Working again with Aaron Dessner, Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere: fingerpicked ballads, colorful pop music, and her first country songs in years.

Evermore

The tale of how Evermore came to be is the stuff of first loves, holiday rom-coms, Taylor Swift songs. Crafting the woodsy surprise album Folklore in isolation, she felt the spark of something exciting and new, and knowing all things must pass, wanted to make it linger just a little longer. Swift started telling romantic, bittersweet stories like this as a teenage songwriter in the mid-2000s, and her first instinct was to pair her words with glossy, plainspoken country-pop. As she became one of the most famous artists on the planet, the sound of her music followed the trajectory of fame itself: boundless and airborne through the early 2010s—then omnipresent and colossal, on the verge of suffocating by 2017’s Reputation.
Now 31, Swift is enjoying a phase characterized by great unburdenings. She described her 2019 album Lover like a deep breath, and she has spent the 16 months since its release in a kind of elongated exhale. Early this year, she attempted to unload a career’s worth of self-analysis and confessions in a documentary titled Miss Americana. In one scene, filmed just ahead of her 29th birthday, she experienced a minor panic attack while eating a burrito in the studio: “I kind of don’t really have the luxury of figuring stuff out,” she said, “because my life is planned two years ahead of time.” Any day now, she predicted, her proposed tour dates would start rolling in and her future would, once again, harden into a string of obligations.
Of course, most people’s plans were canceled in 2020, and Swift is instead making the quietest, most elegant music of her career with an unexpected collaborator, the National’s Aaron Dessner. In contrast with the producers who helped amplify and smooth her songwriting for the masses, Dessner invited Swift to ramble and elaborate, to tell stories from beginning to end, to invent fictional characters with interconnected storylines. He is the friend who offers a comfortable place to spiral, leaning in and refilling their wine glasses. In other words, he would probably be really stoked about the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” with the extra verses and cursing.
The way Swift tells it, she and Dessner were so invigorated by the process of making Folklore that, without a standard press cycle and tour to follow its release this summer, they decided to just keep working. Five months later, we have Evermore, a companion album built from the same general sounds and personnel, with Jack Antonoff, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, all returning to the fold. It’s the fastest follow-up in her career and her first album to not directly overhaul the sound of its predecessor: The goal isn’t to recapture the glow of Folklore’s cabin getaway but rather to extend her stay for another season.
While Folklore seemed to materialize from nowhere as a complete, cohesive vision, Evermore is structurally akin to something like 2012’s Red, where the breadth of her songwriting is as important as the depth. Within its 15-song, hourlong tracklist, you will find the closest things to country music she has written in years (the gorgeous “Cowboy Like Me,” the Haim-assisted true-crime anthem “No Body, No Crime”) and colorful pop music she largely avoided in her last batch of recordings (“Long Story Short,” “Gold Rush”). Elsewhere, there’s a ballad in a 5/4 time and another that bursts suddenly into a Bon Iver song halfway through before gently floating down to earth. “I haven’t met the new me yet,” Swift sings at one point. While that may be true, she has found plenty of new ideas for the old one.
Dessner’s fingerpicked guitar and somber piano, along with wintry string arrangements from his brother Bryce, remain crucial to this music, and Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere they’ve honed over the past two decades with the National. Their instinct together is to leave her songwriting artfully uncluttered, as in the spacious piano ballad “Champagne Problems,” or to furnish her voice in cozy chambers of acoustic guitar, cello, and male duet partners. (Ironically, the National’s own Matt Berninger ends up sounding somewhat out of place in “Coney Island,” especially compared to Vernon, the most natural and inventive vocal accompanist Swift has found to date.)
On her own, Swift remains a versatile and expressive vocalist—hear the scare quotes in her delivery through the lightly clattering kiss-off of “Closure” (“Don’t treat me like some situation that needs to be ‘handled’”). She has always been a wordy lyricist, often seeking to mimic the sound of rushing, restless endorphins, and here, she uses that skill to magnify sad, small moments like the home-for-the-holidays fling in “‘Tis the Damn Season.” In a near whisper, she treats Dessner’s electric guitar framework as an empty diary page, her notes spilling into the margins, using every inch of space he offers to describe the fog on the windshield, the mud on the tires, the parking spot by her old school.
Another stunner is “Ivy,” a knotty fairytale that reveals darker characters in the storybook setting of Swift’s early work. Backed by banjo, trumpet, and gentle harmonies from Vernon, she begins with an allusion to Miller Williams’ 1997 poem “Compassion.” “I’ll meet you where the spirit meets the bone,” she sings before describing a forest dreamland corrupted by someone else’s roots. The Arkansas poet she quotes happens to be the father of outlaw country legend Lucinda Williams, who used the same line as the title of the first album she released on her own label, 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. (“We can do what we want to do now,” Williams said at the time, after decades of mistreatment from the music industry. “Plus we own the masters, everything we record.”)
Allowing her own biography to fall to the background, Swift loosens her need for narrative resolution and emotional clarity, sometimes letting the music speak for her. (An uncharacteristic retraction in “Happiness”—“No, I didn’t mean that/Sorry, I can’t see facts through all of my fury”—suggests she’s striving toward more stoic, distanced writing.) The climactic “Marjorie” is named after her maternal grandmother, an opera singer who died during Swift’s adolescence. Over Dessner’s pulsing keyboard arrangement, her lyrics are fragmented, almost chantlike, composed from bits of memories, advice, and regrets. As Swift considers how legacy works, she offers the album’s most forthright summoning of a ghost: “You’re alive/So alive,” she sings. “And if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were singing to me now.”
If the periods of hibernation between Swift’s records once felt crucial to the drama of her returns, her music now is filled with these momentary silences and breakthroughs. After a career spent striving for the next level of stardom, she has discovered a more sustainable path for evolution. I think about the caustic 2017 music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” where she depicted herself as a zombie, lining up all her past selves to taunt each other; she seemed spent, haunted, sick of competing with herself. And I think of 2006’s “Our Song,” one of her first great songs, which took comfort in the idea that no music can capture the chaos of a lifetime, its moments of hope and loss, the familiar routines and sudden jolts. On Evermore, she seems at peace with her past, in a suspended moment of transition, letting us follow along as she learns: Don’t just get settled, she tells us through this bounty of material. Get stronger.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the New York rapper’s unsuspecting 2001 debut, a breath of fresh air for a city who needed it.

