Ishmael Butler, the MC of the futurist hip-hop duo, looks in a new direction for inspiration on his latest project: his own son, emo rapper Lil Tracy.

Shabazz Palaces: The Don of Diamond Dreams

The Don of Diamond Dreams

Ishmael Butler and Tendai “Baba” Maraire of Shabazz Palaces have always been proud iconoclasts, consistently breaking ground in spaces once thought incompatible with hip-hop. They were among the few rap acts signed to Sub Pop; they were pretty much the only rap artists to ever perform at the avant-garde Big Ears festival in Knoxville. This adventurous spirit continues down the Butler family line with Ishmael’s son Jazz, aka Lil Tracy. It seems that Jazz’s work has had a profound effect on his father’s project; in recent interviews, Butler cites his own son as an influence.
As one of the original members of the GothBoiClique, Tracy is an important figure in the development of “emo rap,” and what’s fascinating about Shabazz’s new album The Don of Diamond Dreams is the degree to which Ish seems to be learning from the new generation. Like polarizing label mates clipping., Shabazz’s brand of “alternative” hip-hop is not so much opposed to the mainstream as it is reflective of it, absorbing tangents of influence from trap, Auto-Tuned R&B, chopped and screwed, and other variants. Their lyrics are often shaped by the hip-hop hegemony too, playing off Rap Caviar tropes and taunting the Top 40 with a tongue-in-cheek braggadociousness, the kind that lets you know that Butler is still the same MC who told us he was cool like that all those years ago.
On The Don of Diamond Dreams, the group absorbs and warps a different sonic palette than usual: listen for the loopy guitar solos on “Wet,” or the swaying riffs on “Bad Bitch Walking” and “Fast Learner.” That spectrum of influence is a new strand in their complex sound, but what surrounds it is very much classic Shabazz: glistening synth crystals on tracks like “Ad Ventures,” Maraire’s distinctive kick drum throughout, and a lyrical ode to the Divine Feminine (not their first) on “Thanking the Girls.”
The Shabazz project began a decade ago with Butler and Maraire searching for a place in the cosmos alongside their Afrofuturist inspirations; their discography has been a process of ascension, elevation, and spiritual expansion, from novice pupils to musical prophets. For years now, Shabazz Palaces have oozed a kind of creative wisdom, the type that can only come with age and years of lived experience, but The Don of Diamond Dreams demonstrates a sign of even deeper wisdom: living an entire life of your own, and realizing that there’s still value in learning and listening from the youth.

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On his latest project, the Griselda Records rapper reflects on old battle scars and new riches over luxury beats helmed by Hit-Boy. Though he occasionally steps into cosplay, the result is ambitious.

Burden of Proof

Benny the Butcher’s story, like the rest of his Griselda Records cohorts, is one of endurance. There are 14 years between his debut Tana Talk and 2018’s Tana Talk 3, the Buffalo rapper’s formal introduction on the same label as his cousins Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine. During that time, he sharpened his style and emerged fully formed, rapping about dope needles and broken bottles. Benny’s gruff voice, hard-earned lessons, and punchlines quickly earned him a reputation as a feature killer on the rap circuit. More than just a textbook bruiser, though, he’s the rap game’s answer to Jason Voorhees: unrelenting, focused, stoic to the point of menace.
Benny’s latest project Burden of Proof is as much a reflection on his old life as it is a celebration of his new one. Tours have sold out and Rolex watches gleam on his wrist, but old ghosts and lost friends still haunt him. Benny’s music has never shied away from the grisly nature of drug dealing, but now he’s more closely examining the consequences of early spoils. He remembers nights spent in the hospital due to asthma attacks (“Where Would I Go”) and conversations with his girlfriend over bringing his gun on the road (“New Streets”). Every diamond in his bezel was earned through strife, and Benny reveals more aspects of his journey on Burden than ever before.
Even with the battle scars, Burden never becomes dour or overbearing. Unlike Westside Gunn, who's released three albums in 2020, Burden is Benny's first solo project since 2019’s The Plugs I Met. That's an eternity in Griselda time, and Benny's best raps across the album are more potent as a result of the breather.
In fact, everything about Burden’s construction is maximal, scanning as the Next Big Career Step it clearly aspires to be. The album was produced entirely by California super producer Hit-Boy and was mixed and mastered by Young Guru, rap’s engineer to the stars. Hit-Boy has spent 2020 in rap chameleon mode, crafting entire albums to suit the likes of Nas, Dom Kennedy, and Big Sean. He attempts to do the same for Benny, outfitting Burden with a sound that closes the gap between the lush grandeur of early-2000s Roc-A-Fella and early-2010s Maybach Music Group.
When the duo clicks, it feels monumental. “Famous” straps throbbing drums and cymbals to a wailing vocal sample and pulls the ripcord, placing Benny’s braggadocio (“Three Rollies, two cribs, six figures/And I still don’t feel famous”) on a proper pedestal. Closing track “Legend” bounces hi-hats and shining synths off of Benny’s amped-up mythmaking to create what sounds like superhero theme music. Hit-Boy chops chipmunk soul loops and even offers his spin on the minimalist aesthetic that put Griselda on the map. At its best, the sample work across Burden is stunning.
For all its bells and whistles, there are times where Hit-Boy’s beats sound too clean, even sterile. “Over the Limit” shoots for stadium rap and lands somewhere in an NBA2K commercial featuring the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of mediocre Dom Kennedy features. “Where Would I Go” feels tailored more to Rick Ross’ sensibilities than to Benny’s, especially considering Ross’ hefty 90-second verse on the backend. The beat sounds like it was originally meant for Ross’ Port of Miami 2 but was retrofitted here instead.
It’s hard to blame Benny for wanting to branch out from the gutter-soaked boom-bap that first brought him attention. He has every right to experiment and try on sounds as he sees fit. Hit-Boy attempts to balance this out by heading in the opposite direction so fully that it occasionally overwhelms Benny’s personality. There’s a thin line between making songs that evoke the feeling of Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 2 or Ross’ own Mastermind and songs doing Roc-A-Fella and MMG cosplay.
Still, Benny is in rare lyrical form. “What’s more important: the flower or the soil that grow it?” he raps on “One Way Flight,” mixing stories of drug felonies and life advice to dizzying effect. His energy and wordplay help him rip through the album’s lesser beats like Porky Pig, transcending them entirely. He’s been rechristened as one of Buffalo’s first rap stars and you can hear the confidence in his voice. Burden of Proof is undoubtedly the next step in Benny’s evolution, even if the music doesn’t always match the vision.

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August Alsina is a rapper in an R&B singer's body, more likely to sing about his harrowed past and the things he's done to keep food on the table for his family than some romantic tryst. On This Thing Called Life, he hangs hard onto the idea that salvation can be found through perseverance and belief, whether in a higher power or simply your own ability to get through the day.

This Thing Called Life

Ever since August Alsina emerged in 2012 with his first official mixtape The Product, he's been somewhat of a curio. In essence, he's a rapper in an R&B singer's body, more likely to sing about his harrowed past and the things he's done to keep food on the table for his family than some romantic tryst. Even "Would You Know?," the lone love song on the New Orleans native's latest album, This Thing Called Life, is a conflicted ballad on which Alsina is a ball of nerves, afraid that opening up to the possibility of love would leave him vulnerable. But Alsina applies the tender, ruminative aspects of R&B—and its sense of longing, especially—to his street tales, and his second studio album solidifies his place amongst the upper echelon of modern-day R&B.
Like many of his contemporaries, Alsina shares the same interest as Jeremih and PARTYNEXTDOOR—even Young Thug—in exploring the percussive elements of rapping and the myriad of ways they can be married to melody. On sepia-toned lead single "Hip-Hop," he effortlessly slips back and forth between sweet rhythmic singing and melody-oriented rapping as he describes the environment he grew up in and how he "came up in criminal ways." The chorus of "Dreamer" finds Alsina employing a triplet cadence à la Migos, a clever flip of the rap-song-with-a-sung-chorus template. Alsina's line-blurring between rapping and singing is never quite as experimental as someone like Jeremih or Young Thug, but it feels completely natural.
Alsina's music also gestures towards his gospel roots. A singer in his church's choir as a child, he hangs hard onto the idea that salvation can be found through perseverance and a strong sense of belief, whether in a higher power or simply your own ability to get through the day. Persistence is Alsina's default mode of engaging with the world—when he's boasts about "buying the same thing three times" on "Why I Do It," a horn-laden banger featuring an engaged Lil Wayne, Alsina sounds prouder of the work he put in to get to where he is than the spoils of that work.
This Thing Called Life also corrects one the most egregious flaws of Testimony, Alsina's 2014 debut: its guests actually make thematic sense. There are only four: in addition to Weezy, Anthony Hamilton, Jadakiss, and Chris Brown all make appearances. With the exception of Brown, who doesn't subtract anything from the slick radio-ready earworm "Been Around the World" but adds nothing, the guests feel like kindred spirits rather than label-mandated concessions, artists for whom the experiences of a hard-luck upbringing are never far from the center of the frame.
The album loses a bit of steam toward the end, when another love song or two would actually be a welcome change of pace, but it perks back up in time for closer "The Encore." A joyously triumphant paean to perseverance, the track captures Alsina's wide-eyed and generous approach to songwriting: "Always thought that it would be good, but I never had it this good." It's hard not to root for someone whose music is suffused, at the DNA level, with such appreciation. He's grateful for his good fortunes even as he can't help but be surprised by them.


The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation ...

