Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we examine the lone and remarkable album from the Olympia, Washington band, a noisy, youthful, and chaotic expression of indie rock in the early ’90s.

These Are Not Fall Colors

Lync were only around for two years, just a blip on the timeline. In the brief window between late 1992 and fall 1994, the Olympia, Washington, trio released four 7"s, three compilation tracks, and their lone LP, the beloved These Are Not Fall Colors. That’s the sum total of their official output, save for a six-track demo cassette that never reached beyond their friends around town and scenesters they met on Econoline jaunts up and down the West Coast. If Lync had called it quits before completing their only full-length, they might be remembered no more vividly than scores of other groups that spent a year or two in the DIY trenches before disbanding, leaving behind a few pieces of wax as the only evidence of their existence.
But with this whirlwind of an album, Lync articulated something exceptional: a blurry expression of youth, fleeting and ineffable. There was something else in the record’s inchoate swirl, too, if you listened for it: a proposal for where rock music might go next. Still—and this is a big part of the record’s approachable charm—their designs were hardly as grandiose as all that. These Are Not Fall Colors is not a manifesto but a personal statement, the sound of a fistful of wrinkled notebook pages covered in blurry blue ballpoint. Marked by an evident lack of calculation or self-consciousness, the record wasn’t an attempt to set any kind of bar; it was a simple bloodletting, wild and joyous and pure.
Olympia, a smaller town located an hour southwest of Seattle, had been an incubator of independent music since the early 1980s. That was partly thanks to Evergreen State College, a public institution, founded in 1967, whose freeform methods attracted restless thinkers from all over. But it had even more to do with the efforts of Calvin Johnson. A Baltimore native, Johnson had moved with his family to the region in 1970, when he was 8 years old. Despite Olympia’s relative isolation, he discovered punk in its very earliest days. By 1978, still a high-school student, he had his own show on KAOS, the fledgling Evergreen College radio station, and in 1982 he launched K Records, a cassette label with a quirky, homespun aesthetic.
K began as an outlet for music by Johnson and his friends—bands like Mecca Normal, Girl Trouble, and his own Beat Happening. The sound of the label was lo-fi by default. Early releases were recorded straight into a boombox; Beat Happening tracked part of their second album, 1987’s Jamboree, on the porch. The label’s scrappy feel was partly a function of Johnson’s tastes, partly a function of necessity. They Xeroxed sleeves and colored them by hand because it was cheap; they used stick-figure drawings because they were unpretentious. When other punks were festooning their boots with spikes and chains, Johnson had a pink bandana tied around his ankle. (“This guy’s a kook,” his friend Ian MacKaye recalled thinking.) At 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention, a six-day festival that definitively put the Olympia scene on the map, Johnson threw fistfuls of vegan-friendly candy into the crowd.
At the center of K’s aesthetic was an inextinguishable innocence, a sincerity summed up in a letter that Johnson wrote to the New York Rocker in 1979, when he was just 17 years old. “I know the secret: Rock’n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.”
By the early 1990s, K had become a hub in an international network of musicians, artists, and zine-makers. They had forged links with like-minded folks in Japan and the UK, and had found kindred spirits in Washington, D.C.’s Dischord, swapping artists and sharing tours. Shielded from the glare of Seattle’s grunge boom, Olympia’s scene was flourishing, developing its own idiosyncratic character. (“One of the reasons I kinda was pretty heavy-handed about having us be from Issaquah is I didn’t want to get pigeonholed with either Seattle or the Olympia thing,” Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock would later say. “You know, the Seattle music scene, i.e. grunge or whatever, was a little more straightforward rock or metal, and Olympia seemed to get a little stranger.”) The riot grrrl movement had its roots in Olympia, where Bikini Kill and Bratmobile got their starts. Another young man with strong ideas about teen spirit also briefly lived in Olympia before he moved to Seattle and became world-famous: Kurt Cobain even wore a stick-and-poke tattoo of the K Records logo on his forearm.
All the while, new labels like Kill Rock Stars, Yoyo Recordings, and Punk in My Vitamins were springing up to accommodate the growing number of bands in town. “You’d just walk down the street and talk to people and meet all these people,” Lync’s Sam Jayne would later recall. “People would come from out of town… to play a show, and they end up staying there for a week because there’s nothing else to do. It was really transient, and there were lots of kids that were scenesters… It was a total network of kids that were crashing on each others’ couches and moving from one town to the next.”
It’s easy to look back today and think of this era as a monolithic movement. But terms like “grunge” and “Pacific Northwest” (or, more frequently, “Seattle”) were just metonyms for other forces impossible to pin down. In 1992, punk and what today is called indie rock were in flux; the scene was a tangle of ideas, musical styles, and social networks. Hardcore, pop punk, emo, screamo, white-belt, pigfuck, metal, thrash, sludge, powerviolence, riot grrrl, indie pop, lo-fi, alt folk, alternative, college rock, and yes, even grunge—they all overlapped, feeding off one another even when they were at odds, and Lync, who refused to pick a lane, reflected the beautiful chaos of it all.
Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider were teenagers when they formed Lync. There is very little documentation of their early years as a band; their debut appearance seems to have been on the October 1992 cassette compilation This Is My World, on Seattle’s Excursion Records, alongside local bands like the straight-edge Undertow and the similarly NYHC-inspired Brotherhood (featuring Greg Anderson, later of Sunn O)))). Lync’s placement on 1993’s Julep: Another Yoyo Studio Compilation, with groups like Heavens to Betsy, Slant 6, and Kicking Giant, earned them a mention as “up-and-comers” in that October’s SPIN. A Seattle scene report published in the inaugural issue of Punk Planet, in May 1994, noted, “Three good things about Olympia—Unwound, Mary Lou Lord, and Lync. I sure can’t think of anything else.” (Clearly, the inter-city rivalry was real.)
Its rarity notwithstanding, Lync’s 1993 demo cassette, Codename is not a particularly auspicious debut. The audio is tinny, the timekeeping ramshackle. Jayne’s voice sounds like he’s singing through the wrong end of a telescope, Schneider’s drums are just a cracked glaze of crash cymbals, and it’s difficult to make out Bertram’s bass at all. Stylistically, the six songs are a mix of by-the-numbers emo and pop punk, with some jangly garage rock thrown in for good measure. “Lightbulb Switch,” sung from the perspective of a boy who can’t reach the lightswitch, has a yelpy viridity that suggests the Dead Milkmen covering Shel Silverstein.
Lync’s February 1993 session with Pat Maley at his YoYo studios yielded sharper sound and clearer vision: The three-song Pigeons EP situates them halfway between the impassioned pop punk of Jawbreaker and the tortured post-hardcore of their scene-mates Unwound (technically from Tumwater, just down the road from Olympia). Slow and brooding, “Pigeons” riffs metaphorically on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, Jayne’s voice shifting between muttered spoken passages and the raspy sing-shouting that would become his trademark; the peppy “Electricity,” obliquely about the ecological cost of hydroelectric power, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Bay Area’s Lookout! Records, where Green Day got their start.
If those lyrical themes sound awfully emo, the music also occasionally waded a few too many steps in that direction; in “Friend,” Jayne’s voice breaks as he shrieks, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the raw wounds of teenage angst rendered just a smidgen too performatively for comfort. It’s clear that Lync were still finding their sound. “We had our influences and I don’t think we could even step out of them for a second to see what those were,” Jayne later observed. “Like, I had no idea what kind of music that Lync was making. And somebody would try to explain it to me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’”
Lync recorded again in late 1993, this time with Nation of Ulysses’ Tim Green at the Red House, an unassuming Olympia studio that would turn out records from Bratmobile, Karp, Unwound, and Sleater-Kinney in its brief run. They were getting closer to the sound of their album—thickening the guitars, alternating between ringing open chords and thorny patches of dissonance. On “Two Feet in Front,” a 1994 single for K’s International Pop Underground series, they approached their arrangements first like glassblowers, drawing out elegantly elongated tones, then blacksmiths, hammering bent chords till sparks flew. “Lightbulb Switch” reappeared on the B-side, this time as a frenetic two-minute blast of double-time hardcore.
In May and June 1994, Lync set up at John & Stu’s Place, in Seattle, with Phil Ek in the producer’s chair. A former grocery store, the studio was the place of grunge lore. Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and TAD had all recorded pivotal albums in previous incarnations of the space. It was also the site of Nirvana’s first recordings, two of which would end up on Bleach. It’s striking to think that Ek, just two years into his career behind the boards, was recording Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love at the same time he was making These Are Not Fall Colors. The two bands may have had overlapping histories (in 1993 and 1994, Doug Martsch recorded a number of songs with Calvin Johnson, one with Bertram and Schneider as his rhythm section, that were later released on K as The Normal Years), but the albums bear zero resemblance to one another. Where There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is all layers and light—close-harmonized vocals and clean-toned jangle filigreed against Martsch’s incandescent soloing—These Are Not Fall Colors is dense and humid, sticky as the browning leaves in a compost pile.
