The pop-punk band ages gracefully on a heart-achingly earnest record about parenthood.

The Wonder Years: The Hum Goes on Forever

The Hum Goes on Forever

Even before he was a parent, Dan Campbell felt the crushing weight of adult expectations. “I’m 26/All the people I graduated with all have kids, all have wives,” he roared on 2013’s “Passing Through a Screen Door,” before bemoaning his doomed, lonely outlook: “Did I fuck up?” Nearly 10 years later, the Wonder Years’ frontman lives in a South Jersey suburb of Philadelphia with his wife and three-year-old son. But anxiety is like matter: It can’t be destroyed. Even after your worst fears don’t come true, they take on another shape. Now that Campbell has a child, there’s the other half of “Passing” to worry about: “I don’t want my children growing up to be anything like me.” On The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years write the impossible: a pop punk parenthood record that attempts to grow up without growing out of their hooks and heart-achingly earnest outlook.
The Wonder Years take a serialized approach to songwriting, connecting characters across albums, with Campbell as an unreliable narrator. He writes about what, and who, he knows: his college dropout friends, his ex-girlfriends, specific locations in Philadelphia, down to the street number. There’s a new addition in the cast on The Hum Goes on Forever: His son, Wyatt, who stars as the album’s thematic center. There he is haunting Campbell’s nightmares on “Cardinals II”; his tiny gloves tucked into Campbell’s winter coat are a “reminder that I’m not alone.” And then there’s his very own “Wyatt’s Song (Your Name),” which measures his son in heartbeats, in first words, in breaths while he’s sleeping. Like the best the Wonder Years songs, it is both littered with specific details and so fervently emotional that it feels universal.
As he stares terrified into the future, Campbell also revisits proper nouns from the band’s past and tries to tie up loose ends. Colleen, who skipped town on 2011’s “Coffee Eyes,” still weighs heavy on “The Paris of Nowhere.” The song is a love letter to Philadelphia, with all of its potholes and junkyard fires. The Eagles won their first Super Bowl after the Wonder Years finished recording 2018’s Sister Cities, and Campbell makes up for lost time with nostalgic shrines to “St. Nick Foles.” There’s Madelyn, a dark, brooding companion on The Greatest Generation who now appears increasingly itinerant on “Oldest Daughter.” She’s sleeping in public libraries; Campbell is settled in the suburbs. He wants to send her a birthday gift and pictures of his children, but she doesn’t have a permanent address. When Campbell calls back to a line from that album—“We both know how this ends”—it echoes with the distance between who he was in 2013 and who he is now.
Among aging punks who felt old at 26, there’s an unspeakable fear of cooling off, quieting down, and hanging up the riffs. Sister Cities backed away from the outbursts and intensity in favor of fingerpicked melodies to mixed success. Their most recent release was a toothless 2020 acoustic rework of their catalog, complete with wispy string accompaniments. But luckily on The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years deliver the shredded vocals and taut palm-muted guitars that made them Warped Tour heroes without sacrificing the depth and nuance in Campbell’s writing. Opener “Doors I Painted Shut” begins with just Campbell’s voice and a guitar and builds anticipation by layering doubled vocals, guitars, and percussion until it surges into an appropriately Wonder Years refrain: “I don’t like me.” The exceptions prove the rule: “Laura and the Beehive,” with its quiet piano accompaniment, is strained and sleepy, especially on an album that demonstrates the band is still capable of sounding huge. “Wyatt’s Song” and “Oldest Daughter” would fit alongside the thrashing, high-energy anthems from their debut. This consistency is hard-earned, and their careful approach to making records has resulted in a discography that can age gracefully with them.
There’s a poetic symmetry to the arc of the Wonder Years, a band from the Philadelphia suburbs who wound up, a little older and questionably wiser, in a different Philadelphia suburb. Their incessant self-referentiality makes this growth all the more emotionally resonant: You can measure your life by the characters in Campbell’s songs, by a riff that returns as a motif, by a lyric that comes back again and again, slightly different each time. Campbell still sings “Passing Through a Screen Door” at shows. Which version of himself is screaming, “Did I fuck up?” For the Wonder Years, the past and present are always intertwined.


The Toronto rapper’s debut is a long shot at cementing his legacy that is plagued by indecision and self-doubt.

Reckless

In 2016, Nav was a SoundCloud star—a producer/songwriter/performer triple threat who made moody, self-doubting anthems with lines perfectly suited for Instagram captions. He had a petty and unforgiving personality that you would expect from a then 26-year-old rapper who felt he was yet to get his due. But success came fast and soon that pettiness began to look a lot more like insecurity. He was scared of criticism and obsessed with securing the cool rapper image. It’s what makes his debut album Reckless anything but. Instead, it’s a project where the Toronto-bred rapper’s ability to make trend-capturing hits is constantly clouded by a fear of being rejected by the rap community.
Throughout these songs, Nav is uptight. He’s locked in a zone where he takes himself so damn seriously, he can’t take a step back and realize that everything going on in this drug-fueled, R&B-influenced, high school edition of Future’s HNDRXX is completely absurd. On the surface, Reckless should be a quotable bonanza where lines like “I taste codeine when I burp” pop instead of being bogged down by the seriousness. It’s an issue that Drake had to overcome on VIEWS when he also became determined on creating a project that defined his legacy.
On Reckless, Nav is consumed by this unnecessary anger. He delivers a screed against XXL on “Freshman List” for overlooking him on their annual fêting of young rappers (“I wouldn’t show up for the Freshman List/Your swag expired, you ain’t fresh like this”). Nav comes across paranoid, convinced that his self-justified indignation—which he tries to mask behind neverending lists of lavish life experiences—isn’t actually directed at unimportant issues. On the bouncy collaboration with Travis Scott (“Champion”), he is irritated by insane things like women who have over one hundred thousand followers on Instagram. On “Faith,” he is unsettled by the light admonishment he receives from his sibling after introducing their assumed underage child to weed and he takes the reasonable bashing hard. Subsequently taking Percocets in the rain while crying and calling himself a lame (“I’m off the perkys and I’m cryin in the rain/Right now I’m poppin’ but sometimes I wish I wasn’t lame”). Capturing the brooding and ridiculous tone feels like an episode of “Riverdale” that takes place in the SoundCloud universe.
And despite Nav’s CW-storytelling, he still comes away from Reckless as a better performer. Nav has always been a producer first and, uncoincidentally, much of his previous criticism has been directed at the monotone nasal-voiced droughts he often sinks into. Thankfully, Nav brings a few new vocal flavors here, most impressively the smooth sing-rap flow he hits midway through the album’s essential “Never Change.” Capturing the over the top despair that when combined with his newest robot-voiced melody and his self-produced lushness creates something that’s missing from much of Reckless and still offers the enjoyable lines of inner turmoil: “When they ask me if I’m good I say ‘ya’ but I’m not.”
But quickly Reckless transforms from enjoyable to uncomfortable. The humor is unintentional and once you realize Nav isn’t in on the joke, things just get pathetic and start to become the story of a rapper who wants nothing more than to be indelible but can’t overcome his self-doubt. And unlike Future who delves into many of the same topics but still maintains some sense of confidence or perseverance, Nav’s journey is without that self-awareness. He’s a rapper so consumed in his own self-seriousness that all of the fun that could be had is dragged down by the lack of genuine belief he has in himself. Nav is whining, hiding behind braggadocio and making it an album that brings the listener down to the same place as the should be hitmaker. By the end, Reckless feels like a Fast & Furious film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Why is there so much dialog? Just blow shit up, you’re good at that.


Former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist continues lap steel-dappled explorations of melancholy, funky kitsch.

Love If Possible

In Japan, the dream of the ’90s is alive. Or parts of it are, anyway, with CDs still making up the majority of music sales and a slow shift to a digital market. And there’s former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist Shintaro Sakamoto, whose three solo albums over the past six years have embraced the sort of funky exotica and playful eclecticism—think Beck, or Cornelius, or Stereolab—that sounded futuristic at the turn of the millennium. For 2014’s Let’s Dance Raw, Sakamoto dialed back some of the grooving to make room for chrome bubbles of Hawaiian lap steel guitar. And on the new and equally beautiful Love If Possible, Sakamoto dials back the lap steel slightly, too, making space for even more space.
While marimba sparkles (“Foolish Situation,” “Presence”), Sakamoto duets with robot voices (“Purging the Demons”), and the lap steel glitters on nearly every song, the album's main reference point might be reggae. Though some songs flirt with outright roots grooves (notably “Another Planet”) and organs echo and diminish elsewhere (“Others”), it works mostly as an atmospheric strategy rather than as direct quotation. With longtime producer/collaborator Souichirou Nakamura acting as live echo technician on Yura Yura Teikoku’s tours—and returning as engineer for Love If Possible—Sakamoto is no stranger to the wonders of dub. But Nakamura and Sakamoto keep it restrained on Love If Possible, creating a wide-open sense, implying the untapped worlds waiting to be opened by the right echo technician.
Recording a dozen studio albums between 1992 and 2007, Yura Yura Teikoku played to large audiences in Japan, only touring outside the country (including the United States) for the first time in 2005. Evolving from an indie guitar trio to encompass psych-folk,, garage groovers, electronics, and much more, the wildly inventive Yura Yura could sometimes sound like a Japanese equivalent to Yo La Tengo, with whom they developed a late-career friendship. To longtime fans, Sakamoto’s solo projects might seem comparatively contained. Love If Possible and its predecessors play like careful articulations of a place Sakamoto has found and wants to stay in, with moments that gently recall his past, like the lounge-surf and quiet organ that colors “Feeling Immortal.”
After three albums in this mode, this now feels like a language of Sakamoto’s own, maturity only disguised as irreverence. In the untamed years of the late 20th century, artists like Beck and his shibuya-kei twin Cornelius flirted with kaleidoscopic vocabularies they might discard after a single usage. Retired from the road but still quite active as a musician, Sakamoto’s mission isn’t novelty, but an expressive palette he has carefully made for himself with a ship-in-a-bottle-like focus.


The dubstep disruptor returns with two albums—one of super-massive bass juggernauts, one of dizzy emo-rap—that make a surprisingly strong case for the Skrillex reboot.