Dusk at Cubist Castle

The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion.
In the mid-to-late 90s, Athens, Georgia's Elephant Six collective established themselves as a group of artists with a shared interest in expressing the inexpressible through pop music. The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by singer/songwriters Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, encapsulated both the collective's unabashed love for both classic pop and psychedelic music, and its sincere interest in experimental music and sounds. This, the band's debut album, represents their most fundamental integration of these two impulses-- never does the record's sonic palette seem like an afterthought to the songs, nor do the songs themselves seem like haphazard carriers for carefully chosen sounds. For an album with so much going on, Dusk at Cubist Castle is strikingly holistic, its diverse elements held together by an uncanny awareness of what they can evoke and represent.
The Elephant Six Collective is known largely for their reverence towards classic pop music, and Dusk at Cubist Castle inevitably draws comparisons to The Beatles and Beach Boys. But the influence of these seminal pop groups seems to be evident in the Olivia Tremor Control's approach as much as their aesthetic. One imagines Hart and Doss not simply admiring Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, but utterly internalizing them-- appreciating them not only for specific melodies and sounds, but also for how affecting those melodies and sounds could be. Though the bouncy basslines and rich vocal harmonies of Dusk often bring to mind Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, nothing sounds like the result of shallow imitation, as much as reverence and profound understanding.
Nowhere is this clearer than on Dusk's near-flawless first half. "Jumping Fences", one of the finest songs ever penned by Hart and Doss, conjures an air of introspective melancholy without ever approaching languor. At just under two minutes, "Jumping Fences" barely repeats itself at all, instead subtly building upon a beautiful, catchy melody with layered vocal harmonies, pianos and guitars. "No Growing (Exegesis)" follows a similar path, this time incorporating dramatic horn blasts into a climactic chorus.
The second half of Dusk at Cubist Castle is a decidedly more abstract affair, anchored by the 10-track "Green Typewriters" suite. It's here that the experimental undertones of Dusk at Cubist Castle begin to bleed through more noticeably. The fifth "Green Typewriters" track is a brief, unsettling, rhythmically insistent drone piece that foreshadows the extended ambience of "Green Typewriters" number eight. In part nine, the first discernible vocal melody for about ten minutes simply utters "how much longer can I wait," ushering in a majestic guitar solo that immediately plunges into a swirl of backwards sounds, whooshing cymbals and fuzzed-out chords. After the final installment of "Green Typewriters", Dusk at Cubist Castle returns to a slightly more stripped-down and fragmented variation on its first half, finally closing with the ghost-in-the-four-track noises of "NYC-25", one of their most affecting pop songs.
Aside from granting the album an air of timelessness, Dusk's saturated 4-track production always leaves me with the feeling that there's more to this album than can possibly be heard. And sure enough, eight years after its initial release, Dusk at Cubist Castle still somehow surprises me every time I listen to it. As its title suggests, there's something intensely cinematic about the record, and also something perpetually incomplete-- the images and ideas evoked stay with you much longer than the album itself. It's the masterful translation of these images and ideas that makes Dusk at Cubist Castle such a unique and unforgettable record.


Neil Young’s not-exactly-live album EARTH, a set of songs from across his career about food awareness, feels like the first time in a while that Young has been in on his own joke.

EARTH

Neil Young has been many things over the last five years: High-quality audio preservationist. Prolific memoirist. Reassessed film director. Leader of a reunited Crazy Horse. Jack White collaborator. Serial archivist. All of which is to say, among these positions, you might not find “acclaimed songwriter.” Quickly forgotten releases like 2014’s Storytone and last year’s The Monsanto Years have not gained half the visibility of the pissed-off hippie hawking Pono, but there is something admirable about the work Young has released this decade. In a sense, it’s been his most unpredictable, all-over-the-place era since the ’80s, back when his own record label sued him for not sounding enough like himself. Unlike the first decade of the millennium, when he penned sequels to his earlier works, both in name and in spirit, the past few years have found him following a stranger muse. It’s telling that his most crowd-pleasing and well-received record in recent memory was a feature-length double album opening with a 30-minute screed against MP3s.
This all leads us to Earth, Young’s latest project and his first non-archival live album since 2000’s Road Rock. This time around, Neil deserves kudos for not throwing “Vol. 1” after the title (or “Neil Young Archival Release #83,” for that matter). But Earth is not really a “live” album at all. For an album recorded while touring a collection of songs about food awareness, there is very little organic or even natural about Earth. This should all be abundantly clear by the time you get to the third number—a jammy rendition of The Monsanto Years’ title track that features egregiously overdubbed animal sounds, choir vocals, and Young’s voice AutoTuned to oblivion right in time for a line about detecting GMOs in your food. Is it a little heavy-handed? Oh god yes. But it also feels like the first time in a while—maybe since the product placement overload in the “This Note's For You” video—that Young has been in on the joke.
Speaking of jokes, let’s talk about those animal sounds. It’s been one of Young’s talking points in promoting the record (“All of the animals and insects and amphibians and birds and everybody," he explained, "We're all represented.”) and he sticks to his word. At a certain point, you just sort of get used to the crows and frogs chiming in during the human applause occasionally (and seemingly arbitrarily) thrown at the end of some tracks. For the most part, the animals are harmless. We never really needed to hear a bunch of roosters crowing to imagine where “My Country Home” takes place, but it still doesn’t feel intrusive. What really gets your attention, then, is when Young uses the animal sounds for rhythmic effect, punctuating the downbeats with cawing crows and mooing cows, as if he borrowed Ross’ keyboard from “Friends.” Simply put, the album would probably be better without them.
As such, Earth could have been—and sometimes comes damn near close to being—a total disaster. Like the sci-fi road fantasy of Trans or the Southern Gothic rock opera of Greendale, or hell, like the Pono, it’s a well-intentioned project that's far too unwieldy to ever successfully come to fruition. Somehow, though, it all kind of comes together. The laughably un-catchy call-and-response structure of new track “Seed Justice” (when I say, “Fighting for the farms and the land in the good old way,” you say, “They’ve been here since time began!”) probably won’t knock “Like a Hurricane” out of your top 10. But the Monsanto material actually sounds pretty good, with “Big Box” coming closer to being the epic barnburner Young might have imagined it to be when he first scribbled it down on a napkin, munching Pirate's Booty and watching CNN.
The new material also stands out because Young almost entirely avoids including any of his most recognizable work, instead favoring cuts from records like 1994’s Sleeps With Angels, 1986’s Landing on Water, and the cultishly-beloved-yet-sadly-underperformed mid-70s Ditch Trilogy album On the Beach. It’s about as far from a Greatest Hits set as one could imagine; for some casual fans, it might even play like an all-new Neil Young album. But while it doesn’t come close to illustrating the breadth and beauty of Young’s work, Earth serves a different, and maybe even more admirable purpose.
The record all hinges on a theme, illustrating how committed to environmental issues Young has been throughout his career, from the disheartened musings of 1978’s “Human Highway” all the way up to last year’s “People Want to Hear About Love.” Recent tracks like the latter may be awkwardly time-stamped with buzzwordy proper nouns, but the general ideas have been in his work all along. When “After the Gold Rush” pops up in the middle of the album, it feels eerily current (and not just because he updates the lyric to reference “Mother nature on the run in the twenty-first century”). As a record, Earth is surprisingly balanced and well-considered.
Of course, credit goes to the thematic consistency of Young’s songwriting, but also to Promise of the Real, his current backing band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Mika. After their mostly timid and non-distinctive performances on Monsanto Years, they now seem to have fallen into a loose, steady groove, allowing Young to sound more relaxed and playful than he has in a while. His voice stretches like an old rubber band over their demonically slow shuffle in “Vampire Blues”—a performance hilariously capped with about 30 seconds of looped audience applause (and the hissing sound of bugs). In songs like these, the chemistry between Neil and the band makes Earth a strangely fun and rewarding listen, even when it borders on preachiness or outright absurdity. It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.


With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour ...

Feels

With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour and get a preview of the album to come in their live show, but aside from that, it's difficult to tell which direction their music will go next. If you'd heard Spirit They're Gone or Danse Manatee you could possibly have predicted the more difficult and abstract direction of Here Comes the Indian but you wouldn't have guessed they'd make something like Campfire Songs around the same time; if you'd heard the latter you'd might hazard a guess about Sung Tongs but Feels wouldn't necessarily strike you as the work of the same band.
That said, the newly released Feels is not a total departure from Sung Tongs, and it actually tracks it quite closely in terms of the album's structure. It's apparent from the first few bars of "Did You See the Words" that A.C. begins in "song" mode, setting aside for the moment the soundscaping that defined the earlier records. The first spin is a tad disconcerting because, with its electric guitar and more trad band set-up, Animal Collective sound for the first time like what they've always been to detractors with more outré tastes: an indie rock band. The songs proceed with a logic that has more to do with the early experiments of Mercury Rev than say, Sebadoh, but where Animal Collective previously sounded as if they were working according to an unusual set of rules, the first half of Feels exists in relationship to music history, and not just any music history, but rock.
I hear the ghosts of 1950s artists like Buddy Holly inside more straightforward pop songs "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle". On "Grass", the reverb on Avey Tare's voice adds a hiccup to every syllable and the guitar is processed to sound at times like the rollicking boogie-woogie piano rhythm. Of course, 50 years ago no one would have made a chorus out of loud, clipped screams synchronized to bashed drums (well, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis), and the conversational vocal harmony breakdown of "The Purple Bottle" jumps ahead a decade to a highly psychedelicized Beach Boys. Such moments are why the adolescent unpredictability of Animal Collective is such an asset-- they're able to tap into the narrative of Western pop while making it their own.
Like Animal Collective's previous full length, Feels is sequenced carefully, with jauntier, tuneful numbers leading to an amorphous back half. The two transitional songs in the record's middle, "Bees" and "Banshee Beat", are among the best things Animal Collective has done. "Bees" imagines how a drifting pop song might sound inside the sonic universe of an Alice Coltrane album, with a trebly autoharp that is all strings and no body and sustained clusters of piano that bring to mind an ascension through clouds. "Banshee Beat" is even better. Animal Collective's signature approach to composition-- in which open chords are strummed repeatedly for longer than seems necessary to create a unique sense of tension relieved only by vocal chants and howls-- finds its apotheosis over these eight minutes. "Daffy Duck" is a further exploration of the ideas presented on "Bees", and "Loch Raven" is an uncharacteristically tender electro-acoustic lullaby, vaguely Aphexian in the way it mixes sine wave drones with a simple piano line and a cluster of wordless voices.
The upbeat "Turn Into Something" brings the album back to where it started. Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time. But it's also interesting to contemplate as a chapter in the Animal Collective story. If the childhood pals can stay friends and continue to inspire each other we may have some more great records down the road. At the moment they seem on a pretty heady plateau, but you don't get the idea listening to Feels that they've said nearly all they have to say.


