Flanked by a close circle of collaborators, hip-hop experimentalist Ishmael Butler takes a brief, mysterious trip through rap aesthetics past and future.

Robed in Rareness

Ishmael Butler once likened influence to a vortex. Time, he said, doesn’t move linearly like an arrow, but “goes around like a whirlpool, where things are picked up and moved around but they may appear in the same place that they appeared earlier or later.” He pointed to Lil B, who championed hip-hop fundamentals like freestyling and dancing around the same time Butler and Tendai Maraire formed Shabazz Palaces, as an example of this coiling chronology. But it applies to Butler as well. The futurism of Shabazz Palaces has always been interwoven with the past and present, their songs scintillating tapestries of old-school shit talk, proggy psychedelia, and melodic flossing. Robed in Rareness is draped in this multiplicity as Butler and a team of close collaborators swagger across eras of rap.

The seven-song record is the third Shabazz Palaces project without Maraire, who left the group sometime before 2020’s The Don of Diamond Dreams. The production, helmed entirely by Butler, is icier and more metallic without Maraire’s rhythmic touch; the arrangements don’t swell, contract, and glow as intensely as those on Lese Majesty or the Quazarz albums. But that muted palette fits the cool, nocturnal mood. Though there’s still plenty of Shabazz Palaces’ signature chaos percolating within the beats, from the distorted moans drifting through “Binoculars” to the spacey sound effects stardusted across “Scarface Mace,” the music largely brings to mind the calm of a club’s backroom. There’s a party happening a few feet away, but this particular crowd is happy to kick it in private.

Butler rolls deep, tapping features for all but one song. Geechi Suede of Camp Lo, Colorado Springs’ O Finess, and Butler’s mysterious signee Lavarr the Starr, with whom he co-released an album in April, are among the guests, their disparate styles reflecting the music’s eclectic mix of punchlines, flexes, and cosmology. Butler leads the pack, gamboling through his verses like a hurdler. “I’m in my smooth phase/The L’s, they L me like Cool J/How could I fugaze?/The gangsters they hear me and shoe gaze,” he raps on opener “Binoculars,” his voice compressed into a fizzy warble. “Of the jiggy OGs, I’m the president,” he says with pride on “Woke Up in a Dream,” a collaboration with his son Lil Tracy. Butler charmingly calls Tracy his “idol,” a nod to their familial bond, and to his multidirectional understanding of time.
He really is a rap time traveler. There’s no parasitism or trend-chasing desperation to the trap hi-hats and Auto-Tune vocals on “Cinnamon Bun,” on which his cadences strangely evoke Father and Chavo. The haunted beat of “Scarface Mace” brings to mind the cinematic loops of Roc Marciano and Alchemist, and could easily slot into a Griselda release. I doubt these are conscious reference points, though. Butler is a true lifer, the pursuit of new sounds as intrinsic to his style as sounding fly. The ease with which he shifts directions and shuffles through time keeps the album engrossing, even though the guest verses lag Butler in terms of skill. Robed in Rareness is ultimately a less significant Shabazz Palaces release, but there’s something fitting about a casually adventurous album by a vet dropping in the year of hip-hop’s 50th birthday. As the doomsayers look backward, Butler turns his gaze everywhere.


The teenage South African duo build the lean rhythms and jazzy melodies of amapiano into a sprawling debut suffused with dynamic energy and tantalizing uncertainty.

Teenage Dreams

Near the beginning of the documentary SHAYA!, the filmmakers note that amapiano “was born in the soil of the streets of South Africa, therefore it belongs to all of us.” The sentiment reflects the organic, bottom-up growth of the genre; before its massive popularity across South Africa, it was an underground sensation ignored by almost every local radio station. It’s also emblematic of the music’s accessible, welcoming aura: In the past few years, rappers and producers who’ve focused on other South African styles have tried their hand at amapiano. It just sounds irresistible.
Amapiano’s winning formula is relatively straightforward: log-drum loops, jazzy piano melodies, and soulful vocals in a deep-house shell. The tempo hovers around 110 bpm, a crucial sweet spot: Poppier tracks find a comfortable range to luxuriate in sunlit grooves, while moodier songs prove hypnotic thanks to the slow, hard punches of syncopated drums that burrow deeper than the high-tempo frenzies of gqom. Native Soul, the Pretoria-based teenage duo of Kgothatso Solomon Tshabalala and Alfred Zakhele Mhlanga, work primarily in the latter mode, and their debut Teenage Dreams places refreshing emphasis on production. Amapiano has incorporated vocals since 2018 and the most lush tracks, especially of late, have placed them at the forefront, but Teenage Dreams is largely vocalless; that it’s among the most cohesive, invigorating amapiano albums to date is no small feat.
Economic pacing is Teenage Dreams’ core tenet, and “The Beginning” kicks off the album with a familiar setting: sparse log drums and periodic synth blips. Soon, it eases into a brooding atmosphere, and as the musical elements compound, the track maintains an airy, cautious mood. It’s a clever maneuver: Just as the song risks dissolving into fog, vocal flourishes and percussive strikes erupt to suffuse it with dynamic energy and tantalizing uncertainty. Much of Teenage Dreams feels similarly sprawling; with each song exceeding five minutes, Native Soul allow ample time to ease into a headspace before injecting the mix with surprise. “The Journey,” for example, begins by folding piano-house chords over an agile bassline and flute, only for scratchy, processed vocals to arrive for brief but thrilling passages.
These small details make Teenage Dreams captivating. Gloomy synth pads cast a darkness across “Long Lasting,” while thin keyboard plinks bolster its sci-fi mystique. As an assortment of splash cymbals, handclaps, and synth pulses interlock and shift rhythms, they run through a similarly granular array of emotions: cryptic at one moment, strange at others, and then, for a short flash, outwardly dramatic. But Native Soul can do bangers too. “Burning Desire” is all about the massive propulsion felt in its drums and flagellating synths, and while it’s one of the more riotous tracks, it’s still deliberately reserved, projecting both finesse and masterful control over the proceedings.
As impressive as Native Soul’s work is, they clearly understand that they’re building on a foundation set by others. “Letter to Kabza De Small” namechecks one of amapiano’s most influential producers as it sets laser-like synths dancing alongside piano melodies in a grandiose spectacle—a worthy tribute to the “king of amapiano.” The title “Dead Sangoma” refers to the South African traditional healers who, during a ceremony, channel an ancestral spirit and dance along to drums. While the drumming patterns aren’t the same here, there’s a deference to music as something that can take hold and leave you in a trance-like state. Native Soul accomplish this very goal throughout Teenage Dreams: They ensure you’re transfixed.

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Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz's debut album is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. It's full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretention, and yet somehow, with a few listens, it's easy to enjoy this unusually paced album.

Gist Is

In the early-to-mid 2000s, unconventional, long-form song structures became something of a trend in North American indie rock, which created resonances with the flashy, epic-poetic progressive rock of the 1970s. The music of Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz recalls this (now somewhat unfashionable) approach; their debut album, Gist Is, is full of formally convoluted songs which seldom run shy of five minutes, and feature plenty of brisk, ponderous guitar figures and difficult-to-parse drumbeats. However, the album’s complexity is the brushwork rather than the subject described; a gentle flow of melismatic, often beautiful melody takes center stage and provides the band's compositions with a necessary unifying element.
It’s often easy to discern Adult Jazz's base of contemporary influences. Opener "Hum", with its blue-eyed soul aspirations and vocal processing, recalls Bon Iver's most recent album, while the histrionic vocalizations on more angular and dissonant tracks ("Donne Tongue", "Be A Girl") invites comparisons to like-minded British iconoclasts Wild Beasts. However, the band eventually refract and re-contextualize even their most familiar-sounding gestures, leaving room to showcase plenty of their own signature tics. Lead singer Harry Burgess usually doubles or extends his meandering, plainchant-like vocal melodies on guitar rather than providing them with chordal support (on "Am Gone," the technique closely resembles the signature scat-alongs of adult-contemporary jazz favorite George Benson). Meanwhile, the sporadic, acerbic percussion remains affectively detached from the slickness of the rest of the ensemble, and compellingly dense.
There are also jarring interjections from sampled, electro-or-acoustic reeds, horns, strings, harp and vocals—their processed quality sometimes evokes the pitch-shifted trumpet work of Eno/David Sylvian collaborator and avant-New Ager Jon Hassell. However, these gestures provide mere coloration; the base arrangement is always skeletal. Frequently, there are passages of just two or three instruments playing at once, and the full force of the entire ensemble is used sparingly. This allows Adult Jazz to maintain powerfully restrained dynamics when desired, as on the muted “Pigeon Skulls,” which mixes deft, Richard Thompson-esque acoustic guitar picking with disconnected wisps of vocal melody.
For the most part, Adult Jazz avoid the typical gambits of the post-Funeral Indie Rock Song; songs end abruptly, like their allotted time is up, without heavy-handed catharsis or blaring, tacked-on codas. The one exception to this is ten-minute album centerpiece “Spook”, which closes with an extended section attempting unsuccessfully to deliver some tom-heavy, Peter Gabriel-esque gravitas. The song’s three or four movements mix somewhat pat chord structures with nondescript vocal licks, and ultimately the track comes across like a jambalaya of undeveloped sketches—juxtaposed without meaningful connective tissue.
Another element of Gist Is that may be initially difficult to stomach is its lyrics__,__ which read something like a collection of Gertrude Stein poems (“Bold claim to taste a feel in felt/ To ham it up, the heart’s a sore/ For babies sake and nothing more”). Sentences sometimes go unfinished, devolving into nonsense and half-words. However, the gibberish often proves to be just as expressive as the cogent language: colorful, motormouth ululations represent Burgess’ addressee “going on and on” in “Am Gone,” and the vocal tracks on “Idiot Mantra” are cleverly scrambled, reversed, or crudely cut off mid-phrase to evoke its eponymous sound. One of Burgess’ discernible themes is the fundamental difficulty and ineffectuality of communication (“It’s all in aphorisms/ I was just believing myself slowly/ And the feeling changed”), so when the band engages in this type of onomatopoeia and word painting, it seems appropriate and makes for some of the album’s most memorable moments.
Ultimately, the primary appeal of Adult Jazz’s music is in its unique and playful syntax, which is neither indulgently collage-like or remotely predictable. Their sound is not revolutionary, but nonetheless wholly distinctive—and nowadays, this seems a hard bargain for any rock band to strike. Gist Is is full of clever turns of musical and lyrical phrase which will dispel possible accusations of self-indulgence and pretension, and somehow, within just a few listens, it becomes easy to enjoy this unusually paced album of so few easy hooks, and so many seemingly insignificant words.