Quest for Fire / Don’t Get Too Close

Skrillex is what tech folks would call a disruptor. For decades, there was only dance music: a patchy network of underground nodes and connections that made sporadic incursions into the mainstream. Then, sometime in 2010, yet seemingly overnight, there was Electronic Dance Music. It was as if Steve Jobs had clicked his little clicker and shown us the future.
Thousands of people used the word “dubstep” for the first time because of Skrillex. To this day, n00bs are still getting flamed on r/skrillex for not knowing who Benga and Coki are. (They are “the Croydon dub guys that started this,” as thanked by Skrillex after winning three Grammys in 2012.) Sonny Moore changed the definition of a genre, and the heads hated him for it. Here was an emo kid from Los Angeles with half a haircut, making $15 million a year from a corpulent mutation of real soundsystem culture so that raging frat dudes and lidded suburban teens could run amok on giant racetracks while a few industry suits cashed in.
The snobby response wasn’t just about the money, the perceived inauthenticity, or that EDM was such a straight, white, and male phenomenon. It was very much also about the music: the fairground drops, the skrrr-eechy synth leads, the idiotic samples, all the ways a bassline can be compared to an unwell digestive system. But Skrillex was the master of brostep, a technical wizard, and the most imaginative of the new breed of festival behemoths. Before EDM’s billion-dollar bubble burst, he’d hopped to safety in pop’s upper tier.
In the last decade he’s worked with industry giants (Diplo, Ed Sheeran) and edge-curious artists (Vic Mensa, Kelsey Lu), scored a Harmony Korine movie (Spring Breakers), briefly reunited with his old screamo band From First to Last, collaborated with Japanese megastar Hikaru Utada for the whimsical RPG Kingdom Hearts III, and somehow released a song with the surviving members of the Doors (“Break’n a Sweat”). Yet he hasn’t put out a solo album since 2014’s Recess, and by his own account, the last few years have been tough.
In 2022, he reached his “tipping point,” pulled out of two festivals, and stepped out of the public eye. After his mom died in 2015, he “drank the pain away” and last year found himself “with no drive and purpose for the first time.” Posting those tweets on his 35th birthday, he made it clear, however, that he had turned a corner, that he was ready for a new chapter. It is both apt and revealing, then, that one month later, Skrillex returns with two albums and four hyped DJ sets around New York City, including a last-minute sold-out show at Madison Square Garden—all in five days. More likely he’s been working out this move for a while, aiming for pop domination—but also underground cred, rap co-signs, and begrudging nods from Four Tet fans. And to do it, he’s lined up a deft pincer move: By dropping one album of super-massive bass juggernauts and one album of dizzy emo-rap, he intends to claim the whole territory.
In Quest for Fire, Skrillex goes in search of—obviously—the most fire beats in the land, plus a few of the sickest drops for good measure. Special guests are stuffed in tight, from headline-grabbing heavyweights (Four Tet, Missy Elliott, Mr. Oizo) to underground choices primed to surprise the music nerds—artists like Bristol bass sculptor Joker and experimental percussionist Eli Keszler.
Don’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets. Again, guests on every available surface: old bud Justin Bieber, rappers Chief Keef, Kid Cudi, and Swae Lee, and viral pop arrivals PinkPantheress and Prentiss.
In the years since Recess, he’s spent many days and nights sharpening his mind to the fundamentals of pop—not just the technical craft, at which he already excelled, but the real juice: what makes a melody stick, what makes a listener rewind. Knowing his eat-sleep-rave-repeat approach to the industry (“If I have any time off, I get antsy,” he once told Rolling Stone), there’s a sense that he’s working at his physical limits here, straining to deliver the “v99_final_FINAL.wav” of every good idea he’s had in a decade. More often than not, it works.
Quest for Fire is a huge evolution from the brash, stadium-sized ragers of Skrillex 1.0. He’s finally absorbed the fundamentals of dance music: basic stuff, like having a rhythm that makes you want to move your body. Everything rolls along like it’s actually going somewhere—not a flatulent dubstep waddle, but an aerodynamic gallop that brings to mind a deeper lineage of loud and obnoxious dance music, from the technical end of drum’n’bass to “proper” dubstep, Northern bassline, and Chicago juke.
The tracklist is patently bananas, like something tapped into his Notes app after a long night on the vodka-Red Bulls: what if 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and d’n’b technicians Noisia? What if Missy Elliott and Mr. Oizo? So we end up with “Ratata,” Missy extending a line from “Work It” into a TikTok-friendly hook as Oizo’s mosquito synths buzz between pounding columns of bass. On “Supersonic (my existence),” Josh Pan’s mohair vocals are dwarfed by the sci-fi bass architecture erected by Brady and Noisia. East London legend Flowdan, an MC who’s been honing his sinister flow since the days of UKG, turns enemies to stone on “Rumble” and “Hydrate” while blessing the project with a splash of grime’s holy water.
Skrillex has given us loud, cartoonish, and bombastic before, but has he ever given us groovy? With “Butterflies” he might have made his first respectable house track, origami-folding Starrah’s loved-up vocals into Four Tet’s twinkly shuffle. Less respectable but no less appealing is “Leave Me Like This,” where a pitched-up Bobby Raps croons over a bassline house monster with one of the most stupid-glorious drops on the record. And the dark slopes of “Tears”—aided by the laser-clean finish of bass technicians Joker and Noisia’s Nik Roos—are the closest he’s come yet to “proper” dubstep.
There are some ill-fitting moments: “TOO BIZARRE (juked)” is indeed a juked version of Skrillex’s emo-punk collaboration with Swae Lee, Siiickbrain, and Dutch basshead Posij, now bouncing at a double-time pace that might buck the casual listener. Closing track “Still Here (with the ones that I came with)” is earnest fromage-garage in praise of the rave crew: sweet but naff.
Don’t Get Too Close, conversely, is intriguingly weird, likely to confound the older fans while opening new doors for Skrillex as a collaborator. Fundamentally, it’s an emo album: a nostalgic throwback to his teenage tastes, but also a producer’s response to the plate-shift we’re living through, where experimental music sounds like pop, pop sounds like rap, and rappers sound like emo singers. The mood is overwhelmingly nostalgic, a meditation on lost innocence achieved through endless juxtaposition. Trippie Redd’s post-Blink weyy-oh vocals are the foil to PinkPantheress’ bubbly 2-step raps on “Way Back.” Yung Lean and Bladee take the sadboi philosophy into celestial, harp-filled realms on “Ceremony” and “Real Spring”—two moments that suggest Skrillex can still confuse the hell out of anyone’s parents.
The generation gap melts away on “3am,” where 15-year-old bedroom-pop cherub Prentiss drops a kindergarten melody next to the enduringly youthful vocals of veteran rock singer Anthony Green. Things get really Back to the Future on the title track, as Bibi Bourelly and Skrillex inhabit their younger selves for a pining duet: “I’m on my PC/I see famous people/I think they’re like me/So why aren’t we equal,” pleads Skrillex, regressing: “Don’t get too close/Nobody knows me.”
Skrillex is 35 now, a ripe age for some mental processing. He’s not given any interviews to explain exactly what he was dealing with during his absence, but coming to a standstill after years of non-stop touring, sleep deprivation, and vodka is always going to be a shock, especially if you’ve been blotting out grief. When he was 16, Sonny Moore found out that he was adopted. He fell out with his parents but they reconciled; he talked about wanting to take care of them as they got old.
Time-travelling is certainly one way to process old feelings. In one interlude, he dredges up a goofy interview with Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz from 2005, where they pledge to celebrate their success by “getting girlfriends and going to Disneyland!” You might assume they were being sarcastic, but Skrillex is guffawing from the heart. This, after all, is the gushing dude who pinpointed his two-second cameo in Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph as the highlight of his career.
Skrillex will probably always make the kind of extreme and emotional music that appeals to angsty kids and nostalgic grown-ups. He’ll always be the emo guy on a hoverboard who wants to take his girlfriend to Disneyland, the guy who imagines himself as a sad-eyed 3D hedgehog (don’t get too close!). The endearing dweebiness runs eternal, as do other qualities. Perhaps he’s not capable of disrupting another industry in his lifetime, but with Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close he’s still intent on shaking things up, fuelled by nothing but boundless enthusiasm. And when the dust clears, his mid-career rebrand—Skrillex 2.0, if you like—will rise from the rubble.


Packaged with demos, outtakes, and a new remaster, this 20th anniversary box set presents the California indie band’s wide-open third album as a prescient meditation on the need to escape.

