Will Oldham has a doppelganger of sorts in Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter behind Songs: Ohia. No, Molina hasn't been ...

Ghost Tropic

Will Oldham has a doppelganger of sorts in Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter behind Songs: Ohia. No, Molina hasn't been known to sport a Marxian beard, and he's long since ditched his multiple monikers. But he has a few other things in common with Oldham, alt-folk's reigning Prince of Darkness. Consider the following: in 1996, Molina released a single on the Palace imprint; he now consistently records with a rotating cast of musicians; and Ghost Tropic was Molina's second full-length release of 2000 (The Lioness came earlier in the year).
But the connection runs deeper. Molina also plays hushed, somber folk music, usually with sparse instrumentation. His lyrics, while more personal, are nearly as poetic and dark. Then, of course, the most obvious comparison: the fragile voice. Generally speaking, Molina's pipes are cleaner than Oldham's-- a fact that becomes particularly apparent during those rare high notes. But when low-key, his voice sounds disconcertingly similar. Thus, given that since 1999's Axxess & Ace-- his highwatermark thus far-- Molina has become subtler and even more subdued, and his voice has moved closer in nature to Oldham's. On Ghost Tropic, where Molina's voice is now similarly broken, the difference would be indistinguishable to the untrained ear.
The comparison between Molina and Oldham has been made time and again, and is probably as sickening to Songs: Ohia's fans as it is to him. But there's a reason I insist on making the tired comparison: never before has it been more apt. Ghost Tropic, the band's fifth proper full-length, makes even The Lioness seem, at the very least, content. For his version of "I See a Darkness"-- or rather, "I See a Heart of Darkness"-- Molina again enlisted Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out, who also played on The Lioness, as well as members of Lullaby for the Working Class. Their influence, though, goes sadly undetectable.
Ghost Tropic was recorded at Dead Space Recording Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska, but sounds as though it were recorded live in a haunted hut somewhere in an Ecuadorian rainforest. At night. Take, for instance, the opener, "Lightning Risked It All," which begins with wooden percussion, a sparse acoustic wrenched out of tune after each note, and the lines, "Still no guides/ It's not a generous world/ It is a separate world/ The bad luck taste of the dark/ The broad luck of blood on the water." But these words aren't delivered with any rapidity: you're given enough time between each line to consider eternity. A random kickdrum might snap you back to reality, as might subtly increasing percussion. Or you might continue wandering off, set further adrift by the increasingly restless wooden clacks that sound like water dripping in puddles.
The rest of the album isn't much different, with the bulk of its tracks rarely progressing from where they begin. South American percussion usually offers tempered accompaniment along with a thunderous piano, both of which are occasionally complimented by a Spanish guitar, pedal steel, glockenspiel, eerie keyboard-chorus or shrill triangle. And Molina's voice inevitably enters in, usually after the one-minute mark, to deliver, in a death-bed rasp, lines such as, "Death as it shook you/ You gave it a fool's look/ You said I am an empty page to you" ("The Body Burned Away"), or, "Simply to live, that is my plan/ In a city that breaks us/ I will say nothing" ("No Limits on the Words").
But what really holds the album together-- perhaps better than the choice of instruments, lyrics, or Molina's voice-- are the tropical birds. Unlike, say, Phish or Quasi, Molina doesn't tactlessly plop a mess of birds in the middle of his album. Instead, birdsong slides in now and then, reminding you where you are (the tropics, fool). Only occasionally do the chirps reach a cacophony, as on the two instrumental tracks entitled "Ghost Tropic," where the birds sound as though they've been awaked by the unsettling music emanating from the hut.
None of the eight tracks that comprise Ghost Tropic are true songs. They're more like movements that make up the larger whole of the album, which acts as a 51-minute song. There are no tangible choruses; at best, you'll hear a couple lines repeated two or three times. In short, this is a mood piece. As such, it'll suit your needs perfectly at times, and incompletely at others. The two 12-minute tracks that essentially end the album-- separated only by one of the short instrumentals-- won't seem long enough for you one day, and will be horrendously sluggish and repetitive on another. It's like watching a Brita filter a liter of water: sometimes you're too damn thirsty to wait, so you give in to tap water; other times you hold out, knowing that your patience will make the experience entirely satisfying.


The Tel Aviv-based electronic music producer Yotam Avni mines the trenches between tech, tribal and deep house, adding in choral elements that mingle the ancient with the futuristic.

Tehillim

For the last thirty years, Israel’s electronic music scene has operated in fits and starts. When India opened up their borders to Israeli passports in 1988, many youths who had finished their conscription services poured into the country and became entranced by Goa trance, bringing that rave aesthetic back home with them. But by 1997, police cracked down on bigger festivals, driving electronic music further underground. The last few years have seen an uptick in hotly tipped young Israeli producers such as Moscoman, Autarkic, Deep’a & Biri, and Red Axes (not to mention Moscoman’s always intriguing Disco Halal imprint). Of them all, Yotam Avni might be best positioned to crossover to larger festival crowds, as his resumé links him with the likes of Derrick May, Osunlade, and Terrence Parker.
Avni knows every side of the industry, beginning as a music journalist before moving to party promoter (AVADON) as well as his own club, Resek. Across a handful of singles, the Tel Aviv-based producer has mined the trenches between tech, tribal and deep house, his tracks popping up on both Ben Klock and Âme & Dixon’s Essential Mix. Following up on this summer’s “Monad XXII,” this four-track EP (also on the Berlin-based Stroboscopic Artefacts imprint) continues to push him towards a sound at that’s more assured, though he continues to take risks to varying degrees of success.
“Orma” strikes a plangent, ominous chord and quickening hi-hat pattern for the techno. Just when it seems like it might just plunge deeper into darkness, Avni introduces a saxophone skronk and lets it echo. Quick fillips of tom and an incessant beep are added, but despite the horn and the possibilities it suggests, the track never quite moves beyond its original components. “Shtok” features glimmering struck bell tones not unlike Pantha du Prince, which Avni then sullies with sweeps of white noise and a phantasmal wordless vocal, just balancing between beauty and menace.
“Even” mixes the EP’s stoutest beat with the most elegant filigree of strings –both plucked and bowed—and piano. For the title track, Avni builds a rhythm of rattling gourds and thumped wood, harkening back to his tribal house productions. Before it goes down that route though, a men’s chorus enters, making the “Tehillim” (or “psalms”) of the title a literal reference. The first few times through, the combination of choir and drums feels more like a throwback to Enigma. But Avni unleashes squalls of feedback and noise that give the track some grit, so that a mix of the ancient and futuristic also has a bit of the messy present in it.


Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Natasha Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Featuring collaborations with Beck, Rob Ellis, David Sitek, Portishead's Adrian Utley, and others, The Haunted Man is at once striking and enigmatic.

The Haunted Man

Natasha Khan has said her third album as Bat for Lashes is partly inspired by studying her own family history. This is informative. Her father, a trainer for the Pakistani national squash team, left suddenly when she was 11, and his departure casts a shadow on the fairytale drama of Bat for Lashes' debut, 2006's Fur and Gold. Yeah, but one of the guys Khan's dad coached? Her cousin, Jahangir Khan? He went on to become a six-time world champion and basically his sport's equivalent of a Pelé or Michael Jordan. You don't need Natasha's Ancestry.com password to know there's competitive drive in her blood.
That's her up there in The Haunted Man cover art. Naked, un-retouched, and un-made-up, with a similarly naked man draped around her shoulders. The suggestion is that her follow-up to 2009's lavishly sensual Two Suns is more intimate and stripped bare, and sure enough, there's less reverb on Khan's voice, and the lyrical concerns have moved from an otherworldly New York to the English countryside. But what the Ryan McGinley-shot art most closely shares with the music you'll find within is that it's at once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.
Some albums sound effortless. The Haunted Man sounds like effort magnificently realized. The rawness of feeling is achieved through equally raw ambition. Bat for Lashes' sophisticated blend of art-rock grandeur and synth-pop directness again carries echoes of 1980s luminaries like Kate Bush and the Cure, gleaming with autoharp, Abbey Road-recorded strings, and a continuing exploration of electronics. Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and one of the year's most beguiling albums.
Two Suns' sublime, Karate Kid-nodding "Daniel" won Britain's Ivor Novello songwriting award. The potential hits here are just as overpowering. "Let's Get Lost", the sumptuous slab of goth-bubblegum Khan did with Beck for 2011's Twilight: Eclipse OST, was a promising sign of what to expect. On slinky, guitar-centric "All Your Gold", Khan is the one who's haunted, but it only takes a few listens before Gotye's awfully similar smash sounds fleshless in comparison. "Marilyn" adapts the 1950s matinee-idolatry of Lana Del Rey to a dream-pop production worthy of its "silver screen," with a staggering, spectral bridge-- and several instrumental contributions from Beck (plus arranging by ex-Ash member Charlotte Hatherley).
Though sometimes over-reaching, the less likely singles here are as darkly enigmatic, sonically curious, and thematically textured as their equivalents on Two Suns. The centerpiece is the title track, with its "Scarborough Fair"-tinged male choir marching up that distant hill. "Yes, your ghosts have got me, too/ But it's me and you," Khan replies, summing up the album's main conceit: the way previous experiences can twist our current relationships. On M83-gauzy, Dave Sitek-assisted opener "Lilies", though, "the figure of a man" answers a life-affirming, womanly prayer. Druid-like male voices on "Oh Yeah" introduce the poised yet passionate exultation of a narrator "in bloom." As on the album cover, Khan's music can acknowledge the female body without reducing it to sex-kitten cliché.
In fact, if the last album was about contrasts-- between two suns, two lovers, even two sides of the narrator's persona-- then The Haunted Man is defined by balance, between the bare and the polished, between the communal and the personal, and between the respective ghosts haunting our personal interactions. Compromises can lead to breakthroughs: "Where you see a wall, I see a door," Khan sings on "A Wall", another Sitek-backed, baroque synth-pop anthem. By the restrained yet intricate closing lullaby "Deep Sea Diver", which meets the bar set by Two Suns' collaborative finale with famously reclusive crooner Scott Walker, Khan finds a compromise for two people separated by masks: "Darling if you can't see out/ You know that I can hear you shout." They're together, alone, shaking through.
The most overtly naked track here, "Laura", is also the most transcendent. With a gently orchestra-kissed piano-and-voice arrangement, this goosebump-inducing collaboration with the former Lizzy Grant's "Video Games" co-writer Justin Parker is the clearest example of how Bat for Lashes perches on the fulcrum between indie-associated sincerity and pop-oriented savvy. We'll never know Laura, really, but we can feel what it might be like to know her. On an album with more names in the credits than Khan could ever use for song titles (also including Portishead's Adrian Utley, among many others), the greatest testament to her strength of will might be just this: She has added a new unforgettable character to pop's family tree.


