Oh, Elliott. Are things really that bad? We've been listening to this grizzled old bastard's miseries since his ...

Figure 8

Oh, Elliott. Are things really that bad? We've been listening to this grizzled old bastard's miseries since his self-titled, indier-than-Mary Lou Lord 1995 debut on Kill Rock Stars. And what has it gotten us? Well, those of us addicted to Smith's plug-and-play hooks got it in the ass-- we've invested well over $50 on his entire catalog. Ah, but it's a value, I guess. After all, it's a pretty rare event when we find someone this effortlessly capable of crafting whole albums of instantly accessible pop.
When we last left Elliott Smith, his Dreamworks debut, XO, was being called the best album of 1998 by all your dad's periodicals. His songwriting had clearly advanced since the release of his heralded indie classic, Either/Or, and songs like "Bottle Up and Explode", "Tomorrow Tomorrow", and "Pitseleh" featured far more intelligent lyrics and melodies than the songs off its predecessor. But Smith's long-time followers-- Olympia indie punks and emo kids-- saw a problem. XO's multi-layered vocal harmonies, syrup-drenched string sections, polished effects and warm atmospheres detracted from the intimacy of his semi-confessional earlier work. It also didn't help that, from out of nowhere, he was nominated for a very un-punk Academy Award for his song "Miss Misery", which was featured prominently in the also very un-punk Good Will Hunting.
A minor indie backlash ensued shortly after the record's release, but the songs spoke for themselves, and despite the record's overwhelming studio sheen, XO still holds up today as a damn fine record. The new album, of course, will be a major determining factor in the course of his career. It could break new ground in the genre, taking a hammer to conventional pop rules and re-writing music history (don't count on it), or it could establish him as the new king of adult contemporary radio, virtually erasing his name from punk's history books. Of course, it comes out somewhere between the two. Figure 8, ultimately, isn't as good a record as XO or Either/Or, though the man's not out of the picture yet.
Punk fans will be pleased to know that Figure 8 is a bit more raw than XO, though the same production team-- Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf-- was called in again. The album accomplishes more with less saccharine perfection. But sadly, Smith still goes a little overboard here and there. The throwaway toy-piano honky tonk of "In the Lost and Found (Honky Bach)" is a giant, airy studio disaster complete with high-treble piano, a rambling, go-nowhere melody, and a glistening chamber hall effect that sounds like someone dropped a reverb bomb by the mic. "Wouldn't Mama Be Proud" is a grasp for the VH-1 ring that puts Reef to shame. And the first single, "Son of Sam", hasn't got a damn thing on "Sweet Adeline" or "Speed Trials", Smith's previous album openers-- it's one of the least infectious songs this guy's written since Roman Candle.
But while Elliott Smith includes some of his least inspired music of all time on Figure 8, he also surprisingly pulls out some of his best to date. The simple, jerky, acoustic melodrama of "Somebody That I Used to Know" proves that Smith can sing in other tones than his standard shy whisper. "Everything Means Nothing to Me" harbors an unpredictable, evolving, vaguely psychedelic tune, and uses the album's massive major label budget to its advantage by incorporating creative, unique ideas and not overdoing it with the Neil Diamond Orchestra. "I Better Be Quiet Now" serves as the most affecting ballad here with its acoustic intimacy, gentle guitar strum, and Smith's lyrical honesty: "If I didn't know the difference/ Living alone would probably be okay/ It wouldn't be lonely/ I got a long way to go/ I'm getting further away."
But "Pretty Mary K" sums up Figure 8 most ably. It carries the burden of that "wall of Schnapf" reverb overdrive, and is a shining example of Smith's sometimes lumbering songwriting which, in its attempts to remain original, can become unbearably random-sounding-- a problem that plagues this record from start to finish. Yet, it also pulls some of the album's most impressive twists, and most clearly recalls the Beatles of any of these songs.
16 Elliott Smith songs is a lot to plow through, though-- even 16 of his greatest tracks would be a task. The question here is: is it worth wading through the filler to get to the good stuff? In some cases, as with "Color Bars" and "Everything Reminds Me of Her", it can be. But how much "Honky Bach" can one person stand? Figure 8 is, without a doubt, another step down from XO in terms of songwriting, even if its production has taken a step in the right direction (that is, away from Michael Penn's house). In the grand scheme of things, however, you only need to hear so much Elliott Smith before you get the point.


The Michigan band’s debut defaults to the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze, but sounds best when it plows through the guardrails.

Girl, Buried

Ann Arbor, Michigan quartet Big Vic recognize the undeniable correlation between loud music and emotional expulsion. Singer, main songwriter, and lead guitarist Victoria Rinaldi is quite comfortable tearing up her strings on the band’s debut Girl, Buried—yet her voice rarely rises above a whisper. Rather than shout, Rinaldi hangs back from the mic and shreds, hiding pithy observations within the heady squall of her bandmates: guitarist Geoff Brown, bassist Ines Hidalgo, and drummer Joe Fortino.
The four friends met at the University of Michigan, where Rinaldi studied multi-disciplinary visual art. She’d begun writing songs in high school, and as an Asian American, she was disheartened by the lack of diversity she saw within heavier music scenes. The success of rock artists like Mitski helped inspire her to shift the balance. Big Vic is her first proper band, and the nine-track Girl, Buried is powered by the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze—a default setting that sometimes holds the album back. The band’s reverence for groups like Slowdive and Sonic Youth is earnest and precisely rendered, but Big Vic sound best when they get lost in their own clamor.
Lyrically, Girl, Buried is lean. Rinaldi isn’t the type of frontperson who occupies a large, ego-driven space, and her voice never pulls you away from the energy of her band. On “Broken Car,” her languor serves a narrative about depression and inertia: “Spent the last three weeks in bed/Haven’t left this house in days,” she murmurs. When she finally gathers the strength to leave town, her car won’t start. She doesn’t shout or bang her fist on the dashboard; she simply climbs out of the driver’s seat and wanders off, sounding more exhausted than ever. As the drums and bass fall away, she scrapes the length of her fretboard. Its descending metallic croak is the only indication of catharsis.
Rinaldi often downplays her voice, allowing her instrument and those of the band to land the emotional punch. On the frenzied late album track “Worms,” technically her most verbose entry, Rinaldi’s words are so buried in the mix that they’re largely indecipherable. When the occasional phrase emerges (“Her eyes turned red, the anger bubbling up”), it’s effectively smothered by Fortino’s big plastic toms and Hidalgo’s rubbery bass. The layers of sound—grimy distortion, shrieking feedback—pile on top of Rinaldi’s vocal like heaps of earth. By the end of the song, the noise engulfs her. She’s slightly more audible on the sprawling closer “Anymore,” but she pares her lyrics back to just two lines: “I don’t really care if you come down anymore,” she sings. “Truth is, I don’t love you or miss you anymore.” She mouths the words softly at first, gradually cutting deeper as she dials up the volume. The shift is incremental and then exponential: The song culminates with a shouting fit rivaled only by the screech of her guitar.
Big Vic are measured, steering carefully between softness and sonic heft. The balance lends their music dimension, but they sound best when they plow through the guardrails. They’re delightfully unhinged on “Gun Girl,” a clipped, two-and-a-half minute track propelled by sharp, uneven planes of guitar and Rinaldi’s wry delivery, not unlike Kim Gordon’s trademark snarl. “I feel his unwelcome eyes all the time,” she deadpans. “More and more I want to see his insides.” As she mumbles that unnerving line, she rips into a shrill, blood-curdling solo, disemboweling the creep with her instrument. A squawking saxophone, perhaps the best surprise on the album, leaps in at the last minute to join the action. Big Vic thrive in this kind of chaos—like a swirl of limbs in a Looney Tunes brawl, it is simultaneously joyful and ferocious.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


California singer-songwriter Jessie Jones left the garage-rock quintet Feeding People to pursue her visions of radiant pop grandeur. On her debut LP,  she spins intoxicating tales over exuberant and sugary pop, splattered with bipolar stylistic change-ups.

Jessie Jones

On her debut LP, California singer-songwriter Jessie Jones advises her listeners "And all the mystery is over a fear that by letting/ Go of love it'll feel like an ending/ Give it away/ It'll come back when you're ready." This sanguine, if-you-love-something-let-it-go philosophy is in line with her career. She's traded in leading the charge for garage-rock quintet Feeding People to actualize her visions of radiant pop grandeur. It's a smooth transition for Jones, whose versatility as a vocalist alone is enough to warrant her place in the spotlight.
On her solo release, she comes across as the best advocate you could have for not taking shit from anyone. But she also spins intoxicating tales that reveal her spiritual perspective on life. Her hippie-influenced outlook is partially why her name has been mentioned in the same breath as Janis Joplin, but her syrupy mew is closer in sound to indie-pop peer Alex Winston. Opener "Sugar-Coated" recalls a King Con-era Winston, as Jones builds the sprightly pop song with her deceivingly innocent voice before skyrocketing to carry the anthemic chorus. She plays with tension and release vocally on the rapturous "Lady La De Da".
Mottled with giddy tambourines and spattering drum fills, the album is a little bipolar in its approach to instrumentation, but it isn't messy. "Quicksilver Screen" is anchored by jangly riffs, letting a squealing synth lead drop into deeper, wonkier ones that bob up and down with resilience. Jones flirts with brassier proclivities on "Twelve Hour Man", as rollicking horns steal the show, racing jazzy percussion and fluttering piano chords to the finish line. Closer "Mental Illness" is the album's biggest outlier but also one of its biggest successes. Suddenly we're placed in Jones' bedroom, as she nearly whispers in your ear, "My mental illness/ There's nothing wrong with it/ Sick of my feelings, tired of faking it/ Crying so hard, I can't explain it." She repeats this over a few bare riffs until her singing smudges into echoes. It's a stark jump from the up-to-mid-tempo psych-pop that precedes it, but it's a self-titled record for a reason. Jones wants to give her all, even if her moment of vulnerability is only a brief glance.
"La Loba" is another anomaly, though a less severe one. It's a flamenco song that feels like an ancient fable put to music. Jones' voice snakes luxuriously around a few low, slick chords, a violin weeping. She grows increasingly desperate and unrelenting as the track builds, howling across zipping guitar lines, the pressure bubbling over like a pot of boiling water. It's a testament to the formidable range she never got a chance to fully realize during her time in Feeding People.
Jessie Jones is a well-rounded introduction, one that holds little back. When asked about her personal philosophy, Jones is frank. "Love yourself and speak your truth. I believe in individualism, I'm not anything but who I am is only something I live with." This album's inconsistencies are deliberate. Without them, she would be presenting a false identity, an incomplete version of herself. With them, we can more fully work toward understanding Jessie Jones, the individual.