Sumday Twunny

Jason Lytle is an unlikely spokesman for our electronic companions. As an amateur skateboarder growing up in the Northern California city of Modesto, the Grandaddy frontman aspired to a career working in the elements: a fireman, or perhaps a park ranger. Instead, a skateboarding injury forced him inside, where he befriended circuits and sequencers and rediscovered an early love for the guitar. Joined by bassist Kevin Garcia and percussionist Aaron Burtch, Lytle released a series of early Grandaddy EPs before the band put out their debut, 1997’s lovably unrefined Under the Western Freeway. Their breakout second album, 2000’s The Sophtware Slump, drew comparisons to the sci-fi surveillance state of Radiohead’s OK Computer. Combining the disillusionment of nearby Stockton, California slackers Pavement with kaleidoscopic synths and surprisingly poignant lyrics about broken vacuums, Grandaddy brokered an uneasy peace between the flagging post-grunge landscape of American indie rock and the impending digital dominance of electronica.
But after years of endless touring, Lytle and his bandmates were waning. It wasn’t just the physical trials of life on the road—they were tired of singing about dead humanoids and abandoned appliances night after night. For their third album, 2003’s Sumday, they went into Lytle’s home studio with a few explicit goals. “It had to be more optimistic and it had to be more concise,” guitarist Jim Fairchild recalled. The bar was low—their last album opened with a nine-minute epic about an alienated astronaut—but while song lengths averaged out at a much more reasonable four minutes, Lytle still revealed new anxieties about the future, even as he tried to unplug. For the album’s 20th anniversary, Grandaddy have released a box set that includes remastered recordings, four-track demos, and a collection of unreleased songs from contemporaneous studio sessions. Lytle’s ambivalent premonitions of our digital age, underscored by a growing listlessness in the face of capitalism’s death drive, sound both quaint and prescient in our hyper-mediated present.
Even at the time, Sumday stood apart from its predecessors. “Now It’s On” roars with a confidence and cautious hope that breaks from the existential woes of The Sophtware Slump and its wayward space cadets. “Once you’re outside you won’t want to hide anymore,” Lytle sings over a palm muted guitar, his rosy outlook finally catching up to his perpetually sanguine vocals. And though there are layers of pixelated texture on songs like “O.K. With My Decay,” analog instruments dominate the record’s sound, apt for an album about returning to nature. “Saddest Vacant Lot in All the World,” brimming with Grandaddy’s characteristic layer of ambient noise, demonstrates that Lytle can build worlds just as bleak as his digital dystopias from only a piano. The cassette demos, which for the most part keep the same shape and feeling as their fully realized versions, similarly showcase what his music might have sounded like if he fully explored this stripped-down setting: “The Go in the Go-for-It” is transformed from a buzzy, hunched over rock song to a plaintive ballad.
The reissue also includes a dozen songs from the cutting room floor, now released as their own album under the name Excess Baggage. Grandaddy obsessives, who have dutifully cataloged the band’s myriad unreleased demos and live performances, will recognize most of the material: “The Town Where I’m Livin Now” existed as a live cut for years before Lytle released an official version under his own name. Others like “Derek Spears” only existed in shaky YouTube videos. The tale of an itinerant eccentric down on his luck, it’s a peek into the lives Lytle observed in Modesto— “He says he made 90K a year before he hurt his back”—but he shelved the song because “the only people who really get this song are people who live in the Central Valley.” Other songs, like “Running Cable at Shiva’s,” sound right at home next to Sumday’s “Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake,” with chirping keyboard synths and lyrics about the “slightly living dead.” The close-miked “Dearest Descrambler,” a song so thin it threatens to vaporize at any moment, crash lands with an evergreen economic anxiety: “Is it too late for me to master a trade?”
Compared to their contemporaries—Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, the Flaming Lips—Grandaddy excelled at demystifying the terrifying unknown, even if that familiarity still bred contempt. Rather than foretelling a future of epic battles against robot armies or pianos crumbling into the sea, their songs described people in a world much like ours, existentially vacant and starving for meaning. Lytle’s androids weren’t paranoid, they were idle; his robots weren’t evil-natured, but lonely. He turned his lens at the inner lives of machines, finding their rusting husks as tragic as a washed up drunk at last call: limousines without a celebrity to chauffeur, factory robots toiling in the dark, emails crying out in our inboxes for the gaze of a weary human eye. Perhaps it was this ability to connect fears of the future with the quotidian angst of our daily lives that made David Bowie, progenitor of the lonely space age explorer, such a huge fan in his later years.
Where Grandaddy’s previous albums focused on our tactile, external interactions with technology, Sumday hinted at the ways it was beginning to change us from within. “The Group Who Couldn’t Say” follows a team of office workers who win a trip to the great outdoors, only to find themselves too stunned by nature’s beauty to speak. Even lyrics that should sound dated in our post-iPhone parlance—“Her drag-and-click had never yielded anything as perfect as a dragonfly”—are resonant in their sense of wonder. It speaks to the same thirst for escape that sends startup lackeys to Burning Man every year, but cloaked in hazy synths and soft “doo doo doots,” it remains a picturesque vignette rather than a superficial quest for salvation. On Sumday, Lytle presented a world where we become so accustomed to technology that its absence is felt more strongly than its omnipresence.
While Sumday presented an idyllic exit for Grandaddy, it also forecasted the beginning of the end. Touring and recording had taken its toll, and Lytle harbored a desire to escape the constant churn of album cycles. “I feel so far away from home,” he sang mournfully on “El Caminos in the West.” In interviews, he spoke about the band’s future with palpable exhaustion: “If I don't end up dying in the process, I might benefit from another life after music. I won't try to extend the dream until it becomes pathetic.” As he put it on “The Go in the Go-For-It,” the industry “tried to wreck” his head, and he wanted out. Sumday, then, is his journey to rediscover the world outside of his studio, the would-be park ranger moving through life like “wind blowing through the leaves.”


Collecting 12 years of solo piano recordings, the Berlin composer explores some of his quietest, most intimate material yet, in which the creaking of the pedal is often as audible as the notes.

Old Friends New Friends

Nils Frahm is no stranger to minimalism, but on Old Friends New Friends, the Berlin-based pianist and composer homes in on every tiny detail. Over the course of the 80-minute solo piano record, he gives each note ample space to ring, relishing the pauses as much as the simple melodies. It’s telling that he opens the album with a hushed (but hardly silent) tribute to John Cage’s 4’33”: This is a subtle, introspective album that encourages us to listen to the minutiae as much as the whole picture.
Old Friends New Friends brings together 12 years of archival material that didn’t make it onto Frahm’s previous albums. Each track highlights his gentle piano playing. Rather than the cavernous, enrapturing sound he harnesses on albums like 2018’s All Melody, these recordings are closer to his other piano-focused albums, like 2015’s Solo, but still more pared down. He explores a range of shades of post-classical and ambient minimalism. But the music stays steady in its wistful atmosphere, centered on just Frahm, his piano, and the tactile quality of the recording.
At points, the piano is more of a background character than a protagonist. Frahm weighs silence and music equally, letting extraneous sounds ring as clearly as notes. During pieces like “Late” and “Berduxa,” his audible breath and the piano’s pedals become characters in the music, sounding with almost as much strength as the rounded tones he plays. It fosters a sense of presence, as if we were right there in Frahm’s living room. This coziness takes different forms across the record. On “Strickleiter,” Frahm’s gossamer melody sounds like a music box; on “The Idea Machine,” the piano sounds like it’s being run through a rickety old film projector, notes shrouded in fuzz. It feels as if we’re watching Frahm play on a black and white screen.
Nostalgia and intimacy suit Frahm’s compositional style, which relies on tugging at the heartstrings. But at times, the surfeit of feeling is overbearing. “Then Patterns” moves sluggishly, repeating a bright melody that seems out of place with the album’s gentle melancholy; “Forgetmenot” puts Frahm’s rolling piano melodies in the background, washing them out with static and echoes. “Weddinger Walzer” takes on a somber classical style, like a slowed-down waltz that’s meant to be in the background of a dinner party rather than stand on its own. In these pieces, Frahm’s tenderness turns sappy.
With pieces like “Iced Wood,” though, Frahm’s music goes deeper. This is one of the album’s moodiest tracks and most engaging moments. Here, Frahm swaps barely-there melodies for a richer sound. A low, distant ripple blossoms and fades away as the piano’s pedals gently tap alongside it. It’s in tracks like this that the music feels most three-dimensional, a reminder that simplicity doesn’t always need to forgo depth. Here, the piano grows from a thin whisper into a warm murmur with just a couple notes and a subtle change in dynamics. It’s in these tiny, almost undetectable changes that the music becomes radiant.

Buy: Rough Trade
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At 77 minutes, Metallica’s eleventh studio album delivers everything you could want from a Metallica album in 2023 and so much more. Too much more.

72 Seasons

At some point in the last 15 years, Metallica started sounding like themselves again. Certain hardcore fans might say it began with the Rick Rubin-produced Death Magnetic; the more skeptical among us started caring again eight years later with the old-school double album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. On those albums, Metallica attempted a return to the thrashy tempos, elaborate song structures, and bitchin’ solos of their 1980s glory years, seeming to realize there was no longer any reason to pander to the current sound of rock radio, because Metallica is bigger than whatever goes on in that backwater these days. They release an album every seven or eight years, a relaxed pace that apparently suits them as they near their 60s. When they do put a record out, it’s like they’re making up for lost time, which is what gets them in trouble.
72 Seasons, at a marathon 77 minutes long, delivers everything you could possibly want from a Metallica album in 2023, and so much more on top of that. Too much more. Like Hardwired, its predecessor—the same length, incidentally—72 Seasons is both a thrill and a slog. The best riffs, like the galloping harmonized runs that arrive in the final minutes of “Roomful of Mirrors,” or the call-and-response between machine-gun power chords and jagged leads that open “If Darkness Had a Son,” have the spirit, if not always the magic, of Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets. But no single song sustains that level of excitement for its duration. That’s a high bar, and they could have gotten a lot closer to clearing it with some editing. There is almost always some bridge, breakdown, or umpteenth repetition of the chorus that a given song would be leaner and meaner without. If a classic like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” can get in and out in five minutes, “Sleepwalk My Life Away” does not need to be seven.
One major difference between Metallica in 2023 and 1983 is the subject matter, which has taken a 180 since the cartoonishly nihilistic days of Kill ‘Em All and is now focused on getting past personal demons rather than following their lead. James Hetfield, who has battled his fair share, writes as if he’s just gotten out of a therapy session. His wellness talk works best when he manages to make it sound metal, as on “Shadows Follow”: “Now I know if I run/Shadows still follow.” It’s less convincing when he just strings together vaguely related words that happen to share the same suffix: dogmatic, traumatic, summarize, patronize. But it seems beside the point to critique 72 Seasons on the level of songwriting, per se. “Lux Aeterna,” the worst offender for dopey rhymes—“Anticipation in domination” is the opening line, and the rest of the song proceeds from there—features at least three different killer riffs and a Kirk Hammett solo that sounds like a motorcycle speeding through a portal into hell. Most importantly in the context of this album, it’s over in less than four minutes. It doesn’t really matter whether a Metallica song is finely wrought. What matters is that it kicks ass.
72 Seasons kicks ass roughly half the time. Not bad, all things considered, but it still leaves you with 30-plus minutes to sit through. The strongest songs tend to travel at the breakneck speed of vintage thrash metal; the weakest edge back toward the midtempo hard rock of Metallica’s ’90s albums. One upside to the excessive runtimes is that even the lackluster tracks might have at least one redeeming moment. Often enough, it’s Hammett’s lead playing. His solo on “If Darkness Had a Son” is like a miniature composition unto itself, with its own dramatic arc, from long bluesy bends to frenzied shredding. Elsewhere, he’s less deliberate, more impulsively expressive, slamming on the whammy bar and wah pedal in passages that have more to do with razor-edged texture than melody. After years of Metallica albums with little if any soloing, 72 Seasons is worth playing if only for the chance to hear one of metal’s greatest guitarists ripping in top form again.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a new Metallica album without a gripe about the production. For 72 Seasons, one potential issue is that the drums—bear with me here—sound too good. Too precise, really, with every snare thwacking and kick thumping at exactly the same volume, with exactly the same articulation, all at a tempo so locked in it seems inhuman. I wondered, almost as soon as I turned it on, with the hi-hat on the opening title track ticking along like a literal metronome, whether there might have been some drum programming involved. I turned to Reddit and found several fans vociferously debating the same question.
After early tragedy, massive success, artistic floundering, interpersonal drama, headline-making battles over technology, and a few on-camera group sessions with a professional performance enhancement coach, Metallica are a band painfully conscious of its own history. Who else would make a sequel to one of the least distinguished albums in their catalog, or construct a miniature second stage for their stadium tour to simulate the small rooms where they woodshedded their earliest material? Whether or not the drums were gussied up digitally, their airtight sound can give the sense of 72 Seasons as an overworked product of that same impulse. Even the simple proposition of Metallica sounding like themselves seems fraught with peril and cause for great deliberation, as if a single stray drum hit might make the whole thing come tumbling down. It is funny, and perhaps even a little comforting, after years of drummer Lars Ulrich getting grief for everything from his stance on file-sharing to the fact that the snare on St. Anger sounds like a trash can, that he would now face criticism for doing his job extremely well. If that guy can’t catch a break in 2023, at least one part of the classic Metallica dynamic still comes naturally.


