The startlingly accomplished solo debut from the art-pop singer-songwriter is a world of birdsong, whistles, hums, and silence, anchored by her magnetic voice.

Fire Escape

Alena Spanger prefers non-verbal communication. On her new album, Fire Escape, she is partial to birdsong, wind that chimes like Erik Satie, and the sound of rain hitting the roof at dawn. In Tiny Hazard, the experimental pop group she formed with college classmates, she whispered, giggled, gasped, and howled over feverish guitars and jagged basslines. Her elastic vocals, which evoke the kineticism of Björk on “It’s Oh So Quiet” and Karin Dreijer on “Heartbeats,” are often most powerful as wordless interjections—a sudden “ha!” mid-verse or a maniacal cackle at the end of a chorus. On Fire Escape, her solo debut, Spanger and a collective of fellow Brooklyn musicians construct a dreamlike atmosphere of wind instruments, harps, and synths around her operatic range.
When she does reach for words, Spanger takes inspiration from nature’s fury and splendor, rather than more muted human emotions. On the twinkling “Ines,” she’s not just paralyzed by apprehension—she is both underwater and on fire. On the slow-moving “Agios,” “a man’s pain” isn’t simply destructive—it “hollers down the mountain, with the grace of a giant.” Her loved ones are like “starfish,” and the ocean is as much an existential threat (“Fire Escape”) as a source of absolution (“Satie Song”). Spanger refers to herself in self-deprecating terms—“a fickle girl,” a “sly wicked child”—but withholds details, gesturing at seesaws and lavender fields as shorthands for shortcomings. She shades in the vagueness with sharp inhales, speechless stutters, and single syllables repeated like mantras. It is, as she sings on “All That I Wanted,” “illegible and whole,” her words more deeply felt as they shapeshift and disconnect from meaning.
Fire Escape covers a surprising amount of ground in just over 40 minutes—the slightly askew dance pop of “Sinking Like,” the impressionistic, ambient textures of “Fire Escape” and “My Feel,” the jittery rock of “Ines.” With Spanger’s voice at the center, discordant transitions, like “All That I Wanted” leading into the lullabye-esque, aptly named “Go to Sleep,” feel part of a whole, connected by synth pads and the slight rasp at the corners of her range. The surrounding instrumentation expands and contracts to fit Spanger’s many modes: the gentle rumble of Carmen Quill’s upright bass and Kalia Vandever’s trombone on “My Feel” echo the elegiac solitude in her voice; the harp on “Ines,” played by Kitba’s Rebecca El-Saleh, matches the fantastical elements in its lyrics. But often her voice needs very little additional accompaniment—like former tourmate Adrianne Lenker, Spanger is most evocative at her quietest: When she dips into a low, hushed tone on “Methuen,” the world around her grows silent to accommodate.
At the intimate Brooklyn venue The Owl in January, the crowd was laughing with Spanger, even if she wasn’t trying to be funny. Sitting at the keyboard, she sang the opening line of “Difficult People”—“You tricked me with your flickering eyes”—and the subsequent reveal—“I didn’t realize those were your everyday eyes”—landed like a punchline. Many of Spanger’s songs twist like this: an unexpected metaphor, an indecipherable vocal sample, a joke where one might expect a confession. For an album that might at first seem minimalistic—indeed, it resonates just as strongly performed on solo piano—Fire Escape is jammed full with whistles, animal calls, pitched hums, and crackling roars. It’s a remarkable debut that is both patient and restless, whimsical and wise, conveying whole worlds without saying a word.


The majority of English/German singer Annika Henderson’s releases to date have comprised dank covers of pop and folk songs with BEAK> as her backing band. Her newest in this vein features her takes on the Kinks, Chromatics, the Crystals, Yoko Ono, and Shocking Blue, as well as a dub version of an original.

Anika EP

Both of English/German singer Annika Henderson’s releases to date have been named Anika: her 2010 Stones Throw/Invada debut, and now this six-track EP. Note the single “n” in her stage name; she once described the difference as offering “part of me, not all of me,” stating, “You’re indestructible if you split yourself into little bits.” She’s succeeded in so much as it still seems hard to get an idea of the real Henderson. Sure, she was once a Berlin-based journalist reporting on education reform, and lived in Bristol before that, but the majority of her releases have comprised fantastically dank, intimidating dub covers of pop and folk songs with BEAK> as her backing band, which haven't immediately conveyed a great deal about her.
It’d be unfair to imply that there’s any lack of personality in Anika’s music, though. On the Anika EP, which features one original, there’s a divide between covers to which she brings a certain bloodlust, and those from which she strips it away completely. Her vocal on Ray Davies’ plangent, eerie midnight votive “I Go to Sleep” has a Weimar-like swoop that takes languid, elegant steps around the staccato waltz of the organ and the raw snaps that punctuate each line. The unusual lope in her brusque singing style makes it seem tragic, passionate even. She barks commandingly on a brilliant cover of “In the City”, one of Chromatics’ less impassioned songs, which becomes beefier and funkier in Henderson’s hands. She and her band evoke a Chic shimmy, a Pop Group tremulousness, and add nervy grit to the song that makes it relatable to anyone who doesn’t live in Chromatics’ pastel L.A. fantasy.
On a cover of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me”, Henderson's medicated, dispassionate vocal plays like a coping mechanism to recount the grisly details of an assault to a police officer’s notebook. The band match the surprisingly proto-dubby feel of Spector's original arrangement, but trade the Crystals’ sweet female chorus for a warped, lurching, seasick siren coven, and underpin the whole song with a buzzsaw drone. She maintains the slightest presence on Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz”, singing in a taunting, distant tone, this time from the perspective of the emotional abuser, dissolving into the chorus as BEAK> push the original’s no-wave minimalism into an almost Eastern palette.
The final two songs on the Anika EP are adapted from the Anika LP, which may make this collection seem like an unnecessary purchase, but they help to solidify Henderson's creative political stance. A redux of her take on Yoko Ono’s “Yang Yang”, a song about the dehumanization of the sexes, is curdled and blurred, though her call to “join the revolution” leaps out from behind the lurching Doppler guitar. A dub version of her own “No-One’s There” isn’t quite as striking as the original, but on the chorus-- “Stop looking over your shoulder/ No-one’s there”-- Geoff Barrow’s production on her voice adds a spatial dimension that warns against her command. Suddenly, she’s cut off mid-line, as if she's been yanked by the throat by an undetected assailant.
Henderson has said that she never wants her music “to shy away from articulating what I believe in,” yet her original decision to release mostly covers was because she thought releasing an album of her political material “would have been far too heavy for anyone that wasn’t familiar with it.” It’s an intriguing juxtaposition, either indicating a lack of confidence-- and awkwardness is crucial to both her live show and her decision to make music in the first place-- or a stealthier attempt to grease listeners’ ears for an even more jarring collection next time around.
If there’s a political stance to be inferred from the distinctly unsentimental, aloof interpretations she places on songs, it recalls what Ellen Willis once wrote about “aesthete-punk” and “self-conscious formalist” Lou Reed, whose music she saw as “an attempt to purify rock-and-roll, to purge it of all those associations with material goodies and erotic good times.” (Though the Anika LP proved influential to a band who definitely do not do minimalism; Yeah Yeah Yeahs called it a huge influence on the sound of Mosquito, with Nick Zinner describing it as “totally fucking outsider, left-of-the-box music.”)
Henderson's few original songs rail against power-tripping cops and capitalism; as far as “authority sucks and everything’s fucked” sentiments go, she's concise, if not as challenging as she might think, especially in comparison to the intense political statements made by potential peers Savages. What’s more radical is Henderson’s ascetic approach, which divests music about emotionally and physically abusive behavior of emotion, and sets songs by acts like Chromatics on the same level as those she covers by Dylan. Releasing dub versions of her previous material is also a traditionally economical move that fits with her rant about excess in "No-One's There". There are several layers of ego-removal at work here, and although both of Henderson’s records to date are essentially named after her, it’s worth remembering that she originally responded to Geoff Barrow’s call for a weird female singer to do BEAK>'s bidding, though she seems to lead the direction more now.
Stones Throw have said that the ending of the video for “I Go to Sleep” “invites speculation about this phase in Anika’s career.” Okay, then: the clip is blurry and refracted, Henderson walking through a Brandenburg forest, and winding up ostensibly dead, buried beneath a pile of leaves. The most obvious impression is of some sort of rebirth; no more covers, no more keeping one “n” in reserve, reuniting the “little bits” to present a brittle, human whole. She's also intimated that her performances for the next album won't be as rooted in awkward stage presence. As the Anika EP shows, Henderson has a rare ability to convey a political stance without being overly hamfisted or explicit about it; how she brings that approach to music where she's the creative focal point is going to be seriously interesting to behold.


Working with Neko Case drummer Dan Hunt, violinist Peter Broderick, and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, singer/songwriter Laura Gibson sounds newly invigorated, resulting in her best record to date.