On piano and cello, this cross-generational drone partnership finds common ground in the desire to explore the fundamental malleability of sound.

MV Carbon / Charlemagne Palestine: Liquiddd Changesss

Liquiddd Changesss

For Charlemagne Palestine and MV Carbon, sound is a malleable object, something to mold and sculpt. As Palestine once said, “I have always felt and heard and mixed the sounds in my world as liquids, not as solids. Sonic liquids are material that is endlessly transformable.” On their first collaborative album, Liquiddd Changesss, Carbon’s cello swirls and shifts alongside Palestine’s piano riffs, like liquid becoming ice in the cold or steam in the heat. They draw from their backgrounds in drone and noise to make music that often feels psychedelic and anguished, probing darkness to find radiance. A cross-generational partnership—Palestine began playing in the 1960s, while Carbon came up in the ’90s—the two artists find common ground in their shared desire to play with sound’s physicality.
Drawn from two hours of sessions recorded at Palestine’s Brussels studio in 2015, Liquiddd Changesss undulates between lengthy, cavernous drones and hollow echoes. The opening “Evaporated Whispers” clocks in at 19 minutes, manifesting a state of continual growth. In concert, Palestine is known for quaffing brandy while he plays, and here, his rattling snifters and dramatic strumming—a technique in which he holds the piano’s sustain pedal down as he hammers at the keyboard, forming an array of overtones—crash into Carbon’s gravelly cello. Those thunderous few minutes feel turbulent and fulsome, but they dissolve into muted squeals and nervous tremolos. Elsewhere, gossamer shimmers and quiet whispers become screams. The two musicians never stay in one place for too long—their sound is always on the move, ready to morph at the drop of a hat.
One of those metamorphoses is the movement between rich sound and eerie quietude. The music is often loud and resonant, but their more scattered textures are less cohesive. “Crushed Little Gem” builds from bouncy, echoing plucks and abstract vocal cries, a desolate sound that evokes an arid desert; piano pulses, guttural wails, and harsh cello tones pop out of the fold, creating spiky patterns. The draw of Carbon and Palestine’s music is its densely woven layers and naturalistic motion, but here, their sounds drift aimlessly.
With “Glass From Sand,” however, they achieve more hypnotic effects. Built from tumultuous piano and glowing cello, the track bubbles with energy. The pace and dynamics increase as they play, growing from a suspended drone into agitated trembling. The instrumentation harkens back to the album’s opener, but here it feels more unsettled: Palestine’s piano rumbles with nervousness while Carbon’s restless cello slides and quivers, swirling around a steady electronic glimmer. Even as the tension fades, a sense of darkness remains, a fretful energy that signals deep unease.
Despite its abstracted nature, at its best, Carbon and Palestine’s music uncovers intense emotional depths. Harrowing feelings simmer among the music’s twists and turns, threaded inside each wavering tone. The duo’s music is like a sculpture that’s being crafted in real time, never reaching its final form. Their sound is always evolving, always plunging even further into the unknown.


Detroit producer and Slum Village associate continues to work at a very high level, with hard-hitting beats and textures ready for both clubs and headphones. Guests include Pharoahe Monch, DJ Premier, and Royce da 5'9".

Tronic

Blame it on trickle-down economics, but things just ain't the same for superproducers-- not only have guys like Timbaland, Pharrell, and Kanye stuck with the steadier pop/R&B dollar (or priced themselves out of hip-hop), you'd be hard-pressed to find any of the up-and-comers who could truly go multimedia (though it's not for Polow da Don's lack of effort). Which leaves Black Milk on something of a singular plane-- he's just a super producer (and MC) with an album mindset, and Tronic just might be his boldest statement yet, far exceeding the modest nature of its Fat Beats origin.
In fact, Tronic could very well be the best end-to-end production job you've heard all year. It's hard to talk about anything Black Milk does without evoking J. Dilla, but even though there's a blatant nod here to the structure of Midnight Marauders, I'm hearing a real ATLiens vibe in the gorgeous, almost dubby undertow to the lunar sonics*.* The album cover is no ruse, as this is the most electro of Milk's productions, but he combines clubby textures and warm EQing in a way that begs for headphone listening even at its hardest knock. So the "Knight Rider" bassline of "Bounce" is counterbalanced by swirling, psychedelic keys and what initially sounds like an accordion on "Tronic Summer" turns out to be a sweltering vocoder.
Though in no way a concept album, Tronic is meant to be consumed whole and some of the interstitial moments are the most rewarding-- "Losing Out" tumbles into an erratic drum'n'bass beat reminiscent of the Roots' "You Got Me", while the sprightly strings that take up the final 20 seconds of "Hell Yeah" feel like a lost treasure. This is a Black Milk album, so you know the drums are going to hit hard, but a lot of tracks sound like he's imported "Tekken" combos into his MPC. There often isn't a traditional earworm beyond the way Milk interacts with his beats-- "Give the Drummer Sum" features a Quasimoto-like chant on the chorus, but the real hook is how Milk pulls tricks like dropping out the drums on the line "let the organ get a stab at it." He practically lives inside the beats, and "Try" is something of a conversation with a soul sample from an artist who promised to stay away from them (a concession similar to Kanye's intro on "Everything I'm Not").
But if you're wondering why that number up there isn't higher, well, here's the thing-- I'd hate to give Milk more reason to get defensive about his mic skills, since far too much of Tronic is muddled by saber rattling over haters who doubt his flow. First off, exactly which corner of the internet spends its time hating on Black Milk? Moreover, he's more than nice with his, considering that if he learned anything from Dilla, it's how to make electronically based hip-hop jiggle organically. That's some pretty bumpy mixed meter terrain he's able to traverse on songs like "Hold It Down" and "Overdose".
While he's every bit as thoughtful about his penmanship as he is about his production, Milk is nowhere near as adventurous. As was the case with Popular Demand and even the split he did with Fat Ray from earlier this year, you get the odd feeling that Milk put his heart into his work, and yet it feels slightly impersonal, save for the career summary "Long Story Short". Beyond his battle rhyming, he most frequently rails against the current state of hip-hop, but his lines are so vague that they actually fail to indict anyone. Even while the kiss-off of hangers-on "Without U" resembles Slum Village at its most softbatch, the topicality, at least, is welcome.
Tronic usually finds Milk's humility working in his favor, however, since he has no qualms about being a facilitator. Royce Da 5'9" breaks hip-hop's silence on Kwame Kilpatrick and absolutely shreds "Losing Out", and "The Matrix" is pure Soundbombing bait for those stuck in the one-nine-nine-nine: a reinvigorated Primo scratches while Milk trades verses with a typically old-man strength 16 from Sean P and Pharaohe Monch dropping a spectacular dud of a punchline likely causing agita at a message board near you ("Like pants legs around the ankles of hipsters-- I'm tight!")
Unfortunately, it makes me think back to something Wale spoke to on "The Perfect Plan"-- "Instead of singing our praise they do/ Raise the bar to a level unattainable." But it's to Black Milk's credit that so much is expected out of him. Maybe he's got the Detroit Chronic in him-- something with Elzhi (where's he?), Royce, and fuck, who's Eminem getting beats from these days?-- but for now, Tronic is one hell of a holding pattern.


The third album from London composer Bastien Keb is a soundtrack to a nonexistent film: a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and French New Wave.

