Both creepy and cozy, the Pennsylvania singer-songwriter’s original score amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of director Jane Schoenbrun’s deeply online horror.

Alex G: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the debut film from director Jane Schoenbrun, the internet is both a safe haven for expression and a terrifying realm of artificiality. The plot follows Casey, a lonely teenager who immerses herself in a horror role-playing game called the World’s Fair Challenge and begins to upload progressively eerier videos of herself online. Soon, she draws the attention of an older man. As their uneasy relationship grows over Skype calls that teeter between fact and fiction, the fragmented narrative shifts from creepypasta horror to drifting mumblecore to harrowing drama, intimately exploring the way self-identity is both established and ruptured online. In World’s Fair, even the loading time between clips in an endless YouTube autoplay stream comes loaded with atmospheric dread.
Schoenbrun’s film is highly attuned to sound: clacking keyboards, the beeping timer on a Photo Booth recording, and gentle, sleep-inducing ASMR help establish World’s Fair’s deeply online mood. Schoenbrun also listened to the music of Alex Giannascoli, aka Alex G, while writing the script, and eventually they recruited the Philadelphia songwriter to compose an original score. Giannascoli is a natural fit, an enigmatic artist whose impressionistic lyrics and scuffed indie rock taps into the same suburban ennui that Schoenbrun captures in World’s Fair. Strip malls, empty parking lots, and dirty snow banks make the setting of the film chillingly universal; Giannascoli’s homespun music amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of those haunted scenes.
To bridge the gap between Casey’s quiet home life and unsettling discoveries on the internet, Giannascoli’s songs vacillate between gentle passages of acoustic guitar and strings and more abrasive, digital instrumentals. On “Stitch,” Giannascoli stretches a glacial synth line to its limit, letting it grow uneasily until shrieking distortion interrupts; it’s as uncomfortable as the scene of body horror it soundtracks, in which a man pulls a string of admission tickets out of a sore in his arm. The seven-minute highlight “Casey’s Walk” embraces ambiance, with formless, sullen tones punctuated by blaring synths that echo and then settle back down, simulating Casey’s closed-off existence while hinting at the turbulent personality lurking beneath the surface. “Main Theme” evokes burnt-out shoegaze, using a wistful guitar melody, fuzzy pitch-shifting, and chanted, barely comprehensible vocals that recur at crucial moments in the film. Giannascoli’s decidedly lo-fi, close-mic’d music might seem a strange choice for a film so thematically and aesthetically trained on the internet, but his fusion of acoustic and digital instrumentation helps ground the humanity of Schoenbrun’s plot and characters.
That’s not to say the World’s Fair score doesn’t work on its own merits, even if it may scan as an errant side project for diehard Alex G fans. On “End Song,” which foregrounds Giannascoli’s vocals, he captures the murky danger at the film’s core with characteristically elliptical lyrics: “I tumble through my day/A fish in mud/A scarecrow full of blood,” he murmurs softly over a lone guitar, leaning into depersonalization to deepen the sense of isolation. “You know what they do to little dogs like you.” Then, halfway through, the song brightens up with an ascendant chord progression and beating drums, working its way to finish on a bittersweetly hopeful note. As Casey delves further and further into unreality, Giannascoli’s music and imagery linger like the vivid imprint of a nightmare.


Recording in Chicago with Steve Albini at the controls, Ben Frost unleashes volleys of brutalizing electronic sound as an allegory for the grim state of the world.

The Centre Cannot Hold

In June 2010, when Ben Frost announced his year-long mentorship with Brian Eno, the match-up may have appeared curious. Following a stint with Coldplay and a gospel album with David Byrne, Eno had recently co-produced U2’s latest comeback album and scored Peter Jackson’s supernatural drama The Lovely Bones. Frost’s newest works, on the other hand, were electroacoustic pieces made with the sounds of frying bacon, Swedish metal bands, orca whales, and new music composer Nico Muhly. By the Throat, Frost’s ferocious 2009 breakout album, positioned him more as a sonic thrill seeker than an artist interested in Eno’s kind of palatable brilliance. But there was some common ground. Eno’s experiments with tape loops, samples, and generative systems offered parallels with the field recordings and software Frost employed to extreme degrees. On a deeper level, the two shared a holistic and procedural approach to art. Reflecting on his time with Eno in a 2011 interview, Frost said, “It’s just been about occupying one another’s space.”
No joint music ever came of that project, nor were any performances or exhibits planned. In fact, the only material produced in direct relation to the partnership was a small collection of photos, interviews, and videos. But the ensuing years have consistently been the most fruitful and interesting of Frost’s career. The Australian-born, Reykjavík-based artist developed from a gifted producer revered in underground electronic circles into a widely prolific polymath. Between 2011 and 2015, he wrote music for multiple dance performances, co-produced a video-game soundtrack, directed and composed his first opera, and scored a film and a TV series. He also contributed to the music of everyone from fellow audio deconstructionist Tim Hecker to avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson and the inimitable Swans. In 2014, he released the official follow-up to By the Throat, the intensely immersive A U R O R A. The album was yet another huge leap forward for Frost, galvanizing his brutal sound design with the physicality of live drums and the brashness of rave aesthetics.
Political and social climates have drastically shifted since 2011, and so has Frost’s artistic focus. Following a trip to Democratic Republic of the Congo, recording sound for a video installation by filmmaker and photographer Richard Mosse, Frost has continued to explore the effects of war across the globe. Frost and Mosse were embedded along with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier sending warplanes to bomb ISIS, interviewing its crew and documenting the experience. Early this year, the three collaborated on the video installation Incoming, which presented the refugee crisis in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East through the lens of a military-grade, thermal imaging camera. Around the time of his mentorship with Eno, Frost called his work “the result of absorption via osmosis.” For all that’s changed since then, this part of his creative process has only become more vital in the years leading up to his fifth studio album, The Centre Cannot Hold.
Whereas previous records were either global affairs or written wherever Frost was living at the time (Australia, Iceland), he recorded the entirety of The Centre Cannot Hold with Steve Albini at the latter’s storied Electrical Audio studio. Tucked away in that nondescript corner of Chicago’s North Side, the two spent 10 days in the summer of 2016 dedicating spartan live performances to tape. The first sound heard in the opening track, “Threshold of Faith,” is a marker: Albini calmly saying, “You are rolling,” before seconds of hiss-addled silence swell with expectation. It’s an introduction to this music’s unvarnished reality. An artist most interested in the tactile properties of sound, Frost has traded the tangible, surreal instrumentation of his previous work for the sense of a specific place—its reverberating walls and the context around them. He starts The Centre Cannot Hold by placing the listener there next to him, and then he rains down fury.
But this rage isn’t blind, nor is it unwarranted. Where the music may lack the immediate punch of A U R O R A or the outré impulses of By the Throat, Centre nurtures a more deliberately emotional core. In the angriest moments, such as “Entropy in Blue,” blasted bass frequencies hit like thunder claps and leave blazing noise in their wake. The buzzing, chaotic “Trauma Theory” uses sounds like helicopters and alarms to fashion its oppressive anxiety. For each acrimonious stretch, Frost tempers his volatility with relative calm, albeit charged with sadness or desolation. The dark, wavering synths of “Ionia” recall the dreamlike pain that girded the Knife’s Silent Shout, as does the windswept “Healthcare.” At its best, Centre merges its emotional counterweights into a seething, howling whole. These pieces, including the centerpiece “Eurydice’s Heel,” are downright awe-inspiring, like witnessing firsthand an apocalyptic barrage fall from the heavens. If the outtakes and alternate versions on Frost’s previous EP, Threshold of Faith, sounded more like a flashy but sometimes aimless soundtrack, Centre recasts those ideas with a resonant sense of mortality, bringing the music into full, vivid relief.
Taking its title from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” Centre establishes itself as an allegory for the grim state of our world. Yet, with its ambiguous references and flurries of mangled emotion, the album’s air of protest feels largely abstract, albeit impassioned. Frost does point the finger once: “A Single Hellfire Missile Costs $100,000.” Named after what’s lovingly called “one of America’s favorite missiles,” the twinkling, almost childlike track is 12 seconds long, or what could also be a missile’s flight time after launch at close range. Its miniature leitmotif returns to punctuate “All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated,” as if to highlight the cause of the titular cataclysm. “Hellfire” echoes the time Frost spent aboard a nuclear-powered warship in 2015, where he captured the dread and dissonance of organized destruction. Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.


Band's first four albums are given expanded reissues.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: From Her to Eternity / The First Born Is Dead / Kicking Against the Pricks / Your Funeral... My Trial