Ghetto Fabolous

Everything Fabolous knew could be found in blocks encompassed by the Brevoort Houses in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. There, his personality developed: skeptical, quiet, unbothered, the type to stand around the freestyle circle but never contribute a verse himself. Throughout his childhood, he watched hip-hop blossom in Brooklyn, from the sound of the underground to something he couldn’t walk out of his home without hearing. One of the first rappers he became enamored with was Big Daddy Kane, his swag was undeniable—the chains, the high-top fade, Madonna—and everyone in the neighborhood had a story about Biggie Smalls and Lil’ Kim.  In high school, before he was known as Fabolous, and before his debut album was released on September 11, 2001, the kid born John Jackson would draw at an art and design school in Midtown Manhattan, another world. But even as he traveled to the city, he couldn’t help but notice rap’s impact around him—it was the soundtrack of neighborhood fish fries and basketball games, and he would hear about hip-hop duo Smif-N-Wessun outside like local celebrities. He wanted to have that effect.
After a few small-time recordings, Jackson laid down a verse on a local producer’s flip of Puff Daddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins.” The track became a neighborhood hit and eventually, the word spread to Queens-born party promoter and manager Kevin Webb. Together, they recorded a proper demo, and Webb made a promise that he could get Jackson’s music to the ears of a DJ who was breaking hits in New York like a one-man WorldStarHipHop.
DJ Clue, raised in Jamaica, Queens, was a pioneer of the rap mixtape. In the 1990s, after landing an internship at RCA, Clue began to get access to unreleased exclusives. His mixtapes, known as Clue Tapes, were essentially curated playlists and goldmines for everything New York hip-hop. Coated with his signature DJ drops, Clue Tapes were launching pads for iconic New York rap records of the ’90s from Method Man to  JAY-Z to Biggie. Often his tapes would include songs acquired without permission, like the time he ignited a beef with Bad Boy Records after leaking a track from Ready to Die and Biggie traveled to the Bronx with a gun in search of Clue. But by the time 1997 rolled around, Clue’s platform was so powerful—from the clubs to the streets—that Diddy invited him to get an advance listen of Biggie’s Life After Death and choose any two songs to include on a mixtape. Clue chose two records that would become timeless: “Hypnotize” and “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems.” Hot 97, New York’s premier radio station, desperately wanted access to the pair of Life After Death songs so they began to spin the records with Clue’s DJ tags still attached. The success led to Hot 97 recruiting DJ Clue for his own show on the station, “Monday Night Mixtapes.”
Kevin Webb had known DJ Clue from parties he used to throw—Webb would secure the venue, Clue would DJ. Webb played the demo for Clue’s partner and manager, Rich Skane. “Yo, I heard some stuff from this kid, he sounds aight,” Skane said to Clue. “You should check him out.” Clue invited Jackson to meet him at Hot 97. In 1998, Jackson, at this point a high school senior who had yet to even form an official rap pseudonym, pulled up to Hot 97 with an Avirex jacket draped over his lanky frame, expecting nothing more than a typical sit-down meeting. But that day, he would leave Hot 97 with a rap name and the support of hip-hop’s most influential DJ.
In 1998, the New York rap dream was simple: secure a record deal and get a song played on Hot 97. When Jackson arrived, Clue was fumbling around the radio station’s headquarters and told Jackson to wait in the studio with Noreaga, who at the time was one of New York’s hottest rappers. After a commercial break, Clue told Jackson and Noreaga they were going to freestyle live on Hot 97’s airwaves. Clue dropped the beat for The Lox’s “Money, Power, and Respect,” and suddenly, the typically quiet and reserved Jackson erupted.
“Just in case y’all was lost, I’m the face in the sauce/Long Cuban, white ice, placed in the cross,” raps Jackson on the opening line, an introduction to his smooth wordplay and blase delivery. Noreaga followed him with a verse, but Jackson wanted to leave his mark, and surprisingly dropped a second. In this verse, Jackson washes Noreaga and misspells a word that DJ Clue would stamp as his rap name: “It’s the F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S/In a new S, circling the U.S.” The next day the DJ gave him a call, and soon enough the first signee of Clue’s Desert Storm Records was Fabolous.
Fabolous spent the next few years being touted around New York by DJ Clue like an up-and-coming boxer and his promoter. He became a staple of DJ Clue’s mixtapes, as the fresh-voiced kid who delivered clever punchlines effortlessly. On The Professional, DJ Clue’s platinum 1998 debut album, Fab made two appearances, one with Foxy Brown and Mase, another solo. As a part of Desert Storm Records, Fabolous joined Interscope, where he began to put together a debut album. It was a rough introduction to the music industry for Fabolous: Once, the label paid Lil Wayne $100,000 and four bottles Cristal out of Fabolous’ budget to record a guest verse for the Brooklyn rapper. Lil Wayne showed up for 15 minutes, laid down a verse, grabbed the bottles of Cristal, and left without as much as acknowledging Fab.
When Clue left Interscope, Fab followed, and together they signed a distribution deal with Elektra Records. But still, Fabolous was rooted in the mixtape world—spitting verses was all he knew, hooks and song structure were an afterthought. In 2001, on “Fantastic Four Pt. 2,” one of rap’s signature mixtape posse cuts, Fabolous held his own, but was ultimately in the shadow of Cam’ron, Styles P, and Jadakiss. Compared to those larger than life personalities, Fab’s laid back persona was easy to overlook. But his appeal would fully emerge when a fledgling R&B singer asked DJ Clue for help.
Lil Mo, a Long Island-born singer who emerged in the late ’90s as a protege of Missy Elliott, was in search of a hit of her own. Her first attempt “Superwoman (Part I)” was a misfire, and the desperate R&B singer brought the song to DJ Clue and convinced him to do a remix using a beat originally intended for the rap duo M.O.P. Next, she needed a guest verse, and instead of turning to Missy, Mo asked Clue about Fabolous. “She came to Clue and was like, ‘Who’s that kid on your mixtapes doing those freestyles? That kid is hot,’” Fabolous later said. Featuring Fabolous, “Superwoman Pt. II,” was released in early 2001, and pushed on DJ Clue’s preferred platform: radio and mixtape placements. Over a quintessential early 2000s beat, which similar to an early Missy and Timabland track sounds like demented funk, Fabolous balances the punchline-driven rhymes the underground loved with a swag and good looks perfect for MTV. That summer, “Superwoman Pt. II” hit No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Within months, Fabolous went from an underground mixtape rapper to a rising Brooklyn phenom, with a highly anticipated debut album set to be released on September 11.
On the morning of Ghetto Fabolous, Fabolous was prepared to begin his rollout and ready to face what he thought would be his biggest obstacle: JAY-Z. Earlier in the year, the Roc-A-Fella overlord moved the release date up a week for The Blueprint, soon to be one of hip-hop’s definitive albums. Fab was unconcerned and delusional—he shrugged off JAY’s competition on an episode of 106 & Park—until he woke up the morning of his debut to a phone call where he was told his press day was cancelled and he should turn on the television. “I thought Hov had sabotaged everything,” Fabolous later said. But when he tuned in, it was just in time to see the second plane crash into the twin towers.
Fabolous climbed on the roof of the Brevoort Houses in Bed-Stuy and watched the smoke from the World Trade Center’s towers fill the sky. New York was thrust into panic mode: first responders flooded the scene, parents fought to reach their kids at schools, and the city began to shut down. While the world watched in horror, a nation and by extension its culture, began to rally around the flag. In the coming months, patriotic anthems suddenly became Billboard charting hits: Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning.” Films, television, and even comics became either a source of unity—Marvel comics published an issue which featured major superheroes as sidekicks to firefighters and police officers, and The West Wing responded with a preachy special on terrorism—or unintended escapism: the boom in fantasy films. Everything was looked at through the lens of 9/11, even Ghetto Fabolous.
Ghetto Fabolous—the name a spin on a term credited to record executive Andre Harrell—was reinterpreted by listeners in whichever way they see fit. The music video for his lead single “Can’t Deny It,” featuring smooth-talking G-Funk crooner Nate Dogg, unintentionally became a patriotic symbol because of its red, white, and blue color scheme. “We ended up having the No. 1 video at MTV when the stats came back, they pushed that forward on their own,” Fab said in an interview. “They wanted that video to be No. 1 because of what it symbolized and what it showed visually.”
No matter how much he raps about drug dealing and murder, the album always feels like a celebratory rags-to-riches story. “Most broads I done met, ain’t see a guy/Who spend a G on Gucci T’s, five for sweats/I’m what chicks strive to get, I stay in the PJ’s/You thinkin’ Brevoort, I’m talkin’ private jets,” he says on “Ma’ Be Easy.” But Ghetto Fabolous is most effective when he embraces the hip-hop and R&B formula, which began to pick up steam after Diddy organized Jodeci’s “Come and Talk to Me (Hip Hop Remix)” in the early ’90s, but exploded with a big-budget pop-friendly slickness in the early 2000s. Fab would inject the style with his wordy punchlines, nonchalant delivery, and constantly spelling his name like he’s afraid you’ll forget.
On “Take You Home,” Fab reunites with Lil Mo and her soothing hook seamlessly complements his raps that sound like they were pulled from the back half of a lengthy Clue Tape. “I love the way you smirk and giggle, jerk and wiggle/Throw yo’ legs up while I work the middle,” he says, with a bold confidence that makes up for cheesiness and a lack of originality. He captures similar energy with Jagged Edge on “Trade It All,” though the crew belts a chorus that could have been recorded by any of the R&B groups of the era. Yet, with Fab’s calm demeanor, the song is low stakes and breezy, ready for a day of consuming nutcrackers at the beach.
Beatmakers of the moment like Timbaland and Just Blaze briefly appear and hand Fab instrumentals fitting for the celebration. Timbaland’s beat on “Right Now and Later On” is true to his signature organized chaos, and Fab’s verses are pure escapism. “Fab’s hard to be found/But most likely I’m with a foreign dame who name’s hard to pronounce/I started out, gettin’ hard by the ounce/No more cash in stashes, it’s cards in accounts,” he raps, blurring the lines between reflections on his past and fiction. Just Blaze’s “Ma’ Be Easy” instrumental would make any New Yorker Harlem Shake after a sip or two of brown liquor, and Fab catches the perfect balance between punchlines you can’t wait to forget and memorable ones: “I be the club king with diamonds shuffling your friends.”
On the album’s centerpiece, “Young’n (Holla Back),” the Neptunes convince Fabolous to embrace the goofier side of his personality. Initially, Fab was against the idea, he wanted to make something harder, but Pharrell pushed him to be inspired by rap flows of the past. “He said, ‘You should rhyme like Rob Base or Vanilla Ice,’” Fab reflected. “Then he went into the vocal booth and did a reference vocal himself. We was laughing, but it sounded alright.” He makes Pharell’s vision, which certainly would have been corny in someone else’s hands, come to life, while still getting off the chest-puffing street raps he was known for: “Thuggin’ jeans and Timbs/Fitted to the front lean the brim/Ride but never on teenage rims/And I keep a chick’s face between my limbs.” Part of the broadly appealing balance that made Ghetto Fabolous the perfect album to lighten the city’s mood.
In the years since, Fabolous has become a debated figure in Brooklyn rap lore: To some, he’s forever synonymous with cheesy punchlines, uninspired beat selection, and questionable fashion choices, and to others, he’s an example of consistency, a trusted guest feature, and an underappreciated ability to adapt his style to fit the times. In reality, it’s probably a bit of both, though Ghetto Fabolous is by far the best iteration of Fab, for a moment the only person cooler in Brooklyn was JAY-Z. It’s easy to look back at the formulaic R&B hooks, dated production, and mixed bag of punchlines, and say that Ghetto Fabolous was never any good. But that would be removing the context of a moment, where Fabolous was a breath of fresh air for a city grappling with a new normal.


The Help! soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but it lacks that record's glowering intensity; it's a great but confusing record.

Help!