Bastien Keb: The Killing of Eugene Peeps

The Killing of Eugene Peeps

Consider the tradition of the imaginary movie soundtrack. From Brian Eno’s ambient collection Music for Films to the Olivia Tremor Control’s kaleidoscopic opus Dusk at Cubist Castle (not to mention lesser-known specimens, such as Barry Adamson’s remarkably creepy Moss Side Story), songwriters have been crafting soundtracks to movies that exist only in their minds for more than 40 years. Sure, scoring an actual film is more lucrative for a working musician, but scoring a nonexistent one may be the more fulfilling creative endeavor: You don’t have to cater to anyone’s vision but your own, and your work will never be tainted by association with a mediocre film.
The Killing of Eugene Peeps, the third album from the London multi-instrumentalist known as Bastien Keb (born Sebastien Jones), is a fascinating new entry in the imaginary-soundtrack category. Keb is a lifelong cinephile—a former video store clerk who spent long, customerless shifts immersing himself in movies—and a composer who knows a thing or two about scoring, having crafted music for TV commercials and documentaries. But no commercial sounds like The Killing of Eugene Peeps, a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and 1960s French New Wave with remarkable specificity.
Keb’s previous albums, 2015’s Dinking in the Shadows of Zizou and 2017’s 22.02.85, gravitated towards a genre-fluid style of jazzy trip-hop with a skewed aesthetic, and even drew some raves from U.K.-based music press. But Eugene Peeps swaps out the beat-driven sound for creaky analog intimacy. There’s an eclectic array of borrowed or found instrumentation: trumpet, bass, flute—even a singing saw floats into the mix on the standout “Young Ponies.” Like a sprawling narrative arc, the music shifts from rickety jazz (“Israel Ate His Own Mind”) to funk (“Street Clams”) to brooding, meditative passages with relative ease. Recurring motifs percolate throughout, and as if the cinematic theme needs further underscoring, the album cover looks like a poster for the kind of fictitious film-within-a-film that might crop up in a Tarantino screenplay.
The most engrossing cinematic flourish, however, is the recurring narration by Keb’s friend Kenneth Viota, who takes the lead on a series of spoken-word passages adapted from Keb’s own journals. In an interview with Bandcamp Daily, Keb described creating the record while coping with the misery of a night-shift warehouse job: “I was a zombie for a year,” he said, “piecing the album together while I was working.” Viota’s coarse growl, and his darkly funny mutterings of desolation and depression (“They’ll be better times ahead—I hear hell’s nice this time of year,” he deadpans in “The World Creaks”), reflect that mind state and recall the seedier spoken-word tracks from Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits. (Keb’s own voice couldn’t be more different; his layered falsetto on songs like “Rabbit Hole” bears a curious resemblance to Justin Vernon.)
If the resulting record sounds like an obscure ’70s soundtrack culled from a dollar bin, that’s by design. Keb commits to the bit, and his fluency with the vocabulary of film scoring means that he is capable of summoning the expressive eccentricity of Ennio Morricone (“Can’t Sleep”) or the roiling, low brass intensity of Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score (“Bookie”). By contrast, the rap cut “Paprika,” featuring a freewheeling verse by Nottingham rapper Cappo, feels conspicuously out of place—it’s the one moment where the film-score illusion shatters.
At 18 tracks, The Killing of Eugene Peeps is undeniably ambitious and occasionally scattershot, but never tedious. It helps that the music is constantly shifting, mutating between styles and tones—often within the realm of a single song—like an anthology film caught between genres. Take “Theme for an Old Man,” for example: In less than four minutes, the track unfolds from doomy brass squalls that evoke a specter of violence to a warped trip-hop groove befitting a DJ Shadow production. From there, the beat drops out and a miniature symphony of descending strings lingers in the air like cigarette smoke, pointing the way to the mournful timbre of “Can’t Sleep.” You may not know much about the characters or storyline, but with music like this, there’s a film in your head, too.

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The Mexico City duo of Mabe Fratti and Héctor Tosta break with the hushed beauty of the cellist’s earlier work, exploring sprawling new directions in modern composition, jazz, and art song.

Vidrio

When we last heard from Mexico City-based cellist and singer Mabe Fratti, she was exploring sun-baked, sand-blasted textures on 2022’s Se Ve Desde Aquí. It was a shift from the earthy chaos of her earlier albums, where shape-shifting instruments tangled like root systems of ancient, verdant trees. This summer, Fratti announced a new project, a collaboration with her live-show linchpin Héctor Tosta, aka I. la Católica. They called it Titanic, which certainly takes nerve: Would the duo tackle Céline Dion? The much-missed Kirsty MacColl’s breathy folk-rock? Would it be camp? Would it be a disaster? Their debut album is confident in its ambitions. Vidrio cross-pollinates the spatial management Fratti has spent the past few years cultivating with Tosta’s taste for prog sprawl. The album’s title is a word for “glass.” The record is a window overlooking fertile plots of modern composition, jazz, and art song.
“Anónima” digs in with sharp whacks at Fratti’s cello, some crashing drums, ringing piano that collapses the separation between melody and rhythm, and chiming percussion that does the same. Above all else, there’s Fratti’s voice. She intones the title (translation: “anonymous”) as trails of reverb slowly surround her. Her voice doubles, quadruples, too clear and strong to stay unknown for long.
Much of Virdrio’s beauty sprouts from the juxtaposition of Fratti’s voice (and that of her cello, which she also makes sing, as if it had not only a neck but a throat) and the various experimental grounds she and Tosta map out. In “Hotel Elizabeth,” Fratti stumbles into a jazzbo waltz; her voice sometimes leads its partner, Jarrett Gilgore’s beastly saxophone, around the dancefloor, and sometimes they do little dances of their own, Fratti never losing her cool in the face of Gilgore’s reedy tantrums. “Entre mis contradicciones crece una flor” (“In between my contradictions grows a flower”), she sings, and her voice sounds like it’s doing just that.
Fratti and Tosta initially drafted much of the album together on synths and drum machines. But their mutual appreciation for both the praxis and finished products of Talk Talk inspired these final versions, which take long jams and use them as stems for studio arrangements. “Circulo Perfecto” shows off the appeal of the process, with its thoughtful precision serving as an ideal vessel for Fratti’s chatty vocal runs.
“En Paralelo” is decidedly darker, with Fratti sawing and hacking at her strings like she’s Bernard Herrmann and speak-singing like she’s Trish Keenan—and what follows, the diabolical “Te evite,” grows and thickens and worries its way towards the deep dark woods Broadcast lost themselves within. Instead, we arrive in the grand “Palacio,” in which piano chords climb five stairs, again and again, only to reach an agonizing suspension of strings, feedback, horn, and silence, and then tumble back down again. It’s frustrating, fascinating, and kind of funny, too. Fratti shares a sense of drama with brainy singers like Nico, Björk, Kate Bush, and Meredith Monk, but her songs often feel smaller in scale, little blossoms instead of great fields of ground and sky.
The highlight of the album offers growth potential, though. Stretching to some seven and half minutes, “Cielo Falso” is twice the size of most of the album’s songs, and you could imagine, say, Julia Holter swelling it into a full album side. Or you could just play it on repeat, as I have, marveling at the way it cross-breeds Vince Guaraldi and Fleetwood Mac, as its amiable piano and hi-hat gradually bloom.
Gilgore skronks all over closer “Balanza,” his bold tone battling Fratti’s breathier one as she proclaims and laments, “Siento una avalancha/Que cae sobre mi” (“I feel an avalanche/That falls over me”). Vidrio is willing to risk sinking deep into ugliness, yet it manages to sidestep the swamps of self-seriousness. “Está descalibrada la balanza” (“The balance is out of calibration”), she decides, but the song never collapses. What might sound wrong on another record—a long-held note swaying in and out of tune, gasps of air moving in and out of her lungs, Tosta’s occasional fiddly filigree, Gibrán Andrade’s drums sinking in and out of pocket—on Vidrio sounds right as rain. Nature doesn’t make mistakes.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1978 ambient masterpiece that helped launch the genre through its technological savvy and its soft heart.

Brian Eno: Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Ambient 1: Music for Airports

