Since 2010, Louis Vasquez of the Soft Moon has twisted his personal demons into songs, quietly breathing new life into gothy post-punk. New album Deeper finds him with his most assured production yet.

Deeper

Because there will always be miserable teenagers and because nihilism and disaffection are just as much a part of the human condition as falling in love, there will always be a place—and a market—for explorations of abject darkness set to music. Since 2010, Luis Vasquez of the Soft Moon has twisted his personal demons into songs, quietly breathing new life into gothy post-punk. On his new album, Deeper, he pushes his foreboding synth-pop even further.
Given the nature of Vasquez’s music, it’s almost too perfect that Deeper was recorded in seclusion in the mountains of Italy at a studio simply called Hate. Even though the Soft Moon has always essentially been a one-man show, the tracks on Deeper are light years beyond the fuzzy bedroom recordings on the project’s 2010 debut. Working alongside producer Maurizio Baggio, Vasquez has married his old school goth pop sensibilities (imagine a dalliance between NIN’s The Downward Spiral, Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, and Chris & Cosey’s Songs of Love and Lust) with production that positions the album firmly in the now. He still lays a thick sonic fog over these tracks but the songs operate with a kind of icy precision, leading to a record is both unrelentingly dark and amazingly fastidious.
Like its predecessors, Deeper leans more heavily on overall mood than it does on obvious hooks, but there are catchy moments. “Far” is the kind of hyper-morose electro pop that wouldn’t have been out of place making kids pogo at the Batcave back in the early ’80s, while “Wrong” has the kind of jackhammering synths and stuttering beats that could have dropped off an old Nitzer Ebb single. But Deeper is more than a collection of cleverly assembled references. It splits the difference between the more glacial dirges (“Without”, “Wasting”) and intricately-layered synth tracks (“Feel”, “Black”) without feeling too turgid or weighed down by the record’s decidedly bleak subject matter.
Vasquez himself remains a kind of cipher—a detached vocal presence too often content to float along the periphery of the songs. When he abandons the processed vocals or the Reznor-esque sing/speak and let’s his voice come through, the results are often surprising. On “Wasting” when he ominously intones “You’ve gotta take life by the hand/ Let the substance close you in/ Hope to one day come alive,” it provides what is one of the album’s few moments of emotional reprieve. And the record occasionally suffers a fate common to aggressively “dark” music—the lyrics, though undoubtedly deeply personal, tread a fine line between effectively bracing and the stuff of bad teenage poetry.
Occasional goth clichés aside, Deeper is a thing of beauty. Few contemporary artists have managed such a clever reimagining of post-punk and spooky new wave in a way that sounds both familiar and somehow fresh. Nowhere on Deeper is this more evident than on the album’s closing track, “Being”, a six-minute stunner that builds from bits of collaged tape loops and whispers before evolving into a pulsing industrial track and ultimately exploding into a wall of white noise as Vasquez screams “I can’t see my face/ I don’t know where I am.” For an artist who seems hell-bent on finding new ways to take listeners somewhere both beautiful and frightening, the song’s final three minutes of hiss and roiling noise seems like a perfectly appropriate place to end up.


Ikonika's new album Aerotropolis is a stated tribute to the old-school freestyle house and synthpop jams that soundtracked Sara Abdel-Hamid's 80s youth, a record thats feels like an innovative rulebreaker hitting the reset button and starting a completely new persona from scratch.

Aerotropolis

Whether listeners should hold artists to a standard of constant innovation is a knotty problem-- If a musician wants to express their urge to break free from their previous constraints by going back to their roots and influences, there's more than enough precedent to make that move something less than shocking. But if their early work was driven by a distinct disinterest in rules and predictability, especially in the middle of a wider movement's healthy bouts of iconoclasm, is it worth getting disappointed when that classic-homage sound rises up to take its place-- especially when the end result is fairly enjoyable on the surface?
That's a paradox that pops up in frustrating ways on Ikonika's new album Aerotropolis, a stated tribute to the old-school freestyle house and synthpop jams that soundtracked Sara Abdel-Hamid's 80s youth. And while the short answer to what would happen if Ikonika was old enough to make music at the time is "a pretty good record," that puzzling Mobius strip of inspiration and expression leans so heavily on the idea of pop as a historical waypoint that something feels a bit detached. Not on its own context-free musical level, granted, but in the larger scope of the reputation Ikonika's made for herself as one of late-period dubstep's more melodically subversive and off-kilter composers.
If that means the album's biggest flaw is that it nails a certain aesthetic too faithfully, that's not a very harmful problem to have. Early album cut "Beach Mode (Keep It Simple)", which recruits up-and-coming singer Jessy Lanza, is Ikonika's first-ever vocal track, and the coolly haunted tone it sets is immediately resonant as something deeply affectionate for a clearly remembered (and reassembled) past. It's a feel that runs a line through the whole album-- the burbling fusion of synthpop and boogie funk "Mr Cake", the Madchester throb of "Eternal Mode" and "Lights Are Forever", Class of 1987 house tribute "Manchego", and the upended cathedral chords of Optimum teamup "Mega Church". It's far from a cold and emotionless recitation of last generation's digital pop heritage; if those aforementioned tracks don't race pulses, "Cryo" and its foreboding minor-key stormcloud formations should call up shivers.
So why is there this nagging feeling that something's missing? Ikonika's transition to vintage sounds and signifiers, whether through old-school synths or uncluttered 4/4 patterns, is reverent enough to parallel their sources instead of update or subvert them. And even when she pulls back the curtain to nudge the listener over how much of a stylistic transition this album might be-- one of the shorter, more skeletal exercises in gaining her throwback footing with Hacienda-ready 808s and keyboards is called "Practice Beats"-- it sounds more like a history lesson than history in the making. Her 2010 LP Contact, Love, Want, Have was a thrill because it had the self-admitted playfulness of an artist learning as she went, leaving a trail of brightly smart-assed tweaks to formula-- she fit right in with that year's trailblazing class of gloom-defying bass artists like Rustie and Joker.
Even as last year's I Make Lists EP darkened her style a bit, it still had a similar unpredictable intrigue and sense of left-field jitteriness that was too lighthearted to be alienating. Aerotropolis' 180 pop move-- as comfortable and assured in its own niche as it is-- is so abrupt that it almost feels like an innovative rulebreaker hitting the reset button and starting a completely new, much more familiar persona from scratch. Where things go from here hinges on what happens if or when she finds a way to upend that end result in the same way she crashed the scene to start. No doubt it'll sound good-- but fingers crossed it'll also sound strange.


On her fifth album, Sharon Van Etten conjures tempests and explores their subsequent calms. It is the peak of her songwriting and her most atmospheric, emotionally piercing album to date.

Remind Me Tomorrow

Sharon Van Etten returns at the time of year meant for streamlining: Kondo-ing your frazzled mind, dysfunctional relationships, and sloppy habits into one efficient machine. Remind Me Tomorrow is not a product of this mindset. Just look at the mess on the cover: a tiny photograph of Van Etten barely visible amid the chaos of a kid’s bedroom. It’s an album made after she thought she had let music go for a while, until it crept back in as a reliable constant while she started acting and scoring films, studied for a degree in psychology, embraced a fulfilling relationship, and became a parent. A lesser artist would find a cheap fulfillment narrative in all this. Van Etten characterizes these complicated pleasures as a tempest, and it feels true.
It’s her first album made with John Congleton, a producer many acts have turned to in recent years under the guise of wanting to mimic his art-pop work with St. Vincent—a noble but futile game. That is, thankfully, not the case here; nor is it that Van Etten, tired of the guitar, just threw a few synths at the wall. Remind Me Tomorrow is as much a faithful reimagining of her muscular songwriting as last year’s Double Negative was of Low’s haunted spirituals, right down to the shared apocalyptic atmosphere. Corroded synths flicker like a helicopter rotor, cutting her characteristic grace with a sense of menace; the production and Van Etten herself often sound as though they’re asphyxiating. The aggressive sound meets its match in her cresting, torrid sense of melody.
More than ever, it’s these uneasy textures that do Van Etten’s storytelling for her. An abusive relationship she experienced in her early 20s has defined much of her songwriting to date, so much so that it started making her feel uncomfortable. “It’s cathartic to play, and people like it,” she told The Ringer of one old song, “but I also want to challenge people on why they like it, and how it makes me feel.” Remind Me Tomorrow starts with a disclosure, “I Told You Everything.” “You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died,’” she sings, repeating the line throughout the song and peeling back layer by layer of shock factor until only sad starkness remains. The exchange forms the start of a relationship: held hands, knocked knees, total candor. Crucially, we never find out what she tells him. The restraint is more of a revelation than another addition to the grim details that litter her catalog, explaining everything about Van Etten’s hard-won control over her life.
And yet, Remind Me Tomorrow is not unyielding. It is the peak of Van Etten’s songwriting, her most atmospheric and emotionally piercing album to date. Often when it concerns love, it’s about how tentative it feels: “Turning the wheel on my street/My heart still skips a beat,” she sings on “Jupiter 4” (named for the synthesizer behind much of the album), a whirring dirge filled with ghostly cries and thunderclaps. “You’ll run,” she sings on “Memorial Day,” drawing out the words into a narcotic, sparkling haze. The album’s truest love song, “Malibu,” relishes the memory of a carefree romantic holiday, but Van Etten still highlights the transience of driving down the coast in “the little red car that don’t belong to you.”
The most traditionally robust songs on Remind Me Tomorrow are about Van Etten as a teenager, usually a time of confidence that is later revealed to be naivety. “Comeback Kid” has a puffed chest and a sense of ragged pride; the standout “Seventeen” exudes the reckless freedom of standing in the sunroof of a moving car and spreading your arms wide. It mixes despair for her poor decisions, nostalgia for that headstrong girl, and anxiety over what she would make of her now. “I know what you’re gonna be,” Van Etten taunts at full vocal power: “You’ll crumple it up just to see/Afraid that you’ll be just like me!” She gives no indication of who is right: the teenager disgusted at the thought of growing up and joining the straight world, or herself now, wanting to protect that girl who had no idea what difficulties were to come. What do you attempt to hold onto and let go of?
“I don’t know how it ends,” Van Etten sings dreamily on “Stay,” a reverie of rippling piano and bass that addresses the need for reciprocal support and independence between a mother and her child. It sounds like a resolution, or at least her making peace with how to develop trust when everything can slip away so easily, but the arrangement is still anesthetized, unresolved. Having more to live for, hence more to lose, is rarely soothing. But it’s worth the mess.