Paul McCartney resurrects his long-dormant alter ego, teams with producer Youth, and makes an album that can honestly be called "Beatleseque."

Electric Arguments

With the possible exception of the Starbucks employees forced to listen to it on repeat, Paul McCartney's 2007 release, Memory Almost Full was his most warmly received album in years, debuting in the Billboard top five and selling more than a million copies in the U.S.-- his first stateside platinum disc in nearly a quarter century. The album didn't transcend McCartney's notoriously sentimental tendencies, but it provided enough evidence that his sense of adventure hadn't vanshed. But then, Memory Almost Full's success was arguably less a product of content as circumstance: It was preceded by the sympathies he gained from a nasty divorce and a much-publicized move from EMI to Starbucks' Hear Music label, making him a rock dinosaur fearlessly adapting to an ever-changing music industry.
Fast forward a year and Starbucks is struggling to move frappuccinos let alone CDs, and the coffee conglomerate put Hear Music on ice this past summer. That an artist of McCartney's stature would quickly find another label home (ATO in the U.S.; One Little Indian in the UK) is no surprise; that he's using the occasion to resurrect his long-dormant alter ego the Fireman-- a sporadic recording collaboration with producer/ex-Killing Jokester Youth-- constitutes an unexpected, brow-raising move for an artist known for his play-it-safe crowd-pleasing. And where the Fireman's two prior records-- 1993's Strawberries Oceans Ships Forests and 1998's Rushes-- were anonymous collections of post-Orb ambient instrumentals, Electric Arguments is a work of full-blooded (and fully voiced) anthemic pop music that's being actively promoted by the duo. But even with this newfound populist intent, Electric Arguments holds onto an original Fireman ideal: to make Paul McCartney sound less like Paul McCartney. That it does so within more traditional pop-song presentations-- while steering clear of McCartney's usual preferences for piano-pounded rockers and string-sweetened ballads-- is the ultimate testament to its success.
Electric Arguments presents not so much an abrupt break from typical McCartneyisms as a gradual drift away from them. The album actually picks up right where Memory Almost Full's blooze-explosive closer "Nod Your Head" left off, with McCartney adopting a comically over-the-top growl for the Zep-heavy "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight". Rather than set a blustery tone for the rest of the album, the song effectively wipes the slate clean for the more meditative music to come-- it's immediately followed by "Two Magpies", whose lo-fi acoustic ambience and brushed-snare beat harkens back to the homespun charm of 1971's classic Ram.
But it's third track "Sing the Changes" where the album's identity comes into focus: McCartney opts for a higher register, while Youth imports some of the Big Music expanse he's lent to recordings by the Verve and U2; the fact both verse and chorus share the same ascendant melody only enhances the song's buoyant, new-day-rising feel. "Dance 'Til We're High" works a similarly widescreen formula to even more rousing effect, with exuberant violin sweeps and a church bell-punctuated chorus. Collectively, these songs imagine an alternate 1980s for McCartney, had he more eagerly answered the challenge laid down by the new generation of British pop stars (instead of churning out anodyne, adult-contemporary pap like Pipes of Peace and writing jingles for Rupert the Bear).
Throughout Electric Arguments, you can hear McCartney make great efforts to obscure his voice by playing to its extremities, whether adopting a deep, wizardly tone for prog-folk odyssey "Traveling Light" or double-tracking his falsetto and growl on the cheeky country-gospel workout "Light From Your Lighthouse". Or, on the album's two complementary centerpieces-- "Lifelong Passion (Sail Away)" and "Is This Love?"-- he sublimates his voice to the textural haze around him. As the titles indicate, these are love songs, but ones devoid of the usual McCartneyian romanticism. Rather, with their highlands-bound stomps, synthesized bagpipe reels, and floating flute lines, they present love as the messy, mysterious head-trip that it is-- and when McCartney repeats the line "be my lifelong passion," the quiet desperation in his voice betrays the fact that he once lost his.
Following these emotional peaks, Electric Arguments loses it way in the home stretch: With its faux-gothic ambience, "Lovers in a Dream" hews too close to Enigma-level chill-out cheese, and the would-be climactic rock-out "Universal Here, Everlasting Now" is undermined by a dated, "Miami Vice" chase-theme quality. But given McCartney's long-standing efforts to assert that he-- not John-- was the most avant-garde Beatle, the Fireman thus serves a purpose analogous to Nick Cave's similarly named, equally deconstructive Grinderman project: To get its primary songwriter back to where he once belonged.


Portishead's Geoff Barrow unveils an odd, menacing, and even potentially alienating work that sounds more like 1971 than 2009.

Beak>

What a defiantly strange album Portishead's Geoff Barrow has made here. Beak> sounds like almost nothing else going around in 2009, though admittedly some of it sounds an awful lot like 1971. It's menacing and even potentially alienating. It's a work of loving pastiche with none of the deadening, touchy-feely hesitancy you can get when musicians attempt to wrestle with their heroes and wind up embarrassed by their own hubris halfway through the process.
Beak> is off the cuff in the best sense, a burst of itchy inspiration. Many of the same influences colored Portishead's Third, but Beak> unshackle them from singer and song structure, gaining intensity for what it loses in memorability. There's a ruthlessness to Barrow's writing here, especially in regards to rhythm. Barrow understands the appeal of Can in full-tilt flow-motion far better than the average band who earns the comparison because they swipe a Jaki Liebezeit drum pattern every now again
But while the stamp of Cologne's finest is all over Beak>-- mixed with a little Neu! on "Iron Action"-- Barrow's more interested in figuring out what gave Can's records their vibe, rather than Xeroxing their jams. "Pill" evokes that classic krautrock feeling of wandering clammy castle halls, getting dripped on by condensation as you try to find the band you could swear you heard jamming on one fierce, hypnotic note. All the vocals on Beak> seem to emanate from the far end of one of those hallways, like the mumbly moans of "I Know", vocals that don't suggest dread or terror so much as a low-grade but fully saturated eeriness. There's something plain off about Beak's tense vibe -- a creepy hollowing-out of rock's usual boundless energy.
In one sense it's a vibe not so far removed from Portishead proper, minus Beth Gibbons' drama-queening. But it's hard to imagine Portishead ever writing "Ham Green", which noodles for a while before dropping the boom with 1970s doom metal's "let's drink Cisco by the train tracks and call it a seance" camp menace, funny and coarse in a way you just don't associate with the trio that made Barrow famous. Of course, Beak> don't have Portishead's moments of mannered majesty, either. There's certainly nothing as emotionally overwhelming as "The Rip" on Beak>, and compared to Third, this is obviously the "lesser" work.
But that looseness and liberating inconsequentiality is kind of the point. You're getting Barrow's obsessions here, unfiltered, and Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums. This is Barrow off the leash and free to chase the beat.


Filled with gut punch hooks, the Tallahassee band’s second album is carried by their battle-tested friendship and irrepressible chemistry.

Pool Kids

While Pool Kids have made their name in Florida’s vibrant DIY emo scene, their second LP works in the musically agnostic style of “breakup album.” All of those tried-and-true narrative beats—devastation, resilience, reconciliation, catharsis, probably in that order—have coalesced into a genre of their own, drawing in people who might not otherwise be interested in someone slumped over their piano or acoustic guitar or sampler. Pool Kids announces its intentions from the jump with “Conscious Uncoupling,” its Goop-pilled title at hilarious odds with the realities of an aimless, twentysomething relationship collapsing and taking everything down with it: “I’m probably never gonna clean this house again/I’m probably never gonna see your mom again.” But from that shellshocked opening, vocalist and guitarist Christine Goodwyne mashes a 47-minute song cycle into a supercut that scrambles the typical breakup album timeline: One second she’s spitefully yelling that she’s not acting out of spite; the next she’s softening her tone and wanting nothing more than to look back and laugh. By the end of the song, she’s back on that stupid couch again, unaware that she’s going to do the same thing again 11 more times.
Of all the razzle dazzle of Pool Kids, the most diabolical trick is its first: faking like it could be mistaken for any of the sad bop-type beats clogging your feed. It lasts less than a minute before Pool Kids bring back everything that made their’ 2018 debut, Music to Have Safe Sex To, as adorable as it was invigorating: double-kick drums and harmonized, tapped-guitar leads betraying their roots in Florida hardcore and emo revival, and Goodwyne shouting at the rafters even though they’re only a foot above her head. The two most popular songs on Music were titled “Overly Verbose Email Series, Pt. III” and “$5 Subtweet,” and Goodwyne continues to explore how the tone and cadence of Twitter discourse spills over into real life, because really, what’s the difference anymore?
Yet the most rewarding parts of Pool Kids come during its numerous moments of respite. As he did on exquisite sounding LPs from Special Explosion and Great Grandpa, Seattle-based producer Mike Vernon Davis uses Transatlanticism as the gold standard for formerly scrappy indie rock bands making albums that sound rich but not expensive, a veritable lookbook of emo textures—the soft scratchiness of worn furniture, the heavy haze of a hangover stubbornly lasting until lunch time. Pool Kids isn’t a required headphones listen, but it’s filled with so much tactile, subtle post-production that even a decent set of AirPods turn it into a deluxe version of itself. The dualities of Pool Kids—instrumental exuberance and lyrical devastation, the pine-scented breeze of the Pacific Northwest and Florida’s elliptical rhythms and gut punch hooks—play out like tennis aces locked in a tiebreaker, the mesmerizing builds punctuated by knee-buckling, angular shifts.
These moments are likely what caused Hayley Williams to liken Pool Kids to an earlier, much rawer version of her own band; or at least what Paramore could have sounded like if they aspired to play Fest or ArcTanGent rather than Warped Tour. It was the most consequential cosign in this realm since Mark Hoppus discovered Hop Along’s “Tibetan Pop Stars,” a pop-punk icon showing admiration for a knottier, more humbly charming band that could be big, if not MTV big. The biggest hooks on Pool Kids—“You wanna start a fight! You wanna start a fight! You wanna start a fight!” or “I’m telling what I/Telling you what I need”—are exorcisms of obsession and frustration, even when they sound like triumph.
“I’ll bet you didn't think we'd make it this far/But we’ve made do,” Goodwyne sighs on the gorgeous, moody centerpiece “Comes in Waves,” maybe at an ex-partner or online troll, but probably at herself. Pool Kids have been through a little of everything since Music. (Drummer Caden Clinton’s mother died in an accident prior to the recording of Pool Kids, and towards the end, the band’s gear was destroyed in a flood.) The closing “Pathetic” samples footage they took of the destruction: “What can we make of this?” It’s the album’s final line, though it retroactively echoes through every previous song that asks how can anyone move on, whether stuck in their own head or on their phone. The solution apparently has something to do with leaping out of a plane, Pool Kids filmed themselves skydiving for the video of “Arm’s Length,” a song whose first line complains about the energy it takes just to get out of bed. But Pool Kids power through with an unshakeable belief that their battle-tested friendship and irrepressible musical chemistry can get them through anything.


