Over the course of her career, Juliana Barwick has perfected a very particular form of ethereal vocal ambience. For her new album, she recorded in Iceland with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, members of múm, and the string quartet Amiina, resulting in her most emotionally complex work yet.

Nepenthe

Growing up in rural Louisiana and then later on a farm in Missouri, Julianna Barwick was a preacher's daughter at a church whose organ got very little use. "We would always sing a cappella," she explained in an interview a few years ago, "And instead of instruments we would clap or sing in rhythmic rounds." A curious kid and a bit of a loner, Barwick showed a precocious fascination with the human voice. Her hobbies included harmonizing with random sounds, making up songs about whatever she was doing at the moment, and singing long, loud notes in hollowed-out spaces like parking garages and inside the trunk of a giant tree just to see what the echo would sound like. "It sounds kinda psycho, I know," she admitted in our interview, but sometimes "I would sing to myself and get so lost in it that I would cry."
Actually, it doesn’t sound that crazy; it’s very easy to become lost in the music that Barwick now makes as an adult. Over the span of her career, from her imaginative 2006 debut LP Sanguine up through 2011's dazzling breakthrough The Magic Place (the name is a nod to that aforementioned giant tree trunk, where she'd unwittingly discovered reverb), Barwick's gradually refined a process that is at once inventive and incredibly simple. She sings short, reverb-drenched, often wordless vocal fragments into a loop station (though she made the loops on the painstakingly lo-fi Sanguine using just a guitar pedal) and layers them into luminous compositions that feel like the aural equivalent of an airplane ride through a cloud. Toweringly sublime yet invitingly human, her music has an uncanny power to transform whatever space it's played in. It can make a cramped apartment feel like a high-ceilinged cathedral, or-- when she plays in one-- an actual cathedral feel like a gear-cluttered basement show.
Following the warm reception of The Magic Place, Barwick's approach has often been compared to ambient pioneers like Steve Reich and Brian Eno or the conceptual vocal artist Meredith Monk, but something about her music remains approachable and deeply personal—more intuitive than academic. Even as Barwick's songs become as polished and ambitious as those on her third full-length album, Nepenthe, they’ve managed to retain a certain playfulness and an openness to the process of discovery. It deserves mention among the best and most artful ambient music being made today, but Barwick’s work still feels like the realization of a dream left over from childhood, made by someone downright giddy that she has finally figured out a way to sing a round song with herself.
Sanguine, the 2009 EP Florine and The Magic Place all conveyed a sense of serenity found in solitude, which is maybe why her collaborations with other artists have been such a mixed bag. Her records with Ikue Mori (for RVNG’s FRKWYS series) and Helado Negro (as the duo OMBRE) have been solid, but a 2011 remix EP (featuring versions of Magic Place songs reworked by the likes of Diplo, Lunice and Prince Rama) basically just underscored how beside the point it is to remix a Julianna Barwick song. Her music is so pure and reliant on moments of quiet that another artists’ presence often overwhelms. So Nepenthe was a potentially risky move: It marks the first time she’s worked with other artists on one of her solo albums. And we’re not exactly talking anonymous session guys here: she recorded it with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers (members of múm and the string quartet Amiina also contribute) at Sundlaugin, the band’s famed Icelandic “swimming pool studio.” (As a kid Barwick probably couldn’t have even imagined what sort of natural reverb you can get out of an abandoned swimming pool.)
Thankfully, Nepenthe sounds like a step forward for Barwick, a noticeable expansion in scope that still honors the sensibility that made her early records so unique. Somers’ lush production gives her music a larger and crisper depth of field, making it that much easier to get lost in its many overlapping folds. The structures of some of her tracks have become more complex: The billowing “The Harbinger” finds drama in the movement from crescendos to moments of quiet and back again, while the misty incantation “One Half” feels (true to its title) like a seamless fusion of two separate arcs. (For once, there’s even discernable lyrics in that song, but their purpose is purely phonetic, like words spoken in a strange dream.) But even in its most epic moments, one of Nepenthe’s greatest virtues is restraint. Given free reign in one of the most spectacular studios imaginable, Barwick didn’t go all kid-in-a-candy-store on us here. Nepenthe is a modest evolution-- the work of an artist growing, smartly, to scale rather than adding on needless bells and whistles or pushing prematurely past her limits.
It’s also more emotionally complex than her past work. The Magic Place was a slice of pure, unfiltered bliss, but the songs on Nepenthe ache and yearn. Album opener “Offing” hovers like thick fog over a remote pond, while Amiina’s strings drone and growl ominously throughout “Pyrrhic”-- these songs are still ethereal, but they’re stormier clouds than Barwick’s conjured before. On a few tracks, Róbert Sturla Reynisson from múm plays a guitar that, true to his post-rock pedigree, sounds more like a tiny spaceship or the noises made by a comfortingly unthreatening alien. But it’s Amiina’s presence that’s particularly harmonious with Barwick’s overall aesthetic. They're creative with the sounds they get out of stringed instruments, which allows Barwick to use them in a way that says something more complex than “[insert orchestral grandeur here].” They often feel like an extension of her own voice. “Waving to You”, the muted, palliative finale, fits in so well with Barwick’s vibe that it took me a few listens to realize it’s the only song on the album without vocals.
Barwick claims she went to Iceland with nothing written ahead of time. This is how she’s always worked, from her childhood experiments up to The Magic Place-- tapping into the vibrations of the present, and turning them into something that is somehow both enduring and impermanent. You sense feelings of longing and unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen, and perhaps a more rewarding one.


The songwriter’s new EP reimagines four tracks from her recent album Punisher with devastating orchestral arrangements that bring her voice into dramatic focus.

Copycat Killer EP

During the hellish week that we waited for the results of the U.S. presidential election, Phoebe Bridgers promised that if Trump lost, she would cover “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. Her pledge felt partly like earnest emotional bargaining and partly like a joke, but when Bridgers, joined by Maggie Rogers, released the cover the following week, it was clear she took the challenge seriously: Bridgers’ “Iris” transformed the alt-rock power anthem into a twangy, hushed plea for belonging. Her cover felt a bit like a teaser for Copycat Killer, a new EP of reworked songs from this summer’s excellent album Punisher. It would have been easy to replicate the plucky folk of her debut, 2017’s Stranger in the Alps, but instead, she and arranger and string player Rob Moose (who has worked with Bon Iver, Taylor Swift, and FKA twigs) reimagine four songs as devastating orchestral arrangements.
Like an auditory bokeh effect, Copycat Killer places Bridgers’ voice in dramatic focus, causing the emotional heft of the songs to balloon. Excavated from layers of watery distortion, every lyric lingers in the air as she sings about losing friends, searching for signs of an afterlife, resisting emotional vampires, and managing her savior complex. The strings elevate the vocal drama, swooping and majestic one moment, percussive and anxious the next. Without Punisher’s twinkling production flourishes and array of friends’ voices, there are no distractions. Listening to Copycat Killer all at once feels like waking up from an evening nap or entering a movie theater in daylight and leaving in the dark. You’re nourished but also disoriented, limbs tingling as they recalibrate to the outside world.
“Kyoto,” originally written as a ballad, is most beautifully transformed. The Punisher version was propelled by a whimsical trumpet section and synth line, mirroring Bridgers’ restless lyrics about travelling in Japan but missing California. On this version, her gossamer vocals bring other aspects of the song to the forefront: the father who forgets his son’s birthday, the flailing attempts to stop loving someone you know will continue to hurt you. On “Savior Complex,” another highlight, the original string section expands effortlessly, cellos filling the song with foreboding. The final words—“All the bad dreams that you hide/Show me yours”—feel more menacing than empathetic.
Bridgers’ songs are so devastating because she plays both hero and villain, creating a Möbius strip of virtues (like selflessness) that twist into flaws (like savior complexes). Rarely is there a feeling of catharsis or righteousness, especially on Copycat Killer, where the paralyzing angst and introspection feels so stark. Yet the EP ends on a quietly hopeful note. After setting a crisis of faith to heart-pounding strings on a new version of “Chinese Satellite,” Bridgers closes with “Punisher,” an ode to her idol, Elliott Smith. Though delivered with the same agonizing intimacy as the rest, at its heart, it’s a song about connection. “What if I told you I feel like I know you/But we never met,” she ventures cautiously, finding reassurance in Smith’s generosity and talent without ever having witnessed it firsthand—the very definition of faith. Meaning doesn’t always come from institutions or scriptures, but from the heroes we pick for ourselves.


A well-regarded player in the Chicago jazz world, bassist and composer Joshua Abrams has also established a reputation as a composer for film. Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters collects two scores Abrams composed for documentary filmmaker Steve James, best known for his 1994 picture, Hoop Dreams.

Joshua Abrams: Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters

A well-regarded player in the Chicago jazz world, bassist and composer Joshua Abrams has spent the last several years recording expansive trance music with his band, Natural Information Society. That outfit’s records are driven by improvisation, though not necessarily in the form of individual solos. Instead, Abrams and his collaborators create hypnotic interlocking patterns, rhythms, and melodies that seem to spool forth endlessly without any single voice taking center stage. It is serene and peaceful music that relies on spontaneous invention, but also on restraint.
It’s a sensibility that is carried over to Abrams’ other pursuits. In the past several years, the bassist has also established a reputation as a composer for film. Released digitally by Eremite Records, Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters collects two scores that Abrams composed for documentary filmmaker, Steve James—best known for his 1994 picture, Hoop Dreams—including the two features in the title as well as a two-minute piece written for the short, A Place Called Pluto.
If you’re coming to this music having listened to Abrams’ work in Natural Information Society, one thing will be immediately noticeable: these compositions are a lot shorter. Working in the context of a film, there’s no room to sprawl and most of Abrams’ cues last barely more than a minute. It’s a very different kind of music making, but the results share certain qualities with the composer’s other outlet, mainly in that they often carefully balance ambience and melody.
Released last year, Life Itself is an adaptation of film critic Roger Ebert’s memoir of the same name. Though the film includes interview footage shot during the final months of Ebert’s battle with cancer, the mood is not morose. Abrams’ score is mostly lighthearted, often taking stylistic inspiration from blues and '60s cool jazz. Much of it seems to capture spontaneous interplay. The central thread, "Roger’s Theme", finds a brass band trading riffs and "Professional Enemies" is largely a bass solo. For the film’s somber and reflective moments, Abrams’ arranges music that suggests a sense of peace—drones and light chords embellished with flourishes of trumpet and harp.
This is followed by Abrams’ score for James’ 2011 film, The Interrupters, which tracks a group of anti-violence activists working with communities in Chicago. Commissioned a mere six weeks before the film's Sundance Film Festival premiere, it's the slightly less polished of the pair. However, with its focus on percussion and hip-hop rhythms, it’s probably the more enjoyable of the two to listen to outside of the context of the film. On both, Abrams’ benefits from the presence of great musicians, including drummer Hamid Drake, saxophonist Ari Brown, and guitarist Jeff Parker, who also performs in Tortoise.
Watching the films, Abrams’ music is never intrusive. It enhances a scene, but never forces a mood. And while it’s probably not the first place you’d turn to experience his work, it provides an example of his stylistic reach and musical ability. Natural Information Society’s music thrives amid the extended zone-out, but listening to the music for The Interrupters, it’s surprising how malleable many of those sounds are—that, in miniature, the music can slot so naturally into somebody else’s story.