Based on the paintings of Thilo Heinzmann and recorded by Brussels-based Echo Collective, this is the late Icelandic composer’s first proper work for string quartet alone.

Jóhann Jóhannsson: 12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann

12 Conversations With Thilo Heinzmann

Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was prolific, a fact made clear in the months since his tragic passing in 2018. Five scores completed just before his death have since been released, and there’s a reissue in the works for Jóhannsson’s ’90s synth-pop duo Dip, with Sugarcubes drummer Siggi Baldursson. And that’s before the second part of the massive Retrospective box set series arrives next year. 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann accentuates Jóhannsson’s creative restlessness. Originally premiered three years ago in London, it’s based on the works of Berlin painter Thilo Heinzmann. In accordance with the composer’s wishes, these pieces were recorded by the Brussels-based Echo Collective.
If you ever found yourself swayed by Jóhannsson’s first major work, 2001’s exquisite Englabörn, you’ll know that from the start, he exhibited a heightened sensibility to the timbre of a string quartet. Subsequent works bore that out, even when he deployed brass ensembles or a full orchestra. Surprisingly, 12 Conversations marks his first proper work for string quartet alone. Jóhannsson often eschewed such formalities in his compositions, weaving in piano, electronics, vocal samples, and rumbling drones to give his work grit, chasmic depth, and emotional range. His genius lay in part in his ability to invert expectations of classical instrumentation to give rise to new sonorities, as when he deployed 12 double basses for Sicario. How else to explain the immense foreboding and dread he conjures on “The Beast,” perhaps his defining movie theme?
This means that 12 Conversations can sound like Jóhannsson at his purest, most deferential, and—in the scope of his body of work—perhaps slightly unfinished. “Manifest” stuns with its beautiful theme, moving from a somber opening to something more sweeping and teasing a gorgeous line from the cello that stays just this side of a drone. It’s Jóhannsson totally unadorned, and it feels all the more lovely because of it. “Shell” might resemble a Bach suite, but it moves achingly slowly, evocative because of its deliberateness. The stately “Lacrimosa” sounds like a subtle homage to the likes of Vivaldi. But the gestures of “Stuk” and “Zurich” feel oddly disconnected and unresolved, like thematic sketches awaiting delivery of a rough cut of a film before being fully fleshed out.
Originally commissioned by British philanthropist and art collector Richard Thomas to convey the communal transfer of artistic ideas beyond borders, the set projects an underlying theme about the European Union. Or rather, a British patron connected with an Icelandic composer to convey the visual aesthetic of a German painter with help from a Belgian musical ensemble. At such a precarious time on the continent, it’s a noble pursuit. Only, many moments on 12 Conversations feel more like an ambient backdrop than a focal point. A piece like “Danse” is the kind of classical music you put on when you want it to be totally unobtrusive. But when the high frequencies of “Form” strafe across the stereo field on the latter half of the album, it startles you to attention. In that moment, one pines for Jóhannsson himself—for his willingness to sully and scuff up the most pristine and stuffy of Western musical traditions in a true expression of the collective spirit of the 21st century.

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The mischief-making duo is up to its usual tricks on this three-song, six-minute EP, but it fails to deliver the thrills of the group’s debut.

Snake Eyes EP

100 gecs’ brilliance lies in their ability to recontextualize established sounds through cheeky juxtapositions. In a year when blink-182 dropped their insipid ninth studio album, “stupid horse” was a miracle, like Laura Les and Dylan Brady were dictating what puckish pop-punk could sound like if filtered through the sensibilities of the terminally online; that its vocal melody felt like a riff on the California trio’s “Roller Coaster” was the cherry on top. More recently, “mememe” brought back the guitar skanks but with a Crazy Frog hook, recalling other songs rooted in the internet. (“Numa Numa” and “DotA,” anyone?) Even “Doritos & Fritos” largely benefits from sounding like a prankster’s take on the current crop of UK post-punk bands. As in the tradition of jesters, 100 gecs are expert observers of culture, treating humor as a conduit for enlightenment as much as entertainment.
Snake Eyes, a surprise three-song EP dropped in advance of their forthcoming second album, 10000 gecs, doesn’t capture the spark of 1000 gecs or anything thereafter. Not only does this release barely breach six minutes, its ideas are so bereft of creativity and nuance that it’s hard to view it as anything but a slapdash stopgap for fans awaiting their new record. Beginning with its titular declaration, “Hey Big Man” repeats a familiar formula, but it sounds far less engaging than “money machine” and its “hey you lil’ piss baby” opener. The braggadocio on the latter was surreal, heightened by a sticky hook and blistering sonics; the music here sounds like a timid retread of Brady’s 2017 material with a Sleigh Bells filter, stymieing any heft their smack-talk could have. There are four seconds of hardcore dance music about halfway through that add momentary suspense, but it’s lazily shoehorned in instead of cleverly embedded.
If 100 gecs’ appeal was contingent on shocking listeners, they’d be playing a losing game, but they’ve always had adroit songwriting to back up their mischief. Its absence is palpable on “Runaway,” a drab ballad whose soft piano melodies build into a recycled hook. Its vocal melody sounds like a lackluster version of “hand crushed by a mallet,” and misunderstands what made that song indelible. When I saw 100 gecs perform it in 2019, there was palpable catharsis as a sold-out crowd shouted “oh my god, what the fuck” in unison, bolstered by other pithy one-liners embodying current malaise (“Feel like I’m not good enough” and “I might go and throw my phone into the lake” were two other howlers). Here, Les and Brady prattle on with lyrics that are characteristic of a traditional breakup song, the only consolation being Les’ frustrated acceptance of the circumstances: “I understand/I just think it’s fucking gay!”
The grimmest signpost for 100 gecs’ future is “Torture Me,” a song whose Skrillex feature is antithetical to their shtick. When 1000 gecs & the Tree of Clues came out in 2020, its litany of guests felt like a victory lap and celebration of intersecting scenes—only 100 gecs could’ve brought them together. But to have another artist on one of their own non-remixed songs is an unnecessary shortcut to revealing the superficial nature of genre boundaries. On paper it looks bad, but in practice it’s worse: Skrillex provides his characteristic EDM wobbles, and the beat is overwhelmingly familiar and plodding. Les sounds convincingly like she’s on the verge of tears, but the song’s banalities make it feel like she’s the featured artist, not the other way around. Much of this brief, inconsequential EP repeatedly comes up short in this way, as if 100 gecs have become hucksters selling knock-offs of their wares.


A sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, this record is every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds: A convoluted tangle of spoken word and keyboard gurgles, RMC is an experiment in oral history-as-pop, an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, and a magnificent failure.

