The relatively short project from the Houston rapper reasserts her absolute domination on the mic and takes her to new melodic spaces to mixed effect.

Suga

Megan Thee Stallion did not originally intend to put out Suga last week. She had hoped to drop the project on May 2—her late mother’s birthday—and claim it as her debut album after last summer’s breakout mixtape Fever. Draped in a dark, pillowy fur on The Breakfast Club last Friday morning, she course-corrected. “I’m still working on my ‘album,’” she said, curling her fingers into air quotes. “I had to hurry up and put out an EP.”
Why? Potentially because her next opportunity to release music on her own terms was foggy. On March 1, Megan claimed that her label, 1501 Certified Entertainment, was blocking her from putting out songs. The next day, she sued 1501, seeking to terminate her deal; a Texas judge granted her a temporary restraining order against the label, allowing the album to be released. Tight and satisfying, Suga is a reminder that Megan is who she’s always told us she was, even as she grapples with what it means to be herself in public.
When Megan Thee Stallion first caught eyes in 2017 with her bombastic “Stalli Freestyle,” she declared herself a money-making, man-taking, sex-positive powerhouse. In just two years, her cutthroat bars and candid nature turned her into a lyrical frontrunner in hip-hop and a viral sensation. Suga takes stock of all the things that have changed for the 25-year-old, with millions “tuned the fuck in” to her professional and personal lives as she navigates business, pleasure, and loss. Like Lil Kim, Beyoncé, and Nicki Minaj before her, Megan channels rage, pomp, and sensuality through alter egos. If her alter ego Tina Snow was a boss—grown, sexy, and intimidating—and Hot Girl Meg was her more debaucherous side, Suga is “a girl who’s going through it but getting through it.”
Megan tackles fame and pain with sharp, clear raps. Album starter “Ain’t Equal” jumps into her new circumstances: life under the microscope, without her mother or great-grandmother’s support. Though she spent the past year getting friendly with lots of women across entertainment, pouring dark liquor down the throats of Doja Cat, Lizzo, and Summer Walker, Megan is skeptical of new friends on Suga: “You bitches is weird, I don’t wanna hang,” she cooly raps on the chorus of “Stop Playing.”
She’s also spent the year being romantically linked to musicians, an athlete, and an actor. But she embraces her sexuality, even if she resents the constant speculation around it. On “Captain Hook,” she spells it out simply: “I like to drink and I like to have sex.” The song is a showcase everything Megan has built her career on: energy, humor, brashness. “Dance on the dick, now you been served/I like a dick with a little bit of curve/Hit this pussy with an uppercut/Call that nigga Captain Hook!” she says, over swashbuckling sound effects.
Though when she emulates Gunna’s flow on “Stop Playing,” it turns into a new, infectious kind of experimentation. The Neptunes-produced track is one of several moments where Megan dabbles with something calmer and more plush. On Suga, she shakes out of the comfort zone that found her frequently sampling down-south acts, and instead heads west. She enlists Kehlani on the upbeat G-funk track “Hit My Phone” and interpolates Tupac’s “Rather Be Ya Nigga” on the vulnerable “B.I.T.C.H.”
Megan also commits to more melodic overtones, in contrast to the straightforward spitting on her more recognized songs. Fully outfitted in Auto-Tune and complemented by a choir sample, Megan gives herself a lightly profane pep talk and sends up a prayer on “Crying in the Car,” a tender earworm. R&B isn’t where Meg shines brightest—it can sound basic—but together, “Crying in the Car,” “B.I.T.C.H.,” and “What I Need” illustrate that Megan Thee Stallion is becoming more than a sex symbol, wig-splitter, and party starter.
Megan occasionally struggles to package new truths about her social status in the whip-smart ways she did her old ones. As far as calling someone corny goes, “Had to X some cheesy niggas out my circle like a pizza” (from “Savage”) is no “Bitch, keep talking that shit from your Honda.” But at only 24 minutes long, Suga avoids the bloating that plagued Fever, and a good-not-great song like “Rich” is over too quickly to complain much. Suga may not be remembered as a keystone in Megan Thee Stallion’s catalog, but it’s a fine portrait of an artist embracing her full self as her world changes drastically.

1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment


The problem with jazz is... well, I'm not exactly sure. I can tell you that I'm getting tired ...

These Are the Vistas

The problem with jazz is... well, I'm not exactly sure. I can tell you that I'm getting tired of opening jazz reviews with a survey of the genre's problems. In the end, it's probably no worse off than any other music predating rock and roll, and that it at least still has a Grammy category should be encouraging. Perhaps the only real problem is that big labels have a tough time marketing it (see if you can name any one of Billboard's current Top 40 jazz albums). However, unlike, say, contemporary polka (also a tough sell, especially in our war-torn economy), people are still making interesting, creative statements in jazz. For experimental music listeners, jazz is probably as vibrant now as it ever was. You just have to live with a dimmer spotlight, if that matters.
And so, along comes The Bad Plus, from the heart of the Midwest, and with big Columbia dollars paying for their hotels and, presumably, Blender blurbs. They have the shiny blue CD cover, have snagged Sheryl Crow and Tom Waits' producer, get in-store promotion at Tower and Borders, and press releases that-- wouldn't you know it-- herald them as jazz's saviors! Of course, none of this really covers the various musical contributions that pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King (a member of the Minneapolis jazz combo Happy Apple, and replacement drummer for the legendary Christopher McGuire in 12 Rods) may have made to their own record. As you probably shouldn't be surprised to know, their press hasn't really done them too many favors except to garner them raves from the NPR and Good Morning America crowd.
The three members of The Bad Plus, hailing from Minnesota and Wisconsin, have been playing together off and on since the early 1990s. They released their self-titled debut in 2001 independently, and had a follow-up available last year (now out of print), recorded live at the Village Vanguard. They've steadily built a following of fervent jazz fans and alert critics, though are likely as surprised at their exposure this year as anyone. These Are the Vistas, beyond the production and fanfare, is pretty squarely along the lines of much new, young straight-ahead jazz: integrated use of new beats and electronic music touches, covers of various Gen-X hits, and the will to sporadically launch brief, free improv blowing sessions. Naturally, those sessions are much fewer and farther between than your average Tim Berne disc, but then again, Columbia doesn't invest in 20-minute Bloodcount tunes for a reason.
First, the covers: supposedly pianist Iverson had never heard the song previously (only in Wisconsin, folks), but the trio's rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is, er, spirited. Iverson favors broad, dramatic chord clusters and liberal use of his sustain pedal, so instead of ragged rock glory, we get faux-cinematic\ grandeur. Anderson does a nice Ron Carter impression underneath, linking the performance to what must have been a big inspiration for them: Miles Davis' mid-60s similarly eccentric quintet. They hit Aphex Twin's "Flim" with kid gloves, almost too delicately. Producer Tchad Blake incorporates a few filters to make King's drums sound computerized, but it's my feeling that you can't really hide a jazz band. Their version of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" is probably the most ambitious song on the entire record, if only because they try out about three completely different moods before arriving at the song proper. I'm not so sure they're as convincing way out there as they are straight up, but points for giving it a go.
The Bad Plus is at their best when they step out of the jazz chair entirely, as on the marvelously kinetic "Big Eater", which opens the album. King is an amazing drummer, certainly a treat for anyone loving modern jazz percussionists like Ben Perowsky, Kenny Wollesen or Jim Black, and his performance on Anderson's piece is fantastically, aggressively precise. Likewise, Iverson's block chords, serving as melody, are straight out of the great-lost post-rock riff book, and would undoubtedly make Tom Jenkinson mighty jealous. If only they could keep up that intensity throughout, as other tunes seem either flat homages to the avant-garde ("Boo-Wah"), or small-group MOR jazz balladry ("Silence is the Question")-- though there is a download-only ballad titled "What Love is This" that's a lot more engaging than most of the ones here.
Marketing aside, I wouldn't be surprised to see The Bad Plus become pretty successful. They have a knack for hitting the melody where some more experimental outfits might opt for a diverse array of craziness. The three performers are also very good musicians (particularly King and Anderson), and I imagine they put on a good show. It's not their fault some record company guy thought they could be the new face of jazz, so I'd urge hipsters to keep an open ear, and everyone else not to expect fireworks. Hey, it could be worse-- you know Elvis Costello is giving Diana Krall Mitchell Froom's number.


The young Icelandic post-punk band Fufanu traffic in icy disaffection and glacier-cool synths, but their latest album hints at hearts beating beneath the veneer.

Sports

Though Iceland has a fertile music scene, it has produced few international names. The ones that have emerged—Björk, Sigur Rós, and, uh, Of Monsters and Men—tend to paint a picture  to the outside world: A tiny nation filled with artsy, insular weirdos. Yet the scene there is bustling with all sorts of sounds:  Black metal, punk rock, serrated electronic music, rap. And then there’s the chilly post-punk offered by Fufanu, Iceland’s most exciting young band.
Revolving around the core duo of Hrafnkell Flóki Kaktus Einarsson and Guðlaugur Halldór Einarsson (no relation; Icelandic names use patronymics), Fufanu has grown from an experimental techno duo (then known as Captain Fufanu, when Kaktus and Gulli were just teens) into purveyors of terse, claustrophobic post-punk, injected with bleary-eyed psychedelia and dystopian electronic textures. (Live, the band expands their sound into a raging, swaggering storm, though they’ve opted to reign it in on record thus far.) There is also a surprising amount of Britpop lurking in their DNA. Kaktus worked on Damon Albarn’s 2014 solo release Everyday Robots; Fufanu opened for the Britpop star later that year, and for Blur at Hyde Park in 2015. Though the band understandably chafes at the focus on their connection to Albarn, there’s no denying how their echoes of late-’90s Britpop enriches their music.
Sports is the group’s sophomore LP, following quickly on the heels of their late 2015 debut Few More Days to Go. It flows more than its predecessor, and trades their debut’s corroded guitar for glacier-cool synths and hissing electronic rhythms, both propulsive and meditative. Like many great post-punk groups before them, the band consistently sounds disaffected and removed. Lead single and standout “Sports” is a terse drawl of seemingly disconnected thoughts, a masterclass in building tension. “Bad Rockets” sounds like a Bond theme from an alternate timeline in which 007’s become an ashen-faced junkie, featuring the haunting refrain “Bad rockets hit—rockets fly above my head.”
The title Few More Days to Go was a refrain the band members would deliver to loved ones asking when they’d return home. Sports, though brooding at first glance, celebrates the little moments of homecoming, of reunion, of pleasant daily life. Kaktus, who lives with his girlfriend in Reykjavik, sings of young but stable love throughout. “Going out, with my love/Jump around like a six year old” on “Sports”; “Just hold me like I’m your fool/We’ll sleep on the back of the new moon” on “Your Fool”; “I said something about leaving soon/It’s drumming in my heart/And asking for restart” in “Restart.”
“Your Fool” and “Restart” form the record's conclusion, and they’re unlike anything else the band has done, vulnerable and beautiful.  The disassociation and disaffection of the rest of the album suddenly makes sense in the rearview, a buildup to moments of pure, aching romanticism. They transform a solid album into something of an emotional journey, and hint strongly that beneath their low-key snarling, Fufanu have grander things on their minds.


