David Rawlings finds news ways of inhabiting old folk music alongside his longtime musical partner Gillian Welch. There’s a crisp intimacy to his new solo effort, but also a self-awareness.

Poor David’s Almanack

Poor David’s Almanack is David Rawlings’ third album or his eighth, depending on how you count. In the last 10 years, he’s made two records as the Dave Rawlings Machine, a loose reference to the old Woody Guthrie slogan, but he’s made five more with his musical partner Gillian Welch under her name. They both play on each other’s record, they both inform the direction each other’s music takes, but they maintain separate musical identities. Yet, their combined catalog comprises perhaps the most ambitious and most peculiar corpus in roots music today, one that digs deep into the past to find neglected song forms and defiantly old-timey notions: new ways of old singing, of just inhabiting the music.
His latest is credited to just David Rawlings, but it features Welch and members of the Machine. He remains the most prominent personality on the album, and he’s a fine singer with a slightly nasal twang, a way of bleating his vowels that belies his New England origins. Listen to Rawlings dive into the chorus of “Lindsey Button,” drawing out each syllable: “A long time ago.” There’s a full decade in each word. He’s an even better guitar player, with a graceful picking style and a full bag of tricks. When he bends his notes on “Airplane,” he adds an earthbound dissonance to its airborne chorus. In his songwriting, Rawlings favors the repetition of the blues and the wily phrasing of folk. He rewrites the old tune “Cumberland Gap,” popularized by Guthrie and Lonnie Donegan, into a third-person tale of lost love and hard times.
Rawlings, Welch, and the backing players use the same instruments available to any roots musician, but very little roots music sounds quite like this. That’s partly due to Rawlings’ production. He’s lent his touch to albums by Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, and Dawes, and has a notoriously discriminating ear, to the extent that he and Welch are only just now releasing vinyl editions of their albums after 15 years of unsatisfactory test pressings. There’s a crisp intimacy to the record, but also a self-awareness. He and especially Welch were long dogged by criticisms of “inauthenticity,” which might have more to do with her L.A. origins, but they’ve managed to outlast them. Still, there is useful playacting to their music, as though they understand that any 21st century folk singer necessarily has some distance on their subject.
Folk music has traditionally spoken to its present moment, addressing contemporaneous events and circumstances: murders and mining disasters, economic downturns and income inequality. So you might listen to Poor David’s Almanack and wish Rawlings had more to say about 2017. “Yup” is about a woman too strong-willed for the devil to keep in Hell; “Good God a Woman” is about Adam pestering his Creator to hurry up with Eve. They might hint toward contemporary feminist attitudes, but that’s a stretch—and perhaps Rawlings intends it to be a stretch. “Money Is the Meat in the Coconut,” with its carnivalesque tone and tale of monkeys getting married, sounds like an old political cartoon set to music, its inspiring calamity long forgotten even as the monkeys keep stealing kisses.
Despite his obvious debts to Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Rawlings is no protest singer. His truest subject is not really the past—or, not merely the past. Rather, it’s the joy to be found in old songs, in old instruments, in old sounds, in old perspectives. Nearly every tune on Poor David’s Almanack has roots in something or someone specific. “Come on Over My House” is surely meant to echo Robert Johnson’s invitation in “Come on in My Kitchen,” recorded 80 years ago. Rawlings scrambles the scenario, speaking in the voice of a poor man in love with a woman above his station and repeating the refrain, “But I surely love you, surely love you!” Lusty but not leering, the song has a freewheeling pace, a bright and excitable tone grounded as much in the vocal harmonies as in the lyrics themselves. And that’s key to what distinguishes Rawlings from so many of his contemporaries: He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes.


A year after the soul singer’s death, the label that gave him a third chance collects his stray tracks, shaping a showcase for his incredible versatility.

Black Velvet

Charles Bradley lucked into the kind of third act that few people could ever imagine. His early years were filled with neglect and poverty, buoyed by his discovery of James Brown when he was 14. As an adult, he drifted back and forth across North America, working odd jobs and singing on the side. In 2002, Bradley finally happened to be in the right place at the right time—in New York City, just as Daptone’s retro-soul empire began to rise. Bradley heard about Daptone’s success with Sharon Jones, another singer specializing in soul from another era. He was in his mid-50s and moonlighting as a James Brown impersonator named “Black Velvet,” one of many monikers he used in service of his JB tribute. Bradley introduce himself to Daptone co-founder Gabriel Roth, who heard something within that gravelly rasp. He signed Bradley to Daptone, linked him with producer and guitarist Tom Brenneck, and released the single “Take It As It Come,” launching a partnership that lasted until Bradley’s death from stomach and liver cancer in September 2017.
Black Velvet rounds up the stray tracks Bradley made during his last decade, apart from his three studio albums for Daptone. Despite his illness, diagnosed just months after the release of 2016’s Changes, Brenneck didn’t abandon the idea of creating new music with Bradley. He wrote and recorded “Black Velvet” with his Menahan Street Band, the group that backed Bradley since his 2011 debut, No Time for Dreaming. But Bradley couldn’t muster the energy to sing it, so the instrumental plays here as a mid-album elegy: soft, slow, and sweet, a song in search of a singer.
The presence of the unsung “Black Velvet” suggests Bradley didn’t leave much in the vaults. Black Velvet runs a scant 10 tracks, just three of which are newly unearthed and completely finished: “Can’t Fight the Feeling,” “Fly Little Girl,” and “I Feel a Change,” each dating from a different phase of his brief career. Otherwise, the compilation gathers songs stranded on singles or released as bonus tracks; a deluxe edition contains “Stripped Down Mixes” of songs from Bradley’s first two albums, spare variations on the original recordings designed to showcase his voice. This may lessen the feeling of discovery for longtime Bradley watchers, but Bradley’s music was always about maintaining tradition, not discovery.
To that end, Black Velvet is a fitting tribute to the late singer, perhaps capturing the breadth of his appeal better than any of his actual albums. Black Velvet isn’t as cohesive or tight as 2013’s Victim of Love or the emotionally charged Changes. But its sampler nature showcases how Bradley could ease himself into any style of the classic soul era. The closest nod to Brown comes through the guttural growls of a deeply funky cover of Nirvana’s “Stay Away,” but the arrangement pulsates to fuzzy guitar more reminiscent of the paisley-bedecked Temptations than the Godfather Of Soul. Bradley leans closer to Otis Redding here, especially on a slightly stiff reading of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” Brenneck and the Menahan Street Band shake things up by adopting any number of sounds from the golden age of AM radio.
Black Velvet plays a little like a compilation of obscure vintage 45s. But listen closely, and the illusion dissipates. The production is a little too tidy, reliant on affectionate signifiers of classic soul that don’t necessarily allow the music to breathe. Paradoxically, the songwriting is loose. Bradley eschews lyrical precision for free-flowing imagery, as on “(I Hope You Find) The Good Life,” where he interpolates Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” The melodies can follow similarly elliptical routes. Such slips didn’t happen on stage, where Bradley could rely on the tricks he honed through years of hard work.
But that can be said of every one of his records: They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure. He could adapt to whatever Brenneck gave him, making music that sounds tantalizingly out of time—a quality that will not fade as the years roll on without him.


M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel reassemble the works of Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer into a playful fusion of electroacoustic music and electronic pop.

Matmos: *Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer *

Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer

The two men of Matmos are living rebukes to the idea that conceptual art is somehow scary and inaccessible. When they decide to make a track out of the sounds of a breast implant or a cow uterus, they’re challenging themselves not just to use those noises, but to make them sound funky and fun. In a recent interview with Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug, M.C. Schmidt—one half of the duo alongside his musical and romantic partner Drew Daniel—described being one of 10 people at an electroacoustic festival a few years ago; the problem, he believed, was that the venue had only invited “academic composers” to the festival, rather than putting up flyers and getting the word out to the public. “I feel like multi-channel electroacoustic music can and should be a populist/popular art form,” said Schmidt. “Just, for example, enjoyed by anyone who smokes marijuana.”
Their new album Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer integrates electroacoustic music and populist art in a very literal way. While most of the record is stylistically in line with the duo’s M.O. of mapping sounds from unconventional sources onto a rhythmic grid taken from electronic pop, all the sounds here are sourced from a sample pack the duo created from the electroacoustic works Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer made at the influential Polish Radio Experimental Studio in the 1960s and 1970s. The couple didn’t know Schaeffer’s music before Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute commissioned the sample pack, and it’s hard to blame them: Though popular in Poland, especially in the 1990s, Schaeffer is little known abroad. Recordings and performances of his pieces aren’t always easy to come by, but anyone who saw the awesome recent touring print of David Lynch’s Inland Empire will have heard his work.
The 11 pieces incorporated into the sample pack provided just about everything the duo could need for the album’s eight tracks. Choral samples take on the role that fake angel-choir presets generally play in electronic music, casting eerie chords to create a sense of grandeur and foreboding. It seems unbelievable that a ridiculously funky bit of frat-rock organ on “Cobra Wages Shuffle / Off! Schable w gurę!” could’ve come from Schaeffer, but nope, it’s from Schaeffer’s “E.S. Jazz.” (The titles are bilingual, and three are delightful anagrams for Schaeffer’s name.) A forest of bells criss-crosses the landscape of opener “Resemblage / Parasamblaż”—not the fairy-tale kind but gruff clanks that emphasize the fact of bells as percussion instruments. Then there are the honks. Matmos adores honks, and Schaeffer provides them with no shortage thereof.
In other words, it all sounds very much like a Matmos album, from the hyper-swung house beats to the way they introduce their tracks by spilling out their constituent pieces and then gradually assembling them into a coherent groove. The duo’s most novel stylistic gambit on Regards, excluding the album’s concept itself, is the splitting of the record into two distinct sides: five shorter and more rhythmic tracks on the first, three longer and more ambient cuts on the second—a sequencing that might make more sense on vinyl than an uninterrupted format like CD or streaming. The beat-free cuts are highlights of the duo’s recent catalog, especially the closing “Anti-Antiphon (Absolute Decomposition) / Anty-Antyfona (Dekonstrukcja na całego),” which slices the center out of their sound and leaves a gaping, ghostly, ominous void.
But, for the most part, the music here doesn’t push Matmos’ sound into unfamiliar territory so much as recreate it with new materials. While the sources of their sounds often impart the most elemental, essential bits of themselves—the wetness of the washing machine on Ultimate Care II, the sickly squish of the surgical procedures on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure—we don’t get much of that on Regards. What we’re left with is a great-sounding Matmos album constructed from bits of Schaeffer’s work. You probably won’t come away knowing much more about either the duo or the composer than you did before, but if it gets stoners curious enough to hit up their local electroacoustic festival, it’s a win all around.


