This new deluxe, limited product is only for hardcore fans; the music, however—both the original LP and this record’s extras—is timeless.

Spiritualized: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space B P

“There's a hole in my arm where all the money goes,” moans Jason Pierce at the start of “Cop Shoot Cop...,” the 17-minute closer of Spiritualized’s third album and lone masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. His bedraggled voice drips through the words. He’s an addict, but it’s as if he realizes none of it mattered, anyway—there’s no salvation, no redemption, only cold life and sudden death. One cop lives to kill another cop. (Or a junkie survives only long enough to shoot up again.) The world keeps turning. Just like in his opening line, he quotes John Prine: “Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”
Since the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen, Spiritualized have recorded three LPs, a handful of singles and EPs, and two double-disc sets called Complete Works. And the noise-gospel rock sprees that followed Ladies and Gentlemen cemented Spiritualized’s reputation as one of rock’n’roll’s best live spectacles. Pierce has also scored a Harmony Korine film, recorded a solo electronics album, collaborated with Spring Heel Jack, and sculpted a mesmerizing long-form drone record with pianist Matthew Shipp. He also almost died, in 2005 of bilateral pneumonia, only to recover and finish a remarkable return to form—Songs in A&E. Yet Pierce unequivocally reached the height of his recorded powers with Ladies and Gentlemen. Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict—between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate.
Like most any critical and commercial success, the record has now been repackaged with extra content—specifically, in an ornate limited run meant for collectors and zealots. Ladies and Gentlemen’s treatment as an edition of 1,000 numbered box sets from ATP is outrageous and elegant enough to match its contents: Each song comes on an individual black three-inch CD, the discs sealed inside black blister packaging, like the single tablets of a treatment regimen. Two discs of demos and isolated elements from the finished tunes—those lonesome, blue horns blaring through “No God Only Religion,” for instance—get their own package, too, as does a personalized prescription signed by the doctor Jason Pierce himself. The liner notes take the form of lengthy instructions and technical specs for the medicine—how the pills were made, who made them, and how they should be taken. “What is Spiritualized used for?” asks the silver metallic ink. “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”
There’s no better way to put it, really. Ladies and Gentlemen is, at its core, an album about wanting something you don’t have until, as “Cop Shoot Cop...” says, it brings you to your knees. Pierce wants to fill that hole in his arm, or—as it were—the hole in his heart. Kate Radley plays keyboards and sings on Ladies and Gentlemen, and she begins the album with that famous telephone call: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,” her voice delivering horrible news with ruinous calm. Her romance with Pierce had just ended. Four days before Spiritualized were to open for the Verve in England in 1995, she secretly married the headliner’s Richard Ashcroft. “All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away,” Pierce repeats for the album's first minute. Your heart would hurt, too.
Pierce famously denies that Ladies and Gentlemen has anything to do with Radley, telling The Guardian as late as 2001 that “People have this idea that anyone who writes music is bearing their soul.” He cited “Broken Heart,” in which he admits that he’s too busy to actually have one, as an example of playfulness. These songs were mostly written before they called it quits, he’s said, and, after all, it’s only rock’n’roll. But with very vivid words and visceral sounds, Ladies and Gentlemen expresses the extremes of attachment and separation. “I just don’t know what to do on my own/ All of my thoughts are with you,” Pierce sings. But he’s not just hurt—he’s also angry. His band eventually unloads a rock salvo that feels like a fistfight. The drums roil. The piano pounds. If there ever was a melody, the harmonica’s choked the breath from it. By the next number, he’s practically sobbing over a galactic country drift: “Stay with me/Smile all the time/Don’t go.” He’s still addicted to something, and, on “Electricity,” he lets us know how good it felt. “I’m playing with fire, if you know what I mean.”
The rub, of course, is that we don’t know what he means. We can only interpret and internalize for ourselves. Maybe it was Radley, or maybe it was the heroin he smoked and the booze he drank. Hell, maybe he was just being an entertainer. But if you don’t know those feelings, the highs of love and the lows of loss, you’ve fared better than most. This sort of emotional ambiguity makes Ladies and Gentlemen an eternal album, as provocative then as it is now. People haven’t stopped loving and losing and hurting yet, and they won’t, of course. These pleasures and pains can be attached to anything. But what makes this ostentatious reissue—the box costs £125.00, or about $190, plus postage—so interesting right now is that it feels like a souvenir forwarded from another era. Ladies and Gentlemen is an extinct breed of album, a production so lavish that you have to think most record label executives would balk or faint at the thought of funding it in 2010. To wit, New Orleans fixture Dr. John is but a session player here, joining a cast of a dozen players, the London Community Gospel Choir, and a high-profile string quartet. (The record is also being reissued as a single disc, with new artwork, and as a 3xCD set without a lot of the pricy trappings of the more extravagant package.)
That spirit is evident on the demos included here, as well. On Ladies and Gentlemen, “Cool Waves” is a diorama built with weepy vocals, darting flute, schmaltzy strings, building concert bass drums, and a choir that’s just begging for salvation. But its one-minute demo included in this set seems no more complicated than the demos Pierce made with his schoolmates in 1984, his former band Spacemen 3’s first recordings. If the demo is a Polaroid, the album is Avatar. There's no way it could have been cheap.
While Ladies and Gentlemen established Spiritualized as one of the supreme bands of the ’90s, it was by no means an overwhelming commercial success. It earned album of the year honors from NME in 1997 and placed on year-end charts in The Village Voice, Q, and Uncut. But Ladies and Gentlemen charted only as high as No. 4 in England. In the United States, it’s sold slightly more than 111,000 copies—about 20,000 less than Merriweather Post Pavilion. To wit, Sony Music scrapped its plans for this reissue in America, meaning it’s available only through ATP’s mail-order service. The disc did better by the band’s legacy, one assumes, than it did for any label’s bottom line.
After all, it’s an album mostly without a clear hit single, a massive production better enjoyed as a whole than in bits and pieces. Though Spiritualized eventually released edits, remixes, or reworkings of “I Think I’m in Love,” “Come Together,” and “Electricity,” those songs thrive best in the context of the album—in their original, much more grand iterations. “I Think I’m in Love,” for instance, flows brilliantly from “Come Together” and, eight minutes later, its dénouement shapes the perfect non-introduction to the casual piano of “All of My Thoughts.” In the interim, Pierce reveals the breadth of the band’s ideas and influence. The first half combines Spacemen 3’s LaMonte Young–like 20th century composition (with its growling synthesizer drone), dub, soul (with its thick, stunted bass line), American blues (with its twisted harmonica howls), and folk (Pierce’s subtle autoharp strums). The back half is a sassy, baritone saxophone–backed dialogue between Pierce’s self-confidence and his self-doubt: “I think that I can rock’n’roll,” he sings. “Probably just twisting,” he answers. And on “Come Together,” one of only a few Ladies and Gentlemen tunes you’re likely to still hear live, Pierce fancies himself a young man that’s sad and fucked (a word he manages to use five times in as many minutes here) amid references to suicide, heroin, and busted dreams.
Even “Broken Heart,” the album’s ballad and most beautiful moment, clocks in close to seven minutes. It needs every one of them, too, since the song’s overwhelming sadness depends entirely on its length and its ability to establish an atmosphere. This is an album of emotion and empathy, and it’s hard to capture feelings with a format. That’s what ranks Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space alongside the best art: Jason Pierce and a big band that included his ex-girlfriend and a whole slew of people that soon became his ex-bandmates faithfully render the cycle of loving anything—the innocent exuberance, the bitter rejection, the episodic denial—in 70 perfect minutes. And even if you can’t afford this version of that achievement, you should have it on hand. One day, it’ll come in handy. After all, “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”


The powerhouse singer’s voice is chameleonic and present in every guise. Her debut is most satisfying not because she whizzes across multiple genres, but because of the skill she displays at each.

Jessie Reyez: Before Love Came to Kill Us

Before Love Came to Kill Us

The 2010s R&B renaissance gave rise to a lot of little renaissances, one of which is the R&B singer-songwriter. Their arrangements are acoustic and expensively dusty, like a piano whose warped keys are recorded from across an attic. Often the songs are R&B in name only; they sound like—and are intended as—alt-rock or folk. The lyrics might be florid, might be plainspoken, but will always be dead blunt. The first line will catch and bleed like a songwriting garrote, something like, “I should have fucked your friends.”
Jessie Reyez’s Before Love Came to Kill Us begins with this hook. From there, she claws in deeper, addressing her ex in a deceptively sweet croon: “I’m the monster that you made, yeah, you made me/Now I’m just like you, so don’t complain.” She threatens to Goodfella them. On the axis from 0 to Kelis’ “Caught Out There,” Reyez is at the far furious end. And while Before Love Came to Kill Us is technically her debut, it follows several EPs of similarly unsparing music like “Gatekeeper,” a vicious, Clockwork Orange-referencing exposé of sexual harassment by a former producer (whom she later named as Detail). It’s the kind of thing young women are encouraged to quietly write out of their career narrative or else, and a genuine risk.
Before Love Came to Kill Us showcases more of that high-stakes swagger. Reyez’s songwriting is extremely online—on one track she mentally Twitter-mutes a scrub—and extremely death-driven, whether she portrays herself as the death or the killer. Her voice is chameleonic and present in every guise: quirky lilt; delicate head voice; and, often and best, a blown-out, purposefully ragged belt that sounds like it’s trying to claw its way out of the recording. What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force.
“Intruders,” with shades of Kali Uchis’ “Tyrant,” is as romantic as it is subtly unsettling: “a love song, a war song,” and a metaphor of love as colonialism, of scorching other people’s earth. Equally alluring and disturbing is the woozy 6LACK duet “Imported.” Reyez’s and 6LACK’s vocals slip from background to foreground on the chorus; Reyez’s verses dissolve mid-flirt into nothing. Both artists, though commanding presences, surrender to the anonymity of the affair, singing some variation on “my name is fuck it, ’cause my name is not important.” The album takes its title from “Kill Us,” a power ballad built atop guitar heroics, like something Miguel would do. Best of all is the glitchy, carefree party-starter “Dope,” full-to-bursting with slyly lewd vocals and whoops.
Like all “debut” albums stitched together from various EPs—themselves stitched together from standalone singles and streaming-only tracks—the album has a cursory feel. Much of its best material has been around for years, like the radioactively angry “Kiddo” offcut “Deaf” and the breakout single “Figures,” or a newly remixed version of “Imported”. Sometimes it’s the other way around: Early versions of “Ankles” sent to streaming suggested the track was meant to feature Rico Nasty and Melii, which is either a metadata screwup or the reason the solo version on Before Love Came to Kill Us sounds a little unfinished and thin.
Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above. “Love in the Dark” and “I Do” are fusty ballads, and while Reyez sings the hell out of them, she’s also mixed way to the front, as if her producers don’t trust her performance alone to elevate the song. Likewise, “Coffin” is the requisite doo-wop track many an R&B singer has done in the past few years. Reyez revels in its melodrama anyway, drawing up blueprints for coffins built for two—but then 2020 Eminem arrives, an entirely different kind of grim. (Gather ’round the coffin, kids, and let me tell you of a time when the average Eminem verse was at least as funny as 6LACK saying “Six-Lack.”) But all these flaws have less to do with Reyez than the industry she’s in. Throughout, she proves adept at cutting through its BS and noise—by being louder.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The soundtrack to the new Cameron Crowe film consists of a song by Sigur Rós, music from Jónsi's solo album Go, and 30 minutes of new material with arrangements by Nico Muhly.