“B,” the album’s opening song, might as well have been the work of a different band than the one that had recorded those earlier 7"s. It begins with a gust of feedback and a spidery, dissonant guitar figure; Bertram’s bass enters, briefly teasing a reassuringly consonant resolution, but then the axis slips, throwing the harmonies into disarray. Schneider’s drumming is just a sea of flayed cymbals punctuated by the occasional snare. Things only get messier in the chorus, where Bertram mashes at his strings as though his hands had not quite worn off a local anesthetic. Can something so formless even be called a chorus? There’s no actual melody to speak of; bass, guitar, and drums merely tumble in rough concord, like a rockslide moving grudgingly uphill. Jayne is sing-shouting front and center, something about seriousness and serial killers, while in the background, another voice screams bloody murder.
Anyone paying close attention to the rapidly evolving sound of emo might have recognized some of these sounds. Heroin had explored parallel ideas on their self-titled 12" the year before, and closer to home, Unwound had spent the previous three years developing a remarkably similar grammar of feedback flare-ups and detuned strings. But with These Are Not Fall Colors’ next song, “Perfect Shot,” Lync showed that they weren’t simply angling to be the next signing on Gravity, the San Diego label that brought screamo into the world.
The song begins with a trim, almost jaunty guitar riff; for a moment we’re back in Jawbreaker territory. Then Bertram mashes a bass chord, Jayne shouts something unintelligible, and Schneider smacks the snare, just once. This is the drummer’s favorite trick: to signal an impending shift with a snare crack as unmistakable as a rifle report. Then all hell breaks loose. Like the album itself, “Perfect Shot” is a collision of errant vectors, a tug-of-war between competing impulses. Schneider’s toms swirl like leaves in an updraft; Jayne’s guitar and Bertram’s bass are perpetually jabbing and sparring. The album’s arrangements boast a newfound complexity, the changes mapped out in hasty, back-of-the-napkin calculations that lurch between consonance and dissonance.
The real signature is the music’s immediately identifiable texture and weight: Its bottom-heavy sonics and ringing harmonics give it the heft and dull gleam of a lump of tarnished bronze. Everything is supersaturated. It’s frequently difficult to tease out the bass parts from the guitars; Jayne and Bertram don’t voice their chords so much as wring them from the coils. It’s a murky, logy sound, which only makes Jayne’s sandpapered howls and slightly nasal sing-speaking come off all the more unhinged. The muddiness feels intentional: not the obfuscation of a poor recording job but a sense of surfeit, as though there were so much sound in the room, so much turbulent, intractable feeling, that it overwhelmed the circuits and the tape.
For all the ferment, the record is not without its anthems. “Silverspoon Glasses” strikes the perfect balance of pop-punk hooks and screamo turmoil, and between its shout-along chorus (“Bombs go! Krakakowkrakow!”) and conspiratorial muttering, contains one of Jayne’s most compelling vocal performances on the album. “Cue Card” is a wistful triumph of soaring chords with lyrics vague enough that you could find just about any meaning that you wanted in it. “Heroes & Heroines” harnesses the chaos of Universal Order of Armageddon before sinking back into the album’s sweetest chorus: “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you/You know the sky’s the limit for you.” As much as Lync mirrored some of their contemporaries, These Are Not Fall Colors cast a wider net: “Cue Cards” channels the full-spectrum shimmer of Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü, and “Turtle” evokes Slint forebears Squirrel Bait’s “Sun God,” from their 1985 debut EP on Homestead Records, with almost uncanny precision. However accidental the resemblance, the comparison is instructive. Consciously or not, Lync were reaching back to the punk and indie rock of a decade before and picking up strains that had largely fallen by the wayside.
The yearning “Pennies to Save” might constitute the album’s emotive peak. Even if you couldn’t make out the bulk of the lyrics, that pleading chorus was plain as day: “Where has it gone?” It’s as though even here, in the brightness of their youth, Lync could feel the carefree days slipping away, calcifying into adulthood. Written from the perspective of a grownup who has woken up one day and realized that their youth is behind them, the song represents a remarkable feat of empathy. Punk taught to live fast, die young, but here, Lync understood the necessity of grappling with life’s inevitable denouement.
The album title made clear how central ideas like youth and disappointment were. Its genesis is revealed on an insert with the album. On the right-hand side of the page, there’s a photocopied diary entry of Jayne’s, dated January 5, 1983, which would have made him 9 or so. On the left-hand side, a drawing of a tree with some blue scribbles over the top. Then, in a grownup’s hand, a note with an arrow pointing at the drawing: “Use a fall color, not blue.” With that knowledge, the album’s din becomes even sweeter, every “wrong” note and dissonant smear an act of vengeance against small-minded teachers and childhood traumas.
The album was released on July 25. There weren’t many reviews—one in CMJ, another brief mention in the Orlando Sentinel—but they were generally positive. “While their music sometimes tumbles down from serenity into an avalanche of noise, it always does so with a touch of grace,” noted the Seattle Rocket. “These Are Not Fall Colors is their best release to date, and it is indicative of the new world order at K Records: a shift away from the cutesy minimalism that people often (wrongly) attribute to the label.”
Lync played at least a handful shows that summer, including Olympia’s YoYo A GoGo Festival and Berkeley’s hallowed 924 Gilman Street. Then, on October 11, 1994, at an all-ages Seattle club called the Velvet Elvis, the band played its final show. Footage from the gig captures a wall-to-wall crush of kids. Jayne, in wraparound shades and a black track jacket, stands impassive at the mic, while Schneider wails away behind him in an argyle sweater and Bertram, turned to face his bandmates, repeatedly leaps into the air and falls to the ground. The video quality does few favors to their already muddy sound, but even in this no-fi presentation, vitality courses through their playing.
“It was another one of these rash decisions that I made,” Jayne would later say of the breakup. “I didn’t think we were making as many songs in Lync as I wanted… I was just running rampant around Olympia. I drove myself and everyone crazy because I just had this unchecked energy level.” Jayne had begun recording tapes in his bedroom on a 4-track recorder before graduating to an 8-track given to him by his cousin, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. “I would just sit and record tons of music,” recalled Jayne. “Then I kind of just quit Lync for some reason. I got frustrated with those guys or something like that, probably something really stupid.”
With his Love as Laughter project, Jayne’s tapes would occupy him, miraculously, for the next 26 years of his life. What began as experiments in extreme lo-fi—akin to Smog or Sebadoh’s hermetic early work, captured on a pair of self-released cassettes in 1994—gradually evolved into winsome bedroom garage pop on two albums for K in 1996 and 1998. In 1999, he’d sign to Sub Pop, going on to record three albums of sharp-eyed power pop and classic rock for the Seattle label. (Schneider even joined him on 1999’s Destination 2000.) Bertram and Schneider, meanwhile, would join Built to Spill for a spell; Bertram also picked up with 764-HERO, a Seattle guitar-and-drums duo whose skewed melodies were clearly influenced by Lync’s own songwriting, before moving on to Red Stars Theory.
No matter how brief their tenure, Lync left a lasting mark. When Jayne died in late 2020, age 46, his teenage band was mentioned in headlines right alongside his long-running solo project. Jayne had gone missing in mid-December. He was found a few days later, curled up in his pickup truck. His family says he died of an undiagnosed heart condition on the eve of a road trip back to the Pacific Northwest. In the following days, a flood of tributes sketched out a tapestry of his influence. There were remembrances from his peers in the Pacific Northwest—Phil Ek, Modest Mouse’s Kirby James Fairfield, his former bandmate Schneider—as well as Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, even the comedian Fred Armisen, who recalled Jayne joining Modest Mouse on stage for a 2004 performance on Saturday Night Live. Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold wrote simply: “You didn’t know it but you were an elusive and formatively inspiring hero to me and you touched so many of the lives of the people we love. You were Sam fucking Jayne. Fuck.”
What virtually all those tributes share in common is an emphasis on his generosity of spirit. Many of them feature some brand of late-night hijinks that are notable for their childlike innocence. Mike Simonetti, whose Troubleman Unlimited label would co-release Lync’s 1997 anthology Remembering the Fireballs (Part 8), recalled playing basketball with Jayne until dawn after a Lync show in suburban New Jersey. The Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson remembered Jayne as the mastermind of an imaginary “gang” called the Soda Jerks, filling up Dixie cups with self-serve soft drinks and then dashing out the door, screaming “Soda Jerks!” Sugar also featured in Lois Maffeo’s tribute, in which the two tourmates bought cotton candy from a convenience store in the Midwest and then proceeded to soak each other with car-wash hoses, leaving them bent over with laughter and holding wet, sticky paper cones.
The innocence of these memories feels true to the essence of These Are Not Fall Colors. For all its turbulence, it is a hopeful sound. In early 2020, Jayne made one of his occasional posts to the group’s page on Facebook. “The band we made as children is still loved and listened to and is for ‘kids’ of all ages,” he marveled. Back in the day, he could hardly have imagined that his album would someday become a classic; he was just intent upon making music for himself and his friends. But even then, he added, he had an inkling that there might be something lasting in these songs: “My feeling was I hoped to remind my future self what it meant to be young and stand for something. I think it worked, standing in 2020 I’d like to hug that kid and thank him.”

