Using Mellotron and electric organ, the Canadian minimalist teases echoes of Baroque music and post-rock while honing in on the idea of the drone as a phenomenological, time-bending experience.

Sarah Davachi: Let Night Come on Bells End the Day

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day

Few artists would want to be defined by their earliest attempts at original work, but in the case of Canadian minimalist Sarah Davachi, her sandbox phase is instructive. As a fan of the Romantic tone poet and pianist Frédéric Chopin, the young Davachi took his tear-jerking chord progressions and distilled them into her first compositions, with everything subordinated to these shifting tonal elements. Her motivations haven’t changed much since those early experiments in tone and texture, even if her methods have. Like Henri Matisse, whose paintings turn still life into inner life by prioritizing color above all other elements, Davachi drills down into a single instrument at a time, cracking open a vast spectrum of harmonic variation to reveal new expressive possibilities.
On Let Night Come on Bells End the Day, her fifth full-length release in six years, Davachi limits her palette to Mellotron and electric organ across five pieces which, like the best drone music, offer a fleeting glimpse of the infinite. Her albums derive their individual character from their respective sets of instruments, varying according to her systematic exploration of the range of available timbres. Vergers in 2016 was composed on the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the 1970s, while last year’s All My Circles Run was entirely acoustic, focusing on overdubbed strings, organ, piano, and voice. Davachi’s ability to leap from instrument to instrument, framing their individual temperaments while listening for unexpected affinities, isn’t a fluke; one of her first jobs was as a guide at Calgary’s National Music Centre, where she would arrive early to spend time learning a new instrument before conducting tours.
Throughout her many releases since 2013, Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in California, has tended to center herself in meditative, durational drones, drawing comparisons to the deep, dense planes of Éliane Radigue and Kevin Drumm. But once you’re absorbed into the hazy vistas of Let Night Come, ornate melodic whispers begin to peek through. On “Mordents,” she hints at a childhood spent straight-backed at the piano as a baroque melody wends its way towards encroaching chords, each note decaying into harmonic fog; tones mingle like drops of moisture in the air until all is enveloped.
Grander still, “Buhrstone” unfurls itself like a post-rock epic, each chord change building up to an urgent, breath-catching ecstasy; after seven minutes, the climax echoes the soaring heights of Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Through the familiar wobble of the organ and the Mellotron—a 1960s keyboard that utilizes magnetic tape—Davachi also paints a subtle homage to classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Grateful Dead. The trail of organ reverb in the final seconds of “Mordents” even feels like an abstract approximation of a rock ‘n’ roll ending: a flourish at the end of a black angel’s death song.
The fifth and final piece, “Hours in the Evening,” is a sensory nerve-jamming of sustained, pearlescent tones that nods to her chief influence, the minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, whose practice had a transformative effect on Davachi as a music student. Like her forebears, Davachi has an innate understanding of drone music as a phenomenological, time-bending experience. The beauty of drone, after all, lies not in its duration but in its ephemerality: a single, conscious moment both collapsed and extended, disintegrating right before us. Let Night Come on Bells End the Day is loyal to that momentary perception of the sublime.


Having shed the beardy affect and folksy shuffle, the band could now slip mostly unnoticed between Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, but their newly palatable sound could really use more quirks.

Delta

Modern rock isn’t dead—it’s just weightless. Save for the occasional nostalgia act attempting to rattle the terra firma, most radio-ready bands in the ailing musical genre have recently ditched the riffs for glassy keyboards, echo-soaked percussion, and vocal affectations as wispy as the white trail of an e-cigarette. Even Arctic Monkeys—a band that spent much of the past 16 years wielding six-stringed weapons with such old-fashioned macho swagger that they dressed up like goddamn greasers to promote 2013’s AM—have packed up their guitars and launched themselves into zero gravity, lunar taquerías and all.
The reach for streaming-algorithm brass rings has often been prescribed as the cause for this sudden dip in aggression and subsequent sonic flattening—but there’s precedent at play here too. Much-maligned British polymaths alt-J have spent much of this decade sanding down Radiohead’s Kid A-era abstractions to resemble smooth, uninteresting steel, and Coldplay’s influence also looms large, years after they finally managed to escape their own post-Radiohead shadow. There’s a revealing sequence in the just-released documentary Head Full of Dreams as the band performs at the 2001 KROQ Weenie Roast; sandwiched in between ultra-masc acts like Sevendust and SR-71, their sensitive pop-rock is met with boos and debris hurled at the stage. Fifteen years later, the cultural tables have definitively turned.
And no big-ticket rock band in the last five years has carried Coldplay’s influence quite like Mumford & Sons, the previously shuffling folk-rock troupe led by Marcus Mumford, who unwittingly led the EDM-reactionary “real music” movement in the early 2010s. Revisiting the band’s first two albums of largely unremarkable Appalachian-isms, it’s surprising to recall the level of vitriol that Mumford and Sons were met with practically upon arrival; as evidenced by Sigh No More’s “The Cave” and Babel’s “I Will Wait,” they were occasionally capable of turning out a moderately pleasing tune, and Mumford’s own contributions to the soundtrack for the Coen brothers’ gloriously melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis was proof of his inherent musicality.
But as time passed, Mumford & Sons got tired of sounding so out of time. 2015’s Wilder Mind ditched the washboard percussion and loud stomping for clean, streamlined, and positively Coldplay-esque rock music wallpaper-y enough for Zach Braff to disappear completely in; the following year, they gamely hopped over to Johannesburg for an EP of the same name, recording with African musicians like the Very Best and Baaba Maal. Delta, the group’s fourth proper LP, picks up where Wilder Mind left off, with a slightly altered approach; they’ve swapped producers, replacing Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford with indie-mainstream Svengali Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Adele), and they’ve incorporated some electronic gewgaws and rubbery beats into their anthemic music.
You could conceivably slip most of Delta’s 14 songs in between recent hits from Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, and whether that’s a good thing is totally up to whoever’s listening. But Delta is also the strongest collection of songs Mumford & Sons have released to date; the cool-handed atmospherics and dreamy melodies here simply suit them better than any other sonic guise they’ve worn, from the cresting crescendo of opening track “42” to the rippling chorus of “Woman” and “October Skies”’ aching emptiness. Close your eyes while listening to the simmering mid-tempo pop of “Picture You,” and you can practically imagine Chris Martin belting it out in front of a massive crowd.
More than anything else, Delta evokes Coldplay’s 2005 album X&Y—and not just in its predilection for gaseous choruses and moody melodies. Coldplay’s worst album is notorious for its imposing length, and the 61-minute Delta is similarly a slog, as Mumford & Sons’ new sound takes on a dull, beige quality when consumed for too long. When singer-songwriter Gill Landry shows up in the middle of “Darkness Visible”’s stormy pianos to recite an excerpt of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (yes, really), the dramatic finality is undercut by the fact that there are are four more songs that follow. But at least Landry’s poetizing lends some personality to the album. While Mumford & Sons have never sounded as purely palatable as they do on Delta, they do so at risk of achieving total anonymity—the aural equivalent of unflavored Alka-Seltzer dissolving in a glass of milk.
Somewhat bewilderingly, the album’s strongest moment comes when Mumford & Sons evoke their folksy roots: the moonlit ballad “Wild Heart,” buried in Delta’s back half, which showcases Mumford’s lovely vocal talents over brushed drums, tinkling piano, and a quietly strummed acoustic guitar. “No one is better armed/To tear me down with a slight of the tongue,” Mumford murmurs, addressing not his fiercest critics but the give-and-take that is passionate, complicated love; it’s an intimate, revealing moment on an album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

Gentlemen of the Road / Glassnote / Island


Trevor de Brauw is the guitarist for the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His solo debut collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade.

Uptown

For almost 20 years, the guitarist Trevor de Brauw has anchored the stalwart instrumental rock band Pelican. His chiseled riffs, stretching skyward from a crust of doom metal toward the wide skies of post-rock, have long been its real hook. As prolific as that band has been, de Brauw has kept busy with a litany of side-projects, too, from his new trio RLYR to the slow-motion creep of the drone collective Chord. Still, as late as last summer, de Brauw confessed to a lack of confidence in his guitar prowess, doubtful even of his ability to reproduce songs onstage. Making music, he said, was an emotional and mental necessity, not some chance to flex his technical abilities.
That compulsive approach is critical to Uptown, de Brauw’s solo debut. Instead of serving as a showcase, Uptown instead collects six open-ended, marvelously textured guitar instrumentals written during the last decade. Sure, there is a certain level of wizardry here, especially with guitar loops that wrap into Moebius strips of sound or the army of ways de Brauw warps the signals from his six strings. During the record’s tremendous finale, the twelve-minute beauty “From the Black Soil Poetry and Song Sprang,” de Brauw manages to conjure and control a symphony of guitars by himself. The piece suggests the choir-like calm of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail or Growing in its prime a decade ago.
There’s sophistication, too, in the ways that de Brauw patiently peels layers apart or puts them together. “Distinct Frequency” is little more than three minutes of a powerful drone and a broadcast of what might be the evening news, pitted against one another. But de Brauw pulls them apart so slowly that the music is dramatic and demanding, as if always on the verge of some major revelation. But Uptown is a subtle record, and both signals just fade into silence.
Indeed, the complexity and real delight of Uptown stem more from its commingled, nuanced emotions than its instrumental execution. These six songs are, alternately, messy webs of anxiety and comfort, frustration and hopefulness, fatigue and energy, together always pushing past simple binaries of happy or sad, light or dark. The deliberate chords of “They Keep Bowing,” for instance, seem at first caustic. But as they decay, they blossom into something beautiful, with individual notes suddenly circling above like halos.
Likewise, “Turn Up for What” (who said solo guitar records couldn’t have a sense of humor?) transitions from chimes and bells into a loud electric groan into, finally, a riff that aims for liftoff. The boundary between each phase is fuzzy, implying that each state is linked to the others. Like the intertwined loops and nested layers, there are no discrete or easy feelings to Uptown. It is, de Brauw says without a word, complicated.
The world of solo guitar records isn’t really the domain of urgent, timely statements. They are, more often, practiced steps on a continuum, sometimes speaking only to like-minded practitioners and listeners. Despite its long gestation, though, Uptown feels surprisingly necessary and somehow reassuring. There’s confusion and clarity within these songs, an understanding that these ideas and emotions only make sense in the presence of each other. During Uptown, the darkest parts sometimes allow for flickers of light, though other times the darkness swallows the light whole. It is an apt soundtrack for the start of 2017, then, when signs of pending apocalypse and revolution seem to bleed into one.