A too-cautious sequel to the Louisville rapper’s breakthrough mixtape dangles fascinating production experiments but winds up returning to the script.

El Toro 2

When El Toro came out in 2019, EST Gee never ran out of spellbinding ways to describe his reality as a candy man and opp exterminator. The gravel in his voice emphasized the intensity of his survive-or-die narratives and paired sensationally with the production of ForeveRolling. It was then that Gee and his right-hand producer established a brand of music that would later allow them to transition from respected members of the underground hip-hop scene in Louisville to Billboard chart mainstays. Now having proved himself across the board, Gee’s development should be fully on display in the title’s second edition.
Except El Toro 2 is a tug of war between EST Gee’s usual formula—bars about flipping bricks and making his chopper sing—and fresher style experiments that emphasize a more melodic dispatch and an infusion of R&B and soul samples. As expected, EST Gee flaunts his unfiltered storytelling, lurid wordplay, and Midwestern-to-Southern flow. But El Toro 2’s groovier production palette sets it apart. On “Tuscan Perfume,” he abandons his usual jagged rapping to murmur about thugging through the pain over a hazy, pitched-up flip of Mary J. Blige’s “You Remind Me.” On the stunt-hard paean “Another Moment With Gotti”—which features the CMG head honcho and flips Willie Hutch’s 1974 interlude “Overture of Foxy Brown”—each bar cuts through the ethereal backdrop with precision. The pulse of “Back to a Time” is so saucy that any Kentucky native is bound to hit the John Wall dance.
EST Gee is constantly aiming for his sweet spot somewhere between trap and soul. But there are times when this formula falls flat. “Nobody Else” features posthumous contributions from Playa’s fallen member Static Major, though it fails to make Gee’s romantic tales and Static’s once in-demand vibratos a cohesive rap&b product. Elsewhere, Gee is mostly focused on his memories of family trauma, cheating death, and being unable to stray away from illicit activity. These are well-worn topics for him, and while he does his best to keep them interesting, the off-kilter flows don’t always work. On “Bad Guy” and “Toast,” his uneasy attempts at singing grind against the detonating production. The records feel like rough demos dusted off to beef up the tracklist and they prolong the problem with last year’s MAD, where he was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
El Toro 2 finds EST Gee stuck between the old and new versions of himself. When he takes more risks and diversifies his method and sound, it’s good. When he leans on the shield and raps in the same way that he did on the first edition of El Toro in 2019, it’s not. The rapping overall is pretty pristine. And the beat selections are A1. But does El Toro 2 signify a momentous change in Gee’s career? Not quite. He dabbles with the idea of taking things up a notch but sounds like he’s still trying to figure out what else he should do and how exactly he should do it.


In his first solo project since the group’s dissolution, the former Daft Punk member swaps his customary synths for a full orchestra—but some old habits die hard.

Mythologies

Even before Daft Punk announced their retirement in 2021, fresh updates from the duo were often old news: the release of bonus tracks, archival concert footage, album reissues. It was a welcome surprise, then, when Thomas Bangalter announced the release of Mythologies, his first full-length solo project in 20 years. It was even more surprising that the release was not an electronic record, but an orchestral score originally composed for Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet of the same name. This sharp left turn offers a look at Bangalter’s work beyond the dancefloor—and stripped of the helmet he was apparently all too ready to shed.
Mythologies embodies classical tradition, both musically and culturally, in 23 movements that draw inspiration from mythical tales and figures. Take “Le Minotaure”: The myth of the Minotaur concerns a half-man, half-bull monster created by a god’s vengeful curse. The creature is kept isolated in the center of the labyrinth until the hero Theseus slaughters it on a quest. Bangalter’s piece begins with low strings and grumbling brass, stopping and starting in bursts, anguished and suspenseful. Heavy timpani and syncopated rhythms give way to a lamenting violin solo that sounds like a reinterpretation of the central character of the myth: not a fearsome monster, but a lonely creature crying out into the darkness.
At first glance, these sprawling symphonic compositions bear little resemblance to Bangalter’s more recognizable club anthems and dance epics. But both mediums rely on balance, voicing, and form; both de-emphasize words, focusing instead on sound and atmosphere. Mythologies allows Bangalter to seek a different kind of satisfaction. As he said in an interview with The New York Times, “To write a chord or a melody and have the performers—human beings—play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”
While Bangalter might have wanted to distance himself from computers, lingering sensibilities from electronic music still seep into his compositions. Pieces like “Aphrodite,” “Zeus,” and “Circonvolutions” sound as though they are built on the loops of his past: a repeated arpeggio, a sequenced melody, the same articulation asserted over and over again. Though such repetition may suit a choreographer’s work, the technique grows wearisome across the album. With an entire orchestra at his disposal, the reliance on these mechanistic structures feels like a wasted opportunity to fully explore the expressive potential of the symphonic medium.
Mythologies can be captivating. The devastating “Icare” stretches upward bit by bit and tumbles through the sky like its story’s subject. “Danae,” the tale of a prophecy fulfilled, begins and ends with the same delicate dissonance of fluttering strings, a cyclical choice that imparts a sense of inevitability. A somber chorale theme appears in several pieces, nodding to the fundamentals of classical music and Bangalter’s appreciation of their storytelling potential. This melodic recurrence allows for moments of solace and reflection within the often dour source material, starkly at odds with his former duo’s habitually upbeat demeanor. Mythologies sounds like the work of an artist stepping out of his comfort zone in search of personal creative fulfillment. It might be equally rewarding for the listener if only any of these pieces were as memorable as Daft Punk’s songs.


The Sacramento duo’s 2002 debut album might be the platonic ideal of math rock, but its real joy lies in the way it seems to escape the bounds of logic altogether.

Hella: Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue)

Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue)

Has there ever been a genre name that sounded more eager to be shoved into a locker than math rock? Even the bands who spearheaded the sound—Polvo, Don Caballero, Ruins—distanced themselves from the term, rejecting the cold, dispassionate calculations that it conjures. Though legions of groups have wheeled out odd meters and looping pedals as if they were performing parlor tricks, those that transcended simple gimmickry tapped into something rawer and deeper. The bands that made the sound exciting in the first place are those who forced you to stop counting time altogether.
Sacramento’s Hella miraculously pulled this off by taking their calculus to its most extreme endpoint. They may have been the nerdiest band of them all: When they formed, guitarist Spencer Seim was in another group dedicated to playing Nintendo covers, while Zach Hill had dropped out of high school to play drums for as much as seven hours a day. Technical complexity was essential to their experimental style of noise rock, but it wasn’t the goal; Hella’s music followed a stream-of-consciousness logic, apparently spontaneous in spite of its intense choreography. The product of two California boys taking cues from Zeppelin, Zappa, and Hendrix, their music refracted vintage rock lore through a skater outcast mindset, all brewed in the cauldron of ’90s DIY. Together they created something that sounded like the platonic ideal of what math rock could be, while nevertheless existing in a brain-rewiring universe all its own.
The band came about by accident. Their high school quartet Legs On Earth fell apart after their lead vocalist fell into heroin addiction, and Seim and Hill realized they weren’t going to be able to find any other musicians to play the kind of music they were envisioning. Slowly the two of them oriented their songs to be played by just a guitarist and drummer. Seim would double-tap his basslines while Hill searched for what he called “invisible pockets”—intervals he could reorganize his rhythms around to create new patterns that wouldn’t make sense in a normal meter. Their debut, Hold Your Horse Is, was a deliriously adventurous hybrid of punk and prog that thrashed with playful violence. Though later dalliances with OutKast-style double albums and expanded lineups demonstrated the band’s restlessness, Hold Your Horse Is remains the most thrilling snapshot of Hill and Seim’s frantic, far-out chemistry.
Kill Rock Stars has remastered and reissued the album to celebrate its 21st birthday, with the band’s original three-track label demo included as an extra 7"—a charmingly scrappy snapshot of an ambitious young duo working out its sound in the garage. The album has lost none of its power: When the Game Boy menu music of “The D. Elkan” first slams into “Biblical Violence,” Hill’s snares come crashing down like hail shattering through a sunroof. As Seim nimbly sprinkles triplets up and down the fretboard, Hill tosses grindcore blast beats and jazzy cymbals together as if they were always meant to be complementary flavors. In these songs, the guitarist’s and drummer’s roles are reversed, with Seim’s spidery riffs acting as a grounding agent for Hill to batter his instrument to kingdom come. The timbres of the drumming are as dazzling as the speed—utilizing custom-fitted pieces of trash and metal appliances in addition to his worn-out gear, Hill’s sound is coarse and rich, each snare hit colliding with such scalding power that listening to it for too long can start to make you sweat.
Hill sought to create a visual experience with his playing, both in his use of everyday objects and in the sheer neighbor-waking force of his attack (he broke so many drumsticks during sets that he once planned to build a bed frame out of the splinters). Hold Your Horse Is is surprisingly textured for an album that mostly consists of just two instruments, and the new remaster fills out the bassier end nicely. One doesn’t nod along to the beats so much as chase after them, and at a certain point all you can do is surrender to the endless churn. Still, as dense as the duo’s compositions are, they flow naturally. In “Republic of Rough and Ready,” Seim and Hill approach their riffs as if they were taking turns loosening a rope, then snapping it tight again; “Better Get a Broom!” seems to wobble in and out of time, like a spinning plate about to topple over.
Though it’s hard to ignore Hill as the star of the show, Seim deserves equal credit for his inventively odd tunings and twisty playing. Take “1-800-Ghost-Dance,” whose midsection descends into a dizzying whirlpool of notes swirling and sloshing against one another, or the stern central riff of “Republic of Rough and Ready,” which blows wide open in the bridge as he taps out a melody that rains down like fighter jets careening through the sky. The tracks on Hold Your Horse Is work precisely because they’re actually songs, complete with arcs and recurring themes and, above all, feeling. As precise as Hella could be, the driving principle of these tracks is the messy, human intensity behind them—a frenzied conviction that seemed to find the kinship between the chaos of John Zorn, the electricity of Melt-Banana, and the bugged-out lunacy of their beloved Primus.
Hella’s legacy is so singular, it’s all the more remarkable that Hill went on to have a second life as the percussive muscle behind Death Grips. In both bands, Hill has communicated a very specific language—one speaking directly to a generation slowly becoming more plugged into the mainframe—of tension and release. Though some may have accused Hella of being too intellectualized, or impossible to headbang to, watching live videos from those early shows paints a different picture: scrawny kids giddily vibrating in place, shaking their bodies as best they can to indecipherable beats. In eschewing conventional time signatures, Seim and Hill tapped into an unfolding tesseract of rhythm, as if imparting to listeners that the best way to move is to just let their own internal pulse take over, and let that incalculable energy guide the way.


