For his third Telekinesis record, Michael Benjamin Lerner traded in producer Chris Walla for Spoon’s Jim Eno, and Dormarion's power pop is grander and tougher than Lerner's past material.

Dormarion

To paraphrase Sam "Ace" Rothstein, Michael Benjamin Lerner’s voice is like an emotional car wash. No matter what Lerner is singing about, it all comes out sounding clean, winsome, and nice. It’s a good voice for the music he makes as Telekinesis-- the power-pop blueprint has long relied on boyish dudes who can turn their inner misery into sunny songs, and Lerner’s pipes puts him squarely in the tradition of brooding tunesmiths like Matthew Sweet and Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood. But Lerner’s soft tenor also tends to cleanse his music of any semblance of tension or grit or personality.
Telekinesis’ third album Dormarion is Lerner’s best, most bountifiul to date. At 35 minutes, it’s the longest Telekinesis record by approximately 150 seconds. Sonically, Lerner veers into synth-pop on alluring tracks like the billowy “Ghosts and Creatures” and the near-danceable “Ever True”, and flirts with toned-down hard rock on the magnetic start-stop riff of “Little Hill”. Trading in Chris Walla (who produced the first two Telekinesis LPs) for Spoon’s Jim Eno, Lerner has made Dormarion sound grander and tougher than his old records; he’s looking outside his modest melodic pop-rock for the first time while adding some heft to his always solid melodies. In the studio, Lerner handles almost all of the instruments (though Eno supplies his Bonham-like timekeeping to several tracks), but Dormarion sounds like it was conceived for his road band. As grabby as the New Order-like “Wires” is on record, the big drums and insinuating bassline ought to get hips swinging when Telekinesis plays it live.
Musically, Lerner has broadened his range of dynamics. But tonally, Dormarion is a little flat. Opening track “Power Lines” has the standard Telekinesis structure: A quiet acoustic verse, an explosive chorus, and Lerner’s sweet vocal confessing bitter truths. “I’m a broken man,” he sings. “I’m damaged goods.” Several tracks later, the low-key jangler “Lean on Me” is selling fantasies of idealized domestic bliss: “We could cross the country in our beat-up truck/ stopping every minute because the thing don’t run/ but I don’t care because we’re in love.” Lerner’s delivery is the same on both songs-- happy or sad, he sounds blank. He’s like a narrator with no vocal inflections, which makes accessing something resembling an emotional core beyond the surface beauty of the songs very difficult.
If Dormarion is a record of superficial pleasures, at least those pleasures are considerable. As a craftsman, Lerner must be counted among the best young pop songwriters working in contemporary indie rock. At his best, like on “Wires”, he offers a wealth of hooks in the verse, chorus, and bridge. There’s no question he can put a good tune together; what’s less clear is whether he can interpret those tunes as well as he writes them, and breathe a little flesh-and-blood human messiness into them in the process.


The second album from the Boston hardcore group is a tentative push toward accessibility, exploding its sound in new directions while nodding to familiar touchstones.

Vein.fm: This World Is Going to Ruin You

This World Is Going to Ruin You

The only way Vein.fm’s second album might sound like a more hopeless reflection of the world today is if they wrote any of it in the past two years.The quintet finished recording This World Is Going to Ruin You at a locked-down New Jersey studio in April 2020, stunted by the pandemic while their 2018 debut Errorzone was still ascendant: a metalcore milestone that unified the Carhartt and AJ Soprano T-shirt factions like few others since their Boston Beatdown forefathers in Converge. But rather than leveling up on an expected timeline, they made lateral moves. There were inevitable side projects: most notably Fleshwater, a strong entry in an otherwise suffocating subgenre of hardcore bands practicing Deftones and Hum worship. They released Old Data in a New Machine, a compilation of remixes and B-sides whose “Vol. 1” seemed to promise more to come. They also added an “.fm” to their name that almost nobody says out loud. But these seemingly unrelated actions serve a unified purpose, to ready listeners for a version of the band that isn’t tied to what they did in 2018. And indeed, This World Is Going to Ruin You cannot simply be pegged as a lateral move or a leveling up: It explodes Vein.fm’s sound into seemingly dozens of different directions.
Despite inducting synth/turntablist Benno Levine as a full-time member, Vein.fm have largely dropped the tech in “Doomtech,” setting aside the breakbeats and breakdowns for ambience and blunt force, a blinding futuristic sheen swapped for a feel-bad rainbow of all rotted browns. Anthony DiDio described the lyrics as a “birth-to-death narrative,” often delivered in a panicked shriek or guttural bark that really does sound like either childbirth or death throes. The words are just about indecipherable without the album insert, so Vein.fm are wise enough to let the piledriven riffs of “Welcome Home” get the message across: Our birth-to-death narratives are nasty, brutish, and mostly short, at least until the closing duo of “Wavery” and “Funeral Sound” take up over a third of the album’s half-hour runtime.
Though the opening lyrics of This World Is Going to Ruin You are “Let go/Lay back like a patient,” the ensuing rhyme is more indicative of its mindset: “Let your conscience fuck the pavement.” “Pennies in the shit well/Pick ‘em up/Rinse ‘em off with your piss” is just a sample of what the lead single has to say about the human condition. But if the buckets upon buckets of Kool-Aid blood spilled in the video for “The Killing Womb” didn’t make it clear, two consecutive songs titled “Hellnight” and “Orgy at the Morgue” should settle any debates about whether Vein.fm has developed a sense of humor about themselves. It’s the difference between a dystopian, prestige horror film centered on experimental surgery and the analog gore of the Saw franchise.
Similarly, the plot of This World Is Going to Ruin You is a secondary concern, the dialogue mostly a self-aware series of prompts towards the next kill shot, each of which has to be more extreme than the last. No longer beholden to their signature alchemy of groove and grind, Vein.fm take an approach more akin to their remix album than Errorzone, doing everything they hinted at previously and doing it more. “Welcome Home” transposes detuned riffs to a tempo about half as slow as anything they’ve ever done, like if Slipknot contributed a chopped-and-screwed remix to Old Data in a New Machine. Conversely, the rave-rock hybrid “Magazine Beach,” named after a bucolic public park in Cambridge, could’ve feasibly fit on 120 Minutes, Headbanger’s Ball, and Amp playlists. Vein.fm have never fit more wrath and math into one song as they do on “Versus Wyoming,” which lasts all of 55 seconds. The impact of whatever’s happening at any given moment is amplified by the unseen—if the minute-long transitional tracks seem to cut off too early, something very different and just as thrilling will be happening 30 seconds from now.
Yet throughout, there’s a tension between what constitutes progress and regression; at times, This World Is Going to Ruin You feels like the album that could’ve come before Errorzone, from a band willing to try anything in search of a signature sound. When they lean on bionic drum programming and sinister samples during the album’s slower, more atmospheric moments, Vein.fm acknowledge massive debt to nu-adjacent classics like Iowa, White Pony, and The Fragile, benchmarks of the era’s genre fusion and progressive production values. But these days, it’s not so radical to hear a high-pass filter drum set against drop-C guitars. The melodic bent of “Wavery” and “Magazine Beach” is intriguing in the context of a Will Putney-produced album where listeners expect more breakdowns than choruses. But the hooks come off as a bit timid, not just compared to, say, “Left Behind” or “Rx Queen,” but also to Vein.fm’s own “Fear in Non Fiction.” What begins as a Brief History of Screamo in its scabrous, mutant origins fast-forwards to its platinum age with a clean vocal, swooping in to lift it toward the rafters. But the most thrilling and divisive moment of This World Is Going to Ruin You is also the most irreplicable—the hook is delivered by Thursday’s Geoff Rickly, a guy largely responsible for record execs throwing around millions at post-hardcore bands.
Perhaps the push toward accessibility on This World Is Going to Ruin You wouldn’t have sounded quite as tentative had it actually been released in 2020—before the first 20 seconds of “Virus://Vibrance” could be heard in Planet Rave’s embrace of late-’90s drum-n-bass; before the renewed critical and commercial interest in nü-metal; before the booming fortunes of Code Orange, Turnstile, and Knocked Loose proved there was a lane for uncompromising and artful heavy guitar music outside of its hardcore fanbase. Vein.fm still sound like a band ready to take on the world; only this time around, the world is just as ready for them.

Closed Casket Activities / Nuclear Blast


Fuck Buttons' Benjamin John Power offers his solo debut as Blanck Mass, working in a slower paced ambient vein to hypnotic effect.

Blanck Mass

The sheer maximal strength of Fuck Buttons' second album Tarot Sport was something to marvel at. It felt as if the duo of Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung were shifting around vast tectonic plates of noise, daring one another to see how much detail their music could retain while pushing the volume firmly into the red. That love of scale remains firmly intact on Power's debut album under his Blanck Mass moniker, although he's purposefully tempered its overall feel with a more reflective bent. This is a themed work, based around "cerebral hypoxia and the beautiful complexity of the natural world" according to the Blanck Mass Bandcamp page. At times it crosses paths with the folksy elements of the Ghost Box aesthetic, where creepy electronics are twisted to produce the kind of deadened atmosphere found in old horror flicks like Witchfinder General. It sometimes shares that film's lack of refinement, with Power allowing his sounds to loop over vast expanses of time, matching Fuck Buttons' prowess for chiseling crude beauty from repetition.
Much of this music is rooted in the ambient tradition; there are no beats, and Power often leans heavily on a wash of wave-like noise similar to what Brian Eno cultivated on "Alternative 3" from Music for Films. On first glance it can feel like there's little structure underpinning the glass-like inflections of "Sifted Gold" or "Chernobyl", but dig a little deeper and subtle shifts in tone and mood gradually unravel. It demonstrates how adept Power has become at adding and subtracting layers of gentle abstraction in his music. Blanck Mass also shows how well he can foster an atmosphere of unease without pushing everything skyward all the time. Occasionally it threatens to topple over into a Fuck Buttons-style morass of jagged edges, but on songs like "Sundowner" the prickly distortion dissolves into clear digital glitchiness. The track has a woozy atmosphere, causing it to feel like Power and his table of instruments are rocking back and forth on a creaky old ocean liner.
Elsewhere the Blanck Mass sound sinks into introspection. "Sub Serious" is a densely layered piece full of twinkling loops and percussion elements that make it sound like it was recorded in the middle of a rain forest. The mood subtly slides from pessimism to dejection throughout; on "Sub Serious" it's the former, while the similar "Land Disasters" and "Icke's Struggle" use great swells of synth to generate an air of sadness. The latter two songs both use sampled birdsong, one of the few overt attempts to maintain the natural-world theme. Occasionally Power steps close to his other band's territory, particularly on "Land Disasters", where he channels that wall of gnarly distortion again and sets it to the kind of icy interference that dominated "Sundowner". Those two tracks feel like distant cousins here, both feeding off the same kind of ultra-frosty banks of towering electronics that Power was clearly obsessed with creating during the making of this record.
Blanck Mass reaches its apex in the form of the extraordinary 13-and-a-half minute "What You Know". The shifts in tone encompass many of this album's contrasting styles, including the glacial pile-ups of noise and the dips into impossibly quiet reflection. At its close there's even a hint of groove as a bass synth expands and contracts, ultimately blocking out the rest of Power's palette and opening up new lands for him to explore with this project. The air of serenity shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fuck Buttons' work-- in many ways Blanck Mass functions as a continuation of the bittersweet emotion pulled out of the closing Tarot Sport track "Flight of the Feathered Serpent". But this mostly feels like Power taking all his musical impulses and tunneling inward toward a more nuanced spot. The shadow of his other band always feels like it's on his shoulder, but that tension between his past and present guises is what makes this work so well. Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out.