In A Hard Days Night, after throwing a sarky George Harrison out of their studio, a fashion-maven TV producer and his assistant try and make sense of him. Such a rude young man-- but is he "an early clue to the new direction"? They consult the calendar: no, the new trend isn't due for another three weeks.
It's a gag, and not an original one, but born of truth: the fashion watcher's assumption was that things ran on a two to three year cycle. As 1965 began, the Beatles obviously weren't going away, but being pop's aristocracy didn't necessarily make you pop's leading edge. The kids were coming up from behind. Commentators like Nik Cohn had noted sections of the pop audience looking to R&B clubs for their harder-edged, bluesier sound, and this was bleeding into the mainstream. The Animals could claim a no. 1, the Stones had two. So did London's Kinks, and if the Who didn't it was only because their routines were too extreme.
And so, two years and four albums into their career, the Beatles at last had rivals. Serious ones, who'd rampaged through the door the Beatles opened and blithely ignored the showbiz conventions the Beatles were contractually tied to. While the Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction", the Beatles were being trotted around the world shooting the ambitious, ridiculous Help!. Its soundtrack album is as haphazard as Beatles For Sale, but lacks that record's glowering intensity.
Luckily, it replaces moodiness with curiosity and a much-expanded instrumental palette. They'd been intermittent experimenters from the start, but Help! is where the band's interest in sound and arrangement really starts to flower, and this remastered version is a particular feast of new timbres and ideas: the percussion on "You're Gonna Lose That Girl", Indian instrumentation appearing on "Ticket to Ride", the weary woodwind on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away".
All this is put into the service of some of the band's best pop songs. The title track, for instance, where Lennon's as confused and angry as he was on "I'm a Loser", but now the music doesn't follow suit-- its briskness blanks his pleas, and his bandmates sound more mocking than sympathetic. Paul gets similar finger-wagging backing on "The Night Before", a wonderfully jaunty song about being dumped after a one-night stand. "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is another song happy to marry beauty to venom-- its words an explicit threat, its harmonies an example of the seemingly effortless loveliness that makes people go gooey and mystical when the Beatles are mentioned.
Obviously, their new interest in texture wasn't wholly distinct from their new interest in drugs. The "reference" in "It's Only Love" is played for laughs, but "Tell Me What You See" falls halfway between romance and mysticism and is rather awkward despite its marvelous period percussion. The album has other murky spots-- Harrison's songs are fine, but "Act Naturally" suggests that finding a tune for Ringo every album was becoming an issue. And the closing version of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" is a farewell to the "end it with a rocker" formula that drags despite Lennon's best efforts to rouse it.
It doesn't help "Dizzy" that it's placed just after two personal breakthroughs for McCartney. "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday" are both love songs, rich with feeling but never overwrought, with the deceptive lightness that would become trademark and millstone for their writer. "Face", a folksy country song, demonstrated the gift for pastiche that would help give the rest of the Beatles' career such convincing variety. "Yesterday" went further, demonstrating that you could arrange a pop song orchestrally in a way that might deepen it, not just turn it into kitsch. Of all their tracks, "Yesterday" is surely the one that's hardest to listen to with new ears. This remaster, capturing its preternatural serenity, is a terrific opportunity to do exactly that.
Help! is almost the last twitch of the Beatles as a working, gigging beat group. It's a great but confusing record, and no wonder contemporaries felt they might at last be losing direction. With hindsight confusion looks like transition, and the remasters-- issued all at once and linked to a game designed to present the band's story as a story-- can't help but invite that hindsight. But the story could have turned out differently, and these early records are still so fierce and alive. Taking the Beatles one disc at a time lets us recover their precariousness, the risks they took, what they lost as well as what they gained.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Breeders’ debut album, a warped and indispensable piece of the ’90s alternative canon.

Pod

Sex may be the engine of pop music, but what of breeding? Nothing looks less cool (to those for whom the appearance of coolness is of prime importance) than changing diapers, starting a college fund, and being optimistic enough to believe in the long-term survival of the human species. More than that, though, even the word breeding carries the humiliating connotation of intimate acts performed in captivity, under surveillance. It makes the Breeders kind of a gross band name, as Kim Deal was well aware. “Back in the late ’80s, there was so much shit given to gay people,” she has said, “but at the same time gay people thought heterosexuality was disgusting, and I loved that.”
Although it dates back to Deal’s pre-Pixies teenage duo with twin sister Kelley, the moniker is eerily well-suited to the band’s debut album. Released amid the bursting buds of May 1990, Pod is vividly sensual and sexual without being sexy in an alluring sense, like the music of the era’s biggest pop stars: Madonna, Janet Jackson, Prince. It is also, in its close atmosphere as well as its lyrics, a little disgusting. Deal has described the record as a collection of “ugly, stinking gross songs.” One of the best of the bunch, “When I Was a Painter,” captures the record’s tension between intimacy and revulsion, describing a room thick with “bad sex and bad TV.”
Maybe it was this hermetic, almost fermented quality that kept the collaboration between Deal and Throwing Muses co-frontwoman Tanya Donelly from attracting nearly as much attention as they were getting in their more extroverted main gigs. In the 16 months between 1989’s Doolittle and 1990’s Bossanova, Black Francis barely needed to cough to have NME and Spin asking for a quote. But Pod was mostly dispatched with faint praise by that same rock press whose support was so critical to independent artists at the time. Just a few years later, by which time Donelly had left and Kelley had rejoined the lineup to replace her, alt-rock had become an unlikely music-industry gold rush. The Breeders’ sunnier, airier second album, 1993’s Last Splash, rode the “Cannonball” wave to platinum certification and relegated their earlier releases to footnotes. Only in retrospect did it become apparent how crucial Pod was in creating the necessary conditions for the Breeders—and so many other bands—to thrive.
Like so many underground bands that prominently featured women (the Raincoats, the Vaselines, Shonen Knife), the Breeders got a boost in visibility during the early ’90s through the effusive support of Kurt Cobain. Speaking to Melody Maker in 1992, the world’s biggest rock star explained: “The main reason I like them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song and Kim wrote it.” The same year, Nirvana would take the Breeders on tour and Cobain would later admit to Deal, in a joint interview with UK ambassador to grunge Everett True, “I loved Pod so much that I was really freaked out to meet you.”
Much has been made of Cobain’s characteristically self-deprecating insistence that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was really just a Pixies rip-off, appropriating a dynamic that was “soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” But the influence of Pod seems to run even deeper in his music. Its sensibility is palpable not just in the song structures on Nirvana’s two major-label studio albums, or in their decision to hire Pod’s producer, Steve Albini, to record In Utero. (Though Albini also produced the Pixies’ debut album, Surfer Rosa, he has often expressed his preference for the Breeders. On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2015, he opined that Deal was a “genius,” but “the Pixies, as a band, they were fine. Whatever.”) There is also a striking similarity between Cobain’s preoccupations and the themes of the Breeders’ debut: loneliness, disgust, trauma, sex, childhood, introspection, anatomy, intoxication, psychosis. The songs evoke isolation but never feel desolate, swaddled as they are, almost to the point of suffocation, in the warm, druggy, dissociative fog that the Cobain of In Utero would name “your magnet tar-pit trap” and “the comfort in being sad” and “a Leonard Cohen afterworld.”
Nothing could’ve been farther from the kind of music Deal and Donelly started out trying to make, the night they left a Sugarcubes show in 1989 determined to get rich off a dance hit. Unfortunately for their bank accounts, neither had a “Regina” in her. “We started it and figured out we couldn’t do it for beans,” Donelly told the L.A. Times in 1990. “We had no idea what to do.” They also realized that their existing record deals would prohibit them—both impressive songwriters whose contributions to their original bands were being minimized or overshadowed by bigger personalities—from sharing primary writing credits on any Breeders album. So they decided to take turns. Pod turned out to be a half-hour of brooding sketches Deal had already written. Donelly was supposed to be next, but her material got kicked far enough down the road that she wound up extricating herself from the Breeders and Throwing Muses’ fragile visionary Kristin Hersh to found Belly.
Deal recounted the often grotesque backstory behind each track in early interviews. “Glorious” opens the album with playful, preverbal babble, as the dual guitars wind around each other, Pixies style. Deal repeats the minimal chorus—“It’s glorious”—as if in a reverie, stretching the final syllable like she’s desperate to hold onto the word. This, apparently, is a song about being molested by an aunt; the tea she mentions in one verse is made of psychedelic mushrooms. Built on a skeletal bassline from Josephine Wiggs, formerly the bassist for onetime Pixies openers the Perfect Disaster, and fleshed out with meaty arena-rock riffs, “Hellbound” is the cartoonishly gory tale of a fetus that survives an abortion. In a less literal sense, Deal told Option, it’s “about creating stupid stuff, creating messes. Sometimes we all do dumb things and say, ‘Oh look, I've created an abortion and it lives.’” “Oh!” shares its languid, alt-country vibe with Mazzy Star, whose first album came out the same month as Pod. But what sounds like a delicate love song, softened by gentle backing vocals from Michael Allen of the Wolfgang Press and plaintive violin from Ed’s Redeeming Qualities co-founder Carrie Bradley, is allegedly about what it’s like to be an insect.
But this is information you can only really get from reading about the album. Though the lyrics are technically in English, it might as well have been recorded in a private language. When you’re actually listening to Pod, what resonates, more than any specific narrative, is the mood. Each line of Deal’s songwriting is a discreet smear of paint, legible in isolation or as part of the composite whole, but rarely as part of its immediate surroundings. “Fortunately Gone,” a concise little sock-hop jam that bounces atop drum beats from Slint’s Britt Walford (a last-minute addition to the group, on the advice of Albini), makes its torch-song wistfulness felt in Deal and Donelly’s sweetly overlapping vocals and in images like the one that opens the track: “I wait for you in heaven/On this perfect string of love.” Try to follow that train of thought through the next few lines—“And drink your soup of magpies in a/Pottery bowl that looks/As I am now, brown, round and warm”—and you’re lost. At the same time, “brown, round and warm” makes its own kind of sense; it describes the song’s sensory effect completely.
Pod can be so intensely physical as to test the line between exhilaration and obliteration. “Hour by hour!” Deal howls over and over as cymbals clang and guitars scratch on “Iris”—a track whose snarl contains the DNA of Hole’s blistering 1991 debut, Pretty on the Inside—and you’re imprisoned with her, watching the hands of the clock crawl. “Limehouse” is tactile in the extreme; so vivid it’s almost sticky, Deal’s description of how “warm black tar forms balls” cements the title’s reference to East London’s 19th-century opium district. Then she hands us the pipe as the interplay between verses creates a narcotic tunnel vision on one or two instruments between maximal choruses that whip the band into an ecstatic frenzy. “I’m in a lime house!” Deal keeps screaming, building up to sensory overload. There are plenty of charming hooks on Pod, but it’s most powerful at moments like this, with its lurid imagery amplified to the max and churned up by repetition into an annihilating force.
The Breeders’ shoegaze contemporaries also lived to overwhelm, but they required so much studio embellishment to get there. Albini, in his usual self-demoted capacity as engineer, did the opposite. After Deal and Donelly’s considerably bouncier demo tape convinced 4AD head Ivo Watts-Russell to invest $11,000 in the project, the band spent a couple weeks at Edinburgh’s Palladium Studios with Albini, who wrapped up the sessions early and sent them home with recordings that were slower, rougher and sludgier than the material they’d brought him. The isolation and darkness and physicality and rot had always been present in Deal’s songs. Just as he’d go on to do with many other classic alternative albums, from PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to In Utero, Albini simply kept the Breeders from tempering the weirdness and abjection in what they’d created.
Yet Pod turned out to be every bit as inviting as it was creepy. As Albini understands it, “The two elements always at war in Kim’s music are prettiness and decadence, the deb and the dirtbag each holding a ladder for the other.” For all its rawness, his production also establishes intimacy. By weaving in snippets of casual studio conversation and abruptly halting tracks before they have a chance to get boring, he recreates the messy energy of a DIY show in the listener’s headphones. The album’s comforting aspects may have also reflected how pleasant the recording process was. Deal told stories about the band’s time in Scotland, rhapsodizing over “sheep walking along the front lawn of the house we were recording in,” and summing up the experience as “cozy, like going to winter camp, or being in a pajama party."
Whatever alchemy was at work, it made Pod the kind of record that feels like the listener’s own secret no matter how popular it gets. The Raincoats’ self-titled debut, the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World or Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth—all Cobain favorites—have the same quality. With the partial exception of Nevermind, Nirvana albums are just the same: intimate, sensory, and psychological rather than cerebral or distanced. Deal articulated the difference between her music and the Pixies’ in 1990: “Do I write the same kind of songs as Charles? No! Get outta here! I don’t care about the Bible! I don’t care about UFOs!” You can imagine Cobain, who wrote about bodies and babies and heroin and feeling alone, heartily agreeing. If he shaped grunge, then the Breeders helped shape him. And he returned the favor, unintentionally, by creating a captive audience for their future releases.
I wish Deal got more credit for her impact on Cobain. It seems like a small thing, but Nirvana marked the convergence of mainstream and underground rock, catalyzing a permanent shift that only accelerated in the 21st century. And they’re usually placed in a lineage that begins with the Beatles, touches on punk and winds down with a list of mostly male ’80s indie acts: Mudhoney, R.E.M., the Meat Puppets, Pixies. Even as pop culture grows ever more eager to vanquish the appearance of sexism, we hear so little about how female musicians—or female artists in any medium—influence their male peers. It’s as though such a relationship would violate some natural hierarchy of creativity. And that’s one way pioneering women get written out of the history of their art form (see: Hilma af Klint, Clarice Lispector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe). It took Last Splash for the Breeders to win a place in the alt-rock canon, land of sold-out reunion tours and fat licensing checks. But without Pod, that canon might have looked very different.