The mostly solid debut album from the South African producer Okzharp and vocalist Manthe Ribane foregoes their earlier sound for something slower and more ponderous.

Closer Apart

Much of the electronic music that the wider world hears from South Africa is by turns tough (gqom), weird (Die Antwoord) and frenetic (Shangaan electro). Okzharp—aka South African producer Gervase Gordon—is no stranger to all three. As one third of the group LV, he contributed to tunes like “Sebenza” and “Boomslang,” which flowered with the energy of a bristling South African scene, while his two EPs with vocalist, artist, and dancer Manthe Ribane hid a muscular energy among their drum machine bounce.
For their debut album Closer Apart, Okzharp & Ribane (alongside filmmaker Chris Saunders, who has produced a sumptuous video accompaniment) have rung the changes. Out goes toughness and energy in favor of what Ribane calls her “‘Lady’ side.” “I grew up listening to jazz, classic, and Gospel, I am a very soft-spoken person and it resonates with being confident with that,” she said. What this means in practice is that the BPMs on Closer Apart are lowered to a crawl, the production nods more to R&B than dance-floor house, and Ribane’s vocals, which had the rebel-rousing swagger of a confident MC on early tracks like “Maybe This” and “Fede,” are delivered in a tone that is altogether more ponderous.
It is a move that makes a certain sense for an electronic act on their debut LP, as they move away from the ephemeral thrills of the track in favor of a format that is theoretically more lasting. And yet, it puts a focus on Okzharp & Ribane’s songwriting in a way that leaves them exposed. The album’s lyrics, the majority of which are in English, are often poor, relying on the kind of rhyme-restricted universal truths that would make even Noel Gallagher give it a second edit. “Make U Blue” raises the ghost of high school poetry in couplets like, “I got something I need to say/Hey is that ok? /I’m gonna say it anyway,” while “Why U In My Way?” buries the asininity of “What is that you say?/There’s no yesterday/Don't you fade away” amid endless repetition of the song title. This situation is hardly helped by the slow, deliberate, and sometimes rather tuneless way in which Ribane delivers her lines, her voice drenched in the kind of modish vocal effects that only serve to date the album.
The production, meanwhile, is solid rather than brilliant. The drum machine programming may be full of stutter and invention but the instrumental melodies rarely rise above the acceptable and the overall sonic palette invites comparison to Okzharp & Ribane's Hyperdub label mates. Opener “W U @” has the misty instrumental mope of early Burial, for example, while “Make U Blue” recreates the wipe-clean synth sound of Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch. At times—notably on the disjointed “Never Thought”—the music and vocals are working at cross purposes, as if shunted together by necessity rather than invention. Okzharp has said the album was made “in hotel rooms, planes, and airports in the brief periods of time that we spent together” and you wonder if Closer Apart has come out undercooked.
What makes this particularly galling is that when Okzharp & Ribane do connect they create moments of verve, invention, and emotional impact that rival anything on their first two EPs. “Time Machine” brilliantly captures the mournful disconnect of being lost in an airport, complete with vividly surreal imagery (“Airport queues/Cerulean blue/Viper trails/Cross the skies”), while “Treasure Erasure” balances drumline energy with a melody of ecstatic melancholy. Best of all is lead single “Dun,” which marries a tough, lolloping beat to queasy keyboard blips and a grand-standing vocal performance from Ribane at her cocksure best.
That the best track here is also the one closest to Okzharp & Ribane’s brash rhythmical past is telling. On paper, the decision to mix the raw invention their early work with the melodic catharsis of jazz and gospel sounds fascinating, while Closer Apart’s weirdly gorgeous companion video makes a case for Okzharp & Manthe Ribane as an enthralling visual act. But the album itself feels frustratingly limp, making you wish Okzharp & Ribane had stayed true to the kinetic force that lit up their EPs.


Recorded in the same sessions as April’s excellent Life Metal, the drone metal band’s new album is a rich, fundamentally life-affirming experience.

Pyroclasts

Stephen O’Malley once described Sunn O))) as his “guitar band,” which is a striking understatement. Over the band’s nearly two-decade run, they’ve never deviated from a singular mission: crushingly glacial guitars played at devastating volumes. Since 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions, the duo has gracefully slipped the shackles of heavy metal, remaining rooted in its ferocious aesthetic while pursuing high concept collaborations and drone at its most incantatory. Sunn 0))) is a guitar band like a hurricane is wind.
April’s Life Metal had a distinct back-to-basics quality, stepping away from the orchestrations and composer commissions for some of the pure, indefinite-hiatus riffage on which Sunn 0))) built their name. Recorded by Steve Albini, the album showed Greg Anderson and O’Malley summoning a sound of overwhelming scope and elegance, moving with just a little bit of extra authority.
Pyroclasts is a companion to that album, recorded in the same sessions but stripped even further back. At the start and end of each day of recording, the group and their collaborators would perform a simple exercise: explore a single modal drone for 12 minutes; Albini would capture it, and they would move on. These four selections can be experienced as a sort of frame for Life Metal’s more definitive statement. Not compositions, nor exactly improvisations, the group describes them as “a daily practice,” calling to mind a regular meditation or yoga routine (except at pain-threshold dB). And like a series of stretches, these sessions were intended to open up the musicians as they worked through the album.
None of that would matter if they didn’t open the listeners up, too. But, of course, they do. The experience on even the biggest headphones won’t ever be the same as Sunn 0))) in concert, but a full run through with Pyroclasts cranked all the way will leave few moods unaltered. Though visually steeped in the quasi-medieval occultisms of Scandinavia’s most notorious groups, listening to Sunn 0))) has always been a fundamentally life-affirming experience. Their tunings are too rich, their gestures too focused for nihilism. The titular inversion of Life Metal suggests a manifesto, and Pyroclasts could be Exhibit A in their argument.
There’s little use discussing the relative merits of one track over another. Though variations span the length of the album, the feel is so consistently immersive you lose track of yourself in the sound, which seems like the point. “Frost (C)” howls and shudders, its low end seeming to extend to the deepest, cruddiest bowels of the earth. Around the five-minute mark of “Ampliphædies (E),” someone takes what might loosely be called a solo. No surprise that it focuses mostly on one note; rather than articulating melodic flourishes, it feels like it’s clawing its way out of a mudslide of distortion, gasping for air before being subsumed into the mass. Finally “Ascension (A)” lunges with a triumphant drive worthy of its title.
“You’re inside of it,” O’Malley recently said of his sound in an interview. “That’s something that’s been part of my own development as a musician… evaporating.” Here one might think of buddhist monks in the Himalayas. The chant “om,” when pronounced correctly, is supposed to come from the throat, through the mouth and then the lips before returning to the silence from whence it came. This completeness is a sacred expression of the radiant, transcendent infinity of the universe. Pyroclasts feels about as close to that completeness as a metal album by a druid-robed group named after their amplifiers can get.

Buy: Rough Trade
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…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin, but most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication.