By January 1975, Brian Eno worked like an electron. He bounded among projects and people, flitting into sessions only long enough to add what Peter Gabriel insisted upon calling “Enossification” to Genesis’ 1974 opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. A self-proclaimed non-musician, Eno would appear with his early EMS synthesizer in a briefcase, then wind others’ instruments through it or a panoply of tape recorders, augmenting their sounds with the excitement of the ineffable.
Then a free agent just shy of 27, Eno had already become a rock star with Roxy Music. He was the alien razzle-dazzle beauty, sashaying among his electronics and upstaging singer Bryan Ferry until the resulting tension prompted Eno’s exit. Other opportunities abounded, anyway: As he labored over his first two solo albums—obtuse hybrids of high-art idealism and glam-rock strut—he daydreamed about outré ensembles he might start but never did. Luala and the Lizard Girls, for instance, was his plan to pair his catholic sexual enthusiasms with his artistic transgressions. Like many other Eno hypotheticals, it never happened.
Though he couldn’t much play the clarinet, he lent his lack of skills (and budding imprimatur) to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the amateur orchestra of composer Gavin Bryars that mutated the classical repertoire with uncanny allure. He even helped them secure an unlikely record deal. There were his foundational tape-and-guitar improvisations with Robert Fripp, sporadic dalliances with boyhood heroes Nico and John Cale, and his collaborative loyalty to the remaining members of Roxy Music not named Ferry.
Around the middle of January 1975, Eno was leaving a session with Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera, daydreaming about what he’d just played and the sudden uncertainty of his career when he slipped on a drizzly London street. He fell into the path of a speeding black cab. Eno bled from the head and was badly bruised, but he soon returned home from the hospital to convalesce, an electron momentarily at rest.
What followed is now, nearly a half-century later, essentially the origin story of ambient music, as riddled with factual uncertainty as all good fables. On her way to visit Eno, Judy Nylon, his former roommate and confidant, bought a cheap album of antique harp tunes near the train station. As Eno lay in his living room, with the rain tinkling against the windows, Nylon put on the record and adjusted the sound to fit the ailing mood. Eno heard his new direction: He wanted to make music like this, sound that could enliven or enhance a space without overpowering it, like a faint stick of incense in the corner or a dim sconce glowing in the distance. Eno now wanted to render the antithesis of the preening rock’n’roll that had made him famous—no glory, only grace.
But first, he again worked like an electron. He would soon finish Another Green World, another ostensible rock album punctuated by opalescent instrumentals, and establish Obscure Records, a short-lived but crucial fountainhead for contemporary classical music. One of its first four records was his own, Discreet Music, an entrancing but halting attempt to re-create that living room calm with a 30-minute keyboard hypnosis and warped fragments of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. Eno assembled a potpourri of brief pieces for movies and commercials, then expanded it. He courted Talking Heads and Devo as their potential (and eventual) producer. And he repeatedly jetted to Berlin to join David Bowie on what would become the Berlin Trilogy and to Cologne to commune with Motorik idealists Cluster on a series of less commercial but eerie and luminescent works.
That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious, told Stephen Colbert 34 years later, much as he’d said to Lester Bangs in 1979 and repeated in his own published diary in 1996. “Let’s face facts.”
Within a matter of months, Music for Airports was finished. Eno had struggled for years with the sessions that would become his de facto rock farewell, 1977’s Before and After Science, as he wrangled more than a dozen collaborators in two countries. But rock’s valence electron had finally found his perfect fit, coming to rest in the sound he’d been circling for years. This one—an act of near-complete self-reliance, informed by a decade of attentive listening, thought, and arguable artistic theft—arrived in a flash.
Alternately panned as a soporific joke or praised as a cathedral of escape, Music for Airports soon became Eno’s bestseller. And in the last half-century, of course, it has become so much more. Pragmatically and presciently co-titled Ambient 1, few albums have ever been more synonymous with the genre that followed, with the field of play they named. It is an ur-statement of scope and intent. “The listener, I felt, became the population of a sonic landscape,” he later wrote in the foreword to Mark Prendergast’s The Ambient Century, “and was free to wander round it.”
Systems had forever fascinated Eno. As an adolescent in a rural town near the Suffolk Coast, Eno was drawn to his grandfather’s player piano, which required no skill to activate and which he was soon modifying to render his own new melodies. As a budding teenage artist in Ipswich, he turned painting into performance art by trying to recreate someone else’s work by studying the pigmented drips they’d left on the floor. He loved Steve Reich’s early tape pieces, studied the groundbreaking ideas of David Tudor and John Cage, performed a La Monte Young composition that instructed him to repeat a sound as many times as he found necessary (three hours and counting!), and repeatedly installed a George Brecht piece in which water dripped from one container into another.
Synthesizers, tape recorders, and electronic circuitry at large allowed him to bring those propensities and experiences to bear on the rock music he also loved. He had magpied 30 secondhand tape machines by age 20, and, at 24, became the first person believed to be credited for “tapes” on a rock album, with Roxy Music’s debut. By the mid-’70s, writes David Sheppard in his authoritative biography, On Some Faraway Beach, Eno counted himself an apostle of Lee “Scratch” Perry and dub, particularly smitten by Perry’s 1974 rendezvous with King Tubby. The record’s back cover pictured their mixing consoles in striking chiaroscuro portraits, a secret handshake to anyone who believed in the endless possibilities of the studio.
Eno also found several kindred spirits among the German explorers that shaped the krautrock frontier. Chief among them may have been Conny Plank, a slightly older but no less adventurous engineer who had worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen and then converted a farmhouse outside Cologne into a cozy country studio. By the time he and Eno met there in 1977 for the first of two sessions with the duo Cluster, Plank had helped nurture that atmospheric vanguard through classics with Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia. He celebrated the value of craziness, especially in the studio. “Conny always seemed to enjoy the idea that something we didn’t yet recognize would appear,” Eno later remembered of Plank, who died a decade after their first sessions at the age of 47. “[He] wanted to be surprised, to hear something new.”
And then, thanks to Plank, it was Eno who heard something new. During a return trip to Cologne in early 1978, months after he’d had his airport epiphany, Eno saw the reels of tape that Plank and former Can bassist Holger Czukay had meticulously spliced together from samples of shortwave radio transmissions, disco drums, highlife guitars, and Arabic singing. Eno had been struggling to make yet another rock record as a lead singer, and these patchwork spools presented a way out: Someone else could sing, and the system could do the job for him.
Plank’s partner, the actress Christa Fast, typically fed the musicians, often baking sumptuous cakes. Now, though, Eno gathered her and two studio assistants, Inge Zeininger and Christine Gomez, to sing simple “aahs” alongside him, a little plainsong choir. He and Plank cut bits of tape from the results, spooling loops of slightly different lengths around the legs of the studio’s metal chairs, mixing the voices in real time. They thought it was beautiful, celestial—like flying, maybe? This was the start of the music for airports he’d imagined.
Eno had also been interested in another very different system, even before Roxy Music began at the decade’s dawn. Inspired in part by the casual classics of Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia, he liked to assemble ad hoc ensembles, offer vague instructions (including his famous Oblique Strategies), and listen for resulting bits of intrigue. It was an extrapolation of John Cage’s indeterminacy, applied to rock settings. As Robert Fripp once put it, “He’s my favorite synthesizer player, because instead of using his fingers he uses his ears.”
Back in England, he asked old chum Robert Wyatt to hop on the piano, with audio engineer Rhett Davies on Fender Rhodes and the maverick Fred Frith on guitar. No one could hear anyone else, but, listening back, Eno spotted a synchronous moment when a six-note Wyatt phrase not unlike the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” intersected with Davies’ electric piano just so. He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit. Music for Airports, for all intents and purposes, was finished.
Though it was the last piece to materialize, Eno smartly made that augmented 17-minute loop from the studio jam Music for Airport’s opening gambit, calling it “1/1,” or Track 1 on Side 1. On an album where the pieces are so amorphous they suggest Young’s ideas of music that would go on forever, it is the most recognizably shaped, with Wyatt’s trusty piano pattern recurring like mileposts on some desolate and enchanting highway.
True to Eno’s aviation intent, “1/1” suggests the feeling of being held aloft by a partner, parent, friend, mattress, or anything else that buoys you as you begin to sag. His synthesizer passes—faint at first, gradually growing bolder—reinforce that sensation by cradling Wyatt’s piano phrase, by lifting higher the very thing that is doing the uplifting. Sure, death had been on Eno’s mind at the Cologne airport, but the future feels suddenly limpid during “1/1.” A haze steadily dissipates, and the sky brightens, with something new now lingering on the horizon.
Both “1/2” and “2/1”—twin outgrowths of that vocal experiment with Plank and company in Cologne—maintain that sense of the future with vastly different instrumentation and implications. Though his voice is indeed nestled inside the quartet, Eno is nearly a phantom during “1/2,” letting the spools of tape move in and out of sync to create harmonies so soft and slow they almost feel inhuman, pillowing and billowing and collapsing and returning.
“As the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. They stay the same,” Eno told a rapt San Francisco audience in 1996. “But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety.” This, then, is the sheet of clouds in the sky, the same few substances morphing in endless permutations. They suggest that there is an upper limit, that a ceiling has been reached; you can float in that state of grace for as long as you like but can go no higher. On Music for Airports, “2/1” lasts nine minutes. Eno has teased a 30-minute rendition, and you can spend much longer inside it during this radiant time-stretched take. It is music that seems to begin and end only because physical media has material limits.
Eno’s most overlooked stroke of brilliance here is to take those same vocals to the flipside, “1/2,” and push them further apart, like heavy clouds spreading into wisps. Where Wyatt’s piano on the opener is confident and breezy, Eno’s is tentative but exploratory on “1/2,” as if the “non-musician” is still trying to understand the way the keys function together. It’s easy to imagine the kid plundering his grandfather’s player piano, poking new holes in the rolls just to see how the results might sound. There is a delicate hopefulness to his phrasing, like a prairie dog poking its head up after a violent thunderstorm has passed or like an airplane passenger finally exhaling after moving through a tide of turbulence. The first three movements of Music for Airports are the sounds of continued belief, none more so than the faltering but perseverant 12 minutes of “1/2.”
If the first 40 minutes of Music for Airports are about being lifted and then remaining so, then “2/2,” its finale, is the comedown, the score for sinking toward some final destination. Eno cut these 10 minutes at Plank’s place in Cologne, improvising on an ARP 2600, slowing the tape to half-speed, and feeding it through a litany of delays. It is technically the simplest work here, an instrumental modified in post-production. But it is emotionally the most sophisticated and ambiguous, the reason that listeners sometimes leave the halcyon heights of Music for Airports feeling unsettled or vertiginous.
The motion of all the music is spectacular, akin to watching the moonlight shimmer from the ocean’s surface at night. Water, however, is the last thing anyone wants to contemplate in an airport or airplane, and that image makes for unease as “2/2” lumbers forward like some pipe organ dirge, guiding you finally to an end that does not begin again. These are those facts that Eno wants us to face, that death is always hovering nearby. Maybe it is true that this stunning building in Cologne—that happened to be designed by the father of the kid from Kraftwerk—may be the last splendid thing you ever see. Of all the possibilities Music for Airport’s first three pieces frame, they never preclude that certainty. If the beginning of this album feels like an ellipsis, its end is a period, as clear and absolute as mortality itself.
These days, Eno is a frequent guest at creativity conferences, with Music for Airports brandished as one example of his technological advances in music. But it wasn’t that, really. There were already synthesizers more advanced than the relatively common ARP 2600 by early 1978, and the tape tricks Eno deployed for these tracks were not altogether new. His own innovations in that field with Fripp years earlier already owed debts to Terry Riley’s psychedelic meditations a decade prior.
What’s more, a bevy of artists, from Popol Vuh in Germany to Éliane Radigue in France, had touched on so many of these sounds and circumstances. The delays, reverbs, variable speeds, and philosophical understanding of the studio as perhaps the greatest instrument of all were exclusive neither to Eno and Plank nor white rock’n’roll at large. Music for Airports was the result of Eno’s longtime interests and enthusiasms, suddenly given the right name and context. He had enough sense to recognize it, enough restraint to leave it alone.
But Music for Airports has become a wellspring for a now-sprawling genre and an essential record unto itself, its machines turned into a score played by the likes of Bang on a Can, ragtag rock experts Psychic Temple, and insightful pianist Bruce Brubaker. There’s more than restraint and synthesis at work. Instead, Eno—forever the systems man, more devoted to process than product—stumbled upon a true emotional center here. Perhaps it was because he was working to address his own anxieties through sound, but these four tracks radiate a kind of warmth and care that his sometimes-cold art had rarely embraced—and, for that matter, would often eschew in the future. At its core, Music for Airports moved to meet worry with relief, a response that lasts longer than any cutting edge ever can.
One no longer needs to wrap magnetic tape around leg chairs to make something that sounds like Eno’s 1978 masterpiece. These sounds are now matters of software, of templates, of common course. The generative machines of our AI future will likely understand Music for Airports like the alphabet. But it’s the beating human heart at this record’s center—palpitating at first, steadying as the record spins—that distinguishes it after so many decades. As you lift and fall with it, you remember how it is to feel.
After all, the moment he conceived the concept behind Music for Airports, Eno had a specific enemy in mind: Muzak, or music that didn’t allow anyone to feel much of anything.
Amid the Cold War jitters and political upheaval of the ’60s, the idea of piped-in pleasantry became a very big business, not only priming the sales pump in stores globally but also setting a pleasantly productive mood in workplaces. Founded in the wake of World War I by a high-ranking veteran of a particularly tech-driven Army wing, Muzak even found a home in nuclear submarines. By the time the Vietnam War shuddered to a halt, or as Eno’s head encountered that fast black cab, Muzak generated $400 million per year and soundtracked 43 of the world’s 50 biggest businesses.
Eno bristled at these pillow-soft pop arrangements and schmaltzy jazz standards, in and out of airports. His four tracks were not only intended as an architectural accompaniment but also as a replacement for what he heard as commercial drivel. To those ends, Music for Airports has actually enjoyed very limited success—a 40th-anniversary loop at London City Airport, an eight-day stint at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International soon after the album’s release, and a brief broadcast in Brazil’s São Paulo/Guarulhos that was so loud and distorted Eno demanded it be turned down.
In 1980, he installed Music for Airports in LaGuardia alongside four screens showing rudimentary footage he’d filmed from his apartment window after moving to New York. He called the piece 2 Fifth Avenue; airport employees complained about the racket. Still, for Eno, Music for Airports and such installations were breakthroughs, flinging the doors wide to the generative music and multimedia exploration that continues apace even as he nears 80.
In the years since, Music for Airports has become something of a daydream that has backfired in slow motion. By the end of the ’70s, when the record finally began attracting earnest attention stateside, Eno was already seen as a serious artist. He countered seemingly pretentious dalliances with contemporary classical music, cryptic notecards of vague instructions, and interviews that lasted nine hours with transformative popular albums alongside the likes of Bowie, Talking Heads, and Devo. He was a pop guy with a theoretical underpinning, an intriguing comment always at the ready.
But Music for Airports helped to erode the walls between sound designed to lubricate commerce and music made because it was beautiful, meaningful, personal, or powerful. From the jump, most critics did not distinguish between corporate background Muzak and Eno’s auteurist version of it: “Avant-garde Muzak?” The New York Times review began. “Doktor Eno investigates the possibilities of Muzak,” The Los Angeles Times quipped. “Eno’s version of Muzak for our age,” GQ reasoned. These ingenious and heartfelt symphonies of machines were just another dude’s take on background pablum.
That seems like a crucial development on the path to our modern music economy, where the vast majority of recorded music is valued at $10.99 per month, when it is valued at all. Most everything has become background music, and multiple playlists of “music for…” most every imaginable task—baking, fucking, crying, studying, even birthing another human being—abound. “I should think by now I’ve met about 60 or 70 kids who came out of the womb listening to [Discreet Music], which of course, is any marketing department’s dream,” Eno once quipped about his sound’s functionality. “Get in there right at the beginning, you know?” As he completed Ambient 1, Eno actually designed a cover for Ambient 2: Music for Healing. That record never materialized, Eno perhaps sensing his own future disdain for the coming New Age.
“It must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno wrote in conclusion of Music for Airport’s oft-quoted liner notes, a Holy Writ of ambient. Less than a half-century later, it seems like a permission slip to ignore most everything, no matter how interesting. Music is now a utility, a tool to be used for doing something else. Eno, of course, is not to blame for this sea change, but his fortune and reputation were made in large part through the cultural frameshift he helped ferry into being.
I am a first-rate offender when it comes to Music for Airports, a habitual user for whom the record’s sprawl has become a crutch. I put it on nearly every time I write something of any real length, this piece included. The telltale mind of Apple Music informs me I’ve played it nearly 200 times in the past year.
And yet, when I actually stop to listen, to hear Music for Airports as more than a background balm, these four tracks remain wondrous and transformative, able to rearrange the air in a room. Just a few weeks ago, I visited a favorite aunt whose husband had recently died. He had left behind decades of accumulated records in a basement crowded by a lifetime of hobbies and collections. She needed to know what to do with those thousand or so LPs, each cover inked with his name in blue ballpoint pen.
As I sat on the floor scanning the spines, she flitted about the room, trying not to cry as she busied herself with arcane errands but failing. It was the first time I’d been in that room in 20 years, and it was a fraught scene, weighted by thoughts of a kind man of a million passions who died too young. Wedged between a few Magazine records and a Nick Cave single, I spotted the familiar blocky black capital letters: “AMBIENT #1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS.” I pulled it from its place and asked my aunt if she knew it. She’d never heard of Eno, let alone the record.
Minutes later, Robert Wyatt’s lullaby-like piano chimed from speakers wedged among busy rows of books. And then it repeated, of course, seeming to tug itself and the entire room skyward even the second time around. My aunt stopped her busywork, looked up, and finally let the tears flow. We stood there in silence for a while, like electrons coming to rest, held aloft by this music. In those quiet moments, we did exactly what Eno had hoped Music for Airports would allow people to do, in or out of an airport—to not pretend we too weren’t going to die, and to go on ahead, anyway.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