In his final completed film score, the late composer and experimental musician revels in extreme sounds, delving into black metal, menacing ambient, doom drone, and piercing orchestrations.

Jóhann Jóhannsson: Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Film composers don’t always get to decide what their final score will be, whether it will constitute a career-capping classic or just another paycheck. While Bernard Herrmann finished the mournful saxophone score for Taxi Driver just hours before his death, the last entry in Henry Mancini’s mighty filmography is the best-forgotten Son of Pink Panther. The tragic passing, earlier this year, of the 48-year-old Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who seemed sure to have a long and distinguished career ahead of him, was a blow to both cinematic and experimental music. Fans who followed Jóhannsson’s career from his exquisite debut album, Englabörn, to his Oscar-nominated scores for The Theory of Everything and Sicario—and who agonized over what his aborted score for Blade Runner 2049 might have sounded like—can only wonder what might have come next.
To learn that Jóhannsson’s final completed score was for a Nicolas Cage horror movie could give one pause (or make one scream: “Not the bees!”). But Mandy isn’t just any Nicolas Cage horror movie; it’s the second film from Panos Cosmatos, the director responsible for 2010’s hallucinatory Beyond the Black Rainbow. And in Jóhannsson, he had a composer willing to forge ahead to the most extreme sounds possible. “Jóhann went above and beyond, and I suspect to the limits of his sanity, to make the music for this movie,” Cosmatos says in the soundtrack’s liner notes. It’s a visceral thrill to hear Jóhannsson leave the demands of Hollywood orchestral scores behind and move wholly into his element, pushing toward harrowing new sounds. Mandy revels in black metal, menacing ambient, doom drone, and piercing orchestrations in the mode of Italian experimental composer Giacinto Scelsi.
Darkness and despair infuse nearly every moment of Jóhannsson’s score, its atmosphere conjured in part by co-producer Randall Dunn, with Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley on guitar. The heaviness native to their work is palpable from the tectonic bass rumble and low chords of “Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye” to the dread-inducing brass smears of “Starling.” Even the film’s love theme is forlorn, all solemn guitar swells. Mandy bears some resemblance to Dunn and O’Malley’s work with Oren Ambarchi on 2014’s Shade Themes From Kairos, except that the album’s side-long immersions are split into smaller, but no less intense, chunks. This harshness reaches a breaking point with the fierce, lashing noise of “Black Skulls,” its metal scrapes and queasy low frequencies pushing the entire track into the red.
But one of Jóhannsson’s great gifts was his sense of sonic balance: He could make icy, spare soundscapes drip with warmth and locate the human element amid big machinations. Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.” Similarly, the ambient anxiety that suffuses the early part of the score also gives a rhythmic element to its back half, with the sludgy thuds of “Dive-Bomb Blues” and “Waste” evoking Melvins’ early-’90s run.
Mandy also ventures into some entirely new terrain for Jóhannsson. The glassy ’80s electronic tones of “Children of the New Dawn” evoke the Italians Do It Better roster as well as the work of French house producer Kavinsky; though the piece is an outlier on the soundtrack, it might well have opened up a new sonic world for the composer to explore. It’s tragic that we will never know just what lay ahead for Jóhannsson, but Mandy hints at a future both bright and bleak.


The singer-songwriter-superproducer teams with the Vermont jazz musician Chris Weisman for an invigorating collaborative album that’s whimsical and wistful in surprising ways.

Jelly Road

In 2019, Blake Mills and Chris Weisman were tasked with recording new music that sounded like it was 50 years old. They basically wrote an album’s worth of songs as a made-up band for the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & the Six, inspired loosely by the soft-rock drama of Fleetwood Mac. Energized by their introduction, the two continued working on new music that sounds like Jelly Road, with rich layers of guitars, vintage keyboards, and an assortment of woodwinds. In these 12 songs, they wrap surreal imagery in otherworldly melodies that feel blissful, seamless, and eerily suspended out of time.
Jelly Road feels of a piece with Notes With Attachments, Mills’ 2021 album with bassist Pino Palladino, another spirited collaboration between studio heads. Mills has used his solo output to develop his reflective songwriting and immersive production style; as a producer and accompanist with Bob Dylan, John Legend, Phoebe Bridgers, and plenty more, he’s become a formidable presence who nonetheless functions as support for somebody else’s project. Mills’ two album-length alliances have allowed him to bring both practices to the fore, and in contrast to the spiky jazz slant of Notes With Attachments, Jelly Road is smooth and satisfying from start to finish. The opening guitar tumbles of “Suchlike Horses” are a tantalizing introduction, rippling outward into a pool of wavering synth lines that sounds like a wayward trombone.
Weisman sketched out some of the shapes of Jelly Road on an iPad mini, emailing fragments to Mills late at night on borrowed Wi-Fi while he stood outside a local library branch in his hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont. Keeping a lower profile as a jazz-forward improviser, Weisman has admitted that he’s “always done only what the fuck I want to do, and skipped the stuff that irritated me” with regards his own work. In the same 10-year span that Mills has established himself as an in-demand producer, guitarist, and songwriter, Weisman has self-released more than 30 records of electroacoustic adventures, which range from longform deliberations to pocket-size petit fours.
Weisman told Fretboard Journal that he wanted to encourage Mills’ virtuosity as a guitar player, which manifests in the meaty guitar solo at the end of “Skeleton Is Walking.” It returns in “Breakthrough Moon,” which has a solo passage that settles in like a layer of strong incense amid a loose layer of percussion. There’s a quicksilver streak of sleaze to Mills’ twists and turns, outlining the sort of seedy lounge scene that might play host to the creatures of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.”
Jelly Road is populated with Hammond C3s, a Roland Juno-106, and a celeste, which Mills and Weisman alternate between an assortment of acoustic, fretless, and electric guitars and basses. Sam Gendel steers the Electronic Wind Controller on “Unsingable,” later picking up the more familiar saxophone for “Without an Ending.” On “Wendy Melvoin” and “There Is No Now,” he plays a massive contrabass recorder, adding a woody texture that feels both earthy and extraterrestrial. In “Highway Bright,” Weisman and Mills offer independent bass parts on each side of the mix, a detail that leaps out in close listens.
The bewitching air of the instrumental “Wendy Melvoin”—named after the guitarist and vocalist from Prince’s band the Revolution and Wendy & Lisa—makes it one of the album’s strongest moments, and the woman herself joins Weisman and Mills on multiple tracks. Accompanying Prince, Melvoin was indispensable to the Revolution’s high-power sound; here, she expands the duo’s adventures with more subdued flourishes. In “Press My Luck,” her off-kilter wah-wah guitar additions sketch a loose figure, and the electronic interference that crackles through creates a picture that echoes the jumpy, colorful abstraction of scrambled cable.
Though Jelly Road is an invigorating listen, at times, it feels like a case study in hauntology: its squishy production and armory of vintage gear evoke a warmth toward the past, while its lyrics and gently off-kilter melodies hint at wariness toward some vague future. Time is short and littered with empty material rewards in “The Light Is Long,” but it fully dissolves in “There Is No Now,” where Mills croons, “Time unfolding is a trick.” The soft piano and resonant percussion of “Unsingable” pads the reflexive approach, with Mills wondering aloud about the existential qualities of making music: “What can make a song unsingable? What can make a song feel lost?”
In Jelly Road’s title track, Mills’ layered vocals breeze around percussive cloudbursts, its lyrics populated by once-happy dinosaurs and the cozy storybook kings Frog and Toad. It feels like spiritual kin to the kooky Jerry Garcia-David Grisman take on “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” with a more wistful undercurrent that speaks to lost pleasures. “And though we’ve had some good times/This is what we chose/Tell me it again/About the Jelly Road,” Mills sings, with an air of melancholy that such a place exists only in fantasia. Though clouds of doubt hang in the eaves of Jelly Road, Mills presents a straightforward perspective in “Press My Luck,” where he offers, “Things start getting clearer when they’re fucked.” The path forward may be paved with crumbling bricks, but, as Jelly Road suggests, there might be unknown delights left to discover along the way.


Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld is a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire. Her second solo album of compositions The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, but it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing.

The Ridge

The level of pure athleticism required to play the violin reveals the pained rock faces of the classic rock axe-slingers to be a dramatic ruse. The touch it takes to make an electric guitar sing is unbelievably light, and there’s a strap to hold it in place. Violinists (and violists and string bassists, for that matter) not only must hold a not-insignificantly heavy wooden body up for an extended period of time, they also have to maintain a steady bowing arm and pivot carefully to maintain control of the sound. Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld — a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire — delivers her fair share of grimaces in the band’s energetic live show, and she’s clearly earning them.
In her compositions as a solo artist, the relentless physicality of her technique is part of the listening experience, and immediately central to its appeal. In the short pieces that make up Neufeld’s latest album The Ridge, the sound of her bow moving frenetically back and forth across the bridge of her violin often settles into a blur. There is a sharp contradiction between the gossamer blocks of sound we hear, and the limber, near-constant motion that makes them possible. Neufeld presses down on the strings to create a whistle-like harmonic that surges in between notes and chords; it’s the violin equivalent of the otherworldly-sounding tones her comrade-in-arms Colin Stetson (who appears here playing lyricon) favors in his sax playing. Reverb and delay effects enhance the atmospheric effect of Neufeld’s playing, creating moments where sound seems to be coming from another room.
While Neufeld’s previous solo outing Hero Brother daringly explored the overlap between classical minimalism and regional American fiddling techniques, The Ridge’s musical vocabulary is more familiar and less transportive. It starts unconvincingly with the title track, a piece of high-dramatic "chamber rock" which recalls the Arcade Fire-related instrumental unit Bell Orchestre in which Neufeld participated in during the '00s. Wringing out a few unsurprising chords for maximal self-importance, it’s a propulsive, amelodic piece which seems like it could work better on traditional rock instruments, or with a denser ensemble.
Neufeld largely avoids linear melodies  — her feathery, very intermittent vocals add little in this regard — in favor of rhythmic cells in the Philip Glass tradition. Often, with the help of effects, these are reduced to synthetic-sounding pulsations. Like a good several-times-removed disciple of the minimalists, her writing is best when it revels in contradictory rhythms overlaid on top of each other -- when complexity is more of a focal point. The appealing, fractured Afrobeat cadence of "We’ve Got a Lot" gradually falls together like gears locking into place, and the explosive pizzicato of "The Glow" experiment with unsteady meter changes.
Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. It’s hard to make strings-based, indie-rock-tinged instrumental music in this vein sound fresh. But as in her past work, Neufeld’s focused, restless recordings invite the listener to share in the intensity of her ritual as a performer, creating a necessary and refreshing air of intimacy.