An hour-long excerpt of an experimental performance at the Tate Modern in 2019, Tissues is rooted in opera but extends the sounds, themes, and harrowing moods of the Berlin-based musician’s electronic work.

Tissues

Pan Daijing’s studio discography leans toward post-industrial and dark ambient—whether it’s the mechanical misanthropy of 2017’s Lack 惊蛰 or the organic sprawl of 2021’s Jade 玉观音—but the underlying skeleton of the Berlin-based musician’s work is keenly operatic. An hour-long excerpt of an experimental play originally performed at the Tate Modern in 2019, Tissues is the fulfillment of that tendency. Though the recording derives from an opera-based performance, it doesn’t feel dissimilar to Pan’s electronic work; its traditional choral arrangements are haunting and cryptic, and its vast expanse is familiar in its agitation. Pan’s music has often used sound as a means of investigating the collision of the biotic and the synthetic, and on Tissues, she turns to the human voice to explore the title’s multiple meanings, both paper and flesh.
Opening with an uneasy cascade of electronic tones, the opera quickly melts into a ritualistic soprano, its dialogue intentionally untranslatable. Tissues is divided into four sections demarcated by shifts in motion and terror, tracing a journey from “A Raving Still” to “A Deafening Hum.” In addition to the double-bladed meaning of “tissues,” Pan pursues the idea of duality more generally in the libretto’s mixture of old and new Chinese, establishing an unsettling tension between the two forms that mirrors the piece’s contrasting vocal styles. The body of the story itself is ouroboric, the libretto loosely inspired by Murong Yan, a wuxia character whose male and female aspects try desperately to kill one another.
The interplay of warring voices informs the thesis of Pan’s project. The abstract structure, at least compared to a traditional opera, piercingly emphasizes the beauty of its arrangements. Across the seamless span of “A Found Lament” and “A Tender Accent,” swooning sighs and orotund mezzo-soprano are backed by an almost melodic drone, and high-pitched voices cry out, “害怕! (Fear!),” to protest the minatory wall of mechanical sound encroaching on them. On “A Raving Still,” a strangulated, robotic voice commands, “Wake me after, wake me after,” before the song is pierced by an inhuman screech that recalls a hawk’s lone journey across a canyon. A delicate battle plays out between Pan’s electronics and the voices that color them. Her own voice, rich and euphonic, adds to the frisson of these tracks—marking a stark contrast to the bite of synth punk in her cries on Amnesia Scanner’s “AS Chaos,” or her spoken word across 2017’s A Satin Sight.
Despite her fascination with opera, Pan has no formal musical schooling. “I’ve never studied a single day of music and now I want to write an opera,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “Where does that come from?” But when performed at the Tate Modern, draped against the brutalist backdrop of the Tanks, Tissues emerges as a vivid, full-bodied narrative. A large ensemble of dancers and opera singers is drenched in shadows of black and red; they contort and perform the play’s ceaseless conflict against the museum’s inorganic architecture. Even removed from the context of the live performance, Tissues remains charged with resonant beauty and keen-eyed focus, despite the pervasive air of disquietude. Its duality never strives to pull itself apart.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Paul! Good god, man, it's been a while. Last I heard, you were wasting away in some piss-gutter on Minneapolis' north side, regaling the local liquor slobs with tales of 7th Street glory and Tommy Stinson's bitchin' hair parades. Hey, how about that solo career? Yeah, you blew it right from the start. Christ, dude, "Silver Naked Ladies"? *Suicaine Gratifaction??* What'd, you have an aneurysm? Ahh, no offense, pal. Heard your new records-- fuckin' *shocker*, man! Thought we'd heard the last of you after that career-ender back in '99. But that's all history now, buddy. Get up on that barstool

Paul Westerberg / Grandpaboy: Stereo / Mono

Stereo / Mono

Paul! Good god, man, it's been a while. Last I heard, you were wasting away in some piss-gutter on Minneapolis' north side, regaling the local liquor slobs with tales of 7th Street glory and Tommy Stinson's bitchin' hair parades. Hey, how about that solo career? Yeah, you blew it right from the start. Christ, dude, "Silver Naked Ladies"? Suicaine Gratifaction?? What'd, you have an aneurysm? Ahh, no offense, pal. Heard your new records-- fuckin' shocker, man! Thought we'd heard the last of you after that career-ender back in '99. But that's all history now, buddy. Get up on that barstool and talk some noise about Pete Jesperson. You still owe me a rum-and-coke for "World Class Fad".
Such is how a conversation between myself and olde Paul Westerberg might've gone had we hooked up for a drink at the Turf Club a couple of months ago for an interview I just dreamt up to make this transition smoother. Yeah, I could be like the rest of you cynical half-breeds and feign disinterest, write this weathered codger off and tell you to save yourself the worry and pick up a Sorry Ma reissue. After all, I've got the practice, having spent the last ten years bored to tears by Westerberg's post-Replacements solo schlock. 14 Songs and Eventually have long since left my memory banks, forgettable like the phrase "adult contemporary singer/songwriter." Yet, after getting the boot from two major labels in the past four years, Westy's back on the minor circuit with a sense of confidence so renewed it produced two full-length records.
But what shocks even more than his sudden resurgence in popularity is the fact that these albums mark the first time since about 1987 that Westerberg's released anything worth more than a 5.0. And while I'm on a roll here, I'll go ahead and be controversial: Stereo and Mono are the best work Paul's done ir like fifteen years. And yeah, I'm just as surprised as the rest of you skeptics.
Stereo's a collection of low-key, country-tinged acoustic ballads, sad love songs, and bluesy rock beaters that were reputedly self-recorded in the basement of Westerberg's house over the course of two years. The amateurish production announces its presence with abruptly ending songs and occasional, unintentional background racket. Westerberg plays all the instruments, occasionally flubs lyrics, and gets defensive in the liner notes: "Unprofessional? Perhaps. Real? Unquestionably." Cocky? Yep. But the man's got a right. This here's the inventor of cock, the guy who shared a town with the already well-established Hüsker Dü and openly mocked them in a song on his band's debut album!
That cockiness fights its way onto both Stereo and Mono, and solely on the basis of the man rediscovering his testicles, these records are worth a listen. But there's more: reverting to his trademark graveled vocals and veering off the path of predictability by dropping some genuinely loud material along the way, Westerberg's conviction is nearly as strong now as it was in his prime. And, spared the studio polish and complex arrangements of the rest of his solo catalog, these songs are simply solid-- proving that when he's inspired, he can still bring home the magic. Unquestionably.
The disc opens with "Baby Learns to Crawl," with its spacious guitar and muted accordion effects fading into "Dirt to Mud," a plaintive, acoustic Dylan-esque paean to regret. The excellent, waltz-timed "Got You Down" even recalls the sparse intimacy of Nebraska-era Springsteen. For an album conceived and recorded with a modicum of slick production toys, it does a great job manipulating atmosphere from song to song. Take the downtempo blues-pop of "No Place for You," which, for its spatial expanse, is remarkably intimate (likewise the lo-fi rock of "Unlisted Track"). Makes one wonder about the acoustics of Westerberg's basement.
Included with the original pressings of Stereo comes Mono (released under that cheeseball moniker Grandpaboy), and seen as a double album, Stereo/Mono is particularly effective. If the Paul Westerberg of Stereo is a seasoned musician putting his sorrows to music in the basement, Grandpaboy is his incorrigible alter-ego, playing spacious, low-fidelity Stones-stampin' rock 'n' rule that evokes his Replacements days without pandering to nostalgia. Westerberg's even joined by a tight backing band on Mono, and claims to have recorded the album in a state of hurried, sweaty-handed irrationality-- something some of you digital perfectionists out there might take a cue from.
As on Stereo, Mono moves fairly seamlessly across genres without disrupting the essential tone of the album: the bar-brawling "High Time" kicks things off somewhere between rootsy Americana and power-pop; "Let's Not Belong Together" is a reverb-heavy, imperfect rockabilly number; "Anything But That" pits Jagger swagger against Westerberg's best 'Mats yowl. And of the two, Mono holds up as the stronger album throughout. But only by a hair.
Both of these records are considerable accomplishments, considering that the last time we heard from this guy it was on the cut-out bin damnation of Suicaine's abysmal "Bookmark." Westerberg's influence was planted ir this fertile indie rock soil back in 1982, and whether it's been bastardized through the generations or not, you can still hear echoes of his rasped tone deep in the mixes of today's greatest counter-cultural masterpieces. Mono and Stereo would be fine records from any musician-- that Westerberg himself is the source makes it all the sweeter. These albums, if nothing else, serve as a reminder of all he's done, and all he's yet to do. Congrats, Paul. Didn't think you had it in you.


The strikingly intimate debut from the London-via–South Africa singer showcases an exciting new talent despite its occasionally lead-footed pacing and stilted theatrics.