The confrontationally prolific Buffalo rapper cedes space to his dynamic guests on both halves of his latest project, a supremely competent data dump that is memorable only in fits.

Hitler Wears Hermes 8

Westside Gunn’s work, like that of his Griselda Records partners, comes as steadily as an IV drip, though one imagines he would only accept the metaphor if the IV bag were designer and the needle came from Italy. Last week, the second half of the eighth installment in his Hitler Wears Hermes mixtape series was released, following a couple of minor delays, roughly a month after the first. For most artists this hitch would be unremarkable—two discs issued in four weeks under the same umbrella title could reasonably be considered one project—but for the confrontationally prolific Buffalo rapper, it has the effect of making the records feel exactly as distinct from one another as all his prior LPs do, which is to say: not very.
Gunn is fond of the term “curator,” which serves to deemphasize the importance of his rapping per se. This is wise. Gunn’s nasally drawl is wonderful as added texture, but loses its power the more central it is forced to become; the writing is reliably OK—imagine a Balenciaga safety net—though prone to cliche and shapelessness. But he is clearly a superb A&R. The Griselda records are smartly sequenced with the in-house producers’ roles expanding and contracting based on who has the hot hand at the moment, and the near-uniform excellence of the guest verses implies both a loyalty among his collaborators and a willingness to ask for rewrites. And every album is stitched together by interludes of wrestling promos, old fashion ads, or audio from art auctions in a way that highlights the artificiality of the world Gunn coaxes listeners into. Each half of Hitler Wears Hermes 8 (the first is maddeningly subtitled Sincerely Adolf, while the second is simply Side B) leans heavily on collaborators and this mise-en-scène, the sum total being yet another Westside Gunn project that is supremely competent, yet memorable only in fits.
On each disc, Gunn shrewdly cedes space to these guests, who steal song after song: On “Claires Back,” Benny the Butcher doesn’t rap about writing letters in jail as much as he raps about the recipient, and the way she dutifully saves them; Boldy James realizes on “716 Mile” that his watch has Roman numerals where the Arabic digits are supposed to be; Lil Wayne continues his breathless run of features on “Bash Money,” even sliding in a Dash store reference he’s likely had in the chamber since the late W. Bush years. Sincerely Adolf makes a lot of room for the Syracuse rapper Stove God Cooks, whose vignette on “Vogue Cover” about waiting at the plug’s house while he “mowed the lawn, washed all his cars, and watered the flowers” has already earned its own cult fandom online. Gunn allows these guests to play off of him like a generous actor, receding into the background when appropriate—though HWH8 runs a combined 103 minutes, few if any Gunn verses overstay their welcome.
If the broader project does not quite distinguish itself in his catalog, HWH8 does contain some of Gunn’s most accomplished moments. The dreamlike “TV Boy” is one of the finest songs he’s ever recorded, Gunn practically gleeful as he weaves his way through utter grime. And his chemistry with Mach-Hommy—the two recently reconciled after a long feud, collaborating on Mach’s astounding Pray for Haiti—continues to yield songs as gripping as “RIP Bergdorf,” where Mach boasts about spending 30 grand on sweatsuits. Still, these peaks—like the infrequent low points—are momentary blips. Even when the halves diverge (where Sincerely Adolf is relatively precise, Side B sprawls; where B skews toward harder drums and more punishing sounds, Adolf is atmospheric) they feel as if they’re part of one long data dump, a perfectly pleasant stream of 1s and 0s.
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The New York band’s jangly indie pop is more ambitious than before, but their lyrics too often fail to move beyond low-stakes camp—hardly the radical liberation the band has hinted at delivering.

Prehysteria

No matter what advice you could give your younger self in retrospect, growing up was always going to suck. Navigating those adolescent years—particularly middle school, the tour de force of puberty, rejection, and angst—is key to figuring yourself out. New York four-piece T-Rextasy write indie-pop cheers for tackling that preteen insecurity. It’s a natural inclination, given that the band formed during its final year of high school. But on their sophomore LP, Prehysteria, T-Rextasy are too busy emphasizing cliches to leave room for wit or insight—traits that strengthen camp when flexed a little more subtly.
It’s clear T-Rextasy pushed themselves musically with Prehysteria. The band’s jangly power-pop sketches reach farther than before, dabbling with trumpet and trombone, reviving 1960s girl-group harmonies, and toying with stripped-down versions of ska. The faux-frail delivery gives songs like “Rip Van Vintage” the feeling of a Deerhoof cover, full of pent-up energy and saccharine falsettos. But the steadfast campiness of their lyrics could’ve been ghostwritten by a children’s band. Songs about ditching a lover for breakfast (“I Don’t Do Lunch”), embracing acne (“The Zit Song”), or horny makeout sessions (“Coffee?”) opt for obvious laughs without much, if any, commentary to elevate them beyond the elementary. Legitimizing adolescent struggles is a worthy endeavor, no doubt, but T-Rextasy bog their banter down with coffee-bean innuendos and empty odes to Etsy, content to shoehorn influences like the B-52’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe into the music instead of the lyrics.
On paper, Prehysteria’s narrative has sharper fangs than the record itself. Vocalist Lyris Faron, bassist Annie Fidoten, guitarist Vera Kahn, and dummer Ébun Nazon-Power describe the album as them “owning our madness.” That concept is on par with their past. T-Rextasy’s biggest hits off their 2016 full-length Jurassic Punk, “Chick’n” and “Gap Yr Boiz,” were clap-backs against street harassment and pseudo-enlightened crushes. Those raggedy, self-empowered anthems attracted a fanbase eager to hear more—using Indiegogo, T-Rextasy crowdsourced over $3000 to create Prehysteria—but the summation of Prehysteria’s themes in press releases and interviews oversold the reality of its middling subject matter.
Quirkiness isn’t a personality. T-Rextasy seem to remember that when struggling to cross the queer friendzone on pop-punk charmer “Girl, Friend” and while emphasizing intentionally cloying harmonies on the album’s post-punk tentpole, “Theme from Prehysteria.” But elsewhere, the band misses opportunities to use their vibrant music as a platform for meaningful takeaways, regardless of how comedically it’s presented. There’s a reason the emotionally quotidian stories of acts like the Front Bottoms and Hobo Johnson or the charmingly sardonic kitsch of Childbirth and Tacocat flourished. T-Rextasy reiterate the importance of speaking out against sexism and tokenization in interviews, but their music does little to define who or what they want to champion beyond basic critiques of beauty standards and the queer dating scene. Like the band’s playful moniker, Prehysteria reinforces the idea that T-Rextasy are an outlet for goofing off with friends to prove that you can. The only drawback of that is expecting people to feel as liberated as you supposedly did while making it.


Evoking the landscapes of the American Southwest, these peaceful guitar duets find the duo tapping into the serene, timeless quality of their instrument.

Marisa Anderson / William Tyler: Lost Futures

In the promotional trailer for his 2016 opus Modern Country, William Tyler ominously declared,  “We stand at the precipice of the twilight of empire.” Ever the storyteller, Tyler plays guitar just like he talks: an amused, if weary, witness to the decline of Western civilization, the sole documentarian of its dying beauty. The five intervening years since Modern Country certainly haven’t challenged Tyler’s notion that the American experiment is tailspinning out of control, and Lost Futures, a lovely collaboration with fellow instrumental guitarist Marisa Anderson, embodies that sense of hope in persevering through chaos. The album finds both guitarists refining their craft to its most essential properties, tapping into the serene, timeless qualities of the instrument.
Recorded in Anderson’s adopted hometown of Portland as the George Floyd protests were turning the city into a hotbed of unrest, Lost Futures’ seemingly peaceful sketches are infused with a subtle sense of doom. Named after Mark Fisher’s hauntological concept of “lost futures”—the better worlds we may never know now as our lives succumb to a prison of endless nostalgia—the album finds Tyler and Anderson flipping through their own personal histories, returning to the barebones acoustic style that both guitarists built their names on. For Tyler in particular, Lost Futures is the most traditional music he’s made in some time; after new agey releases, textural experiments in ambient music, and sparse film score work for Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, it’s refreshing to hear that he is still capable of wielding melody like a cartographer’s quill, summoning vast landscapes with each run of the fretboard.
Anderson and Tyler are natural collaborators, with quick, clean styles of fingerpicking that can sound equally complex and effortless. For much of Lost Futures, restraint is the name of the game. “News About Heaven” is as enchanting for its simple, sighing chords as it is for the faint bells that seem to twinkle in the edge of the frame. “Haunted by Water” plays like a Led Zeppelin roots-rock ballad slowly coming to life, its riffs gradually accumulating weight as they roll down some imagined dusky freeway. The whole album conjures the barren, sandstone hills of the Southwest, thanks in no small part to the violin and quijada work from Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez and Patricia Vázquez Gómez. At times, however, the feeling of pastiche sets in, like Tyler and Anderson are remembering passages from some great American epic rather than writing a new one themselves. The galloping two-note riff of “Something Will Come” feels like a nod to krautrock, a common influence in Tyler’s work, but it fails to materialize over the course of its droning six minutes: a sustained prelude searching for a point.
On their solo records, Tyler and Anderson might fill the extra space with thumbed bass notes or dizzying flurries of melody, but here their interplay rounds out the picture. As a result, these songs don’t have the same mythical grandeur as Tyler’s best work, or the same unfurling experimentalism of Anderson’s. Instead, they play like a wandering search for peace, with both artists turning to their guitars—and to each other—as a respite against a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart. Lost Futures forecasts that the road ahead is dark, and sometimes folk tales are the only thing that can make the night less bleak.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Adventure

Though French producer Madeon has been known in electronic circles for years—he’s been active under the moniker since 2010 and has appeared at Coachella and Ultra—it became increasingly clear last year that the 20-year-old (!) Hugo Pierre Leclercq had bigger conquests in mind. The instrumental "Imperium", the first released song from his new Adventure, was first featured on the soundtrack of the globally massive soccer video game "FIFA 15". This is a distinction that often breaks big artists to a world audience, and Madeon’s mixture of colorful, sample-heavy EDM and its attending uplifting lilt made for the perfect feel-good vibe directly before the complexity of the new "FIFA" made you want to hurl your controller through your brother’s flat screen.
With Adventure, Madeon’s debut LP, the producer presents a strikingly versatile collection. In a landscape filled with hot-on-paper-but-kinda-"eh" collaborations between big name vocalists and hip producers, Madeon deploys his guests (Passion Pit, R&B singer Kyan, Bastille frontman Dan Smith) with a stirring effectiveness. Album highlight "Pay No Mind" weaponizes Passion Pit's bright synth-pop for a stadium anthem, and the warmth of "La Lune" recalls a more laidback version of Bastille’s catchy hit "Pompeii". On tracks like "OK"—which features a Charli XCX sample culled from a scrapped collaboration—and "Pixel Empire", Madeon pays homage to 8-bit video game soundtracks, reminiscent of Rustie’s Essential Mix and the incomparable (yes, incomparable) "Donkey Kong Country" soundtrack all at once. While Adventure carries all the hallmarks of your usual skyscraping EDM release—stomping breakdowns, soaring choruses, maximalism-for-the-sake-of-it—it also straddles a fine balance between being a pop record and being a dance record.
Though not everything is as huge as its banner singles, more inward-looking tracks like the closer "Home" are arguably as successful. "Home" perhaps best exemplifies Madeon’s range, given that it’s one of the only songs on the album that features Leclercq’s vocals. Over a track that moves from delicate and glimmering to sweeping, Leclercq sings delicately before jumping into the thundering chorus. It’s a sweet note to end on, and marks a signpost for the young producer to follow, if he chooses that direction. The good thing about Adventure is that there are many markers like this; on the path to what feels like something huge, Madeon’s journey is just beginning.


Intimate by design but expansive in scope, the rapper’s latest project is an inventive and unnerving evolution of his singular style.

Laughing so Hard, it Hurts

Mavi was expecting to follow his acclaimed 2019 debut, Let the Sun Talk, with a record called Shango, which the 23-year-old rapper has taken to calling “a very manly, muscular album” and which was eventually shelved. In its place came first the slightly tortured EP End of the Earth, released early last year, and now the gently probing Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, a record whose raw nerve endings sizzle and pop to make even its weariest verses seem animated by a desire for contentment, for harmony. It’s intimate by design, with Mavi’s frequently muted voice drawing the listener’s ear close to the speaker, but expansive in scope: Its opening song is named for a folk hero from American slavery, and its closing one traces the running routes through his native Charlotte, North Carolina that are “carved into the small of [his] back.” Languid in spots, but never for too long—its 16 songs last just over 38 minutes—Laughing so Hard suggests a zen state that is being punctured then resealed in endless loop.
It would be tempting to collapse Mavi’s style into the Earl Sweatshirt/MIKE scene that has been so popular and so prolific over the last five years. And while he shares plenty of qualities with those rappers—he has in the past affected voices similar to both pre- and post-Some Rap Songs Earl, and his taste in production skews toward the jagged and seemingly unfinished—Laughing so Hard features a staggering number of vocal styles and melodic ideas. That aforementioned hush, heard especially on songs like “Doves,” invites tantalizingly ambiguous readings, sounding at times like a seduction and at others like an embarrassed confession. He’s desperate on the tender “My Good Ghosts” and guarded despite the exuberant beat on “Opportunity Kids”; elsewhere, on “Spoiled Brat,” the way Mavi allows the last line of each phrase to unspool into song turns simple detail (“I’m glad I washed my hands”) into maxim.
Dylvinci and Wulf Morpheus combine to furnish roughly half the album’s beats, with contributions from monte booker, Jacob Rochester, and longtime collaborator ovrkast, among others. As with Mavi’s voice, the music is thick with invention. Let the Sun Talk was originally uploaded to SoundCloud as a single, 32-minute track; while the palette here is brighter and slightly more polished, Laughing so Hard retains the feel of different musical directions overlapping and enjambing. This is not precisely the muddy, self-consciously lo-fi production spilling out of New York’s underground, nor the ostentatiously technical post-post-post-Dilla chops that dominate other corners, but a welcome hybrid of the two where lushness and brittleness converge in beats, like Rochester’s “The Inconvenient Truth,” that are at once rugged and delicate. Mavi, who wrote the majority of the album to melodic demos without any drums programmed over them, navigates those rhythms with a dexterity that is never foregrounded, but stunning on inspection.
Like the rappers to whom he’s most most frequently compared, Mavi’s writing is often characterized as cryptic or enigmatic. And while his verses do include some little parabolic bursts, he is most effective when he’s being direct, as on the harrowing “Chinese Finger Trap,” when he says he’s “finally sober—and it’s just another layer of lonely,” or when he laments, on “Hemlock,” “I see when niggas get famous, the revolution in them die.” The latter line gives way to one of Mavi’s best modes, a rigorously economical tangle with spiritual struggle:

They gnaw my flesh
Mispronounce my name
Deny my breath
Snap my bones in two
Memorize my screams
Then memorize they steps

There are more lighthearted applications of his straightforward approach, like when he quips that money is getting “mildewy, like white people dreads,” or when he raps that a girlfriend “know she can get a Chanel whenever my streaming hit.” Twenty years ago, that line appearing on a nominally underground rap record would have seemed like a radical blurring of hip-hop’s different spheres—it’s essentially the core conflict of The College Dropout. When Mavi says it today, it’s instead unnerving for the way it literalizes the more symbolic parts of his music, the gnawing at his flesh monetized and tracked down to the thousandth of a cent. But Laughing so Hard does not take a defeated or cynical view of that economic exchange. It sees that slow accrual as one more line on a ledger of incremental progress toward a world that is slightly more forgiving.


The release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League offers both the director and soundtrack composer Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim. The resulting movie and score are both aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing.

Tom Holkenborg: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Depending on who you follow on Twitter, the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League means entirely different things. To some, the so-called “#SnyderCut,” the allegedly authentic and uncut original vision of the underperforming 2017 superhero movie, is the product of a fan-driven harassment campaign. To others, it’s an act of restorative justice, erasing the changes of an abusive collaborator and giving a grieving director a legitimate space to make peace with the personal pain that hijacked a high-profile project. Whether you view it as desperate cash grab or the last stand of authorship in an industry intent on suppressing original voices, it’s quite obviously a commodity, like every “Final Cut” or “Unrated Edition” designed to make viewers purchase new copies of movies they already own. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the cinematic equivalent of overstuffed streaming re-releases like Taylor Swift’s folklore: the long pond studio sessions (from the Disney+ special) (deluxe edition) or Trippie Redd’s Pegasus: Neon Shark vs Pegasus Presented by Travis Barker (Deluxe), a product that probably would not exist if it did not have a recently launched platform to promote. Split into DVD menu-like chapters, an artistic choice that also aids aimless shuffling, the Snyder Cut ends with an epilogue that stitches together scenes of set-up for sequels that will never happen, much like an assortment of bonus tracks and remixes, feat. Martian Manhunter and the Joker.
When Snyder left Justice League due to his daughter’s death and was controversially replaced by Joss Whedon, its original score was mostly scrapped in favor of replacement work by Danny Elfman. The Snyder Cut is advertised as the director’s unaltered vision, but if he had never left the movie in the first place, this take would have been subject to reshoots, and would probably still be shorter and lighter. Junkie XL’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is also different from what he might have composed originally, as it was produced entirely during quarantine. In both cases, this re-release offers Snyder and Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim, and the resulting movie and score are each aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing. Either you will be moved by the intensity, sincerity, and sheer ballsiness of the film and its music, or you will be alienated by their runtime, dreariness, and ponderous seriousness. At a mammoth 54 tracks and 3 hours and 54 minutes, the soundtrack album runs just a few minutes shorter than the Snyder Cut itself.
Tom Holkenborg lies squarely at the intersection of superstar producer and superstar composer. After years of pop-oriented work, as well as scoring for high-octane game franchises like Need for Speed and SSX, Junkie began collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the soundtracks to Christopher Nolan films like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and was enlisted into Zimmer’s cacophonous supergroup the Sinister Six—along with Pharrell, Johnny Marr, and Incubus’ Mike Einziger—for Marc Webb’s misbegotten The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Now, the apprentice has overtaken the master, or at the very least they’ve swapped places: Hans Zimmer plays festival stages and is worshipped like an EDM DJ, while Junkie dutifully churns out scores to Sonic the Hedgehog and Godzilla vs. Kong under his real name. The once-prolific Zimmer has become increasingly sparse in his scoring, superseded by a new generation of creative multitaskers, as fluent in popular musical production as they are at adapting to the conventions of the blockbuster soundtracks: artists like Trent Reznor, and Childish Gambino compatriot Ludwig Goransson, who replaced Nolan’s right-hand music man Zimmer with the driving techno score for Tenet.
Junkie’s most-played track on Spotify is still 2002’s Elvis Vs. JXL remix of “A Little Less Conversation,” best-known for its association with Ocean’s 11, a Bush-era reboot of the Rat Pack. Drawing on a self-consciously “vintage” sound and the often cornball textures of commercialized “world music,” Junkie XL rode one of the first waves of real dance music superstars, who cashed checks from Woodstock 1999 headlining slots and soundtrack gigs alike: Moby, Paul Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and trance producer BT. The multicultural melange perfected by these omnipresent producers was like the Mod Jams to ESPN’s Jock Jams—upper-middle-class, ready-to-wear electronica for tasteful commercial spaces. Some of Junkie’s biggest paydays have come from spots for coveted brands like Nike and Cadillac, so it’s only natural he and Snyder have become creative bosom brothers; Snyder was also weaned on advertising gigs.
Like Snyder’s movies, Junkie’s music is heavy on pastiche, often schmaltzy, and blatantly commercial. Snyder is an unapologetic dweeb: a guy who writes at a desk surrounded by human skulls and owns an axe collection, someone who thinks the height of coolness is Jason Momoa walking into the ocean while a Nick Cave song plays, while Henry Cavill walking out of the ocean as a Chris Cornell song plays comes in a close second. His use of pop music has always been subtlety-allergic: in his remake of Dawn of the Dead, we hear Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” as a viral plague spreads during the opening credits, and “Down with the Sickness” twice, both the big-band cover by Richard Cheese and Disturbed’s original; Cave singing “There is a king” as the camera stares into the face of the King of the Sea; multiple renditions and versions of “Hallelujah,” even decades after Shrek made that now-cliched music cue the butt of a joke. The much-derided jukebox mecha musical Sucker Punch, released at the height of mash-up culture, even features a Queen remix medley with a guest verse from former Terror Squad member Armageddon. Snyder’s films are an entire universe of cliches, but he exalts each one, lending them the portent of religious rituals. The intensity of Snyder’s Christian Scientist upbringing carries over into this spiritual take on the medium—if comic books are his myths, superheroes his new gods, then pop songs are Snyder’s hymns.
The Justice League soundtrack opens with a cover of “Song to the Siren” by coffee-shop playlist singer Rose Betts—most famously performed by This Mortal Coil but originally written by Tim Buckley, the kind of mythologized songwriter Snyder seems most attracted to (in addition to the aforementioned Cave, Cash, and Cohen, Bob Dylan also figures heavily in Watchmen, and the director is a noted Morrissey fan). But the movie and its soundtrack embrace moody abstraction more than pop clarity. JXL’s score is the kind of orchestral music that is easier to imagine from a synthesizer than an ensemble: one finger on the strings, another on the choral voices, a pinky sliding over to trigger the mournful military brass. The hand of Zimmer always feels present, in the influence of that inescapable Inception BWAH, and in the mingling of symphonic portent with a four-on-the-floor pulse.
Junkie’s stylistic trademark as a composer is relentless drumming. “The Path Chooses You” begins with dark, dubby textures and a light hip-hop sway before pivoting to intense minimal techno and then once again into full-fledged trap EDM. Though there’s a rumbling consistency to the score, its tenor varies based on each hero: Junkie’s versatility allows him to create distinct worlds for each character. Wonder Woman is often accompanied by an absurd banshee wail, presumably the voice of Amazon past—what the closed captioning describes as [ANCIENT LAMENTATION MUSIC PLAYING]. For better or worse, the blazing guitar solo signaling Gal Gadot’s on-screen appearance is one of the few iconic blockbuster themes of the past decade—peaking into the red, a little annoying, imminently recognizable. Aquaman music cues like “We Do This Together,” appropriate for a character always chugging Jack Daniels and draped in wet denim, are full of car-commercial butt rock, though Junkie still smothers every instrument in walls of crackle and distortion. The sparse piano keys of “A Splinter From the Thorn that Pricked You” and the metronomic beat of “Cyborg Becoming / Human All Too Human” feel suited to a horror film, fitting for Cyborg’s narrative arc about the terror of a changed body. And the euphoric strings of Zimmer’s score for Snyder’s almost-Malickian 2013 film Man of Steel are still intact on cues like “I Teach You, the Overman.”
It’s those unsettling elements that often make Junkie’s score distinctive: metallic shrieks, jagged strings, and THX-like deep notes are as central as “real” instruments. That emphasis on texture makes the Justice League score surprisingly listenable as a background piece, at times almost bordering on the algorithm-driven sonic creepypasta known as dark ambient, though there are often the kind of repeating, frenetic musical cues you hear over and over again during a final boss battle. Junkie’s score and Snyder’s film are both ultimately about feeling and sensation: This take on Justice League is about the existential awe puny humans feel when confronted with mythical titans rather than a straightforward superhero story. Appropriately, its soundtrack is more often an extended vibes playlist than a clear suite. These products may not have been made with streaming in mind, but lend themselves to a state of endless flow, like scrubbing through an Adobe After Effects timeline or Ableton project instead of experiencing a full work. Streaming makes the work of remixing endless; a black-and-white edition of the Snyder Cut, Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice Is Gray, drops on HBO Max soon.

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After the push-and-pull of his MMG years, Wale gazes back towards his past on his fourth album, nodding to his 2008 "Seinfeld"-referencing breakout The Mixtape About Nothing and attempting to recast his audience's perception of him.

The Album About Nothing

Wale’s alignment with the Top 40 rap crowd never felt like a healthy fit. Since his 2011 alliance with Rick Ross’ Maybach Music, the D.C. rapper has found success but has never seemed comfortable with it. And the critical failure of his last album, 2013’s The Gifted, must have shaken him to his core, because at first blush, his latest effort, The Album About Nothing, screams "return-to-form." Its title nods to his 2008 "Seinfeld"-referencing breakout The Mixtape About Nothing, a freebie hosted by Fool’s Gold impresario Nick Catchdubs. This was around the time when the first wave of "weirdo" nerd guys like himself, Charles Hamilton, a pre-pop B.o.B and Kid Cudi were springing forward—emotional, obsessed with melody, ambitious, accessible. Wale promptly eschewed that sensibility for guest verses on songs like Waka Flocka Flame’s strip club paean "No Hands" and Ross’ my-cum-tastes-good commercial "Diced Pineapples". Through it all, he struggled to exude palpable confidence. So what does it mean that after all of this push-and-pull, his fourth studio album finds him gazing back towards his origins?
The Album About Nothing begins by holding a mirror to Wale’s past, which reflects some of the trappings of his more-famous present. The intro is informed by go-go, D.C.’s signature reworking of funk, and a sound he used frequently early in his career. And once again, the voice of Jerry Seinfeld acts as commentary, stitching the tracks together thematically.  But Wale doesn’t have to rely on audio clips from "Seinfeld" anymore: He has Jerry, himself (the two are friends, and Jerry even name-dropped him as one of his "top five" in Top Five) providing the sound bites. On "The Helium Balloon", one of the more interesting songs on the album, he laments his reception as an artist, adding "Still know what my core needs/ So fuck who ignores me." What follows isn’t so much the diligent fan service all this promises, though, so much as a muddied collage of attempts at current trends and a lot of sour disaffection. In other words: a Wale album.
Wale clearly remains frustrated with his inability to ascend to the top tier, and on Nothing he presents himself as a rap-industry antagonist. He burrows into the background of "The Middle Finger", revealing his discomfort around other rappers and making a hook out of "Fuck you, leave me alone." On "The Glass Egg", he opts for cleverness over anger, upending Groove Theory’s "Tell Me" and flipping its lyrics ("I’ve been doing my own thing"; "Tell me if you are for real") from their original incredulous-about-a-crush context into the cry of an outsider. It works so well that it’s almost surprising no one has done it before.
Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting. The most unfortunate moment is "The One Time in Houston", an amateurish attempt at the city’s signature syrupy screw sound. "The Girls on Drugs" cleverly samples Janet Jackson’s house party celebration "Go Deep", but isn’t packed with enough of Wale’s dour thoughts to sound like he’s doing anything more than cribbing Drake’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late flow. For someone who spends so much time decrying other rappers’ lifestyles, it’s a wonder why he is pantomiming at all.
Interpolation is one of the constants of Nothing. "Balloon" concludes with a pseudo-dancehall coda loosely riffing on Ini Komoze’s crossover "Here Comes the Hotstepper". "The Success" borrows from the Eurythmics’ "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)". "The Body" fully rips "You Remind Me of Something" by R. Kelly, who might not be the best guy to pay homage to in 2015, but when you have Jeremih, an heir to the Chicago R&B throne, on the hook, it’s a little easier to take. "The Body" is the last of five romantic songs on the album, most of which fail to captivate: Only on his Usher collaboration "The Matrimony", and on the tender "The Bloom (AG3)", where he reminds us how good he sounds rapping over a live band, does he sound alive.
Wale remains intent on dismantling the public’s sour perception of him, but he doesn’t seem to know how. He wants us to know he’s "Lil Wayne meets Wayne Perry/ Bad Brains from the go-go" ("The God Smile") but he’s loaded his album with the opposite: There are no lyrical acrobatics à la Weezy in his prime, and his reference to Wayne Perry is a head-scratcher because Wale has never purported to be a gangster. He waxes political on the J. Cole-featuring "The Pessimist" about the negative perceptions of black America, through the lens of police brutality or "Love & Hip-Hop", but is missing the punk fervor of the Bad Brains he namechecks. While there are clear themes throughout the record (love, black experience, a rapper’s malaise), The Album About Nothing is mostly about fear. Fear of becoming an outsider projecting a false hatred of the inside, fear of pushing musical boundaries to nurture one’s own creativity, fear of being vulnerable and, thusly, denying his listeners access to himself. If Wale could only shatter those walls and deliver an album where he no longer sounds like a caricature of himself—it’s no wonder he loves "Seinfeld"—he might finally get back the amnesty he has been so desperately grasping at for the past five years. All he has now is Nothing to lose.


Nap Eyes sound like the kind of slacker-rock band that plays while slumped over on half-folded futons. But even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. If your idea of a perfect night is sitting on your sofa, reading a listicle on your laptop with Netflix on in the background while carrying on a conversation on your smartphone as you reply to a text, then let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload.

Thought Rock Fish Scale

Most rock'n'roll singers throw parties. Nap Eyes frontman Nigel Chapman attends mixers—which are basically parties for people who don’t get invited to many. But even those are a bit much; two lines into "Mixer," the elegant, cocktail-clinking song that opens the Halifax quartet’s second record, Chapman is already craning his neck for the exit. "When I look at myself on the right/ I’m wondering if I’m really here," he sings, like someone who’s pinned up against the wall of an overcrowded bar. That lonely-in-a-crowd feeling permeates the entirety of Thought Rock Fish Scale, but rather than communicate feelings of disillusionment and alienation, Chapman seems remarkably calm and content—because, in this case, social isolation is the first step toward self-actualization.
Nap Eyes sound like the kind of slacker-rock band that plays while slumped over on half-folded futons, but even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. Its lethargy feels like an act of defiance against the hyper-speed pace of modern life. Its pledges of sobriety and good health constitute affronts to peer-pressured intoxication and food-blogged indulgence. And its purity of vision amounts to a declaration of war against a culture that encourages mass distraction. If your idea of a perfect night is sitting on your sofa, reading a listicle on your laptop with Netflix on in the background while carrying on a conversation on your smartphone as you reply to a text, then let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload.
Thought Rock Fish Scale arrives mere months after Paradise of Bachelors introduced Nap Eyes’ debut, Whine of the Mystic, to Stateside audiences, but they’re already a very different band. While Whine introduced Chapman as one the most intriguingly idiosyncratic lyricists in Canadian indie rock this side of Dan Bejar, the album betrayed competing desires to engage its audience intellectually while cranking out rave-ups that could sate a Saturday-night bar crowd. T**hought Rock Fish Scale does away with any such concessions—as Chapman observes early on, "If you go around trying to please everybody/ It only becomes your crutch." Though clocking in at a mere 34 minutes, it’s the sort of album that takes its sweet time going where it wants to. While it wields a lighter touch, it strikes a deeper chord, by placing Chapman’s richly detailed ruminations front and center, and cutting the jammed-out clutter. It’s as if their favorite Velvets song has suddenly shifted from "Foggy Notion" to "Pale Blue Eyes," forsaking the visceral, fleeting thrills of rocking out to savor the sustained beauty of lingering on.
Chapman has one of those voices that feels immediately familiar, yet is bracingly distinct. You can hear Lou Reed in his conversational verses; Stephen Malkmus in the voice-cracking choruses; Jeff Mangum in the fantastical, quasi-religious imagery; and (again) Dan Bejar in the tendency to hurriedly overstuff his stanzas while retaining perfect enunciation and rhyme schemes. But his winsome, observational perspective is his own—and not just when he’s referencing the pitfalls of having to work his day job in biochemistry while school’s out ("at the lab, they have turned off the hot-water heater/ from the month of June right through until July"). His lyrics can take the form of self-help mantras ("And now I know who I really, really am/ I’m going to stay on track"); they also speak to more peculiar personal insecurities ("Can you tell me, do I have a glass eyelid?/ Can you tell me, do I have a glass forehead?"). But even his most bizarre musings sound like emotional breakthroughs achieved amid moments of great clarity—"Stargazer" may speak of of serpent kings and laser beam blasts, but it uses those storybook devices to battle real-life demons.
Chapman particularly excels at writing two kinds of songs. There are perfectly minimal jams like "Lion in Chains" and the aforementioned "Stargazer," each nothing more than a beautifully languorous verse melody—mirrored by gently-weeping guitar refrains—repeated over and over again until they feel like choruses. At the other end of the spectrum are sublime, intricately constructed turns like "Click Clack" and "Alaskan Shake," each a long, winding hallway lined with many doors that open the songs up to surprising new directions at the precise moment when they seem like they’re going to ramble off aimlessly. Appropriately enough, the last words we hear Chapman sing on the record are "trust, trust, trust, trust me," a plea for redemption doubling as an assurance that, even in the most circuitous, fanciful Nap Eyes song, Chapman will eventually steer you back on course.


The experimental artist’s latest project is the most dynamic, unpredictable album of her career—a collection of instrumental music that flows like an interconnected suite.

Only Love From Now On

Twenty-three minutes into Carmen Villain’s fourth album, at the outset of the antepenultimate track, we hear something we’ve never heard from the Mexican-Norwegian artist before: the buoyant pulse of dub techno. Even for listeners who have kept pace with her gradual transformation from indie singer-songwriter to jazz-inspired ambient musician, this might come as a surprise. But it confirms just how far Villain has traveled since the fuzzboxed strumming and narcotic vocals of her 2013 debut, Sleeper. On two subsequent albums and two more EPs between 2017 and last year, she laid down her mic and electric guitar and sank deep into the folds of synthesizers, drum machines, flute, and electronic tools. The turning point in this metamorphosis was her 2020 release Affection in a Time of Crisis, whose billowing, beatless shapes reflected the marble contours—and 23-second reverb—of the mausoleum where she recorded it. But even as her music has grown more abstract, she has simultaneously hinted at alternate paths that it might take, commissioning gently pulsing remixes from leftfield electronic musicians like DJ Python, Parris, and Huerco S. Their rhythmic energies feed back into “Subtle Bodies,” a high point on her most dynamic—and unpredictable—album yet.
From a carefully selected set of softly rounded shapes and muted tonal choices, Villain wrangles a surprisingly varied selection of instrumental tracks that flow together like the interconnected parts of a suite. All seven songs are shot through with an abiding sense of mystery. When there are rhythms, they thud like an object being dragged into the woods by an animal. Her imaginary landscapes are illuminated by a muted glow, like the mist burning off fields at dawn. Aside from occasional telltale electronic processing, much of the album’s palette appears to have sprung from acoustic sources, though it’s often impossible to pinpoint the source of a given sound. In the brief “Liminal Space,” an unsteady rhythm might be flat stones clacked together, or hard footsteps echoing down a dry riverbed.
Like a creation story, Only Love From Now On begins with breath: Wind instruments provide its essence and define its shape. In the opening “Gestures,” Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen’s horn is run through an electronic harmonizer, recalling Jon Hassell’s eerie, prismatic sweeps. Over a ritualistic pulse of gong-like tones and wooden percussion, Henriksen plays an eloquent improvised lead, while in the background, Villain smears its echoes across the stereo field—a richly enveloping mix of sounds that feels less like a song than a four-dimensional environment expanding around you. In “Portals,” harmonized and layered clarinets waft above a lonely percussive loop reminiscent of Seefeel’s Succour. And in the eight-minute title track, flutist Johanna Scheie Orellana, a frequent collaborator of Villain’s, traces languid lines over a drifting backdrop of glowing chords, weaving between gentle consonance and hissing dissonance. Her timbre often has a wheezy tone that emphasizes the physicality of the breath filling her instrument.
There are broader themes embedded in these songs. “Gestures” references Hannah Wilke’s eponymous 1974 video-art piece about the male gaze, and “Silueta” and “Subtle Bodies” are homages to the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s feminist works, which traced lines between nature, violence, and the female body. In the context of Only Love From Now On, those hints are just that: breadcrumbs that might lead curious listeners to a deeper understanding of Villain’s processes and motivations, as well as indicators of places she might take her music in the future. It’s difficult to address complex ideas like these in ambient compositions, of course, and to its credit, Only Love From Now On never feels like it is awkwardly shoehorning anything extraneous into the music. What matters is all right there in the sounds themselves, and in the way minuscule, easy-to-miss details combine to create almost subliminally evocative clusters of tone and texture.
That’s particularly evident in the late-album pairing of “Subtle Bodies” and “Silueta,” which together lay out the record’s full stylistic scope. “Subtle Bodies” begins with a rhythm that might be the sound of feet crunching through snow. Then, like a film camera pulling back to reveal the vastness of the landscape, Villain widens the frame to admit glowing chords, whooshing white noise, chest-caressing sub-bass, and, eventually, layer upon layer of almost inaudibly harmonized wind instruments, pale as watercolors. The musical inspiration comes from dub techno of the 1990s—artists like Pole, Vainqueur, and Vladislav Delay—but her materials seem less electronic than elemental: dripping snowmelt, scraping metal, frosted air glistening in the morning sun. The album’s most complex, densely woven track, “Subtle Bodies” gives way to the record’s simplest: “Silueta” is made of ambiguously looped and layered woodwind sounds drawn out and processed electronically, twisting in slow motion like coils of ticker tape. This patient, meditative song feels as natural as breathing; one is struck by both its absolute economy of materials and the wealth she generates with them. After nearly a decade of music-making, “Silueta” is evidence of just how much Villain has stripped away from her music; for now, anyway, this feels like her vision distilled to its essence.


Collaborating with Blake Mills to make his best album yet, the gentle songwriter pushes beyond feel-good stereotypes to look for small joys amid vexing times.

Meet the Moonlight

Jack Johnson never completely fit inside the “Life Is Good” T-shirt that two decades of adult-contemporary hits wove for him. Sure, Johnson—a strong-jawed Hawaii native with a disarming grin and a twilit voice as tuneful as a commercial jingle—extolled making banana pancakes as a romantic getaway, turned an ode to a lover’s bulbous toes into a staccato jam, and recruited certified goof G. Love to sing along about Curious George. Perennially posed on the edge of some salty shore, guitar in hand, he seemed the heir apparent to Jimmy Buffett’s fiefdom of mixed drinks and beach breezes, a pleasant guy with cheesy tunes about the surf and your soul, man.
But Johnson’s emotions and concerns have been mixed since his perspicacious 2001 debut, more complicated than facile no-shoes/no-shirt/no-problem sloganeering. He somehow snuck “diegetic” into a pre-9/11 plea about media callousness toward murder, and commiserated with a sex worker while excoriating a john’s religious hypocrisy. More James Taylor or even Jackson Browne than the cash cow that Mister Margaritaville became, his preternatural sense of sangfroid has sometimes crowded out his surprising depth as a world-weary songwriter in search of small moments of respite and delight.
Johnson’s timely and calming eighth album, Meet the Moonlight, should clear up some confusion. The 10 balmy songs sway into two broad lyrical categories, unified by the same open-toed shuffle from which Johnson has only occasionally wavered: polite protest numbers and little devotionals. He stakes out the twin territories on opener “Open Mind,” a winning lament about trying to step back from perpetual disappointment. First he bemoans blind faith in unseen gods—Christ, capitalism, whatever—and then tries to leave such true believers alone, intending to afford himself the sanity of ignoring what he cannot understand, let alone accept.
These sociopolitical songs aren’t out to change anyone’s minds or offer some revelatory worldview. If you’ve ever bemoaned a reply guy or frowned inside an infinite echo chamber, you’ve had the same worries about social media Johnson broadcasts during the tensile “One Step Ahead.” “I give in, I give up/It’s too much,” he snaps without a breath, his voice suddenly sharp as flint. “3 A.M. Radio” takes on the cheap salvation of disinformation with an irritation so velvet-gloved it’s easy to mistake for tenderness. The breezy “Costume Party” seeks to leave a society of posers, where we camouflage our true selves to be liked; its rudimentary accompaniment of beer bottles, blown by Johnson so they sound like pennywhistles, offers a charming and playful send-up of careerism.
But it’s the other songs—the ones about trying to find space to be anything but irate, exasperated, and exhausted—that make Moonlight so relevant and assuring. Nestled between a simple slack-key jangle and slide guitar sighs, his voice during “Calm Down” feels like a deep-breathing exercise. He asks someone he loves to sit beside him for a spell, so they can slip away from wailing sirens and our collective quest to find out “how low until the bottom.” And the title track extends an open invitation to find hope and wonder in an act as simple as walking outside, looking up, and spotting the moon. Johnson often crams lots of words into three-minute spaces, but here he luxuriates inside scenes for five minutes, as if he’s learned enough to shut up and be still. “It’s good to be right here,” he coos, the bloom of his voice betraying a sense of genuine surprise. This epiphany is the core of possibly the prettiest song of his career.
Johnson is a 47-year-old father married to his college sweetheart who has now made enough of a fortune to make two nonprofit businesses devoted to giving it away. But little about Moonlight scans either as a self-righteous sermon or a fireside lament about how bad he has it. Instead, Johnson is only wrestling with what he sees around him, trying to facilitate empathy in a society where just that can mean working overtime. He nails that conundrum on the masterful “I Tend to Digress,” a relatable snapshot of a mind spinning around a hamster wheel. In the first 100 seconds, he sorts through a litany of big questions: Is there a god, and, if so, does it care about us or how we feel about it? Why do we cripple ourselves through comparison? And are we ever more than people’s perceptions of us? “I want meaning/I want reason/It’s not enough to have a pleasing morning,” he sings to start the final verse before pulling back and admitting that such simple joys, no matter how brief or pedestrian, may indeed be the point.
Blake Mills produced Moonlight in Los Angeles and Hawaii, working with Johnson at his home studio. It may seem surprising that a guy typecast as a beach strummer now joins a string of Mills collaborators that also includes Bob Dylan, Perfume Genius, and Fiona Apple. But lean in closely, and you can hear Mills’ subtle flourishes—the lambent drone beneath “Open Mind,” for instance, or the spectral percussion underneath “Windblown Eyes.” Mostly he fosters a newfound restraint in Johnson, so that the lines rarely get goofy and the arrangements never try too hard. Really, Meet the Moonlight sounds a little like a backyard picnic in lockdown, as simple as a friend coming over when the weather’s warm to play some songs about the day’s sadness and distant hope. If, for 20 years, Johnson’s seemed like the guy insisting “Life Is Good,” this setting makes it clear that his message is both shorter and more complicated: Life … Is?


Long Island death metal stalwarts bring considerable technical aptitude to an album that works within the framework of their long-established sound.

...Of the Dark Light

Suffocation are like the death metal equivalent of an old roller coaster that still makes your stomach drop even though you’ve ridden it hundreds of times and there are plenty of newer rides that are faster and more jarring. If you were following death metal in the early 1990s, when there was a sudden explosion of technical proficiency across the genre, Suffocation’s work since re-forming in 2002 will probably make you nostalgic for that era. By this point, fans will hardly be surprised to know that Suffocation’s eighth full-length, ...Of the Dark Light, doesn’t significantly expand on the formula established by landmark releases like 1991’s Effigy of the Forgotten and 1995’s Pierced from Within.
Like those albums, the new material comes stuffed with the instrumental gymnastics and headache-inducing atonality—that's a compliment, by the way—that first put the band on the map. In many ways, ...Of the Dark Light takes you back to a pivotal moment in death metal history. But the album also benefits tremendously from modern production that gives listeners a chance—arguably the best in the band’s almost three-decade career—to zoom in on the finer points of Suffocation’s music. When bassist Derek Boyer hits low notes or swollen chords, for example, it gives the music a sense of body you won’t find on the ‘90s recordings helmed by iconic death metal producer Scott Burns.
As usual, though, it’s the guitars and drums that occupy the spotlight. Once again, founding guitarist and bandleader Terrance Hobbs serves up a veritable air-guitarist’s dream of an album. Hobbs has the ability to cram multiple riffs and changes into even short stretches, so that by the time you’re 20 seconds into a song, you’ve got a ready-made guitar workout you could practice for days on end. Hobbs’ fretboard facility is so reliable that it’s easy to take for granted, especially since the acts that arose on Suffocation’s heels—Gorguts, Cryptopsy, Necrophagist, etc.—almost immediately raised the stakes when it came to complex song structures.
Since Suffocation’s first official recordings surfaced on the then-fledgling Relapse label in 1991, death metal’s growth has been exponential. If you examine the band’s whole catalog, you walk away with the impression that Hobbs and company haven’t tried to keep up with what other bands are doing. They’ve avoided stagnation, however, by continuing to push themselves within the framework of their established sound, and here the band gets an infusion of new blood from two new younger-generation members, drummer Eric Morotti and rhythm guitarist Charlie Errigo.
Thanks to the refined production, listeners can really sink their teeth into the way Errigo and Hobbs play off one another. Meanwhile, Morotti—recently described by Hobbs as “one of the fastest drummers we’ve ever had”—may not match the unique touch of founding drummer Mike Smith, but his superhuman chops no doubt pushed his new bandmates.
Perhaps the biggest sign of growth from the early days, though, comes in the form of Boyer’s lyrics. Death metal has always lent itself to metaphysical speculation, and Boyer's references to astral projection and “channeling forces we don’t understand” make the perfect lyrical foil for a character like the group's frontman, Frank Mullen. Mullen’s legendary growl is certainly forceful, but you can still make out (some of) what he's singing, which is more than you can say for the majority of his peers. Like a lot of death metal frontmen, Mullen sounds pretty convincing when he says things onstage like “this song’s all about killing people ‘cuz that’s what I like to fuckin’ do.” But there’s always been a hint of comic charm lurking behind that thick Long Island accent. These days, though, Boyer gives him—and us—a little more to chew on. Mullen’s personality goes a long way in setting him apart from the pack. The same goes for Suffocation as a whole, whose staying power on ...Of the Dark Night is undeniable.


The Toronto band’s debut album brightly blurs the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, but its lyrical preoccupations are much darker in tone.

Love in a Vicious Way

Mother Tongues make pretty, pristine music about messy, primal emotions: a brand of dream-pop that’s teeming with the sort of thoughts that can keep you up at night. The Toronto group’s debut full-length, Love in a Vicious Way, is an album of love songs, but they’re less interested in the blissful final destination than the arduous emotional journey. This isn’t so much a record of stories as a catalog of sensations: the animalistic nature of desire, the fight-or-flight response to falling for someone, the anguish of needing to know if your feelings are being reciprocated, and the grim thoughts that fester when your partner is no longer at your side.
That mix of euphoria and fear finds its musical manifestation in a disorienting sound that hovers between eras, vibes, and indie-pop subgenres. Singer-bassist Charise Aragoza and guitarist Lukas Cheung came up in the same 2010s noise-rock scene that yielded local favorites like Dilly Dally and Odonis Odonis, and some of that grungy residue could be detected on Mother Tongues’ free-ranging 2020 debut EP, Everything You Wanted. But these days, the group is closer in sound and spirit to pandemic home-recording hero Hannah Bussiere Kim, aka Luna Li, who played in an earlier iteration of Mother Tongues, while Aragoza has performed in Kim’s touring band. Like Luna Li, the Mother Tongues savvily blur the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, while feeding orchestral elements, Gainsbourgian grooves, and strobe-lit electronics into their cinematic swirl. But Mother Tongues are distinguished by their sense of unrest. Immersing yourself in their lustrous sound world is easy; making it out peacefully is another matter.
Unsurprisingly, Aragoza and Cheung cite Broadcast as a crucial influence on their delicate balance of retro style and spectral sonics. Having faithfully covered “Come On, Let’s Go” a few years back, Mother Tongues open Love in a Vicious Way with what’s essentially their own attempt at rewriting that song. “A Heart Beating” instantly lures you in with its cool go-go-dancer beat and twinkling textures, but its despondent, self-flagellating verses give way to an anxious chorus line—“A heart beating/Inside an animal”—that reads like a threat of an imminent attack, while Aragoza’s eerie wordless vocal incantations shift the mood from heady to haunted. The following “Dance in the Dark” then blindsides you with something you don’t often hear from dream-pop bands—a mutant metal riff—before introducing a ping-ponging, Stereolab-like hook that’s as delectable as it is desperate: “Why can’t we just be/Two lone souls floating side by side?”
Though it’s billed as Mother Tongues’ first full-length, Love in a Vicious Way is only five minutes longer than the EP that preceded it, but the distinction is important: Where Everything You Wanted captured a nascent group drifting through a shoegaze haze and taking the occasional dubby detour, Love in a Vicious Way feels more cohesive; its panoramic production makes the band’s diverse influences seem like natural parts of the same ecosystem. This band can get a lot done in a tight, three-minute timeframe: “Drip Drip” begins as a wistful rainy-day reverie about missing someone so much it hurts (“Body quake/No sleep tonight/Put your hands on me/I need that feeling”), but as Cheung and co-producer Asher Gould-Murtagh layer on the string effects, cosmic synth doodles, and gleaming guitars, the song floats off into outer space, transforming its carnal thoughts into cerebral sensations. (Ironically, when Mother Tongues do give themselves more space, they struggle to fill it: “Luv 2 Liv” begins as an intriguing goth/psych mash-up that gives the doomy, descending riff of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” a swinging-’60s Franco-pop spin, but ends up going in circles as it shimmies past the five-minute mark.)
Fittingly for an album preoccupied with the more unsettling aspects of romance, Love in a Vicious Way culminates in a song that depicts passion as a death pact. The glistening “Worm Day” is effectively Mother Tongues’ own “Just Like Heaven,” a tune where the guitars sparkle as brightly as the lyrics are dark. But the location has shifted from the raging sea that stole the only girl Robert Smith loved to the cemetery where Aragoza imagines resting next to her one and only for all eternity. “I lie down in the dirt beside you/I lie down in this shallow grave,” she sings, “So come take me home.” Traditional marriage vows may define the lifespan of a relationship up to the moment where “death do us part,” but Mother Tongues would rather sing about the sort of wild, ungovernable love for which even dying provides no limit.


After a scary bout with cancer, Boosie Badazz has a new lease on life and is releasing new music at a steady clip. Thug Talk is another hard memorandum on the turmoil of gangsta life.

Thug Talk

In a series of menacing, raw and honest records, Boosie Badazz has become something of an evangelist for getting out of the thug life, offering his take on the dark side of the drug game and gangbanging with vivid storytelling. The results have been some of the most vulnerable and transformative street-rap in years, and Thug Talk continues down that path. "We say sister be cool, even when it ain’t cool / Tell our nephews to chill, but they wan' live just like you" Boosie ruminates, reflecting on the dichotomy of living wrong while striving to be an example of stability and morality for those around you.
Thug Talk works almost as a concept record in which Boosie, like a peer rather than a judge, relates to the rush of gangsta life while trying to warn against it. "Wake Up" puts a fine point on it by sampling the late Pimp C, Boosie's mentor, from his most famous radio interview, in which he urged rappers to "talk about the bad side of the drug game too." Boosie snarls with the urgency of a teacher in an inner-city school drama: "You distributed well, hung with all the stars/Now they done took ya crib, repoed all ya cars / Sentenced all ya boys, locked ya momma up/ Now you gon turn rat or leave ya mama stuck." His preaching is effective because it’s rooted less in righteousness than the simple need for survival.
Yet Boosie still zeros in on the aspects that are too attractive for even him to still deny about that sordid lifestyle. On songs like "Off The Chain" he raps about violent altercation with the fearlessness and braggadocio of his younger, more reckless self.  The unfortunately titled "Retarded," meanwhile, harkens back to the old, looser "ratchet" party records that put him on a larger platform.
The real highlights come from the pulsating, thumping "For da Love of Money", about the perils that money and shine bring, and the sobering, meditative "Right Game Wrong N***a" about the ways in which the people around you will double-cross and take advantage. Meanwhile, the elegant ode to his children "Found Love n U" captures a father’s love and dedication with complete earnesty, and it’s a testament to Boosie’s artistic range that he can go from vicious and cold to extremely tender and loving with relative ease and no sense that he should hide any of his feelings.
Thug Talk might not have the emotional weight of In My Feelings, and it doesbn't outshine the ferocity and incredible production of* Out My Feelings,* but it pulls its weight against both records by continuing Boosie’s incredible 2016 streak. On the intro, he promises us that by the end of the album, "you will understand thug talk," and his innate gift as a teacher and a philosopher on record all but guarantees that to be the case.


Released after extensive touring, Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now. And that's moodier, louder, more atmospheric.

Static

Cults' name has always suited them well—the out-of-Bandcamp-nowhere ubiquity of the New York duo's "Go Outside", still a fixture in TV commercials, had all the hallmarks of a cult success. It also samples a cult leader, but Cults drew thematically on various ideas related to its nominal subject: romance as kidnapping, a band as a cult-like escape from the rest of the world's expectations.
Except Cults' songs never sounded like they belonged to a niche audience. Despite a slight lo-fi haze, their bittersweet collage of 1960s girl-group elements, 21st-century production techniques, and direct, inventive songcraft was almost as distinctive on arrival as near-contemporaries Sleigh Bells' Bubble-Yum blasts. But Cults weren't even abrasive. They could be fuck-you blunt, their spoken-word samples were potentially off-putting, and even their sweetest teen-angel prom dances had devilish undercurrents. But particularly on a song like "Bumper", a masterful breakup-scene duet, their potential for converts seemed limitless.
Static is more cult-like than Cults. Released after extensive touring, Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and admirably finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now. And that's moodier, louder, more atmospheric. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Oblivion and singer Madeline Follin again co-produced the album with early Vampire Weekend engineer Shane Stoneback, but this time they got heavy-hitter help from Ben Allen, the former Gnarls Barkley producer whose more recent clients include Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Washed Out, and Youth Lagoon. Static deepens Cults' sound, but the song probably won't spread as far, or as quickly.
Glockenspiel is (mostly) out; 60s and 70s film-score bombast is in, befitting the band members' film-school backgrounds. Shaft-infused orchestral skull-cracker "High Road" evokes cinematic James Mercer-Danger Mouse project Broken Bells in more than song title; one-minute reverie "TV Dream" hurtles after sci-fi theremin. Also in, by the way, is static itself. Recalling the all-silver-everything studios that produced LCD Soundsystem's 2007 masterpiece Sound of Silver, Cults have said they'd wheel broken TVs into the room while making the album. A fittingly frazzled guitar shrieks midthrough the galloping, organ-bummed, banjo-folked "We've Got It". White noise delicately coats sighing opener "I Know" and piano-centered finale "No Hope", which tests out a newly Beach House-like duskiness in Follin's vocals, amid gorgeously, brutally depressive lyrics.
"Static" can also mean staying in one place, of course. With Follin's words buried a bit more in the cacophony, and a relative lack of standout songs compared to the debut's treasure trove, that's also relevant here. First advance track "I Can Hardly Make You Mine", with whirring live-band propulsion and a convincing romantic desperation, is by far the poppiest song. Stasis occasionally comes up in the lyrics, too, as on the locket-pocket swayer "Always Forever", which sends Follin's voice to unusually pinched heights, or blurrily loping "Shine a Light", where all her narrator wants is "to keep you here forever." On "No Hope", we're told to "forget tomorrow."
Cults have studiously avoided revealing what exactly they mean by Static's title, but they've made clear in interviews their label knows its bread isn't buttered by this little band from the internet. What if static is, in the parlance of our times, business-related interference? "I Can Hardly Make You Mine" might be the catchiest song here, but "So Far" is the one I keep coming back to like the last album's "Bumpers": the way it builds off the debut's occasional shoegaze squall, the spaghetti-western expansiveness. And, to be perfectly frank, the way it repeats the album's title phrase.
"I wonder how you sleep at night," Follin belts on this one, almost echoing John Lennon's 1971 Paul McCartney diss—her vocals their most fervent on the whole record—before adding, "Your static is so far from me." I like to imagine it's a classic industry kiss-off, a declaration of independence. Can't you almost see the executives listening these demos and frowning, grumbling about "not hearing another 'Go Outside'"? We'll never really know. Still, last time Cults found freedom in becoming a pop group; on Static they find freedom in remaining stubbornly their own kind of pop group. That might not turn Cults into America's next Top 40 religion, but it should keep their tunefully skewed devotionals well worth revisiting.


The buzzing L.A. rap group flattens some of its personality with its major-label debut, a mix of party cuts and bland compromises.

Mafia Bidness

The Los Angeles rap group Shoreline Mafia blew up in 2017 with raw, druggy cult hits like “Musty.” In a strange twist of fate, the young quartet’s fledgling career was given a boost when the video for “Codeine Bryant” featured in a Fox 11 Los Angeles news piece that targeted “the codeine craze.” Their local-hero status led to a contract with Atlantic, a stunning rise for a collective with roots in the city’s graffiti scene. To hear group member Ohgeesy tell it, the story is something akin to twee indie teen movie Mid90s: just average teenagers having fun and wasting hours under the shadows of the palm trees. “We was just going stupid,” he told Fader in 2018. “I was tagging, skating. I was into crazy-ass shit—it was fun. Now, I’m not doing nothing unless I get actually paid for it.”
Ohgeesy’s assertion that money is the motivation, with fun relegated to second place, seems to predict the problems that hold back new record Mafia Bidness. The pursuit of a check is obviously a necessity—in rap, it’s venerated—but there’s the feeling here of something beautiful being corrupted. Mafia Bidness is being pitched as Shoreline’s debut album after a series of mixtapes, and there are times when you can sense the commercial compromises. Take “Poe The Drop”: A Future feature makes perfect sense on paper—the group’s magnificent debut tape ShorelineDoThatShit was an out-and-out sizzurp record. But here the collaboration feels perfunctory in the extreme. It’s not that the song is bad, exactly, but Future barely sounds like he’s in the room and the chemistry never catches fire.
Though influenced by Southern lean culture, Shoreline’s music fits neatly into the ratchet music corner of L.A. rap. When it comes together, Mafia Bidness boasts some of the most infectious California rap records of the summer. “Aww Shit” and “Fuck It Up” feature slick keyboard riffs, crisp snares and spotless production that feels heavily indebted to DJ Mustard—the perfect backdrop for the group’s alluring raps and playful punchlines. As usual, the murky voices of Ohgeesy and Fenix Flexin are most prominent throughout the album, with Rob Vicious and Master Kato dropping in and out to help keep things interesting.
The fusing of West and South is most obvious on “How We Do It,” a séance that attempts to resurrect Montell Jordan’s Angeleno anthem “This Is How We Do It” and turn it into a drug song (“The codeine’s here on the west side,” spits Fenix). You can feel an element of hit-chasing to the decision to ride Jordan’s beloved ‘90s classic. But the tweaks to the beat are to the song’s detriment, with a hum coating the bassline adding an unwanted distortion. Needless to say, guest vocalist Wiz Khalifa is a strange taste-making pick in 2020.
Mafia Bidness is stacked with guests, and the chemistry is at its best when L.A. artists come through. The inclusion of a very old Drakeo The Ruler freestyle showcasing his stony delivery may be an attempt to honor the incarcerated star. Later, YG and underrated Maryland rapper Q Da Fool jump on the album’s best experimental moment, “Gangstas and Sippas (Remix).” With long-time Shoreline collaborators Ron-Ron The Producer and AceTheFace’s hiccupping horns summoning the spirit of Missy Elliott, it proves the group can excel outside their established formula.
Thematically, Shoreline stay focused on one topic: women. They’re interested in romance, providing their lovers with material luxuries, and sex. A lot of sex. In Shoreline Mafia’s world, every text message is illicit. They’re probably the most sex-obsessed Californians since Too $hort. Sometimes this one-track mindedness can be a bit dumb: a song titled “Bitches” queasily catalogues the different types of women they claim to come into contact with. More interesting is “Change Ya Life,” produced by Helluva Beats. A sweet hook and heartfelt candor makes way for sinister piano keys and a throbbing beat, making the song at once a hip-hop-R&B crossover single and horror-movie score.
Innovative moments can’t relieve the disappointment that such a lengthy tracklist contains little as dark and sneakily gripping as “Musty” (which, importantly, Shoreline have claimed was recorded in one take) and “Whuss The Deal.” The inclusion of bonus track “Bands”—which featured on the 2018 Rob Vicious showcase Traplantic and includes all four members—just acts as a reminder of how irresistible their music can be, the group fluidly passing the mic to one another, the formula pure. With its flaws, Mafia Bidness is a solid L.A. party record, but no definitive Shoreline Mafia document. In the future, the group should make it their business to stay truer to themselves.

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The low-end mastermind behind the Bug and King Midas Sound turns his gut-rumbling frequencies and queasy atmospheres to the terrors of new parenthood.