On their third full-length of 2017 alone, the Melbourne psych-rock band are surprisingly agile, incorporating soul, jazz, North African overtones, and pastoral English folk.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard / Mild High Club: Sketches of Brunswick East

Sketches of Brunswick East

When King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard announced their plan to release five full-length albums in 2017, it was a potential sign that the increasingly prolific Melbourne, Australia seven-piece had lost its instincts for self-editing. Sketches of Brunswick East, the third full-length the band has released over the last six months alone, proves the opposite to be true. Among the most relaxed material the band has ever put out, the new album deviates from King Gizzard’s long-established formula of jam band-esque psychedelic rock with surprisingly agile detours into soul, jazz, North African overtones, and pastoral English folk.
It’s no surprise that Brunswick East would take the band down new roads, as it began quite differently than the last two releases. For this one, bandleader Stu Mackenzie traded ideas on acoustic guitars with Mild High Club mastermind Alex Brettin. Initially, Mackenzie and Brettin didn’t even have fully-formed songs on their hands, and they chose to develop those ideas casually in the studio as other King Gizzard members added parts of their own. If you listen to previous King Gizzard titles against last year’s sophomore Mild High Club effort Skiptracing, the directions of Brunswick East make sense.
Presumably, it’s Brettin’s laidback style that mellowed King Gizzard’s frantic demeanor. The album opens with acoustic piano courtesy of Brettin as drummer Michael Cavanagh joins in with a feathery, double-tracked part and Mackenzie does his best Genesis-era Peter Gabriel impression on flute. Right away, it’s clear that both acts benefit from each other’s presence. King Gizzard’s enthusiasm has always been undeniable, but it’s also a refreshing change to see the band ease back on its goofiness, which can verge on aggressive at times. In reverse, the members of King Gizzard prevent Brettin from coming off as lethargic.
Still, Brunswick East amounts to way more than just a hybrid of two signature styles, or even a mere consolidation of each party’s respective strengths. When Brettin forays into 1970s AM tropes on his own, he can come off as if he’s being ironic, the line between sincere homage and smirking ridicule as hard to gauge as the commentary on, say, a podcast about yacht-rock. But when working around Brettin’s ideas, Mackenzie and his bandmates never linger too long in any one genre. As a result, the songs on Brunswick East have an endearing mutant-like quality about them that, for the most part, prevents them from turning into revivalist clichés.
While the album title references Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis’ groundbreaking collaboration with Gil Evans, Brettin and King Gizzard thankfully don’t attempt a literal reinterpretation of that album’s iconic fusion of orchestral jazz, classical, and flamenco. Instead, they pursue its spirit of freedom. On “D-Day,” for example, Brettin, Mackenzie, and multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker all play microtonal instruments on a musical theme that blurs the line between fusion, Moroccan folk, and Southern rock in the vein of the Allman Brothers. At several other points—“Countdown,” “The Spider and Me,” “Cranes, Planes, and Migraines”—Brettin and the band walk a slippery tightrope between blue-eyed soul, bass-popping funk, and swooning, sun-kissed indie rock.
Some tracks just trail off, and players come and go throughout the album, piling-on piano, keyboard, guitar, and bass. (The revolving-door feels literal: Brunswick East is the name of the Melbourne neighborhood where the band’s studio/art-collective space is located.) On “Sketches of Brunswick East II,” a Fender Rhodes-like electric piano captures the timbre of Hawaiian steel guitar, and you can’t tell from the credits whether it’s Mackenzie or Brettin playing because both contribute electric piano to the tune. The whole album has a casual, freewheeling vibe, but it’s a testament to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s unity that it holds together so well.


The English band’s second album explores big questions with a bucolic, open-ended new sound. Where once they surged forward, now they wander.

O Monolith

Just a few years ago, Squid were frenzied, bugged-out chroniclers of urban anxiety. Emerging from London’s fertile new guitar scene and influenced by dystopian science fiction, their full-length debut Bright Green Field documented the suffocation of city life under increasingly untenable economic conditions, the surveillance state, and the UK’s slide toward far-right politics. They crammed a lot into that album, and for its follow-up, they explore the rest of their homeland.
O Monolith arose from a seated-only, socially distanced 2021 tour. The always-restless quintet used their return to live music as an opportunity to experiment, improvising onstage and workshopping ideas for these eight, free-flowing tracks. Then they decamped to England’s West Country to work at Peter Gabriel’s studios. The bucolic surroundings reshaped Squid’s music, resulting in an album that blooms and overgrows while chasing more abstract themes.
In just 42 minutes, Squid fire off in a lot of directions. Their core sound remains, with flares of distortion and full-throated freakouts erupting from wiry rhythms. But now floaty synths are just as important as corroded guitars, and their volcanic climaxes share equal space with songs that sputter, fade, and drift. Tracks like “Devil’s Den” or “Green Light” still work off Squid’s liquid-then-scabrous guitars, but the former also incorporates melodic cues from British folk traditions. Drummer and primary vocalist Ollie Judge’s squawk-sing yelp often leads the charge, but he deploys it more judiciously. For a band that has always been adventurous, Squid now seek a different kind of freedom: They no longer surge forward, but wander.
In doing so, they find ways to evolve their sound—sometimes by inverting it. One of Squid’s favorite tricks is forcing their songs to coil tighter and tighter until they burst. “Siphon Song,” one of O Monolith’s most striking moments, is a dreamlike flipside. A spacey, vocodered slow-burn, it plays like an elusive sigh before its alien refrain introduces one of the album’s most unshakable melodies. It’s a more shadowy rendition of the band’s typical intensity, mirroring its inspiration: the numbness of the 24-hour news cycle and “compassion fatigue.”
The rest of the album’s subject matter is characteristically dense and far-flung. Squid collapse the ancient and contemporary, depicting witch trials alongside scenes of police brutality. British folklore and the enigmas of the West Country creep in alongside even more esoteric interests. During a spate of pandemic boredom, Judge began reading about animism and imagined people being reincarnated as mundane objects, yielding “Undergrowth” and its story of being reborn as a dresser drawer. “If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away” is as arcane as its title: an impressionistic meditation on rats, inspired by their long and contentious relationship with human society.
Judge has said he was trying to make a “spiritual” record, but also notes that his inherent cynicism attached a pessimistic lens. O Monolith raises bigger, more eternal questions about humanity’s relationship to nature, and Squid’s music becomes more open-ended while wrestling with them. This weaving quality means the music is unpredictable and often exhilarating, but the message is blurrier. Compared to the seething life of Bright Green Field, O Monolith doesn’t settle on many concrete conclusions—either in the societal commentary or its suggestion of where exactly Squid are headed. Fontaines D.C. adopted a moodier take on Britpop arena anthems; Black Midi became gonzo prog pranksters; Black Country, New Road embraced maximalist emo-indie. Fascinatingly, Squid are still somewhere off the map.


The wonderful Arrangements, Vol. 1 draws on Parks' self-described "earliest studio adventures," featuring a dizzying cast of collaborators (Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Bonnie Raitt singing calypso) with his unifying hand presiding over the collision of styles.

Arrangements, Vol. 1

In 2008, I had the opportunity to briefly interview Van Dyke Parks. It wasn't long after his collaboration with Joanna Newsom on Ys. brought him some fresh headlines, but I mostly asked about his long, itinerant career as arranger for three decades of rock musicians, from Brian Wilson and the Byrds to Rufus Wainwright and Frank Black. After amiably answering my questions, he signed off, semi-sardonically, with "Thank you, Jayson, for celebrating a position that perhaps serves best in its anonymity."
The remark seemed half self-deprecating jab, half mission statement: Parks has a career-long acquaintance with anonymity. His most well-known association is with a record that, for thirty-odd years, was famous for never coming out. His solo records, starting with 1968's confounding Harry Nilsson-meets-Charles Ives opus Song Cycle, are subjects of fervent cult adoration but known to few. His arranging work, meanwhile, has put an inimitable stamp on American pop, though the vast majority of music fans have no idea when they are listening to his work. He is the quintessential liner-notes hero, in other words, which makes the overview of Arrangements, Vol. 1, on his own label Bananastan, that much more gratifying.
The compilation is curated by Parks himself, drawing on what he calls "my earliest studio adventures in the 60s." The roster of collaborators represented here is dizzying-- Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Sal Valentino, Bonnie Raitt singing calypso-- and hearing Parks' unifying hand presiding over this collision of styles makes for a wonderful way to experience the art of his arrangements; their lushness, their invention, how they provide the texture and teeth to a composition. He opens with an arrangement ripped off the bones of the song it was meant to accompany: a mono single mix of Donovan's "Donovan's Colours". It's a gently instructive focusing tool for the rest of the album, training our ears to go to the margins, to pay attention to the filigree.
Not that Parks' arrangements need much prompting to be noticed. They don't exactly fade demurely into the background; they jostle and blurt, intruding brazenly into the songs they support. His arrangement for Sal Valentino's goofy zydeco number "Alligator Man" boasts not one vigorously sawing fiddle, but two-- on top of twinkling mandolins, a seasick tuba groaning low notes, snatches of saloon piano, and a piping saxophone. It sounds horrendously overcrowded on paper, but Parks has an uncanny instinct for how to densely populate a composition's every corner without choking it. The instruments are spaced evenly in the mix, and the result feels like a bustling table of gregarious friends instead of a crazy-making riot.
All of these embellishments, of course, were obsessively layered and re-layered onto increasingly overworked analog tape, and Arrangements, which kicks off with the sound of a rickety reel-to-reel firing up, is also partly a tale told by that tape. Parks' arrangements come through intriguingly warped, as if all the instruments on the track had been fished from a flooded studio floor, and the wobbly, dazed sound world that results, however accidental, is crucial to the record's appeal. The sumptuous string orchestra Parks supplies to Arlo Guthrie's take on the Appalachian standard "Valley to Pray", sounds gelatinous, a symphony viewed through a fish-bowl. The Mojo Men's "Sit Down I Think I Love You" would be a standard-issue mod-pop song in a simpler context, but Parks' arrangement sends the song stumbling through a haze of slide guitar and bandoneón that feels like linoleum curling in real time. It's nearly impossible to pick out every individual instrument from the soup on these songs (is that a harp? a celesta? a zither?), but the sound world is wonderfully dense and liquid, and it fills headphones like sunlight flooding a window.
The songs selected on Arrangements are uniformly fantastic. Bonnie Raitt's cover of Calypso Rose's racy "Wah She Go Do" is hilarious and startling, and Jimmy Cliff's "Sitting in Limbo" gets an improbably gorgeous reading by Dean Martin's son Dino. But trying to imagine them without Parks' additions, as the compilation encourages you to, is illuminating. Pop-song arrangements tend to hide in plain sight, and are usually practiced by spotlight-averse eccentrics who fit comfortably into neither the classical or the pop worlds. But the pop universe would be drained of color without them-- try to hear the Delfonics' "La-La (Means I Love You)" without its nimbus of strings, or, for that matter, the Beach Boys' "Surf's Up" without the distant horns and chimes. Arrangements is a joy to spend time with, but it also amounts to a pretty forceful argument for the lost art of arrangement itself, and for Parks as one of its unrivaled masters.