Rehearsing My Choir

Just a few years into their career, and the Fiery Furnaces are already one of rock's most restless, unpredictable bands. The sibling duo launched in 2003 with an addictively quirky debut (Gallowsbird's Bark), promptly rolled out an elaborate follow-up (2004's epic Blueberry Boat), released a collection of UK singles and B-sides (the full-length EP), and are now about to dump their grandest opus to date on poised-and-perplexed ears: Rehearsing My Choir is a sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, and it's every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds.
If you can swallow Rehearsing My Choir as oral history, in the vein of NPR's National Story Project or Tom Russell's Kerouac-slurping poetry, the album offers an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, all rickety old Fords, crinkling photographs of Robert Mitchum, excessive drinking, gabbing about the war, working on the railroad. The sequencing isn't chronological-- if you trace the map Matthew includes in the record's press kit, the album moves from the present to the 40s, 20s, 30s, 50s, back to the 40s, into the 60s, and then the 90s-- though it doesn't much matter, as the narrative instead follows the kind of internal timeline that makes sense only to its tellers. Ultimately, it's the story of Sarantos' love of her late husband, the heft of her grief, and all the stuff that happened between first kiss and funeral march-- from the condolence cards of opener "The Garfield El" to the graveyard of closer "Does It Remind You of When?", Rehearsing My Choir is a weird testament to the inevitable passage of time, and the casualties of inertia.
As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless. Narrative supersedes melody time after time; there are no real songs, just cacophonous noodling and stacks and stacks of polysyllabic words. The majority of the record plays like amateur musical theater, steeped in prog-rock dementia and in love with the sound of its own voice. Unsurprisingly, the chief exception is the predominantly grandma-free (and essentially irrelevant, at least story-wise) "The Wayward Granddaughter": The song features drum machine boinks and zip-zapping synths and Matthew's disco whirls bouncing off Eleanor's (comparatively) silky pipes, as she embodies "Connie," a popular, Greek-American teenager who bites it (metaphorically, and possibly literally) at the hands of one of two boyfriends named Kevin. When Sarantos eventually does appear, it's as Connie's grandmother-- and delivers some of the record's most telling couplets, lamenting the capriciousness of age ("Her gorgeous red-brown hair black/ When she turned 15 behind my back") and, to an extent, explaining the impetus behind the entire enterprise ("Well, we could talk about it, Connie/ But often, memories are better off sung/ Remember when I was young?").
Sarantos' voice is weird and spectacular, dripping with dramatic flair, richer than Eleanor's determinably flat intones, and more obviously enthralled with the material. Deep and vaguely creaky, with just enough quake to emphasize the gravity of her story, Sarantos' pipes are thick and androgynous, heavy with the weight of hindsight-- appropriately, they age as the record plods onward, and by the closing track, Sarantos sounds exhausted and beaten. Eleanor's role, vocally, is less clear: For the most part, she embodies her grandmother's younger self-- the self-ascribed voice-of-the-moment-- but she does so without immediacy or aplomb, leaving the two vocal lines too distinct to convincingly articulate the same story.
Meanwhile, the band does its best to incorporate Matthew's instrumental diddles, with varying success. "We Wrote Letters Everyday" uses upright piano to recreate long-lost love letters; it's a coy, earnest device, protecting the sanctity of the form. "Who knows what we wrote/ And what they said/ But this is probably how they read," Sarantos muses, followed by alternating bits of dark, longing piano and sprightly keyboards. Later, breaking down the voices of the priests at her wedding ("They all had fine voices/ But, and I mean this respectfully, they didn't match pitch," Eleanor clucks), Sarantos commands, "Listen!"-- and we're rewarded with an off-key, disharmonious keyboard mess that's perfectly logical in the context of the story, but, taken independently, makes for supremely crappy listening. So goes the whole of the record-- the music is sharp and grating, too reliant on narrative nuance, and unsure of its own role.
Thus, the central problem of Rehearsing My Choir: It's a spectacular experiment, groundbreaking and perverse, bloated with possibilities and prime for parsing. But its practical function is unclear. No matter how open your mind, how welcome to art-without-directions you may be, it's difficult to consume Rehearsing My Choir without taking some kind of quasi-academic, cultural studies stance, reachable only after hours of careful, dedicated, uninterrupted listening: The emotional components are in place, but willfully (and successfully) obscured behind obtuse instrumentation and overdone wordplay. You can pick it apart, but can you dance to it, roll around on the floor with it, weep to it under your favorite blanket? This is not to say that art should be easy or instant or utilitarian-- but it should be penetrable, purposeful. And somewhere along the way, the Friedbergers got all chewed up and swallowed by their own experiment.


Met with confusion back in 2001, just nine months after the landmark Kid A, Amnesiac can take its rightful place among Radiohead's classics.

Radiohead: Amnesiac: Special Collectors Edition

Amnesiac: Special Collectors Edition

You've released a series of masterpieces in a row, each more challenging and rewarding than the last. You're being called the greatest band in the world, and many want you to become the biggest. You've been charged with uniting and possibly leading a large group of listeners who spent the late-1990s exploring some combination of the outré genres of post-rock, IDM, exotica, Tropicália, and French house; the emotionally resonant yet textural sounds of artists like Björk, the Verve, Beck, Stereolab, and Spiritualized; and the once-potent but now flagging spheres of rave, jungle, and techno. In short, there's a hell of a lot of pressure on you.
Whether prescient or just fortunate, Radiohead never had to create a new set of songs under the weight of these expectations. Instead, they followed the instant-classic Kid A with what they had planned to do from the start: Relatively quickly issue another set of songs recorded at the same time, a lengthy studio-bound period that ate up much of 2000.
Appearing nine months after Kid A, Amnesiac faced an uphill climb as steep as the icy mountains that adorned the earlier record's cover. And so it was that the record was met with derisive "Kid B" jokes, sniffed at as pretentious, or considered the work of a band that had moved a little too far to the left. In the face of choosing between the forward-looking sounds of Radiohead and the revivalism hailed as the New Rock Revolution, a lot of listeners and critics chose the easy way out. Eventually, later in the decade, artists like the Knife, Animal Collective, Liars, and LCD Soundsystem would carry the mantle of blending genres and upsetting listener expectations in rewarding ways. But in 2001, in an era when the radio and MTV were still the primary delivery systems for new music-- and after the majors felt burned by electronica, or by U2 and Smashing Pumpkins' ahead-of-the-game attempts to experiment with electronics in a stadium-rock setting-- creatively ambitious guitar music was still considered a commercial misstep.
Amnesiac was in some ways another leap beyond Kid A, an album that already was heavily influenced by experimental electronic music, 20th century classical, and ambient music, and often featured the manipulation of singer Thom Yorke's voice and found Jonny Greenwood ditching his guitar for a compositional electronic instrument called the Ondes Martenot. To a generation raised on Pearl Jam and Oasis, it wasn't always easy listening.
Three other things handicapped the record from the go: First, the belief that, because these songs were released after those on Kid A, the band felt they were inferior, which has never been the case. Second, in order to ensure Amnesiac's summer 2001 release, Kid A wasn't promoted in a traditional manner: No singles were officially pulled from the record, and no videos were created. The band commissioned a series of online "blips," short films that preceded the record's release, but because the LP wasn't being milked for extra product it appeared to be a unique, complete piece unsullied by scrupulous promotion or overexposure. If you wanted to listen to Kid A, you listened to the CD, at a time of your choosing, generally front to back. As Rob Mitchum said in his review yesterday, for many, it was virtually the last record they engaged with in this way.
Amnesiac, by contrast, was promoted with singles, which gave it an aura of both ordinariness compared to Kid A and gave the impression that the band itself, threatening even then to dismantle the received wisdom about how to record, promote, and release music in the digital age, had caved to the wishes of their label.
More than all that, however, Amnesiac is the first album I can remember most everyone I know getting online in bits and pieces. In the slipstream between encoding mp3s and records leaking in full, songs would tend to dribble out one by one. For a record like Amnesiac, this was particularly disadvantageous. The word on Kid A was already that it flowed so perfectly as an album (which is half-true: Like Daft Punk's Discovery, also out that year, its first half does. But then each CD featured a palate-cleansing instrumental and a more traditional second half which, other than their respective finales, could have been arranged in arguably any order.)
For Amnesiac, the tracklisting is important because of the tension it creates rather than the comfortable way in which it flows. As a result, there are a number of songs that work as experiments or filling between more traditional pieces, and these tracks' power is heightened when you listen to the record straight through. When you've spent 30 minutes to download a song, you don't want to hear something like Robert Fripp homage "Hunting Bears" or leftfield excursions like "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" or "Like Spinning Plates". They work just fine as standalone songs to my mind, but many in 2001, upon first encountering them, felt cheated. No more so than with the band's decision to release a second version of Kid A's "Morning Bell". At the peak of the bloated CD era, when a record is already a "mere" 44 minutes long, spending three of those precious minutes re-working a song from your previous album wasn't a popular move.
Yet despite the supposed arm's-length coldness of Amnesiac, it's an emotionally resonant and often very warm record. When the group aims for rich, tonal undercurrents of sound beneath swelling, heart-lifting arrangements, on Amnesiac the songs are less likely to be buffered by electronic crackles and pops or swirling strings. The difference is most notable in that second version of "Morning Bell", but pick any of the album's more glacial, atmospheric songs and you have the blueprint for the band today. "Pyramid Song" and "You and Whose Army?" surely, but even rhythmic, vibrant songs like "I Might Be Wrong" and "Dollars & Cents" sound like the itchy, impatient way in which Radiohead today balance their rock and electronic impulses.
As a whole, the friction within a song like "I Might Be Wrong" is played out on a grand scale, heightened by some of Yorke's more aggressive lyrics. After the evocative, often lonesome and disconnected lyrics of Kid A, Amnesiac's snap more clearly into place and often are pointed or defensive. "You and Whose Army?" and "Knives Out" on their surface carry tinges of violence, while elsewhere Yorke pleads for people "to get off [his] case" or threatens to "crack your little souls."
The strains of paranoia that had run throughout Yorke's songs for a half-decade came most sharply into view on album closer, "Life in a Glasshouse", which oddly seems to predict the post-9/11 Bush administration's misguided warmongering (in Iraq), belief that patriotism is equated with obedience, and willingness to trade liberty if they believe it will bring security. The only song on Amnesiac recorded after the release of Kid A, it would also have been the only song recorded after the election of Bush, and with its stately, funereal New Orleans jazz arrangement it provides an earthy, traditional close to the forward-looking Kid A/Amnesiac.
Released again, with its grab bag of B-sides-- some more interesting than lovable, but all worth hearing-- and a few songs recorded in a Paris studio (all reconstructed enough to make them worthwhile, if a bit sterile at times in this environment), Amnesiac can ideally take its rightful place among Radiohead's acknowledged classics. More than Kid A-- and maybe more than any other LP of its time-- Amnesiac is the kickoff of a messy, rewarding era in which rather than owning records that were of a piece, we listen and engage with a wide variety of sounds in jumbled, sometimes confusing ways. And Amnesiac sounds like what the dawn of the mp3 era sounded like: disconnected, self-aware, tense, eclectic, head-turning-- an overload of good ideas inhibited by rules, restrictions, and conventional wisdom.