In their mix of soulful grease and punky grit, Seratones feel like a natural, rollicking complement to The Alabama Shakes.

Get Gone

Seratones would be just another pretty-good-not-great rock band without frontwoman AJ Haynes' powerful voice leading the charge. Their first LP, Get Gone, brandishes playful guitar hooks that swing in at just the right moments, but Haynes is the band’s best asset, lighting these otherwise-conventional songs on fire.
In their mix of soulful grease and punky grit, Seratones feel like a natural, rollicking complement to The Alabama Shakes, but it’s not quite fair to call them a ripoff. Where the Shakes go for the groovy soul of Muscle Shoals, Seratones instead veer toward swinging Southern garage rock. Get Gone’s guitars crackle with the heat of the band’s native Louisiana. In his earliest days as a Squirrel Nut Zipper, Get Gone producer Jimbo Mathus specialized in fast-and-loose tunes that sounded like they might fly apart at any moment, an energy the Seratones often capture well (though some extra occasional grit wouldn’t hurt, either).
Haynes attributes her vocal prowess to learning to sing in a church choir from a young age, and she shows off her quivering high notes right away on opener “Choking On Your Spit,” balancing it neatly with a sneer at the song's recipient. When she belts that she’s seen the light “Don’t Need It,” you believe it. She slinks a little lower on the more blues-inclined title track before cutting in with sharp, cathartic “Ooh-ooh!”s for the song’s chorus.
The band is at is best when it’s playing fast and tight, as with the bright, soaring “Sun.” They lose momentum on the drifting “Tide” early in the record before picking up with the punchier “Chandelier,” and closing track “Keep Me” is pretty, but it feels like a sleepy, anticlimactic close to a record that otherwise vibrates with energy. “Kingdom Come” begins with an impatient patter before dipping into chugging guitar riffs, combining for a track that oozes anticipation.
Haynes' charisma is palpable through almost every song—even the giggles that bubble up on “Kingdom Come” inject the record with a genuine joy. She ends that song with the line, “I’ll be your best, believe me,” delivering the last two words like a slow punch to the gut. She does so much work on Get Gone that you wind up hoping she follows through on her promise.


On his debut EP, the Kansas City singer-producer shows off both his extraordinary voice and his remarkable facility for wringing maximum sentiment out of the most negligible nonsense phrases.

Two Houses EP

There are a few definitions for the word boofy. In Australian slang, it’s used to describe those who are big, dumb, and strong. It can also refer to the volume of a hairstyle or the puffiness of an object. It's not far from the Britishism “bouff,” which describes the accumulation of wealth (i.e. the “Bouff Daddy” as popularized by the grime rapper J Hus). But for 1010 Benja SL, “boofiness” means something altogether different—and it’s a very serious matter.
In the the Kansas City, Missouri, singer and producer’s breakout song, boofy is a sensation between love and jealousy (“Boofiness/Half in us/Often makin’ walls small”) that makes romance rich with contradiction. It’s also a very silly sounding word. It’s hard to keep a straight face when saying it; even harder to make it the subject of something so sincere. But Benja does wondrous things with nonsense language. His extraordinary voice, thin and raw and redolent of Timberlake, pours a titanic amount of emotion on “Boofiness.” Accompanied by bouncing piano and chorus-line handclaps, cursing the “bougie buddy bitches” he must vanquish, Benja turns a ludicrous word into something pretty beautiful.
Benja’s voice makes all that possible: The set of pipes on this guy is shocking. Precise and powerful, he can extract a wellspring of feeling from the goofiest of lyrics. Take, for example this bewildering turn of phrase on “Tragic X,” a highlight from his debut EP, Two Houses: “Precious face, wholly emotive, yeah/Shoo, shoo, shoo, little mosquito/Little nightmare, don’t wake me.” He glides through the line with confidence and verve, stretching syllables to their limit, doing vocal backflips before your ears. Only listening to the song again is it possible to glean the strangeness of his seemingly free-associative writing.
This linguistic playfulness is just one part of what makes his music so interesting. His sound is both erudite and buggy, flickering wildly between neo-soul, boom bap, grime, garage, and ambient collage, sometimes within the frame of a single song. He’s also, as you might expect, “mysterious”: Biographical details are scant, besides the fact that he grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has a loose affiliation with the label NON WORLDWIDE, which has released music from Arca and Mykki Blanco. This all lends Two Houses an undeniable—if somewhat predictable—allure. (Another enigmatic pop artist? You don’t say.)
Looking past the mystery, Benja’s debut still ranks among the most promising new projects of 2018. There’s a streak of bona fide mad genius running through his production technique: On the EP’s opener, “Fairwater,” the grand horns and colossal backing vocals strike the perfect middle ground between Timbaland and Elysia Crampton. In “Easy Going,” the contrast between an imperial march with a flute-like instrument is striking. And on “Tragic X,” the song morphs and mutates and grows so many times—from a wave of silvery synths to a whispered interlude to an earthshaking finale—that it becomes a little world onto itself. It’s all held together by his remarkably expressive, agile voice. (His awe-inducing humming, part Kid Cudi and part choir of angels, is particularly resplendent.) While Two Houses is by no means perfect—the wooden and very conventional Auto-Tune on “Hadit” and the generic rapping on “Only One” are the most glaring missteps—it still does a great job of previewing the scope of Benja’s skills. Each song presents a little doorway of possibility, offering a hint of what might come next. It’s clear that he’s on the cusp of doing something stunning.


On his tenth studio album, now reissued with rarities and B-sides, McCartney grappled with emotions too big to neatly fit inside a pop record.

Flaming Pie

Flaming Pie, Paul McCartney’s 10th solo album, arrived at the tail end of the Beatles’ mid-’90s renaissance. The remaining Fab Four members instigated this revival with the release of their long-gestating documentary The Long And Winding Road, which was given the generic title Anthology by the time it ballooned into a multi-media retrospective in 1995. Due to a stroke of luck, the release of the documentary and its accompanying rarities compilations coincided with the rise of Britpop. The time was ripe for McCartney to deliver an album steeped in Beatles lore, and that’s exactly what he claimed Flaming Pie was.
Upon its release in May 1997, McCartney maintained that his immersion in the Beatles’ past inspired him to up his game, to make an album in the vein of his old band. Even its title was a nod to an arcane bit of Fab Four lore, derived from Lennon’s claim that he had a vision of a man on a flaming pie declaring that his band would henceforth be known as ”Beatles with an ’a’.” It was a canny marketing method, a tacit acknowledgment that perhaps his recent albums weren’t quite up to snuff while also snagging listeners whose interest in the Beatles may have been rejuvenated thanks to Anthology and the new breed of Britpoppers. It also was a bit deceptive. Flaming Pie sounds as similar to the Beatles as Oasis, which is to say not much at all; it’s recognizably in the same melodic vein, but all the production frills don’t recall Sgt. Pepper’s and the tone of the album is decidedly reflective, suiting a man taking stock of his life upon the cusp of his 55th birthday.
Back in 1997, this wistful undercurrent was criticized as solipsistic—in the original review for Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis dismissed the album opener “The Song We Were Singing” as a self-congratulatory “boomer reminiscence”—but a dive into the rarities-laden Archive Edition of Flaming Pie reveals that the album represented the end of an era as well as a creative rebirth. According to McCartney, he was told he could not release his solo album while the Anthology rollout was underway, so he kept tinkering with the songs that would comprise Flaming Pie while working on other projects—Standing Stone, his second long-form classical piece, for example, and a fairly tedious 1996 single called “The Ballad of the Skeletons” in which he jammed with avant-garde icons Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, and Marc Ribot.
Elsewhere, he sat for the interviews that formed the heart of Barry Miles’ authorized 1997 biography Many Years From Now and spent a chunk of 1995 living out his DJ fantasies via the Westwood One radio show Oobu Joobu, whose 15 episodes were condensed and edited into six B-sides for various Flaming Pie singles. He tagged along with his wife Linda whenever she promoted her line of vegetarian meals and cookbooks, sometimes stealing away to write a new song.
All of this activity fed into Flaming Pie, whose origins are more piecemeal than the finished project suggests. Trawling through his back pages led to pulling two songs from his archives: the melodramatic pomp of “Beautiful Night,” which he attempted with Billy Joel’s band in 1986, and "Great Day," which dated all the way back to the early ’70s, sharing a partial melody with “Big Barn Bed” from Red Rose Speedway. A couple of loose blues rockers cut with his old friend Steve Miller back in 1995 (“If You Wanna,” “Used To Be Bad”) were short-listed along with a pair of unreleased George Martin-produced outtakes from 1992 (“Calico Skies,” “Great Day”) and then he enlisted the services of Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra leader who shepherded the two “Threetles” Beatles reunion tracks for Anthology.
After the first solo session with Lynne, the McCartneys received bad news: Linda had breast cancer. Paul decided to carry on and complete the album because “the thing about those moments in life is, there’s no option but to get on with it, ‘cause the other option would be to just lie down and go to sleep, which isn’t an option. So you’ve just got to get on with it, you’ve got to do things, you’ve got to go to the doctors, keep the thing going, keep running the shop. You get on with it, and this is me getting on with it.” He wound up writing two songs after Linda’s diagnosis, neither of which are heavy with grief. “Really Love You” grew out of a funky jam with Ringo Starr, and “Heaven on a Sunday,” a lazy slice of jazzy yacht-rock, only hints at his love for Linda through its refrain “If I only had one love, yours would be the one I choose.” Comparatively, the delicate finger-picked “Calico Skies” and “Little Willow” are infused with a sense of loss and mourning, floating along upon a bittersweet breeze that neatly complements the sepia-toned reflections of “The Song We Were Singing” and “Somedays.”
These sweetly sad songs are the ones that linger, and they’re served well by their earliest incarnations as home recordings and demos that serve as bonus tracks on both the double-disc reissue and companion 5-CD/2-DVD edition. As nice as it is to hear these hushed, unadorned rough versions, McCartney feels most comfortable when he’s crafting an entertainment, which Flaming Pie certainly is. Maybe they don’t sound like the Beatles, but with their stainless steel gleam, "The World Tonight” and “Young Boy” were ornate singles designed to grab attention whether heard on VH1, adult contemporary radio, or the soundtrack to the forgettable Robin Williams & Billy Crystal comedy Fathers’ Day. The casual but tangible chemistry between McCartney and Miller may be in service of featherweight compositions, but they made the final cut instead of the more interesting throwaways “Broomstick” and “Looking For You”—B-sides both, presented and accounted for on the reissue—because the easy-rolling guitar duels offer some welcome air among the album’s heavier numbers. Individually, they feel thin, but they help make an album that captures multiple sides of McCartney’s personality, a record where his craft, silliness, sentiment, and charm are in balance.
Maybe McCartney achieved that delicate equilibrium on Flaming Pie because he was indeed "getting on with it," coming to terms with his wife’s illness by making an album that celebrated those he held dearest. He’d continue to play with Ringo for many, many more years, and he’d work with longtime engineer Geoff Emerick a while longer, but Flaming Pie would be the last time Linda sang on one of his records, the last time George Martin wrote him an orchestration. It was also the first time he found space for his son James on a record, giving him the guitar solo on “Heaven on a Sunday,” a gesture that gained poignancy over the years. Most importantly, Flaming Pie gave McCartney his first US Top 10 album in 15 years, giving him the confidence to try newer and weirder things as he headed into the new century. Some of these albums were good, some were bad, but none of them had the same heart as Flaming Pie. It may have its flaws, but it’s one of the rare McCartney albums where he grapples with emotions too big to neatly fit inside the confines of a pop record.