The Roots: ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin

...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin

"Yes, @TheRoots have NEVER been conventional in anything__--__least of all our album titles," Questlove tweeted wryly, announcing the Roots 11th studio album, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. The way the title is worded, it could almost be the title of a "Louie" episode. But the phrase comes from KRS-One's "Step Into A World": "MCs more worried about their financial backin'/ Steady packin' a gat as if something's gonna happen/ But it doesn't, they wind up shootin' they cousin, they buggin." It's a joke, but a bleak, mirthless one, with nothing but dread at its core. Maybe Louis CK really could use it.
Questlove has actually called this record satire, adding "but in that satire, it's an analysis of some of the stereotypes perpetuated in not only the hip-hop community, but in the community." He has had these things on his mind even more than usual lately; witness his series of thoughtful essays on how hip-hop "failed Black America" for Vulture. "The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range—social contract, anyone?—but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black star-liner," he wrote.
In many ways, these have been Questlove's concerns since the beginning. The Roots' late-90s high-water mark Things Fall Apart opened with sampled dialogue between Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington from Mo' Betta Blues. "It incenses me that own people don't realize our own heritage, our own culture—this is our music!", says Washington."The people don't come because you don't play the shit that they like," Snipes retorts. In the liner notes, Quest notes the exchange, musing "But what if you gave people what they need? Hmm."
This basic assertion—that there is something people need from pop art that they don't know to ask for—underlines the Roots' career. It's a tricky, contentious notion, but they've always managed to tread this want/need line deftly, even as people shouted at each other over the their shoulders. Roots albums, no matter the landscape around them, always feel sturdy, firm—responsible, in the classic Gangstarr way. To paraphrase what Guru once said, they have a formula, but they update that formula. They've been representing the idea of "Adult Hip Hop" for a shifting demographic for 20 straight years now, and order to keep yourself at such a dignified arms'-length from the prevailing zeitgeist for that long, you actually have to have a pretty canny grasp on it.
In some ways, the Roots are in middlebrow-culture heaven: They are well-supported by a cushy, high profile, well-paying TV gig, one that loosens them up to do whatever the hell they want. But they are in a weird place right now. Their last album started with a neck-kicking snare and closed with a four-movement wordless jazz suite; it sold about 35k in its first week. Around the same time, the Roots backed Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, who played their Bruno Mars-assisted single "Young Wild & Free", from the execrable 2012 stoner movie Mac and Devin. The soundtrack debuted in the Top 10.
…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, then, finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. The album itself is "uncompromising" in the way all Roots albums have been—the sequencing is fluid and streamlined, and touches of avant-garde jazz and older forms of black pop bleed into the fabric. The mood is dour and bleak, and the rappers who assist Black Thought—Dice Raw, Greg P.O.R.N.—are full-time members of the group by now, as far as listeners are concerned. D.D. Jackson, the pianist who crafted Undun's four-movement suite, returns, and he helps whip the conclusion of "The Coming" into a panicked frenzy. The astringent strings swarm the song's edges like locusts clouding a window, and they are the wildest, most anarchic sound here.
"Black Rock", which samples the same clotted, smoke-clouded rare 45 that Black Milk used on Album of the Year's "Deadly Medley", is one of the hardest-hitting and most baleful songs on the album. The Roots always surprise when they let their edges fray just a bit—Questlove has admitted that he enjoys the moments where he can stop "icing out" his technical precision and let his playing go sloppy. It's an infectious feeling you can hear spread through the entire group; "Black Rock" is the exact meeting point where Quest's cerebral grit meets Black Thought's all-body-blows rapping. They work beautifully this way, the group's own Lennon/McCartney, in ways that they don't when they stray into more conventional, rock-album formalist ambitions.
Black Thought remains a spectacular rapper, decades into a career with plenty of invitations to burn out. He hasn't slackened an inch. His flow patterns on "Understand" hit like flurries of jabs to the sternum. The problem for listeners, of course, remains that he never quite knows how to stop dancing on his toes; he always sounds like he's high-stepping through a tire-field. His writing lands on a vividly sculpted image—"I was born faceless in an oasis, folks disappear here and leave no traces," from "Never", or "I'm down to 95 dollars, that's the extent of my riches/ Out of 99 problems, 98 of them is bitches," from "When the People Cheer"—just as often as it tapers off into bars and bars of stock phrases. It keeps Quest's concept-album ambitions on the frustratingly muddy side.
That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin. But most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication. The opening track, "Theme From Middle of the Night," is just that—Nina Simone, singing the luxuriously wallowing theme song for the 1959 film. Mary Lou Williams' gothic, frightening "The Devil" gets sampled for a 40-second snippet that cuts off on the baleful warning "The Devil looks a lot like you and I." The song leads directly into "Black Rock", the two voices carefully lined up to feel like a direct continuation of each other. There is a squalling burst of musique concrète in "Dies Arae", which erupts with Scott Walker fierceness out of the blank space and marauds through the mix for a minute. The album feels haunted, even plagued, by other voices and memories.
And, of course, the records sounds spectacular. Black Thought's voice sounds raspier and more guttural the older he gets. The snares on "The Dark (Trinity) feel like fingers flicking your ear drums. The Roots have gotten very proficient at making Roots albums. But the hooks on "Never", "When the People Cheer", and "The Coming"—sung by Patty Crash, Modesty Lycan, and Mercedes Martinez, respectively—are somewhat flat and generic-sounding. And the songs themselves rely on a Roots template that feels a little too well-worn to generate much friction anymore—midtempo, muted, built around a minor-key piano line and heavy with intimations of doom. It's in those moments, the comfortable, careful ones, that you wonder how closely the Roots examine the symbolic freight aboard their own vessel, how far they would be interested in shaking themselves up.


A Lot of Sorrow, the National's collaboration with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, found the band playing their song "Sorrow" repeatedly for six hours at MoMA PS1. They've now released the entire performance as a box set composed of nine clear LPs featuring approximately 105 iterations of the song.

A Lot of Sorrow

That the National were going to spend six hours repeatedly performing the same song in an art gallery was one thing. A collaboration with Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, A Lot of Sorrow wasn’t intended as a physical endurance test, but a study in the evolving emotional tenor of a work stretched to its limits: National frontman Matt Berninger described its aim as “reaching a different sort of euphoric, mantra-like state.” Releasing the entire performance in a box set composed of nine clear LPs, however, strips away the sad communion of the original Sunday afternoon show, leaving just the listener and approximately 105 iterations of “Sorrow”, spanning six hours, five minutes.
“Sorrow” is the second track on the National’s fifth album, 2010’s High Violet, and one of the few moments of joy on that fraught, scared record. “[It’s] about a person’s love affair with his own sadness,” Berninger has said. “Sadness is not always the worst feeling. Sometimes it’s a really pleasurable thing to be overwhelmed with sadness.” It works beautifully: High Violet marked the point when Berninger started reaching for livelier vocal harmonies, but his helpless, heavy monotone on “Sorrow” is the perfect forlorn center, caught between resisting sanctuary while craving its embrace. The band anchor him there: Bryan Devendorf’s drums are a subtle hiss with a ‘60s girl group dimple, while guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and bassist Scott Devendorf modulate between three richly thrumming chords.
The luxurious purgatory that Berninger sings about in “Sorrow” is a crucial part of the National’s appeal, which A Lot of Sorrow tests. Every fan wants to believe that they have a special relationship with their favorite band—that they can access something within their work that others could never see—so choosing to engage fully with this kind of project is predicated on the hope that it would induce some kind of transcendent state. (Or, masochism.) But it is a lot—even for a card-carrying National devotee who’s seen them play 25 times in six years, who can’t make it through Alligator without listening to “Baby, We’ll Be Fine” a dozen times straight, or High Violet without lingering on “Lemonworld” for half an hour. I enjoyed an hour of it through headphones on the way home to the suburbs, half-drunk after a Sharon Van Etten show (a very National way to listen to the National), and did the remaining five hours in one go, partially while laying prone on the floor, and soon felt in need of a cold shower.
But A Lot of Sorrow clearly isn’t intended as a consumer item to be placed on your turntable in solemn, linear fashion, which justifies asking what it is for, divorced from its live, physical origins. This release exemplifies pretty much everything that the National’s detractors hate about them, which is rarely just their indulgently sad music. The Ohio-born five-piece are the best dressed straw men in the business, making people bristle at the idea of identifying with the ascendant, middle-class Brooklynite angst of their records. At any rate, it’s a social strata you’d probably have to occupy to afford a copy: sets cost $198 + a hefty postage charge (with all profits benefitting Partners In Health). A week prior to release, the 1500-edition run hadn't sold out yet.
There’s nothing quite as serious as a dead-weight of clear vinyl, yet the existence of A Lot Of Sorrow feels like a cosmic joke, both at the expense of the band’s self-seriousness (an image they’ve been trying to shed with their recent videos and the Mistaken For Strangers documentary), and of those who would accuse them of having made an entire career out of playing the same song over and over. If it weren’t for A Lot Of Sorrow's artistic origins, you could almost interpret it as elegantly weaponized monotony, like Mark Kozelek’s prolific prosaicness, and Aphex Twin apparently dumping his entire hard drive on Soundcloud after releasing his first album in 13 years. You want blood? We got it.
But much as it’s exhausting and unrealistic to absorb in one go, as much a millstone as a symbolic objet d’art, A Lot of Sorrow rewards patience in the most literal fashion. (Another inadvertent joke at the perception that everything the National make is “a grower”…) “I don’t wanna get over you”, Berninger sings in a faint plea every time, an Old Testament pop trope that works as an act of self-preservation and insurance against the responsibility of being the one who has to change. It’s a voluntary slow-death sentence, which he bears stoically throughout the six hours: joking, singing with a mouth full of sandwich halfway through Side O (Kjartansson brought them food and drinks throughout), and saying they’ll have to start over after he coughs during a chorus.
It’s only at the end of Side Q, around the 95th take, that Berninger breaks down. He gasps halfway through “sorrow’s a girl inside my cake” before missing a line and crying, having lost his nerve because he couldn’t see his wife and daughter in the crowd. His live performances are frequently marked by a frightening volatility, and he often openly declares that he needs someone in song, but he’s rarely vulnerable like this. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the band's backing musicians take the lead on vocals (and the crowd joins in), and Bryan Devendorf intuits that he should sit this one out.
Throughout, the unspoken conversation between the band is mesmeric: early on they play more muted versions, like steady long-distance runners. They never break between songs—there’s always that hissing drumbeat or a steady guitar line to guide the transition—and the Dessners constantly experiment with different textures. Sometimes the guitar parts swing like slack machinery; later they tremble with the seismic presence of a Richard Serra sculpture, shriek like birds, and swell drunkenly. I didn’t see the original performance, and had wondered if it might mirror William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, fading as energy and morale grew dim, but the ceaseless invention here keeps the song alive.
We’re often curious about how a band—and particularly the singer—can remain engaged with the circumstances that originally informed their music night after night. Not that it’s the most apt reference, but perhaps it’s worth remembering the part of Katy Perry’s Part of Me documentary where she emerges beaming on stage seconds after crying over the breakdown of her marriage. After over 100 renditions of “Sorrow”, the National still sound close to its emotional heart, rather than inured to it. No naysayer will be converted by this completely absurd artifact, but it’s a moving manifestation of the relationship that fans have with any band that means anything to them, playing their songs over and over to tempt the point where the magic fades away. A Lot of Sorrow is a strange achievement and vindication. Stay down, champions, stay down.


Leyland Kirby, aka V/VM, creates a 3xCD set of anodyne melodies focused on mood, composition, and performance.