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Steve Buscemi reads the cut-up passages of William Burroughs while backed by the drones of Elliott Sharp. It rarely works.

Steve Buscemi / Elliott Sharp: Rub Out the Word

Rub Out the Word

Despite his unassailable stature as a literary giant, modernist trailblazer, and fringe icon, we continue to sell William Burroughs short by the way we remember him. The late author is celebrated for his unparalleled ability to disfigure the language, both via his “cut-up” approach to non-linear narrative flow and also for the unrelenting hideousness of his subject matter. But let’s imagine, by comparison, that Jackson Pollock or John Coltrane had gone down in history solely for the audacious splatter of their technique, rather than the innate grace they brought to those techniques.
In Burroughs’ case, even though he structured several of his key works so that readers can start on any page and work through the text in any order, we shouldn’t ignore his gift for putting words together in the first place. If it weren’t for their underlying lyricism, Burroughs’ harrowing portraits of heroin use and pederasty wouldn’t have the arresting impact that they continue to have more than half a century later. And yet, after all that time, even highly creative artists like composer/instrumentalist Elliott Sharp and actor Steve Buscemi miss the mark. Both of them should know better.
A live performance that took place as part of a month-long celebration of Burroughs’ birthday centennial in 2014, Rub Out the Word will likely satisfy the author’s most avid cheerleaders, but anyone looking for a fresh take should look elsewhere (such as Burroughs’ spoken-word collaborations with the bands Material, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and his 1990 album of readings with various artists, Dead City Radio). It’s not that Buscemi and Sharp don’t mean well, or that they don’t bring a great deal of attention to their respective crafts here. They also deserve credit for not fetishizing Burroughs’ most reprehensible qualities (i.e: his unapologetic fascination with guns even after recklessly killing his second wife with one, and his celebrity among junkies as “the pope of dope”). And yet the pair apparently couldn’t resist looking at their subject through a superficial lens.
Rub Out the Word zigzags between the author’s prose and his musings on the art of writing itself. On paper, it would seem as if Sharp chose wisely from the vast body of text that Burroughs left behind, especially where Buscemi recites passages that tease at offering insight into the author’s process. It is in this area that Rub Out the Word fails the most to deliver on its potential. Unfortunately, Buscemi and Sharp fall into the trap of being seduced by the cut-up technique as the defining aspect of Burroughs’ legacy. They even unwittingly ring the death knell for this album right off the bat, when Buscemi reads, “What better way to invoke a writer than to cut and re-arrange his very own words? Like all keys to be used with caution, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.” Too true, as this album would've benefitted hugely from a mix of random and structured flow. Sharp, presumably taken by his attraction to chaos theory, copy/pasted Burroughs' texts and ran them through an online word scrambler, an unnecessary step akin to filtering an innovative guitarist's parts through the same effects pedal twice.
Burroughs was capable of keeping readers spellbound through the jagged shifts in his train of thought, but it’s obvious within this album’s first few minutes that the cut-up technique doesn’t have the same verve in spoken form that it does on paper—at least not the way it’s delivered here. As an extended oral work, Rub Out the Word simply lacks coherence. And though Sharp’s eerie background drones complement the more nightmarish passages, what begins as a compelling exercise in texture ultimately falls flat from a lack of sonic variety or buildup. Which leaves the spotlight on Buscemi’s stylized voice, an egregious affectation that the material just didn’t need.
Buscemi actually breathes life into the final track “Taking the Virus” by reading in a rapid-fire, low-pitched whisper that conjures images of an auctioneer making a hushed speech at a funeral. The difference between the vocal technique on this piece and the previous ones is startling. It also shows how much Burroughs’ writing breathes when subjected to new interpretations. Buscemi treats “Taking the Virus” like a script where he has room to invent the narrator’s character, which works wonders. And when Buscemi slows down, he does so with the agility of a seasoned musician. The shift in pacing is revelatory and also creates room for Sharp’s accompaniment to shine through. It’s the one moment where Rub Out the Word has dynamics and dimension. By that point, though, it’s far too late.


This Chicago six-piece plays heavy, proggy psychedelic rock with just the right amount of power-pop sugar to sweeten the mix.

Post Animal: When I Think of You in a Castle

When I Think of You in a Castle

Psychedelia comes in many guises, and Post Animal wear just about all of them. The Chicago sextet’s debut, When I Think of You in a Castle, is a practical travelogue through the genre’s more melodic and explicitly rock-y incarnations, tempered with just the right amount of brawny power-pop. At times, they resemble the ’70s-radio dreams of ELO and Wings, or an alternate-universe Thin Lizzy that came up in Athens, Georgia’s storied Elephant 6 collective instead of the pubs of Dublin. The band’s previous EPs—Post Animal Perform the Most Curious Water Activities from 2015, and 2016’s The Garden Series—leaned hard on haze and fuzz, and while those elements are far from absent on When I Think of You in a Castle, there’s a new sense of clarity and realization. As far as first LPs go, it’s shockingly confident.
Among the members of Post Animal is actor Joe Keery, whom you might recognize from the depths of your Chromecast as “Stranger Things” mimbo Steve Harrington. The six musicians in the group collectively share writing credits for the album, and they frequently swap lead vocal duties, so Keery’s contributions wouldn’t necessarily stand out—except for the fact that his other gig almost prevented Post Animal from continuing at all. “We weren’t sure what the future of the band was going to look like,” drummer Wesley Toledo states in a one-sheet. “We didn’t know where we were all going, but we knew we wanted to make an album with all of us in the same room.”
Good thing, too: A self-produced effort recorded in a cabin by Michigan’s Paw Paw Lake, When I Think of You in a Castle at its best resembles six guys jostling for elbow room as they pile colorful, blocky riffs atop one another like an intense game of Jenga. “Heavy” is an adjective often applied to variants of psych-rock and pop, and Post Animal often sound like they weigh a thousand tons, breaking into doomy sludge in the middle of the dizzying “Gelatin Mode” and melding Toledo’s arrhythmia-inducing bass hits and Keery’s frantic vocals on “Dirtpicker” to create an endlessly building, ziggurat-like effect.
If those descriptors sound like they hew closely to the nerdy sonic calculus of prog rock, you’re not too far off. Mountain-scaling arpeggios and showy chord progressions are practically in the band’s DNA, and there’s a sense of old-fashioned skill emanating from When I Think of You in a Castle that is, at times, gloriously unfashionable compared to the current indie rock landscape. But focusing on Post Animal’s considerable chops also risks overlooking the band’s impressive skill for crafting memorable melodic baubles. Dalton Allison’s satisfying high register punctuates the turned-loose drum solos and stop-start breakdowns of “Tire Eyes,” and “Ralphie” opens up from a six-stringed air raid to reveal a sweet power-pop gem with interlocking vocal hooks crafted to raise your blood sugar levels.
Despite being a clear album standout, the panting horndog-isms of “Ralphie” also represent Post Animal’s true Achilles heel: They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive. The band recently admitted in a track-by-track breakdown that the lyrics of “Gelatin Mode” are essentially interchangeable placeholders, and Post Animal’s subject matter—generally falling into the two broad categories of lusting after women and expanding your mind—confirms the impression that words aren’t their focal point. This is, for now, fine; there’s a long legacy of psychedelic music where what’s being said is of far lesser concern than what’s being played. But the lyrical efforts from some of Post Animal’s clearest predecessors—MGMT’s saucer-eyed apocalyptic visions, the Magic Eye-like emotional anxiety of Tame Impala—highlight the fact that this band has nowhere to grow but up.