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

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


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 gem of No Limit Records, one that’s as much a flex of power as it is a musical triumph.

MP Da Last Don

Halfway through the 1998 direct-to-video movie MP Da Last Don, Master P inexplicably begins to speak with an Italian accent. It actually might be Cuban—it’s never made clear if it’s supposed to be a homage to The Godfather or Scarface and I’m 99 percent sure Master P wouldn’t know the answer either. Regardless, he stars (as well as co-writes and co-directs) as an aspiring basketball coach and youth mentor named Nino, who learns that his Italian-looking father and mafia boss Salvador Corleone has been killed. After learning of his father’s death, Master P acts completely normal and starts to rock banana-colored suits and chain-smoke cigars like a comic book villain. At a high-ranking mafia sit down, in a room full of Tony Montana clones, he lays out his plans to take over the seat at the head of the table. He comically asks, “What, you got a problem with that ’cause my skin is a little darker than yours?” Everyone is extremely pissed and a war for power breaks out within the family.
Master P is adamant that he only wants to be the Don so he can give back to the community and clear his father’s name of something the movie never mentions. He spends most of the 46-minute runtime making no progress toward either goal and instead murdering anyone who mildly irks him. Really, he only makes the community worse; while trying to split time between his new gig as a mafia boss and being a youth basketball coach, the entire team gets caught in the middle and they’re all assassinated except for Silkk the Shocker. Master P is broken up about this and ends up in a warehouse shootout with the family. He kills them all and wins the war, but victory isn’t sweet like he thought it would be; he breaks down in tears and is apprehended by the police. At this point, I guess, they ran out of money because the rest of the story is resolved with a title card: He gets sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison, but escapes on the way there. No one changed. Nothing was learned. It’s pointless. It could only come from someone as powerful as Master P was in 1998.
That year, Master P’s self-made New Orleans-based independent rap label, No Limit Records, was at a musical and promotional peak. Defined by their camouflage gear, iced-out military tank logo (including the gold-plated one that was driven onto a basketball court in the “Make ’Em Say Ugh” video), cover art designed by the Houston graphic team at Pen & Pixel, and the year-round release schedule, the No Limit roster—which included homegrown stars like Mia X and Mr. Serv-On, P’s younger brothers Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder, and high-profile free agent signings like Mystikal and Snoop Dogg—was untouchable. A mid-’90s deal P signed with Priority, which gave No Limit an unheard-of 75 percent cut of sales, allowed him to put his business plan into hyperdrive: Flood the market with albums and use each record as a vehicle to cross-promote the entire roster. Sources vary, but of the 23 albums No Limit put out in 1998, more than half either went gold or platinum. The movies were essentially advertisements. Shot in a couple of days on a shoestring budget, MP Da Last Don was a way to promote Master P’s 1998 double-disc epic of the same name.
MP Da Last Don is Master P’s best album, while simultaneously representing the astronomical heights No Limit reached and the corporate approach that contributed to the label’s sharp decline. P liked to consider himself an entrepreneur first and a rapper second, and those ideologies sometimes clashed. By 1998, No Limit was cranking out albums on an assembly line; a handful of them were written, recorded, and completed in a couple of days. (Yes, it’s rumored that Tupac made the Makaveli album in a week, but sorry, the twin brother duo Kane and Abel are not Tupac!) There was very little quality control; P compared selling albums to selling cologne, as if they were nothing more than a product to leverage into brand investments. That sentiment is unsettling, though somehow P’s albums like 1996’s Ice Cream Man and 1997’s Ghetto D never felt soulless. MP Da Last Don doesn’t either, but you can feel the shift in Master P slightly creeping in. Especially considering that Da Last Don was billed as his retirement album, which was part shameless promotion (he never actually retired) and part genuine desire to focus on turning No Limit into a conglomerate with multiple revenue streams.
But Master P is, in fact, the type of businessman that you only hear about at the movies. The stories sound like folklore, and they could be since so many have been shaped by P’s self-mythology: In the days before the Priority deal, Jimmy Iovine offered P a million dollars to sign with Interscope, and he walked away from it. When Jive told him that No Limit couldn’t sign red-hot New Orleans rapper Mystikal because he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, Master P busted out his checkbook on the spot. That time when P sat down with Suge Knight at Mule Creek prison and negotiated the multi-million dollar buyout of Snoop Dogg. He added a couple hundred thousand just to make Suge happy.
Long before Master P established himself as the ultimate rap salesman, he was Percy Miller, born and raised in New Orleans’ Calliope Projects. In interviews, he describes his upbringing as so poor that he slept on the floor and some days only ate corn flakes and water. Around 1989, Percy, his wife Sonya, and son Romeo relocated from Calliope to Richmond, California in the Bay Area. There, using $10,000 from an insurance payout—the result of a medical malpractice incident in which his grandfather died after receiving another patient’s medicine—he opened a record store called No Limit.
At the record store, he sold gangsta rap records by local Bay Area stars like E-40, JT the Bigga Figga, and Spice 1, and soaked up their hustle. Soon enough, at a Jack in the Box in Richmond, he ran into his childhood friend King George. Good news: They both wanted in on the rap game. Few in the Bay respected P as a rapper, though. This was years before André Benjamin graced the stage of the 1995 Source Awards and declared “The South got something to say!” to a symphony of boos, so, of course P blames the bad reaction on his Southern drawl. That probably has some truth, but also his early records sound like cheap N.W.A. and Ice-T demos. He didn’t hit a stride until 1994’s The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me!, an album P and George hustled $6,000 to make. The album cut of the same name is the record’s signature track; over a soothing G-Funk beat, P in his bluesiest melody coos, “Sellin’ dope is the only thing I know how to doooo.” In his verses he raps about a common thread in his work: Reality-based reflections on the street hustling that trapped him every time he tried to escape.
Out of the trunk of his car, Master P sold tens of thousands of copies of The Ghettos Tryin To Kill Me! Using that money, he recorded the two albums that led to his monumental deal with Priority: a Bay Area compilation tape called West Coast Bad Boyz and his 1995 album 99 Ways to Die. The next era of No Limit commenced as relationships in California deteriorated (he fell out with King George) and Master P reconnected with his Southern roots.
Back in New Orleans, Master P recorded a 30-second commercial on a beat that he brought back to Richmond and fleshed out into the legendary track “I’m Bout It, Bout It.” Produced by KLC, a DJ turned producer who was a favorite of P’s No Limit recruits Mia X and Mr. Serv-On, the sped-up synths of the instrumental were dark and grimy, unlike the laid-back West Coast funk P was comfortable with. Meanwhile, he ran into his lost cousin Mo. B Dick, a producer and slick crooner, in a club in Dallas. At the time, Mo. B was making music in Morgan City, Louisiana with a clique called Critical Condition. P sent for Mo. B Dick to come out to Cali. Then, after some pushing from Mia, he sent for KLC as well. He rented out an apartment for everyone in Hayward, California that they called “Three niggas and a broad.” It was there that KLC and Mo. B Dick formed Beats by the Pound, the not-so-secret weapon of No Limit that shaped the next era of the label’s sound.
By 1998, Beats by the Pound grew to include Craig B, O’Dell, and Carlos Stephens. The production collective were the masterminds behind nearly every hot No Limit album that hit the streets between 1996 and 1998, for example P’s Ice Cream Man, punctuated by a revamped club-ready version of “Bout It, Bout It,” and instant classics like 1997’s Tru 2 Da Game by TRU (Master P, Silkk, and C-Murder) and Mac’s Shell Shocked in 1998, the best rapping to ever land on a tape stamped by No Limit. Their sound was versatile yet consistent, centered around thick basslines, steely synths, and punishing 808s; they could easily go from R&B grooves to New Orleans bounce to an early iteration of Southern trap.
Beats by the Pound are the catalysts of MP Da Last Don. Because Master P has never exactly been ’94 Nas or Scarface on the mic, the beats have to be immaculate, and they are. There’s a Mafia-movie theme to the record, though the funk of the Pound’s instrumentals makes me recall Blaxploitation gangster movies—a world filled with pimps, prostitutes, and the type of majestic furs Yaphet Kotto wore in Truck Turner.
Check “Get Your Paper,” where Master P brings the Bay Area back into the fold by trading “Uggggh” ad-libs with E-40: The Pound’s beat goes from a mind-melting electronic intro to classic G-Funk bounce. It sounds like it should backdrop a strip club on the moon. On “Welcome to My City,” the electric guitar riff has an effect that resembles the wah-wah pedal you could find on the Shaft theme, blended with rattling hi-hats and P and Mac on top of their game. The funk is out of control on “Black and White” as well, that plucking of the bass strings is hypnotic—too bad it’s consumed by Master P shouting some afterschool-special struggle raps.
Master P’s more introspective side is the glaring flaw of Da Last Don; he’s not a good enough lyricist to make his fairly general thoughts about social and world politics compelling. “Dear Mr President,” where he pens a letter to POTUS about the conditions in the hood, is probably the worst one. His heart is in the right place, but the verse is bad. “One nation in God we trust/But then you say Saddam ain’t gon’ fuck with us,” he raps like he just watched an episode of 60 Minutes. It’s confusing why Master P even made “Dear Mr President” or “Black and White.” The only reasonable explanation was that they were the songs intended to straighten up his image for future No Limit brand ventures.
It’s not to say that Master P can’t get deep. There’s been a dark vulnerability to his music since the days of The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me! It’s just more effective when it’s told through personal stories; his bellowing voice can convey such pain and paranoia. On the opening lines of “More 2 Life” he sounds exasperated as he shouts, “Jealous niggas wanna see me dead, hoes wanna steal my bread,” over a KLC beat so smooth it’s therapeutic. His vignettes are vivid on “Ghetto Life,” lifting traumatic memories from his past: the death-fearing nightmares that kept him up at night, the cramped project apartment, and the idea of suffering while society moves along. It’s some of the clearest and most evocative writing of his career.
But this is Master P. The dude who made “I’m Bout It, Bout It” and “Make ’Em Say Ugh.” What really takes Da Last Don to new heights are the records where he and his No Limit crew turn up over thudding Pound beats. “War Wounds” belongs on the No Limit posse cut shortlist. Fiend sounds like he could crack a coconut with his fist; Silkk’s mouth is moving faster than his brain and he’s never been sharper; Mystikal’s verse is unhinged. And P pierces through the swirling beat with his trademark ad-libs that sound like he has phlegm in his throat.
Of the softer tracks, “Ghetto Love” is the most memorable. It’s produced by the most soulful member of the Pound, Mo. B Dick, who flexes his sampling chops and drops in a mesmerizing Nate Dogg-style sensitive gangster hook. The P verse is solid, but Mia X’s is even better as she claims she’s so loyal to her man that it doesn’t even matter if he cheats or goes broke. And you can’t talk about Da Last Don without mentioning the Master P and Snoop records: Their shining moment together, “Soldiers, Riders, & G’s,” opens with Snoop smooth-talking (“Greeting niggas and niggetts”) and Master P punching through the Pound’s thunderous funk.
No Limit never again had a year like 1998. To be fair, has anyone? MP Da Last Don went four times platinum and, led by Master P’s relentless approach, the label sold almost 15 million records that year. But the art couldn’t keep up with the business. Beats by the Pound were burnt out, churning out beats at an unsustainable pace. Coupled with financial disputes and a growing feeling that they weren’t getting the credit they earned, the crew, minus Carlos Stephens, bounced in 1999. The soul of No Limit was gone—it was now the corporation Master P always hoped it would be.
MP Da Last Don may not certainly be the greatest No Limit album, but it’s surely the most definitive: A long, sprawling, and flawed record that’s as much a flex of power as it is a musical triumph. It’s a snapshot of a moment, one in which Master P the CEO landed on a Forbes list between the Rolling Stones and Robin Williams, and simultaneously Master P the rapper was filming low-budget gangster movies where he got a blowjob and two characters killed within the span of minutes. Not even Master P could make that up.

