Tom Krell's intimate second How to Dress Well album uses the common tools of R&B and pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.

Total Loss

Tom Krell has never been shy about naming his influences. On Love Remains, his How to Dress Well debut, they were pop and R&B acts like Ready For the World, Shai, Michael Jackson, and Bobby Brown. He's no less forthcoming about the inspirations behind his heartbreaking second LP, Total Loss. During the penultimate apologia "Set It Right", he provides a roll call: Ryan, Dan, Mama, Grandma, Francey, Robbie, Nicky, and the list goes on. None of them are famous, none are musicians. They're real people in Krell's life. Some have died (his uncle and best friend), others are living but have slipped out of view, many including himself are struggling with depression. So the title Total Loss gives you fair warning about what to expect. Where Love Remains drew much of its power from emotional suggestion and tactile sensation, Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.
The cruel irony of Total Loss is that it finds Krell striving for directness and candor with family members who've become unavailable to him through breakups, depression, addiction, or death. The record's first lyric-- "You were there for me when I was in trouble/ You could understand for me that life was a struggle"-- is addressed to Krell's mother and reprised later on. Otherwise, the listener is in the position of the "you" populating so many of Krell's thoughts.
The sleek, alabaster sound of Total Loss is a far cry from the heavily distorted and distant Love Remains. That album wasn't considered a drug record for the same reasons Ambien isn't considered recreational, but its shrouded production mimicked the effect the drug can have when it starts to kick in: the sensation of controlling yourself in an out-of-body experience. That feeling is foreign to Total Loss. It's still flooded with reverb, but the anesthetic is gone.
As a result, Total Loss feels subject to heightened sensitivity both sonically and lyrically, and the effect is made more unnerving by the sharp, sudden movements of its elements-- harp plucks, ticking hi-hats, slapped snares and, of course, Krell's own voice. It's high, thin, and boyish, but in no way timid. His quavering falsetto creates an intriguing friction against the newly aggressive, seething tone of his lyrics, particularly when he grapples with the self-blame, hopelessness, and betrayal that survivors of suicide victims often experience. "Say My Name or Say Whatever" begins with a recording of a homeless teen from the 1984 documentary Streetwise describing the freeing effects of flight. "The only bad part about flying," he says, "is having to come back down to the fuckin' world," a projection of Krell's own idealism and disillusionment.
Though it contains Total Loss's most visceral, even sexual music, "Cold Nites" sounds downright angry. The hook boasts, "But I keep on doing it/ Ain't gonna stop until we're through with this," and it's an anger born from Krell's perception of his own shortcomings-- "Tell me what I've got to do to get better."  Album opener "When I Was in Trouble" is a piano hymn that takes its cues from William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, decaying in real time. Krell moans, "Dear Mama, didn't you try to tell me everything was going to be safe?" and then repeats the line in a rare lower register. The effect is chilling, and indicative of the confusion that permeates Total Loss: Whether Krell is trying to find relief in hurting himself or others is left open-ended.
Fortunately, How to Dress Well's malleability prevents Krell from getting too ponderous. If you found his orchestral direction on last year's Just Once promising, there's the string interlude of "World I Need You, Won't Be Without You (Proem)" which is reprised on the emotive centerpiece "Talking to You". "& It Was U" pulls a similar deception, as Krell's accumulating harmonies disguise an imploding relationship over joyous new jack swing. It maybe lacks the shock of his earliest singles, and that's fine: Coming from someone discovering that his love for a style of music and his ability to pay it homage are starting to intersect, it's every bit as promising.
The rhythmic backbone of Total Loss's second half slackens a little, which can make the album feel frontloaded on the first few passes. Though Love Remains was more of a compilation than a proper album, its highlights were spread out judiciously. Total Loss doesn't fully compensate for its lack of clear standouts like "Decisions" or "Ready for the World", but it does benefit from a narrative cohesion that Love Remains lacked. Its path of grief follows psychology's Kübler-Ross model in chronology, from denial to bargaining to something resembling acceptance-- the lyric sheet even shows a smiley-face emoticon appending the "Set It Right" line, "as far as love goes, it's one step at a time." "Struggle" revisits Krell's love for blown-out reverb, obscuring gut-punch lyrics that attempt to reconcile the joys of reckless behavior with that sort of action's deadly, consumptive attraction: "I remember drinking with you in your bed… But in the morning we'd go and start again." And while "Ocean Floor for Everything" wasn't a stunning first single, erring too close to melodies Krell has used before, it's an apt sendoff for Total Loss, the point where the pain has settled in. But any hope here is implied. It's not explicitly a happy ending.
It's a fitting conclusion to a record that is very lonely for Krell and risky for How to Dress Well. In light of the "PBR&B" digs that initially circled Love Remains, it's notable that many of the most exciting artists to arrive in its wake (the Weeknd, Jessie Ware, AlunaGeorge) are nominally "indie" but incorporate modernist R&B in a similar manner. Krell hasn't benefited much from that swell of momentum, operating in a space that's far more niche and less overtly "pop," in both genre and populism. But Total Loss is similar to the xx's Coexist in retreating to further minimalism and introspection after a groundbreaking debut. It feels like more of a success because there's no dissonance between its artistic intent and its optimal home-alone listening experience. Its effectiveness is a result of its intimacy-- or, as Krell puts it on "Set It Right", being "true to you, I'm true to me, too."


Though still a bit shaky and cloying, the New York band strikes a good chord with a power-pop sound and starts to carve out a space of their own.

King of the Dudes EP

Since the band’s inception, Sunflower Bean has struggled to define their musical identity. In 2015, they rooted their debut album in a vogue New York milieu, as lead singer Julia Cumming adopted the vocal style of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher. Then, in an effort to depart from their early “fashion band” branding, Sunflower Bean went anti-trend in their 2018 sophomore album, embracing more soft rock sound and taking cues from Fleetwood Mac while performing a slightly more knowing pastiche.
While these references seemed incidental, on King of the Dudes there’s finally a logic and cohesiveness to the band’s musical inspirations. With Cumming increasingly at the center—her voice once a whisper, now a growl—the band’s latest EP spins around a stylized axis of femme, sugar-kissed power-pop, both finally carving out their own space, and sounding not totally unlike Hole in the process.
Right from the EP’s riffy get-go, the band finds the sweet spot between the grit and gloss of “Celebrity Skin” and the pop-rock artists—Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, the Veronicas—who followed it. This combination of soft aggression and sheened moxie is potent enough to have its own gel pen scent. The clean production, the rutilant guitar sound, the hybridization of pop and glam are all so irresistibly nostalgic that it’s hard not to be transported back to a time when physical objects—posters, magazines, cherry-stinking stickers—more routinely accompanied music. King of the Dudes is a badge to put on a backpack, a call to break the boy-girl partition at a school disco.
It’s clear that the band are now trying to position themselves among a—for a severe lack of a better term—“women in rock” chronology. “Women are fed up,” Cumming vaguely opined to Rolling Stone, “and we needed a way to express that,” she says, sounding more like an obligation than a rallying cry. She does her best Joan Jett on opening title-track; on “Fear City,” her mediated sentimentality sounds a bit like Hayley Williams’ later vocal stylings; on the closer, “The Big One,” she tries her hand at a Shirley Manson snarl.
While their contemporaries—Veruca Salt, Garbage, Hole—forcefully staked out their own claim, King of the Dudes feels predictably and meretriciously rebellious. The title track, which has Cumming proclaiming herself “king of the dudes,” wasn’t of her own volition. In the same interview with Rolling Stone, the band confirmed that it was producer Justin Raisen’s idea to incorporate the phrase. That might be why Cumming sounds so unconvinced by her own protestations. She’s the king of the dudes “if you want me to be,” she sings.
Lead single “Come for Me” sounds just as editorialized as the opener. Its chorus is bolstered by a gauzy funk guitar line and punchy snares intended to dynamize, but the lyrics “do you really wanna come for me?” feel unworthy of the band’s bombastic setup. It’s the sexual equivalent of a “your mom” line on a diss track, and it follows a slew of empty, artless machoisms. Its opening line: “I’m looking for the manly solution” is an attempt to maintain the already unconvincing “king of the dudes” persona, and it feels about as on the nose as a blackhead.
The EP’s strongest moment by far is “Fear City.” Guitarist Nick Kivlen puts in his best work, as he supports Cumming’s verses with a fluid, tinkering riff, before breaking off into staccato strums during the chorus. Meanwhile, Cumming really embraces that old Umberto Eco adage: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us,” as she sings, “We walk down the boulevards/Open hands and open hearts,” in a way that finally seems to touch on the band’s own experiences. It’s a moment not about what they think they should say, but rather a simple moment of reflection, edging into a space of introspection that the band so sorely need. Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.


The psych-pop outfit's contribution to the long-running LateNightTales series is heavy on obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk and the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie.