Leyland Kirby: Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Once Was

James Leyland Kirby is an artist first and a musician second, which is another way of saying that his records can be more rewarding to think about than actually listen to. But that's not a value judgment, it's a confession and disclaimer-- and, effectively, a statement of fact that you can verify by trudging through some of the prose inspired by Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Once Was.
All the high-minded talk about Sadly is strange given how intuitive the music sounds. Where Kirby's first records (as V/VM) were little nightmares of aggression and pure provocation, Sadly-- three discs of anodyne melodies wandering through static and echo-- is all mood, composition, and performance. It might be dull music, but it's definitely music, which constitutes a radical change for a guy who once released a record filled with the sound of pigs feeding.
The music on Sadly isn't ambient, or at least not how I think of ambient music. It doesn't meet the world halfway. Instead, it's a little like Charlie Brown's personal raincloud: all-encompassing, portable melancholy. Its monotony is part of the point, I think, and its consistency is one of its virtues-- sometimes I forget that it's on until it's over and I'm sitting in my room feeling lightly bummed out about something I can't describe. Kirby is situating himself in a continuum with composers like Erik Satie and Harold Budd, or groups like Deathprod-- music whose finished state sounds half-erased and feint. The conceptual thrust-- if you accept conceptual thrusts-- is a kind of faded-photograph feeling, an effort to represent loss through degraded and scraped-away sounds. The concept is ethereal, and the consistency of the product's effect can't really be guaranteed-- one person's hollowed-out futurescapes of ruined beauty is another person's bore.
Kirby's sound has mellowed, but his approach-- three discs, four hours, little variation-- is still extreme. While I hear the dark undercurrents in his music, I'm not sure he's any more interested in the evocation of emotion than other abstract instrumental composers, nor am I presumptuous enough to say whether or not he's better at evoking them. Sadly is a record I admire more often and more deeply than I feel it, but I definitely admire it-- mostly because Kirby makes music of stasis that doesn't announce itself as much as it seeps. It never grates and it never bores. At worst-- or, at best, depending on which side of the concept you're on-- Kirby's music just vanishes.


This fine second album from Annie Clark's project finds the one-time member of Sufjan's band sharpening her songwriting and expanding her arrangements.

Actor

Annie Clark, the musician otherwise known as St. Vincent, projects an aura of eerie perfection-- beautiful, poised, good-humored, and well-adjusted to a degree uncommon for rock performers, let alone ordinary people. She's clearly not oblivious to her disarming qualities. On the covers of both her albums, her wide eyes and porcelain features give her the appearance of a cartoon princess come to life, and in the songs contained therein, she sings with the measured, patient tones of a benevolent, maternal authority figure. The thing that separates Clark from any number of earth mother Lilith Fair types, however, is her eagerness to subvert that effect. Her album covers may showcase her pretty face, but her blank expression and the tight framing leave the images feeling uncomfortably ambiguous. Her voice and arrangements are often mellow and soothing, but those sounds mainly serve as context as she exposes undercurrents of anxiety and discomfort hidden just beneath a gorgeous façade.
The songs on St. Vincent's second album, Actor, are primarily sung from the perspective of women who feel stifled and restless in their safe, orderly lives. Her characters worry about the judgment of neighbors and strangers, struggle with boredom and complacency, attempt to sublimate or defuse their anger, and, in one of the record's darkest selections, fantasize about disappearing completely into a new identity. Her lyrics are sympathetic observations rendered with clear, economical language focused on a specific moment of conflict or epiphany, occasionally undercut with self-deprecating asides and subtle humor. Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters' angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others.
The sound of the recordings depict the nuances of these deliberately muted emotions with uncanny accuracy, but the result is not overly polite or unaffecting. On the contrary, Clark's compositions hone in on precise fluctuations in mood, and flesh out complex inner worlds for the women suggested in her lyrics. At some points, as in the climax of "Black Rainbow" and the groovy, robotic hysteria of "Marrow", she achieves a harrowing expression of panic and desperation, but she does just as well in conveying the tension and pressures within less bombastic numbers such as "The Bed" and "Save Me From What I Want". The latter, which takes its title from one of artist Jenny Holzer's best-known aphorisms, is particularly successful in the way its faintest textural details communicate an unease at odds with its airy tone and steady beat.
Since Clark's voice seldom strays from a calm, lovely tone, her guitar parts articulate much of the record's anxieties and provide its moments of cathartic release. Her style is melodic and controlled, conjuring abrasive textures that nevertheless have a clean, meticulous quality that complements her immaculate arrangements as well as her characters' temperate demeanor. Despite a reliance on processed tonality, she manages to avoid a sterile coldness, and has a way of performing her most tightly composed hooks with a touch of looseness and immediacy. In her heaviest, most warped riffs, Clark finds the grace in her subjects' frustration and purges their fear and repressed anger with a glorious, singular noise.
In "Actor Out of Work", an atypically straightforward rock song early in the album's sequence, Clark uses the title phrase as a sad epithet for an inappropriate yet attractive suitor with an inability to lie convincingly. Acting, of course, is a lot more than just lying and pretending. It's about inhabiting characters, being able to fill in subtext with cadence and gesture, and having the empathy required to understand the motivations and actions of the person being portrayed. With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.


Deftones’ ninth album reaches for a plane beyond loud and quiet, where the band is free to indulge its harshest and most gentle impulses at once. For the first time, they make it look easy.

Ohms

For Deftones fans, the relationship between frontman Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter carries mythological importance: two opposing gravitational pulls that keep the band’s beautiful and bludgeoning music hovering precariously in between. Carpenter is the proudly unreconstructed metalhead, delivering slabs of distorted low end on 7- and 8-string guitars and publicly airing grievances about songs that aren’t heavy enough. Moreno is the sonic experimenter and starry romantic, with a voice that sounds misty and ethereal even when it breaks into a scream—the man whose band gave a generation of angry young rock radio listeners their first exposure to the Cocteau Twins. Moreno and Carpenter’s personal relationship is surely more nuanced than that, and Moreno is clearly a metal fan, too. But the push-pull between musical elements is real, and the reason why Deftones albums continue to feel exciting and alive while nearly every other band once labeled nu-metal now looks like self-parodic kitsch.
The Deftones catalog is full of moments that illustrate this fundamental tension, but none satisfies in quite the same way as “Urantia,” the third song from their ninth album Ohms. It begins with a jagged one-one riff played with disorienting power, gearing you up for a sustained assault. Instead of attacking, the song veers hard in the other direction: spacious and tender, riding a variation of the lithe, hip-hop-influenced hi-hat groove drummer Abe Cunningham developed around the time of 2000’s high-water mark White Pony and has been refining ever since. It’s a satisfying reversal, and becomes something greater than that when the riff comes back—as big and loud as it was the first time, but newly seductive and agile, guiding Moreno’s airy vocal through a series of pop chord changes toward a chorus that floods the room with light. Suddenly, the band’s two driving instincts are no longer in tension at all, but perfectly natural complements, each lifting and twirling the other like partners in the world’s most brutal figure skating routine. For the first time—after years of strife and a hard-fought comeback in 2016’s Gore—Deftones are making it look easy.
Moreno signaled in a recent Uproxx interview that Ohms would satisfy fans of Deftones’ most intense material, while also giving himself some plausible deniability: “‘Heavy’ is kind of subjective, you know? The last thing I ever want to do is be quoted saying, ‘This is our heaviest record!’” He’s right that “heaviest” isn’t quite the proper distinction for an album that never wields the unrelenting sledgehammer force of “Elite” or “When Girls Telephone Boys.” But it also forgoes the crystalline hush that seems to bother Carpenter so much, never offering respite for more than a minute or two before slamming you again. Instead, Ohms reaches for a plane beyond the simple loud vs. quiet dichotomy, where the band is free to indulge its harshest and most gentle impulses all at once. On “The Spell of Mathematics,” an eerie high synthesizer line softens the sludge metal guitars that churn beneath it; against the grinding feedback and noise of “Error,” Moreno purrs lovelorn free associations instead of adding his own howls to the fray.
In the three decades since their origins as Sacramento skate rats, Deftones have struggled with addiction, lost bassist Chi Cheng to a coma and eventual death from heart failure, and repeatedly appeared on the verge of implosion over Moreno and Carpenter’s musical differences. At some point amid the turmoil, they became elder statesmen—and not just in the commercial hard rock world, but to younger, hipper bands like Nothing and Deafheaven that proudly wear their influence. They’ve earned the right to relax, and they’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.
On Ohms, they keep their most adventurous sounds to the margins. “Pompeji” dissolves into a wash of ominous synth drone, lulling you into complacency before the hydraulic rhythms of “This Link Is Dead” arrive to shake you awake; “The Spell of Mathematics” spends half its runtime on a gorgeous instrumental coda, with placid guitar chords draped like a security blanket over anxiously shuffling drums. At times, I wish the band would integrate moments like these more wholly into the songs themselves, but perhaps doing so would upset the delicate equilibrium they seem to have reached. Still, Deftones thrive on tension; there’s a reason none of Moreno and Carpenter’s side projects, where each is free of the other’s constricting influence, has produced anything as resonant as their main band’s best work. If they’ve reached a détente, don’t expect it to last for long. In April, Moreno live streamed a DJ set that paired extreme metal like Blut Aus Nord with left-field electronic music like Suicideyear; in August, Carpenter announced he’d added a ninth string to his guitar.

Buy: Rough Trade
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More than two decades in, the Omaha electro-rock band finds new reasons to stay angry and keep dancing.