When Low emerged from snowy Duluth, Minnesota with their 1994 Kramer-produced debut, I Could Live in Hope, their trudging funeral ...

Things We Lost in the Fire

When Low emerged from snowy Duluth, Minnesota with their 1994 Kramer-produced debut, I Could Live in Hope, their trudging funeral marches, sparse instrumentation, and Royal Albert Hall production values were strikingly fresh. Though they were preceded in the slowcore movement by earlier innovators like Galaxie 500 and Codeine, it was Low that defined the genre's sound.
Of course, by their third album, 1996's The Curtain Hits the Cast, the formula began to wear thin. New producer Steve Fisk brought little to the trio's sound, which remained virtually unchanged. While Low turned out a few great songs on the record-- namely, "Anon," "Over the Ocean," and "Lust"-- the near-Canadians failed to branch out, save for the 15-minute jam session "Do You Know How to Waltz?"
Low began loosely experimenting on 1998's Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, but returned to less adventurous songwriting the following year with the full-length Secret Name. The album sported crisper, less dramatic production, but failed to deviate from the concept the band had begun with five years earlier. Regardless, the songs were of a similar caliber to those on previous outings, and a whole legion of new fans sprung up.
Most newcomers haven't grown tired of Low's penchant for lethargy, since, to this day, few bands have attempted what the three have already perfected. The closest runners-up may be New York's Ida; the two bands are often considered contemporaries within the same genre. But this comparison belies one simple backbone fact: Low rarely force themselves to sound beautiful. Instead, they focus on building tension and atmosphere around sloth-paced pop songs, while Ida witlessly water down their own country/folk influences with syrupy strings and gaudy "prettiness." Vanity has never been Low's concern, and on Things We Lost in the Fire, their humility has never been so affecting.
The opening track features a double-timed, pounding snare, a basic descending chord structure, and the gratingly "nice" refrain, "You bought some sweet/ Sweet/ Sweet/ Sweet Sunflowers." But a more attentive listen reveals a new lyrical direction. They've toned down the ambiguity and opted for creepy surrealism: "When they found your body/ Giant x's on your eyes/ And with your half of the ransom/ You bought some sweet sunflowers/ And gave in to the night."
Even if the British EP hadn't been available since last year, "Dinosaur Act" would stand out as the obvious single. Mimi Parker's tiny snare drum is squashed beneath pummeling tympani like the song's prehistoric namesake, as frontman Alan Sparhawk closes the song's final chorus with a shouted "Dinosaur!"
But Things We Lost in the Fire's finest moments come just as the album draws to a close. On "Like a Forest," the band dig themselves out of their somber rut to briefly uplift; the track is paced at nearly twice the speed of their other pieces, and seems generally optimistic, if lyrically vague. "Like a Forest" is filled out with an economy-size string section produced to sound incredibly dense. But rather than overwhelming the song with soaring drama, the strings are incorporated conservatively low in the mix, and generate a warm hum for the sake of ambience. Meanwhile, a lone plinking piano note keeps pace alongside Parker's snapping percussion. Were "Like a Forest" the only Low song you'd ever heard, it's unlikely you'd suspect its somewhat psychedelic chord structure and absolutely engaging, see-sawing vocals were the product of the progenitors of slowcore.
"In Metal" is a simply crushing Parker-sung ode to she and Sparhawk's new baby, Hollis. Parker's chilling voice, as she confesses her hopeless longing for the child to stay small forever, simultaneously attains both heartbreakingly desperation and jubilance: "Partly hate to see you grow/ And just like your baby shoes/ Wish I could keep your little body/ In metal." There's a bizarre David Lynch quality to the concept of immortalizing a baby in some kind of Han Solo freeze that prevents the song from crossing over into blatant sentimentalism. But Parker's affection for the child, who can be heard squeaking at low levels during the song's first verse, is not feigned. The song serves as a flawless finale, to the point that it can alter your view of the album as a whole.
In truth, the whole of Things We Lost in the Fire rarely equals the impact of "In Metal," and at many points, even floats out of immediate consciousness to dwell in pits of mediocrity. "Whitetail," despite spectacular brushed cymbal loops and effects, flounders aimlessly for more than five dragging minutes; "Laser Beam" is beyond minimal, with just Parker singing quietly over pausing guitar; "Embrace" is painfully melodramatic as Parker spouts such ridiculousness as "I fell down the stairs/ I wished I were dead"; and the 49 second-long untitled track that precedes "In Metal" plays like a manufacturing error that accidentally caught a portion of labelmates Windy & Carl's Consciousness.
Still, Things We Lost in the Fire's high points are, without question, the best they've done. An endless list of studio guests-- including ex-Soul Cougher Mark D'Gli Antoni on piano and sampler, trumpeting by Bob Weston, and impeccable production by one Steve Albini-- certainly add to the enjoyment. But above all else, it's Low's willingness to finally live up to their Kranky cohorts by experimenting with ambient textures, eerie tension, and advanced songwriting methods that saves this from being yet another I Could Live in Hope. Here's hoping they get even weirder.


The chatter surrounding Myrkur, the once-mysterious one-woman black metal act that was recently revealed to be Ex-Cops co-leader Amalie Bruun, has roared and raged in the heavy music community before a lick of her debut EP was heard by most. So: how does it sound?

Myrkur

Sorry, Soused, Blake, and Inquisition: With only one song, the one-woman black metal band Myrkur became the flashpoint for extreme metal in 2014. Even before the release of “Nattens Barn,” a six-minute slide between celestial vocals, blast beats, and a coda that combines the two, onlookers began speculating about the identity of Relapse’s new signee. She was named after the Icelandic word for “darkness” (and possibly an early Sigur Rós song?) and had roots in Denmark, but little else seemed certain. She was a model from Los Angeles, some insisted, a mere marketing ploy from one of metal’s major labels to create the heavy world’s Lana Del Rey; others maintained, though, that Relapse was right—that, as their press releases asserted, she had indeed “emerg[ed] from the darkness of Scandinavia” and did possess “a distinct sense of Nordic isolation.” The debate fomented controversy on message boards, music blogs, and their itinerant comment threads. People lodged researched guesses as to Myrkur’s identity, extoled her as black metal’s possible popular savior, and said inordinately hateful things about her label, her gender, and her heritage—all, of course, without hearing very much of her fastidiously rudimentary seven-song, self-titled debut EP.
As many have suggested, Myrkur is indeed Amalie Bruun, a successful Danish model who has lived and worked in America for many years and co-leads Brooklyn buzz-pop band Ex-Cops. She’s made pleasant solo singles and albums and worked for Chanel and Scorsese, appeared in that Lonely Island music video alongside Michael Bolton and led Elle on a shopping tour of Brooklyn—all things omitted from the project's initial reveal. After months of conjecture, Myrkur’s publicist finally confirmed the bandleader’s identity a week before the release of the EP, information that went public only the day the record was issued.
“I don’t think any record label prefers an artist who doesn’t want to do any press,” Bruun said in the interview that revealed her identity. “But it was my requirement or I didn’t wish to release the EP at all.” Maybe that’s right, but doesn’t it seem suspect that months of careful, chatter-inducing concealment ended on the targeted date—a break in the dam of discussion, meant to lift the once-mysterious project into circulation again? This perfect scenario feels more like good marketing than pedestrian coincidence.
But the dust-up and release plan, turns out, are much ado about very little, at least for now. Myrkur isn’t a masterful release full of grand visions and endless intrigue; rather, it’s an occasionally charged listen that is, at best, more confident in its promise than its purpose. Bruun’s underlying approach is a rather simple one—bait and lace primitive black metal with pretty textures featuring a multi-tracked choir of one. Opener “Ravnens Banner” unfurls dreamy harmonies, stretched by echo that suggests the granite walls of a great cathedral. After a minute, her flat-toned electric guitar—a manipulated sheet of sheer static—hangs atop racing drums, credited to Swedish friend Rex Myrnur. The pace staggers, speeds and, at one point, stops altogether, returning for a mid-tempo climax where Bruun’s own lofty tone hangs like drapes over the livid arrangement.
There’s variation, of course, like the placid acoustic-and-electric waltz of “Frosne” and the brief, vocals-only postlude “Ulvesangen.” During the tempestuous “Må Du Brænde i Helvede,” Bruun even screams, bellows, and grunts, imploring a sort of dark sorcery that she most often leaves to the instruments. But by and large, Bruun looks for compulsion in contrast and, ultimately, the consolidation of these disparate elements. That’s epitomized by “Latvian Fegurð”, which flips between an angelic introduction, a bruising body, and a noisy onslaught—moves that comingle in the song’s final minute. She even adds a bit of alt-rock melancholy (or Mellon Collie, as it were) during “Dybt i Skoven.”
This combination of madness and majesty in black metal is nothing new; Bruun cites Ulver as a touchstone, and that’s something they’ve always done well. Bruun dutifully touts and embraces the form’s longstanding roots in and fascination with classical composers, too. More recently, pillow-topped acts like Wolves in the Throne Room, Deafheaven, and Alcest have attained relative popularity by overwhelming the listener on simultaneous fronts. The real frustration with Myrkur, then, is not the whiff of marketing chicanery or publicity deception; it’s that these songs offer skeletal suggestions of what’s come before them, with the barest of bones doing nothing to support the spirit and vigor that gives the best of this ilk its strength. You get the sense that, lifelong metal fan or not, Bruun is simply trying on these ideas as a musician. She’s yet to commit to living in them. The only thing overwhelming about Bruun’s black metal is the prevailing sense of being underwhelmed.
Remember, though, this is a debut EP in a crowded, active, contentious field, and there are moments here that peak beyond only promise. Yes, Bruun is a professional musician and model, and her premature hype has been powered by a large PR campaign and record label. And no, these seven songs don’t warrant the hubbub they’ve created. But moments of Myrkur move beyond narrative intrigue, hinting at more than this start can deliver. Let’s hope Bruun’s sudden exposure, intentional or not, won’t prevent her from pursuing them.