LateNightTales

For MGMT, the best thing about selling a million copies of your debut album is not all the cocaine, heroin, elegant cars, and models for wives that a platinum record presumably affords you. No, the real reward is in being elevated to a position where your words suddenly carry some weight, where a simple endorsement can provide a career boost to an unsung forebear. In retrospect, MGMT's wiggy, divisive 2010 release, Congratulations, was less a premeditated ploy to alienate their more casual fans than a noble attempt to turn them onto some of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser's more eccentric influences, via songs named after cult heroes like Brian Eno and Television Personalities founder Dan Treacy. And if but one of the 39 million people who've watched the "Kids" video on YouTube was inspired to pick up a Spacemen 3 record on account of seeing Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember's name listed in the Congratulations liner notes, then his producer's fee was worth it. (Likewise, when recently invited to perform a cover for Pink Floyd Week on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon", MGMT passed over the Floyd's deep well of FM-radio standards in favor of Syd Barrett's menacing "Lucifer Sam".)
That same charitable spirit more explicitly informs MGMT's curatorial contribution to the LateNightTales series, which draws evenly from obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk, the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie, and modern variations thereof. The tracklist is dotted with some notable avant-rock icons (the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, Suicide), but they're represented by serenely atypical tracks ("Ocean", "Lord Can You Hear Me?" and "Cheree", respectively) that serve to set up this compilation's more esoteric selections. And as if to further increase their aesthetic distance from Oracular Spectacular's day-glo pop hits, the mood here is almost uniformly somber, if not downright ominous (hello there, "Pink Frost" by the Chills). More so than previous participants in the series, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser take the LateNightTales concept at face value, weaving together their song choices into a dark-night-of-the-soul narrative heavy on themes of isolation and 4 a.m. introspection. Even the band's own contribution is a straightforward rendition of the one Bauhaus song ("All We Ever Wanted Was Everything") that perfectly suits this stoned-and-dethroned mood.
VanWyngarden and Goldwasser take great care to ease you into this despairing headspace, opening with the fortuitously timed inclusion of a track from the recently resuscitated Disco Inferno (the gorgeously glistening "Can't See Through It"), and offsetting more droll depictions of loneliness (the Television Personalities' "Stop & Smell the Roses", Julian Cope's "Laughing Boy") with affecting instrumental interludes (Felt's "Red Indians", the Durutti Column's "For Belgium Friends"). However, everything on this compilation feels like a set-up for and recovery from the harrowing "Drug Song" by Dave Bixby, a 70s-era Christian folk singer whose songs of spiritual reawakening are nonetheless colored with melancholy and regret; divorced from their born-again context, lines like "How did I get this way/ It's so unreal/ I'm no longer a person/ I can't even feel" seem especially resonant for a couple of guys who went from recording in their dorm room to suddenly finding themselves playing VIP parties at upscale department stores. MGMT may have gotten famous by ironically declaring they're fated to pretend, but with LateNightTales they take solace in building a soundtrack for when shit gets real.


In what is ostensibly a solo record with a few high-profile collaborations, Dave Longstreth masterfully peels away layer after layer of heartbreak across a strange, dizzying pop album.

Dirty Projectors

Like most people going through breakups, Dave Longstreth wants you to believe he’s doing just fine. The nine songs on Dirty Projectors delve into his separation from former bandmate and girlfriend Amber Coffman, whose arresting voice over the past decade was as vital to Dirty Projectors’ sound as Longstreth’s own yelps and howls. It’s impossible to ignore the context of the record, largely because Longstreth makes it impossible to forget. He’s quick to admit that “a song isn’t a newspaper” and that Dirty Projectors isn’t entirely autobiographical, even if the album’s narrator sings about writing a tune called “Stillness Is the Move.” Memoiristic or not, he’s found a way to express the lonely anthologizing of events that matter only to you and one other person, couched within a strange, dizzying pop record.
For a band who once felt like an army of mannered Brooklynites and is now ostensibly the solo project of one bearded Longstreth, Dirty Projectors have always brought pop music to their homemade sound. Since his last album, 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, Longstreth has worked alongside Rihanna, Kanye West, and Solange (who co-wrote this album’s “Cool Your Heart”). But much of Dirty Projectors takes its inspiration from further back, comfort food for someone who may very well be nostalgic for the halcyon days of 2009. The stop-and-start buzz of “Death Spiral” is as delirious and slick as a Futuresex/Lovesounds interlude. “Cool Your Heart,” with its fancy-car music video and massive chorus, is a feel-good R&B trade-off with D∆WN that calls back to the same era of weirdo pop duets as Moby and Gwen Stefani’s “South Side.” The music on Dirty Projectors sounds like the propulsive, hyper-curated nostalgia you put on to forget your heartbreak.
Instead, Longstreth uses it to help reveal what hurts. In the stunning “Little Bubble,” he lies around the house, cursing his “dumb and meaningless” dreams and longing for death. In “Winner Take Nothing,” he reflects on a broken relationship, unable to find anything positive to say in its wake. “This has turned me against myself,” he sings, “In losing you, I lost myself.” For anyone wondering what Kanye song he was listening to on the Taconic Parkway in “Up in Hudson,” my money’s on “Blame Game,” when Kanye fragments his vocals to represent the myriad demons haunting him at once. Longstreth incorporates a similar tactic throughout the album, pitch-shifting his voice, distorting and layering it to mimic the hocketing sound that’s long defined his songwriting. But what once felt whimsical and communal now sounds suffocating and paranoid. Longstreth is trying to escape himself.
“Maybe love is a competition that makes us raise the bar/We better ourselves,” he sings on “Work Together,” a selfish way to define a relationship but a viewpoint that seems to have inspired a sense of confidence. Using this freedom to find new collaborators like Solange and Tyondai Braxton, Longstreth has refined and upgraded himself, becoming bolder in the process. In fact, Dirty Projectors, in its own warped way, might be the sharpest, tightest record he’s made yet. Like Joni Mitchell’s epic “Paprika Plains,” which layered a sweeping string arrangement over an autobiographical improv piano piece, Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.
The fatal flaw in this work, the same one that’s haunted every Dirty Projectors album from the elaborate Black Flag rewrites of Rise Above to the faux-folksy love songs of Swing Lo Magellan, is the feeling of conceptual overload. But overthinking is a core part of Longstreth’s aesthetic and here it balances the drag of a post-breakup bloodletting, when even the album's title feels, to say the least, confrontational. You can hear Longstreth analyzing his thoughts in real time throughout these songs, sometimes finding a sense of resolution in the process. On the closing track, “I See You,” he reaches for a happy ending in the most characteristic song on the whole album—it’s the only thing here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Bitte Orca. But the lyrics hint at a transformation. “The projection has faded away,” he sings right after landing on a line that’s extremely corny, slightly condescending, and maybe even romantic: “I believe that the love we made is the art,” he sings sternly. He knows it’s not perfect, but for now, it’s the best he’s got.


Five albums recorded in the late 1950s capture the skill and the frailty of an acclaimed jazz trumpeter on the brink of disaster.

Chet Baker: The Legendary Riverside Albums

The Legendary Riverside Albums

Chet Baker had two careers. Through the mid-1950s, he was one of the biggest stars in jazz, a strikingly beautiful man who played trumpet and also sang in a strange and androgynous voice that seemed too fragile for this world. He won both critics’ and readers’ polls in DownBeat magazine, and his recordings, particularly his early work with baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, were essential documents of West Coast jazz. But in the years following Baker’s descent into heroin addiction, he became a cult artist, a figure whose musical output was often eclipsed by the tragic narrative of his life. His gaunt and caved-in face told the story of a promising young talent gone to seed.
In the late ’50s, after his first run of legal problems connected to his accelerating drug use, Baker spent a year cutting albums for the Riverside label. It was a transitional period, a moment when Baker hovered between one career and the next. He still sounds young—he would turn 30 just after recording these LPs—and he’s surrounded by top-shelf supporting musicians, the kinds of bands that would be difficult for Baker to assemble once he became an industry pariah.
Baker began his year on Riverside with It Could Happen to You, a vocal album aimed at a pop-leaning audience. His singing—unsteady in pitch, frail and delicate, with a disorienting mix of sexiness and naiveté—has always been an acquired taste, but there’s a context for it now that didn’t exist then. Its damaged innocence and dreamy loveliness carry a hint of irony that, 60 years on, brings to mind sounds we might hear in the unlit corners in David Lynch’s universe. You can hear that quality all over It Could Happen to You—take “My Heart Stood Still,” where Baker sings at the higher end of his natural range for an effect both chill-inducing and slightly creepy. Outtakes and Alternates is heavy on vocal numbers from the It Can Happen to You sessions. Some songs are even more haunting (“While My Lady Sleeps” is downright gothic, with Baker close to the microphone and singing way behind the beat), while others were shelved for a reason (he sounds especially high on this alternate take of “Everything Happens to Me” and struggles to articulate some words). If you can tune into Baker’s unsteady frequency, the voice showcased here is like nothing in jazz.
Baker was obsessed with Miles Davis’ cerebral Birth of the Cool and one can trace a significant portion of his trumpet style to those sessions. Like Davis, Baker mostly avoided the extremes of his horn’s range and focused on its middle, the frequency band where his melody lines could evoke a human voice. He had a natural ear for phrasing, and would alter the melodies of familiar tunes to wring a maximum amount of feeling from a minimum number of notes. Chet Baker in New York pairs Baker with two veterans of Davis’ rhythm section, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones, along with Al Haig (who played with Charlie Parker) and saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Continuing the homage, the group even tackles Davis’ tune “Solar.” Baker was strung out and in rough shape around the time In New York was cut, and the idea, according to Riverside label owner Orrin Keepnews (who also produced the session), was to “cover him over cosmetically with the best supporting cast, try to bury him.” To an extent, the approach worked. “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” is lush and romantic—a little vacant, maybe, but easy to get lost in—while “Hotel 49” is a satisfying 10-minute blues on which Griffin shines.
Much better is Chet, a set of pure floating atmosphere cut directly after In New York. Most of the tunes were recorded with pianist Bill Evans, who was at a peak moment of his career, and his style fit perfectly with Baker’s. “It Never Entered My Mind” is a poignant showcase for Baker’s horn, his judicious use of vibrato elevating the sadness as the rest of the ensemble falls in the mix to allow his phrases to linger. On some tunes Baker plays eloquently with other soloists: A duet with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams on “’Tis Autumn” allows their horns to entwine as if in an embrace. On “Alone Together,” Evans improvises a haunting opening refrain that sounds like a trial run for “Blue in Green,” the piece he would record with Davis on Kind of Blue a few months later. Mature and beautiful, with a great selection of songs rendered in slow motion, Chet is one of Baker’s best albums.
Plays the Best of Lerner & Loewe, another instrumental LP cut later in 1959, finds Baker paying homage to the composers of My Fair Lady. It’s the weakest of these records, though it has its charms. Ballad-heavy and recorded with heavier reverb, there’s something almost crass about it, a sickly glamour that sounds good in the right mood. Baker completed it after serving several months at Rikers Island, and the rest of the 1960s were disastrous for him: an endless series of busts and jail time, mostly in Europe, that led to his expulsion from several countries. In 1966, he was injured in an assault likely related to a drug deal; he lost some teeth, impairing his ability to play, and his music career ground to a halt. Eventually he returned, first to make novelty records that ought to count as some of the worst music ever made—try “Sugar, Sugar,” from Blood, Chet and Tears—and then for the decades-long cult period, in which he recorded and gigged constantly and once in a while made something great. The Riverside period, flawed but occasionally brilliant, is the last, missed exit before he got on that road.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Channeling the scrappy ache of ’90s emo, the New York City band’s DIY rock songs voice the joy and catharsis of creating in community.