Unlike his predecessors in the fraternal order of wild-child rock'n'roll frontmen, Nick Cave has shown that aging and raging are not mutually exclusive properties. Thirty years into his performing career, Cave's critical stock has arguably never been higher, following the one-two punch of 2007's Grinderman one-off and last year's Bad Seeds return Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! To wit, at similar points in their careers, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop were stocking used-CD-store bins with the likes of Wandering Spirit and Naughty Little Doggie.
Still, it can be difficult to reconcile the diaper-clad zombie doing strange things to billy goats in the "Nick the Stripper" video with the stately, sartorially blessed Renaissance man who, over the past decade, has comfortably infiltrated the pop-cultural establishment through acclaimed screenwriting efforts (2006's The Proposition), Kylie Minogue duets, and crooning Beatles songs for Sean Penn Oscar bait (I Am Sam). The 25th-anniversary reissues of his first four solo albums provide a gauzy lens on how Cave went from fronting one of rock's most volatile, destructive bands (The Birthday Party) to one of its most enduring, redoubtable ones, the Bad Seeds. (They also serve as a bittersweet end-of-an-era time capsule, what with the recently announced departure of Cave's long-time foil, Mick Harvey.) However, what you hear over the course of these albums is not the typical, linear trajectory from chaos to control, but a series of sudden reinventions and relapses. Like the temptation-plagued protagonists that figure in his songs, Nick Cave's road to redemption is marked by sharp, sudden detours back into the wild.
With Cave and Harvey recruiting Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld, ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, and guitarist Hugo Race mere months after the Birthday Party's 1983 demise, the collapsible sound of From Her to Eternity (1984) speaks to the Bad Seeds' hastily assembled origins and fluid instrumental roles. Cave may have be in the throes of an infamous heroin habit that would both fuel and plague him for most of the ensuing decade, but on From Her he sounds like he's in withdrawal from his former band, striving to distance himself from the Birthday Party's junkyard punk, but occasionally reverting to its shrieking hysterics ("Cabin Fever!").
When removed from the context of antagonizing a bar full of pissed-off Birthday Party fans, some of the album's more provocative gestures now feel diffused: While the grim reading Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" sees Cave already aligning himself with pop's legendary outsiders, the black-cloud ambience and gnashed-teeth delivery make it more closely resemble the opening overture to Goth: The Musical! But with the unnerving piano pulse and feedback spasms of "From Her to Eternity" and the murderous, militaristic goose-step of "Saint Huck", the Bad Seeds refashion the Birthday Party's post-punk splatter into something even more devious and powerful. Here, the band aren't merely providing musical accompaniment to Cave's nightmarish narratives; they're reacting to and manifesting them, favoring space and tactility-- the lacerating scrapes of guitar strings, the tremorous vibrations of piano chords-- over noise-for-noise's-sake. And therein lies the evil genius of the early Bad Seeds: They re-imagined the rock band as foley artists.
The opening track to the Bad Seeds' second album, The First Born Is Dead (1985), elevates that cinematic sensibility with the seven-minute, desert-storming thriller "Tupelo", a song that, even if Cave had succumbed to his smack habit in the mid-80s, would nonetheless have secured his legend. Where most post-punk/New Pop artists of the day had abandoned contrarian values to embrace concepts of affluence and technological progress, Cave and the Bad Seeds went about digging up the deadest of dead horses: the blues-- a music that, at the time, was being neutered into supper-club smoothness by the likes of Eric Clapton and Robert Cray. But if the back-to-roots tilt of The First Born Is Dead-- the first product of the band's four-year relocation to Berlin-- stands in stark contrast to the future-minded, sample-based pop music of the era, lyrically, "Tupelo" is no less a masterful mash-up, weaving a breathless yarn from strands of the Old Testament, the birth of Elvis and John Lee Hooker's "Tupelo Blues" (itself a re-imagination of the namesake city's history, casting it as a victim of the 1927 Mississippi River flood that, in reality, had spared it). The First Born Is Dead is never quite so bold again, adopting a more familiar bluesy swing on "Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree" and last-call piano-bar warbling on "Knocking on Joe", and when Cave bellows "I am the Black Crow King", you're more likely to picture one of the Lizard variety. But in the raging reappropriation of Bob Dylan's "Wanted Man", The First Born Is Dead feels like less of a genre exercise and more a distillation of the philosophy Cave would pursue for years to come-- i.e., when it comes to search-and-destroy deviance, punk rock's got nothing on wild-west outlaw history, old blues songs and the Bible.
If the Dylan covers and Hooker references hadn't already established Cave's old-soul aspirations, for his next move, he opted for a strategy that most aged entertainers resort to when trying to revive their careers three decades in, let alone three albums: the all-covers collection. In a sense, what Cave attempted with Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) was not all that different than what any one of us do when we hit a karaoke bar: Push ourselves out of our comfort zones and have a bit of a laugh while doing so-- certainly, the Bad Seeds have never sounded more cheerful than in the sloshed group sing-along of the Velvets' "All Tomorrow's Parties" and the cheeky, cowpoke reading of country ballad "Long Black Veil". But while stacked with murder ballads that fit right into Cave's wheelhouse -- "Hey Joe", Hooker's "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman"— what's most remarkable about the album is the amount of conviction Cave invests in his more schmaltzy selections. Rather than subject AM radio golden-oldies like Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", Tom Jones' "Weeping Annaleah", and Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten a Hold of My Heart" to contemptuous desecration, Cave sounds determined to use them as vehicles to make him a better singer, and the Bad Seeds a more sophisticated, stylistically diverse band.
Their next album would yield the real fruits of the Pricks experiment: Your Funeral... My Trial (1986) showcases Cave and the Bad Seeds' various modes and models with peak-form precision, building up from the elegantly wasted reveries ("Sad Waters", "Stranger Than Kindess"), creepy cabaret set pieces ("The Carny") and exquisite murder balladry (the title track) of the album's first act before erupting into the show-stopping, whip-cracking surges ("Jack's Shadow", "She Fell Away", a definitive cover of Tim Rose's "Long Time Man") of the second. Every guise Nick Cave would assume from hereon in-- from the dignified piano balladeer of 1990's The Good Son to the mad preacher of 2004's Abattoir Blues-- can be traced back here; indeed, even Grinderman's unhinged "No Pussy Blues" seems a touch less feral once you get reacquainted with the blasphemous depravity of Your Funeral's "Hard on for Love", which intensifies its libidinous thrust into rabid bloodlust and then abruptly cuts out when Cave hits his frothy-mouthed fever pitch.
The Bad Seeds' final Berlin-based recording-- 1988's Tender Prey, featuring certified Cave classics "The Mercy Seat" and "Deanna"-- is not a part of this initial remaster series, presumably so Mute could reissue the band's eight releases for the label in even blocks of four. However, its exclusion also underscores the notion that Your Funeral... My Tria**l represents the true apotheosis of the Bad Seeds, drawing from the strengths of its three quite different predecessors-- the horror-film atmosphere of From Her to Eternity, the apocalyptic oration of The First Born Is Dead, the velvet-jacket suavity of Kicking Against the Pricks-- into a superbly structured, singular work. Every bruised romantic to emerge in its wake-- from PJ Harvey to the Tindersticks, Mark Lanegan to the National-- owes it a tip of the syringe.
The timeless quality of Cave's songwriting sources, and the live-in-the-room ethos employed by producer Flood mean that these albums have aged infinitely better than most bands' mid-80s output, bearing none of the technical sheen, studio gimmickry and drum compression that dates so many records of the era. But these remasters are still worthy additions for both long-time enthusiasts and recent, post-Grinderman recruits. On top of revising the tracklists to their original vinyl running orders (the old North American CD versions bizarrely interspersed B-sides into the flow mid-album), the new mixes render the Bad Seeds' mise en scenes even more nightmarishly vivid-- on From Her to Eternity's chain-gang howl "Well of Misery", Harvey's percussive hits really do sound like hammers hitting rock, while the multi-tracked madness of Your Funeral's "The Carny" is about as close as you'll get to having Cave read you a scary bedtime story in your room.
The four issues are sold separately but, in a clever gambit to make you buy all four, the discs are each appended with sequential portions of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's accompanying DVD documentary, titled Do You Love Me. The films are strikingly simple, comprised entirely of uniformly barren, head-shot interviews with members of the Bad Seeds (Bargeld, Adamson), their peers (Go-Between Robert Vickers, former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard), celebrity admirers (Moby, Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner), critics (Simon Reynolds) as well as regular fans, including, most memorably, a stripper from L.A. who-- at height of Guns N Roses' late-80s peeler-bar dominance-- insisted on dancing to Cave's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". But beyond the revelatory anecdotes about each album's recording-- heck, I could watch Blixa Bargeld read out department-store catalogues-- the documentaries show that, for all of his songs' grandiose theatricality, Cave's music affects his fans (famous and otherwise) on the same deeply personal, intimate level. Fittingly, pretty much the only principal not interviewed about Cave is Cave himself-- because, like their subject, the filmmakers respect the distance between those who tell the myth and those who make it.


The latest mixtape from this brilliantly over-the-top R&B singer finds him mixing spirituality with salaciousness while creating a heavily Auto-Tuned space somewhere between T-Pain and SOPHIE.

Shugga Sextape Vol. 1

Dolled-up Brooklyn R&B singer Ian Isiah is a sex-positive star-in-waiting. His glam image and pansexual appeal work in tandem with his raunchy songs, panty droppas with a nod to the progressive. His music relishes overabundance, matching a voracious sexual appetite with wondrous, multi-tracked layers of Auto-Tuned artificiality. His voice is often distorted to the point of near androgyny, and he sees his look—invoking what Little Richard called “the gay thing” in an interview used as a skit here—as a political act of subversion. Isiah’s new project, his first in five years, called Shugga Sextape Vol. 1, is a showcase of casual attractions and titillating thrills.
Isiah came up in New York City’s GHE20GOTH1K scene, known for its mix of hip-hop culture and electronic music, and he is both a carrier and a product of that style. Produced largely by electronic producer Sinjin Hawke, Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 hedges toward the dancefloor, with icy synths and bump-n’-grind-worthy rhythms that venture as far as dancehall. He can flip into “Love in This Club”-levels of horny excess or turn a bedroom scene into ceremonial sex magic with the erotic dream logic of Eyes Wide Shut.
Isiah’s 2013 debut, The Love Champion, packed the steamy R&B of The-Dream into club-forward electronica. It was obvious he had pipes just like Terius Nash, but he wasn’t quite as sharp as a songwriter. But the songcraft was functional, and the songs almost whimsically lewd. If nothing else, that project sketched out the idea of what he wanted his music to sound like, serving as a blueprint for what has followed. Where his old songs blindly tried to reimagine what Jeremih sex jams might feel like produced by someone like Hudson Mohawke, his new songs are like transmissions from an alternate universe where the sensual and the divine not only commingle but are worshipped at the same altar.
Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 doesn’t just sound sexier; it sounds more self-assured. Isiah, having performed alongside Blood Orange for years, now seems to relish the spotlight. His growing command of Auto-Tune allows him to paint with a much broader color palette. The stunning pageantry of “Bleach Report” layers his vocals as if he’s being backed back a choir, his voice refracting like light catching a colorless diamond. Throughout the ménage à trois paen “Bedroom,” Isiah’s glazed warbles melt into synth arpeggios, and he sounds completely in control dictating positions, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out who exactly he is addressing. “Killup” mixes whine-friendly dancehall with a capella, dropping out the snares so he can make a pitch-corrected sentence seem like one run-on word.
The nonstop shape-warping shimmer that distorts images for much of Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 clears for a two-song serenade at the close, and the purity of Isiah’s crystalline vocals really shines through. In these instances, he makes the erotic feel like gospel. And it is in that contradiction, where sex becomes spiritual, that Ian Isiah seems to prophesy R&B’s future.


The former Mazzy Star frontwoman presents three gentle tracks where her mature, reserved delivery gets tangled in threads of childlike whimsy.

Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions: Son of a Lady EP

Son of a Lady EP

Even in Hope Sandoval’s early work with Mazzy Star, the singer, then in her twenties, did not give off an air of youthfulness. Her vocal on “Fade Into You”—the 1993 track that marked the band’s one and only foray into Hot 100 territory—sounded vaguely anesthetized; it’s the voice of a woman who’s seen plenty and knows better than to pour more feeling into the world than it could possibly give to her in return. Over the years, that world-weariness was stitched into Sandoval’s assorted recording projects, including a handful of releases with her band, the Warm Inventions, and Mazzy Star’s comeback, 2013’s Seasons of Your Day. Sandoval’s latest release with her band, Son of a Lady, comprises three gentle tracks where her mature, reserved delivery gets tangled in threads of childlike whimsy.
The EP opens with a lullaby. Nursery-style word repetition and simple rhyme are the building blocks of “Sleep,” and when the first ping of glockenspiel—that old classroom favorite—hits, you almost start to wonder when the children’s chorus will join in. The lyrics tucked in between refrains of “Sleep, sleep” and “Weep, weep,” though, are more unsettling than pacifying, and Sandoval’s suggestion to sleep “until you feel desire” or “until you don’t feel alone” posits sleep as a cure-all for depressive tendencies. Above the strum of an acoustic guitar, she seems to long for the time when sleep was a routine activity celebrated in song, not a necessary refuge from the disappointments of the waking world.
Where “Sleep” borrows from lullabies, “Son of a Lady” takes cues from fairy tales. Sandoval sings in hushed tones about “the son of a lady/Whose heart was betrayed”—character description that could be plucked from the pages of a child’s storybook. The tale of secret messages and locked doors is scored by glittering strings that are the sonic equivalent of twinkle lights, so gorgeous and glowing that they effectively distract from anything unsightly lurking in the shadows. The unlit corners of “Son of a Lady,” are filled with intimations of heartbreak and betrayal; and, unlike fairy tales, this song gives no indication that resolution is imminent. Sandoval’s voice here is worn as ever and does not inspire hope for a bright future.
The last of the three tracks, “Let Me Get There,” feels separate from the others. It’s a solo version of a song previously released as a duet with Kurt Vile; Sandoval’s vocal melts into the warm acoustic accompaniment, but without the tempering presence of Vile’s brand of indie cool, the phrase “It’s all in the groove” sounds strange in her mouth. The irony of that insistent, recurring request of the chorus is that it embraces a kind of logic that Sandoval’s music typically rejects—the lyric implies a specific destination, an urge to move forward that rarely characterizes her songs themselves. Instead, they meander, consider, and drift in and out of focus. The languid soundscapes Sandoval and her collaborators have created over the years forgo driving production, overt emotional upheaval, or anything else overly dramatic; they revel in stasis.
That is, perhaps, why we can’t fault the singer for sounding on Son of a Lady almost exactly as she did during her tenure as frontwoman of Mazzy Star, decades after the fact. Her songs aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and neither is her artistic project as a whole; when stasis is this intoxicating, nobody cares to ask for change. The enduring sameness of Sandoval’s style also provides proper context for the nostalgic undercurrents of Son of a Lady. After all, what is nostalgia but immobility—the halting of forward motion by the insatiable desire to go back.


The multi-talented Floridian musician flaunts his 2000s indie and emo influences on a debut EP of perky pop that chronicles a post-breakup transformation.

Moodie EP

Yuno Moodie literally makes pop music in his bedroom, but “bedroom pop” doesn’t quite cover his range. The Florida native’s influences (which he’s never been reticent to shout out) are a mixed bag of 2000s indie and emo gems, encompassing AFI, Regina Spektor, Animal Collective, Flight of the Conchords, and many more. And the new Sub Pop signee doesn’t just write, perform, record, and engineer all of his music—he creates all of the accompanying visuals, from album art to music videos.
His debut, Moodie, comes in the form of a breakup record. Although it is Yuno’s surname, the EP's title also suggests the spectrum of vivid emotions and dynamic instrumentation contained within its six songs. Moving on can be a process, and Moodie explores the varying degrees of acceptance, anger, and misery that ordeal entails. Yuno illuminates how the end of a relationship can create a disjointed sense of self. As painful and intense as the experience of putting oneself back together in the aftermath of heartbreak can be, it can also serve as a catalyst for reflection and growth. In Yuno’s case, the breakup turns out to be an impetus for self-discovery and innovation.
Opening track “Amber” captures the sense of chaos that immediately follows a big breakup, interspersed with glimpses of future clarity and relief. It begins with a recording of Yuno preaching strength and love in Jamaican patois. His childlike nasal vocals are manipulated and filtered, as though rescued from an old warped tape from his parents’ home island. But the words themselves suggest an older and wiser version of Yuno giving his younger self a pep talk: “You must look inna di mirror, bust through the exterior, and be the superior.” In the chorus, however, he can’t help but rifle through memories saturated in melancholy. “Please call for help, I need to hear an ambulance,” he begs, amid muffled yelling and yelps that mimic the sound of a siren. The song’s vibe remains pleasant even as Yuno succumbs to hysteria, brightened by clinking glass and a hopscotching ballpark-organ riff. It’s a complementary lead-in to the defiant “No Going Back,” solidifying his resolve to resist the bittersweet memories that keep infiltrating his mind.
The EP’s standout is “So Slow,” an exercise in catharsis and self-actualization buoyed by bright, balmy sounds. As clanking chimes swim around a hopping bassline, Yuno sounds as though he’s yelling into a cave (a vocal effect he employs with less success on the fierce, Sleigh Bells-style preceding track, “Why For”). “Still I have to wait for relief/I’ll be OK eventually,” he shouts, with an urgency that captures the psychological intensity of his healing process. A testament of growth, “So Slow” also recognizes that change doesn’t happen all at once. “For the ones who move fast/Time heals so slow/But soon you’ll move past,” Yuno assures the listener—and himself.
Moodie is about facing the unknown and feeling lost in your own life, and in that sense, it’s more than just a breakup record. Beginning with uncertainty and ending with a newfound understanding of personal strength, its narrative of self-discovery also suggests the process of an artist developing his creative identity. In the jovial pep talk from “Amber,” Yuno concludes, “Yah haffi be somebody you are proud to be.” He both portrays and achieves this transformation on his first EP, in a triumphant combination of vulnerable, emotionally complex lyricism and perky pop.


On his third solo album, the New York producer finally proves he’s a proficient rapper, but his audacious beats take a backseat in the process.

Good Movie

Pi’erre Bourne is a producer first, even if he won’t admit that. On the deluxe edition of The Life of Pi’erre 4, released in 2020, none of the words he rapped through a glaze of Auto-Tune mattered as much as the dreamy synths or the hypnotic overload of producer tags. The beats powered that project, but that’s not the only thing that Pi’erre wants you to focus on. Since he first emerged in the mainstream landscape with lush productions for Playboi Carti’s 2017 self-titled mixtape, he’s been on a mission to have his raps taken just as seriously. On Good Movie, he accomplishes that by stripping away some of the flavor of his instrumentals and shifting attention to what he’s saying. It mostly works out—he’s a pretty good rapper, but softening his production isn’t entirely worth it.
It’s not that Pi’erre is masterfully technical all of a sudden; there’s no flow that will blow you away, and if you single out a punchline or two, you’ll probably burst out laughing. But he makes up for that deficit by giving the project a strong narrative pulse. This is a breakup album, or maybe an album about wanting to fall in love after a breakup. Before this record, his lyrics felt strung-together and goofy. But on Good Movie, there’s a point when he outdoes himself; some lines are astonishingly inane.
Throughout the album, he bounces between wistfulness and bitterness, reflecting on minute details and fond memories of a relationship, like when his girlfriend got her hair and nails done. It’s music that is less interested in big arguments between partners, and more in the moments that come before and after them. “Where You Going” is a formal breakup song, but there’s no melodrama. Instead, he lilts about the slow deterioration of his connection with a past fling. Over a downtempo, spaced-out groove on “Love Drills,” the writing is simple but effective: “All the love we had, now we need our space.” Unlike the vast majority of post-Future melodic heartbreak rap ballads, there’s hardly any straightforward wails here—you know, complaints along the lines of, “Oh, I’m in so much pain” or “Fuck my ex.” Refreshingly, Pi’erre’s melancholy is a bit more subtle and muddled.
Meanwhile, the beats are solid: They are soothing, sweet, and build slowly to their climaxes, even if they are too clean at times. What is a Pi’erre Bourne album with tempered production? It’s like a Spike Lee movie that’s only mildly angry, or a Kevin Durant game where he passes on pull ups. Brash and busy yet sweet production is his thing. The jam-packed beats of the deluxe edition of TLOP4 too often buried his raps, but that organized chaos is missing here. “Shorty Diary” is begging for some glitchiness; the dance cut “What You Gotta Do” is too elementary. The flattened drum’n’bass rhythm on “DJ in the Car” is only saved by his lovelorn Auto-Tune croons going full Zapp and Roger on “Computer Love” at the song’s end. When the production is dry and there are too many lulls, the album struggles to sustain the energy, especially since the beats bleed into one another, as if the whole project were a single, never-ending song.
There might be more vocal high points than production ones on Good Movie. Pi’erre’s hook on “Kingdom Hall” is so bad it’s good: “She pop up at my place, Jehovah’s Witness,” he coos, his voice drenched in waves of reverb, resembling K-Ci and JoJo’s “Crazy.” On “Kevin Heart,” romantic troubles lead to some of his catchiest and most heart-wrenching riffing.
But Pi’erre has proven he can do so much more on the production side, an ambition that he just doesn’t demonstrate as often here. The saccharine melody on “System” is overpowering, but his opening lyrics about nostalgically scrolling through an ex’s Instagram are strong enough to stand on their own. The fluttering layers of “Hop in the Bed” push his croons to the background, but the mood doesn’t suffer. The twinkling keys and woozy synths of “Ex Factor” tell a better love-drunk story than the lyrics do. Too often, his beats aren’t this alive. He may have proved his rapping is worthy of attention, but to get there, he had to hold back his singular vision as a producer.


Macklemore’s earnest yet clunky new album attempts to split the difference between high-budget stadium pop and grimy boom-bap.