The band’s seventh album adds more chaos to their stately drama. It is full of abandon and quiet contemplation as Matt Berninger sings not about how to enjoy life, but how to simply endure it.

Sleep Well Beast

Here’s a handy tag cloud of adjectives the National have no doubt grown to despise: Restrained, controlled, intimate, slow-burning, patient, grand. No doubt, too, that their live shows can feel like frantic exorcisms of all of these respectable, middlebrow signifiers: Onstage, Matt Berninger is a kind of yuppie Dionysus, downing bottles of red wine, tearing at his collar, pushing through the crowd, shouting off-mic. The contrast between the two versions of himself, the staid crooner and the wild-eyed rocker, felt like the band’s ace in the hole: It meant they could play stadiums and soundtrack scenes of snow falling in sedate indie films about unhappy New England families.
Sleep Well Beast is their seventh album, and their first attempt at inviting some of that disruptive energy into the studio. Making records with this band has sometimes sounded about as fun as a forced-bonding office retreat, but this time they built a studio in a pastoral area of upstate New York that muted intraband creative friction. As Berninger memorably put it, “It’s hard to be a dick when you look out the window and there’s this tranquil pond.” As a result, Sleep Well Beast quakes and shivers with all kinds of un-National sounds—barbed, intentionally sloppy guitar attacks, drum loops, bits of digital crunch and splatter, and a rawer, more abandoned performance from Berninger. They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.
The first single “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” was a bit of a shot across the bow. The song introduces itself with a series of stray-hair noises—a steely guitar line, a frosty choir of “oohing” voices, a boxy drum loop, and an imperious grand piano airlifted from U2’s “New Year’s Day.” It forms an intriguing mist, but as you squint into it, familiar shapes emerge: The major-key chorus arrives with the same effortlessness as all their best songs, with that glinting phalanx of horns pushing it quietly forward. These are National Songs, made with the sounds and feelings that should be poured into the making of a National album. Some of the eccentricities and raw touches left at the edges feel like wind resistance tacked onto a beveled-smooth vehicle after the fact.
The same trick happens at the beginning of “I’ll Still Destroy You”: With a fluttering piece of drum programming and some mallet percussion, we are given a convincing twenty-second impression of a Björk song, circa Homogenic maybe. Then the swaying chords, the murmuring piano, and Berninger’s rumbling voice enters, dispelling the illusion and planting us back in the dimly lit auditorium on the cover of Boxer. The song kicks up again on its way out, with a wild, chaotic build that careens directly into “Guilty Party.” These controlled breakouts, bookending the otherwise-dependable pleasures of their music, provide a neat analog for the bits of craven irresponsibility and abandon you cling to in the margins of an otherwise stable existence—the occasional 2am-Tuesday, the weekend away from the kids. This has always been, and remains, Berninger’s character: “Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” he pleads on “Day I Die.”
The wildest he allows himself to be, and maybe the wildest the band’s ever sounded, is “Turtleneck,” a mid-album cut that veers startlingly close to “National rave-up.” Berninger pitches his vocals at a ragged shout. It’s a political rocker, sardonic and full of withering asides like, “Light the water, check for lead.” “The poor, they leave their cell phones in the bathrooms of the rich,” he mutters, a lyric he’s explained refers to Trump venting typo-ridden tweets to the nation from his toilet-bowl throne. The song melts open into a pair of squealing, squiggled guitar solos that wouldn’t feel out of place on a latter-day Pearl Jam album, and Berninger moves in fitful circles around the kind of earnest activism that Vedder has practiced for years.
Like Vedder, or James Murphy, or really any rock singer wringing drama from their own limitations, Berninger remains the marquee character in the National’s music. He’s the guy the spotlight follows, and the band—as limber and powerful as the Dessner and Devendorf brothers are—serve mostly just to set the scene for Berninger to mutter intelligent, self-deprecating things into strange and counterintuitive rhythmic pockets of the songs. He wrote a lot of these lyrics alongside his wife Carin Besser and possesses an unerring ability to zero in on the bits of conversation that signify a lifelong coupledom: “I only take up a little of the collapsing space/I better cut this off, don’t want to fuck it up,” he repeats to himself on “Walk It Back,” a pitch-perfect evocation of trying to talk yourself out of having the same fight with the same person again, likely with the same results. “You keep saying so many things that I wish you won’t,” from “Empire Line,” is a sort of “I-don’t-want the-kids-to-hear-us” version of “shut up, goddamnit,” the version you offer when years of mutual respect have supplied the brakes to your worst impulses.
But perhaps the most resonant lyrics here speak to the band’s persistence and the durability of any long-term union. “Nothing I do/Makes me feel different,” he confesses on “I’ll Still Destroy You.” “Forget it/Nothing I change changes anything,” he offers on “Walk It Back.” Like R.E.M., whose ongoing existence became its own kind of raison d’être as they aged, the National offer testimony to something we don’t often celebrate: Enduring is a superpower of its own. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. And yet, there’s a reason it remains such a dominating lens through which to examine them. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy. Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. There’s a reason anniversary cards say things like “All these years later, I still love you.” It’s because the miracle isn’t in the “love,” it’s in the “still.”


On her debut solo EP, the cellist and vocalist explores a vaporous middle ground between R&B and chamber pop.

Antidotes 1 EP

Before she clocked hundreds of miles touring with Slint and Stars of the Lid, before she joined FKA Twigs’ live band, before she released dainty chamber pop as one half of the duo Felix, Lucinda Chua was a photographer. Her pictures are small moments, dramatically lit — a girl staring at a grand piano; a faceless woman searching for a book on her knees. To Chua, photography could only hope to convey a piece of a wider story, a small fraction of an emotion: “all it can show is a fragment of a narrative,” she said. Antidotes 1, her debut solo EP, radiates with the same kind of heightened interiority, swapping stage lighting for the complex rhythms of her cello.
As the vocalist of Felix, Chua had a kind of manic flow, urgent and hushed, like someone spilling secrets to a friend in the middle of homeroom. But from the first notes of Antidotes 1, Chua is altogether richer, closer, more patient. A classically trained cellist, Chua adeptly molds her vocals around her textured, drawn-out bow strokes. She wades carefully into opener “Feel Something,” taking stock of her surroundings, like a morning stretch: “How high, how far, how deep,” she sings, her voice velvety like a weighted blanket.
There is a tactile quality to Chua’s singing, an intimacy that incites goosebumps. She can take the word “something” in the opener’s refrain, “I just wanna feel something,” and chop it up, shortening the first half and dragging out “thing” until it reveals the crevices of her breath. In another world, her low, soothing croon could place her next to neo-R&B singers like Milosh, but there is a distinctive rawness to her singing. Parts of “Feel Something” originally appear in a composition called “Music For One,” and the record indeed seems designed for solo consumption: “It’s music for you, in your bubble, with your headphones,” she said of “Music For One” in 2013.
Chua takes a circuitous approach to writing. There is nothing that could be called a “chorus” here; she instead prefers to repeat long verses until they become hypnotic. Like her photographs, her lyrics are cryptic, dropping into the middle of a fable: “You better have bore a son,” she sings ominously on “Whatever It Takes,” before launching into a dark refrain about “witches in exile.” Chua has a way of sounding remarkably human even in the depths of a fairytale narrative: “The demons I carry are fake,” she sings, the pain palpable as her voice breaks on the last word.
Antidotes 1 is a lesson in patience—Chua holds a note for an entire breath, until she buckles and runs out of air, and drags the cello through one note until it seems to naturally fade into the next, as on “Semitones.” In music, a semitone is the smallest interval between two notes. Chua makes these steps, first on the guitar and then echoed on the cello, in slow, languorous movements. As if in conversation with the instrument, she fills the space in between notes with her voice, raised barely above a lilting whisper. When she harmonizes on “Somebody Who,” it is with an alien, distorted recording of her singing, sharpened slightly. “The earth is dying,” she repeats plainly, as her vocal accompaniment begins to break down. The cello descends a dissonant scale, glassy and full, until it seems to fade into memory.


With flourishes of R&B, house, and funk, this exuberant and sweltering nine-track mini-album nails the transition from left-of-center cult favorite to bona fide diva.