Tears to Grow EP

For the Brooklyn band Blair, emo is an action, a summoning of feeling from the spark where it forms. On their new three-track Tears to Grow EP, Blair channels the tattered glow of ’90s Midwest emo and blown-out Northwest indie rock through the hearts and minds of young born-and-bred New Yorkers. Theirs are songs not for long drives, but for anxious subway rides. When the members of Blair lock in, though—when the poised noise of the guitars weaves with the textured swoop of the drums, when the call-and-response vocals collectively build to a scream, when they make room for a rushing solo before all crashing back together—the sound of Tears to Grow reflects the joy and catharsis of creating in community.
Blair began shortly before the pandemic, releasing their debut single, “day one homies,” in 2019 and performing in both the city’s underground punk and rap scenes. You might recognize drummer Anysia Kym Batts’ name from her expansive collaborations with New York rapper MIKE. And before Blair, singer-guitarist Genesis Evans was known for his streetwear brand, Humble, as well as his skillfully understated skateboarding. Fellow skateboarder and emo instigator Ian MacKaye once said, “Skateboarding is not a hobby or a sport; skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.” In their ecstatic DIY rock songs—rounded out by guitarist Pauli Ocampo Zapata and bassist Nico Chiat—Blair ride that radical perspective and open it to others.
Tears to Grow evokes the scrappy ache and daydreaming of early Jawbreaker, the droll introspection and bent melodies of Alex G. But Blair’s lyrics, which voice earnest appeals to overcome self-loathing and learn self-love, are uniquely affecting. More than one song expresses care and concern for a mother, while acknowledging the facts and grave injustices of being young and Black in this country. “Hi Mommy, I’m sorry/I’d like to speak eventually,” goes one devastating measure of “by the c.” “Take a step back/Could have been me/Who died last week.”
In a 2020 interview, Evans discussed Blair’s origins, how he grew up rapping and singing on friends’ beats but “always wanted to try creating it all from scratch”; Batts has noted a similar impulse behind her expressive drumming. Describing Blair’s collective influences, from hardcore to jazz and R&B, Evans cited other young Black artists, like Navy Blue and Mal Devisa, who use “their voice to talk about their struggle, Black liberation, mental health issues.” This amalgam plays out beautifully on Tears to Grow’s six-and-a-half-minute closer, “promise,” an emo epic in three movements.
“Promise” sounds like memories cascading in real time—a call dropping, a door closing, time running out—reaching forward by way of Blair’s own nonlinear logic. It’s a song about the promise Evans makes to his mother to not hurt himself, about the promises his father has left unsaid. And it contains a promise to potential listeners, too, as Blair sing about how “no one’s as misunderstood/As that lonely Black child/Who’s born and raised in the hood/Who’s so capable of anything/No one’s told ’em that they could.” Actively encouraging self-worth, peaking into shouts, “promise” turns the candor of emo into a positive force. Every note feels charged by the power of vulnerability as a vital component of liberation. “We can do anything as long as we begin,” Blair sing. “We’ll heal from it all/Promise/I know we can.”

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Angel Olsen taps deeper into her country influences on a warm, self-assured album whose fluid narration unites love and grief, past and present.

Big Time

For over a decade, the highwire eloquence of the Angel Olsen songbook has been grounded by the emotional weight of living mostly in your mind. The heaviness of solitary dreaming—“Hiding out inside my head”; “I like the thoughts I think…without you”; “Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind”—is paired with comforting grace when reflected through Olsen’s fever-pitched warble and incisive lyrics, her schema of gravity and wonder. Like other artist-philosophers of the human heart before her, Olsen creates a spirit of hard-won knowledge, the feeling of steadiness in a brutal world.
Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease. Having journeyed from folk-rock poet to jukebox rock’n’roller to baroque epicist on her last proper record, 2019’s monumental All Mirrors, she is reborn on Big Time as an alternately smiling or crying cowgirl. Olsen teases out the twang and pedal steel of her longtime country influences, like the audacity of Skeeter Davis and Tammy Wynette, or the blistering ache of Hank Williams. The tough-and-tender extremity of country music has always been present in her yearning cadences, now more lucid than ever, but here she leans further into its in-the-room glow, its honesty and resilience. As her heights magnify, so do her depths.
In the months leading to the recording of Big Time, Olsen came out as queer with a new partner. She told her parents, who by chance both passed away within weeks. Big Time absorbs the entangling transformations of grief and new love, their power to clarify, and reprioritize, everything—the album, she said, is the work of a person “irreversibly changed.” The titular concept of Big Time is not just an evocation of its glistening Nashville sound, nor is it only a declaration of overflowing, abiding love, as when Olsen croons “I’m loving you big time/I’m loving you more.” In one time-collapsing swoop, that refrain echoes words of affection Olsen received from her partner as well as from her late mother. All of Big Time is charged by an elevated awareness of the clock’s hands, how they fold in on each other: time Olsen loses track of; time she spends in vain, “to be somebody”; time that physically slows and that quickens to the instant. This is a record about how time billows out from the center of now—forward, backwards, inside and down, like in a science fiction novel.
Where Olsen once sang of being a fool in love as if it were uncool, Big Time presents dignity in such a position. On the closer, “Chasing the Sun,” she sends her partner a “postcard” from another room: “I’m just writing to say that I can’t find my clothes/If you’re looking for something to do.” The golden hour title track beams with the quotidian intimacy of Frank O’Hara in a pickup truck: kissing, coffee, nature, sunshine, “talkin’ with your eyes.” A songwriter who formerly wished that she could only buy into all that was promised to her is now a believer, soundtracking the crystalline clarity of feeling connected, at last, to herself and others.
But Olsen still takes her pen like a scalpel to emotional wrongdoing, voicing bemusement through a skeptical Mona Lisa grin. “Ghost On” is grounded by Lucinda-caliber feminist defiance, each forthright word held at the edge of a simmer: “I don’t know if you can take such a good thing coming to you/I don’t know if you can love someone stronger than you’re used to,” she sings, seeing straight through the smoke and mirrors of a bad relationship. Olsen refuses to make herself small. The soulful opener “All the Good Times” sets the tone of biting self-possession from the start. “I can’t say that I’m sorry when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” she sings with calm conviction, before the Mellotron and horn arrangement bursts widescreen. Olsen offers scant particulars of a subject who does not earn complexity. “So long, farewell, this is the end,” she sings dryly. It seems straightforward until you realize it could be a goodbye to a former self.
Big Time is filled with moments like these, which seem to contain other moments within them, the past and present as one. The emotional undertow of Olsen’s gentle arrangements is crucial to this narration of nonlinear time. On “Dream Thing,” her voice is in tight, immediate focus, even as she begins to recall a dream about the future: “I was looking at old you, looking at who you’ve become,” and suddenly, “I was just a kid/I was searching my mind for the words to that Black Captain song”—a reference to her one-time bandmate, Will Oldham. Her voice becomes cellophane on “This Is How It Works”—written about phone calls to her mother—as she admits, “I’m barely hanging on.” “It’s a hard time again,” she sings, the last word a continuum of pain.
Nowhere is Big Time more arrestingly or fearlessly attuned than on its tightrope of a centerpiece, “Right Now.” The spare choruses crash down, distilling the air around Olsen’s measured vulnerabilities. “I won’t live another lie about the feelings that I have/I won’t be with you and hide,” she sings, “I ain’t the past coming back to haunt you/I’m telling you right now.” As the song delicately raves up, Olsen incants those last words of hope as if they could save her life. She’s not the only one.


Doom outfit Pallbearer's ascension as one of metal's crossover acts started with 2012's Sorrow and Extinction, and with the release of their brilliant second album, it's easy to imagine them gaining even more popularity. Foundations finds a band firing on all cylinders and surpassing what already seemed like a watermark for the genre.