Ben

Since The Heist, his breakout 2012 LP with Ryan Lewis, Macklemore has been painfully self-aware in his music. He’s aware of his whiteness, and how it gives him a leg up on his competition. He’s aware of his detractors, who dismiss him as a flash in the pan. He clearly hears the criticism, and in the past a lot of his raps have felt like retorts to various tweets and thinkpieces. Though he hasn’t returned to the commercial heights of hits like “Can’t Hold Us” and “Thrift Shop,” his fanbase remains sizable and hungry. His new album, Ben, finds him on the other side of a pandemic-assisted relapse, an underground rapper turned international pop star who’s now more concerned with the opinion of his wife and kids than any critic.
More than any of Macklemore’s previous LPs, Ben has two parallel aesthetics: soaring pop songs with stadium-sized hooks alongside grimy DJ Premier sample-stitched boom-bap. It’s difficult to reconcile the Ed Sheeran impression of guest singer Windser on “Maniac” with Macklemore’s snarling bars on “Grime,” a stripped-down number with funky horns and strutting bass. “Grime” sits smack in the middle of a three-song run that starts with Premier’s “Heroes” and ends with “I Need,” a sarcastic send-up of the narcissists that thrive in our culture of conspicuous consumption. As a three-track EP, these songs might have been an eye-opening reminder that the man can still rap. Wedged between his “living my best life” pop and midlife crisis introspectives, the sequencing is jarring.
So is Macklemore a pop star or a rapper? The two are not mutually exclusive, but they feel distinctly separate within his catalog. At times, Ben sounds like the work of three different artists, perhaps reflecting the upheaval of its recording. Macklemore started work on the album before the pandemic shut things down; at home with no shows to play or 12-step meetings to attend, he relapsed for several weeks, fracturing his life and family. The album’s scattershot approach might have worked, too, if the transition from bubblegum pop to East Coast grime weren’t so abrupt. There are some catchy melodies beneath the slick synth-pop sheen of “No Bad Days” and “1984,” but they’re also drenched in cheese. It’s juvenile by design, the perfect karaoke party-bus jam for his 7-year-old and her friends.
Ben’s more personal angle also winds up underselling one of Macklemore’s greatest talents: mimicry. He possesses an innate ability to emulate other rappers’ flows, a skill honed by years of fandom. You can hear it clearly on his previous album, Gemini, where he bounces along with Lil Yachty and rolls triplets as fluently as Offset. Yet with few other rappers featured on Ben, his own flows seem to fall into two distinct patterns: buoyant exuberance on the hyped-up pop tracks and a morose monotone on the more plaintive ballads.
Part of the reason Macklemore is so popular is that his perspective is familiar to huge swaths of rap fans. His diction is clear, his references are decipherable. He grew up a white kid obsessed with hip-hop, enthralled by hood tales from New York and Los Angeles, idolizing hustlers-turned-rappers from hundreds of miles away. If Eminem allowed white kids to imagine themselves on stage, rapping like their idols, Macklemore is them on stage—white kids who love rap and were told their whole lives that their version of Black music is inauthentic. His Del the Funky Homosapien flow on “Heroes” is hard, yet his idolatry of carjacking and gangster movies scans a bit silly. And while his apology to his wife (“Sorry”) feels genuine, it’s also rife with clichés.
And that’s ultimately what Macklemore’s music is missing: These experiences, while certainly authentic, aren’t particularly interesting. The struggle of the wealthy and talented white rapper was never especially sympathetic. And on Ben, his trials are mostly internal, the enduring struggle of man to find meaning and leave a legacy. This Macklemore is likely the most honest version we’ve seen to date. So what if he’s a little corny? Most of us are.


First proper solo release from Crooked Fingers mastermind is full of spare and intimate folk songs.

To the Races

On his first proper solo album, To the Races, Eric Bachmann continues the exploration of American folk music he initiated with Crooked Fingers. Stripped down to Bachmann's gravelly timbre accompanied by acoustic guitar, these 10 songs are restrained and unadorned, making this his most austere release. For most songwriters, boiling songs down to such spare arrangements is a risky move; there's no veneer of glossy production to hide behind. But Bachmann's elliptical picking patterns are always tasteful and his voice is rich and engaging enough to fill the space.
Opener "Man O' War", in which the narrator is "caught up in a dangling sting off the shore," unfurls like a landscape at dawn. Calling to mind the density of vintage Bob Dylan lyrics, Bachmann layers image upon image in this sprawling song, set in Spain, which acts as a metaphor for displacement and loneliness. Augmented by Miranda Brown's delicate backing vocals and spacious, echoing piano accents, the naked arrangement of "Man O' War" charges the song with an affecting emotional honesty.
Where To the Races falters is when Bachmann lapses into the sort of posturing that plagues many singer-songwriters. Like Dylan or, particularly on the hoarsely whispered "Home", Bruce Springsteen, Bachmann can adopt a detached and knowing persona, weathered by experience and weary of the world. When, in "Carrboro Woman", Bachmann sings, "I came upon a wounded beast/ She was laying in the sand/ Her heart held in her hand," he exudes all the self-importance and arrogance of Leonard Cohen, but lacks the same poetic elegance to pull it off.
In spite of its flaws, To the Races charms with its somber atmosphere. Evenly paced and modestly scaled, the album sustains a mood that effectively supports Bachmann's vulnerable material. And by limiting outside influence to Brown's gorgeous backing vocals and Tom Hagerman's violin contributions-- most notably on the jaunty title track-- the album has a hermetic feel, recalling other intimate statements such as Cat Power's haunting Covers Record or Kristin Hersh's elegiac The Grotto. And although To the Races isn't as affecting as either of those projects, it's an admirably understated record that reveals yet another side of Bachmann's prolific career.


The Philadelphia musician offers a meticulously filtered, distorted document of indie rock. Though it’s his most accessible album, his best traits remain obtuse storytelling and oddly-shaped songs.

Rocket

In a sense, singer/songwriter Alex Giannascoli is the modern ideal for an indie rock throwback. The frequent comparisons with Elliott Smith or Sparklehorse are legitimate, but mostly regarding his recording process: Every production decision—whether double-tracking vocals or close-mic’ing the guitars—creates the assumption of intimacy, recalling an earlier time when instrumental or monetary limitations necessitated ingenuity. But he records on a laptop rather than a 4-track, and he was an early example of a songwriter leveraging a strong Bandcamp presence into a deal with a high-profile imprint, in his case, Domino. Beach Music, his first album for his new label, was a gorgeous and puzzling release that gained esteem throughout 2015, but it seemed determined to offer continuity with his scruffy early work rather than to serve as any kind of break out. Rocket, a record that first feels oddly soldered together, is in a sense the album that Beach Music wanted to be, the most comprehensive and accessible document of a diffuse catalog.
Even the newfound stylistic hooks here are slippery things. Singles “Proud” and “Bobby” are rootsy in an unfamiliar way—there’s twang, fiddle, yearning harmonies, a duet with fellow Philadelphian singer/songwriter Emily Yacina, and the broad influence of Lucinda Williams. Otherwise, Rocket’s Americana is cobbled together from the junkyards scoured by experimentalists like Califone; “Poison Root” and “Alina” in particular imagine if “The Orchids” spawned an entire subgenre of backwoods psychedelia. There’s some eyebrow-raising Auto-Tune on the queasy piano ballad “Sportstar” and “Brick” is a welcome reminder of the evocative, hard-edged screams of his live show, though the overall experience is a little like hearing a Show Me the Body gig from outside the venue.
Though the sonic diversions on Rocket are the most ephemeral draws, they provide immediate access points and a means of providing distance from a simple archetype. Both Alex G’s falsetto and the cocktail jazz arrangement of “County” obscure how its title references a gnarly prison scene. The narrator, “locked up for nothing/stealing or something” sits next to bloody wall, courtesy of a seemingly quiet kid who swallowed two bags of heroin and a razor blade. “Hey, why don’t you write that into a song/Your fans will dig that,” an officer snarks after Alex sings, “See, I got stories.” It’s unclear whether “see” is meant as an interjection or a response to the prevailing image of him as someone who goes out of his way to deflect any sort of attention or self-disclosure. How would your opinion of Alex G change if “County” was about him? Entire album narratives have been framed on lesser stories.
It’s unclear how much of Rocket is autobiographical—the closer one leans into these songs, the more they confound the first assumption. “Proud” and “Sportstar” can be instantaneously read as rock ‘n’ jock archetypes if that’s what you want to use them for. When “I wanna be a star like you/Wanna make something that’s true” becomes, “I wanna be a fake like you” on “Proud,” it’s easy enough to take Alex G literally considering his touchy relationship with the press. But it’s just as likely that he’s being sarcastic, maybe about himself, maybe about the truthful nature of alt-country. That might initially seem the case when he sings, “Let me play on your team/I’m clean” on “Sportstar,” but every seemingly plainspoken lyric thereafter takes on a tone of anger, then self-hatred and emotions that are much more unsettling (“In the back of my car/Could you hit me too hard?/You’re scarred”) for their inability to be defined or described.
Rocket isn’t unknowable or obtuse, just indirect—more willing to get under the skin or tug on an ear than hit directly on the nose. This kind of purposeful restraint can feel damn near novel in the current day, as efforts to illuminate the artistic process becomes its own kind of oppression—so many of Alex G’s peers feel the need to issue statements outlining the meaning behind any given song and album releases feel like the endpoint of an exhausting cycle of content creation rather than a start of a meaningful relationship. “The reason you enjoy music is because of its unlimited potential, the inability to really understand it,” he offered in a recent interview, and that’s projection to a certain degree. Sometimes, there really is no substitute for the revelations that come when an artist unlocks the mysteries of their work. But it’s certainly the reason why Rocket feels like one of the year’s most endlessly generous records, as Alex G’s restraint is our gift that keeps on giving.


The noise-rock band’s fifth album features new voices, new textures, but strikes the same affected pose.