Empire Builder

It takes roughly three days to travel on the Amtrak from Portland, Ore., to the East Coast. At a speed of roughly 50 miles per hour, the Empire Builder rumbles across the Willamette River and Columbia River Draw Bridge, past rolling hills and scenic landscapes. In theory, the trip gives plenty of time to rest and reflect, and for a calm spirit like singer/songwriter Laura Gibson, it allows her to pull from nature as it scrolls past the window.
The folk musician sketched the title track of her new album on that very train, as she traveled two years ago toward a new life in New York City. Gibson was headed for grad school to study creative writing at Manhattan’s Hunter College, leaving behind her family and a long-time boyfriend. Maybe that’s why the song—the centerpiece of Gibson’s new album—feels especially pensive, shaded by loss and isolation, with an eye toward new beginnings. “This is not, an escape,” she hums distinctively. “But I don’t know how to hold someone without losing my grip.” The track sets a strong tone for Gibson and Empire Builder as a whole: She’s using the past as a route toward joy and prosperity. Gibson pushes beyond her comfort zone, resulting in her most assured work to date.
There were obstacles along the way. Shortly after Gibson moved into a fifth floor apartment in the East Village, she broke her foot, which kept her at home and away from the studio. During breaks from school, Gibson went back to Portland to keep recording with producer John Askew, who’s worked on albums with singer-songwriter Neko Case and indie rock duo the Dodos. In March 2015, Gibson’s apartment building burned to the ground in a gas explosion incident that killed two people and injured 19 others. Gibson wasn’t hurt, but she lost all her lyrics and instruments. She couch-surfed for a while as she restarted her life.
You can feel Gibson’s despair throughout Empire Builder, even as she hopes for a brighter future. She doesn’t wallow in self-pity, instead using her sweet voice to assess her path, pulling scattered scenes from her mental scrapbook. “Now I’m staring at the Hudson, I am humming to the passing trains,” she sings on the acoustic “Louis,” following with “And I no longer miss the silence, but I miss your eyelids flickering.” It’s unclear who—or what—Gibson is talking about (maybe it’s her old flame, maybe it’s Portland in a figurative sense), but she has this uncanny way of drawing you into her ruminations, making you connect with her emotionally. She’s at a crossroads on this album; lyrically, she’s digging deeper to present a rich narrative. On certain songs, namely “Five and Thirty” and “The Search for Dark Lake,” her words feel poetic, wafting in from faraway places, gently floating along the melody.
Gibson reminds me of Marissa Nadler, in the way she needs very little behind her to make her songs come across. Her voice carried her work in years past, but on Empire Builder, the music is more fleshed out. Where 2012’s La Grande was filled with charming campfire songs that took a bit longer to sink in, Empire Builder makes an immediate impact: Aided by Neko Case drummer Dan Hunt, violinist Peter Broderick, and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, the arrangements are strong but subtle enough to keep Gibson’s voice at the forefront. These songs feel more alive, full of nuance. On the title track, after Gibson has finished singing, a faint electric guitar arises, carrying the song to a soft landing. As a whole, Empire Builder rumbles along like that train that influenced its creative direction. The pace is unhurried, and Gibson offers a cathartic tale of loss and redemption, set against a gorgeous sonic backdrop. She sounds newly confident, invigorated, and free.


The “Get in With Me” rapper’s single-minded focus on getting money and spending it irresponsibly is a perfect distraction from the precarity of real life.

Mr Beat the Road

BossMan Dlow’s dope-dealing motivation rap exploded at exactly the right moment. Inflation is everywhere. Trips to the grocery store are backbreaking. Jobs would rather lay off workers than give them a couple extra dollars. Turn on the TV or go on social media and it feels like everyone is getting money but you. With these very real anxieties in the air, Dlow’s reckless, turnt-up anthems about chasing the bag and upgrading your lifestyle can feel damn near spiritual.
That was the case with “Get in With Me,” his January single that went from regional Florida rap barnburner to viral sensation and nationwide hit, mostly because he sounds like a life coach: “You wanna boss up your life? All you gotta do is get in with me.” This February, I was in Phoenix with a few friends for a wedding, and the nickel-and-diming of travel had worn us down. After a night at the club spent slow-sipping drinks to stretch our thin wallets, “Get in With Me” came on the radio during the drive home. We blasted his vivid imagery of jewelry, sports cars, and hibachi restaurant dinners and for a few minutes, we felt rich as hell.
“Get in With Me” is the lead single on Mr Beat the Road, the Port Salerno-bred rapper’s first mixtape since entering the mainstream fold. At 17 tracks, it’s a pedal-to-the-metal blur of hustler’s ambition and fantasies about all the irresponsible shit you can do with too much money. Dlow is not a versatile rapper. The Michigan-meets-the-South party beats are formulaic and his one-note celebratory punch-ins mean that the mixtape is full of lesser variants of “Get in With Me.” The good news is that “Get in With Me” is such a shot of adrenaline that even B-tier versions of it still make you want to act a fool.
When Mr Beat the Road brings to mind the grind and glory of Southern rap albums of the past, it’s not the emotionally complex ones that sound as if they’ve survived war, like Jeezy’s TM101 or Webbie’s Savage Life, but the hard-earned flash and opulence of a Big Tymers project. In that duo, Birdman and Mannie Fresh were two limited rappers getting by on swag and embellishment, with a deadeye focus on all the rims and chains their years of grueling work had gotten them, rather than the work itself. Mr Beat the Road is pretty similar. The recurring background sounds of scraped pots, flickering burners, and rubber on pavement remind you of the hustle, but mostly Dlow’s having a good-ass time. His greatest attribute is that he can’t wait to tell you how large he’s living, an excitement so contagious that rapping along feels like part of the experience.
Lyrical repetitiveness works in Dlow’s favor because the songs are so easy to memorize. I pop when he hollers about his shopping sprees—$1,300 at Prada, $1,250 at Lanvin, and $1,500 at Balenciaga, to name a few—or comes up with yet another way to say he’s liquid: “Pockets full of (clucking sound) I’m starting to walk like a chicken, nigga,” he raps on the uptempo “Talk My Shit.” Another recurring bit refers to blowing past the speed limit, like on standout “Mr Pot Scraper,” when he shouts, “The way I’m drivin’ the (vroom) I just might wreck or somethin’.” (Inserted sound effects are one of his preferred methods of communication.) Sometimes he gets so amped that his words bleed together, like when he raps, “I be pullin’ up in a, what kinda fuckin’ car is that?” on “Trippin’,” fumbling slightly through the bar like he can’t even believe it himself.
His guests are game, too. Rob49 sends the already fired-up “Lil Bastard” into another gear by doing that thing where he squeezes way too many words into one bar. Sexyy Red’s raunch shines on “Come Here” as they connect for a cut that should have strip clubs on lock. When Dlow slows it down a notch on “Boss Talk” and “Mike Smiff,” it’s a buzzkill—sacrificing that blast of charisma and motivation for something closer to Moneybagg Yo-core radio rap. That could be a glimpse into his future, though I hope not. Even if his current style is lean and samey, it’s rarely boring. The static mainstream rap landscape could use a voice who actually makes you want to crank the volume all the way up.


This massive box set captures the British art-rock legends’ progression from Syd Barrett’s cracked-out psychedelia through the experimental song suites of the early 1970s.

The Early Years 1965-1972

“Today’s underground may be the answer to tomorrow’s leisure,” intones an earnest British newscaster, narrating film of London’s U.F.O. Club circa January 1967 while its house band, Pink Floyd, jams amid the flashing lights. And darned if he wasn’t right: the black-and-white segment is now found on the massive new $550, 11-CD/9-DVD/8 Blu-Ray box set, Pink Floyd: The Early Years, 1965–1972. With over 27 hours of material, the package overflows with replica 45 rpm singles, gig flyers, posters, tickets, sheet music, and more, and the ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.
The Early Years tells the remarkable story of Pink Floyd’s career up through the moment they became part of yesterday’s underground and today’s mainstream, stopping just before the writing and recording of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. Charting the band’s progression from the wig-flipping baroque psychedelia of Syd Barrett’s songwriting through their wooliest jams and into the new space beyond, The Early Years doesn’t follow a straight path. It shows an astonishing capacity to turn corners and evolve, a long arc that might give hope to every band jamming away in its practice space in search of a voice.
Beginning as a blues combo with the perfectly British drug-punning name the Tea Set (“tea” being slang for weed, maaaan), the band rechristened themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound by the time of the 1965 demo sessions that open the box’s first disc. Though not particularly competent or interesting R&B players, as demonstrated by their cover of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” just as much as an untitled 1968 “Blues Jam” on a later disc, it’s fascinating to hear Barrett’s already distinctly bent rhythm guitar as filtered through the Bo Diddley beat of “Double O Bo.” Unheard before being released in 2015 as a double 7" for Record Store Day, the 1965 sessions also highlight the first fruits of Barrett’s songwriting, the playfulness of “Butterfly” displaying the stylist and singer he already was. “Along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent,” David Bowie would say of Barrett, a madcap permission-granter for a new generation of British musicians less beholden to imitating their American heroes.
Leaving the band in a haze of mental health issues in early 1968, Barrett’s legend would loom over the quartet for years. On the set’s volume from that year, titled Germin/Ation, Floyd’s earliest songwriting without their former leader sounds like a drab imitation, with keyboardist Rick Wright’s “It Would Be So Nice” anticipating the B-list ’60s twee-pop parodied by Spinal Tap on “Cups and Cakes.” Instead, Floyd would start to find themselves in the deep space of their early jam centerpiece, “Interstellar Overdrive,” the nearly 10-minute freak-out that closed their 1967 debut and whose descending chromatic riff dropped them into the beyond. With seven versions on the set, including a devastatingly weird DVD/Blu Ray-only 1969 take of the later slower arrangement featuring Frank Zappa on guitar, the song would provide the first portal for the band’s furthest explorations. (One of the set’s few big bummers is that it doesn’t offer audio-only downloads of the live performances featured on the visual discs.)
For fans of Floyd’s experimental tendencies, The Early Years offers enormous fun, beginning with a never-bootlegged soundtrack session. Recorded by the Barrett-era lineup in October 1967 to accompany an abstract film by John Latham, the nine takes are all light show swirl, star-splatter guitar, and primitively convincing free drumming by Nick Mason. And though, later on, Barrett replacement David Gilmour would rightly become known as a guitar hero, his playing throughout The Early Years is judicious when it comes to solos. Wailing some tasty space-blues on “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” during a jam-heavy August 1969 set from Amsterdam and a blistering “Atom Heart Mother” from Montreux ’70, Gilmour just as often fits into the band’s tapestry of gentle cymbal taps and moody keyboard filigrees.
Where their American countercultural cousins in the Grateful Dead found mind-manifesting wonder in their musical interpretation of cosmic space, the Floyd more often channeled the cold vacuum and existential tedium, perhaps a reflection of the post-psychedelic fate of Barrett. “Moonhead,” their soundtrack to the Moon landing performed live on BBC TV and captured on Bonus Continu/Ation, is a deliberate controlled float, more proto-symphonic than hippie jam. It’s this questioning sadness that the band starts to tap into during their 1969 sessions, the first mournful strains that would find their fullest expression on Dark Side of the Moon. The watershed event comes when Waters’ “Cymbaline” and “Green is the Colour” and Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way” all first turn up on the box, part of a May 1969 BBC recording for John Peel; it’s one of seven sessions for the DJ, all classic bootlegs in their own right.
In slightly different and renamed form, all three songs play a part in one of the box’s most enticing if imperfect pieces: a complete live recording of The Journey and The Man, the band’s first attempt at conceptual suites of music, performed as two halves of a show on several occasions in 1969. Though fans have attempted to reconstruct the performances as though it were a lost album, the actual product includes reworked existing pieces, going back as far as “Pow. R Toc H.,” from their 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, here becoming “The Pink Jungle.” Performed with onstage happenings and fourth-wall-breaking intrusions, the music is a fascinating forerunner to Floyd’s more successful theatrics. With sci-fi noir atmospherics (“The Labyrinths of Auximines”), live musique concrète featuring band-members sawing through wood (“Work”), overblown drum solos in disguise (“Doing It”), as well as genetic connections to the Anglophonic fun of the Syd era (Waters’ “Afternoon,” collected as “Biding My Time” on 1971’s Relics), the two suites are first drafts. That the band scrapped them and moved along to the next ambitious projects in the queue is yet another testament to their developing editing skills.
As career periods go, the seven years of Pink Floyd’s Early Years don’t exactly match other intense eras of classic rock creativity, like Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1968 or the Beatles from 1962 to 1969. But this set illustrates something about both Pink Floyd’s own path and the rewards of resilience. While remembered for their outsized onstage gestures like inflatable pigs and the disassembly of a giant wall, the real revelation of The Early Years is to hear exactly how slowly and modestly Pink Floyd came into themselves; despite the scale of their ambition, the box feels less a blueprint than a scale model. While Barrett’s contributions remain singular, the development of the band over these years wasn’t so much genius than inspired workmanship, not all of it successful. David Gilmour’s “Fat Old Sun,” appearing first on a July 1970 Peel session, is less compelling in its 15-minute jammed-out incarnation the following year. “Embryo,” though, develops from a three-minute post-Barrett psych-folk bauble on a 1968 BBC session to a fully realized 10-minute prog arrangement by 1971, the band’s restlessness apparent and worthwhile.
There’s plenty to gnaw on, from Barrett’s whimsy to the formless countercultural yearning of the middle years to the emergence of Waters and Gilmour as songwriters to the brilliant suite-making of 1971’s “Echoes.” While the band would shatter amid acrimonious lawsuits a decade after this set’s conclusion, the music is the sound of musicians working in concert towards an unseen and unknown goal. In the modern age of oversized vault-clearing and copyright-protecting box sets, there is something resoundingly human about The Early Years, which only makes the achievements more extraordinary. Concluding with a new mix of 1972’s Obscured by Clouds (excluding bonus material), one can hear all the pieces of their more iconic future albums clicking into place and the sound of space closing around them into something more fixed. But that’s the topic of another box set.