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As its title suggests, the Atlanta rapper’s album is pop-focused and geared for emo. She sounds reborn, retrofitting her scrappy rap with Technicolor pop-punk for songs about overcoming heartbreak.

Baylor Swift

The Bali Baby introduced on Baylor Swift is a brand new model. Anyone familiar with the three tapes the 20-year-old Atlanta rapper (by way of North Carolina) released in 2017, or perhaps just one of her more popular songs—like “Iggady,” “Banana Clip,” or “Pretty”—won’t recognize this version of her. Bali has pivoted away from her natural no-hook trap before, but not even the more melody-focused 2018 EP, Bali Blanco, foreshadowed a transformation of this magnitude.
As the title suggests, the album is pop-focused and geared for emo; the artwork implies this shift, depicting the outline of a Stratocaster, a photo collage, and a journal with “DO NOT READ” on its cover. These hint at some long-established signifiers of teenage angst, a lovestruck girl scribbling her inner-most thoughts inside the sanctum that is her bedroom noodling at a guitar and screaming them into songs. The implication is that pop rock allows for a rawness that rap does not. “I love rock-pop music,” Bali told XXL last month. “I listen to every song on Guitar Hero.” Baylor Swift leans into that interest to fashion a brand new identity. Bali sounds reborn, retrofitting her scrappy rap with Technicolor pop-punk for songs about overcoming heartbreak.
Produced entirely by New York beatmaker and frequent collaborator Chicken, Baylor Swift is a high stakes emotional investment more daring than anything coming from her peers in Atlanta. Bali said the album “tells the tale of a broken-hearted girl who put her all into the mic,” and this plays out in an arc over the course of eight tracks. A few times, headphones become symbols of escape, of drifting away and disappearing into song, where the memory of an ex can’t find you. Her music mines that same withdrawal, finding a simple comfort in just getting this out of her system, like she’s wailing into a pillow and purging the impurities from her body. From the outset, she laments lost love, how quickly feelings that were once so intense can fade (“Now every time you touch me, it doesn’t feel as strong as it used to!”), but by the end, she’s acceptant, albeit still bruised. “Yes, I know I’m gon’ forgive her/’Cause that’s how I wash the pain away,” she sings on “Killer.” It’s a slow-building catharsis full of rewarding turns, in sound and temperament.
As a rapper, Bali is usually peppy and playfully confrontational. She brandishes weapons and impishly makes light of her enemies (“Bounce on your tits if they’re looking like racks/I set a trap ‘cause these bitches is rats”). But as a singer on Baylor Swift, she is an aggrieved lover swaying from dependent to indignant. The opener, “Introduction,” is designed to throw the album’s first-time listeners off the scent. Atop squelching synths, she raps as she always has, literally reintroducing herself with clever parallels like “Bitches copy me, just need to cop a fucking feature/I’m a perfect picture, niggas say I’m Mona Lisa.” The album really starts with the nasally “Backseat,” which has drawn comparisons to everyone from Avril Lavigne to Rebecca Black. From there, Baylor Swift spirals outward into a moody post-rap mash-up of guitars and synths.
There is a punchy rap intermission, “WWW,” slotted in, meant as a reminder that she does, in fact, still rap—“So I see y’all forgot I had motherfucking bars so I had to bring it back out real quick, you dig?” she says in the song’s intro—before she ventures even further out for a four-song suite spanning glitchy bedroom pop. She navigates this sonic mélange just as she navigates the challenging romance explored in her lyrics: thoughtfully and with great finesse. She understands the limits of her voice and never pushes too hard, at times letting the pitchiness or the distortion of her vocals speak for her. “There’s a few things I know for sure/And one of them is: loving you is way too hard,” she bawls on “Few Things,” dragging out some syllables as she’s nearly swallowed up by incoming waves of sound. She refuses to resign herself to an endless cycle of pain: “There’s a few things I know: That I will not die without your love/I’ll miss you a lot, but I’ll be fine.”
Since Lil Wayne’s Rebirth exploded preconceptions about rocking while hip-hop, moving the goalposts for rappers making music they decidedly classify “rock,” the seams in rap-rock have become harder to find (See: Trippie Redd or Lil Tracy or Princess Nokia). Where does rap end and rock begin for these young artists? These rappers don’t draw lines between their rap personas and their rock aspirations, they just adjust as it suits their mood and their music. Someone like Lil Uzi Vert is a near-perfect synthesis of pop punk and rap, the love child of Wayne and Paramore, and the late Lil Peep was finding the middle-ground between Future and Brand New. But Bali’s influences are somewhat harder to trace. Her characterization of pop rock as “stuff that was on Guitar Hero” implies a distillation of sounds. Somewhere along the line, she decided that “rock,” for her, simply meant emotional honesty, being true to herself and her feelings. Across the candid songs of Baylor Swift, the Atlanta shapeshifter embraces the healing power of self-actualization.


The Hold Steady frontman's solo work continues its twilit exploration of frail hopes, wasted lives, and quiet battles against despair.

I Need a New War

Craig Finn calls I Need A New War the conclusion to a trilogy he began with 2015's Faith In The Future and continued with 2017’s We All The Same Things. but like so many rock ‘n’ roll triads, it only came into focus in hindsight. At its outset, neither Finn nor his fans assumed he was on a grand journey; he was merely experimenting with softer, quieter territory. By reuniting once more with producer Josh Kaufman—along with drummer Joe Russo and engineer Dan Goodwin—Finn puts a capstone on a period of exploration that has yielded richer results than anyone imagined, possibly including Finn.
All three records share a subdued palette that stands in stark contrast to the barroom roar of the Hold Steady. The moody smear of saxophones, keyboards, and guitars suggest a noir netherworld pierced by lone shafts of color in the form of rousing horns and choirs. Finn spends as much time speaking as singing, and the gently cresting result can feel a bit like a collection of lullabies for adults. This is music designed for twilight.
All these sly, subtle arrangements shift attention directly upon Finn's songs, which withstand such close scrutiny.  More than ever, Finn feels more like a short-story writer than a singer-songwriter. New York City as a presence and an idea looms over the record, but you don’t need to know the first thing about the place to have these songs resonate. Every one of Finn’s characters exists in a recognizable world, one where disappointment is commonplace but despair is rare.
Finn's sardonic humor and empathy appears to have deepened with age. The narrator of “Something To Hope For” celebrates the silver lining of an insurance payment delivered after an accident work—a perfect Craig Finn character. It's this humanism that distinguishes I Need A New War from its partners in Finn's loose trilogy, and helps the record stand alone. In its quiet way, it radiates with all of the intensity of the Hold Steady’s scrappiest cuts. Finn has already built a sturdy legacy, but his solo records yield their own durable pleasures: I Need A New War shines like a beacon of light in a dark time.


On her new album, Tamaryn aims for sky-high '80s-goth melodrama.

Dreaming the Dark

On the first three albums she released under her first name, Tamaryn Brown adopted a shoegazer's approach to her own voice, casting it as just another instrument in the bleed. She sings differently now. Tamaryn's new record Dreaming the Dark retains her penchant for nostalgic brooding, but it spikes her voice up to the top of the mix, where she wields it with commanding ferocity.
If previous Tamaryn albums drew abundant comparisons to Thatcher-era goths like Cocteau Twins and The Cure, Dreaming the Dark is more aligned with Tears for Fears, the English duo whose 1985 album Songs from the Big Chair broke over to the U.S. market. She has cited Tears For Fears in interviews, while positioning Kanye West as an interloper between herself and the '80s. "You know when you listen to 808s & Heartbreaks [sic]? If you listen to that record you see that he has this unabashedly, blatant worship of Tears for Fears," she said recently. "I feel like my album is kind of like trying to capture that relationship."
Trying, maybe, but in the end Tamaryn sounds more worshipful of Tears for Fears than Kanye ever did. If 808s and Heartbreak cleaned up weepy '80s synth-pop for the digital age, ditching the reverb but keeping the melodrama, Dreaming the Dark plunges it right back into its original murk. Reverb coats just about every sound on every track. Most of the synthesizer patches and drum machine beats sound like they could have issued from equipment that was lying in storage since the Reagan era.
As a result, the album feels a little staid and trapped in amber. Tempos hit at a regular pulse and melodies round their bases without fanfare.  "In a fit of rage/I will select the pain," Tamaryn bellows on "Fits of Rage," like pain were an item in a drop-down menu. A church bell, or a facsimile of one, tolls at the beginning of "You're Adored" and I can't even envision the graveyard.
Only in the opening track, the terrifically fun "Angels of Sweat," does Tamaryn cut loose and swing for the rafters. The song offers a plummy take on a Thatcher-era goth classic—the vampire love song. "Embrace your desire," she impels, launching her voice up to the top of her range and elongating the last syllable to an extended gasp. "Lived so many lives/It's already night/Feel as hard as I bite." No matter how many incarnations it takes, no matter how many decades it stalks through, vampire sex, it seems, never gets old. It offers a strange kind of power, this evil you want to fuck and then become. The construct of the vampire positions death and terror as objects of desire, not revulsion, and it's a great time to close your jaws around what you fear.
The camp of goth doesn't present itself as lucidly on other songs as it does on "Angels of Sweat," which is a shame: Tamaryn has the voice for it. Without that delight at the darkness, the sense of triumph over what ails you, the album tends to get bleached from velvety black to matte beige, all its chrome spikes sanded down to meet public school safety regulations.


The English band’s second album this year isn’t a complement to its predecessor so much as just another iteration on a now-standard formula.

Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2

At this point, Foals have settled into their role as alternative-radio festival stalwarts. Ever since the grimy riffs and macho vocals of Holy Fire lead single “Inhaler,” they’ve shown increasing comfort with their U2-sized sound. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the build of oft-synched signature song “Spanish Sahara” remains so stirring that its replicants, like “Late Night” and “Sunday,” soar by association. Even if March’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 was too cluttered to recapture the intimacy of “Sahara,” unexpected detours like the sparse “Cafe D’Athens” and chaotic rave-up “In Degrees” broke through the murky production. Part 2, the band promised, would be heavier still—but mostly it continues the now-standard Foals album formula, dividing its tracklist into Aggressive, Funky, and Somber. It’s not a complement to its predecessor so much as just another collection of Foals songs.
Besides, it hardly makes sense to differentiate between a rock and a pop album when every instrument is reduced to overcompressed mush. The band’s brash self-production blows up their sound until all definition is lost. The most disappointing casualty is Jack Bevan’s drumming—once the backbone of Foals’ music, he now sounds buried beneath atmospheric synths and guitars. Not that he has a lot to do: First single “Black Bull” is rhythmically identical to “What Went Down,” second single “The Runner” mimics “Inhaler,” and so on. “Like Lightning” plays like the kind of utilitarian blues-rock that music directors reach for when the Black Keys aren’t in the licensing budget.
Foals are most interesting when exploring new territory. While Part 1 shined in its homages to In Rainbows-era Radiohead, Part 2 harks back further to the progressive rock of the ’70s and ’80s. “10,000 Feet” is a half-time Rush homage, down to a repeating “Tom Sawyer” synth. The album’s back half recalls the post-Peter Gabriel, pre-Abacab Genesis, a band that balanced technical prowess with surprisingly poppy melodies. Genesis also evolved from eccentric outsiders to pop stars, and while Foals are too self-serious to embrace the style’s campier elements (leave that to their smarter, more irreverent tourmates Everything Everything), they seem to have tapped an unexpected wellspring. For all their posturing about making a record that “really resonated with the current time,” they’re more at home in old-fashioned prog.
The lyrical content, meanwhile, remains virtually unchanged between the two records. This band is famous for its energy, not its insight, and you’d be hard-pressed to hear the political subtext Foals say they’d like to impart. The band describes “Black Bull” as “a conflicted diary of masculine confusion and negative tendencies”; the actual chorus goes, “We not playing around/The black bull’s in town.” Even an intriguing turn of phrase like “turn me into a wedding ring” turns out to be a thuddingly literal reference to a more interesting story: Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose ashes were turned into a diamond more than 25 years after his death. “Dreaming Of” is made up of references to other, better songs (“you’re dancing on your own,” “you’re always crashing that same car,” “there’s always something in the way”), but at least the magnet-poetry approach feels like a deliberate character study of someone obsessed with looking back instead of facing reality.
Rather than forming the second half of a complete statement, Part 2 struggles to differentiate itself. Even with the occasional continuity—like when the earlier “Surf Pt. 1” pays off on Part 2’s penultimate “Into the Surf”—this album could have arrived first with few alterations. “Neptune” and “Dreaming Of” will slot nicely into live performances, but they’re surrounded by songs too effortful to be filler and too unmemorable to be worthwhile. “The defining record of our career, I think we’ve still got it in us,” frontman Yannis Philippakis recently admitted to Dork, but Foals’ career-defining statement is less likely to be a new record than a playlist of all their singles. It’s hard not to lose patience as they trudge towards that album, promising they’re getting closer while moving in place.