Pinned

In a 2010 review of The Big Lebowski, film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the Coen brothers’ cult comedy was “about an attitude, not a story.” Brooklyn noise rock trio A Place to Bury Strangers can be counted among a growing number of New York bands with a similar approach to music. Just as Lebowski used its farcical plot as a scaffold for character and wit, so A Place to Bury Strangers uses songwriting as a pedestal for a certain historical flavor of cool. Album after album, the band has reinstated the same compositional logics: simple post-punk basslines; driving industrial drums; violent, brooding lyrics; and squalls and squalls of noise. They are historical actors reanimating the New York of Suicide and Sonic Youth, luxuriating in memories of a cheap, scrappy city years after CBGB’s was priced out of the neighborhood.
APTBS’s fifth album, Pinned, at least folds in a few new elements to the band’s sound. It’s their first release with drummer Lia Braswell, formerly of Le Butcherettes, behind the kit, and her secondary role as a backup singer means it’s also their first release with a second voice chiming in across most tracks. Braswell makes a good foil to frontman Oliver Ackermann’s unflappable deadpan. Her light, airy delivery offsets his pained tenor, which always sounds sung through several rows of gritted teeth. Pinned also indulges more flexible vocal melodies than much of APTBS’s output; Braswell and Ackermann’s voices lilt upward over an endlessly droning two-chord progression on “Never Coming Back,” they dovetail charmingly on “Frustrated Operator,” and they crinkle vulnerably atop a reverb-heavy Cure bassline on “Situations Changes.”
Pinned reels in some of APTBS’s famous noise, but it doesn’t budge Ackermann from his station as a long-standing rock’n’roll archivist. The band’s discography to date could be boxed up and sold as A History of Alternative Rock in 50 Basslines—it’s that faithful to its myriad but period-specific sources. To the uninitiated, an album like Pinned probably makes a good primer, a gateway drug into a rich history of wiry bands melting people’s eardrums out of their skulls. To listeners with very little eardrum left to melt, it can feel reiterative: entertaining not because it’s never happened before, only because it’s happening now.
Though a competent quilter of established rock gestures, Ackermann has never really gotten the hang of penning lyrics to go on top of them. It is easy to sing with disaffection; harder to write words that actually sound good in the sheath of an uncaring drawl. “Never Coming Back” works because it’s chock full of vaguely dispirited phrases, like “I drift so low” and “I get so high,” that are easy to ignore in favor of riding the overall groove. “Too Tough to Kill,” with the couplet “Kill more dumb shit/Build more life forms,” sprays like masculinized bluster, and “Frustrated Operator” loses footing with the hypnagogic sequence, “Out to get us/Manipulate us/Hot potato/Operator.” “Brain flesh” (“Was It Electric”) sounds like a phrase a zombie in Wayfarers on a motorcycle might utter and I hope I never have to hear it again.
A Place to Bury Strangers could do what they do indefinitely, which is great news for concertgoers who love to be walloped in the ribcage with the output of a dozen bespoke guitar pedals. It will probably always be fun to see this band live, just as it’s always fun to see a great character actor put on a show even when there’s no plot and no dialogue to speak of. APTBS songs become about poise and a pose. For them, it seems, that’s enough.


Though it’s one of his most considered and carefully curated projects, Gucci plays it uncharacteristically safe for most of it.

Evil Genius

Evil Genius might be the first album in Gucci Mane’s enormous discography that he took his time on. It follows his last project, El Gato: The Human Glacier, by a full year, a gap that would hardly be worth mentioning for some artists but is unprecedented for Gucci, a rapper who spent three years in prison and still averaged about a mixtape a month. So Evil Genius answers a question that even the most diehard Gucci fans must have wondered by the third or fourth time he dropped a trilogy of mixtapes on the same day: What would he be capable of if he were a little more selective?
After months of big talk from Gucci about his newfound high standards—“I’m trying to make this project one of my best projects ever,” he told Billboard—is Evil Genius any better than the average Gucci Mane album? Not really. There are fewer outright duds than on most of his projects, but also fewer happy accidents. His rhymes feel more rehearsed than usual, but that isn’t necessarily an improvement. On his best verses, Gucci sounds like he’s laughing at his own private joke. Here he mostly feels like he’s posing for a video shoot.
For a rapper known for his recklessness, he plays it uncharacteristically safe. Save for the prim, Bruno Mars and Kodak Black-assisted soul throwback “Wake Up in the Sky,” Evil Genius sticks entirely to of-the-moment trap, with a cadre of the industry’s top producers all contributing mostly interchangeable music. The beats are hard, sometime impressively so—especially during the record’s cold, bass-heavy opening stretch, including the Quavo feature “BiPolar,” where Gucci lands the record’s greatest Gucci-ism: “I’m talking to a shrink and I’m draped in a mink.” But they’re also overfamiliar. Each song is like a round of horse against a guy who insists on sinking the same two-pointer every shot.
Listeners skimming the record for something different might as well skip straight to the second half, where a few beats have a little more spin on them. A combination of alarming 808s and a gabby Kevin Gates feature jolt “I’m Not Goin’” to life, while “Lost Ya’ll Mind” is absolutely wild, with synths that play like a microwaved Super Nintendo cartridge. “Solitaire,” with Migos and Lil Yachty, has some cool, Tetris-shaded keys, too, but an album with more than two dozen credited producers really ought to have more surprises than this.
Production isn’t the album’s biggest concern, though. More than any project Gucci’s recorded since he emerged from prison happy, sober, and looking like he stepped out of a Bowflex ad, Evil Genius has a past-tense problem. Too often Gucci is rapping about the things he used to do, the life he used to lead, the terror he used to be. He’s already documented all that extensively, and his raps about those darker days aren’t becoming any more revealing the further removed he is from them. Instead, it would be nice to hear him rap a little more about the man he’s become, the ab-plated, kale-devouring, self-actualized newlywed currently living out one of those most riveting second acts in rap history. Now there’s a figure we still have new things to learn about. Gucci Mane still has plenty of new ground to explore, but on Evil Genius, he opts not to go there.


Following a four-year hiatus, the Chicago instrumental group Pelican return with a new guitarist and a new album, Forever Becoming, a collection that finds them raging like they never have before.

Forever Becoming

Instrumental rock bands engender a feverish devotion. Groups like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor boast rabid fanbases yet get raked over the coals—much of the time by those same fans. But, perhaps none of the aforementioned groups have seen the kind of "Crossfire"-level handwringing as Chicago's Pelican. Couple the group's four-year hiatus with the fact that they often toe a line that dips into metal territory—another style that claims adherents quick to nitpick—and you’ve got a recipe for controversy. But, on Forever Becoming’s second track, Pelican seem to be issuing a gag order of sorts. Two minutes into “Deny the Absolute”, it’s apparent that the band is as heavy and anthemic as ever. Pelican can’t hear you above the din.
“Deny the Absolute” is a remarkable song with an even more striking center. It chugs along ominously and fiercely like something Colonel Kilgore might have selected to play after “Ride of the Valkyries”. It’s utterly thrilling, a testament to Pelican’s present unity. Oft-maligned drummer Larry Herweg keeps a tight beat, while his brother, Bryan, unleashes a thrusting bass assault. And, to reiterate, it is heavy: the kind of track that a baseball closer might be wise to adopt as entry music.
It’s the pinnacle of Forever Becoming, but the record has other worthwhile moments. “The Tundra” paces forward with a vigorous clip and ignites in its last minute. It’s further testimony that Pelican are at their best in synced-up moments. “Immutable Dusk” is more ruminative, splitting the difference between the sounds of Explosions in the Sky and, say, Isis or Neurosis. (Most of the song titles on Forever Becoming could be easily mistaken for lost Sylvia Plath poems or, at least, the wall scribblings of a Sarah Lawrence College sophomore. As a recent press release ponderously reports: “Forever Becoming is an immense, speaker-rattling meditation on the infinite cycle of death and life.”) “Dusk” is followed by another epic, “Threnody”, which adeptly explores the poles between quiet and noise.
Many instrumental bands exploit builds, and while Pelican do so with tact, you can be left wanting more variation and exploration. “Threnody” moves from tickled picking into a teamed-up crescendo. It’s a trip, the quartet—which includes guitarists Trevor de Brauw and Dallas Thomas—strumming as quickly as possible. Still, it’s all a bit familiar. Haven’t others plotted out this territory previously and more effectively? And, further, hasn’t Pelican? Certainly, a track like “Autumn Into Summer”, from 2005’s Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, uses its nearly 11 minutes to expertly showcase a raw and bold post-rock. The layered guitars on it (one of them is played by Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who departed the band last year and was replaced by Swan King’s Thomas) converse and converge with each other in a way not found on Forever Becoming.
Pelican’s harder sound makes such earlier developments hazy. Yet, the band comes back to them awkwardly. The album’s closer, “Perpetual Dawn”, is a dead-ringer for a tune Mogwai would choose to cap an LP or show. But it’s that fact—that Mogwai or Godspeed or Explosions could be playing it—which is troubling. It’s an oversimplification to declare that a share of post-rock “sounds the same” but, sometimes, Pelican suffers from being too weighed down by its roots. That said, when Pelican rages—in a way they never have before—they prove they still have plenty of life left.


Recorded over two nights at London’s Café Oto in 2017, this live performance from the group showcases the band’s unique ability to fuse folk traditionalism with drone experimentation.

Reticence / Resistance

Over the past 30 years, Pelt has become known for their distinct blend of Americana, drone, improvisation, and psychedelic rock. When they first formed as a rock band in Richmond, Virginia in 1993, they quickly learned that they weren’t interested in tight forms and fully composed structures, rather, they found themselves jamming in order to see where the sound would take them. And as they played more, they began absorbing the variety of styles that appeared around them. They visited places like La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, a sound and light installation in New York that explores how long-held tones and vibrant lights shift over time, and got into drone music’s immersive qualities. Over time, each band member has delved into genres such as free jazz, Indian classical, and Appalachian folk.
Reticence / Resistance showcases two tracks that each explore the band’s variety of influences from a different angle: one ecstatic and one inquisitive. It sits in the sounds and styles Pelt has carefully mastered over time, patiently finding moments of joyful reflection. Pelt recorded the album over two nights at London’s Café Oto in 2017, and it provides a snapshot of how the band effortlessly melds a flurry of musical ideas into one. The band’s current lineup of fiddler Mike Gangloff, pianist Patrick Best, percussionist and banjo player Nathan Bowles, and harmonium player Mikel Dimmick play on the album. Unusual instrumentation like bowls, bells, and gongs are also scattered throughout the music, helping to generate the meditative, folk-like sound the band perfects here.
“Diglossia,” the album’s opening track, is a jubilant articulation of the band’s vision. The song’s trilling piano and exuberant fiddle create a sense of exhilaration from the first few moments. Gangloff’s untamed violin, which draws equally from the style of Tony Conrad’s Four Violins and Appalachian fiddle, drives the music’s continual forward motion, while underneath, harmonium and bowed banjo hum with entrancing, long-lasting tones. It’s classic Pelt, grounded in folk traditions and spaced-out drone that fill up every second with seemingly endless layers of noise.
Drone music is rooted in the idea that tones held for a very long time will morph ever so slightly, changing our perception as they unfold. Pelt highlights those moments of metamorphosis. On Reticence / Resistance’s second track, “Sundogs -> Chiming -> The Door In The Hill,” they trade cascading melodies for distant hums, choosing to explore a more muted palette. But the band’s vibrancy doesn’t quite disappear: rather, it goes through a transformation. Gangloff plays his fiddle a little slower and the bowls and bells sound more distant; they’re content to sit in that uncertainty and see where it goes for a while. But by the end of the track, Pelt’s sound becomes bright once again, finding catharsis through a gradual shift of tone.
Despite their taste for sustained notes that induce a trance state, Pelt makes music that feels rooted deeply in active participation. Reticence / Resistance feels that way, too, by balancing shapeshifting, dreamy tones with robust, earthy melodies that follow the group’s already established musical paths. Through a complex layering of styles and instruments, the band chases celebratory release, and they bring you along to feel it, too.