Foundations of Burden

When underground metal bands appeal to non-metal listeners, it's often because they've found a way to tweak, expand, or do away with genre conventions. Outside of iconic heavy classic rock or shiny mainstream metal, this doesn't mean the music is easier to listen to as a result—there's the collaborative art-drone of Sunn O))), as unlikely a crossover band as any, and Deafheaven's blend of shoegaze guitar textures and screamo/black metal vocals. It's rare that a contemporary group remains entirely in the metal world and still manages to find an audience outside of it, but the vintage-doom players in Pallbearer have done just that. Their ascension started with their debut, 2012's excellent Sorrow and Extinction, and with the release of their brilliant second album, Foundations of Burden, it's easy to imagine them gaining even more popularity.
When the Arkansas quartet put out Sorrow, they had already built excitement in the metal underground based on a three-song 2010 demo; but for most people, the five-song, 49-minute LP—with its gorgeous guitar tones and sky-soaring vocals—was their first taste of the group. Pallbearer ended Sorrow's thank you list with "and, of course Black Sabbath," which made perfect sense because they appeal to that diverse cross section of people who also thank Black Sabbath for their own personal reasons.
Two years later, they've returned with a collection that feels even more connected to the pure, unadulterated aspects of doom, and Pallbearer have transcended the need to thank anyone but themselves. The group were given a bigger budget from their label Profound Lore to record Foundations, and they did so with Billy Anderson, who also sat behind the controls for the classic Sleep oeuvre and has recorded seminal works for High on Fire, Melvins, Jawbreaker, and others (including Red House Painters, who's early material had a sense of space that makes sense in this realm).
In an interview I did with Pallbearer co-founder/co-lyricist/bassist Joseph D. Rowland, he said Anderson told them he's never recorded a band that used so many guitar tracks—an element of Pallbearer's sound that explains the massiveness of Foundations, as well as how they saw  *Sorrow'*s successes as an opportunity to deepen and strengthen their craft. This is an ambitious record that doesn't feel at all over-worked or stale, and while Sorrow and Extinction holds up beautifully two years later, Foundations is the stronger collection to the point that Sorrow almost comes across as demos for this new material.
Though Pallbearer arrived fully formed, vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell's stirring voice was a little pitchy live, suggesting that he was sometimes straining beyond his abilities. When I reviewed Sorrow, I said that "Campbell has been described as a young Ozzy Osbourne, and that influence is certainly there, but imagine if a young Ozzy had the ability to transform into Geddy Lee." His singing on Foundations has more ease, soul, and grit, and he sounds steadier, smoother, and more assured. It helps, too, that bassist Rowland and guitarist Devin Holt offer their own vocals on three tracks, adding details, depth, and complexity to the melodies. When they join Campbell, you get the sense of a madrigal, with overlapping harmonies that will give you goosebumps. You get a taste of it right out of the gate on the 10-minute opener, "Worlds Apart", a song that features cascading three-part vocals powering upward between layered guitars that crunch at the same time as they soothe. On "The Ghost I Used to Be", Rowland's screamed vocals mix with Campbell's more honeyed voice, creating a raw, almost punk dynamic for Pallbearer that didn't exist previously.
There's dense, regal play all over Foundations: guitars collide, a Rhodes adds subtle details in the distance. There are new textures, bigger tempo shifts, and dynamic turns. It's a great headphone record, but you'll want to be listening to these songs in a larger room where you can move around and make contact. Where Sorrow often felt like a great solitary album—especially in its focus on death and mortality—Foundations is clearly built for larger communal spaces, as even the quiet moments are massive. Pallbearer are patient, and the textures they build feel painterly (kudos to Anderson, many times over). There are moments where things drop out, like on "Watcher in the Dark", where you get some low-level fuzz accompanied by Mark Lierly's nimble drumming (he's a more agile, technical player than original drummer Chuck Schaaf). When the rest of the instruments return at full volume, it's physically impossible not to want to move. In the same song, there's a limber guitar solo over gentle piano parts; elsewhere, synthesizers hum, bells chime, the band showcases a newfound swagger to go with the psychedelia and '70s prog.
The music's catchy, too, and full of hooks. Pallbearer are proud fans of rock groups like Boston and Rainbow, and these songs, while long, go down easy. As Rowland told me, "[Our songs] are all almost exactly three times the length of a standard pop song, almost to the second, so I decided that that's our version of writing pop songs." With the twinkling three-minute "Ashes", you actually get to hear them doing doom-as-dusky ambient pop.
Rowland has talked about how Sorrow was focused on a loved one's death, and that the subject matter of Foundations is more varied; even so, these songs deal in ashes, formless voids, feasting on blood, time crushing things, and in general, loss. Still, it's never a bummer. In "Worlds Apart", Campbell sings "Where lays our heart of hearts defined/ My darkness and your light, still yet remain entwined." This mixture of light and dark seems to be the crux of Pallbearer, a group who make sadness seem uplifting, darkness seem bright, and songs about mortality seem life-giving. The final words of the album are: "We're always shifting/ And always becoming." The sentiment comes during the stampeding moments of the heady, muscular "Vanished", and that endless becoming is fitting on both an emotional and conceptual level. Foundations finds a band firing on all cylinders, and surpassing what seemed like a watermark for the genre. As obsessed as Pallbearer is with endings, the music here is timeless.


The new N.E.R.D. album is full of guests: Rihanna, Kendrick, Gucci, 3000, M.I.A., Wale, Ed Sheeran. They all help elevate an album that is occasionally ineffectual in its attempts at protest music.

No_One Ever Really Dies

In 1978, the science fiction author Douglas Adams was trying to dream up a kind of interstellar Long Island Iced Tea—a drink that could get all the alien races of the universe equally trashed. He called his concoction the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and in his radio series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that consuming one was like “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”
What Adams was describing, to perfection, was the experience of listening to a N.E.R.D. single: the strange, visceral pleasure to be found in what is too often excruciatingly painful. “Lapdance,” “Everyone Nose,” “She Wants to Move”: Even if you liked these songs (and I did), you were responding to the idiot provocation of the beats, to the thundering simplicity of their repetitive choruses.
You might be able to add “Lemon,” the first single from N.E.R.D.’s first album of original songs in seven years, to that list if not for Rihanna. She’s the first of several guest stars to elevate No_One Ever Really Dies, which features Future, Gucci Mane, Wale, Kendrick Lamar (twice!), André 3000, M.I.A. and even Ed Sheeran. It’s the first N.E.R.D. record to include such an extensive list of guests. One of the best decisions that the trio of Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shae Haley make on their new album was calling in those favors.
In the early aughts, Williams and Hugo’s duo the Neptunes pushed rap forward with their percussion stir-fry, candied samples, and tolerance for negative space. But N.E.R.D. is often dismissed, as this website once put it, as “a reliable repository for all of Pharrell’s worst” ideas. And it’s true that the lesser N.E.R.D. songs, the B-sides, are often sewn together from scraps that the super-producers wouldn’t have dared to offer an A-lister. Still, particularly on 2002’s In Search Of… and 2008’s Seeing Sounds, there was something thrilling about these pedigreed engineers of pop breaking their toys and making jagged things out of the discarded parts, creative little mergers of rock and rap that anticipated the genre-mixing we’re seeing today.
Unfortunately for the group’s apologists (which include Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, and, well, me), a newly woke Pharrell has decided that the operative mode of No_One Ever Really Dies is activist chic. It’s a pretty disastrous look. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news or who’s running my country but it’s a real fucking shit show,” he told The Guardian recently. “I’ve never seen such desperation in my life.” Leaving aside the question of whose desperation he is referring to, Pharrell does not sound equipped to make a protest record here, nor does he sound interested in making one. That means even the better songs here are hamstrung by stabs at seriousness so vacuous that they seem like parodies. “Deep Down Body Thurst” includes this bumbling salvo, ostensibly directed at President Trump: “Oh you won’t get away/The way you treat Islam/Oh you won’t get away/Jesus will open his arms/Oh you won’t get away (hey hey)/Mr. Wizard of Oz.”
Still, the album’s first half sounds relatively strong, powered almost exclusively by that poised Rihanna verse on “Lemon” and Kendrick channeling “B.O.B.”-era OutKast on “Don’t Don’t Do It”—a song inspired by Keith Scott, the black man who was fatally shot by police in Charlotte, N.C. last year. Tune out its lyrics, and “Deep Down Body Thurst” is urgent and catchy, opening with the downtempo piano chords that the Neptunes have long favored and slowly pumping itself as bass, drums, and Spymob-style guitar chords are added to the mix.
But No_One Ever Really Dies runs into a wall midway through, as old ideas rear their heads like those nobbly-headed creatures in Whac-a-Mole. The band has long loved interludes and presents some good ones here. “Voilà” includes a fun little chant. The melody in the middle of “Rollinem 7’s,” though it forestalls André 3000’s verse, makes for a decent digression. But Pharrell’s impatience also bloats the worst songs out of proportion. “Esp,” the record’s nadir, runs on the fumes of bass blasts and bad lyrics for five and a half minutes. And while it’s possible to develop a soft spot for the melodies on the otherwise dopey “Lightning Fire Magic Prayer,” there’s no reason it should be nearly eight minutes long. Elsewhere, do we really need “Drop It Like It’s Hot”-style bubble pops on both “Lemon” and “Lifting You”? Or a song like the pandering “Secret Life of Tigers,” which, musically, offers nothing that Britney fans didn’t hear in 2001?
That’s perhaps what’s most striking about No_One Ever Really Dies: the way these former architects of Future Sound have become handmaidens to their past. The weaknesses on their previous records (other than Nothing, which every good N.E.R.D. fan ignores) came from ideas that pointed off in new directions even if they weren’t fully fleshed out. Here, even the better songs are recycled, as the band lives off blood infusions from its guestlist. Out of the game so long, the N.E.R.D. antennae have picked up on something extra-musical in the air, and crafted their old sound around it. It sadly renders as a piece of resistance-bait, one whose clumsy, on-the-nose message slams you in the head harder than most of its songs.


The new album from Irish producer Iglooghost presents an alien landscape with only rare bits of human comfort. Even at its most elegant, it unfurls like a sensory attack.

