Beyond its myth or this questionable new remix, the debut album from the Band made roots music sound as impressionistic and idiosyncratic as any other kind of rock’n’roll. It was revolutionary.

Music From Big Pink

Music From Big Pink went from album to legend decades before it reached its 50th anniversary this year, an occasion being celebrated with the release of a variety of splashy commemorative reissues, all featuring a startling new remix by Bob Clearmountain. Such a milestone offers an opportunity for a reassessment, but the striking thing about the Band’s debut album is how its story hasn’t been changed since its release in the summer of 1968, when it provided a tonic to the overblown psychedelia swamping the late 1960s.
This narrative didn’t just come out of the blue. Journalist Al Aronowitz wrote three lovely portraits of the Band in 1968—appearing in Life, Rolling Stone, and Hullabaloo, covering every possible readership—that made hay of the many years the Band spent grinding out a living on the road. He treated Big Pink, the house the group shared with Bob Dylan in West Saugerties, New York, with a nearly mystical reverence. This framing persists to this day, buttressed by repetition and hagiographies, all citing elements of these initial stories as accepted fact, possibly because there is considerable supporting evidence that Music From Big Pink had a profound influence on the Band’s peers. At the time, George Harrison and Eric Clapton cited the album as the reason why they decided to abandon overdriven blues and psychedelia to pursue a path of quiet contemplation and authenticity.
Authenticity is always a tricky thing regarding the Band. Music From Big Pink is often called the place where Americana starts even though every member, save drummer Levon Helm, hails from Canada. What’s harder to parse is how Music From Big Pink gets conflated with The Basement Tapes, the collection of homemade recordings Dylan cut with the Band during the summer of 1967. Intended as songwriting demos and self-amusement, those recordings wound up circulating as a bootleg for years, headed off by the 1975 release of a double-album which was loaded up with Band tracks not recorded at the Big Pink, giving the impression that the Band were equal players during this time, when the tapes were largely devoted to Dylan. Similarly, the very title of Music From Big Pink suggests that the album itself is a product of The Basement Tapes, which is true as far as its sensibility and many of its songs originate in the music Dylan and the Band made when nobody was listening during 1967.
Music From Big Pink, in contrast, was very much made with an audience in mind. Because of their months of woodshedding with Dylan, the Band—who at that point were lacking even their plain Jane name—were a hot commodity within the music industry. They signed a deal with Capitol who put the group into high-end recording studios in Manhattan and Los Angeles with producer John Simon. While they were there, the Band didn’t follow standard procedures: Guitarist Robbie Robertson is fond telling an anecdote where the group insisted on removing studio baffles so they could play face to face. Because of, or perhaps despite all this, they wound up with an album so rich and complex it still sounds singular even on its 50th birthday.
From the outset, its originality was described in terms of genre, how Music From Big Pink draws from a number of American roots musics—country, blues, gospel, folk, gospel, rockabilly—without ever sounding distinctly like one its inspirations. Such a hybrid has since become common, yet Music From Big Pink still sounds trapped out of time, lacking the simplicity of its predecessors or the po-faced sincerity of its disciples, and so much of this is due to how the album is executed with a casual disregard to authenticity. Robertson may have advocated for the Band to play as a unit, a savvy move that captures their elastic interplay, but Simon didn’t produce the group as if they were a mere bar band. The very presence of Garth Hudson, an organist who doubled on horns, removed the Band from the confines of three-chord rock’n’roll, with his waves of texture evoking not just gospel but the heady horizons of psychedelia the Band reportedly rejected.
While it’s true that the 11 individual songs on Music From Big Pink are steeped in tradition, the album itself is resolutely modern, a studio concoction meant to expand the mind. Listen to how the album starts, not with a salvo, but with a dirge. “Tears of Rage” comes into focus with a guitar line phased so heavily it sounds like an organ, the piano chords piling up just as pianist Richard Manuel’s lonely voice begins to pine. It’s well over a minute before another voice is heard, with the song slowly expanding to encompass horns and harmonies, every sound in concert and every musician in communion. The tempo soon quickens with “To Kingdom Come,” where the supporting vocals of Rick Danko and Helm carry the shakey Robertson through to the end, setting the stage for the communal hymn of “The Weight.” Simultaneously the best example of the Band’s collective nature—Helm and Danko switch verses, everybody chimes in on the chorus—“The Weight” also is an outlier on Music From Big Pink, pointing the way to the lean and sinewy sound of their self-titled second album. The rest of the record contains so many textures, it nearly feels ornate: the plaintive “Lonesome Suzie” gains resonance with its washes of echo and horns, while “Chest Fever”—the hardest rocking number here—is a head trip, thanks to the roar of overdriven organ and indecipherable vocals.
Music From Big Pink may be rooted in the earth but it exists entirely within the head. The way it makes roots music sound as impressionistic and idiosyncratic as any other kind of rock’n’roll is revolutionary. It casts a very distinct spell, which is why it’s so unsettling that the new Bob Clearmountain mix breaks this moody magic. Clearmountain takes pains to separate the elements that were previously inextricably intertwined, shattering the specific otherworldliness that has been retained in every reissue of the album over the past fifty years. Sometimes, certain parts are pushed to the forefront—the call and response on “We Can Talk” by Helm and Danko are isolated from each other—and sometimes, everything piles on to of each other, as on the cacophonic “This Wheel’s on Fire.” Worse, extraneous studio chatter has been added to “The Weight” and “Lonesome Suzie,” a move that punctures the illusion that Music From Big Pink materialized out of thin air from a cheap rental house in the woods of New York.
Perhaps this super deluxe reissue accidentally deflates that myth, but the legend of Music From Big Pink is so deeply ingrained in musical culture that one single splashy reissue can’t tarnish its reputation. If anything, this super deluxe edition—complete with a 49-minute album pressed as a double-LP at 45rpm—encourages exploration of the original album, because even with the bright, discordant new remix, there remains a mysterious core that can not be explained but only experienced.


This storied 1986 live bootleg captured the band on the cusp between New York Noise act and alt-rock behemoth. Thirty-eight years later, it finally gets an official release.

Walls Have Ears

If Manhattan’s misunderstood muck could talk—think smashed-up cigs, boot-trodden gum splotches, the strange liquid that oozes from certain subway stations—its voice would sound a lot like early-career Sonic Youth. Long before their weaponized tinnitus would take their music, and their tour van, across the globe, they occupied a derelict yet fertile corner of New York, where dissatisfied art types recognized the squalor of their city, processed it through shitty speakers, and threw it back in its face. This was a nascent, no-holds-barred iteration of post-punk, marked by left-field song structures, unforgiving decibel levels, and, in extreme cases, bloodied strumming hands. “I maintain that/Chaos is the future/And beyond it is freedom,” Thurston Moore deadpans in “Confusion Is Next,” from 1983’s Confusion Is Sex. To extract catharsis from chaos, you must first spend time at chaos’s altar.
On paper, Moore’s declaration sounds vague, like the sort of thing a young eccentric might scribble in protest of detention. But it was also pretty prophetic: Spearheaded by Sonic Youth, indie rock’s next decade would seek strange beauty in the bizarre—tongue-talking pedalboards, battered whammy bars, feedback that foamed at the mouth. Pulled from three 1985 UK shows, Walls Have Ears pinpoints the band between sputtering sound system and well-oiled noise machine, soon to transcend fringe credibility for alt-rock titanhood. The record existed for decades as a coveted bootleg, originally issued without permission by Paul Smith, an early arbiter of their European releases. Thirty-eight years later, it still sounds like a smuggled good. The mixing is stuffy, low quality, borderline claustrophobic. It’s hard to listen without feeling, ever so faintly, like the walls are closing in, damning you to suffocation in a shaking hell. You can’t hide from the monster—and yet, for some reason, you don’t really want to.
The collection offers a ragtag crash course in Sonic Youth’s first three records, interspersed with occasional cameos from the then-unreleased Evol. On raucous renditions of “Death Valley ’69” and “Kill Yr. Idols,” Steve Shelley’s drumming—at that point, a fresh addition to Sonic Youth’s apparatus—is enchanted and animalistic, a hungrier, more depraved engine behind tracks that already seemed murderous enough. “Brother James,” in particular, makes the version that appears on Confusion Is Sex sound pedestrian, maybe even polite. Kim Gordon wants to usher you “straight to hell”; Shelley’s thumps are the feet of the devil, dancing with glee at the sight of fresh meat. For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one. Midway through “Kill Yr. Idols,” when Moore hollers “Confusion is seeeeeeeex,” letting the “sex” hang just long enough for you to think about it, the naked guitar registers, uncannily, like the rasping throat of a ghoul. When Shelley and Gordon return to fill in the empty space, it’s one of those moments where you feel like the room is shrinking, an inch every beat.
The record’s second half pulls from an April pre-Shelley gig, one of their last with early drummer Bob Bert. There’s volcanic musicianship here, as is true of the Shelley shows, but there’s also more of the in-between stuff—like the minutes-long fuzz-guitar murmuring that precedes “Ghost Bitch,” or the tentative input-jack bursts that eventually fester into a second “Brother James” rendition. They weren’t the types to say it themselves, but Sonic Youth were hungry to be respected, hungry to have their dissonant catharsis understood by outsiders to the city that produced it. By the mid ’80s, much to their annoyance, writers had been making cheap comparisons to the Jesus and Mary Chain, another upstart quartet that drew more acclaim, faster. Between “Ghost Bitch” and “Death Valley ’69,” while the group audibly readies guitars, a JAMC cassette can be heard playing, sped up to the point of cartoonish oblivion. They aren’t doing any talking, but you get the sentiment.
Walls Have Ears is rife with an endearing patched-together air, the splotchy varnish of a band established enough to gig overseas, but not quite ready to afford guitar techs. They had a chaotic gospel to spread, and they were hellbent on spreading it—regardless of where, to whom, and to what effect. Sonic Youth were often desperate, it seemed, to prove that the filthy was even filthier than you imagined: Your America was their wicked warzone, your Manhattan their squalid sublunary. With the grittiest versions of their grittiest songs, it’s hard to deny that even at their best, they were brash, harsh, and confusing. They’d probably take each of those as compliments.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Tejano star’s landmark 1994 album, her magnum opus that redefined the sound of Latin pop.