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With tangled, stop-start arrangements that open to unexpected trap doors, the composer and synthesizer musician brings playfulness to the fore. You might call this her “pop” album.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Let’s Turn It Into Sound

Let’s Turn It Into Sound

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith revels in the plasticity of electronic sound, stretching and twisting it with colorful, kinetic abandon. The Orcas Island native’s work isn’t ambient in the strictest sense, despite her billowing synthesizers or her affinity for yoga and meditation. Smith’s songs are too composerly, too active, her voice leaping nimbly over arpeggios that churn like candy-colored magma. Her music’s lightheartedness can be subtle, overshadowed by the aura of hushed awe that hangs over stately chord progressions, bucolically burbling waveforms, and open-armed invocations of wonder, like this mantra from 2017’s The Kid: “If I let go of holding on to my ego/Will you let go too?” But on Let’s Turn It Into Sound, her playfulness comes to the fore. You might call this Smith’s “pop” album. Her beatific overtones have morphed, giving way to sparkly-eyed whimsy and, in places, some shockingly muscular grooves. At first, the squirrelly twists and turns can be hard to follow; an air of mischief keeps things chaotic. But once you lock into the ebullient mood, its joy—her joy—is unmistakable and irresistible.
To underscore just how far we’ve come from the abiding calm of a track like “Remembering,” from 2020’s mind-and-body-uniting The Mosaic of Transformation, she kicks off Let’s Turn It Into Sound with an antic burst of 8-bit bleeps. For anyone expecting the usual atmosphere of patient reverence, it feels like stumbling into a secret video arcade hidden in the backroom of the ashram. Then, a sudden shift: “Have you felt lately/The beauty that you are?” she sings, painting an unpredictable melody in zig-zagging stripes over a soft bed of organs. While you’re still meditating on that positive affirmation, an erratic beat slams into the side of our protective sanctuary, sending stained glass flying. Drums stutter and lurch, echoing the glitch techno of the Y2K era. Clarinets carve out a momentary pocket of calm. And finally, a buoyant chorus comes soaring over a slightly less scattershot iteration of that same stumbling rhythm, until downward faders usher us gently out. The whole album is like this, and it’s both disorienting and thrilling: a funhouse full of trap doors, fakeouts, and wormholes.
Featuring an array of Buchla modular synthesizers along with other synths, woodwinds, and airy pads made from samples of Smith’s own voice, the record’s palette is similar to that of her last couple of albums. But the edges are sharper, the colors brighter, the textures more vivid. In “Pivot Signal,” she arrays pulsing synths and woodwinds into a gorgeous piece that recalls the kaleidoscopic spin of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, telegraphing a clear-eyed mixture of hope and resolve. “Locate” begins with wheezy reeds but soon blossoms into a lopsided hip-hop cadence arrayed in angel choir and perky sax and flute, like a three-way fusion of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Flying Lotus, and Raymond Scott. Smith has toyed with beats before—for instance, on The Mosaic of Transformation’s “Steady Heart”—but they’ve never been as foregrounded, nor as forceful, as they are here: The elliptical groove of “Is It Me or Is It You?” takes cues from both Ricardo Villalobos and Autechre, while “Unbraid: The Merge” incorporates dembow-inspired syncopations into the kind of deep-diving house rhythm that you might expect to hear pouring out of a warehouse soundsystem while the rest of the neighborhood is getting ready for work.
But what most distinguishes Let’s Turn It Into Sound are its tangled, stop-start arrangements. Again and again, songs begin with one idea—a vision of phosphorus rolling in the tide or a snippet of intergalactic jazz—and then abruptly change course, making way for tumbledown drums or lofty choirs or regal fanfare, sometimes all at once. Most of these songs are really three or four discrete tracks shoehorned together, separated by a hiccup’s worth of silence or a swooping jump cut; sometimes, the parts aren’t even in the same key. The pace of these changes is dizzying yet delightful; she bounces from idea to idea like a kid flitting from present to half-opened present on Christmas morning. And while they are both formally intriguing and viscerally pleasurable, I suspect that these abrupt edits serve a deeper purpose.
In Smith’s new book Somatic Hearing, a short philosophical tract on the practice of listening, she writes about the link between perception and emotional understanding, themes she picks up here on “Unbraid: The Merge.” “You are being obstructed,” she intones atop slow-moving clarinets. Dissonant orchestral sounds bubble up from below; the vocal melody whirls like a tossed polyhedron as she urges us to “change the angle/Look at it straight on instead of perpendicular,” lyrics that could have come straight from a deck of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Then, just before a loping drumbeat sweeps the frame, she offers this: “Let’s hold this together/The merge.” It sounds a lot like a lesson she says she picked up in music school when one of her professors pointed out “that every note and every rhythm can connect. You just have to find the common ground.” With Let’s Turn It Into Sound, Smith turns her music upside down, shakes out her assumptions, and lets the pieces fall where they may, all in the interest of finding new connections between things that were never meant to go together. It’s a leap into the unknown, and her excitement is infectious.


Inspired by Brooklyn’s current electronic scene and ’80s acid house, the New York trio applies a sophisticated sheen to analog-driven electro-pop.

The Golden Mile EP

Unpacking their influences, Flash Trading namecheck the scenes around two iconic venues: Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club and Manchester’s Haçienda. As such, you might expect the trio’s music to be a natural hybrid of the music blaring from those ’80s raves and the techno you can hear in Brooklyn today.
The Golden Mile was released by TAG OUT, a new label run by DFA’s former label manager, Kris Petersen. While at DFA, the label LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy co-founded in 2001, Petersen worked with bands like Guerilla Toss and Essaie Pas, and sonically speaking, Flash Trading are the equatorial midpoint between those two acts. They traffic in the same spirit of high-energy DIY noise as Guerilla Toss, but their old-fashioned sound occupies the same world as Essaie Pas’ classic coldwave. The trio calls its own music “balearic acid sophistihouse”—a ridiculous term, on its face, but one that nevertheless helps make sense of The Golden Mile’s collage of styles.
From the outset, Flash Trading present themselves as a band very much interested in two-things: nostalgia and vibe. Their sound, rough at the edges but tightly produced, is mostly made from burbling TB-303 tones and needling hi-hats cushioned by warm stabs of synth. Their instrumentation is never glossy or shiny; in fact, it’s so focused on sounding old that there are moments on the record that are the aural equivalent of dipping paper in tea to make it look like an antique. Their assortment of hardware drum machine sounds and schmaltzy synthesizers bathes the music in an unmistakably vintage light. Listening to their first EP, you might think you’ve found some grimy CD in a yard sale.
That’s not a bad thing; it only lends to the strong sense of mood and atmosphere. Their songs work hard to create a space for movement: Their rhythms sway with the insistence of a rocking chair, and as hard-edged as they can get, a certain brightness pervades their work. The tracks on The Golden Mile are as sunny as rays of morning light piercing through club fog.
These songs are anchored by vocalist Monae Freeman, who uses her voice intelligently and interestingly. In more house-oriented tracks, she bubbles beneath the mix, sounding almost like a well-wrought sample, and in poppier efforts like “Elmhurst” she stays up front, guiding the song. She’s an elegant performer who helps duct-tape the disparate sounds together in a way that makes sense. In their best songs, like “Acceleration” or “Vini,” they’re able to concoct a musical blend that’s equal parts aggressive acid house and plush sophistipop. On paper, it shouldn’t work, but the trio’s ability to navigate the swirling world of their own making is admirable.


On last year's breakout solo collection Interstellar, Frankie Rose shifted from the character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop. On her new album, Herein Wild, she tries to sound bigger and smaller at the same time.

Herein Wild

It felt like only a matter of time before Frankie Rose evolved from a bright light in New York indie rock to a legitimate star and unsurprisingly, it happened on last year’s Interstellar, the first album attributed to her and her alone. The surprising part was how she shifted from the more character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop, a genre that all but requires putting form before flair (see also: DIIV, Wild Nothing, Lotus Plaza). The main lyric in the chorus of Interstellar highlight “Know Me” actually went “don’t know me,” which felt apt for a record with a sharp and subtly diverse array of songs that revealed the range of Rose’s talent but not much about herself. Unfortunately, by making an exact replica of Interstellar minus the sharp and subtly diverse array of songs, Herein Wild reveals the limitations of that range while turning its predecessor’s personality void from a cost of doing business into a serious liability.
It’s futile to listen to Herein Wild without succumbing the urge to compare it to its predecessor; in fact, the sequencing is so similar that it damn near dares you to do so on a track-by-track basis. As with “Interstellar”, the leadoff here boasts a scene-chewing verse where Rose sings with the timbre of a touchtone phone before an anticipatory, on-the-one bass-drum thump guides her out of the vaporous reverb. Only you lose the knee-buckling dynamics of “Interstellar” and instead get a smooth ascent to one of Herein Wild’s 10 lilting and lightly pitched choruses. As with “Gospel/Grace”, the third song here is sleek and silvery indie-pop, but instead of flowing like liquid mercury like its Interstellar equivalent, “Into the Blue” sits in place like a glob of puffy glitter paint. Herein Wild is, once again, identically bisected by a beatless vocal showcase; previously, “Pair of Wings” wisely used Rose’s voice for texture, looping and weaving soft and silken harmonies. “Cliffs As High” at least acknowledges a new influence in Björk by demonstrating a similar obsession with altitude and surprisingly angular melody. But it’s the exact opposite of “Hyperballad” in every conceivable way, dozing off waiting for a more forceful vocalist who can counter its somnambulant string arrangement.
We could seriously do this for all 10 songs, but lead single “Sorrow” about sums up the disassociation between her ambitions to sound bigger and smaller (i.e., more ostensibly “personal”) at the same time. Ignore, if you can, how “Sorrow” has the same drum pattern as “Know Me”, since that song pretty much nicked its own from the Cure’s “Close to Me”, a sort of “Be My Baby” public domain entity for artists of this stripe. It’s also easy to condone the lyrics throughout Herein Wild trying to express more individual desires through the same water/dream/sky vocabulary that kept Interstellar so purposefully vague. More important is how “Sorrow” gives you an idea of what Rose meant when discussing the influence of film soundtracks on Herein Wild, in that there are real strings rather than synthesizers and songs not entirely indebted to strict verse/chorus structure. Yet the added orchestration adds bulk rather than depth; the strings arrive exactly when you’d expect and add another layer of syrupy sheen rather than counterpoint, the bridge doesn’t introduce any new melody or dynamic shift and the fake fade-out just kills time.
The misallocation of resources is even more pronounced when Rose tries to hearken back to Interstellar’s rawest rock song (“Night Swim”). “The Depths” makes a literal callback with its introductory lyric (“swimming across the water”), and its murky, bass-driven arrangement at least recalls a different iteration of the Cure (Pornography rather than Head on the Door). But even when it tries to menace, the overwhelming takeaway from Herein Wild is just how edgeless it is, bearing the consistency, texture and sickly sweetness of a circus peanut.
It’s not like Frankie Rose forgot how to write a catchy song and there are enough here where you wonder if it would be heard as “promising,” had it come from a new band as opposed to someone more familiar. But that’s the paradox of Herein Wild: it might be subject to less scrutiny had it not followed Interstellar, but then again, it might not be subject to scrutiny at all, and simply filed away with any other competent and unexceptional dream-pop. Besides, what’s the point of pretending Interstellar doesn’t exist when Herein Wild does the exact opposite? As the saying goes, the strict imitation of Herein Wild sincerely flatters its predecessor; it just doesn’t do the same for the person who made it.


More than a simple greatest-hits collection, this box set commemorating Jamaica’s powerhouse independent label offers a well-rounded portrait of the iconic imprint’s role in reggae history.

Various Artists: Down in Jamaica – 40 Years of VP Records

Celebrating 40 years of growth in a fickle, fast-moving industry, VP Records’ Down in Jamaica draws from the label’s practically unrivaled catalog to honor the story of Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneurs Vincent and Patricia Chin, whose trajectory was remarkably synonymous with that of dancehall reggae itself. Launched from an ice-cream parlor in downtown Kingston, the Chins’ business (originally called Randy’s Records) grew from a one-stop shop for local wax into a bustling recording studio, the world’s largest independent reggae label, and a major arm of the global reggae industry, after the Chins relocated to Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s and turned their focus to foreign markets.
Over the years, VP became the premier international distributor of Jamaican music, issuing hit singles, Grammy-winning albums, and such popular compilation series as Strictly the Best, Reggae Gold, and Riddim Driven. Few labels have played so central a role in reggae’s modern era, documenting the rise of rapping deejays and digital riddims, and in the 21st century VP has continued to grow, acquiring onetime international rival Greensleeves in 2008 and building a catalog that includes the lion’s share of dancehall hits among its 25,000 sound recordings.
As such, a 40th anniversary compilation from VP offers a vital a representation of Jamaican popular music since the late ’70s.  This particular selection is held together by its depiction of dancehall’s development, the genre’s relationship to the “roots and culture” scene, and the perseverance of reggae as a national feeling, style, and brand. More than a greatest-hits collection based on data or settled narrative, the compilation aims for a well-rounded portrait of VP’s role in reggae history.
Still, hits abound. Nearly every song was a big tune in Jamaica during its day and remains a perennial standard wherever reggae is played. Those unfamiliar with dancehall reggae will find a fine introduction in the 82 tracks spread across four CDs, while longtime listeners will revel in the number of cherished songs. For devotees, the compilation also includes four 12" and four 7" records featuring re-pressed versions of obscure 12" “disco mixes” from the late ’70s along with unique mixes of dub classics like the Congos’ “Fisher Man,” produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose Upsetter label was distributed by VP. Such deluxe sets are often over-the-top grabs at the collectors’ market, but for a label that has spanned the vinyl to digital age (and back), the multi-format throwback vibes seem apt.
While some amount of in-house production by the Chins and their sons added to the label’s stockpile, because VP was a reliable one-stop for Jamaican producers, they licensed, manufactured, and distributed many of the biggest songs coming out of Kingston’s many studios, including tracks by all of the most successful and influential producers of the last few decades: Steely & Clevie, Gussie Clarke, Philip “Fatis” Burrell, Bobby “Digital” Dixon, Dean Fraser. Among others, VP cultivated an ongoing partnership with notorious producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes in the early 1980s, distributing the massive dancehall hits on his Volcano imprint to the wider world, with audible consequences for reggae, hip-hop, and pop.
The collaboration with Junjo gave rise to tunes and riddims that echo across popular music to this day. Of the many collected here, two of them feature what has come to be called the “Diseases” riddim, after Michigan & Smiley’s catchy brimstone chant of the same name about women wearing trousers (not good, in their view) and elephantiasis (also not good). On that song, the duo inveighs over bare, bouncy dub-funk by Junjo’s house band the Roots Radics—tight, spare drums, driving bass, and a jangly guitar riff that, just a few years later, would add rudeboy edge to Boogie Down Productions’ “Remix for P Is Free” and, even later, lend poignancy to Black Star’s elegiac “Definition.” Doing his own inimitable thing on a customized flip of the riddim, Yellowman offers up one of the stickiest earworms of all time on “Zungguzungguguzungguzeng.” First crossing into hip-hop as one of BDP’s weaponized reggae references, the chorus melody has since turned up in over 60 other recordings, spanning reggae, hip-hop, rock, and electronic music, most recently rearing its head in Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Ride or Die.” (The compilation includes other worthy riddim pairings, like Wayne Wonder and Bounty Killer on Lenky’s iconic “Diwali,” and Jah Cure and T.O.K. taking turns on Don Corleon’s “Drop Leaf.”)
While the collection represents the dancehall era’s dazzling search for new sounds, from dubbed-out live bands to digital riddims to post-millennial pop crossover, the musical through line that unites it all is the persistence of the roots reggae sound and its righteous messaging. This thread ties together the Wailing Souls bearing witness on “Fire House Rock” in the early ’80s; protests of hypocrisy in VC’s turn-of-the-millennium “By His Deeds”; and the past decade’s “new roots” of Jah9, Chronixx, and Raging Fyah. Banner-bearing revivalists such as Garnet Silk, Buju Banton, and Luciano all bring their booming voices to the project of reinfusing dancehall with Rastafarian ideals, while roots reggae’s trademark upbeat bounce gives lift to a set of sweet songs about love and heartbreak, including Junior Kelly’s “Love So Nice,” Beres Hammond’s “Rockaway,” Sizzla’s “Just One of Those Days” and Tarrus Riley’s “She’s Royal.” (On the other hand, the likes of Ninjaman, Cutty Ranks, Spragga Benz, and Mavado assure some “badman” representation, while Sanchez, Sean Paul, and Gyptian sing of love in more secular terms.)
Although the resilience of roots against a restless dancehall backdrop emerges as the central theme, the collection also touches upon the wider variety of music VP has issued, including soca and R&B fusions. (VP’s Gold Disc imprint even released early records by proto-reggaetonero El General in the early 1990s, though none appear here.) These and other recent productions round things out, in a sense, but they can seem slight next to dozens of time-honored dancehall anthems. The relative scarcity of women artists also calls attention to the challenge of doing justice to a wide swath of Jamaican music while reflecting the established canon. Although the ratio improves over the last two decades of releases—nearly one-third of the artists on the fourth disc are women, while only four appear on the first three discs—this feels like a missed opportunity. While the disparity reflects a long-standing industry prejudice that is hardly confined to reggae, VP’s vast catalog could have accommodated a more balanced mix. Despite these issues, the compilation stands as a grand monument to the dancehall era and the triumphant efforts of an enterprising family to share Jamaican music with the world.

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The Swedish producer takes the long view on his fifth album full of drifting compositions that knit together twin feelings of melancholy and hope.

Infinite Moment

Axel Willner’s sixth album as the Field approaches slowly, like a car on a highway shredded by heat haze. Two chords oscillate; a humid bass tone rumbles a human voice, or maybe a synthesizer trained to sound like one. The voice is a scream trapped in amber, agitated but distant, a reaction far removed from its spark. Though voices dart in and out of much of the ambient techno Willner makes, this one is different from his usual samples, which tend to hold more structure—a discernible consonant, a fossil of breath. This voice sounds human and not human, fevered and at peace, calling for something just out of reach.
Infinite Moment basks in motion that feels like stillness. It repeats itself, like Field albums do, but here Willner keeps his melodic arrangements simple. Often he oscillates between just two or three notes, expanding the space between them until it feels big enough to slip inside. Unlike 2016’s The Follower and 2013’s Cupid’s Head, which wove together slippery, dexterous figures, Infinite Moment maintains a plane of focus broad enough to reach the horizon.
These hypnagogic compositions tend to bury the reflex to keep time. Willner’s no stranger to longer compositions—many of his songs breach ten minutes—but Infinite Moment doesn’t ask the listener to take stock of each measure or unpack its composite parts. It doesn’t pull the body into a pulse like dance music does; it washes over the body, surrounding it, lulling it into a closed environment. It’s hard to find the motivation to count seconds. A track like “Something Left, Something Right, Something Wrong” could be three minutes or 30 if you’re hearing it without a clock in sight. It’s propelled by a simple beat, but Willner destabilizes the bass drum with a shuffle of clipped synthesizers whose edges add polyrhythms. There’s one kind of time, the downbeat, and then just beyond it there’s another, blurrier time shifting in and out of focus.
The vocals on “Hear Your Voice” enter the fray so slowly it feels like they’ve sneaked up on you, and the song’s synthesizer elements just peel away until the track has thinned out. “Made of Steel. Made of Stone” starts with vocals, and uses the silence between their distorted cries to set a tempo before a muted click track kicks in. Throughout Infinite Moment, Willner revels in these subtle transitions. A synth line is perceptible only once it’s obvious that it’s been playing for a while already. Even the most structured, percussive song, “Divide Now,” washes its beats over with insistent ghostly noise. No hard edges present themselves on the album. Even the snare drums sound bleary.
Infinite Moment’s loose relationship with time and synchronicity follows a year full of albums with a similar drift. Recent experimental works like Yves Tumor’s Safe in the Hands of Love and Low’s Double Negative let song structures surface like ancient ruins: decayed, elliptical, present but halfway lodged in another time. Willner’s latest also evinces a sense of loss, but he’s just as interested in growing new forms in the holes he’s punched in his music. Moss covers his ruins and he recognizes it as life—not a scar on a decrepit form, but a new expression of being, another way for the earth to roll through time. The warmth of Infinite Moment radiates from its symbiotic growth of melancholy and hope. Willner doesn’t privilege one over the other, but allows them to knit together, watching from a distance to see the shapes they might take.