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The Los Angeles singer’s mellow, folk-inflected R&B explores give-and-take in relationships with others and with ourselves. A companion release revisits her recent EP, adding texture and emotion with live instrumentation.

UMI: Introspection / Introspection Reimagined

Singer and songwriter UMI, an L.A. transplant by way of Seattle, writes with the earnest, diaristic vulnerability familiar to those raised in an era where self-interrogation is a public, shareable form of artistic expression. She debuted in 2018 with a four-track EP, Interlude, which was soon followed by a single, “Remember Me,” a wistful rendering of love deferred in the vein of Aaliyah’s “Four Page Letter.” Two years later, her Introspection EP signaled a more confident vision of the type of artist she wanted to be: Songs like “Bet” and “Pretty Girl hi!” cast UMI as a child of ’90s R&B with a folky pop twist. Her music is mellow, an unobtrusive soundtrack for daydreaming and long drives; it didn’t quite scratch the surface of the mainstream, but online, it found an audience.
Last week, when Twitter informed me that the high-profile relationship between rappers Saweetie and Quavo was over, UMI’s “Bet Reimagined” was playing in the background. Saweetie had alleged infidelity, observing that no material gift could bandage the betrayal; UMI’s lyrics seemed to encapsulate the separation of a couple who had appeared outwardly perfect, even as one party nursed righteous fury. “I be moving around it/And you on some clown shit/And I ain’t about it/Don’t ever doubt it,” she sings, simultaneously offering a warning and a farewell. “Bet Reimagined” comes from UMI’s latest Introspection Reimagined EP, where she has now dynamically reimagined Introspection’s stories of give-and-take in relationships, both with others and ourselves, with live accompaniment.
For the live version, UMI called more than a dozen collaborators to Malibu’s Shangri-La Studios, where they remixed and rearranged her existing material with their own artistic interpretations. On opener “Introspection,” Hailey Niswanger’s flute and Aisha Gaillard’s drums create a pop-inflected rhythmic background that carries hints of classical music, adding greater tension to the song’s story of stifled rage and emotional insecurity. UMI writes all of her own songs, projecting a purposeful and personal voice, though her lyrics are sometimes weighed down by simplistic musings that land without a great deal of substance. Lines like, “And maybe who I be is enough/And maybe all I need is a hug,” from “Open Up”—now “Open Up Reimagined”—come across as feeble attempts to emote indecision, suggesting an artist who’s still learning to shape compelling narratives from intangible strands.
There are singers whose voices transform a room with their sheer force and range, and others who seep into the atmosphere, adding contrasting colors to empty space. UMI is among the latter, and she’s even better with a live band beside her. On the bleak “Where I Wander,” her feathery tone is knotted by pain and her notes are jagged at the edges. “I just let go of the pressure to hit notes or sound perfect….and when I let go of that it’s like the notes just hit themselves,” she explains in an accompanying documentary. The Reimagined string quartet (bassist Micah Moffett, guitarist Jake Nuffer, cellist Jean Paul, and violinist Victor Ekpo) are steadying companions: They do not take over UMI’s storytelling, nor do they wallow in the background. Instead, they step forward when she recedes, adding texture where it’s needed. The remade EP offers two new tracks, “Beautiful Day” and “Solitude,” interludes that connect the dissolution of a relationship to the stretchy bliss of regeneration. The instrumental arrangement on the latter echoes the darkness of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Bitter; UMI’s vocals are restrained but hopeful.
By reworking an existing body of work, UMI makes her progress something to which we all can bear witness. She dares to show the cracks in her voice, removing the studio polish and letting emotion take over: same person, same songs, different delivery. Some changes are subtle, others more significant. It’s not a small step to take as an up-and-coming artist, and it shows that she’s willing to go out of bounds for the sake of the candor that’s so central to her music. The process of revision can carry a connotation of failure and incompleteness. But when you revise—or in this case reimagine—new possibilities become evident and a type of metamorphosis occurs. It’s not always obvious, but when done well it compels us to accept change and embrace the difference. So then: What about a Saweetie remix?

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The Chicago artist marries political commentary with deep introspection, resulting in a richly composed R&B album about the echoes of the past and the promise of the future.

LEGACY! LEGACY!

When Nina Simone first learned of the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls, her immediate reaction was to try to build a gun in her garage for retaliation. After a cooler head prevailed, thanks to her then-husband/manager, she retreated to the den of her home in Mount Vernon, New York and wrote “Mississippi Goddam.” For the next seven years, the civil rights movement guided her artistic compass, and she became an unwavering voice for oppressed people of color everywhere.
With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods eagerly takes the reins from pioneers like Simone. On Woods’ 2016 debut HEAVN, her acerbic wit was literally child’s play—transposing the clapping game “Miss Mary Mack” for stark lyrics about police brutality on “VRY BLK,” for example. Those kernels have now ripened on her second album, one that is richer and fuller in every respect. Evocative of Mos Def’s landmark album Black on Both Sides, LEGACY! LEGACY! marries incisive political commentary with deep introspection. The result is an album full of wordplay, anger, and wry humor. Woods returns to us a brazen young artist and woman, keenly aware of the backlash she could face for her transparency.
Each track on LEGACY! LEGACY! highlights a legendary artist of color, spanning disciplines, genres, and decades—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, Miles Davis. For Woods, collectively, they become examples of how to unapologetically navigate life as a person of color. Each song’s subject is treated with the same reverence and warmth as Woods’ own ancestors, who are also referenced throughout. While she assumes responsibility for mining sociopolitical issues in her music, she also stands on the shoulders of these figures in search of her own humanity.
Inspired by the life of trailblazing singer Betty Davis, the album’s opener “Betty” begins with just three simple chords on the piano—in walks “Betty Mabry,” quiet and unassuming, a then-23-year-old girl raised in Pittsburgh. When we meet “Mrs. Miles Davis,” Woods injects bold, rhythmic layers into the track, marking her arrival. She served as Davis’ muse, but taking a backseat role was just not for her. Their turbulent union dissolved after just one year, and not long after, the funk goddess emerged onto the scene. Armed with her newfound independence, Davis would go on to break barriers in rock, R&B, and funk, but she never achieved mainstream success and was often criticized for her hypersexuality. As Woods sings on “Betty,” she finds both catharsis and validation for the audacity to be different without compromise: “I am not your typical girl/Throw away that picture in your head,” she declares.
The ways in which black excellence has been continuously jettisoned in America is unending: take Muddy Waters’ first meeting with the Rolling Stones. At the time, Waters was allegedly painting the ceiling of his own record label, Chess, when the British rock stars arrived to record “Satisfaction” during a stop for their first U.S. tour. On “Muddy,” Woods cries out, “They can study my fingers/They can mirror my pose,” over an electric guitar that blares out in protest and anger. She is caught between adoration for her hero, rage over the rampant appropriation of black music, and the understanding that this damage goes beyond repair.
On “Basquiat,” Woods explores how the behavior of an artist of color unfairly becomes fodder for public opinion. She draws inspiration not just from her own run-ins with the media, but chiefly from an interviewer who once asked the renowned artist “what makes him angry,” suggesting that the “rage” seen in his work could be summoned upon command: “These teeth are not employed/You can’t police my joy.” The song simmers along on a jazzy hip-hop groove for nearly seven minutes, peppered by a staccato call-and-response (“Are you mad?/Yes I’m mad”). Tellingly, the song never erupts, and when Woods sings “They wanna see me angry,” she’s sighing, not shouting. Her exhaustion is palpable, resigned to wear the mask that “grins and lies,” as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar once said—the mask that she must wear to quell the seething rage she feels when asked, once again, to explain herself.
In his landmark 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,” W.E.B. DuBois argued that the liberation of all black people would come from cultivating a handful of exceptional blacks through higher education. Over a century later, black artists and activists, poets and politicians continue to thrive across a spectrum of different mediums. Almost every predecessor conjured in and in-between Woods’ lyrics balanced their craft alongside an unending fight for total equality, whether they wanted to or not: “All the women in me are tired” becomes a running motif throughout the album. With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods positions herself to join the battle, bridging the gap, once and for all, between our unresolved past and the promise that awaits us all on the horizon.


A solo artist gathers some pals for a trippy trip through the droney side of the avant-garde. Good for island meditations and pretending to be weightless.