The eighth Black Lips album finds the band with a new five-piece lineup. Weighing in at 18 tracks, it assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium.

Black Lips: Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?

Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?

The Black Lips have been many things over their 18-year run: insolent garage-rockers and innocent pop balladeers; good-ol’-boy country crooners and bad-trip trainwrecks; lo-fi dirtbags and hi-fi hustlers. But ever since their four-piece line-up solidified in 2004—just in time for their first great record, Let It Bloom—the band always exuded a fraternal, last-gang-in-town sense of solidarity. Their catalog may be defined by dramatic shifts in fidelity and focus from album to album, but you never doubted their commitment to seeing each one through.
Their eighth album, though, is the product of some radically reformulated chemistry. The Black Lips are now a five-piece, only 40 per cent of which—guitarist Cole Alexander and bassist Jared Swilley—appeared on their previous record. Original drummer Joe Bradley (singer of arguably their most enduring anthem) and long-time guitarist Ian St. Pe are gone. Not all of the new faces are actually new—recent addition Jack Hines preceded St. Pe’s tenure in the group—but in addition to recruiting drummer Oakley Munson, the Black Lips also now have a full-time saxophonist in Zumi Rosow to thicken up their sound.
Whatever the reasons for it, the shake-up has altered the course of a band that was approaching a career crossroads. The Black Lips’ previous two records—2011’s Arabia Mountain and 2014’s Underneath the Rainbow—saw them make tentative tip-toes toward the mainstream with the help of some platinum-grade producers: the former tapped Mark Ronson’s retro-pop panache, the latter assumed Patrick Carney’s Black Keys bounce. But neither record really elevated the Black Lips beyond their club-level/cult-act station. And so with Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?, they essentially say “fuck it” and indulge their every scatterbrained whim. Like its immediate predecessors, the new album boasts some familiar names in the liner notes: Sean Ono Lennon served as producer, his mom provides (barely perceptible) backing vocals, and additional spiritual guidance was provided by Saul Adamczewski of anarchic UK slop-rock outfit Fat White Family.
As its title suggests, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? invites oppositional, Rorschach-test interpretations. It is at once the Black Lips’ most sonically elaborate album and its most aggressively primitive. The band wrap the songs in a cinematic, carnivalesque clamor, but shout themselves hoarse as if they were still trying to hear themselves over a blown-out church-basement PA. Weighing in at 18 tracks, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium. There are overtures and interludes and reprises and spoken-word passages, but no discernible logic holding them together. Which could very well be the point—when a band as notoriously unruly as the Black Lips opt to make a double-album opus, don’t be surprised when they come off like a group of road-tripping teenagers who’ve scored a Groupon for a five-star hotel and opt to take a dump in the bidet.
Following a brief, jazzy intro, the puffed-up Lips come out swinging with “Occidental Front,” a bracing, stormy blast of desert psych that sounds like the “Rawhide” theme rerouted through the Stooges’ Fun House. But the ceaseless paisley-pop stomp of lead single “Can’t Hold On” provides an early indication of this album’s nagging flaw: its tendency to hammer a simple two-minute tune into a laborious four-minute one. The sense of torpor is exacerbated by tossed-off intermission tracks that drag on for as long as the proper songs, as if branding the bloozy scuzz of “Got Me All Alone” and the warbled-out bongo soul of “Interlude: E’lektric Spider Webz” as “interludes” exonerates the band of aimlessly dicking around.
The album’s best songs are tucked onto Side Two. “Squatting in Heaven” imagines an alternate 1960s where the Stones got stuck in the toga-party circuit; “Rebel Intuition” supports the theory that the first punk album ever was Highway 61 Revisited. And then there’s the gleaming, Spector-like “Crystal Night,” the sort of sweetly subversive song that only the Black Lips could pull off. Just as their 2007 standard “O Katrina!” conflated a girl-done-me-wrong narrative with the worst natural disaster in recent U.S. history, here, the Lips set a typical brokenhearted love song against the backdrop of the 1938 Nazi raids that set the Holocaust in motion (thereby adding the gravest of subtexts to otherwise wistful lines like “Do you remember/The snow was falling/And I held you in my arms then we kissed/I think it was November”). The equally winsome “Wayne” has a similarly unnerving effect, its slow-dance swoon disrupted by an eye-opening lyric—“Is it true/Was it them or you/What you said about the man/Strung up by the Klan?”—that suggests the song could very well be about a certain controversial Southern rapper.
But such sublime moments are in scarce supply, as the album gets bogged down by repetitious mid-tempo rave-ups (“We Know”) and sluggish strip-club struts (“Come Ride With Me”) where Alexander overcompensates for the temperate pace by blowing out his vocal cords. Curiously, the closest thing Satan’s graffiti has to a climax is a random cover of the early Beatles classic “It Won’t Be Long.” It envisions what the song would sound like if it was recorded in 1966 instead of ’63, with Swilley lingering on the line “till I belong to you” until his anxious anticipation starts to sound more like a threat. And it’s a subtle reminder of what the Black Lips do so well, teasing the horror out of wholesomeness and recasting golden-age rock’n’roll in a strange, discomfiting light. But it’s a quality that often gets obscured amid this album’s unwieldy, unbridled sprawl. Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.


The 20-year-old New Zealand singer follows up her ironic TikTok smash “Supalonely” with a surprisingly sincere album that only stumbles when it lapses into conventional pop.

Hey u x

The latest Gen Z pop star to emerge from TikTok and Chill Indie playlists into minor stardom, Stella Rose Bennett—aka BENEE—found success early in the COVID-19 pandemic with her Gus Dapperton collaboration “Supalonely” and its ensuing dance challenge. Unlike fellow youth alt-pop Billboard phenomenons like Conan Gray’s “Heather” or Clairo’s “Sofia,” “Supalonely” doesn’t even hint at a deeper meaning: The song depicts an alienated teenager post-breakup, reveling in self-pity with taunting backing vocals and slap bass. Fortunately, “Supalonely” (originally released on 2019’s Stella & Steve EP) is not indicative of BENEE’s debut full-length, Hey u x. Like an album-length version of Mean Girls or Easy A—high-school movies where underdog protagonists briefly become pariahs before realizing they must Be Themselves—Hey u x is at its best when it’s down to Earth, and only stumbles when it lapses into conventional pop.
When BENEE’s peers strive for profundity, the results can be as cheesy as any recent pop. Conan Gray’s “The Story” attempts to handle sensitive topics like teen suicide, but winds up exposing a lack of maturity (sample lyric: “They were just 16/When the people were mean”). Instead of trying to be a voice of a generation, BENEE finds depth by focusing on her own feelings and reactions. On “Happen to Me,” she depicts intrusive thoughts and ambivalence around death, but her tone is realistic rather than moralizing: “I understand why people leave/But leaving seems scary to me.” Though the lyrics aren’t especially innovative, there’s an honest, youthful plainspokenness to lines like, “Don’t sell yourself short/There’s something about you/Can’t explain but I can’t live without you,” from “Same Effect,” or “Driving inside your car/You put your hand around my heart/But I’m afraid/You’ll try to control me,” from “A Little While.”
Producer Josh Fountain is eager to match BENEE’s energy, whether borrowing a drum groove from Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes” on “Happen to Me” or indulging silliness like “Snail,” which feels primed for another TikTok challenge with nonsensical chants (“I’m like a snail/You’re a guy/Kinda mad/I can’t fly”), 808 cowbells, and vocal manipulations. Ironically for a major-label pop album, the most upbeat excursions are the weakest. “Sheesh” with Grimes (more or less a reprise of melodies from “Kill V. Maim”) aims for upbeat hyperpop but tops out at maybe 50 Gecs. BENEE’s deadpan choruses on “Plain” provide amusing contrast to Lily Allen and Flo Milli’s pettiness, but that pettiness feels at odds with the rest of the record. These songs play like concessions to anyone who wanted an album of “Supalonely” instead of an album of sincerity.
Yet “Supalonely” fits better than expected in the context of the record’s more thoughtful songs, to the point where its obnoxiousness feels endearing, even playful. It helps that the rest of the album contains none of the same smarmy aloofness—even if “Kool” sounds slick, it’s really just envious of people who can pull that off. There’s room here for wackiness like “Snail,” but BENEE gets better results by dropping the cutesy affectations. When the pace slows down, Hey u x strikes a balance between whimsy and moodiness, particularly on “A Little While” or the Frankie Valli-alluding ballad “All the Time,” a duet with New Zealand newcomer Muroki. BENEE can wink at the camera when she needs to, but Hey u x is most poignant when she doesn’t.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With the final TLC album, Chilli and T-Boz have crafted a conscious epilogue to their catalog and a love letter to their fans. It hits every style in their vast range and dignifies their career.