Prolific producer Charif Megarbane mixes symphonic soul, grainy funk, and old European film scores to offer a relatively concise glimpse into his wide musical world.

Cosmic Analog Ensemble: Une Vie Cent Détours

Une Vie Cent Détours

Charif Megarbane makes music at a pace so rapid it would leave Lil Wayne circa 2007 in a daze. You can browse the Lebanese musician’s vast archives on Bandcamp, where, beneath the umbrella of his own Hisstology label and under many noms de plume, he drops new albums like Gary Oldman makes movies or Steph Curry hits threes—over 80 full-lengths since 2005. Such prolificacy sometimes precludes more casual listeners from entering this overwhelming orbit, but often operating as a one-man band, Megarbane comfortably shuffles between throwback genres at will, from nimble acoustic folk and Tony Allen-influenced Afrobeat to grubby funk and beat-tape boom-bap. He even wants the collection to look like your parents’ vinyl rack, self-designing a gloriously old-fashioned cover for each release.
Cosmic Analog Ensemble is Megarbane’s most potent moniker, under which you’ll often find his signature sound: a mix of the vintage movie scores of Ennio Morricone and Riz Ortolani and grindhouse cinema. You get the symphonic soul of David Axelrod and the airy charm of French yé-yé records, right through to Adrian Younge’s grainy funk and splatter-flick grooves. Megarbane plays on nostalgia and romance hardwired into our senses via pop culture. On Une Vie Cent Détours, one of his most polished efforts to date by any name, he toys with our notions of France and Italy—the ones instilled by quaint European pop fare and stylish black-and-white cinema. A devilishly simple piano underpins “Quiétude Inquiétude,” as lo-fi guitar lines, cheap organ riffs, and Megarbane’s deep harmonies (one of the album’s few vocals) guide you through the narrow alleys of a city you’ve never seen. The dramatic organ stabs of “Programme Original” score the most thrilling moment in some Paris-set movie you’re not really watching.
Despite this geographical specificity, Une Vie Cent Détours still trades in Megarbane’s endless appreciation for music from all over the map. (Having lived and thrived in Nairobi for most of his recording career, he’s now pitched up in Lisbon.) “Premiers Détours” offers a flavor of Middle Eastern pop. “Urban Safari” feels like a drive around the Harlem of 1970s Blaxploitation flicks, supported with the organ and bass of the scintillating Afrobeat that came from West Africa in the same era. “Ajournamento” seems summoned from the vast production archives of MF DOOM. A hip-hop head, Megarbane’s back catalog includes beats that sample his own original orchestration; rap producers looking to snatch a loop for their own beats should consider Cosmic Analog Ensemble.
Une Vie Cent Détours is Megabane’s second release for the French label My Bags, following last year’s excellent Les Sourdes Oreilles. Maybe it’s input from the label or the pressure that comes with spending other people’s money, but the relationship has prompted two of Megarbane’s most focused full-lengths. Through My Bags, Megarbane is building a streamlined version of his output. These are the records that newcomers should investigate before they dive into his robust archives. Une Vie Cent Détours is a major landmark on Megarbane’s musical travels; the next stop is right around the corner, location to be determined.


This live set captures Body/Head (improvisational guitarist Bill Nace and Kim Gordon) operating at a furious peak, reeling from no-wave to free jazz to pop hooks in an exhilarating blur.

No Waves

The highlights from the meticulously recorded 2014 Body/Head live set at Big Ears selected for No Waves clock in all together at only 40 minutes, which is exactly the point at which those of us with punk training start to get restless beyond consolation in live settings. No Waves is, in its essence, tenuously and perfectly balanced between experimental challenge and punk efficiency. At first listen, it may seem wild and free; under deep scrutiny, it’s extremely artful, no moment out of place.
This should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with either half of Body/Head, Bill Nace or Kim Gordon. Nace is an extraordinarily skilled improvisational guitarist who’s collaborated with contemporary greats like Chris Corsano, Jessica Rylan, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Bill Orcutt, Okkyung Lee—the list goes on. What remains audible through all of these disparate collaborations is his core skill—as are all titans of improvisation, he is highly adaptable, and above all, an excellent listener. His style is unmistakable, but he never forces his collaborators to bend to it. Instead, he stretches elastic, copper, and rough twine sounds around the structures his collaborators build; it’s magical to observe. Gordon, for her part, has a noted ear for breaking apart pop songcraft; in Sonic Youth, in Free Kitten, and with Body/Head, she’s always written bass and guitar lines that are as indelibly catchy as they are inscrutable. There’s always a delightfully missing hinge to what she builds, urging the listener to push open the door instinctively only to watch the entire frame crumble.
Of the two shorter tracks, “Sugar Water” and “The Show Is Over,” only the latter has a studio counterpart, while “Abstract/Actress” takes two tracks from Body/Head’s debut, Coming Apart, and blurs them together into a thick, tense paste. If the versions of these songs on Coming Apart sometimes felt like never-ending spiral staircases from a surreal dreamscape, their mutated live representation paws the ground, less Escher-esque than Baba Yaga’s hut—dream gone nightmare; landscape gone mythic hell. The track takes up the bulk of the album, and yet it never becomes boring and never feels long. There are nods within to no-wave scrawl, to free jazz freakout, to pop hook, and to psychedelic drone. It’s exhilarating.
“Sugar Water” is nothing short of beautiful, Nace’s and Gordon’s guitars delicately chiming together, their clangor blending smoothly into a murky dissonance, like church bells. Gordon’s voice twists over the top, wordless, serving as an instrumental tone unto itself, as she has often deployed it. “The Show Is Over” ping-pongs between placid ambience and blown-out, quick-strummed frenzy; Raymond Pettibon’s cover art (far from the gnarly punk line work he’s perhaps best known for, but congruent with his lifelong usage of greens, blues, and yellows, as well as his fat scroll-like brush technique) depicts a seemingly calm lake (the No Waves title, after all, is not just a play on a a genre name), and one may be reminded of that art particularly by this song; how quickly the wind can kick up, how quickly a fresh-water monster could emerge.
The dynamism of all three tracks is another of No Waves’ greatest strengths; where Body/Head’s studio work is all matte-finished and fascinatingly horizontal, here their interplay stands up in full, palpable relief. The recording retains the crackling live energy and natural ease of the set without sacrificing clarity. No Waves stands as a memorable document on its own and a hopeful harbinger for new material to come.


On his solo debut, the Red River Dialect frontman explores personal, spiritual, and musical growth after his nine-month retreat at a Nova Scotia Buddhist monastery.

Monastic Love Songs

When David John Morris left his London home for Nova Scotia’s Gampo Abbey in October 2018, he knew he’d have to shelve his guitar for the next nine months. Life during his monastic retreat would consist of work, study, and meditation with the Buddhist monks in residence. The precepts of the community would also require him to abstain from sex, drugs, alcohol, and, most crucially for the prolific songwriter, playing music. Stepping away from his instrument marked the unlikely starting point of a process that yielded some of the strongest work of the Red River Dialect frontman’s career. His richly rendered solo debut, Monastic Love Songs, vibrates with the energy and intimacy of his stay at Gampo, and it seems to light a way forward for Morris as a songwriter.
A 2018 profile of Red River Dialect characterized Morris as someone who consciously tried to decouple his public persona as a musician from his professional, spiritual life as a Buddhist chaplain. Agreeing not to play instruments at Gampo tracks with this characterization of Morris as a kind of delineated self—the monk and the musician living in one body, but consciously kept separate. Yet in the final month of his residency, Morris requested a guitar and was granted permission to play it for one hour each day. The musician was becoming one with the monk, and the songs that flowed from that newly unified being reflect that harmony.
Monastic Love Songs feels like a reset button for Morris, whose albums with Red River Dialect had increasingly emphasized the rock side of the folk-rock equation over the past decade. As one might expect from an album written during a monastic retreat, his solo debut feels more meditative, its songs built around voice, acoustic guitar, and negative space. Morris has called Monastic Love Songs a spiritual sequel to Red River Dialect’s Tender Gold and Gentle Blue, another musically unembellished song cycle. Where that album’s palette often suggested desolation, the quietude of Monastic Love Songs evokes inner peace. “Rhododendron” sets Morris’s quavering vocal to a sparse but insistent guitar line as the sight of the title flower sends him into a reverie, an echo of Wordsworth with his daffodils. “I’ve been taking, now I’ll learn to give,” Morris sings, the vulnerability in his voice, once sorrowful, now recontextualized as openness. It’s one of many lyrics on the album that plays like a mantra.
With the exception of the slyly surrealist “Circus Wagon” and a new arrangement of the traditional ballad “Rosemary Lane,” every song on Monastic Love Songs is autobiographical. On “Purple Gold,” Morris recalls “listening to R.E.M., one earphone each” with his first teenage love, and on “Steadfast,” he finally finds brotherhood in a difficult relationship when he stops trying to force it. Elsewhere on the album, he sings directly of his experiences at the monastery. “Skeleton Key” narrates his journey through the self-discovery process Buddhists call the Bardo of Becoming: “Old self died, new self not yet born.” The luminous closing track, “Inner Smile,” was originally written as a poem of thanks to Morris’s beloved tai chi teacher. Set to music, it becomes an object of pure beauty and lightness. The common thread through the album is love—love for oneself, for one’s fellow humans, for the Buddhist practice.
The sessions for Monastic Love Songs took place at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studios just days after Morris left Gampo. Thor Harris (Swans) and Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) sat in on drums and bass, and their performances are quietly crucial to the album. They sound preternaturally comfortable staying in the pocket and letting Morris guide their playing, only swelling to crescendo when the emotions of the song demand it. Morris may consider the album a sequel to Tender Gold and Gentle Blue, but his collaborators, paradoxically, help make it feel like a true solo record.