Josh Homme's band with Jesse "the Devil" Hughes returns with another album of sleazy and entertaining rock'n'roll. But Zipper Down’s tongue-in-cheek humor belies the dark self-awareness of two guys well-versed in the study of human depravity.

Zipper Down

It’s been over 15 years since childhood friends Joshua Homme and Jesse "the Devil" Hughes founded their cartoonish, carnal blues-rock project, Eagles of Death Metal. When Homme's not manning the drum kit or the mixing board for Eagles (he’s produced each one of their LPs) he fronts Queens of the Stone Age, one of the biggest hard rock bands on the planet. So it makes sense that listeners would categorize the group as a Queens of the Stone Age side project. But EoDM has never been Homme’s show—this band has always been about Hughes, the strutting, showboating, irredeemably decadent presence at its center, the greasy cog around which the freak show turns.
The arrival of Zipper Down coincides with the documentary The Redemption of the Devil, which details one hell of year in Hughes' life, one in which he becomes ordained as a Protestant minister, prepares to marry former adult film star Tuesday Cross, ventures further to the right on the political spectrum (he's a noted gun fanatic), enters a custody battle for his kid, and, somehow, finds time to cut a new Eagles record. The film attempts to answer a question faced by every aging rocker at some point in their lives: when you’ve had your fill of sex, drugs, and scuzz-rock, who do you turn to for guidance? In Hughes’ case, there are only two logical responses: the guy upstairs, and the guy behind the bar.
On Zipper Down, it's clear that Hughes’ certificate of ordination doesn’t exclude him from the party; as outlined on album closer "The Reverend", his spiritual leanings are all part of his divine mission to get us all to "boogie-woogie". In interviews, he's preached the gospel of pure methamphetamine and public sex acts, while openly accepting the fiery abyss that lies in wait. In other words, he’s prepared to pick up the tab for every bender (and miserable morning after) detailed on *Zipper Down—*but only once the party’s over. Accordingly, most of the songs aren't about angels or demons, but rather girls who like to shake their asses ("Got a Woman" and its "Slight Return" on side B), girls who like to swing their asses ("Silverlake (K.S.O.F.M.)") and two-timing heartbreakers ("I Love You All the Time", "Oh Girl"). Homme supports the songs with one shuffling, snare-heavy beat after the next, peppered by handclaps and the odd cowbell.
But Zipper Down’s tongue-in-cheek humor belies the dark self-awareness of two guys well-versed in the study of human depravity. A closer look at the puffed-up, pivoting highlight "Silverlake", for example, reveals it not as a paean to the fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood, but rather a tale of a wannabe hipster trying to weasel his way into the hotspot-du-jour by having his girl get with the bouncer ("So if you date this guy/ He's gonna let us in!"), only to suffer an existential crisis in the end. Likewise, a forlorn, foggy-headed cover of Duran Duran’s one-night-stand anthem "Save a Prayer" revisits the album’s coital motifs through a confessional lens, solidifying aforementioned themes of atonement and reckoning.
Despite these more reflective moments, Zipper Down mostly sticks to the formula of the duo’s past three albums, frequently recycling structural and instrumental elements from past songs. The haggard guitars and handclap-heavy backbeat of "Got a Woman" recalls Death by Sexy highlight "Chase the Devil", while "The Deuce" shares a bluesy foundation with Peace Love Death Metal's "So Easy". This repetition isn’t to the Eagles’ detriment: theirs has always been a goofy project, one grounded in humor, wit, and sass rather than paradigm shifts. Easy rockers like the sawtoothed, shimmying  "Complexity" prove that the tricks aren’t necessary, as long as your hips are moving.


Though the rapper takes questionable creative risks on his fifth album, he’s still capable of bringing scenes to life with a wide eye and a sharp pen.