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.


The New Jersey producer’s third album is the first to extensively feature his own voice, which sounds nothing like the buttery crooning that often populates house music.

Rainbow Doll

Joey Anderson hails from New Jersey, but there’s always been something a bit alien about his house and techno creations. He's got a unique rhythmic sensibility—likely stemming, at least in part, from his background in the club scene as a house dancer—and his tracks often veer from dance music’s typical linear structures; they might start on an off beat, or embrace an unusually contemplative mood. Even those descriptors fail to capture the full complexity of Anderson’s singular production style, which is inherently soulful, but also dark, psychedelic, and a bit unsettling.
Rainbow Doll, his third full-length, heads further down the proverbial rabbit hole. His work has always felt deeply personal, but the new album is the first to extensively feature Anderson’s own voice, which sounds nothing like the buttery crooning that often populates house music. The vocals recall someone like South African artist Portable, but Anderson’s pipes, while similarly affecting, are thinner and less polished. He’s more Robert Smith than Robert Owens, and much of his singing on Rainbow Doll resembles the gloomy goth and post-punk of the 1980s.
“Beside Me” is one of the LP’s most prominent vocal cuts, a standout in which Anderson plaintively moans, “You’re always there/Beside me” amid galloping percussion and crystalline synth tones. It’s not a club track per se, but with its sci-fi undertones, it suggests David Bowie working with the sound palette of Chicago house. Anderson goes even bigger on the propulsive “Cindy,” which simultaneously feels like a string-saturated lover’s lament and a trippy, synth-soundtracked vision quest.
Weirder still is “Live It,” where a dubby vocal snippet and funk-punk bassline calls back to the avant-garde, post-disco sound of early ’80s outfit Liquid Liquid. “Heaven Help Us” pulls from the same era, but this song—one of Rainbow Doll’s few instrumentals—references the hypnotic guitar loops and Krautrock chug of Manuel Göttsching’s influential E2-E4. An obvious highlight, it’s likely the first time one of his productions could be called twangy, and Anderson’s addition of warm pads gives the track a loosely Balearic sheen.
Rainbow Doll does have a couple more straightforward dancefloor offerings. With clacking drums, a sturdy bassline, and tweaky acid blips, “Bounce With It” feels like an update on the classic Trax formula, and the sparkling melodies and jaunty rhythm of “Can Not” close the LP on a loose, lively note. Both would likely be effective club tools, but in the context of the album, they’re somewhat forgettable.
Although Anderson has had a few breakout club tunes over the years—songs like “Press Play” and “Above the Cherry Moon”—none could be described as massive anthems. His music has never been overly concerned with hands-in-the-air revelry, as his tracks tend to be thoughtful, introspective, even a little sad. One gets the impression that he’s more concerned with excavating the inner recesses of the mind than triggering sensory overload. With Rainbow Doll, Anderson digs deeper than ever before.

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


James Hinton, the Brooklyn-based producer who records as The Range, doesn't do anything new, but his music crackles with the air of discovery. Potential recalls the optimistic rave moment when the right combination of people and the right DJ could make you feel like you were part of something that mattered.

Potential

James Hinton uses samples like he invented the entire concept. The Brooklyn-based producer, who just released his second album as the Range, doesn’t do anything with the technique we haven’t heard before. Quite the opposite in fact—the songs on Potential touch on instrumental hip-hop, dubstep, twinkling electro-pop, and more, and they’re defined above else by their immediate familiarity. But Hinton dives into his samples with the verve of a producer who just this morning discovered the jolt of creative joy that comes from flipping a vocal fragment just so and finding a way to repeat it that brings a cascading wave of emotion. His work may not feel new, but it crackles with a sense of discovery.
Hinton got to this point by honoring the act of listening. Most of the tracks on Potential were built around samples of people he found singing on YouTube. But he didn’t focus on the pop stars, or even the viral sensations, but the amateur performers whose work survives deep, deep down search holes, the videos that were uploaded in a rush of expression and were subsequently seen by almost no one. As he described in an interview with Pitchfork, Hinton found these videos, assembling phrases from them that had a certain musicality but also carried an ineffable feeling. Though he transforms the voices with the usual techniques of pitch-shifting, echo, reverb, and so on, you can get the tiniest sense of the individual behind each utterance. Pay attention to the feeling of yearning in a young person saying “Right now I don’t have a backup plan for if I don’t make it,” in “Regular,” or the extra tug of effort around each R&B-inflected phrase in “Superimpose.” The voices feel anonymous but somehow closer because of that; they are faces in the crowd, just like us.
Around these voices, Hinton crafts songs, full of house piano loops, clapping drum sounds, and tightly sequenced synth patches. This is music designed for uplift, with carefully plotted builds yielding to big choruses, and it taps into electronic music's sense of possibility not by pushing things further, but by simplifying and paring back. Hinton brings to mind specific eras not from direct reference or slavish devotion to genre, but by striving to remember the historical moment when a specific element of sound first clicked—the squelching synth in “Genius of Love,” the ghost vocal loop in “Xtal,” the piano in “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt.” Because of this bedrock positivity (and, probably, because so many of the voices come from the UK) it also obliquely recalls the optimistic rave moment when the right combination of people and the right DJ could make you feel like you were part of something that mattered.
All of this positivity means, naturally, there’s not a lot of darkness to explore in this music. The only pain present seems like the kind that that music is able to zero in on and explode, which is certainly not true of every kind of pain. At times, this uniformity of mood threatens to blunt the emotional pull of the album, but then there’s always a clever turn-around or defiantly catchy vocal loop to snap attention back in place.
Perhaps unusually, Hinton tracked down the forgotten sources of his YouTube samples and signed them on for a share of his publishing. It may or may not lead to financial gain (though it’s pretty easy to imagine many of these tracks sounding good on TV in any number of contexts), but the gesture affirms the interconnectedness of life at this moment, how watching a random homemade video on YouTube can be thought of as a collaborative act. Hinton has an ability, not unlike the Books when they first hit the scene 14 years ago, of making shopworn techniques in sound manipulations seem strangely fresh, and Potential is the kind of music that makes you think about what your own part in a seemingly passive musical transaction of music might mean.


Retreating from the experimentation of Gigaton, Pearl Jam delivers a comforting blend of agitated fist-pumpers, roiling ballads, and yearning mid-tempo anthems.