If Merchandise weren't a rock band before, they certainly are now. They've gotten a little more earnest and shoot for a bigger sound. It's a mixed bag, but it's hard to hate them for it.

A Corpse Wired for Sound

If you were up and around a TV set in Tampa on Tuesday, sometime after 10 a.m., you might have tripped into a surreal scene. On WFTS, Merchandise made an appearance on the local channel’s morning show, “Tampa Bay’s Morning Blend.” The disposition the show is supposed to render is sunny, cheerful, the perfect complement to a complete breakfast. The band was there to play a song from their new album *A Corpse Wired for Sound, *but not before an interview. When asked to describe Merchandise’s sound Carson Cox joked, “We play both kinds, we play country and western,” before getting at least slightly serious. “It sort of mutates all the time... When we started I feel like we were really snarly and aggressive. And now we’ve matured a lot.” Then they play, giving the early birds an unvarnished but romantic rendition of album highlight, “Lonesome Sound.” The performance is unencumbered and affecting, and runs in interesting contrast to the album version: a swaggering and distorted ballad. For those up at the hour, it must’ve been a strange scene. For Merchandise fans, it was a pleasantly confusing one as well.
The band for a long time has maintained a strict policy of home recording, though what they've conjured up in their last five records has never sounded grainy, but ambitiously wrought. *A Corpse Wired for Sound *signifies the first time Merchandise has stepped into a studio (in Rosà, Italy) to record an album, and the majority of the material was written after Cox left Tampa, living between New York and Berlin. His bandmate and writing partner Dave Vassalotti stayed in Florida, though he moved to Sarasota. Their face time was limited, and the professionalized air and transient process imbued something uncharacteristic to Merchandise. The album almost feels buttoned up.
Their sonic influences have widened, with dub especially playing into the band’s changing sound. Even though Cox has said in the past, “genres are not for us,” in their latest, the hair-sprayed guitars and general geniality paint them more as rock band than ever. The songs in A Corpse Wired for Song have gotten considerably shorter in length than previous albums (under five minutes for the most part), and they seem more spacious, or at the very least much louder, as if recorded with large rooms in mind. Yet, when you return to Tampa morning TV, a certain unifying thread runs from that unadorned live experience and the recorded one: a sentimental resonance. In the time between records, Cox and Vassalotti have gotten sweeter, softer, and better at writing straightforward love songs. “It wasn’t love/She was putting me on/I went further down,” Cox sings on “Lonesome Sound.”
By no means is their sixth studio album perfect. It's an uneven experience all together, but by and large Cox’s admittance of maturity rings through in this record. Even if  the luxuriant guitars in a song like “Lonesome Sound,” are almost cheesy, it makes A Corpse Wired for Sound more anthemic. In a way, Merchandise’s uncoolness has always been what’s refreshing about them. This is present from the opening moments of the record, in “Flower of Sex,” where they give their eccentric approximation of stadium rock. If anything, the big room ambition comes off almost goofy and funky in construction and effect. Take for example the jaunty slinking synth chords that begin “Right Back to the Start.” Cox’s voice follows in like, pitch shifting and wiggling its way through the song’s surrealist lyrics (“My grandfather’s eyes flash against the wall/I stay up all night expecting his call”).
Corpse overcomes its moments, due in part to concision and earnest songwriting. This is true especially of the the penultimate track, “I Will Not Sleep Here,” filled with syrupy acoustic guitars, a splatter of electronic noise, and Cox’s near cracking voice guiding the song. Lines like “Blood is thicker than water/But both can go down the same drain” teeter on hokey, but they’re sold by virtue of how genuine the performance feels. Past the voluminous catalog of influences they say went into the writing of the record (the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Burroughs’ cut-up-technique, etc), *A Corpse Wired for Sound *is their least obscured record. It contains a feeling of strange optimism, as if each song was written for closing credits, or sunsets on a horizon that need driving towards. Even if unintended, the embrace of normality that seemed evident in their television appearance earlier this week points to a band more comfortable in its own skin: happy to sing songs about love.


Started as the soundtrack for Pete Travis' forthcoming Judge Dredd adaptation, Portishead's Geoff Barrow teamed with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury for this tribute to the fictional setting of the comic book series.

Geoff Barrow / Ben Salisbury: DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One

DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One

The fictional Mega-City One is the ultimate impure vision of the future. Apartment blocks shoot toward the heavens, spilling over with bored and persecuted citizens. Unemployment rates are high. The crime rate is even higher. Forget about buying coffee-- it's been outlawed as an illegal stimulant. Patrolling the streets are a series of fascistic Judges, employed to keep the peace by any means necessary. It makes the Blade Runner universe look like Disneyland. At least, that's how the makers of popular Brit comic 2000 AD imagine it, as told through the eyes of their most famous character, the granite-jawed Judge Dredd. Portishead's Geoff Barrow was a kid who, like me, grew up devouring this world, buying 2000 AD week after week to see which perp was going to end up on the business end of Dredd's lawgiver. DROKK is Barrow's tribute to Mega-City One, coming out of a series of sessions with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury.
Dredd is the kind of character who continues to leave a vivid imprint on the minds of successive generations of comic book fans, but he's been remarkably ill-served when removed from the confines of 2000 AD. The Fink Brothers' musical tribute to Mega-City One, and Sylvester Stallone's hacky 1995 interpretation of Dredd, are best forgotten. Despite this, hopes for Pete Travis' forthcoming big-budget adaptation, simply titled Dredd, are reasonably high. Even Barrow, who began this project with Salisbury to provide the soundtrack to Travis' film, only to find their work left on the cutting room floor, said he thought the feature was going to be "fucking brilliant." But Dredd will feel less foreboding without their music. Armed with three vintage Oberheim two-voice synths, the pair reaches into the grubby, blackened heart of Mega-City One, via a soundtrack flooded with the kind of trepidation that classic 2000 AD artists like Brian Bolland so often conjured up.
DROKK reveals Barrow's comic book fandom, but it also highlights his taste in soundtracks. There's no escaping the specter of John Carpenter hanging over these tracks, especially his drone-heavy Assault on Precinct 13 score. But there's a relentless darkness at work here that even Carpenter might shy away from dipping into. The Escape From New York theme had a sanguine beauty to it, but Barrow and Salisbury lock into an obdurate form of austerity early on ("Lawmaster/Pursuit", "Helmet Theme") and never let the tension drop. Mostly, the atmosphere is meat-locker cold ("Scope the Block", "Clone Gunman"), and while it never reaches the extremities of Whitehouse or Throbbing Gristle, it bears a similar kind of ornery undertow. Occasionally they work in pure drones, adding a portentous type of beauty to tracks like "Exhale" and "Iso Hymn", making it feel like all the air just got sucked out of the room.
Elsewhere, it's not hard to hear traces of Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner and the work Tangerine Dream carried out for Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark. Like those albums, the music on DROKK provides a definite sense of journey, a feeling that we're being tangled up in plot twists that unravel, conclude, and maybe leave a few questions open at the end. Soundtracks that work well often create a strong sense of narrative when isolated from the visuals they're representing, and DROKK functions in much the same manner. It's even easy to picture the credits scrolling over "End Theme". Sadly, we'll never see Dredd gliding through the city on his Lawmaster while the pummeling "Titan Bound" echoes through a multiplex. But maybe it's better that way. Instead, this album provides Dredd fans with a chance to fix this music to their own favorite stories, giving the unrelenting decay and despair of Mega-City One the ferociously solemn musical backdrop it's always deserved.


The experimental troupe gathers Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and Mulatu Astatke for a sometimes-glorious, sometimes-chaotic attempt at attaining spiritual rapture.

Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith: Mummer Love

Mummer Love

To the uninitiated, Sufi mysticism can seem vaguely new age-y. It’s a misguided but not unreasonable thought—like voguish strains of body healing therapy, meditation, or most dance music, its raison d'être is that of psychic obliteration. Arch and ascetic, the Sufi aims to dropkick their consciousness into a state of dizzy ecstasy in the name of reaching God’s warm, annihilating glow.
The methods of getting there, however, are myriad, and passageways steeply sloped. The Sufi tradition— various as it may be—believes that man is the middle slice in a Venn diagram that junctures divine command and divine creation, and access to either side of the model is earned through sweaty rite. A famous faction of Istanbuli Sufis whirl while chanting, reaching somatic exhaustion by exhaling Quaranic verses as they spin in white linen skirts and tall hats—which, en masse and from a distance, appears like a human-scale vision of whipped meringue—whereas some Syrian, Iraqi, and Ethiopian divisions pray and recite passages for marathon hours to reach what in Arabic is referred to as a state of tawajjuh, or “orientation.” A meeting with the limits of a mind is the only path to egoic liquidation; worthiness, in other words, granted through discipline and self-erasure, is the key to becoming one with something greater.
A troupe known as Soundwalk Collective has explored a version of this idea since their conception in 2000. Over the past nineteen years, their belief in the primacy of raw, unmediated connection to a higher source has led them to a series of magpie collaborations in pursuit of the unknowable. There have been elegant payoffs in the past, some more tasteful than others. Now, they’ve assembled a colossus—Philip Glass, a titan of minimalism; Mulatu Astatke, creator of the term ‘Ethio-jazz,’; Patti Smith, polymathic punk ad-libber; and the Sufi group of Sheikh Ibrahim, whose muscular voices suggest the love of God incarnate. Together, they’ve produced Mummer Love, a large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.
The second in a triptych the Soundwalk team has termed “Perfect Vision,” Mummer Love summons the usual Sufistic tropes of memory, imagination, hallucination, and desire via incantatory repetition. Recorded onsite in the holy city of Harar, Ethiopia—an epicenter of Sufism in Africa—the field recordings and ambient pickups bear the faint whiff of travelers visiting a foreign place in active quest of truths not found in the usual metropolitan studio.
This is not necessarily a bad quality. It’s easy to be caught in the spirit of the squad’s spiral toward rapture. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud—whose work scans “Oriental Sufi” in spirit—serves as a conduit for their explorations. Rimbaud’s relationship to what he referred to as his “beloved Harar,” and the traces he left there, refract through the voice of Patti Smith, who riffs hard with his words as source text and prayer.
At times, it feels as if control is ceded entirely to Smith. Like the title of her praise poem to the poet, the track at the core of the work, and the source of the album’s namesake, the record is a genuinely tender performance of “Mummer Love.” (Mummering, per an old Newfoundlandian tradition, is a wintertime custom that involves participants dressing in disguise, visiting neighboring villages, and imploring strangers to guess their identities.) For decades, Smith has been a perma-mummer of Rimbaud’s, taking elements of his literary and physical corpus—the wide, lambent eyes, the haystack hair, the love of a bestial turn of phrase —and inhabiting them all like a comfortably cut suit.
The throughline between them here is direct, and the fit perfect. These are expressions of the same Smith who, early on, traded her muse in Bob Dylan for the French enfant terrible (and, lest one forgets, the title of her indelible “Piss Factory” is an oblique paean to the poet after she earned a swirly for reading a copy of his first collection, Illuminations, on the shift at work); the very Smith who still finds ways to incorporate urine, her favorite abject fascination, as a connective to the man she calls her sage (in the title track: “I will piss in the urinal you pissed in, a young man cursing existence, [...] piss and tears and urine”); the exact Smith whose eccentricities are always controlled, whose metaphors remain clipped and brutish, whose voice still sounds like the tumbling of stone and soil. (Her, again, on rain: “the piss of the angels.”)
Smith’s gleam also highlights, perhaps unintentionally, the detachment within the team, who operate less as one, and more like distinct actors in a multi-act theatre performance. The wild pile-up in, say, “Bad Blood,” breeds chaos, not singularity: identifiably, there’s Glass, the Sufi troupe, Astatke’s touch, Smith’s voice, but they never truly merge, only exist in parallel. In some moments, the super-groupy nature of the entire outfit feels precisely like what it is: the sum of its parts.  It frankly works best when the Sufi team stand on their own—take the hugely reverential “Aw Abadir”—but there is something of the plurality within the all-hands performances that feels like ideas swarming, not swimming.
An oft-used metaphor in Sufi poetry is one of a raindrop falling into the ocean as an accurate portrait of proper submission to God: once the drop joins water, it cedes its identity as droplet and becomes annihilated into the sea. The mystic’s goal is to surrender the “I,” and instead become one with divine glory. The “I”— or, rather, Smith’s “I,” Collective’s “I”—throughout “Mummer Love” never fully submerges, but remains afloat. Despite the earnestness of their chase for transcendence, it remains a chase. They are too there to dispossess themselves of themselves; too present to yield to something bigger.
There are glimmers of this idea, though. “La Maison de Rimbaud” is perhaps the most consummate attempt at spiritual capitulation, as recordings of the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) bubble alongside Philip Glass on the keys, quiet, airy and sacred. There are sparrows, footfalls, murmurings, ambient chatter, hallucinations of Harar at dusk. “Suddenly,” as Rimbaud may have put it, “dyeing the blueness, delirium, were slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight.”


On their quietly commanding darkwave record, songwriter Noah Anthony and poet Elaine Kahn use harsh noise and power electronics to show it’s possible to care for chaos.

Somewhere Else

Formerly working as Night Burger, Social Junk, and Form a Log (with Ren Schofield of Container), Profligate’s Noah Anthony arises from the polluted underground stream where noise, techno, and industrial music flow together. The title track of his new record, Somewhere Else—a collaboration with the poet Elaine Kahn—is rife with horror-movie menace in its opening moments: predatory bass, the sizzling curl of a downed power line, the creaks of treading through snow. But then, instead of growing more claustrophobic and intense, it grows more spacious and alluring. There’s a little song inside this black hole, a trace of dream-pop guitar and a voice that sometimes sounds like Panda Bear’s evil twin.
Lure them with danger then stun them with beauty—throughout Somewhere Else, that is Profligate’s game. Anthony uses the tropes of harsh noise and power electronics in a more subdued fashion as if he’s cooling them in baths of synthesizers. Hardware beats ripple around like massive sea serpents, unseen but outlined in the music they displace. The result is a quietly commanding darkwave record that blends ripped and lustrous textures, conjuring visions of Coil covering Cold Cave or Prurient doused in Depeche Mode.
Take “A Circle Of,” a taut roll of percussion scoured with breaths and beeps promises mayhem to come. But rather than boring down into carnage, it turns out to be the spine for a colossus of revolving chords and pretty, affectless vocal harmonies. Nor is the record entirely chained to an industrial sound: Some tracks bring in an 8-bit boss-battle feel, like “Enlist” and the granulated “Black Plate,” where Anthony flexes his technical skills, Edward Scissorhandsing a leafy synthesizer theme into a kind of unsettling topiary.
For a collaboration with a poet, Somewhere Else has a smartly understated way with words, which are often delivered so slowly or mutedly they serve a function more sonorous than conceptual. Only “Lose a Little” clears away at the end for an untrammeled exhibit of Kahn’s tender nihilism. Otherwise, her tuneful monotone blends well with Anthony’s slumberous croon and the music’s convulsions. By the time the penultimate track “Jet Black (King of the World)” rolls around, the composition thins out into something more linear and sparse, more like countless ephemeral tapes whose hardware jams Somewhere Else draws upon. The record leaves a lingering impression of how to care for chaos and the good intentions of violent impulses.


The follow-up to 2007's manga soundtrack Afro Samurai, Resurrection finds RZA working with many of his Wu-Tang cohorts.

Afro Samurai Resurrection

When RZA oversaw the Ghost Dog OST, it had the perfect kind of soundtrack symbiosis-- between lyrical themes, helpful bits of dialogue, and the Wu mythology, you could listen to the music and have a good idea what its parent film was about. But you didn't need to actually see the Forest Whitaker movie to know the record knocked something serious. Due to RZA never really breaking character when choosing alter-egos/side projects, I expected something similar from Afro Samurai Resurrection, the follow-up to 2007's manga soundtrack Afro Samurai. However, if I'm to take the music as face value indicative of its inspiration, the two things I'd figure about Afro is that 1) He derives his power from some sort of headband, and 2) He was a lot better at doing what he does about 15 years ago.
This whole "return of the 90s!" thing could be mashed into a fine paste before it reaches outside of internet writing circles, but the main problem hip-hop isn't sharing with, say, Slumberland and noise-pop redos is that most of the artists trying to revive Clinton-era styles actually recorded during that time. And really, RZA's too busy chopping it up at Guitar Center tech displays and on set with Russell Crowe to realistically compete with his past.  Sonically, it's not far from anything he did on Digi Snacks or Birth of a Prince-- simultaneously too slick and digital to work towards his strengths, but not plush enough to suggest he could have anything but a Rik Cordero video treatment without Afro's attendant Kill Bill meets Boondocks animation.
We've heard these elements before-- Shaolin hand-block snare, steamy funk guitar, bass that hits like a depth charge of The Chronic. But where RZA would weave each together into backdrops as bloody and vibrant as a freshly opened vein, here he's content to chop a sample and let it repeat every four bars, if not even more often than that, and it's hard to imagine anyone fighting to get the first crack. There are a couple of ripe exceptions, notably "Dead Birds", which has System of a Down (well, the bassist at least) helping conjure an El-P-style dystopia, but you just spend three minutes wishing it was an actual El-P track. "Girl Samurai Lullaby" could pass for some touristy Reggae Sunsplash shit from the softest day in Shabba Ranks' 1992; "Nappy Afro" is a throwback to a time when trying to rip off She'kspeare was the quickest way to radio rotation.
Things really aren't that much better on the mic-- god bless RZA, but at this point, he's all but ignoring meter completely, flowing like a three-legged race. Sixteen years after Method Man expounded on the genesis of Inspectah Deck's name, we can only sit back and watch him play himself: "I'm looking for some get back/ I'm quick to push your wig back/ You shouldn't have did that." Fortunately, we get some much-needed career resuscitation from Rah Digga (though neither beat does her justice) and "Whar", the strongest track and the one that has the least to do with the plot. And yet, even as Kool G Rap (sounding a lot like Jim Jones now that he's ad-libbing) and Ghostface kick nice punchlines about Al Capone's syphilis and Abe Lincoln's beard, it's still somewhat by-the-numbers.
But after the initial burst of brand recognition, we're left with the same Wu affiliate filler that most of us have been wisely ignoring for the better part of two decades. Killah Bees don't die, they multiply and spit martial raps full of discipline and bereft of any iota of personality that could distinguish between Wu-Tang Name Generator figments like Prodigal Sunn, Rugged Monk, and Moe Roc. The Black Knights stand out by matter of (relative) familiarity, and if you happen to be a blood relative of someone on "Take The Sword Pt. III", you might be able to make it through all 10 minutes.
Look, it's no fun either way-- to plow through Afro Samurai Resurrection, or to bitch and moan about back in the day, a fate that befalls something like 99% of all mainstream releases. But at least the video game looks tight, which is something you can't say about Wu's output in that market back in the rec-room era. In this economy, that's just choosing your battles wisely.


The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience.

¡Ay!

