring a circle,” to attempt the impossible. The lyrics parallel Plain’s hunger for compositional progression and search for complex meanings; even when moving slowly, there’s no hesitation.
Though these songs sound light and clear, Plain’s lyrics are hallucinatory, adding to their perplexing nature. Her words are mirage-like, their meaning almost graspable but still vague, just confusing enough to escape full comprehension. What a Boost makes many mentions of dreams, illusions, and hauntings: “A dream, a dream/A realistic dream,” Plain sings on “Symmetrical.” When she repeats some of the same phrases at beginning and end, they’re off by a line or two, casting the song itself just slightly off-balance. “Strange about the change/Strange about the same,” she continues, substituting a conventional linguistic definition with purposeful phrasing that embodies asymmetry.
On “Conditions,” galactic sounds and twinkling synths splatter against a soft snare drum as Plain repeats questions like a mantra of consent and concern: “Is this the way for love?/Is this okay in love?/Are you okay in love?/Are you okay for love?” Her voice reaches a barely louder volume, marking the song’s climax with a direct address to another in a final sign of affection. This transition from introspection to outward-looking cognisance is a subtle detail, and part of what makes What a Boost such an exquisite treasure.
Dream logic can be asymmetrical, mimicking a sense of rationality but never quite connecting the dots. Knowing that you were asleep doesn’t unravel the subconscious logic, but it helps you accept its peculiarity. Like the moment of realization upon waking from a dream, the sprawling, elaborate compositions that cushion Plain’s lyrical ambiguity are a kind of tether to reality. These 10 tracks meander and crawl; they swell into percussive bursts and shrink into silence. To some degree, they feel inaccessible—unable to announce their purpose or direction. But that’s the beauty of What a Boost: Its mystery isn’t a gimmick, nor a playful riddle to be solved, but an abstraction awaiting interpretation.


On her fifth album, the Australian singer-songwriter steps away from the bleak feelings of her early, glitch-scoured work, reflecting this newfound clarity with unadorned arrangements for voice and keys.

forever music

Katie Dey sounds a little less alone. The Australian singer-songwriter has fought hard to reach this state since she first released her glitch-scoured debut asdfasdf back in 2015. She began her career making music that captured the hollow, gloomy feeling of spending too much time online—frustrated, keyboard-smashing pop songs about solipsism, disconnect, and feeling deeply misunderstood. Her voice was often pitch-shifted beyond recognition, analog and electronic instrumentation swirled together in a chaotic fog. Even at its most beautiful, Dey’s twisted-up indie pop was tense and overwhelming. On her self-released fifth album, forever music, she steps away from the bleak feelings that clouded her early work, singing about the possibility of love and the sudden appeal of perseverance when you have something or someone worth living for.
Inspired by the flowering of an “internet relationship,” she began to explore these feelings on mydata. She presented her voice more clearly, opening up about the trials and tribulations of a connection mediated by the internet. On forever music she goes even further, stripping down the electronic experimentation in favor of simpler, gentler arrangements of voice, keys, and plodding percussion. She’s said that her voice is deliberately “unfiltered and dry,” which feels like a bold choice for a musician who made her name with digitalist contortions. Yet, this description accurately describes the directness of songs like “unfurl” where Dey sings about trying to be a better person in an evil world. Bare and bold, she reveals more of herself than before, continuing the slow blossoming of her records—each a little more generous and optimistic than the last.
It’s an approach she holds onto even in the heavier moments, like on “real love,” where Dey details memories of “screaming, fighting, constant violence.” And yet, the song soars with a fragile, futuristic beauty, like a Disney ballad produced by A.G. Cook. Eventually, she realizes that “inner peace lies waiting” for her, marking a distinct change in mindset. In the past, she might have just sulked amid the devastation, but now there’s a reason for pressing onward, for looking for the little cracks where the light shines into the darkness.
The record is full of these little moments of clarity. On “fuckboy,” she offers that someone might “find a better way of growing older.” “impossible” is built around the mantra-like insistence on taking “one more step.” And on the lush, lilting title track, Dey sings of learning to “live without killing my heart.” These moments feel true because of the casual directness of her vocal melodies, the result of a songwriter who’s done a lot of soul-searching in tough times. But what makes these songs most striking isn’t the positivity alone, but how hard-won these realizations are.
The unadorned arrangements give Dey the space to conjure some real emotional weight. Her voice carries desperation, weariness, and then, eventually, joy. While she once concealed the special contours of her instrument, the production of forever music lets her evoke both the bad times and the good, lending depth to the darkness and real color to the moments where she realizes she might make it through. While each of Dey’s records has been a little brighter than the last, forever music feels like the first to offer real hope. It’s easy to imagine it comforting lonely searchers, offering them the courage to trudge on, at least for one more step.
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Highlighting the bookish indie pop at their core, this Pains EP still sounds classic and timeless, even if it's more Field Mice than Shop Assistants.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Higher Than the Stars EP