Farben (German for 'colors') is a poetic moniker for a Berlin's Jan Jelinek, because he claims to be influenced ...

Textstar

Farben (German for 'colors') is a poetic moniker for a Berlin's Jan Jelinek, because he claims to be influenced more by painting than music. It's not hard to imagine Jelinek's music as the aural equivalent of a Rothko canvas-- clear geometric structure made soft and ambiguous through warm tone, blurred hue, and an exacting sense of detail. As Jelinek has made albums under his own name and as Gramm (derived from 'kilogram'), he's continued to release EPs under the name Farben, and the good folks at Klang Elektronik have been kind enough to collect some of highlights as Textstar.
This nine-track CD draws material from the EPs Farben Featuring the Dramatics, Beutone, Raw Macro, and Farben Says: Don't Fight Phrases. An expanded vinyl set called Starbox contains all the original EPs, complete with a total of six tracks not on the CD. Yet, despite this being a collection of material from previous releases, Jelinek's sonic style is so distinct and consistent that Textstar feels like a singular work.
The borders are porous, but generally speaking, Jelinek uses Farben to represent his most upbeat, danceable music, the stuff that would fit nicely under the heading 'microhouse.' Most of the tracks here have a house foundation, usually a sub-bass kick drum deep enough to blow the speakers in Luke Skyywalker's Jeep paired with a high-hat cast from a tiny scrape of static. The tracks have a structure much closer to pop music than Jelinek's later work, with variations that seem analogous to the verse/chorus/bridge/chorus template, and short melodic phrases that could be best described as riffs. Tying it all together is a supremely dubby production philosophy, where each sound is endlessly tweaked and filtered until it serves the overall design of the track.
Despite the consistently bare-bones approach of the sound, Jelinek always keeps things interesting. He has an uncanny ability to make a handful of sounds do an enormous about of work. Rhythmic, textural and melodic elements are handled by an array of squelches, clicks, and washes, all anchored by wall-rattling bass. The instruments are juggled into compositions that seem constantly in motion. Unlike an artist such as SND, Jelinek's songs are loose, wet, rubbery and unpredictable, unfolding according to some odd internal logic.
Take "Beautone." After an intro comprised of a slightly awkward rhythm tapped on a virtual woodblock, a commanding house beat takes over. The bass is a squelchy 303 that seems to be running in unpredictable circles around the programming, and the chords just might be the ghosts of some Hammond organ Jelinek pulled off one of his jazz records. A couple of minutes in, a sample of an easy-listening wash of strings and flute punctuates the chorus, providing the track with a disorienting and humorous twist that nonetheless seems like it was designed to fit into this precise spot.
Another dizzying but funky track is "Live at the Sahara Tahoe, 1973" (titled after the Isaac Hayes live LP). Several elements each seem to be keyed into their own separate, but complimentary rhythms: a churning synth loop and sampled cymbal lag slightly behind the crisp beat; an electro-inspired breakdown of faint laser-gun sounds repeats for two bars and never returns; a gorgeous orchestral sample, heavily processed and seemingly beamed in from another dimension, forms the track's emotional core.
By contrast, "Farben Says: So Much Love" is Jelinek at his sleekest and most elegant. The deep, sensual bass hammers home an elastic riff of pure technofunk, and the microscopic high-hat is like the smallest possible unit of what can be considered a sound. Between these sonic poles is an ever-shifting pool of warm chords, off-beat, jazz-inspired rhythm accents executed on glitchy percussion, and a sexy, whispered female voice saying something about getting a haircut.
Textstar is a sonic feast if you want to dissect the myriad timbres and underlying structure, but you'll probably just want to turn off your mind and dance. And that's alright. Either way, it's clear that Jelinek is one of the most inventive producers working in this field today. This compilation is a must-own.


After more than a decade away, guitarist John Frusciante returns for the band’s first album in six years, a restrained and familiar effort to recapture an old spark in a new era.

Unlimited Love

From their multi-platinum peaks to their sad, desperate lows, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have always aspired toward a humble goal: to make you feel like you’re in the practice space with them, zoning out and goofing around, watching three exceptionally talented musicians and their extremely jacked singer spitballing ideas and keeping each other entertained. It’s an intimate bond that has fostered an intense connection among their fans. But it’s also opened them up for harsh scrutiny. When a relationship is built on these simple pleasures—jammin’ and rappin’ and slappin’ the bass, cramming your lyrics with cartoonish sex talk and rock history allusions, calling your reunion album Unlimited Love and really meaning it—it’s easy to feel you’ve outgrown it.
If audiences have sometimes felt that way, imagine how John Frusciante must feel. He first joined the Chili Peppers in the late 1980s, a teenage virtuoso helping shape his favorite group’s horned-up funk-rock into something more melodic. He quit in 1992 while touring their commercial breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik, then returned in 1998 as the mystical, fragile heart of their most fruitful period. Even if you don’t like the band, you can at least acknowledge that his inventive solos, layered vocal harmonies, and wide-ranging influences have always been attempts to make the music more artful and ambitious (or, at the very least, more like the Cure).
Unlimited Love—the Chili Peppers’ first album in six years and first with Frusciante in 16—recaptures their natural camaraderie. At once live-sounding and restrained, it’s Frusciante’s first record with the band where none of the songs sound remotely like anything on mainstream radio, which maybe speaks more to the times than the group’s efforts. The last time Frusciante recorded with them, on 2006’s double album Stadium Arcadium, their riffy, pile-driving anthems felt at home alongside hits by fellow, enduring Gen X peers like Foo Fighters and Green Day. On Unlimited Love, which arrives nearly 40 years into the band’s career and makes no concessions to any prevailing trends of popular music in 2022, the Chili Peppers sound like no one but themselves.
In fact, they sound a lot like themselves. After testing the waters with replacement guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who debuted on 2011’s I’m With You, and new collaborator Danger Mouse, who produced 2016’s The Getaway, the goal here is to act like no time has passed, settling back into their old magic and maybe finding some winners to slot between the hits in their live set. Grungy first single “Black Summer” and glittery funk throwback “She’s a Lover” should do the trick, but even mid-tempo cuts like “Bastards of Light” find satisfying payoffs from the moody, patient songcraft they attempted during their tentative past decade in the wilderness. As for the lyrics, there’s a song that seems to be about traffic in Los Angeles; another about how good the music was in the ’70s. There are some veiled references to aging and grief and climate change. There’s a chorus that promises (threatens?) that Anthony Kiedis’ “aquatic mouth dance is waiting for you”; there’s another where he argues how cool it would be if the great apes could roam free.
It’s nothing new, but that’s kind of the point. Every decision seems to be pulled from a dog-eared manual of how this band operates at its best. To their credit, everything still plays to their strengths, from Rick Rubin’s stark production to the overcrowded tracklist, like all their best albums—long and rangey, stacked with crowd singalongs near the beginning and woolier, destined-to-be fan favorites at the end. Along the way, you’ll hear all the trademarks of those old chestnuts: intricate, popping bass from Flea, climactic snare thwacks from Chad Smith, and some rhymes from Kiedis that I’ll do everyone a favor by not quoting out of context. (If I must: “Please, love, can I have a taste?/I just wanna lick your face.”)
As for Frusciante’s contributions, it’s a pleasure hearing him play rock guitar again, after a decade mostly occupied by left-field electronic experiments. I have sometimes gotten the sense he views his role in the band like a logic problem—a challenge to expand their limited vista without completely overhauling it, once going so far as to filter all his solos through a modular synth rig—and his innovations here are humble but rewarding. I look forward to reading the Guitar World interview that explains how he recreated Adrian Belew’s distant-seagull slide sound from “Matte Kudasai” in “Not the One,” or how he landed on the beautiful, jazzy register for his vocal harmonies in the muted chorus of “Aquatic Mouth Dance.” He has cited early psychedelic bands like the Move as an influence, and the dry, chunky crush of his solos in “The Great Apes” and “The Heavy Wing” hits with fresh inspiration.
In the latter song, one of the best here, Frusciante elbows Kiedis out of the way to sing the chorus himself—a move he last attempted on “Dosed,” a tender highlight from 2002’s By the Way. That album arrived during the peak of Frusciante’s creative powers in the band, after he brushed off the dust from his comeback and took fuller control of their sound. Like last time, some 20 years ago, there’s apparently a lot more where this came from: The band claims they’ve already got enough material for a follow-up, and the worst moments on Unlimited Love have the feeling of jams sculpted into songs as quickly as possible, while everyone’s still giddy and no one has the chance to raise concerns like, “Haven’t we written this before?” or “Should we try a take where Anthony doesn’t sing like a pirate?”
Granted, this impulsive nonchalance has always been part of the Chili Peppers’ appeal. The other day at the bar I found myself defending their music to some friends. I gestured vaguely toward the hooks, the confidence, the sadness below the surface, the grain of Frusciante’s playing. It was difficult. Growing up as a classic rock kid in the late ’90s, their songs just so happened to be the ones that caught my attention on MTV, at public pools, in CD players in my friends’ basements. I was mostly drawn to the mood—the feeling that these fun, dangerous, frequently shirtless dudes from California were letting me hang with them for 70-minute intervals.
Blocking out its sentimental appeal, the music on Unlimited Love is tested by familiar pressures of late-era releases from successful rock bands: balancing the risk of self-parody with the need to live up to people’s nostalgia, knowing they’ve already written the music they’ll be remembered for but still wanting to keep the ride going. Like a lot of these types of albums, Unlimited Love is competent and comforting—its creators rarely try to grab your attention but never totally embarrass themselves either. (Well, maybe a little during the rap verses in “Poster Child.”) If you’re not on board, then there’s little reason to hop on now. But if you are, or ever have been, then one day you might find yourself like me, looking into some inquisitive, unsympathetic eyes, trying to articulate what you recommend about this ridiculous, once-radical band. Unlimited Love won’t be the first thing that springs to mind—but that doesn’t mean you won’t be glad it exists.