The French trio’s third album trends towards accessibility without losing its taste for the visceral pleasures of more technical post-hardcore.

Gris Klein

Birds in Row have spent the past decade making albums about essentially the same question: How can people relate to each other as the world descends into chaos and division? This is fertile territory if you happen to make blowtorch-intense post-hardcore music. The consistency of the French trio’s subject matter demonstrates the adaptability of their artistry, because none of their three LPs have settled on the same sound or the same solution. On their 2012 debut You, Me & The Violence, there was little “post-” in their hardcore and little restraint in their ferocious antagonism. Six years later, We Already Lost the World opened up the possibility of finding common ground with opposing forces. Having realized the futility of mending fences, Birds in Row return with a new album, Gris Klein, that offers the way out: moving on and never looking back.
This is the band’s first release for Red Creek, a boutique label recently launched by Swedish post-metal icons Cult of Luna. Continuing the trajectory of their relatively scant catalog, Gris Klein trends towards accessibility. But it doesn’t indulge in typical crowd-pleasers like metalcore choruses or chiming post-rock crescendos. Though Birds in Row are now making six-minute songs with clean vocals and strummed guitar chords, “Noah” and “Trompe L’oeil” take on a jittery, La Dispute-style sing-talk simmer before reaching a boil. Trusting the suggestive powers of propulsion, the band use the pent-up energy of their previous work as fuel for uplift rather than demolition.
“You say you’re not one for confettis and hats,” Bart Balboa screams on “Confettis,” a kind of inverse of 2018 single “I Don’t Dance” that does away with the stop-start gymnastics, letting everyone get caught up in a pushpit of forward momentum. Though Birds in Row aren’t exactly dancing on Gris Klein, bodies are constantly in motion. “Confusing loneliness for freedom, solitude for a serum, and complaints for poetry,” Balboa shrieks, forgoing his most florid syntax for an unmistakable mission statement. To the degree that they’re immediately legible, Balboa’s lyrics convey the urgency of taking positive action towards negative energy. If there really is a better future for us out there, it won’t be based in capitalism (“Noah”) or nihilism (“Daltonians”).
The band has a better grip on pacing and mood this time around, and a better sense for how to use the rhythm section as a guide. When Gris Klein shifts to a preparation phase of its mission, the beats are more menacing and tom-heavy. When it’s time to lay waste to false prophets or weak philosophies, the energy comes in rejuvenating bursts. Birds in Row haven’t lost their taste for the visceral pleasures of more technical post-hardcore; the riffs of “Rodin” are cut up like a microhouse beat, seemingly impossible in their precision.
Gris Klein’s most crucial departure has little to do with the music. Previously, the band preferred to remain obscure; the members blurred their faces in photos and were identified only by their initials. This time around, they’re quite visible: Bassist Quentin Sauvé released an acoustic singer-songwriter album under his own name and Balboa can be heard chatting with former labelmate Jeremy Bolm on the Touché Amoré singer’s podcast. This all aligns with the record’s call to arms: How can Birds in Row ask the listener to drop their defenses without first showing their own faces? Rather than marking a clean break with their prior approach, Gris Klein considers the subtle but important difference between “going hard” and “moving forward.”


The Colorado percussionist’s debut solo album is a glitchy sound collage where drums resemble saxophones and voice memos share space with guest vocalists.

muted colors

Ben Sloan is a percussionist whose touch is so light and musical that it melts the border between beat and melody. In his collaborations with other artists, from the National and Moses Sumney to producers like Mouse on Mars, you can consistently hear a musical intelligence seeking the point where the drums fuse into the texture of the song. He’s on a short list of drummers, along with Liturgy’s Greg Fox, whose extended solos you can easily imagine taking center stage.
On his debut full-length, muted colors, Sloan brings his impulse for melodic and rhythmic communion to a piece of software called Sensory Percussion, which can transform drumming into a blurting saxophone, a ghostly synth pad, or a crying voice, all in real time. It’s a kick to hear him wield this tool across the glitchy, dreamy surface of muted colors. Sloan says the album’s music was “culled from his digital scrapbook”—“old hard drives, folders, field recordings, studio sessions, and countless voice memos”—and he’s stitched these ephemera into a loose tapestry full of stray threads of mumbled voices and flute sounds. The music floats by in a genial haze, with bits of color and life flashing by at the edges of your attention.
The mood isn’t too far off from what used to be called, in the early ’00s, “laptop pop”—Boards of Canada, the Books, Cornelius. Sloan loves incidental sounds, and the album is a tiny crawling sensorium full of them: on “Who’s Melting,” you hear what sounds like change falling out of pockets, fingers drumming a desktop, and what could be a passing car as captured on an iPhone through a pants pocket. You don’t actively listen to the result so much as notice it from time to time.
Sloan invites a handful of guests and friends to drop by, and the album grows more vivid and focused whenever they appear. Serengeti and Josiah Wolf of WHY? tag “Too Much Internet” with soft, motormouth rapping, and it sounds amusingly like a Death Grips song muttering to itself at the library. Madeline Kenney’s cool-blue vocals on “1e&a” evoke Feist’s collaborations with Broken Social Scene. Moses Sumney brings his unholy charisma to “Philistine,” reminding you that any song he appears on automatically becomes his own.
Sloan himself seems to have modest aims for the album—he’s called each track “a little colorful, sensational world to briefly indulge.” That feels exactly right. If you have half an hour of aimless transit and a window to stare out of, muted colors makes pleasant, and evocative, company.


Whereas the first Creed soundtrack reached for the rafters, the sequel is placeless and tame. Its only muse seems to be Mike WiLL’s contact list.

Creed II: The Album

The standout scene in Creed isn’t a fight. It’s Adonis Creed, the main character, shadow boxing in front of a projection of his dead father fighting Rocky Balboa. Adonis has no relationship with his father, but in that brief moment he inherits the glory of his father’s career. Fueled by that distant admiration, and determined to forge his own path, he spends the rest of the movie escaping his father’s shadow, a struggle that deepens in Creed II. The film’s soundtrack isn’t as gutsy. Executive produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, the record is a bland collection of struggle raps and overwrought ballads. “Inspired by” the film to a fault, the album is so literal it hurts.
In theory, Mike WiLL is a perfect fit for a film franchise about the strain of legacy. A key player in rap’s pop coup over the past decade, he’s established himself as a shrewd expansionist. Starting with trap and strategically branching out, he’s built a solid catalog of strip club anthems (“Rake It Up”; “Pour It Up”), spacey trap ditties (“Turn on the Lights”), pop bangers (“23”), and everything in between.  He often speaks of this versatility as a direct product of his fear of being pigeon-holed. “I don’t want to just have a rap label. I want to have a whole label. I want to have a whole dynasty,” he said in 2015. “If you’re a super producer you can produce on all levels. Any genre of music,” he said earlier this year, “You can produce artists. You can produce clothing. You can produce movies.”
Given his proven range and his will to keep on broadening, a soundtrack would presumably be an ideal platform for Mike WiLL to stretch his wings.
Instead, the record is grounded to a fault. The soundbed is largely monochrome and dim, confined to a drab grayscale that’s often embellished with streaks of gloomy noodling and dull brass. Reproducing the weighty tone of the film, the vibe is generally either sad or serious—which ultimately comes across as safe.  Whereas the first Creed soundtrack reached for the rafters and used Philadelphia as a muse for its pomp and brashness, this record is placeless and tame. Its only muse seems to be Mike WiLL’s contact list.
While the first film’s soundtrack had the benefit of being a compilation stacked with iconic songs like Tupac’s “Hail Mary” and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody,” the original songs (one of which was produced by Mike WiLL) were more than placeholders. They embodied the spirit of the movie, channeling Adonis’ strife and determination into chest-puffing fun.
Here, the performances are either remarkably phoned in or embarrassingly straightforward. Nas’ verse on “Check” is a literal plot summary. “He trying to be a father, but he lost his father to the same thing,” he raps. “Watching Me” squanders excellent, moody verses by Kodak Black and Slim Jxmmi to pad what feels like a drowsy Swaecation throwaway. Quavo raps a play-by-play narrative of a fistfight on a song imaginatively titled “F.I.G.H.T.” and it’s somehow more literal than the song name: “Knuckle up, knuckle up/Nigga got hit with the uppercut/He got a cut on his eye/Damn, now he can’t see, it done closed up.”
Ari Lennox and J. Cole’s sultry “Shea Butter Baby” and Crime Mob and Slim Jxmmi’s crunk throwback “We Can Hit (Round 1)” escape all this literalism and bring some much appreciated camp. Both songs are excessive and, most importantly, amusing. There is only one knockout, though. Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar are dazzling on “The Mantra,” spitballing flows and ideas into weird, technicolor lines. For them, legacies are built both inside and outside the ring, within the intensity of competition and the looseness of play. That attitude fits Creed II, which ends with Adonis defending his title by redefining what it means to him. If this colorless cash-in is the extent of his vision, Mike WiLL, too, might want to redefine his title—for this outing, super producer doesn’t fit.