TLC

As one of the top rewards for the Kickstarter that funded TLC’s fifth and final album, donors who pledged $5,000 or more were gifted a slumber party at the personal residences of T-Boz or Chilli. “We’ll put on our jammies,” read the description, “order some late night snacks, and have some #TLCPillowTalk. Mom and Dad won’t be there, so there’s no need to keep the volume down.”
Such an intimate prize—and its dishy, familial language—encapsulates the ethos guiding TLC since their first album, Ooooooohhh… on the TLC Tip, in 1992. In their music as well as their personas, they have cultivated their regular-girlness as an asset while retaining an aura of cool, a feat few if any pop stars have achieved with such massive success. (Katy Perry, who procured one of those T-Boz slumber parties, may have come close at an earlier point in her career.)
As feminist heroes, even TLC’s biggest hits have been a beacon for multiple generations of women and girls, delving into such topics as self-esteem (“Unpretty”), and not settling (“No Scrubs”), as well as social issues like AIDS awareness and the cycle of poverty and drug dealing  (“Waterfalls”). TLC were practicing devoted “fan engagement” (and defining it) near-decades before the constant cheesing of social media, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that they would would freely offer up their own homes to fans, as well as set Kickstarter records for how quickly those fans raised and surpassed the $150,000 goal.
The resulting album, TLC, is a love letter to them. While not as explicitly directed as 1999’s Fanmail, it both hits on every style in TLC’s vast range and properly dignifies their storied career, incorporating songs that acknowledge their impact without waxing nostalgic (even if the boppy lead single was titled “Way Back”). After an intro jam declaring they need “No Introduction” while simultaneously introducing them in a heavy sub-bass clatter that seems tailor-made for opening arena concerts, Chilli and T-Boz begin with a pointed set of barbecue jams. The breezy “Way Back” calls to mind Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle’s R&B classic “Saturday Love,” and paired back-to-back with the Boney M-sampling disco rave-up “It’s Sunny,” TLC gives a nod to its influences, a statement that even icons have icons. As album openers, the throwback qualities of these tracks are significant on a recording-career-ending album, reverent goodbyes that also recognize the wide age range of their devoted listenership. And the unique symbiosis of the duo’s voices are as impeccable as ever, T-Boz’s smoky alto gliding beneath Chilli’s chirpy one. That sound is a symbol of round-the-way-girlhood so embedded into the cultural fabric that it’s hard to know when it ever wasn’t, and strange to think these are the last iterations of it.
Its finality certainly weighs on the album, as Chilli and T-Boz have crafted a conscious epilogue to their albums career (they say they will still perform together). While overall TLC doesn’t burn with the glossy sheen they created with longtime collaborating producer Dallas Austin, who’s notably absent here (he and Chilli have a son together), perhaps it doesn’t need to. The warmest tracks are centered on acoustic guitar or piano, letting the burning vocal take the lead—particularly in the sensual “Start a Fire,” a midnight bedroom track as satiny as the pajamas they donned in the “Waterfalls” video, and on the touching album standout “American Gold.” The latter is the song most obviously written about Left Eye, who was the eminently unique “crazy” in their CrazySexyCool trio before her death in a car crash in 2002. “I lost some friends, some friends I didn’t want to,” Chilli and T-Boz duet sublimely. But “American Gold” also serves as an antiwar song and a chance for spiritual uplift. “Feelin’ undefeated/From the ones who try to have power over you,” the duo intones. “Don’t let ’em control you.”
That message of self-motivation and self-sufficiency is central to any TLC album, and here T-Boz and Chilli include it on “Perfect Girls,” a rebuttal to the distorted worldview transmitted to women and girls via Instagram and the fashion world. It’s a gentle track, their voices deliberately soft like an arm around the shoulder, as they remind us that “Perfect girls ain’t real/They live a lie but it’s always on your mind/’Cause you’re online all the time/Know that perfect girls ain’t real… Gotta learn to love yourself.” At first glance, it might seem obvious, but with piano trills and a synth counter-rhythm the message truly hits in the heart and gut, a 2017 companion piece to “Unpretty.” TLC, again, has always been mindful of its audience, particularly targeting underrepresented black girls and other girls of color who lack representation in the media and have a comparative dearth of positive reinforcement about their physical beauty (and the beauty of their existences).
With the nuances of that track in particular, it’s tough to let TLC go, their position as role models so crucial to a pop/R&B landscape that needs them. And yet, TLC's letting-go is bittersweet and good, a sometimes somber, sometimes playful requiem for their time together (and with us). The duo’s official wave goodbye comes in the form of “Joy Ride,” ostensibly the album closer, and a cheerful, lightly funky appreciation of their career. Its first words are “thank you” and it sounds like a parade, a brass section fêteing T-Boz and Chilli’s gossamer harmonies. Their positivity never flags, and the melody is as infectious as any song they’ve written through the years; the Kickstarter funding of the album is less an indictment of the lack of institutional support from the music industry and more of a reminder that they’ve always had a special relationship with their fans. As they remind us: “I ain’t never left you, I accept you, I respect you.” TLC, an indelible part of pop history, will never be gone.


On their latest EP, the UK dance duo amp up their latent melancholy, luxuriating in a rather British strain of pastoral electronica.

Everything U Need EP

Eight months into pandemic-adjusted reality and the netherworld of dance music has reached a critical point. Disco lights are gathering dust. All new techno releases have surely been completed with the present situation in mind: a home-listening scenario which favors melody over repetition, intricacy over seismic subs. On their latest EP, Overmono respond to the new normal by amping up their latent melancholy and luxuriating in a rather British strain of pastoral electronica.
Brothers Ed and Tom Russell, also known as Tessela and Truss, have grafted their way into the UK dance A-list with a rave-indebted sound that has one foot in Room 1 (pumping, ecstatic) and the other in Room 2 (disjointed, dicey). Older by 10 years, Tom brings the blood and guts, with a back catalogue of industrial-edged material as Truss, MPIA3, and one half of bug-eyed techno trolls Blacknecks. Kid brother Tessela is the drum machine, able to slice an Amen break 50 ways.
You’d think a hybrid of these impulses would be tough as a bouncer’s boot, but their releases as Overmono, mainly for the rave-rooted XL Recordings, are vivid and accessible, keeping ruffneck drums in check with smiley-face signifiers and notes of ’90s euphoria. Everything U Need goes brighter still, highlighting their way with a melody—a skill they may have honed through years of classical instruction at the behest of their orchestra-conductor father. So where Overmono’s earlier records hopped between contradictory moods and sketches, these four tracks unfurl as a continuous suite, more like the first side of an album than a club-targeted EP. Their sharp edges have been sanded down, their shiny bits polished up. It’s bijou enough to bring to mind a record like Boards of Canada’s In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. Take the soft chimes that interrupt “Clipper (Another 5 Years)”—just the sort of saucer-eyed whimsy you’d associate with the classic Warp duo, along with the faux-mysterious snippets of speech.
Similarly, the title track is a bedroom anthem built on itchy minimal drums, a smear of waterlogged pads and a distinctive detuned synth lead: three ingredients that together reboot the kind of tear-stained techno that James Holden and Luke Abbott were perfecting in the late ’00s. With its yin-and-yang combo of creepy-crawly percussion and toy-box melodies, “Clipper” is a dead ringer for early Nathan Fake too, which points us towards an older lineage, a pastoral slant on techno that you can trace back to Aphex Twin—though in his hands, more like folk-horror than a caravan holiday. It’s a sound we haven’t heard much of lately; the mid-’00s revival is gathering pace.
The outer edges of the EP point to another ouroboros of influence, as the opening revs of “Aero” mimic Skee Mask’s “Dial 274” before accelerating into the wide-open sky, leaving trancey chemtrails in their path. “Verbosa” completes the record with a further nod to the cloistered breaks of Compro, as a rack of weary-sounding drum machines chatter under warm drones. Skee Mask is behind some of the only essential records of the breaks revival that Tessela and Overmono helped foment, and their shared genealogy can be traced back to the haunted terrain of Burial and, beyond that, Aphex Twin again. In these blue remembered hills are emotions that run deeper than nostalgia: this is where British ravers buried our collective joy and catharsis, allegedly in some forgotten field off the M4. It’s a powerful collective memory which expands to include each new generation of those who weren’t there.
Unlike the records it most resembles, Everything U Need is fundamentally straightforward—no strange time signatures here, no bait-and-switch drops, no glitchy stunts. In one sense, that feels like a cop-out given current conditions of prolonged boredom and insular listening. But if we’re doomed to stay in our corona bubbles for a whole winter, any record that revives the MDMA-zing after-party techno-glow of the mid-’00s might as well be labelled “functional.” No one can stop us staying up to watch the sunrise, anyway.

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Though the Seattle band would produce more focused efforts, In the West is a fascinating document of nascent indie rock that sounds revelatory 25 years later.