We Bought a Zoo OST

You've got very few choices if you're looking for someone with name recognition and vestigial indie cred to score a big-budget holiday movie called We Bought a Zoo. The Flaming Lips have already done their Christmas movie soundtrack (and, yes, even have a song about Christmas at the zoo), and this is a Cameron Crowe film we're talking about, one that's being touted as "from the director of Jerry Maguire," as opposed to, say, "from the director of Almost Famous." So Jónsi it is, and you can't argue with the decision. As frontman of Sigur Rós, his vocals embody wide-eyed wonder without devolving into unbearable twee overload. So We Bought a Zoo naturally manifests as a work of mutual admiration and mutual benefit and everyone comes out of it feeling better about themselves. Which is to say that above all else, the level of risk and likelihood to satisfy is on par with that of, say, a Cameron Crowe movie being released for the holidays.
What Crowe gets out of this relationship is obvious. But if Jónsi actually ever needed an audio résumé to snag more jobs like this one, he could just slap down a USB of We Bought a Zoo and have it speak for his emergence as a unique, bankable commodity post-Ágætis Byrjun. This is partially by design: one Sigur Rós song is included, but it's an epochal one. Much like "Svefn-g-englar" (a major player on the soundtrack to Crowe's Vanilla Sky), "Hoppípolla" has become shorthand for a specific era of Sigur Rós, indicative of their brassier, bolder, and more concise songwriting that came after ( ) stretched their most inscrutable tendencies to infinity.
We Bought a Zoo gets its spark from key tracks off Jónsi's 2010 solo album, Go. Yes, it's hard to separate Jónsi from his day gig, but if We Bought a Zoo gets people to think of Go as far more than something other than a Sigur Rós spinoff, well, hopefully it'll inspire Jónsi to give us more of the same. Despite the greater prevalence of synthetic strings and dance beats, there's something more primal about these songs than those of latter day Sigur Rós. "Go Do" speaks to a universal ideal of action and while time will reveal how "Boy Lilikoi" fits into this particular movie, the childish primitivism would've worked just fine within Where the Wild Things Are (though perhaps with Disney animation rather than brooding browns and grays).
So what's the draw for those of us who already share Crowe's ardent Jónsi fanhood? That's where a shade over a half hour of new music he composed for the film comes in, with tasteful brass and string arrangements courtesy of Nico Muhly. It's heartening to hear about the film's working title and climactic scene being inspired by 2007 live documentary Heima and the director encouraging Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson to listen to certain Sigur Rós songs to get their energy correct for certain scenes (I expect plenty of beatific, skyward gazing). And certainly, it's exciting to imagine Jónsi coming from Iceland to hunker down with what Crowe calls a "a toy sample keyboard and a head full of ideas." But let's not forget that while Crowe brought Jónsi in for his uniquely whimsical and weighty approach, it's still whimsy-for-hire.  So those trebly piano twinkles, elegiac tempos, octave-shifted vocals that hover and haunt like friendly ghosts? They're all here, treated with a bit of textural abrasion and arranged into small, three-minute packages with utilitarian titles like "Sun", "Brambles", and "Humming". Even one of two vocal tracks Jónsi composed specifically for the film hints a little to the melody from "White Christmas". Dude's a good company man.
Of course, it's all lovely and certainly more immediately engaging and compact than Jónsi's mostly-instrumental Riceboy Sleeps multimedia project from 2009. But it also has something going for it more important than gorgeous ambience: the Jónsi seal of quality. Does his work as an arranger and curator rank in the same percentile as his work as a vocalist? Not really, and even if starlit passages like "Sinking Friendships" or the luxuriant title track put in fine work with moving images, they aren't likely to dislodge anything from the upper echelon of his past work. But hopefully, offering the bold and evolving gestures of Jónsi's past decade in a relatively safe and compact design allows the possibility that a moviegoer might come out of the theater curious enough to parlay $10 into a meaningful relationship with Jónsi's music. And if that's the case, I think a lot of us are jealous of those who get to experience Sigur Rós for the first time in 2011.


This New York-based art project made its mark during the first wave of electroclash and now returns with its first full-length album in four years.

Entertainment

It's been nine years since Larry Tee, the man who coined the term "electroclash," put on the first Electroclash festival. Rather than looking at how that scene died, it's interesting to see how many of those festival headliners-- Fisherspooner, Peaches, Ladytron, Scissor Sisters-- survived. (Not to mention that nobody sniffs at later electro-pop bands like Hot Chip, Justice, Crystal Castles, CSS, etc.) Maybe the key for the the duo behind Fisherspooner (composer Warren Fischer and singer/performer Casey Spooner) is that they don't consider themselves "dance musicians" in the conventional sense. "I mean our music isn't really dance music," Fischer told Pitchfork's Tom Breihan in a recent interview. "I don't really know what genre it would lie in. I guess it's kind of like indie pop or pop music."
They always were, and still consider themselves, an art project first (notice he says "our music" rather than "we"). As they said, they get commissioned for dance pieces (the kind performed in concert halls), not for remixes. Their shows are built on spectacle rather than the charisma of any one of their players, including frontman Spooner. Unfortunately for a band that tries to turn glitter and polish into art, Entertainment is a lackluster performance. Here they almost become the indie pop group they claim they've always been, but the irony of their cries against capitalism and artifice ultimately fail without compelling songs to keep them afloat.
Entertainment begins promisingly. Lush opener "The Best Revenge" scans as old Fischerspooner sleaze for its first few seconds, but then the track shudders awake with broken keyboard notes and a dated but delightful horn line-- the kind where you hope someone yells "Blow, daddy!" But no one ever does. "At what cost? There is a price," warns Spooner. He lives by this admonishment throughout Entertainment (the title perhaps evoking that other anti-capitalist "dance" band, Gang of Four). The stance is funny (though understandable) coming from a band you'd always suspect was created exclusively for readers of BlackBook. Some of his warnings-- "Currency can only do so much" ("Money Can't Dance"), "What's real? What's fake" ("In a Modern World"), or "It's no one's fault but our own," from their slippery anti-war track "Infidels of the World Unite", ring insincere, an unfortunate side-effect of Spooner's deadened vocals.
Fischerspooner's bolder attempts at pop, like the flute-backed twee verse towards the end of "Money Can't Dance" and the more personal "Door Train Home", hint at something more interesting. The latter song is unusual here: though Spooner's still deadpan, his specificity and intimate lyrics make up for the rather broad strokes of sawtooth synth and whining guitar from his partner. But there are far too many tracks on Entertainment where both members are sleepwalking. "We Are Electric" comes off particularly half-hearted; Fischer cycles the song's tinny, repetitive synth pattern though different filters while Spooner intones the title line over and over. Both halves play like they were written for different songs with no thought given to how they'd get along.
For a group not making dance music, their danciest tracks are still their best. "To the Moon" coalesces in all the right ways: found audio detritus blends into a likable, warm synth melody and a layered, exultant beat. Slivers of violin and keyboards are inserted into all the best spots, and even Spooner finds an elementary vocal melody before backing out gracefully. It works in this context, for a group that seems all about context. Like, "Danse En France"'s textured, fractured pieces and spoken intro don't work until you know that the song was commissioned for a particular dance company, and is based on a hilarious story of casual sex via boneheaded Americanism. So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor. Those halves that don't quite fit? They're begging to be pulled apart and put back together by heavier hands.


Unreleased at the time, the Japanese guitarist's elemental free jazz opus provides the missing link between Albert Ayler, Merzbow, and Acid Mothers Temple.

Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit: April is the Cruellest Month

April is the Cruellest Month

Few record labels provided succor for generations of freaks, seekers, and weirdos like ESP-Disk. Founded by lawyer Bernard Stollman in New York’s bustling East Village in 1963 to promote the language of Esperanto, it soon pivoted to another kind of international language—music—introducing to the world the searing, ecstatic jazz of Albert Ayler and Sun Ra as well as the stoned folk of the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. The ESP catalog still sounds like little else in recorded music, radically obliterating all preconceived notions of what a saxophonist, a jazz singer, percussionist, or rock band might sound like. If only the label had gotten to the singular guitar of Masayuki “Jojo” Takayanagi.
That was the plan back in 1975 at least, when Stollman first encountered the Japanese guitarist and offered to put out a record on ESP-Disk. Takayanagi and band recorded a session in the spring of that year only to lose touch with Stollman over the summer. By fall the label was bankrupt and Takayanagi’s April is the Cruellest Month sat on a shelf, only seeing release on CD in Japan some 16 years later. Now rescued by New York’s Blank Forms label, April attempts to properly answer the big “What if?”s around it and to properly place Takayanagi as paterfamilias for the likes of Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Acid Mothers Temple, Michio Kurihara, and the PSF roster. There’s no need to blow the dust off, as it sounds as vital and unfettered in 2019 as it did forty years ago.
Versed in blues, jazz standards, and modal excursions, but equally comfortable transforming his guitar into a gale-force storm (this particular concert from 1972 highlights his astonishing range), Masayuki “Jojo” Takayanagi got his start in cool jazz bands back in the 1950s. But his development paralleled that of jazz from halfway around the world, in particular the likes of 1960s Coltrane, forever seeking new vistas even as it challenged and alienated audiences. Takayanagi began to explore the sound of feedback as well as the kinds of sounds he could make by lying his guitar on a table top and attacking it with all manner of objects, be it a violin bow or metal. There are aspects of his sound that bring to mind the likes of Western peers like Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock, Derek Bailey, or AMM’s Keith Rowe, but those players’ sensibilities rarely overlap save in Takayanagi’s work.
By the ‘70s, Takayanagi began to turn away from jazz completely, concerned less with chords and structure and more with conjuring elemental forces. One need only a few opening seconds from a live "Mass Projection" from 1973 to not so much hear as feel Takayanagi. April is the Cruellest Month captures Takayanagi during a fertile, frantic creative outburst in 1975, coming between formidable albums like Eclipse and Axis/ Another Revolable Thing. Had it come out back then, it would have been a mighty triumvirate for Takayanagi and a coup for the Japanese free-jazz scene, putting one of their most incandescent acts on the same roster as Ayler and introducing Japan’s music to the world at large. Similar in structure to Eclipse and Axis, April presents three different approaches across three long tracks gradually increasing in intensity and ferocity. “We Have Existed” features Kengi Mori’s flute, Nobuyoshi Ino’s kinetic bowed cello, and Hiroshi Yamazaki’s careening freeform percussion. Each member scrabbles away at their sound and Jojo’s guitar binds it all together. Approaching 20 minutes, “My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart” is about as close as one can get to having a cyclone churn through your living room.
In the ‘80s, Takayanagi would collaborate with John Zorn and perform at international jazz festivals, but it was a missed opportunity to not have the Western world know what fierce sounds were arising from Japan. It would take until the 1990s for adventurous listeners to have their eardrums blown out by the likes of Keiji Haino, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and the like. How many budding young American guitarists might have stumbled across Takayanagi and April is the Cruellest Month knowing that they too could push even further into the unknown? Cruelly unreleased at the time, Takayanagi’s sound remains formidable and transformative.


The dubstep artist follows his critically acclaimed debut with the even richer*,* more complex, and more enveloping Untrue, a record of reverb-heavy and mournful songs that feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener.

Untrue

If you know the true identity of London dubstep artist Burial, consider yourself a member of a very exclusive circle. Steve Goodman, who runs London's Hyperdub label, knows-- he cuts Burial's royalty checks, after all-- but if anyone else does, no one has yet had the temerity to out Burial's inner Peter Parker. Read an interview or two with the artist himself, and you'll quickly figure out why he's chosen to remain anonymous. Burial's decision not to let a backstory be a part of the music doesn't come across as a strategy calculated to maximize hype, but just the opposite: a means of keeping the music pure, faceless, answerable only to itself-- a closed system.
The critical success of Burial's self-titled first album threatened to derail the project's mystery, however. A collection of tunes recorded at home on a low-tech setup over the course of many years, Burial-- moody, brooding, by turns supple and sullen-- shot to the top of many critics' best-of lists last year. To judge from a recent interview with Burial posted on the Hyperdub website, the attention was more distracting than gratifying. "The first [album] got slightly out of where it belonged," he says, "and I found it a bit difficult to just block things out and make tunes in a low key way again, and it took time to just get back to doing that, and liking it, and doing it fast, and not trying to be a perfectionist. Just trying to dream up tunes again without worrying what people were going to think."
But if it's the reclusive life that Burial seeks, he might just be his own worst enemy, because his new album, Untrue, bests Burial's fans' wildest hopes for the followup. Burial was a worthy, sometimes thrilling record-- an impressive debut-- but it sometimes lost focus, particularly when it attempted to carve out something closer to "proper," clubwise dubstep. But Untrue maintains the style and the vibe of the first album and yet does it better. It's a deeper album-- richer, more complex, more enveloping. The irony is that almost nothing has changed. Burial still makes his beats (at least, so he claims) with relatively lo-fi audio editing software, eschewing the comfort of sequencers and MIDI clocks. His string sounds, which on Burial let many a critic to call his music "cinematic," sound as unabashedly canned as they did last time, and his manipulated vocals-- warped, time-stretched, pitch-corrected-- are just as unabashedly emotive.
Like Burial, Untrue is a homage to UK garage, or two-step-- a short-lived, oft-mourned fusion of breakbeats and house music that peaked in the late 90s before morphing into offshoots dubstep, grime, and bassline house. Thus Burial's beats swing wildly, as though flitting between two tempos in the space of a single bar; jittery hi-hat patterns flash like knives being sharpened, and tooth-cracking rimshots invariably fall on the third beat, dividing time in odd ways. His beats seem to rush, trying to catch up with their own out-of-control forward motion, and then-- crack!-- having caught up, they simply hang there, as though unsure what to do with the remaining time left in the measure. It's a relay race marked not by starter's pistols, but stopper's pistols, leaving an impression at once rigid and woozy.
But what Burial gets wrong is at least as interesting as what he gets right. Where two-step was marked by its precision-- staccato sub-bass, nimble cadences, rapid-fire vocal shots-- Burial smears everything until the songs' moving parts are all but indistinguishable. In "Ghost Hardware", what sounds like the creaking of a swingset grates in the background, as if attempting to tug the music out of its planned arc. On "Shell of Light", piano and strings eddy to a crawl as rain drizzles over muted, multi-tracked vocals. There's nothing on Untrue that's likely to work in the dance club, but that's beside the point. Top-heavy with sad string passages and mournful vocal loops, Untrue is an album meant to be heard at home, in the car, on headphones-- his songs feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener.
Thanks to Burial's use of vocals, Untrue is overflowing with earworms, its spongy terrain pocked and pitted until the ground threatens to give way with every step. It's not a pop album, at least not by Top 40 standards, but his voices-- male, female, and ambiguous-- wriggle deep into the listener's consciousness. They're just intelligible enough to stick-- I'm pretty sure that the refrain to "Near Dark" runs, "I can see why I love you"-- and unintelligible enough to resist dislodging. Occasionally paired with scraps of what might be movie dialogue, they recall the haunted intimacy of Luomo's Vocalcity; like that record, they toy with r&b's conventions, heavy with breath and rippling with trills and melisma, some of it digitally imposed.
Like everything in Burial's music, the vocals are supercharged with emotion: Loaded with distance, they often sound like they've been recorded several rooms away from their source. Burial isn't afraid of sidling up next to cheesiness, practically flirting with bathos-- his string sounds are uniformly synthetic and his voices seem expressed in miniature; like Thom Yorke, he raises affect almost to the level of fetish. Burial's all-permeating use of reverb could be a crutch if it didn't work so well. The haze works in his favor, leaving a level of plausible deniability-- you can never be entirely sure that what you're hearing is really there in the track, creating a wonderfully unfinished feeling to the record.
"Sometimes you just want music to stay where it is from," says Burial in his Hyperdub interview. "I love drum & bass, jungle, hardcore, garage, dubstep, and always will till I die, and I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music. I like underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light." Untrue is just that. It quivers like a hissing lightbulb, one that illuminates the tracks scattered around it-- garage, dubstep, soul-- and in doing so smears them into unique shapes. Untrue shows the hunched, unreadable form of Burial's refusenik stance-- back turned, hands shoved in pockets-- and practically commands you to follow.


While the rapper’s latest of multiple releases this year is too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, he’s landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment.

Make Drunk Cool Again

It’s one thing to be a prolific rapper in 2021, but Rxk Nephew attempts to reskin himself with every release. None of the nearly dozen projects the Rochester rapper has dropped this year sound the same, and he clearly relishes laying his non-sequitur raps over as many regional styles as possible. Nephew’s music is breathless and unpredictable; he’ll call out rappers for lying about gang activities one minute and diss a producer while rapping over their beat the next. This tenacity makes him suited to a place like YouTube—where his page is updated frequently—and would theoretically make him a great mixtape rapper, but his ever-growing discography fluctuates wildly like a polygraph test. The drawback to being a loose cannon is not knowing when or if your firepower will blow up in your face.
But Nephew keeps the steady drip of music coming anyway. Make Drunk Cool Again—which isn’t even his latest project—is another left turn in a short career already brimming with them. The beats, handled mainly by producer Rx Brainstorm, swerve from the chopped samples and 808s of Crack Dreams 2 toward swaying synth-funk, house music, and bachata before collapsing into a pile of thrash metal on the closer “Slitherman Solo Set.” While Drunk is still a little too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, Nephew is landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment.
Much like his brother turned frenemy Rx Papi, Nephew’s appeal lies in his bluntness. Most of his punchlines and stories reframe bizarre scenarios in the most direct way imaginable. On “Peter Gunnz X2,” he makes several jokes and comparisons to Gucci Mane, Joe Biden, and infamous rapper-turned-manager Wack 100 in under two minutes. Other times, like on “Wake Up the Dead,” he’ll pause mid-bar for emphasis and draw out unexpected laughs: “I told myself I’ma quit Henny/Shit... I lied.” Every word is a potential landmine primed to shock and surprise.
What sets Drunk apart from Nephew’s other 2021 projects is the wild variety of beats and new tweaks on older formulas. Slitherman, Nephew’s gravel-voiced alter ego, pops up occasionally to highlight a punchline or to growl out a handful of bars. This works best when Slitherman has the track to himself, like on the sludgy “Slitherman Solo Set,” and only sporadically when Nephew slips in and out of the persona on songs like “Gunnz” and “Dead.” The funk slathered across the album’s first half inspires Nephew to try singing his hooks, and his passable vocals are refreshing in context.
What’s less refreshing is that Drunk can’t figure out how to make all its sounds cohere. The synthetic funk of “Too Tuff Tone Tarantino,” the 2010s EDM-lite of “Time 2 Not Go Home,” the Latin flavor of “Cuban Plug,” and the crunchy guitar riffs of “Slitherman Solo Set” all sound good on their own, and Nephew navigates them well, but each plays like it belongs on a different project. This discord would work better if it said anything about Nephew outside of “He likes lots of music,” which, if you’ve listened to any of his other drops over the last few years, you already know. These are good songs grinding up against each other for the sake of chaos with little rhyme or reason, a valid creative outlet that nonetheless grows more and more tired with each release.
Luckily for Nephew, his personality and still-shocking bars are enough to keep things interesting. Listening to Drunk is like watching a professional daredevil perform their signature trick for the third or fourth crowd of the day: the opening beats generally play out the way you expect, but the element of danger lurking underneath ensures he won’t pull the same move twice. Nephew doesn’t crash often, but even when he does, there’s always something to take away from the wreckage.