Amid newfound success, the soulful Los Angeles singer voices the anxieties of growing up and meeting creative expectations during turbulent times.

Lost EP

A year has passed since the tender 23-year-old songwriter and soul singer Brent Faiyaz released his breakthrough album, Sonder Son, a pensive and dreamy glimpse at his DMV-to-LA odyssey. During that span, he’s earned a Grammy nomination and the praise of Drake and Tyler, the Creator. But the title and tone of his follow-up, the six-song EP Lost, suggests that the singer who recently lamented his classroom troubles and anxieties about moving to Los Angeles in song still feels misdirected. Sharing a name with his label and crew, Lost ably embodies the isolation and anxiety of these tunes, with hookups and friends alike passing in and out of Faiyaz’s life. He seeks solace in self-reliance or companionship—any way out of feeling alone, really.
Lost is more vulnerable and succinct than Sonder Son, a charming introduction that probed his upbringing. It starts on “Why’z It So Hard” with an unflinching reflection on race and injustice. Over complicated crisscrossing harmonies and a beat that seems to droop beneath its own sadness, he reflects on being marginalized and degraded as a young black man: “Why they wanna see me dead?/I ain’t even grown yet/Baby, you got too much to offer/That’s prolly why they want you in a coffin.” He’s speaking to power dynamics that hover like a guillotine and how black brilliance is treated as a threat to white hegemony. During “Came Right Back,” his soft voice stretches over scintillating guitars and uneasy piano chords covered in static. The deconstructed ballad soon disappears into a conversation where Faiyaz ponders the burdens of promise. Lost is a wunderkind’s search for catharsis, a quest to find his voice while battling demons of self-doubt.
Faiyaz contemplates his relationships with loyalty and faith; he’s continually questioning or checking the intentions of others and himself, having recognized that social media has made the prospect of privacy during a rise toward fame almost impossible. With this in mind, the EP’s centerpiece, “Trust,” is its thorniest moment. Layered vocals and resentful ad libs haunt the track with grief and contention. “You told me I could trust you/And I could really use it,” he sings. He is disoriented, his voice splintering in multiple directions, a tree damaged by lightning. Instead of picking up the pieces himself, he searches again for comfort in a companion. “But I just wanna feel love,” he calls out, confessing he’s vulnerable with or without a connection.
Although he largely trades in the tender Spanish guitar licks of his past work for luxuriating synths and terse hi-hats here, Faiyaz continues to use skits and sound effects to give these songs context. The cries of sirens and the crackle of rain make the hardships of “Why’z It So Hard” clear. While he chats with his friends about his artistic progress amid the hum of passing cars during “Came Right Back,” we hear that, although the world around him brims with adversity, he’s proud of his trajectory and confident in his abilities. Rather than veil himself in anonymity to foster a sense of mystery, like the vintage version of the Weeknd, Faiyaz instead cozies up to transparency and vulnerability. He’s advocating not only for himself but others who may feel lost. As he poignantly reminds us during the unexpected spectral coda of “Poundz,” his voice powered by sudden conviction, “You can’t lose your faith/You can be what you want when you get older.”


Reissued by Temporal Drift, this recording of the mysterious Japanese psych-rock band’s loud, legendary 1993 set at Club Citta’ is the best they’ve ever sounded.

CITTA’ ’93

For decades, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ legacy has been plagued by myth and misdirection. The Kyoto-based psych-rock ensemble, founded in 1967 by guitarist and vocalist Takashi Mizutani, never recorded a studio album. Instead, their trance-inducing jams, blanketing the atmosphere in thick haze, spread through the Japanese underground (and eventually to Western shores) via rampant bootlegging of their live shows. Most of the recordings were of such poor quality that it’s difficult to hear anything but walls of harsh noise. Mizutani—so reclusive that even his bandmates had trouble keeping contact with him—avoided giving interviews or making any public appearances, leaving space for rumors and fantastical tales, like that of member Moriaki Wakabayashi participating in the hijacking of a commercial flight and subsequently getting exiled to North Korea.
Mizutani wasn’t a fan of any of this: the lack of control from all the bootlegging, low quality of the recordings, and accompanying artwork that didn’t suit his vision. The first officially sanctioned Les Rallizes Dénudés releases—a trio of live shows released by the label Rivista in 1991—were the only ones with his blessing. So Mizutani got in contact with former bassist Makoto Kubota, who left the band in the mid-’70s, to inform him of his interest in properly remastering and releasing the endlessly pirated live shows, starting with recordings from the fabled Tokyo venue OZ where they first made a name for themselves. Then Kubota didn’t hear from Mizutani for the next three decades. They finally got back in touch in 2019, but communication dropped again. Kubota feared something had gone wrong. Later that year, his suspicion was confirmed when he received word that Mizutani had suddenly passed away.
Kubota was determined to see his late friend’s wish come to fruition. He got to work retooling the OZ shows and the Rivista albums in preparation for reissues on Temporal Drift. While those releases were still in the pipeline, something unexpected was uncovered—a recording of the band’s performance from Club Citta’ in 1993. The concert, which was their second public appearance during a brief comeback in the ’90s, had been circulated as a bootleg for many years and was notorious for being one of the band’s most intense shows. Three speakers blew out; the front doors swung open and attendees rushed out to escape the noise. The newly found audio beggared belief—it was chronicled on state-of-the-art ADAT magnetic tape, recorded without Mizutani’s knowledge. The audio therein would be, without a doubt, the best LRD would ever sound, and Kubota would spend hundreds of hours over several months slaving over it.
Nearly as soon as the Citta’ set starts, the total sensory assault begins. “The Night, Assassin's Night” begins with a thumping drum pattern, which quickly gets washed away by a cascade of feedback from Mizutani’s amp. It’s a stylish way to kick things off, and also a happy accident; rhythm guitarist Katsuhiko Ishii recounts that Mizutani’s instrument wasn’t plugged in, unleashing a rush of noise. Unperturbed, Mizutani stuck the landing and launched straight into a solo, all while drummer Kodo Noma continued to play without missing a beat. It’s a powerful illustration of Les Rallizes Dénudés’ unflappable cool.
LRD’s sets were always unpredictable. The group rarely played a song the same way twice, and at Club Citta’ they go all out; staples of their catalog appear here as some of their best renditions. On the fan favorite “White Awakening,” they slowly work up to a frenetic pace before Mizutani suddenly detonates into a fuzzed-out solo. (Compare it to the slow and contemplative version on The OZ Tapes, which may as well be a totally different song.) The unprecedented fidelity helps to illuminate dimensions of Mizutani’s musicianship never heard before. On the bootleg recording, a tidal wave of static washes over the mix when he slams down his pedal, drowning out the finer textures; here, his nimble shredding is on full display. LRD’s traditional set closer “The Last One” benefits most from the deluxe treatment, its sludgy riffs ramping up and descending to fill a transcendent 40 minutes—the longest the band has ever jammed on one song.
Kubota would take particular care to preserve the electric live energy of the event, augmenting the digital audio with sounds from multiple sources—a process he likens to “restoring an ancient Buddhist statue.” You can hear these techniques clearly on the bluesy “Deeper Than the Night”; crowd ambience can be heard between the steady shuffling groove and tortured screams from Mizutani’s guitar, spliced in from various cassette recordings made inside the club. The echo was also meticulously adjusted on Mizutani’s vocals to approximate how they reverberated around the venue, his wails hanging on the air like cries from a vengeful specter. It’s the closest any LRD release feels to being in the room with them.
Rather than spoiling the mystery of Les Rallizes Dénudés, CITTA’ ‘93 is a revelatory document that shows their vibrant color. Makoto Kubota and Temporal Drift have gone above and beyond in addressing Mizutani’s frustrations, reuniting the music with the context it’s always been lacking. Now the picture is fuller; you can more clearly hear the ways in which Les Rallizes Dénudés resembled their peers—taking cues from the acid rock of Flower Travellin’ Band and the freewheeling spirit of Taj Mahal Travellers—while setting themselves apart in explosively loud style. If there’s this much to appreciate below the surface of just one legendary recording, imagine what more can still be discovered.


With a crew of equally radical peers in tow, the Atlanta band’s new album is a dissonant but hopeful statement about dreaming up a better world.