In the West

The same year that the Missoula-born, Seattle-based band Silkworm released their In the West, Kurt Cobain killed himself, ending an entire phase of rock music as we understood it. 1994 was an inflection point for alternative rock: Soundgarden released Superunknown. Weezer released The Blue Album. Hole’s Live Through This came out, as did Green Day’s Dookie and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Silkworm’s album, despite being produced by Steve Albini, who finished In Utero for Nirvana the previous year, was lost in the shuffle. Much of that has to do with Silkworm’s sound, which gestured at popular rock music of the time, but used the form to create weird songs that sounded like they were scrawled on a napkin just before last call in a dive bar. Guitarist and vocalist Joel Phelps would soon leave the band, but In the West provided a blueprint for Silkworm’s entire catalog: discursive songs that devolved into twirls of feedback, mantra-like lyrics about escaping life, drinking, lost love, and feeling uncomfortable in your skin.
Though Silkworm would later produce more focused efforts—1996’s Firewater chief among them—In the West is a fascinating document of nascent indie rock that sounds revelatory 25 years later. In Silkworm’s world, loneliness is inevitable, happiness deserves suspicion, and nostalgia is extremely dangerous. “This is the place that I miss the most, but this town is full of ghosts and I always feel like I am inside the throat of the devil here,” bassist Tim Midyett sings on “Garden City Blues,” the first words on the first song.
One of Silkworm’s great tricks was that they managed to make overwhelming depression sound nimble. In the West is a heavy listen, but there is a deadpan quality to some of Phelps’ starkest declarations. There’s a nearly audible smirk in lyrics like, “Go into the woods and live with the bears/That way you can kill someone and nobody cares/And when we’ve had enough then it’s time to ascend to heaven.” There is no place for delusion in Silkworm’s world of hard-won epiphanies, and wherever there is clarity, there can be humor.
The band keeps the emotions as messy around the edges as the arrangements. The volatility kept them unpredictable, which means that when Phelps erupts into a brief gut-wrenching scream midway through album centerpiece “Raised By Tigers,” it is so genuinely startling that it sounds improvised, a moment of catharsis that disappears as soon as it surfaces.
In the West is a brief snapshot of a fascinating band hitting on a sound at exactly the wrong time. It was too heavy to slot next to other indie rock of the time, not heavy or self-serious enough to hang with the post-Nirvana grunge set. A lot of ‘90s rock music wallowed in misery, and Silkworm was certainly miserable. But they lived inside that pain with wry good humor and sang (and screamed) about it with a light touch. They didn’t point to a way through suffering, but they showed how to bear up under it with grace.
This reissue somehow manages to offer too much bonus material without much new context. They seem to include every possible version and iteration of songs recorded circa In the West, and while it’s mildly interesting to listen to alternate takes, live versions and an entire concert from 1993, none of the material feels essential to anyone but devoted fans. Even for us, this stuff is a curio at best.
Still, it’s worth calling out Albini’s rework of his own production here. The original’s density was occasionally frustrating: Phelps’ lyrics were sometimes lost in the mix, the bass overtook everything to the point that some of the more interesting guitar moments were muddled, and many tracks sounded like first takes cut right to tape. The reissue does a lot to clear that up, or at least more properly define what is supposed to be heard when. The bass is still very high in the mix—you can never not hear it, but thanks to Albini’s work on this reissue, you get a real sense that these songs were recorded in an actual room. The songs still resemble first takes, but they’re supposed to sound that way. Twenty five years later, it’s clear that In the West was the vital sound of a band of outsiders trying not to implode, and then realizing that sometimes imploding is part of human nature. In other words, it’s the sound of messy acceptance.


The zenith of Ronnie James Dio’s formidable career, reissued on what would have been his 80th birthday, is a heavy metal holy grail —a beacon of iconic riffs and ecstatic, empowering anthems.

Holy Diver (Super Deluxe Edition)

Before the release of Holy Diver, Ronnie James Dio was merely the greatest hired gun in the history of rock’n’roll. In 1974, Deep Purple’s Roger Glover drafted the diminutive American, born Ronald Padavona, to sing on his bongwater-soaked rock opera, The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. Dio’s performance so impressed former Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore that he hired him to front his new neoclassical hard-rock band Rainbow. Dio made three albums with Blackmore, but left Rainbow in 1979 to join Black Sabbath, taking on the daunting task of replacing the newly solo Ozzy Osbourne for the band’s Heaven and Hell. Dio’s second album with Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, was another masterpiece, but Dio was growing tired of standing in the shadows of his more visible bandmates. (His debut with Rainbow was literally called Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.) When Sabbath showed him the door, it was a blessing in disguise. The midnight sea was calling.
There was no question what the 40-year-old singer would call his new band. Dio formally launched in the fall of 1982, with the eponymous rocker on the microphone and fellow Sabbath expat Vinny Appice behind the drumkit. After a brief dalliance with future Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee, the band’s lineup solidified: Dio, Appice, former Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, and guitarist Vivian Campbell, from the Belfast band Sweet Savage. Their first album, Holy Diver, came out the following spring. The supporting players were crucial, but they were just that: supporting players. At last, there was a recorded document of Ronnie James Dio as a true bandleader. On a new four-disc, super-deluxe reissue, his leap into auteurism sounds as visionary as ever.
Holy Diver opens with “Stand Up and Shout,”—or, more accurately, it opens with the main riff to “Stand Up and Shout,” one of the most iconic and ubiquitous runs of notes in metal history. That simple, blues-based power-chord progression is an object of totemic power, passed from metal guitarist to metal guitarist like a talisman. It just screams heavy metal. Variations on the riff showed up on Riot’s “Swords and Tequila” in 1981, Accept’s “Flash Rockin’ Man” in 1982, Mercyful Fate’s “Curse of the Pharaohs” in 1983, and Iron Maiden’s “2 Minutes to Midnight” in 1984. The urgent, double-time version that Vivian Campbell plays on “Stand Up and Shout” lands right in the middle of that timeline, and while its similarity to those other riffs is almost certainly coincidental, it’s fitting that it announces the arrival of Dio. First on Holy Diver, and then on the nine additional Dio albums he would make before dying of stomach cancer in 2010, the singer would bend the sound and aesthetic of classic heavy metal to his will.
All the ecstatic truths of Ronnie James Dio are in full bloom on Holy Diver. His rich baritone is in career-best form, clarion-clear even when he digs into his lower register for a little extra grit. By ’83, operatic tenors with soaring falsettos were becoming a new standard in metal. Singers like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, and Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate seemed like the future of the genre. Dio couldn’t always hang with those guys on pure technique, but he anchored his voice in a deep, convincing earthiness they couldn’t quite access. His clean articulation of every syllable was also key to his appeal. Audiences could sing along to a Dio song within a couple repetitions of the chorus, even if it was their first time hearing it.
The lyrics on Holy Diver frequently push metaphor beyond its breaking point. Dio sings about velvet lies, a truth as hard as steel, the palace of the virgin, the chalice of the soul, and a rainbow in the dark. He chose words that sounded good coming out of his mouth first, conjured a vivid image second, and made logical sense third—if at all. What the hell is a holy diver, anyway? The cover art, illustrated by Randy Berrett, suggests it’s a priest who’s been tossed into the sea by a demon, but the lyrics provide no such concrete evidence: “Holy diver/You’re the star of the masquerade/No need to look so afraid/Jump on the tiger.” Dio preferred piling on imagery to building a coherent narrative, but his overarching themes always came into focus. He liked to speak to people who felt alone in the world, who needed his songs to overcome whatever private adversity they were going through. “You’ve been left on your own/Like a rainbow in the dark” may not be the most cogent simile ever written, but when Dio sang it, its empowering beams shone through.
Holy Diver also helped codify traditional heavy metal as a recognizable sound, particularly in the United States. With thrash rising on the California coast and cutting-edge regional scenes emerging in Europe and the UK, Dio became a standard bearer for old-school metal. Bain and Appice formed a rock-solid rhythm section; Campbell’s style was firmly rooted in the blues, proficient but not overly flashy or technical. Their chemistry on Holy Diver belies the fact that they had only started playing together months prior. “Gypsy” swings like Zeppelin on amphetamines, “Caught in the Middle” crunches in groovy lockstep, and “Shame on the Night” wrings high drama out of a simple blues backbone. “Rainbow in the Dark” is a pop-metal banger before the vocabulary for such a thing existed, built around a lilting motif played on a cheap Yamaha keyboard. It's one of the best metal songs ever written, and according to Campbell, “we had the fucking song written in 10 minutes.”
There are six versions of “Rainbow in the Dark” on the new Super Deluxe edition of Holy Diver, released on what would have been Dio’s 80th birthday. Like most box sets of this size, it provides an overwhelming amount of music with limited replay value. A new remix by Joe Barresi (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age) unearths outros that were initially lost to the album’s deeply ’80s fade-outs, providing a small behind-the-scenes glimpse of the sessions, but his aggressive tinkering sterilizes the songs. Hearing Holy Diver this crisply feels uncanny and a little unnerving, like watching an old TV show with the motion smoothing turned on. The new remaster sounds much better, offering a beefier listen without sacrificing the character of the original recording. A recording from a 1983 Fresno concert shows off how great Dio sounded live at the time, but the dull drum solo and 20-minute version of “Heaven and Hell” don’t play nearly as well when you aren’t there in person. The outtakes and alternate versions are strictly heads-only.
None of that underwhelming bonus material can dampen the greatness of Holy Diver. Dio went into the sessions with something to prove, and he left with one of metal’s holy grails, a classic of the same magnitude as Paranoid and The Number of the Beast. His work with Rainbow and Sabbath was just as pivotal to the genre, but Holy Diver is his zenith—the most Dio album of all time. These are the songs that made Dio the avatar and patron saint of dorky metalheads everywhere. Here was a 5'4", middle-aged man, singing about rainbows and tigers and drinking red wine from a golden goblet. His very existence was a siren song for dweebs; if you were uncool, Dio was for you. Consider the virtuosic opening sequence of 2006’s still-awesome Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny: Our hero (Troy Gentile, playing a young Jack Black) is terrorized by his buttoned-up Christian father (played by Meat Loaf), who destroys all his rock’n’roll paraphernalia and slams the bedroom door. Only one poster survives the melee—the star of the masquerade, the rainbow in the dark, the truth as hard as steel. Ronnie James Dio, seated on his throne, comes to life and urges the crestfallen teen onward: “You will face your inner demons,” he instructs. “Now go, my son, and rock.”


Over the last few years, the mysterious, much-hyped Swedish band formerly known as Ghost have cultivated an alluring persona of subversion and symbolism. Infestissumam, their first album for a major label, follows their 2010 debut Opus Eponymous, a collection of old-school "Satanic" heavy metal with hooks as addictive as sin.