Neō Wax Bloom

There is barely a repeated moment on the bizarre Brainfeeder full-length debut from Irish producer Seamus Malliagh, aka Iglooghost. It’s a more radical prospect than it might seem. Put aside the bewildering nature of his actual sounds—painstaking maximalism on a shapeshifting grid—and Neō Wax Bloom is frantically composed. There are no loops at all, and there is rarely a sustained melody to latch onto; that many of his alien-sounding electronic bursts are immediately fleeting makes their novelty all the more jarring. Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.
The audiovisual concept behind Iglooghost is a zany hallucination: an invented backstory replete with graphics of googly-eyed kitsch, which actually do help explain the neurosis of his sound. When Brainfeeder released the album’s second single, “White Gum,” Malliagh took to the YouTube comment section to explain himself: “PLS IMAGINE A MONK CALLED YOMI & A LITTLE BUG BOY IN A CLOAK CALLED USO HAVING A HUGE FIGHT - HOPPING OVER LEVITATING FRUIT & FIRING LASERS AT EACHOTHER [sic],” he wrote. Malliagh has earnestly designed a sound that belongs to Yomi’s laser and another that belongs to Little Bug Boy’s, and every moment on Neō Wax Bloom is ostensibly a prop or landscape element in their universe. Of course, none of that alleviates the confusing thrill of listening to the song itself, which seems to crumble and crackle under its own weight in a constant morph.
Malliagh once said his first impulse, when he started making music, was towards “terrifying breakcore,” and he’s strayed well beyond that ambition with Neō Wax Bloom. But the album does carry that genre’s attendant fidgeting. Malliagh weaves manic combinations of footwork and techno for aggressively paced tracks. “Göd Grid” tops out at more than 220 BPM without ever settling into a groove, seemingly dozens of sounds flurrying forward to combine for the record’s harshest track. “Super Ink Burst” feels like a barrage of body punches despite its cartoony landscape: a frantic saxophone trickles up and down, a kick adds a breakneck thump, the invented synth sounds glitter relentlessly. On “Pale Eyes,” Malliagh pits that same saxophone alongside an anxious harpsichord sound, as bulbous little meeps and moops share background space with not-quite-human gasps and moans.
Throughout, Malliagh injects manipulated vocal samples that are often twisted beyond recognition into a chipmunky gibberish. On “White Gum,” he flips the grime rapper AJ Tracey’s already relentless “Naila” vocals into a peculiar high-pitched attack. The ambiguous underground rapper Mr. Yote shows up for an original feature on “Teal Yomi / Olivine,” braving the storm of complexity with his own other-worldly pitch shifting. The pair have worked together before, and here they push avant-garde hip-hop that demands exacting listening. With an opposite approach, the Japanese dream-pop vocalist Cuushe glides over “Infinite Mint,” a succulent ballad that devolves into one of the album’s most soulful appendages. Malliagh softens his edge for moments like these without sacrificing the encompassing effect of his excess.
There’s a glistening sheen to nearly everything Malliagh touches, and his songs blend together if for no other reason than their similar hue. He’s also self-referential, sampling his own work throughout the record as a rare bit of continuity. There’s a soaring, soulful vocal sample that needles its way throughout several tracks as a shimmering mirage of familiarity. It seems to have first appeared on a previous Malliagh production, last year’s “Gold Tea,” and it pops up throughout Neō Wax Bloom like a beaming signpost, a rare bit of human comfort in an otherwise austerely alien landscape.
Even at its most elegant, the album unfurls like a sensory attack. This seems to be Malliagh’s odd equation as Iglooghost: filtering outlandish electronic music through his saccharine world-building to intensely emotional effect. To his credit, he’s architected a world entirely unto itself. It’s the type you might take deep a breath before jumping into, knowing that the strangeness of it all is not built to last.


In 1965, the Buffalo-born folk musician Jackson C. Frank cut a 10-song Paul Simon-produced masterpiece. Only now, 16 years after his death, are we learning that his slim output and tiny reputation stand as one of the great legacies of a movement in which he's sometimes considered but a blip. The Complete Recordings pairs earlier excavation attempts with the latest finds from Frank’s archive.

Jackson C. Frank: The Complete Recordings of Jackson C. Frank

Jackson C. Frank could never quite come back. In 1965, under the aegis of producer Paul Simon and with the assistance of sideman Al Stewart, the Buffalo-born Frank cut a 10-song masterpiece of the transatlantic folk revival. Frank’s self-titled debut gathered together the requisite folk threads of his day and refashioned them with his steady picking and a tenor that lilted, even as it moped. Frank could be topical and timely, as on the Dylan social nod "Don’t Look Back", or he could web simple phrases and patterns into enigmatic, illusory anthems, as he did for "My Name Is Carnival". He made existential unease charming on "Just Like Anything", and he updated Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s ancient American banjo trot, "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground", for a new generation of post-beatnik vagabonds.
Frank got to all of those feelings at once during "Blues Run the Game", reportedly the first song he ever finished and, for most, the sole perfect number that forms his entire legacy. On The Complete Recordings, the most exhaustive assembly of his catalog to date, Frank’s standard tellingly appears three times—at the start of Jackson C. Frank, in an extra tender 1968 take from John Peel’s radio show and in its reverb-enhanced, slide-gilded 7" form. A mantra for those who can never outrun their own tail of perennial sadness, whether they catch a boat to England or try another city, it doubles as the perfectly tragic summary of Frank’s own life. Before his death in 1999, he would suffer impossible penury and injury and drift into anonymity, but he would never record another album. Frank, you could say, never outfoxed his self-diagnosis of perpetual blues.
A year before Frank made his auspicious but low-selling debut, he left the Northeast for London, where he became an influential implant in that scene’s vibrant and varied lot of writers and pickers. Though new to songwriting, he seemed one of the scene’s certain stars, carousing with the names of the day and soon signing a deal with Columbia. Though only in his early twenties, Frank had already survived a great amount of sadness. When he was 11 years old, a school furnace exploded, burning him and many classmates so badly that he spent months in the hospital. The incident seemed to trail and torment him his entire life, responsible in part for the shadow that hung over many of his songs and made them so immediate but also for the depression that debilitated him. Frank tried time and again to restart his career, just to fumble again. Only now, 16 years after his death, are we really learning that his slim output and tiny reputation stand as one of the great legacies and losses of a movement in which he has sometimes been considered but a blip.
In the five decades since Frank recorded his only proper album, a dozen efforts to revivify his catalog have come and gone, from covers by people like Bert Jansch and John Mayer to deluxe reissues. The Complete Recordings pairs those earlier excavation attempts with the latest finds from Frank’s fragmented archive, though much debate remains about just how complete this set is. Ba Da Bing is issuing Recordings in conjunction with the arrival of Jackson C. Frank: The Clear, Hard Light of Genius, the most tender and authoritative biography on the singer to date. Befitting Frank’s entire career, though, the coordinated schedule hamstrings the set itself, as a truncated and badly edited essay serves as the surrogate for proper liner notes.
At least Recordings begins brilliantly, with Frank’s debut LP in its wonderful, remastered entirety. It then backtracks four years to the campus of Gettysburg College, where Frank and some friends slur through "CC Rider", creep through "In the Pines", and race through "John Henry". According to Mark Anderson, the friend with which Frank cut many of these songs, there were at least a dozen more, but it matters little. These collegiate curios mostly show us the roots of Frank’s musical development. They dovetail well with his ramshackle teenage take on "Heartbreak Hotel" (recorded in 1957, the year he met Elvis) and a 1960 session of folk standards Frank cut on the cheap back in Buffalo. He’s less a stylist on these standards than a teenager piecing together his toolkit; these songs would matter to his overall approach, yes, but these takes do not.
The jewels of Recordings come, in many cases, more than a decade after Frank’s debut, long after he and others had already tried to resuscitate his career. The scraps from his aborted follow-ups don’t hang together quite so well as his lone album, but taken together, they reaffirm and expand his general mystique. The terse, romantic existentialism of "Cover Me With Roses" overcomes the tawdry blues guitar beneath its chugging chords; a song about the raw deals we all make and deal with "if you can," it adds pep and a bit of wit to the essential premise of "Blues Run the Game". "Madonna of Swans" is as graceful as the title suggests, with Frank’s lush chords and gentle harmonics lifting his wavering voice.
But it’s the loping "Spanish Moss", recorded in 1974, that haunts most. One of the brightest songs Frank ever cut, it is his preemptive "Tangled Up in Blue". He details a romantic rendezvous that feels sinister in its execution—"She opened a picture of Lucifer in chains," he haltingly offers—and melancholy in its temporary necessity. "Her hair hung like a sacrament," he relays, "our bodies to begin." It’s perhaps the most vivid narrative language in the emotional impressionist’s entire songbook, an unfulfilled promise for the possibility of the other scenes he may have soon set. "Spanish Moss" is sexual, sophisticated, and playful, the work of a writer who had momentarily shrugged aside his blues, even if he would never fully break their spell.
He didn’t, of course: During the next two decades, Frank sometimes found himself homeless or committed to sanitariums. He lost an eye in a senseless shooting but was eventually rescued by a fan who got him money from royalties and a new guitar. Some of the most poignant and compelling numbers in Frank’s oeuvre arrive at that point, nearly 20 years ago. In 1994, Jackson cut several songs in a proper studio, and the results rival the best material of his debut. "October" is a meditation on the judgment of the drunk and the way that time can never be captured. "I Don’t Want to Love You No More" is an attempt to deny the undeniable, a transmission from someone working to regain some semblance of sanity and civility. It’s like George Jones’ "He Stopped Loving Her Today" rewritten by the survivor. In these sunset songs, you can hear premonitions of Richard Buckner and Damien Jurado, Will Oldham and Bill Callahan, songwriters who would soon similarly mumble and croon their way to measures of success Frank never enjoyed.
By 1997, when Frank recorded a set of fragmentary songs and false starts in a kitchen, both his voice and verve had stiffened considerably. His late-life charm had faded. That material is hard to hear, really, as you can tell that Frank’s quest for redemption is slowly drifting into oblivion. The whole situation recalls one particularly excruciating passage from "Goodbye (To My Loving You)", my favorite Frank relic from 1994. "Now that love is leaving," he ends one of his saddest, sharpest verses ever, his voice quaking, "there’s nothing left to show." Nearly three decades later, blues would finally end the game, he seemed to say, just as they had run it for so long.


The kinetic French singer Hélöise Letissier lets us into the whole of her life, creating an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid pop-funk.