Digital Roses Don’t Die

It’s no secret that Big K.R.I.T. is something of a rap anachronist. His music—transfixed on the dichotomy between the trunk-rattling anthems and soulful grooves that dominated Southern rap from the mid-’90s to early 2000s—has persisted both for its otherness and overall quality. Songs like 2010’s “Just Touched Down” and 2014’s “Soul Food” served as tributes to 8Ball & MJG and Goodie Mob, respectively—and weren’t in fashion at the time they came out. But K.R.I.T. wasn’t so much wearing his influences on his letterman sleeve as he was creating his own patchwork from the same materials.
The Mississippi rapper’s fifth studio album, Digital Roses Don’t Die, feels like the biggest curveball of his career, even for an artist used to going against the grain. Between his 2017 double album 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time and 2020’s K.R.I.T. Iz Here, K.R.I.T. achieved a delicate balance of brash and introspective cuts, which has since been abandoned. Instead of subwoofer-shredding bass, Roses subscribes to the sleek funk style of bands like Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic—sounds that his Dungeon Family progenitors would spend hours digging through crates to replicate. Roses aims for a similar love-soaked retrofuturism as albums like OutKast’s Stankonia, Mac Miller’s The Divine Feminine, and Silk Sonic’s An Evening with Silk Sonic. And though K.R.I.T.’s risktaking is commendable, the results flounder between earnest ballads and cover band hokeyness.
Roses’s imbalance is a shame because its direction feels like a logical extension for K.R.I.T. His past love songs are as seamless as the fusion of his pet sounds, pulsing with the rush of first love or the gravity of an argument as the narrative demands. Roses is more expansive in scope, encapsulating a four-act love story from first contact to breakup, sectioned off by the four elements: the early passion of fire; the foundation of earth; the familiarity and rhythm of water; and the turbulence of wind, as he explained during a livestreamed album listening event.
K.R.I.T. is still capable of bringing scenes to life with a wide eye and a sharp pen, and certain moments showcase the warm sincerity of his earlier work. “Southside of the Moon” is a playful take on the age-old love story to hip-hop (“I’m from 300, she from 106 & Park/BET Uncut, I used to see her in the dark”), told over producer DJ Camper’s minimal 808s, snaps, bass notes, and hums. That song and “Rhode Clean” evoke vintage K.R.I.T., effortless rap-R&B hybrids that cruise by like gently refurbished muscle cars. On “Generational - Weighed Down,” he fears passing his alcoholism and bad decisions onto his future children and second-guesses the relationship he spends the first half of the album building. “Even if we are faithful,” he coos to his nameless lover, “Sometimes love flames out.”
But moments with genuine heart and drive are too often spoiled by overeager schmaltz. The raps on Roses are fleeting compared to previous projects, and while K.R.I.T. has proven many times that he can carry a tune, the album suffers when he shifts gears completely. “Cum Out to Play” is supposed to be a velvet-sheeted sex jam for the ages—K.R.I.T. has even admitted that he purposefully produced the song at 69 bpm—but it’s little more than Isley Brothers karaoke. Ditto the post-breakup bar crawl of “Wet Lashes & Shot Glasses” and “Show U Right,” which aims for roller-rink jam status—complete with talkboxed vocals on the hook—but lands in generic ’70s-movie-soundtrack territory. This clash of time periods sometimes manifests in unintentionally hilarious ways, like a shoehorned 8Ball & MJG reference on “Show U Right” or K.R.I.T.’s insistence on including rap adlibs over the decidedly mellow hooks of “Boring” and “So Cool.” For the first time in his career, K.R.I.T. is trying too hard, inserting puzzle pieces where they don’t quite fit.
As forced as the album sounds, K.R.I.T.’s commitment shines through the muck. He truly enjoys the music he’s recreating, and on standouts like “So Cool” and “Generational - Weighed Down,” that love is infectious. But the interpolated soul beats that have been his calling card for the last decade and change have more personality than much of the staid bandstand work on display across Roses. The album’s four interludes end with slightly different variations of the titular phrase, each one drifting further from the preserved romance of the original: “Take a picture, but keep it original/’cause who needs filters when digital roses don’t die?” K.R.I.T.’s love for the music that made him was never in question, but it would benefit him to find a new way to show his love for the old school.


After reckoning with her father’s legacy on recent records, the singer offers a vivid, complex portrait of life and the compromises and love that shape adulthood.

She Remembers Everything

Country music has a long memory. Decades after Hank Williams’ death, he remains shorthand for the music’s spirit, still cited in songs that have no resemblance to his honky- tonk fare. Williams isn’t the only figure whose myth casts a shadow over country. Johnny Cash pops up as a rebellious totem for mainstream country singers and remains a clear touchstone for alt-country troubadours such as Colter Wall. The eldest daughter of Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash never exactly ran away from her father—she covered his “Big River” on Right or Wrong, the 1980 LP that kicked off a decade of untouchable albums. But she strove to define herself independently, too. Throughout the 1980s, she threaded new wave and roots-rock into records targeted at the mainstream, then left Nashville behind entirely in the 1990s, striking up a creative and romantic relationship with John Leventhal and settling in New York City.
Cash didn’t begin reckoning with parts of her father’s musical legacy until after his 2003 death. Much of that process involved looking into the past. On 2009’s The List, she covered songs her father told her she needed to know by heart, like Harlan Howard’s country classic “Heartaches by the Number” and Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” On the Grammy-winning The River & the Thread five years later, she untangled her roots in the American South, delving into its myths and music; it was as immediate as anything she had ever made. With the new She Remembers Everything, Cash takes those lessons and applies them to the present, creating an album that addresses the turmoil of the moment by tying it into the past.
Working once again with Leventhal, Cash muddies up the clean lines of The River & the Thread, choosing atmosphere over grit. All the soft echoes and muffled rhythms are hazy, not dreamy. These subdued sonics suit a set of songs concerned with compromises, loss, and enduring love, the very things that shape adulthood. The women who narrate Cash’s songs here feel the weight of their previous decisions and look to their current situations with clarity. But She Remembers Everything isn’t a topical album: Cash casts her eye on the larger picture, how all these dashed dreams and small victories add up to make a life.
There are exceptions: On “8 Gods Of Harlem,” three chords punch through the album’s tasteful fog again and again to draw attention to muted but manifest anger. The song captures a school shooting through a trio of distinct perspectives: one written by Cash, one written by Kris Kristofferson, another by Elvis Costello. Each writer contributes a verse that pulses with their own lyrical rhythms. Cash emphasizes the pain of the mother, setting the scene in the street. Kristofferson breaks the spell with vulgar bluntness, countered by Costello’s florid summary of the aftermath. These varied approaches suggest that such violence is beyond one songwriter’s comprehension.
This is the only place on She Remembers Everything where Cash cedes the spotlight to another singer or deigns to be so direct. She doesn’t avoid collaborations; she co-wrote the title track with singer/songwriter Sam Phillips, penned several with Leventhal, and links with the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy for some harmonies. But these partnerships are part of the music’s fabric, not sparkling accoutrements. She Remembers Everything demands quiet contemplation. The hushed tones of opener “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For” serve as an appropriate keynote for the album, its waves of reverb providing a shimmering counterpoint to Cash’s quiet, compelling presence. Amid these misty guitars and muffled rhythms, Cash wanders through the debris of a relationship, resolving that the love made the struggle worthwhile. This tension, residing within both the music and the mind, is apparent throughout She Remembers Everything.
The difficulty of maintaining relationships with the passing of age is a key theme for these 48 minutes. This isn’t limited to romantic partnerships. The stately “Everyone But Me” finds its narrator coming to terms with the absence of her departed parents. It’s a situation that shares similarities to Cash’s own story—and to that of many people, of course. Neither this, nor the stirring ode to the sustenance of long-term romance, “Not Many Miles To Go,” should be read as autobiography. Like “8 Gods Of Harlem” or any of these songs, these are short stories. She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life.


A new reissue highlights Vini Reilly’s 1998 turn towards pop, a less explored period of the guitarist’s long career as the forward-looking post-punk outfit the Durutti Column.