Undying Color

A project begun on an island in Washington State, Mind Over Mirrors springs from the imagination of Jaime Fennelly, who now resides in Chicago. Across five limited edition releases, Fennelly has performed alone. And while Undying Color, his sixth album (and first for Paradise of Bachelors) also began as a solo excursion (this time with Fennelly decamping to southwestern Wisconsin), he then went back into the studio with a full-fledged ensemble, including members from Eleventh Dream Day, Califone, Circuit des Yeux and Jon Mueller of Death Blues, to add more color to his drones and drifts.
But while Mind Over Mirrors now sounds like a live group, their influences don’t reference bands per se as much as they do iconoclastic American composers of the 20th century. Mirrors’ bio references G.I. Gurdjieff’s esoteric harmonium music, but almost every piece on Undying Color hearkens back to the likes of Terry Riley, Harry Partch, Laurie Spiegel and Henry Flynt, to name a few. And at the center of it all remains Fennelly’s hard-pumping harmonium. His drone hovers over opener “Restore & Slip,” the album’s most energetic number. It then swiftly scales up thanks to a tumbling drum kit beat and some furious fiddling that evokes the sawing fury of Henry Flynt and his penchant for hillbilly minimalism. Together it all builds to an ecstatic and buzzing peak that the album is hard-pressed to replicate for the remainder of the album.
While Fennelly’s Indian pedal harmonium has always been the centerpiece of Mind Over Mirrors, with Undying Color he adds in an Oberheim synth and shows a wider range and malleability. On “Gray Clearer,” he has a tone that wheezes and expands like Pauline Oliveros’s bandoneon against a shuffling, shamanic thump. For “Splintering,” Fennelly mimics the antigravity properties of Laurie Spiegel’s analog components, floating free alongside rubbed singing bowls and a wordless vocal from Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater member Janet Beveridge Bean. His harmonium swirls and slowly accrues a thick shoegaze fuzz on the flickering “600 Miles Around.” And on “Glossolaliac,” Fennelly’s keys churn and cycle like one of Terry Riley’s vintage all-night flights, soon synching with violin and Haley Fohr’s voice. It’s the clear album highlight, a cosmic trip that condenses such expansive minimalist explorations into a delectably concise three-minute length.
Inversely, where the album stumbles is on the lengthy 12-minute song, “Gravity Wake.” The Oberheim yawns and crests, a steady snare pattern giving the piece its processional rhythm. Bean and Fohr’s voices entwine in murmurs about space and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Fohr’s more dramatic voice giving gravitas to the command: “Be the gravity wake.” Tasteful and restrained as Fennelly’s playing is, here it doesn’t have quite enough energy or movement to sustain such a runtime. That said, the expanded palette and membership bodes well for future explorations.


Farao is the Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen. Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. The lyrical themes circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them.

Till It’s All Forgotten

Farao, aka Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen, could have taken a more predictable road on her debut album. She has the breathy, clear, slightly husky soprano voice that's come to characterize "indie" (the genre, not the ethos). She has the right image. She has the instrumental chops. She could have created songs that are more easily consumable than those on Till It's All Forgotten, songs that fit into TV and film montage or title sequences. She could have taken the easy road. We should all be thankful she didn't.
Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. It's not in the least bit easy to create music that sounds truly like you and nobody else, but Jahnsen manages to do so. The instrumentation on Till It's All Forgotten is rich—electronics, horns, synth strings, piano, a standard guitar-based rock band, vocal manipulation—and though all that layering and texture could feel heavy and cluttered, it rarely does. Jahnsen has an ear for structure, always pulling when the song could have pushed, turning right when it could have turned left, never relying on ABABC to get her through. Opener and title track "TIAF" is a perfect example—it's a lush, beautiful song with stacked vocals and a cascading synth that would drift into quirky Starbucks background fare if not for the stuttering, off-time percussion that jars the song out of complacency.
The lyrical themes on Till It's All Forgotten always circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them. It's an album about slippage, discomfort, unease. "Bodies", which was released as a single with an unsettling and intimate video depicting the solitary and intense relationship between two teenage girls as they explore a landscape abandoned by adults, is a dense song even without the visuals, with its military-percussive lope and clot of horn punctuation. Jahnsen has said the song is about "surrendering to bad decisions and consciously going down the wrong path", something all of us can relate to but few of us would brag about.
It's this commitment to quotidian territory  that makes Till It's All Forgotten so engaging. The delicate "Hunter" could read as a love song but is instead about the process of dehumanizing another. The haunting "Feel" could be simply about sexuality but is instead about the desire for deep connection with someone else. The sprawling "Warriors" refuses to lapse into epic inspirational platitude; it is about the exhaustion of being perpetually ready to fight. Jahnsen takes well-covered general themes and distills something small and strange out of each; her instrumentation is huge and complicated while her lyrics remain resolutely human-scale.
Jahnsen played and arranged many of the instruments on the album herself, and the album is like an expansive and bizarre terrarium in which Jahnsen has carefully called for the placement of each element. She places tinny synth microtones next to big wooden piano notes on "Fragments", a song about human complications, and she loops her vocals around these basic tones, she demonstrates how naturally complications arise from a simple setup. Arrangements this teeming could be claustrophobic, but Jahnsen exerts firm control over her rich and highly detailed world. It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile.


Available for the first time digitally, these two albums from the free-jazz supergroup featuring pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Anthony Braxton offer a singular display of musicianship and chaos.

Circle: Circle 1: Live in Germany Concert / Circle 2: Gathering

Pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Anthony Braxton were not destined to be creative partners for long. But the year these virtuosos spent in the free-jazz supergroup Circle proved to be a notable one. By 1970, Corea was a master of high-energy, abstract playing, thanks to his tenure in a particularly wild edition of Miles Davis’ group. And Braxton’s work alongside fellow Chicagoans like Wadada Leo Smith had already put a charge into progressive improvisers on multiple continents—though Braxton was also down in the mouth over the long odds he faced in getting his ambitious classical pieces heard in New York and Paris. On the night he met Corea, Braxton considered himself more of a chess-game hustler than a working musician.
The origin story goes that Braxton was prodded into a one-off gig by some longtime associates. After the concert, drummer Jack DeJohnette led the crew over to the Village Vanguard, where Corea was playing in a trio with drummer Barry Altschul and bassist Dave Holland (another Davis veteran, as was DeJohnette). Braxton sat in with Corea’s group, and when the night came to an end, the pianist gave Braxton his address and asked him over to jam. Six months later, CBS Records was taping a show by Corea, Braxton, Holland, and Altschul—a quartet going by the name Circle.
Circle 1: Live in Germany Concert was originally issued in 1971, along with the final studio session the group produced before busting up (Circle 2: Gathering). CD reissues of both albums came out through Corea’s Stretch imprint in the ’90s, before falling out of print. Now both records have been introduced to the digital catalogue. As none of Circle’s other studio sessions and live recordings are available on streaming services, these reissues would be welcome even if they were of middling quality. Luckily, each one comes across as a worthy addition to this short-lived band’s discography.
*Germany *shares a setlist with the latter half of Circle’s other famous live album—though at this gig, the band pushes prettiness and aggression to greater extremes. A long suite of two compositions by Holland opens the record. Corea gives “Toy Room” a haunted solo introduction that keeps the childhood nostalgia of the main theme from seeming too innocent when it arrives. With the rhythm section offering free-time support, Corea’s long feature only gives brief glimpses of the prickly side of his playing. Braxton’s entrance on flute has a similarly lyrical quality, even when his lines create strange harmonies. Corea occasionally follows Braxton into freer vistas before pulling the saxophonist back to the underlying tune. Despite the fact that the song never gets that far “out,” there’s a compelling drama to the way the players negotiate this loveliness.
After an improvised, transitional section in the suite, another Holland tune follows. (In keeping with a typo from the original pressing, the song “Q & A” is once again spelled “O & A” on this reissue.) Given its jabbing, repetitive hook, this composition was well suited to demonstrations of Circle’s collective power. But this take from Germany sounds particularly energetic. From the outset of his first soprano solo, Braxton is heard mixing all the paints from his “language music” palette—with harsh overblowing quickly giving way to longer-held tones, then wide-interval attacks.
In addition to the timbral intensity of the performance, the quick juggling of such different sound styles has its own hardcore feel. And when the band relents, they keep the experimental vibe afloat by rustling around with miscellaneous percussion instruments and whistles. Later on, Corea flashes some powerful cluster-chords (which owe a debt to Cecil Taylor), and then Braxton helps thrash through Holland’s theme again, this time on alto. He stays on that instrument for the band’s frequent concert closer, the standard “There Is No Greater Love.” It has a buoyant strut—at least until the band bashes its form to pieces.
Though each show could prove distinct, Circle’s setlists never seemed to alter greatly. By contrast, their output in studio sessions could result in unstructured group improv, as well as tight duos, trios, and full-quartet workouts. The only studio album released near-contemporaneously with the group’s existence was Circle 2: Gathering. After Corea found a large public with his rock-influenced Return to Forever ensemble, Blue Note records hurried out archival collections of Circle’s first studio rehearsals with Circulus and Circling In. But while those vault-clearing sets are interesting, they don’t cast the same spell that Gathering does.
The album is one long track, credited to Corea’s compositional pen. But the openness of the performance—and its simultaneous balance—is an achievement that only a well-drilled group can deliver. The poetic understanding between Braxton and Holland is announced early on when the string player (on cello) offers gorgeous bowed lines behind the soprano saxophonist’s soulful phrases. Corea’s opening melodic material is similarly attractive, and he provides well-timed transitions and smart support to other band members throughout.
Circle’s two biggest personalities may have both been impatient to explore their new ideas. For Corea, that meant a hard turn away from the free-jazz fringe, and an embrace of both Scientology as well as what he called the more “communicative” sound of his subsequent rock-fusion style. Braxton had electronic music, big-band albums, and multi-orchestra concepts knocking around in his head. But on Gathering, they still had the patience necessary to make a collaborative group work at a high level.


After last year's successful collaboration "Bo Peep (Do U Right)", R&B singer Jeremih links up again with moody producer Shlohmo for a full EP's worth of songs, including the latter's previously released remix of the former's "Fuck U All the Time". Chance the Rapper guests.