Chris

Most of us have a hard time seeing people for who they really are. We reduce even those we love down to two-dimensional sketches so they fit into our lives neatly and without concern. Christine and the Queens’ new album Chris is remarkable for a few reasons, but this is the one that’s sticking with me: It’s impossible to deny the complexity of the person at its center. She uses masculinity like a sledgehammer to enrich her womanhood; she’s a crude, libidinous woman, but her heart is still tender; she has the courage and creativity to make a life for herself outside of the status quo, but she still feels the pain that comes with choosing a path other people don’t understand. Chris is a portrait of an instantly memorable character making utterly gleaming pop music.
Chris didn’t just spring into being fully-formed. After touring in support of her 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine and its 2015 re-release in English, the French artist Hélöise Letissier felt herself changing. The rigors of dancing and performing every night made her body tougher and more athletic; she reached new levels of wealth and confidence that had until recently seemed hard to imagine. And while she was experiencing these transformations, her newfound fame granted her access to the inner sanctums of culture and celebrity. She considered the boundaries that male stars were permitted to cross while their female counterparts were held back. “They can be sexual, flawed, and incredibly charismatic,” Letissier told GQ. “Complexity and intricacy is reserved to men. Women must make it unthreatening, simplified. I wish I could be Nick Cave or Mick Jagger.” Unlocking the persona of Chris—a “horny, hungry and ambitious” woman, as Letissier told The New York Times—liberated her to step over those boundaries and more fully embrace the whole of her being. Instead of becoming Cave or Jagger, she created a seductive, slutty hero of her own.
The resulting album is an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid, sizzling pop-funk. Dewy lead single “Girlfriend” lays down the terms of engagement: Chris may not feel like your girlfriend, but she could get used to being called your lover. She’ll leave for an early workout and push you back into bed just when you’re ready to wake up: “Came back steaming in sweats in the morning,” she pants. “I muscled in, for I wanted to hold him.” (I heard it and thought about Justin Theroux jogging through the first episode of The Leftovers in one of this decade’s most infamous pairs of sweatpants.) “Damn (What Must a Woman Do)” explores the “shame and isolation” women are made to feel about their lust; Chris’ cool, pointed whisper suggests Erotica-era Madonna working over production from Junior Boys. Shimmering opener “Comme si” equates the act of listening with a carnal pact. The confidence Letissier draws from tapping into Chris is radiant: “There’s a pride in my singing/The thickness of a new skin/I am done with belonging.”
While Chris’ vigor is intoxicating, Letissier hardly conceals the trauma and hurt women like Chris are made to endure before achieving this degree of self-possession. Her approach to conveying emotion through her singing is subtle and refined: When she opts for restraint, it says as much as when she chooses to explode. On the kinetic “Doesn’t Matter,” verses about overcoming suicidal thoughts and being tempted by nihilism are delivered in a controlled, distant near-monotone. She only leaps into the higher end of her range once she pulls herself back from the brink, encouraging the listener to move forward as if they “stole a shard of sunlight.”
You can hear a moment of dark clarity break through the heat of a sexual transaction on “5 Dollars”: “Some of us just had to fight/For even being looked at right.” The heartbreaking “what’s-her-face” is a reflection on years spent bullied and tormented, leaving wounds that are always threatening to be reopened. Here and on spare late-album highlight “Make Some Sense”—an anguished look back at a childhood crush who morphs into an infamous, violent attacker— her voice is softer and more pliable, but it’s still anchored by a fundamental strength. It’s the sound of bending but never breaking.
The song that best captures the complexities of Chris is “The Walker,” which chronicles the kind of indefinite stroll you take when your blood is thundering through your veins and you need to clear your head. Chris sets out with no fixed route, and her rage is simmering just beneath the surface. She sends birds flying out of her way with concerted stomps; when she passes by other people, they “politely smile to make sure I won’t come any closer.” Her pain has no definite source or target. When enough time passes, she starts to come to terms with the feelings coursing through her body. “It hurts, I feel everything/As my sense of self’s wearing thin,” she sings, her voice feeble. Just when she’s threatening to collapse, you can hear her regaining her vitality with every new word: “Such pains can be a delight/Far from when I could drown in my shame!” Isn’t that what it means to be alive? Isn’t it better to embrace the slings and arrows launched your way than to curl yourself into a ball and settle for something less than your purest possible truth? Chris answers those questions with a resounding yes.


Summer Walker’s follow-up to her 2019 debut album offers a quick tour through the Atlanta singer’s world—a couple sultry strip club joints, a couple guitar-led ballads, and a playful reunion with PARTYNEXTDOOR.

Life on Earth EP

Watching Summer Walker spray and wipe down a pole in the video for her Over It single “Stretch You Out,” you see three of her lives colliding. Before she became a sought-after singer, she was a janitorial entrepreneur offering $25 fridge-cleaning deals; before that, she danced at an Atlanta strip club. Over It, her successful debut studio album, solidified her place in contemporary R&B with a mix of moody trap-soul, ’90s nostalgia, and singer-songwriter charm. Walker’s music works through identity and relationships with candor, and her autobiographical lyrics strike at the heart of being in and out of love with others and yourself. Her follow-up Life on Earth EP offers a quick tour through Walker’s world—a couple sultry strip club joints, a couple guitar-led ballads, a playful reunion with PARTYNEXTDOOR—but on this trip, the endearingly keen insights into sex, love, and self are harder to find.
Walker’s first big hit was the remix to “Girls Need Love,” a gentle antidote to slut-shaming, which earned its popularity with a Drake assist. Her vulnerability drew out some of the most tender and understanding bars from a man who’s been rapping about women for more than a decade. On Life on Earth, three out of five tracks have features, all by men, but the guests are less captivating. New York newcomer NO1-NOAH appears on both the sensual “SWV” and “White Tee,” and doesn’t add much to either. On “SWV,” he meets Walker’s delicate trills with flat, Auto-Tuned singing, taking up space she could have used to expound on the loose ideas around wealth, isolation, and desire in her first verse. They’re a stronger pairing on “White Tee,”  where Walker meets NO1’s Nav-ish vocal with a sing-talking performance as a money-hungry sex kitten. He plays her target trick. Still, Walker vividly embodies the role—“I throw my lil’ fits, I talk my lil’ shit, and I always be getting my way,” she purrs—while his cool act feels uninspired.
That’s not to say her talents are fully deployed here, either. Walker’s vocals are as pristine as ever when she leans into them, and her rap-like cadences on “White Tee” and “My Affection” are cute and bouncy. Her verses, though, are rarely as tight and clear as in her previous work. Walker can be incredibly direct, telling a lover that they’re passionless, that they’re out of their league, or that they’re missed with precision and poetry. Lines like, “Days gettin’ longer/And drugs been gettin’ hard to find,” on “My Affection,” or “I want to give in but scared to rely,” on “Deeper,” show traces of her usual thoughtfulness, but they arrive buried in scattered or shallow ideas about romance, fear, and regret.
“My Affection” is the EP’s most fun moment, allowing Walker and PARTYNEXTDOOR to feed off one another’s boasts about growing and glowing up, huffing and sighing over incessant, rhythmic ringing. Opener “Let It Go,” though, is its most emotional, and comes closest to tapping into the frankness and introspection of Walker’s older music. She’s ethereal over live instrumentation, as on her first EP, Clear, and on “Let It Go,” an acoustic guitar radiates over subtle, programmed percussion. Walker has always had prescriptions for good relationships (“When you have somethin’, you treat it good/And you want it bad and you need it”) while finding herself in messier ones (here, she describes a partner calling the police because she tried to leave). Such beautiful and crushing truths from a “weird” young woman trying to make sense of her experiences create a special kind of R&B. Life on Earth can be a joy to listen to— smooth, sexy, and bright—but it’s missing the searing songwriting Walker is capable of.

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These belligerent North Carolinians epitomize the crossover vitriol of metal and punk in 2018 and help signal the crucially political personality of their label.

Superstition

A Southern drawl opens Superstition, the second album from North Carolina metalpunk upstarts Funeral Chic: “I got your melancholy, baby,” murmurs someone in the studio. And then, a chaos and a relentlessness leave no question that Funeral Chic sport the mark of the devil. Funeral Chic’s sound is a snarling summary of extreme metal in 2018, a menacing hodgepodge of blackened crust, hardcore punk, and putrid black’n’roll. This particular recipe of unholy crossover has been steadily gaining ground, thanks to Prosthetic Records and a handful of like-minded labels that have all embraced it with gusto, from Halo of Flies and Alerta Antifascista to Southern Lord. Funeral Chic is a perfect distillation, a rare beast that could just as easily open for Mayhem in a big rock club as headline an anarchist squat in Berlin. They’d probably feel more comfortable at the latter, at least politically.
Superstition opener “Rotten to the Core” is a bloody, belligerent manifesto, its frantic d-beats and off-kilter solos muddled by blasting black metal and an anthemic build that recalls Tragedy and Watain in one fetid breath. “Red Laces” serves up bruising metallic hardcore to the tune of Cursed, while “Off the Rails” is a wild-eyed pit invocation replete with gang vocals. Backed by tireless percussion, singer Dustin Carpenter is free to move all over the place—roaring, spitting, howling, and sometimes even belching up the sort of satisfying grunt that kicks off “Deep Pockets.”
Funeral Chic’s choice to sign to Prosthetic seems significant. While most of the big indie metal labels—Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Relapse—tend to take reactive approaches to their signings, Prosthetic has made a concerted effort to move in one very specific direction: crusty, fast, unabashedly political. Given that the label first rose to prominence during the metalcore boom of the early 2000s and often struggled to find its own distinctive voice, Funeral Chic’s ferocity suggests they’re getting close. (This shift mirrors Southern Lord’s own metamorphosis from doom-and-drone warehouse to purveyor of thrashy hardcore and blistering metalpunk.) Prosthetic’s roster remains a mixed lot, but Funeral Chic joins the ultra-political Dawn Ray’d, Venom Prison, and Neckbeard Deathcamp and fast-and-furious crossover crews like Dödsrit, Wildspeaker, and Trap Them.
While Funeral Chic aren’t nearly as overtly partisan as some of those labelmates, they’re not shy about their allegiances. Their motto, after all, is “VITOA (Violence Is The Only Answer),” which they have explained is their own take on “Fuck Nazis forever.” They’re vocally anti-cop, a running theme that is especially apparent on “Decorated.” Over crunching riffs streaked by Swedish death, Carpenter’s growl becomes a sneer as he rails against “Pigs of law on the prowl, like a pack of wolves/Rats that scurry, hiding from traps, selling out brothers for food.”
Funeral Chic’s impact will likely be felt in the trenches—on the road, in the underground. Their sound pulls in the best bits of multiple grime-encrusted metal and punk subgenres, the results lobbed overhead like a Molotov. They’re too ugly for the main stage, but that seems to be exactly how they like it.


Literary, emotional, and filling in pockets between indie and post-rock, the Los Angeles band’s third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared.

S/T

A name like Young Jesus is either deadly earnest or a total piss-take. This record’s literally called S/T, a statement in itself as if to say, “Please do not call it “Young Jesus’ self-titled album.’” Its seven one-word song titles can be read as a strange poem and the last two of them take up over half of S/T’s 47-minute run time. The band is listed as “composers” in the credits. It comes not with a “RIYL” list but a reading syllabus. Their most prominent interview for this album cycle was done by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Young Jesus are not at all ashamed about the lengths they’ve gone to make a big ol’ piece of art, and it might be completely insufferable if S/T didn’t prove them to be acts of generosity that break down the boundary between the artist and listener—Young Jesus’ third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared.
This is an important distinction between S/T and their sorely, but understandably, overlooked previous work. 2015’s Grow/Decompose was hyperliterate, barfly talk-rock that recalled pickled lifers like the Hold Steady and Protomartyr, but it was also a concept album that explored spiritual and sexuality confusion and fluidity—that’s frontman John Rossiter dressed in drag on the cover. Reflecting the band’s transplantation from Chicago to Los Angeles, there wasn’t any of the jocular referentiality, Midwestern rumination, or classic rock poses that made those other bands such an easy sell to aging critics.
The authorial aims of S/T are no less ambitious: “There’s a theory I’ve got cooking/about the way the body moves,” Rossiter intones on “Desert,” but it’s more of  an invitation to converse, not a lecture. Compared to the ripe prose of Grow/Decompose, S/T does a lot less talking with its economic poetry: “You are a room/If you want to settle down,” introduces “River,” a plea for reconciliation that reaches a crushing, predictable conclusion as Rossiter sings with faltering stoicism: “I guess I’ll see you around.” The 10 minutes of “Feeling” become intimidatingly literal, taking extended instrumental stretches to meditate on a single verse about the metaphysical sensation of feeling the feels. These are the rare moments of emotional brinksmanship on S/T, which is more interesting in exploring the life happening in between, perhaps inspired by Mount Eerie, a key passage finds Rossiter looking at crows and trying to divine meaning. Unlike Phil Elverum, he doesn’t just find it, but it’s one that makes him feel joyously overwhelmed by meaning (“I feel a fullness/feel entire moments always change”).
At times, this awareness becomes overwhelming in the opposite direction: “Every little landscape breaks my heart,” Rossiter muses on “Desert,” later screaming, “Every little landscape breaks apart” in desperation on “Storm.” Rossiter is always in touch with his surroundings throughout S/T, abetted by a shockingly stark recording; there’s almost nothing associated with production, almost no perceptible overdubs or even reverb, the ambience arid and alien like a desert in the winter night. Or, as Rossiter puts it in “Green,” “A stranger in a strangely intimate embrace.”
Freed from conventional post-punk, Young Jesus truly earn the title of “composers,” refashioning the tools of rock music as transportive devices: “Green” flows blissfully towards a coda of harmonic feedback, while “River” is an interstate heartbreak song, surveying scenes of nothing but cracked flatland and twisted metal. In its quiet moments—most of the time—S/T shares the same out-of-time, transportive, aural sandbox appeal of Young Team, Laughing Stock, Spiderland—a working title for “Eddy” could’ve been “Getting Stoned to Slint.”
As for side-long closer “Storm,” imagine Broken Social Scene’s ”It’s All Gonna Break” rewritten as a feverish drunkalogue. “Back in ‘95/Mom and dad were screaming/And you were leaning out the back door of your mind,” Rossiter shouts. It’s initially left to interpretation whether he’s an omnipotent narrator, but his role becomes more clear as “Storm” unfolds: “Ten years later at the Holiday Inn breakfast, I started crying...I called and said I’m sick/I inherited something I can’t deny,” to which that friend or brother or substitute father figure replies, “You gotta deal with it.” It traverses 12 years in as many minutes until it finds Rossiter back in the present, standing in his kitchen under the weight of it all. “Is this existing? I’m gonna make it work,” serves as the valedictory sendoff of S/T, but it sounds like they band is just getting started.


An expanded edition of 2004’s alarm-sounding masterpiece presents the century’s greatest Southern rock band at its most powerful and its most poignant.

Drive-By Truckers: The Complete Dirty South

The Complete Dirty South

The Corvette that killed Buford Pusser nearly 50 years ago remains on public display, its mauled frame and twisted wheels perched atop a little platform in a small-town Tennessee museum. In the early ’60s, Pusser—a one-time Chicago wrestler with a head like that of a pitbull—returned to southern Tennessee to wage legal war on rebellious confederations of bootleggers, gamblers, and thieves along his home state’s chaotic border with Mississippi and Alabama. His efforts and resulting assassination attempts made him a movie star in the loose biopic Walking Tall, at least until he fatally crashed his Corvette at top speeds in 1974. But his all-too-convenient death has remained the stuff of local legend in subsequent decades, with persistent rumors that his specialized car had been sabotaged for murder. Perhaps the steering rod had been sawed, to ensure that the locals trying to make an illicit fortune would never again have to “watch out for Buford.” Though Pusser is long dead, his Corvette endures, both a reminder and portent of regional chaos.
This conspiracy and that warning are the premise of Drive-By Truckers’ “The Buford Stick,” the centerpiece of a four-song suite about the warfare for homeland sovereignty, as riveting as any movie about Pusser. It arrives late in The Complete Dirty South, an expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece. A complicated survey of power dynamics and strife in a benighted region rich in half-true folklore, hydroelectric power, and heroes who stunt-double as villains, The Dirty South has been this century’s most compelling document of Southern rock since its release 19 years ago. With the addition of three scrapped songs that eventually appeared on later records (and a multitude of archival illustrations by the band’s visual world-builder, the late Wes Freed), The Complete Dirty South adds even more nuance and intrigue through tales of family-man suicide, small-town crooks, and simple country pleasure.
Two decades ago, the Truckers were so prolific that it actually pissed off their then-new label, New West. When the band revealed in early 2004 that it had nearly finished its second double-disc opus in four years, or just six months after New West heavily invested in the already-sprawling Decoration Day, the label balked. Sure, the Truckers were unsteadily climbing a ladder of Southern rock stardom after 2001’s ballyhooed Southern Rock Opera, but how high could that actually go in the 21st century, anyway? If the label was going to release The Dirty South, the band would need to trim it to a single disc, meaning the Truckers excised three of its 17 songs.
Late in 2001, less than three years before releasing The Dirty South, the hard-touring, hard-partying band had locked into one of the most potent lineups in modern rock history. Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood had played together for 15 years by that point, excavating hardscrabble Southern stories in rock every bit as rough as the subjects. And then Jason Isbell—a sensitive marching band geek from Muscle Shoals who, at 22, had seemingly slogged through a lifetime of woe already—enlisted, creating a three-singer, three-songwriter, three-guitarist chimera whose font of stories suddenly seemed inexhaustible.
As a young writer, Isbell could look at any fucked-up scene (including his own) and extract grace and empathy, adding a welcome softness to the Truckers’ worn steel chassis. And as a burgeoning multi-instrumentalist who knew his way around a Wurlitzer or 12-string and whose horn parts sometimes came to him in dreams, he also imparted a textural depth that left the Truckers a better band even after he left a drunken mess. At the start of 2004, with steadfast drummer Brad Morgan and new bassist Shonna Tucker, the Truckers were at the very peak of their form, the most poignant and powerful they’d ever be at once.
For the Truckers, The Dirty South is the social geographic region of places, people, and attitudes that have shaped so much of their work. Though the band was inspired by the storytelling acumen of Southern hip-hop and sounds that rose from historically Black blues, their constellation of characters is largely white.“They understand that they lack the expertise to inhabit the voice of Black characters,” Stephen Deusner writes in his history of the band, Where The Devil Don’t Stay, “or speak to that experience because they have not lived close enough to it.”
They have lived close enough to poor white grievance, however, to nail its substance, spirit, and sound, even when they don’t agree with its finer points. In The Dirty South, wonder and ambition get you sucked out of a small-town auditorium by a twister, as on Hood’s “Tornadoes,” or warp you into a sad sack set on self-destruction, as on Isbell’s “Danko / Manuel.” If the martyrdom of “The Day John Henry Died” represented a victory of human willpower, it also signaled the eventual dehumanization and disappearance of blue-collar jobs. On Hood’s “Goode’s Field Road,” a narrator decides to get himself killed just to feed his family with insurance money; Hood even considers throwing himself off “Lookout Mountain” to escape creditors and tax collectors. The heart-rending closer “Goddamn Lonely Love” is the farewell transmission, one last sigh when there’s nothing left to do or say. If life is only about working hard enough to survive, the Truckers collectively reason, why bother with either?
But they sing for the survivalists, too, the hustlers who sell whatever part of their soul is required to keep up the fight. That is the essence, after all, of the songs about Buford Pusser and all the Southern outlaws that defied him. The Truckers have long and lovingly called such folks “Heathens,” even giving them a theme song by that name on Decoration Day. They are simply trying to exist, even when that means killing someone to do so. It’s the firefighter who gets paid to set car dealerships aflame or the deep-woods scion begging “the ATF and the ABI” to fuck around and find out. And it’s the Walmart employee of the masterful “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” looking back at his life as an outlaw and tripping over an existential crisis therein. Those old days offered the kind of living that might have killed him fast, but this new existence just means slowly dying without too much living at all. “I could clothe and feed my family,” Hood sings of those dangerous days, his voice cracking like a desiccated patch of red clay. “Still have time to love my pretty wife.”
For all the pains and struggles that radiate through The Dirty South, there is joy here, too, a feeling that this updated set bolsters. It was always there, of course, especially in Cooley’s songs. Yes, “Where the Devil Don’t Stay” is a Southern noir scene of class conflict and hypocrisy, but the narrator’s dad plays stump-top poker as he mans his backwoods moonshine still. There are worse ways to live, let alone die.
Previously relegated to a B-sides compendium, the linchpin here is Isbell’s “TVA,” an ode to the simple pleasures of the very complicated Tennessee Valley Authority and the 49 dams it uses to power the South and manage its waterways. The massive federal project destroyed ecosystems and small settlements, a Truckers subject long before Isbell even joined. Isbell nods to these problems, but he focuses on the little personal wonders he found atop Wilson Dam, the massive neoclassical beauty near the Truckers’ Muscle Shoals homeland. He fishes as a kid from the top with his raconteur father, gets to second base at 15 atop its locks, and then realizes as an adult his ancestors may never have endured the Great Depression without its existence.
From Pusser’s assassination to the insurance men investigating the clandestine suicide of “Goode’s Field Road,” The Dirty South ripples with anti-authority rhetoric. “TVA,” however, refuses to look FDR’s gift horse in the mouth by finding at least some happiness in what you’ve got. As his acoustic shuffles and the pedal steel sighs, Isbell’s hangdog tone is less about glory than whatever contentment he can muster. The Truckers have made a career articulating the assorted “dualities of the Southern thing.” A government gift that also ruined lives, Wilson Dam is both gift and curse, the duality encapsulated by 1.3 million cubic yards of concrete.
Back in 2004, the domain of The Dirty South might have felt mythical and far-off, its cast of outlaws, pariahs, and survivalists all part of some distant land that surely didn’t exist amid the digital promise of the glittering 21st century. The Drive-By Truckers sang of a fractious but quaint past, fading into the rearview of the future. American anxiety during those Bush-Cheney years hinged on outside peril, not the scorn festering in our national backyard. We know better now: The pernicious resentment and fear of poor if privileged whites have become dominant political themes of the last decade, an essential raw ingredient for the rise of Donald Trump and associates. In their way, the Truckers—some old enough to remember when Pusser died, others old enough only to have seen his scorched Corvette in a museum—called it.
“Motherfucker in the White House said a change was comin’ round,” Hood sings late into “Puttin’ People on the Moon.” “But I’m workin’ at the Walmart, Mary Alice in the ground.” It’s a perfect post-industrial American jeremiad, reducing the wages of Reaganomics, government bloat, and private healthcare cruelty into five irascible minutes. Like The Dirty South as a whole, it has aged tragically well, as the vein of rage it exposed with such clarity has come into full public view. The Drive-By Truckers didn’t invent these woes, of course, and their progressive politics have long since suggested they don’t believe in many of them. But few other American rock bands, Southern or otherwise, have better sounded the alarm bells of its own region than the Truckers did on these 17 songs.


Following the success of his viral hit “White Iverson,” Post Malone releases a 68-minute album that shows exactly why he should have never been given the chance to release a 68-minute album.

Stoney

“White Iverson” is not a foundational brick; it is a sandcastle on a windy day with a high tide. No one who appreciated the breezy distraction of a radio song in 2015 wanted to hear nearly 70 minutes of Post Malone a year later. There are new one-hit wonders to enjoy; there are pop icons making important works; there’s probably a book somewhere worth reading.
The song was charming, though: Through the haze of its production and Post Malone’s slurred delivery was a certain nostalgic desire and childlike wonder. Somehow, he hopped on a tour with Justin Bieber, and Universal subsidiary Republic Records believed that Stoney, a 68-minute long dirge, was the correct use of his talents. Even if you liked “White Iverson,” was there anyone who thought to themselves, I want to hear this guy’s story! What’s he all about? We need to know more!? For all of Stoney’s faults, its most damning one poisons the record at the source: This thing is completely soulless.
It’s not for a lack of trying, however—Post Malone (real name: Austin Post) is presenting his most authentic self here, talking openly about relationships and taking too many drugs and drinking a little too much, amidst numerous “we made it” anthems. But he’s simply not a compelling artist; he doesn’t say anything new about these struggles, doesn’t frame them in a particularly memorable way, and has nothing to say now that he’s wrestled with his fame. What pushes Stoney past being merely forgettable and into a kind of cynical, punishing listen is the access to a bunch of producers and songwriters that came together behind the 21-year-old to ensure a product so highly polished, and so clearly connect-the-dots, it robs him of any trace of charm. The album ends up doubling as a tacit acknowledgment that, hey, maybe this guy is just not that interesting.
If it’s lowlights you want, Stoney’s got them: “I Fall Apart” brutally crashes the party, appearing right after “White Iverson.” The song is full of acoustic guitars, and features Post’s most obnoxious crutch: that weird little vibrato thing he does, a vain attempt to convey emotion. “I Fall Apart,” a self-lacerating breakup anthem, recalls Staind, working that same woe-is-me white boy pain with an unpleasant voice slathered all over it. “Go Flex” boasts a foot-stomp chorus and enough echo to sound exactly like the Lumineers or any other faceless “whoa-oh-oh” band; it’s as unholy as it sounds on paper.
Stoney indulges in a few huge, expertly written, admittedly catchy hooks, but since Post doesn’t have a strong voice and is usually not saying much more than cliches, many of these faux-triumphant songs sound tailor-made for headphone commercials. See: “Congratulations,” with a “let me collect this check” Quavo appearance, or “Too Young,” a song that’s probably about a year old, and already in line to appear on the soundtrack for the next movie about a white boxer.
To its credit, Stoney lets its best run of songs loose near the beginning of the album, after turgid opener “Broken Whiskey Glass.” “Big Lie” has a nice, booming DJ Mustard beat, sounding like something that could’ve been on Anti or SremmLife 2, and one of the record’s strongest hooks, mostly because it plays into the same kind of sleepy-eyed charm of “White Iverson.” The baroque beats on songs like “Dej Vu,” with Justin Bieber, and the Pharrell-assisted “Up There,” are begging for someone with a little more humor to show up, maybe Young Thug or any of the under-21 Atlanta guys. Still, Post Malone finds those grooves nicely, and they are the least burdensome songs on the record.
I have a perhaps wishfully optimistic hope that Stoney could mark the end of a specific kind of rap album: the spiffy cash-in after the viral hit or mixtape run. Post feels like the flimsiest artist yet to get this treatment, and he got such an extravagant treatment at that. With a recent era of mixtape rappers on the decline, along with the steady hemorrhaging of album sales and bigger names taking bigger risks, it seems as if this type of hollow release could soon become as anachronistic as an $18 CD is today.


On her 1992 album, the iconoclastic vocalist and her band of German experimentalists pushed each other to virtuosic extremes, spanning styles and genres.

Our Likeness

In 1981, a young man sat quietly in Conny Plank’s legendary Cologne recording studio, watching Japanese singer Phew record her debut album. She had been whisked from Osaka to Germany at only 20 years old on the strength of her first single with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Her backing band included krautrock legends Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, some of the only musicians in the world who the young iconoclast adored. The band decided to improvise, and Phew wrote lyrics on the spot. Miraculously, her voice, though sometimes small and uncertain, gradually found its place amid Czukay and Liebezeit’s bang and clatter.
The spectator during those sessions was Chrislo Haas of German new wave bands D.A.F. and Liaisons Dangereuses. Though he didn’t introduce himself at the time, he contacted Phew almost a decade later in Tokyo to suggest they record together. Haas masterminded the sessions for Phew’s eclectic 1992 record, Our Likeness, inviting Liebezeit back to record with a new generation of the German underground in Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten and Thomas Stern of Crime and the City Solution. Now in her early 30s, Phew reprised her role as vocalist in Plank’s studio. This time she came prepared.
The years between Phew’s self-titled debut and Our Likeness, which is now being reissued by Mute, were turbulent but productive. The first Cologne recordings were pivotal for her—she has admitted that she likely would not have continued making music without meeting Plank—but they triggered a period of aimlessness. Encountering Plank’s immaculate studio and his meticulous recording techniques challenged her punk rock ethos. She spent five years reconciling what she observed in Germany with her own simple, go-ahead approach. Meanwhile, her legend grew as the vocalist who recorded with Sakamoto and Can and then disappeared. She returned as a more assured artist with 1987’s View, a poppy, synth-driven affair with relatively restrained, melodic vocal lines.
Though Our Likeness is Phew’s third album, it is the spiritual sequel to her debut. On both albums, Liebezeit’s percussion unlocked the potential of Phew’s vocals across their language barrier. “Music is a language, and the music a person makes is dictated to a certain degree by their mother tongue,” she explained in a 2003 interview for The Wire. “You can hear it particularly in the drumming. Listen to a German drummer and you will be able to detect the influence of the German tongue on his playing.” Frustrated by the constraints of singing in Japanese, Phew catapults her vocals off of the taut platform of Liebezeit’s hyper-precise drumming, twisting and stretching her words with confidence that she will land back in the pocket.
The German experimentalists transform each track of Our Likeness into a world of its own. The band does its best Liquid Liquid impression on “Our Element” while she barks over their dance-punk groove until she runs out of breath. “Being” is the most surprising song for its big, dumb, heavy-metal riffage, but Phew’s growls succeed in making the track more disturbing than silly. Elsewhere, her lilting, sing-song melody lifts the chiming guitars on “Spring” into sublime, airy territory, setting the stage for Hacke’s soaring guitar solo.
Phew complements Haas and company’s most outré tendencies. On “Smell,” sound effects of water splashing, coins dropping, and spooky sci-fi ambience are punctuated by crashing guitar chords. The track becomes tensely dramatic as each sound contrasts with Phew’s calm syllable-by-syllable recitation, as if some malevolent force is threatening to interrupt a child’s bedtime story. These unstructured moments contrast with the blissful pop of the title track, whose twangy guitars and clockwork drumming build to a climax of Phew’s tightly controlled vocal acrobatics, hovering and twisting above the instruments like calligraphic skywriting. Like a punk-rock Meredith Monk, Phew has tirelessly developed her inimitable singing style for over 40 years, from her late-’70s punk band Aunt Sally to her recent run of solo records. When her 1981 debut went out of print, it was heralded “the great lost Can album.” On her triumphant return to Cologne, Phew stepped out of the shadow of her collaborators and made music that sounded unmistakably her own.