When *Is This It* landed in 2001, prognosticators claimed the Strokes would break big, reassert New York's post-punk primacy, and save rock and roll. One out of three ain't bad. Though early references were made to canonical art-rock legends such as Television and the Velvet Underground-- bands that achieved more popularity after disbanding than at their creative peaks-- the Strokes were superstars by comparison: Their debut sold more than 2 million copies worldwide; the Velvets wouldn't crack *Billboard*'s top 100 albums chart until the release of 1985's posthumous *VU*. But that's where the glory fades: The Strokes simply ascended to

First Impressions of Earth

When Is This It landed in 2001, prognosticators claimed the Strokes would break big, reassert New York's post-punk primacy, and save rock and roll. One out of three ain't bad. Though early references were made to canonical art-rock legends such as Television and the Velvet Underground-- bands that achieved more popularity after disbanding than at their creative peaks-- the Strokes were superstars by comparison: Their debut sold more than 2 million copies worldwide; the Velvets wouldn't crack Billboard's top 100 albums chart until the release of 1985's posthumous VU. But that's where the glory fades: The Strokes simply ascended to mainstream acceptance, leaving a potential underdog rock legacy in the dust, and accruing a truckload of backlash in the process. So one can hardly blame them for cutting their losses and going for broke on their boorishly titled third album, First Impressions of Earth.
Here, the Strokes simultaneously settle into diminished expectations (delaying an album until just after Christmas = not screening a movie for film critics) and wildly ratchet up their sound, trying new things, getting weirder, but remaining true to the core of their sound. Though always inhumanly taut, the band has grown even tighter, and now plays with a precision that, while coldly machinelike at times, is impressive more often than not. On songs like "Juicebox" and the standout "Electricityscape", drummer Fab Moretti and bassist Nicolai Fraiture form a no-nonsense rhythm section that keeps these songs as concise and focused as possible. Albert Hammond and Nic Valensi, meanwhile, build a complex weapons system out of just two guitars, interlocking like Thundercats and launching short singsongy riffs that add tension and spark, particularly on tracks like "Heart in a Cage" and "Razorblade".
But if the group has grown deadlier and more dynamic in their five years together, singer Julian Casablancas still struggles as a lyricist. Perhaps dogged by persistent assertions that he has nothing to say, he finally cracks here, asserting that no one does. "Seven billion people got nothing to say," he moans on album closer "Red Light", "Are you coming on to me?" And leading up to that summary statement is an insistent defensiveness that curdles otherwise decent songs into tedious self-consciousness. On "Ask Me Anything", he admits, "I've got nothing to say", and tempers his cynicism with nonsense as proof: "Don't be a coconut/ God is trying to talk to you."
Of course, no one ever listened to the Strokes for deep insight into the human condition. They benefitted from being in the right place at the right time, coming into their own while the dominant trends of the late 90s were fizzling out. Just like many of the flannel-clad Seattle-ites of that decade (and, arguably, the spandex-sporting hair-metal bands of the 80s), the Strokes encapsulated numerous trends at once, projecting more meaning through their style and sound-- that scruffy hair, weathered denim, slouchy throwback punk-- than through their songs. And regardless of message, Casablancas has proven himself a large and important part of that appeal, for both his physical presence and his vocals, which remain ragged and loose in opposition to the band's rock-solid dynamic. On First Impressions, however, he seems eager to break the mold, but unsure how: On "Vision of Division" and "The Ize of the World", he strains harder, screaming through gritted teeth; "Heart in a Cage" and "Fear of Sleep" find him leaning too heavily on repetition of phrases that quickly become grating; during the Pogues-like stomp "Evening Sun", he fakes a Shane MacGowan accent for the first few lines before dropping the schtick altogether; and on "Ask Me Anything" and "On the Other Side", he makes this album the Strokes' loungiest to date.
A handful of these modifications are welcome as a change of pace, and at times make First Impressions sound prickly and confident. When the band is on, the songs attain the force and fury of previous outings. Unfortunately, the album is also clogged with a number of tracks that are as sloppy as titles like "The Ize of the World" and "Vision of Division" suggest. But the band's failures do, if nothing else, possess a certain schadenfreude, allowing a fascinating glimpse at a band futilely grasping in all directions for something new and meaningful, only to fumble with a half-fragment of unformed idea between its desperate fingers.


John Lennon's "Glass Onion", a daffy throwaway from the Beatles' self-titled album, isn't among the band's best songs. But a snippet fits very nicely in the third position on *Love*, the Beatles catalog remix album and Cirque de Soleil soundtrack created by George Martin and his son Giles. After an angelic "Because"-- a capella, but here fluffed up with bird songs-- there's the "A Hard Days Night" chord into Ringo's drum solo on "The End", which then fades into "Get Back".

"Glass Onion" was Lennon having fun with the Beatles myth, referencing his earlier songs and mocking the tendency to "decode"

Love

John Lennon's "Glass Onion", a daffy throwaway from the Beatles' self-titled album, isn't among the band's best songs. But a snippet fits very nicely in the third position on Love, the Beatles catalog remix album and Cirque de Soleil soundtrack created by George Martin and his son Giles. After an angelic "Because"-- a capella, but here fluffed up with bird songs-- there's the "A Hard Days Night" chord into Ringo's drum solo on "The End", which then fades into "Get Back".
"Glass Onion" was Lennon having fun with the Beatles myth, referencing his earlier songs and mocking the tendency to "decode" them that would eventually get way out of hand when Beach Boys pal and "Never Learn Not to Love" composer Charles Manson sent his minions into Beverly Hills to commit mass murder. "Glass Onion" was Lennon's attempt-- on the fly, while the band was at its peak-- at recontextualizing his Beatles work, to remind us all that music is supposed to be fun. The joker was laughing with us, jabbing an elbow in our sides to say, "Hey, we're just a pop band here, folks."
That's a good thing to keep in mind with the Beatles. They were just a pop band, even if they were possibly the greatest entity ever to fit that particular classification. The Beatles were so good that they're not very interesting to talk about-- it's like listening to someone drone on about the Grand Canyon. No other band has generated as much dull commentary, even as the music remains unimpeachable.
They're certainly the best band I almost never listen to. I'm guessing I share this with a lot of music obsessives; the Beatles' music has been so thoroughly absorbed into our consciousness that we can play the songs in our heads any time we like. Which is why the idea of someone doing something new with the catalog-- mixing and matching different songs, blending the whole thing into an epic suite-- is potentially exciting. Any attempt to fiddle with this music is like long-distance brain surgery, toying with our collective memory with the hope of creating something new.
Listening to Love I'm reminded first of a few artists that took from the Beatles without their permission, and how illicit beginnings gave their samples an extra hit of fun. There's the entire Danger Mouse/Jay-Z mashup The Grey Album, of course, but I'm thinking of smaller details. When Ringo Starr's solo from "The End" appears early here I go immediately to Jason Forrest's "Ten Amazing Years", not Abbey Road. The swirl of strings from "Good Night" stitched here to Ringo's "Octopus's Garden" brings to mind Ekkehard Ehlers' drawn-out loop of the same phrase that comprises the entirety of one side of "Ekkehard Ehlers Plays John Cassavetes". Having all the mixes band-sanctioned loses a little something. Paul McCartney is said to have heard Love and remarked that he wished it went a bit further out. And it's hard not to agree, especially for people used to hearing mash-ups and guerilla sonic deconstruction via laptop. How badly do you want Yamatsuka Eye to do a Rebore Vol. 0 on this material?
Really, the mashed-up bits here are just a seasoning, the occasional jarring effect to remind us that we're not just sitting around listening to Beatles records. Who knew that the backing track for "Drive My Car" fit perfectly over verses from "The Word" and "What You're Doing"? The a capella "Sun King" sounds great backward on "Gnik Nus" leading beautifully into "Something" and doesn't contain any hidden messages beyond the one conveyed by the opening "Because"-- that the Beatles were great singers. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" seems a natural soundtrack for tumbling acrobats, and the coda to "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" sounds like it was made for this project.
As the album wears on, the songs get "bigger" and are also made to stand on their own, without the mix trickery. But they also suffer from truncation. It's great to hear a round of the "Hey Jude"'s epic chorus with just voice and drums, but the song means so much less at four minutes than it does at seven, with a full verse cut and the final fade happening earlier. I will say that hearing it pulled apart finally confirms that Beta Band's "Dry the Rain" steals from it almost completely, one instrument after another.
It seems impossible to follow the final chord of "A Day in the Life", but the Martins are just closing the door on the darker, artier aspect of the Beatles, letting the uplifting pop band carry the day during the album's final section. The trimmed "Hey Jude", the reprise of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (let's face it-- not great, but included because of all the showbiz connotations) and then closing with "All You Need Is Love".
What seems to consume people most about this record is the sound of the thing, just how beautifully the original material was recorded and how great it comes over on a purely sonic level. The art of recording a rock band, it seems, reached its zenith in the late 1960s. In terms of capturing guitar, bass, drums, and voice, nothing since-- no matter how many tracks-- sounds as pure and lovely as what the Beatles did at Abbey Road studios. Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about.


The Pacific Northwest metal duo’s riveting new album is a sludgy and simmering call to action.