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The solo guitarist’s fourth album is soft and subtle, approaching the strains of pop while still basking in the solitude of Americana.

Goes West

With each new album, William Tyler’s portrait of America gets deeper and more personal. His compositions—always wordless, mostly in major keys—have been written for acoustic guitar (2010’s Behold the Spirit), electric guitar (2013’s Impossible Truth), and an innovative band blending rural folk music and krautrock (2016’s Modern Country). Despite the differences in presentation, his work always conjures a similar image of the country. When Tyler plays guitar, there’s a feeling of hope and forward motion, largely tied to his wildly expressive right hand, which he uses to pluck up bundles of strings like a gardener pulling weeds. He’s a solo guitarist I would call texturally focused, but he’s also the one whose songs are most likely to get stuck in your head. He never aims to dazzle with virtuosity; he’s got too much ground to cover.
With Goes West, Tyler’s fourth solo album, he’s written the prettiest, simplest songs of his career. Compared to the psychedelic epics on Modern Country, these compositions show their cards quickly, with many sticking to traditional verse-chorus structures, and they play like balms. If so many of Tyler’s records have found him loading up the trunk, inviting you into the passenger seat, and heading some place new, then Goes West is more like finding a remote spot to park for a while and taking in the sunset. Accordingly, it’s also his most sentimental work, subtle and emotionally charged in a way that highlights his evolution as a songwriter. In an autobiographical sense, the title marks a turning point: Tyler’s first music since leaving his native Nashville for Los Angeles. But it’s also the closest thing to pop music the 39-year-old composer has ever made.
Leading the band with his trusted, timeworn Martin D-18 acoustic, Tyler has assembled a group with a lighter touch. Griffin Goldsmith’s drums are brush-stroked and lyrical; piano and synth from co-producer Bradley Cook and James Anthony Wallace often resemble wind chimes, or at their more atmospheric, the slow breeze behind them. And throughout the record, Meg Duffy accompanies on electric guitar with a shadow-like effect, suggesting depth and distance to Tyler’s beatific melodies. The album’s strongest moments are also its softest: the elegiac “Call Me When I’m Breathing Again” and “Rebecca,” whose refrain is so sweet and familiar it had me trying to figure out which McCartney song it resembles. Both Tyler and Duffy—who records as Hand Habits and has also played with Kevin Morby and the War on Drugs—have a zen-like melodic sensibility, levitating up the fretboard in glassy, crystalline patterns. Duffy’s most affecting solo on the record cuts the plaintive “Man in a Hurry” in half: It’s bright and fleeting, a burst of lightning in lazy summer rain.
When Tyler lived in the South, he used his music to interrogate a place he’d known since childhood. In these songs, he’s more tentative about the world around him, if no less inquisitive. Working in a line of disparate artists ranging from New Age, folk, and classical—which he recently characterized as “cosmic pastoral”—Tyler has always paired the sprawling sound of Americana with the ugliness that can reside within its expanse. The tension in his work often feels like his way of navigating the dissonance; that so many of his compositions resolve in ringing, open chords becomes a way of summoning peace from deep within. On Goes West, he employs this to a subtler effect. “Fail Safe,” with its lapping drums and waterfalls of trilling harmonies, could soundtrack a TV spot for a beach resort, but it was also inspired by the language accompanying threats of nuclear war. “Virginia Is for Loners” is one of his many tributes to the road but it’s distinct in conjuring mostly the barren vistas along the way, a low cello humming through its lonely refrain.
Tyler is drawn to instrumental music that takes inspiration from distinct historical events, he once explained, “like Hiroshima or the crucifixion of Jesus.” Goes West feels less conceptually united than any of his work—more inspired by the contemplation of history than history itself—but this searching quality adds to its honest, meditative power. Many of the songs feel like visions left intentionally ambiguous, and the record is bound by a pensive, permeating calmness. The closing “Our Lady of the Desert” occasionally threatens to break this hypnotic spell, rising in momentum with jazz lifer Bill Frisell’s lilting, birdsong guitar solos. Where one of Tyler’s earlier compositions might have taken off from here and become airborne, this one rises and falls and fades, ending the album like a deep exhale, a wordless signal that it’s time to keep moving.


Rising talent Julianna Barwick has her ethereal, gorgeous EP given a well-deserved wide release.

Florine

Julianna Barwick recently told Pitchfork * *that she didn't "think" there was any guitar on her new EP. We can sympathize with her hazy recollection of the specifics-- Florine leaves a lingering impression of unreality in its wake. A breadcrumb trail of piano and synthesizer guide us through the misty forest of Barwick's voice, and we come out on the other side wondering if it really happened. The mood is blissful and bewitching; lost, but somehow secure. Using a loop station and pedals to produce cyclical patterns on the fly, Barwick's work can't help but recall Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Even so, Florine feels bracingly intimate and original, in its hieroglyphic way.
The most cunning thing is how the music seems wordless at first, then divulges gentle commands, both real and imagined-- stay, higher, come back, choose. Because of the album's spare substance, these little imperatives take on a divine weight. And divinity is the spark that gets Florine going. Barwick begins with a halogen hymn, "Sunlight, Heaven", and then builds a cathedral in the sky, "Cloudbank". But when "The Highest" dips into tones of serene lament, her sacred equanimity begins to slide. "Choose" chirrups like Enya doing Kate Bush; "Anjos" spills Glassian waterfalls of piano; "Bode" epitomizes the cherubically neurotic flutter of Florine's second half.
Nothing you can say about Florine directly accounts for its elegiac, magnificent aura. Except maybe this: Barwick has remarked that the album was inspired by her memories of playing music without instruments in church, and the course it charts, out of the choir loft and into the more fluctuant realms of leftfield pop and post-minimalism, could represent... gosh, all kinds of narratives: the loss of received values, the fading of religious conviction, the basic human learning curve from clean myth to murky reality. How fitting that the first song after the opening trio of tearjerkers, at the moment when the spiritual seems to lose ground to the postmodern, is called "Choose". This blend of uplifting sounds and postlapsarian concept might account for the music's sorrowing, joyful, dreamlike impression-- it moves in two directions at once, floating upwards to describe a fall.


Matthew Shipp hasn't reached his teeth-baring potential. Yes, he's the greatest pianist of the modern age,\n\ blending ...

Anti-Pop Consortium: Antipop Vs. Matthew Shipp

Antipop Vs. Matthew Shipp

Matthew Shipp hasn't reached his teeth-baring potential. Yes, he's the greatest pianist of the modern age, blending diverse atonal qualities with an unequivocal spryness and an effortless range of emotion, and all those other things that come with being a brilliant player. (Free cocktails?) But when you compare the sentiment in a record like Nu Bop to that of most 20th Century composers with a similar vision, Shipp's stuff just doesn't hang on the low end of the friction enough. I want his music to punch me in the face with its dramatic, chaotic authority. He is for the advancement of jazz. He is supposed to be the Edgard Varèse, the Charles Ives of our generation, goddammit, interpreting the city sounds around him through improvisation and a sensitive, reflective ear. Unfortunately, the purpose of his recordings-- evolving jazz by including its urban peers in hip-hop and electronics-- has always stopped a hair short of success. The performances are airtight, but the crust is soft.
As it turns out, one thing that was missing was Antipop Consortium, and more specifically, their unequalled, futuristic, split-atom beats. Up 'til now, Shipp's beat programmers have been all wrong. Past collaborators DJ Spooky and FLAM are decent from an electronic and an emotional standpoint, but what they've offered hasn't ever defied expectations. If Shipp truly wants to advance jazz into the realm of youth-popular urban culture, he's gotta break bread with the crazy funk, collaborate with the most innovative musicians.
Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp opens with a brow-furrowed block of Shipp's piano chords cut into the boom-bap of the bass and hi-hat. It's an imposing, rhythm-heavy intro, and while not a complete song, its neon spritzes of keyboards and backwards-looped cymbals offer a clear theme of what's to come: future jazz in the most definitive sense. From there, Shipp's piano turns backflips all over APC's swimmy, electro-alarms. William Parker's bass and Shipp's low-end counter each other as Beans and Priest holler, "Stereo! Stereo, Stereo! It sounds so fresh, I'll sing it once and repeat!". From here, the mix alternates between rap solos, piano solos, some loose drums, chunks of chords, sample of dogs barking (two breeds), keyboards on the holodeck. Shipp's piano is sampled for melody and rhythm, as much as it solos-- and even the high-end, winky optimism with which Shipp sometimes flirts holds up way deffer as a platform with a little electro street beat.
There's not much of that froufy shit, though; it wouldn't be an Antipop joint without their cold, twitchy vision: "Svp", "Stream Light" and "Coda", specifically, feature their marble-clinking rhythms and bleak, controlled atmosphere, M. Sayyid rapping with a resigned wateriness in his voice, and blooming with heavy-footed atonal melodies. "Monstro City" has a cigarette-burning be-bop vibe, lyrics unfurled like spoken word in tandem with clicky bongo and, yes, more gaping hunks of piano chords, teetering into a dark chasm of a future. This is true-blue street jazz, and you can tell it comes straight from the heart and head.
Okay, but the thing is, this is billed as an Antipop Consortium record-- their absolute last release, as a matter of fact, since they broke up last autumn. (R.I.P!!!) And while this is a step forward for Shipp, for APC, it's a side-step from their gleamingly tricked-out, beat-tweaked and freaky Arrhythmia. Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is solid, yes, but the experimentation doesn't always work in their favor, and it often dilutes the propulsive fire beneath their final release. Then again, maybe it's appropriate that their last hurrah-- Antipop's final track, "Free Hop", has them melting scratches and turntables backwards over a charged improv session, marking a deflated and untimely end, for eight years was simply not enough.


Teaming up with a soulfully minded boom-bap producer, the Brooklyn rapper shapes a warmly nostalgic album around the core tenets of East Coast hip-hop.

Mona Lisa

It takes extreme dedication to the old school to keep your references on point. No self-respecting b-boy, after all, raps about data ownership, the Tide Pod Challenge, or “The Conners.” Certainly not Joell Ortiz, who’s less a golden-age hip-hop revivalist and more a hardened industry survivor. There’s a moment on “Decisions” when, in an attempt to assert his lack of interest in keeping up with fashionable young stars, Ortiz name-drops Lil Wayne. No disrespect to Weezy, who just put out his most vital album in years, but that the reference is probably about a decade out of date tells you more about Ortiz than the lyric itself. He goes on to advise listeners on where to buy their CDs, like a rap Jasper Beardly. Street-corner rhymes and grubby beats in 2018? What a time to be alive.
Ortiz’ career so far has been nomadic. That his time on Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment failed to produce an album is no disgrace—the list of rappers who have struggled to hold the good doctor’s attention is long and distinguished (Rakim, for one). He hooked up with Joe Budden, Royce de 5’9”, and Kxng Crooked to form Slaughterhouse in the collective hope that the spectacle of four beaten-down rappers would be enough to gain some kind of traction. But Mona Lisa feels like Ortiz is done chasing ghosts. Dedicated to the core tenets of East Coast hip-hop, the album finds the Brooklynite incredibly content to bask in a sound as classic as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. At just 38, he’s only a couple years older than Westside Gunn, one of the contemporary stars of cracked New York rap. Yet on Mona Lisa, Ortiz revels in his elder-statesman status. It’s as comfortable a fit as a pair of silk pajamas two sizes too big.
To achieve this synthesis, you need a producer smothered in the original myths of hip-hop—a chop-up-the-soul symphonist who worships at the altar of DJ Premier. Enter Apollo Brown, the Detroit slinger of throwback boom-bap. Like Ortiz, Brown doesn’t pardon his old-fashioned proclivities, blazing a production style built on dusty samples, quick-hand scratches, and steady drum loops. With a batch of beats that sound like they came off the same production line as No Question, the equally solid joint record he put out this year with Locksmith, Mona Lisa won’t win awards for ingenuity or surprises, but it’s rarely hard on the ear.
Ortiz’s affinity for Brown and this project is confirmed by how strikingly personal his writing is. The whimsical beat of “Reflection” finds Ortiz staring out onto the Hudson River, picturing the rap riches he might have achieved before peacefully reconciling with the career he has had (“My fans don’t expect me on the charts/Guess when you gifted, sometimes you rap yourself into a box”). Sometimes he uses his seniority to spin wisdom like a modern version of Ossie Davis’ Da Mayor from Do the Right Thing. After shouting out his Brooklyn roots on “Grace of God,” he unleashes a reminder of what the borough’s residents have dealt with with since time immemorial: “The police, they did the same shit  y’all seeing now, ‘cept camera phones wasn’t out.”
Not everything is as sweet. Ortiz sounds oafish on “Cocaine Fingertips,” which, among other things, has a vile double entendre that refers to cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Turns out he’s more Gilbert Gottfried than Action Bronson when it comes to oddball humor.
Mona Lisa has few such obvious flaws, yet the album can sometimes feel overly snug. A little more tension would have been welcome—the kind that fellow mature-minded New Yorkers like Roc Marciano and Ka lean towards with their warped orchestration, or the Alchemist, with his affinity for more psychedelic sounds. But it’s hard to grumble too much about an album that speaks the eternal truths of boom-bap with such nostalgic romance. More importantly, it shows us that a clear-minded Ortiz, with no interested in proving anything to you or me, is well worth keeping around.


The Microcosm is a sort of European answer to the influential new age comp I Am the Center. Featuring Vangelis, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and others, it draws lines between visionaries of many stripes.

Various Artists: The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986

Nominally, The Microcosm is a European sequel to I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990, a heavyweight compilation of American new age music curated by Douglas Mcgowan of the California-based Yoga Records and released on Light in the Attic in 2013. But it’s not quite that simple. In ’70s America, cassettes by artists like Steve Halpern and Iasos became surprise best sellers, and new age became an industry, with a mail order network, its own chart—even, from 1987 onward, its own Grammy Award. But while this sort of music—mellow, instrumental, technologically savvy and concerned with matters of the spirit—certainly existed in Europe, it defied such easy categorization. In The Microcosm’s liner notes, McGowan explains how more than one artist featured refused to be involved if the project carried the “new age” tag. Instead, the collection is subtitled Visionary Music Of Continental Europe, and if that sounds vague, McGowan has set himself the task to prove otherwise, drawing lines between disparate musicians who share a belief in something greater, but are resolutely off on their own trip.
Whereas I Am the Center surveyed several generations, covering a 40-year window between 1950 and 1990, The Microcosm takes a tighter focus. The earliest of these 16 tracks dates from 1970—birth year of pioneering commercial synths like the ARP 2500 and Minimoog—and the latest from 1986, as analog instruments were being superseded by a new generation of digital music equipment. Some names here will be familiar to those even loosely acquainted with experimental European music of the period. The compilation begins with “Creation Du Monde,” a 1973 track by Vangelis, who would later find global fame scoring Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, but is featured here having just left the Greek prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child to explore more ambient realms. A serene soundscape made from a Hammond organ treated with tape echo, it found its way to soundtrack Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and thus to the ears of a generation of American youth open to enlightenment from above.
Also present are a number of names typically associated with krautrock—itself a term contested by its creators, but that’s another story. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, formerly of Kluster and Harmonia, is represented by “Wenn Der Südwind Weht,” which sends a blissfully centered melody pirouetting slowly through a soft cumulonimbus of synths. “Brüder Des Schattens—Söhne des Lichts” captures Popol Vuh some years after founder Florian Fricke had abandoned synthesizers as a route to transcendence; instead we hear them crafting a medieval-tinged devotional music with sitar, piano and church choir. Manuel Göttsching’s Ash Ra Tempel were, early on, one of the more fiery and eruptive kraut groups, but “Le Sourire Volé” is in line with the looping experiments of Göttsching’s solo work, guitar and Farfisa organ cast out in shimmering waves.
All great stuff, but even when pursuing spiritual ends, the krautrock groups veer towards studious art music, and the most intriguing material on The Microcosm comes from its more obscure, eccentric figures—a cast of mystics, shamans and oddballs who, in their friendly earnestness and paperback spirituality, feel somewhat closer to the American new age fraternity. Some, like Robert Julian Horky or Ariel Kalma, achieve rich soundscapes through homespun means: the former, a longhaired Austrian flautist, achieved his remarkable, pulsating “Dance for a Warrior” by running his instrument through an Eventide Harmonizer; the latter’s “Orguitar Soir” gently layers plucked guitar, droning Farfisa and the sound of birdsong captured in the Borneo rainforest. Others, like Ralph Lundsten or Gigi Masin, pare their music right back, leaving mere wisps of melody and warm tones that glow like embers.
Mcgowan’s liner notes are an essential accompaniment to this often abstract music, supplying valuable biographical context. Bernard Xolotl, a French-born synesthete and student of sacred geometry, explains his deeply trippy “Cometary Wailing (Night Plateau)” was recorded during a week of “musical transcendence rites” powered by MDMA. Enno Velthuys, whose “Morning Glory” is one of the compilation’s gentle highlights, is described as a “Dutch Syd Barrett,” a ’60s burnout who whiled away his dotage lost in a private world of psychedelic synth exploration. And there is the German-born musician Georg Deuter, whose “Spirales” is plucked from one of his 60 albums of reiki sound healing, made while resident of Rajneeshpuram, a commune in eastern Oregon founded by the Indian guru Osho. (In a dark twist of a very new-age kind, Rajneeshpuram entered the history books when Osho’s followers contaminated salad bars across Oregon with salmonella, poisoning at least 700 people—the largest biological terrorism attack in US history).
In short, good stories. But The Microcosm would stand up without them. New age might be a goldmine, but even a quick survey of the genre demonstrates you need to dig through plenty of fluff to find the good material, and it’s a testament to Mcgowan’s research that nothing here feels hokey or kitschy. If this feels like a slightly less coherent set than I Am the Center, blame the idea of visionary music itself, a category that—by its nature, perhaps—lacks clear boundaries. Still, none of that diminishes the power of the contents. As Robert Julian Horky puts it: “I do my work under any name or label. Time is a River, you know.”


The duo of Elucid and billy woods delivers a moody, unsettling, sharply observed album balancing moments of self-reflection with vivid snapshots of societal dysfunction.

Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

Backwoodz Studioz engineer Willie Green has said he wants people to have a “physical reaction” when they listen to one of the label’s records. Last year, Green and Armand Hammer’s Elucid assembled a crew of players for a session at the Greenhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with the idea of jamming to beats and following where it led them. It was the first time that Shabaka Hutchings (flute), Adi Myerson (bass), Max Heath (synthesizer), and Hisham Bharoocha (drums) had met; Elucid says that watching their early fumblings give way to grooves with spiritual heft was foundational to the creation of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Armand Hammer’s sixth album. By Green’s own rubric, the album is a success—it can feel like being tugged by dozens of different hands yet still being pulled forward.
That organic jam session—in which relative strangers found the funk in their very first meeting—mirrors the way that Elucid and his partner in the duo Armand Hammer, Backwoodz founder billy woods, have collected a slew of eccentric personalities and given them a common purpose. woods has called Elucid Backwoodz’s “secret weapon” as an A&R, and he might be right; it’s hard to imagine anyone else making a record like this sound coherent. woods and producer Kenny Segal’s 2023 album Maps was a vividly evocative tour diary populated by colorful characters, but when the two rappers work together, Elucid lifts woods into the ether.
Armand Hammer’s music can be indecipherable by design, with profundity often camouflaged by abstraction. On We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, they contemplate their inevitable end, often graphically (“Men pregnant with death, frightened at the quickening/It totters on unsteady legs, boy you invited to the christening,” woods raps), yet manage to stave off hopelessness. The two continue to process life’s indignities with absurdist humor and a caustic wit, telling disjointed stories through intersecting narratives that only come into focus when viewed as a whole.
The most unconventional of their guest stars is, of course, JPEGMAFIA, the Baltimore rapper and producer known for his abrasive productions and persona. JPEGMAFIA’s work accounts for a little more than a quarter of the album, but his glitchy, warped aesthetic bookends the tracklist and helps define the mood. He opens the album with a hypnotic synth loop and a vocal sample stuttering in the background; there’s no bass, just a single snare crack punctuated by a landline dial tone. He’ll bury a gentle melody beneath cacophonous yelling, then switch the beat mid-song to weave video game SFX into boom-bap drums and drench the whole thing in reverb (“When It Doesn’t Start With a Kiss”). Even in the slow and quiet moments, chaos lurks in his productions—an interrupted moan, a hair-raising scrape—and it’s fascinating to watch woods and Elucid adapt their flows to meet the challenge.
We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is as much a Backwoodz Studioz showcase as an Armand Hammer album. Over the last decade or so, Backwoodz has steadily established itself as a paragon of the New York underground, an example of how a community and a business can feed off one another. You can see the equity as plain as their publishing splits. Backwoodz’s roster is all over the LP—guest verses from Curly Castro and Moor Mother; production from Steel Tipped Dove, Kenny Segal, Jeff Markey, and Willie Green—resulting in an album that gels despite its idiosyncrasies. It’s fitting that there’s an El-P production credit, as his now-defunct indie label Definitive Jux was to the New York underground in the ’00s as Backwoodz is today: a loose collective of left-of-center artists that coalesced around creative freedom rather than a particular sound, emphasizing transparency in business, if not always their art.
The guests bring a welcome sense of contrast to Armand Hammer’s own styles. Moor Mother’s breathy enunciation floats through woods and Elucid’s more pronounced flows, while Pink Siifu’s monotone straddles the line between lethargic and loquacious. The standout feature is Brooklyn rapper and NYU adjunct professor Junglepussy, who remains bafflingly overlooked even though she’s typically the coldest MC in the room wherever she turns up. She’s credited on two songs—“Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here” and “Empire BLVD”—sounding extremely hot and unbothered, disposing of men and lesser rappers as casually as a chewed-up wad of gum: “Sitting on his face ’til I’m inspired/Why fuck him, I’m a better writer.”
Elucid and woods are no longer young men, and We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is rooted in the existential angst of middle age, when you find yourself decades deep into a career and a family, wondering where to go next. “I am the mud/Waiting for the flood that they said would never come/High-water pants on the shoulders of my elders/I be knowin' better, but ain't done it yet/Some don't know no better and they won't,” Elucid raps on “Trauma Mic,” his voice tinged with the weariness that comes with wisdom.
The two rappers’ free-associative style doesn’t typically emphasize bold-faced themes; their writing is richly imagistic but also cryptic, and they tend to slip laterally from idea to idea and couplet to couplet. But there’s an undercurrent of unease in their references to knocked-out teeth, oxygen tanks shackled to a leg, a suicide bomber’s vest that doesn’t explode. “The aperitif bittersweet, no pleasure/My heart pump ketamine,” raps woods on “Niggardly (Blocked Call),” summing up the anhedonic mood.
The album draws its title from the innumerable signs posted on poles around New York City’s outer boroughs—a symptom of America’s prohibitively expensive healthcare system, which turns insured diabetics into street-level suppliers.. The signs are everywhere yet easy to ignore—windows into a sick world where basic human needs are bought and sold out of necessity. Collectively driven, grim but never nihilistic, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is Backwoodz’s version of an immune response: a flare-up to fight off the disease.


The New Jersey producer and Brooklyn rapper’s slanted, rhythmically intricate electronic rap album sounds beamed in from the future.

HeadSpace

The moment JWords and maassai crossed paths, collaboration was inevitable. After meeting at a showcase in 2017, the New Jersey producer and Brooklyn rapper each felt they’d found a kindred spirit, deciding to unite the former’s knotty production with the latter’s blunt introspection as the duo H31R. On their 2020 debut ve·loc·i·ty, JWords laid Jersey club rhythms and boom-bap drums atop warped loops as maassai unspooled philosophical examinations of self. Their new record, HeadSpace, is a confident expansion of their electronic rap vision, with wonky, alien-sounding songs that feel beamed in from the future.
For HeadSpace, JWords followed the synth-based blueprint of ve·loc·i·ty highlight “toxic behavior,” a flurry of lightning-speed kicks and locomotive hi-hats that charges through soft fog. The songs seem to glow from within: Textured, harmonically rich pulses drive “Backwards” and “Glass Ceiling,” while “Static” and “Train of Thought” feature glassy FM tones. JWords’s percussion sounds are warm and rubbery; bass drums land with a gooey throb and every snare has a satisfying mechanical snap.
It’s the duo’s manipulation of rhythm that makes HeadSpace so entrancing. JWords seems to delight in pushing syncopation to new limits, often starting with a certain sequence only to completely scramble it. The agitated line that opens “Glitch in Time” threatens to wriggle free at any moment, but the song locks into place once JWords adds a rigid latticework of clicks and beeps. “Backwards” fits a loping, atonal synth figure into a stuttering drum pattern, constantly playing with the location of the downbeats. Occasionally, songs end before the groove can fully breathe—the ghostly drum’n’bass of “All Over the Place” could be a sprawling dancefloor jam, but disintegrates after one minute.
As a rapper, maassai is equally beguiling. She subtly stretches and compresses her husky voice, delivering each line with a slight sneer. At first blush, her lyrics read as swaggering shit talk—“I ain’t eat dinner yet/But I’m so full of myself I could skip it,” she boasts on “Train of Thought”—but they’re often cues for deeper self-examination. She frequently alternates point of view, giving her raps a dreamlike, psychedelic quality. “When you scared of me, I’m scared too/You look at me and see you,” she raps on “Reflection,” her voice somewhere between a coo and a growl.
Together, JWords and maassai create songs that feel like expertly assembled puzzles. On “Down Down Bb,” maassai spits rapid-fire lines as JWords’ kicks hang off the edge of each phrase: “Let me get the rhythm of your head/Let me get the rhythm of your feet.” On the closer “Air It Out,” JWords constructs a mechanical churn while maassai repeats certain phrases as if subject to delay, adding swing to the track’s grid. On HeadSpace, two potent solo artists tap into and augment each other’s strengths, practicing a kind of understated alchemy that doesn’t sound quite like anyone else.


What was supposed to be a kiss-off alimony payment to his ex-wife shape-shifted into a towering ode to divorce. The maligned and complicated double-LP remains a candid soul confessional.

Here, My Dear

As a teenager in the 1950s, Marvin Gaye learned how to love from doo-wop songs, three-minute odes to innocence that didn’t curdle or grow up or live beyond their own pining harmonies. They were pure, and Gaye wanted to be pure too. “I was in love with the idea of love,” he once said. Which is sweet. But the fantasy of pop music should be just that—a fantasy. Believe it to the letter, and wait for your world to crumble. Vows break. Sadness sours. Divorce looms. Gaye was aware of these perils, but he spent much of his life haplessly wishing them away. His music always told a different story.
Gaye married Anna Ruby Gordy in 1963. He was 24; she was 41. He was an aspiring singer; she was the sister of Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records. Looking back on the relationship years later, Gaye described it to biographer David Ritz as a mercenary move. “Marrying a queen might not make me king, but at least I’d have a shot at being prince,” he said. “I wanted her to help me cut into that long line in front of the recording studio.”
For a few years, though, Gaye was able to approximate the fairytale love he had always dreamed about. The couple adopted a baby boy. And Gaye’s bounding heart can be heard in his hits of the era like “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” where he beams, “You were better to me than I’ve been to myself/For me there’s you and there’s nobody else.” But soon enough, infidelities arose. Fights erupted. Raised in a strict religious household, Gaye had trouble reconciling ideas of love and sex, and though this struggle would lead to some of his most fascinating songs, it also doomed him as a husband.
Complicating matters further was his extreme Oedipus and “Madonna-whore” complexes. He lost his virginity to a prostitute and went on to pay for sex through much of his life (and marriages). Meanwhile, he considered his mother to be the absolute pinnacle of womanhood, to a detrimental degree. “No other woman ever looked as good to me as Mother,” he said. He often referred to Anna as “Mama” as well. So as his wife helped her self-destructive husband become a star with her connections and encouragement throughout the ’60s, she could never be his mythical savior. Nobody could. Gaye described his own conundrum in typically candid terms: “Without Anna, how could I reach my next plateau? With Anna, though, how could I ever be a happy man?”
By the late ’60s, the couple was decidedly on the outs. Gaye was still part of Motown’s hit factory at that point and wasn’t writing his own songs, but he still offered performances that mirrored his emotions. He laced the skulking “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with paranoia just as he and Anna were cheating on each other. He even recorded something of a breakup album, M.P.G., in 1969, filled with chugging songs that put love in past tense. But Gaye and Anna didn’t get divorced. Both were scared what would happen; Gaye was worried he would fall out of Berry Gordy’s good graces, while Anna, accustomed to the celebrity lifestyle, didn’t want to give up on her superstar husband.
As the ’70s began, Gaye entered his auteur period, breaking out of the Motown mold with What’s Going On. In 1973, at age 33, he fell in love once more, with a 16-year-old named Janis Hunter. A year later, they had a baby together. Gaye and Anna were still married. Finally, in 1975, as Hunter became pregnant with another child, Anna filed for divorce.
She had the right to be fed up, but the timing also made sense in the greater context of American marriage. In ’75, the number of divorces and annulments in the U.S. exceeded one million for the first time, more than doubling the tally from just a decade before. Reasons for the uptick were plentiful: evolving social mores, the declining role of religion, laws that simplified the process, and an overall sense of personal entitlement. In a previous generation, Gaye’s mother considered divorcing her husband, who never really loved Marvin and beat him relentlessly as a child, but she didn’t out of what she called “loyalty and responsibility.” But times had changed. “This is an era in which many Americans are far more concerned with their rights than with their responsibilities,” declared a 1976 New York Times article titled “Divorce Epidemic,” “and also a time when little premium is put upon patience or accommodation to less than ideal situations.”
Though Anna was trying to move forward, Gaye dragged his feet. He was ordered to pay $6,000 a month in alimony and child support, but he refused, allegedly telling Anna: “I’m not going to obey any court order no matter what they try to do me. The only thing I am going to do is take off my hat when I enter the courtroom.” For all the sympathy and understanding of Marvin Gaye’s music, the man could be a boor. He once claimed to be “the last of the great chauvinists. I’ll never change. I like to see women serve me—and that’s that.”
But no amount of ball swinging was going to settle his divorce. Gaye was terrible with money, often investing in bogus schemes and blowing untold sums on pot and coke, so when Anna asked for $1 million, he simply didn’t have the funds. So his lawyer proposed an interesting solution: Gaye would pay $600,000, half of which would come from the advance for his next album, with the other half coming from that album’s royalties. It was an insane idea. Of course Gaye agreed to it.
Recorded in 1977, around the time Gaye’s divorce became final, the singer originally planned to produce something quick and mediocre, but the subject matter was too rich. The result was Here, My Dear, a 73-minute epic and the only double-LP he would ever make. Though birthed from contentious circumstances, the album still retains its power because it’s not just a heated diatribe, a peeved he-said to infinity. Unlike some of Gaye’s real-life actions, the album is nuanced, thoughtful, progressive.
After a scene-setting intro—“I guess I’ll have to say this album is dedicated to you”—the story begins in earnest with, fittingly, a doo-wop song. “I Met a Little Girl” boasts all the longing and vocal stacking of Gaye’s beloved ’50s music, but with the perspective flipped—he’s singing not as a green teen but as a man in his late 30s who has tried and failed at love, and is no closer to figuring it out. Gaye exquisitely sings all of the parts himself, creating an echo chamber of hurt. Though the singer spoke out against the women’s liberation movement of the era, there’s a generousness to his voice and sentiments, and a shared blame. “Then time would change you,” he squeals, “as time would really change me.” The song is nearly zen in its wistfulness, with a sumptuous arrangement and languid pace. Later, on a track called “Anger,” Gaye still takes the longview, condemning the soul-destroying properties of rage rather than giving into them. Perhaps the slow crumble of Gaye’s marriage across more than a decade allowed him a certain distance, and a way to make this very personal album feel like much more than one man’s loss.
Like much of Gaye’s ’70s work, Here, My Dear is a groove album. Voices, instruments, and hooks don’t jump out as much as they lay in the cut waiting to be discovered. Though it can sound redundant at first, its unvaried instrumentation and tempo strengthen the thematic bonds within. Three tracks called “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” are worked into the suite, all with the same easy sax funk, as if Gaye keeps returning to the question in hopes of a definitive answer. Spacious jazz backgrounds make tracks like “Sparrow” and “Anna’s Song” luxuriate in memories and idylls gone by—even when Gaye breaks character by screaming “An-na!” the vamp barely breaks its stride, acting as something of a calming agent.
Here, My Dear is not entirely civil. As in love and life, there is pettiness. “Is That Enough” aims at Anna’s spending habits, with Gaye somehow making divorce-court language sound effortlessly cool: “What could I do/The judge said she got to keep on living/The way she accustomed to.” Meanwhile, on “You Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You,” the singer claims that he was essentially held prisoner by Anna’s power and money for all those years, as he ventriloquizes his wife’s demands. “That young girl is going to cost you,” he sings, referring to his girlfriend Janis. “If you want happiness, you got to pay.” There’s a gorgeous hymn of forgiveness that could fit on What’s Going On, a strutting pep talk about getting your shit together, and “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” an out-of-place eight-minute misstep about space sex that has Gaye talking about people getting “plutotized” in a “plutotarium” on, um, Pluto. And yes, that was the single.
But neither the song nor the album was a smash. Here, My Dear peaked at No. 26 on a Billboard chart stuffed with disco acts like Chic, Bee Gees, and Village People in early 1979. Anna, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of the project. In a JET interview at the time, she took the high road, saying, “The things he said, the way the lyrics relate constantly to our personal marital relations, are certainly a violation of many things that I held sacred.” Anna threatened to file a $5 million invasion-of-privacy suit but it never materialized; in 1987, three years after Gaye was shot and killed by his father, she accepted his award into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson famously said that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience.” Which might help explain why, after getting through a tortuous divorce and then recording an album about that divorce, Gaye married Janis Hunter in 1977, mere months after his split with Anna was official. But Gaye’s self-destructive habits had only deepened; by the time of Here, My Dear’s release, at the end of 1978, it was Hunter who was thinking about filing for divorce. “Once we got married, things only got worse,” Gaye said of his relationship with his second wife. “I saw that I’d trapped myself again, but I couldn’t help it.” With his warped expectations of love, it was impossible for Marvin Gaye to fully experience the happy family life he so desired. But there were flashes. One can be heard on “Falling in Love Again,” Here, My Dear’s final full song, where he sounds free and joyous in a moment of satisfaction with Hunter. “So love me, as though there was no tomorrow,” he pleads, trying to freeze a moment of bliss before it’s gone.


The pop singer’s debut is a promising reintroduction that shows her emotional and melodic strengths if she can avoid the clichés of influencer culture and the digital age.

lil kiiwi

In June 2015, a 20-year-old singer named Kiara Saulters uploaded the song “Gold” to SoundCloud under the moniker Kiiara. Its chorus had a trance-like pull, chopping up vocals and splicing them into an indecipherable hyperpop concoction. Within a year, Kiiara had landed a deal with Atlantic, and “Gold” was climbing the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where she found herself in the company of once-rising contemporaries Olivia O’Brien and Halsey. The popularity of “Gold” threatened to define her career, though she already considered it to be old before it had even reached its peak. In the age of viral hits, artists like Kiiara are often forced to milk the moment or risk becoming one-hit wonders, with little room to grow into their sound.
Lil Kiiwi is a promising reintroduction to Kiiara, who, at 25, is now making pop music that grapples with the impulsiveness of her early 20s. Having spent three years releasing one-off singles that experimented with hyperpop, alternative R&B, and rock, she now ditches the chopped vocals in favor of whispered admissions over lo-fi beats and plucky electro-pop. Lil Kiiwi carves out a sustainable space for Kiiara in the modern pop canon, so long as she doesn’t fall victim to low-hanging, predictable clichés.
Kiiara can be a captivating storyteller when she fully commits to the song. Across the album, she takes on the role of a vengeful ex, cuts down the egos of men, and escapes into drugs to avoid confronting her own feelings. Her music is most effective when she reflects on past relationships—the ones that failed, those that could have been, and others that never should have happened. On “Accidental,” she owns up to sabotaging a potential relationship by being dismissive and manipulative, but ultimately deflects and fumbles her attempted apology: “The drugs fucked my head up/Why did you let me?/Why didn’t you come and get me?” She sings about wanting to resist an attraction to danger. But when her lyrics consider the possibility of what could have been had she chosen differently in various scenarios, they’re heavy with remorse and angst.
When Kiiara blames her actions on being intoxicated or emotionally unavailable, her impulsivity is chalked up to her being young and overwhelmed with life; but the haze dissipates as she analyzes these moments and past relationships with maturity. A sense of loneliness echoes throughout “Never Let You” as she yearns for a do-over of her career, relationships, and college. Defeat piles up with each line of the ballad “Empty,” where she resents sacrificing so much of herself for a love that left her drained, and she wonders, “Where were you on my darkest day?”
Rather than bringing the same intensity of these unshielded emotions to her rousing hyperpop performances, Kiiara hides behind the pervasive clichés of influencer culture and the digital age. “So Sick” recruits blackbear to complain about the toxicity of using Instagram to keep tabs on an ex. Elsewhere, Felix Snow haunts the album on the 2017 leftover “Whippin’,” which attempts to replicate “Gold” but sounds stale more than five years later.
Kiiara does better in the company of collaborators who play to her charm instead of watering it down. On “I Still Do,” electro-pop drops bounce as she sings about still loving someone who betrayed her trust. Kiiara could have easily built an album out of the one-off singles released in recent years, but on Lil Kiiwi, she makes a true effort at encapsulating the past five years of her life, how they changed her, and what she learned in the process.

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Conor Oberst retires the Bright Eyes moniker with an LP that sees him returning to Nebraska to record but eschewing Americana and attic-pop for sunnier sounds.

The People's Key

Late last year, Conor Oberst lost a close friend in Omaha to suicide. At the time, he was close to completing The People's Key, his seventh full-length under the Bright Eyes banner, an album for which he had returned home to Nebraska to record in bursts throughout 2010. Tucked into the album's waning moments is "Ladder Song", a purse-lipped heartbreaker Oberst wrote on piano out of grief. When he sat down later to record the song in the home studio he co-founded with Bright Eyes producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, Oberst opted to play it on an old keyboard rather than the grand piano their new setup afforded him. The end result-- eerily similar to "Sunrise, Sunset", a song from 2000's eye-opening Fevers & Mirrors-- sounds very much in tune with Bright Eyes' beginnings: manic and rickety, grave and strangely gripping, Oberst spitting his words up as though it's just as painful to share them as it is to keep them inside. Here, on what the one-time wunderkind has called this project's final ride, its playlist's final addition stands completely alone both sonically and otherwise. "Ladder Song" is not just a bracing tribute, it's a throwback glimpse at how much has changed or not changed at all in the way Oberst has chosen to present himself and his songwriting.
Well over a decade after its inception, it's easy to forget that before Oberst's lyrical abracadabra on 2002's Lifted garnered "New Dylan!" hosannas, the Bright Eyes brand got its first bit of traction amongst emo kids. Leagues of them. Oberst was a pin-up-- his hair always swept perfectly across his sad, massive, Milk-Dud eyes-- fit to erupt in small rooms like those in which he first recorded. In the years that followed *Lifted'*s release, he left behind his handcrafted, attic-pop leanings to fully embrace American roots music. It was a path he hit all the harder as his audience and profile grew. From pure folk to ham-fisted honky tonky to the classic rock of his Mystic Valley band, each subsequent release employed a recording method to match the ambition of Oberst's increasingly dystopian lyricbook. That trajectory reached a pivotal point in 2007's Cassadaga, a cinematic, string-embossed epic that found Oberst in all those modes at once, engaging even further with themes both mystic and apocalyptic. Despite its flaws, that record seemed the loudest expression of what Bright Eyes had seemingly always been about: articulating the world's many weights, as he meant to carry them around. The People's Key, its sci-fi successor, breaks from the narrative. It doesn't articulate much at all.
While a few traces of pedal steel remain, Oberst, Mogis, and recently anointed permanent member/keyboardist Nate Walcott (with few exceptions Bright Eyes' cast tended to revolve) have given the former's songwriting a new sonic skin. Gone is the "rootsy Americana shit" he recently told Billboard he was burnt out on.  In its place, the three have settled into a middle space somewhere between the distorted crunch of Oberst's short-lived Desaparecidos project and 2005's electro-pop experiment Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. On the hard-charging "Jejune Stars", new wave synths piggyback power chords, while "Triple Spiral" spikes meatier guitar work with organ and a number of space-bound key flourishes. Walcott's contributions in particular-- like on the hiccupping "Haile Selassie"-- digitize a lot of the pop elements that distinguish Bright Eyes from Oberst's work elsewhere. It's as well-assembled and produced a set of songs as you'd expect from pros like these guys, but unfortunately, much of it tends to ring empty. What's missing is Oberst.
As "Jejune Stars" comes to a close you'll find a short interstitial recording of Denny Brewer, a Texas musician whose husky, some-might-say-batshit musings on other dimensions and extra-terrestrial, ancient reptilian life forms also comprise most of the album's found sound interstitials and intro, a Bright Eyes tradition. In talking about the etymology of the word "pomegranate," he renacts the moment the fruit got its name: "I don't know why it's called a pomegranate, but it looks like a pomegranate. No matter what language you spoke it in, syllables are frequencies." Though his brayed delivery tends to be a tipping point for many, Oberst's lyrical acumen has always been his work's great strength. Whether it was four chords for a love song or three to size up of everything that's wrong with Right Now, he's been able to rule a recording from the start. Omaha, East Village, the simpler the better: Oberst could connect in his own way. But here, he's occupying a frequency all by himself, arranging words that do wonders harmonically, yet mean next to nothing side-by-side. Through and through, this record's overarching themes of "oneness" and connectivity feel painfully blurred by the fragmented, illusory nature with which Oberst shares them. It's as though he's fallen down any and every rabbit hole he could-- Rastafarian imagery makes room for shamanic allusions, futurist tail-chasing, half-baked philosophizing, aimless retrospection, Bono-like levels of evangelizing (see closer "One for You, One for Me"), dead end time travel and one very short, psychedelic walk into a place named the "Land of Tomorrow".
That very last bit comes from opener "Firewall", a song whose sharp-toothed guitar figure and holy shit build can't help but feel hollow once Oberst disconnects as early as he does. When his voice is distorted into barely intelligible warbles during the strummy quiver of "Beginner's Mind" it seems fitting, just as it sounds perfectly believable when, on "A Machine Spiritual (In the People's Key)", he says he'll "float into the ether." None of these songs are quite as overwrought as those found on Cassadaga, a record with enough instrumental soul there at times to carry the load anytime he went rogue. But with the plain exception of "Ladder Song," the slick sonics here make the rest of the pack all the more cavernous and impersonal, a long ways from where the whole story began. Every line is laid with the rich sense of rhythm and texture that he's mastered over the years, but it still adds up to very little: a wildly spiritual record without any spirit.


The Arkansas doom metal band's stopgap EP features a Black Sabbath cover, a Type O Negative cover, and one original that reinforces their place among the best of them.

Fear and Fury

For the last five years, Pallbearer have seemed poised in a very rare position for a doom metal band—on the brink of substantial popularity. First with 2012’s auspicious debut Sorrow and Extinction and even more so with the engrossing follow-up, 2014’s Foundations of Burden, Pallbearer’s high-volume lurch ballooned from an absolute core of rock band accessibility. Within their slow-motion sprawls, you could hear the guitar heroics of the Allmans, the grand arch of Rush, and the arid sizzle of ZZ Top. They weren’t exactly kowtowing to radio standards with songs that always pushed or passed the ten-minute mark, but it wasn’t hard to imagine them landing there or earning an opening slot with a massive band and making mainstream converts that way. At least to date, they remain very much at that brink, a top-notch, highly acclaimed doom band with actual crossover status not entirely out of reach.
Fear and Fury, a delightful stopgap EP from the Arkansas band, brazenly reaffirms that position without actually advancing it. The three-song set is a bit of an odds-and-sods collection, gathering a remastered version of the title tune (previously released as a flexi-disc single with Decibel last year) and two very telling covers. Pallbearer first takes on “Over and Over,” the last song from Black Sabbath’s Dio-lead Mob Rules. And then there’s the absurd and awesome Type O Negative hit, “Love You to Death,” a song where sex and sadism and Satan warp into one surreal chimera. Pallbearer is faithful to both songs but not overly so, steel-plating their smooth pop contours in a way that proves again their understanding of and comfort with melody and approachability.
“Over and Over” becomes tougher in Pallbearer’s hands. The dual guitars are more tense and cautious, creeping with suspicion through the riffs rather than swiveling through them. And the rhythm section lumbers, landing each measure as its own fresh blow. “Over and Over” is a song of deep depression, where the exigencies and exhaustion of life seem more demanding than the rewards. But Pallbearer deftly pose the Dio lament as a threat, a warning shot meant to make you get over it. The way the melody lifts and the solos screech make the song too redemptive for giving up.
Likewise, Pallbearer nails Type O Negative’s theatricality and melodrama during “Love You to Death.” Singer and guitarist Brett Campbell revels in the bombast of the original for the entire song, from the almost a cappella, scene-setting first verse to the wide-angled glory of the chorus. The churning guitars and big drums again add an extra layer of toughness to the original, as Pallbearer stakes its claim as a nominal doom band. But the gigantic refrain and the structure don’t suffer under that weight. Instead, it reinforces them.
The real coup of these covers, though, is how they reinforce Pallbearer’s ability to craft and deliver hooks of their own. Even alongside these proven anthems, “Fear and Fury” stands its ground, with militant, marching verses lifting into radiant instrumental tangles. Clocking in at almost six minutes, “Fear and Fury” is one of Pallbearer’s lone attempts at the radio-ready format, and it mostly makes you wish they’d do it over and over. The monstrous, angled riffs remain, as does a rhythm section that pushes the whole affair forward. Campbell doesn’t soften or lower his voice to make this or any of these songs work. He just fits it into a smaller package for three songs that, taken together, confirm that Pallbearer’s doom is just light enough for liftoff.


The Gastr del Sol founder melds minds with a Japanese guitarist and electronic musician who shares his skewed approach to songwriting on an album inspired by the work of novelist Atsushi Nakajima.

David Grubbs / Taku Unami: Failed Celestial Creatures

Failed Celestial Creatures

David Grubbs has the instincts of a gardener who prefers the thorns to the blossom. In a career that spans more than three decades, he has developed a unique language for the guitar, one that flickers between consonance and dissonance; his hooks are barbs bent at odd angles, his melodies unreliable narrators. His quirks are difficult to describe, which might be why his reviewers over the years have favored adjectives like “elliptical,” “slanted,” and “spidery” (all absolutely correct, by the way).
Grubbs attacks his songwriting in roundabout fashion. Though coherent, it tends to be slightly off, as though he’s taken rock’s classic song forms and run them through a kid’s cereal-box decoder ring. His music flows strangely, a Cubist river of hard lefts and sudden interruptions. It doesn’t sound abstracted so much as distracted, as though you were listening in on a particularly absent-minded thought process in real time. When he sings, Grubbs favors knotty prose constructions and halting cadences delivered in a genial tone that reveals faint traces of his Louisville upbringing.
This style emerged a quarter-century ago on The Serpentine Similar, the first album from Grubbs’ band Gastr del Sol, and he has since pursued it across 14 solo records and appearances on nearly 200 more. His new album, Failed Celestial Creatures, is a duo project, recorded over the course of two days in August 2017 with the Japanese guitarist and electronic musician Taku Unami. But it feels of a piece with Grubbs’ last two records under his own name, Creep Mission and Primrose, both nominal solo releases that each features a handful of guests. On all three albums, Grubbs uses the presence of collaborators to play with drones, repetition, and improvisatory interplay, taking his style to a more intuitive place.
The bulk of Failed Celestial Creatures is given over to the title track, a 21-minute meditation inspired by the musicians’ mutual fondness for the mid-century Japanese novelist Atsushi Nakajima. Notes on the album situate the song within the context of the novelist’s interest in the “failure of ritual,” which might explain its uneasy tug-of-war between mantra-like repetitions, inquisitive melodic deviations, and, ultimately, explosions of chaos. For the first third of the piece, it would be easy to miss the fact that there are two players, with Grubbs’ searching movements wreathed in a luminous fog of electronics. When his guitar is joined by Unami’s, their playing resembles a figure dancing before an enchanted mirror—a tangle of gestures that seem identical but prove, on further examination, to be entirely different. Then the distortion pedal kicks in: The final six minutes are snarling and dissonant, the guitars blackened, out-of-tune frequencies beating the air like bats’ wings.
The remainder of the album finds the two musicians locked even more deeply into their uncanny mirror-play—particularly on “Threadbare 1” through “Threadbare 4,” short, improvised pieces that make an impression as ephemeral as the wind bending high grass. Even for longtime listeners of either musician, it’s difficult to say who is doing what, engaged as they are in a questing yet relaxed mind meld. Only one song, “The Forest Dictation,” breaks from that mold, as Grubbs’ vocals take the lead atop shimmering, gently intertwined guitars. It’s the sort of performance he’s been giving since his days in Gastr del Sol: not quite singing and not quite speech, but some third option hidden in the divide between the two.
The lyrics, inspired by Nakajima’s The Moon Over the Mountain, concern a human-tiger hybrid that dwells in the forest. But, typically for Grubbs, they don’t resemble traditional lyrics so much as a page pulled at random from the library stacks—a text made musical only by virtue of his dry sing-song: “The irreversibly combined voices/Of human tiger/Recited 30 poems, some long and some short/As to their quality/I would not presume to judge.” It’s a magically low-key moment on a magically low-key album, a manifestation of the divine couched in playful but fundamentally level-headed terms. The human tiger’s two unflappable witnesses remain focused on their fretboards, fully immersed in the rapture of their craft.