Nakhane: You Will Not Die (Deluxe Version)

You Will Not Die (Deluxe Version)

Nakhane Touré was only 19 years old when he came out as gay. Living in a small town on the Eastern Cape of South Africa in a community of strict fundamentalist Christians at the time, coming out meant the actor and musician was sent to conversion therapy, an experience that made him question his Christian faith altogether and turn to his own form of prayer for guidance. Eventually, following a controversial appearance in a queer South African film that prompted death threats, Nakhane relocated to London, where his music career has since flourished. It’s a life story loaded with enough affliction and triumph to make You Will Not Die, Nakhane’s deeply personal, grief-stricken shout of a debut album, an instant revelation on its own terms. With several stunning moments centering Nakhane’s crises of faith that give his supple voice room to strut and soar, You Will Not Die is a strikingly intimate album that succeeds despite some occasionally lead-footed pacing and stilted theatrics.
You Will Not Die was released in Europe last year, and it’s now being re-released stateside in deluxe form with five new tracks, featuring the standout song “New Brighton.” The victorious, upbeat track tackles the legacy of colonialist names and monuments conferred on towns in South Africa, with streaks of bright synths, rhythm guitar, and backing vocals by ANOHNI. “Never knew them before, don’t know them now,” Nakhane rallies proudly over the charging backdrop, “What about my mother and her sisters/Where was their name?” The song is a revelatory statement that twists the album’s recurring themes of religiosity and his personal history into bold new shapes.
Early highlight “Interloper” pulls off a similar trick, riding swaggering electric guitar licks and a rolling drum line as Nakhane details the clash between a clandestine tryst and his faith: “Good Lord, I see him now/Tell me what happened to the opium of your word,” he sings seductively, recalling Wild Beasts’ similarly wily and expressive Hayden Thorpe, “Let me put my finger in the cavern of his mouth.” Nakhane’s vocals throughout “Interloper” simmer under the surface until he lets them rise on the chorus, letting out a piercing clarion call halfway through that sets the song ablaze.
Nakhane’s voice is a deep and soulful instrument, and he employs it with both the delicacy of a feather and the weighty drop of a hammer. Yet the funeral march across You Will Not Die’s middle section undercuts Nakhane’s talent. Moody ballad “The Dead” plods into “Star Red” and “Fog,” both downcast and overly theatrical to the point of an Off-Broadway production. A few songs on You Will Not Die also feel perhaps overly indebted to ANOHNI, whether drawing from the solemn dramaturgy of Antony and the Johnsons (“Presbyteria”) or the pummeling electronics of 2016’s HOPELESSNESS (“Clairvoyant”).
Yet Nakhane proves he’s able to craft ballads while bringing his influences into play in a more intriguing way, dialing things down for a cover of New Order’s eternal, springy 1983 single “Age of Consent.” Suspended by sparse electric guitar, piano, and choral backing vocals, the cover is an opportunity for Nakhane’s voice to take center stage in unblemished fashion, climbing up to a falsetto and back down again while rendering the song completely anew. It’s a maneuver that, like “New Brighton,” offers up exceptional promise for Nakhane’s future, wherever it may lead.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this review inaccurately reflected portions of Nakhane’s biography.


On his new album for Shanghai’s Genome Tapes, London’s Tim Zha applies Auto-Tuned vocals to hybrid pop informed by dancehall and Afrobeats, where bright details dance against a blurry backdrop.

Into One Name

“Inner poetry eludes words,” said the 20th-century Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. “One doubts the exactness of words, their ability to express what we feel within us.” That awareness of the limitations of language guides Organ Tapes, a solo project of the London-based vocalist and producer Tim Zha. His new record on the Shanghai label Genome 6.66 Mbp takes its title from a Jiménez poem, and Zha also borrows the poet’s slippery linguistic approach. He slathers his vocals in Auto-Tune, to the point where discrete words often fail to materialize from within a waterfall of sound. “I want people to make their own meanings,” he told Dazed. “I want the song to function as something that approaches being outside language.” His alias is suggestive of emotions captured in a preverbal state, still roiling inside the body. Zha pulls sentiment straight from the gut.
The singer operates within a loose orbit of young London talents, including Mixpak vocalist Palmistry and Bala Club’s resident crooner Uli K, who’ve established a niche crafting delicate pop accented by R&B, trance, and dancehall motifs. With its large Jamaican population, London has long served as an inflection point where Caribbean influences bleed into fusion subgenres like ragga-jungle and 2 tone. This legacy has left contemporary London youth hyper-attuned to regional sounds from around the world—and ruthlessly willing to experiment with them. Under his DJ Corpmane alias, Zha makes off-the-wall edits that connect the dots between unexpected emotional valences in, say, baile funk upstart MC Pedrinho and screamo legends Circle Takes the Square, or Lil Peep and Kamixlo. That might sound like a gimmick, but Zha is totally sincere. He’s a bloodhound on the trail of raw feeling, following his nose wherever it might lead.
That omnivorous approach informs Into One Name. Like generations of bedroom pop musicians before him, Zha strips established forms down to a spare framework. His smudged melodies cast a homespun glow on the dancehall and Afrobeats sounds he loves. “Li Bu Kai,” which features Bala Club affiliate Yayoyanoh, pays homage to the Nigerian star Mr. Eazi’s tender 2016 Afrobeats hit “Skin Tight.” Zha—who grew up between London and Shanghai—sings in Chinese, and Yayoyanoh’s verse cites the original’s lovelorn refrain, “If you give your heart to me.”
Sometimes Zha’s approach doesn’t connect. On “New” and “All Night,” hooks never crystallize out of the spongy atmosphere. The Auto-Tune elides his vocals into background texture, and the outlines of pop songs struggle to emerge from the gloom. Elsewhere, the record leans too heavily on pastiche. “Song” has a catchy hook, but it follows in the jetstream of melody-friendly rappers like Trippie Redd and Future without adding to their formula.
Into One Name succeeds when Zha contrasts blurry sounds with strange, sharp details. On “Something,” Zha floats over a translucent riddim bursting with 8-bit chirps that glisten like dew on a soccer field. He resembles Alkaline by way of Daniel Johnston. “Can I Know,” a duet with the like-minded London singer Malibu, isolates a fun mood with surgical precision—it’s just two voices harmonizing over a breezy kalimba loop, like the hold music you might hear while calling to book the world's coolest cruise.
Best of all is “Seedling,” a breathtaking jam that pops up near the end of the record. Zha sculpts a few sparse details—flute, xylophone, frosty synth—into what sounds like a trance rave captured in a snowglobe. “I’m burning inside, and I’m freezing,” he sings, in thrall to the mind-melting paradox of unrequited love; “I lost it, I feel it, I’m broken, I need it.” The tension builds toward a major percussive climax complete with crunk-inspired “What!” and “Hey!” samples. At the end of a record that scrupulously avoids fixed meaning in favor of fragile moods, it feels good to hear Zha get something real off his chest.


When Kate Boy debuted with the song "Northern Lights" three years ago, they joined a group of synth-pop oddities enraptured by the Knife. Their long-gestating debut hits the same targets as that song: Kate Boy love pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is exhausting as often as it is potent.

One

When it came out three years ago, Kate Boy's "Northern Lights" joined a new, growing class of Knife-wielding groups. Purity Ring, Chvrches, and Niki and the Dove all made debuts that year that recast the Swedish duo's roiling, synth-heavy formula into new electropop oddities. But the strutting "Northern Lights" stood out for a number of reasons: Those teeming, plasticized synth melodies; that widescreen, euphoric chorus; the promise that "everything we touch turns to gold" that on repeat listens sounded more and more like a threat. In spite of singer Kate Akhurst's voice bearing a borderline-scary similarity to Karin Dreijer Andersson, Kate Boy's music remained irresistible, dressing up Silent Shout's pressurized gloom in vivid, maximalist clothes.
Kate Boy's long-gestating debut, One, continues to hit those same targets, for better and for worse. It includes "Northern Lights" and three other tracks culled from an EP quietly released earlier this year, and none of the album's new offerings stray from those songs' well-established blueprint. Kate Boy loves pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is as exhausting as often as it is potent. On "Lion for Real", Akhurst's cries of "It's adrenaline that you're traveling" are matched in force by the synthetic drums that rally behind her like a militia, an explosion of sound that practically demands you to move. "Burn" is similarly gratifying, in a slower, more consuming way, Akhurst stretching her vowels out in a pained howl that sounds like an alternate universe in which Fever Ray was making Billboard-charting singles. Nothing on One really feels as immediate as "Northern Lights", but Akhurst's ability to grab you by the throat with each chorus and the trio's playful use of texture—the descending wash of glassy synths at the end of "Human Engine", the '80s-indebted guitar line that slinks through "Higher"—make One an easy, undemanding, and ultimately unsurprising listen.
This speaks to Kate Boy's credentials: Australian-born Akhurst has been working as a songwriter since the age of 16 and spent time in L.A. penning songs for Disney star Ashley Tisdale and "Glee" actor Charice in the early 2010s before migrating to Sweden, where she met Markus Dextegen and Oskar Sikow Engström and formed Kate Boy (Engström has since been replaced by Hampus Nordgren). But where the group excels at assembling all the bones of a good pop song, One's lyrical content is broad even by those same standards. Platitudes like "It doesn't have to be this way/ We're different, still the same/ Move your mind to a higher state" are vague and don't manage to express much nuance beyond "we're all human, get it together." "Self Control" reaches a bit further, girding its narrator's insecurities as self-defense and providing an interesting counterpoint to the bright, jagged sounds Kate Boy likes to plays around with. On "Human Engine", they even shoot for a bit of self-awareness: "We like the word 'dynamic'/ We like to use it a lot." Still, those moments are fleeting; sometimes the group even resort to baffling, tech-referencing word salad, as on "In Your Eyes": "Activate emotion waves, oppression down/ Activate the open changes flowing out."
But maybe Kate Boy's sleekly designed songs aren't meant to be ingested with so much scrutiny. They're aiming for the same big, emotional targets as those aforementioned electropop peers here, with enough brooding style to make it distinct. Besides, the group has admitted that they're painting with broad strokes, saying in an interview last month that their main goal is to create "something that we can all feel empowered singing together." There are enough dance-ready, skyward hooks on One to render that mission accomplished. Perhaps next time they'll have something worthwhile to say.


Syrian singer Omar Souleyman's first proper studio LP Wenu Wenu, produced by Kieren Hebden, was colorful in its exuberance, a headlong rush into new love. Bahdeni Nami is the immediate aftermath, and it's heavier this time, both lyrically and musically.