After experiments in free jazz and psychedelia, the UK producer reckons with the rave music of his youth. It’s a utopian project that melds dance music’s forms with an organic sensibility.

James Holden: Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities

Drop the needle at any given point on James Holden’s fourth album, and you might think the music is building toward carefully orchestrated catharsis: the moment when the big melody finally drops in, or the various rhythms cohere into a single body-moving lockstep, and the crowd loses its collective mind. There were plenty of those moments in Holden’s earlier work, when he was a young DJ making sweeping trance and progressive techno anthems. But time and time again on Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, the climax turns out to be an illusion. A filter sweep reaches its apex to reveal the full glowing resonance of a particular synth, and you realize the pulse of its chord progression has been working at cross purposes with the rest of the track, pulling you away from its patient groove rather than toward it. A strobe-lit rave piano arrives just in time for the drums to drop out entirely.
Holden has said that the album is his attempt to recreate the sense of hearing, as a teenager, far-off pirate radio broadcasts of early UK dance music, the soundtracks to a woolly and utopian rave scene that had largely dried up by the time he was old enough to make music professionally and had to settle for more slickly commercial sounds. Thematically, this is not so different from the territory where Burial has made his career, summoning the atmospheres of emptied-out warehouse parties and solitary walks home. Rather than mourning a paradise lost, Holden instead focuses on the joy and freedom his younger self imagined those ravers must have been feeling. Every individual sound is as bright and welcoming as can be. It’s the way that these sounds cohere—or more often, refuse to—that suggests a certain distance. The album’s new-agey title may provoke eye rolls in some listeners, but the first word poignantly grounds it. If we have to imagine that this is a place where everything is possible, it probably isn’t in reality.
By the time of Holden’s first album, 2006’s The Idiots Are Winning, he was already dislodging himself from the club; his third, 2017’s The Animal Spirits, looked like a final break, with Holden leading a full live band on excursions into free jazz and Terry Riley-ish minimalism. His full-lengths have also reflected a growing interest in oblique, free-flowing rhythms, seemingly inspired by the unpredictable complexity of the natural world rather than the mechanistic precision of much dance music. While High Dimensional Space on one level represents a return to the timbres of clubland, it retains this organic sensibility. Acoustic instruments like saxophone and tabla punctuate “Common Land” and “Contains Multitudes,” respectively. The latter also plays with your expectation that the sounds of electronic dance music will stick to their own narrowly defined bands of the frequency range and roles in the larger arrangement. One particular keyboard ostinato begins in the middle, and traverses down to sub-bass depths and up to piercing heights over the course of the track. Listening closely is like watching a time lapse of a tree’s roots bursting through the sidewalk.
The quality of the rhythms across the album, each developing concurrently at its own pace rather than in strict alignment, mirrors the fragmentary timelines of nature as well. “Trust Your Feet” comes tantalizingly close to ecstatic release, its arpeggios percolating onward past the juncture where they might have locked in with the other instruments to deliver a satisfying payoff. Witnessing waterfalls and sunsets, there’s no single perfect moment when all the elements come together and make their mysterious relationships clear; this music works similarly, absorbing you in the whole of its trajectory rather than any specific waypoint.
The lack of definitive resolutions can make the album at times difficult to really love, rather than just appreciate or admire, despite the music’s unflagging optimism. The rare moments when everything does come together are the ones that move me the most: the tumbling snare drum and burbling modular synth of “Continuous Revolution,” rushing together toward a horizon we never quite glimpse; the droning violins and unexpectedly funky bass guitar of “Worlds Collide, Mountains Form,” which sound a bit like what might happen if the ancient architects of Stonehenge decided to form a jam band. In between these set pieces, the full enjoyment of Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities requires some imagination of your own, a sort of listening past the vaporous surface of the music. Like teenage Holden at the radio, you may sense a magical world there, just beyond what you can hear.


The Australian producer built his career on pop accessibility, but his latest EP—featuring Pusha T and Moses Sumney—lacks the spark to make his pop music memorable.

Skin Companion EP II

The chasm that once separated mainstream electronic music and Top 40 has all but vanished. A few years ago, a captive festival goer might have been a producer's target audience; now the casual radio listener is the true prize. It's the difference between Skrillex, one of electronic music's most prominent artists, making “Bangarang,” a 2x-platinum-certified single from 2012 that didn't register with the average commuter, and forging “Where Are Ü Now?” a Justin Bieber number that guaranteed a primo spot in the great hall of pop.
The Australian producer Flume (born Harley Edward Streten), built his career on a different type of accessibility. His songs can be easy to fall into, but they don't usually lasso listeners and ensnare them like an undeniable airwave triumph. Flume's 2012 self-titled debut, an oasis of lite house and loungeable hip-hop, offered refuge from the fusillade of trap beats sweeping through electronic music at the time. His second full-length, Skin, released four years later, set aside big-room lullabies to emphasize big-name collaborations, but there was a reticent quality to it. Flume worked with rappers on the declarative, bruising end of the spectrum—Vic Mensa, Vince Staples—but didn't make the kind of songs that really knocked you on your ass. He enlisted singers—Beck, Tove Lo—to create pop songs that were neither sugary nor off-kilter. He spoke of “mak[ing] experimental music accessible” and “fus[sing] the abrasive and the beautiful,” but seemed to sell both sides short.
Flume patrols the same liminal zone on Skin Companion EP II. He leads with an uppercut, a track that's supposed to slug its way into your subconscious: “Enough” features rapping from the stolid veteran Pusha T, and the beat shovels a stream of noises—hollow wood tones, staticky crumbles—at the listener to stimulate a fight-or-flight response. But the song plays as an attempt to redo Lil Uzi Vert's “Uzi” and extract the magic from its alluring rumble. The central riffs of the two tracks are similar, as are the liquidating blots of bass and the drum breaks that “Uzi”-producer Charlie Heat also inserted into Kanye West's “All Day.” “Enough” never surges beyond emulation, any abrasiveness blunted by the feeling that this is an academic beat-making exercise.
The rest of Skin Companion II veers away from the rough stuff to return to the modes Flume explored on his first album. “Depth Charge” will do fine as a bridge towards the more peaceful side of a live set. “Fantastic,” a collaboration with Dave Bayley of Glass Animals, is a colorless mid-tempo number with a clomping drum pattern designed to make heads bob. The most promising tune on the EP is “Weekend,” a reverie with extended beat-less portions. Though Moses Sumney's presence only registers as the song begins to wind down, his soothing tone is enough to summon the floating, comatose feeling. Flume doesn't want to be pinned down, and he's intent on proving his ability to make functional music for multiple scenarios. But malleability is only really powerful when it's accompanied by memorability, and the latter remains out of reach for Flume.


Rhino continues its expansion of the Nuggets brand with a 4xCD look at the fertile Sunset Strip and other SoCal musical locales of 1965-68.