Mykki Blanco: Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep

Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep

At a time when many rappers seem to reach astronomical levels of fame within literal months of their first release, Mykki Blanco works at their own pace. For almost 10 years, they’ve cycled through multiple musical identities and genres, always prioritizing creative exploration over any particular niche. The diaristic, introspective lyrics and relatively sleek production of their most recent full-length album, 2016’s Mykki, represented a watershed moment in Blanco’s output—perhaps the nearest they’ve come to full self-realization in their music. Five years on, Blanco has made yet another about-face. With flourishes of R&B, house, and funk, the exuberant and sweltering nine-track mini-album Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep nails the transition from left-of-center cult favorite to bona fide diva.
Not that this record is some sort of overly produced pop confection. In the past few years, Blanco has struck up a blossoming partnership with electronic producer FaltyDL, and the pair have collaborated on some understated gems, including a remix of Ashnikko’s recent single “Deal With It” and “You Will Find It,” a subtly gorgeous electro-folk-trap track featuring Devendra Banhart (a somewhat unexpected early touchstone for Blanco). FaltyDL takes the reins on Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, enveloping Blanco’s signature banjee rhyming style in a warm mist of languid beats, like summer jams spilling out of a parked car at the Christopher Street Piers on the hottest day of the year.
“Summer Fling,” with Kari Faux, is perhaps the best example of the album’s abiding mood. As a distorted vocal declares, “Summer come, no time to be boo’d up,” Blanco rattles off a list of seasonal conquests that harkens back to “men ain’t shit” classics like Lil Kim’s “How Many Licks?” Mykki’s firecracker wit is ever-present: When a “hippie dude” swears that “J. Cole saved rap,” Blanco spits back, “Your dick smells like hamsters, go take a bath.” This is what the persona of Mykki Blanco has always been—quick, cocky, confident, real. On “Summer Fling,” they sound ready to devour everything in their path.
Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep features an all-star cast of Blanco’s contemporaries; each supporting player brings their own flair, yet never outshines Blanco’s vision. When Big Freedia joins album closer “That’s Folks,” it’s not a frenetic bounce verse but a joyous, powerful moment to celebrate chosen families within the Black experience. On the Dev Hynes collab “It’s Not My Choice,” probably the most unlikely track on the record, Blanco is transported into a Blood Orange dreamworld without relinquishing their role as the main character. At every turn, Blanco asserts themselves, unwavering.
The old Blanco still rears their head, smeared eyeliner and all. “Fuck Your Choices,” a short, scathing breakup banger that packs acerbic ire over a quasi-industrial beat, is the song most reminiscent of Blanco’s earlier work. Smack dab in the middle of the album, it’s less a wake-up call than a screeching alarm. Though only a minute and a half long, it’s meant to remind the listener that Blanco isn’t just a rapper—they’re an artist who purposefully embodies multiple aspects of queer Black culture. Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep is the latest chapter in the chaotic yet deliberate evolution of a no-holds-barred performer who’s only now reaching their apex.

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The rapper and singer’s endlessly imitative new album chases trendy sounds and obvious samples to mask that it has nothing to say.

COI

While some artists begrudgingly hopped on TikTok to market their music, Coi Leray turned the app into her digital playground with bite-sized hits like “Big Purr (Prrdd)” and “Twinnem.” The 26-year-old rapper and singer knows how to play the numbers game, to create frenetic snippets to hold a toddler’s attention in between episodes of Bluey and Temple Run. Her imprint, Trendsetter Studios, seems to be based on principles of originality and future-forward creations. True to Trendsetters’ mission statement, Coi Leray models a future where generative AI has taken over the music industry. The year is 2040, and the only songs produced are ones “sampling the sample that was already sampled.” Welcome to Prince’s hell.
Coi Leray’s new album, COI, might as well be marketed as a covers album. Roughly 75% of the album relies on painfully obvious samples, copied and pasted in with little modification. Its big hit is “Players,” which deploys the intergalactic strut of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” to insist that women can run games on men too. From Hall and Oates’ “Rich Girl” (“Bitch Girl”) to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” Coi unimaginatively spins songs by men into #girlboss anthems. Hall’s vocal presence on the former song disrupts the heart rate accelerating momentum of the electric guitar, gospel-like “oohs,” and Coi’s roach-stomping delivery—one of the few semi-unique elements on the album.
If Kidz Bop covered some of the songs on this record, you would only be able to tell it’s not an original because of the curse words. “My Body” butchers Lesley Gore’s iconic track “It’s My Party” with a childishly dull slogan: “It’s my body, I can fuck who I want to,” she raps brattily in an amateur attempt at slut-shaming commentary. “Hakuna Matata, these bitches don’t want a problem” she continues the egregiously corny lyrical streak on “Make My Day,” a workout tape version of Technotronic’s party-starting “Pump Up the Jam.” The raucous choir and country-rock guitar line lands on “Black Rose” lands more like a soundtrack to a Chevy Silverado commercial than stadium-ready rock in the vein of Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock ’N’ Roll.”
When she’s not deploying samples of popular songs, she’s hopping on the wave of today’s popular sounds. House is popping, so she proclaims to like voguing on the lethargic club-thumper “Spend It,” complete with a phoned-in verse from Saucy Santana. Oh, the youth are shaking their hips to Jersey Club? Here’s “Get Loud” for you. “Don’t Chat Me Up” is the best example of Coi trying to jam her feet into a boot 5 sizes too small. Featuring Peckham rapper Giggs, the track also features an egregious British accent from Coi. Since the early 2010s, Nicki Minaj has used British accents for her alter egos Martha and Roman Zolanski or just to up the theatrics of her live performances. Of course, Gen-Z has been seen adopting fake British accents, but when Coi does it (“Gimme that ting I want”) it sounds like she’s weirdly mocking Giggs, not becoming a character.
“Bops” takes advantage of the late-’90s, early-00s music revival with slinky percussive clinks and a glitchy synth reminiscent of the Neptunes’ signature production. If you didn’t catch it, don’t worry, she gives you a clue: “Pull up in the spaceship, call me Neptune.” To be fair, the song is a bop. However, the plural “bops” she claims to have are on timeshare. In a recent interview with Ebro, Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.


A new compilation from Habibi Funk records highlights the old and interweaving sounds of Algerian coladera, Lebanese AOR, Egyptian disco, Moroccan funk and more.

Various Artists: Habibi Funk: An Eclectic Selection of Music From the Arab World

In an interview with The Believer, Sublime Frequencies founder Alan Bishop described a vast difference between Western and other cultures. “There’s a thing about ‘new is everything,’ old is unwanted,” he said, going on to add that while he fetishized these cultures’ old music, he realized that in locales like Thailand, Morocco, or Syria, “the culture is left to rot, just like the buildings and the infrastructure. No money is going back into preserving things.” Perhaps as a bulwark against such rot, the Habibi Funk imprint was set up two years ago to shine a light on older music from the Arab world and founder Jannis Stuertz is aware of that dichotomy. “Too often re-releases of old music are mainly being consumed exclusively by a western audience,” he writes in the liner notes that accompany his label’s latest compilation, though he notes that in traveling through the Middle East, he now counters young fans who “got attached to music of their parents’ generations and that they are now themselves…looking for records.”
Reissues of late often scrounge neglected parts of the world for western pulses, be it Surinam, the French West Indies, or Hawaii. And across its first six releases, Habibi Funk generally does appeal to what sounds good to western ears, usually of the funk variety, with traces of soul, R&B, rock and smooth disco for good measure. But in our current climate where Islam and Arab culture remains grossly distorted and willfully misunderstood, there’s a sense of urgency that—beyond the music—the label is also offering a Western audience a chance to better understand this region by moving to it.
It’s fitting that the set kicks off with “Bsslama Hbibti,” a hard-sweating stomp from Fadoul, a Moroccan whose closest parallel might be to James Brown. From the artist who helped put them on the radar, “Hbiti” features gritty drums, lashing guitar, and Fadoul’s near-manic pleas atop it all. But whereas Brown and band would be dapper and disciplined, there’s something unhinged in the energy of the performance that brings to mind the raucous takes on R&B that Rob Tyner and the MC5 dipped into. Its companion is Bob Destiny’s “Wang Dang,” which—although recorded and released in Algeria—is shouted by an African-American from New Orleans who spent time in the region as a choreographer. Similarly curious is how the melody for “Für Elise” crosses borders to Morocco to become the guitar line for the shouts of a raucous unknown track from Attarazat Addahabia.
Fans of Sublime Frequencies and their exhaustive look at Southeast Asian bands taken by surf music will find kinship in “Mirza” and the skronking sax lines of Sudanese track “El Bomba.” And just when it seems the comp is firmly entrenched in an exploration of how ’60s rock and R&B infiltrated the region, the tumbling disco beat and needling reeds make Mallek Mohamed’s “Rouhi Ya Hafida” refreshing. (The liner notes also hint that the Algerian musician also recorded but never released experimental electronic music as well.) “Sah,” from Egyptian artist Al Massrieen, also rides a slick dance beat, the female backing vocals and slide guitar sending it towards the cosmic end of the disco spectrum. But sometimes the sleeker funk doesn’t quite work on some of the tracks, as on the too busy rubber bass of “Lala Tibki” and lo-fi “Games.”
The most arresting track is “Ayonha,” featuring buoyant drum machines, jangly guitars and tickly synths, all played by Libyan-born Hamid El Shaeri. El Shaeri found pop stardom in Egypt from the ’80s well into the ’00s and the track’s airy harmonies and easy feel wouldn’t sound out of place on AM radio in California. Similarly, sweet vocal harmonies drift across Tunisian band Dalton, who embrace the likes of Tim Maia and the Doobie Brothers on the laidback “Soul Brother.” Sounding at once American and Brazilian, the Tunisians suggest—if sadly not a real-world actuality—a musical brotherhood that transcends such boundaries.


The mysterious electronic musician, now a solo artist, scores a whimsical soundtrack to a 90-year-old German silent film. Soft, gentle, and sparse, his music is imbued with a quiet sense of wonder.