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Featuring habitual collaborators like Jamael Dean and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A. percussionist and producer’s sprawling, shape-shifting seventh album finds joy in unexpected connections.

Actual Presence

Carlos Niño has always been attuned to the atomic. Twenty-five years ago, when the prolific L.A. percussionist, arranger, and producer was merely a revolutionary teenaged DJ, he designed his radio show Spaceways as a method for tracing back the long lines that led to hip-hop. He’d play jazz and funk records whose samples formed the bedrock of the genre, eventually moving deeper into new age, folk, and recordings from around the world. Judging by the pan-genre music he’s spent his career perfecting, the process trained him to see songs as being made of discrete units: a series of moments that might one day lead elsewhere and connect to unrelated sounds in unexpected ways. On Actual Presence, the seventh album in his long-running Carlos Niño & Friends series, he tries to anticipate as many of these moments and connections as possible, traveling along with his collaborators as they open door after door on a staggering number of paths.
Niño isn’t a traditional bandleader; he’s more of a weather system, hovering over and influencing the events at hand. As it weaves through free jazz, ambient, new age, hip-hop, contemporary classical, and beat music, Actual Presence is often beyond its creator’s ultimate control, which is probably the point; listening to it is like being rocked to sleep in the abyss. Working with frequent collaborators like Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Iasos, Deantoni Parks, and Sam Gendel, Niño subjects these songs to a kind of musical Spirograph, spinning them along and finding joy every way he turns them. Consider it cubist healing music, presenting support from every possible angle.
Much of Actual Presence was cobbled together from live and in-studio improv sets, which Niño then edited and augmented in post-production. He manipulates the stereo space with ease, moving the listener through multiple dimensions as these songs unfold. “Explorations 7” opens with a gorgeous piano run from Dean that transitions into a Cecil Taylor mambo, which Devin Daniels cheerfully chases down with his alto sax. Niño takes us through a veil of gongs, plucking out Randy Gloss’ pandeiro and dunking it in reverb, then stripping away the rest of the band and dropping into a brand-new, crystalline space; when the musicians return, the air between them sounds polished. “Luis’ Special Shells,” meanwhile, opens in a lobby, where the titular shells hold court with a plonking keyboard. Niño kindly shoulders through, leading the way to a noticeably larger stage where fireflies of gong and cymbal flit around a spotlit Dean, who plays an aching lament. At any given moment, Niño seems to be thinking of where else he needs to take us, moving quickly from room to room as if he’s chasing the spirit through myriad incarnations.
Dean is both the album’s shooting star and its grounding point. He performs the same role Lonnie Liston Smith did for the early Pharoah Sanders groups, setting the scene with a few chords and hammering everyone back into tonality when necessary, and he gives Niño a solid  place to return when the post-production excursions threaten to get too far out. Dean puts “Actually” in motion with a solo that recalls Girma Yifrashewa and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s blend of Ethiopian and Western classical modes, trickling his notes through the rocks of Niño’s hobbled bass synth. “Youwillgetthroughthis, I promise” glides to an end on the back of his organ, which emanates from Alice Coltrane’s ashram in one moment and Frank Ocean’s warehouse in the next. With field recordings of rain and waves splashing around him, the steadiness Dean provides for the song’s long denouement is the musical equivalent to the second half of its title—a sudden shift to standard grammar that signals how sincere we should understand the message to be.
When John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy overturned jazz conventions (and greatly annoyed jazz critics) with what would be called the “new thing” in 1961, Coltrane justified their moves by claiming they were “just another way of saying that this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is.” Though it was partially recorded before the pandemic and the uprisings that have defined 2020, Actual Presence is music for an unpleasant present. It’s discordant and fractured, and it frequently comes off as a long trip toward a salvation that’s just out of reach. But like Coltrane, whose spiritual influence runs deep here, Carlos Niño believes in a big, beautiful universe that exists in spite of the present suffering. The sprawling, ever-changing sound of Actual Presence is his best attempt yet to recreate the joy of losing yourself to it.

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Recorded over a period of just 10 hours, the future star’s breakthrough 1969 debut captured her idiosyncratic mix of soul, jazz, and folk and her singular vision as a bandleader.

First Take

Throughout most of the eventful year of 1968, the soon-to-be-famous Roberta Flack was ensconced in a residency at Mr. Henry’s in Washington, D.C., an unfancy but inimitably hip jazz club located at the corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, playing three nights a week to rhapsodic audiences. All around, the world was diligently unraveling. Following the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., riots broke out in several cities, including the District. Flack continued performing her sets, lines forming around the block. Those coming to hear someone make sense of the chaos chose astutely. No artist working in the moment was doing a finer job of chronicling those tenuous, terrifying, revolutionary times.
Her talent was otherworldly: The Black Mountain, North Carolina-born pianist and singer was admitted to Howard University’s top-flight music program at the age of 15, possessing prodigious jazz and classical chops and a voice splitting the difference between Sarah Vaughan’s elegant alto and Etta James’ deep-blue expressiveness. D.C. wasn’t a center of the music industry like Los Angeles or Nashville—places where gifted aspirants went to be discovered. But Roberta Flack wasn’t your average gifted aspirant. She spent some wilderness years teaching high school, but word of mouth spread, and soon enough they came to her. When visiting jazz legend Les McCann was dragged along by friends to see Flack perform one night, he immediately provided his most forceful recommendation to Atlantic, and soon after she was signed.
Flack’s debut, First Take, was recorded over a period of 10 hours at Atlantic Studios in New York, in February 1969. Her extraordinary backing band, consisting of stalwarts Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Ron Carter on bass, Ray Lucas on drums, and other heavy hitters gelled with seamless immediacy, as Flack lead them through a repertoire of brilliantly chosen soul and folk material she had spent countless hours perfecting at Mr. Henry’s.
An opening rip through the Gene McDaniels-penned standard “Compared to What,” with its stabbing horns and unyielding groove, anticipates both Marvin Gaye’s socially conscious landmark What’s Going On and Sly and the Family Stone’s negative-vibe masterpiece of a rejoinder There’s a Riot Goin’ On by two years. The elegiac second track “Angelitos Negros” is borrowed from the soundtrack of the 1948 Mexican social-realist film by the same name, which addresses the prohibition of interracial relationships. Flack’s interpretation—entirely in Spanish—is profoundly moving on its own merits and the more so for connecting inequities between two cultures over generations. A tremulous Donny Hathaway/Robert Ayers collaboration, “Our Ages or Our Hearts,” and an inspired slow-burning take on the traditional “I Told Jesus” round out Side One in bravura fashion, ably setting the stage for the album’s astonishing back half.
Beginning with a definitive take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”—a track that belongs on any short list in the competitive category of finest-ever Cohen covers—Flack raises the spiritual, romantic, and political stakes to towering levels on Side Two, ultimately rendering a song cycle which acts as both a spiritual cousin and equal to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, released the previous year. Her epochal reading of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a composition by British folk singer Ewan MacColl, transforms the original’s tender devotions into an evocation of love so fixed and immutable it causes the firmament itself to tremble. Her devastatingly understated vocal conveys not so much pain or joy, but instead something like total awe at the power of two hearts in lockstep, be it mother and child, soulmates in tandem, or god and creation.
The supple groove of “Tryin’ Times”—a second collaboration with Hathaway, abetted by the Impressions’ Leroy Hutson—musically quotes Miles Davis’ “Freddie Freeloader” while depicting a Phil Ochs-worthy tableau of a society unraveling at the seams from its institutions to its family structures. Album closer “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” doesn’t explicitly mention Vietnam, but it may be the single greatest protest song written about that endless, insensible bloodbath. On first blush, it could be a stray track left off Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours—an agreeably purple, Runyonesque account of callow youths whiling the hours away in some urban watering hole. Only over the course of the song’s seven-minute run time does it begin to dawn on the listener who these men “trying to forget” truly are. Because the deferment system established in 1951 protected college-enrolled men from the draft until 1968, the vast preponderance of those conscripted into the first years of the war were poor, racial minorities, or both. “Who is burning?” John Fogerty wondered, in that same year, about that same conflict. “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” is the proportionately painful answer to that wounding question.
A generous new 50th year reissue is festooned with interesting tidbits. A spirited series of demos recorded in 1968 with a different group of musicians demonstrates the extent to which the idiosyncratic mix of soul, jazz, and folk that comprises Flack’s timeless sound is indeed the deliberate and singular vision of a taskmaster bandleader. Romps through everything from the contemporary Marvin-Tammi hit “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to the traditional “Frankie & Johnny” are proof of Flack’s capacity to move seamlessly not only through genres, but entire eras, a profoundly rare skill shared by the likes of Dylan, Prince, and Joni Mitchell.
It took seven months for First Take to enter the Billboard charts, a testament to both the unbound-by-genre unusualness of her sound and the inevitability of its sheer brilliance. Over decades, Flack would enjoy a legendary and influential career and eventually the well-earned successes of a hitmaker and household name. But First Take was before all of that, recorded in the violent blinding flash of a moment when absolutely nothing seemed certain. “And it would last ’til the end of time,” she sang. So it has.

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Brian Eno had a busy decade in the 1990s, including working on U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa and David Bowie's Outside, scoring Neil Gaiman's TV series Neverwhere, and recording the Windows 95 startup tone. He also released four solo albums that have now been reissued in expanded editions, with an extra CD appended to each.

Brian Eno: Nerve Net/The Shutov Assembly/Neroli/The Drop

Brian Eno had a very busy decade in the 1990s. He worked on U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa, James' Laid, David Bowie's Outside, and innumerable other records by musicians from around the world. He scored Neil Gaiman's TV series Neverwhere. He wrote the fascinating diary published as A Year with Swollen Appendices. He published the fourth edition of his brilliant card deck of "worthwhile dilemmas," Oblique Strategies. And, of course, he recorded his greatest hit, one of the most-played compositions of all time: the Windows 95 startup tone.
Somewhere in there, he also released the four solo albums that have now been reissued in expanded editions, with an extra CD appended to each. Well, four and a half: in 1991, My Squelchy Life, his first song-based solo album since 1978's Before and After Science, made it as far as advance promotional cassettes. Then, as he told Audio magazine a few years later, he found out that the album was being pushed back from September to February, and decided to withdraw it and replace it with a newer recording that was more on "the cutting edge... my feeling is that things don't come with intrinsic and timeless value. Where you place them in time, the context they fall in, is what charges them."
The album that replaced My Squelchy Life in the context of 1992 was Nerve Net, which is more obviously a product of its time than any other Eno record. It's roughly half-vocal, half-instrumental, and half-baked. The vocals are generally not Eno's, and mostly spoken; the instrumental tone is cold and brittle (although a couple of Robert Fripp guitar solos briefly light a fire on its surface); the synthesizer tones are the presets of their moment. "Ali Click" even interpolates the "Ashley's Roachclip" break made famous by Milli Vanilli, as well as some iffy rapping. Also iffy: "What Actually Happened?", a Vocoder-distorted discussion of a rape, paired with a forceful beat. The album's home stretch features two consecutive mixes of the not-up-to-much instrumental "Web", totaling over 15 tedious minutes.
The bonus disc on the reissue, though, is its real draw: My Squelchy Life, Eno's most enjoyable solo album of the '90s by a wide margin. It's only "retrospective" (as he dismissed it) in the sense that it plays to some of the strengths he'd demonstrated earlier in his career, like songwriting and singing. (A couple of its songs were re-edited for Nerve Net, and most of the rest were parceled out on one release or another over the next few years; this is the first time it's all officially appeared in one place.) Its opening tracks, the dissonant stomp "I Fall Up" ("I'm sucking the juice from the generator! M**ore volts!!") and the slow churn "The Harness", are the proclamations of the King of the Weirdos come home to rule again, and for every failed experiment like "Tutti Forgetti" there's a delightful throwaway like "Stiff".
The 10 rhythmless, tuneless pieces that make up The Shutov Assembly, also released in 1992 but recorded between 1985 and 1990, are named after places where Eno had done image-and-sound installations—although presenting them outside those contexts also depleted whatever charge they might have had. Eno later described them as sketches for orchestral works: electronically generated tones that acoustic instruments were meant to somehow replicate. They are whooshy, and evaporate as soon as they're over. The bonus disc is seven more pieces from the same era, in the same amorphous vein, although a few of them have some sort of beat; "Storm" even incorporates what sounds like another Fripp guitar solo.
Eno likes to talk about his interest in perfume, and a scent provided the title of the hour-long, single-track 1993 album Neroli (although he'd already released a four-minute edit of the same piece as "Constant Dreams" on the 1989 album Textures). At the time, it might have been a riposte to the low-key dance tracks that were being fobbed off as "ambient": as the person who'd more or less invented ambient music, Eno knew well that the point of ambience is that it's just barely perceptible. But the softly echoing pings and plinks of "Neroli" are instantly overfamiliar; without the famous name on the cover, no one would have given it a second thought. The new reissue pairs it with a previously unreleased hour-long drone piece from 1992, "New Space Music", which mostly suggests that Eno had figured out how to hold down keys for a really long time.
1997's The Drop is a set of mostly brief instrumentals—and one very long one, "Iced World"—in a style Eno referred to as "Unwelcome Jazz" (because, he explained, "most of the people I played them to don't really like them"). They're semi-abstract or "generative" electronic pieces, made with instrumental sounds that already have cultural associations, like piano, early-hip-hop drum machines, and, on "Dear World," samples of Eno's own voice. It's not uninteresting to hear once. The extra disc here is a set of The Drop's outtakes and alternate versions, originally sold as a limited edition at a Tokyo exhibition of Eno's "77 Million Paintings".
Eno subsequently recorded a string of limited-edition soundtracks to installation pieces, but his next solo album to see wide release would be 2005's Another Day on Earth. It included the same version of the lovely, slowly pulsing "Under" that had originally been intended to appear on My Squelchy Life—a song whose "retrospective" character had apparently worn off in the intervening 14 years.


Sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-decade underground's richest musical nodes, and this Barcelona electro-pop put a beautiful spin on the sound.

Ayrton Senna EP

Man, that Wavves "meltdown" really bummed me out. Not because a rising lo-fi rocker acted stupidly-- who doesn't sometimes?-- but because I'd always imagined being on ecstasy in Barcelona would be a lot more fun. After all, some of the most rewarding music from the last couple of years basically promised as much. Or was Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours being insincere? How about U.S. labels True Panther and Underwater Peoples? From Oslo to Melbourne, from indie rockers to club kids, sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-2000s pop underground's richest musical nodes.
Just as that endless blissed-out summery vibe unites everyone from Panda Bear to Todd Terje, Barcelona electro-pop four-piece Delorean pull up at the intersection between several disparate and exciting movements. Start with their remixes: In the U.S., the bedroom pop of Glasser and disco-punk of Lemonade; in the UK, the NME-approved guitar rock of the Big Pink and Mystery Jets; and, right in Delorean's hometown, the sample-heavy tropical psych of El Guincho. They can be as airy and suave as Air France or Phoenix, but their unremitting beats are also plenty huge enough to convert fans of Cut Copy or MGMT. John Talabot, a Barcelona DJ who's released cosmic disco grooves for Munich label Permanent Vacation, lends a house remix to the group's current EP, Ayrton Senna.
The third release on Fool House, the new label from French indie-dance blog Fluo Kids, Ayrton Senna represents a similar kind of convergence. In the early 2000s, Delorean originally set out to be something like Jimmy Eat World crossed with Elliott Smith, keyboardist Unai Lazcano confided to The Pop Manifesto magazine last summer. By the time of their promising Transatlantic KK album a couple of years ago, Delorean had absorbed the synth-pop sleekness of New Order and the echoey guitar spikes of post-punk revivalists like !!! or the Rapture, with one transcendent moment: so-called "breakhop" finale "Apocalypse Ghetto Blast". On the Ayrton Senna EP, the group's burgeoning dance-pop savvy comes into bloom with three unstoppable summer bangers, the Talabot remix, and a digital-only bonus cut.
Despite their rock roots, Delorean do tracks, not songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi is a Ph.D. candidate with a background in philosophy, but Delorean use his Factory-ready yelp more as just another element to loop than as a vehicle for delivering lyrical content. "Seasun" is the best example of Delorean's layered approach to composition, methodically building 1990s piano-house keyboards, disembodied female vocals, Baltimore club-ready handclaps, and a ringing guitar line into the ultimate beach house (not Beach House). But "Deli", with its breakbeats and youthful enthusiasm, and "Moonson", all 90s-house liberation and anthem-rock yearning, are almost as thrilling. Talabot's "Kids & Drum" remix of "Seasun" could well hold up after even more listens than the original version, its hand-percussion samples reaching closer to the islands but its vast, clean lines stretching out toward space.
Prior to Ayrton Senna, arguably Delorean's most compelling release was its remix for oft-misunderstood electro-pop Serge Gainsbourgs the Teenagers. On last year's occasionally brilliant Reality Check, the French band's "Love No" is a hilarious, sleazy, and brutally scathing snipe at a nagging girlfriend who disapproves of the narrator's self-absorbed internet stonerdom. Delorean's bass-heavy "No Love" version-- like Studio's "Possible" rework of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible", only more dramatic-- strips away all the negative lyrics, ditching a chorus of "I'm not in love" and instead repeating the big question: "Are you in love?" Well, that's a hell of a thing for a pop song to ask. The track promises dancefloor absolution, only to nag at the heart in a way the Teenagers' lame girlfriend never could.
Summer always ends too soon, and before long I'm sure beachy dance music will sound as cloying as rock fans considered the Beach Boys by the late 1960s. Like Wavves in Barcelona, Delorean recognize there's a dark side to their ecstatic vision, the aching truth that utopia-- literally, "no place"-- can never totally be fulfilled. As equally impressive bonus track "Big Dipper" puts it: "Babe, if you want to we could run away up into the sun/ But we would only fade from black to black." Delorean's similarities to other "sunny", "shimmering" new artists, ultimately, are far less important than their similarities to other practitioners of well-crafted and instantly gripping pop.


On her second album, Meg dishes out disses, gets political, and grapples with her personal life. It’s an ambitious and uneven attempt to step into her most challenging role yet: herself.

Traumazine

Ever since the inaugural Hot Girl Summer in 2019, Megan Thee Stallion’s rise to cultural dominance has been shadowed by grief, betrayal, media scrutiny, and online harassment. In response, she’s thrown up a series of alter egos, each fiercer, flirtier, and funnier than the last: Tina Snow, Suga, Hot Girl Meg. On her second album, the surprise release Traumazine, Meg takes on her most challenging role: herself. While albums like JAY-Z’s 4:44 and Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers are recent additions to therapy-rap canon, Megan takes on the daunting task of crafting a digestible and multifaceted album about her trauma in a society and musical genre that notoriously vilify Black women and dismiss their pain—all while allegedly being sabotaged by her team. Ultimately, her need to maintain an unbothered image takes precedence over real introspection and evolutionary risk-taking, a glaring misstep on an album marketed as her most vulnerable to date.
But Meg really does peel back layers and try to show us a different side to her. At certain moments, Traumazine follows the confessional style of a diary entry. On “Anxiety,” she opens up about her struggles with mental health and invokes the legacy of famous women whose hardships were likewise picked apart by the media: Marilyn Monroe, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston. But even when she conveys emotionally raw thoughts, the tone of the production does not match the gravity of her words. The yodeling instrumental and upbeat piano distract from Meg’s poignant musings about the apologies she’ll never get to make to her late mother. On “Flip Flop,” a closer tonal fit, Megan clings to the toughness and a bit of playfulness that has allowed her to survive in the industry and in life.
Although she’s talked about the interpersonal betrayal she experienced on Good News and Something for Thee Hotties, as well as in thoughtful op-eds and interviews, Traumazine marks the first time that Meg has fully infused socio-political commentary into her music, save for the brief “Justice for Breonna Taylor” mention in “Shots Fired.” On “Not Nice” she raps, “My skin not light enough/My dialect not white enough/Or maybe I’m just not shaped the way that makes these niggas give a fuck,” shining a light on the rampant misogynoir she endured these past couple of years. Meg’s known for her celebrating her body in visuals and lyrics, but in this context, it becomes a call-out to those who enjoy her sexualized image but refuse to acknowledge her personhood. She continues this thread through multiple mentions of embracing her natural hair and Blackness: “I’m Black, Biggie-Biggie Black … my Afro my Powerpuff.” She’s reclaiming her body from everyone who’s picked her apart, from the saltiest social media commenter to the United States Supreme Court, and she tops off “Gift & a Curse” with the line, “My motherfucking body/My choice.”
When it comes to disses, Megan still snaps. She delivers lines that make you grateful you’re not her target: “You got the roaches in your crib sharin’ snacks with your kids.” Although her punchlines are not as sharp as on previous albums, on ’90s-inspired tracks like “Plan B” and “Not Nice,” she taps into the ruthlessness of a battle rapper and the galvanizing force of Queen Latifah to prove that lyricism and delivery are her weapons. Even on sloppy production—the Murda Beatz producer tag jump scare in a “Gift & a Curse” and the gimmicky theremin sample on “Scary”—her voice remains steadfast and lethal. When she borrows the bouncy house beat and staccato vocals of ballroom music for a TikTok-ready chorus on “Her,” her delivery illustrates the effort she’s put in to match the inspiration.
The featured artists are a mixed bag. Megan and Latto are a true team on “Budget”: two Southern women whose braggadocious demeanors compliment each other and make it sound like they’re spitting on haters. At other times, it can feel like Meg hopped onto her collaborator’s song instead. She matches the pop energy of “Sweetest Pie,” a collaboration with Dua Lipa that follows a formulaic Future Nostalgia template. Lucky Daye shines on “Star,” a breezy Zara dressing room soundtrack where Megan sings in a style similar to her Instagram live karaoke videos. Although it’s a nice change of pace to hear Meg corny in love on a track, Jhené Aiko’s sweet harmonies are less than essential on “Consistency.” And Future’s lackluster feature on “Pressurelicious” is not worth the $250,000 it cost.
On “Southside Royalty Freestyle,” the Meg who caught the internet’s attention with standout verses in parking lot cyphers now leads her own. On an album marked by fears of betrayal and isolation, it’s refreshing to hear Houston rappers Sauce Walka, Lil’ Keke, and Big Pokey—the sound of Meg’s city backing her up. Sauce Walka’s stream-of-consciousness rant over sharp snares and an Isley Brothers sample give the track the feel of a live recording and further reinforce Megan’s status at the vanguard of a new generation of Southern rap. Like generations before her, she’s got the biting diss tracks, intoxicating charisma, and flexibility to swing between genres. Most importantly, she’s sincere as she continues to further a cultural interrogation of the mistreatment of Black women within rap. As a concept album, Traumazine is uneven. But as an embodiment of the phrase “healing isn’t linear,” its significance couldn’t be more clear.

1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment


For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers, and it largely abandons heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines.

Dave Gahan / Soulsavers: Angels & Ghosts

Angels & Ghosts

For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. As such, Gahan's voice has only grown stronger over the years—deeper, more controlled, and more iconic. During this time, that voice has mostly been employed in the service of someone else's songs, that person being Depeche Mode co-conspirator and the band's primary songwriter Martin Gore. It only makes sense that at some point—namely, around the time of 2005's Playing the Angel—that Gahan would want a more active role. Outside of the band, he would eventually release two solo albums—2003's Paper Monsters and 2007's Hourglass—and two collaborations with Soulsavers (aka British producer Rich Machin).
Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers. Much like 2012's The Light the Dead See, the record offers an opportunity for Gahan to stretch his legs creatively and shake off some of the baggage that a band with a 35-year history like Depeche Mode invariably has to carry around. In doing so, Gahan and co. largely abandon heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines.
The album opens with "Shine"—a kind of stomping, slide-guitar heavy slow burner in which Gahan imbues a ridiculous line like "when you look around, it's so profound, what we can do" with a kind of gravitas that only someone with his particular pipes can pull off, but it still feels like a lightweight version of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You". "You Owe Me" could be a distant cousin to Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game"—all midnight hues and romantic yearning—while "One Thing" is the kind of piano-driven ballad that you could almost imagine popping up on a Depeche Mode record. "Just lay down next to me," Gahan sings, "We can watch those tasteless shows on our TV." It's the kind of 'no one understands us and it's us against the world forever' track that Gahan has made a career out of perfectly articulating, but in the end the entire thing gets punched in the face by a chorus lyric so hackneyed that one wonder how on earth it actually made it onto the record: "You just need one thing/ Love."
As a frontman, Gahan is a marvel of preening and grandstanding, which means that he actually shines on tracks that aren't afraid to get all messianic and pump up the melodrama. In that sense, the album's lead track, "All of This and Nothing" (despite also famously being the title of a Psychedelic Furs song and album) is perfect for him. The song is populated by black waters, heavy storms, and ghosts that hover continuously outside of windows, which means it's classic territory for Gahan. "I'm all of this and nothing/ I'm the dirt beneath your feet/ I'm the sun that rises while you're sleeping/ I'm all you need" he sings, sounding for the first time like the kind of equally doomed and exalted kind of character that he embodies so well. If there's something decidedly lacking on Angels & Ghosts, it's more of his famously gothy bravado. Gahan clearly has a predilection for casting himself as the tortured sinner ("One hand in my pocket/ One foot in the grave/ Standing here, waiting to be saved"), but the nine tracks here—packed full of twangy guitars and tastefully deployed string sections—reach for a kind of holy redemption that they don't ever actually earn.
Angels & Ghosts isn't a bad record, but it's frustratingly tepid. Superfans will still find pleasure in hearing Gahan's voice tear through these songs. But at this point, a truly radical departure—or even some kind of insanely catastrophic creative failure—would be more interesting than another selection of songs half-heartedly playing around with tired blues and gospel motifs. One certainly can't fault Gahan for needing his own private creative outlet, but at this point just writing more flatly on-the-nose songs about sin and faith and redemption doesn't sound refreshing or the least bit fun, but instead like something you've already heard him tackle a million times already.


On the follow-up to his 2017 debut, the Chicago guitarist ventures beyond his folk roots, sounding looser and freer than ever. Despite the solo billing, he sounds more like a bandleader here.

Ever-Roving Eye

Ever-Roving Eye, guitarist James Elkington’s second solo album, opens with a brief acoustic overture—a short melodic theme repeated just a few times, followed by a volley of deftly, delicately picked notes, barely a minute long altogether—that could be a holdover from his 2017 debut, the spare and thoughtful Wintres Woma. But then it’s interrupted by the sharp thwack of a snare drum from Spencer Tweedy, and “Nowhere Time” abruptly takes off in another direction: The tempo quickens, and Elkington’s acoustic is joined by a taut rhythm section and even an electric guitar tracing loops and spirals around his vocals. There’s a lot packed into that transition from solo to full band; it sets up one of Elkington’s most elaborate arrangements to date, allowing him to sound freer and looser than ever. It’s as if he’s trying to shed the expectations of folk guitar as a restrictive genre, one rooted deeply in the past. “Nowhere Time” sounds like Elkington and his small combo are more interested in the present.
That moment also signals Elkington’s disparate musical influences. The intro is grounded in the stylings of UK folk players: the stateliness of John Renbourn, the directness of Davy Graham, the jazzy agility of John Martyn. But “Nowhere Time” is grounded in American soil—in particular Chicago, which Elkington has called home for some 20 years. After fronting the inventive indie-rock outfit the Zincs throughout most of the ’00s, he spent the ’10s entrenching himself in the local music scene and playing with pretty much everybody in town, including Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard, Eleventh Dream Day, and post-rock icons Tortoise as well as their offshoot Brokeback. He was the only member of Tweedy not named Tweedy.
Lyrically, Elkington remains an eccentric songwriter, given to playful turns of phrase as ornate as they are cryptic. There’s a menagerie of animals roaming around Ever-Roving Eye, hyenas and leopards and wolves; at one point Elkington even declares himself a malamute. Such odd imagery doesn’t distract him from the mortal dread that seeps into these songs. Rather, it magnifies it, as though he’s staring down death with a chuckle. “You’ll be underground in no uncertain terms, and dozing with the worms,” he prophesies on “Nowhere Time.” “There’s a master plan somebody understands, and I wish that one was me.” The unstoppable passage of time is his primary theme, and he’s found an intriguing way of addressing it through his music: Ever-Roving Eye collapses time as Elkington combines elements from previous projects into his current folk palette, as though he’s playing in all the above groups all at once.
That’s especially enlivening after Wintres Woma, whose combination of Albion folk and American Primitive occasionally sounded a little too tidy. The focus on that album was clearly on Elkington, but on Ever-Roving Eye he sounds more like a bandleader. These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here. He devises new tricks of phrasing and layering on “Late Jim’s Lament” to complement the song’s pulse, rooting deep in his lower register like he’s digging into peat. In this setting, even a more straightforward folk instrumental like “Rendlesham Way,” written and recorded for Wintres Woma, sounds more pointed, more purposeful, maybe even pricklier—as though Elkington is pushing against some expectation he has for himself. Or, as he sings on “Nowhere Time,” “It is time for you to move. You’d better get somewhere to go.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Originally released as a 13-track LP in 1981, this compilation documents the fruits of New Psychedelia, which set the scene for glammy Britpop, nerdy twee pop, playful college rock, and more.

Various Artists: Another Splash of Colour - New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985

"We’re a reaction against the violence of London. Here you can be what you want to be. We’re carrying on where the '60s left off. We put jelly on the floor and ask people to eat it. The fact that they do shows that there is still hope for the world." These are the words of the Doctor, a glammed-up, pylon-haired oddball, speaking to the UK’s Observer magazine in 1981. The Doctor’s heady proclamations, made in the wake of punk and postpunk and at the dawn of Thatcherism, were typical of an idealistic new movement rooted in the mod revival. It antagonized both dreary realists, who were unforgivably bland, and the reigning New Romantics, whose pop-futurist stylings were considered elitist and played-out, stuck in front of the bedroom mirror. New Psychedelia, fomented ____in early-80s England, peered instead into the kaleidoscope of psych-rock—13th Floor Elevators, Traffic, the Nuggets compilations—and saw something momentarily more appealing.
A Splash of Colour, originally released as a 13-track LP in '81, documented the scattershot fruits of that vision, just as it began to spread beyond clubs and second-hand clothes stores in London’s Soho and Kensington. Reissued as Another Splash of Colour, the set has now expanded to three discs, comprising 64 songs recorded between '80 and '85. Ancestors of glammy Britpop, nerdy twee pop, playful college rock, and prime-era Creation Records rub shoulders, jostling for attention as each song pulls the rug from under the last.
What connects the groups is their investment in a collective, '60s-themed imaginarium, from Robyn Hitchcock’s inspired nonsense ("It’s a Mystic Trip") to the straight-faced period pieces of groups like Pink Umbrellas ("Raspberry Rainbow"). Though genre revivalism was hardly novel, New Psychedelia—which, besides this compilation, left few footprints in the British underground—was the first scene since punk to observe the widespread rejection of '60s Britrock, and to reject that rejection*.* Thanks in part to the "second Cold War," as well as the severity of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative politics, many would-be dissidents had drifted into a state of woozy social escapism*.* That musical response, writes one-time NME scribe Neil Taylor in Another Splash of Colour’s liner notes, "made a curious contrast, as the inimitable Dan Treacy was to later point out on 'She Was Only a Grocer’s Daughter': 'Relax your mind and float downstream/Pretend it’s all a very bad dream.'"
For New Psychedelia’s frontmen (and it’s curious to note that no group represented here had a frontwoman), those bad dreams were a creative goldmine. The compilation’s second track, "Just Like a Dream" by the High Tide, is a grim fantasy of nuclear apocalypse. It’s joined by escapist head-ventures from the Marble Staircase ("Still Dreaming"), Treacy’s TV Personalities ("The Dream Inspires"), and Naz Nomad & the Nightmares, who cover the Electric Prunes’ "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)." Rather than dream up a new world, the artists were scavenging and inhabiting the recent past—in this case the late '60s, already established as the unimpeachable golden age—because they considered their copious imagination an end in itself, rather than a weapon. Like their siblings in twee pop, the scene’s aggrieved youngsters saw no contradiction in protesting neoliberalist austerity by reviving the '60s idealism that failed to prevent it.
There’s much to enjoy in the free-spirited music that impulse wrought, even if it proved a bit of a dead-end. "Just 'cos the blank generation blew it/Don’t mean we have to," is a typically feisty missive from Miles Over Matter, whose kaleidoscopic "Something’s Happening Here" is the record’s closest thing to a manifesto. The Barracudas, who applied their psych fripperies and lyrical polemic more sparingly, contribute a neat, jangly anthem called "Watching the World Go By," which rallies disenchanted dreamers who believe "The world is just too crazy" and who "prefer being left behind." Cleaners From Venus, led by the great Martin Newell, offer "Wivenhoe Bells II," a more pastoral and poetic social commentary that could slide onto XTC’s Skylarking, with a reverb-heavy, alienated vocal that clambers over tumbling arrangements, like a child across beach rocks.
While wimpy eccentrics characterized the scene, the highlights here are diffuse. The militant urgency of Blue Orchids’ "Work," a hit on John Peel’s radio show, isn’t far off that of the group’s transatlantic contemporaries Mission of Burma and the Wipers. The Soft Boys' "Only the Stones Remain" and Julian Cope’s brilliantly haughty "Sunspots" are neo-psych heavyweights that have swaggered through the decades, while Glasgow band the Chicanes, on "Further Thoughts," identify and triangulate the best bits of all of it, corralling dingy postpunk, breezy Postcard pop, psych mystique, and post-hardcore dissonance into something surprisingly forward-facing.
In fact, listening through the comp, there’s a sense New Psychedelia’s weak link was maybe the psychedelia: When Another Splash of Colour drags, it’s thanks to emboldened hammer-ons, zealous chorus pedals, or stray jam passages—many of the fineries that another psych descendant, the shoegaze scene, ditched a few years later. Still, the cluttered, trove-like format suits the record. As is customary for sprawling retrospectives, listeners enter an unspoken pact in which they’ll persevere with, say, Firmament & the Elements’ "The Festival of Frothy Muggament" (sample lyric: "We played and they paid/And was it good?/Mmm, yay, verily, it was good") because forays into absurd theatricality are part and parcel of any scene sustained by LSD-fuelled boat parties and a fondness for shirts with Edwardian frills. Not only does the record’s scrappy, lived-in ambiance reflect the DIY necessities of that scene—it creates an intimate, densely packed time-capsule, in which strange aromas have mingled until even the minor curios are a source of wonder.


The Punjabi-Canadian MC returns from his eight-week retirement with a droning collection of listless would-be bangers.

Bad Habits

When Nav announced his retirement two months ago, hip-hop fans, for the most part, could care less. The Punjabi-Canadian MC made the decision out of solidarity with his buddy Lil Uzi Vert, a far superior talent who had recently declared that he was “done with music.” In hindsight the move was predictable; Nav has always been a creature of imitation, cribbing the styles of his various peers to far less interesting results, whether it’s Travis Scott’s Auto-Tuned croons or fellow Torontonian Drake’s minimal production. He’s the artistic equivalent of the “I Made This” meme, only the sketched character throws up on the invention in the third slide, ruining what made it special in the first place. Bad Habits, his so-called comeback album, is more of the same, a hollow and magic-free entry into the trap-rap canon. At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.
The lone highlight of the project comes early on the chorus for “I’m Ready,” where Nav for once finds himself in the melodic pocket, humming about his congested chest from smoking too many Backwoods and leaving someone facedown in a plate of spaghetti after pulling a mob-style hit. It’s a ridiculous visual, but shows Nav making the most out of his limited vocal range, his nasally thrum coming off almost endearing in its frailty. Things go straight downhill from there, though. On the very next track, “Taking Chances,” Nav is back to dropping clunker boasts like, “Rockin' my closet, I can't tell you my favorite, I got plenty of clothes.” The chorus is even worse: “I don’t like taking chances/I like fucking hoes I already know,” he declares.
This paranoia shows up constantly on Bad Habits. Nav tells us constantly that he doesn’t trust anyone outside his circle, that he never leaves home without a weapon. It’s impossible to take this kiddie-pool Scarface routine seriously when his paranoid delusions are followed up by giggling admissions like “Got a little bad bitch/Got some work done on her butt (On her butt).” (Meek Mill, who’s featured on the track, takes Nav’s cue and one-ups him by rapping, “Put my thumb all in her A-hole.”)
It’s a contrasting dynamic made more taxing by the fact that Nav doesn’t lean into his weirdness nearly enough, something he could learn a thing or two about from Atlanta oddity Young Thug, who appears here on the song “Tussin.” Rather than highlight his own eccentricities, Nav’s songwriting is based in sinister tough talk, which doesn’t suit him and is boring to boot. By the time The Weeknd appears on “Price On My Head,” singing about, well, prices on people’s heads, you’re completely burned out. Combine this with painfully repetitive production—the drum patterns on two consecutive tracks, “Dior Runners” and “Vicodin,” are virtually identical—and that Bad Habits includes more blatant misogyny and homophobia than any project in recent memory (“She said you're such a fuckboy that you made her turn dyke,” is one particularly memorable blurt of ignorance) and you start to pine for a simpler time, only a few weeks ago, when Nav had supposedly put down the mic for good.


With JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), ex-Royal Trux woman Jennifer Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the hair-metal 1988 she never got to experience the first time around.

JJ Got Live RaTX

Jennifer Herrema's former band, Royal Trux, released their first album in 1988 at the height of the hair-metal era, and at the time, their brand of lo-fi blues-concréte couldn't have been further removed from prevailing, poofy-coiffed rock trends. But with each new album from Heremma's post-Trux outfit RTX, it becomes clearer that former partner Neil Hagerty-- now releasing increasingly inscrutable albums under the Howling Hex mantle-- was holding her back from her true calling of denim'n'leather metal queen. Where 2004's RTX debut Transmaniacon featured a handful of Trux rewrites and last year's Western Xterminator detoured into strung-out psych-folk, with JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the 1988 she never got to experience the first time around.
But for Herrema, the real attraction to hair-metal isn't the panty-peeling riffs and wiggly fingered solos-- though those are in bountiful supply here-- but its androgynous implications. With her lean, statuesque physique and long blonde locks, no one is ever going to mistake Herrema for a guy, and yet, when she asks "are you a boy, or are you a girl?" on the track of the same name, you have to wonder if she's talking into a mirror, her gruff, three-cartons-a-day voice sounding several degrees more ballsy than those of the spandexed pansies who once populated "Headbanger's Ball". The irony of 80s cock-rock is that most of the dudes singing it sounded like they didn't have one, so leave it to a woman to correct that deficiency; with the talk-boxed strut of "You Should Shut Up" and the open-sunroof charge of "How'd You Do It?"-- RTX's most straight-up, no-bullshit rocker to date-- Herrema embodies the kind of ultimate rock chick that a young Vince Neil or Axl Rose aspired to be when they were applying their eyeliner and hairspray.
Where past RTX albums sometimes apologized for their heavy-metal love with deliberately messy production (as if still trying to appease Royal Trux's indie-centric fanbase), JJ Got Live RaTX unashamedly revels in authentically 80s details: The slowly swelling synth intro to "You Should Shut Up" that sounds like Giorgio Moroder's intro theme to Scarface; the squealing lead fills on "Are You a Boy or Are You Girl" that fly by like orange globulars on "Guitar Hero"'s expert level; the crunchy-riffed break in the middle of "Virginia Creeper" lifted straight from Scorpions' "No One Like You"; the brief, ZZ Top Eliminator-style techno-boogie denouement to "Mr. Wall" that's actually more interesting than the song that precedes it. RTX can't transcend all genre clichés-- namely, numbskull choruses ("Fuck that! We don't give a shit!") and intentional typos ("Too Badd")-- but they score where it counts: In the power-ballad department, though JJ Got Live RaTX's lone slow-dance moment, "Cheap Wine Time", is less "Sweet Child O' Mine" than "Sweet Jane" had the Velvet Underground been the house band at the Whisky in 88 instead of the Factory in 66.  In a sense, RTX's de-cheesing of 80s pop-metal couldn't better timed-- provided that disgruntled GN'R fans spend their Chinese Democracy refund money on this.


The exceptional second album from the London group plays like a slow burn to a triumphant finale. Softer and more melodic, the band remains just as challenging and delightfully confounding as ever.

Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There

Ants From Up There

The Concorde jet: aeronautical disgrace, financial boondoggle, multinational embarrassment. Hell of a metaphor, though. Isaac Wood returns to it repeatedly throughout Black Country, New Road’s second album, Ants From Up There, most pointedly on the thematic centerpiece that bears its name. “I was made to love you, can’t you tell?” Wood pleads as “Concorde” reaches a dizzying altitude, desperately embodying a romantic sunk cost fallacy, throwing good love after bad.
Until about a week ago, Ants From Up There could be heard as a classic breakup album. All seven members of the London band amplify the dynamics of Wood’s every convulsion, from giddy infatuation to paralyzing despair, as he desperately sacrifices his serenity for a tragic and heroic cause. But on January 31, the band announced, through Wood’s own emotional letter, that he “won’t be a member of the group anymore,” and that the remaining members will carry on without him. So now the question is, “Break up with whom?” “Isaac will suffer, Concorde will fly,” he sings a minute earlier on “Concorde.” Perhaps he’s talking to the band he’d leave four days before they shared a triumphant album with the rest of the world.
For all of the doubt the circumstances around Ants From Up There casts on the band’s immediate prospects, they’re right about where they left off nearly a year ago to the day. Both of Black Country, New Road’s studio albums are final destinations, bringing closure to a yearlong stage of roadtesting new material. Almost 75 percent of their 2021 debut, For the first time, had been available and loudly celebrated before its release, and when the album came out, the band began to distance themselves from their “phase one.” “There will be a clear delineation between these first 18 months…and what follows,” saxophonist Lewis Evans stated nearly four months before their debut LP. “We’ve gone in a new direction and are writing with a new ethos.” Ants From Up There’s very first moments re-introduces a band that could not be more excited about where things were headed. Whereas For the first time began with an audacious and alienating six-minute instrumental, this “Intro” lasts 54 seconds before barging right into what the band has called the “best song we’ve ever written.” They’re not wrong.
“And though England is mine, I must leave it all behind,” Wood announces as the album’s opening statement, a newly handsome lilt bearing a quintessential BC, NR lyric: brash enough to double as a pull quote for an NME cover and subject to granular pop culture forensics. It’s definitely a reference to the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, maybe a tweak of the Smiths’ “Still Ill,” and, hopefully, a shot at the wave of talky UK post-rock bands that Black County, New Road were once part of and have now graduated from. “Chaos Space Marine” might be better described as pre-rock, touching on klezmer, chamber music, jazz, or any form of pop that used strings or horns as primary instruments.
A few years removed from cheeky references to professing love at a black midi show and singing about how they’re “the world’s second-best Slint tribute act,” bassist Tyler Hyde claims that during the writing process of Ants From Up There, Black Country, New Road became obsessed with Arcade Fire. In the same interview, drummer Charlie Wayne implies that they set out to make an album full of hits, having run up debts that put them in grave legal and/or physical peril. Both statements speak to the band's wry sense of humor—of the 10 songs on Ants From Up There, two are instrumentals and five are at least six minutes long. The album’s purest pop moment—Wood crooning, “She had Billie Eilish style/Moving to Berlin for a little while” during “Good Will Hunting,” as a THX synth renders it appropriately cinematic—could possibly spawn an entire TikTok subgenre for the rest of 2022. Yet the song itself shifts rhythms almost constantly, its pop appeal as unorthodox as its lyrical inspiration.
Still, if they didn’t hit the mark of Arcade Fire’s Funeral, you could throw a dart at just about any critically lauded indie rock band from 2004-2007 and land on a potential comparative point. It was a time of strivers and try-hards, bands whose unwieldiness and anachronism were kinda the entire point. They worked with feverish literacy and earnest emotion, conservatory-trained musicianship and childlike whimsy. They gave themselves complicated names and used too many woodwinds and made life-altering and reflexively divisive music whose values seem wildly out of step in 2022.
A more warm and sentimental Black Country, New Road remains just as challenging and potentially confounding as their former selves; this isn’t due to any sonic alteration on Ants From Up There so much as their shift from the self-conscious remove of post-punk to the life-affirming extremity of emo. It’s not the sound, but rather the spirit of adjacent masterpieces like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, The Monitor, and Teens of Denial that extrapolate social and psychosexual turmoil to the scale of world wars—the kind that inspire painstaking Genius annotations, longing sighs of they don’t make ’em like this anymore, and also the recognition that we can only handle one of these things every six years or so.
Part of what is so effective about this style is how Wood and his bandmates manifest every glimmer of hope as a heaven-sent beacon and every letdown as a plunge towards the void. On “Bread Song,” Wood ponders the vulnerability of eating in bed while desperately squeezing his phone as if it can make his intentions more direct and compelling. The relationship dynamic is familiar, but it’s never been heard on a song that slowly morphs from vaporous, free-time improv to bouncy township pop. Similarly, “Haldern” can only sustain itself so long against Wood’s nuclear self-pity (“Ignore the hole I dug again/It’s only for the evening”); it ends with piano keys being mashed into splinters. Wood’s singing voice recalls icons of gothic grandeur while also homing in on the quotidian textures of normal lives—“Breathe in your chicken, broccoli and everything/The tug that’s between us, that long string.” The band’s commitment to recurring motifs and cross-references ensures that Wood’s world remains somewhat coherent, though trying to explain it by analogy results in absurdly incongruous and incredible dream dates: Los Campesinos! covering Feels? Nick Cave …Is a Real Boy?
In their new incarnation, Black Country, New Road wield something far more exciting than mastery: an open invitation to their process. The placeholder titles of “Bread Song” and “Haldern” reflect their origins as improv exploration; the latter emerged from a 12-minute jam in the middle of a half-hour festival live stream set, between “Athens, France” and a Weezer cover. Even without the YouTube archives, it’s easy to picture the evolution of “Snow Globes” in real time; a braid of harmonized guitars repeats until the strings follow suit, all while Wayne bashes away in a completely different meter, a provocation and also a fitting rhythm to Wood’s slow-motion implosion. What could’ve been a mesmerizing one-minute interlude expands to a nine-minute devotional. The 12-minute closer, the remarkable “Basketball Shoes,” is a kind of “True Love Waits” of Black Country, New Road’s Isaac Wood era, a song that’s been spoken of with hushed reverence by fans since the band’s early days and has gone through numerous versions and rewrites since 2019. His final line as the frontman of Black Country, New Road looks at a relationship—a lover, the audience, himself—and sums it up: “All I’ve been forms the drone/We sing the rest/Oh, your generous loan to me/Your crippling interest.”
Since the release of the lead single “Chaos Space Marine” in October of last year, Wood had been preparing us for a Viking funeral of an album—not just because he yelps, “So I’m leaving this body/And I’m never coming home again!” As shocking as Wood’s departure is right now, it just sped up the inevitable: Most bands eventually collapse, and most relationships between people in their early 20s do as well. Knowing how it all ends does nothing to detract from the joy Black Country, New Road have poured into Ants From Up There—not when they spend every second reminding us of why we let ourselves get swept up in these beautifully doomed fantasies to begin with.

Buy: Rough Trade


DaBaby’s hypeman manages to make money sound boring on his first solo outing.

RICH YOUNGIN

Stunna 4 Vegas has a great gig. He gets to be the hype man to DaBaby, one of the world’s biggest rappers: he pops up for a few guest verses, shows off his ice in the background of his Instagram snippets. But no rapper wants to be “the other guy” for long. Since DaBaby’s breakout a year ago, Stunna has been itching for a moment of his own. The North Carolina rapper’s latest album, RICH YOUNGIN, is Stunna’s attempt at scoring the solo spotlight.
There’s a case to be made that Stunna 4 Vegas’ songs aren’t that much different from DaBaby’s; they both rap over spare, bass-heavy beats with a barrage of puns and run-on sentences. They even have the same flaws: a narrow taste in production and unmemorable punchlines. One of their first viral singles as a duo was “Animal,” the trunk-rattling marathon that set the blueprint for DaBaby’s sound. It was technically Stunna’s song, but DaBaby got all of the attention. And that’s understandable, because DaBaby’s personality is magnetic. He can go viral without saying a single word; he’s suave like that uncle that has a new car every time you see him. Stunna 4 Vegas is far less interesting.
RICH YOUNGIN is supposed to be Stunna 4 Vegas’ rags-to-riches story—you know, the one where you announce that your pockets at one point weren’t fat, but now they are. “Nigga really got rich in six months, for real, I watched that shit with my own fuckin’ eyes,” says an unknown voice on the album’s intro. “Really three, but that nigga spend too goddamn much.” Stunna spends the rest of the time making money sound boring. There are no stories about the lavish purchases he’s made, no details about spending a rack on his family. He doesn’t even tell you anything about North Carolina, except that he lived there.
Most of the time Stunna 4 Vegas is going through the motions. His pop culture references are dated, like he hasn’t turned on the television since the second Bush administration: Robert Horry, Damon Wayans, Roll Bounce starring Bow Wow. And he shouts with little enthusiasm over production from up-and-coming beatmakers. Some inject the project with much-needed life, like 20’s flute-sampling “WET,” and others contribute to the mess, like the Beat By Jeff-produced “F*CKING UP FREESTYLE,” which sounds like Stunna trying to have a conversation in a truck with engine problems. But even when the beat is strong, Stunna has nothing notable to add. “Russian” only has that title because it’s produced by Rvssian, and if that wasn’t already clear, the hook goes, “I’m smokin’ West Coast Cure in a Russian/And I’m on a beat by Rvssian.”
When Stunna settles back into a complementary role, he thrives. “CHANGE MY LIFE,” alongside Blac Youngsta, is a heart racer. Then there’s “DO DAT,” the song that justifies the entire album. Next to DaBaby and Lil Baby, Stunna holds his own, even as Lil Baby teaches Stunna how to properly stunt with the line “My dollars and followers match.” RICH YOUNGIN isn’t the moment that Stunna hoped it would be, but at least his life is great. He’s got money and can afford Offset verses, and even as his music stumbles, he can always return to executing the perfect money phone alongside DaBaby.