The Durutti Column: Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids

Time Was Gigantic... When We Were Kids

The Durutti Column’s 1980 debut album—confusingly titled The Return of the Durutti Column—originally came packaged in a sandpaper sleeve, a detail that couldn’t have been more at odds with the music inside. The sandpaper was a Situationist prank dreamed up in part by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, who signed the group to his label, but there was nothing abrasive about the sound of the record, which set Vini Reilly’s quicksilver guitar melodies against Martin Hannett’s ghostly atmospheres and spare electronic production.
Although it had begun as a full-band effort—contributing two songs on 1978’s A Factory Sample EP, alongside Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire—the Durutti Column was in effect the solo project of Reilly. Twenty-six years old when he released his debut, he had been playing guitar for 15 years and studying nearly as long, and after a brief stint crunching power chords in a Manchester band called Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, he bought a £12 acoustic guitar and unlearned everything that punk had taught him, fashioning an idiosyncratic style out of bits and pieces of jazz, classical, blues, and flamenco.
Led by his own quixotic impulses, Reilly developed a singular style across dozens of albums released over the following decades. The essence of his sound is his tone: at once liquid and crystalline, and touched by quick, nervous vibrato, like a dewdrop quivering on a blade of grass. Combining expressive phrases with unusual voicings and unpredictable chord changes, his playing often has an almost discursive quality, as though he had transcribed the cadences of speech for his six-stringed instrument.
Reilly, who suffered a series of strokes in 2010 that left him unable to play, was never a particularly famous figure, but his 1980s albums frequently landed in the Top 10 of the UK independent charts, and over the years he amassed significant fans: John Frusciante reportedly called him “the greatest guitarist in the world.” It’s hard to overstate Reilly’s influence in the 1980s and ’90s, even as he swam against the current. He opted for a clean signal when distortion was de rigueur, and jazzy harmonies when barre chords were standard; he displayed virtuoso talent in an era when many of his post-punk peers were picking up their instruments for the first time. Year after year, the Durutti Column’s music—patient, reserved, catlike—appears more prescient. Today we would call it dream pop, but back then, there was no name for his sui generis brand of largely instrumental, quasi-ambient avant-pop. “Call it new music, but not radical or unpleasant,” Reilly said, with characteristic wryness.
Even as Reilly’s tone retained its unique character, his music evolved in significant ways over the years. Moving on from his minimalist origins, he folded in harp, strings, and cor anglais before experimenting with drum machines and samplers. Some of the vocal loops on 1989’s Vini Reilly anticipate Moby’s Play, while 1990’s Obey the Time was in conversation with acid house. By 1996’s Fidelity, he was citing the influence of UK rave duo Orbital. With 1998’s Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids—newly remastered and reissued with five additional songs—Reilly made a subtle but unmistakable shift toward pop music, due in large part to the vocal contributions of a singer named Eley Rudge.
This wasn’t the first time Reilly worked with vocals. Though The Return of the Durutti Column was entirely instrumental, he began singing with 1981’s LC, and his warmly mopey murmur became a frequent feature of his albums. (In his memoir 24 Hour Party People, Wilson jokes that he tried to persuade Reilly to stop singing, but “failed miserably.”) Guest vocalists became commonplace on Durutti albums beginning with 1987’s The Guitar and Other Machines, and Rudge turned up on two songs on 1996’s Fidelity. But Time Was Gigantic feels like a showcase for her singing, prominently featuring her on six of 11 songs.
On the opening “Organ Donor,” Rudge seems a perfect foil for Reilly’s playing, which piles up in sparkling layers. She has a dulcet tone, and she pursues a sing-songy melodic line that complements his own harmonic voicings without overpowering them. In its blissful tone and mood, the song feels like a response to the gossamer pop of the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, released eight years prior. But Rudge’s other appearances on the album are a mixed bag. Her tone is frequently so sweet that it comes off as cloying; her melodic choices suggest a less bluesy Edie Brickell or a less breathy Harriet Wheeler, of the Sundays. Where Reilly’s playing is mercurial, she’s one-note; while he slides effortlessly over the fretboard, her vocal tics sound affected. She’s not a bad singer, but she’s conventional in a way that doesn’t suit the subtleties of Reilly’s playing. It doesn’t help that the lyrics gravitate toward rote rhymes and facile sentiments (“Let’s make love again/Just one more time/I’ll be yours/You’ll be mine”). Her singing has the distinct air of a ’90s coffeehouse.
Fortunately, Time Was Gigantic remains a more nuanced and exploratory album than Rudge’s lead vocals might suggest. The instrumental “Pigeon” is cool and dusky, Reilly’s multi-tracked guitar trailing long strings of echo behind. In “Twenty Trees,” Reilly takes the mic, and his voice—although buried in the mix, as usual—is warm and reassuring, intimate in its fragility. It’s an unusual song for the Durutti Column, swollen with string synths and a looping tabla rhythm; the guitar is relegated to a silvery filigree. Tabla also figures prominently on “I B Yours,” its rippling patterns mirrored in Reilly’s quick-fingered runs. And on “For Rachel,” he mixes together a trip-hop beat with contrapuntal guitar lines, one flamenco-inspired and the other vaguely West African, along with choral loops and what might be a vocoder. It may lack the grace of his early work, but it’s gratifying to hear him experimenting like this, seeking out new applications for his familiar guitar tone.
Five previously unreleased bonus tracks mostly break with the album’s mood. “Kiss of Def” is a thundering drum’n’bass remix of album cut “My Last Kiss”; “New Order Tribute” is a synthy, squelchy homage to his erstwhile labelmates that he banged out “for fun” in 90 minutes, according to the liner notes. Perhaps the most intriguing bonus cut is the 94-second “It’s Your Life, Babe”—an almost entirely atmospheric track with an unmistakably Lynchian cast featuring ghostly, operatic singing from Ruth-Ann Boyle, who also appeared on 1994’s Sex & Death. Hearing this sketch, it’s tempting to wonder what Reilly might have done had his fascination with Orbital led him in a more explicitly ambient direction. It’s those hints of possible futures that make Time Was Gigantic worthwhile, if not the ideal starting point. Reilly’s fractal spirals of notes always suggested overgrown gardens of forking paths; his catalog is so rich, his ideas so engrossing, that even the detours and dead ends make for rewarding wandering.


The buzzing rapper’s debut mixtape is an easygoing 40 minutes of sugary trap and mellow, blissfully hazy vibe-music that runs with the sounds of the moment without advancing them much.

Life of a Dark Rose

This winter, the buzzing 19-year-old rapper Lil Skies broke down the first verse of one of his 2017 SoundCloud hits, “Signs of Jealousy” in a video that plays a bit like a comedy sketch. For six minutes, the chatty rapper talks in circles as he enthusiastically footnotes a verse that isn’t exactly loaded with cryptic subtext. The line, “First place when I finish the race,” he explains, means “basically, like, I’m just coming in first,” for instance. If anything, he reveals that his lyrics may actually have less meaning than they appear to have on the surface. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t know what an Uncle Tom is, so for him, the term just signifies an old, cranky uncle—a hater, basically.
Lil Skies is grinning the whole time, so it’s hard to tell if he fully appreciates the absurdity of the exercise. He’s so charming and such a good sport about it, though, that you want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Consider the video a litmus test for his music: Either you’re drawn in by his considerable charisma, or flabbergasted by the inanity of half of what comes out of his mouth. Like so many zeitgeist-chasing rappers in his age bracket right now, he invites hard opinions.
It’s lucky that Skies has charisma to spare, because he won’t wow anybody with his originality. He adheres to a “look the part, be the part” mentality, styling himself after SoundCloud rap’s preferred uniform of dreadlocks and face tattoos that may as well read RIYL: Lil Uzi Vert. “I got tattoos on my face, I use that shit as motivation/I can never get a job so for my dream I’m dedicated,” he raps on the opening track of his debut mixtape Life of a Dark Rose, an easygoing 40 minutes of sugary trap and mellow, blissfully hazy vibe music that runs with the sounds of the moment without advancing them much.
Skies doesn’t try to outdo his flashier peers. He isn’t as radical as Lil Pump, a far less competent rapper who makes up for his limitations with raw energy, and although he sings about being a rock star, he doesn’t act the part like Lil Yachty. What he does bring to the table, though, is an agreeable demeanor and a pleasant, sticky-sweet singing voice with shades of Swae Lee, which he’s comfortable enough with to forgo the Auto-Tune that makes so much of this music bleed together. Leaving his voice naked is his smartest and most distinguishing aesthetic choice. It lets Dark Rose breathe in a way most mixtapes in this lane don’t.
The whole project goes down easy, although it only periodically makes good on the promise of its flagship single “Red Roses.” That’s the track where Skies’ melodious flow matches with a perfectly woozy beat and everything clicks (it’s also got the tape’s most Teflon hook: “I got all the drugs in the world that you need/We get high to pass the time, but bitch I ain’t no fiend.”) Only a handful of songs come close to capturing that rush, including “Signs of Jealousy,” another track with the plush ambiance of an opium den, and “The Clique,” a daffy number with more than a trace of Playboi Carti in it. A few more of their caliber could have turned the tape into something genuinely notable, but at least its second-tier material is agreeable enough. Even when Skies isn’t saying much—and he’s rarely saying much—he sounds good doing it.


After a five-year hiatus that's been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Alec Ounsworth and co.'s third album casts them as the very thing their detractors claimed them to be so long ago.

Hysterical

The majority of unsigned bands never have their failure to upend the music industry held against them, but... you already know the deal with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The excitement surrounding their 2005 self-titled debut and its DIY success was certainly warranted, but two years later, blogs were still grasping at straws for the sake of "firsties," bands still wanted to get signed, and CYHSY's wildly uneven follow-up Some Loud Thunder all but acknowledged its impending backlash as a given. It was an alternately awkward and rewarding record, but at the very least, a heartening show of artistic gumption in light of hype-bubble peers such as Sound Team, Birdmonster, and Voxtrot essentially turning tail upon encountering the slightest bit of real scrutiny. And yet, after a five-year, self-imposed hiatus that's been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Hysterical freely casts Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as the very thing their detractors inaccurately claimed them to be so long ago: a band whose story is the most interesting thing about them.
Truth is, Hysterical feels self-conscious from the moment you press play. In that inimitable avian squawk of his, Alec Ounsworth crows, "we'll make the same mistakes," and it's hard not to see it as winking irony since they're doing the exact opposite: Unlike their previous two records, Hysterical's opener doesn't boast some sort of abrasive production tactic meant to trigger instant buyer's remorse. In fact, "Same Mistake" actually sounds fantastic and emphasizes the elements of their sneaky anthemic streak-- Ounsworth's broad vocal strokes, a brisk rhythm of splashy, 16th-note hi-hats and insistently strummed guitars, all coated in a wash of synthesized strings that soothes like aftershave. It's instantly likeable, it can also just as easily be tuned out completely, and there are 11 others of its kind here.
As hard as it is to believe that anything featuring a vocalist of Ounsworth's piercing timbre can be considered background music, Hysterical is almost hypnotic in its unerring consistency. You hire John Congleton as a producer, and you're all but guaranteed to sound amazing, but compared to his some of his well-known charges (St. Vincent, Bill Callahan, Shearwater), CYHSY work within a far narrower range of dynamics, tone, tempo, and instrumentation-- they sound like a more high-rent version of themselves, revealing how much ramshackle charm played a part in their debut, and that even the most jarring experiments from Some Loud Thunder were for their own good. If you've got a jones for no-qualifiers-necessary indie rock ca. 2005, you can get a proper fix from the title track, "Idiot", and "Yesterday, Never", where snares snap in double time, chords resolve in the most predictable fashion, and Ounsworth's melodies stride and stutter-step through familiar patterns. Still, it's tough to tell whether they impress on their own merits or whether they obtain some sort of halo effect due to their hard proximity to "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth".
So you're left to grasp for trimming: the horn charts on "Maniac" that shed Hysterical's rhythmic straitjacket and hearken to Ounsworth's New Orleans fetish from Mo Beauty, the humid Mellotron strings and puzzling melody on the lonely "In a Motel", the gnarled guitar that corkscrews it way through the middle of "Into Your Alien Arms". But if you cut Hysterical, what does it bleed? At the very least, you'd think "Ketamine and Ecstasy" or "Misspent Youth" would offer some sort of insight based on titles alone, and judging by a teasing Eurythmics quote or a stray line about "trading sex for drugs," maybe they do. But the words themselves rarely linger for effect, instead getting smeared over by Ounsworth's oily melismatics and distended diction.
Look, even those who fell hard for "In This Home on Ice" or "Is This Love?" wouldn't be too surprised by the way things would turn out by 2011-- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may have a confrontational edge about them, but outside of straight-up indie rock, they're not the types you'd confuse for firebrands. The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.