Various Artists: Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

At some point in the mid 1960s, the kids started hanging around on Sunset Strip, which at the time was still home to many of the restaurants that once boasted famous Hollywood patrons. To curtail the invading counterculture, the city imposed a strict curfew, and cops clashed with longhairs in a series of small riots that galvanized the hippies rather than dispersed them. The skirmishes inspired Buffalo Springfield to write "For What It's Worth" and Four-Leaf Productions to bankroll the teensploitation flick Riot on Sunset Strip, featuring a theme song by local group the Standells. It begins mundanely enough: "I'm going down to the Strip tonight, I'm not on a stay-home trip tonight," sings drummer Dick Dodd over Tony Valentino's snarling guitar lick. But the song's hard beat is more of a billy-club swing than a hip shake, and the lyrics become increasingly serious, as he laments the Strip has become "just a place for black-and-white cars to race. It's causin' a riot!" More pointed and angry than the square film that bears it title, the song depicts Los Angeles as a tensed city on the brink of chaos and violence, and the Standells could just as well have been singing about Watts or any of the race riots that made the curfew clashes seem polite and placid by comparison.
"Riot on Sunset Strip" kicks off Rhino's 4xCD set Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, setting the scene for the 100 tracks that follow. Local bands were drawing inspiration from the sights all around them, whether it was sirens on a cop car or sirens dancing in the clubs. For them, L.A. was the center of the universe, if not the entire universe itself, and these groups-- some of whom, in true Nuggets fashion, lasted no more than a 45 or two-- established a particular dialogue with the city that projected well beyond Sunset Strip and reverberated around the Valley. Arthur Lee details just such a trippy travelogue on "You I'll Be Following", a bouncy number from Love's debut with killer harmonies and his electric vocal. Kim Fowley's hysteric "Underground Lady" tries to capture the scene in the surreal slang of the times, and on "Los Angeles", one-time Byrd Gene Clark calls it the "city of the doomed," although you might swear he's singing "city of the dunes."
Despite its appearance of insularity, the scene was not a closed circuit. In 1965, the Byrds charted a hit with a cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man", and their then-new folk-rock not only energized local musicians, inspiring scores of imitators and innovators, but attracted the attention of listeners, DJs, and suits across the country. Where the Action Is! picks up around this time, introducing the Byrds with "You Movin'", a sophisticated throwaway from their early "preflyte" sessions. You can hear their influence throughout the box set, as other musicians put their stamp on the sound, mixing it with go-go rhythms, psychedelic mindmelts, art-rock excursions, canyon folk, and pretty much anything else that came to hand. Including bagpipes.
A diverse collection of tunes that have little else in common beyond geography, Where the Action Is! depicts the L.A. scene as impossibly busy and variegated. The first two discs collect songs from some of the progenitors of the sound, who played frequently in the clubs and taverns that eventually took over the Strip. The desert eccentricities of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Zig Zag Wanderer" jostle with the proto-flower-power sounds of the Seeds' "Tripmaker" and the southwestern flair of the Bobby Fuller Four's "Baby, My Heart". The Rising Sons' "Take a Giant Step" sounds self-propelled and gritty, at distinct odds with the Palace Guard's "All Night Long" and Sonny & Cher's "It's Gonna Rain", which sound stuffy by comparison. The Strip found room for all these disparate acts, who honed their distinctive sounds through live performance before demanding audiences.
As the second disc moves beyond those clubs to document the bands around the Valley and throughout the Inland Empire, Where the Action Is! grows even heavier, more adventurous, and more diverse: There's a considerable Latino presence here, such as Thee Midniters rumbling through their energetic "Jump, Jive & Harmonize" and the Premiers begging you to "Get on This Plane". Acts like the Chymes and Penny Arkade offer very different takes on the Strip beat, suggesting the vast difference between the artists there and elsewhere. If the first half of the set emphasizes performance, the third and fourth discs examine the evolution of the studio as an instrument, whether as an agent for Thorinshield's psychedelic exploration on "Daydreaming" or as a tool for beefing up rock songs like Keith Allison's "Action, Action, Action". There's an even wider range of sounds, obviously, although the songs typically lack the hard-edged grooves of the Strip bands: Jan and Dean's "Fan Tan" and the Yellow Balloon's "Yellow Balloon" even sound like commercial jingles, and Rick Nelson's kitschy "Marshmallow Skies" comes across as a targeted cred grab, despite his avowed advocacy of the new folk rock.
But there's an even larger narrative traced by these discs, which show how the sounds that developed in clubs and bars were adopted by more ambitious and at times already established artists. There are familiar, sometimes unexpected names on the fourth disc: Tim Buckley and Randy Newman were both influenced by this scene, and their songs show little-heard aspects of their work. Peter Fonda and Hugh Masekela collaborated to record Gram Parsons' "November Night" (which Parsons himself never recorded), and Where the Action Is! persuasively argues for the Strip's impact on the Beach Boys by including an alternate take of "Heroes and Villains", whose menacing sound bite-- "You're under arrest!"-- sounds especially loaded in this context. Together, these four discs give the sense of an exciting rock underground arising and mutating and interacting with and changing the mainstream-- not just locally but nationally and internationally. It'd be 10 years before L.A.'s scene would regain this level of excitement and punk purpose, but that's another box set altogether.


The Atlanta rapper does not go pop on this release, choosing instead to dive deep into his unique blend of horror tales and unsettling production.

DR. EV4L

DR. EV4L could have been the Young Nudy album where he decided it was time to find a comfy spot on those Spotify playlists and aim for the big bucks. Who would have blamed him? He’s had critical acclaim; he’s got a loyal fanbase; he has the support of both a major label and his hometown Atlanta, the most powerful city in all of rap. Because of his laid-back flow, his cruel lyrics could have worked on beats that were a bit brighter, maybe even with a hook sung by one of the many pop rap stars his city has birthed. Both his cousin 21 Savage and his inspiration Gucci Mane did this without completely sacrificing the menace that laced their early records. Ultimately, Young Nudy gives that pathway a fat middle finger, and if his older mixtapes felt like slasher movies, this one is The Shining.
That tone is set by the production, which is almost entirely done by Nudy’s in-house Atlanta producer Coupe. On “Revenge,” the combination of the ominous piano melody and slowly thudding hi-hats is less traditionally scary than it is tense and uncomfortable. It sounds like what would play right before everything went to shit, which happens to be Young Nudy’s sweet spot. His enjoyment of the pain and punishment of others would be disturbing if it wasn’t so fun. And yes, Nudy almost gleeful rapping about home invasions, chain snatchings, and chasing down helpless enemies like he’s Liam Neeson is messed up, but if you’re looking for upstanding morals, a Young Nudy tape is the wrong place to search.
In comparison to Nudy’s more popular work with the superproducer Pi’erre Bourne, this is entirely different. The appeal of their work was the clash between Nudy’s maniacally laughing supervillain persona and Pi’erre’s murky, yet airy Nintendo 64 beats. Nothing is sugar-coated when Nudy and Coupe are together; it’s pure wickedness. “And I’m tryna catch a body, kill a bitch nigga with no feelings,” he raps leisurely on “Walking Dead,” where the beat would suit an exorcism.
If anything, he suffers from not detailing the brutality enough. He repeatedly shouts, “Murder!” “Kill!” and “Rob!,” to the point where the words almost become meaningless. When he’s opposite G Herbo on “2Face,” it’s easy to notice Nudy’s one-dimensional lyricism. The Chicago rapper expertly weaves between wisely worded punchlines and short tales, while Nudy sort of monologues over the beat. It turns out fine since the album is kept tight, and Nudy excels in that one dimension. But there is one moment where Nudy reveals what turned him into this particular madman. “Always sayin’, ‘Go to school,’ but I got kicked out/Now I’m stuck in the street and my momma kicked me out,” he says on “Colombian Necktie.” That may sound like the typical rapper plight, but it does add a subtle layer to him.
The fear with Nudy’s course is that one day the repetitiveness of his raps will make them lose their luster, but today is not that day. DR. EV4L thrives because it embraces the sinister spirit of his music instead of making it accessible. You’re not going to find anything on Rap Caviar quite like it.
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Suede's first two albums, key documents of the music of 1990s Britain, are reissued with a generous helping of bonus material.

Suede: Suede [Deluxe Edition] / Dog Man Star [Deluxe Edition]