Infestissumam

It’s difficult not to pull for Ghost B.C.: During the last few years, the mysterious Swedish metal outfit formerly known as Ghost have cultivated a sterling, alluring persona of subversion and symbolism. Their leader is a papal parody named Papa Emeritus II, who comes cloaked in inverted crosses and a sinister skeletal mask. He's flanked by five Nameless Ghouls dressed in matching black uniforms that suggest Darth Vader using the force to infiltrate and overrun the Catholic Church.
Despite mounds of speculation and the exposure risk the band’s touring schedules involves, the identities of the musicians remain unknown (or, at least unconfirmed), furthering the allure of their at-large intrigue. Ghost have risen to popularity in relatively antiquated order, too, parlaying the buzz behind a single issued via social media (a move now more democratic than issuing a 7”) into a record deal and a licensing contract for the exciting Opus Eponymous, a debut that upended many 2010 and 2011 year-end lists. The old-fashioned label bidding war that followed led to a contract rumored to be as high as $750,000 with new Universal Records imprint, Loma Vista. To recap: A major label funds a band that poses as the Anti-Christ and his henchmen and plays old-school heavy metal with hooks as addictive as sin while also covering the Beatles and ABBA: Why wouldn’t you pull for Ghost B.C.?
One compelling reason to forego the Ghost B.C. fanfare is Infestissumam, the band’s mostly laughable second album. The ballyhoo for Ghost’s follow-up has been so strong that it landed them on the 100th cover of Decibel two months before it was issued. A name change, an album cover so controversial some manufacturers allegedly refused to print it, and the fortuitous timing of the actual Pope’s early departure have only ratcheted anticipation. And though these 10 songs seem to be a logical progression from Opus Eponymous, Infestissumam all but abandons the twin senses of danger and discovery upon which Ghost once depended. This is a pop-rock record underwritten with childlike Anti-Christian sentiment; the tension between those underdeveloped directions-- surface-level darkness and near-translucent accessibility-- creates little but an insufferable stiffness.
Sure, Infestissumam delivers a handful of hooks you won’t escape and a few zingers that’ll make you smile, but that’s about it. “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen”, for instance, is the record’s eight-minute centerpiece. Above forlorn piano and Coldplay-earnest guitar, Papa uses his best Ben Gibbard croon to mix Latin and empty Satanic jingoism. The song eventually sidesteps into surf-rock, black metal, and a “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” sing-along; it is one of the most awkward things you will ever hear. At its best, Opus Eponymous capably laced Ghost’s pop ambition with heavy metal’s sense of danger, as with the bracing crunch of “Ritual” or the hangman guitar tone of the simultaneously clever and goofy “Satan Prayer”. At its best, however, Infestissumam is only a reminder of that earlier record’s now-apocryphal promise.
With their label’s largesse secured, Ghost B.C. surprisingly headed to Nashville, Tenn., to record with Nick Raskulinecz, a regular Foo Fighters producer who’s also worked with the Deftones, Alice in Chains, and Velvet Revolver. If Ghost B.C. were going to be a major-label metal act, they needed to sound like a major-label metal act, right? To that end, Infestissumam is at least a crisp and full production, from the grand theatrical choir that invokes the black mass at the start to the pitch-shifting synthesizer that goads along album closer “Monstrance Clock”. But Raskulinecz brightens the band until the mystery and suspense disappear, turning these evil thoughts into baubles that sound safe enough for big money and rock radio.
The record’s back half, for instance, is a half-marathon of bad stylistic decisions that put Ghost B.C. in settings that they just can’t make convincing. “Body and Blood” is about necrotic cannibalism, but it sounds like something Sloan might have left on the floor of the editing room. Its affable jangle and eventual surge wilt under Raskulinecz’s spotlight. If They Might Be Giants decided to cut a funny little metal record (and why haven’t they?), “Idolatrine” and its jaunting organ might form the fourth single. And “Depth of Satan’s Eyes” offers neutered quips about flatulence and feces above a vaguely doom metal clip; it’s the sort of flimsy, silly, and safe pap that suggests Ghost B.C. might be a side-project for another band in costume, the motherfucking Doodlebops. Infestissumam is a great critique of how self-serious yet puerile heavy metal can get, but that’s probably not the point of a lucrative record deal.
In the heavy metal community, Ghost B.C.’s defenders often talk about the band as a gateway for young metal fans, a new chance to expand the musty dark legions. In his smart 2011 piece for Invisible Oranges titled “Why Ghost Matters,” Justin M. Norton argued that metal needs new converts, and that Ghost was the band to do just that. “I could play [Opus Eponymous] for my mother, a Carly Simon devotee, and she’d find something to like. … I see The Undead Pope becoming an effective recruiter, much like Eddie or Anton LaVey. He is metal’s own Uncle Sam.”
But, in 2013, to what exactly is Ghost B.C. a gateway? Back to old notions of rock’n’roll, where Jim Morrison is still a poet waxing above organs and major-label polish is a requisite of important music? To an excuse for a lack of substance in the presence of great style and pristine surface? To a worldview in which darkness and anger and frustration serve only to become a punchline and where the Anti-Christ “comes into the daughters of men” and creates silly portmanteaus like “Idolatrine”? Is that even a gateway anyone wants to offer anymore?


The New York singer-songwriter’s third album maps life’s changes to sleek, vibrant R&B that’s packed with 1980s soundtrack flourishes and big moments; it’s the perfect frame for her extraordinary voice.

Scenery

It’s the time of year to wonder: What would happen if we packed up our shoes and moved to grassier pastures? If we got some fresh sunshine on our bones, would everything be warmer and sweeter? With her new album, Scenery, Emily King reports yes, with delicate murmurs and melty calypso rhythms. King just moved from the Lower East Side block she’s lived on her whole life to Woodstock, got a car and some wind in her hair, like “one of those scenes from the ’80s.” Then she whipped around the next week and wrote “Remind Me,” the stirring electro-R&B first song on Scenery. The album could be a daydream soundtrack for King’s imaginary movie. There are twinkling guitars, earnest and anthemic resolutions, a silky touch, a backwards glance, and wistful sentiment for the present.
A decade into her career and now on her third album, King’s distinctive, breathy staccato seems to have found a suitable ecosystem. Since 2007’s sincere East Side Story and 2015’s flirtatious The Switch, King has stretched a bit. Having found a frothy groove in her intricate blend of R&B and soul, she sounds like she has room to breathe. The unassuming, seductive “Caliche” could be a study in vocalizing a soft touch. There’s a cotton-candy composition to King’s voice: It’s full and crystalline and sweet and floating. In Scenery, she skips around closely held R&B harmonies, navigating vintage synths in “Remind Me” and sparkling guitars “2nd Guess.” If King’s voice seems to flit on gentle tiptoe, it’s with balletic athleticism. She’s trained enough to make it look like she’s floating.
For all the softness of her tone, King has a taste for the declarative. In keeping with its ’80s-soundtrack DNA, Scenery has many big moments. On “Go Back,” King even does a touch of Springsteen. The guitars are rousing, the cymbals crashing, and the breaks are tough. Her controlled hesitations show the double bind of leaving home: regret and resolve. When she promises, “I’ll never go back,” you can hear that this might not be true, that she’s singing this because she wants it to be true. If King’s lyrics go for the universal, she relies on her extraordinary vocal skill to add lifelike texture. She also leaves room to get weirder, if she wants. The album is fantastic in its stranger moments: In the yearning, sexy “Foregiveness,” while lawn sprinkler clicks keep the time, King gearshifts between quick enunciations and desperate, elongated syllables. It’s fantastic.
Scenery rings with the thrill of a new start, with the nostalgic satisfaction of slotting moments of life into their respective chapters. The organization of Scenery scatters the notion that this all might be linear. It zigzags thematically, from a lover’s snuggle (“Blue Light”) to deeply felt reckoning (“Foregiveness”). The album closes with a fantastic oh-you’re-something-special-can-I-buy-you-dinner seduction (“2nd Guess”) and then the fist-clenched goodbye of “Go Back.” An album’s gotta end sometime, but these songs, two of the record’s most propulsive, seem to grab us by the arm to yank us into the shimmering neon starlight—and then it’s all over. If it’s good enough, the audience will linger through the credits. King could let it linger a little more.


Even with the help of outside songwriters and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, the blues-rock duo can’t help reverting to the same old same old.