On three albums released from 1971 to 1973, Yoko Ono subverted pop forms and widened her vision, which at once grew more accessible and more explicitly feminist.

Yoko Ono: Fly / Approximately Infinite Universe / Feeling the Space

The first installment of Secretly Canadian’s Yoko Ono reissue series presented a creative partnership, with two albums credited to Ono and her husband John Lennon and a third featuring him in her Plastic Ono Band. The second set, comprising three Ono albums released between 1971 and 1973, shows her gradually breaking free from that association. Though Ono was at least Lennon's creative equal from the start of this series, it's fascinating to hear how, as he becomes less involved in each subsequent album, her vision widens and strengthens, both personally and politically.
This development coincides with Ono’s music becoming broader and more accessible. The 1971 album Fly is a natural followup to Ono’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band, filled with raucous freak-out jams and conceptual experiments, with lots of Lennon participation. Things take a turn on 1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe, which adopts rock, glam, and funk tropes for sociopolitical protest. Later that year, Ono made Feeling the Space during a split from Lennon, and she embraced pop music in a subversive work of feminist flag-bearing.
On paper, the most experimental of these three Ono albums, Fly, might also be the least ambitious. But there are still plenty of big ideas on Fly: one side is a 22-minute soundtrack to an Ono film consisting primarily of her uncategorizable vocals; “Toilet Piece” is a half-minute of flushing sounds; and all of side three consists of abstract soundscapes made with the Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., a group led by one of Ono’s comrades in the art collective Fluxus. Still, by this point, Ono was already a well-practiced conceptual artist, meaning Fly is less about stretching than honing.
That honing is consistently interesting, especially on tunes that further the loose, charging avant-rock that Ono first launched with Plastic Ono Band’s bursting opener, “Why.” “Midsummer New York” and “Hirake” are spilling blues supporting Ono’s escalating screams, while on the 17-minute “Mindtrain,” her rhythmic chants ride a groove that evokes Can’s extended jams. Most mesmerizing is “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow),” Ono’s hymn to a daughter from her first marriage who essentially disappeared when her ex-husband won custody. The song’s only words are “Snow/Don’t worry/Kyoko,” but the way Ono stretches them into impressionistic shapes is hypnotizing, as are the sliding riffs from her backing band, which—for just this track—included Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton.
One song on Fly presages Ono’s next move. “Mrs. Lennon,” featuring Ono’s somber singing over Lennon’s slow piano chords, shows her growing interest in both conventional songwriting and glammy balladry. She extends that mode on Approximately Infinite Universe, infusing drama into piano-led tunes such as the majestic “Winter Song,” the hymn-like “I Want My Love to Rest Tonight,” and the impassioned “What a Bastard the World Is.” The latter, a breakup song that morphs into a political screed, is a gripping example of Ono’s strident attack. “You know half the world is occupied by you pigs,” she spits. “I can always get another pig like you.” Yet she can also be vulnerable and questioning, as on “I Have a Woman Inside My Soul,” which views personal identity as an elusive target.
The somber ballads on Approximately Infinite Universe are mixed with slow rockers, funky workouts, and show-tune style numbers (all played mostly by New York band Elephant’s Memory; Lennon appears on a few tracks under a pseudonym). There’s a breezy thrill in Ono’s omnivorous songs, performed with both committed seriousness and campy humor. Over the samba-ish beat of “What a Mess,” she sings, “If you keep hammering anti-abortion/We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men... If you keep laying on money and power/We’ll tell you meanwhile your sprinkler is out of soda.” Even funnier is the horn-propelled “I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window,” wherein Ono playfully grapples with her parents’ influence, eventually questioning their sanity as well as her own.
Ono’s parents show up again on Feeling the Space, when soft opener “Growing Pain” begins with the lines, “I’m a battleship/Frozen by my mother’s anger.” From there, Ono persistently explores feminist struggles in ways both poetic and polemic. Some tunes, like the lifting “Coffin Car” and the theater-worthy “Woman of Salem,” paint metaphoric pictures of life as a woman. But more often, Ono confronts problems with bold brashness, in songs with titles like “Woman Power,’’ “Angry Young Woman,” and “She Hits Back.” The latter succinctly explains Ono’s anger: “My ears get tired of listening all the time/They’ve been taking lots of garbage all their lives.”
Feeling the Space’s only weakness is the conventionality of the music, played by a rotating collective of seasoned session musicians. There’s a generic quality to the compositions here, which feature little in the way of noisy guitar, unpredictable structures, or sonic abstractions. But that can also be a strength: Ono’s decision to play things so straight after years of experimentation is rather daring. Setting radical diatribes to familiar sounds is a statement itself, living proof of what ’70s rock could’ve been if more voices were represented, and loudly so.
On one of Feeling the Space’s bonus tracks, a live version of “Coffin Car” recorded in 1973 at Harvard’s First International Feminist Conference, Ono talks openly about how she’s been perceived. “What I learned from being with John is that society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man,” she says. “Some of his closest friends told me I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work, and that way I’ll be happy... I was lucky I was over 30 and it was too late for me to change.” It’s true that she was too strong to succumb to the opinions of others, but these three albums show how much she could change, at her own will, to follow her muse. In the process, she asserted her independence not just from Lennon but from expectation. By subverting pop forms, she extended her vision without compromising it.


On his latest mixtape, the Atlanta rapper uses his innate charisma and exacting eye for the details of the drug trade to court a national audience that has so far eluded him.

Spaghetti Factory

Peewee Longway was a star even before anyone had heard his music. In his recent autobiography, Gucci Mane recalls that the rapper “was always this little, funny, charming nigga whom people just seemed to gravitate toward” and that his widely respected “dealings in the streets” earned him a deal with Gucci’s 1017 label without so much as a demo. Five years, 11 mixtapes, and one official album later, the diminutive former hustler, who was raised a few doors down from Young Thug in the since-demolished Jonesboro South projects, is one of Atlanta’s preeminent rappers. But, beloved as he is in rap’s most influential city, he has yet to ascend to the same heights as his former neighbor. With his latest mixtape, Spaghetti Factory, Longway is still seeking the national renown that keeps eluding him.
He has two obvious strengths as a rapper: First, there’s his infectious charisma. He seems to have apprehended the crucial, if counterintuitive, lesson that gangster rap demands a sharp sense of humor. But there’s a fine line between making listeners giggle and becoming an exhausting punchline rapper, and Longway stays on the right side of it with lyrics that are plainly absurd and ribald. Central to the chorus of “Jumanji” is the frat-house refrain “rock out with my cock out.” On “Freestyle,” he’s both “shipping and handling through Amazon” and “putting dope dick on an Amazon.” “I Can’t Get Enough” follows up the line, “Iced out my teeth like I’m Mike Jones” with the spurious claim, “I don’t even talk with the lights on.”
Longway’s second great asset is his exacting eye for the material details of the drug business. He relishes the minutiae, single-mindedly monitoring stovetops, hoarding residue for addicted product testers, and wrapping brick after brick after brick. On “Crop It,” he sets the scene of a cannabis-and-poppy-growing operation: “Poppy seeds in the sun room/Ain’t answerin’ my phone ‘til June/October, November, December they bloom/We rewrap in black balloons.”
Unfortunately, that exacting eye doesn’t see much beyond avarice and black-market ambition. Spaghetti Factory is almost completely devoid of biographical or emotional details that would add depth beneath the songs’ charming veneer. Whether it’s due to studious avoidance of self-incrimination or a simple lack of artistic vision, this withholding is what separates Longway from Southern rap’s most compelling personalities. Kevin Gates, Boosie Badazz, and 2 Chainz flesh out their oversized personas with street names, sadness, mentions of their loved ones, memories, and worries—the bits that make them who they are.
It’s understandable to plead the fifth when federal agent DJ Vlad shines a light in your face and asks if you’re a Crip, but that doesn’t have to mean eliding essential parts of yourself from your art. As recognizable as he is on record, with his high-pitched dope-boy checklists, and onscreen, with his gold rictus and “get money gut” (as Waka Flocka Flame once dubbed his own belly), Longway remains a mystery. He might have seen every view from Atlanta’s curlicue Spaghetti Junction, sold every drug from Schedule I to IV, and loaded every caliber of ammunition into clips—but we still don’t know what effect any of it had on him. Longway may only find the audience he seeks, and that his talent deserves, when he steps back from the trap-house stove.


The Norwegian space disco producer follows last year's surprisingly sticky Ragysh EP with a refreshingly clean four-track EP composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer.