Lucrecia Dalt is gleefully cerebral. Over the last decade, the Colombian artist has used her oblique experimental music to ponder metaphysical phenomena and the nature of human consciousness. Dalt has a fondness for philosophical contemplation, and concepts from her training as a geotechnical engineer often creep into her work. On her new album ¡Ay!, she reprises this erudite mode. This time around, the story centers on Preta, an extraterrestrial entity that arrives on our planet and confronts earthly conceptions of temporality, embodiment, and love for the first time. Across 10 tracks, Dalt sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with, traced with ambling congas, jazzy double bass, and quivering tides of distortion. Unspooling the rhythmic threads of these styles, she weaves them with strands of opacity and dissonance. Through it all, Dalt poses questions about the rhizomatic essence of time, skillfully using texture and acoustics to make good on the promise of narrative-driven experimental music.
¡Ay! isn’t just technically masterful; it’s also an audacious statement on cultural identity. In the Western world, traditional or folkloric genres from Latin America, especially ones with African and/or Indigenous origins, are seen as static and creatively stale. These are presumed to be relics of the past, styles that few experimental musicians would touch. But on ¡Ay!, Dalt spurns that kind of colonial thinking. Instead of dismissing the genres of her youth, she transforms and stretches them, demonstrating how capacious they really are. The result is an invitation to broaden narrow interpretations of Latin American music and identity, embracing multiplicity and idiosyncrasy in the process.
All this context might sound heady, but ¡Ay! doesn’t require you to fully comprehend the details of its narrative, or even study its underlying sources. The music is poignant and meticulously arranged, and all you have to do is surrender to it. It helps that the engineering of ¡Ay! is pristine, often evoking a smoky, afterhours lounge, the kind you might find in a spy film from the 1940s. At times, it is so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly in your ear—perhaps a byproduct of her recent ventures as a film and TV composer.
Take the standout “El Galatzó.” A somber double bass vibrates, a flute flutters in the air, and galactic synths linger like a UFO hanging in the sky. The warm, open tapping of bongos, played here with wooden sticks, converges with metallic synth stabs, allowing the rhythmic silhouette of a bolero to appear. Dalt assumes the perspective of Preta, keeping her voice low and close to the mic. She enunciates her words with intention, each fricative consonant arriving with controlled, breathy precision. The track unfolds at a slower tempo than bolero and son are typically played, giving it a spellbinding and serpentine touch. By the time the final verse arrives, it no longer feels like Preta is describing her experience of the tangible world; it almost resembles a manifesto, as if Dalt herself refuses to conform to restrictive ideas of identity and genre. “No obedezco a tu verdad lineal,” Dalt sings, high-pitched strings crescendoing in the background: “Romperé tu narrativa/Y alteraré tu paisaje aplanado.” (“I don’t obey to your linear truth…/I’ll disrupt your narrative/And alter your flattened landscape.”)
“Atemporal,” “Bochinche,” and “La desmesura” perfectly capture the genre-crushing force of this record. On “La desmesura,” forlorn clarinets and trumpets resemble a cartoon character tiptoeing into a quiet room. There’s a wistful call-and-response chorus, the kind you might find in a Cuban son of the 1930s. But the song slowly progresses into industrial decay; by its end, mechanical whirring and a strutting double bass collide. “Bochinche” contains similar moments of artful incongruence: Snare drums pitter-pat steadily alongside dapples of cosmic synths, and Dalt briefly retreats into the feeling of a classic Latin American love song, delivering romantic, nostalgic lyrics. But before long, the freakiness returns—she drops phrases like “Cripsis plástica bípeda” (“Bipedal plastic crypsis”). Her style is so hypnotic, you barely register that her words are esoteric references to animal life.
¡Ay! often feels like it’s suspended in time, but somewhere in a faraway galaxy, thousands of years in the future. On the penultimate track, “Enviada,” synths tremble into serrated laser beams and fuzzy waves of distortion descend like cryptic transmissions from space, all over a doleful clarinet and the percussive echoes of bolero. The effect is disorienting and anachronistic, but it also points to the album’s foremost gift, one that transcends even its intellectual and technical ambition. Dalt inverts tradition and forces us into the unknown, unsettling any rigid assumptions about spaces that music of the Latin American diaspora is supposed to occupy.


In the wake of Main Pop Girl 2019, Jaime Brooks delivers a patchwork of dense, often cartoonish reimaginings of those songs, exploring pop’s fluidity with a deft, funny, and heartfelt touch.

Pain Mop Girl 2020

In a 2019 Q&A, Default Genders’ Jaime Brooks likened her artistic practice to fanfiction, and to cumulative video game modding. “Modding communities in gaming are just like fanfiction communities,” she writes. “People pouring tons of time and heart and effort into an IP someone else owns for pure love of the thing. That’s what motivates the best and coolest ideas. That’s how this stuff is supposed to work.” This is the conceit of Pain Mop Girl 2020—both a showcase for Brooks’ bold, fractured songwriting, and a convincing argument for this strain of digital democratic thinking. Restless art invites restless interpretation.
Brooks knows this well: last year’s Main Pop Girl 2019 was a masterclass in conceptual splatter, with reference points as far-reaching as Dylan, jungle, and the indie electronic sounds of the early 2010s. The music is humid, gestural—constantly shifting under its own weight and without a foothold in any particular style or framework. That Brooks’ clubby, nightcore-adjacent cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” fits as well as it does is a testament to the record’s perpetual motion: Having to square the Boss with a DIY rave only sucks you further into the relentless flow.
That sense of whiplash makes Main Pop Girl 2019 well-suited to the project of a remix album. And Pain Mop Girl 2020 is that, more or less: a patchwork of dense, often cartoonish reimaginings from similarly-minded internet futurists, as well as two entirely new tracks, “cascadia subduction zone” and “am i gonna die?” On the latter, shuffling percussion and a half-slurred vocal delivery are proxies for self-doubt. “If I survive is it just/Because some paperwork got lost?” Brooks asks, collapsing the distance between the bureaucratic and the existential in a turn of phrase. The aesthetic palette is muted, but the lyrics remain sharp and searching.
And though much of Pain Mop Girl 2020 is similarly attuned to questions of life, death, and material reproduction, there’s no single throughline. Canadian electronic tinkerer Drainpuppet’s take on “pharmacoma” ditches the frenetic drum programming of the original in favor of low-fi alt-rock, serrated pop melodies, and vocal processing that feels of a piece with big-tent EDM. The Tom Waits-referencing “christmas card from a scammer in minneapolis (live)” benefits from the addition of piano and a newly uncluttered ambient backing; the fact that it wasn’t actually recorded live itself points back to Waits, whose faux-live Nighthawks at the Diner is also set in an imagined lounge. It’s a flirtation with a certain kind of computer-controlled humanity that permeates the entire collection.
The album’s most revealing rework is “sophie (wren dove lark edit),” which appears here in its third incarnation. Originally written for Magical Pessimism 2014, the track was transformed on Main Pop Girl 2019 from a fairly straightforward slow-burner into something slick and free, with pitched-up vocals as an anchor for lyrics about grappling with gender identity. The Pain Mop Girl 2020 version is her first under the name Jaime, and with new pronouns; singer-songwriter Wren Dove Lark’s rerecorded vocals, strained and ecstatic, speak to the universality of the writing, and to changeability as a guiding ethos in both content and form. No take is definitive because the music is fundamentally iterative, and nothing is ever finished.
Even on the closer, the second and more inspired of the album’s two “checking in with the old gang” remixes, there’s a hint of continuity. In the hands of GLITCHLETTE, a self-described emo and synthpop musician based out of Washington, the track becomes an ethereal duet. Its central refrain is restructured as call-and-response between two voices: “Do you feel it?/Do these tired old lies feel true?/Well I used to believe them/But I’m not sure I still do.” There’s renewed pathos in the experience of an answered question, but an encroaching wave of guitars keeps a tinge of darkness in the mix.And at the end, just before it all fades out, there’s a crucial bit of barely-audible studio banter: “That was just extra, for fun. OK, let’s do it again.” Brooks and her collaborators suggest that all the fun’s in fluidity—not exactly in recursion, but in homage, references, covers, and antecedents, explicit or otherwise.


On her debut LP, the Portland songwriter turns her incisive gaze inward, writing from the feelings in her heart and the visions in her head.

Haley Heynderickx: I Need to Start a Garden

I Need to Start a Garden

That Haley Heynderickx’s debut album exists at all is a testament to her tenacity. The singer-songwriter’s initial attempts to record a full-length, following the modest success of her 2016 Fish Eyes EP, collapsed. First, sessions in a cold barn just outside her adopted hometown of Portland sapped her energy and confidence. Then, a self-funded effort sapped her bank account. Even her third attempt, which ultimately yielded I Need to Start a Garden, was fraught with obstacles: Routine technical difficulties in the studio made for endless false starts and do-overs.
Eight songs ultimately made their way to tape, and Heynderickx’s mettle shows through in all of them. I Need to Start a Garden carves paths through loneliness and confesses long-harbored uncertainty, doing both with the acuity of someone comfortable enough to be honest about her doubts. Though the album is supported by a number of other musicians, Heynderickx’s craft feels solitary. In many passages, she accompanies herself on just acoustic or electric guitar, using a fingerpicking technique adapted from the style she practiced as a kid taking lessons from a local bluegrass player. Often, she pulls delicate, melodic tendrils and driving bass rhythms from her instrument simultaneously. “I’m just a sucker for little details—and a loner at times—so I have to become my own bass player,” she recently said.
Loner that she is, Heynderickx tends to turn her incisive gaze inward, writing from the feelings in her heart and the visions in her head. When other people do surface in her songs, they appear almost as faceless silhouettes—like in the aptly titled “No Face,” where an aloof partner leaves Heynderickx to wonder what about her is so wrong. “Jo” names its subject, but captures her in uncertain terms, with only the tense of the lyrics suggesting that she’s no longer around. Heynderickx demurs when it comes to the specifics, instead using metaphorical language to capture Jo through the fuzzy, romantic lens of memory: Her kindness was “like honeycomb holding the bee in the folds.”
More animate are the characters Heynderickx invents to keep herself company. In her “Untitled God Song,” she imagines her creator as a vision in knockoff Coach, conjuring sunsets when she forgets to shut off her headlights. Heynderickx writes here with an expansive, inclusive understanding of feminine perfection that feels uplifting, even if the theism that frames it is inaccessible to some listeners. The specimens that populate “The Bug Collector” are among her most imaginative: a vindictive centipede, a priest reincarnated as a praying mantis, and a grumpy millipede, personified by brass voices that banter with Heynderickx’s spry guitar as she tries to remove them from her home, lest they ruin her loved one’s “perfect morning.”
It’s hard to imagine Heynderickx singing about anthropomorphic insects with a straight face, and indeed, well-timed levity is a crux of her songwriting. She’s inclined to break up moments of intense emotional candor with spurts of humor. No song does this more effectively than the album’s lead single, “Oom Sha La La.” Here, Heynderickx likens her mental state to the decaying contents of her fridge, admits to being “doubtful of all that [she has] dreamed of,” and then launches into a chorus of gleefully delivered nonsense syllables. It’s a song about embracing the absurdity of the everyday when the big picture is hidden from view; she ends it by frantically shouting the declaration that titles the album. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of young people today, their gardens, and the perennial effort to combat existential doubt by cultivating something beautiful. Haley Heynderickx may not have a garden just yet, but if beauty can cure uncertainty, this album should be enough for now.


Touring the gritty underbelly of Ahmedabad, India to the sounds of swaggering synth and G-funk, the 25-year-old rapper’s debut makes an auteur’s plea for authenticity in a transactional world.

RUAB

Dhanji has spent the past four years working feverishly to probe the limits of his genre-blending iconoclasm and restless, larger-than-life imagination. The seven mixtapes he’s dropped since 2019—five in 2020 alone—are all over the map, setting his off-kilter, multi-lingual flow over everything from stoner boom-bap (The Dhaniya Tape) and cinematic trap (Drive-In Cinema) to drug-addled industrial music (Zorba collab DZs Control) and spectral flips of old Bollywood classics (Lab Rats). His trend-dodging alt-rap has won over a small legion of fans captivated by the emotional resonance of his voice and the fragmented unpredictability of his bars, delivered in a loopy, lean-laced Ahmedabadi street patois. But it all felt a little rough around the edges, like lab experiments that broke containment before they were fully formed: Dhanji was still looking for a sound to fit his outsized ambitions.
Not anymore. All he needed was some funk. On his debut full-length, RUAB, the 25-year-old rapper borrows heavily from the genre’s various incarnations—the raucous hard funk of James Brown, the smooth, portamento synth leads of West Coast G-funk, even the mongrel psych-funk of iconic Bollywood composers Kalyanji-Anandji and R.D. Burman—to create the perfect cinematic backdrop to his absurd, off-the-rails rhymes. Propulsive basslines slouch and swagger in lockstep with tightly syncopated drums and bright horns spar with keening synths, all filtered through the dusty, sepia-toned lens of 1970s Indian parallel cinema. RUAB sounds like the background score for a Blaxploitation-meets-Hindi-film-noir movie, with Dhanji and his hometown of Ahmedabad as the main protagonists.
Samples from a 1988 CNN interview with James Brown and the 1954 Bollywood classic Taxi Driver are littered across the record, along with plenty of pop culture references ranging from Bill Burr to Kishore Kumar. The Taxi Driver reference is particularly telling. In the film, Dev Anand plays a cabbie nicknamed “Hero,” an everyman do-gooder who hangs out in seedy nightclubs and gets entangled in a love triangle with two struggling entertainers. At its heart, Taxi Driver is a love letter to Mumbai, as seen through the windshield of Hero’s 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. On RUAB, Dhanji—a self-described cinephile—gives the same treatment to his hometown of Ahmedabad, or as he likes to call it, “Amdavad.”
But it’s not the Ahmedabad of contemporary national imagination that he wants to celebrate, with its prohibition-state social conservatism, its neighborhoods segregated by faith (a legacy of the 2002 pogroms that killed thousands), and its new hyper-capitalist icons (the city is home to at least 49 of India’s 170-odd billionaires). Dhanji’s Amdavad is a grimier place, full of struggling petit-bourgeois traders, chain-smoking gangsters, and corrupt, power-hungry police. It’s a city of narrow-laned pols and dimly lit highway underpasses, where delinquent teenagers hide from the cops as they get drunk on illicit liquor. Dhanji and his pan-India crew of producers and collaborators—including Circle Tone, MLHVR, EBE, and unfuckman—invoke funk’s sleazy vitality as an antidote to the chrome-and-glass sterility the city’s development-obsessed leaders seek to impose on his Amdavad.
Walking—or maybe driving—down these streets, Dhanji is RUAB’s quirky everyman “hero,” alternately amused and perplexed by the contradictions of creating art within the constraints of contemporary capitalism. Blending autobiography with narrative fiction (and a generous helping of gleefully juvenile humor), he prods at the tension between external value—as denoted by sales receipts and streaming numbers—and the artist’s intrinsic worth. There are other concerns too: class and mental health on the lovesick synth-funk of “Magaj Ka Bimari,” meditations on contemporary masculinity on the sparse, darkly hued “Mulaqat” (which features a starkly introspective verse from Mumbai MC Gravity). But the album’s best moments arise from its central thematic conflict, between ruab (usually translated as “panache,” or maybe “swag”) and abru (a Dhanji neologism for externally derived value). The title track’s pulsing bassline and hypnotic drum grooves set the scene as Dhanji blends rap braggadocio with existential doubt, a nihilist philosopher with a penchant for loony ad-libs. His stream-of-consciousness rhymes jump from messianic flex to identity crisis to knowingly cringe visual puns, all delivered in an idiosyncratic, beat-switching flow that sounds like Lil Wayne channeling Javed Jaffrey’s performance on “Mumbhai.”
Over the languid skulk of “In Event of Change, Money & Notoriety,” Dhanji grapples with the corrupting influence of fame and cash, fusing pathos with goofy piss-takes on “struggling artist” clichés. Posse cut “What Would the Credit Department Do?” brings in a coterie of underground rappers from across the country—Bagi Munda, Faizan, Arpit Bala, Lit Trust, and Siyaahi—to run roughshod over PSV’s constantly shifting drum grooves, with multilingual lyrics that shine a spotlight on the transactional nature of a music industry that consistently undervalues them. There’s more than a hint of punk rock’s influence on this one, from its Devo-style demystification of music industry glamour to the stomping menace of the guest features. “Fuck a corporation,” Dhanji snarls over a reverb-drenched drum fill. “But it all wouldn’t have been possible/Without a corporation/Par kab tak? (But for how long?)”
The album’s emotional and thematic center is the eight-minute-long “1 Khabri / 2 Numbari.” The first half of the track sticks to the blueprint, all lilting keys and chromatic bass, as Dhanji once again focuses his attention on the interplay between class, social capital, and self-identity, riding the beat like a leaned-out Gujju Danny Brown. Then the keys give way to jagged industrial synths and cavernous sub-bass. Dhanji finally drops the sneer he’s been holding up as a shield and opens up about the personal trauma he’s been hinting at throughout the record: an alcoholic father’s repeated trips to jail, his mother’s suicidal ideation, poverty’s corrosive action on the human spirit. Coming hot on the heels of the insalubrious bounce and cartoonish menace of the rest of the album, this sudden swerve into true darkness hits like a masterfully disguised suckerpunch.
Not all of Dhanji’s left-field experiments are as successful. The classical piano-led lounge-funk of “Put That on Wax” sounds like it belongs in a luxury cruise commercial rather than an experimental rap album. When the producers stray from funk-as-world-building into straight tribute—as Circle Tone does on the P-Funk indebted “Thaltej Blues”—the result can sound flat and unconvincing. Even with these missteps, RUAB is a refreshingly unique and rewarding debut from an artist making a strong claim as Indian rap’s most innovative auteur.


The indie-pop veterans mix together classics, rarities, some new songs, and instrumentals for the original film soundtrack.

Belle and Sebastian: Days of the Bagnold Summer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Belle and Sebastian have soundtracked so many real-life depressed teenagerhoods that they practically invented the genre of “songs to stare out car windows to.” This is probably why, in their 23-year tenure as indie-pop royalty, so many movies and TV shows have relied on their songs, from Juno to High Fidelity to “The O.C.” and “Gilmore Girls” and beyond.
Their original film soundtrack Days of the Bagnold Summer will feel familiar to anyone who’s heard the band underscore a dreamy montage sequence. The film, an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name from rookie director and Inbetweeners star Simon Bird, stars Earl Cave (son of Nick Cave) as a teen equally obsessed with metal and moping in the bathtub. His ennui is only heightened when plans to visit his father in the U.S. are canceled and he’s forced to spend summer vacation alone with his mum.
The soundtrack consists of 11 new Belle and Sebastian songs and some instrumentals, along with “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” from the 1998 This Is Just a Modern Rock Song EP, and “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” off of 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister. Also on the album is the ancient and excellent “Safety Valve,” a paean to codependency Stuart Murdoch wrote before Belle and Sebastian formed but had never released. “It’s maybe 25 years old,” he wrote in a press release. “The only time I can remember ever playing it was in a coffee shop with a friend of mine and people scratching their heads.”
Perhaps we live in a time more accustomed to anxiety and excessive emotional dependence on friends, because there’s no need for head-scratching now: The lyrics (“’Cause sometimes I just need a pal/Thanks for being my safety valve… Hey, I’ve been there before/I’ll save you, it’s a serious bore”) nail the feeling of knowing you’re emotionally overburdening a friend but doing it anyway.
Days of the Bagnold Summer’s instrumentals, which comprise the score of the film, are actually are some of the album’s best moments. “We Were Never Glorious,” a greensleeves-y fiddle track, nails the delicate balance of “hopeful yet totally melancholic” and is just the kind of music suited to walking around pretending you’re in a movie.
The new songs, meanwhile, feature a return to form for Belle and Sebastian, whose more recent releases have ventured away from their trademark style of “puckishly depressed” and into explorations of the dancy, the jazzy, and, occasionally, the kinda bad. No one can blame them for wanting to experiment, but it’s good to see they’ve shelved the synths for this album. When you have Belle and Sebastian soundtrack your film, there’s likely a particular sound you’re after, and the band doesn’t disappoint.
Some numbers, like the excellent “Sister Buddha,” seem like “Classic Belle and Sebastian”—vivid storytelling conveyed through pithy lyrics and sprinkled with empathy. “Step across the lonely threshold of your selfish mind,” Murdoch instructs “Sister Buddha,” “and embrace the loving goodness of your human kind.” Okay! Good advice.
Others, however, sound like “Belle and Sebastian doing an impression of Belle and Sebastian.” “Did the Day Go Just Like You Wanted?” seems a bit like an older outfit trying to recapture the tone they’d perfected in a younger iteration. Lyrics like “When the tears roll down on your cheek/You know you’re alive/Let the rain pour down/Let the winter come” feel on the nose in a way they’ve never been before.
Perhaps it’s the lyrical complexity of the “oldies” on the album that throw this particularly into focus, making the newer songs seem relatively facile. Which isn’t to say those songs aren’t good—just, it’s hard to beat the champs, even when you are the champs. “Nobody writes them like they used to,” Stuart Murdoch sings on the re-recording of “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” “so it may as well be me.” Good point.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Crafted in tandem with the Gost Zvuk affiliate Flaty, the Moscow producer’s second album balances streamlined electro pop with a hint of rave mayhem.