No More EP

Few releases have so effectively shrugged at the supposed dichotomy of “alternative” and “traditional” R&B over the past few years than Late Nights with Jeremih, the free mixtape from Jeremih that quietly grew to be a cult favorite after dropping from left field in 2012. And anyway, that binary—which took real shape around 2011, thanks in large part to the clamor around the Weeknd’s landmark debut, House of Balloons—has always been more about the audience than about the artist. There are vague aesthetic similarities among R&B artists pegged as “alternative” (or otherwise)—a focus on vibe over narrative, a tendency to distort vocals to the point of disembodiment—but what it more often designates is a certain seal of approval, a go-ahead for guilt-free consumption by whatever your term of choice may be for those who’ve warmed to R&B in the 2010s but approach the bulk of the genre under the protective cloak of irony.
Late Nights, at once radio-driven and experimental, shared some of those aesthetics but managed to duck that conversation so thoroughly that it made you question if the conversation was worth having to begin with. Its oddness was approachable from all angles, as Jeremih and a league of ambitious producers (Mike WiLL Made It in his absolute prime, pop soothsayer Tricky Stewart, occasionally Jeremih himself) took cues from the sounds of the underground but never quite presented them as “cool.” All this was especially surprising coming from the guy best known for “Birthday Sex”, a doofy novelty hit that’s endured solely because people continue to  have birthdays. But even then, there were glimmers of promise: in a 2009 acoustic performance of the same song, he transformed it into something intimate and feather-light, accompanying himself on piano.
When Jeremih initially linked last year with moody L.A. producer Shlohmo for Yours Truly and Adidas Originals’ Songs From Scratch series, it wasn’t such an improbable pairing: here was a singer willing to go all in with producers’ stranger impulses working with a beatmaker that possesses omnivorous tendencies, whose gooey sad-boy soundscapes draw from ghostly R&B balladry, abstracted hip-hop percussion, and hissy ambience alike. (The first half of last year’s Laid Out EP could, with very slight stretches of the imagination, be considered some warped form of R&B itself.) That collaboration, “Bo Peep (Do U Right)", was proof enough: gorgeously smoggy, humid, and sort of tragic despite the surface romance, with Jeremih’s weightless falsetto piercing through the groaning bassline, “Wish somebody would’ve seen us, baby.” It was heavier than Jeremih’s usual stuff, but it worked, at least as a one-off. A year later, the duo aim to replicate its magic on No More, their six-track collaboration; but where Jeremih floated on “Bo Peep,” the majority of the EP falls flat.
Shlohmo’s productions are typically dense and blurry, his bittersweet melodies rendered in smudgy sepia tones and built from intricately arranged layers of what sound like organized anxieties. When there are vocals, they’re often samples; even when they’re not, as with “Don’t Say No”, his lovely 2013 collaboration with How to Dress Well, vocals tend to serve as yet another instrument in the mix, rather than the focal point. Though “Bo Peep” proved an exception, Jeremih’s voice isn’t intended for this sort of environment; there’s a translucency to his falsetto that radiates when given the proper space, but gets bogged down by too much outside noise.
Late Night’s best moments— “773 Love,” “Fuck U All The Time,” “Go To The Mo”—shared a certain sense of delicacy, their productions defined primarily by negative space. No More could benefit from some of this airiness; instead, it often feels stifling, Jeremih’s voice mired in the layers of hi-hat twitches and bass grumblings. Title track “No More” burbles and quivers yet doesn’t quite move in any particular direction. “Let It Go” is pretty—it’s certainly the best new song on the project—but ultimately reads as a slightly subpar cousin to “Bo Peep”. And when the duo aim for sparseness, on skeletal closing track “The End,” they’re left with a handful of parts and not much whole; Jeremih’s a touch off-key and slightly out of time, and a tacked-on appearance from Chance the Rapper is a bizarre choice for a finale, entirely at odds with the warm, woozy sensuality of the preceding tracks.
Most questionable here is the inclusion of Shlohmo’s “Fuck U All the Time” remix, the original version of which he released well before the two ever crossed paths. It’s essentially just an extended version of the original, which boasts an additional Jeremih verse packed with mildly cute, mostly embarrassing lines like, “Don’t let the time ticky-icky-icky while I’m snapping off your bra/ And biting on your Vickies.” Moments like that are forgivable, if a bit dorky (and it’s far from the first remix of the song crammed with superfluous verses), but it’s harder to understand the impulse to improve upon a song that draws seductiveness from subtlety by piling more stuff on top—that familiar moaning bassline, those little beeps and clatters. It’s that same impulse that characterizes much of the past few years of so-called alt-R&B: pile on the effects, pitch down the voice, and let 'er rip. That impulse holds No More back from approaching the transcendence of Jeremih and Shlohmo’s first collaboration (or most of Late Nights): too much of the EP feels like a drawn-out remix of a song that didn’t really need it in the first place.


The soundtrack to the runaway-hit Netflix sci-fi series evokes some of the ‘80s touchstones of the show, but in a more restrained way.

Kyle Dixon / Michael Stein: Stranger Things OST, Vol. One

Stranger Things OST, Vol. One

You could occupy a whole afternoon arguing about whether the Netflix series “Stranger Things” marks the jump-the-shark moment for the ’80s fetishization that’s been building for the past half-decade, or whether it represents the trend’s creative peak. Does the show cleverly re-invent the ’80s film touchstones that directors Matt and Ross Duffer wear on their sleeve? Or is their riffing on Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, and John Carpenter just artistic cannibalism? Is it time to adjust the tracking-control in our minds and stop looking at the world through VCR-tinted glasses?
Surprisingly, these question are pretty much moot when it comes to the first installment of the “Stranger Things” soundtrack. (The forthcoming Volume Two contains entirely different material and more or less accompanies a different set of episodes.) Much to their credit, composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein opted for a far less overt nostalgia than the Duffers. This is all the more surprising—not to mention admirable—when you consider that in Dixon and Stein’s main gig as members of the Austin-based experimental synth quartet S U R V I V E, they’re not necessarily shy about their taste for referencing ’80s keyboard sounds, even if they do so with good taste.
If S U R V I V E don't quite blur the distinction between the cheese and the cream of that decade, it doesn’t so much matter. By and large, audiences no longer seek to distinguish between, say, the Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F” and Duran Duran bassist John Taylor’s serpentine fretwork. Under the heat lamp of kitschy nostalgia, what once sounded artificially sweetened or even objectionable has acquired a hazy glow we regard with fondness. But for the first 10 of *Volume One’*s thirty-plus tracks, you might get the impression that Dixon and Stein were aiming for the vibe of minimal early-’90s ambient techno instead. Even when they construct a keyboard riff ringing enough to serve as a top-line chorus hook (“Kids”), they still don’t oversaturate the music with retro tones.
Whatever you think of how Dixon and Stein’s scoring cues succeed within the framework of the show, the pair deserves credit for its efforts to avoid being intrusive. There are moments when S U R V I V E nods to John Carpenter’s scores, but the duo don’t make the same move here: The first 10 tracks don’t remotely suggest the suspense, horror, supernatural thrills, or even the basic human drama that the show’s storyline aims for. With a plot that involves a search for a missing child, another child who possesses telekinetic abilities, an ancient, monstrous being called a demogorgon, etc, “Stranger Things” hardly lacks for elements one would expect composers would drool at the chance to sink their teeth into.
Taken as a suite of music on its own merits, Volume One flows rather seamlessly—no small achievement. The canvas they paint on is remarkably spare and restrained: At any given point, it feels as if there are only a handful of sounds in the stereo field, and what at first comes off as a limited range slowly reveals itself as the opposite. It takes a while to notice because the first third of the album streams by with the unhurried gentleness of a tiny brook; it’s no insult whatsoever to say that this section of the music, with its pillowy synth pads, is perfectly suited for a scenic drive or even a rainy-day meditation on the porch. *Volume One *even borders on New Age at times, which initially leaves you scratching your head as to how Dixon, Stein, and the Duffers envisioned that this music would complement and support its target material.
But then Volume One takes a dramatic and agile heel turn. The first minute and a half of the album*'s* 11th track, “The Upside Down,” begins with much of the same unthreatening serenity that precedes it, as a feathery keyboard glimmers like rays of sunlight beaming down through the treetops. You almost expect Enya to appear (again, no insult) until the composers hit a 30-second stretch where, using little more than a handful of keyboard swells, they very gently begin to suggest a shift toward a darker mood.
When the piece hits the two-minute mark, listeners find themselves plunged into a nightmare before they’ve even had time to blink. Dixon and Stein pull off the change with uncanny grace. Perhaps the most deft and unsettling touch is their use of synths to mimic a vaguely inhuman howling. At its best, horror cinema taps into humankind’s primal terror and reminds us that, at the end of the day, we are still at the mercy of predatory forces that we don’t fully understand. Dixon and Stein’s arrangement on “The Upside Down” hits the bullseye on that sensation, and the fact that they wait so patiently to spring this shift on the audience shows that they put a great deal of thought into their decisions. Down the homestretch, Dixon and Stein allow themselves to indulge the shades of melodrama that listeners will immediately recognize as typical of TV music. Understandably, several of their choices in this section recall the music from the “X-Files,” but at this point, they have have earned the right to ham it up a bit.
Aesthetics aside, “Stranger Things” also reminds us of the pros and cons of modern television. Audiences get to enjoy more daring work in long-form format that the traditional network structure just couldn't allow for. On the other hand, we can never be sure these days whether a series is going to make it to another season. As it stands now, it’s up in the air whether “Stranger Things” will be back for a season two. But with not one but two scores to show for their involvement, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein have at least proven themselves to the world, whatever happens to their vehicle next.


Migos found the perfect moment to drop their short but potent EP 3-Way.