Egowerk

The Faint haven’t always had the convictions to match their fury. On 2014’s Doom Abuse, the Omaha electro-rock outfit sounded more than ever like a band in search of a machine to rage against, settling instead on a succession of ever-sillier anti-tech, anti-conformity, anti-everything screeds that it’s hard to imagine even they took very seriously. Substance has always been secondary to style for these guys, but it’s still no fun listening to a band that doesn’t buy their own sloganeering.
If the Faint are still smirking on Egowerk, their first album in five years, then they’re doing a better job disguising it. They’ve focused their ire on a subject a good deal more topical and resonant: social media, specifically the ways online platforms play into society’s worst instincts and exacerbate cultural divides. Singer Todd Fink doesn’t need to overstate the fallout, because we’re all living it. Especially in the wake of 2016, we’ve seen how people willingly spread misinformation, bully each other into eating disorders or worse, and viciously attack anybody perceived as the opposition. “Chameleon Nights” details the entrenchment: “Everybody’s talking but we don’t know shit/You fight, I fight, it’s an ego trip/It’s a video game and you’re an avatar/What you fake becomes what you are.”
The damage isn’t only confined to the comment sections. There’s also the gradual erosion of your self-esteem that comes from spending so much time in an artificial environment where everyone you know is trying their best to make their lives look better than yours. “Life’s a Joke” captures the fruitlessness of seeking validation online. “You want to fit in/But you want to stand out,” Fink sings over grinding, distressed synths. “You want to trust your body/But you’re best without.”
As usual, the music is fitfully vicious. Opener “Child Asleep” may be the Faint’s most colossal track yet, a gnarly frenzy of rumbling 808s and electric jolts. Self-producing has served the band well; the drums have the uncanny synthetic clap of techno, yet they sound like they’re reverberating off of real walls. It won’t surprise anybody who’s caught their live show that the group is still in fighting shape. Long after casual listeners misplaced their copies of the Saddle Creek 50, the Faint continued drawing surprisingly large, passionate crowds, and some of those stage reflexes carry over to Egowerk’s dramatic halts and breakdowns. Even as the group has graduated beyond the reedy electronics of their early ’00s dance-punk and immersed themselves more fully in EDM, the music has retained its urgent physicality.
Still, it’s probably for the best that the Faint continue working at their recent leisurely pace of about an album every half decade, because this band burns through their ideas fast. Toward the end of Egowerk the songs grow thinner and more obvious in their ’80s references. Gary Numan synths flutter over the four-on-the-floor electro-funk of “Young & Realistic,” the album’s most faithful callback of the Danse Macabre days, while “Automaton” robot dances the record to the finish line with no particular ambition to awe. A little bit of the Faint goes a long way, but as long as there’s technological angst—and it’s impossible to imagine a time when there won’t be—there’s always going to some life left in this sound.


One of the most dependable big-name producers in rap takes a turn as an MC, camouflaging his weaknesses and sometimes even turning them into strengths.

One Man Band Man

Swizz Beatz is one of the most dependable big-name producers in rap. His clanging, anthemic keyboard-beats were one of the main forces behind the late-90s rise of the Ruff Ryders crew, and more recently he's kept buys churning out dense, furious club-bangers for the likes of Beyonce and T.I. But he's not a rapper. "It's Me, Bitches", the Swizz solo single that hit radio early in the year, is a total mess. On that track, he huffs and puffs, grunting a lot and saying absolutely nothing, repeating the same verses twice, attempting to make a hook out of "chillin' in my Beamer, listening to 'Ether'" despite the fact that "Beamer" doesn't even come close to rhyming with "Ether." And yet "It's Me, Bitches" is one of the best rap singles of the year. The song is a delirious burst of energy, oscillating synth-blips and churning martial strings hammering away while sirens scream and drums shatter. The track keeps interrupting itself, flying apart and then back together before ending in a great incendiary scratch-solo. Any actual rapper would have a hell of a time navigating this minefield, but Swizz just plays hypeman for himself, screaming catchphrases and adding to the clutter rather than trying to stay above it. "It's Me, Bitches" is a forceful and mindless dumb-out classic, and it feels like a glorious fluke, the sort of success that could not possibly repeat itself. As great as "It's Me, Bitches" might be, it doesn't exactly give the impression that Swizz Beatz would be capable of making a good album.
Somehow, though, One Man Band Man is a good album, though by no means a great one. The album works because Swizz for the most part internalizes the lessons of "It's Me, Bitches", camouflaging his weaknesses and sometimes even turning them into strengths. The album's best songs are meaningless shots of adrenaline built on the dizzy energy of that first single. Follow-up "Money in the Bank" is even busier and nearly as inspired; its tire-screeches, stadium-drums, finger-snaps, stadium-chants, bass-rumbles, and squeaky sped-up vocals somehow cohere into something simple and infectious. "Top Down", meanwhile, swirls riotous bursts of 70s-soul horns and strings around one another.
Best of all is "Take a Picture", which slightly slows the tempo without losing the album's sense of exhilaration. Built on top of a luminous sample of the joyous burlbing bass from Bill Withers' "Take a Picture", the song works as a loopy, euphoric grin, even if Swizz doesn't do much more than brag about his funny. In fact, Swizz's clumsy-ass rapping has a sort of goofily naive charm to it. He delivers all his lyrics in a breathless bark and repeats himself constantly: one song after "chillin' in my Beamer, listening to 'Ether,'" he's "cruisin' in that Lambo, lookin' like Rambo." He sounds utterly elated to be rapping, blissfully unaware that virtually every line is a certifiable clunker.
The album is short: Ten songs, one obligatory all-star remix, and one pointless voicemail message from Snoop Dogg. It's over in roughly half and hour, which barely gives the energy any time to lag. Confusingly, the only rapping guest to appear on any track other than the all-star remix is Ruff Ryders refugee Drag-On, who turns up on "Bust Ya Gunz" and who's only barely a better rapper than Swizz. Even more confusingly, Swizz himself only produces about half the tracks, though the guest beatmakers mostly do a good job at recreating his antic aesthetic. Against all odds, One Man Band Man never wears out its welcome.
The album only falls to pieces when Swizz tries to get serious, which he does on tracks bad enough to cast a huge shadow over the whole thing. On "The Funeral", Swizz tries to sound haunted and paranoid, but he ends up with a handful of ridiculously dumb pseudo-goth images like "it's been nothing but black clouds and black cats/ And every night I see an old man with black slacks." Lyrically, the sleepy, downtrodden poverty-reminisce "Part of the Plan" may be even worse: "I wish I could fly away on a unicorn/ I'm from the ghetto, and every day a human's born." Confusingly, the track is billed as featuring Chris Martin, but that guest-appearance turns out to just be a sample from "X&Y", which isn't even a good Coldplay song. If "Part of the Plan" manages to end the recent trend of rappers looking to Chris Martin for choruses, it'll justify its existence. Meanwhile, Swizz is a whole lot better off yelling over sirens and talking about his money.


The debut mixtape from Detroit’s Tee Grizzley argues for him as a sober, sincere street rapper with the potential for some crossover success.

My Moment

There are 13 songs on Tee Grizzley’s debut mixtape, My Moment, but the first three minutes alone will convince you of the young Detroit native’s exceptional talent. With no instrumental, the 23-year-old beats out a drum pattern on a kitchen table, snaps his fingers, and adds his own harmonies to a rhyme about the stomach pains and betrayal he felt while serving time in two states. It drips with pathos: “I sat there and waited/For niggas to help me/All that talking they did, them niggas ain’t show it/I sat there and starved/I remember the hunger.” My Moment was written during Grizzley’s incarceration, and argues for him as a sober, sincere street rapper with the potential for some crossover success.
Prior to his time in the spotlight, Grizzley, born Terry Wallace, was sentenced to 18 months for second-degree home invasion in Michigan and nine months for a jewelry store robbery in Kentucky. The former charges stem from his time at Michigan State University, where he studied accounting and finance; an acute financial crisis of his own inspired him to raid a series of dorm rooms before being caught with nearly $20,000 worth of cash and electronics. This was February 2014. Grizzley was released pending an investigation and then fled to Kentucky, where he was eventually picked up during that botched jewel heist.
All told, Grizzley’s legal troubles only lasted about two and a half years—a far cry from the 30 years he claims to have been initially offered in a plea deal. As he raps on his breakout single, “First Day Out,” which is included here: “My first offer was 30 years, not a day lower/I told them crackers, holla at me when they sober.” My Moment frequently feels like a series of formal exercises, someone taking his mind off of his immediate circumstances by diving into his work. “Catch It” could slot into most rap radio playlists, perhaps between Big Sean’s “Bounce Back” and Future’s “Fuck Up Some Commas.” “Country” is like a rapid-fire resume for Grizzley as a technical rapper, and the hook on “How Many” sounds as if it could be a reference for Ty Dolla $ign.
Speaking of those technical points, Grizzley follows in the long line of Detroit rappers whose syllables frequently spill out on either end of the bar. It’s a careening, freewheeling flow, where phrases are expanded and contracted seemingly at random, but where the sum total is a near-perfect groove. (If you’ve ever heard a Big Sean song and wondered why he’s rapping off-beat, he isn’t—he’s approximating this very approach.) There’s a bonus effect to this. A song like “Day Ones,” with its more perfectly coiffed delivery, stands out as a departure on My Moment, where on an industry-trained rapper’s record, it might get lost in the din.
As great as some of the new songs on My Moment are—see “10K”’s bounce in particular—“First Day Out” remains Grizzley’s masterwork. It’s as defiant as could be expected for a song he recorded in the same clothes he was wearing as he left prison, but it’s also somber, an elegy for those left behind behind bars or for those already departed. “First Day Out” is extraordinarily dense with names, nicknames, and references to real people in Grizzley’s life, to the point where quoting its lyrics feels invasive. Maybe that’s what’s so enrapturing about My Moment: despite Grizzley’s newfound buzz, and despite the commercial aspirations betrayed by some songs, the tape feels like it was made for his friends and family, a love letter to everything that brought him to this point, good and bad.


The Staten Island quartet follows Why There Are Mountains, its self-released debut of 1990s indie rock alchemy, with a difficult and potentially divisive sophomore LP, a lyrics-first record that puts confidence in the listener's attention span.

Lenses Alien

Cymbals Eat Guitars have followed Why There Are Mountains, their self-released debut of 1990s indie rock alchemy, with a difficult and likely divisive sophomore LP. Which isn't all that surprising-- these things happen when the "next step" involves signing to a label, hiring a venerated producer (John Agnello, who also worked this year with alt-revivalists Male Bonding), turning over half of your personnel, and releasing an 8 1/2-minute song as the "first single." Here's the thing: Lenses Alien doesn't really sound all that different from Why There Are Mountains, which is a tribute to how fully formed and musically tight CEG were right out of the gate. Perhaps the most challenging thing about Lenses Alien is how it makes what it sounds like fairly unimportant: Like last time, almost none of its sonic touchstones exist outside of the Clinton administration, but Joseph D'Agostino takes an enormous leap of faith by doubling down on his brick-thick verbiage during a lyrics-first record that puts more confidence in the listener's attention span than pretty much anything else I've heard this year.
It's become something of a cliché to praise an "album in the mp3 age," and while Lenses Alien certainly isn't intended to be strip-mined for singles, it's meant to be experienced on a remarkably micro level. It's actually more ambitious than the already grand Mountains, but it doesn't manifest in Byzantine song structure or far-flung sonic touches. While there's a peripheral shift from the more blue-collar, populist likes of Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and the Wrens into the deconstructive and unfairly less celebrated Cap'n Jazz (when it's loud) and the Appleseed Cast (when it's quiet), the craft is evident in how every lyric and riff is exactingly honed to be of near equal importance.
The rest of Lenses Alien doesn't take after the sprawl of "Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)"-- it's about twice as long as anything else-- but it lays out the record's rules of engagement. I've talked with others who consider its flow to be somewhat clunky, which is understandable considering what listeners typically expect from a song of that length, particularly an opener. There's not an epic build or a cataclysmic blowout: D'Agostino occupies the mind of an unstable, possibly predatory narrator, changing perspective and mood from verse to verse, the extended floods of physically punishing guitar feedback acting as outbursts of mental anguish linking unorthodox yet accessible and sprightly vocal lines. I'll call it anticlimactic as a compliment: Over an ugly, gnarled cluster of notes, D'Agostino asks, "What former police sits at the bus stop offering rides?” and the song ends abruptly like a stunning reveal. After eight minutes of psychodrama played out in his head, the camera pans out for you to imagine the yellowed teeth or cold, vacant stare of its main character.
So many of Lenses Alien's enduring moments come from these mergers of sensation-- the chorus of "oh-whoas" from tired passengers on the cunningly catchy "Shore Points" underlining an abrupt change of plans along the Jersey coastline; a picture of motorboats and Styrofoam coolers amidst the burst of crowd-pleasing guitars during "Keep Me Waiting". Then there's the liquid, unsteady near-instrumental of "The Current" stopping to make a brief and lucid prayer for a universe free of physical suffering, while "Gary Condit" offers the record's final grasp at understanding: "Is it teeth-shaking polyphony, grace, and completion or nothing?" delivered as an unholy, desperate cry for help.
The need for release runs throughout Lenses Alien, as it condenses the spacious travelogues of Mountains into claustrophobic ruminations on the metaphysical, moving cars, and D'Agostino's mind existing as purgatories. "Plainclothes" opens suggesting a True Crime story, but it's a passing thought during a paranoid drive up a New York highway interspersed with startling, vivid details-- the tricks cops pull on unsuspecting drivers during initiation season, the sensation of being haunted by ghosts of past partiers in a guest house. This unsettling otherworldliness continues through "Definite Darkness", a mysterious police investigation causing a sleepless night that fades out on a coda of wearied sighs.
Considering all the paranoia and fleeting revelations, drugs unsurprisingly play a big role here, particularly psychedelics whose side effects are less about hedonism than discovery. D'Agostino and friends have relatable freak outs and puke in sand dunes, pass out with their shoes on, roll down hills on skateboards, and remark upon how "dried mushrooms taste a lot like communion wafers." They’re disarmingly naïve about worlds opening up to them, seeing gas leaks, air force bases, and the suburban and rural expanses of the northeast United States as reflections of celestial significance.
The downside is how the music occasionally buckles under the weight of its own restlessness and D'Agostino’s words-- a slightly skewed ratio of visceral immediacy to cerebral satisfaction making it a slight notch below Why There Are Mountains. While packed with forceful riffs and quirky melodic turns, "Another Tunguska" and "Secret Family" are such slippery compositions that D'Agostino's backing can sometimes feel incidental. But once you stop looking for the hooks and choruses as they might be defined traditionally, dozens of inventive melodies emerge: Is the elegant, Elliott Smith-esque melody of "Shore Points" less sticky because there’s no chorus? Do the soulfully swooping harmonies of "Wavelengths" constitute a chorus even though the lyrics don’t repeat?
I suppose it's indicative of Lenses Alien's strange magnetism that it raises as many questions when it's catchy as it does when it's inscrutable. After all, it's so thick with overlapping images, memories, stray thoughts, and second guessing that I sense D'Agostino's asking us throughout: How real are our own emotions? Are you guessing at your own feelings? It's heavy stuff, never answered in an easy way, and can really feel out of step with their peers who treat lyrics as placeholders and thoughts as fact. More than the sound of the 90s, Lenses Alien recalls, at least to these ears, the way we might’ve interacted with those records at the time: poring over the lyrics sheet, having a real sense of investment.
It's no slight to say Lenses Alien isn't at the level of Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica -- it's not a masterpiece. But while Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.


Experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek partners with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita to create gorgeous clouds of shifting sound.

Schaum

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after a playful and prolific run through most of the 2000s, the peculiar electronic music producer Jan Jelinek had taken an extended break. Since 2006’s Tierbeobachtungen, there hasn’t been a full-length released under his name. There have been collaborations (though it would appear that his work with Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples is, like his Ursula Bogner releases, simply another iteration of Jelinek working under another name) as well as a series of wonderfully weird vinyl-only 12”s that collected radio pieces and art commissions. One release—in an act of surreal prescience four years before the fact—even opened with a sample from eventual Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Throughout this time, Jelinek’s one constant has been an ongoing collaboration with Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They released an album in 2010 and followed it up with a live EP in 2013. Now comes a second duo album, and the dialogue between the two is so sympathetic it's hard to tell just where Fujita’s prepared vibraphone ends and Jelinek’s whirring mechanisms and blipping loops begin. It’s a musical relationship that lends itself towards atmospheric explorations, the sounds taking on the hazy sheen of a particularly muggy afternoon. As Jelinek writes on the back cover of Schaum, he notes that the tendency of their work tends towards the tag of “tropical.” “I have long been obsessed with the tropics,” he writes. “This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness.”
So the grayscale palm frond on the cover is fitting, though “extravagant” would be a deceptive way to describe these eight woozy, mainly unhurried pieces, but there is something deliciously irrational about all of them. Small, fluttering drones mix with swamp gas and what sounds like a clock being wound up on “Urub,” and “Helio” sounds like R2-D2 getting burped. The bubbling glitches and cricket sounds that open up “What You Should Know About Me” soon turn queasy and comical, a bicycle bell and thrummed piece of metal providing a rhythm not unlike a submerged bumper car thumping against a sea sponge. Or is that a gamelan bobbing against the sides of a bath tub?
So gentle and breezy is Schaum that the density of sounds the two players actually stir up is easy to miss. “LesLang” and the aptly titled “Vague, Yet” could be a nature recording that’s gently processed into an ambient wash. But home in on the sounds that mimic chirping frogs and soon you’ll note that crickets and coos come into greater detail, as do all manner of squiggles, buzzes, plonks and squelches, to where your ears toggle between focus and fuzziness, just like listening in nature.
On the exquisite nine-minutes close “Parades,” Jelinek’s observations and obsessions come true and the album transforms into an uncanny landscape worthy of Henri Rousseau, weirdly flat and deeply detailed all at once. Each piece of Schaum is open enough so that they can be perceived as formless or self-contained microcosms. It’s an album immersive enough to suggest dense foliage or a wavering landscape completely submerged underwater, depending on your idea of paradise.


William Basinski: Silent Night / Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive

I'd call it "fast", as in: alarmingly out of control, spiraling nowhere but in a righteous hurry to get there. This is life I'm talking about, and it's killing me at the moment. I suppose that's what life does, ultimately, but must it move at so breakneck a pace? The past month has been one of feeling caught up in the flow of people, work, and events just hoping to come out on the other end: Day job's a mess, the train rides are long, my poor wife is being dragged all over the country by her job, there are cats to feed and bills to pay and too much e-mail, and it's all enough to make one quite sleepy, but at the same time too agitated to fall asleep easily.
So. Everybody feels this way now and then, but what the crap does this have to do with William Basinski? Well, everything and nothing. Basinski has really nothing to do with fast or the too-quickness of life and everything to do with the antidote. I'm not even going to skirt around it: Lately, I've been listening to basically nothing but Afrobeat and drone-based ambient music. It's a strange combination, but this month that's what I'm in the mood for. Basinski's records, of course, falls in the latter camp (I've yet to find anything that falls into both camps-- if anyone out there has a tip, drop me a line).
Basinski has his own unique ambient voice. Slowness is the thing with Basinski-- well, not the only thing, but one thing, and an important one-- and as if to drive home the point, his most celebrated work, The Disintegration Loops, took a couple of decades to make. Not by design, mind you, as he had no way of knowing how his stored tapes would decay over time, but it's nice to think about a piece of music incubating before finally being offered to the world at large. But more broadly, his music is unhurried and develops very slowly, rather unlike the information-soaked world it's meant to enrich. His two most recent releases are not things you just listen to in dribs and drabs. You need to actually have a seat and take them in; you need to put aside time to be alone with the music, which is marvelous, I think, because it forces you to realize just how much you're rushing in your daily comings and goings.
Silent Night is the shorter of the two pieces and can be succinctly described as an ambient excursion built of soft, humming drones that swell and recede under and over a hissing, bug-like drone. For an hour. That's all it is, superficially, but there's so much more going on here, manifested in the irregular intervals between swells, the way a rapid succession of hums play off of the drones, and the alternately melancholy and joyous manner in which the sounds recede and return. And the sound. Ooh, such timbres. These are sounds you can really dig into-- rounded, water-smooth sounds with palpable surface tension and mile-thick bass whale calls that seem to have a soul. Unfortunately, the bugs get the last ten or so minutes to themselves, but up 'til then it's magic.
Variations, like The Disintegration Loops, was originally created in 1981, remained unreleased for ages, and involves metamorphosis through reiteration. It sprawls, to say the least, over two discs-- each split courteously into four sections for listening ease-- all made of the same elements: piano loops played against each other in endless variations. The piano recordings aren't laid straight out in front of you, though-- they're coated in a layer of thick, pillowy muffling, which not only takes away the sharpness of the piano's attack, but also makes it sound alien and wombed in from the world. On the first piece, the loops dance around the stereo spectrum in a disorienting ballet; on the second, they build ever outward as more loops are added and echoed and set randomly against each other, creating heaving, oscillating waves of liquid piano.
Basinski's liners refer to the process of setting the loops against each other and multiplying the sound as allowing the sounds to "breed," and that's basically what they do. A short, melodic piano figure is the basis for each piece, and the breeding of the loops makes for moments of both startling beauty and dense, opaque numbness, much more the former than the latter. There's a terrible kind of sadness in these loops as they waver and repeat, clouding themselves over and generating swells of feedback-- the sepia piano tone and the choice of notes play like a hazy memory of loss.
This is part of what separates Basinski from other minimalists and experimental composers. There's an obvious process, even a theory, operating in his work, but it never sounds scientific or cold-- the human element of emotion comes first and is multiplied by the process. As such, Basinski's work has the potential to appeal to many listeners who otherwise wouldn't care to listen to hours of slow, incrementally changing tape loops. And, of course, sometimes the slowness of the music itself can be all the justification needed for setting aside an hour to get outside of our up-to-the-minute existence and really, truly listen.


The powerhouse DJ trio returns with a sprawling 17-track album and a solid Weeknd collaboration, though the forays into menacing, murkier sounds prove less satisfying.

Paradise Again

Swedish House Mafia songs are relentless, pounding like the first slice of light through the curtains on your most hungover morning. Maximalism is the minimum—their tracks start with a gargantuan beat drop and explode outward, confetti so thick you can’t see through it. The producer-DJ trio of Steve Angello, Axwell, and Sebastian Ingrosso fused together in the late 2000s and quickly became staples for the glowstick and glitter set. They raged at Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival; they surged on the dance charts; they sold out Madison Square Garden in nine minutes, the first DJ act to headline the venue. And then the lasers and light shows started to sputter out. “We came, we raved, we loved,” Swedish House Mafia wrote in a 2012 missive announcing their breakup. But three months later, the group released what would become their biggest single, a track so successful they had no choice but to embark on another round of shows, which they titled One Last Tour.
“Don’t You Worry Child” twisted inane, earnest vocals into a song that sounded boundless. The lyrics are cloying, the sentiment overbearing, the stomping lead-up to the beat drop just short of suffocating. But the synths tower; every beat shivers. Swedish House Mafia steamroll their way into emotion, the blithest shortcut to bliss. After that triumphant last tour, the group receded, popping up only every few years for one-off sets. Last summer, they made another dramatic announcement: The band was back together, signed to Republic and ready to release a new record, Paradise Again. The sprawling 17-track album is richer in texture and grander in scope than previous releases, but the group’s forays into menacing, murkier sounds prove less satisfying than the crystalized euphoria that made them crowd pleasers.
When Swedish House Mafia hit their peak, EDM was at the center of pop. The dance music scene is more fragmented now, and perhaps as a response, the group has adjusted its approach. Paradise Again opts for a darker sound, crammed with buzzes and whirs. “Mafia” is a wordless trudge that sounds more apt to soundtrack a video game than an arena rager; midway through, the drums slump and then pause, like the song itself needed to gasp for air. A faint drone hums under the entire track, an effect that’s ominous at first but eventually becomes draining. Swedish House Mafia used to make songs that crashed over you like a wave; far too often on Paradise Again, they sound like they’re treading water. “19:30” falls into a smudge of bleats and beeps; sirens reverberate around a limp beat drop on “Don’t Go Mad,” grating under frazzled layers of distortion. Swedish House Mafia are great at shaking you awake, but they aren’t very scary: They recruit A$AP Rocky for “Frankenstein,” an attempt at a foreboding mosh pit anthem, but the song crosses into caricature, with Rocky on autopilot as he chants about fucking up the club.
It takes The Weeknd for Swedish House Mafia to succeed at sounding sinister. Together, Abel Tesfaye’s sullen, sparkling disco and the trio’s incessant throb form both sides of the case for hedonism—the Weeknd exudes nihilism, and Swedish House Mafia turn it into a party. The group produced some of the most propulsive songs on Tesfaye’s recent album and are slated to headline Coachella alongside him; their collaboration here, “Moth to a Flame,” is Paradise Again’s best track. They build into it with a palate-cleansing instrumental interlude from Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad, a pocket of stillness on a constantly churning album, before the beat rises once again. “It’s just one call away/And you’ll leave him, you’re loyal to me,” The Weeknd croons, equal parts terrorizing and tender. The tingling production is more elegant than Swedish House Mafia seemed capable of a decade ago.
In their time off, the group has mastered more polished, contained songs that could still shake a stadium. Now, they’re able to braid a delicate beat or piano interlude into the walloping soundscape. “Home,” a toned-down track with a sleek percussive exoskeleton and occasional sprigs of guitar, shocks because it sounds so muted. On “Lifetime,” Ty Dolla $ign and 070 Shake’s voices glint and echo as they sing about the glaring lights of a city skyline, the promise of clasped hands. The lyrics in Swedish House Mafia songs have never attempted poetry—Ty fumbles through a line about “the best sex,” and the album opener features the inscrutable pronouncement, “It takes a man to be real/It takes a woman to know that.” But the group is at its best when it balances excess and exuberance, when its sparse snippets of quiet feel like clarity, not compromise.


Kirk Knight is a member of Joey Bada$$' Pro Era crew. His debut has some of the Pro Era reference points (Madvillainy, Wu-Tang) but Knight shows that although he's learned from the past, he's not living in it. Featuring Mick Jenkins, Joey Bada$$, Thundercat.

Late Knight Special

Brooklyn rapper Kirk Knight begins his debut album Late Knight Special quite boldly, with a sample from Sun Ra's Space Is the Place sci-fi film. For Knight, Ra's otherworldly musings are irrelevant: He picks the sample because Madlib uses the same audio clip to end Madvillainy's absurdist "Shadows of Tomorrow". Knight's connection to the 2004 classic ends there: His narrative-driven lyrics don't resemble MF DOOM's post-modern syllabic wordplay in the slightest. But by leading with an obvious and familiar sample, he indicates to the listener where his hip-hop allegiances lie. Unlike fellow Pro Era member Joey Bada$$, Knight doesn't try to compete with his more accomplished forebears. At its best and its worst, Late Knight Special is an unassuming project.
That opening track, "Start Running", encapsulates much of its successes and shortcomings. Knight flows smoothly and competently, but hardly any notable lines emerge, and he spends much of the song simply telling the listener that he is rapping, which doesn't work without artful twists of wordplay. It's the song's production—Knight's forte—that makes "Start Running" worthwhile: The light hi-hats allude to boom bap, but Knight manages to avoid copycat '90s-worship. Throughout the album, Knight shows that although he's learned from the past, he's not living in it.
The more daring Knight gets with his production, the more interesting Late Knight Special becomes. When he cranks up the bass and ventures into the minor key, he gets more intense on the microphone and sharpens his focus. "Brokeland", for example, very much recalls Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M.", complete with a send-off from Knight that "everybody know that money is the root of all evil." The song is also built on an obscure Italian harpsichord sample of which RZA would surely be proud. Knight's lyrics focus on concrete details: "With the Hammer pants, I keep security cards in my sneakers." The tales from the block—which have the potential for honesty and insight—suit Knight well.
During a mid-album suite of poppier love songs ("One Knight", "Scorpio", and "Down"), Knight makes the hooks his focus. He actually has quite a knack for choruses and half-sings most of them himself. The accompanying bars, however, fail to register. As the album comes to a close with a series of deeper, more ponderous songs, the earworm hooks disappear and the beats remain relaxed, leaving Knight to hold attention with his bars. Ultimately, his Chicago guests Mick Jenkins and Noname Gypsy end up making as much, if not more, of an impression. On "Dead Friends", for instance, which also features Thundercat on bass, Knight meanders his way into a story about an older friend who had taken him under his wing; he later finds out secondhand that the friend died. It's a thoughtful sentiment, but lacks urgency. Noname, on the same track, jumps in with biblical, Billie Holiday, and Yeezus allusions in her first two lines.
Kirk Knight's rapping career is very much nascent. Before this debut, his biggest look as a rapper was probably his guest verse on Joey's 2013 "Amethyst Rockstar". It's as a producer where Knight's had plenty of opportunities to excel. He's got credits on legitimately popular songs, such as Joey's "Big Dusty". This imbalance shows through on Late Knight Special, for better and for worse. The whole thing sounds crisp and determined, but he hasn't yet showed us why he deserves to be center stage of his own productions yet.


Another record of entrancing, spectral folk and English ballads.

Marissa Nadler: The Saga of Mayflower May

The Saga of Mayflower May

Marissa Nadler's 2004 album Ballads of Living and Dying was a burnished gem of entrancing, spectral folk, and with her follow-up she not only returns to the luminous musical landscape of her debut but also to her enigmatic character Mayflower May. Though not the cohesive narrative its title implies, The Saga of Mayflower May again finds Nadler skillfully echoing the forms of traditional English balladry as she crafts another captivating collection of songs steeped in the melancholy of distant, half-forgotten passion, doomed love affairs, and various crimes of the heart.
As a vocalist Nadler is considerably less idiosyncratic than such peers as Joanna Newsom or Josephine Foster, and here her dusky, lived-in soprano settles diffusely between contemporaries like Hope Sandoval and Chan Marshall, and 60s-era folkies like Vashti Bunyan or Mimi Farina. On these 11 tracks her arrangements are kept simple and powder dry, typically featuring only her 12-string guitar and the occasional flourish of organ, ukelele, or flute as accompaniment.
With this spare instrumentation providing an understated backdrop, Nadler sounds increasingly relaxed and confident throughout the album, and each performance sparkles with haunting, rain-swept emotion. Tracks like "The Little Famous Song" and "Horses and Their Kin", are further distinguished by mesmerizing wordless passages where it almost sounds as though she's attempting to use her voice to approximate the lonesome shimmer of a singing saw.
The significance of the character Mayflower May to these songs is unclear. Nadler has previously described May-- who also made a couple appearances in the lyrics of Ballads of Living and Dying-- as a lonely old woman of faded beauty. And though May is never mentioned by name on any of these songs, perhaps one is to assume that nostalgia-laden, first-person accounts like the opening "Under an Old Umbrella" or the rapturous "Calico" are intended to feature May as narrator.
Also a talented visual artist, Nadler naturally fills her lyrics with color, and these songs abound with azure skies, turquoise eyes, and (especially) ruby red blood. On tracks like "Yellow Lights" and "Mr. John Lee (Velveteen Rose)" Nadler fearlessly enters traditional murder ballad territory, exquisitely depicting a world where love is forever shadowed by loss.
Curiously, for the dramatic "Lily, Henry, and the Willow Trees" the album's lyric sheet includes a final, particularly gory verse that leaves little doubt as to the fate of poor Lily. Perhaps finding these lines out of keeping with her music's otherwise deft, subtle touch, Nadler leaves them unsung, one of the few instances on this enthralling album where she pulls any punches whatsoever.