Sirens

What no one really tells first-time fathers about childbirth is how intensely fucking scary it can be, especially when something goes wrong. Watching, waiting, and realizing there’s almost nothing you can do while your partner endures acute physical pain and your child struggles in its first brutal moments is a surreal, savage experience with few parallels in sanitized modern life. Kudos, then, to Kevin Richard Martin—better known for his work as the Bug and King Midas Sound—for tackling the subject on Sirens, a solo album that charts his emotional response to new parenthood, an experience heightened by his wife's emergency procedures and his son’s medical problems. The song titles alone are enough to give parents bad dreams: “There Is a Problem,” “The Deepest Fear,” “Life Threatening Operation 2,” “Necrosis.” (Fortunately, it resolves on a happier note, with “A Bright Future.”)
Sirens works as a kind of companion piece to King Midas Sound’s 2019 album, Solitude, which tracked the grim aftermath of a failed relationship. Both are howls of impotent rage at situations that seem beyond our control: childbirth and its complications on Sirens; yearning for someone who won’t be coming back on Solitude. Both albums share a footprint of drones, dread, and rumble, a kind of vaporous sonic creep that wafts out of the speaker like the pungent smell of death. On Solitude, this was balanced by Roger Robinson’s doleful vocals, which gave a stagnant, bitter life to the proceedings. But Sirens is an instrumental record, the only clear human touches provided by a heartbeat rhythm on “Too Much” and the tearjerking song titles.
That Sirens has its origins in a 2015 live performance makes sense. Room40 label boss Lawrence English has spoken of the gig’s “absolute, crushing bass,” and you can imagine the gothic distortion on tracks like “There Is a Problem” and “Life Threatening Operation 2” being majestic at skull-crushing volume. On record, though, Sirens becomes a more thoughtful work, less physically impressive but probably more interesting; it opens the door for questions. Why, for example, does the childlike sound of glockenspiel (or something very similar) feature on “Alarms,” its bell tone breaking through the ambient murk? Is it a sign that the infant life force is stronger than the drones of death? Or does Martin just like the sound? Toward the end of the album, on tracks like “Kangaroo Care” and “The Deepest Fear,” volume is replaced by whispery melody, in line with Brian Eno’s vision of ambient music as part of the environment. These delicate melodic clouds are among the most rewarding parts of Sirens: songs that invite you to lean in and lose yourself in the experience.
At its best, Sirens is a work of deep texture and curdled shade; it resembles a smudged imprint of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 2 where only memories of melody remain. It is both abstract and primal, the recorded equivalent of a panicky feeling in the gut; its moments of staggering dark intensity bring to mind the nameless dread of the best horror soundtracks. Sirens’ unrelenting nervous abstraction can be difficult to take over 14 songs, but perhaps that’s the point: The arrival of parenthood is long, intense, and frequently troubling, so why should Sirens be any different?


Ed Sheeran is older now; he’s married and newly a father. With all this change comes a new set of trite observations about love, life, and partying amid anonymous and synthetic pop music.

= (Equals)

Life, man. It’s a highway. It’s a trip. It passes you by. Just ask Ed Sheeran. In the four years since his inescapable blockbuster ÷, he married his childhood sweetheart and had a daughter. Sheeran has hit the ripe age of 30 and while he still indulges in the occasional pint down at the bro-tel, dude’s on diaper duty, and proud of it. All of these big changes loom large across Sheeran’s latest album, =, from the literal first words out of his mouth. “I have grown up, I am a father now/Everything has changed, but I am still the same somehow,” he dramatically declares in the opening seconds of the album on “Tides,” a soaring arena rocker about how life changes, like tides.
So who is this different-but-not-really version of Sheeran, other than unwaveringly heavy-handed? For starters, he’s fully embraced the synths that he’s been flirting with since the start of his career. Throughout most of =, Sheeran’s trusty acoustic guitar is gathering dust somewhere, abandoned in favor of the flashy 1980s pop and R&B-lite that is currently dominated by the Weeknd. Two years after he dabbled in dancehall with Justin Bieber and rapped alongside Eminem and 50 Cent, Sheeran has decided to rush the charts on his own once more, without any guests. Lead single “Bad Habits” is a Bronski Beat ripoff that’s all late nights, neon lights, and empty conversations. As suggested by an ominous synth line and a vampiric music video, the whole thing is meant to be a little spooky, a little edgy. But despite Sheeran’s fangs, “Bad Habits” has zero bite. It’s the same deal with “Shivers,” an unfortunately catchy song about dancing “’til the sunlight cracks” and not much more.
Over the first decade-or-so of his career, Sheeran has gamely played the part of pop’s biggest dweeb, a self-proclaimed underdog who appealed to moms and teenage girls alike. Once in a while he would attempt to poke a hole in this nice guy image by swiping his claws at a wanton ex, her swole new boyfriend, or the music industry. But that was the old Ed. On =, there’s a silver lining to every relationship gone sour, and every photo is developed in sepia. He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak.
But then again, who is listening to Ed Sheeran hoping for a little jolt of danger? = doesn’t venture very far beyond the idea that true love can ride out any storm, that a loving embrace can stop time, that happiness can be restored with a single kiss. And = offers plenty of songs that will make someone out there say “aw” while waiting to fill their prescription at a pharmacy. Like “Tides” before it, “Love in Slow Motion” takes the physics of its title literally and tries to freeze a vision of candlelit romance into amber. “Overpass Graffiti” is one of the album’s strongest songs but Sheeran sabotages himself with lyrics that seem destined for an Instagram stock photo: “We’ll never fade like graffiti on the overpass.” (Ever heard of a pressure washer?)
When the slightest whiff of conflict arises on =, it’s quickly brushed away by the reassurance that this too shall pass. “Read my mind, there’ll be ups and downs/But it won’t change a thing between you and I,” he croons on “Stop the Rain,” an optimistic track inspired by an ongoing plagiarism lawsuit. Even a misplaced wedding ring—lost somewhere between “we made love in the sky” and “overslept and missed the Northern Lights”—on the gratingly saccharine “Collide” isn’t cause for concern. Every song does the work for you, the most obtrusive example being a ballad called “The Joker and the Queen” which pushes card game metaphors to their breaking point (“When I fold, you see the best in me”).
These are not songs that invite close listening. Besides, when you do start to dig below the surface, Sheeran’s gestures of supposed depth become glaringly hollow. Women, the most frequent subject of his music, are continuously described as little more than body parts that Sheeran wants to attach himself to. Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood. “Visiting Hours,” an acoustic tribute to Sheeran’s late music mentor, finds the singer wishing he could drop by heaven for a bit and ask for some advice. It’s the one opportunity to approach something dark with a sense of maturity, anger, anything that has shown he has truly grown up. Instead, he imagines death as a young child would, where heaven is a physical place—with visiting hours.
After that comes “Sandman,” a cloying lullaby for Sheeran’s young daughter that would be right at home on a Baby Einstein album. Would you want to watch someone sing an intimate song to their infant for four minutes while you stand there and listen? And would you then want that person to give you a copy of that song so that you could play it back on your own time? These are questions that surely went unexamined amid the fog of a new father’s mind. At any rate, it’s underwhelming that Sheeran’s perspective on fatherhood is as trite as everything else he writes about. Love is forever, heaven is for real, the party never ends. “Ain’t it funny how the simplest things in life can make a man?” he marvels on “First Times.” It sure is, Ed.


In many ways, French producer Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. Borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, he returns with a guest-heavy album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. Guests include Laurie Anderson, Gesaffelstein, John Carpenter, M83, Fuck Buttons and more.

Jean-Michel Jarre: Electronica 1: The Time Machine

Electronica 1: The Time Machine

In many ways, Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. The French producer was a pioneer of flashy outdoor events—laser harps, pyrotechnics, crowds of a million or more, and budgets running into the millions, set in places like the Great Pyramids of Giza. His records sold like hotcakes—his 1976 debut, Oxygène, is said to be France's best-selling album ever—and featured spacy, arpeggio-laced fantasias, halfway between the "cosmic" synthesizer music of Tangerine Dream and the techno-pop of Kraftwerk, but they often veered dangerously close to kitsch.
The French musician's last new album was in 2007, but now he returns, borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, with an album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. There are 16 songs on Electronica 1 and 15 collaborators ("Automatic", a co-production with Yazoo's Vince Clarke, is in two parts), and they run the gamut, from titans like Tangerine Dream and Laurie Anderson to rising dance-music stars like Gesaffelstein.
Fellow synth maestro John Carpenter represents the electronic old school along with Anderson and whatever surviving members of Tangerine Dream are now using the name. The classical pianist Lang Lang lends a little high-culture gravitas, and Pete Townshend is here for some reason. Then, on the contemporary side, there's the French synth-pop soundscaper M83, one of the artists indebted to Jarre's sense of texture and volume, along with the adrenaline-loving techno producer Boys Noize, the prog-minded electronic duo Fuck Buttons, and the electro-pop singer and musician Little Boots.
But this diversity presents our first problem. Because unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists—and given the generic title, maybe that's the point—there's little to hold it together. In the first three songs we're taken from buzzing, high-energy techno-pop with Boys Noize, a billowing schaffel number with M83, and a weird New Order-goes-New Age pastiche with Air, and it never gets more coherent than that, unless you count Jarre slathering filters and bright, buzzing synths on everything like so much Cool-Whip as a common denominator.
And that brings us to our second problem: apart from a few songs—the moody "Automatic", with Vince Clarke, and maybe the goth-leaning Gesaffelstein track—the music just isn't very good. "Suns Have Gone" is an anodyne electro-house bouncer featuring a mopey Moby. The Tangerine Dream tune features some nice, pinging synths, but there are literally dozens, if not scores, of Tangerine Dream records you'd be advised to reach for first. "Rely on Me" saps Laurie Anderson's voice of its arch, critical qualities and turns her into the centerpiece for a sultry downtempo cut you'd expect to find on a Hôtel Costes compilation.
Maybe the song that makes the most sense is the Armin van Buuren collaboration "Stardust", and that's because the trance icon is most like Jarre himself in his fondness for whooshing effects, gleaming synths, and big, emotional-button-pushing chord changes. Of all contemporary electronic styles, trance is the only one where Jarre's influence is really felt; it would have made more sense to team him up with a dozen producers from that style, where a real back-and-forth exchange of ideas might have taken place. Instead, Electronica 1 is mostly a matter of superimposing one style upon another—sort of like tracing shapes on the pyramids with lasers.