Shook

Algiers’ politics are not subtle: For starters, they draw their name from a place once at the heart of the anti-colonial struggle. The Atlanta band’s lyrics are staunchly anti-capitalist, fueled by the righteous anger of people who know exactly how we got here and who’s to blame. Moreover, frontperson Franklin James Fisher is hyper-aware of his place as a Black frontman in a white industry—and of how the band’s values inform the way they’re perceived. While their debut was tight and focused, the group has sometimes buckled under the weight of their own bombast, hunched like Atlas as they carry a burden so great it threatens to crush them. But Shook, while characteristically dark and deadly serious, feels different. It’s a record built around community, evidence that when the struggle is shared with like-minded peers, it feels lighter. So does the music.
The group draws from an eclectic palette (gospel, blues, rap, jazz, R&B, metal, spoken word), creating a chaotic patchwork underpinned by industrial drums and synths. As influences, they cite producers DJ Premier and DJ Screw; first-wave New York punks Dead Boys; East Berlin post-punks Dïat; Memphis MC Lukah; and the rappers of Buffalo, NY crew Griselda. It’s intentionally disparate, but you can see where the dots connect: The way Premier and Screw used wildly different ways to manipulate previously recorded material; both the New York and German bands’ sneering tone, which drips with sarcasm; and the outsider ethos of rappers spiritually connected to New York City, even if they’re physically distant from it. It’s difficult to pinpoint, but these ostensibly paradoxical legacies intertwine all throughout Shook.
The characters that populate the album help narrow the scope of their rage, zooming in on individual perspectives and experiences. When the rapper-producer Backxwash raps, “The news said I was looney/Till poof, happens to you” on “Bite Back,” she does so in a world that seeks to criminalize her existence, in a verse that leans heavily on the infamous manhunt of former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner. When Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha barks, “What it be, God?/No rehab for my jihad” on “Irreversible Damage,” he does so from the heart of his band’s radical ethos.
Yet no figure has as much influence on the overarching message of the LP as Big Rube, the spoken word poet best known for his Dungeon Family affiliation and his narration on classic OutKast records. The rumbling bass tones of Rube’s voice, which are peppered throughout the album, instantly lend Shook a strong sense of place, declaring from jump that this record is a product of Atlanta. And there’s a gentleness to his speech, its weathered texture hinting at hardships endured. He serves as the record’s—and in some ways, the city’s—conscience, the wise old uncle willing to give you the unvarnished truth.
The themes on Shook are often bleak. But wherever there is struggle, there is also joy. The skit “Comment #2” features the activist An Do, who speaks about how marginalized communities struggle to be seen outside of the context of their oppression. When your experience of pleasure is erased, and your identity reduced to your most tragic moments, your status as “other” is solidified. Still, there’s not much handholding here—listening to Shook, it can be difficult to find moments of levity amid the suffering and rage. Instead, its brief buoyancy is camouflaged: Consider the battered optimism of the instrumental breakdown on “Irreversible Damage” (“That’s what hope sounds like in 2022 when everything’s falling apart,” Fisher said in a statement upon the song’s release), or the “brown skin shining against the sun” in LaToya Kent’s poetic performance on “Born.”
That said, the group sounds most natural at their darkest—the reverbed growl of guitars, the synths colored with dirt and grime. They benefit from Matt Tong’s virtuosic drumming, which feels looser and more alive than any drum machine. While much of their early work stuck closely to standard pop song structures, they seem less restricted by convention than ever, building on the sound collages found on their tour mixtapes and one-off projects, like “Can the Sub Bass Speak?” (a reference to the foundational Gayatri Spivak essay). The Mark Cisneros collaboration “Out of Style Tragedy,” which starts with Fisher’s spoken word over a Sun Ra refrain, layers sample after sample until it unravels into dissonant noise. The link to Shook World, the mixtape that collaborator King Vision Ultra crafted from the album’s stems, is clear. Though Shook World’s raw, freewheeling structure often veers into the chaotic, ironically, the individual pieces that comprise Shook come into focus once deconstructed from their final form. Fisher’s words never ring clearer than when they’re cutting through the cacophony.
An Algiers record often requires some heavy lifting in order for the listener to fully engage. Usually, it’s easier to fit the pieces together if you’re familiar with the political references, or if you’ve already been living under colonialism’s yolk. But Shook feels more urgent, more arresting, with performances that draw you into their world. In part, it’s because the band has become a conduit for the community they’ve built, their work elevated by their own mutual admiration society. If we are indeed the company we keep, the Algiers coalition is strong, talented, and not about to go down quietly.


On his third album, Sam Hall performs lo-fi keyboard-trap doused in the same ecstasy produced by fleeting interactions with your middle-school crush.

Bunny

As its Gen Z affiliates funnel into the mainstream, the definition of “bedroom pop” is murkier than it used to be. But in 2014, before Cuco penned a celebration of his modest Honda, before Gus Dapperton sold Urban Outfitters-exclusive vinyl, and before Clairo sighed at the shallow demands of being a “pretty girl,” New York City-based label Orchid Tapes had a more intimate vision in mind. They presented their blueprint on a compilation released that year, Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes, featuring early cuts from low-key songwriters like (pre-Sandy) Alex G, Yohuna, and the multiple aliases of Sam Ray. Sam Hall, a more recent addition to the Orchid Tapes roster, performs lo-fi keyboard-trap as Ghost Orchard; he created his third album, Bunny, by himself at his Michigan home.
Hall, 21, wrote more than 300 songs for Bunny after moving in with his partner of only a few months. This is an album of goopy love songs, each doused in the same ecstasy produced by fleeting interactions with your middle-school crush. It’s naive and a little cheesy, but Hall’s rosy optimism feels fresh in a genre overrun by “sad boy” tropes. “Station,” one of the album’s brightest moments, is an amalgamation of acoustic strums, stuttering beats, and budding romance. Tracing the map from his hometown to Chicago, Hall details a new relationship in a world where his biggest obstacle is public transportation: “At the station/Ticket in my palms, I can feel my hands shaking… Take the 9 back just to feel your hands in mine.” It’s a sweet reminder of how vast the world feels at 18, though it reads like a page from a John Green novel.
Bunny’s title track is one of the few times Hall begins to consider that love might require some effort after all. “Maybe we’re moving too fast/But we’re having so much fun,” he sings. “Lord knows we both have our differences.” Still, his devotion permeates the song: “I’m in this,” he promises, sounding committed—at least for now.
These and other guitar-driven tracks (“Carousel,” “Balloon,” “First Time”) feel most natural for Hall, whose past projects spotlighted grainy, lilting riffs. Bunny uses more electronic instruments than he’s put to tape before, but his experimentation doesn’t always equate to originality: “Guess” sounds like a rejected Hot Chip song, while opener “Witness” could suit Joji’s warbly SoundCloud verses, and closer “Honeymoon” feels like a Xerox copy of Rex Orange County’s sunkissed R&B.
On paper, Bunny’s hip-hop-meets-six-string aesthetic could easily lump Ghost Orchard with the type of tacky pop-rap crooner dying to convince you that he’s a bad boy with a sensitive side. But Hall’s earnestness feels genuine. He still has some maturing to do: His simple lyrics about young love and summertime outings recall the salad days of school vacation. But Bunny is lighthearted, inoffensive, textbook bedroom pop, and it doesn’t try to be more. It’s nice to imagine that love and coming-of-age could be so painless.


Memphis rapper proves himself a conflicted thinker, with an outsider/insider perspective that merges the personal and the political.

Digital Lows

Cities Aviv begins "Fuckeverybodyhere" with a swaggering declaration: "I could say some chill shit, but fuck all that." Given the song's hazy production--Steely Dan's "Midnight Cruiser" hammered into jagged boom-bap-- the impulse to lapse into laconic stoner rap makes sense, but nothing plays out quite so predictably on Digital Lows.
And so, in a drunken RZA-like flow, the Memphis rapper narrates his heroic origin story ("Bluff City born with a mic in my palm, I came up out the womb spittin' in the rarest of form"), hilariously big-ups himself ("In this 8-bit world I'm Bowser"), and mockingly croons the song's shit-talk title. Even the usual hip-hop clichés are afforded specificity thanks to his expressive wit and precise determination not to use words in the same exact way as every other rapper. He describes the girls he's pulling in by joking, "as a youngin' jerkin' off I could never picture this," and refers to his haters as "voyeurs."
Dude's got personality. He's a conflicted, searching thinker, with an outsider/insider perspective that merges the personal and the political, and lashes-out against the street mentality that mocks his forward-thinking hip-hop. "Niggas say I dress white," he observes a little hurt, and retorts, "flow must be cocaine." He also makes a joke about "white bitches" whose "favorite band is Mr. Bungle," which is just really funny. A few years ago this would be derisively called "hipster rap," but that kind of categorical thinking has been pleasantly deconstructed by now.
Digital Lows also has a group of out-of-nowhere, brilliant producers (Muted Drone, RPLD GHOSTS, Danny Dee, and others) behind it, all of whom contribute imaginative but still traditionalist beats. "Black Box" gives Gil Scott-Heron's "Winter in America" a blunted beatmaker refix. "Die Young" loops the intro to Depeche Mode's "People Are People" and turns the new wave classic into a hybrid of Rammellzee's avant-rap and Southern fight-rap. Three 6 Mafia's subtle influence on this next-generation Memphis rapper always manifests itself in subtle, indirect ways like that. "A Beautiful Hell", "Doom x Gloom", and "sixsixsixes" invoke Three 6 shock rap at moments when Cities, usually thoughtful and witty, sounds at the end of his rope, far beyond "fuck it"-- so he lets loose with lines like, "we fuck broads on the cross and they gulp the semen."
For contrast, placed between "Doom x Gloom" and "sixsixsixes" is "Meet Me on Montrose (For Ex-Lovers Only)", a bittersweet love story based on a sample of "Oh Lori" by the Alessi Brothers, which is quite possibly the least "hard" song ever made. "Voyeurs" lobs goofy disses at fellow rappers ("In a city full of fake Rick Rosses/ I rock Cuban link chains with inverted crosses") and ends with a burst of digitized noise before giving way to hopeful album closer "Float On", a wizened freestyle over Blackbird Blackbird's cover of the Modest Mouse hit. Balance is important here, and the darkest moments of Digital Lows soon enough let up to highlight Cities Aviv's most winning quality: his mordant humanity.


Under a gray sky of grief, the Detroit post-punks’ sixth album makes space for skulking grooves, shoegaze-y experimentation, and a Baja Blast that’s always half full.

Protomartyr: Formal Growth in the Desert

Formal Growth in the Desert

The symbolic and literal centerpiece of Protomartyr’s new album Formal Growth in the Desert is “Graft Vs. Host,” a song about forcing yourself to experience happiness after a crushing loss. In Joe Casey’s typically circuitous and surreal lyrics, Detroit bars and locals transform into poetically abstracted iconography and overheard asides become barked choruses. Here, the way he writes about his late mother is quiet and direct. “She’d want me to try and find happiness in a cloudless sky,” he sings. Alex Leonard’s rumbling drums back Scott Davidson and Greg Ahee’s ominous simmer, but all the heft falls away for a few overwhelming melodic tones—bursts of light through the darkness. Casey doesn’t always sound particularly convinced, but Formal Growth feels like an earnest attempt to get there.
Ahee, the guitarist and album co-producer, has said that scoring short films informed the process of assembling these songs, and Casey’s bandmates assist him by summoning positivity even when that feels impossible. Take the start of side two, when after 11 years and six albums spent gradually evolving toward a big, sweeping indie-rock sound, Protomartyr charge in with the thrashing guitars and fuzz-caked bass solos of their punk foundation. Casey, in his trademark mumbled bark, muses about the estimated 3,800 tigers known to survive in the wild. At first this grim statistic darkens his view of humanity—there’s “far too many of you fools”—but soon the broad ruminations give way to “write what you know” riffing. As if compelled by the logo on his hat, Casey starts in about Detroit Tigers legend “Sweet Lou” Whitaker and turns the hometown chant “eat ’em up, Tigers” into a howled command. The tug-of-war between endangered wildlife and a baseball team (extinction and a beacon, desert and growth) is classic Protomartyr—an unrelenting tension anchored by a Detroit institution they know like the backs of their hands. It also rips.
A stray, ragged, and fast punk song will forever be catnip to the Protomartyr faithful. Similarly, all you’ve got to do to prove they’ve still got it is quote any of Casey’s eternally quotable lines, like his reference to one character’s “array of disappointing nephews.” Those are the highlights, but some of the album’s most rewarding moments are its most gradual and subtle. Bill Radcliffe plays pedal steel on several songs including “We Know the Rats”; it’s a deft ambient touch that softens Protomartyr’s jagged edges, inching closer to shoegaze than they’ve ever been.
Protomartyr albums historically reward patience—close, repeated listens on headphones with typewritten lyrics in hand—so it’s a tough hurdle that the least remarkable song here is right up front. Opener “Make Way” jumps back and forth between quiet and bombast, sputtering without generating any real buildup or cool-off. It’s a less than inspiring introduction to a record with several songs that are distinguished by strong pacing. The swaying, skulking rhythm of “Let’s Tip the Creator” doesn’t require a big climax or drop; it’s a space where the band could’ve easily lingered for another several verses. “Polacrilex Kid,” the best of the advance singles, is another testament to Leonard’s crucial steadiness, laying the groundwork for Ahee to gradually transition from mellow atmospherics to crunchy power chords to a nimble and anthemic chorus.
“Make Way”’s other drawback: It’s the least lyrically specific song on an album replete with unbelievable details. When he sings about deserving love and the dangers of solitude on “Rain Garden,” Casey delivers the album’s best vocal performance while his bandmates build to the magnitude of an orchestra. Meanwhile, he’s asking you to consider the symbolism of a half-full Baja Blast in a parking lot behind a Coney Island restaurant. Elsewhere, a tragedy about two lovers dying in a car—lost on the way to the titular fulfillment center—begins with the admission that these people are a plot device to make the song “more heartbreaking.” Such sharp, fourth wall-busting writing this deep into their discography isn’t a given. Formal Growth in the Desert is a remedy for spiritual depletion: a promise to stay open when there seems to be nothing left.


I've been considering ways to dole out an introduction to this review for nearly\n\ two weeks, each attempt ...

Neon Golden

I've been considering ways to dole out an introduction to this review for nearly two weeks, each attempt more futile than the last. I considered keeping a diary of listening (and actually went so far as to do it on a number of occasions), piecing together thoughts and hoping something cohesive would come of it. Re-reading my scribbles, I realized that it was like fitting the jumbled pieces of a puzzle together. Every entry referenced something wholly other than what had preceded it. Inevitably, part of it became personal; so I nixed it. Still, the task became a vital part of this, almost as if I had lived inside the sounds of Neon Golden, drifting in and out of song, mixing familiar with unknown, moving above and beneath the textures and never completely keeping time. In the end, it's apt that this resulted from a Notwist record. The last decade for them was full of shifting movements.
Beginning in Weilheim, Germany in the early 90s as a heavy metal outfit, Markus and Micha Acher, along with drummer Martin Messerschmid, released two albums filled with pounding drums and guitar solos (The Notwist and Nook) before almost abandoning it completely. However, with Nook, things had already started to change. Interests moved away from thudding power riffs and toward the direction of complex rhythms and structures. Even so, to listen to those albums now, most people would find it difficult to believe the same band made this new disc.
In the mid-90s, the Notwist finally got an American distributor with 12, on the now-defunct Zero Hour label. With that, they began to explore even more textures in their sound, enlisting Martin Gretschmann (aka Console) to help with production and add his special electronic touch. Resulting in a more poppy sound for the group (some might even call it indie rock), 12's beauty is startling from beginning to end.
With Martin Console now in tow as a full-time member, Shrink was a huge step into the world of electronic music and sounded almost completely unlike anything else made at the time. Mixing rock and pop with free jazz, old-timey folk, jagged minimalist beats and just about anything else you could toss in, I don't have any problems saying now that the record was ahead of its time. To top it off, the shame in it all is that very few took notice; Zero Hour went belly up (rendering 12 and Shrink virtually impossible to find in record shops these days), and the Notwist went back to Germany and sort of disappeared for a few years.
So it seemed. Console never really slowed down, releasing a ton of solo projects (one of which was 1999's Matador-released Rocket in the Pocket), remixing just about everyone, and doing the programming and production on possibly the best track from Björk's Vespertine, "Heirloom." The list of Notwist side projects became quite lengthy, too: Tied and Tickled Trio (sax player Johannes Enders' continuing project), Village of Savoonga, Potawatomi and Lali Puna, to name a few. So, after four years of what only seemed like hiding, the Acher brothers and the Martins (Console and Messerschmid) return with Neon Golden. Their website says it was worth the wait. And, well, it's true.
Neon Golden is replete with textured sounds, drifting (and occasionally driving) pulsations, and mesmerizing hypno-rhythms. It's been quite a while since the last time I actually felt I've been with a record like this. Sounds odd, but that's exactly the feeling I've received over the last two weeks. And when you've got that much time to spend with a record, it becomes an entity in and of itself. Most times with a record review, you get a few precursory listens and then by number five or six, you're spitting out a review. Not so here. With well over fifty listens to this disc, it's like a relationship has begun to spring forth out of the ether. I guess you could say Neon Golden and me have become well acquainted and it's already akin to hanging with an old friend. Given that amount of time, realizations occur. One of my first was that, in many ways, this record is about textures: electronic bleats, pulsing waves, the mixture of organic instruments with digital blips and loops, and most notably the serenity of Markus Acher's voice.
While Acher's singing has always been appealing to me, it wasn't until this album that I finally recognized something and, for you lyric analysts, it's probably not a good thing. I've found myself spending more time listening to Acher's voice than paying attention to what exactly he's singing about. In some ways, it's similar to Arto Lindsay. On albums like Mundo Civilizado-- when he's singing in Portuguese, it's unclear exactly what he's talking about. Yet his ability to mesmerize and captivate the listener with his singing can be simply haunting, and damn if his voice just doesn't ooze sex appeal. A very similar thing often occurs when I'm listening to Acher. The songs are sung in English. I know the words and I can sing along. Thing is, my attention becomes devoted to the way his phrases are formed, his ability to roll words off his tongue, the manner in which certain syllables, consonants and vowels are stressed, and the way familiar English words all at once become foreign. On "This Room," there's a moment at around the 1:30 mark where the driving percussion suddenly comes to a delirious halt and leaving only Acher's voice imbedded in a wave of electronic gurgles and throbbing beats. The track is rendered into two halves here, Acher's voice cut-up and pieced back together in a dizzying loop, bouncing off itself in nonsense half-syllables and creating a split-second feel of nausea-inducing vertigo.
Elsewhere, a track like "One Step Inside Doesn't Mean You'll Understand" is comprised of plucked strings atop a low saxophone moan while hisses and crackles burble just below the surface, waiting for the end of the song, and fading out with the hum of nothing but fuzz, as if the stylus was just caught in a locked groove. Prior to that fading hum, thin layers of sound begin to unfurl themselves, something that transpires on almost every track-- whether it be the distinguishing Notwist banjo, clanking percussion or the layer upon layer of electronics. Even on Neon Golden's most driving track, "Pilot," the band allows space for those resonating electronic hums to break through.
And then, another realization. The Notwist have an uncanny knack for allowing their compositions room to breathe, creating lush sonic textures. Dynamic numbers like "Pilot" or "Pick Up the Phone" come off as thoughtful and unhurried, songs transitioning into each other with languid movements. "Pick Up the Phone" is awash in spastic, pointy-headed beats and it sounds like the feel of crumpled and un-crumpled candy wrappers. With Markus Acher singing in what sometimes sound like barely hushed whispers, Neon Golden begins to take on an introspective beauty, almost as if everything (the musicians, the singer, the music) is lost in contemplative thought.
Nowhere is this pensiveness more present than in tracks like "Neon Golden" or "Off the Rails." The muted, tranquil beauty of an acoustic guitar and Markus Acher crooning "this is all I know" gently over electronic washes of sound in the latter make for lullaby material. "Neon Golden," on the other hand, begins as a gritty dirge, containing a deep saxophone groan, plucked acoustic guitar and banjo, and the mantra-like title chant. As it progresses, though, the song begins to be taken over by drops of scattered percussion, rhythmic drums, congas, and the murmuring buzz of Console's electronic manipulations. At first, my feelings for "Consequence" were ambivalent, but now I see that it's the perfect choice for a closing song. Markus Acher's lovely, plaintive moan of "Leave me hypnotized, love/ Leave me paralyzed, love," is the one time when the lyrics stand against the backdrop of the song, stark and revelatory. Neon Golden can do exactly what he's singing: it leaves you mesmerized, lost in meditative thought and captivated by the grainy, exquisite textures.
Neon Golden would be a staggering feat for any band, much less a band most people had long since forgotten about (or maybe never really knew). A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole. Again, the unfortunate thing is that anyone outside Europe is going to have a difficult time getting their hands on a copy. If you do find one, be prepared to pay, as City Slang stuff just ain't that cheap in the USA. So, why haven't labels like Mute or Communion or Darla jumped on getting this available for domestic distribution yet? A more obvious choice would even be Matador, who recently released one of Console's albums domestically. As of right now, the Notwist have released the record of the year. It's a shame that most people might not have a chance to hear it.


Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for ...

The Ugly Organ

Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for a bookmark. You're obviously hip to the new sensation sweeping the nation: meta-fiction! Maurice the Meta-fiction Moose defines the genre as "post-modern art conscious of and reveling in its own limitations" and it's in full bloom everywhere from the bookstore to the Cineplex, with TV-show characters talking to the camera in-between. Hell, even record reviews do it-- I crafted a densely mirrored concept review around this latest release from Cursive, but it turned out to be too pretentious for prime-time (watch for it in my forthcoming collection of short stories about famous Omahaians).
One media form yet to be infiltrated by the gimmick of self-reference, however, is music, partly because it's more than a little difficult to do in a three-minute pop song, and partly because Jon Spencer ruined it for everybody. But Cursive frontman Kasher is willing to give it the old college try on The Ugly Organ, and somehow manages to do it with a minimum of pretension while simultaneously livening up the crusted emo messenger bag.
Cursive is no stranger to the concept album; their last full-length, Domestica, was a song-cycle dealing with the critical entropy of a dying marriage, and its warm reception seems to have motivated Kasher to stay in the storyteller role. The "plot" of The Ugly Organ, such as it is, revolves around loose themes of fallout remorse and hollow sexual meandering, the latter summed up in the double meaning of the album title. Appropriately, then, recurring organ figures occasionally torment Kasher's protagonist mid-song, while recent Cursive recruit Gretta Cohn's cello grants everything the epic quality it so desperately calls for.
The material fueled by this concept is pretty easy to spot, bearing woe-packed titles like "The Recluse", "Driftwood", or "Bloody Murderer", and aside from the occasional Diaryland line ("My ego's like my stomach/ It keeps shitting what I feed it"), it's a solid record for those without severe emo allergies. "The Recluse" is melancholy and full of ornate note flurries like early Joan of Arc, and the eerie "Driftwood" creeps along like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" beneath Cohn's bowed swooshes.
An entire LP of this slumped-shoulder soul-searching would get pretty tired, however; a fact that even Kasher seemed to realize as he browsed back over the sad-sack lyrics he'd penned. Enter the meta: a handful of songs wherein Kasher either ups the self-loathing ante by both expressing his sadness and further expressing his sadness about his sadness, or brilliantly anticipates the kneejerk reactions of the emo-phobic critical community (not here, of course, no, never!).
Opening the album with the couplet, "And now we proudly present/ Songs perverse and songs of lament," Kasher makes a habit of anticipating the snide commentary of his hatas and beating them to the punch. "Art Is Hard" assails his own band with the biting stab "cut it out/ Your self inflicted pain/ Is getting too routine/ The crowds are catching on/ To the self-inflicted song," and he styles "Butcher the Song" ambiguously enough to make vain critics betcha think he's talking about them, don't we, don't we: "I'm writing songs to entertain/ But these people, they just want pain."
Wisely, Kasher also attaches these masochistic episodes to the strongest songs of the album: "Red Handed Slight of Hand" being all raw anthem like Desaparecidos without the limited understanding of the geopolitical landscape, and "Art Is Hard" using Cohn to her fullest as the rest of the band emulates her fierce bowing while she rips out a buzzsaw melody like a Dick Dale cello composition. Even "Butcher the Song" which turns on a sour riff repeated ad nauseam, has a sort of, well, nauseating effect that emphasizes the self-sickened words.
With the strength of the meta-emo material, plus "The Recluse" and "Driftwood", occupying the first half of the album, it's easy to get caught up in The Ugly Organ's bold aims. Unfortunately, the album is too top-heavy to be seaworthy, the back end full of Fugazi knockoffs and half a song stretched out to ten minutes in a forced attempt at a showstopping finale ("Staying Alive"-- they'd be better off with a Bee Gees cover). The fact that Kasher, in a toe-dipping test of this meta stuff, already called himself out as a Mackaye acolyte on Cursive's last EP can't save the likes of "Sierra" and "Gentleman Caller" from my seen-it-all scorn. Bah.
Still, a solid side A is enough to make The Ugly Organ an emo album (gasp!) on Saddle Creek (yipes!) that I'm not ashamed to admit a conditional liking for. Should Kasher decide to continue along the concept album path, it would perhaps do him good to study himself some Pedro the Lion-- and he might want to steer clear of the meta from here on out-- I hear from New York that unironic is the new ironic. But for twenty minutes of The Ugly Organ, what he's got now is enough to make an idea that sounds, on paper, a million ways wrong and a shoo-in for Most Self-Indulgent Album of the Year work reasonably well. Here's hoping he draws someone less homely than Nicholas Cage for the film version.


Warp Records mainstays Plaid have staked out a well-defined territory over two decades: They make highly listenable melodic IDM, warm and playful. Their latest album doesn't rip up the blueprint.

The Digging Remedy

As hard as it is to believe that Warp Records mainstays Plaid have been making experimental electronic music now for over twenty-five years, it’s even harder to believe that they’ve managed to do without markedly adjusting their basic formula for success. Plaid have staked out a well-defined musical territory for themselves by choosing on each new record to continually mine their existing plot of land rather than explore new terrain elsewhere. Their latest album, the appropriately named The Digging Remedy, reiterates that the Plaid game plan remains intact.
Luckily for Plaid, their game plan has usually been a pretty good one. Their music is a unique strain of listenable, hyper-melodic experimental electronic music that fits the frequently maligned tag “Intelligent Dance Music” all while sounding truly like no one else. They’ve also never made a truly bad album, which isn’t easy to say for a band who’ve been together that long, both in their current incarnation as Plaid and in the past life as the Black Dog with Ken Downie (anywhere from 10 to 15 records depending on how you’re counting). If nothing else, the Plaid blueprint is strong, unique and reliable.
The Plaid coming to us now on The Digging Remedy is in a sort of fourth stage: from the early Black Dog years running from ‘91-‘95; to the first Warp trifecta golden era of ‘95-02; to the experiments and soundtracks of ‘03-'12; and finally in 2014, they hit a wizened, back-to-basics phase. 2014’s Reachy Prints returned to the warm tones and friendly melodies that had worked so well for them over the previous twenty years. Now, two years later, The Digging Remedy picks up where its predecessor left off.
One tradition that The Digging Remedy also carries on is the somewhat odd placement of an album opener that is distinct (and often superior) from anything else on its accompanying record. 2001’s Double Figure opener “Eyen,” with it’s fade-in intro, circular acoustic guitar arpeggio and coo-ing choral vocals sounded beautiful and stands out from the rest of the album. The first two minutes of “Even Spring” from 2003’s Spokes, featuring Leila-collaborator Luca Santucci’s ghostly vocals, sounded even further away (before returning to “standard Plaid” mid-song). And Scintilli’s delightfully exquisite “missing” is perhaps the most unique track in their catalog, incorporating vocals not for lyricism but as a new instrument. On The Digging Remedy, lead track “Do Matter” lays down a tone of ominous, reflective menace that feels like a perfect development for the band: after years of playfulness and warmth, the idea of imagining a darkwave Plaid record that turns that warmth into nightmare feels like a potential home run.
Alas, that dream is not to be, as second track “Dilatone” drags the mood back to familiar territory. The jarring transition from “Do Matter” to “Dilatone,” a slight track that spins in tiny circles while going nowhere, represents one of The Digging Remedy’s biggest weak spots. Though the album reaches greater heights than its predecessor Reachy Prints with a number of excellent compositions (“Do Matter,” “Clock,” “Melifer,” “Yu Mountain,” “Saladore”), the sequencing of everything just feels a bit off, in a way that seems uncharacteristic. Too often, the momentum of a great track is followed by the slow thud of something both different and lesser. The deliberate build and pitter-patter Knight Rider paranoia of “Saladore”—the closest thing to “Do Matter”’s ghoulishness—is wonderful, but to have it wind down into the bass drum circus thump of “Reeling Birds” feels like bit of a let down.
The good news about The Digging Remedy is that it’s lovely and listenable for any longtime followers, or for anyone remotely interested in the kind of melodic IDM defined by this piece. However, it is neither an exciting deviation nor a refinement; as such, it’s really just more of an already-good thing, albeit packaged less delicately. Few artists can say that twenty-five years in they are still able to put out quality records. But here’s to hoping that next time around Plaid might consider stepping off their lawn to chase that darkwave dream.


The California singer-songwriter’s first album is exquisitely rendered, a solemn display of restraint and loneliness.

Anna St. Louis : If Only There Was a River

If Only There Was a River

Before her debut album, Anna St. Louis flipped through the phases of folk-rock with methodical determination, trying to plot a path through the wilderness. She arrived, half a decade ago, in Los Angeles as a Midwest émigré and Philadelphia art-school graduate in search of a new setting and, turns out, a new medium. After learning the guitar, she issued two aptly titled collections—2015’s DEMOS and last year’s First Songs. The earliest set was plaintive and blunt, multi-tracked confessions of heartsickness broadcast above strummed chords—real starter-kit stuff. Two years later, though, the endearing First Songs suggested fingers feeling the walls of some unseen room in the dark. As St. Louis tried to stake out her own corner of the crowded folk-rock field, she tested arid country blues and parlor soul laments, spectral folk moans and smoldering electronic esoterica. You could name the references and hear the effort, a new songwriter diligently scouting the shape of the future songs she would sing.
At last, on the exquisitely rendered If Only There Was a River, St. Louis has started to do just that. She still writes about the sad shapes the heart can take and the loneliness that the expanses of the West can produce. And traces of restlessness pervade these 11 songs, from the Appalachia moan of the fiddle-chased “Hello” to the slightly sinister crackle of the electric “Wind.” But on a record that unfurls with the pastoral ease of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and the idiomatic flexibility of Buffy Saint-Marie’s best, she seems to have made definitive choices about the type of songs she sings and how she builds them with her band. Alongside a sympathetic crew that includes producer Kevin Morby and Pavo Pavo multi-instrumentalist Oliver Hill, St. Louis embraces a sense of elegant austerity here, so that these tunes never do too much at once. She writes, musically and lyrically, so that the emotions expressed and the genres explored are never simple or clear. Rather than continue the search and strive for more, St. Louis has settled on simply being.
The consistent restraint of If Only feels like a minor miracle. “Mean Love” begins with guitar and voice, the intimacy pulling the listener in as close as the song’s suspect subject. Suddenly, it expands, with keyboards, bass, and drums that say what St. Louis struggles to articulate—her patience is running thin. Wrapped around fingerstyle guitar and a distant, luminous drone, Hill’s violin becomes a wagging finger during the chorus of “Water,” demanding the truth from a lover. The hand-drum drift of “The Bells,” the amplifier creak of “Desert”: St. Louis has learned to say so much with so little, suggesting the kind of keen aesthetic awareness that some songwriters burn through years, producers, studios, and labels trying to develop.
Likewise, St. Louis can web prehensile ideas around the occasional breathtaking, concrete image, like a pair of headlights signaling from the other end of some dark desert strip. “The heat that we both felt/Faded out like a cigarette,” she sings wryly during “Understand,” a song that views a relationship’s future fate with elliptical indifference. “Hello” is the plea of a new city dweller looking for respite from drugs and dance halls. “How the painted floor fades/The blues turn to white, and the yellows turn grey,” she offers at the start of its second verse, the audible grin in her voice countering the exhaustion of the lyrics. Having mapped out the folk-rock landscape on First Songs, St. Louis thrives here in its liminal spaces.
She ends her debut with “If Only There Was a River,” her strangest song to date. Emulating a mandolin, her high, loping guitar sweeps into easy dialogue with Morby’s Wurlitzer. “If only,” he chants in a dreamy whisper, like a shaman conjuring St. Louis toward her own farewell. She answers, singing a wish list of personal fulfillment—a river to take her away, a town to call her home, a sense of self-worth to satisfy her needs—in a tone of pure, peerless longing. Just as the guitars, keyboards, and three-part harmonies start to crest, they disappear, vanishing at the horizon line like a dream you’ll try to remember but never will. It is a tease, an intriguing suggestion of possible next steps in the motion of one of this year’s most promising new singer-songwriters.