MGMT’s fourth album marks a shift in tactics. Abandoning the belabored excess of their last two albums, they opt for streamlined synth-pop.

Little Dark Age

This could have been MGMT’s last chance. The narrative around the duo is well known by now: College buddies stumble into a few fluke hits, capturing a generational mix of youthful exuberance and modern ennui. Then they rocket to stardom, only to spend the next two albums kicking against everything that fans, critics, and their record company expect of them. One look at their first three albums’ declining streaming numbers on Spotify—2013’s MGMT has just four percent the plays of their 2007 debut—confirms that the band’s fan base has steadily winnowed over the past 11 years, whether or not MGMT fully intended it.
That’s hardly surprising. Indie has changed over the last decade-plus, yet MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser have seemed uninterested in keeping up. A glimpse at some of 2007’s other big albums—by Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, et al.—suggests to what extent their initial success fit into a broader trend of yelpy, brightly-hued indie with a toe dipped gingerly into electro-pop. But the zeitgeist quickly shifted toward bigger, bolder sounds, and as Chvrches, Purity Ring, and scads of other acts popped up with sleeker, more commercial versions of “Electric Feel,” MGMT stubbornly doubled down on wooly psychedelic navel-gazing.
The good news is that Little Dark Age marks a welcome shift in tactics. Much of the belabored excess of the last two albums is gone. They have traded the shaggy 1960s references and overstuffed arrangements for comparatively streamlined pop, and they have rediscovered their ability to write hooks. The dark undercurrent that has always permeated their music is still here, but the lyrics are less diaristic and more focused, less acid-soaked and more acid-tongued.
The opening “She Works Out Too Much” shows just how much the duo has evolved in a relatively short time. Slathered in jazzy chords and funk bass, it’s almost unrecognizable as MGMT. Ostensibly, it’s a song about dating-app fatigue. The chorus is a he-said/she-said battle of gym memberships; it’s introduced by a narrator who might be a PC Music–schooled spin-class instructor. A vocoded voice in the chorus sounds like it’s singing “Destroy.” The whole thing is absurd, and far more fun than it has any reason to be. It’s also a good bellwether for what follows.
They go goth on “Little Dark Age,” a synth-heavy dirge that sounds like a B-side to Gary Numan’s “Cars.” On “When You Die,” they ponder the void (“It’s permanently night/And I won’t feel anything”) over a breezy tune that sounds almost like Metronomy, and the contrast between the song’s suicidal urges and its chipper mood is what makes it so engaging. “Me and Michael” is a note-perfect rendering of a mid-’80s John Hughes soundtrack, a mode they pick up again on “One Thing Left to Try,” a fence-swinging festival anthem. Two of the album’s best songs are its most unassuming: VanWyngarden drops his voice to an exaggerated baritone on the wistful “James,” sounding pleasantly like Stephin Merritt. And “Days That Got Away,” the album’s lone instrumental, poses a dubby thought experiment: What if chillwave still existed in 2018, and didn’t suck?
Not all of this stuff is necessarily necessary. “One Thing Left to Try” sounds suspiciously like Empire of the Sun, and one of them is more than enough. Similarly, the album probably doesn’t need two songs about the evils of the hand-held internet. (In addition to “She Works Out Too Much,” we also get “TSLAMP,” or “Time Spent Looking at My Phone,” which, spoiler alert: They are none too pleased about it.) But the duo’s delight in sound itself is often infectious. The album is a riot of vintage synthesizers, dubby effects, and sumptuously gated snares, and they round out that ’80s fixation with just the right amount of psych-pop. Flangers flange, phasers phase, and the stereo panning spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl, but for once, the bells and whistles don’t drown out the songwriting.
While VanWyngarden’s lyrics have often strayed toward the impenetrable, here he’s more focused, settling into a dark mood that feels timely. Little Dark Age is an album about certainties dissolving. “Welcome to the shit-show/Grab a comfortable seat,” VanWyngarden sings in the very first song, pretty much summing up the second half of the current decade. It’s telling that the album’s most sing-along-friendly refrain is the rousing “Go fuck yourself!” of “When You Die.” Toward the end of the LP, “When You’re Small” makes a compelling argument for strategic downsizing: “When you’re small/You don’t have very far to fall.”
At this point, MGMT probably know a thing or two about the fear of falling. They seem to acknowledge as much on the closing “Hand It Over,” which, like Congratulations’ eponymous final song, is a kind of reckoning with their career, a self-aware snapshot of the whole complicated business of being MGMT. “If we lose our touch/It won’t mean much,” sings VanWyngarden, as if acknowledging their tenuous grasp on whatever brass ring the music industry once offered. The Beach Boys harmonies and Sgt. Pepper’s horns are familiar—it’s the first time on the album they sound like the old MGMT, really. “The joke’s worn thin,” he sings, early in the song, and, later, “The smart ones exit early.” It’s a long way from the rock-star fantasies of “Time to Pretend.” But if Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one.


Kings of Leon have laterally shifted from one easily understood linear narrative (festival band) to another (arena rock band), turning themselves from the Southern Strokes into the Southern U2.

Only By the Night

After years spent building a career on the enduringly romanticized Stillwater archetype, Kings of Leon have laterally shifted from one easily understood linear narrative (festival band) to another (arena rock band). Dropping the transparently hayseed act, the band could have turned an artistic corner; yet the first single from Only By the Night is called "Sex on Fire", so if there was any debate about whether Kings of Leon are in on their own joke, I think it can be put to rest. If we're misreading them, we're missing out on one corker of a comedy album based on an "SNL"-level premise: What if Bono got lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains and was replaced by a local yokel? (Suggested band name: Y'All2.)
But even the move from "southern Strokes" to "southern U2" is way better in theory than in practice-- these are the same clunky Kings of Leon songs, just now presented in an incredibly weird context. It all starts with Caleb Followill's never-ending need to play to type, and if you've kept up to this point, you know the drill-- though his band has toured the world several times over, dude can't see past his own dick. He sings terribly on Only By the Night, any modicum of youth and young manhood compromised by "real talk" overemoting and an accent that seems to have no geographical origin.
But why go on when Followill is more than happy to hoist himself on his own petard, doling his typical mix of stock characterization, open misogyny, and bizarre non-sequitirs. You can hear the brooms sweeping as the lonesome guitars of "Revelry" attempt some sort of last-call poignancy, but it's spoiled from the time Followill opens a mouth full of Meatloaf-- "What a night for a dance, you know I'm a dancin' machine/ With the fire in my bones and the sweet taste of kerosene." This goes on before you get the dominant KoL ethos on the chorus: "With the hardest of hearts I still feel full of pain/ See the time we shared it was precious to me/ But all the while I was dreaming of revelry." It's basically "The One I Love" with no riff and no irony.
Meanwhile, "Sex on Fire" turns out to be disturbingly literal, while the dopey travelogue of "Manhattan" has Caleb waxing with the naïve enthusiasm of a senior yearbook quote: "We're gonna set this fire we're gonna stoke it up/ We're gonna sip this wine and pass the cup/ We're gonna show this town how to kiss these stars," and it's nearly impossible to stifle your laughter when he punctuates each verse with a smarmy soul-papa "I SAAAAIIIID!"  All that's missing is the attendant video where Caleb walks the NYC streets and gives dap to passers-by while the band taps away at their idea of funk. You'd figure "17" would be right in their wheelhouse, because what's a better Kings of Leon topic than underage pussy? But after the first line (I'll spot you "Winger" as a hint and let you guess what it is), it just sort of trails off, leaving the last memorable moment of an album that still has about 20 minutes to go.
No longer steeped in Dixieland signifers, Kings of Leon now weirdly owe a debt to Washington state. If the rumbling toms, splashy cymbals, and cascading synth strings of songs like "Notion" or "I Want You" sound familiar, I'm willing to bet you have a copy of Sunny Day Real Esate's The Rising Tide or a recent Death Cab record. Strange bedfellows, and not really the right ones-- while the latter two were trying to adjust their modest hooks and personal lyrics to a larger scale, Kings of Leon have always been as emotionally cavernous as the drum sound here, and when the tempo slows, ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in swamp. Followill is haunted by all that he can't leave behind, trying to have it both ways with riffs that are supposed to bellow with reverb and bite with distortion. The band never soars, instead mostly muddling in a bog of muffled echo that liberally applies Caleb's cottonmouth to every other instrument.
At its best, Only By the Night at least gives the impression that Kings of Leon is actually an interesting band that would be exponentially and immediately improved with someone even average at the controls (call it the Tavaris Jackson Corollary). Musically, "Closer" sets the bar unrealistically high for the rest of the album, building on squeaking, modulated keys, tricky polyrhythms, and a solid melody unfortunately piledrived by Followill's self-pity ("You took my heart and you took my soul.../ Leaving me stranded in love on my own"). "Crawl" could pass for something off the first Secret Machines record with its hydraulic, distorted bass and hotly mixed percussion, but even before they can seal the deal with some dubious conspiracy mongering (something about the red, white, and blue crucifying you), you get the usual KoL idea of sweetalk: "You better learn to crawl before I walk away." Next thing you know, "Sex on Fire" starts and Kings of Leon's fourth album has peaked after seven minutes. Surely, we can do better for the platonic ideal of a rock band than four guys gunning for a spot rightfully inhabited by My Morning Jacket but instead coming up with the best songs 3 Doors Down never wrote.