Higher Than the Stars EP

In his review of the title track from this album, Tom Breihan did us all a great service by disallowing the use of the term "lo-fi" with regard to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. From the start, folks threw around that phrase when discussing the group mostly because their early material put a light wash of textural guitars on their otherwise melancholy indie pop, but, really, it was a garnish and not the main course. At their core, Pains aren't about scuzz or even shoegaze, they're a classic bookish indie pop band-- twee, you might even say-- and Higher Than the Stars, an EP of four new songs and one excellent remix, drives that point home very clearly.
In addition to helping clear up misconceptions about the group's M.O., Higher Than the Stars also marks a small but important aesthetic shift for Pains. On their self-titled debut from earlier this year, the band worked within a pretty specific strain of indie-pop from the mid-80s and drew heavily from the hazy guitar pop of early My Bloody Valentine and C86 acts like Shop Assistants. But this EP demonstrates a tweaking of that sound that falls more in line with the cleaner approach of late-80s Sarah Records bands, most notably the Field Mice. That may seem like a minor distinction, but it helps to show Pains not as period fetishists, but instead a group of indie-pop aesthetes who seem to be able to operate comfortably within several different subdivisions of the genre.
The song that most exemplifies this altered formula is the EP's title cut, "Higher Than the Stars", which is noteworthy not only for its gloss but the assurance with which it bounces along-- its twinkling synths, crisp guitar strums, and longing vocals all hitting at the right moments. I'd put it right up there with "Come Saturday" and "Young Adult Friction" as one of the best tracks in Pains' catalogue so far. Though perhaps not quite as dazzling, "Falling Over" is equally crisp, and also puts a greater emphasis on rhythm and synths (keyboardist Peggy Wang-East's playing is confident throughout) and works as a sappy ballad about the uncertainty of a potential new love. Frontman Kip Berman's sad-sack tenderness could be irritating here if it didn't sound so great, as he shields himself from hurt, singing, "Don't you, don't you touch me... I'd fall over for you," in his most convincing faux-British accent to date.
The two tracks that stand out as different from the pack here are "103" and the Saint Etienne remix of "Higher Than the Stars", the former a holdover from the time of the self-titled LP's recording and more in line with that style. (It's pleasant enough but probably the slightest of the batch.) The Saint Etienne remix, though, is fantastic, stretching the original's four minutes to nearly seven of the kind of tropical dance-pop the group is famous for. It also makes for an interesting complete circle here, since Saint Etienne associate Ian Catt also produced the Field Mice (whose influence, again, is clear on this EP) in the 80s, and SE covered the Field Mice's "Let's Kiss and Make Up". Saint Etienne's co-sign on the would-be torchbearers for this style is high praise indeed. It also further emphasizes the argument this EP makes, which is that Pains could be the most promising indie pop group around.


The newly minted rap superstar’s obligatory label compilation is more merch bundle than album.

JACKBOYS

In 2018, Travis Scott became a bonafide rap superstar, reaching a plateau where the only way to prove how high you’ve reached is to bring other guys up there, too. And so here comes his obligatory label compilation, a signal boost for his signees designed to be a flex in and of itself. Only problem is: He doesn’t have much of a crew. The only people in Scott’s orbit are the three rappers signed to his Cactus Jack imprint: Don Toliver, Luxury Tax 50, and Sheck Wes (in a joint deal with GOOD Music). As roster compilations go, this seven-track sampler spread what few assets it has too thin and hardly makes for a showcase.
JACKBOYS has been pegged as a “debut album” for the titular crew, but that is clearly an overstatement. There are two Don Toliver songs and one Sheck Wes song. There is one Luxury Tax 50 verse. Travis Scott fills out the tracklist with a 50-second instrumental and a remix to his recent hit single, “Highest in the Room,” with Rosalía and Lil Baby. JACKBOYS is a branding opportunity, pure and simple: From the Harmony Korine cover art to the promotional film shot as if A24 produced a Need For Speed sequel, it all seems like empty influencer bait. This is music as part of a merch bundle, about as necessary as a branded fire extinguisher.
With ASTROWORLD, Travis Scott finally earned the maestro mantle he was so eager to bestow upon himself, but that curator’s touch is missing here. Pop Smoke is in his element over AXL’s drill production on “Gatti,” pushing Travis into the margins. The song sounds like diet “Welcome to the Party,” and drill isn’t the kind of subgenre where you’re looking to cut calories. “Out West” finds Young Thug carrying Travis (for the umpteenth time), and in this case Thug is barely even trying. Don Toliver’s “Had Enough” is his song in name only; with Quavo and Offset on hand, it sounds like another Migos demo for the Carters’ album with its blatant “Summer” sample and blank, reference-track vocal takes. The sole JACKBOYS posse cut, “Gang Gang,” is all over the place, squandering WondaGurl production.
If anyone comes off like they didn’t waste their time making this, it’s Don Toliver, who goes full tilt even working in the periphery of other people’s songs. His breakthrough on ASTROWORLD’s “Can’t Say” outlined his promise; his was such a distinct performance among an all-star cast that it left listeners scrambling to identify him on the creditless tracklist. He doesn’t squander any of that goodwill here, coming off as a budding talent even as the album grows more and more forgettable. (He scored his first TikTok hit with “No Idea” late last year.) Toliver is like the T-1000 model of Travis Scott: he uses Auto-Tune to similar effect, but he works in a higher octave range than Scott and is simply a more lifelike upgrade of his prototype. This is best expressed on “What to Do?”, a duet with Scott in which they both try to put the pieces of a drunken night back together. It’s Toliver who sounds like he’s rallying, his voice less like a piece of software and more an instrument of feeling. His singsong verse is one of the few moments on JACKBOYS that isn’t just product.