Dropout Boogie

When the Black Keys coughed up their debut album, The Big Come Up, exactly 20 years ago this week, the smart money definitely wasn’t on them being the slow-and-steady victors of the early 2000s garage-rock rat race. Released on psych/punk speciality label Alive Records, The Big Come Up presented a camera-shy duo that wanted nothing to do with the thrift-store chic of the Strokes, the theatrical myth-making of the White Stripes, or the hammy showmanship of the Hives. Compared to their youthful, more photogenic peers filling up the pages of SPIN and NME, singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney already sounded like grizzled old men content to spend their evenings bashing away on Muddy Waters standards and de-psychedelized Beatles covers in their basement, with no ambitions beyond recreating the sound of a crackly AM radio stuck between two stations.
However, while those aforementioned acts succumbed to prolonged hiatuses, break-ups, or failed Pharrell collaborations, the Black Keys’ proverbial junkyard beater was gradually tricked out into an auto-show-worthy muscle car, complete with hydraulic wheels and neon under siding. With the wham-bam Grammy-scooping double shot of 2010’s Brothers and 2011’s El Camino, the Keys thoroughly rewired the sound of modern rock radio over the next decade, uniting wayward factions of 78-collecting blues traditionalists, frat boys, neosoul lovers, Southern rock die-hards, aging hipsters, and their teenage kids purchasing their first guitars. Now, after exhausting every play in the post-success playbook—the detour into cinematic psychedelia, the reactionary return to FM radio fundamentals, the covers album hat-tip to their roots—the Black Keys have finally achieved the ultimate marker of classic-rock sainthood: the luxury of coasting into middle age, coupled with the casual assurance that the arenas and amphitheaters will still be packed no matter what they put out.
Fittingly, the band’s 11th album arrives roughly at the same point in the Keys’ career as the Stones were at in the mid-’80s, when Mick and Keith became less concerned with chasing the zeitgeist and just settled into doing what comes naturally. Dropout Boogie may share its name with a classic Beefheart cut, but the good Captain’s corrupting influence doesn’t extend past the record spine—the Keys’ first album of originals since 2019’s “Let’s Rock” could’ve easily been titled “Let’s Roll.” After recruiting members of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside’s backing bands for last year’s Mississippi-blues retreat Delta Kream, the Keys carried that collaborative spirit over to Dropout Boogie, opening up their creative process to a team of guest songwriters for the first time. Certainly, the Black Keys are among the few bands on the planet with the both the star power and underground pedigree to corral garage-punk lifer Greg Cartwright (Oblivians, Reigning Sound), Nashville hitmaker Angelo Petraglia (Trisha Yearwood, Taylor Swift, Kings of Leon), and ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons onto their record. However, in this case, a few drops of new blood here and there can’t keep the Keys from reverting to a lot of the same old same old.
The opening track, “Wild Child,” was apparently kicking around for years until writing contributions from both Cartwright and Petraglia brought it to the finish line. But, despite its tantalizing disco intro, the song simply ticks off all the boxes for a boilerplate Black Keys radio single, with a main guitar riff caked in enough studio-sculpted fuzz to sound like a horn section; a huge shout-it-out hook that’ll give the band’s lighting tech ample opportunity to cue the crowd for a singalong; and lusty lyrics that find Auerbach once again pining for some vaguely sketched unattainable girl. (Only in this case, the sense of familiarity is compounded by the fact the big chorus sounds like someone dialed up the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” at karaoke but were too drunk to remember the words and had to adlib their own.) A similar sense of going-through-the-motions afflicts “Burn the Damn Thing Down,” which runs a distant second in this band’s recent attempts to hotwire T. Rex’s “Jeepster,” while cribbing its city-razing, road-warrior manifesto from Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band.” But even those lifts seem subtle next to “Baby I’m Coming Home,” where the Keys bank on the faint hope that the majority of their fanbase has never heard the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.”
Such par-for-the-course riff-nicking would be more forgivable if the Keys had anything new to say on top of it, but, co-writers or none, Dropout Boogie rarely strays from Auerbach’s wheelhouse of women who have done him wrong and/or who have got to do him right, and he doesn’t bring the heat where it’s most needed. The centerpiece ballad, “How Long,” mines the same ’60s-soul elegance and baby-come-back pleading as Brothers’ definitive cover of Jerry Buttler’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” but it can’t muster any of the latter’s down-on-my-knees desperation. Auerbach fares much better when the topic shifts from broken hearts to empty wallets: On “For the Love of Money”—a spirited hill-country blues that effectively licks the Delta Kream spoon clean—he uses his secret-weapon falsetto to convey economic anxiety, savvily updating the blues’ age-old themes of impoverishment and sell-yer-soul temptation for our current late-capitalist nightmare. Then again, as Dropout Boogie proves, the easiest way to allay such fears is to build your own money-printing machine: Honoring the Keys’ reputation as a TV-sync powerhouse, “Your Team Is Looking Good” repurposes an old cheerleader taunt into a gently choogling chant that all but guarantees its placement on NFL Sunday pregame shows in perpetuity.
But for all the audio upgrades and commercial fortunes they’ve reaped over the past two decades, the Black Keys can still resemble the same dudes from Akron who found their calling 20 years ago by tuning out the world and getting lost in their own greasy groove. Only now, they don’t have to settle for merely conjuring the spirit of their blues-rock idols—they can actually invite them to their studio. You need not read the liner notes to recognize Billy Gibbons’ presence on the seedy Degüello-worthy jam “Good Love,” and though he doesn’t stick around for the closing “Didn’t I Love You,” his Texan mojo still hangs thick in the air, as Auerbach and Carney lock into a steady dirt-road rhythm that feels like it could go on way longer than its four-minute runtime. They’re the sort of tunes that the Keys can pull off with ease, as satisfying as a perfectly tossed curveball landing in a beaten-up catcher’s mitt. But they also make you wish the Keys didn't spend the rest of Dropout Boogie lobbing underhand pitches right down the middle of the plate.


Seven years after the original, the two rappers deliver a sequel that is unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms.

2 Chainz / Lil Wayne: Welcome 2 Collegrove

Welcome 2 Collegrove

Here’s something that doesn’t seem like it should be true: 2 Chainz is five years older than Lil Wayne. Of course, in the mid-’90s Wayne willed his way into the Cash Money Records offices as a quasi-intern—and then onto radio and television—before he was old enough to drive; of course, the arc of 2 Chainz’s early career more closely resembles an EKG readout, to the point where the first song on 2007’s long-delayed Playaz Circle debut was a paean to missed release dates called “Dear Mr. L.A. Reid.” And still, this little piece of biographical data seems wrong.
When 2 Chainz finally became a star, in the early 2010s, it was in a distinctly post-Tha Carter III world. Mixtapes were still idiosyncratic and unmonetizable, but rap was in its brief flirtation with EDM, and the collapse of the CD sales economy meant only established megastars or exaggerated personas like his could cut through the din. Even the way the two close friends have processed, in their solo work, their relationships to the past are incongruent, with Wayne perpetually shadowboxing the greats of prior generations while 2 Chainz tinkers with prestige objects self-consciously positioned as modern successors to The Blueprint.
Unfortunately, Welcome 2 Collegrove, the second album to pair these two MCs, is profoundly unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms. The liner notes recall an entire era including SARS, Perez Hilton, and Iraq war protests through the Obama campaigns: DJ Toomp and STREETRUNNER, Bangladesh and Big K.R.I.T., Usher and Marsha Ambrosious. But the LP is frustratingly polished, defaulting to pristine mixes and beats that are crisp, thin, and wholly anonymous. (This extends, sadly, to those from the most beloved contributors: Mannie Fresh’s crowded, directionless “Big Diamonds” and Havoc’s pair of middling tracks, including a stale 36 Chambers riff.) Combined with verses that frequently prioritize competency over invention, these tracks make for an album that only intermittently gestures toward either rapper’s signature styles.
On Da Drought 3 or T.R.U. REALigion—even on the highlights from 2016’s superior Collegrove—there was an air of delirious impulsivity, the sense that Wayne or 2 Chainz might, in the next moment, conjure a flow or an image that no human being had ever before conceived of. There was a looseness of structure that allowed for hooks or high stakes but required neither. Welcome 2 Collegrove drags each artist into the middle of the road where even some inspired premises (the mutation, on “Crazy Thick,” of Wayne’s infamous deposition video into a strip club instrumental, or his tight little seesaw cadence on “Long Story Short”) are sanded down to their least memorable versions. This is true on the utterly rote “Millions From Now” and the practically narcotized “Transparency,” the schmaltzy “Can’t Believe You” and “Godzilla,” a song as “lukewarm” as 2 Chainz describes a particular woman’s mouth.
When Welcome 2 does click, it’s almost always due to Wayne, who seems to snap upright halfway through the album’s runtime. Near the midpoint, on the overproduced “Significant Other,” where the desperation in his writing and performance finally converge, his verse begins to sound—as on so much of his best work—like an impossibly complex house of cards, the tone and momentum of each line resting on not just one but four, eight, 12 bars that preceded it. But this verse just a precursor to his turn on the Benny the Butcher-assisted “Oprah & Gayle,” where he pushes the outer bounds of the beat’s measures in either direction, rapping at first at the extreme front end of every bar—and later dangling off their back end.
The moments that do stick in the mind—Wayne camping outside an enemy’s house for so long that he starts cooking s’mores, 2 Chainz boasting that he’s “been poppin’ since your first computer”—are scattered throughout dozens of placeholders. Where the mixtapes that saw these two find their footing often felt like first drafts, with all the excitement and jaggedness that entails, the songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.


After a life-threatening motorcycle accident, Jay Rock returns with his strongest album yet, a collection of rap songs that highlight his struggle and journey.

Redemption

Jay Rock’s music is consumed by his struggles; he wrestles with the granular details of street life and gangbanging. His clear-eyed accounts of surviving in the California ghettos are far from glamorous. “Struggle” is an operative word in the retelling of his story. When asked why he was the first artist to get signed by Top Dawg CEO Anthony Tiffith, he responded, “Me and him, we come from the same neighborhood; we come from the same struggle,” therein lying an unspoken bond. On the opener to his 2015 album, 90059, he rapped, “The struggle is real/You gotta do what you got to just to get over the hill,” over and over. In a bit of irony, Rock is the least heralded member of the Top Dawg crew, despite being the cornerstone upon which the empire was built. He toiled and fought and stumbled so those that followed could win Pulitzers. Redemption, his battle-tested and watchful third album, bears those bruises with pride, the way a soldier might be proud of their service record. All Jay Rock albums champion survival, but after a near-death experience, he finds new power in persistence.
In 2016, Jay Rock was involved in a debilitating, near-fatal motorcycle crash that left him with a broken leg and a cracked pelvis. He was flipped off his bike doing wheelies the same night he was supposed to attend the Grammys with Kendrick Lamar. The experience was humbling for the Watts rapper, who now has screws holding his body together. In the interim, he became uninspired and depressed, trapped in a death spiral. On Redemption’s “The Bloodiest,” he presents the accident as karma for years of robbing and dealing, the universe taking from him just as he took from others: “Flipped off that bitch, milly rockin’ the wheel/Two hundred thousand in the bank, straight to hospital bills.” Redemption, co-executive produced by Kendrick and TDE President Dave Free, is about Rock getting a second chance at life, a new opportunity to show his pedigree, and about seeking a sort of absolution. The album traces his path from hood survivalist to indie darling of modest means to TDE dark horse and crash survivor, in search of even greater heights.
Rock is obsessed with winning at any cost, even if simply by association. “I’m just part of a winning family, call me Marlon Jackson,” he raps on “Broke +-.” Over the course of the album, he comes to recognize something: if cheating death is its own victory, then navigating life’s challenges can present little triumphs, too. In his raps, Jay Rock can come off as a reclusive hard-liner with a remarkable storyteller’s acumen and an internal logic that always feels sound. Few gangsta rappers are better at illustrating just how limited their options were and how undaunted they had to be to overcome them.
On “For What It’s Worth,” Rock runs scenarios through his mind as a small-time rapper still hustling on the side. His decisions are carefully considered and well reasoned for someone stuck in a no-win situation: “I can’t have my babies walkin’ around in projects/While I’m on my bunk stressin’ through the process/I’d rather be a prospect, you know, God-like/But for now, many Tec’s: This is my life.” He surveys the Nickerson Gardens projects he grew up in on “ES Tales” with crisp, cold chronicling. On “OSOM,” J.Cole draws him into an even more introspective place: remembering his rocky rise with marked insight (“This system’ll give it to you when you gettin’ to it”). It took all those wounds to make him this formidable. Rarely has his writing about struggle been this painless in its execution, even as he expands his range. Celebration is a means of surviving, too, and there are a few songs on Redemption that revel in self-medicating as a way to escape, namely “Tap Out” and “Rotation 112th,” in turn producing some of the most ambitious and enjoyable music in his catalog.
Jay Rock’s Redemption was forced to compete with albums from rap legends upon release: a comeback  from Nas entirely produced by Kanye West after a six-year hiatus and a surprise project from JAY-Z and Beyoncé. This record could easily be swept away by event albums and the conversations surrounding them. But the Jay Rock story amounts to more than a first-week sales total or a chart slot; his legacy brings to mind a Jay lyric from Everything Is Love: “Over here we measure success by how many people successful next to you.” In the “WIN” video, there’s a scene where the entire TDE roster is at Jay Rock’s back, standing with him. Listening to Redemption, it’s clear Rock knows exactly what he’s accomplished. Their wins were born of his struggle.