Dark Matter

When a veteran artist turns to a young-gun producer for a shot of contemporary savvy, it usually signals a desire to revamp their sound or embrace a new era. Sometimes it works: Jack White brought some bluesy grit to Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose; St. Vincent nudged Sleater-Kinney in a sleeker, icier direction. And sometimes it doesn’t; remember when Danger Mouse tried to steer RHCP into an album of lush space-funk? But generally, at least, a spirit of reinvention animates the proceedings.
Pearl Jam, though, seem to have hired Andrew Watt to help them sound more like… Pearl Jam. The 33-year-old producer, who was born a few months before Ten was recorded, made a name working with Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber but has since become a sought-after studio whisperer for rock elders, slickening up recent Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop albums without embarrassing his heroes. He even produced Eddie Vedder’s last solo album. With Pearl Jam, Watt seems to have served more like an accountability manager. “He really kicked our asses, got us focused and playing, song after song,” guitarist Mike McCready told an interviewer, emphasizing the album’s heaviness; Vedder told fans he believes “this is our best work.”
Alluring testimonials, but the reality is less dramatic. Dark Matter plays like another solid late-era Pearl Jam record, reliable but not revelatory, with the requisite well-honed mix of generic fist-pumpers, roiling ballads, and mid-tempo gems where Vedder gets a chance to howl and yearn and babble in the upper registers as only Vedder can. As ever, he evokes a potent balance of pain and perseverance, but the album is marred by boilerplate rockers that try to confront fascist dread with platitudes and banal expressions of resistance.
The title track, in particular, makes for an uninspiring lead single. A grinding, metallic rocker that’s sophomoric in its simplicity, it feels indistinguishable from the band’s legions of corporate-rock imitators. Vedder’s railing against right-wingers and press suppression seems well-intentioned: “No tolerance for intolerance or/No patience left for impatience no more” is a nice sentiment, but doesn’t exactly hit with the same provocative thrill as “I’ll never suck Satan’s dick!”
The punk quickie “Running,” a fast blur of sewage metaphors and Guitar Center-core power chords, isn’t much better, while “React, Respond” thrashes and shakes like a Vs. outtake with the eccentricity sucked out. Again, Vedder is animated by righteous rage, but a frustrating vagueness dogs the lyrics, as though he’s speechwriting for a DNC keynote: “The light gets brighter/As it grows/The darkness it recedes,” he sings in “React, Respond.” It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most devoted heads differentiating these songs from deep cuts on, say, Backspacer. They’re “heavy,” sure, but not in the way that leaves a real impression.
The promotional emphasis on these high-octane rockers seems baffling, because the heart of Dark Matter—the songs that remind you what made this band so special in the first place—are the slow-burners. The searching, six-minute “Upper Hand,” in particular, is a centerpiece. After a long, ringing fade-in reminiscent of Joshua Tree-era U2, it blossoms into a bluesy cousin of “Yellow Ledbetter,” and a launchpad for some of McCready’s most soulful soloing to date. It surely ranks among the best Pearl Jam songs this century. “Wreckage” is both world-weary and hopeful, the kind of generous midtempo ballad that could belong to any era of the band’s discography. Its layered tapestry of backing vocals delivers a climax worthy of the arenas they’ll play this summer.
Then there’s “Waiting for Stevie,” which originated when Vedder and Watt were idly waiting for Stevie Wonder to show up and record a part for Vedder’s last solo album. Despite the red herring title (the lyrics seem to be about depression and self-doubt, not Stevie Wonder), the song is a meaty, anthemic rocker of the kind the band has largely shied away from this side of Y2K. It has already become a favorite in the PJ fan community, though its tinny, compressed production gives it an unpleasant sheen and suggests that live versions will be superior.
As Dark Matter draws to a close, survival seems heavy on Vedder’s mind. “I’ll be the last one standing,” he sings on “Got to Give,” a Who-like bundle of ringing power chords where the singer sounds more and more like Roger Daltrey the higher the song builds. “Am I the only one hanging on?” he wonders on the somber closer, “Setting Sun,” an elegy seemingly for a departed friend.
Who can blame him? At 59, the man has outlived a shocking number of his grunge contemporaries. It’s been two decades since Vedder eulogized Layne Staley on “4/20/02,” three since he destroyed his hotel room after learning Kurt Cobain was dead, and still, seemingly every time Pearl Jam returns with a new album, another grunge icon (most recently: Mark Lanegan) has suffered an untimely demise. This band’s longevity is a wonder. They are unwitting standard-bearers for a long-passed movement. Their inessential albums feel like luxuries in a reality where their peers never got to make an inessential album. On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.
If Dark Matter has an overarching theme, it’s the search for hope and perseverance in a shattered world—and that’s a world where the existence of any new Pearl Jam album, even an uneven one, is a small miracle.


The Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper revels in the hyper-referential code-switching of his work in Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys while bringing newfound focus to his writing.

LAFANDAR

The idea that Heems should need to prove his rap credentials to anyone is absurd. As one third of late-aughts/early-2010s alt-rap deconstructionists Das Racist, the Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper helped redefine hip-hop for the internet era, combining incisive, hyper-literate commentary on race, rap, and identity politics with irreverent jokes about smoking weed and George Costanza’s penis. After the group’s dissolution in 2012, he showed he could also be sincere and emotionally vulnerable, documenting the trauma of the post-9/11 years on 2015 solo album Eat Pray Thug. His last full-length—Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 album Cashmere—was a landmark of code-switching diaspora rap that bridged the gap between Queens, Hackney, and Delhi’s Chandni Chowk.
But throughout his career, Heems has struggled with the labels—joke-rapper, hipster, the Indian guy—that have been forced onto him, fuelling the perception that this working-class Queens native who grew up on Nas and the Lost Boyz was somehow an outsider to hip-hop. “The worst rapper on this track, third coolest,” he rapped on Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire’s “The Last Huzzah!,” a sardonic riposte to haters that nonetheless hinted at a little insecurity. On the Lapgan-produced LAFANDAR, his first release in six years, a re-energized Heems sets out to finally put those doubts at rest. “I really wanted to make a real rappy-rap album,” he said in a recent interview. “So I could once and for all finish the ‘can he rap?’ conversation.”
On that front, LAFANDAR delivers. This is the sharpest Heems has sounded in a minute, dishing out tongue-twisting quotables in rhyme after rhyme, all delivered with his signature nonchalant swagger. There’s a focus to his writing here that has eluded him on earlier solo outings. All the glorious messiness and anything-can-happen eclecticism of Das Racist and his early solo work on Nehru Jackets and Wild Water Kingdom is still present, but there’s precious little of the erratic non-sequiturs and self-indulgent irony that bogged down parts of Eat Pray Thug (he’s not repeating the word “clarity” like a broken record and passing it off as a bar anymore).
“My dough nuts, ich bin ein Berliner,” he raps on “I’m Pretty Cool,” referencing Kennedy’s classic anti-Communist speech (and a classic German jelly donut) in service of a gleefully juvenile wisecrack that’s classic Das Racist. On “Kala Tika,” he takes the very Indian trait of mixing up our “v”s and “w”s and runs with it, effortlessly switching syllables to hilarious—and hypnotic—effect. There’s a sinister timbre to his voice on the coke-rap-adjacent South Asian posse cut “Going for 6” (featuring Sonnyjim and Abhi the Nomad) that oozes cartoonish menace, a version of Heems you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark street. The record’s diverse collaborators—ranging from Sir Michael Rocks and Cool Calm Pete to Saul Williams and Fatboi Sharif—all bring their A-game, and Heems is at his most inventive when trading bars with his fellow emcees. His chemistry with Your Old Droog is palpable on “Sri Lanka,” where he plays the wise-cracking smart aleck to Droog’s broody boom-bap drawl. Elsewhere, on “Obi Toppin,” he sounds thrilled at sharing a track with an early idol. “Yo check me out I got a song with Kool Keith,” he declares over a mangled soul sample, and you can’t help but smile at this charmingly guileless humblebrag.
Heems’ dense verses touch on everything from the trauma of America’s forever wars to anti-immigrant xenophobia and post-colonial schadenfreude (“Fuck the queen, white woman with my nani jewelry”), but the most thrilling lines are the ones that feature his distinctive brand of hyper-referential code-switching. Signifiers of his Indian heritage (lassi, Sufi poets, the Bollywood film Pyaasa) sit in easygoing camaraderie with New York name-drops (Canal Street, former Knicks power forward Obi Toppin), as Heems celebrates the kaleidoscopic diversity of his many, many roots.
In Lapgan, Heems has found a like-minded cultural magpie. On his last album, History—the first release on Heems’ label Veena—the Chicago producer stitched together samples from South Asian film and folk music with classic hip-hop instrumentation. Given the opportunity to work with a musical idol—he cites Nehru Jackets as a key influence—Lapgan goes all in, sampling not just obscure records from South Asia (such as a flip of a lullaby from a 1982 Tamil film), but also Levantine folk and English post-punk to create beats every bit as eclectic as Heems’ bars. Lapgan’s production positions LAFANDAR as a spiritual successor to Bollywood-sampling hip-hop classics like Madlib’s Beat Konducta, Vol. 3 & 4: In India and Dan the Automator’s Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars & Sitars. Only this time, it’s the brown guys in charge.
Beyond all the high-minded narratives about identity and multiculturalism, LAFANDAR is a record about rediscovering the pure joy of rapping—the sheer thrill of bending words around a beat with skill, style, and a wicked sense of humor. After all that Heems has endured over his 15-year career—the divisive backlash to Das Racist, label troubles, struggles with mental health and addiction—he’s happy just to still be here, rocking up to the mic, rhyming Assata with enchiladas. It’s one of hip-hop’s smartest, zaniest oddballs taking a long overdue victory lap for having outrun all the shit that was keeping him down. And it’s definitive proof that Heems is, as he once declared on “Michael Jackson,” “fucking great at rapping.”


The Auto-Tune crooner catches everyone’s attention and promptly squanders it again.

1UP

How many times can we be surprised by the strength of T-Pain’s voice? Back in 2014, clips of the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning artist singing without the aid of Auto-Tune for NPR’s ”Tiny Desk” series quickly went viral for their deft display of vocal control, proving that the man who soundtracked our high school proms and parties with pitch-corrected pop anthems could command a room with his God-given croon. Now, five years later, he’s shocking us once again, this time by winning a reality singing competition that required him to shroud his identity in a furry cyclops costume and belt Sam Smith ballads. The show’s judges guessed the identity of “The Monster” was a former R&B star, like Jamie Foxx or Tyrese Gibson, or even Darius Rucker. No one considered the Rappa Ternt Sanga, who, upon shedding his mask and on the verge of tears, explained, “I didn’t get a chance to enter the game with my natural voice...this helped get my voice out there.” It only took a few performances dressed like a nightmarish Monsters, Inc. character to do so.
This isn’t really T-Pain’s fault. With the massive success of his early singles like “I’m Sprung,” “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)” and “Buy U a Drank,” he ushered in a new landscape for pop music that’s still going strong today, influencing everyone from Paul McCartney to A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie to harmonize through an audio processor. Thus it’s hard to separate T-Pain from the technology that he reintroduced to the world (it first infiltrated pop nearly a decade earlier on Cher’s 1998 smash “Believe”) and continues to lean on heavily. By the same token, his refusal to try anything new on his recent albums has stifled his ability to capitalize on the goodwill he’s garnered. His newest project, 1UP, is no different, with many of its 12 tracks sounding like they could have come from his 2005 debut. As a result, what starts as a fun ride down memory lane quickly turns into a grating slog by a trendsetter who frustratingly still hasn’t gotten his due.
Things start out relatively strong with the opening title track, which sees T-Pain strike a more serious tone than usual. Over filtered synth plucks and stuttering snare claps, he harmonizes from the other side of the phone to a friend in jail, wondering what placed them on opposite ends of freedom. “Phone smell like tears, how my dawg get up in there,” he sighs. Its barreling energy and introspectiveness recall the work of fellow crooner Future, who took T-Pain’s digitized sound and made it darker and harder-hitting to critical and commercial success. The profundity pretty much ends there, though. A few songs later and we’re at “U Up,” a prototypical T-Pain love lullaby that captures the feeling of running across a picture of an ex on social media and wanting to text them after one too many whiskey sours.
“U Up,” although nostalgic, is representative of the predictability of 1UP, which by and large incorporates the same snap sounds used on past hits like “Buy U a Drank.” The album is filled with rehashes of old material, whether it’s the chest-bumping camaraderie of 2010’s star-studded DJ Khaled collab “All I Do Is Win” on the party anthem “It’s My Dog’s Birthday” or the gentle keys of 2008’s “Can’t Believe It” on the ballad “Be Your X.” Many of his bad habits as a lyricist still linger, too, as he often crosses the line between being playful and juvenile, like on “Here It Comes,” which opens with the painfully clumsy line, “I put the hurt on the derriere,” or “Keep This From Me,” where he devotes the chorus to brazenly cussing out a partner’s parents. Features by Canadian singer Tory Lanez and rapper Russ, known for their simplistic and sometimes crass approach to heavy subject matter, don‘t help.
And then there’s the Auto-Tune, which, by the end of the album, is suffocating in its repetitiveness; not even a lighter-flicking Lil Wayne, Pain’s longest-running collaborator, can help breathe life into the project on its final track. Rather than giving his vocals a go minus filters or switching the production to lean into the acoustic nature of his viral performances, T-Pain instead relies on a tired formula.
The one saving grace of 1UP is that he still knows how to craft earworms, most clearly encapsulated by the song “We All We Got.” Its impish melody and sing-along hook draw my mind to another artist heavily influenced by Pain, Tierra Whack, whose most-recent project Whack World acts as a more decadent and straightforward version of his songwriting, with its warbled choruses and short runtimes. “We Got” follows a similar path, essentially functioning as one big chorus and thus making it a breeze compared to other tracks on 1UP, many of which stretch over four minutes long. Maybe this is the groundwork for Pain’s next project; if he can’t take cues from himself, he can from others like Whack.


Mark Lanegan again teams with UK electronic vets, with guest spots from Spiritualized's Jason Pierce, Mike Patton, Richard Hawley, and Gibby Haynes.

Broken

For most of the 2000s, Mark Lanegan has been a wandering samurai in search of a master. He released only two solo full-lengths and an EP this decade, and those have been handily overshadowed by his hired-gun work with Martina Topley Bird, Melissa Auf der Maur, and the Baldwin Brothers, as well as his collaborations with Greg Dulli and Isobel Campbell. He could easily take the lead on any of these projects, but Lanegan seems to think we'll like him better in small doses. That, or he's planning a sort of Yojimbo double-cross that will pit the Twilight Singers against Belle and Sebastian.
Who knows where Soulsavers would come out in such a melee? The British duo-- Rich Machin and Ian Glover-- are something of an unknown quantity, especially on American shores. They formed in 2003 as an electronica outfit specializing in remixes for bands iike Starsailor and Doves. Their distinguishing characteristic seems to be their fascination with American traditional forms, texturing their songs with buzzy threads of blues, gospel, folk, and jazz. Reportedly, touring behind their second album, It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land, shifted their priorities even further, away from programmed beats and toward live instrumentation to create a cinematic atmosphere on Broken, their third album and second with Lanegan.
If How Far You Fall was formatted to fit your screen, then Broken is in CinemaScope. Spaghetti-western strings swell and shiver on "Shadows Fall", guitars grind vigorously on the Gene Clark cover "Some Misunderstanding", stray synthesizer blips shoot through "Death Bells" like sparks, and a lone piano provides an almost gothic solemnity on the Palace Brothers cover "You Will Miss Me When I Burn". The record features a sizable cast that includes Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, Mike Patton of Faith No More, Richard Hawley, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, and Australian newcomer Red Ghost, aka Rosa Agostino. Entering late in the album, she makes a good supporting actress, her smooth voice a nice compliment to Lanegan's rougher textures on "Rolling Sky". Perhaps she'll get more screen time on the sequel.
Lanegan, however, remains our main protagonist, roaming Soulsavers' musical landscape mostly in isolation. His miles-of-bad-road voice is an obvious match for Soulsavers' gothic Americanisms, and he sounds like just another instrument in their arsenal, communicating meaning via sound more than lyrics. That's a good use of him, especially when his lyrics veer toward Biblical overstatement, as on "All the Way Down" when he sings about "crystalline dawn" and "six white horses." Also, there's this gem from "Can't Catch the Train": "Sure as the shovel is blind, deaf, and digging/ One day you're alone at the end of your road."
And that's perhaps the problem with Broken: Too often its soundtrack atmosphere is too thick, its arrangements as obvious as a painted backdrop. The strings sound too much like Morricone, and "Wise Blood" recalls the quieter moments from Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman's score for The Last of the Mohicans more than the John Huston movie. On "Unbalanced Pieces" the whispered backing vocals dogging Lanegan have all the spooky effect of a horror trailer, and the menacing bassline is both seedy and Bad Seed-y, which only reinforces the unflattering comparison with the recent soundtrack work of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. In trying to literalize the often dismissive term "soundtrack rock," Soulsavers emphasize the former to the neglect of the latter.


Simone Schmidt and company navigate interior and exterior life with country-inflected improvisations that stretch out like a long summer afternoon.

Fiver: Fiver With the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition

The contemporary musician’s to-do list only gets longer and more obtuse in the name of Engagement and Content: write funny tweets, gaze into the TikTok abyss, maintain a carousel of fresh photographs, sprinkle it all with carefully maintained parasocial politeness. Simone Schmidt has never really played the game. And why would they, really? Outside of projects like One Hundred Dollars, the Highest Order, and Fiver, their work has also included a long commitment to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty; over the past year, they’ve dedicated time to Toronto’s Encampment Support Network, a mutual-aid organization addressing the failures of city officials in treating unhoused residents with much empathy or urgency.
Fiver With the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition returns to a project Schmidt established nearly a decade ago and expands it with an eponymous ensemble that’s smaller than its substantial name would suggest. The group squares the free-for-all sensibility that animates improvised music with the commitment necessary for a searching interior journey. Together, Schmidt and the band render their spontaneity into songs that embrace the discomfort and delight of feeling out of step with society.
The album stretches out like a long summer afternoon, flitting between airy splashes of light and protracted shadows. Opener “Yeah But Uhh Hey” drifts forth on light cymbal splashes and brushed percussion, with Schmidt making a casual introduction in their cool, smoky warble. Schmidt’s bandmates, whose recent credits include stints supporting Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s comeback, abstain from flashy solos. Instead, the group reach their most sublime moments with ear-catching details.
“June Like a Bug” unfolds over plodding drums, its fluttering saxophones balanced against piano parts that glint like a watch face catching the sun. Schmidt sings as though they’re pushing their entire being against the heavy weight of summer; it’s a slow, cathartic release. As if by sleight of hand, Schmidt leads the group into “Jr. Wreck,” a mild admonition that acknowledges how the world is sometimes stacked against you: “There’s no paper notion/That won’t fold or tear when it’s pushed into life.”
Building off loose guitar twang, pianist Nick Dourado’s light touch presses the songs toward gospel. On “Jr. Wreck,” “Sick Gladiola,” and “Death Is Only a Dream,” choral vocals recall both heavenly choirs and their soft-focus earthly counterparts in pop groups of the 1940s and ’50s. As Schmidt and company skate toward these edges, their music feels carried by an all-encompassing spirituality. “Death Is Only a Dream” becomes divine as Schmidt surrounds their grief with their awe of the universe. As Schmidt smudges the boundaries between waking life and dreaming, earth and cosmos, they find another duality in the pain of an excruciating loss, singing, “So with no end I too am blessed/My love for you, infinity.”
Schmidt also makes pointed observations on equity and loneliness. In “Leaning Hard (On My Peripheral Vision),” they draw on language from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to acknowledge their shared distaste for white moderates who rely on complacency to enforce a “negative peace” instead of meaningful justice. With “Sick Gladiola,” Schmidt unfurls the disappointment of dried-up California dreams in a tender barroom twirl. A neglected houseplant in the check-out lane—“Rootless and blooming for nothing, not even itself”—becomes a fine metaphor for feeling pitiful.
Schmidt’s latest work with Fiver emphasizes their multiple identities: musician, citizen, and community caretaker. “For Your Sake,” the album’s closing track, epitomizes Schmidt’s unwavering dedication to a person’s right just to be. “I would be there for your sake/For your sake in mine is doubled,” they sing. Schmidt sees everyday reality with clear eyes, while still acknowledging the wonder and beauty inherent to it. To borrow from Pete Seeger, who celebrated the power of regular folk for the better part of a century: Take it easy, but take it.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Pixies! Do not reunite! Please! Think of all that you have to stay dead for: four legendary albums, ever-strong legions ...

Frank Black & the Catholics: Show Me Your Tears

Show Me Your Tears

Pixies! Do not reunite! Please! Think of all that you have to stay dead for: four legendary albums, ever-strong legions of adoring hero-worshippers, and maybe the single most firmly entrenched reputation in the history of alternative music! Just consider it... it doesn't need to end this way...
But maybe it's no use; without even knowing for certain if the rumors of a supposed reunion will become a reality (the band and label have neither confirmed nor denied our inquiries), it's almost a truism in rock that matters of a band's sterling reputation inexorably descend to the lowest depths of the lowest common denominator. The worst part is that, with his latest misstep in the company of The Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, it's hard to think that lowest common denominator isn't Black Francis himself, sitting at the bottom of the barrel, waiting for the rest of the Pixies to finally arrive (Joey, as a member of The Catholics, would seem to be a shoo-in). It's bad enough that Frank Black can't seem to work hard enough these days to encourage what little confidence his name still instills in the hearts and minds of his few resolute followers; the Pixies shouldn't have to gently follow him into that good night, too.
But there's no need to even bring the Pixies into the picture; the scene presented by reality-as-we-know-it is grim enough. Good ol' fashioned Catholic guilt ought to have set in on Black by now for coasting on the fumes of his reputation in the baffling quest to reach some bland ideal of jangly, Midwestern shit-rock, but no such luck. He's still belting out bar-ballads for the type of bars he and his peer group are old enough to frequent. And there's no end in sight, either; any songwriter of Black's caliber could churn out homogenized roots-riffs and schmaltzy sentiment to last call and beyond. Heed the keen insight he offers on "Horrible Day": "It's a good day/ No, it's a horrible day/ And for the first time in my life I just don't care." In the battle of Frank versus the bar, my money's on the bar, and Frank's is, too, evidently; the next round's on him.
Now, it might be fair to suspect that I'm holding Frank to artistic standards that he never held for himself. First of all, even if that's true, why shouldn't we expect artists (in general) to perform to their demonstrated ability rather than sincerely offering up pieces of the comfortable little rut that they've been apathetically carving out over the past few years? If it was just a question of failing to live up to the Pixies, no one would need a review to predict the obvious, but it's so much worse than that; paling in comparison to the Pixies is expected (and it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise), but Tears isn't even a good Catholics album.
The excellent first half of Pistolero-- particularly the dazzling crescendo of "Western Star"-- is everything that the Catholics can and ought to be: rock as large, expansive, and over-romanticized (like right now) as the western skies hanging over the rural-route honky-tonk dives whose atmosphere they so readily evoke. Considering how little has changed in their dusty, trail-worn aesthetic between then and now, the listless songs on this album don't indicate maturation, or evolution of the band's sound, just lack of interest.
Only "Everything Is New" offers any sort of highlight by (not without some irony) most readily harkening back to some of the pent-up energy and easy melody of earlier Catholics material. It's comparatively slight next to the blustery faux-rockers on Tears, and flatter than the cloying sentiment of the more somber tunes, but that's because it may be the only track that doesn't need to compensate for the simple desire that, in all other cases, just isn't there. The elegance of the melody is superbly understated; it doesn't seem like much at the time, but it does its work like any good pop song, and you may well be humming it long after the final coda. Even if there's little more to recommend, it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Still, it's the single, tiny bright spot on all of Show Me Your Tears, almost insignificant in the long twilight of Frank Black & The Catholics, and it's getting pretty dark down at the bottom of the barrel.


The eccentric New Zealand singer-songwriter turns his skewed pop sensibilities toward soundtracking a five-part melodrama of his own making; it’s intermittently gorgeous but frustratingly foggy.

Jassbusters

Since the late 1970s, New Zealand has produced an array of skewed pop savants, from Martin Phillipps to the Kilgour brothers, Chris Knox to Lorde. But is there another Kiwi who has inveigled themselves and their peculiarities into the modern indie-rock stratosphere quite like Connan Mockasin? Carrying the air of an alien beamed down to earth, Mockasin has popped up alongside some of indie music’s most revered figures: James Blake, Charlotte Gainsbourg, MGMT, John Cale, and Dev Hynes, to name a few. No matter the artist, he brings a surrealist bent to the proceedings. He’s a naturally helium-huffed crooner, and his songs meander like a stroll in the park, his warped guitar lines as knee-bending as a good curveball pitcher.
But his proximity to bigger pop acts hasn’t done much to alter Mockasin’s approach to his own music. Five years after Caramel, Mockasin’s third album, Jassbusters, finds him to be just as squishy, unmoored, and diaphanous as he was when he debuted with 2010’s Forever Dolphin Love. On Jassbusters, Mockasin and bandmates drift in and out of songs shaped like murky pools, full of submerged pulses, noodly reveries, and murmured lyrics that briefly bewitch and then wiggle right beyond remembrance.
While its title might titillate, “Charlotte’s Thong” instead wanders a far different path. The groove is slack, unformed, and stoned as an early-’70s country-rock session; as the band nods along, it summons memories of Fleetwood Mac and Michael Nesmith, Mockasin’s guitar lines by turns lethargic and tart. It’s appealingly hazy, but Mockasin’s marble-mouthed delivery (is he singing about thongs or songs?) comes dangerously close to dissolving into gibberish.
The album is apparently intended as a companion piece to Bostyn ’n Dobsyn, a “five-part melodrama” directed by and starring Mockasin. But it’s hard to imagine any plot or visuals making the album cohere any better. Does it matter who Momo or Con Conn actually are? The bits of dialogue that crop up (“You can do anything to get good grades,” or “Your grades are slipping, every subject except for music”) don’t help clarify matters much.
As a result, a strange, slow fog settles in over the course of the record, which comes to feel like an album-length exercise in torpor, clouding over some unabashedly gorgeous turns by Mockasin. He has James Blake and his fragile falsetto take the lead on “Momo’s,” a languorous song that floats like exhaled smoke. “Last Night” also moves at the speed of deep breathing, a gently tapped ride cymbal providing the subtle pulse as Mockasin does his best Brothers Gibb quiver. It has all the makings of a heartbreaking, slow-burning soul ballad, were it not for the weird squeaking-balloon sounds that continually disrupt the setting. “Con Conn Was Impatient” also smolders, even as Mockasin’s pleas slowly crumble into ululations and wordless ash. Rather than convey a sense of melodrama, Jassbusters often feels like the wispy, lite-rock tribute that Ween never got around to making.


Just 18 minutes with Kenny Beats shows Rico Nasty evolving. She remains one of the heaviest hitters in the no-rules arena of rap.

Rico Nasty / Kenny Beats: Anger Management

Anger Management

On a hot afternoon in the Indio, California, desert, Rico Nasty glided onto the Coachella stage dressed in a grand black and neon green tutu gown; the stones that scaled her long ponytail shimmered as she sent the audience into roars. Rico didn’t have to yell the words to the opening song, “Trust Issues” to stir the crowd—her conviction is the heartbeat of her mighty sound. With a swelling fanbase and constant stream of radical musical breakthroughs, the 21-year-old is brimming with mega pop-star promise. She’s punky, femme, cool-headed, and audacious with the growing ability to integrate her multi-facets into her work. Over the last year since the release of Rico’s debut album Nasty, she’s been letting down her guard a bit. With her latest EP Anger Management, she revels in her latitude.
It’s a joint release with her friend and close producer Kenny Beats. The two joined forces in 2018 after Kenny stepped away from a career as an EDM DJ to pursue his dream of becoming a rap producer; already, their fruitful link-up has produced some of Rico’s most bone-crushing tracks, like “Smack a Bitch” and “Countin’ Up.” Those songs, in particular, signaled the progression of Rico’s hardcore sound. It’s become less about the punch of her throaty vocals and more about the new flows she’s mastered over peculiar and far-out beats. Rico’s stretching her voice without limits, placing her in the zeitgeist of rap music’s increasingly rule-bending state.
On the EP, Rico and Kenny have a brilliant dynamic in the studio. And while working in tandem, Rico’s discovery of refreshing tempos and clear emotion (especially the guitar-led track “Sell Out”) spotlight on her role in setting the bar high when it comes to innovating. Consistently bringing her best requires her co-creator to do the same—she and Kenny elevate each other.
Though short, Anger Management feels like an arrival. For nine tracks and 18 minutes, Rico activates the energy she first tapped into on Nasty, offering scores of fresh cadences, pacing, and sentiments. She starts off the EP with her signature grit and intensity, and in true Rico fashion, every word comes from her chest. But that fiery energy is heaviest at the beginning. Midway through, “Big Titties,” featuring Dreamville rap duo EarthGang, feels like an abrupt segue.
The gripe isn’t with the sound of the song. It’s just that after such a rousing interpolation of JAY Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” on the previous track, “Hatin,” there’s a desire to hear more of solo Rico. Thankfully, throughout the rest of Anger Management, she shares the degrees of her angst and presents a thoughtful portrait of who she’s growing to be. During the EP rollout, Kenny tweeted from his account: “Listen to Anger Management from the start to the finish! Its like a temper tantrum. Starts off panicked. Thinks it Out … finishes calm.”
She begins this thoughtful wind-down with “Relative,” a transition into Rico’s more inner thoughts. Her fury has long been a part of her music, but here it seems she’s beginning to process in real-time with a maturing emotional outlook. For just a little over one minute, Rico savors its warmth and grooves about dealing with disingenuous people post-fame. The jazzy piano chords feel very early ’90s New York—enchanting but minimal like the backdrops used by earlier MC’s known for storytelling like Method Man or A Tribe Called Quest. But Rico’s reimagination of the nostalgic sounding track illuminates her range. She’s still hard, but contemplative, too. “I be gettin’ money, now everybody my relative/Talkin’ bout, ‘It’s all love,‘ like I don’t know what jealousy is,” she raps.
Being direct and honoring rage can be especially tricky to navigate for black women as this bold expression remains unjustly used to label or dismiss us. But in the spirit of reclamation before the closing track, Rico’s uses the song “Sell Out” to face herself. “The expression of anger is a form of rejuvenation,” she says. It’s a quick one, but it’s one of the most important moments here. Instead of softening her truth, Rico suggests that the journey of healing and self-actualization is personal and nonlinear. It proposes that our internal seething is worth exploring and in some cases, critical and necessary to confront in order to be or feel free. Anger Management is a hell of a rap-production slapper, but most of all it’s a turning point in Rico’s evolution.


The young European produer Chevel takes a bold, confident step away from the dancefloor into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design on his latest album. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it.

Blurse

Chevel is a young European producer with fashionable friends—he's had a long working relationship with fellow Italian Lucy—good DJ bookings, his own label (Enklav), and a fair amount of hype. He also has something a lot of precocious upstarts don't: a deep and evolving catalog, counting 15 singles and now three albums to his name. His latest, Blurse—out on Lucy's excellent Stroboscopic Artefacts label—is a bold, confident step away from the dance floor material he's been honing and into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design.
Blurse opens the way a lot of techno records do—with a grimy, compressed kick drum—and that's about the last time Blurse proceeds the way a lot of techno records do. The second kick arrives nearly a second later, an eternity on a dance floor. By the 90-second mark Chevel seems to have lost interest in the kick drum entirely, taking a mid-track siesta with the swirling harmonics and buzzing synths/insects. The drums come back—they almost always do—but these kind of aberrant structures define Blurse, which sees Chevel continually chart his way to abstraction and back again.
Blurse, then, is kin to a certain strand of hypnotic, percussion-heavy dance music that sits at the edges of house and techno, the kind only touched by adventurous and skilled DJs. There are elements of Pearson Sound's coptering drums, of Objekt's cryptic architecture, even of the spacey suspensions of early dubstep masters such as Loefah. And, impressively, Chevel never veers too far into the avant-garde; Blurse, with its hard gray surfaces and dubby quivers, is always identifiable as techno in some mutated form. Chevel is walking a tightrope here, maintaining structure while unmooring most of a track's conventional building blocks.
There's fun to be had in the details, too. The end of "Watery Drumming" features wildly rippling echoes as what sounds like an actual clock keeps time. "Down and Out" consists mostly of short, pitched percussion sounds and little stabs of an electric piano; skipping around the track with your mouse you're as likely to find utter silence as anything. The gorgeous "Loop #33" sees gooey, molten synths rise from beneath the cracks in the percussion.
Concrete melodies are a little thin on the ground, so Blurse can sound homogenous. The record sometimes lacks the dynamism of works by the aforementioned artists, at times bordering on ascetic and clinical. But this style, which results in a lot of short, compact tracks, lends itself well to the album format. Which might be the point: Chevel has released two EPs and a 10-inch this year, all of them showcasing his steady progression but aimed more squarely at the dance floor. Blurse has the precision of a practiced producer and mischievousness of a rogue. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it.


On the duo’s generation-spanning double album, Fela Kuti leads in spirit while the baton gets passed down the family tree.

Legacy +

Fela Kuti, the Nigerian activist and Afrobeat pioneer, became famous in the 1970s with an inventive mix of Highlife melodies, Yoruba chants, uplifting jazz, and funk infusions. A dynasty has since steadily carved itself out. For years, Fela’s sons Femi and Seun Kuti have carried the torch, with the latter inheriting his father’s former band, Egypt 80. It’s a legacy that continues to keep fires alive at home in Lagos while the genre’s influence spreads far and wide, from inspired foreign bands like Antibalas reinterpreting Afrobeat in distant continents to hip-hop samples in songs by Missy Elliott and Nas.
Legacy+ is a celebration of that status quo and a nod to Afrobeat’s future. Fela’s eldest son Femi Kuti, now 58, has spent years performing after Fela’s death. Femi’s own eldest son Made, 25, did not witness Fela in person, but the spirit of the music and the weight of his inheritance was enough to direct his musical path. What Legacy+ offers is a merging of Fela’s legend, Femi’s unrelenting struggle, and Made’s extension of the genre: three generations of Arobeats in one place.
Fela’s political ethos and sound echo throughout Femi’s half of the double album, Stop the Hate, in polyrhythmic drum patterns dressed with commentary about government accountability and its debilitating effects on the masses. “Na Bigmanism Spoil Government” cheekily strikes at the core of class politics in Nigeria. “Come on, tell them, let them change their ways,” Femi instructs his band, with the help of deep horn grooves. Afrobeat demands that you move to the rhythm, even if your heart is straining with the gravity of the message.
Femi doesn’t always punch up. Building an improved society involves labor from the community, too. “Set Your Minds Free” redirects his sermon to the people. Leaving space for instrumentation, his yearning picks up as he admonishes his countrymen: “Don’t let them confuse you. Don’t let them deceive you. Don’t let them think for you,” he says—it’s part-grating, part-melodious, by design.
Where Femi can drift off into poignant pining, Kuti stands on strong storytelling and delivery. He’s still towing the family theme of freedom, justice, and responsibility. But there’s a renewed energy to his offering. At just 25, Made didn’t experience Fela Kuti’s brilliance in person. But he’s inherited his flair for experimentation. “Blood” leans closer to funk in its production, as Made explores the conditioning that allows citizens to accept bad governance. On rare occasions where he stops addressing the government, his attention shifts to mundanities: “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,” he emphatically repeats on “Young Lady.”
The Kuti family has long delivered on the thankless task of holding a mirror up to Nigeria’s dysfunction. With Made’s emergence, that responsibility isn’t leaving their household any time soon.

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


The Berlin sound artist explores the creative potential of vibroacoustic research, composing ambient music for therapeutic mattresses that transmit ultra-low frequencies directly to patients’ bodies.

Music for Parents

For Florian T M Zeisig, ambient music is as driven by ideas as it is by immediate feeling. As one half of the Berlin new-age duo OCA, the sound artist has used samples cribbed from YouTube synth demos to explore the hidden aspects of contemporary music production. His 2020 solo album Coatcheck made a similar attempt to shed light on invisible labor, weaving field recordings captured during his job as a coat attendant at a Berlin nightclub into a stark meditation on nightlife’s structural underpinnings. On Music for Parents, Zeisig turns his attention to the domestic sphere, crafting a series of compositions through the lens of vibroacoustic therapy.
As a therapeutic method, vibroacoustic treatments use low-frequency harmonic pulses to address chronic health issues. Established by the Norwegian sound therapist Olav Skille in the early 1980s, the relatively experimental practice has been used to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and depression with varying degrees of success, and the practice lives on as a wellness technique that’s especially popular in Scandinavia. In addition to therapy sessions with alternative healers,  a variety of pillows, mattresses, and massage tables come fitted with speakers and transducers designed to blast ultra-low, 20-60 Hz sound waves at their respective points of contact. The effect is something akin to the rattling sub-bass of the TR-808, but directed toward specific areas for holistic bodily treatment.
A student of Alva Noto at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Zeisig has long been interested in composition that tests the limits of human perception. During a visit to his hometown in Bavaria, he discovered that his parents had purchased a vibroacoustic mattress in hopes of improving their chronic sleep issues, and he became fascinated with the mattress as a medium for site-specific composition. After nearly two years of research, he emerged with a collection of tracks that combine the soft, mid-range tones of ambient music with the rich, low-end frequencies that are essential to vibroacoustic perception, presenting the album as a gift to his mother for her 60th birthday.
Zeisig’s use of vibroacoustic therapy’s low-end frequencies serves mostly to complement his foundation in the ambient tradition. The album’s opening track, “Dad Is Painting Again,” starts with a gentle flourish of cricket chirps and aquatic burbling before slowly introducing sub-bass frequencies mirrored by synthesizer tones. Soft, reed-like synth lines sweep through the mix at steady intervals as the track alternates between natural samples and distinctly digital keystrokes. The piece feels like a clear continuation of Zeisig’s earlier work with OCA, which channelled the spirit of Japanese environmental music into a careful study of the Alesis QS6 synthesizer on their album Aging. But beyond the arrangement’s careful restraint, the track nonetheless leaves listeners guessing as to exactly how it might be informed by the composer’s relationships with his parents, despite their obvious presence in the album’s backstory.
The album has presumably a different effect in headphones than it would if encountered lying on a vibroacoustic bed, but the musical content remains the same, regardless of the medium through which it’s experienced. Tracks like “Giving/Receiving” and “Dip Pool” make attempts to capture the furthest limits of the audible spectrum, with warm pads and organ tones that add a resonant, full-bodied feel. The former uses glistening textures and gentle gusts of white noise to achieve a delicate, ASMR-like effect in the upper register, while the latter leans into the voluminous low end associated with vibroacoustic listening. While these pieces are attuned to the knotty specifics of their technological parameters, the album feels like a missed opportunity to say more about these technologies, or about ambient composition in general in a moment saturated with digital media.
Ambient music has long defined itself in opposition to commercial background music, and a similar tension exists today amid the sheer abundance of ambient listening options. Ad-supported platforms have made albums like The Disintegration Loops and Music for Airports more accessible than ever, while mobile software applications like Calm and Endel promise endless relief through mood-altering playlists and generative algorithms. Functional listening has become a million-dollar industry, and even the cognoscenti are not immune, judging from the popularity of albums like Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Hiroshi Yoshimora’s GREEN. While less commercial than their app-based counterparts, these albums show that there’s a real audience for this kind of holistic, new-age approach to ambient composition, and Zeisig’s work builds on this tradition.
Comparisons with the sustained popularity of ASMR on YouTube feel apt; vibroacoustic therapy also promises to induce new kinds of bodily feeling. While Zeisig doesn’t make any claims about the album’s ability to induce ASMR (though he’s mentioned it in the liner notes of earlier releases), Music for Parents presents an equally compelling case that there are still untapped possibilities for ambient composition that lie beyond the perceptual limits of the ear. But by using this technology in pursuit of the same functional ends already so common in ambient composition, Zeisig risks papering over what’s genuinely unique and exciting about vibroacoustic listening with ambient clichés. A minor statement from an artist doing exciting work within the art world, Music for Parents remains a static proof of concept in place of what could be a more meaningful engagement with its premise.

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