The sprawling closing chapter of Colin Stetson's New History Warfare trilogy adds a welcome wrinkle in the vocals of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon-- sometimes angelic, sometimes metal brutal-- and sees the Montreal-based saxophonist explore extremes of darkness and light.

Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light

With a hyper-demanding solo technique, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson has plowed a unique path through the music landscape in the last five years. His music is heady but always rooted in the body. Stetson uses circular breathing to produce an endless stream of notes in mode of classical minimalism, music that lulls the brain into a sort of reverie. But the unusual production for his solo records, placing microphones close to capture every nuance of sound (the clattering treble of keys, the bassy thump of the pads over the holes, the whoosh of breath, the moan of Stetson’s vocals through the horn), keeps the hypnotic repetition grounded in an intensely physical now. 2011's New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges was his breakthrough, an album that appealed to people who had very little time for experimental music that also managed to sound like nothing else. He’s been characteristically busy in the year since, playing solo shows and also touring as a member of Bon Iver, whose leader Justin Vernon is featured prominently on the third part of this solo trilogy.
Though guest vocals on Stetson’s music add a welcome textural wrinkle, it seems like a challenge to figure out exactly how to integrate them. For one, when clear vocals are present, it tends to ground Stetson’s music in genre when it otherwise seems to float somewhere on its own, free of classification. On Judges, that meant the sound of theatrical classical with the calming cerebral articulation of Laurie Anderson, cut with a studied take on blues from Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. Vernon’s distinctive presence puts this record in a different light, driven home by the fact that opener “And in Truth” starts with a huge spread of his angelic harmonies. For a moment, you feel like you’ve wandered into the next Bon Iver record, and it's slightly disorienting. But the easily identifiable voice is used on four tracks to different ends, affirming Vernon’s ability to adapt his style to the project at hand.
The most striking bit of shapeshifting comes on “Brute”, where Vernon assumes the Cookie Monster bark of a death metal frontman and turns out to be very good at it. Giving Stetson’s skill at conveying menace and the darkly churning low end of his work on the bigger horns, a metal lean to the music makes perfect sense and maybe even seems inevitable. “Brute” feels like the soundtrack to a child’s nightmare, and the fact that it sits so easily next to the subsequent “Among the Sef”, which feels like a triumphant, tightly appreciated fanfare celebrating everything that is good in the world, is a testament to all that Stetson can render from his instrument.
Indeed, To See More Light shows impressive range. In some respects, Stetson seems to have gravitated toward the extremes while leaving the minimalist tapestries in the background. At some points, like on “High Above a Grey Green Sea”, and “Part of Me Apart From You”, his tone is especially gnarled and biting and feels connected spiritually to the dark forces of heavy metal. But “And in Truth” and the multi-tracked Vernon guest vocal on the cover of the spiritual “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” are warm and human, more earthy folk than heady art music. The centerpiece that binds it all together is the 15-minute title track, which moans and swoons and moves between sections like a work of romantic classical music. It is perhaps Stetson’s most powerful single track, though it takes some serious focus to absorb in one sitting.
Heard as the closing chapter in Stetson’s trilogy, To See More Light feels essentially like more: it’s more intense, more sprawling, both darker and lighter simultaneously. And in one sense, the record’s marked ambition can make it a harder listen as a whole, as it moves through moods and modes and seems constantly on the verge of burning itself out. But the album’s sequencing and the essential facts of its live, in-the-moment construction keep it flowing like a singular statement, at times just barely. None of which takes away from Stetson’s hugely impressive achievement: We’re here in 2013 and and he’s spinning out pieces in real-time using common instruments and the result is a sound that could come only from one person on earth.