Desolation’s Flower

Ragana’s saints weren’t canonized by a specific religion; they were forged by fire. In the sanctuary of a century-old Catholic church-turned-studio in Anacortes, Washington, the Oakland via Olympia metal duo of Coley and Maria (who do not publicly share their last names) paid their respects to their queer and trans predecessors with what they’ve described as a hymn of gratitude. “Desolation’s Flower,” the opening title track of their new album, is simmering and righteous. Coley’s obliterating, fuzz-slathered, single-note guitar melodies echo alongside Maria’s massive and gradual percussive crash. From that foundation, they build to multiple movements of feverish drumming and soaring black-metal riffs. Coley’s screams suggest anger, but instead of unleashing pure rage, their words express gratitude for their forebears and a promise to live in their example.
“Holy are the names,” they repeatedly insist, of those who withstood the relentless hell of oppression to find a hidden world of reprieve. Their symbolism evokes the 19th-century Romantics, offering an indelible image beyond the confines of this music: “They found desolation’s flower.” As the song winds down after eight minutes, each of Maria’s evenly spaced bass drum thuds lands like a firm, persistent reminder. In both its gradual climb and its focus on forebears who cleaved through volatile terrain, the song provides the sonic and conceptual groundwork for the entirety of their sixth album, Desolation’s Flower.
The seven tracks on Desolation’s Flower splice panoptic frenzy with near-ambient calm to underscore the present fraught moment in history where oppression is written into law. Ragana’s anarchist politics have carried through as the conceptual undercurrent to all of their records to date, and that continues here. In their lyrics, the metaphorical ecosystems of the world are all freezing cold, dense fog, untenable fires, and brutal winds. It’s a setting that breeds desperation and intense longing. “There is no return to a place before pain,” Coley reveals on “Winter’s Light Pt. 2.” The best way to survive out there is together; the duo recently discussed how easy it is to find community and connection through protest. “May we find shelter in what remains,” the song concludes.
For all its heft and darkness, Desolation’s Flower is never full-on bleak. The emphasis on collective strength, on reaching out when everything seems hopeless, is a call to action when crumbling feels like the default. It’s there in their lyrics, and there’s also something intrinsically motivating about this Pacific Northwest queer anarchist black metal duo’s shredded vocals and raw, slow-building sound. Even the way the album is put together mirrors it’s focus on finding power through solidarity: Coley screams and plays guitar on all the odd-numbered songs, and for the rest, they sit behind the drums while Maria takes the lead. Ragana have spoken about consciously balancing their individual styles on their records—Coley’s more elaborate odysseys next to Maria’s quieter and more minimal compositions—and that melding of aesthetics keeps Desolation’s Flower riveting.
Their division of labor leads to a stark diptych on the back half. “Winter’s Light Pt. 2” is a sparse build that turns torrential. Coley shrieks about feeling empty and wild, praying for relief from the decimating elements. Maria seems to respond with its follow-up “Pain,” a gentle and lolling sprawl of a song that feels more indebted to ’90s alt rock and grunge than all-out metal. Her voice is soft as she offers an outstretched hand: “I want to feel your pain with you/I want to know what it feels like.” Much of the album's emotional content and its landscapes feel elemental. “Wind blows through the ruins,” Coley screams longingly on “Ruins” before distortion whips through the church studio. There’s an analogy on “Winter’s Light Pt. 2” about a small deer surviving in its winter home. In several moments, fire is meager and distant—once this great destroyer that left behind an unforgiving aftermath.
Then, on “DTA,” Ragana’s rage and sadness come into a sharp contemporary focus. “Death to America and everything you’ve done/I can’t feel anything, I am numb,” Maria repeats in a quiet voice. When the duo kicks up a cyclone of scuzzy distortion, Maria’s guitar sounding suddenly like a Crazy Horse bootleg, there’s a “fuck the police” chant sampled from a video of a recent protest and riot in Oakland. For one song, they no longer offer a poetically ambiguous look at oppression—they’re reacting to acts of hatred right outside their window. Maria closes with the same words from before, this time in a harrowing scream as though she’s desperate to feel anything after withstanding a daily tidal wave of heartbreak.
All that’s left in the final seconds of Desolation’s Flower is the sound of lapping waves. It’s an appropriate conclusion to an album where the natural world is foregrounded as a punisher, but also because Ragana required a boat to get from the studio to Phil Elverum’s off-site gong. Everything about the album—the heaviness and quiet, the steady build and the massive cathartic payoff, the solitude and the solace—heaves steadily forward and back, forward and back in the same direction. Every song is in service of the same message, and each one cuts stillness with show-stopping slow metal heroics, like a massive scream or an unbelievable riff. “We live in the light of the burning world,” Coley and Maria sing—and yes, shriek—in solidarity with one another.


Three years after he galvanized a new class of grime MCs, the UK rapper tries to meet the high bar he set for himself.

Ignorance Is Bliss

In May 2016—before Brexit, before Trump, before plastic straw bans—Skepta released Konnichiwa, an uncompromising blow to the establishment and one of the best grime albums of the decade. The Mercury Prize-winning album quickly turned the heads of UK execs bent on ignoring homegrown talent, becoming a beacon to younger MCs who sought broader recognition. It received an unprecedented Top 10 placement in the UK charts, leading the way for a number of rappers who would follow in his slipstream. Now, with Ignorance Is Bliss, Skepta is faced with meeting the high-water mark he set for grime what seemed like ages ago.
In the years following Konnichiwa, Skepta dropped a handful of new tracks and features but mostly occupied himself with designing Nike trainers, launching a high-end streetwear line, and causing a mild tabloid stir by posing unclad with supermodel Naomi Campbell for the cover of GQ. He also set up a youth music facility in his hometown of Tottenham, London, was made a chief in Nigeria, and, late last year, became a father. Somewhat fittingly, Ignorance Is Bliss is an album that swings between the glamorous life of a tastemaker and someone grappling with new responsibilities both practical and esoteric in nature.
Searing political barbs and fiery rhetoric have become the lingua franca of the UK’s new class of MCs. Breakthrough rappers such as Dave, Stormzy, and slowthai are lauded as dissident voices for a young audience largely overlooked by the country’s legislators. This arguably comes less easily to Skepta (last year he became a short-lived meme after sticking his fingers in his ears at the very mention of politics.) Of course, he can engage when he wants to. “Glow In The Dark” offers deft commentary on political hypocrisy and identity politics. On album opener “Bullet From A Gun,” he flows effortlessly over a skittish slice of grime, covering everything from petty break-ups and juvenile braggadocio, to the never-ending rotation of the earth and his role in the long bloodline of Adenuga men. Skepta is at his best when he nails this kind of disaffected nonchalance. It makes the occasional flash of intimacy or vulnerability all the more powerful—“Recently I’ve been learning a lot/All I know is there’s no better feeling/Than getting home and seeing my little girl in her cot,” he off-hands on “Bullet From A Gun.”
Some of the flourishes in his production are exquisite here. The beat to “Same Old Story” is a fresh take on the kind of golden-era emotive grime peddled by Ruff Sqwad, and the 90 seconds of glistening synths and stream-of-conscious monologue that begin “Animal Instinct” feels genuinely inventive, too. But these bright moments stand out against a sometimes patchy showing: The beat to “No Sleep” is as jarring as the insomnia it conjures and serves only to mask Skepta’s skippy flow; “Going Through It” feels like a half-baked idea that should have been left on the cutting room floor; “You Wish” is a lesson in how chorus-led grime tunes will always be a hit-or-miss affair. In a statement accompanying the album, Skepta said: “The internet is making everything and everyone politically correct but that takes away the artistry.” But in the context of tone-deaf metaphors such as “slap it like Ike Turner” on “Redrum,” the freedom of speech he’s so aggrieved about hardly seems worth it.
In the video for “Bullet From A Gun,” Skepta sits in a North London underground station watching over a stroller while the trials of inner city life swirl around him. As so often with Skepta, whose tight one-liners and impeccable diction have set him apart since the days of fuzzy pirate radio broadcasts, the message is clear and unselfconsciously simple: Fatherhood has offered him a new perspective. But as the album plays out with its series of sketches that flip between the trivial and contemplative, and as Skepta tussles to find his place in the world, you’re left wondering whether he craves the bliss of youthful innocence or the responsibility of being a voice for a generation. Unfortunately, Ignorance Is Bliss is a deferral, splitting the difference with a series of half-measures. When he apes fellow UK rapper J Hus’ freestyle flow on the second verse of “What Do You Mean” it’s hard to determine whether it’s pure homage or a kind of time-warped nostalgia, a yearning to return to his own breakthrough days.


Drake's fourth proper album feels claustrophobic and too long and weirdly monotone, but the occasional tweaks in sound lead to a few great moments.