Amor Prohibido

You can find Selena’s face on prayer candles, tote bags, and coin purses; coffee mugs, ’90s-style band tees, and poster prints; throw pillows, air fresheners, and baby onesies. MAC Cosmetics created a limited edition Selena collection in 2016, featuring lipsticks in her signature cherry-red stain, as well as makeup pouches in the shape of her indelible rhinestone-encrusted bustiers. There have been reusable grocery bags sold by the Texas supermarket chain H-E-B, a juniors’ apparel line at JCPenney and Sears, loungewear from Forever 21. I could go on.
The branded knickknacks and cutesy homewares tell a more sinuous—and sinister—story of Selena. They reflect her status as an icon, forever young, shot dead at 23 by a resentful employee. To some, she has become a saintly figure free of complexity and contradiction. But of course, the Tejano star’s life was far less neat and digestible than that.
Amor Prohibido, the last album Selena released before her death, is her magnum opus. It has soundtracked quinces, barbecues, and rough breakups, harnessing the kind of romantic suffering that leaves you weeping on your bedroom floor. Amor Prohibido distills Selena’s legacy, but it’s also a statement about the boundless aesthetic potential of Tejano, a once-maligned working-class folk genre, whose touchstones include the accordion, the bajo sexto, and rhythms from Czech and German genres like the polka and the waltz. Over 11 tracks, she and her band Los Dinos stretch the limits of Tejano and cumbia, warping elements of R&B, reggae, and electronic music into eminently catchy songs of love and loss. Amor Prohibido was a commercial blockbuster, and it remains the best-selling Tejano album of all time. But more importantly, it is a glimmer of all the corners of pop music that Selena was beginning to explore—both in English and Spanish.
In 1993, Selena’s brother and go-to producer A.B. Quintanilla III was in a bind. A year earlier, he’d co-written his sister’s breakout hit “Como La Flor,” which propelled her to fame in Mexico and Latin America. By then, Selena was already a superstar in her home state of Texas. Mexicans across the border, along with non-Mexican Latinx groups in the United States, had long stigmatized Tejano as too old-fashioned, too blue-collar, or too gringo. Selena’s previous album, 1992’s Entre a Mi Mundo, helped dismiss skeptics by updating the genre’s templates while preserving its working-class allegiances. The next challenge was to write an album that would safeguard her authenticity and simultaneously introduce her to new audiences across the U.S.
More than simply venturing into different stylistic territory, or ushering Tejano into the pop realm, Amor Prohibido lands as an avowal of Selena’s mutability. On “Techno Cumbia,” A.B. arranges explosive synths and guacharaca scrapes into a command to get your ass onto the dancefloor. Here, Selena raps, growls, and beckons. She berates all the losers at the party, instructing them to toss their chairs aside and sweat. In the early ’90s, it was rare for any mainstream Latinx artist in the U.S. to experiment with dance music, hip-hop, and traditional genres in a single production. But Selena was constitutionally intrepid. She was a child of the border region, born to seek out hybrid contours in the music she called home.
There is the part of Selena that knows how to bottle anger, too. “Si una vez dije que te amaba, no lo vuelvo a hacer/Ese error es cosa de ayer,” she sings on “Si Una Vez.” If I once said that I loved you, I won’t do it again/That was yesterday’s mistake. Selena delivers these lines with pure rasp, in a voice that sounds like it’s been forced to constantly defend itself against betrayal. She longs to remain in the tides of resentment, far from the waters of forgiveness. In her rage and disaffection, Selena invites us to cultivate a discipline of self-worth.
Several of Selena’s vocal performances (and the lessons they contain) feel forged from the anguish of women who came before her, including ranchera legends like Chavela Vargas, the musical doyen of love’s agony. On “No Me Queda Más,” Selena conjures that inherited endurance in flashes, entering a kindred mode of performance as she searches for relief. “No me queda más/Que aguantar bien mi derrota/Y brindarte felicidad,” she sings. I have nothing left but to withstand my defeat/And toast to your happiness. Her voice, husky and melismatic, exhibits the kind of breath control only the most technically skilled ranchera singers and rappers can. When she sings “Y aunque vivía enamorada/Y totalmente equivocada, no me importa,” the word “importa” gushes out of her lungs like a bloody wound, transforming into desperation itself.
But Amor Prohibido suggests the grief doesn’t have to be suffocating. There is always the remedy of movement. “Fotos y Recuerdos,” a cover of the Pretenders’ 1983 single “Back on the Chain Gang,” retains the original’s looping new wave melody, but Selena’s version doesn’t possess the same kind of melancholy; cumbia pulses and dapples of steel drums nourish the production. Instead of feeling like an embittered farewell to a partner, “Fotos y Recuerdos” puts the subtle joys of cumbia front and center. It’s as if she wants to remind us that these lilting rhythms are embedded with exactly what you need to feel good again.
Amor Prohibido was as much a claim for broader industry appeal as it was an ardent request for a Latina star to be seen as multivalent, contemporary, and capable of constant reinvention. Selena packs the album with genre-crushing experiments: “Techno Cumbia;” the wispy R&B jam “Donde Quiera Que Estés,” featuring New York’s Barrio Boyzz; the reggae-inflected bounce of “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom”; and the rock grit of “Fotos y Recuerdos.” But the press often overlooked her artistic complexity, instead presenting Selena as both an archetypal “good girl” and a gorgeous seductress. Profiles and interviews from that era referenced her “innocence” and “immaculate purity” at the same time that they labeled her exotic and sensual—in part because of her sparkly bustiers, the cultural fascination with her butt, and her signature “washing-machine” choreography. All the while, journalists lauded the way she deferred to her elders and offered “positive comments about any subject thrown her way.”
These flattening portrayals should come as no surprise. The impulse to deny young female pop stars the luxury of self-determination and depth is a longstanding American tradition, one that was acute in the ’90s, especially for Latinas. But Selena’s presumed virtue wasn’t absolute; it wasn’t even a fact. Consider the title track of Amor Prohibido, which tells the story of two young lovers from different sides of the tracks who fall for each other in spite of their parents’ disapproval. Co-written by A.B. and backup vocalist Pete Astudillo, “Amor Prohibido” was inspired by Selena’s grandmother, a maid in a wealthy Mexican household who fell in love with the son of the family.
“Amor Prohibido” has come to represent much more than family lore. The song’s narrative is uncannily similar to Selena’s own story of forbidden love; in 1992, she famously eloped with band member Chris Pérez, ignoring her father’s objection to their partnership. Over the years, many fans have reinterpreted the song as an anthem for other kinds of verboten relationships, especially queer ones. When Selena sings,“Qué importa qué dirán, también la sociedad/Aquí sólo importa nuestro amor” (“Who cares what they say, society too/Here, only our love matters”) over those moonstruck synths, it doesn’t feel like a story of generations past. It resembles the quotidian acts of defiance that embody queer dissent.
Plenty of Anglo critics overlooked the innovation of Amor Prohibido, instead focusing on its commercial performance and Selena’s looming crossover. Headlines reminded readers that “just a few years ago, hardly anyone knew of Tejano,” and journalists wondered if she would be able to duplicate the lofty career arc of Gloria Estefan, apparently the only referent for Spanish-language music back then. The label expectations surrounding what would become Selena’s first posthumous album, Dreaming of You, only fueled the media obsession with her crossover. In an interview for La Prensa de San Antonio, A.B. said that at first, the label sought to assume control of the forthcoming English-language album, choosing songs on behalf of the group. “We said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. It’s not like we’re some small-time group that hasn’t sold any records.’ We’ve proven ourselves,” Selena later explained.
So much of Selena’s place in the collective imagination is framed through these pressures of legibility. For the belittled or the slighted, the chance to finally be understood is seductive. Some of us have spent our lifetimes softening our edges to settle on a version of self that is breezy, simple, flat. The fantasy of crossing over offers freedom from pigeonholing, and the potential to be whole and unfettered. In this rosy paradise of recognition, the crossover is another item in the long checklist of qualifiers that might make us feel like we belong.
The martyrization of Selena was practically instantaneous: At her public funeral in 1995, a crowd of more than 50,000 fans assembled to mourn the artist at the Bayfront Convention Center (now the Selena Auditorium) in her hometown of Corpus Christi. There were candlelight vigils in San Antonio, roses and placards outside the motel where she was murdered. A high school near where she grew up called in guidance counselors to console grieving students. People, Entertainment Weekly, and Texas Monthly all released tribute cover stories in the months after her death. A Tampa Bay Times article published in the fall of 1995 felt prophetic: “She is the fallen one…and an industry of mythology is perpetuated.”
Amor Prohibido has been cemented as Selena’s masterwork and a watershed moment for Spanish-language pop, in part because Selena and her band sought out fresh and versatile ways of sustaining Tejano. And instead of chronicling the genre’s familiar, masculinist tales of female infidelity and deception, the album gave a language to the scars that patriarchal love leaves behind. For the dozens of other Latina stars who followed in her footsteps, including Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, Selena’s trajectory became a blueprint for navigating the demands of a world that couldn’t contain your multiplicity.
Yet that legacy has become inextricably bound to Selena’s sanctification. There are the aforementioned mementos; the Netflix series; the Gregory Nava biopic starring Lopez; and a recent album of previously released material, digitally manipulated to age Selena’s voice. Part of that worship, as the scholar Deborah Paredez has written, emerges from the historical context of Selena’s celebrity. In the ’90s, corporations sought to capitalize on what they perceived as a “Latin boom” in culture and business, even as the country experienced a nativist panic around immigration. As Paredez notes, Selena became a symbol for Latinx communities’ longing for a brighter future.
In the almost three decades since her death, the image of Selena as a martyr has intensified, often yielding omissions or elisions about her life and beliefs. Selena grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, a denomination that would have strictly prohibited her deification. In the Texas Monthly cover story that followed her death, even Selena’s father made it clear the veneration was unwelcome. “She believed worship should go only to the Creator…I don’t think Selena would be pleased to be part of any form of idolatry,” he said. Retellings of Selena’s story, whether by fans or in screen adaptations, often skip over her conservative views on abortion and premarital sex, “in favor of focusing on the way she embraced her sexuality on stage,” as Cat Cardenas noted in a 2021 article for Texas Monthly. When we perform Selena’s memory like this, it creates a space of possibility—a utopia where our communities’ social and cultural conventions might disappear. But this is a dismal kind of victory. All that is left is an impression of a star that is static and flawless, rather than human.
Pop martyrdom is an easy and reductive kind of devotion. It creates an alluring simplicity, and eliminates the discomfort of multiple truths and multiple realities. It allows the palimpsest of an artist’s legacy to overshadow the music itself. But if you peel back the layers, you’ll see that Amor Prohibido begs us to consider Selena beyond her mythos. The album doesn’t paint her as some fixed totem so much as it exhorts us to consider all the possible creative directions she may have explored if she’d survived. It forces us to remember Selena on her own terms, in all her intricacy, and not through the imagined liberation of a crossover. As the critic Margo Jefferson reminds us, “goddesses belong to myth, not history.” To render Selena an idol, rather than a person, only distracts us from fully immersing ourselves in the joy and originality of her music. We, and Selena, deserve all that and more.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


This is the latest from Matthew Houck, and though he still sounds a hell of a lot like Will Oldham, his blend of harmonies-and-drone with delicate folk-pop is a perfect autumn sound.

Pride

Matthew Houck’s adoring fans occasionally find themselves conscripted into straw-sheriff roles, bound to struggle against the mob justice of Inspector Bloggit followers who'd charge him with petty theft just because he seems aesthetically connectable to other dignitaries within his cosmic art-folk / mystic alt-country / slowcore-gospel idiom. The Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons that his work used to attract were inexplicable to this typist's ears-- wtf, because he also lived in Athens? And yes, now that he claims Brooklyn, one can detect-- in three songs-- a flirtation with those post-Animal Collective poles of, y'know, elliptical ethereality and raucous tribalism in his approach to song structure and performance.
Sure, a few acts do consciously cannibalize others' textures, but we hype-machinists too frequently commit the fallacy of assuming that soundalikeness equals influence or translates as aping. Try this at home: Play a guitar and sing, and odds are, now that so many of our psyches are plumb awash in multiplicities of bands, you're going to innocently/organically "sound like" somebody else, unless you're, I don't know, David Thomas Broughton. If in the past Phosphorescent's work contained moments that could be received as echoing Sparklehorse, Tindersticks, Clem Snide, Low, downbeat Flaming Lips, the Pacific-pastoral K Records stable, and the Joe-Henry-curated Jesus' Son soundtrack's commingling of soul, spirituals, oldies, and faux-ldies, well, good for humanity.
But the Will Oldham thing: yeah. And Pride continues that tradition on all fronts. First, the cover photo is difficult not to perceive as an homage to Oldham's Days in the Wake, itself a Jandek homage. And the lion theme, even if it's based on Houck's hair-encircled face: consult Oldham's "The Lion Lair" (since citing the Sage Francis team-up "Sea Lion" would be rash). The yelping, howling, abstract title track: consult Oldham's "Come a Little Dog"-- from Days in the Wake, no less. Speaking of canines, this album's "Wolves": consult Oldham's "Wolf Among Wolves" and Superwolf. Houck's voice warbles exactly like mid-career Oldham, one of his old songs even used a Days in the Wake song title ("All Is Grace") as a lyric, both performers abuse further animal metaphors, both frame songs as prayers, both feature lackadaisical-verging-on-catatonic overdubs, and both include female singing as flesh-out fodder. Most damningly, Pride was preceded (and upstaged) by a kickass Daytrotter session featuring arrangements and production that strike me as aiming for the throat of Oldham's greatest 4-song EP, the Kramer-helmed The Mountain-- the two closing songs of which Houck already mimicked in terms of lyrics and inflection on his last full-length's "South (of America)."
The above paragraph: FOOLED YOU! Could have kept going, too, through more Phosphorescent-discography lyrical and vocal similarities with Lost Blues and Western Songs, even milking the strangely touching syllabic nonsense of Houck's Aw Come Aw Wry and Oldham's All Most Heaven, but this "review" would have then topped 2,000 words. I also could have faked an equally dubious/convincing chunk about Iron and Wine, down to the hirsuteness, biblical dabblage, EP supremacy, and the titles of Beam compositions such as "Lion's Mane" or the new album's, um, "Wolves." My point: I don't put much stock in Jungian collectivity, but nobody gets to monopolize this archetypal shit. Oldham and Beam were both called copycats of their ancestors when they dawned, and 'tis time to afford Houck the respect that their work has since earned. OMFG all three of 'em use the same chord progressions AND mention the (planet-dominating) ocean a lot! OMFG, I think I hear traces of Pride's awesome guestlist in Phosphorescent's music, too! That'd include Nat Baldwin, Annie Palmer, Jana Hunter, Liz Durrett, Dirty Projectors, and Castanets in the conspiracy!
So: stunning, stand-alone album. Except that the reportedly high-school-marching-band-inspired version of "A Death, A Proclamation" here-- while more interesting than anything recently by, say, Will Oldham-- doesn't hit the heights of the wailed, piano-solo-assisted Daytrotter arrangement. Same goes for "Cocaine Lights", despite its being a fine comedown un-anthem on par with classics by Kris Kristofferson or Neil Young, every chronicled gesture precise (the "blood clicking" and face-covering) and every phrase beautiful (the partner-in-a-slip and the "showy amen"). Pride romanticizes the burden of touring ("Even in these dirty clubs counting 1-2-3"), but: Live in concert, Houck just dwindles and stumbles. Over multiple shows, I've only seen him confident once, when right in front of the stage, I redneckfully started a shoving match with a former bosom chum turned consummately annoying townie who insisted on yammering loudly to someone gullible enough to suffer him and who made fun of my investment in the show after asking him to be quiet or move back five fucking times. Houck put his hand on my head like a guru, and to an even less worthy arrangement of a requested "Cocaine Lights", smirked and repeatedly crooned, "Where is the love?"
The love is in Pride's lyrics, which escape the shackles of their occasional poetic flourishes to be unmysterious and self-explanatory, totally broken and totally vulnerable, and therefore unique. The speakers' partners are pretty much anchors, and the crack in Houck's voice: a mournful yodel. These voices would have us believe that they mean to repair the relationships they're in: "Tell me where you've been and I will tell you where I've been/ It will all be okay." But seductive statements of faith in resurrection are eventually outweighed by aftermath-odes; these speakers prefer loss. The listener gets the sense that they don't even miss a singular individual but a composite of squandered loves, Frankenmates formed in minds that crave impossible partners, even while retroactively full of promise: "O love, the one day I tarried too far and I never came home/ O love, I always carried your heart married deep in my own." And even the internet doesn't have room for me to gush over the Beach-Boy-haunted, vocal-drone stuff.


Neko Case is a force of nature. Her voice can knock you over-- it's one of the strongest in any genre. She has immense control and surprising physical and stylistic range, able to jump from cowgirl honkytonk to pop muse to Americana banshee with ease and grace. However, on her fifth studio album, *Middle Cyclone* , she literally becomes a force of nature: Case sings opener "This Tornado Loves You" from the point of view of an actual tornado, tearing up trailer parks and cutting a 65-mile swath in search for its beloved: "I carved your name across three counties,"

Middle Cyclone

Neko Case is a force of nature. Her voice can knock you over-- it's one of the strongest in any genre. She has immense control and surprising physical and stylistic range, able to jump from cowgirl honkytonk to pop muse to Americana banshee with ease and grace. However, on her fifth studio album, Middle Cyclone , she literally becomes a force of nature: Case sings opener "This Tornado Loves You" from the point of view of an actual tornado, tearing up trailer parks and cutting a 65-mile swath in search for its beloved: "I carved your name across three counties," she sings defiantly as the guitars whip around her and the snare patters frantically, suggesting destruction can be a demonstration of love. Later she's a cyclone, an elephant, a killer whale, a dove, a magpie, and possibly a mollusk. "I'm an animal," she sings on "I'm an Animal". "You're an animal, too."
Middle Cyclone is another strong entry in her strange catalog, a culmination of some of the lyrical and musical concerns she's been exploring since Blacklisted , when she started receiving full songwriting credit. That 2002 album marked a turning point for Case as she abandoned the straightforward country-soul of 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby for a spookier sound that favors odd song structures and odder imagery about serial killers, downed planes, and automobile accidents. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood developed those ideas and Middle Cyclone further refines them. It plays almost like a culmination of her career this decade, the final installment of a trilogy about the weird American wilderness of her mind.
Listeners more familiar with Case's previous work will appreciate the tendrils of mythology that reach from this album into her recent catalog. With its first-verse image of a man "filleted on the stairs," "Polar Nettles" recalls the bloodspatter lyrics of "Deep Red Bells" on Blacklisted ; "Red Tide" and "Magpie to the Morning" play with critter imagery similar to "Lion's Jaws" and "Maybe Sparrow" on Fox Confessor . In fact, "People Got a Lotta Nerve" sounds like a sequel of sorts to "The Tigers Have Spoken", from her live album of the same name. Both concern zoo animals who rebel against their prisons, and both end, tragically and inevitably, in bullets. The album, however, doesn't demand any special context to be enjoyed: It sounds impressive and immersive on its own, so those who've only heard her name will find much to admire in her skewed songs. But because Case doesn't really write hooks and typically avoids the standard verse-chorus-verse song structure, Middle Cyclone may take even longer than previous albums to reveal their charms and mysteries.
What ties everything together is her unmistakable voice. Pushing herself, she shows off a few new tricks in these songs. On "People Got a Lot of Nerve", she fashions one of the album's best hooks from the repeated syllables of "man man man eater", then ascends a vertiginous scale on the bridge, hitting that impossibly high note with no loss of tone. She layers her voice to create an airy chorus on "Magpie to the Morning" and a dramatic gospel on her cover of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth". "Prison Girls" may be her best performance here, with an emphatic vocal that gives the chorus-- "I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes"-- new meaning and greater menace with each repetition.
Case remains her own best muse, a strong, feminine presence who demands you meet her songs halfway (she calls herself a control freak in every article I've read), but her band deserves credit for creating the ambient, dark-night setting in which her tales of murder and animals sound natural and compelling. Middle Cyclone features the same core group she's been playing with for years-- including guitarist Paul Rigby, bass player Tom V. Ray, multi-instrumentalist Jon Rauhouse, and back-up singer Kelly Hogan-- along with a supporting cast that includes regulars Garth Hudson of the Band, M. Ward, Sarah Harmer, and members of Calexico, the Sadies, and Giant Sand. With an increasing familiarity between them, this cast finds new ways to sell her songs and couch Case's vocals in unpredictable arrangements. "People Got a Lotta Nerve" kicks off with a chiming Byrds riff that makes it impossible not to perk up and listen to the song, and a strangled guitar line staggers through "Fever", implying an unnamed threat just off camera. Much of the album is acoustic and subdued, and a few of the slower songs start to sag a bit. The album picks up considerably towards the end, as "Prison Girls" lurches ominously like film noir and "Red Tide" generates a rumbling garage-rock stomp.
Middle Cyclone ends with "Marais la Nuit", which translates to "The Night Marsh". True to its title, it is 30 minutes of frog noises that Case recorded at her farm in Vermont, just outside the barn where most of these sessions were held. It's not surprising that her animal lyrics would break down into real animal sounds, and as chill-out music for any domesticated wildlife in your home, it's not unpleasant. It is, however, nearly as long as the album proper. Its inclusion show just how thoroughly Case has imagined her own little world on these three albums and how thoroughly she rules that realm.


On his collaborative album with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, the producer, multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and archivist remains masterful by simply turning what he hears into something new and revelatory.

Sound Ancestors

Listening to music can be a way of making it. Few artists understand this better than Madlib. Across dozens of releases and nearly as many alter egos, the West Coast hip-hop producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, and de facto archivist born Otis Jackson Jr. has worked chiefly by flipping cherished records from his collection, inviting audiences to hear what he hears: the unique emotional texture of this particular vocal line, a saxophone solo distilled to its most elegant single bar. Madlib places these moments at the center of our attention, stuttering and alive, their significance impossible to ignore for those of us who might miss it otherwise. Cue up one of his beats side-by-side with its source material and you may be surprised at the similarity. But such an attempt at demystification would miss the point of his music. Some producers specialize in manipulating their samples until they are unrecognizable; for Madlib, the hearing itself—the noticing—is as important as whatever happens after that.
Sound Ancestors, his new album, is a rare entry in his vast catalog to be billed straightforwardly as a Madlib solo release, not a collaboration with a rapper, or a record by one of several fictitious jazz players and ensembles he’s invented, or an entry in an arcane thematic series. But it, too, is a joint effort, this time with Kieran Hebden, the electronic producer better known as Four Tet, who curated, edited, and arranged its 16 tracks from a body of hundreds of recordings that Madlib sent him over a period of two years. Their process reminds me of 2003’s Shades of Blue, which Madlib created by raiding the vaults of Blue Note Records, sometimes chopping the original jazz recordings intricately and sometimes letting them unfold for long stretches without much apparent editing. Now, Madlib is the one opening his archives, and Four Tet is the one listening and assembling.
The two are friends whose recorded collaboration began in the mid-2000s, when Four Tet remixed several tracks from Madlib’s classic MF DOOM collaboration Madvillainy. Hebden’s arrangement of Sound Ancestors shows deep and intuitive engagement with Jackson’s weed-scented sensibility, which has no use for presumptive distinctions between the beautiful and the funky, the silly and the profound.
“Loose Goose,” a delirious early highlight from the album, pairs an enormous dancehall rhythm with a minor-key woodwind line and a repeated sample of Snoop Dogg exclaiming “Fo’ shizzle, dizzle,” before veering hard left into the territory of some faintly demonic, helium-voiced avant-garde pop, then returning to its original groove just in time to end. Immediately after comes the whiplash of “Dirtknock,” built on a loop of tender vocals and bass guitar from the cult-favorite Welsh indie rock band Young Marble Giants, plus a snippet of what I can only guess is a YouTube tutorial about how to properly hit a bong. Of the many mind-expanding contrasts in this passage, the most striking involves the surface quality of the audio: the way the trebly mix of an early 1980s post-punk record sounds especially brittle and tactile when it emerges out of reggae’s subaqueous low end, and vice versa. Madlib’s preference for leaving his samples largely raw and untreated, and his appetite for music across genres, eras, and locales, lead to many such juxtapositions. Recording fidelity is no longer a fixed characteristic of the album as a whole, but an inflection that is subject to change from moment to moment, as mutable and expressive as rhythm or pitch.
Despite the album’s frequent joyous and even comic moments, it also has the feeling of an elegy. Its release comes not long after the death of MF DOOM, and one of its tracks is presented as an homage to J Dilla, another collaborator and kindred spirit who died young. “Two for 2 - For Dilla” is a pitch-perfect emulation of the late producer’s style, and serves to highlight the similarities between the two musicians (Sound Ancestors, like much instrumental hip-hop from the last decade and a half, bears more than a little resemblance to Dilla’s 2006 swan song Donuts), but also the differences. Soul samples arrive in herky-jerky staccato, turning half-words and breaks between syllables into unlikely hooks: pure Dilla. But the stretched-out backdrop they punctuate in the track’s second half bears Madlib’s smoky signature, suggesting the sound of Donuts as imagined in a daydream on a lazy afternoon. It would be hard to come up with a more fitting tribute.
One emotional peak comes during “Hopprock,” a track whose construction seems almost offhanded: palm-muted guitar, a simple drum line, a fragment of bass that pops in every few bars. Several ghostly voices float at the margins, sounding more like Four Tet’s previous work than Madlib’s. Their words are mostly indistinguishable: a yeah here, a what! there, a few ooohs in between. Together these elements alchemize a feeling that none would summon on their own. Listening in the right mood feels like watching a sunrise over a mountain.
Across his catalog, Madlib has maintained a tricksterish relationship to authorship, relishing his ability to leave you wondering who exactly is doing what, and when. On a series of jazz-oriented releases that feature Otis Jackson Jr. playing many or all of the live instruments himself, he has adopted a series of fanciful aliases: Yesterday’s New Quintet, Sound Directions, Ahmad Miller, The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble. Whatever other roles these characters serve in his process, they also upend received hierarchies of value in musical creativity. He’s happy to take credit for an album that a traditionalist might write off as plagiarism of other people’s work—but when he’s playing bass, drums, percussion, kalimba, synth, organ, electric piano? That wasn’t Madlib, that was Monk Hughes & the Outer Realm.
Sound Ancestors is elusive in subtler ways. “Duumbiyay,” its gorgeous final track, features a grainy child’s voice and a crisply recorded jazz combo working in tandem. When a piano enters the mix and stabs out a two-note figure that precisely mirrors the singer’s exclamatory phrasing at the end of a line, the moment is mildly startling. The voice and the instrument sound like they were recorded in different decades, perhaps on different continents. As the track goes on, their involvement becomes more intimate: the piano seems to accompany the singer deliberately, harmonizing the simple melody with a jaunty left-hand bassline and densely clustered chords, as if they were in the same room. Maybe we are hearing the magic of two musicians reaching unknowingly toward each other across time and space; maybe Madlib played the piano himself along to an old field recording he likes, or maybe he hired a session musician to do it. Maybe the strange mix of fidelities is all baked into a single uncanny sample, and he’s just letting it play. Whatever the answer, the effect is the same. Hey, you, the music calls out. Listen to this.

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Kevin Morby, who played bass in Woods and the Babies and now resides in Los Angeles, offers a collection of intricately textured songs that function as a love letter to New York City.

Harlem River

Considering his career, Kevin Morby’s own shift from buzz band sideplayer to existentially peripatetic frontman is an interesting one. Once upon a time, the Kansas City-bred musician was based in Brooklyn, playing in groups like Woods and the Babies. Now, he lives in Los Angeles and has written Harlem River, a love letter to New York City that transforms its eponymous subject's long stretch of water into a metaphor for a wandering heart.
Within Woods’ discography, Morby's bass-playing wasn’t necessarily meant to suggest the existence of a richly detailed interior. Meanwhile, the Babies were formed from an inside joke and have been self-described as a party band. Harlem River has the same emotional looseness as those groups, but its instrumental texture is more focused: it’s made up of intricately plucked acoustic guitars, shimmering organs, and electric guitars cutting through the negative space like a foglight. And, given the proper room to breathe, Morby’s voice reveals its lazy-day Kansan cadence, sounding not unlike Cass McCombs, Kurt Vile, or any guy with a guitar who’s got something to tell you.
What Morby has to say is unspecific, but no less true. On “Miles, Miles, Miles,” he alludes to the darkness the song’s protagonist has come from, while offering a wishful portrait of the place he’d like to be. The title track is slow and ponderous, Morby’s voice reduced to a muted creep as he seeks answers from a path showing no end. On “Slow Train”, he sings of not wanting to be destroyed by his temperament while wondering if he’s already missed his chance at redemption. That title, borrowed from the most spiritual of Bob Dylan albums, is surely no coincidence. The song features Cate le Bon, a similarly-minded singer who on her most recent album offered the mournful admission: “I forget the detail/ but know the warmth.” That, more than anything, functions as an explanation of Morby’s creative ethos.
Harlem River is mostly concerned with different shades of subtlety, which makes the rare overt moments stick out like an anarchy patch on a wedding dress. This is an album which references Easy Rider and Bob Dylan and has the temerity to sing a song called “Wild Side” (which is largely concerned with walking) in a recognizably Reedian drawl. That also means Morby’s perhaps quixotic intent to refashion himself as a 60s-era nomad is sometimes undercut by the limitations of his arrangements: the repeating breakdown in “Wild Side” is rhythm-disrupting brittle, and the cowpoke shuffle of “Reign” is a little too on-the-nose in its attempt to tell a modern outlaw tale. But those moments aren’t too distracting. Morby largely succeeds at taking us on his journey, imploring that the big "Where am I going?" question isn't so daunting so long as you keep collecting suggestions.


The second album from the singer-songwriter is a dizzyingly isolated record, spare and serene music that gains momentum as it burrows deeper.

The Two Worlds

Irish songwriter Brigid Mae Power makes folk music that can feel more like doom metal played on acoustic instruments, focussing on one motif and stretching it into slow, delirious shapes. And while her lyrics are careful and sharp, Power mostly crafts nonverbal hooks, howling along with the melody or elongating her words until they lose all meaning. In that sense, she resembles Jason Molina, particularly in the early 2000s, when he used the components of country music to build haunted drones that felt like the long fadeouts to more conventional records.
The Two Worlds, the follow-up to Power’s self-titled 2016 breakthrough, is a dizzyingly isolated album, music that gains momentum as it burrows deeper. Power wrote most of it after moving back to her native Ireland with a goal of communicating “what my environment looks like here at the moment out of my window.” Performed with her husband, composer Peter Broderick, the album effectively captures that view: rainy, sprawling, familiar, and serene. But it also reflects the room she’s peering out from. Even in its more propulsive tracks, like the staggering protest song “Don’t Shut Me Up (Politely),” Power’s music feels hushed, like you’re eavesdropping on rehearsal from outside her door.
This quality makes the music on The Two Worlds Power’s most ambitious and her most introspective: an expansion from the intimacy of her previous work but a retreat from its starry-eyed tranquility. Most of these songs have a tugging, downward trajectory, a grounding force for Power’s heavenly falsetto. The piano-based tracks are highlights. “Is My Presence in the Room Enough for You?” and “So You’ve Seen My Limits” are centered on jazzy melodies that drift like falling snow, as Power weaves between the notes with a ghostly chill. While the more upbeat songs are rich with open-tuned guitars and accordions, these moments of quiet intensity—just Power’s voice and one other instrument—are where the album shines.
In the psychedelic spiral of “Down on the Ground,” Power meditates on the dichotomy that’s always existed in her work, melding atmospheric bliss and stark desperation. “I thought I’d find a balance between the skies and the earth,” she sings, “But maybe it will be with me always/That feeling of not wanting to put my feet down/Or just not knowing how.” It’s a driving tension of the record—the dissonance between fantasy and emotional urgency—and one she’s also addressed in recent essays and interviews. “I can’t be up in the clouds forever,” she decided. The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes, interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.
Mirroring the earthier tone of the music, Power’s lyrics often deal with self-preservation, letting people go and finding yourself in their absence. The sweeping album opener “I’m Grateful” is sung in fragments and visions while the music fills in the blanks, illustrating the push-and-pull of devotion and dependence. With an arrangement that sounds like traditional Celtic folk, “Peace Backing Us Up” spins from self-deprecation to cosmic understanding with one realization. “If you ask for something,” she sings, “I can just say no/With peace backing me up.” It’s a simple but crucial declaration. Home is a feeling that begins in one specific place, she reminds us, but you can carry it with you wherever you go.


Ty Dolla $ign’s new album is superbly refined. It leverages his gravelly voice, attention to detail, and willingness to kill his ego.

Beach House 3

Ty Dolla $ign’s Beach House 3 opens with “Famous,” an acoustic number that mulls over people’s desires to see their names spelled out in capital letters on Sunset Strip marquees, to watch their likenesses pop up two-dimensionally on flatscreen TVs. “They wanna sign autographs,” he sings slyly. You know: “All the important things.” It’s a curious meditation for Ty—a man whose career can be measured by its proximity to serious stardom, but has lacked the type of massive breakout he has sometimes helped to orchestrate for others. So it’s not surprising when “Famous” turns a bit caustic: “They don’t wanna work all day/They wanna make it overnight.”
The South Central-bred singer and producer is not an artist on R&B’s fringes sneering at the pop stars. Since he emerged in 2012, Ty’s been churning out would-be hits with dizzying ease. The original Beach House mixtape (co-hosted by a pre-stardom DJ Mustard) showed Ty—and D.R.U.G.S., the production collective of which he was a key part—had a knack for radio-ready, delightfully sleazy R&B. A trio of successful singles followed: the Jeezy-aided “My Cabana”; the tortured, irresistible “Paranoid” (which featured B.o.B); and “Or Nah,” slinking and conspiratorial.
Those songs and an early string of mixtapes, including the second Beach House installment, garnered Ty a significant following, and placed him in various high-powered sessions as a writer, producer, and collaborator. When it came to his solo career, though, he had to hurry up and wait. There were some misfires, but Ty mostly maintained a steady stream of guest turns and test balloons. Finally, in the fall of 2015, a debut album called Free TC hit shelves. Named for his incarcerated brother, the record was packed with stars and had a radical musical diversity, from plodding, post-Dre processionals to frenetic pop, from minimalist SoundCloud R&B to defiant guitar with Babyface. It was anchored by “Blasé,” a Future- and Rae Sremmurd-assisted song that embedded itself in L.A. radio and didn’t leave for well over a year. Free TC debuted at No. 14 on Billboard.
And so Beach House 3, released almost exactly two years after Free TC, is a superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks. The five different interludes with “Famous” in the title could have served as the scaffolding for a career-making hit for a young artist from Toronto or Miami, but instead exist here as tossed-off asides. This is in step with the rest of the record, where songs revel in low stakes and stay within themselves. To wit: a duet with Jeremih, “Dawsin’s Breek,” feels decidedly minor next to other cuts on the album, and yet its hook—“I’ve got a brand new coupe”—is impossible to dislodge from your brain.
Though he adapts to almost any collaborator, Ty is at his best when he’s with his long-time cohorts. “Ex,” which reunites Ty with YG, is breezy and propulsive, and features a superb turn from the Compton rapper (“I’m on jet skis with naked bitches”). “Don’t Judge Me” nearly reunites the team from “Blasé”—sans Slim Jxmmi—and repurposes Future’s flow from “Relationships” into a motivational anthem of sorts. (At the end, Future even breaks into his Big Rube impression.) And when Ty and Wiz Khalifa trade verses over Pharrell’s beat on “Stare,” each sounds rejuvenated.
For all the bids at Billboard, Beach House 3’s finest song is its last, the tranquil, metronomic “Message in a Bottle,” where a flat circle of house parties and Hennessy lead him, inevitably, to make FaceTime calls to exes. It would be a one-note idea in most other hands, but Ty’s talents as a musician are leveraged too well: his gravelly voice, his preternatural attention to detail, his willingness to kill his ego and let the worries about his liver creep in. It’s exactly what makes Ty Dolla $ign’s music so rewarding: the crevices in between hits are filled with angst and world-wearied regret. There’s the party, and then the hangover.


Following on last year's Frank Sinatra tribute Shadows in the Night, Dylan's latest finds him once again putting his own idiosyncratic spin on a set of standards.

Fallen Angels

You can go all the way back to the beginning of “What the fuck is Bob Dylan doing now?” and find jazz. “Peggy Day” from Nashville Skyline—his first detour into melodic crooning—is snappy Western swing; following that was Self Portrait’s notorious take on Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” and New Morning’s hepcat pastiche, “If Dogs Run Free.” Dylan’s earliest Frank Sinatra tribute dates back five decades and only found its first official release in 2014: the addled Basement Tapes-era riff on the Johnny Mercer classic “One for My Baby (One More for the Road).”
None of this, however, made the advent of his Standards Period last year any less of a surprise. Some of the initial shock was the result of the growing stigma around the aging-rocker-does-the-American-songbook format, not the fact that Dylan would offer his own version. As he himself acknowledged in his labyrinthine Musicares acceptance speech last year, this sort of record has become a convention—a profitable one. At this point, any new release in this vein scans as something more sordid than a stocking-stuffer: an empty money grab.
Dylan’s particular, oddball point in bringing up the trend was to illustrate the absurd degree to which he was still viewed as a man apart. Why did people pore over Shadows in the Night any more than Rod Stewart’s latest compilation? “In their reviews no one says anything,” Dylan demurred. “In my reviews, they’ve got to look under every stone and report about it.”
But his point doesn’t quite land. After all, Shadows, and Dylan’s second standards set, Fallen Angels, don’t bear much resemblance to the market standard. The latter’s arrangements recall a time and place that never existed—a mythical dive halfway between a resurrected smoky East Village club and, when drooping pedal steel figures dominate the action, a Texas barroom. When creaky cellos and horn soloists crop up, Tom Waits’ more muted '00s output comes to mind. But this atmosphere sounds like a byproduct of who could make it to the session, how much rehearsal they had time for between tour dates, what Dylan ate yesterday; it doesn’t come over as carefully cultivated.
Dylan doesn’t put a clear twist on this music; it twists him. Devotees judge performers of early–20th-century standards on their ability to interpret—whether they can shape and communicate a song’s meaning with some degree of musical cleverness. But Dylan simply delivers them. In the process, he tends to draw out the strangeness inherent in the compositions rather than making them sound effusive and natural. On opener “Young at Heart,” the close rhyme schemes and overstuffed lines (“Look at all you’ll derive out of being alive…”) draw attention to themselves. On the ubiquitous “Come Rain or Come Shine,” there’s so much precedent for logical ways to approach this song that one can't help but feel like Dylan is deliberately trying to muck it up. “We’re in or we’re out of the money” is faxed out mechanically, the contrast inherent in the line absent.
The languid pacing—often, as down-tempo you could reasonably take these songs—often improves matters. So while Dylan’s breezy take on Hoagy Carmichael’s greatest triumph “Skylark” is a dead-eyed, aberrant disaster, his pliable, conversational intro to the Casablanca/When Harry Met Sally…-famous “It Had to Be You” feels inviting. But some shifts in pacing work. Blonde on Blonde’s amphetamines are a things of decades past, but perhaps some young engineer handed Dylan his first 5-hour Energy to carry off “That Old Black Magic," Angels’ closest thing to a barnburner. Here, words spring off Dylan’s lips, rather than becoming saltwater in his throat; his ever-odder, geographically indeterminate accent stays out of the way. He chuckles a bit on the final triumphant release, as if he’s stunned even himself.
The axioms in the songs on Fallen Angels were written to speak to various familiar moments of the human experience. With Dylan, though, the universal “truth” in these compositions—that word is littered throughout his Musicares tirade—doesn’t reflect easily, or even deliberately uneasily, back on him. In his muse Sinatra’s case, of course, such truth came easy: The singer was at the bar until last call in both the tabloids and on his albums, probably bemoaning Ava Gardner’s latest tryst. But there’s no clear through-line to Fallen Angels’ subject matter, no point of view.
The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle. In other words, it’s a new Dylan album: the product of a life ritual no one can fathom, but which is doubtless way more typical than one might think; perennially modest; worth a faithful fan’s money.


On his first studio album since 2017, Matthew Barnes details the inner mechanics of loneliness and frailty, mapping them onto lurching rhythms and agonized, alienated cries.

Bolted

In the 2022 supernatural horror movie Skinamarink, the camera’s distorted lens stares into complete darkness for so long that the darkness starts to take on a form all its own, roiling with what’s not there. A similar presence emerges from the holes left open in Matthew Barnes’ work as Forest Swords. His silences have depth and body to rival the figures that clatter inside them. On his new album Bolted, the UK producer details the inner mechanics of loneliness, paranoia, and frailty on the level of the beat, dreaming up a cold world where broken, snarling things have no choice but to huddle together for survival.
Barnes recorded Bolted in a factory in his native Liverpool, joining legions of artists who have drawn grim inspiration from northern England’s post-industrial landscape. Like Throbbing Gristle, the industrial pathbreakers who sprang malformed from Hull nearly 50 years back, Barnes finds plenty to excavate in the physicality of percussion: the way materials slam and grind into each other, the effects the resulting sounds have on the nervous system. (His 2018 DJ-Kicks mix notably included a field recording called “Voice Memo of Piston at Manchester Museum of Science & Industry.”) Rather than sounding as if they’ve been optimized by a digital studio, his beats tend to impart the illusion of different objects crashing to the ground at varying distances. They’re loose, anxious assemblages that leave plenty of space for the ear to play in. On Bolted, they cohere less than they ever have on a Forest Swords record, leaving dance music’s standard rhythmic logic to fray in the wind.
On lead single “Butterfly Effect,” a scraping, asymmetrical beat skitters beneath a vocal from Neneh Cherry. Barnes composed the drum pattern in the wake of a leg injury, and he has described the process of piecing it together as “some kind of attempt to cope with the psychedelic amounts of pain I was in.” The beat’s jittery, deformed locomotion neatly impresses the idea of a body thrown out of equilibrium, shuddering its way through physical suffering. The bold metallic cacophonies of “The Low” and “Rubble” similarly probe at the idea of the body as a lurching machine, and at the chaos that unfurls at the points where it starts to break.
One especially evocative technique in the Forest Swords toolbox is the tight crop on an impassioned vocal sample. Barnes likes to pinpoint the most urgent moment in a singer’s performance, then sever it from its surrounding context: no intake of breath, no resolution, no language, just assonance. On “End,” a displaced voice duets with a dusty woodwind sample; it sounds desperate to be understood, but all the syllables pour out scrambled. This mutilated utterance is lonelier than silence. Someone’s out there, but you can’t understand them; there’s distance between you that can’t be closed.
In the sparse imagery that accompanies Barnes’ music, the symbol of the cage repeats. A 2010 Forest Swords single took the name “Rattling Cage,” while the cover of Bolted depicts a gray humanoid figure trapped inside a rusty cube of wire. On the single “Caged,” which drones in just before Bolted’s halfway mark, a swirling, plaintive vocal sample echoes out into beatless silence—one of those Forest Swords silences that feels planetary in scale. The voice begins to stutter. A single utterance loops, the sharpness of the edit taking on its own percussive quality. And then the actual beat bears down like the hoofbeats of something massive, threatening to pummel the wisps of voice beneath it.
When you look closely at Bolted’s cover, you see that the cage and the body inside it are the same color. You see that inside the metal mesh, something like cobwebs strangles the human form. On the record, voices jolt and quake, their edges hard; the beat clamps down. Maybe this cage is not exactly a cage; maybe it runs all the way down to the bone.


The Baltimore rapper helps the superproducer loosen up on their new collaborative album, a follow-up to 2021’s Memory Lane.

Murda Beatz / Shordie Shordie: Memory Lane 2

Memory Lane 2

Shordie Shordie is a rapper comfortable playing both casanova and jilted ex, sometimes in the same song. He got his start as the hook man for Baltimore rap trio Peso Da Mafia, turning tracks like “Money Man” and “About Us” into anthems for the hustlers and romantically downtrodden. As a solo artist, Shordie has leaned more aggressively on the romantic side of things, delivering dispatches from the nebulous corners of situationships like a raspier version of fellow DMV vocalist Brent Faiyaz. Chameleonic Canadian producer Murda Beatz was a periodically interesting foil for Shordie on their first collaborative album, 2021’s Memory Lane, but his beats often blended into the background. This year’s Memory Lane 2 is like a DLC pack for the first project, tweaking the muted sound of the original and more fluidly displaying Shordie and Murda’s chemistry.
As a producer, Murda Beatz is a jack of all trades who can come across bland, a type-beat producer watering down distinct regional flavors. The Memory Lane projects stick to the guitar melodies and 808s that typify Shordie’s catalog. Roughly two-thirds of Memory Lane 2’s production is string-based; most of it is serviceable, but some songs have more personality and finesse than usual. Early highlight “Me Too” features skittering hi-hats that play double-dutch with guitar strums and Shordie’s lively hums. “A Nice Time” teases out a flamenco shuffle, turning a tale of interstate love into a nervy and seductive dance.
Shordie has always been the animating force behind his and Murda Beatz’ best songs, his melodies, stories, and trademark “ayeee-yeah-yeah” adlib bursting with color. Only he could croak-sing to a woman about having sex with her sister, like he does on the hook for “Drink,” and make himself sound more endearing. Flow-wise, he’s dexterous and unpredictable. “Ride With Shordie Pt. 2” chronicles a drug deal, party, and anxiety-riddled drive with a girlfriend over the course of a night; Shordie brings it to life with a rat-a-tat delivery at the start, then raps verses seemingly in one gulp of breath. His voice can communicate fear (“First Kiss”), excitement (“Sin City”), and regret (“Farmers Market”) effortlessly.
Memory Lane 2 really revs up in moments where Shordie and Murda Beatz go offscript. “WYO” turns the cliche sidepiece narrative into a dialogue, with guest BlakeIANA just as down to creep as Shordie is: “I’m so P, won't tell your bitch, but I might put it in my song.” “Don’t Forget Me” dwells on a drug-fueled fling over a jaunty hyphy beat, the melancholy lyrics contrasting with the peppy atmosphere. You can tell Shordie and Murda are getting more comfortable around each other, figuring out how to turn foibles into ear candy.
Whether he’s dodging enemies or linking with a new lady for the night, Shordie is constantly grappling with several things simultaneously. If he’s with one girl, he’s thinking about another; if one drug trade or shootout ends with him alive, he’s occupied with a different one that almost went south. There’s tension and unease in even his most relaxed songs, and that multifaceted approach seems to be rubbing off on Murda Beatz. The production, though still mostly leaning on reliable tropes, is a little more challenging and curious than before. More collabs together might be what it takes to get Murda Beatz to fully loosen up.


Luaka Bop’s collection of ’70s rhythmic gospel rarities doesn’t feel like gospel in the traditional sense. These working musicians were deeply entwined with the funky, soulful sounds of their time.

Various Artists: The Time for Peace Is Now

The Time for Peace Is Now

Forget the old canard about paying for your Saturday night sins by attending church on Sunday morning. The post-war explosion of recorded music was fuelled by artists transforming gospel music into earthly, earthy pop. Ray Charles built his carnal 1959 breakthrough hit “What’d I Say” on the call and response of a gospel choir, Little Walter changed “This Train”’s call for salvation into an ode to “My Babe,” Sam Cooke turned testimony into sensual pleading. By the time Aretha Franklin ruled the pop and R&B charts in the late 1960s, the open dialogue between gospel, soul, and pop meant even Paul Simon and Paul McCartney were writing songs that were effectively secular spirituals.
The music chronicled on The Time for Peace Is Now, the second volume of Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series (the first was 2017’s The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda), dates from just after this era, when a mention of Jesus didn’t preclude a single’s appearance on the charts. The Edwin Hawkins Singers blazed this path by taking the jubilant “Oh Happy Day” to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969, but the touchstone for much of The Time for Peace Is Now is the Staple Singers. Recording artists since the late 1950s, the Staple Singers became hitmakers once they signed to Stax, the home of deep Southern soul. “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” were smash hits in 1971 and 1972, climbing the pop charts by camouflaging their messages of self-betterment and deliverance underneath funky grooves.
Each of the lesser-known acts on The Time for Peace Is Now adopts this aesthetic for their own purpose. They may be singing about Jesus, but the message is soft-pedaled within pleas for peace, love, and understanding, and the churchy origins are obscured by an emphasis on groove and feel. Since the artists on The Time for Peace Is Now recorded for tiny regional labels and never received national attention while they were active, the compilation represents larger trends within gospel and soul; these singers weren’t on the vanguard, they were riding a wave. They recorded when local studios and pressing plants were plentiful, as were professional musicians eager to make a quick buck at a session, so they were able to cut tracks that felt complete.
Nothing on The Time for Peace Is Now seems like outsider art. There isn’t a household name among these 13 artists, but many of the musicians worked regularly on the gospel circuit during the 1970s, when all these recordings were made. The Triumphs gained enough of an audience to play at the inauguration of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, the Floyd Family Singers opened for Rev. James Cleveland at Madison Square Garden and cut an LP for Savoy, while the Gospel I.Q.’s are said to have recorded for OKeh. Due to bad breaks or distaste for the music industry, these artists receded from view, leaving their recordings to be unearthed by collectors and experts such as Greg Belson, who compiled this set for Luaka Bop.
Belson selected singles and album tracks that illustrate how deeply intertwined these working musicians were with the prevailing funky, soulful sounds of the time. Much of this has to do with the uncredited supporting bands, who evoke the sultry southern grooves emanating from Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Occasionally, the production gets a little slicker and the rhythms a little heavier, as on the four-on-the-floor disco of “That’s a Sign of the Times” by the Floyd Family Singers. “That’s a Sign of the Times” dates from 1980, making it probably the latest cut here, but it sounds like it could be a few years older—an assessment that can be leveled against any song here. As much as the music on The Time for Peace Is Now sounds like a ’70s period piece, individual trends aren’t always easily identifiable. The Staples Singers are a pervasive influence—“We Got a Race to Run” is by the Staples Jr. Singers, who named themselves in homage to their heroes—and there are echoes of Curtis Mayfield and Gamble & Huff’s Philadelphia International evident in the compilation’s silky guitar runs and velvety vocal harmonies. Occasionally, a song even suggests something outside of soul: The lanky rhythms and swirling organ of “Peace in the Land” by the Gospel I.Q.’s are cousins to the British pub rock bashed out by Nick Lowe and Graham Parker.
The concentration on rhythm and vibe means The Time for Peace Is Now doesn’t feel like gospel music in the traditional sense: the chord changes often are elegant, the harmonies are never as raucous as a church service, and the songs seem to aspire to the crossover achieved by the Edwin Hawkins Singers and the Staple Singers. The spiritual message isn’t overt; it’s tucked away within lyrics that otherwise serve as affirmations and inspirations—sentiments that sought healing in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, assassinations, and the Vietnam War. From a distance, it can sound like soulful pop music, but a closer listen reveals that’s not true. Set aside the celestial lyrics: the songs and production are not quite polished, the musical ideas just slightly too common to stand out. What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop.


On his second Ruby Suns album, California native and New Zealand-based musician Ryan McPhun dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds as he skillfully creates sunny psych-pop.

Sea Lion

The cover art for the Ruby Suns' sophomore disc, Sea Lion, is a fitting allegory for head Sun Ryan McPhun: A boy on an island takes pains to try to costume himself, tangling himself in lights and string, and wearing a feather in his hair and a crown on his head. McPhun's work as the Ruby Suns functions in much the same way: Stationed on New Zealand's North Island, the California native dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds but, ultimately, skillfully creating sunny psych-pop.
The result is an album of environments, both natural and imagined, hinted at by the cover art's pastel Candyland, the collage of African wildlife on the CD insert, and McPhun's tributes to his home state's Mojave desert and Joshua Trees ("Oh, Mojave"). The album's title refers to the colony of animals that sun in the ocean off of California's Highway 1, and on "There Are Birds", co-vocalist Amee Robinson pines for a world where "there are birds and it is calm." A host of animal references doesn't equate to an environmentally conscious album, but Sea Lion takes to heart quaint state park signage: take only pictures, leave only footprints. The Ruby Suns visit the world via an array of global signifiers-- pinging conga drums, field recordings of animals, slight, sunny harmonies-- but as they do, the band sounds genuinely curious and respectfully adoptive rather than calculating or opportunistic.
Sea Lion, therefore, has a fair amount of clutter-- expect comparisons to musically busy peers like Panda Bear or the Russian Futurists, and to the jumbled orchestral experimentation of Olivia Tremor Control-- but the album's building blocks ooze with a homespun grace. Opener "Blue Penguin" rubs the sleep out of its eyes before grinding a dirty acoustic guitar into overdriven tape. The tender horns on "Remember" are reminiscent of the gentle indie rock of Beulah before introducing a coda of warm, looped sighing. "Adventure Tour"'s high-pitched, descending choruses recall Avey Tare. "Tane Mahuta", sung in indigenous Maori, provides the sole link to McPhun's adopted home, but the song's furious strumming and dewy harmonies are straight from power- and African- (think Tabu Ley) pop.
Sea Lion likely will be pegged a great guitar-pop album, but it's more sonically complex than that suggests. Intriguingly, some of its stylistic conceits-- the 4AD hum of "There Are Birds" or the New Order-via-Graceland second half of "Morning Sun"-- are found on both their most straightforward and best pop moments. Meanwhile, the unfortunately titled "It's Mwangi in Front of Me", and the even worse "Kenya Dig It?", provide the record its most abstract, collage-inspired moments. Sea Lion's one constant is its hard-charging positivity; even songs that begin with a slow drizzle ("Ole Rinka") or hesitant atmospherics ("Blue Penguin") end up as paeans to suns or birds or-- most traditionally-- love. Sea Lion's artwork, song titles, and McPhun's background all suggest something pan-global and yet the album shines brightest when it stays closest to its indie rock roots-- a reminder that despite their escapist charms, exploration and travel work best as an accent to the familiarity and comfort of home.


Arriving a full 10 years after his debut single, Welsh producer Lewis Roberts’ first album is a bravura display of brain-bending editing that’s more concerned with big feelings.

Agor

Koreless’ debut single sounded like the work of someone who’d already been whittling his ideas down for a good long while. Released in 2011, “4D” and its B-side, “MTI,” were elegantly stripped takes on the nebulous style known simply as post-dubstep: The drums were blippy, the wordless vocals cut to digital ribbons. Unlike dubstep, a style predicated on surfeit—bass so deep it sucks up all the oxygen in the room, reverb that blurs the bounds of time—these songs were trim and sinewy, their percussive sounds little more than bright slivers of tone, as though he’d carved them out of the tick-tocking of a digital metronome. The vocal, a sleek montage of hiccups and sighs, felt like an avatar of human expression, as economical as it was elegant: an aria compressed into a handful of digitized brushstrokes.
It would have been easy to assume that Koreless, aka Welsh producer Lewis Roberts, had begun by painting himself into a corner—that there was nowhere to go but bigger. James Blake had already succeeded in making dubstep as weightless as dust motes. The Field had reduced minimal techno to a gossamer scrim of acoustic samples. But Koreless spent the next few years proving his determination to render club music in the language of electron microscopy. With 2012’s “Lost in Tokyo,” 2013’s Yūgen EP, and 2015’s “TT”/“Love,” he kept zooming in further, until the music resembled luminous pinpricks quivering in empty space. That’s not to say it sounded cold: “TT,” in particular, is as warm and lush as anything from the past decade of dance music. It just seems to have been spattered out of a virtual eyedropper of vocal samples, one minuscule pastel dot at a time. Then, as if he had decided that he couldn’t drill down any further, Koreless seemed to disappear from view.
Actually, Roberts was spending his workdays writing and producing for artists like FKA twigs and Rita Ora, when not pushing painstakingly forward with Agor, his debut album, which arrives a full 10 years after his debut single. The first release under his own name in six years, Agor does not bear much trace of Roberts’ dalliances with pop. Instead, it represents a new shift in the old Koreless sound: bigger, fuller, and more enveloping, despite being assembled from tiny fragments. Like one of David Hockney’s Polaroid collages, it is a mosaic that invites you to swim in it.
Roberts has described the album’s creation in Sisyphean terms, calling it a “sickly obsession,” and you can hear his effort in the details. He remains an overwhelmingly technical producer, a virtuoso of the cut-up waveform, and much of Agor amounts to a bravura display of his brain-bending editing. A few interstitial tracks are essentially sketches to show off a particularly nifty textural pattern, like fabric swatches for the ears. “Hance” is built from bright percussive tones halfway between steel pans and pinball flippers, with a rhythm that alternately speeds and slows. A similarly jittery kinetic impulse drives “Frozen,” a Oneohtrix Point Never-style experiment that plays up the disjunct between antiquated harpsichord sounds and the opalescent shimmer of VR. The same sounds and techniques tend to recur across the album, giving it the feel of an interconnected suite. Roberts lavishes most of his attention on the human voice: shaving isolated syllables down to a hair’s breadth, then layering them in sync with equally infinitesimal bits of synth and percussion, so that it feels like you are witnessing the ripple of molecules as they warm and cool.
But the album is less concerned with pixel-sized fireworks than big feelings. Roberts likes to stack his synths in fat, top-heavy clusters that buzz with overtones, and he’s got a knack for the gut-punch chord change. Sometimes the emo goes into overdrive: Things reach an early peak on the two-part “White Picket Fence” and “Act(s),” in which a soaring, wordless soprano invokes Michael Nyman’s soundtrack to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Here, and in a few other places on the album, Roberts leans a little too hard on the lever marked “pathos”; the sticky-sweet melody feels like a command rather than an invitation. It’s one of the few occasions where he draws his vocal melody out in great, sweeping lines, but his pointillism is more compelling.
Koreless has always taken an ambivalent attitude toward the dancefloor, and nowhere is that more evident than on Agor’s two biggest anthems. Schooled in the choppy syncopations of Robag Wruhme, Lorenzo Senni, and Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” “Joy Squad” layers fluttering tones over the album’s sole, exhilarating house beat. Yet this moment of rhythmic abandon lasts less than a minute; the rest of the track’s runtime is given to agonizing build-ups, like a rollercoaster that’s mostly stomach-churning ascent. On “Shellshock,” a barnstorming song in the vein of Sam Barker’s drum-less techno epics, Roberts repeatedly teases a climax, climbing to a peak and then pulling out the rug. He did something similar on a recent remix of Caribou’s “Never Come Back,” turning a poppy highlight from Suddenly into a spine-tingling subversion of expectations. These counterintuitive moments show the extent to which Roberts, in Koreless’ six-year absence, has largely abandoned dance music’s conventions in pursuit of a more elusive payoff. On Agor, that willingness to push himself—combined with all his obsessive effort—yields both visceral thrills and real feeling.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Inspired by mainstream pop, the experimental punk trio try their hand at honed hooks and concise riffs. At their best here, they evoke not Bieber and Grande but classic Sleater-Kinney.

Palberta5000

Palberta billed themselves once as “New York’s weirdest.” As anyone who’s heard them beat the Bee Gees to death can testify, they’ve more than earned the title. This wildly experimental punk trio has earned critical comparisons to Captain Beefheart and Can; now, after a near-decade of unstructured punk cacophony, they are “focused on making music that people [can] not only sing along to but get stuck in their heads.” On Palberta5000, they accomplish this latter goal, but only through brute force. This band weakens a series of good-to-great songs by repeating a single lyric, without any variation whatsoever, for two to three minutes. A couple of these will definitely be more fun in the pit, but in the absence of pits and the abundance of lonely living rooms, Palberta5000 can be a slog.
This is a bummer, because there is otherwise a lot to laud on this album. The band’s playing, once sloppy on purpose, is now tight, intense, and all the more impressive because its members switch instruments between tracks. Nina Ryser murders the drums on “Fragile Place,” Anina Ivry-Block deftly lays her bass beneath “Big Bad Want,” and just about any time a guitar solo made me shiver, I checked the credits and found Lily Konigsberg on duty. All three women harmonize throughout the album in excellent vocal arrangements, at once studied and playful. There are some brief, tantalizing glimpses of what an instrument-free Palberta might sound like in “Corner Store” and “All Over My Face,” making me curious about the possibilities of a full-on a capella record.
Other bright spots include the jag of brief songs from “In Again” to “Eggs n’ Bac’”—classic, concise Palberta in damn-near perfect form. “Summer Sun” swoons and shimmers with giddy girl-group intensity, while “Red Antz” brings pretty Top 40 melodies to the band’s conventionally scuzzy sound. The album’s best track is the gorgeous love song “The Cow,” a resonant account of amorous friendship between two women who live in a grey city and yearn for greenery. They’d like, ideally, a cottage and a cow, but for now, flowers shooting up through the sidewalk on a morning-after walk home will have to do. The intimacy here is forgiving, prayerful: “I will be there with my hand on your chest/I feel your rumbling internal mess.”
At their very best on this record, Palberta sound like early, self-titled Sleater-Kinney, not ostensible pop influences Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. “Big Bad Want,” especially, is a song Corin and Carrie would be proud to have written. It’d be right at home on The Woods, and not just because of its Little Red Riding Hood motif—at least, until Palberta hit the half-minute mark, repeat the lyric, “Yeah, I can’t pretend what I want” at least fifty times, and kill the whole thing dead. They repeat this trick over and over again throughout the album, and the tedium builds from song to song, an exponential diminishment of returns.
In fairness, the end of “Big Bad Want” would probably sound great live, clicking along quickly, building and building as the crowd thrashes. But “Corner Store” and “Fragile Place,” which both consist largely of a single lyric, repeated, are mid-tempo, not engineered for head-banging. Each takes a glittering jewel of a hook, some line that would’ve been a high point in a more complex pop song, and dulls it.
Repetition is, of course, a mainstay of both punk and pop songwriting. But there is a science to it, a subtlety of structure that makes it move rather than annoy. In pianist David Bennett’s great video essay on the enduring appeal of one-note melodies in pop, he explains that artists like Taylor Swift and the Killers use extended repetition of a single musical note to build tension that dissolves (“In the clear yet? Good.”) or disturbs (“But she’s touching his chest”) in a deeply satisfying way once broken. Many stand-out punk songs use repetition to rile a crowd, usually in service of some eventual explosion, or with enough variation in timing and tone to create sonic peaks and valleys. In one track on Titus Andronicus’ Local Business, Patrick Stickles sings absolutely nothing but the words “I’m going insane” for two minutes straight, but his delivery is so erratic, so exuberant, that the song is equally thrilling whether you’re sitting in your bedroom or surfing across a crowd.
In the absence of any of these techniques, Palberta5000 winds up risking monotony. That’s not a word I ever thought I’d deploy to describe Palberta. There is a good album here. The band’s more characteristically brief songs are flawless, but there’s a lesson in this album for punk bands who may want to explore pop: It ain’t as easy as a great hook.

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Like Burial or James Blake, this producer uses vocal samples to build gorgeous, unsettling post-dubstep; in his case with nods to many sub-genres.

Safehouses EP

As far as songwriting is concerned, starting with the vocal melody and working your way from there isn't exactly a novel concept. Regardless, it was a bit of a surprise when Arthur Cayzer, the UK post-dubstepper who works as Pariah, revealed to me that his beat-building process usually begins with a vocal sample: "I find that vocals make it much easier for me to connect emotionally with a tune, so I guess it makes sense that I have taken to using them in almost every tune I've written."
I've never really thought of the genres Cayzer works in as being particularly voice-centered, but maybe it's time for that to change. He counts Burial and James Blake, two like-minded artists who also showcase some sort of prominent vocal style in their work, as influences-- and that influence is definitely apparent to a point on Cayzer's debut EP, Safehouses. Save for the closing title track, all of the cuts here feature vocal samples in some way, whether it be the chopped-up cries within "Crossed Out" or the ghost-in-the-machine moans folded within "Railroad".
Cayzer isn't just an effective imitator, though; he's doing something distinctly different from his peers here in terms of presentation. Burial shrouds his melodies in bomb-shelter lockstep rhythms, while Blake usually turns vocal lines into putty in his hands, amorphously draping them over whatever screwed rhythm he's dumbing out to in his own mind; Cayzer, by contrast, presents his melodies nakedly, with precious few effects applied. This stylistic approach is aided by the pristine production at work here; every rhythmic hit and clapping backbeat sounds crisp and sharp-- almost the polar opposite of the bitrate-blown terror-juke of Werk Discs head Actress' fascinatingly complex release earlier this year, Splazsh.
The most stunning aspect of Safehouses isn't any singular stylistic tic, though: it's the overall sweep of the thing. Cayzer works through a breadth of sub-genres-- the bass music of "The Slump", "Prism"'s whomping acid-house squelch, the digitized hip-hop clap of "C-Beams", and most impressively, the Gas-recalling ambient smother of the title track. That he's able to incorporate so many recognizant signifiers while transcending pastiche is impressive; the fact that he's done so while moving light years away from his breakout single, last year's "Detroit Falls", is astounding.


On her Thrill Jockey debut, this Basque multi-instrumentalist ties together political and personal revolutions with atmospheric and even cinematic ballads.

Elena Setién: Another Kind of Revolution

Another Kind of Revolution

Americans often romanticize Europe—those short workweeks and stunning landscapes, their accessible health care. What the United States appears to have in youthful spirit, Europe makes up for in art history, afternoon wine, and a sustainable arts ecosystem. But romanticizing any place that consists of so many complex societies strips it of its more textured—and often troubled—history. That’s why songwriters like Spain’s Elena Setién and her Thrill Jockey debut, Another Kind of Revolution, feel so enticing. Revolution—political, personal, environmental—has been a constant for Setién; at their best, these songs show those scars, a reminder that no country is all cobblestones and pastries.
Setién grew up in San Sebastián in Spain’s Basque Country. She was raised during the long conflict between the Spanish government and the Basque National Liberation Movement, where Basque separatists fought for independence. This political turmoil provided the backdrop for an upbringing spent playing piano, then violin. As a young adult, she left Spain for London to study composition and violin. But when Setién began to release solo records, she returned to piano, the core of 2013’s Twelve Sisters, which suggested a more spare, sometimes more romantic take on the early work of Amanda Palmer. After coming home to San Sebastián, Setién recorded 2017’s Dreaming of Earthly Things, a record that now feels like a direct prelude to Revolution. “Your country was no country for a foreigner like me,” she sings at one point, referencing her years abroad, “with all my anger and my misery.”
Another Kind of Revolution is not as overtly political as, say, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Navigator, a record that could share a playlist with Revolution. But Setién explores politics by examining her lineage and legacy, digging into the history (both good and bad) that made her who she is. “In this lonely march, we’re marching/We all breathe as we can/And we carry all our sorrows/Every woman and every man,” Setién sings during “Down the Meadow,” a somber tune accented by morose piano and Spanish guitar. “Another Kind of Revolution” is a shimmering tribute to mythical women—it crescendos cinematically into an image of past, present, and future women standing together in solidarity.
Twelve Sisters and Dreaming of Earthly Things depended on Setién’s instrumental talents. But on Another Kind of Revolution, she takes a step forward as a songwriter and arranger. (She also plays every instrument here but guitar and bass synth.) “Window Two (for Sigurd and Albert)” is as whimsical and intimate as a fairytale, with a syncopated melody played on a dreamy Wurlitzer. “Sail Down the River” lets that Wurlitzer twinkle in high octaves, Setién doubling her vocals. “We grow like a tree with roots that remain/Much more endurant than our simple name,” she sings about leaving home but remembering how it shaped you. Her vibrato reflects stories of loss and endurance.
Revolution can get repetitive, with only a handful of tracks building beyond balladry. Pieces like “Old Jamie” and “Window One,” as well as the album’s stunning title track, succeed because Setién makes each song feel as vivid and atmospheric as a film score. But “We See You Shining for a While” and “Far From the Madding Crowd” feel one-note by contrast. Still, it’s clear that Setién is developing as a writer and arranger, so this seems like the start of something more.
Setién closes with “She Was So Fair,” a slower, troubadour-like tale braided by violin. “Years have gone by/She’s still lying on the bottom of the sea,” Setién sings of a forgotten heroine. “Her breath is water-filled/Her lungs repaired/She belongs down there/Lying on the bottom of the sea.” In Setién’s universe, whether the stories are triumphant or tragic, meanings and morals remain elusive. Setién’s particular revolutions might seem unfamiliar or mysterious, but her songwriting invites curious listeners in, adding texture and complexity where we may not have found it ourselves.


Stripping back the gentle folk of last year’s Solid Love, the New York guitarist writes drifting, mostly instrumental songs marked by a profound sense of interiority.

Good Timing

In the 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker’s experimental documentary travelogue, a narrator relays a letter from a companion looking to understand “the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” It feels counterintuitive: How can absence be lined? But the music of Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel project feels in tune with that idea. On the gentle folk songs of last year’s Solid Love, Knishkowy allowed his voice to sink into the mix, letting lyrics get lost in a tide of guitar and percussion. The effect was to de-emphasize whole images in the service of soft-focus fragments—a trick that feels true to the logic of memory, which only ever crystallizes partially.
Good Timing attempts something similar in a new context. There’s no band here, and almost no singing. These are delicate, tumbling guitar compositions without any fancy manipulation or production. And as Knishkowy strips things down, the music becomes more immediate: A song might build toward a chorus before rejecting it and moving on; melodies spin out of nowhere and settle back down. In their casually improvisational structure, these pieces flow like thoughts.
“Photographic Memory” opens with loose, circular playing that recalls wind and falling leaves; it keeps threatening to arrive at something more songful, but never quite does. “Relate to Joy” is similarly naturalistic, with a back half that’s among the most stunningly orchestrated passages on the album. Knishkowy relishes the give and take between order and chaos: moments of clarity set against a glittering, interstitial tangle.
Knishkowy settled on this solo approach last summer as an antidote to the constraints of an isolated year, and you can hear it in the music. Good Timing rejects the convention that every idea should play itself out, that phrases need to be fully developed before they’re put to rest. When you’re this planted in your own head, not everything needs to make sense.
The title of “Remembering Machines” seems to get at that, too, suggesting that even without lyrics, these songs offer a kind of oblique access to the past. “Blueberry Fingers” borrows its name from the lyrics of a song on Solid Love called “Trace,” and the way in which Knishkowy picks up the emotional thread wordlessly evokes how memories can recur in new forms.
The album’s peak is “Untangling,” which exists somewhere between a campfire and an avant-garde performance space. Bright, spindly textures nod to John Fahey and William Tyler, and right at the midpoint, a hint of conversation bleeds in from the background—the just-perceptible sound of people talking in the distance. It’s a rare moment of physical presence on an album that is otherwise profoundly solitary.
Knishkowy breaks that solitude one more time, on the title track, which contains the album’s only lyric. It’s a single line, repeated over the course of about a minute: “Good timing/When you’re lonely.” Shadowed by guitar and multi-tracked echoes, the words drift and blend together, slowly losing their shape. That energy—the feeling nothing is ever quite set in place—is at the heart of the album. It’s intrinsic to the free-associative thought processes Knishkowy maps out on guitar, and it’s part of why his music amounts to more than just cold etudes. Changeability is more than just a conceit; it’s what keeps these songs alive.

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