3 Way

Trap and drill music—derived from communities within communities riddled with gang ties and drug money—are often dismissed for lack of substance. But once you dig past the “drugs, money, and women” signifiers, there are rich veins of meaning—take Future’s undying paranoia and bouts of depression he gingerly sprinkles into his albums.
Migos did nothing, though, to remedy those stereotypes with their debut single “Versace.” The Atlanta rap outfit came through like a hurricane with a formulaic hook that garnered them immediate club praise and local radio airplay. Then it trickled into the mainstream (everyone loves yelling out the names of deceased fashion designers with an aspirational brand), and they chased “Versace” with “Hannah Montana.” Migos were ultimately disregarded as lacking depth to their music. For this reason, their latest EP 3-Way is a success: The project, while short, introduces us all to new dimensions into the Migos collective psyche.
All lyrics aside, the 5-track EP is full of hard production. Zaytoven checks in twice (“3-Way” and “Coppers and Robbers”) to offer some name recognition, yet travels along a similar vein as the other three producers (Cassius Jay, Ricky Racks, and Dun Deal) in crafting dark, sinister beats that rise and fall with their hammering cadences. The title track is very on-brand, a combo of jazzy and churchish keys supporting fantasies about money. But even as Quavo is yapping about phone taps and “bitches,” he inserts some “coulda shoulda wouldas”: “Shoulda played for the Dolphins/Shoulda played for the Saints.” Once a high-school football star with a potential NFL career, he’s repetitively rapping about guns, and while this probably isn’t some self-actualization moment for Quavo, the recognition of a missed opportunity lingers.
“Coppers And Robbers” is another low-key dark cut as Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff all reveal that in the childhood game of “cops and robbers,” they fulfilled their destiny as the latter. “Can’t Go Out Sad” is a laundry list of material boasts, though the more they emphasize they’re not hurting for money, the more they underscore the other ways they might be hurting (the title alone reveals that need for reassurance). “Savages Only” is the real star of the show: a mildly controversial track addressing police violence but placed within the context of fighting fire with fire, as redemption can only come from “savages only.” Sure, it’s not the most hyper-conscious cut, but for a group that’s been previously written off as thoughtless, this track still feels noteworthy.
Sonically, 3-Way is very much an extension of Migos’ Y.R.N. 2 mixtape from earlier this year, but their content is seemingly drifting into new directions. With the upcoming election, racial injustice, and police brutality, many artists have changed the subject of their tune. Perhaps the country’s current climate inspired Migos to delve deeper this time, or perhaps they were this deep all along and we just weren't listening.


Built on loud, low-bit-rate samples, the New York rapper uses a relaxed, almost deadpan flow to nestle deep in his own consciousness, drawing you in close to his words.

Gangway for Navy

The man behind the Navy Blue moniker, Sage Elsesser, is a pro skater who models for Supreme, has his own Converse sneaker and can be heard at the end of Frank Ocean’s Blonde boasting of his ability to play the theremin. But on Gangway for Navy, a compelling and hazy collection of songs posted to Soundcloud this month, Elsesser is far away from the starry social circles he sometimes inhabits. Instead, he’s nestled deep in his own consciousness, rapping in a loose delivery over tightly wound samples about the friends and family that molded his heart. It sounds a lot like his longtime friend and one-time roommate Earl Sweatshirt’s 2018 album Some Rap Songs and achieves a similar effect.
Like Earl did on Some Rap Songs, which he worked on while crashing at Elsesser’s Brooklyn apartment a few years ago, Elsesser builds the production on Gangway mostly by himself using loud, low-bit-rate samples erected on sharp, crushing percussion. Whereas loop-diggers like Madlib tended to fold his drums smoothly into the sample, Elsesser aerates each snare and bass kick with shrapnel, giving his tracks a big heaving quality, like a barge swaying in the middle of a storm. On “can’t take me,” hi-hats and bass kicks pulse under a rubbery organ line; machine-gun claps propel a bed of pitched-down strings on “slow down.”
This sound is the buoyant force of Gangway, a sound on which Elsesser floats during his verses. His flow is relaxed and deadpan, the opposite of showmen MCs who alter their timbre to emphasize certain lines. You won’t necessarily catch his small pockets of detail on first listen, but that’s part of the fun, searching for them on each return visit. On “carlos,” for example, he encapsulates the long-term toll of abandonment by a loved one with the line, “I can count the years when it hurt the most.” He finishes that verse by stating three words but only attaching meaning to two: “Growth, these words, know they hurt to hold/Grace, give thanks, know I’m not alone/Grief…” He lets the third word linger, as if he himself is its definition.
Heartache is an underlying theme of Gangway, but Elsesser never conveys it dramatically. Rather, it’s more like he’s stating the facts of his existence, balancing questions of profundity  (“My soul is scared...will I fall victim to the same three things?”) with the nuances that formed his childhood, down to what exactly was on the dinner table. He speaks about his role as a man, both in his family (he mentions his sisters, mother, dad, and grandma frequently) and the greater universe. He’s a son and brother to his direct kin, but also to the millions of descendants of Africans who were brought over as slaves to this country. “Got the face of my father, hands of my fathers,” he boasts poetically on the opener, “apprehension.”
There’s zero talk here about his life in the limelight, gracing lookbooks, and popular skate videos, but there are hints of its difficulties, such as on “shine on me!,” when he raps, “More problems on my plate cause I’m grown/Not cause I’m growin’.” Featured on the track is Bronx rapper MIKE, whose music Earl introduced Elsesser to while they were living together. His voice is much huskier than Elsesser’s whirring hum and gives the project—he’s featured on two of its eight tracks—some needed dynamism. “Always hogs on the block cause the area harsh,” he grunts, a colorful line that demonstrates why he’s gradually becoming the face of NYC’s alternative hip-hop scene. But the true beauty of Gangway lies in its personalism. It’s bone-deep, poems spun through a stream of consciousness. It takes a long time for some artists to sound like themselves; for Elsesser, it’s the name of the game.


On their fourth full-length, the Salt Lake City doom band SubRosa take inspiration from a 100-year-old dystopian novel about a modern surveillance state. The resulting album is their best yet.

SubRosa: For this We Fought the Battle of Ages

For this We Fought the Battle of Ages

For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages—the fourth album by Salt Lake City doom-and-drama masters SubRosa—takes its inspiration from We, an almost 100-year-old dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is a paralyzing, prescient portrait of a modern surveillance state, where a world made of glass prevents secrets and state policies curtail pleasurable sex. We predates George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 by two decades and helped shape a literary tradition where the chief concern is exactly how much state authority can overpower individual autonomy. It is a most relevant anxiety in 2016. But an hour-length album that lifts lines, themes, and arcs from an especially didactic framework? That may sound like a bit much.
During the last decade, though, SubRosa has steadily learned to make the obscure accessible, to open up the high-volume lurch and heavy-menace scowl of doom to an ever-widening audience. Founder and leader Rebecca Vernon has woven threads of bewitching folk and magnetic grunge into her metal, an approach epitomized by 2013’s More Constant Than the Gods. Backed by a fleet of violins and a rhythm section that could quickly sink from featherweight to heavyweight, Vernon’s anthems pulled you into their oversized gothic churn. And on Battle of Ages—yet again, the best work of SubRosa’s career—she doubles down on the ability to make the esoteric compelling. This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries. You may want to press “pause” just to ponder, but the brooding, booming music demands you move onward.
Four of Battle of Ages’ six songs break the 10-minute mark, with two lasting for a quarter-hour. These unabashed track lengths give SubRosa room to roam and the ability to fold a panoply of sounds and ideas into one space. “Black Majesty,” for instance, opens with Vernon singing a black widow’s lullaby (“Isn’t it good to be acquainted with darkness?” she begins) over crackling electronics. The song soon lunges forward, though: room-rattling drums cut beneath a low-slung riff before the whole band shifts into a double-time sprint, where screeching violins intensify the raw nerves of the rhythm section. There are strong hooks and soft harmonies, a section that feels like Cocteau Twins gauze and another that feels like Silver Mt. Zion-sized fury. And these are just accessories to lyrics where Vernon poignantly wonders about the redemption inherent in mortality and the error inevitable in myth. “We love the taste of false perfection/The more the lies, the more we laud,” she seethes amid a complicated bridge. The line pulls all her abstraction into a political moment where a reality television star sits near the brink of the presidency.
Elsewhere, Vernon softly sings folk music in Italian over a plucked lyre. The band pits death metal barks against seraphic harmonies during “Wound of the Warden,” a 13-minute sprawl where the midsection could be a rock radio classic unto itself. “Troubled Cells” conjures a loneliness and despair so exquisite it might as well be a murder ballad, while the shout-along coda reimagines the Arcade Fire’s mix of gang vocals and strings with more interest in dark than light. It’s no small wonder that SubRosa’s most ambitious work, where songs last as long as television shows, doubles as its most compulsory listen. Both qualities stem from SubRosa’s command of so many styles and ability to hide the seams that stitch them together.
Novelistic inspiration, turns out, suits SubRosa perfectly, as it matches the band’s scale, where big ideas about life, death, freedom, and love are emboldened by songs that pull in influences like a vortex. Sure, For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages shares themes and scenes with We, from which it, like Orwell did, lifts a worried vision for the future. More important, though, is that it shares the audacity to reimagine how the world looks or sounds. Zamyatin was an architect of what has become an idiom. And few doom bands operate with the urgency and inclusion of SubRosa, a group that’s made an album you can’t escape about a world you wish you could.


The New Jersey band’s debut LP sticks to time-tested hardcore formulas, but even within those bounds—and in under 17 minutes—the group discovers whole universes.