VIEWS

“Know thyself.” — Socrates
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” — Benjamin Franklin
“I’ve always been me, I guess I know myself.” — Drake
Know yourself, the theory goes, and you will know all. The world will open up to you. Existence will be made plain. You will be one with the matrix. Yadda yadda yadda. From arenas to memes, Drake has always had a skill for turning his innermost thoughts, feelings, and anxieties into breakthrough group therapy sessions—he articulates what we know to be true and then lets us rap or sing those truths en masse, exalting in common bonds that are as vulnerable as they are revealing. When he confides his fears, we become a little more fearless. When he turns his woes into anthems, we all get lifted. But there is a razor-sharp line between self-awareness and self-absorption: Whereas self-awareness can expand wisdom by reflecting it outward, self-absorption often festers, drawing things in only to let them rot. For the past seven years, Drake has expertly glided along that line. But on his fourth proper album, he edges closer than ever to a mirrored abyss, a suffocating echo chamber of self.
The record is called VIEWS but its perspective is decidedly singular. “This album, I’m very proud to say, is just—I feel like I told everybody how I’m actually feeling,” Drake told Zane Lowe in a toothless recent interview, differentiating VIEWS from his previous work. This might seem like a ridiculous distinction—there’s never any question that Drake is the star of his own show—but it’s apt, and it hints at why this album feels like more of a claustrophobic mindfuck than a collective catharsis. VIEWS is what happens when venting turns into whining. Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.
Until the last minute, the album was to be called Views from the 6, and it still serves as an ode to Drake’s hometown of Toronto. After having other producers handle the lion’s share of beats on his last two mixtapes, Drake's longtime musical consigliere, Noah “40” Shebib, returns to the head of the table here, with production credits on 12 of the album’s 20 tracks. The atmosphere 40 creates with his music is now synonymous with Drake’s Toronto; the harsh chill of winter is brought forth via cold snares and ice-cube synths, with the summer’s relief often rendered through sped-up ‘90s R&B samples that quietly churn in the background. It’s essentially a screwed-down take on Kanye West’s chipmunk soul, and it has provided a perfect backdrop for Drake’s poignant introspection while ushering in an entire stage of hip-hop’s evolution.
But on VIEWS, the style is simply getting tired, its wintry mood now actively blocking any springtime salvation. It’s also bringing out some of Drake’s most self-loathing tendencies, playing into his groaning paranoia on tracks like “9,” where he laments, “Life is always on, man, I never get a break from it/Doesn’t matter where I go, I can never get away from it.” Songs like these play out like dour self-fulfilling prophecies, puffed-up bad attitudes drunk on their own misery. They also expose the downside of a “no new friends” mindset and how a bunker mentality can snub out curiosity. Marked by frigidness and a furrowed brow, much of VIEWS may be true to Toronto’s darker months, but it also makes the city sound like a pretty inhospitable place.
Fact is, the 6 is one of the most multicultural places on Earth, a sprawling metropolis in which more than 140 different languages and dialects are spoken. And it’s when VIEWS embraces this more inviting and open-minded side of Toronto that it points to a better way forward. Drake’s fascination with the city’s Caribbean enclaves take root in the effervescent rhythms of songs like “With You,” “One Dance,” and “Too Good”—all of them featuring welcomed guest vocals that break up the monotony and also allow Drake to get out of his own brain for a second.
Rihanna co-stars on “Too Good,” finally offering a counterpoint to Drake’s constant disappointment with the opposite sex; when she sings “You take my love for granted, I just don’t understand it,” she’s giving voice to all of the women Drake has spurned on record over the years. (Perhaps tellingly, she only gets to sing the line alongside her duet partner.) Because while Drake’s relationship dissections were once questioning and openly hurt, they too have hardened—at this point, it’s getting impossible to believe he’s not the one to blame for so many squandered attempts at love.
Even slight tweaks to Drake’s usual sound pay dividends here. “Childs Play” finds 40 putting his spin on New Orleans bounce, bringing out Drake’s more playful side as he raps about a lady friend who gets in a fight with him at The Cheesecake Factory and takes his Bugatti for a spin to pick up some tampons. The song’s angst plays out more like a jokey spat than another existential treatise on the hopelessness of searching for the girl of his dreams. “Feel No Ways” is another sad story, but its beat—which zips up Malcolm McClaren’s 1983 hip-hop experiment “World’s Famous”—harkens back to Drake’s masterpiece, Take Care, adding levity and the sense that these feelings, like all feelings, will not be so heavy in time. “Weston Road Flows” is another throwback, with Drake reminiscing about his salad days over a gorgeous Mary J. Blige sample, another instance of a woman’s voice helping to add humanity to the rapper’s toughened exterior. The song finds Drake looking back on his come-up with fondness and, naturally, some melancholy. But when he lets out a little cackle at the end of the track, it’s not out of spite. He sounds like he’s genuinely enjoying himself on the song. It’s nice to hear.
If last year’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late had Drake doing his best all-guns-blazing Tony Montana, shedding his softness for an untouchable-don pose, VIEWS has him on his Tony Soprano, trying to reach deep into his own psyche for revelations but often just falling back on a sour version of what got him this far. Perhaps its shortcomings are in part due to a cloistered view of what being candid really means. “I’m an honest person, I can’t write fiction,” Drake said last week. “It all directly has to do with me or else I can’t make the music.” While artistic honesty is certainly something to aspire to, it doesn’t have to equate with blinding selfishness or even concrete reality. Drake’s most apparent current rap peers, Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, have both let their minds wander to surreal places in order to add depth and intrigue to their own music, and nobody would accuse them of dishonesty. Such inventiveness is required for the type of longevity Drake seems to crave. Because knowing thyself is a quest. It never ends.


For the first time, the singles/EPs/leftovers compilations Past Masters are combined and sold in one glorious package.

Past Masters

Past Masters is the ugly but brilliant sibling of the Beatles discography. Originally released as two separate discs in 1988, it's a catchall for all the stuff the Beatles officially released during their existence that wasn't intended for their albums (and didn't end up on the after-the-fact album Magical Mystery Tour). It's slapped together chronologically, so it begins with an unprepossessing alternate take of "Love Me Do" and ends with the ludicrous doodle "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". And, between them, it includes some of the best pop songs ever recorded-- scratch that: some of the best pop singles ever recorded.
It can be hard to grasp the way it used to work if you've grown up with the basic unit of pop music as the album or the individual song, but the model the Beatles grew up with-- and arguably broke-- was the 45 RPM single: two songs sold together, one of them aspiring to popular success and the other one a sort of lagniappe. They treated their own singles not just as hit-plus-filler but as an often-complementary pair: the massive humanist crescendo of "Hey Jude" paired with the corrective political fireball of "Revolution", the frantic urgency of "Paperback Writer" paired with the dreamy involution of "Rain", John Lennon's bitter, betrayed "Day Tripper" paired with Paul McCartney's hopeful, clear-eyed "We Can Work It Out".
For that matter, their singles weren't simply teasers for an album: Of the 22 singles (and two EPs) the Beatles released in the UK between 1962 and 1970, more than half weren't initially part of a bigger unit. Their first non-album single, "From Me to You", came out all of three weeks after Please Please Me; "I Want to Hold Your Hand" emerged a week after With the Beatles. "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" was actually released-- as a double A-side-- the same day as Rubber Soul, on which neither side appeared. By that point, they were basically just showing off.
Most of the first disc of Past Masters is the product the Beatles were being pushed to crank out over the first three years of their recording career: The three-covers-and-a-leftover Long Tall Sally EP, German recordings of a couple of hits, a version of Larry Williams' "Bad Boy" that filled out an American LP. It also features the two phenomenal, headlong late 1963 singles that transformed them from a perfectly nice Liverpool band to The Goddamn Beatles: "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". It's a testament to the Beatles' gamechanging originality that the opportunistic American bands who tried to make a few bucks by covering those songs over the following few months couldn't even play them right-- the harmonies of "She Loves You" and the delicious rhythmic trick that introduces "I Want to Hold Your Hand" flummoxed every one of them.
The astonishing stuff continues on the second disc: seven A-side/B-side pairs, plus an alternate version of John's devotional "Across the Universe". "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" was the single where they moved away from their great subject of love, and where Ringo Starr perfected his uncanny ability to shift the beat just enough that the band seemed to be hovering a few inches above the ground. George Harrison's "The Inner Light"-- a spaced-out setting from the Tao Te Ching, on which he's backed up by Indian musicians-- is a momentum-killer in the context of an album (as it is here), but it made sense as part of a yin-and-yang pair with Paul's earthy Fats Domino homage "Lady Madonna".
"The Ballad of John and Yoko", rushed out seven weeks after "Get Back", looked like a colossal act of vanity on its surface-- John messing with the Lennon/McCartney copyright juggernaut by reporting so literally on what he'd been up to for the past couple of months that the result was basically impossible to cover, and getting Paul into the studio to bang it out with him, even though Ringo and George were due back in town just a few days later. It's a triumph, anyway. As usual with their singles, there's something new and ear-catching jumping out of the speakers every few seconds (the shaker that doubles the rhythm right after the bridge, Paul's improvised-sounding last-word-of-each-line harmonies, John singing "Gibraltar near Spain" at a moment when that was a political assertion), and honestly Lennon had been having a pretty interesting spring.
And then there's their biggest-selling single and deepest pairing of songs, "Hey Jude"/"Revolution". McCartney is singing about Lennon's son, Lennon is shouting about the system and culture about which they're embedded; "Jude" wraps its arms around the world and gets everyone to join in its mantra, "Revolution" pushes the idiots away with the nastiest noise the Beatles had ever made. It was also the first release on the Beatles' own label, Apple Records-- or, rather, one of two singles that came out the same day. (The other was Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days", which knocked it off the top of the British charts after a couple of weeks.) As a seven-minute song on an album of three-minute songs, "Hey Jude" inevitably overpowers its context; as a free-floating sound file without "Revolution", it's missing the sting that tempers its sweetness. But if you find yourself taking advantage of the reissue-and-"Rock Band" frenzy to sit down and really listen to the magnificent recordings that have spent the last four decades or so as inescapable background music, remember the way much of these two discs were meant to be heard and understood: two by two.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Almost 20 years after it was recorded and rejected by London Records and then made public as unofficial bootlegs or unagreeable edits, stoner-rock legends Sleep's storied one-song, hour-long third album is finally available through a remastered, re-illustrated reissue.