On a stopgap EP between album projects, the Brooklyn R&B musician sloughs off emotional baggage from a soured relationship.

Yaya Bey: The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP

The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP

Yaya Bey’s flow is poised and unhurried, a subdued technique she uses to analyze subjects both personal and political. On 2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’etta Brown and last year’s Madison Tapes, the Brooklyn multidisciplinary artist celebrated Black women and pushed for systemic revolution in guitar-laced R&B and neo-soul. Her new EP, The Things I Can’t Take With Me, is a soothing interlude meant to fill the gap between albums; it doubles as her first release under the recently revived hip-hop label Big Dada. Brooding and assured in equal measure, Bey sloughs off emotional baggage from a soured relationship.
Bey self-produced the six-song set, and she forges The Things I Can’t Take With Me with crackling surface noise and acoustic accompaniments similar to those on Madison Tapes. The spare approach suits Bey’s intimate lyrics, which dissect the ways that dealing with a shitty ex opened up revelations about her own past. “Surely surely I’m my mama’s child/’Cause surely surely I’m out here running wild,” she sings on the autobiographical “the root of a thing.” The song glows with plucked electric guitar and reverb, like she’s sharing confessions over a warm fire pit. Later, the wistful keys and trilling backing vocals on “we’ll skate soon” foreground some of her most cutting lines. “If it’s me or her/If you don’t feel you/We can’t do that shit for you,” she insists in singsong, finding common ground with the other woman before she follows it up with an exhale: “Damn.”
Bey mostly reaches for a sparse yet silky palette of moods. The two-part “industry love / a protection spell” is a carefully calibrated diorama for her free-flowing range, opening with a shuffling R&B beat and guitar chords as she cuts her ex down to size. “All that big dick and won’t bet on yourself/Your moral compass collapsed on itself,” she sings sweetly, having found a sense of self-assurance that gives way to the strummed, downtempo second half. “a protection spell” captures a mantra-like vision of moving on. “No weapon formed against me/Not even you, baby,” she sings, voice curling around the words “weapon” and “you.” The subtle emphasis links the subjects together in a pointed, honeyed harmony.
The Things I Can’t Take With Me may be slight, but Bey doesn’t need long to make a memorable impact. Where Madison Tapes hopscotched between improvisatory sounds and clips of recorded conversations, the songs here largely swirl together as a way for her to focus on lyrics about personal growth. On the fuzzy “september 13th,” Bey’s close-mic’d vocals lay out her intentions: “When I get out this hole that you dug for me/I’ma have a brand-new shiny new love for me.” Bey is disposing of those who no longer serve her, offering up soulful, empathetic music as an outlet for others to follow suit.

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Inspired by the grimness of the present moment and grief over a loved one’s death, the Detroit electro duo is at the height of its dark powers.

Becoming Undone

“We think, we write, we paint under pressure,” wrote the seminal queer theorist Leo Bersani: “a pressure that is in part the ‘knowledge’ the body has of its own death… It is a powerful formalizing element of the energy passing through the extended arm.” Or, as the electro-goth poet Martin L. Gore once wrote, “Death is everywhere.”
The pressure passed through Bersani, who reportedly passed away recently. And it passed through Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, better known as Detroit electro lifers ADULT. As the pair began work on what would become their ninth album, and the pandemic swelled to take its toll, Kuperus’ father took ill. They served as hospice caretakers until he expired. Bereft, they reached out toward new equipment, including a vocal loop pedal and Roland percussion pads, and used the pressure to fashion Becoming Undone, a brief and blistering collection that finds their dark arts at full power.
Mostly, they turn to the kind of vicious pop that has kept rapt fans devoted for nearly a quarter century. Their minimalism is malleable but endlessly evolving. “Undoing/Undone” is their most bulbous jam in years, a bit of knob-twiddling while the world burns. “My body lies,” Kuperus snarls, as if the desire to lose yourself on the dancefloor isn’t just another death drive. “I Am Nothing” dissolves the ego in an acid bath as a way to free the ass so the mind will follow. But “Our Bodies Weren’t Wrong” resists such release, clenching tighter and tighter in a kind of rictus grin while ropes of acid and techno weave a black patent-leather noose. The nasty bit of bounce “Fools (We Are…)” pisses all over such self-seriousness—literally, in the video, a piss-take of the incoming indie-sleaze revival that reads like some abject Cobrasnake x Paul McCarthy collab. If death is everywhere, clowns are also all around us.
Becoming Undone works the dance nerve well. But it also includes their first song without the life force of drum machines: “Teeth Out Pt.II,” a thick miasma of scuzz that Kuperus wanders through, clutching strings of words like lifelines. “Suddenly I will be solitary,” she lashes out. Synths oscillate, seances conjuring the ghosts of cruddy futures. The expert placement of the echoes, a sturdy architecture of ruins, bring to mind the vocal tics and tricks of Robert Ashley, as fertile a reference for ADULT.’s content as the crunch and rush of peak Robert Armani.
The hysterical “She’s Nice Looking” loops Kuperus into a choir with the acrobatic vocal fury of Judy Tenuta, Kathleen Hannah, and Maria Bamford reacting to construction-worker catcalls; digital handclaps land like slaps to the face. “Normative Sludge” is an exhuming sluice of brown noise, an electronic body music for a world in which a pandemic can take out a million bodies and the bodies of power argue over masks. “The particular artfulness with which each of us moves through space,” Bersani wrote, is “the expression, or pressing outward, of death’s inscription within our bodies.” It’s autographed upon the new ADULT. album. Its pressure forced out a gem.


T.I.'s scattershot 70-minute eighth album features guest spots from A$AP Rocky, R. Kelly, André 3000, Pink, Lil Wayne, Cee Lo Green, Meek Mill, and others.

Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head

The 13th song on T.I.'s awkwardly-titled new album Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head is called "Hello". This, in and of itself, is not noteworthy event: many rappers have made a song with that title. But T.I. has now made two: a completely different and altogether better song named "Hello" appeared on his world-conquering 2006 album King. "Hello" is not the worst song on Trouble Man, though its schlocky, "that guy from Goodie Mob ain't never coming back" Cee-Lo hook ensures it's not one of the good ones either. But the oversight of its title demonstrates almost every single design flaw of Trouble Man, which is simultaneously lazy and distracted, ignoring the lessons of the past and while offering reminders that it didn't have to be this way.
The real mystery of T.I.'s later albums is that there's no glimpse of the guy who can still absolutely destroy tracks when he's up to it. Witness non-LP one-offs like "Hear Ye, Hear Ye" or shift the "feat." so tracks like Rick Ross' "Maybach Music III", Drake's "Fancy", Future's "Magic" (Remix), "Big Beast", or "In the A", could all serve as a foundation for a phenomenal T.I. record that still manages to achieve the same goals of demonstrating his commercial clout as well as his artistic malleability. None of them sound anything like "24's", "Rubber Band Man", or "What You Know".
As with every studio album since King, Trouble Man promises a cohesive, thematically sound concept about The State of Clifford Harris that it can't deliver. At least he tries for a spell: Trouble Man is interspersed with re-creations of his multiple arrests and the introduction is indeed rapped over the Marvin Gaye original. But here's a list of the phrases that pop up within the first minutes of "The Introduction": "livin' on the edge," "push it to the limit," "catch me if you can," "I am who I am." T.I. has one of those voices where it's pleasure to hear him rap even if he's saying nothing at all, but is that really what you want?
If so, Trouble Man is 70 minutes and change of mostly that. "Trap Back Jumpin", "Go Get It", and "Addresses" are just more examples of the utilitarian trap muzik that pads out his recent work, the specificity and wisdom of which continues to have an inverse relationship with T.I.'s advancing age. More disheartening is how the tracks drawn from T.I.'s actual experience are sunk by cliché. "Wonderful Life" and "Hallelujah" close out Trouble Man by directly addressing T.I.'s prison bid, but whatever effect his personal disclosures may have is neutralized by taking the artistic path of least resistance: the latter leans on a Christ complex and Leonard Cohen, the former has Akon interpolating Elton John's "Your Song", which...I really do mind. And when Pharrell coined T.I.'s most famous accolade by calling him "the Jay-Z of the South," I don't think he meant it as a prediction that Tip would also make a track called "Guns 'N Roses" with an unbearable arena-rock chorus. Yeah, trading Lenny Kravitz for P!nk seems like progress on some level, but at least the one from Blueprint 2 was about McDonalds apple pies and hangin' with Bono, not a cheap-seats apology more suited to Eminem's Recovery.
The point was that T.I., like Jay-Z, can be a transcendental figure when he chooses, someone whose albums cause hip-hop to stop whatever it's doing so it can take inventory of where it currently stands. And to T.I.'s credit, he makes a few strides to get beyond a sound he basically perfected a decade ago. But he barely makes an attempt to keep up when he's trying to run with the kids: Meek Mill and A$AP Rocky have almost nothing in common stylistically, except for that they both outrap T.I. badly on their respective tracks. More worrisome is how T.I. gets lapped by his own peers. There's no shame in ceding the spotlight to Andre 3000, as he does on the phenomenal mea culpa "Sorry", but then you get the 2 Chainz-style molly & Red Bull cocktail "Ball", which answers the question of "man, how hard can that be?" with "harder than you think."
Part of the problem could be focus. The uneven and pop-oriented Paper Trail (Trouble Man's closest analog in the T.I. discography) had his biggest chart hits and even the long-forgotten No Mercy still went gold*.* Since then, T.I. authored a book, starred in a reality series, signed Iggy Azalea, curated a women’s clothing line, teased a collaboration album with B.o.B., and already promised a sequel to Trouble Man called He Who Wears the Crown. So in its own way, Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good.