A sought-after roller-disco anthem from 1983 makes for a tantalizing hybrid of boogie, electro, and house, and lays the foundation for artists from Chromeo to Dâm-Funk.

Vaughan Mason & Butch Dayo: Feel My Love

Feel My Love

You’d be forgiven for wondering if Vaughan Mason owned stock in a ball-bearing factory. Back in 1979, a Wall Street Journal report that 300,00 pairs of roller skates were being sold each month caught Mason’s eye, and he soon set about making an anthem for the rinks. The result was Vaughan Mason and Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” a knock-off of Chic’s “Good Times” that became an epochal slice of roller disco all by itself, fueling innumerable birthday parties and Saturday nights. Beyond the roller rink, “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” continues to boogie through pop culture: You can hear it in Daft Punk’s “Da Funk,” the Avalanches’ “Electricity,” and shouted out by Janet Jackson on “R&B Junkie.”
When Mason teamed up with vocalist Butch Dayo in 1983 to cut Feel My Love, a five song EP, he crafted another roller-disco number in “Rollalong Songs.” Full of rubbery bass, phased snares and handclaps, and a chant urging you to lace up your skates and grab a partner, it seemed like another sure shot for the rink. But that track couldn’t replicate the magic of his first hit. Within a year, the once-mighty disco imprint Salsoul Records would shutter, and the sound of boogie was soon overtaken by hip-hop and house. (Mason turned his attention to the latter under the name Raze.)
Mason had pretty much been a one-trick pony up until that point, good at assessing other artists’ hits and repurposing them (another single, “Jammin Big Guitar,” would lift parts of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”), but on Feel My Love he branches out and tests other sounds. Not always successfully: It was definitely a mistake to open the set with the torpid piano-and-synth ballad “Oh Love” rather than close with it. That said, he was astute enough to let master DJ Shep Pettibone mix “Party on the Corner,” filling the song with go-go bells, roto-toms, starburst synths, and a sinuous percussion breakdown. “You Can Do It” uses a similar template, making for a boogie track with cosmic-disco elements. Both songs were released as singles, but as cagey as Mason was in flipping a few ideas into a music career, he failed to recognize the true hit he actually had on his hands in the title track.
Feel My Love disappeared, but these days it is sought-after, thanks to the earworm of “Feel My Love” itself, which resonates from the old school well into our meme-able present (this reissue comes courtesy of British label Be With Records). You can trace the aesthetic and sonic template of Dâm-Funk and Chromeo back to this song. It’s strange and immediately endearing, its sleekness cut with some cheese, with bits of electro, modern soul, and house embedded in its boogie sound; it’s powered by simplistic drum programming yet still deeply funky, while Dayo’s overly earnest vocal performance lends an almost naive quality. With a bright, incessant synth line that squirts like a spooned grapefruit, “Feel My Love” has been a staple of block parties, low riders, and skate parties ever since, from the Bronx to SoCal. Simple and sharp, it’s proof of Mason’s knack for keeping wheels rolling.


This Irish rapper's debut suggests great potential, even if he's limited for now by the obvious influence of N.E.R.D and Tyler, the Creator.

Dear Annie

Irish rapper Rejjie Snow is a polymath with a nomadic streak. A few years ago, his left-of-center pop appeal got him a deal with Elton John’s management company and a spot opening for Madonna on tour. He later signed with 300 Entertainment, home of Young Thug and Migos, and has since worked with Canadian dancefloor wizard Kaytranada, Chicago neo-soul mainstay Cam O’bi, French disco auteur Lewis OfMan, and Kendrick Lamar collaborator Rahki, churning out tracks in enough styles to suggest a one-man equivalent to the Odd Future collective. Through all his guises, though, Snow stays true to certain constants. He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences—channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk—that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.
Snow spends most of his 20-track debut LP, Dear Annie, obsessing over a lover he abandons in order to live in Paris. The otherworldly, Aminé-assisted single “Egyptian Luvr,” produced by Kaytranada, and “23” showcase his laid-back delivery, futurist leanings, and ability to write tracks that sound like they should be hits. They fit in well with “Pink Lemonade” and “Spaceships,” both straightforward clinics in N.E.R.D.’s aesthetic. “Must be your birthday, the earth keeps spinning your tune…/The evening stars fall for you/Bet that’s your birthplace/The sun reminds me of you,” he croons over the former track’s interstellar synths and sunny, melodic thump.
In the album’s second half, though, Snow takes a sharp turn from sweet nothings and effervescent dance tunes to smoldering angst and solitude. By “Room 27,” heartbreak has turned to despair, as he contemplates suicide against dissonant, dreamy wedding bells. (The number in the title is a reference to the so-called 27 Club.) “Still I’m chasing demons/Best believe I ain’t been eating/Best believe I see my shadow checking on me like I’m Jesus,” he raps. Spiraling, he continues rattling off bars: “I don’t even trust myself/Feel like I just don’t belong/Feel like fucking flying, wish you’d understand my fucking thoughts.” A few tracks later, on “Bye Polar,” he swings between brooding, sinister tones and strip club bounce, somewhat randomly proclaiming himself “black,” “weird,” and “proud” along the way. Then he dedicates the next song, the cheeky “Charlie Brown,” to bad behavior and bubblegum pop.
That’s a lot of moods for one album, but Rejjie’s commitment to candor and his collaborators’ ace production keep Dear Annie from jumping the rails. It is a solid introduction to an able singer and MC who, at his best, recalls Kendrick’s knack for voicing a variety of characters. That progressive approach is something hip-hop needs in order to sustain growth. Though it’s become more common in the last decade, it still takes heart to lean into vulnerability in rap—to make music this deeply personal in a genre teeming with self-proclaimed bad actors who pride themselves on being impenetrable and emotionally unavailable. Throughout Dear Annie, Rejjie Snow is phoning home to Drake, André 3000, Pharrell, and Chance the Rapper, all of whom have spent years blurring hip-hop’s sonic and emotional lines. The most exciting thing about this album is the prospect of learning more about what he’ll do with the sense of freedom he’s inherited from them once infatuation subsides.


The Norwegian ambient musician Geir Jenssen plumbs the mind of a medieval queen on his beautiful, gripping new album.

Departed Glories

The artist Jessica Ingram’s series of photographs “Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial” seems, at a glance, to simply portray beautiful or quotidian parts of the Southern landscape. But the postcard-ready images are backlit by an appalling fact: They were all the sites of racist murders. On his new Biosphere record, Departed Glories, the influential Norwegian ambient musician Geir Jenssen does something strikingly similar, poised at the emotional conflict between the world’s everlasting beauty and the evanescent atrocities that seem to linger around it long after actual events.
While he was temporarily living in Krakow, Poland, Jenssen started to notice the sites where Polish people had been executed during World War II—the horrors lurking behind an indifferent natural splendor. He began to research the area’s history and learned of a medieval queen who had hidden from invaders in these same forests, and he started to wonder what kind of music she might have thought of to comfort her in her fear. The outcome is an album made mostly from heavily treated samples of Eastern European and Russian folk music, and its forbidding, haunting beauty is a sensitive encomium to the queen hidden in the forest, to all those erased by war, and to the other ghosts of history that invisibly crowd the world.
Jenssen has explored this kind of site-specific territory before. On 2011’s excellent N-Plants, he drew inspiration from the futuristic gleam and looming danger of Japanese nuclear plants, in tracks where pneumatic basses and skating electronic beats gave the impression of mechanical architecture producing massive energy. (The album came out not long after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, though, uncannily, Jenssen says he finished it before.) Those flickers of minimal techno also crept in, albeit less prominently, on 1997’s Substrata, widely regarded an ambient classic. Though Departed Glories has elements of both of those works—the concrete context of N-Plants and the sparser, icier regions of Substrata—it eschews any beats, and exchanges a structure of geological movement for something more like classical composition.
The title track is indicative of how the record is more like chamber music than anything else. It’s just fashioned out of tectonic basses instead of cellos, midrange drones instead of violas, and atmospheric squeals instead of violins. Unlike a lot of ambient music, it doesn’t wantonly spread through stereo space; instead, Jenssen fashions scintillas of sonic information into long, flowing lines of script. He homes in on places where minute frequencies push the red, unleashing spectral harmonies and beating basses on the sublimely austere “Down on Ropes.” On “Aura in the Kitchen With the Candlesticks,” flecks of guitar share a delicate duet with eerie operatic voices. “In Good Case and Rest” demonstrates Jenssen's artfulness with counterpoint, as a scalloped bass and a shivering stripe of voices lock into a tense orbit, and on “Wyll and Purpose,” he develops a monastic theme with the rigor of a composer working out a sonata.
Departed Glories’ strongest individual tracks are uncompromisingly abstract, like “This Is the Matter,” where a series of steppes chiseled into the face of a dark drone somehow has the presence of a hymn. It illustrates Jenssen’s signature ability to latch onto the smallest bit of dark matter and suck us into its core. Less profound, on their own, are the tracks that let edge-of-intelligibility vocal collages in the manner of Julianna Barwick do most of the work. But they play a flattering role in the album as a whole, which is how it should be heard; they also give voice to the lost souls still trapped at the sites that inspired them.
Sometimes we seem to glimpse their deaths: “You Want to See It Too” is a work of breath-holding drama, seizing up and pulsing like a moment of terrible intuition yet slowed down so it lasts for minutes. And sometimes we glimpse their afterlives, as on the gorgeous “Invariable Cowhandler,” which feels like moving through a lit mist filled with silhouettes. We also glimpse the subtle, inquisitive talent that makes each Biosphere album an ambient event, almost twenty years after Substrata carved his name into the clouds.