Writing with painful exactitude, El Kempner crafts a vividly rendered breakup album that’s always threatening to explode.

Eye on the Bat

Eye on the Bat is a defiant ode to being humbled. Life will do that, particularly during a breakup, and El Kempner’s incisive, diaristic lyrics are like coming up from a dive without your swim trunks. On Palehound’s fourth album, Kempner reveals all the tender facets of a split in evocative detail: regret, embarrassment, desperation. The band accompanies these thoughts with sinuous guitar riffs and driving bass lines, turning Kempner’s words into incantations, the sort of shout-sing anthems that beg to be replayed.
Kempner has outright declared Eye on the Bat a breakup record, and the imagery places us right at the center of the conflict, reliving the dissolution with painful exactitude. “Wind turbines and overpasses/Thirteen hours on our asses,” they sing on the title track, remembering cold sandwiches assembled from the trunk and puddles of piss behind the van. Romance dies but the memories refuse to, a specific kind of haunting you can hear in every forlorn vocal. “You didn’t need my help/You didn’t need my help,” Kempner repeats over Zoë Brecher’s raging cymbal crashes and the reverberating guitar chords on “The Clutch,” one of the record’s standouts. It’s easy to imagine them shouting it at a retreating car, livid in the rearview mirror.
Kempner’s conversational tone and deadpan delivery recall both Forth Wanderers and Aimee Mann, sometimes droll (“Bad Sex”) and sometimes smoky and melodic, a little exhausted (“Right About You”). The instrumentation—urgent and vital, more punk than plaintive—makes emphatic what might otherwise be subtle, heightening the emotional stakes, whether it’s the throbbing bassline of “The Clutch” or the anxious riff that jumpstarts “Independence Day.” In stark contrast to the icy silence of a long, pre-breakup car ride like the one in the title track, Eye on the Bat’s best songs are incendiary, kinetic, and restless. Things are always threatening to explode, like a shaken Coke bottle rattling around the passenger’s floorboard.
The momentum falters when the tempo slows and the rage turns contemplative, anger ceding to wistfulness. “Head Like Soup” is a goofy tonal pivot, with juvenile lyrics (“My head like a pot of thick soup/Stirred and tasted/I live to fill you up”) and skittering rhythms that can’t salvage the sluggish melody. Meanwhile closer “Fadin” might allude to Mazzy Star (“There’s nothin’ I can do to keep from fadin’ to you”) but its abstruse imagery and campfire strum skews more Moldy Peaches.
Still, Kempner’s songwriting is far from one-note, and the record’s winsome bombast finds the perfect foil in introspective details, moments of time trapped between the bars. “Right About You” slogs through the moments when the end becomes obvious, signs of doom peppered all around a Northern California beach town. “We came down here to see the sunset,” Kempner laments, “But we’re in a bad spot and I can’t see it,” an obscured vista as a metaphor for the closed-off potential of love. “Route 22” is a tender, strummed ballad, its tentative optimism highlighted and underpinned by doubt (“Would you mind if I get stoned?/Don’t wanna bore you with my teenage habits”).
The universe has a way of roasting us at every turn. There’s the everyday awkwardness, the odd fit of a corset on “Good Sex,” and then there’s unrequited love like an ember in your chest, the constant reminder that you are always, existentially speaking, alone. In “Good Sex,” Kempner takes a disembodied perspective to describe a bumbling attempt at seduction: “I started laughing at myself,” they sing, huffing out a genuine chuckle a few bars later. Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads.


Considering the gap between techno’s roots and its globalized, commercialized present, the writer, curator, and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr., posits alternate futures for the genre.

Techxodus

Techno, in 2023, is far removed from its roots. It is a keyword for lifestyle playlists. It sells tickets to clubs and festivals. It is merch. But techno, for the musician and writer Deforrest Brown Jr., is worth saving.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture, Brown’s 2022 “critical history” of techno, aims in part to reclaim the term for its originators in Black Detroit and those in their lineage. In the early 1980s, when Juan Atkins coined the name for the futuristic music he and his friends were making with synthesizers and drum machines in their bedrooms and basements, the present-day notion of a techno club did not yet exist, and neither did the formal and unspoken conventions that emerged after such places began popping up in Europe in response to the Detroit sound: the premise that an uninterrupted journey from one track to another, accompanied by strobing lights, synthetic fog, and strong drugs, was the ideal context for hearing this music; the standards of tempo and structure, developed to aid the DJ’s seamless mixing; the presumption that most of the people dancing their way through this shadowy wonderland would be white.
Brown, who also releases albums as Speaker Music, calls himself a “theorist, journalist, curator, visual artist, and by necessity, a musician.” His artist biography offers no clarification for the mysterious clause that qualifies the last item on that list. One way to interpret it is that Brown feels compelled to create music that is truer to the spirit of Detroit techno than the stuff you might hear on any given night at Berghain or the Basement: to make techno that lives up to its name. He has positioned Techxodus, his latest album, as a musical epilogue to Assembling a Black Counter Culture, and its opening seconds, in which a disembodied voice offers a working definition of techno—“Black music that sounds technological, rather than music made with technology”—make no secret of his weighty conceptual intent. The music defies any expectations a contemporary clubgoer might have of its genre tag, but it doesn’t much resemble old-school Detroit techno either. Brown is not a reactionary or a nostalgist: The music he loves, after all, arose from an attempt to break with tradition and find the sounds of the future. Rather than simply recreating the past, he imagines a new trajectory for techno, a sort of alternate history in which the music continued to grow and change according to its original precepts as a form of Black sonic expression, instead of the norms that club culture imposed on it.
Brown is particularly reverent of Drexciya, the Detroit group led by the late James Stinson, which contextualized its music within an elaborate mythology involving an aquatic civilization descended from Black children and pregnant women who were thrown overboard from transatlantic slave ships, whose members wage secret war on the white capitalist world order. (Abu Qadim Haqq, who created Drexciya’s visual art, designed the covers of both Techxodus and Assembling a Black Counter Culture.) One distinguishing characteristic of Drexciya’s music was the way Stinson and his collaborators contrasted the metronomic rhythms of sequencers with the unsteady expressiveness of human touch. A bassline might repeat with unchanging precision while an improvisatory keyboard melody dips and weaves atop like a rider on a wave.
Techxodus radically expands on this dynamic. Bit-crushed samples and laser-like synthesizer sounds cut aggressively against the prevailing rhythmic currents of “Holosonic Rebellion” and “Futurhythmic Bop.” On “Jes Grew,” a sample of a saxophone solo is mangled by what sounds like an unconventional use of time-stretching, a feature of many digital audio workstations that allows you to change a sound’s tempo without affecting its pitch, or vice versa. Brown ignores this benign use case to instead explore what time-stretching does when pushed past its limits, twisting the sound of the sax into loops that stutter and spasm. These digital artifacts have their own rhythmic logic, separate from both the grid that organizes the rest of the track—and, I imagine, from the saxophonist’s original phrasing. But within their glitchy unpredictability, there is also the pained and ecstatic humanity of the blues, screaming to break through.
The drum patterns across Techxodus, whether programmed or played freehand, destabilize the very idea of a beat. In its rhythmic maximalism, and its uncanny juxtaposition of drums that are clearly synthetic with those that sound like crisply recorded samples of a live kit, the album often recalls the avant-garde footwork of Jlin, Brown’s Planet Mu labelmate. He has spoken movingly about the impact her music has had on him, and it’s easy to understand why. A former steel worker from the hollowed-out industrial hub of Gary, Indiana, making music whose mechanistic contours gesture ambiguously at a world beyond the toil of the present, she strikes a clear parallel to Brown’s heroes working in Detroit during the decline of the American automotive industry. But where Jlin’s music, even at its densest, seems highly ordered, carrying a certain balletic poise, Brown’s seems wild, impulsive, raw. I don’t know how he makes it, but I imagine him sweating it out over a bank of sample pads, hammering away at them like a technologically augmented free-jazz drummer.
In a 2020 interview with Tone Glow, Brown addressed white listeners, musicians, and critics who misapprehend Black music, techno included. “What they’re seeing with this Eurocentric view of sound and music composition is systems,” he said in part. “They're seeing nodes in a system moving along a linear path for satisfying or not satisfying rises and falls and conclusions—when what’s actually happening is a sort of speaking in tongues.” Where contemporary techno listeners are conditioned to expect that a particular element—a hi-hat, a bass drum, a synth—once introduced, will continue to perform small variations of the same basic function, Brown lets his sounds run free. A drone turns clipped and percussive, contributing to the rhythmic onslaught it once painted over. Midway through “Feenin,” a white-hot surge of electronic distortion arrives abruptly to envelop the entire mix, so loud and abrasive that I can’t help but wonder whether Brown had to lobby against a mastering engineer to keep it in. It sounds thrillingly, terrifyingly wrong, like your speakers might catch fire if you’re not careful. Then, just as quickly as it came, it recedes, but not entirely, hovering and menacing, barely audible behind the drums. You spend the rest of the track wondering: Will it come back? I won’t spoil it for you.
Techxodus doesn’t require deep knowledge of Brown’s work as a critic and historian in order to appreciate it, but it is a demanding album, unlikely to win over the club set. Given the polemical tone of Brown’s interviews and public appearances, I would imagine he prefers it that way. But the music isn’t antagonistic or standoffish; on the contrary, it wants to reach you, shake you, make you feel deeply. By sampling directly from free-jazz horn players on “Jes Grew” and opener “D.T.A.W.O. (Deprogramming the Atonist World Order),” Brown invites the comparison to that earlier rebellion against Eurocentric systems of rules that would enclose and govern Black art. It’s an apt one. Like those pioneers, he seeks to reconnect his music with its radical roots, and in doing so, push it toward the future.