Bahdeni Nami

It's not always easy to tell who the person is behind the persona that is Omar Souleyman—what's really going on behind the aviator shades, the poker face, the dissonance between the high-speed jangling dance music bumping out of speakers and his relatively motionless stage presence. But if Bahdeni Nami is any indication, the man who's become the frontrunner of Syrian techno dabke is, among other things, a human being, who like anyone else is prone to heartbreak.
Souleyman's last release and first "proper" studio album, Wenu Wenu, produced by Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), was colorful in its exuberance, a headlong rush into new love. But if Wenu Wenu was the upswing, Bahdeni Nami is the immediate aftermath, which isn't necessarily pretty and isn't always fun to listen to. It's still dabke—the popular Levantine Arab music traditionally accompanied by circle and line dancing—but it's heavier this time, both lyrically and musically.
Bahdeni Nami was recorded closer to home, in Istanbul instead of Brooklyn where Wenu Wenu was made—though Souleyman is still in exile from his native Syria. Signed to Berlin producer duo Modeselektor's Monkeytown Records, Souleyman has enlisted a slew of producers for this second full-length studio release, including Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Modeselektor, Legowelt (for an out-of-place haunted house remix), and Black Lips' Cole Alexander (for a purported upcoming remix). Unfortunately, Bahdeni Nami as an album isn't stronger for their handiwork. And it's not that their production styles overshadow Souleyman's sound, but rather that as the album progresses, the music becomes static and, in most instances, redundant.
There's still a lot to be said for the mind-bending keyboard work of long-time collaborator Rizan Sa'id and the saz (long-necked lute) skills of Khaled Youssef, who create the bulk of the sound. The opening track, "Mawal Menzal", finds the singer professing his undying love for a woman who has ostensibly left him. It's a mawwal, a sung passage in Arabic music that traditionally involves a vocalist improvising the melody of a poetic text, usually while an instrumentalist intersperses corresponding lines. That kind of dueting is ubiquitous on Bahdeni Nami, alternating predictably with longer stretches of keyboard/saz solos.
It's a formula that helped propel Souleyman to electro-dabke stardom in the first place. And on the album's title track "Bahdeini Nami", it still works. Produced by Four Tet, it's the most light-footed of the lot, and the most communal. Throughout the song, men throw "Yey!"s and "Hey!"s into the air. Even the stomping bass has a sort of upward lift, buoyed in part by lilting toy-Casio-esque syncopations. By contrast, on the dirge-like "Darb El Hawa", synths drone like distorted bagpipes above a lumbering bass drum and staid handclaps. Souleyman drags his voice like tired feet, intoning in Syrian Arabic, "The road of love tortured me/ For so long, I've been waiting for a letter from my loved one." His words echo and ricochet into the distance as he plays and replays his own grief back to himself. Save for saz, voice, and sometimes claps, everything here is simulated on keys, which is how Souleyman and Sa'id have always worked. But there's something poetic this time about the fact that nearly all the instrumentation is simulated; love is often an illusory thing after all.
That said, on much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab". Both have a four-on-the-floor thump that imitates migraine pain above all else. It's not because of the  four-on-the-floor though; it's because the music keeps cycling back on itself without a sense of having moved anywhere or varied much. This monolithic feeling ends up overshadowing some of the more interesting '80s synth music and acid house moments on the album, where the tightly-coiled keyboard solos recall variously a reedy mijwiz (a double-pipe reed instrument), a distorted psych rock guitar, even a Moog. Listening to Bahdeni Nami as a whole can feel borderline-masochistic. But then again, maybe that's the point; longing for or stewing over the memory of someone you've lost is its own kind of hell.


The Palm Beach rapper shows turn-up promise on his latest, but much of this project feels like it’s coasting on autopilot.

Boy Who Cried Wolf

On an emerging Florida rap scene that includes controversial figures like Kodak Black and XXXTentacion, the least volatile newcomer is Wifisfuneral, a quick-spitter from Palm Beach making turn-up tunes about surviving depression and drug dependency. The Bronx-born son of a freestyle battle rapper longed for a connection to his absentee father and chose to follow in his footsteps. Wifi has worldwide aspirations, striving to be connected everywhere, and he met his DJ, Scheme, when Scheme’s best friend killed himself. They formed a duo and Wifi ramped up his commitment to recording. This convergence of ambitions and fatalities manifests in the name he bears, and the life he’s lived.
Wifi has had dangerous run-ins with cocaine, Adderall, and Xanax abuse, spending recent years in and out of emergency rooms. He had a near-death experience while making Black Heart Revenge, which is (perhaps coincidentally) his best work. He’s called a recent project, When Hell Falls, a suicide note turned mixtape. The songs are all about death and misanthropy, surviving a hell on earth and subduing the demon within. Now newly sober, attributing the change to “growing up,” Wifisfuneral seemed to be chasing clear-headedness, telling Mass Appeal, “I don’t want to drown.” But his newest mixtape, Boy Who Cried Wolf, is a relapse: present tense rapping about drug benders and small narcotic operations. If When Hell Falls is about caging demons, Boy Who Cried Wolf lets them loose. This is regression through xanax binges, losing oneself in the darkness. When he isn’t on a drug-induced rush, he’s completely empty.
The rapper has claimed a weird set of sonic reference points: MF DOOM, Gucci Mane, Eminem, and Three 6 Mafia, but rarely does the palette lead him to really try anything daring. His most compelling stuff toyed with opposing forces of hypeness and misery, but much of that is lost on Boy Who Cried Wolf. Wifi has dismissed the “SoundCloud rap” tag out of hand, but he isn’t unlike other locals like Lil Pump and Smokepurpp, or tourmate XXX. They are all internet amalgamations of regional signifiers diluted so vigorously that they don’t represent anything anymore. He sounds like Uzi on “Weigh !t Out!” He sounds like Carti on uppers throughout “Wrist Motion.” Sometimes he’s XXX. Any sense of personal identity has been washed away. Songs on Boy Who Cried Wolf don’t really have topics or ideas, which wouldn’t be an issue if there was anything notable happening. For much of the project, Wifisfuneral uses flows as distractions. The hope is that there are enough head rushes to sustain momentum and wind you into a dizzied state.
The pace can be blistering, and he’s a good enough rapper to keep songs going, but eventually lucidity sets in and it’s obvious Wifi doesn’t have much to say. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things he could be rapping about. His struggle to overcome personal demons has produced some thoughtful writing, but there’s little of that here. He doesn’t talk about his complicated relationship with XXXTentacion, one of rap’s most polarizing figures. He hardly mentions those closest to him—his mother, his longtime girlfriend—or the person furthest from him—his father. The biggest moment of his year gets glossed over: At a tour stop in Houston, he was jumped during X’s performance after he leapt into the crowd. Video of the attack and his unconscious body being dragged back to stage caused such a stir online that he responded the next day.
There isn’t any mention of the incident on Boy Who Cried Wolf, but he facetiously responds to the web gadflies pestering him about it. He has a song called “JoeBuddenProbablyThinksICantRap :(,” decidedly showcasing his technicality within. The follow-up, “lil jeff hardy >:-),” opens with a clip of DJ Akademiks, Budden’s sparring partner on the Complex debate series “Everyday Struggle,” ridiculing Wifi’s stage diving technique and comparing the flip to a wrestling move. These moves prove he can be funny, and that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but they are hollow gestures. If his verses were half as snappy as his gags, his writing would be far less static. The juxtaposition of crazed cadences and stagnant wordplay can be headache-inducing.
There is a single sobering moment, on “DisDaHateSongBby(outro),” that finally addresses the contradictions of his world: “I hate everything that I’m living/I hate everything that I’m saying/I hate the motherfucking fact I never had patience,” before concluding, “I wish I never took these drugs, but it made me.” This is the only thing that feels real and not like wild boy posturing. But one string of contemplative lines can’t negate an entire mixtape of thrasher playacting.
Boy Who Cried Wolf does produce its share of witless bangers, which can be enjoyable when disengaged. His raps aren’t quotable, but it’s possible to become enthralled by the unrelenting motion. “Pop” turns Three 6 Mafia’s “Body Full of Bullet Holes” into a wind sprint. On “Eyez Low,” Wifi crams syllables between the strummed gaps from a pitched-down harp. The Pierre Bourne-produced “1st day out” brings a touch of “Magnolia” flair. The tape’s best song is “Jackie Chan,”  where he karate chops xans like the film icon. But closer inspection exposes a rapper on autopilot. These are all short-lived payoffs—the mark of a rapper chasing fleeting highs.


Blending fuzzy guitars and 2-step beats, the UK singer’s richly textured DIY pop looks to Britpop and garage, Frank Ocean and Drake.

Learning in Public EP

As Downtown Kayoto, Chiko Chinyadza offers a listening experience akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a time limit: You are having it all and you are having it all right now. Fuzzy guitars, sadboi rap, and twinkling 2-step pile high. Some of it is really rather nice, much of it is familiar, and the odd tang is utterly new and remarkable. A good amount will be left on the plate, but the unguarded, have-a-go attitude is all part of the appeal. Previous outings—the Tyler-imitating Pinkboy in 2019, and 2021’s NAVIG8, which embraced guitars and a more forthright pop stance—tried on different looks without fully committing. Influences were proudly advertised, to the point of imitation. Kayoto’s latest EP, Learning in public, is more assured, and sparks with brilliant charm.
It helps that Kayoto, born in Zimbabwe and now based in Hull, is both a nimble rapper and proficient singer. He cycles styles and shifts between registers with ease, channeling a one-man boy band, though it’s his rapping—often delivered in a half-rasp—that’s most urgent and impressive. He can handle choruses from the softer verges of Britpop (“Run from you”) just as convincingly as a double-time verse switch (see “Lite,” which packs more ideas than the average mixtape). Occasionally, he leans a little heavily on his favored touchpoints—Drake, Kendrick, Frank—and slides away from the capacity to surprise. Indeed he’s best, like on slick, bouncy opener “Lite,” when not displaying his influences so proudly. Still, if “In2you” is Drake shortly after discovering archive footage of tastemaking ’90s rave Twice as Nice, or attending a millennial Brit’s wedding where garage-pop totems like “Flowers” and “Sweet Like Chocolate” are belted to the rafters, then it’s also a whole lot of fun—and brightly executed to boot.
More than anything, Kayoto is honest in his approach, and transparent to an almost compulsive degree. On “Run from you” he raps silkily over lounge guitars about flights to California, before admitting, in a barely audible ad-lib, “I’ve never been to the U.S.” We know, because he broadcasts the fact, that this music and the captivating accompanying videos were put together between studying for a medical biochemistry degree and working at a supermarket. He projects ambition, without losing sight of the appeal of what’s real. He embraces Hull’s reputation for, well, not having much of a reputation (an unkind joke describes the place as “one letter from hell”). Kayoto’s done with stacking shelves now, and left the childhood dream of being a doctor back in the lecture halls, but he’s not about to pretend that those things, or his hometown, haven’t shaped him and his quest for pop recognition.
All this transfers via his naked lyrics. “Poison”—where he employs the age-old trick of pairing depressive, sludgy lines with a peppy beat, singing “I felt like poison, the way I spread so slow” over baile funk rim shots—is his take on a breakup song, and potent in its blend of bluntness and subtlety. It’s small-town, post-teen living in all its contradiction and imperfection, and Kayoto’s ability to pinpoint and illustrate these moments—of young love, figuring things out, grasping for a sense of self—with precision, but not pretension, makes him a compelling prospect.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the restless Southern spirit of Lucinda Williams’ fifth album.

Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

When nothing but time can still the pain, a Lucinda Williams song will see you through. In her dry Louisiana drawl, she sings plaintively of abusive childhoods and bad marriages; of drunken bar brawls and suicidal poets; of her own heart that shatters and mends and shatters again, like a puzzle, down-and-out. A magnet for the kind of unrequited love that seems to stop the Earth from turning, Williams persists. Then she’s onto the next town.
Williams was born a rolling stone. Her late father, the poet Miller Williams, was a college professor and the family moved often, to Mexico and Chile and a dozen Southern towns. After Williams was expelled from one New Orleans high school in part for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in protest of Vietnam, dad gave her a list of 100 great books to read instead. (Williams’ family of civil rights activists and union workers passed on that spirit of dissent as well.) Miller’s profession brought a young Lucinda into contact with Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and, most influentially, Flannery O’Connor. Williams would never let go of her O’Connor-inspired fantasy of writing a Great Southern Novel. Instead, Williams set hers to music, becoming an itinerant Southern Gothic beat.
At 18, she left home and belonged nowhere. There was no alternative country in 1974, no alternative rock, no Americana, and in at least one Austin bar where Williams hoped to perform, no room for another “chick singer.” Nashville told her she was too rock’n’roll. Los Angeles said she was too country. Galvanized by Bob Dylan, Williams’ songwriting evoked his poetic ambition, Bruce Springsteen’s every-people, Joni Mitchell’s confessionalism. The lonesomeness of jukebox country met the darkness of an outlaw. The whiskey-stained tenacity of the blues was spiked with the honey of AM pop. She released two albums, a 1979 covers collection Ramblin and 1980’s thrilling Happy Woman Blues, but did not catch a break until a punk label, Rough Trade, came along and signed her (making her labelmates with Stiff Little Fingers, on the one hand; Leadbelly, on the other). Lucinda Williams, in 1988, was her third album and first masterpiece. Ten years later, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was her second.
Williams was by then 45 and over two decades into her career at the fringes: touring small clubs, working with small labels, the life of an ’80s indie band more than a country star. She had released only four albums, filled with female characters who wanted it all—sung by a woman who wanted it all, too. The cool girls in Lucinda Williams songs were always packing up, pawning possessions, saving their tips to split town. There was “Maria,” in 1980, who was “wild and restless” and “born to roam.” There was the small-town waitress Sylvia, in 1988’s “The Night’s Too Long,” who resolutely declares “I’m moving away/I’m gonna get what I want.” “One Night Stand” was like a long-lost string-band ancestor of Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run.” These were mini-manifestos for a female life. Williams’ feminism rang with no stronger conviction than when she used the first-person to narrate her own desires: “Give me what I deserve cause it’s my right!” she longed on her eventual hit, “Passionate Kisses.”
If what she wanted was recognition, or fulfillment, or money—with Car Wheels, she got it. But the road there was almost comically difficult. Labels combusted in her wake: Rough Trade, Chameleon, and American all fell apart after she signed. RCA head Bob Buziak brought her to that label and then got fired. Williams and the music industry seemed allergic to one another. Lucinda Williams was an astonishing album—a classic from a renegade songwriter who never grew too hardened to admit “I just wanted to see you so bad”—but you couldn’t blame the greater public for being somewhat oblivious to it, since Rough Trade went bankrupt shortly after its release. Better-known fans kept the songs alive, with covers from the likes of Tom Petty, Patty Loveless, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. In 1997 the Los Angeles Times wrote: “It’s a good thing Williams has gotten a boost from others, because her own luck as a recording artist has been miserable.”
The six-year gap between 1992’s Sweet Old World and Car Wheels is now charged with myth. By one account, Car Wheels took six tedious years, recorded three times in three cities with three different producers. In reality, there were two years in the studio, from 1995 to 1997, and one scrapped attempt. After Williams started the album with her longtime guitarist and co-producer Gurf Morlix, she felt it was “flat, lifeless, not up to par” and chose to re-record with country fixture Steve Earle and his production partner, Ray Kennedy. She liked their warm, scratchy old equipment and how prominently Kennedy had produced the vocals on Earle’s 1996 album, I Feel Alright. When time ran out, Williams finished the album in L.A. with Roy Bittan, a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, adding keyboards, accordions, guitar, and backing vocals. (Though Bittan claimed, “We redid most everything.”) A tornado hit Nashville just as Williams was mastering the finished analog tapes; someone had to race to the studio to save them.
Unlike her hero, Dylan, Williams was mapping directions home. But home, never fixed to one place, was a profound in-between, more like the breeze that pushed her. Car Wheels is a raw, exquisite travelogue of her American South, from Jackson to Vicksburg, from West Memphis to Slidell, from the Louisiana Highway to Lake Pontchartrain. She searched for novelistic detail in back roads and cotton fields and dilapidated shacks. She played furious bluegrass stompers alongside clenching Memphis soul. Williams and an ex-lover drive through Lafayette and Baton Rouge “in a yellow Camino listening to Howlin Wolf.” Loretta, Hank, and ZZ Top are called out by name. “I see the whole thing like a pitch for a little movie,” Williams once said.
But like Flannery O’Connor asserted, “Southern identity is not really connected with mockingbirds and beaten biscuits… an identity is not to be found on the surface.” Worlds exist beneath Car Wheels’ dazzling edges and monumental hooks. As “Concrete and Barbed Wire” evokes its thorny title, Williams wonders about human divides: “This wall is not real/How can it be real?” she sings, nearly cracking a yodel, a possible polemic. (The track was once covered on the compilation Sing Me Home: Songs Against Prison.) And Williams took bold risks: The opener “Right in Time” includes some of her most irreducible, eloquent poetry—“Not a day goes by I don’t think about you/You left your mark on me, it’s permanent, a tattoo”—before becoming a moaned narrative of a woman alone in bed, pleasuring herself. It is unbelievably sensual, a daydream.
The honky-tonk title track is a sung memoir of an uncertain childhood, set in a Macon, Georgia kitchen with Loretta in the air, the smell of eggs and bacon lingering. At the whim of a disgruntled parent, a young Williams watches the world blur from a car window. When she sings of a “little bit of dirt mixed with tears,” she underscores the vulnerability and toughness at the heart of her character—the shy sense of human imperfection that makes her so heroic, unsettled already from a fixed place. There’s an innocence to this phrase, “Car wheels on a gravel road.” Williams’ melodic wording is sensitive to the bumps you feel, bumps that manifest as chaos and grief and troubled men: drunk men, self-destructive men, men in bands, men doing time, ghost men. Her voice cracks and quivers, allowing ugliness when her subject so demands.
Earle was deeply inspired by rap in the mid-’90s, particularly Dr. Dre’s ’92 gangsta rap gamechanger The Chronic. And while there remains no word if Williams shared in that affinity, it’s an illuminating prospect: On Car Wheels, her words are dramatically upfront, suspended, locking into mellow grooves. That’s especially true on “2-Kool 2 B 4-Gotten,” where Williams sings a nonlinear stream of images of rural Mississippi, her most audacious attempt at a surreal, Dylanesque poetry collage. The title of “2 Kool 2 B 4-Gotten” was taken from a phrase scrawled on the wall of a Washington County juke joint—the social gathering spaces of Black Americans in the segregated Jim Crow South—which she found in a 1990 book, Juke Joint, by the photographer Birney Imes.
But Williams sets her scene 50 miles north, in Rosedale, perhaps in homage to bluesman Robert Johnson, who she namechecks in the song and who sang of the same town in his “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Markings from the wall of yet another Juke Joint photo are scattered through Williams’ lyrics: “No dope smoking no beer sold after 12 o’clock,” “No bad language no gambling no fighting,” “Sorry no credit don’t ask,” “Is God the answer YES.” Williams is like a documentarian of these spaces, which incubated the Delta blues and are extinct today. A humble Imes photo of a juke called Turks Place, in Laflore County, also graces the cover of Car Wheels.
Williams sings “2 Kool” with a toughened poise and a dash of nihilism. “You can’t depend on anything really/There’s no promises, there’s no point,” go its opening lines, and while she continues weaving her Southern patchwork—pointing to a serpent handler outside—“2-Kool” ultimately becomes a eulogy for Williams’s ex-boyfriend, Clyde. The jumbled narrative seems to mirror the impossibility of making sense of death; it never quite resolves, feels diffuse, feminine even. When Williams sings of “Leaning against the railing of a Lake Charles bridge,” of how her former lover “asked me baby would you jump in with me,” it recalls another Southern epitaph: Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” Williams wrote the easeful, bittersweet Car Wheels ballad “Lake Charles” for Clyde as well: “Did an angel whisper in your ear?” Williams cries. “And hold you close and take away your fear/In those long last moments?” It is as close to perfect as elegies come.
The soaring, strummed-out build of “Drunken Angel” suggests an opening blue sky. Williams’s most iconic song is another eulogy, this one for her Texan acquaintance, the outlaw underdog Blaze Foley. She wonders why it had to happen, why he had to die in senseless shootout at 39. Williams’ characterization is masterfully vivid: Foley’s outcast glory, his slovenliness. As she describes his “duct tape shoes” and “orphan clothes,” “Drunken Angel” becomes an anthemic honoring of these hidden people—too eccentric, too outside, too much—who cannot bear this world and who this world, in turn, cannot hold.
Car Wheels pivots, by side B, to a fully blistering breakup album. Williams knows what belongs at the soul of these pristine songs about merciless heartache, placing them at a nexus of obsession, rejection, and occasional delusion. “Metal Firecracker” is a flawless vagabond love song: As she is wont to do, Williams turns two people sitting in a car into a film treatment of just eight lines, remembering when she was his “queen,” his “biker,” curling that last word with so much effortless twang you can feel the sun in your eyes. “Once I was in your blood and you were obsessed with me,” Williams pines. “You wanted to paint my picture/You wanted to undress me/You wanted to see me in your future.” Love that is anything less than life-changing infatuation feels fraudulent in Williams’ world.
A gentle and foreboding ballad, “Greenville” is the resilient sound of a betrayed woman trying, with impossible grace, to keep a toxic man out of her life. The quiet of the song is in stark contrast to this aggressor who screams and fights and lies, who “drinks hard liquor and comes on strong,” who compels Williams to imagine “empty bottles and broken glass/Busted down doors and borrowed cash.” “Looking for someone to save you,” Williams sings, conjuring the feeling of being used, “Looking for someone to rave about you.” Strength and tenderness are rarely entwined so consequentially. The angelic harmonies from Emmylou Harris feel like solidarity, like another woman carrying her safely through.
The rootless rhythms of travel are survival mechanisms on Car Wheels. The album’s finger-picked closer “Jackson” is like a drifting Carter Family hymn. The deeper she gets on the road, Williams sings, the less she will miss yet another ex-lover. It’s clear this woman knows the game, the fiction, that time alone repairs a wrecked heart. “Once I get to Lafayette, I’m not gonna mind one bit,” she sings, convincing herself. “Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won’t cry a tear for you.” Car Wheels ends in motion, Williams crisscrossing the country in pursuit of herself, the thing she can count on.
Car Wheels topped the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop critics poll, earned the Grammy Award for Contemporary Folk Album, and entered the Billboard Top 200. In a four star review for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau began: “Sometimes it seems Lucinda Williams is too good for this world.” Still, other critics turned mocking eyes at the supposedly “nutty” and delirious “perfectionism” Williams demanded. These criticisms would never so beleaguer a male artist—or as Emmylou Harris put it, “When a guy takes a long time to make a record, he’s a genius. If a woman does that, it’s a different matter.” A Times profile from 1997 illustrated a scene in which Williams’ male collaborators questioned her creative decisions and she proved them wrong. When, in ‘98, someone asked Williams what she learned from the process of making Car Wheels, she said, with some reluctance, “I need to learn to assert myself more in the studio environment because I’m dealing with all men. I wish I had more women to work with.”
Reading the tales of how Williams worked on Car Wheels with a record exec knocking, I’m reminded, again, of her heroine Flannery O’Connor, who refused to open the door of her Georgia home until she had completed her morning writing, even with visitors waiting. “I live in my head, pretty much,” Williams said in 1998. For all of its journeying, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road emerges as eternal proof that home, inside you, is worth fighting for.


The Cluster Ensemble tackles some of Philip Glass's iconic early works, playing them more crisply and clearly than perhaps any other recording in history.

Cluster Ensemble: Cluster Ensemble: Plays Philip Glass

Cluster Ensemble: Plays Philip Glass

The Philip Glass sound is easily caricatured in the minds of some listeners: a few minor-key notes are rattled off, and then repeated. By proposing to leave it at that, the composer’s critics reveal they haven’t listened to very much of his music. Insistent arpeggios are a common feature of many Glass compositions, but the overall shapes of lush, late-career works like Symphony No. 9 or Songs and Poems for Solo Cello typically bear little similarity to his hypnotic first opera, Einstein on the Beach, or to the earlier hardcore minimalism that helped Glass establish his name.
After working under Ravi Shankar and writing music for a Samuel Beckett play produced in Paris, a 30-year-old Glass arrived back in New York, in 1967. Upon his return, he started to play alongside his onetime Juilliard classmate Steve Reich, who was already far along in developing his own approach to minimalist composition. By the following year, Glass had honed a distinct method of creating music via minimal means: He discovered that a small unit of melody could be spooled into longer lines, if you took those notes through a complicated process of addition and subtraction. The resulting music could prove spellbinding, if that’s the experience you wanted. But it also rewarded obsessively close listening.
This “additive” approach yielded a succession of important works, between 1968 and 1971. These compositions gave Glass’ minimalism a new, more strictly patterned sound, one that would define the rest of his purely minimalist period. Five of these items—“Two Pages,” “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Similar Motion,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music with Changing Parts”—were also key pieces in the repertoire of the composer-keyboardist’s pioneering own ensemble, which he formed in 1968. And they were some of the first Glass opuses issued on LP. Because Glass and his ensemble were still learning to master this new aesthetic, their iconic early recordings sometimes have a harried vibe, as they learned how to speak their own language.The fact that every rhythmic addition isn’t always faultlessly executed by the group can be charming, though this quality tends to come at the expense of Glass’ compositional ideas. (Glass later said he always thought “Changing Parts” was too “spacey” for his own taste.)
Various modern-classical groups have embraced portions of Glass’ early catalog in recent decades, taking advantage of the fact that the instrumentation is often not specified. But the Cluster Ensemble—a group of talented young players from Slovakia—is the first one to record all the core works from the composer's great-leap-forward period, and to rely on the same instrument that drove the original Glass Ensemble: electric keyboards. (Like the Glass Ensemble, they use woodwinds and brass, too, but it’s clear which instrument dominates.) Cluster’s triple-album survey of this music, issued on Glass’ own label, offers a rare chance to follow the composer’s early-period innovations with consistent precision. And in terms of production, the engineering of Cluster’s keyboard textures is admirably crisp throughout.
This resulting collection offers fresh experiences of several Glass milestones. Two of Cluster’s keyboard players launch “Two Pages,” the earliest work here, with a faster tempo than is heard on the original Glass recording. And they also indulge in more repeats of individual phrase-units. (The Glass Ensemble had LP side-length restrictions to contend with). The resulting transparency is stunning, making Glass’ innovations easier to understand. Amid all the dizzying patterns birthed from the five-note beginning of “Two Pages,” each strike of G lands with an easily identifiable authority. As Keith Potter notes in his valuable book Four Musical Minimalists, that’s part of the score's design.
Thanks to Cluster's rigor, this isolated note thumps harder than it ever has on record. And as you track the prominence of that ringing leap, “Two Pages” can seem like an early example of experimental techno. The ensemble’s clarity also gives the climax a potent sense of emotional release. The traditional line on Glass’s music from this period is that it took on greater and greater suppleness each time out, but Cluster’s version of “Two Pages” makes a strong argument that this early composition was at least on par with the two that followed.
As its title suggests, “Music in Fifths” presents one keyboard part that is shadowed by another at the interval of a perfect-fifth (breaking a cardinal rule of music theory, in a bit of private joke to one of Glass’s old teachers). “Music in Contrary Motion” is dominated by an inverted tonal relationship between another pair of keyboard lines. These two emphatically conceptual pieces receive devoted performances at the hands of Cluster’s pianists, though the comparatively limited nature of the works can’t be disguised. While provocative and energetic, there were only so many pieces for Glass to write in this vein. To find a new one, he’d need some fresh ideas.
“Music in Similar Motion” breaks up this static feel, as it’s where Glass starts to find a place for harmony. The final section offers one of the most sublime harmonic progressions in the early Glass catalog. And then, in an almost perverse move, the composer sets the resulting melody up for destruction. In the space of a few minutes, the music can suggest a stuck-groove, then motorik rock, before briefly offering something danceable again—and finally resolving in a fit of minimalist joy. Cluster’s steady-but-fast playing helps bring out every distinct quality embedded in this climactic rush.
The third CD here is devoted to the magnum opus of this Glass period. “Music with Changing Parts” builds on the harmonic invention of “Similar Motion” by giving instrumentalists the option of contributing sustained pitches drawn from its modes, a choice that adds a contrasting sense of calm, as the rest of the ensemble motors along. In doing this, Glass was opening up his aesthetic to some of the prior innovations of pioneering minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley. Rather than diluting the Glass brand, this expansion of texture helped point the way toward some of his later triumphs, such as Music in Twelve Parts.
During Cluster’s performance, there’s less pitch-bending throughout “Changing” than on Glass’ first recording. As a consequence, this performance seems less wild, more orderly—and thus Earth-bound in a way that counteracts the composer’s onetime diagnosis of this as a “spacey” product. The focused take on “Changing” falls in with Cluster’s general rigor. The composer-performer’s original recordings will always have a place in the catalog, but this impressive survey of his early pieces holds value for multiple groups of listeners. Those who already admire these works will likely find new aspects to treasure. And for those who’ve only regarded the composer through a pop culture filter, this may be the perfect place to begin encountering his steadily changing music on its own terms.


Queens-based beatmaker Luis summons early Warp-era IDM, when acts like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbred hardcore and rave with the introspection of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd.

Dreamt Takes

Brian Piñeyro is part of a bustling New York club music demimonde that includes similarly leftfield-inclined producers such as Anthony Naples, Huerco S., and Patricia. But the Queens-based beatmaker is also verging on a mini-scene all by himself. DJ Wey, DJ Python, DJ Xanax, and now Luis—for a relatively green musician, Piñeyro has run up more than his share of pseudonyms, a tactic that seems part about minimizing awkward questions of identity, and partly about enjoying the freedom that comes from being a little slippery.
Dreamt Takes, his debut 12-inch as Luis, bears traces of what has come before—hazy-eyed synths, brittle hardware drums, a slight wonkiness of rhythm—while adding additional hazy atmospherics, a sort of cotton-wool fuzziness that surrounds and permeates everything. If these tracks have a historical antecedent, it’s that early ’90s branching of the hardcore continuum that spawned Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations, which saw then-green names like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbreed hardcore and rave with the introspective head music of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. Opener “HV’s Sequence” employs the same building blocks as pretty much any given early ’90s hardcore 12”—rattling breakbeats, clipped vocal samples, shuddering bass—but is unlikely to burn up the dance floor, instead aiming for blissful reverie. “Talk Me Down,” meanwhile, slices jungle snares into slim fillets and interlaces them with shimmering 8-bit effects; so pared back are its rhythms that you’re drawn to fill in the gaps yourself, although Piñeyro occasionally pitches in a flurry of drill‘n’bass beats to gesture in the right direction.
Dreamt Takes is a reminder that it wasn’t its much-vaunted “intelligence” that made IDM distinct from the club scenes it span off, but mood and melody. “Shea’s World” suggests that Piñeyro hasn’t yet totally perfected the latter, its cycling of the same motif getting stale around the fifth minute. But the closing “Kirgaly” strikes the right balance between cranky deconstruction and melodic prettiness, a gem of misty-morning acid that’s throwing in neat twists and turns right to close. Whether Dreamt Takes is Piñeyro inching closer to a signature sound or just off another diversion isn’t clear, but for now his elusiveness is endearing.


Portland vocalist-composer Natasha Kmeto has been compared to Maya Jane Coles, Grimes, and Jessie Ware, though she has as much in common with James Blake and How to Dress Well. Her proper full-length debut features precision production, straightforward melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and a new sense of urgency.

Crisis

Portland composer and vocalist Natasha Kmeto is a multitasker. Half her time's spent on careful precision production; the other half, the straightforward melodies and plainspoken lyrics you’d find in more outward-facing dance or R&B. As such, she makes two types of songs: meticulous vocalises that seem hookier than their short length would allow, and more fully-formed songs with melodies and subject matter that wouldn’t be out of place on a 90s R&B crossover-- maybe it was done by Timbaland at his pre-Shock Value loopiest. (For an example, see Kmeto’s tense cover of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down.”) Kmeto has company in this, especially lately, and she’s often brought up alongside vocalist-producers like Maya Jane Coles, Grimes, and Jessie Ware, sometimes on dubious gender grounds. Arguably, she has equal affinity with James Blake or How to Dress Well, artists who share similar ideas about space and moodiness, or Disclosure, who’ve fielded the same questions about composing for vocals. Crisis, her proper full-length debut, has plenty of both, but also-- unlike her half-flirting with trap on this year’s Dirty Mind Melt EP, or the deconstructed snippets of ideas scattered throughout her last albums-- a new sense of urgency.
For one, Crisis has got something that’s eluded Kmeto thus far: a massive single. You can see the stock parts in “Idiot Proof”, the sequencer octaves and skittery percussion, the piano chasing glassy voice down the scale, the chorus that kicks up about three times the storm of anything else surrounding, but it’s authoritative in a way that’s new for her. There’s another, too. “Last Time” presses against a synth slab long enough to highlight how little motion the track’s got-- an apt analogue to the sorta-on, sorta-off relationship described. The quieter cuts have their charms, too. “Morning Sex” is far more unmoored and resigned than the blunt title suggests; it provides its own soft focus. “Vodka Diet” is like a callback to The Ache’s “Detox Saturday”, another hungover hallucination with synth claps, vague trap rhythms, and half-distorted vocals submerged in the fog. The album closes with a three-track suite that sheds progressively more production frippery (thrilling as it is) to great effect, until closer “Prideless” is almost a cappella over snaps and a simple riff. It’s like an early Ashanti track submerged underwater, and just because that’s right off the alt-R&B pantheon of ideals doesn’t make it any less delicately compelling.
Though “delicate” may not be the best word for Crisis. Kmeto’s said that Crisis is her “straightforward, cathartic” album, and while that’s often interview-speak for “album with broader ambitions than the old stuff,” there’s something to it. Just look at the song titles-- the middle stretch in particular comes off like a drugged-out portion of a Laurie Weeks book-- or what they’re saying. “Idiot Proof” is one big protest-- “it’s been a while, I need peace from all the things I’m supposed to be”; the weighty synths punctuating the words as much as Kmeto’s voice, torchy all of a sudden. It’s a little strange at first that such millennialisms are as poppy a prospect as the crashing rhythm, but it’s 2013 and here we are. If “Last Time” is like something out of a mumblecore sitcom, come-on “Take Out” is the party episode: beginning brash, as if Kmeto’s strutting in front of a mirror, it bursts with extra vocal tracks and laser zaps and synths like confetti. Moments like these are, at times, more effective hooks into the album than the actual hooks, or Kmeto’s 90s vocals, for all their perfectly timed retromania. Anyone can get all Aaliyah over Ableton. Where Kmeto shines as a songwriter/producer isn’t simply mashing together trends and skillsets, but finding that emotional entry point.


The debut album from Teenage Time Killers, the brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy, features guest spots from Dave Grohl, Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor, and others. It's not so much a punk album as it is a pageant.

Teenage Time Killers: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1

Greatest Hits, Vol. 1

Congratulations are in order for Teenage Time Killers, the massive, metallic brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy: with the arrival of their long-gestating debut LP, the duo may have very well set a Guinness World Record for the biggest supergroup ever (excepting, of course, one-offs like USA for Africa and Artists for Haiti). Three years ago, they set out on a mammoth mission to recruit their friends, contemporaries and tour-mates and forge The One Punk Album To Rule Them All. Of course Dave Grohl signed up; from Them Crooked Vultures to Sound City Players, the Foos frontman's got a veritable addiction to side projects. Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor: the roster might as well be metal's answer to The Masked Marauders, except the Teenage Time Killers are entirely real, and unfortunately, wholly underwhelming.
Over 20 individual vocalists scream, sing, bark (and in Biafra's case, ramble about Sean Hannity) on Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 backed by various guest musicians; Grohl takes on bass duty on over half the tracks, with Sunn O)))/Goatsnake guitarist Greg Anderson plugging in for similarly long stretches. Listening to the humdrum backbeats of "Ignorant People" and "Plank Walk", you'd have difficulty picking these two out of a lineup. This vagueness carries over into the album's instrumentation as a whole, with some exceptions. Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker brings some timeless So-Cal punk to "Barrio", an album highlight featuring Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba that's practically written for top-down summer drives, and the thrashy, ever-so-sludgy fretwork on "Ignorant People" instantly belies the involvement of Anderson.
And so proceeds Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, not so much a punk album as it is a pageant. One minute, Clifford Dinsmore is staging a tepid, one-man BL'AST! reunion on "Power Outage"; the next, Jello Biafra is stumbling onstage to deliver a minute-and-a-half "Ode to Sean Hannity" (yes, dude, we know Fox is evil). The LP's second half is a doldrum of reheated hardcore ("Big Money", featuring Fear's Lee Ving) and second-rate sludge ("Your Empty Soul", with a grumbled lead from Red Fang vocalist Aaron Beam). When the self-titled closer, a TV theme song of sorts, barrels in to whisk the entire thing away, it feels like a last gasp rather than a final hurrah.
Mullin et al had the chance to make something truly epic—who wouldn't want to hear a heavy-as-fuck response to "We Are the World" from dozens of metal's finest? Instead, the 20-track album plays out like a more dudely version of that "Rock of Love" episode where contestants have 30 minutes to bang out a killer tune for Bret Michaels' amusement. Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.


The New Zealand band’s debut is heavy but nimble, with the tight interplay of an old-fashioned indie rock power trio.

Spiel

When the New Zealand singer-songwriter Kane Strang got tired of going it alone as a solo artist, he started an old-fashioned indie rock power trio called Office Dog. Backing him up are two friends from different iterations of his touring band: bassist Rassani Tolovaa and drummer Mitchell Innes. Like Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and Built to Spill, this threesome emphasizes the personality of each player as it wrings maximum drama from a minimum of instruments. Tolovaa interjects unexpectedly melodic counterparts, Innes drags the songs in odd directions, and Strang favors low, dissonant guitar notes that often sound like an animal scurrying through underbrush. Rather than abrupt or violent, their quiet-loud dynamics are measured, even eloquent, such that Spiel, their debut, sounds like an album about the joy of playing together.
Recorded in Auckland with producer De Stevens (best known from the Dunedin band Marlin’s Dreaming), Spiel wanders some of the same terrain Strang has mapped in his solo work. Too young to have experienced the initial wave of New Zealand indie pop firsthand, he always sounded a little more self-consciously clever, a little less enamored with earworms than the other Flying Nun bands to which he was constantly compared. (Spiel was released on that label last year before getting an international release via New West this year.) But he’s still interested in the way a grinding, slightly dissonant guitar can kick up some dust and how a monotone delivery can make even slightly melodic passages sound almost ecstatic by contrast.
With Office Dog, however, Strang is more than willing to cede control to his bandmates. Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind. While he does craft some intriguingly askew hooks—slicing the word “shade” into multiple syllables, clipping his words into a staccato rhythm on “Tightropes”—Strang pares his songwriting back considerably, deploying just a few words to gesture toward feelings that resist specific labels. Just as the music toggles between quiet and loud, these songs move from alienation to contentment, from unease to “something like an antidote.” That tight interplay between the three musicians sounds so disarmingly poignant because at heart this album is about recognizing and savoring even the smallest moments of joy.
It’s odd, then, to hear Strang close out the album with an apology. “Sorry for the spiel,” he sings as the trio’s dense rumble fades and some tentative guitar licks emerge. “I just wanna feel real.” It’s a meta moment that might have sounded too clever for what precedes it—like a wink at the notion of the indie rock album as a therapy session. But what comes through isn’t self-absorption but something much closer to gratitude. These are songs that catalog small moments and simple pleasures, like a friend’s smile that “feels like heaven to me” or the warmth of “sunshine on your face.” Or maybe it’s just the modest pleasure of bass, drums, and guitar each clicking into place.


On her debut album, the Newcastle-via-Melbourne songwriter works slowly and methodically, lamenting her past and praying for the future.

Plants Singing

Punko treats songs like invocations. The Newcastle-via-Melbourne musician, real name Liv Jansz, makes percussive, lo-fi synth music, filled with lamentations for the past and prayers for the future. Across her debut album, Plants Singing, she wishes away not just a toxic relationship, but the memory of it, too: “It’s hard to remember knowing you at all,” she sings on “Undivided,” repeating the first four words as if to pull them into reality. This type of steely, considered repetition appears on nearly every song on Plants Singing, and for good reason: “Songwriting can be very predictive,” Punko said last year. “Often the things you write about come true, so I have found that by writing about future […] versions of myself who are in a better place, I am opening up a door for that person to come to life.”
Plants Singing captures the possibility of Punko’s future as much as it reflects her past. Jansz was a stalwart of the Melbourne scene before relocating to Newcastle, playing in Sui Zhen as well as the lean, rangy rock outfit Real Love and her own band, Hearing. Vestiges of her pedigree course through the album: Its new age-y synth palette makes it feel like a scuffed, unruly cousin of Sui Zhen’s Secretly Susan, while Hearing’s “Plus Minus,” originally released on a 2017 compilation, is revived as the hypnotic closing track, “+-.”  The difference between the two recordings is staggering: Where the former is discordant and anxious, jolting around like a dinghy in choppy waters, listening to Punko’s version is like watching someone deliver a prophecy. The shift in focus reveals Punko as a musical project less interested in immediacy than endurance. Where “Plus Minus” was starkly thrilling—Jansz’s plea of “I cannot farewell you, friend” like a winding blow — “+-” takes longer to unravel, its intentions altogether more mysterious.
The songs on Plants Singing tend to loop and build slowly and methodically. They work best if you sink into them, leaving the record on repeat and letting the words slowly ingratiate themselves into your psyche. Listening to this album can feel a little like sitting on a beach, watching as new fragments of ocean detritus wash up with each wave. The hollow cacophony of “Plants Singing” is initially the song’s most striking element until Jansz’s lyrics—“I’m distracted by the future/I’m not looking at you” —float to the surface. Punko and Pillow Pro vocalist Christobel Elliot’s unified chants of “I can feel the warmth” on “Time for Us” seem to take up the entirety of the song’s frame, until you notice the rush of hi-hat coursing underneath.
Plants Singing can feel slow-moving, but it reveals its secrets in time. Jansz is a deft lyricist, and she knows to use her most direct and impactful lines judiciously. “Painted by the Moon” is all atmosphere and scene-setting until one lyric, “I’m not in the mood to fear for my life,” rings loud and clear. “Collect” begins with inscrutability (“It’s like peeling fruit/I can see what’s true and untrue”) before slipping into bracingly clear terms: “Holding me close/Will hurt us both.” “Cash Under Your Bed,” the best song here, takes one standout lyric, picks it apart, and builds an entire song from it. Over a sharp synth line, Punko sings about fleeing her relationship, each line fragmented but impossibly vivid: “You were drunk when I left/I took the cash under your bed/You dipped and I ran.” It feels like the rest of Plants Singing is a reverberation of the event she describes in these words—echoes of what precipitated it and flashes of what could come after.