Your Need

The Moscow producer Yana Kedrina put out two EPs and a full-length in the span of three years, but she hit a wall after 2017’s murky hardware outing, Ariadna. “I was a lot more closed off, and I saw myself like a romantic hero who is always alone," the artist also known as Kedr Livanskiy said recently. “I reconstructed my view of the world, my own mind and how to better connect with people.” She’s not alone. The past few years have seen a number of formerly solo producers, like Laurel Halo, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Holly Herndon, moving beyond the parameters of the self and opening up their processes to collaborators.
On Your Need, Livanskiy works in tandem with the Gost Zvuk-affiliated producer Flaty, whose beats add musculature and crispness where in the past she often cloaked her productions in a lo-fi haze. The songs are tighter, too. Unlike Ariadna and January Sun, nothing on Your Need exceeds the four-minute mark, landing the album  squarely in the electro-pop zone rather than the Russian underground dance scene.
Such directness leads to Kedr Livanskiy’s catchiest album to date, even if it means that the best tracks are over too soon. Despite the airy vocal hook and 1990s-inspired breakbeat of a standout like “Sky Kisses,” it tantalizes and then starts to fade away. “Why Love” opens like a classic New Order production, with its ghostly minor-key synth melody and throbbing drum programming, while Livanskiy’s wordless harmonies impart acute heartache.
At times, that terseness can go against a track’s strengths. The frenetic “Bounce 2” combines synth bass, Kedrina’s slivered voice, and a dizzying beat that clocks nearly 150 bpm. But it doesn’t last long enough to truly evoke a sense of delirium on the dancefloor. And the thrilling use of dub space on “Lugovoy (November Dub)” would be well worth lingering in for a tad longer. The skin-prickling “Kiska” (perfectly matched to its body horror video) strikes the perfect balance, its primitive production and creepy, childlike vocals just eerie enough to leave you wanting more.
Named for the Russian holiday surrounding the summer solstice (and shortest night of the year), closer “Ivan Kupala” is a party anthem in the making. Flaty and Kedrina craft a celebratory track worthy of Exit Planet Dust, full of caffeinated snare rolls, DJ backspins, and shaking tambourine. When it all gives way to Kedrina’s voice and a plaintive keyboard melody, it seems destined to raise hands in dingy clubs from St. Petersburg to London. Like any sweaty bash, it’ll make you wish it never had to end.


The debut LP from this young Florida band is first and foremost a great guitar album packed with sing-along hooks, but there's more going on beneath the surface.

Astro Coast

There's plenty to like about Astro Coast, the debut LP from the youthful Floridians in Surfer Blood, but first and foremost it's a great guitar album. So what exactly does that mean these days? Often, it's a reference to either a display of astounding technical chops or innovative use of tone and texture, qualities which, to be quite honest, aren't particularly present here. This is a great guitar album in the way Weezer's Blue Album, Built to Spill's Keep It Like a Secret, or, more recently, Japandroids' Post-Nothing are: six-strings serve as a multiplier for hooks, making it every bit as easy and fun to air guitar with as it is to sing along to.
Nowhere is this more true than on their breakout single "Swim", which spent the second half of last year generating so much praise that it threatened to make any future album unnecessary or future hype redundant. But even after so many listens, its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting-- especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. It may sound like they're hitting you with their best shot, but after an impassioned "oh oh oh!" from singer John Paul Pitts, Surfer Blood explodes into an even bigger chorus and "Swim" becomes almost overpoweringly fist-pumping.
While "Swim" might just remind you of any number of Buzz Bin one-offs now stocking whatever's left of the used-CD store racket, Astro Coast has a strong supporting cast. Throughout, even the titles remark upon how each could've evolved from a killer guitar part into a full-on song-- "Floating Vibes", "Harmonix", "Neighbour Riffs". "Floating Vibes" lumbers with a chest-puffing, two-chord stomp that could evoke either Angus Young or Stephen Malkmus, before the guitars dovetail-- one chiming and light, the other a vocal-leading riff that makes Pitts' handling of the melodic contours sound effortless. The melodic intuitiveness of Astro Coast is in large part due to the interplay heard on "Floating Vibes"-- if every riff is stand-alone hummable, then the vocals take care of themselves.
Surfer Blood know from a good hook, but perhaps what's more promising is how most of their compositions build to their rewards. "Take It Easy" does the opposite at its outset, but by its midpoint the fidgety rhythms cool to a mesmerizing motorik that's continued on "Harmonix". "Slow Jabroni" is lonesome and crowded, distorted acoustics serving as a dusty backdrop for Pitts' Isaac Brock-ian carny barking. The riff that introduces "Anchorage" is as blunt as its sentiments ("I don't want to spin my wheels/ I don't got no wheels to spin"), but its second half unfurls a major-key riff that evokes the roomier compositions of Dinosaur Jr. Putting the record's two longest songs back-to-back might not be the canniest bit of sequencing, but it shows the confidence Surfer Blood have in their ability to escape the confines of three-minute power-pop.
Though they hail from West Palm Beach and come at the tail-end of 2009's indie feel-good beach party, for all of the oceanic imagery that the band name, album title, and cover art convey, Astro Coast is lyrically landlocked and lonely. Pitts is straightforward when he's not being shrouded by the springy reverb favored by the Shins' James Mercer, and at points, he reads pointedly early-00s emo. Topics of concern include confusion about romance, confusion about friendship, confusion about the future, confusion about religion. It's hard not to think that most of Astro Coast was borne of a relationship dissolved by distance, especially if we're to take the otherwise chipper "Twin Peaks" at face value: Pitts travels to Syracuse, watches David Lynch films, and wrenches out lyrics of sexual frustration that suggest most of the drive was spent listening to Pinkerton.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Surfer Blood spent the latter part of 2009 touring with Japandroids, who, along with BOAT and Cymbals Eat Guitars align in a faux-genre some of us have jokingly referred to as "alt-bro"-- guitar-heavy indie rock that's probably influenced by Pavement, likely about girls, and almost certainly made by people who at first blush sound more fun to get a beer with than, say, Dirty Projectors. But it's unfair to think of Astro Coast as reactionary in some way to the more overtly ambitious indie stars of last year-- there are no chamber sections, no pocket harmonies, no integration of West African rhythms (ok, there's some of that). But ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, "classic indie" album in your own dorm room, and if that's what Surfer Blood set out to do, Astro Coast succeeds wildly.


A psychogeographic survey of the Himalayan region of Ladakh rendered in ambient drones and harsh noise, Fatima doubles as an uneasy chronicle of capitalist exploitation and generational trauma.

Fatima

Fear, anger, and alienation have long been the dominant emotions in Ruhail Qaisar’s music. His early solo releases and live sets—under the now defunct moniker SISTER—married the blackened death metal of his short-lived band Vajravarah with power electronics, no wave, and post-industrial noise. A guitar-and-laptop-toting techno shaman harnessing the forces of cosmic chaos for a shock-and-awe assault on the sensibilities of Mumbai and Delhi hipster elites, Qaisar crafted music so brain-pulverizingly visceral that it drowned out all thought. A friend once called it a palate cleanser for the soul.
Qaisar, however, had higher ambitions than crafting sonic mind-wipes, and sometime in 2016 he shifted gears. On that year’s Ltalam EP, he pared back the redlining noise in favor of tense, eldritch atmospheres and mutated found sounds—spectral transmissions from a pre-modern Ladakh, the geographically isolated and geopolitically contested Himalayan region that is Qaisar’s home. He also started experimenting with analog photography and film, drawing these disparate endeavors into an overarching project of hauntological excavation meant to tease the phantoms of Ladakh’s past out from their hiding places in its late-capitalist, tourist-economy present. He carries that work forward on his debut album, Fatima, an uneasy chronicle of personal and generational trauma, and a psychogeographic survey of his homeland’s windswept granite peaks and shrubland valleys.
The Ladakh that Qaisar mourns on Fatima isn’t the mystical and isolated “last Shangri-La” of European imagination, nor is it the tokenized Himalayan fantasy of contemporary Indian tourists. Instead it is the hybrid culture of a polity set on the crossroads of the Silk Route, a land where Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and remnants of pre-Buddhist religion rubbed shoulders with each other—a society whose inhabitants, according to anthropologist Martin A. Mills, once saw themselves as part of a complex cosmology of spirits, protectors and itinerant demons. It’s a world of chthonic rituals, exorcisms, and possessions, of regular communion with the supernatural.
It’s also a Ladakh that is rapidly disappearing—its borders redrawn by 20th-century nationalism, the phasphun system of inter-religious harmony shredded by politics of communalism, its few remaining totems crumbling under the pressures of rapid technological change and what Qaisar calls the “soft-power subjugation of the tourism industry.”
Fatima is an elegy for this Ladakh, and for the futures it could not realize. The album’s discordant drones and atonal shrieks are inscribed with the trauma of recent history—both the external violence of colonialism and militarization and the psychic violence of industrialization and late capitalism. As we traverse this ruined, decaying landscape, we stumble upon echoes of the past—bucolic vistas of serene beauty, revenants of cosmological horror—that Qaisar has painstakingly resurrected through field recordings and experimental transmutations of traditional Ladakhi music and lore.
Ponderous bass pulses in the background of “Fatima’s Poplar” as an alien skittering noise dominates the foreground while a voice reads an excerpt from English philosopher Nick Land’s Circuitries with theatrical flourish. Halfway in, gothic performance gives way to a slab of distorted noise, its edges keening like a chainsaw cutting through rusty metal. But while Land and his accelerationist contemporaries embraced capitalism’s creative destruction with revolutionary ecstasy, Qaisar’s invocation is more ambivalent, suffused with dread of the promised singularity.
On “Sachu Melung,” a high-pitched synth whistles in and out, like the wind through Ladakh’s craggy valleys. Disembodied voices trill and murmur in pre-lingual syllables on anti-tourism meditation “Abandoned Hotels of Zangsti” and post-rockish “Seventh Dream (Ramazan’s Wedding),” suggesting the ghostly whisperings of insurgent spirits hiding out in the vast Ladakhi dominion of rock and scrubland. That sense of menace crystallizes into primordial horror on the brooding, atmospheric “Painter Man,” its throbbing basslines and Dis Fig’s spectral whisper eventually giving way to a Lynchian cacophony of horns and gongs.
Elsewhere, Qaisar grapples more directly with recent history. “Partition (From Astore to Leh)” explores the psychological scars of Britain’s hasty exit from the subcontinent through the lens of Ladakhi experience. The historiography of Partition is dominated by the paroxysms of communal violence and mass displacement that engulfed Punjab and Bengal, and the decades-long conflict that is still simmering in Kashmir. Ladakh’s wounds were less visible but no less profound. Qaisar’s invocation of Astore and Leh—two cities with a long shared history—is a nod to that geopolitically enforced separation, a split evoked in the mournful interplay between two achingly serene chords. In the distance, you can hear rumbling thunder: the war drums of nationalism and modernity.
Fatima reaches its sepulchral apotheosis on closer “The Fanged Poet.” Qaisar’s distortion-drenched guitar unfurls with stoner-doom gravitas over a ritualistic drum beat, while Rohit Gupta’s trumpet squalls in increasingly tortured agony. Delay-soaked field recordings lurk beneath the sludge, occasionally surfacing as half-formed snatches of barely heard conversation, lending a further sense of surreality. The guitar and drums build to a slow-burn crescendo before fading away, leaving only the death throes of Gupta’s trumpet before it, too, retreats into silence. It’s a hypnotic eulogy for a world that has passed, leaving behind only its ghosts and its scars.