People on Sunday

Domenique Dumont’s music has traditionally entailed a game of hide-and-seek, concealing vocals behind layers of reverb and placing the drums right up at the front of the mix, daring the listener to dig to get to the center of it all. The artist is no less forthcoming about his, or their, own identity. The project was previously said to be a collaboration between the Latvian duo of Arturs Liepins and Anete Stuce and an unnamed (and possibly fictitious) French artist. Five years after their 2015 debut EP, Comme Ça, Dumont returns as a solo act, though not much more is known about him. The duo made its name with the underground hit “L’Esprit de L’Escalier,” a chirpy song that was just center-left of outright pop, and their debut album on France’s Antinote label, Miniatures de Auto Rhythm, continued in the same vein of Balearic pop songs made to be enjoyed in the sunshine.
By contrast, People on Sunday takes a more subdued—and more conceptual—tack. The album was conceived as an original soundtrack to a 1930 German silent film of the same name. Part documentary, part fiction, the film follows its characters, played by amateur actors, around a normal Sunday in Weimar Berlin, unwittingly capturing a snapshot of a city on the verge of cataclysmic changes. Accordingly, Dumont’s melodies are also like characters—soft and gentle, and often fairly sparse, yet imbued with all the sweetness, complexity, and intensity of the people they soundtrack.
The album’s title track opens on a motif that loops like a stuck record, suggesting the unchanging rhythms of everyday routine, but new sounds—flutes, harps, chimes—are constantly coming and going, as though testaments to the little changes that interrupt that monotony. Album closer “Everyday Life” has a plodding cadence; it’s upheld by an arpeggiated pattern that bumbles its way through the song, embellished by other elements along the way. In their tweeness, these ornaments resemble the work of Mort Garson, the synth pioneer who composed his landmark 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia to be played to houseplants. The return of the main theme after a significant breather, followed by a final metronome-like beep, recalls life’s ceaseless motion, ever forward, past the present moment and into the next.
Dumont’s palette of vintage synthesizers imbues these vignettes with a quiet sense of wonder. “Gone for a Wander” is contemplative and placid, embodying the aimless pleasure of the song’s title. Dumont’s short flourishes adorn the slow, steady rhythm with moments of delight, like a wanderer stopping in a clearing to observe light bouncing off puddles. “Merry-Go-Round” is one of the busiest tracks on the album, populated with lots of different elements and held together by a single arpeggiated melody. Eventually, the smaller motifs blend into one colourful blur, just as the world does from the viewpoint of the center of a carousel. In little moments like these, the joy that People on Sunday radiates is self-evident, even when untethered from the film that inspired it.
Like the film, Dumont’s soundtrack is about taking stock of the ordinary. It also imparts a valuable lesson, one that could equally apply to the events of this year: Savor the quotidian wherever possible, because who knows what tomorrow will be like.

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The Chicago soul outfit’s latest album is well-arranged and reflective, content with being pretty and sitting still.

Tomorrow

Throughout their decade-long career, the O’My’s have been defined by where they’re from and who they’ve worked with. The group has swelled to almost double digits and been shrunken again to its founding twosome, the vocalist-guitarist Maceo Haymes and the vocalist-keyboardist Nick Hennessey. On their new album, Tomorrow, their first since 2015, those singers surround themselves with a familiar Windy City crew: Chance the Rapper and Nico Segal (who you might know better as Donnie Trumpet, Kaina, a rising singer, and Carter Lang, the bassist who produced the majority of SZA’s Ctrl. The message is clear: No matter how big or small the actual group is, the O’My’s will always constitute a community. Even when they are a duo, they are a merry band.
Haymes and Hennessey have been playing together since they were teenagers and their chemistry reflects the depth of their relationship; they coax a similar, light-fingered touch from their respective instruments, passing the baton to each other so rapidly that it can be hard to keep track of who’s carrying it. Their willingness to hand off the microphone to each other, and to their many collaborators, makes Tomorrow a more sleepy, reflective album, content with being pretty and sitting still. There’s too little energy here, but the record’s palette is so bright that it doesn’t feel comfortably languorous. Instead, it’s just sluggish.
There are exceptions. “Baskets” is a strong single, snapping out of the lull of its lilting verses with an urgent chorus, one that crackles with the dramatic tension that much of the record lacks. “Walkout,” another standout, is more representative, a slow-burning song about a romantic partner whose company serves as a welcome kind of human sedative: “You are my love, you keep me mellow.” But the melody has punch and the song’s lovely instrumental touches are invigorating, and the track ends with a sweet message from Haymes’ grandmother. And the title track gets by on pure stickiness, its refrain undergirded by lovely finger-picking from Haymes.
Unfortunately, stickiness is a characteristic that much of the record lacks. Part of the problem is pacing. The first two tracks on Tomorrow, ”Starship” and “Niña Fresa,” are among the record’s least interesting and they hamper the album’s momentum out the gate, hamstringing more urgent songs like “Baskets” and “Afraid.” Haymes has a lovely falsetto, but its frequent deployment dulls the contrast between different sections of the record and even the more moderately-paced songs seem to crawl. “There’s too much waiting around” the duo croons on “Faces,” and it almost feels like an inadvertent take on their album.
None of this is a knock on the musicianship of Tomorrow. Hennessey is particularly impressive, offering dynamic backup wherever needed and occasionally even breaking through the mix with passages like the ones that sit at the front of “Faces.” But it’s instructive to note what happens to able guest verses by Saba and Chance, which pass in a flash, as if the rappers don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. On “Puddles,” Saba’s verse arrives within the first minute but, perhaps looking to match the mild production, he fails to make much of an impact. Chance fares only slightly better, adapting one of his softer flows on “Idea.”
The problem is, there’s little room for star turns on Tomorrow, a record that feels so tailored to the collective that it fails to highlight any originality on the part of the individual artists involved. Haymes told Billboard about the spontaneity of collaboration in the city, saying that they “happen just by being in the room or being at the park or bumping into somebody.” Tomorrow’s best moments are characterized by that sense of happy spontaneity. But it’s interesting to consider what the record might have sounded like if the duo at its heart fought for a stronger sense of authorship, or if one of their guests had been a little less polite, a little less agreeable. As it is, everyone concedes to everyone else, and a soulful record lacks the bodies that would otherwise give it shape.


Jeremih's long-delayed third studio album officially renders his early career a distant memory and establishes himself as one of R&B's most singular voices. In its subtle seduction, Late Nights feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest.

Late Nights: The Album

Imagine a Groundhog Day sequel where each day is another doomed re-run of your significant other's birthday. "It's the best day of the year, girl," you mumble for the thousandth time, fumbling for a Cialis. No one gets older, and nothing changes. That's been the unfortunate majority of Jeremih's career—somewhat bafflingly, considering the singer and multi-instrumentalist has racked up three platinum singles and features on hits from half the rap game. Since "Birthday Sex"—his 2009 debut single, recorded in college classmate Mick Schultz' makeshift studio—took hold of Chicago radio and then the world, he's tried in vain to politely distance himself from the song. And meanwhile, he obsessively adjusted and readjusted Late Nights, his third studio album: the one that officially renders his early career a distant memory and establishes himself as one of R&B's most singular voices.
The Late Nights universe pays no mind to the swagless Gregorian calendar, abiding instead by the hours of Patron shots and wanton DM slides. Each day begins at dusk and ends at sunrise, eyelids gently twitching from leftover molly. It is a purgatory in the best sense, a retreat from reality for discerning hedonists. Jeremih seems to zone out a lot: two separate instances on Late Nights find him coming to the realization that he is the only clothed person in the room, as if he'd absentmindedly stumbled into a drunken orgy. Above all else, he needs room to breathe. Late Night's guiding principle is space—for his weightless upper register to float, and for the album's barely-there production to echo off itself. "Man, my whip's so big when you in it," he crows to his beguiling passenger on "Planez", this year's best radio R&B single in spite of J. Cole's paraphiliac trainwreck of a guest verse. It's a small sentiment that gestures at something grander: When you're with me, my world opens up. And that's exactly how Late Nights feels.
There is almost no continuity between this album and Jeremih's last, 2010's paint-by-numbers All About You. With its dim-lit crackle and delicate suggestions of beats, Late Nights' only real predecessor is his 2012 mixtape of the same title—one he released for free against the guidance of Def Jam, who seemed unwilling to give Jeremih the benefit of the doubt. To be fair, no one could have seen it coming: impeccably produced, subtle, and hot as fuck, it showed Jeremih like no one had seen before. Parts of Late Nights, the album, feel like direct continuations of that tape's sound: third single "Oui" builds on the delicate doo-wop of "Rosa Acosta" like a gently-traced impression of a Terius Nash creation. But then the bottom drops out, and Jeremih slips into a momentary interpolation of Shai's "If I Ever Fall in Love". It's easy to see what draws him to the 1992 hit: a wisp of a backdrop, over which the quartet's harmonies defy gravity.
But Late Nights' most stunning moments take the mixtape's best ideas and strip them down further than seemed possible. "Pass Dat" is little more than suggestive synth echo and bass tremor; "Woosah" rations percussion like there was a drought, sustaining itself off muted finger-snaps and the flick of a lighter. More than ever, Jeremih—who taught himself the drums at three years old—has learned to use his own voice as a rhythmic element, redefining the idea of "flow" for the R&B set. It's the logical reverse of the direction rap's been moving in for most of the 2010s, blurring rapped and sung delivery to indistinguishability; on "Drank", he skips nimbly from rap-inspired staccato to half-chanted dancehall melodies, the R&B equivalent of Young Thug's "Stoner". Late Nights' most overt hip-hop crossovers ("Giv No Fucks", "Royalty") feel less essential, but to watch Jeremih approach rap and R&B's midpoint from the opposite direction as rhythmic innovators like Future, Migos, and Twista is a fascinating study in contrasts.
It feels like poetic justice that the high point of Late Nights—an album about patience, space, the agonizing tease of perfectionism—is saved for its final track. Over nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Jeremih yawns blearily at his beachside paradise, kind of faded, the only one still awake. He pops some Tylenol, revisits the preceding night's debauchery, smiles. "Sooooo fuckin' wasted," he harmonizes like a delinquent angel choir. It's a derelict canticle, a lullaby for the perpetually hungover, a deep breath. It took him long enough to get here, and he's going to savor the moment for as long as he possibly can, in the little universe he's carved out because the industry didn't have space for him. Late Nights, in its subtle seduction, feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest. Jeremih makes you shut everything else out so that you can hear him whisper in your ear. It was worth the wait.