The duo’s latest speeds between fragmented beats and mournful balladry but rarely makes an impression beyond its sound and fury.

Girl With Basket of Fruit

Girl With Basket of Fruit at least sounds incredible. Across nine uniformly taut tracks, Xiu Xiu slash into and race out of growling viola drones and battered hip-hop junkyards, smoldering torch songs and noise confessionals, racing against some apocalyptic countdown clock. “Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy” puffs its chest and raises its fist like Death Grips entering the octagon; “Amargi ve Moo” reimagines a world where Lou Reed and John Cale never had rock band ambitions. Musically aggressive and texturally provocative, these songs shape a vertiginous whole: As your head spins, you can imagine the minds of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo racing through the possibilities.
But that is, with some exceptions, where the thrill ends. After that early-onset dizziness subsides, Girl With Basket of Fruit loses its power and makes little impact, as if these songs were menacing storm clouds that simply drift into and out of town without leaving a trace. It is heavy but hollow, muscular but oddly meaningless, built with streams of images that, however vivid, are the lyrical equivalent of inert gas inside combustion chambers. During the wonderfully frenetic opener, Stewart shouts about sagging breasts used as body fans and frogs and fleas shoved in assholes, the provocations of an 8-year-old’s wildest short story. During “Scisssssssors,” the tessellated rhythms of Haitian drummers and squiggling samples bounce like popcorn in a skillet, a setting as fascinating as it is tumultuous. But Stewart drowns intriguing fragments about existential erasure and mortal fear in obscure phrases, reciting wisdom from a codex for one.
When Stewart has less cover, though, or when the volume subsides and the production opens to reveal a wider frame, he offers something that lingers. With a falsetto that seems to be fighting tears and swallowing pride, he sings sweetly of a dying loved-one for “Amargi ve Moo.” And the finale, “Normal Love,” ranks as one of the most affecting moments in Xiu Xiu’s vast catalog, a downcast ballad that longs for acceptance as a manifestation of love, for validation more than a Valentine. He tangles esoteric phrases with raw vulnerability, making the struggle personal and real. “I think I have shown you/I don’t need it to be fair/I think I have shown you/I don’t need it to be kind,” he and Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson trade, their voices choked by a desperate sort of soul. “Just let me pretend I have something to lose.” It is a breathtaking revelation, a gut-punch, and an anomaly on Girl With Basket of Fruit.
Xiu Xiu feel like a band readymade for these times. The issues that have been on their lips for decades—blind nationalism, religious servility, reproductive rights, personal freedom, human fairness—now ripple through the pieces of this ripped international landscape. But Stewart and Seo turn inward and insular here, smearing themselves in a camouflage of inside jokes and outlandish images. They blend in with the din, adding to it.
The lone exception comes with “Mary Turner Mary Turner,” a hellscape of bells and bass so blown out it corrodes the beat around it. Stewart forces his way through the traumatic terror of a pregnant Georgia mother, his voice claustrophobic and curdled inside the orchestrated madness. A mob of angry white men ruthlessly lynched, burned, and mutilated her a century ago for protesting her husband’s murder. Ripped from the womb, her unborn child died on the ground. Stewart wrestles with this emblematic American atrocity, his voice splintering as he shoulders its ugly truth. He pulls the scenario out of the past and into the present, daring us to stare into the cracked mirror of history. It is one of too few moments here where the sound and fury push us to reconsider our humanity, not obfuscate it with prurient imagery and associative bluster that seem self-satisfied in their isolation.


Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient entry features regulars Wolfgang Voigt, Thomas Fehlmann, and Jürgen Paape, plus Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld.

Pop Ambient 2011

Even though it's rooted in stasis, ambient music is always evolving. The German label Kompakt, an authority in the field, has driven both its evolution and the entrenchment of certain habits in the last decade. Label co-founder Wolfgang Voigt's ambient techno with Gas and other projects inspired a generation of frank imitators, even as his label's Pop Ambient compilations have pushed the limits of what ambient can entail. The term has picked up such varied connotations since Brian Eno coined it that it's become hard to define clearly. As usual, this year's Pop Ambient entry is an opportunity to take the temperature of what ambient means right now.
Pop Ambient 2011 does suggest some common properties of modern ambient music. It assumes an air of immutability-- then, it changes. It features cyclical phrases, layered drones, sculptural textures, and flashes of traditional instrumentation. It avoids crisp delineation of sections, obscuring its internal dynamics to create a sense of traveling without moving. It has more in common with abstract visual art than other music-- it calls attention to its materials and features enigmatic subjects, like the scraped and peeled paint fields of Gerhard Richter, the colored light sculptures of Dan Flavin, and especially the monumental land art of Robert Smithson. Ambient insists that music is already latent in the raw terrain of sound.
But Pop Ambient 2011 provides exceptions to every rule. "Bernsteinzimmer" by ANBB (that's Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld) conveys an abstracted but palpable narrative via harmonic development and whispers that suddenly break into an authoritative voice. Against the notion that ambient music is sonic wallpaper, it shockingly commandeers the foreground. Triola's "Dunkelraum" also taps into the current vogue for submerged voices, but otherwise is merely an inert bed of tone and texture that represents ambient music at its most pro forma.
Mikkel Metal and Bhutan Tiger Rescue take the "pop" part to heart. The former's "The Other Side Of You" places dreamy piano and drums amid a radiant synthetic sunburst. The latter's "Beginner's Waltz" is built around three lustrous tones that sway endlessly, splashed with sleigh bells and ethereal harmonies. Here, ambient music is something superficial; a haze gathering around repetitive tunes. That's not a ringing endorsement, but it's hard to get mad at pretty songs for conceptual reasons, and the Bhutan Tiger Rescue track has an especially memorable mood. At the other extreme, Crato conceives of ambient as something closer to noise or drone-metal: "30.6.1881" is a grayscale dirge midway between Infinite Body and Svarte Greiner, spooky but rote.
But the most fertile influence on this year's comp is classical music. Voigt offers orchestral halos that wax and wane majestically, like an overdubbed Arvo Pärt symphony. Marsen Jules splices Glassian piano minimalism with a coiled, pouncing filter odyssey, and the Orb's Thomas Fehlmann creates a "cover" of Mahler's First. Best of all is label co-founder Jürgen Paape's huge, swooping "Ein Schöner Land". Like Voigt's offering, it has more false endings than a James Brown song, and a dramatic sense of tension and release. Its shapes are stalwart and high-relief. Nothing feels vague or accidental. These are bona fide compositions, relying on traditional building blocks like tonality, counterpoint, and motivic development instead of the haphazard interaction of shimmering tones-- a style that some of Kompakt's artists seem content with, even as the founders who enshrined it keep pushing forward.


After being dropped from their label, the Portland duo flout despair with a wall of nostalgic, over-the-top sound.

Night Pass

It’s not that Pure Bathing Culture sought out the late ’80s; it’s more like the sounds of those years beckoned them in. In the years since 2015’s Pray for Rain, the Portland duo recorded a full-length cover of the Blue Nile’s 1989 LP Hats. But after being dropped from their label, they crash-landed in the studio with songs for Night Pass already written. They questioned their next steps. They probably pulled tarot cards. Instead of going quietly into the night, they enlisted producer Tucker Martine (R.E.M., My Morning Jacket) and roared back at the void with glossy, grandiose certainty.
Where previous releases dabbled in heady synths or ’60s pop jangle, layering Sarah Versprille’s vocals in folds of reverb, Night Pass’ production is fine-tipped and meticulous. Its snares seem to land a little heavier; its grooves exude a bit more urgency. Underpinning the languid ’80s guitar lines are lyrics that hint at desperation: “Dark nights and blackest dreams, when nothing’s ever as it seems, and you are all alone,” Versprille sings on standout track “All Night.” Pure Bathing Culture juxtapose the highs with the lows, packaging distress as euphoria. The album does its most interesting work on songs like “Moonrise” and “Thin Growing Thing,” where Versprille wails, “Do you want to take it higher?,” as if in homage to Steve Winwood’s 1986 hit “Higher Love.” At its best, Night Pass flaunts the sounds that might have embarrassed you in your dad’s station wagon: the noodly electrified riffs of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night or the earnest soulfulness of Peter Gabriel’s So.
The album’s imagery relies on nature, the night sky, and mysticism, the lyrical equivalent of a shop stocked with lumpy ceramics and letterpress cards. “Black Starling” drops references to both wands and pentacles, and the rest of the album reads like a gemology guide—within 10 short tracks, there’s mention of peridot, obsidian, selenite, and diamond. “Joyous Lake” opens with zodiac sign pairings. The faddish references shimmer out unexpectedly, like broken glass catching light on the sidewalk, and their niche referentiality limits the songs’ potency.
But those quirks aren’t enough to derail a record with such velocity. The album’s greatest triumph is its brashness, the way it flouts despair with a wall of nostalgic, over-the-top sound. Notions of commitment—to an idea, a person, or music in general—are propelled by baroque swells of vocals and guitar, and Versprille’s earnest voice belting, “Darling devotion, you know it’s all we can do.”