Only Constant

Gel make hardcore for the freaks. That’s a statement of intent, established in the title of the New Jersey band’s 2019 demo and reaffirmed at every sweaty, ecstatic show they’ve played since. Increasingly, over an impressive string of singles and a split with Cold Brats, it’s also become a subgenre of their own making. Gel play a joyously elastic version of hardcore punk that rejects the genre’s tough-guy orthodoxy while retaining its powerful punch. On Only Constant, the band’s 17-minute debut full-length, they lay out their most expansive, iconoclastic vision yet.
Only Constant works so well because it faithfully captures Gel’s energetic live set. They know how to get a room (or a Sonic parking lot) moving and keep it moving, and their recordings rely on that same sense of momentum. On paper, they’re not doing anything revolutionary. A Gel song typically consists of two or three riffs, usually played at a couple of different tempos, with a fat rhythm-section groove underpinning the guitars and vocalist Sami Kaiser unleashing their scorched-earth howl on top of everything. But within that relatively simple formula, Gel have discovered whole universes.
“Honed Blade,” Only Constant’s searing opening track, is one such universe. Its first riff, a chunky little three-chord progression initially played just by guitarist Anthony Webster, emerges out of a brief swell of feedback. Kaiser ad-libs a sardonic “Ha, ha,” which prompts the rest of the band to jump in, with second guitarist Maddi Nave doubling the riff and locking it to a stomping groove. At this point, we’re 12 seconds into the song. For the rest of its 100-second duration, Gel work through a couple of their signature tempo shifts, introducing a second riff that functions more like a variation on the first one and letting Webster rip on a squealing effect that may or may not qualify as a lead. Then it’s over, you wipe the blood from your lip, and “Fortified” kicks in.
Gel maintain the same brisk clip for most of Only Constant’s runtime. They’re on record as being anti-horseshoe: the crowd formation that forces non-moshers to the back and sides while a big empty pit opens in the middle of the room. They want bodies in constant motion, with kids flinging themselves at, onto, and off of the stage. The songs on Only Constant reflect that desire. They’re comfortable dropping into the occasional slower groove, but they elide the kind of ultra-obvious mosh parts that tend to form horseshoes. Even when they do offer a little bit of red meat to the pit, there’s always something texturally interesting going on at the same time—a warped take on a Slayer divebomb, a little power-pop bounce to the chords, or a shuffle drum pattern.
It helps, too, that Kaiser’s vocal style is less drill sergeant and more enthusiastic therapist. They sing about confidence, self-acceptance, and their desire to transcend self-destructive tendencies with a kind of suppliant empathy, urging the listener to make the connections that will draw them in even closer to the music. It’s a far cry from the genre’s stereotypical barking exhortations to “open up this fucking pit.” The most forceful lines come at the end of “Fortified,” when Kaiser roars, “Don’t fucking cower/Stand your ground/Stare right back and be proud.” It’s clear that they’re singing it not only to themself, but to all the other freaks in the room.
The emphasis on community that’s baked into Gel’s premise also yielded Only Constant’s one misstep. “Calling Card” sets a series of fan-submitted voice memos to a simple, echoey guitar line and a skittering drumbeat. The clips tend to be catty and vulgar: “If being assertive makes me a bitch, then I guess I’m a fucking bitch”; “You’re a fucking snake and looking at your face makes me want to throw the fuck up”; etc. “Calling Card” appears midway through the track listing, and it stops the album’s momentum dead in its tracks. Worse, its attempt at inclusiveness comes off as cliquey, suggesting that if you can’t relate to the gossipy gripes of the inner-circle hardcore scene, then the song isn’t for you. Maybe that’s what “hardcore for the freaks” means to some people, but it’s far more persuasive when it sounds like a sweat-choked DIY space being whipped into a euphoric frenzy. Fortunately, the rest of Only Constant understands that.


As the touring guitarist for Mikal Cronin and the bassist in Fuzz, Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich is in the orbit of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. He brings serious guitar chops to his own band but also knows how to switch things up, incorporating psychedelic tinges and a heavy bottom end. Segall contributes on drums.

Meatbodies

Mikal Cronin put on some killer live shows last year surrounding MCII, but while he was singing beautifully and strumming his 12-string, another longhair consistently threatened to steal the spotlight. Chad Ubovich, the touring guitarist responsible for the huge solo on "See It My Way", has undeniable chops. He's also the bassist for Fuzz, and it's the same deal—he does a lot more than just slouch in the background and play the minimum. When this dude takes a solo, you watch. Based on those sideman gigs alone, it makes sense that his band Meatbodies got picked up by In the Red for a pair of singles and a long-player.
Last year, they released a very good self-titled cassette on Ty Segall's God? Records (as Chad and the Meatbodies). It sold out fairly quickly and, in circles that care about those sorts of things, became one of those instantaneous small batch collector's items. But with their debut LP, it's more difficult to view the band as small-press ass-kicking upstarts. Meatbodies was recorded and mixed by Eric "King Riff" Bauer, Bob Marshall, and Chris Woodhouse (who, between the three of them, have worked on every Live in San Francisco release and most Segall, Cronin, Fuzz, and Oh Sees records). The cover art was done by Fuzz and Slaughterhouse artist Tatiana Kartomten. Segall even plays drums and bass on a few tracks here. Meatbodies are embedded in that world, and they're working within a formula that's proved successful for their more-visible peers. Comparisons are inevitable; the bar is high.
Pro wrestling heels use the term "B+ player" about guys in Ubovich's position—rookies who put on a good show but aren't quite headliners. But he rips, you see. He's always been a destroyer, and on Meatbodies, he also proves to be an ace rock'n'roll strategist. The tone here is set perfectly: 59 seconds of psychedelic sci-fi noise, and then, very suddenly, Ubovich and Segall come in at full power, electric guitars unrelenting, with "Disorder". It's a loud, exciting, kinetic, and brazen introduction. Like Daniel Bryan before him, Ubovich rises to the occasion.
But Meatbodies don't just blindly hit peak after peak, shredding toward the high heavens uninterrupted for a full album. They pull back and indulge their more psychedelic inclinations, letting Ubovich's voice shine, lilt, and echo over steady acoustic strumming. When that starts sounding too sterile after a couple minutes, he dirties it up by dropping an electric guitar solo in the middle. While they craft plenty of catchy hooks and choruses over the album's dozen tracks, they don't lean on any one thing for long. There's always a changeup in place. They'll dismantle a loud and fast song for a sluggish, slow finish. Any band can churn out an exciting two-minute garage punk song and then repeat the formula a few times. Very few artists of this ilk exhibit this much patience, which makes for a continually rewarding listen.
If there's a clear-cut example of Meatbodies making the upgrade from "band with a tape and some 7" tracks" to "rock band to watch," it's the re-recorded album version of "Wahoo". The ramshackle stomper is now stadium-ready. (It's worth checking out the original tape version of that song, too—a fun document of the band's lo-fi, warbly beginnings.) The track comes late in the album, and when it arrives, Ubovich has already found several opportunities earlier in the LP to show off what he's capable of as a guitarist. And sure, there's excellent guitar work on the track, but there's a clearer focus on the confidence he exhibits as a frontman. He yelps, screams, and croons like a seasoned rock star. "I don't know and I don't care," he sings at the bridge. He does care, though—if he didn't, Meatbodies wouldn't sound half this good.


Four short EPs from Greta Kline feature the singer-songwriter at a piano singing her detailed and deeply felt songs with newfound conviction.

Haunted Items

The objects in Greta Kline’s songs are like signposts along a winding road, underscoring the quotidian intimacy that has become the hallmark of her prolific output as Frankie Cosmos. Her beloved dog JoJo, taxidermied in a museum; a Sappho book read by an anonymous lover, observed through a bedroom window. For her latest project, a series of EPs entitled Haunted Items, Kline takes inspiration from the way objects can contain tiny emotional universes, permeated by the contexts surrounding their existence.
Frankie Cosmos songs often feel haunted—they appear on early albums quiet and dusted with tape hiss, and reappear later, more fully formed. Haunted Items, by contrast, has not played out in the public eye because Kline originally wrote them for piano, an instrument she did not know how to record, even in demo form. Instead, these tracks reverberated in her head, an affectation that plays out in the small rhymes and repetitions that punctuate the EPs. One can picture Kline sitting at the piano or on a tour bus repeating the intro to “Eternal,” a strangely hypnotic track towards the middle of the collection: “Nothing is ever nothing/Everything is everything/Inside of part of everything is nothing.” What could otherwise be a stoner platitude is delivered so earnestly it nearly makes the sentiment feel new again. It is, like the best Frankie Cosmos songs, imbued with an optimistic sense of wonder, a manifestation of what she has called her “mantra”: “Isn’t it crazy that I have feelings and exist?”
The piano was Kline’s first instrument, though she found recitals too anxiety-inducing and eventually took up the guitar. But on Haunted Items, the piano feels like a natural companion that brings you closer to the writing process. On the simple and sweet “Rings on a Tree,” she plunks out a bright chord progression with one hand, as her vocals play the role of the second hand. On “Allowed,” a dissonant minor key helps establish the playfully dark tone of the song, letting Kline’s distinctive lyricism set the rest of the scene: “You are just a scary bug/You can’t hurt me.” It feels a bit like a puppet show put on in a basement, a series of short ditties sung with the conviction of a Broadway musical.
Her voice, always a step or two away from breaking in higher octaves, is quiet but firm, filled with the charming eccentricities that often make Kline seem more like a friend playing songs in her bedroom. She occasionally clips her “g’s,” like on “String,” a song about struggling to maintain a facade while on the verge of an emotional breakdown: “No one’s ever noticin’/The way that I am balancin’.” It lends a closeness, even a kind of everydayness, to ideas that are scary or larger than life.
But despite the intimacy in these EPs—a clear step back from the fast-and-loud approach she adopted on last year’s Vessel—there is a distinctive boldness in Kline’s verses. The nihilism and despondency once commonplace in her lyrics are replaced here with a newfound resilience. If she was once framed as a despondent wallflower, this album begins to recast her as someone wise from heartbreak and loneliness. On “In the World,” Kline finally takes the space she wanted on 2014’s Zentropy, exploring the kind of rebirth that can happen after leaving an all-consuming relationship: “A day goes by that I don’t think of you,” she sings, a line to be scribbled into notebooks by lovelorn teens the world over.
Kline’s lyrics have always had an uncanny ability to sneak up on the listener; the “wow” moment often comes long after the song ends. On Haunted Items, this happened for me on “Tunnel”: “And baby I got hair now that’s never even heard of you,” she sings plainly. It only took 53 albums or so, but Greta Kline has finally turned her acerbic wit on someone other than herself. In the hushed tones of bedroom pop, it is a veritable mic drop.