Dopesmoker

Three stoned kids walk into an expensive studio with the idea of recording one song that lasts for an hour and opens with the line, "Drop out of life with bong in hand." During the course of the tune, which changes every time they play it, they equate weed with most every sacred religious symbol, take solos that stretch for minutes, and sing in some malevolent half-chant incantation. They won't allow it to be edited for radio play, and they don't want to break it into tracks. And, by the way, the label footing the bill is the same 50-year-old institution that released music by the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles and, the Moody Blues: With every year that passes, both the tale and the tape of Dopesmoker seem a little more ridiculous.
The third album by a trio of 20-something San Jose, Calif., burnouts called Sleep, Dopesmoker resulted from a major-label skirmish over a band that had made two very good but not altogether great LPs of distorted, bluesy, and bleary-eyed rock. But those records-- 1991's Volume One and 1993's Holy Mountain-- sported would-be singles, editable jams like "Holy Mountain", "Snowblind", and "The Wall of Yawn" that might have found a home on the radio dial in the filthy backwash of grunge. In the battle between Elektra and London Records, however, Sleep didn't seem so interested in who might pay the most to get their stoner rock on the air; as guitarist Matt Pike, bassist Al Cisneros, and drummer Chris Hakius have said since, they wanted to go with the label that would pay for the album and mostly leave the music alone. London ostensibly signed off on such creative control. So after more than a year of legal wrangling to slip out of an old label contract, Sleep finally went with London and, in 1996, entered Record Two, the aforementioned well-equipped Northern California studio, with producer Billy Anderson and, as the fable goes, a lot of weed.
Their plan was to record the one-song album they'd been writing and testing live for at least four years. As Cisneros told Decibel writer J. Bennett a decade later, London had approved the idea, but the deep pockets began to get concerned as soon as they started to hear the music. Despite London's anxiety, technical troubles, and interpersonal tensions, Sleep finally finished the track in two month-long sessions. The label would never release it: After a series of contentious remixes and edits by a number of different hands hired by London, the imprint eked out a few cheap promos before deciding to can Sleep. The band broke up (in retrospect, they've said, they were headed this way with or without London), and during the next decade, three labels issued unofficial bootlegs or unagreeable edits of Dopesmoker, or as the band later called it, Jerusalem.
Now, 16 years after it was recorded, Sleep's storied third and easily best album is finally available through a remastered, re-illustrated reissue. Loud and more lucid, Southern Lord's greenest version of Dopesmoker pushes the record's highs to higher places and gives the whole hour just a bit more power. The trio has long complained that the previous versions didn't understand their intended aesthetic-- the art, the mixing, any of it. But a brilliant new cover by artist Arik Roper, who also designed the previously popular Tee-Pee version of the disc, pictures the "Weedians" of which Cisernos sings, making their pilgrimage to Nazareth, endless bongs strapped to their backs, an extra-terrestrial landscape in the distance. As Pike exclaimed to The Quietus earlier this year, "This one is going to look so fucking cool, it's so rad." That statement should rightly apply not only to the cover but also to this entire reissue, which at long lasts fulfills the red-eyed vision of the people who made Dopesmoker while confirming the record's legacy both as a stoner-metal and psychedelic-rock masterpiece. This is one of the great major-label casualties, finally available in proper form.
When Sleep broke up after the failure of Dopesmoker, the trio split into two unequal halves: Almost immediately, Matt Pike started High on Fire, who have continued adding different kinds of fuel to the same generalized burn. Years later, Hakius and Cisneros would return as Om to explore the same iterative modalities that made listening to Dopesmoker feel like an instant inhalation. Dopesmoker is the perfect culmination before the collapse; Pike's bombast meet Om's repetition, a friction that rendered ideal sparks. Though the lengths of his solos are anything but modest, his playing itself is largely textural; when he steps into the spotlight, Pike lets repeated notes follow each other into a kaleidoscopic flurry. The persona of the shirtless, shouting dude at the helm of High on Fire remained in check, so as not to distract from the music's naturally meditative state.
To that end, Hakius and Cisneros weren't quite locked into Om's repetition addiction yet, either. Instead, they pushed against each other, Cisneros countering Pike's lumbering riffs with ample burl and perfectly sculpted tone. Historically, Hakius has criticized his own playing during the Dopesmoker sessions. But Dopesmoker is an infinitely explorable listen, the kind of record that will goad your attention through miniscule rabbit holes whether or not you're as stoned as the people who made it. Hakius' pulse is the constant carrot, then, filling the spaces when the band aggresses, forcing them forward when they pull back. He is a reminder to continue toward Nazareth.
And that's perhaps what remains most impressive about Dopesmoker, especially hearing it again for the first time through yet another reissue: It's an hour of adventure and momentum, where the lumber and the repetition somehow always push ahead. At a moment when black metal reinventers and D-beat revivers seem to dominate large sections of the heavy music world, maybe the thought of a resin-voiced singer intoning for an hour over riffs that wrap into themselves and drums that aim ever for infinity seems boring. But no matter how many times they had to record or rehearse "Dopesmoker" to master it, or no matter how much pressure London placed on them to make something more commercial than personal, Sleep sound as if their very existence depends upon the successful exercise of this weed ritual. In a sense, it's safe to say it did. This record's influence on substance, style, and simple ambition within heavy metal has long outlived the band that made it.
Southern Lord's reissue comes with no elaborate set of liner notes or verbose essay concerning the serpentine origin of the release itself. Rather, the tracklist is simply offered on the back cover, as well as the written-and-performed-by bona fides and the production credits. The insert consists entirely of a triptych of Pike, Hakius, and Cisneros performing and a photo of a massive piece of cardboard itemizing the contents of the titanic tune: "Hot Lava Man 4x All Slow (Vocals)", it reads in one spot. The only bonus is a fidelity-compromised live take of "Holy Mountain". It might be tempting to attribute this lack of archival scholarship to stoner lassitude, or to wish for the official story to serve as a sort of reverse score for the long-evasive music. But the story of Dopesmoker and the dissolution of Sleep have been passed around enough-- written about in books, discussed in interviews, warped and exaggerated by years of bong-ripping bros sharing the record with a friend for the first time. This reissue of Dopesmoker doesn't waste time with an introduction that this record no longer requires.


The Rochester rapper is at his best when he isn’t folding to the pressures of wider appeal or tightly-packaged collaborations on his latest project.

Slitherman Activated

The best way to experience Rxk Nephew is to go to his YouTube channel, click on literally anything, and walk away confused, blown away, slightly disturbed, and/or laughing your ass off. In any case, you’ll probably let the next song auto-play. The Rochester rapper’s rambling stream of trapping, Hennessy, hardships, heartbreak, rapper disses, and global conspiracies is a constantly updated document of his churning mindstate. The album format puts arbitrary bounds on an artist who, since 2019, has released at least one song nearly every day.
So what separates Slitherman Activated from the 30 other projects he’s dumped on the internet? For one, it’s released via Towhead Recordings, the New York dance music label at the center of the scene’s ascent. A known aficionado for atypical beats (or maybe everything that lands in his inbox), Nephew brings his relentless, Lil B-inflected flow to a swirl of techno, house, and hip-hop courtesy of city stalwarts like Color Plus and DJ Swisha. On “Beam On Ya Toes,” you’re at a rave in a Brooklyn warehouse watching the Slitherman hand out cocaine and whisper “Poltergeist had the drip.”
The issue is that this can often feel like dance producers trying to make rap beats, which cuts against Nephew’s authenticity. When they’re leaning into their truest instincts, like on the clubby “Early Age Death,” Nephew responds with some of his wildest freestyles to date (in this one, he threatens to kill his parents and the producer, then disses Biggie and 2Pac for good measure). Other highlights are low-stakes exhales, like the Color Plus-produced “Strange Death,” wherein Nephew sounds like an old Screw freestyler with an internet-fried brain: “Nephew got drugs on ya? Hell yeah/Nephew think they cloned Kodak Black? Hell yeah.” But more often, the producers try their hardest to dress up regional rap styles with the occasional wobbly bass or dissonant synth. This becomes apparent when you realize how quickly the record drops off after the opener “Dark Noise,” which isn’t produced by any of these guys but by Detroit rap veteran Black Noi$e.
As if to emphasize how Strange and Cool these beats are, Nephew’s voice throughout is frequently mixed to sound tinny and distant. This feels intentional, perhaps to give his raps a kind of surreal, alien quality, but it makes Nephew seem secondary to the production. We’re here for the Slitherman, not your new VST! It all reminds me of that Hoodrich Pablo Juan and Brodinski tape from a few years ago, which sounded cool and might’ve been a gateway for non-rap fans but had me itching to listen to Pablo Juan’s Designer Drugz series instead. Luckily, Nephew maintains intrigue. On the mind melt that is “I Forgot My Day,” he details quite possibly the biggest bout of amnesia ever in a rap song. The one thing he remembers is “I take my shirt off and all the hoes stop breathin’,” (the Gucci Mane version, probably), which he raps at the song’s end like an uncle reading the lyrics off Genius.
While Rxk Nephew was serving time a couple of years ago, he devoured all the books he could find about conspiracy theories. “I talked to my bunkie about conspiracy theories all day,” he said in an interview on FILO TV. “Area 51, Christopher Columbus, British people wooden teeth… Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks.” He studied texts about aliens, weather control, and lies in the Bible. He read William Cooper’s infamous bestseller Behold A Pale Horse, praised by Alex Jones and the Wu-Tang Clan. Then he got out and recorded “American tterroristt,” his nine-minute retelling of the past, present, and future; the lives of Adam and Eve; Ben Franklin and Santa Claus; Will Smith; and SpongeBob SquarePants—this delirious opus somehow enraptured the rap internet for a moment last winter.
It’d be crazy to expect anything resembling “American tterroristt” ever again, but Rxk Nephew is at his best when he isn’t folding to the pressures of wider appeal or tightly-packaged collaborations. Give him a pack of plugg beats and a night in a studio and he’ll make magic. Slitherman Activated occasionally gets there, too, but is mostly a series of limp attempts at crossover. At least you’ll be able to go on YouTube tomorrow and find a new Rxk Nephew song waiting.

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