It's the Arps

In the parlance of the increasingly vocal menswear blogging community, Todd Terje is "having a moment." A combination of serendipity and opportunism, a moment is a flash of triumph, unplanned and difficult to reproduce. To offer some perspective, cargo pants are also having a moment. Like Terje productions (as opposed to remixes), cargo pants disappeared for a few years mid-decade; now they're back, and they look (sound) better than anyone remembers. Hell, it was only six months ago when, upon asking a friend if he had any interest in a Terje DJ tour stop in Chicago, I received the following curt reply: "No. I don't want to listen to a bunch of space disco shit." But Terje's three-song Ragysh EP-- the one that included year-end chart barnstormer "Snooze 4 Love"-- dropped and proved surprisingly sticky.
This month he follows that with It's the Arps, a four-track EP on "space disco shit" mothership Smalltown Supersound, composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer. The first line of Vintage Synth Explorer's ARP2600 entry is, "The ARP 2600 is without a doubt one of the finest analog synthesizers ever." Terje has always been a sound-- and not a retro-- fetishist. Why else devote his precious remix work to nu-disco bench players and classic rock mammoths in equal measure? It's no surprise then that he'd be tempted by a mystical artifact such as the Arp, which, like many old synthesizers, looks like the kind of rune-encrusted rock-toy that his music's implied spaceships set out in search of. (The former astrophysics student is a rumored future space traveler.)
Terje's own productions-- like those of labelmate Lindstrøm-- favor knob-twiddling disco, like Giorgio Moroder without the pop-vocal instincts. He's confident and gifted enough to throw away an all-time piano loop on a Bryan Ferry remix. On It's the Arps, he trades the sturdy eight-minute structures of Ragysh for a baggier and more colorful sound. "Inspector Norse" would be a pro-forma space-disco jam in lesser hands-- it has that bulbous bassline, the tint of humor-- but Terje transforms it into a daytime noir, one that spreads its pinging notes wide. The star of the show is the two-track "Swing Star" suite, part one a wicked treadmill of double-time sequences over blocky bass and hiss-y drums. It's synth music as roadside fireworks: Light the fuse and back away quickly. "Swing Star Pt. 2" explores the same chord progression but with a cleaner palate, and the result is a light-breeze boogie that feels like a comedown. (The fourth track "Myggsommer" is a narrow miss, a vine-y synth doodle that suggests vintage synth flippancy can be as precocious as vintage guitar-tone exercises.)
This might've been lost in the space disco explosion a half-decade ago, but with his contemporaries wandering off into prog, kraut, and sundry other forms of out-music, the clean lines and easy momentum of It's the Arps are really refreshing. And Jesus, it's fun. The trouble with moments, of course, is extending them. Terje has the imagination. An upcoming Roxy Music remix suggests Terje will be a more consistent presence, which is fantastic: I'd really like not to be comparing him to fedoras in 2017.


BIS: 001-020 collects a track from each release on Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space label, making for a  groovy, lightly psychedelic compilation that might sound best at a deck party, or the beach.

BIS: 001-020

Even at its most inclusive and open-minded, the underground dance community still aspires to a certain cool factor—man or woman, gay or straight, just, please, don't be a dork. This is one of the reasons Beats in Space's Tim Sweeney is a comforting presence: In addition to being one of New York's best DJs and longest-tenured tastemakers, he comes off on his weekly WNYU radio show—broadcast every Tuesday night at 10:30pm since he walked in as a student in 1999, and meticulously archived on his website—like, well, a bit of a dork. His casual demeanor and idiosyncratic interview style, in addition to his musical curiosity, lends his show an irrepressible friendliness that is unusual in dance music culture.
It's a vibe that has carried over to his record label of the same name, under which he's released 20 records—mostly 12"s but also a couple of albums—since 2011. Sweeney's tastes run wide and deep, and he's been in on the ground floor of every important trend in underground dance music during the last 15 years (he notably interned for DFA and has regularly DJ'ed with James Murphy). He's kept his label stylistically diverse but with a few common threads: groovy, lightly psychedelic tracks that might sound best at a deck party, or the beach. Balearic would be a good catchall, though Sweeney's choices represent a very New York iteration—basically disco and its stepchildren—that includes various shades of electro, italo, house, and punky funk.
BIS: 001 - 020 collects a track from each of the label's releases offering an easy, if slightly daunting (there's nearly 150 minutes of music here) overview of the label. The collection doesn't offer any household names; certainly given his connections and status Sweeney could've recruited higher profile producers. What's on offer here is really Sweeney's vision, the humid urban tropics his selections conjure.
In practice this is everything from the bratty guitar stomp of the Hidden Fees' "So What"—as fine a replica of mid-2000s DFA clamor on offer in 2016—to the sprawling acid bass of Secret Circuit's "Afterlife." BIS: 001 - 020 doesn't offer a discernible flow or progression; it's a great record to jump in and out of, or to set to random and cook dinner to. Many of the tracks contain the kind of charming off-key vocals that helped differentiate, say, Ze Records disco tracks from gaudier major label productions. The compilation's more traditional dance tracks—Matt Karmil's Four Tet-ish "So You Say" and Crystal & S. Koshi's roiling "Break the Dawn"—offer chopped vocals, never straying far from an easy tunefulness.
BIS: 001 - 020 is never less than good, but it also falls somewhat short of essential. Labels like International Feel and Permanent Vacation have offered similar thrills for years. It's possible to parse out the peculiarities of Sweeney's taste but there's a certain irony in appreciating Sweeney on a granular level. What has made his radio show so special is that there is no one easy summation of it; its value increases as you return week after week (or archived stream after archived stream), listening to an ever widening variety of DJs and styles. Beats in Space the radio show remains an essential resource for fans of dance music; Beats in Space the label is a fun, friendly capsule of Sweeney's favored style.


Meg Remy is a narrative savant and her glorious, danceable new album is a righteous collection of razor-sharp songs, full of spit and fury, a high-water mark for political pop music.

In a Poem Unlimited

Early in Naomi Alderman’s 2017 novel The Power, teenage girls gain the ability to produce an electric charge with their bodies. This “electrostatic power” is channeled through a set of muscles at the collarbone called a skein. It allows women the ability to change their circumstances, and the way that individuals grapple with their new authority is a primary concern of the novel. Alderman’s book is one of a series of new works of art that are helping to, in the words of the writer Rebecca Traister, adjust “American ears to the sound of female anger—righteous and defensive, grand and petty.” Another, one that shares many qualities with The Power, is Meg Remy’s striking new album as U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited.
Remy, an American expatriate who lives in Toronto, has been making music under the name U.S. Girls since 2007, but the moniker used to be a kind of joke. Her music was so idiosyncratic, even, at times, solipsistic. Responding to those qualities early in her career, Artforum called her “a woman who clearly spends a lot of time in her apartment with the shades drawn.” And reviewing her 2012 album GEM, the last released before she signed to 4AD, Pitchfork said of U.S. Girls that “you can tell without peeking at the liner notes that this is a project born of solitude and isolation.”
But by the time her 2015 record, Half Free came out, Remy had begun to open the band to external voices. And three years later, U.S. Girls has become a cacophony. In a Poem Unlimited, at once the most accessible and sharply violent U.S. Girls album to date, is the product of more than two dozen collaborators, many of them members of the Toronto funk and jazz collective the Cosmic Range. Not a single song was written by Remy alone; two were even written without her input. And yet, the glam and surf rock, disco and pop, (glorious, danceable pop!) on the record speaks to a unified vision, one of spit, fury, and chuckling to keep from crying.
Though it is unmistakably a record about women’s anger in its various shades and forms, Remy signals her awareness of male canons throughout (its title comes from Hamlet and the song “Rosebud” is a clear reference to Citizen Kane.) Those landmark texts are there to be turned inside out: Remy is interested in creating new mythologies, fertilizing stale old ground to nurture a different sort of harvest. The shuffling funk of “Pearly Gates,” for instance, turns a story of quotidian male cluelessness into a religious allegory, asking how a heaven controlled by men could ever be safe.
That might sound to some like a facile observation. But none of the songs on Poem can be folded neatly into a box. Remy remains a narrative savant wedded to the thrill of the unexpected, the razor under the tongue, and she fills her songs with cryptic passages and unexpected allusions. Making a record without psychological depth (or music fit to accompany it) might cause her to break out into hives. The album’s first track, the foreboding, psychedelic “Velvet 4 Sale” sets up a woman’s revenge tale. With its breathy ad-libs and spiraling, almost-Western cinematic synths, it would slot nicely into the soundtrack of Kill Bill: Vol 2, and it includes that most phallic of all musical passages, the guitar solo. The song, co-written with Remy’s husband, the musician Max Turnbull, begins in media res: “You’ve been sleeping with one eye open because he always could come back, ya know? And you’ve been walking these streets unguarded waiting for any man to explode.” It ends (spoiler alert!) with a woman instructing another on how to ensure that her male target is dead.
Hamlet, too, is nominally a revenge tale. But just as revenge becomes a portal to the many layers of Shakespeare’s play, so too do does In a Poem Unlimited soon migrate to more complex scenarios. On the extraordinary “Rage of Plastics,” Remy explores, with sax and surf guitar, the bubbling resentment of a woman whose job at an oil refinery has made her infertile. And good luck solving the riddle contained within the funky dirge “L-Over,” a song about ditching a mysterious lover, an animate being with no heart. With few exceptions, these are stories about how women react after being done wrong. But the reactions are so varied that it feels as if each belongs to a different individual, and the album comes to feel like an entire community in tense conversation with itself.
The musical vocabulary of U.S. Girls has also become so expansive that it can be difficult to pin down. There are flashes of Marc Bolan and Frank Zappa, ’70s psychedelia and Terry Riley’s ambient extravaganzas, but new to Remy’s palette is a disco-driven pop, stoking a wild celebratory spirit barely restrained by traditional verses and choruses. “Incidental Boogie,” “Rosebud,” and most especially “M.A.H.,” the album’s spiritual and intellectual centerpiece, glow with the spirit of Madonna, or ABBA with bayonets concealed under those flowing white robes. Remy has talked about pop as a form of bait, to draw listeners in to her more complex ideas. “M.A.H.” barely disguises an anthem of righteous anger directed toward an old romance. “As if you couldn’t tell, I’m mad as hell,” she sings in her wiry alto. “I won’t forget so why should I forgive?” She’s used the best, catchiest song on the record, you come to realize, to rail against an unlikely antagonist: Barack Obama.
Because Obama, for Remy, is just another avatar of male authority, the kind that she takes on without scruples. On “M.A.H.” she accuses the 44th president of fraudulence, charming half a country while continuing to wage its wars and eavesdrop on its citizens. Remy spelled her more broad skepticism of political power out in a 2016 interview, around the time she had embarked on making the record. “The violence that women experience on an individual basis from other individual men, in my mind it mirrors the violence that’s going on around the world,” she said. “It’s the same as the police brutality that’s happening in the States, it’s the same as the bombing of the Syrian people.” In telling the story of her relationship with Obama as a bad romance, she underscores the way that the most casual forms of male misbehavior are political. And on In a Poem Unlimited, Remy lives within their violence for 37 minutes, seeding it with her own ideas and the sounds of camp and disco records. Thirty-nine years after tens of thousands of people attended the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, it’s as if she’s staged an album-long counterprotest, bringing the artifacts of the patriarchy to the stadium and burning them to ash.
The characters of In a Poem Unlimited exist far from a comfortable echo chamber. Their rage may be understandable, and expressed through Remy’s songs, but, as the album closes, her songs become skeptical, cautious, pensive, and even meditative. The album comes to resemble something like a time-spanning mirror. It anticipates the full range of the conversation that’s been raging in public since October, the complicated, multi-faceted and nuanced exchange that the opponents of the #MeToo movement keep pleading for, ignoring that it’s happening already. Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.


Diplo's 2004 debut is given a 10-year-anniversary reissue. It's an odd release in his catalog: a trip-hop record, put out two years after obvious comparison points DJ Shadow and RJD2 had released albums that were tearing that genre's remnants to pieces.

Florida

It's a familiar ritual to anyone who's recently gotten deep into a veteran artist's catalog: at some point, a new convert's going to dig back far enough to find something that confuses the hell out of them. By the end of 2004, Diplo was already established as one of the brains behind electro-crunk hybridizers Hollertronix, and his name was attached to under-the-wire '04 best-of lists with the similar-minded M.I.A. mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. And those are roots that even his most recent work, and that of the Mad Decent imprint, can be traced to in more or less a straight line.
But the debut solo album he released in the midst of all those identity-building works tends to throw people off. For the unfamiliar: Florida is a trip-hop record. Crucially, it's a trip-hop record from 2004, released two years after obvious comparison points DJ Shadow and RJD2 had released albums (The Private Press and Deadringer) that were tearing that genre's remnants to pieces. So where'd this morose, rarely danceable, sometimes weirdly beautiful record come from, and why does so little Diplo's done since sound anything like it?
The reissue titled F10RIDA takes a shot at giving some additional background to Diplo's come-up during the making of this record, a massive undertaking that includes a special BitTorrent partnership and a multimedia-minded take on archival materials. (Meaning mostly photos, email correspondence transcripts, remixes, unreleased material, and the component "stems" of the track "Into the Sun".) Alongside the promotional-kit feel to all this is the nearly 10-minute commentary Diplo contributed to Big Dada's SoundCloud, where he lays out his mind state at the time the record came together: rooted in an upbringing in both South and Central Florida, making self-taught loops on a cheap stolen sampler, taking inspirational cues from Shadow and DJ Premier and J-Swift, and trying to conjure up ethereal, spooky weirdness with limited means. What he came out with was inspired by "the truest thing I know"—where he lived, and what he took from those environs.
Diplo's Florida is a place to escape before it swallows you: the sun goes down even in the Sunshine State; it's a place of late-night post-job bus rides and weed-and-headphones rumination sessions. The album has the feel of a Southern Gothic elegy for an early life since abandoned, which makes the uncharacteristic nature of the record a bit more compelling. Bummer Diplo isn't a facet we see or hear much of, and even when the album is derivative and simple, if offers some insight into where his head was when he started.
But this is the work of someone who's not quite there yet, especially because his "there" isn't even mapped out. Wesley Pentz has been everything from savvy adapter to clumsy appropriator, but in the process he found a route into a distinct persona. Florida, meanwhile, is little more than the sum of influences. Given the Diplo we know now, it seems (proto)typical that even a primordial release of his would boast a Vybz Kartel appearance; the Nintendo-cartridge banger "Diplo Rhythm" makes his Major Lazer moves seem like a foregone conclusion in retrospect. It's a bit more surprising that this record would also have a guest spot by Freestyle Fellowship's P.E.A.C.E., right in the middle of an era where left coast indie rap was maybe the last thing your average Hollertronix party attendee would claim allegiance to. But the fact that it's a rubber band double-time over the Timbaland-tabla pastiche "Indian Thick Jawns" at least makes it a stealth classic in both artists' catalogs, one that plays to both their familiar strengths.
It's the atypical moodier stuff that's more mixed. Sometimes it's just a loop that sounds interesting until it doesn't. There's some ambition in the longer cuts, an urge to fit in all sorts of ideas and sources in tracks like the snare-riddled, soul-jazz gloom of "Way More" and the swampy, bleary-eyed nine-minute break parade "Works", which pulls strength from restlessness. It all comes together brilliantly in "Summer's Gonna Hurt You", a keyboard-driven Brit-prog lament that he rewires with intricate boom-clap drums. It's like he heard the thunderstorm breaks on Shadow's "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain" and pledged to make a version informed by UGK.
There's more of that on the bonus material, the best of which comes from 2003's Epistemology Suite EP, triangulating early Funkadelic, sound collage, and Mannie Fresh snare rolls. Other material's a bit shorter on weirdness and personality. The remixes go even further in tracking a big muddy footprint all over the context of this record—I know things have changed for Diplo, and as goes Diplo so goes the pop world and all that, but hearing Metronomy rework "Diplo Rhythm" progenitor "Newsflash" into galumphing synth-horn overload or Derek Allen slather wubwub seizures all over "Summer's Gonna Hurt You" doesn't say much for progress. Diplo's music hasn't regressed over the last 10 years, and neither have his sensibilities. But sometimes it's best to let the weirdness stand on its own, make a special place for it, and wonder where else it could've been taken.


London's HÆLOS bring to mind a host of ’90s influences, from trip-hop to shoegaze, but they are able to channel the best parts of those early bands in a way that reflects the present moment.

Full Circle

HÆLOS' debut LP, Full Circle, brings to mind the heyday of trip-hop and British electronic explosion. All of the genre’s biggest characteristics are here—ethereal vocals, muted breakbeats, swelling keyboards, and the occasional reverberating guitar. But Full Circle resolutely repurposes almost every aspect of ’90s trip-hop at no loss to its integrity or listenability. It’s both a total throwback and rooted in 2016, like a fermentation of ideas born 20 years ago and brought back to life with surprising potential.
Bandmembers Lotti Benardout, Arthur Delaney, and Dom Goldsmith all share vocal duties, and the harmonies they create add to Full Circle‘s richness. HÆLOS’ most obvious recent touchstone would be the xx, not only for their use of male/female vocals but their chilled-out, slowed-down love songs coupled with a melancholy aesthetic. This is most pointed on "Alone," where an echoing electric guitar is plucked while the band sing in unison "I won’t lie to you/ Because I know what love is." While these influences are often blatant, HÆLOS’ songs don’t suffer from the association. So while "Separate Lives" bears more than a passing resemblance to Olive’s "You’re Not Alone," with its looped bursts of synths, there’s enough of a spin on it that it’s able to walk the line between homage and imitation without much difficulty.
The centerpiece on Full Circle is "Oracle," a five-and-a-half minute comedown on a record of comedowns. It sounds like the blissful escapism of 808 State meets the urban desolation of Burial, with vocals coasting over the top—an absolutely perfect combination. "Cloud Nine" is another highlight, a mournful piano driving more of HÆLOS’ harmonies deep into a meditation of a breakup, and "Pale," a track with stuttering keyboard samples are undercut by massive breakbeat drums and Bernadout’s version of a diva vocal, ends Full Circle on a triumphant note. By wearing their influences on their sleeve while never slipping into gimmickry, HÆLOS are able to pull off an impressive trick, a debut record that both cements them in a genre and leaves then room to grow.


Detroit techno legend Robert Hood, under his Floorplan alias, invites his teenage daughter Lyric to coproduce Victorious, which is more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of his past work.

Victorious

If you’ve read an interview with Robert Hood in the last few years, you'll see that the Detroit techno pioneer obsessed with one question: What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends. Be it dark room or wooden pew, you should find yourself swaying, head to the floor, singing praises to something beyond yourself. They both function, at some deeper level, in the realm of the sublime and the ecstatic. For the last decade he’s lived in rural Alabama and has been working as a practicing minister when he’s not on tour. While the lifestyles might suggest a radical disjuncture, he thinks that they have to inform each other.  And the music he’s released under Floorplan has been his primary vehicle for exploring the more spiritual ends of his musical identity.
He’s appeared as Floorplan on and off since 1996, but a full album of work didn’t materialize until 2013’s Paradise, a kind of career retrospective for the moniker. Overall, Floorplan is a departure from his epochal minimal techno work, orbiting instead around disco, gospel, and house. He’s also released some of his most iconic tracks as Floorplan, including “Never Grow Old,” which is a template for what you can expect structurally and thematically: exuberantly looped chants and a professorial level of attention to detail, both in production and song craft. And now he’s invited his teenage daughter, Lyric Hood, to co-produce the second full-length Floorplan album, Victorious, a 75 minute long test of Hood’s spiritual dance music.
His daughter first joined him behind the decks as a sixteen-year-old, and after a spat of touring that included a rather heartfelt closing set at Dekmantel last year, she’s helped co-produce much of Victorious. You can sense the youthful energy she imparts all over Victorious, which benefits from hanging a tad looser than Paradise. It’s eleven tracks are more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of what Hood has done in the past.
It opens with the six-minute “Spin,” a clinic on structuring a house-music single, fashioned from effortlessly timed cues, jump cuts, and studied progressions. There’s a moment in “Spin” when the beat becomes vaporous and then solidifies, giving you a sense of how physical Hood can make electronic music feel. This physicality is made even more clear in the particularly religious-minded tracks like “The Heavens & The Earth” where a hypnotic reading of the opening lines of Genesis is placed on top of a warm pulsating synth. The line between club and church is forcefully collapsed, and it’s well-argued case study for the spiritual goals for this kind of music.
For all the seamless transitions within tracks**,* Victorious* can feel a little incoherent as a whole. The tracks often end abruptly, closing their loops before they can pleasantly spill into the next moment. There is repetitiveness to the song structures that can feel predictable at a certain point. While you can sense something clunky about how these songs work as as a full unit, individually the tracks overcome the album’s shortcomings by not feeling overcrowded or overproduced. There is something delightfully dispassionate about the way they can reframe and reign in uncontrollable funk in “Tell You No Lie” or slyly weave a sermon in between the thumps of “He Can Save You.” But then other instances like “Ha Ya” can feel phoned in, and somehow the differences between each track can start still feel superficial on repeated listens.
Perhaps the biggest limitation to it all is that Victorious is in no way a headphone listen. It is constrained by site specificity. If there is a possible maximum-pleasure listening experience it will come from luxuriating in this music very loudly and perfectly articulated over multiple sets of speakers. Perhaps this is true of all dance music, but the thesis of Floorplan is especially grounded in a communal experience. In order to really have that ecstatic event Hood aims for,  you simply cannot be behind a pair of headphones. Victorious is filled with moments that give you glimpses of the club in heaven, but like the afterlife itself, it’s always out of reach, distinct only in brief flashes and in feverish moments.


The Chicago noise-rock/thrash/punk/metal/etc. trio continue to hate you, your band, and most other things.

High Anxiety

The Chicago trio Oozing Wound have planted their flag in the spot where metal, punk, and experimental meet. Four albums in, they are firmly devoted to keeping that space both weird and uncomfortable. High Anxiety doesn’t stray from their aesthetic: it’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.
Whether or not you can understand any of Zack Weil’s shrieks in the opener “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots,” the bile in his guitar is easily understandable. They’re not interested in metaphors or dressing up their hatred in Latin and sigils. The second half of “Idiots” lurches into swampy riffing, a mutated take on a thrash breakdown. It’s more for throwing a bunch of aforementioned idiots off a cliff than for stage-diving, offering no release but annihilation. “Tween Shitbag” is equally incendiary, with Weil sarcastically yelling “Oh man I really love your band!”, a call back to the anti-industry screed “New York Bands” from their debut Retrash.
High Anxiety also recalls Voivod on “Die on Mars” and “Riding the Universe,” not just for their space themes but also how punky thrash and prog goofiness chop it up with one another. “Mars” throws some death metal in the mix, the intro guitar leads sounding like Bolt Thrower solos drifting into a trash-filled outer space. These songs are house shows as terrariums populated by metal dudes too strange for the pay-to-play clubs and punks who punish themselves in Ph.D. programs, and Oozing Wound makes the chaos coalesce. They’re serious, but not serious.
Oozing Wound have always been indebted to Midwestern noise rock like Wolf Eyes and Destroy All Monsters as much as weird thrash — their slogan “the world’s fastest noise rock band” passes muster. The most noise rock moment on High Anxiety is actually the longest and slowest song: “Birth of Flat Earther” plods and drags like AmRep at its most high-gain and high-strung, with no blast beats to energize the grim proceedings. “Earther” also hints at weariness that looms over High Anxiety: they’re still dishing out hate, but it’s starting to get to them. The record was almost called I Know It’s Only Rock and Roll but I’m Tired of It, a longer yet less opaque title. If you were surrounded by fucking idiots all day, you would be exhausted, too.


Documenting the South Carolina stop of the Carrie & Lowell tour, this audiovisual album takes a record that thrived on simplicity and adorns it with glowsticks, but each track retains a subtle beauty.

Carrie & Lowell Live

“I got so little pleasure out of writing and recording the album that I feel like I’m due some enjoyment,” Sufjan Stevens said before embarking on the full-band tour behind his heartbreaking 2015 record Carrie & Lowell. The 11 songs on Carrie & Lowell featured multiple backup singers and instrumentalists, but they retained an almost voyeuristic sense of intimacy, exploring the ways death affects our lives. Stevens mostly shied away from seeking resolution, instead focusing on the shame, regret, and loneliness that can accompany grief. The emotional core of the record came at the end of a song called “Fourth of July.” As the music faded around him, Stevens sounded alone and inconsolable, repeating a simple truth: “We’re all gonna die.”
That moment transforms on Carrie & Lowell Live, an audiovisual document from the South Carolina stop of the album’s tour. Here, Stevens lets the outro of “Fourth of July” build instead of dissipate. If not quite a happy ending, it’s at least a cathartic one—his mantra now backed by pummeling drums and a chorus of voices. This transformation underscores the difference between Stevens’ records and his shows. While even his most elaborate albums feel hushed and solitary, his concerts are communal experiences. On stage, he’ll dress up his band as cheerleaders and strap a giant pair of wings on his back; he’ll take dancing cues from Justin Bieber and cover a hit song by Drake. Carrie & Lowell Live—while highlighting the starkest, saddest songs Stevens has ever written—reflects that side of his personality like no other release. This juxtaposition makes it a compelling listen and a fitting companion to a deep, multifaceted record.
On Carrie & Lowell, tracks segued into each other with haunted anti-solos: ghosting away to reveal one isolated melody or instrument. On the live album, Stevens takes the opposite approach, expanding and amplifying every moment. The wispy pedal steel coda to “Death With Dignity” is sung in unison by his whole band with the force of a prayer, while the second half of “Should Have Known Better”—a chintzy keyboard melody on the record—gets turned into an escalating anthem with a round of vocalists. “All of Me Wants All of You” and “Carrie & Lowell” are both embellished with long, spacey synth solos, while “Blue Bucket of Gold” gets its own 18-minute reprise. The effect is somewhat jarring: taking a record that thrived on simplicity and adorning it with glowsticks. But it’s a testament to Stevens’ songwriting that each track retains its subtlety and beauty in this context.
The Carrie & Lowell tour highlighted the album’s unique place in his catalog, featuring every song from the record and only a small sampling of earlier material. Those additions are whittled down further here to just an interstitial track from Michigan—the wordless “Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou),” used as an intro—and two selections from 2010’s dystopian, electronic opus The Age of Adz. The Adz songs sound surprisingly at home alongside Carrie & Lowell’s more autobiographical material, and not just because of the new synth makeovers. “Futile Devices” arrives near the end of the set and adds an element of desperation to Stevens’ struggles to express his feelings, recounting memories of sleeping on couches and watching a loved one crochet. In “Vesuvius,” Stevens refers to himself in the third person (“Sufjan, follow your heart/Follow the flame or fall on the floor”), and it feels like a pep talk: a reminder that there’s more ground to cover, more life to live.
Stevens once made an important distinction between Carrie & Lowell and his earlier work, stating, “This is not my art project; this is my life.” The live album feels a lot more like an art project—especially the film accompaniment, with its psychedelic light show and collage-like projections of home videos. During the performance, Stevens rarely addresses the audience; instead he mimics the record’s seamless flow and lets his songs speak for themselves. One of his only remarks arrives during the closing rendition of “Hotline Bling” with singer/songwriter Gallant, and it’s a simple bit of levity (“Let me see your best Drake impression,” Stevens says, “Something like this...”). At the end of his set, he’s no closer to finding peace or answering the questions that torment him throughout these songs. But he’s surrounded by friends, and he’s enjoying himself.


Uniform is the industrial metal duo of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg. Their fevered, relentless sophomore record is the sound of clawing for survival and sanity.

Wake in Fright

Uniform—the duo consisting of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg—started out obsessed with trying to make industrial order from punk chaos. Their debut, Perfect World, sounds like sinister master planning in its title alone; in some alternate universe even worse than ours, its cover would be a chic totalitarian symbol. In a short time, they’ve gotten angrier and let the chaos they tried to control run free. Perfect laid out what a gray dystopia would look like; their sophomore album Wake in Fright is Uniform fighting back, leaning more heavily towards their hardcore and metal heritage.
Opener “Tabloid” sounds like Big Black embracing thrash, capturing the precision of a machine coming into conflict with the immeasurable energy of bodies flying through a crowd. Their last record featured a collaboration with Coil’s Drew McDowall; this song shows their ideal touring partners may be Power Trip. Greenberg’s abrasive industrial tone sounds elastic when applied to honest-to-evilness metal riffs, finding a flexibility in rigidity. Even so, he beats you down with select riffs instead of throwing them all out. Such is the case with “Bootlicker,” where thrash gets locked into a snarling loop; if Tom Araya was on vocals, it would be the best Slayer song in years. (Greenberg also nods to Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s reckless, borderline free soloing at the end of “The Killing of America.”)
While it seems simplistic to equate “faster material” with “more urgent,” that’s Fright’s key strength. Greenberg has never sound angrier or more excited (and often, both), and the same can be said for Berdan. “The Light At the End (Cause)” is their most relentless track yet, the moment where both Greenberg and Berdan let a loss of control be their guiding force. It could be replicated by a proficient drummer, but it would sacrifice its jackhammer oppressiveness.
They haven’t abandoned their slower industrial tracks, but flipping the ratio between those and hardcore works in their favor. “Night of Fear” is most like Perfect, aided by the tension between the militaristic drums and Berdan’s shouted urges to deprogram. “The Lost” is their first attempt at warping the poppier side of their industrial influences; it is their most danceable song, loosely speaking, a dimmer take on Cold Cave’s goth-via-hardcore. In terms of club potential, it leans closer to Prurient’s “You Show Great Spirit,” more of an unforgiving blacklight shone on after-hours sleaze. It is also liberating because it allows a light of joy in, however small, which is more radical than an onslaught of persistent negativity.
Uniform couldn’t have predicted the future when they were making Fright, even though Perfect was itself a world-building exercise, but this is the kind of record we need now more than ever. They’re not more vicious by circumstance; their own uncoupling just happens to better reflect our future. Perfect was more of a reinvention for Greenberg, then fresh out of the Men, then it was for Berdan, whose screams didn’t sound much different than they did in Drunkdriver. With Fright, both have found new sides to themselves: Greenberg tapped into his inner metal kid, but Berdan has taken the self-apocalyptic energy of his past and turned it into a weapon for redemption and moving forward, much like Negative Approach did in the ’80s. Salvation may seem to be out of reach at this point, but that’s no reason to claw towards to it; the exercise may be the only thing to keep us sane in the years coming up.