Across a casually sublime album, Cass McCombs is at his most confident and intentional, constantly returning to the imagery of music and the casualties of a life devoted to making and sharing art.

Heartmind

For an artist who has never seemed particularly interested in discussing the facts of his life or the meaning of his songs, Cass McCombs has been unmistakably straightforward about both when it comes to his latest record, Heartmind. “I made this album as a way to handle the loss of some close friends,” the 44-year-old songwriter said in a press release. “Strange to realize, it wasn’t them who were lost, it was me.” More than anything in his catalog, Heartmind could be called a concept album, and unlike anything since 2011’s moody high-water mark WIT’S END, it feels purposely unified and cohesive, sharing themes and textures and musical threads across eight songs in just over 40 minutes.
In the liner notes, alongside two quotes about Sufism, McCombs dedicates the record to the memory of three late musicians with whom he shared crucial history. The guitarist Neal Casal, who died by suicide in 2019, was his bandmate in his utopian folk side project the Skiffle Players; Chet “JR” White, the Girls instrumentalist who died in 2020, worked on McCombs’ 2013 double album Big Wheel and Others; and Sam Jayne, the songwriter from Lync and Love as Laughter who also died in 2020, played some pivotal early shows with him in the mid-2000s.
Created in the wake of their deaths, Heartmind constantly returns to imagery of music and performance and the casualties of a life devoted to making and sharing art. In the lighthearted “Karaoke,” McCombs questions whether he’s experiencing a real connection with someone or if they’re both going through the motions, reciting old lines in an attempt to convince the room they really feel it. In the gorgeously arranged “A Blue, Blue Band,” a down-on-their-luck touring act from Virginia City, Nevada, has a superpower of making every audience member feel, by the end of the set, precisely how they do—which is to say, blue.
Even the songs that don’t explicitly refer to these subjects eventually reveal their common ground. On one level, “Unproud Warrior” is among McCombs’ most traditional folk songs—a nearly spoken-word narrative about a veteran returning home from war, reconciling with his past and trying to ground himself in the unfamiliar present. And yet, for a subject so commonly associated with protest music, McCombs’ take feels almost apolitical—the point has less to do with the stakes of war than those of aging, making sense of the distinct choices that led to the path you’re on. To conclude his point, the final verse lists a series of masterpieces written by young prodigies—people who, presumably, didn’t feel haunted by decisions they made when they were younger, whose sense of agency carried through life.
As a writer, McCombs has never sounded so confident or intentional. For a long time, his most frequent comparison was Elliott Smith due to his hushed vocals, nonlinear lyrics, and stately, winding melodies. (“Karaoke” and “Belong to Heaven” from this record are particularly strong examples of that last gift.) On Heartmind, McCombs sometimes reminds me of Bob Dylan during the 1980s, the era when he shifted his attention to subjects like Lenny Bruce and the rejuvenating power of Jesus Christ and sleeping in a field with a small dog licking your face, all approached with the same fervent intensity, humor, and absurdity. “Empty ketchup packets may inherit the city,” McCombs sings near the end of the title track, one of the more stirring prophecies you’ll hear in 2022.
What comes next also helps: a slow, spiritual jazz coda that closes the record, breezing and rippling like little else in his songbook. The band assembled for this record—including, among many others, multi-instrumentalist and producer Shahzad Ismaily, drummers Kassa Overall and Joe Russo, keyboardist Frank LoCrasto, saxophonist Charlotte Greve, producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Buddy Ross, and guest vocalists Danielle Haim, Wynonna Judd, the Chapin Sisters, and Charlie Burnham—feels hand-selected to create this dusky, live-sounding atmosphere. Even moments of respite like “New Earth,” with its passing mentions of muted tweets and “Mr. Musk,” seem to rustle and shift as you listen, packing in as much texture as possible to keep things building until the fadeout.
This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics. In “Music Is Blue”—a song about obsession with a knotty arrangement that does, indeed, sound like it would take quite a bit of dedication to master, or even just sing along to—McCombs presents what reads like a bleak itinerary of touring life: living off beer, running out of money, losing touch with reality. “I stole to feed her/That’s the lie told by a cheater,” McCombs sings, and it’s around this point that “Music Is Blue” starts to feel like a love song to the person who brought some light into the dark inevitability of his lifestyle. Whether or not the song is autobiographical, you can hear its message resonate through Heartmind, shining on its hard truths and casting a strange, beautiful glow that, for the span of the record, seems like the only thing worth risking it all to share.


Sufjan Stevens, the New York composer Son Lux, and the Anticon rapper Serengeti form an oddball trio on this EP.

Beak & Claw

Unlikely groupings of artists, promising as they seem, rarely yield anything more enduring than a colorful press release. Though it sounds cynical, a roomful of musicians who seem like they have no business being together usually don't, it turns out, and are far more apt to produce a dismaying mess than an unprecedented, illuminating fusion. Over the last five or six years, Sufjan Stevens seems to have suffered a particular weakness for just this sort of collaboration, and his fans, accordingly, have suffered along with him. For whatever reason, one of the earlier decade's most singular voices has grown increasingly fond of hurling himself into colorful masses of people. The BQE project, the Osso String Quartet dalliance, collaborations with everyone from the Clogs to the Castanets to Clare & the Reasons-- Sufjan is now defined largely as the guy you find on everyone else's records. It might be irrepressible eagerness, or it might be his crazy-like-a-fox way of working beyond the kind of flashpoint moment that can stop a career like a clock, but it's resulted in a breathtakingly erratic run littered with inconsequential one-offs just like this one.
Here's the lineup for s/s/s : Sufjan, the new York composer Son Lux (who keeps one foot in the cozy NYC indie classical scene), and the Anticon rapper Serengeti. You'll notice that all three artists' first initials begin with "S." You may now sigh a little and feel a slight sinking in your chest. The first song, "Museum Day", opens with the sound of Sufjan piped through an Auto-Tuner, a moment that heightens the general dubiousness. The effect is tweaked a little too artlessly, giving it a suspiciously parodic hint that feels about three years past its cultural sell-by date.
The good news is that the resulting EP is far less dire than all this suggests. Son Lux and Sufjan have created a nice tapestry of mournful synth pads and strings, and it makes a suitable background for those by-now familiar somber-choirboy voices Sufjan deploys to add shivers. Serengeti's loose, conversational story-rapping is the wild card, but he fits into the subdued atmosphere, talking quietly more than he raps. The downcast, emo-rap slam poetry he works in has a perilously high carnage margin, but he keeps from plummeting off a cliff here, staying understated and writing in reliably small, vivid images: "Sneaking in my sister's purse/ That was money for the water bill." Over an irregular, clomping beat on "Beyond Any Doubt", he tells us about being "Lonely and depressed/ Eating cold fried rice." We've all been there.
On "If This Is Real", Serengeti even invites us to his wedding, where his best man reads a poem: "A beautiful villanelle, you made everybody's eyes well." He tells someone else they are "vital like Krebs cycle," which feels almost ridiculous enough to be something a drunken groom tells a friend. All of this is awkward, obviously, but the openhearted spirit is endearing, and the songs themselves pulse fleetly enough that you aren't really given much of an opportunity to snort. You can feel the breeze on your face from the pages of a 500-page novel riffled in front of you. As for Sufjan, apart from a couple flourishes, his presence is about as detectable as a teaspoon of salt in a pot of jambalaya. But these three have managed to come away with this thing with some actual songs, which is, well, something. Whether or not they've produced anything that justifies the time away they could have spent producing something better, more consequential, by themselves? Well, the jury's still out there.


This blistering punk-rock debut from a 55-year-old veteran of the scene delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. These are weary, angry songs, crafted with an insatiable verve and an almost triumphant fury.

Book of Curses

Chris Rowley is an unlikely mouthpiece for adulthood. As a vocalist in the bombastic Brighton riot grrrl group Huggy Bear, he balanced the sardonic sneers of Niki Elliot and the harmonic cheers of Jo Johnson with his dry delivery, a spoken-word spitfire of resentment and frustration. “Kids get in, pulled out by parent-core in a gravy of envy they're descending,” he barked menacingly on their 1993 record Taking The Rough With The Smooch, a self-aware portrait of teenage rage. But in the 26 years since the band’s predetermined 1994 disbandment (the group, ever principled, allegedly decided their three-year lifespan before they began the band), Rowley has experienced the inevitable yet unthinkable for a one-time punk: middle age. The 55-year-old is now a father with a day job at a non-profit, who until recently had left his days of “boy-girl revolutions” in the past. If Book of Curses, his blistering debut as the frontman of Adulkt Life, is any indication, Rowley’s taut temper has only grown more gnarled in the intervening years. The only thing more infuriating than societal expectations of adolescence, it suggests, is the paralyzing ennui of growing old.
Adulkt Life (“no need to pronounce the ‘K’,” they insist) largely functions as a vehicle for Rowley’s lyrics, a focus that reflects the band’s inception. He connected with John Arthur Webb, who went on to found the British noise rock group Male Bonding, while shopping for records at Rough Trade in the early ’00s. Webb, upon discovering Rowley’s punk past, suggested that they record together. Their then-teenaged drummer and fellow Rough Trade regular, Sonny Barrett, was similarly sold after watching one of the sole live videos of Huggy Bear available on YouTube. With Male Bonding bassist Kevin Hendrick rounding out their sound, the band reimagines the intensity of riot grrrl within the brooding soundscape of post-punk and the thematic lens of fatherhood.
There’s still plenty of Huggy Bear’s “sex and confusion” abound on Book of Curses, but the former is couched in more Freudian, fraught terms: “In your hand a ticking cock,” Rowley shouts repeatedly on “Clean (But Itchy),” rushed as if the phrase were a subconscious tic or an all-possessing hex. And where Huggy Bear once sang of schoolyard sexuality, Rowley surveys the youth with suspicion on “New Curfew,” his rage building with each pass of the song’s winding, bluesy guitars. “What are these kids, 9 or 10?” he asks, before swallowing existential threats of climate change delivered by his daughter: “She said dad one day this will be gone.” Where Huggy Bear once sang of robbing cops, Adulkt Life mines the inner conflict of seeing your child’s generation take up the fight against state violence: “I don't know what I feel when I hear sirens outside anymore,” he yells, an eerily prescient summation of the deepening generational divide on law and order.
There’s an anxiety that pulsates through Book of Curses, from the squealing horns that pierce the opening track to the rumbling feedback that echoes throughout “Room Context,” like a storm brewing on a distant horizon. Rowley’s lyrical brevity darts between the equally sparse instrumentation—”Ha ha!” he taunts on “Whistle Country,” playing the counterpart to Webb’s blunt, dense guitar. “Whistle Country” channels the thrashing noise of Male Bonding into its barest possible sketches; each note lands with the intensity of their fiery debut, but with an added swagger. These are slow songs, but their rhythm crawls with stiffness rather than patience, played through hunched shoulders and bleary, bag-laden eyes. This is the measured, staggering punk of exhaustion, the tense lurch of a band that has internalized the cruel pacing of life itself—Book of Curses, much like adulthood, advances glacially until its building tension suddenly implodes.
Adulkt Life delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. Rather than shouting for revolution, it screams into the void. It seeks to fill the emptiness left by endless PTA meetings, the ceaselessness of work, the unending charge of new, befuddling technologies. Their debut pummels with a confidence borne from nihilism, an acceptance that comes with the realization that history has no natural arc, and that life only grows more vexing after the high-minded certainty of youthful indignance has passed. It’s rock made by a man who refuses to buy a cellphone; it’s poetry written through gritted teeth and the forced parental facade of calmness in the face of chaos. But it’s also crafted with an insatiable verve, an almost triumphant fury. Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

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Tom Krell’s latest album of ambient R&B club music feels both reverent and relevant, with icy textures and knotty lyrics that leave plenty to untangle.

The Anteroom

How does one contend with the term “blue-eyed soul” when listening to the radio nowadays? Bazzi’s “Mine” or something by blackbear always seems to come up; Post Malone is perennial on pop and hip-hop stations. Post is technically a rapper but on “Psycho,” he is doing the same slurry crooning as his guest Ty Dolla $ign—who is not a rapper—and the line of what is R&B to a radio programmer continues to be confounding.
White guys are not just inhabiting the dirtbag tenderness space built in the early ’90s by Jodeci and now dominated in this decade by Bryson Tiller and the Weeknd. Since he first started releasing music online in the late 2000s, How to Dress Well (né Tom Krell) has been working with a palette that incorporates just as much traditional R&B as it does ambient electronic music. But as much as Krell’s music registers as “cool,” the evolution of his sound has been delightfully unhip. His 2014 album, “What Is This Heart,” was more adult contemporary but in a way that made obvious Krell’s grown and modernist vision of pop music. Krell’s latest, The Anteroom, is another endeavor of his polyglot pop fortitude, only this time instead he’s working with icier source material.
Krell’s intention was to make “an ambient dance record where the energy never goes above three out of ten.” Most of the album’s sensations are serene and spectral, often reminiscent of the ghostly electronic-R&B urtext, Burial’s Aaliyah-sampling “In McDonald’s.” The Anteroom is full of skittery electronics with hints of ambient and house textures that work as both as a marker for how outside of the margins Krell operates and how narrowly he deviates from his own previous innovations in the underground. His attention to detail—like corners of the haunting, warped vocals on opener “Humans Disguised as Animals | Nonkilling 1” and the tightly wound phrasing of the lyrics—is what makes the album shine. But in a year when electronic music feels more introspective than ever, calming dance music isn’t really a breakthrough thesis. The intent do something more slowed, oddly, puts him in the company of Post and co.’s Xanax-soothed renditions of R&B.
The lyrics on The Anteroom could work as a standalone chapbook with plenty to pick apart. A striking line comes from “Body Fat”: “There’s still so much pain and anger in your body fat.” It is really jarring to hear something that uses the same language of insult sung in falsetto. It is really jarring to hear the words “body fat” sung so tenderly, in general. It invokes that stoner wisdom that you can exercise the THC out of its storage in your own body fat before a drug test, as if anger and pain can be stored there, as well. The lyric could also reflect the language of body-shaming back to its listener and ring densely cruel with its invocation of pain and anger and fat, even though all bodies have it. I don’t think this is intentional, it’s just late-capitalism has designed the world to make me feel that way. This is the kind of experience, the untangling of his words, that Krell goes for here.
The last three tracks on the album are also worthy of their own study. Here, there is real friction, the kind of cross-pollination of pop, indie, and electronic that Krell excels at. Closers “False Skull 12” and “Nothing” are heavy with the self-cited influence of Coil’s pioneering experiments with new wave and industrial but through the lens of Krell’s own pop vision. On “Brutal (feat. Ocean Vuong) | False Skull 5,” he trills over syrupy boom-bap and pitched-up strings, another new terrain for a record so full of conventional riffs.
These pieces have the same intricacies as his lyrics and make for the most interesting music on the album, but they also skew the perception of where Krell fits in in 2018. Placid R&Bish pop by guys like blackbear and Bazzi works because its numbness is a palliative for the constant influx of heinous news and the din of social media. This is also why ambient is having an enormous resurgence in electronic music. Club music, however, is still a necessary tool to combat tough times and Krell’s soft club ventures don’t quite surprise like his hybrids usually do. He is at his best when he’s tinkering in territories where others are not.


Kenny Dixon Jr.—aka Moodymann—represents the second wave of homegrown Detroit electronic music masters. His new self-titled album throws in plenty of gospel, blues, house music, and roller-rink funk on top of his singular sound.

Moodymann

After the rise of “The Belleville Three”—Detroit techno originators Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins (soon joined by Carl Craig)—and after that decidedly Eurocentric African-American musical export took root in London and Berlin, Kenny Dixon Jr. represented the second wave of homegrown Detroit electronic music masters. He released his first single in 1994 and helmed a renaissance of that scene alongside peers like Rick Wilhite, Marcellus Pittman and Theo Parrish (the four intermittently collaborate as 3 Chairs). Since the 90s, no two producers have better exported that “Detroit” sound than Theo Parrish and Moodymann. In citing that bankrupted American city though, one means a very specific sound, one that writer Michaelangelo Matos recently described in an NPR story as “a byword for high-minded purism, a bulwark against ‘commercial’ dance music,” the music itself informed by “jazz chords, R&B melancholy, snatches of old soul and plenty of cosmic-mindedness.”
All four genres abound in Moodymann’s work, and his self-titled newest album also throws in plenty of gospel, blues, house music, roller-rink funk, all of it capped by a long slow nod in the direction of forbearers Parliament-Funkadelic. There’s a purism to Moody’s music, but it’s made of muddy waters (literally, on “Sunday Hotel”), dusty vinyl grooves and—if the Popeye's inner sleeve is to believed—greasy fingers. Playful in juxtaposition to Theo’s seriousness, the Dizzy Gillespie to Theo's Miles Davis, Dixon might be best glimpsed through the prism of another Detroiter: J Dilla. Both men deconstructed and flipped old funk and soul to new ends, Dilla’s focus towards hip-hop, Moodymann's towards basement-deep house music.
Take an album highlight like “Desire", which features Moodymann with uncredited Blue Note crooner José James. James does his deepest Gil Scott-Heron impersonation, Moody deploys piano chords as judiciously as Bill Evans did, all of it set against a beat that edges towards house only to dissipate just before settling into a steady pace. Old 33 1/3 soul gets spun at 45 on the ecstatic “Lyk U Use 2", the skittering snare pattern of fellow Detroiter Andrés then slowed all the way down to 45 BPM. It’s not only old soul vocals though: there’s an acid squirt over the Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan on “IGuessuneverbeenlonely” and most peculiar of all, has Lana Del Rey ask about death on “Born 2 Die".
But the most prominent voice on the album is Dixon’s own. In a close-mic’d croak, Moodymann’s vocal delivery vacillates between late-night disc jockey and booty call from Sly Stone. He laments that “eight and a half is not enuff anymore,” that girls may not like 45s. One of the funniest call-and-responses of the year occurs on the too-brief “No”; KDJ heavy-breathes from a payphone to one of those bikini-clad nymphets draped across him on the front cover, asks if she likes fried chicken without hot sauce. Also: “Y’all mad I’m a local Detroiter?”
While almost every second of Moodymann’s oeuvre hearkens back to his hometown, Moodymann is perhaps his most explicit ode yet. Snippets of movie dialogue, murder statistics and tales of 70s heroin kingpins like Henry Marzette emerge between the spacious, slack grooves. For all the insouciance that’s informed Moodymann’s work over the past two decades, Moodymann feels downright serious at times. It comes to the fore on the sprawling twelve-minute version of Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop", which is part cover, part edit, part deconstruction, part remix. Yet for a reason not altogether clear amid its haze is that these parts just don’t quite add up. Blame the news report samples or perhaps Dixon’s own croon, but midway through, I fantasized what a sidelong KDJ edit circa 1998 might’ve sounded like instead.


For his first album in five years, Matthew Houck puts fatherhood and a move to Nashville to good use on songs that are sly and wry and allow his voice to cut through intricate arrangements.

C’est La Vie

Maybe it was Pro Tools. Perhaps it was the post-Napster access explosion. Or it may have been the slow spread of Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, or even Bright Eyes. But at some point after the turn of the millenium, every block and every burgh seemed to sprout its own home-recording, achy-voiced strummer, ready to reorient their tunes with field recordings, hip-hop edits, swirling arrangements, Max/MSP processes, or a personal Wrecking Crew of session musicians. It was all personal and wonderful—or, sometimes, simply forgettable.
Matthew Houck emerged into into a moment seemingly glutted with often-bearded songwriters eager to deconstruct and expand themselves, from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon to Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. Houck arrived with a thin but instantly recognizable creak, somewhere in the neighborhood of Will Oldham, and an Elephant 6 auteur’s sense of scope. For the past 15 years, Phosphorescent’s discography has pivoted among arrangement concepts for that voice, from the spare colors of his 2003 debut to the ambitious countrypolitan landscapes of 2013’s much-loved Muchacho. Houck’s tone and songs could disappear into his well-built, tasteful atmospheres. At least for me, Phosphorescent often fell safely in the realm of perhaps-incorrect stereotypes—enjoyable, but ultimately failing to stick.
But on C’est La Vie—the first Phosphorescent studio album in a half-decade and since Houck left Brooklyn for fatherhood in Nashville—his voice cuts through inventive settings with a confidence, clarity, and sensibility that can vividly and unexpectedly recall 1980s Paul Simon, minus the global beats and entitled boomerness. “New Birth in New England” bounces irresistibly, not too far removed from Vampire Weekend, either, but counterbalanced by Ricky Ray Jackson’s luminous pedal steel. Though nothing else on the album quite sounds like that first single (or hits the same giddiness), the Simon similarity runs deep. Houck’s narrator is often sly, wry, and conversational. “‘C’est la vie,’ she says/But I don’t know what she means,” he sings on the chorus of “C’est La Vie No.2.” Like Simon, Houck casts himself as a slightly befuddled subject, his internal monologues tumbling into melody.
As far removed from Phosphorescent’s bedroom folk days as Simon’s 1986 Graceland was from his singer-songwriter debut, C’est La Vie is a mirror of Houck’s own maturation, its similarities to Simon perhaps as structural as they are sonic. In places, it sounds like a late-30s check-in for Houck and his listeners, as “My Beautiful Boy” attests. The type of open-hearted dad-dom, that might make a younger songwriter sneer (or blush), it floats on a cloud of gorgeous ambient percussion that keeps the arrangement from drifting into nebulous string-synths. Though Houck has relocated to Nashville, C’est La Vie’s most compelling music is perhaps its least C&W, finding new uses for all that pedal steel. Some of the album’s best moments are more Lambchop than George Jones, especially the vocoder-touched R&B float of “Christmas Down Under.” It would have been unthinkable on Houck’s earliest work.
Sometimes C’est La Vie is a bit too on-the-nose, much like 2010’s middle-of-the-road Here’s to Taking It Easy. “These Rocks” recalls Daniel Lanois’ work with Bob Dylan. Serving as a piece of late-album heaviness, with Houck condensing life’s battles into a refrain, the music seems to strain to match the gravity of the central lyric—“These rocks, they are heavy/Been carrying them around all my days.” But it does underscore the bittersweet, top-loaded sense of fun possessed by the rest of C’est La Vie, exemplified by the moment that Jackson’s pedal steel locks into the kosmische pulse of “Around the Horn.” The music suddenly soars beyond the land of songs. It’s the kind of turn on the kind of album that might even make a previously unimpressed listener reevaluate how Houck arrived here. Maybe it was Pro Tools. Or maybe it was daddom.


Stronger Than Pride

Sade’s discography has no sharp pivots or seismic reinventions, but there are plenty of slight tweaks and shifts. On Stronger Than Pride, self-produced after collaborator Robin Millar went blind during the recording of Promise, the English band began to whittle down their sound. Dispensing with the nightclub swing and louche, haunted characters of Diamond Life and Promise, Sade’s third album turned the band’s elegant, composed music into meditation, exploring romance as an interior experience.
After releasing and touring their first two records in quick succession, the band took a breather for Stronger Than Pride. Written in Spain and London and then recorded in France and the Bahamas over the course of a year, the album took shape casually. Guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman recalled it as the first time the band composed songs piecemeal rather than as a collective, an approach perceptible in the looseness of the compositions. The album is a breezy, unrushed affair, where songs loop back in on themselves, sway in place, and fizzle out. Sade doesn’t do outright jams, but “Keep Looking” and “Give It Up” come close, locking into grooves and letting the melodies leisurely unfurl. The latter even features some horn blasts—practically an indulgence, given the band’s tendency toward restraint and poise. While Sade doesn’t reinvent itself on Stronger Than Pride, it does unwind.
The music on Stronger Than Pride is reduced on all fronts: softer rhythms, lighter melodies, fleeter verses. “I wanted it to be more basic and less embellished, with the quiet songs quieter and the harder songs harder,” band leader Sade Adu said at the time. The record isn’t as minimal as that quote suggests (especially when compared to the ethereal, hollowed-out mood music of Love Deluxe), but it is certainly sparse. The arrangement on lithe title track “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” is open like a cloudless sky, carried by a patter of keys, percussion, and pan flute that drift around Sade’s airy voice. As she sings of a love that endures a betrayal, the weightlessness of the arrangements sells her candor. “I still really, really love you,” she croons.
Adu maintains the directness and simplicity of the title track throughout the record. Her writing is noticeably less scenic and moody, treating love as more of a concept than an embodied experience. “To turn my back on you/Now would I turn my back on me?” she asks on the dubby “Turn My Back on You,” perhaps the only Sade song that could be described as hard. “Give it up, give it all” on “Give It Up” is delivered less like a steamy bedroom command and more like a call to prayer. Compared to the glitz and melodrama of  hits like “Smooth Operator,” “Is It a Crime?”and “Jezebel,” these songs don’t have much sizzle or flair. But there is an emotional clarity to these spare lyrics—a cleanness almost, as if Adu has rinsed them in cold water.
The writing takes on a mantric bent as Adu reuses phrases and words from previous verses and repeats them by herself or alongside background singer (and secret weapon) Leroy Osbourne, whose rich voice adds warmth to her cool melodies. “Wanna share my life/Wanna share my life with you,” they duet on the upbeat “Paradise.” “Nothing can come/Nothing can come/Nothing can come/Between us,” they incant on “Nothing Can Come Between Us.” These chants aren’t particularly catchy, but their repetition imbues the record with a quiet anguish. Despite their outward mellowness, these songs always have a faint darkness at the edges.
Matthewman, Paul Denman (bass), and Andrew Hale (keyboard) play up the loneliness and fear lurking behind all the affirmation. On the drumless “Haunt Me,” which is replete with lush riffs and fills, the production wafts around Sade’s pining whispers like a perfume cloud. “Haunt me/In my dreams/If you please,” she beckons nervously. Where most pop ballads center the voice, “Haunt Me” allows it to sink into the abyss. On “I Never Thought I’d See the Day,” another breakup tale, the voice is the focal point, Adu hitting the top of her range as Denman’s restrained strums and Hale’s hushed chords fuse into a fluid void. “I wish you could shelter me,” she nearly belts, her voice streaking through the amorphous mix like a lightning bolt. She sounds utterly alone.
Stronger Than Pride is buoyed by Sade’s ability to coalesce around Sade Adu’s directions, fleshing her ideas out or ceding them space to bloom. The band, especially Adu, is sometimes mocked for being risk-averse and even-keeled—never breaking stride or cutting loose like the divas, heartthrobs, and pop rockers they adjoined on the charts—but in a way, their faith in each other is their gamble. Matthewman once described his bandmates as conduits, saying, “Sade doesn’t play guitar, but she plays it through me...we all kinda play each other that way.” Stronger Than Pride is the sound of Sade calibrating that affinity and establishing—for listeners and for themselves—that they are a unit.

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The Brooklyn-based crooner’s abundant talent vanishes behind hazy production and indistinct writing.

Cometa

Nick Hakim seems poised to make a great album. He’s a guitar-slinging soul singer who’s fluent in punk, jazz, psych rock, and hip-hop, a clear descendant of D’Angelo and Funkadelic. His husky voice and unpretentious guitar playing are ideal vehicles for decorative instrumentation: doubled saxophones, flickering Wurlitzer, programmed drums, the occasional synth. While his full-length debut, 2017’s Green Twins, effortlessly demonstrated his virtuosic abilities, 2020’s WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD sagged with tired melodies and sluggish arrangements, sounding like a neverending studio session where every idea was recorded, even the mediocre ones. Yet Hakim’s talent, as ever, shone through; it was easy to sense a more potent, specific, and emotionally active version of the album buried somewhere in the original. His latest offering, Cometa, creates the same dissonance between what is and what could be. Hakim’s talent is once again on display, but the songs here crumple with limp lyrics and listless structures.
Working with an all-star team of guests, including Alex G, Helado Negro, DJ Dahi, and Andrew Sarlo, Hakim creates sleek, rugged backdrops to croon over, his compositions favoring mood and texture over movement and tension. Most songs are built from simple, stacked guitar riffs, analog hiss, electric bass, and gentle drum patterns. “Vertigo” beautifully blends these components together, leaving Hakim with enough room to sing one of the record’s finest melodies, his vocal harmonies blanketed with reverb and delay. On “M1,” a choral synth meshes with a filtered drum loop as Hakim’s smoky voice rises softly above the instrumentation. Cometa’s at its most engaging when Hakim’s singing seizes the spotlight and resists burrowing beneath the beat, when the production breaks free from its haze and shimmies into an improvisational breakdown, like the fuzzy free-for-all that arrives at the end of “Ani.”
Throughout the album, though, Hakim vanishes behind the production. While there are certainly some standout moments, Cometa aspires to be just another vibe in a vibe-saturated economy. It doesn’t help that Hakim’s lyrics struggle to conjure any memorable image or meaningful emotion. Though he describes the record as a “collection of romantic songs written through different lenses,” Hakim’s writing lacks the detail and specificity required to tell a story, evoke a feeling, or flesh out a metaphor. He operates almost exclusively in euphemism, crafting entire songs around airless bromides like “Time seems to slow down when you’re near me” or “I feel like I’m flying when you stare into my eyes.” “Perfume” is a song about being really into his partner’s perfume; the message at the core of “Market” is that love never dies, sort of like… a flame.
One of the album’s best moments is stashed at the end. “Something” features a crusty acoustic guitar melody and a pocky drumbeat; Hakim’s voice sounds richer and fuller than at any other point on the record. “I just wanna feel something,” he sings once, twice. It’s a biting and propulsive song that clearly communicates his appeal: He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim.


The art-rocker reworks songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, offering a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career.

Director's Cut

This is not, strictly speaking, a new Kate Bush album. Just a warning for all of you who'd gotten used to agonizingly long waits between Bush records. It was easy to hope, when Director's Cut was first announced, that we'd been blessed ahead of schedule with the latest transmission from her private art-rock fairy land. Instead, this is a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career, by an artist who claims not to give much thought to her albums once they've been sent to market.
Director's Cut transforms songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. Sometimes crucial elements (rhythm tracks, vocals) are re-recorded. Some aspects (like certain guest performances) are left unchanged. Occasionally an entire song gets a note-by-note remake. It's a major and unexpected reinvention of familiar and very time-bound material, not quite "new" and also not quite what fans have been playing for years now. The very different mix of Director's Cut changes not just the sound but the emotional kick inside many of these songs. What was once the work of a shy woman who came to roaring life on record is now just as often subdued, reflective, inward-looking. It's worthy of standing as its own entry in Bush's discography, without necessarily replacing the albums it draws from.
At the time of its release, The Sensual World seemed both up to date and not of its time. The glossy studio-obsessive production sounded definitely of its moment, fitting for the era of booming drums and reverb-soaked pop trifles from bands like Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. But the songs, and Bush's performances, were stark reminders that she actually came out of the same tradition that gave us the operatic vocals of prog rock, the jazz-tinged complexity of the Canterbury psychedelic scene, the unashamed theatricality that led to Peter Gabriel dressing up like a giant daffodil. It made for a strange hybrid, the smoothness of the Big 80s meets the complexity and expressionism of the prog 70s. Much of the record's tension came from wrapping shiny pop accessibility around songs that might burst into emotionally raw strangeness at any time. Bush played to the moment, but couldn't be contained by it.
By the time of The Red Shoes-- with its prog structures, guest-star guitar heroics, world music touches, all given another dose of pop polish-- Bush's music was too ornate to fit in with the stripped-down "realness" of alt-rock. It was also still too defiantly individual to sit alongside the work of her 70s and 80s peers, many of whom had moved into comfortable, profitable, and bland MOR singer-songwriter territory. Her moment hadn't so much passed-- though it'd be hard to point out anyone else making music that sounded like this at the time-- as she'd become a genre-of-one. The fussed-over textures and genteel folk touches of adult contemporary peeled back mid-song to reveal naked eroticism, rage, joy, Bush's voice spluttering out wordless weirdness or leaping into ecstatic ululations.
What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new. The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile. But not every element of this patchwork has been pieced together perfectly. The eerie keyboard textures on "And So Love Is", the kind of sour 80s kitsch beloved by Gang Gang Dance, seem surprisingly natural in this new environment. But Eric Clapton's bluesy wanking sounds even more out of place now, stadium pop bluster in a homemade world. It produces tension for sure, but the wrong sort.
It's the singing that just as often startles, though. Bush is less show-offy on Director's Cut than any of her pre-hiatus albums. For a woman known for her range, and her fearlessness at using that range, her performances are always tempered and often low-key here. As with so many songs on Director's Cut, "This Woman's Work" becomes almost shocking in its difference, not least because it's transformed from one of Bush's biggest showstoppers into something far more mournful, the singer restraining herself as if almost but not quite broken by love. The backing track is just as minimal, but deeper, the instrumental textures less brittle. A hushed, lonely Bush sounds as if she's drifting through a vast, lonely space. But instead of the original's childlike verses surging to grown-ass-woman longing on the choruses, Bush is more evenly paced here, communicating deep regret more through a bereft tone than diva theatrics. It's desolate and intimate, like much of Director's Cut, where the original's bravura made it feel both tender and defiant, like much of Bush's early work.
Even with an older and more reserved Bush occasionally putting the brakes on that melodrama, these reworked songs don't totally relinquish that unashamed grandiosity that makes Bush such a love-hate proposition. Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions.


With 2020’s lockdown measures in place, the Los Angeles neighbors passed the time playing harp and guitar together. The results capture the melancholy strangeness of those days.

Mary Lattimore / Paul Sukeena: West Kensington

West Kensington

Memory, place, and the ways they intertwine are recurring themes in Mary Lattimore’s music. The harpist’s titles often allude to the places she holds dear, like Wawa, a mid-Atlantic convenience store chain known for its cheap hoagies. “I’ve always loved romantic melancholia in music,” she told 15 Questions, pinpointing her favorite musical qualities as “lush, deluxe with a little nostalgia and some inexplicable sadness.” On West Kensington, she teams up with guitarist Paul Sukeena to continue to explore the ways that music can bring the past to life. Spinning outward from short, looping melodies that offer ample space for reflection, their music is tinged with a dreamlike haze.
The two musicians recorded West Kensington while lockdowns in the United States were at their strictest. Sukeena and Lattimore lived next door to each other in Los Angeles, and they passed the time by making music together. Their tranquil 2020 track “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool,” whose title references a public swimming pool in Philadelphia, offered an early glimpse into their pensive style. West Kensington picks up where “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool” left off, wrapping gauzy plumes around delicately interwoven synths, harp, and electric guitar.
The duo’s most compelling tracks make the most of both brightness and darkness. “Altar of Tammy” folds deep, agitated tones into twirling layers. Twinkling harp spirals around crunchy electric guitar, building from tiny, melancholy melodies into vast undulations. “Didn’t See the Comet” similarly unites airiness and moodiness. Here, the duo weaves together spun-out drones that waver and grow, letting the natural pulse of the sound swell and dissipate.
West Kensington often sounds like a fantasy, hovering in the space between imagination and reality. At times, though, this starry-eyed style can feel sluggish, weighed down by distorted effects and repetition. Opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” builds from a quavering, ascending melody that repeats throughout but never quite blossoms. Instead, it sounds heavy, as if it’s stuck in place. Rather than exploring the details that made other songs feel full, they lean too much into one idea, forgoing intricacy for sameness. But with “Garage Wine,” the record’s most compelling track, Lattimore and Sukeena effortlessly bridge poignant remembrance with glimmers of hope. It’s here that the music encapsulates the broadest spectrum of feeling, from gloominess to contentedness.
More than two years since Covid-19’s arrival, the “pandemic record” has become an increasingly familiar trope. West Kensington is another addition to the bunch, but because so much of Lattimore and Sukeena’s work already dwelled upon wistful reminiscence, their contribution to the genre doesn’t feel like a gimmick. Instead, it builds on themes they’ve often explored to create music that’s both soothing and introspective. At times, the album’s balminess can feel cloying, but at its best, it captures dazzling complexity with a graceful touch. In those moments, Lattimore and Sukeena showcase the mixture of melancholy, nostalgia, and joy that keeps them pushing forward.


Mavis Staples' second album produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy traces the believer's journey from doubt-- conveyed by a reverent cover of Low's "Holy Ghost"-- to certainty, its sentiments more reflective than 2010's rousing You Are Not Alone. Compositions by Funkadelic, Nick Lowe, the Staples Sisters, and Tweedy himself also appear.

One True Vine

The opening track on Mavis Staples’ One True Vine, her second record with Jeff Tweedy, may sound familiar. The song is called “Holy Ghost”, and it’s a lonely monologue featuring her full, beautifully controlled vocals backed by a whispery acoustic guitar strum and a judiciously unobtrusive backing choir. Written by Alan Sparhawk, it appeared on Low’s recent full-length, The Invisible Way, which Tweedy also produced. It’s a curious bit of synergy, and the Wilco frontman might be guilty of shameless product-placement had Staples’ version not turned out so well. Essentially a cappella, it’s a fine showcase for the vocalist, even if it she obliterates all the ambiguity in the original: This is not about “some holy ghost,” but the Holy Ghost.
What rankles, however, isn’t the song choice but its placement. On The Invisible Way “Holy Ghost” comes late on the first side, sounding like a mournful bit of spiritual questioning. As an album opener here, it’s so wistful and downcast that it sounds like we’ve intruded on Staples’ private prayer. This is not introduction but a benediction. One True Vine takes a while to get going, burdened by curious sequencing that emphasizes the songs’ low-key production and lurching pace. After “Holy Ghost” comes the Tweedy-penned “Every Step”, whose guitar feedback and punctuating stomps sound cheaply ominous. That’s followed by the sluggish Funkadelic cover “Can You Get to That”, which features a fine bass vocal from Donny Gerrard but never quite gets to that.
You Are Not Alone, Staples’ first collaboration with Tweedy from 2010, highlighted the septuagenarian’s still-commanding voice-- which has become all the more powerful with age and experience-- and proved the Wilco frontman could work in styles and genres well beyond indie Americana. Its tone was celebratory, as he showed a light touch in the control room and never burdened Staples’ performances with too much sound or too many studio tricks. You Are Not Alone sounded like a celebration: of a God who had blessed Staples with a long and influential musical career but also of a partnership that seemed to bring out the best in both artists.
That’s an almost impossible act to follow, and by contrast One True Vine sounds subdued, hesitant, downtempo, downcast-- its sentiments more reflective than rousing. It’s not until the fourth track, “Jesus Wept”, that the album really picks up. The song begins with Staples' voice: “My throat quits when I try to say how I long for the day,” she intones. “How I wish there was a way I could see you again.” Staples invests those lines with so much fear and yearning that the sense of loss becomes palpable. It’s an arresting moment, and in the album’s best bit of sequencing, it’s followed by “Far Celestial Shore”, written by Nick Lowe. An upbeat tune with a sharply strummed guitar propelling its quirky melody, it provides a contented punctuation to “Jesus Wept” by promising a reward in the afterlife for the trials of this life.
As Staples ponders the connections between the earthly and heavenly realms on “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today” and “Sow Good Seeds”, One True Vine shakes off the dust of the first half and rights itself mightily. An old Staples Singers tune, “I Like the Things About Me”, achieves a light, mobile funk, as though set in motion by some great epiphany, and “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)” establishes a buoyant country-gospel groove punctuated by Staples’ ecstatic hallelujahs.
With its quick pace and infectious hook, “Woke Up This Morning” would make an effective and ebullient album opener, but it works well enough as the impassioned climax before the denouement of the title track. The album intends to trace the believer’s trajectory from doubt (“Holy Ghost”) to certainty (“One True Vine”), which lends the album an introspective quality and invests those final numbers with even more power. Still, One True Vine tarries too long in doubt before finally breaking that dour spell and inviting the listener in on the celebration.