There is music on these albums. Obviously. The reason I'm saying that up front is that discussion of the first two Suede albums is invariably framed in a discussion of the bigger picture, both in terms of what was happening in British rock in the early 1990s and in terms of the discord within the band, particularly during 1994. There are good reasons for this. Suede were at the center of the conversation that gave us the Britpop narrative that so dominated the UK in the mid-90s. They were the band on the cover of the issue of Select that invented Britpop as a concept, they were massively hyped before they even released anything, and their debut album was the fastest-selling in British history. They were ignored in the United States and ridiculously had to change their name in this country to the London Suede after a lawsuit by an obscure lounge singer.
This stuff is all important to understanding who Suede were-- the music they made, especially on their first three albums, is tied closely to their story as a band-- but I really want to make sure that as I make my way through that story, the music doesn't slip to the side of the conversation. Stories and meta-cultural narratives aside, the music is what we have to listen to now, and there is a lot of great music spread over these elaborate reissues. The whole band, including once-estranged original guitarist Bernard Butler, was involved in putting together these packages, each of them a 2xCD/DVD featuring the original album, demos, unreleased outtakes, every contemporary B-side (plus one non-album A-side), music videos, interviews and live performances. The band's entire output, with the notable exception of three early unreleased tracks, "Be My God", "Art", and "Wonderful Sometimes", is now available on five very well-done reissues that include all of the original artwork for both the albums and the singles. They have curated their past well.
Consider the arena this band was entering when it debuted in May, 1992 with "The Drowners". The British rock world was dominated by two waning trends, shoegaze and Madchester, both of which emphasized sound and vibe over personality and pomp. And here Suede were, with a very bold, direct, and sexually charged song that had the swagger of glam rock and was focused on the voice of Brett Anderson, who was powerful and distinctive. Anderson's vocals had a little of Bowie and a little of Morrissey, but there was a lot more there than a simple swirling of influences. Here was a guy who could sing frankly about drug abuse and rough sex without plasticizing it or stylizing it-- actions had consequences in the world he created, and wild nights had mornings after, but he was careful not to tell you the moral of the story.
It wouldn't always be like that, but during the brief years Butler was still in the band, Anderson was at his best as both lyricist and vocalist. The band had a good rhythm section, too. Bassist Mat Osman is a subtle force in the band, playing melodic lines that keep the songs light on their feet, even when Simon Gilbert's drumming locks in on a stomping and otherwise heavy beat. When they matched up with Butler's guitar, they were nearly as charismatic as a trio as the guy who was singing for them. "The Drowners"-- which for all the early hype around the band (they were on the cover of Melody Maker a month before its release under the headline "The Best New Band in Britain") only charted at #49-- has a destructive energy to it that I can understand hearing as a clarion call in the musical climate of Britain in the early 90s. The opening drum stomp, soon joined by Butler's crunching, metallic riff, seems to announce the band as something different and exciting. It drips with sex before Anderson even opens his mouth.
"The Drowners" is joined by three other excellent singles on the band's self-titled debut. "Metal Mickey" was the band's only song to chart in the U.S. top 10, and it is one of their best-- Butler didn't play much conventional rhythm guitar, and this song is a good early example of how his shifting lead style complemented Anderson's vocal melodies. The singles reinforced the idea that Suede were a breath of fresh air, and even though they are fairly basic rock, the band still didn't sound quite like any of their contemporaries. And there are the album tracks as well, which showed them to be a band with considerable range. The interplay between Anderson's vocal and Butler's lead guitar on "Sleeping Pills" is like some sort of dance, and the band makes a convincing modern murder ballad on "She's Not Dead". And Mat Osman's bass does as much to drive the quieter songs as Butler's guitar.
Between albums, the band released a non-album single, "Stay Together", that signaled a shift in direction. By this point, Britpop was a real thing, at least as far as the UK music press was concerned, and Suede were being lumped in with Oasis, Blur, Cast, and a host of other bands that were being championed as the saviors of British rock. This horrified Anderson, who felt his band had very little to do with the laddish groups he was being mentioned in the same breath with, and it strengthened his resolve to move the band further away from conventional rock. Butler's relationship with the rest of the group was deteriorating; on the band's messy American tour in late 1993, he sometimes left the stage mid-gig, having a member of the Cranberries, who were opening, fill in for him. Anderson sequestered himself to write, and the songs he came up with were much darker and more introverted than anything on their mostly demonstrative debut.
By all accounts, the recording sessions for Dog Man Star, the band's masterpiece, were fraught with tension, and Butler often recorded separately, ultimately leaving the band before the album was completed. Whether that tension helped or hurt the album is debatable, but what's not in dispute is that the album is the band's very best work, completely transcending the Britpop wave they'd supposedly helped launch. In many ways, it's more like an album that might have been released in the 70s than in the 90s, and not just because of its heavy glam riffs and towering vocals. It does everything to its extreme, is unafraid of excess or bombast, and is well-structured to play as a cohesive work. From its eerily throbbing, weightless opener, "Introducing the Band", to the orchestral overload of its sweeping closer, "Still Life", there's not a moment on the album that doesn't feel in danger of breaking down, flying apart, or disappearing entirely.
It's a thrilling record. I can't think of anything that's been released since that has quite the same balance of elements. It was enormously risky, but the risk paid off with big returns. Where Butler did play, he played his most inspired parts. "New Generation", "We Are the Pigs", "Heroine", and "This Hollywood Life" thrash and churn; "The Asphalt World" caps its slow burn with a wild and lengthy instrumental coda; and "The Wild Ones" might be Suede's best single, its sweeping orchestration, vocals, and guitar parts coming together in fragile but perfect balance. The quieter songs are stunning. "Daddy's Speeding" ends in a torrent of static and sampled engine noises that sounds like the earth tearing open, and "The 2 of Us" is simply gorgeous, a devastatingly sad song that doesn't feel forced or morose.
The reissue appends full-length versions of "The Wild Ones" and "The Asphalt World" that are significantly longer, and they're worth hearing, as are most of the other outtakes. The demos that fill out the first discs after the albums are marginally interesting, but the essential inclusion on these sets is the B-sides, all of them, from every single the band released through early 1994 (some recorded after Butler left are on the Coming Up reissue). Suede made B-sides that a lot of bands would die to release as lead singles-- their Sci-Fi Lullabies compilation, now redundant, has long been considered an essential part of their discography, and for good reason. Here, you get the elastic snap of "Whipsnade", the stomp of "Killing of a Flash Boy", the breezy swagger of "Modern Boys", the majesty of "My Dark Star", the crystalline sadness of "The Living Dead", and the shimmer of "To the Birds" right alongside the albums, and they alone make these sets worth the price. Anderson even makes alternate tracklists in his liner notes for each album, which often swap out weaker album tracks for B-sides, and I can't really argue with any of his substitutions (dropping "The Power" for "My Dark Star" and "Black or Blue" for "The Living Dead" might have been the only way to make Dog Man Star better).
The DVDs are full of good stuff-- Suede comes with all of its charmingly dated music videos, and Dog Man Star has the concert projections for the band's 1994 tour, though that album's videos are oddly absent. Each set has two live performances-- and strangely, all but one appear to have been shot by audience members rather than professionally, though the sound is acceptable. They were a very good live band, but honestly, as with most bonus DVDs, these are likely to be watched a few times and shelved. It's not bad to have this stuff available, though. More importantly, the band's discography has been consolidated, and their first two albums feel more complete with the contemporary B-sides in tow. Suede were an important band, pivotal to what the 90s came to sound like in Britain, even if they distanced themselves from it. But Suede were also a great band, and these records still sound vital all these years later.


The prepared-piano specialist abandons the meticulous compositions of her previous albums, editing down improvisations and bejeweling them with layers of synthesizers and effects.

Ultraviolet

Musicians can be their own worst critics. Look no further than New York pianist and composer Kelly Moran, who, since 2010, has doggedly pursued her idiosyncratic vision of post-classical piano music through modern-dance soundtracks, concert recordings, and fusions of prepared piano and electronics. Her last album, 2017’s Bloodroot, was her most intensive study of the prepared piano’s mercurial sonics yet, earning acclaim from The New York Times as one of last year’s best classical pieces. But speaking to Pitchfork recently, she bemoaned its premeditated and belabored qualities. Composed “sitting at the piano with staff paper, writing every note down,” she said, it was “very much about how the harmonies and melodies sounded, not so much about how it felt to play the music.” Then she dealt the death blow: “It sounds like I’m trying really, really hard.”
On Ultraviolet, Moran puts down the pencil and goes with her gut. If Bloodroot was an exercise in cartography—plotting points, measuring distances—Ultraviolet is pure flow. Where Bloodroot bristled with bright, dissonant clusters, Ultraviolet is consonant and warm, with steady rhythms and reassuring harmonies. It is a spring rain rather than a freak hailstorm.
The album began taking shape during a bout of writer’s block last year. Putting notes on paper just wasn’t working, so “Fuck it,” she decided. She took the day off, headed for the woods, swam in the ocean. Taking a page from John Cage, she even got down on her haunches and listened, trying to key in to the rhythms and frequencies of nature. Something clicked. As Cage might have put it, her ears were now in excellent condition, and so, apparently, were here hands, because she headed back to her grand piano and spent the rest of the day improvising. The recordings felt refreshingly “unbridled and joyous.” She began paring them down, building collages, and painting on layers of synthesizer for atmosphere.
Given their shared origins, it makes sense that many of these seven tracks follow a similar trajectory. They mostly begin with a tentative, repetitive melodic figure in the right hand. A synthesized buzz begins to grow underneath. Brighter, hard-hammered sounds with the tone of a copper bell may flood into the mix. There are elements of Philip Glass in her cyclic motions and hints of Tim Hecker in the foggy glow. Her melodies do most of the work, moving in circles but frequently deviating from their path, carving new courses and seeking out new terrain. It’s a thoroughly Romantic take on minimalism, emphasizing not just the hypnotic nature of the patterns but also their restlessly expressive character.
Part of the pleasure of the prepared piano—an instrument that’s been treated by placing bits of metal, wood, or paper among the strings and hammers to create phantom rattles and clangs—is its unpredictability. A clarion note may lead to another that buzzes like a broken doorbell. Moran's compositions make the most of those contrasts, feeling them out and subtly emphasizing the muted overtones and inharmonics that are thrown off like soft sparks. The effect is particularly pronounced on “In Parallel,” where a crisp click occasionally leaps from one of the speakers, quietly interrupting the lulling reverie established by the synths or reverb or whatever that is swelling up from below like a deep black pool.
Leaping versus lulling: That’s the music’s motivating contradiction. “In Parallel” is one of the album’s most successful tracks because it exploits the tension between concord and discord. Moran’s playing here challenges the dominance of the overarching key as the sound becomes steam, notes trickling back down in rivulets of dissonance. In the 10-minute epic “Nereid,” an even more engrossing song that ventures further into atonality, the liquidity of her playing finally overwhelms the containers she’s created for it, spilling over and splashing out. The excess is thrilling. It’s here where Moran feels the most unfettered and uninhibited—not just balancing opposing forces, but reveling in their collision and savoring the way the frequencies fly, like raindrops buffeted by gusts of wind.


Träd, Gräs och Stenar: Djungelns Lag/Mors Mors/Kom Tillsammans

Djungelns Lag/Mors Mors/Kom Tillsammans

The music of ’70s Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones) emerged from a chemical reaction between two basic elements: rock'n'roll and Terry Riley. The latter influence came first: when Riley visited Stockholm in the mid 60’s to perform his groundbreaking In C, it blew the mind of an art-school student named Bo Anders Persson. Inspired by Riley’s repetitive, long-form minimalism, Persson experimented with drones and tape manipulations, eventually bringing those ideas to a group he formed with fellow classmates called Pärson Sound.
It turned out Persson and his comrades were as interested in rock and roll as they were in the avant-garde. As they evolved through lineups and band names, that interest escalated. Morphing into Träd, Gräs och Stenar  in 1969, they became a full-fledged rock band, with most of the artier experimentation stripped away in favor of lengthy, guitar-heavy jams. But the group’s extended, open-ended playing still carried the spirit of Riley’s “all-night flights.” Their songs might not have sounded like In C, but they could be just as expansive, indeterminant, and mind-blowing.
That expansiveness is essential to Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s magic. Though their sky-seeking grooves also work in small doses, they usually need lots of time and space to fully explore and develop their ideas. In that sense, this new set of reissues is the best way so far to experience their work. Two live releases from the early 70’s have been expanded into double albums, while a third double album comprises previously-unreleased live material rescued from the attic of band member Jakob Sjöholm. In its biggest version—a six LP box set plus digital download— Anthology’s series offers nearly five hours of music in total, with 12 of the 27 tracks lasting over 10 minutes.
Those numbers may seem like a formula for tedium, but Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s music is never a slog. It’s usually easy to enter, and often downright breezy and relaxed. The band was confident enough not to force epiphanies, trusting that euphoria could grow from steady, upbeat swing. This has led some to call them Sweden’s Grateful Dead, but Träd, Gräs och Stenar were more free-form, and more interested in sonic chaos. In that way, along with their status as communal outsiders, they were more like Father Yod’s primitive psych-rock pioneers YaHoWha 13. The latter’s delirious 3am trips share an aura with the Träd, Gräs och Stenar songs that feature raw, seemingly-possessed singing and chanting.
One crucial difference between Träd, Gräs och Stenar and other communal collectives of the time (YaHoWha 13, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, the Sun Ra Arkestra) was their leaderless nature. With no particular member in charge, their music has a refreshing lack of ego; it feels like the only thing steering the ship is the momentum created by playing together. Though some guitar parts resemble solos, they rarely dominate. All the riffs merge into a mutli-colored swirl, and the band digs into each repetition like coal miners chipping away in unison. Over 40 years later, this all-for-one approach still resonates in the far-flung forays of collectives such as No-Neck Blues Band, Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, and Eternal Tapestry.
Since such emergent music is all about the moment, Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s best work came in live performance. Though they debuted with a self-titled 1970 studio album, their subsequent two live records cemented their legend. The music on 1971’s Djungelns Lag (The Law of the Jungle*)* and 1972’s Mors Mors (Hi, How Are You?**) was captured in locales as diverse as an airfield, an autonomous Denmark commune, and a meadow next to the Vindeln river. Some tunes have studio-level clarity, revealing acoustic strums, rhythmic handclaps, and vocal chatter, while others are as murky as bootlegs. Both of those styles fit the band’s vibe, which could be simultaneously precise and unruly, bold and mysterious. That vibe is strongest on Djungelns Lag, which feels as open and diverse as the universe, and as big too (see the consistently-compelling, 34-minute “Amithaba In Kommer Gösta”). But Mors Mors is nearly as good, rhyming shorter, poppier gems with masterful extended journeys.
The unreleased material Anthology has collected on Kom Tillsammans (Come Together) comes from the same 1972 recordings as Mors Mors, and works in similar ways. As a whole it’s not as compelling as either preceding album, but it does show how deftly Träd, Gräs och Stenar could continually reinvent themselves. Take their covers of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time”: on Mors Mors, they build a relaxed riff into something monumental over nine minutes. On Kom Tillsammans, they completely rethink their attack, grafting in a riff from the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and doubling the length to 17 minutes without losing a second of interest.
It’s hard to think of many bands who could imagine such interpretations, and this eternal openness might be Träd, Gräs och Stenar’s most enduring legacy. There’s a political aspect to it too; as band member Torbjörn Abelli put it in liner notes,“our music was a sort of ritualistic battle cry, a call for people to be free, follow their own rhythm, their own harmony.” Yet that cry would be unconvincing if the results weren’t inspiring. Träd, Gräs och Stenar delivered on the promise of freedom, finding moments that couldn’t be achieved by any other means.


The cosmic fusion group skewers the jazz-trio format as it’s typically understood, flipping the minimalist palette into an electrifying, apocalyptic sound.

The Afterlife

Since their debut was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2016, the Comet is Coming’s saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has become a formidable presence in the international jazz scene in his own right, making fans of Beyoncé and Virgil Abloh along the way. Hutchings landed not just one but three different bands on the Impulse label in the process. From the Afro-Caribbean stomp of his Sons of Kemet to the South African spiritual jazz of Shabaka and the Ancestors, his music is simultaneously rooted in the traditional, broadly international in scope, and thoroughly of the moment.
But there’s something in the way the Comet Is Coming skewers the typical jazz trio that stands apart from his other projects. Its surface speaks to the cosmic sounds of Sun Ra, but there’s something raw and earthy at the core. Comet draw from the minimal, restrained palette of the trio format to make something that’s electrifying and apocalyptic all at once, able to tear the roof of jazz—as well as rock, jam band, and EDM—festivals. A companion piece to this year’s Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery, The Afterlife continues to hover over that album’s scorched earth, not replicating the rush of “Summon the Fire” but instead exploring in greater detail that set’s most somber moments. It’s concise yet also shows the trio’s depth in just over 30 minutes.
Whereas Trust in the Lifeforce’s centerpiece featured the poet Kate Tempest speaking vitriolically of capitalism and “the blood of the past,” here the band welcomes back to the fold Joshua Idehen. Idehen appeared on Sons of Kemet’s Impulse debut and previous Comet albums, most tellingly on “The Final Days of the Apocalypse.” His dystopian demeanor remains unchanged on opener “All That Matters Is the Moments,” spitting lines of “daydreaming of a world I won’t live to see” against a slow roil of drums and widening oscillations. There are glints of clarity, at least, if not hope, as he speaks of holding onto the memories of friendships in trying times.
No matter the cosmic jazz or sci-fi backdrop conjured, Hutchings knows when to ride the carefully controlled swells of drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett and synth player Dan “Danalogue” Leavers and when to rove on his own. He lays in the cut on the beautiful “The Softness of the Present,” basking in warm chords laid down by Leavers and the chunky beat of Hallett, adding just enough vibrato to keep the piece from drifting off into downtempo territory. Instead, the songs drifts into the title track, which strikes a deft balance between menacing sine waves and the kind of gurgling ostinatos that Alice Coltrane would throw down on her organ. “The Seven Planetary Heavens” deftly blends the breathy air of spiritual jazz with the pinging of techno to make something that, instead of reaching the point of combustion, maintains a radiant glow.
Divorced from the flickering electronics and rolling drums, Hutchings’ burnished horn would sound merely soulful, as it is on the two-part “Lifeforce.” But combined with the arpeggios and simmering cymbals, his tone veers towards the melancholic, as if moving over a planet’s surface in search of life. In the song’s second half, as Hallett’s chunky breaks transition towards something more uplifting, Hutchings’ horn picks up enough velocity that the trio achieves liftoff, no doubt to some other unexplored corner of the cosmos.


At its best, this short, punchy album feels like a distillation of everything that has made British producer Lone's work great so far.

Levitate

At this point, we probably have enough albums dedicated to rave nostalgia. And the British producer Matt Cutler should feel OK about that, because as Lone, he's responsible for quite a few of them. His new one, Levitate doesn't really break any new ground; it reprises ideas (and in some cases, specific synthesizer patches) that he has been using since 2010's Emerald Fantasy Tracks. Yet, to its credit, it doesn't feel redundant. At its best, this short, punchy album feels like a distillation of everything that has made Lone's work great so far.
Historically, Lone's music has tended to toggle between two modes. On the one hand, there's drowsy, lysergic downbeat in the tradition of Boards of Canada and Dilla; on the other, a kind of exaggerated rave revivalism, which takes tropes from early-'90s UK dance music and blows them up to gargantuan proportions. Lemurian and Ecstasy & Friends, his first two albums, kept to hip-hop tempos, woozy moods, but the Red Bull kicked in with 2010's Emerald Fantasy Tracks, and he threw himself into house tempos with gusto. The intensity built on 2012's vertiginous Galaxy Garden, and then, since everything that comes up must come down—an adage many ravers know all too well—2014's Reality Testing slunk back under the covers, balancing hip-hop beats with slow, starry-eyed house and boogie in the vein of Floating Points' early singles.
From a title like Levitate, you can guess where Cutler's taking us this time: right back up to the top. It might be Lone's most intense album to date—dancing like a downed electrical wire, with its hooks as immediate as anything he's ever done. Album opener “Alpha Wheel” brings us hurtling up to speed with fat, loud, practically diamond-encrusted breakbeats and a chord progression that sets off tiny serotonin bombs with every syncopated stab. “Backtail Was Heavy” inhabits similar terrain, balancing rough-cut breaks and detuned horn stabs with a sparkly, Aphex-indebted synth melody. In a curious case of double déjà vu, it's a hardcore throwback through-and-through, and it also uses an uncannily similar synth sound from Emerald Fantasy Tracks’ “Moon Beam Harp.”
The shuddering “Triple Helix” and the smooth drum'n'bass roller “Sea of Tranquility” keep the energy levels soaring; even the Boards of Canada pastiche “Sleepwalkers” musters a kind of rhythmic force that the Scottish duo themselves have rarely achieved. Levitate is the shortest album Lone has ever made—just 33 minutes in all, and two of its nine songs are sketch-like ambient interludes. Functionally, it's more like an EP than an album, but that extreme sense of focus works in its favor: There's no wasted effort, and his craft has never sounded better—his beats are Jaws-of-Life strong, his melodies buffed to a blinding sheen. His ingenious way of flipping, chopping and reversing breakbeats recalls Squarepusher’s first two albums, made when the drill'n'bass producer's goofy grin hadn't yet hardened into a smirk. And Cutler manages to find subtle ways to surprise. Both “Alpha Wheel” and “Sleepwalkers” build to their climax and then just drop away.
It all comes together in “Triple Helix”: the sound design, the energy, the optimism. It's wild, disorienting, sugary, hyper-sensory stuff, and it's no wonder that my 11-month-old daughter loves it. Rave has always had an infantilizing aspect, from songs like Smart E's “Sesame's Treet” to accoutrements like pacifiers and Mickey Mouse gloves. Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow.