Two notable sidemen collaborate on an elusive instrumental album inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music. The melodies are fleeting and the arrangements ever-shifting.

Pino Palladino / Blake Mills: Notes With Attachments

Notes With Attachments

Contradictory as it sounds, Pino Palladino is possibly the most famous working session bassist. The 63-year-old Welshman is known for his glissando tone and melodic fills, and he has built a four-decade career as the ultimate supporting player: providing a Stravinsky-inspired fretless performance on Paul Young’s 1983 U.K. number No. 1 Marvin Gaye cover “Wherever I Lay My Head,” contributing to neo-soul landmarks Mama’s Gun and Voodoo, joining The Who after the death of original bassist John Entwhistle in 2002, and much more.
Notes With Attachments is the first album released under Palladino’s own name, co-headlining with producer and instrumentalist Blake Mills. The 34-year-old Mills has a similar history as a supporting player, producing for artists like Perfume Genius and Alabama Shakes and facilitating Fiona Apple’s playing on Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. After first collaborating on John Legend’s 2016 album Darkness and Light, the pair developed songs from Palladino’s archive of musical sketches, recording with a small group of players at famed Los Angeles studio Sound City in a series of sessions spanning two and a half years.
Notes With Attachments is an elusive instrumental album, subtle despite the pun in its title. The songs are based around repeating chord changes inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music, but the continuously shifting arrangements mean that no one instrument carries the melody for long. It’s the sound of consummate collaborators imagining a world where there’s no such thing as a lead performer.
On “Ekuté,” Palladino’s bass and guitar lines bounce off each other in a syncopated rhythm. As fuzzy, distorted yawns of guitar give way to squealing saxophone and bass clarinet, the players match intensities so that they sound almost like the same instrument at different ends of its range. The song started out as a Fela Kuti-inspired one-chord jam. “We were trying to figure out all the different places that one beat or bassline could take you,” Mills said in a statement.
Many songs here seem as if they were already in the air, just waiting to be captured in final form: “Man From Molise” began as a Palladino composition inspired by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal and recorded with a New York ensemble. Mills played it at half-speed, and from there the duo created an entirely new song—though a sluggish feeling lingers, exacerbated by the lopsided 7/8 time signature. “Soundwalk” was written around a horn arrangement extracted from a fully mixed demo that Palladino and saxophonist Jacques Schwartz-Bart recorded while snowed in at a Chicago hotel during D’Angelo’s 2000 Voodoo tour; its lurching rhythm is reminiscent of another D’Angelo collaborator, J Dilla. The percussion drops in and out while the saxophones drag the music ahead, as if the players were exchanging glances, unsure whether to keep playing but carrying on anyway.
For listeners expecting a more conventionally groovy project from Palladino, the album’s restless rhythms may be unsettling. Compared to neo-soul or blues-rock, the melodies are fleeting, the grooves more intricate and less dependent on the downbeat. Running contrary to expectations is part of Mills’ M.O.; “My favorite musicians are people who have a certain dissatisfaction with the sound of their own instrument,” he told Pitchfork in 2018. The few exceptions are hard to miss: a monster riff played in unison by bass, sax, and drums midway through “Djurkel” looms over the entire album. A sax solo on the title track briefly glitters with sentimentality before the song shifts to something more dissonant.
Like cornetist Rob Mazurek’s recent album Dimensional Stardust, Notes With Attachments was stitched together in the studio from multiple performances, yet effectively mimics the chemistry of a live ensemble. On Stardust, Damon Locks’ recitations burst from a bullhorn to be heard through the noise, but here the shifting arrangements don’t even bother to make space for vocals. (A human voice would only diminish the majestic unfurling of “Just Wrong,” or the eerie atmosphere that Sam Gendel generates with sampled saxophone on closer “Off the Cuff.”) Without a lead melody to hone in on, the album’s ever-shifting arrangements can sometimes feel uncertain, like carrying on with a scavenger hunt after forgetting the hiding places. But heard in full, Notes With Attachments’ restlessness sounds more like determination: an insistence on fitting as many ideas into as short a time as possible.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Kaya Cohen's third guitar-and-voice album is a sprawling fascination with the natural world and the nature of people.

Open to Chance

There’s a bit of irony in the title of Itasca’s third album, *Open to Chance. *Musically, this is Kayla Cohen’s most precise, controlled work to date, compared not only to her early abstract drones as Sultan but even to her last full-length, 2015’s beautifully wandering guitar-and-voice record Unmoored by the Wind. It’s also her first recording with a band, which perhaps explains why she kept a tight ship, lest her subtle, intricate folk songs get blurred or drowned by overly-busy accompaniment.
Thematically, though, *Open to Chance *has an apt name. It’s a record about trying something new and journeying into unknown experiences with eager, if cautious, optimism. The album opens with Cohen proposing a move to the mountains with her mate, travels through observations and interpretations of her environs, and closes with a meditation on how this dream might end. That might sound heavy, and certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.
Much of that joy comes from Cohen’s guitar and voice, two finely-tuned instruments that are uniquely adept at conveying her ideas and images. There’s always some spring in her acoustic, finger-picked step, even in Open to Chance’s most reflective moments. Her vocals are more wistful and bittersweet, delivered with a fading restraint that evokes Vashti Bunyan’s best whispers. But she also has a bright lilt that suits her open-eyed musings. When it's applied to lines such as “Wonder if I’ll ever turn this around,” or, “I’m rolling in circles again,” it’s equally possible to hear them as hopeful or downbeat. More likely, it's both at the same time.
*Open to Chance *is also engaging simply because Cohen sounds so fascinated with everything she sees. Her purview is mainly the natural world—trees and flowers, sunsets and breezes, mice and hens— but she’s just as concerned with the nature of people. In one absorbing track, “No Consequence,” she marvels at confident individuals, the kind so assured and charmed that they seem unreal. Cohen views them from every angle, but she’s still suspicious: “You tell me it takes time/But I think you’ve got a joker on your side.”
Apparently for Cohen, that kind of self-certainty means the death of adventure. She’s more interested in potentials and indeterminacies, and all the different ways that things could go. In that sense, “Just for Tomorrow” is Open to Chance’s most fitting song. Just eight lines long, it's tinged with regret. Cohen sings, “I once held a faithful dream,” perhaps referencing the fantasy that opened the album, and yet she still celebrates the unknown: “After all there are so many ways/I might have just walked.” It’s that appreciation of possibility, of the paths ahead and the ones left behind, that makes *Open to Chance *compelling.


Reissued for Record Store Day, the live *Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 *captures the combination of determination, ambition, and vulnerability that makes Bruce Springsteen’s early years so fascinating.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

In 1975, Bruce Springsteen became one of the decade’s great success stories, but he remained plagued by self-doubt. While that year’s Born to Run is often perceived as his masterwork—the aural equivalent of the “rock and roll future” ad copy that’d been plastered above his face to boost sales of his previous two LPs—Springsteen was convinced upon completion that he’d produced a failure. The solution, he thought, was to shelve Born to Run and release a live album instead. His perfectionist tendencies in the studio and the high-pressure stakes of making a hit record amplified Bruce’s worst fear: that he, an artist steadily building his name on supposed authenticity, was in danger of being reduced to a product. But on stage, he was in control. From an early point in his career, Springsteen knew that nobody (no label, no management, no pull quote) could sell his music like he could.
Ironically, it would be decades before the first full-length Springsteen show was released as an album. That show would be his November 1975 performance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon theater—issued as a film accompaniment to 2005’s Born to Run reissue, a stand-alone 2xCD set in 2006, and a vinyl box for this year’s Record Store Day. Among the most celebrated nights in Springsteen’s career, Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 captures the potent combination of determination, ambition, and vulnerability that makes Bruce’s early years so fascinating. Taking place three months after the release of Born to Run and several weeks after he graced the cover of both Time and Newsweek, this show would be his first outside the U.S. Same goes for the E Street Band, now solidified into a sturdy six-man rock group, after stints from jazz musicians and a violinist. “Finally,” proclaimed posters splattered around the city (which Springsteen allegedly tore down in a fit of nervous rage before the show), “London is ready for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.”
While many of Springsteen’s 24 recorded songs at this point were precisely about breaking out of your hometown, proving yourself to the world, and never looking back, his Hammersmith performance feels gloriously unrehearsed. At the 3,500-seat venue, Springsteen effectively separated himself from the crowd—turning his back to them, pulling his thick wool cap over his eyes, and literally crawling into a hole during the breakdown in “Spirit in the Night.” When he tries to make conversation, his storied ability of connecting to an audience is not on display: “So, how’s things going over here in England and stuff, eh? Alright?” he asks, before doubling over in laughter: “I never been here before.”
His unrefined energy carries the show. It took Springsteen six months to record “Born to Run,” but it takes him just four minutes to blast through it, a mere six songs into the set. The band proceeds with a shaky, sloppy spirit, landing miles away from the arena workhorse the song would evolve into. More practiced tunes like “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” are amplified and energized. When the songs reach their climaxes, Springsteen backs off the mic and lets his band overpower him, with massive waves of catharsis from Stevie Van Zandt’s lead guitar and Clarence Clemons’ saxophone.
As a composer and bandleader, Springsteen began refitting his catalog to carry the load of increased expectations. “The E Street Shuffle” is slowed down to lament the innocence of bygone days, while a verse about a dead-end relationship with a waitress in “Sandy” is replaced with him whispering how “the angels have lost their desire for us.” From Roy Bittan’s austere piano introduction in “Thunder Road” to a proggy extension of “Kitty’s Back” that spans an entire side of vinyl, Springsteen’s catalogue feels big and dynamic enough to take on the world. As the show goes on, you can almost hear Springsteen realizing it.
While Bruce and his band were ready for London, the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual yet. A Creem review of the show read disappointedly, with Simon Frith describing the E Street Band as being “pretty crummy in its technical range and subtlety.” He even took issue with Springsteen’s physical presence: “I mean, he’s so bloody small!,” he seethed, “This is the future of rock’n’roll??” Writing for Sounds, Vivien Goldman was sympathetic but skeptical: “There was an immense feeling of strain about this show, following a press and publicity campaign of unparalleled intensity.” An NME writer, meanwhile, concluded his review assuredly: “Bob Dylan can relax.” The audience seemed similarly impassive, occasionally roaring with excitement (especially for the roots-rock covers in “Detroit Medley”), but more often clapping in awkward patches, filling the silence with heckles like, “Oi, turn the guitars up!”
Springsteen took it all to heart. After all, this is an artist who selected his rock critic manager after reading his mixed review of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, calling out its poor production. Once Springsteen returned to the states, his setlists started including a cover of the Animals’ “It’s My Life,” a gnarly enactment of an artist taking control over his narrative. Bruce would evolve accordingly, turning the guitars up and sonically tearing down his label’s press posters with 1978’s righteous, unadorned Darkness on the Edge of Town. But for his desperate stand at the Hammersmith Odeon, Springsteen stood as far from home as he’d ever been, and—backed by a band swiftly ascending to the height of their powers—defined what he’d do for the rest of his career. For those two hours, his myth and his music were inseparable.


The Oakland band’s wide-ranging debut is a whirlwind of biting critique, nervy post-punk guitars, and absurdist humor. Rarely does a first record speak with such a trenchant voice.

Fake Fruit

For Fake Fruit, there’s no shortage of things to be pissed off about, so you might as well enjoy the ride. The Oakland, California band’s coltish self-titled debut favors spirited punk primitivism and two-minute art-rock tracks—punchy, melodic songs united by nervy guitars and cutting takedowns of modern frustrations (scene-y social structures, bad sex, the “plight” of men). Miraculously, they manage to avoid self-serious posturing, resulting in an occasionally dissonant, frequently delightful album where fun and fury overlap. Rarely does a band’s first record speak with such a trenchant voice.
Fake Fruit has had time to figure itself out: Chief songwriter and frontperson Hannah “Ham” D’Amato originally founded the band in 2016 in New York, then moved to Vancouver, B.C. and restarted as a trio, before finding new footing in Oakland. There, she secured a semi-finalized lineup—lead guitarist Alex Post, drummer Miles MacDiarmid, and a rotating cast of bassists—as well as a few side gigs: deejaying Chicano soul and oldies at events hosted by psych-rock eclecticist Sonny Smith of Sonny and the Sunsets and once playing in a Suburban Lawns cover band called Gidget Goes to Hell. By mid-2019, D’Amato, Post, and MacDiarmid had saved up enough to turn a tour tape into their debut LP, tracking the instrumentals in two days spaced a year apart. Now, two years later, Fake Fruit finally arrives via Smith’s label Rocks in Your Head. It’s well worth the wait: In the half-decade since its first iteration, the band has evolved from nomadic experimentation into nascent punk prowess.
From the get, Fake Fruit is electrifying. Rhythmic, garage-y riffs ignite “No Mutuals,” propelled by the song’s dissatisfaction with online social etiquette. At its center is Fake Fruit’s most distinctive asset: D’Amato’s voice, which hits like Courtney Barnett fronting a punk band. “I don’t wanna wait to be christened as cool,” she sings, blowing up the pronunciation of “cool” until it fractures, sounding almost like “cruel.” The final word in “You look like a fool” receives a similar distortion—an eviscerating affectation.
From there, Fake Fruit chase whatever seems to interest them: math-y staccato and frustrated sprechgesang (“Miscommunication”), spiky vibrato (“No Space for Residence”), untidy tempos (“Stroke My Ego”), even an echo of indie pop as D’Amato harmonizes with Post on “Swing and a Miss.” Tonally, “Swing and a Miss” stings of sentimentality, but a closer listen flips the meaning: D’Amato is singing about a partner who couldn’t please her (“It was a swing and a miss/That’s alright/You didn’t make me cum/It wasn’t enough”), and cheekily enough, this song follows another titled “Stroke My Ego.” There’s more absurdity here than it may first appear, a reminder of the humor to be found in the throes of irritation and even of pain. It surfaces in the anxious, acerbic rock of “Yolk,” where D’Amato bellows, “I’m with my honey/He says I’m funny/I had a bad day/His yolk is running,” and on the skronking closer “Milkman,” which opens with a deliciously sour tribute to the list-making mundanity of post-punk: “Hot sidewalk/No shade/Milk curdles/With age.” This band is just a little too impatient to watch paint dry, so milk curdling it is.
What imperfections do appear lie in the album’s pacing: a whirlwind of biting aphorism and gloomy post-punk in one corner; asymmetrical, snapping guitars in another; one song that leverages frustration at self-victimization (“Don’t Put It on Me”) and another where D’Amato riffs on male entitlement (“Lying Legal Horror Lawyers,” featuring the line, “Let’s talk about men’s rights/Let’s talk about their plight/Nah! They’ll be alright”). The amount of movement can be overwhelming, but that’s the point: Whatever the topic, whatever the sound, Fake Fruit is both annoyed and engrossed, teetering between having a great time and trying to hold a conversation with someone who isn’t worth the effort. It’s an urgent, emphatic kind of chaos, where life is a series of discontents, each one worthy of a catchy song.

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Plaid have been reliable fixtures in “intelligent dance music” since the genre first rose to prominence in the 1990s. Their latest, Reachy Prints, is full of new sounds, but their experimentation is tempered with strides towards a greater accessibility.

Reachy Prints

Plaid have been reliable fixtures in “intelligent dance music” since the genre first rose to prominence in the 1990s. Ever since their career-launching debut, 1997's Not for Threes, Andy Turner and Ed Handley have released carefully composed recordings full of warm tones, friendly melodies, and interesting technical sleights of hand; they've often found themselves situated between the genre's mercurial virtuosos (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) and a legion of hacky glitch engineers.
Their latest, Reachy Prints, is full of new sounds. Handley and Turner are dedicated tech geeks who embody the genre’s commitment to exploring off-label uses of different gear in order to see if it makes any interesting noises. “Nafovanny” possesses an intriguingly detuned lead, while “Tether” generates an edgy atmosphere from a fascinatingly ugly, dissonant synth patch. The arrangements are familiar, though, and the album fits in comfortably with the rest of Plaid's discography, defined by a relaxed-but-peppy energy and well-mannered songs that evolve smoothly with as few shocks as possible. (The exceptions to this rule appeared on 2011's Scintilli, which featured some uncharacteristically aggressive and bumpy tracks and was all the more intriguing for it.)
IDM has always been devoted to challenging approaches to experimentation, so consistency isn’t necessarily a virtue in the genre; while Plaid's latest batch of material should satisfy those who have kept track of the duo's output thus far, it doesn’t push many boundaries. Interestingly, though, the type of electronic music that Plaid makes—melodic enough to be accessible while retaining glitchy qualities—has, over the last twenty years, moved from the very fringes of the pop landscape to a little closer to pop's center. Specifically, Aphex Twin's become a touchstone of sorts for rap producers, and his influence has trickled up to the point where it’s not unusual for chart-placing songs to feature the stuttering rhythms, tweaked-out synthesizers, simulated vinyl brakes, and other various controlled malfunctions that Aphex and, by extension IDM’s known for.
So as the pop world has tilted in a way that’s moved Handley and Turner’s music in a closer vicinity to the mainstream, which suits them better. The qualities that previously constrained their music—specifically, their melodic affability, especially compared to the compellingly malicious vibe their contemporaries give off—now work in their favor, but that also means that as an experimental electronic album, Reachy Prints comes off as milquetoast.
As a pop album, though, it sparkles: the oscillating beat, flickering melodies, and cooly dark atmosphere of opening track “OH” could have fit in nicely on Saint Heron, last year’s Solange-curated compilation of alternative R&B. The pair have worked with vocalists regularly in the past, and “Lilith,” their collaboration with Bjork on Not For Threes, is not only one of the best songs of their early career but one of hers too. If Turner and Handley embraced their poppier tendencies, they could conceivably reach a new level of success—stranger things have happened.


Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas has never reached the heights of acclaim afforded to his IDM contemporaries like Aphex Twin, but his importance in shaping the style is indisputable. Chewed Corners, his first µ-Ziq LP in six years, is brimming with optimism and ideas.

Chewed Corners

Mike Paradinas has never reached the dizzying heights of acclaim afforded to IDM contemporaries like Aphex Twin. But, listening to his early Rephlex-released LPs under the µ-Ziq alias, his importance in shaping the style is indisputable. From there his career path has been far from straightforward: by the late 90s he'd made a lateral move, setting up his own label and arguably proving himself a better A&R than he was a producer. Planet Mu presided over several major developments in global electronic music, from millennial breakcore to mid-noughties dubstep and, more recently, footwork.
Paradinas’ own production, meanwhile, seemed to falter during the 2000s. 2003’s Bilious Paths was an enjoyable exploration of the sound-and-fury of drill and bass and breakcore, if a little beholden to label successes like Venetian Snares. 2007’s Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique, meanwhile, followed the break-up of a long-term relationship, and its suffocatingly maudlin spin on Paradinas’ usual melodic style proved rather difficult to love. Since then we’ve heard little from Paradinas the producer, but 2013 has marked a surprising return to form. First there was Heterotic’s Love & Devotion, an album of euphoric, romantic synth-pop produced in collaboration with Paradinas’ new wife, Lara Rix-Martin. Following that was a µ-Ziq EP, XTEP, which showcased a newly airy sound, contiguous with his past work but also displaying the influence of chillwave, italo disco, piano house, and plenty else besides.
As with both of these records, Chewed Corners, the first µ-Ziq LP in six years, has a certain giddiness to it-- a giddiness, it’s tempting to conclude, born of new love and fresh optimism. Of course, that optimism could be less to do with Paradinas’ personal life than with the state of music: much of this record displays the influence of recent Planet Mu signings, or of broader trends in contemporary electronic music. "Taikon" and "Twangle Melkas" draw on Kuedo’s Vangelis-via-Southern-hip-hop schtick; "Tickly Flanks" owes a debt to the sugar-rush hardcore-footwork hybrids of Machinedrum, though it’s a little torpid in comparison to its forebear. "Wipe"'s syncopated rhythms nod to UK funky, while "Houzz 10" could be a symptom of the recent house revival-- except Paradinas’ take on the form is particularly dreamy, rolling along on a single blissy break-of-dawn plateau for its duration.
Fortunately, Paradinas just as often succeeds in massaging his inspirations into an idiom entirely his own. There are plenty of highlights here-- heat-warped synth interlude "Monyth", the heavy-lidded "Hug", "Mountain Island Boner", whose portentous piano chords would almost be laughable were they not rather affecting. All of them sound fresh, but are also recognisably µ-Ziq-- unlike the occasional borderline-pastiche footwork remix Paradinas has turned out in recent years. Granted, the weaknesses of past µ-Ziq work live on along with its strengths, and Paradinas’ penchant for overwhelmingly dense arrangements occasionally gets the better of him-- particularly in closer "Weakling Paradinas", which aims for euphoric texture-overload but overshoots, resulting in a fatiguing mess. But in Chewed Corners Paradinas has put together an LP brimming with fresh ideas-- which, for an artist entering the third decade of his career, is no mean feat.


Lucky 7 is Statik Selektah's seventh and supposedly final producer compilation album, and features contributions from Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Royce Da 5'9 and others.

Lucky 7

Lucky 7 is Statik Selektah's seventh and supposedly final producer compilation album. The title might be a joke, but it also signals an uncomfortable familiarity. Statik, whose real name is Patrick Baril, has unceremoniously pumped out hour-long projects like this for the last eight years, and just about all of them feature some three dozen rappers. Earlier this year Baril was asked about what motivates him as a producer and he responded, "It's a really simple formula: fuck with artists that don't suck at rapping." It's a pretty flat, dispassionate motto, but practically speaking, he's built the philosophy into an alignment with a batch of East Coast semi-underground rappers for the better part of a decade. On albums like Lucky 7 Statik corrals them into an assembly line and feeds them beats.
As a producer, Statik isn't the type to push boundaries. His baseline sound is manufacturable with skill: a few similar drum patterns snap into place on almost all of his songs, a loose sample—guitar, horn, or twinkling keys usually—clicks on top, and a chorus is often, but less frequently recently, scratched out of a famous '90s vocal sample. It's a recipe for an unambitious palatability, but Statik has also definitely gotten better over the last decade, and at his best (which includes about a quarter of this album) he can coax out smoother, more alive grooves than this latter-day boom-bap formula usually allows. The worst thing here is the format—21 tracks and no continuity—not the music.
Statik has loosened his tendency toward a three-rapper quota per song—though there are still far too many of them here—and it's easier to down the first few tracks in sequence because of the effect. On "Another Level", Rapsody delivers with less flash than the rest of the bunch but is nonetheless one of the most interesting. Her oddly placed inflections and abrupt rhyme schemes have become a hallmark, but it's still fun to soak up and parse. On "Beautiful Life", a best-foot-forward lead single, Statik musters up an '80s pop-inflected feeling for Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, the New York rappers with whom he's most closely aligned.
Bronson can make himself at home anywhere, but at worst the collaborations can run cold, a hazard of the format and Statik's production as much as anything else. Royce da 5'9'' sounds tired of his dexterity when he often revels in it elsewhere, but there's nothing in the choppy beat of "Crystal Clear" to charge him up. It's easy to mistake Illa Ghee for Sean Price on "Gentlemen", but at least the off-kilter loop Statik builds up from a prog sample suits them well enough to share the same space. Later, "Top Tier" gathers obligatory and disposable verses from Bun B and Styles P over the most middling production of the album.
As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all. A couple of the songs sound good enough to have just gotten cut from better solo albums, but that's not a strong selling point. To his credit, the guy churned a formal mixtape series into a bona fide discography. It's not surprising he's leaving the format behind, and he's certainly milked it for all it's worth.


On their fourth album, the Welsh rockers build their towering songs on wobblier foundations for the sheer thrill of trying to make them topple.

AAARTH

A major-label deal may no longer be a prerequisite for breaking into the mainstream, but they still do come in handy if you want to stay there. When you think of the biggest rock bands of the past 20 years—Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Muse, the Black Keys—they all ascended to the top line of the festival poster, in part, due to the largesse of a deep-pocketed corporate imprint. And from day one, Welsh power trio and Atlantic Records hopefuls the Joy Formidable seemed poised to join them in the 50-point-font club, with their atomic fusion of Britpop-scaled anthemery and post-shoegaze overdrive. When firing on all cylinders, they could be the heaviest rock band that you would never think of classifying as metal, or the most pop-friendly act to drop the occasional blast beat.
So when the Joy Formidable split from Atlantic after two respectably charting albums, there was a more profound sense of unfinished business than with your typical major-to-indie reversion. Initially, the change in circumstance was noticeable only if you scoured their Spotify page for the label metadata fine print: the band’s 2016 album, Hitch, was streamlined and stage-ready almost to a fault. But where that album saw the band overcome an internal crisis—i.e., the end of singer/guitarist Ritzy Bryan and bassist’s Rhydian Dafydd romantic relationship—their fourth record was nearly aborted by an existential one.
And so, with AAARTH, the Joy Formidable have embraced independence not just as a business-survival strategy, but as a creative-liberation philosophy, too. They still sound very much like a rock band striving for the “Top of the Pops”; only now, they want to be the strangest one on there, too. The sense of playful abandon is right there in the album’s name: the Welsh term for bear (albeit with a few extra A’s for guttural emphasis), AAARTH is the sort of title that would make major-label marketing departments wince, while requiring radio announcers to activate the phlegmiest reaches of their larynx.
Ironically, now that the Joy Formidable have resettled in the Southwest U.S., they seem more eager to assert their Welshness. AAARTH opens with a rare display of their native tongue, “Y Bluen Eira,” but the language isn’t the only thing the average Anglophone listener will find inscrutable. It’s less a song than a statement of purpose—a funhouse-mirrored portal into an album that isn’t as eager to make friends as its predecessors.
AAARTH is hardly lacking in towering rock songs, but the band builds them on wobblier foundations for the sheer thrill of trying to make them topple. The staccato-riffed standout “The Wrong Side” comes on like the introductory lurch to Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” spun off into even more over-the-top anthem: What begins as an earnest, reach-across-the-aisle plea for kindness in post-Trump America gets gradually sucked into a swirl of squirrelly guitar lines and player-piano frivolity. And while “The Better Me” could be the most fetching pure pop song this band has ever produced, it too builds into a whirling dervish of booming drum breaks, short-circuiting synths, and noisy spasms that gurgle and wheeze like gastro-intestinal indigestion.
Not every song here aspires to the same degree of inspired irreverence. While the album introduces some intriguing new looks—like the Eastern-psych strut of “Cicada (Land on Your Back)”—the Joy Formidable still have a tendency to pummel their tunes into a modern-rock mush. AAARTH sags under the weight of its less melodic, more melodramatic moments, like the nu-goth pummel of “Dance of the Lotus” or the muscular but meandering grunge-funk workout “Caught on a Breeze.” They’re the sort of songs that immediately show their hand on an album that otherwise excels at slow reveals and sonic Easter eggs. AAARTH’s most arresting moment comes in the form of “All in All,” a gentle glockenspieled ballad that gradually floats skyward until it burns up and explodes into the stratosphere. Of course, by this point, such nuclear-grade eruptions are to be expected from even the Joy Formidable’s most subdued songs. But here, we at least get a clearer view of the artfully arranged debris swirling inside the tornado.


Singer-songwriter Kevin Patrick Sullivan exchanges straight-to-tape simplicity for full-band arrangements, bringing a warm Americana glow to bedroom ballads full of sadness and yearning.

Field Medic: grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change

Until recently, Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s only bandmate in Field Medic was a boombox. On 2017’s songs from the sunroom and 2019’s fade into the dawn, the California songwriter paired his distinctive reedy voice with simple, lo-fi folk guitar and a drum machine. When he performed live, he drove the van and sold the merch himself, setting his specially decorated boombox on a stool to spit out backing tracks while he stood and sang alone. His new album, grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change, exchanges the straight-to-tape simplicity of his earlier work for more expansive full-band arrangements.
Across the album, Sullivan delivers new sounds with elevated confidence. The record opens on “always emptiness,” a slice of warm, textural Americana with steel guitars and piano in the mix. “stained glass” introduces sophisticated, almost orchestral flourishes, while “weekends” has a country-rock backbone. Sullivan’s trusty drum machine reappears on “i had a dream that you died,” which sounds like an older Field Medic song with a synthy new tint, and “i think about you all the time,” where the prominent, melodic bassline and wordy yet catchy chorus recall the ’90s guitar pop of singer-songwriters like Natalie Imbruglia.
Though Sullivan worked in producer Gabe Goodman’s studio with backing musicians, as opposed to alone in a bedroom with a tape recorder, these songs sound intimate. There’s a slight increase in fidelity, but Goodman wisely uses a light touch. Directness is important because Sullivan’s lyrics are rawer than ever: grow your hair long… is full of hopelessness and yearning, and the songs are naked, painful documents of just barely getting by. “I wanna fall off the face of the earth and probably die,” goes the album’s opening line. “Recently a lot I ponder suicide, but I could never do that to my mom,” Sullivan sings on “i had a dream that you died.” The plain recording style creates an almost uncomfortable tension when paired with statements like these; it’s unfiltered and disarmingly matter-of-fact.
In the past Sullivan has written with self-deprecating levity, but here he trades it for a purer self-loathing. Some of his most memorable songs—2017’s “uuu,” 2020’s “i want you so bad it hurts”—are addressed to a lover. The only song on grow your hair long… that scans as a love song, “i think about you all the time,” is more ambivalent; Sullivan calls it “a love song to alcohol & younger days.” Yet it isn’t an overwhelmingly heavy listen, thanks to the prettiness and charm of the music. And while Sullivan’s lyricism is straightforward and unflowery in service to its subject matter, his quietly evocative imagery pulls you into its despairing headspace. “My heart’s a dark shroud, your heart is book bound,” he sings on “i think about you all the time.” The line that titles the album, which comes from “house arrest,” is one of its most effective, beautiful in a simple, natural way.
It’s also one of the rare moments on the album when Sullivan seems to look up from the bottom. There’s another such poignant glimpse of light in “i had a dream that you died,” when he repeats, “I had a dream that I saw a blue whale, I was happy.” The music’s layered, thoughtful melodicism gives credence to these lines, transforming them from desperate grasps to purposeful expressions of faith. grow your hair long… doesn’t make peace with anything, yet the honesty it offers is strangely warm.


On a new label spun off from the eponymous Berlin party series, Franklin De Costa and Hodge curate a strong selection of formidable bass/techno hybrids from acts like Laurel Halo, Batu, and Violet.

Various Artists: Mother’s Finest Compilation

Mother’s Finest Compilation

Berlin is often touted as the techno capital of the world, but the city’s music scene goes deeper than the steadily thudding kick drums emanating from clubs like Berghain and Tresor. The German capital has always been a musically diverse place, particularly for those interested in leftfield and experimental sounds, and in recent years, a variety of styles have taken root across the city’s many dancefloors.
Until last month, several of those dancefloors could be found at Griessmuehle, a former grain mill-turned-nightclub that was a beloved hub for a myriad of non-techno styles: house, disco, electro, UK bass, and more. The club closed in early February after the property’s owner chose not to renew the venue’s lease, but while the place was still open, its roster of regular parties included Mother’s Finest, with German artist Franklin De Costa at the helm. During the series’ seven-year run—for now, its events are part of the “Griessmuehle im Exil” series at Alte Münze, with a new permanent home coming later in the year—De Costa has established himself as one of Berlin’s most trusted nightlife curators, especially for those who gravitate toward heavy bass and the more adventurous varieties of house and techno.
He now applies those curatorial skills to a new record label, which kicks off with the simply titled Mother’s Finest Compilation. A 15-track collection put together by De Costa and Bristol artist Hodge—a Mother’s Finest resident since 2016—it’s an impressive assemblage of talent that places established artists like Batu, Laurel Halo, and Mosca alongside hotly tipped up-and-comers like Anunaku (aka TSVI), Otik, and Karima F. Although Berlin and the UK are heavily represented, the record does reach beyond the usual electronic music hotspots, gathering tracks from Portugal’s Violet, Mexico’s Nico, and Italy’s Katatonic Silentio.
Stylistically, the compilation resides mostly in the hard-to-categorize nether region between bass music and techno, making additional forays into ambient, breakbeat, electro, and jungle. Similar to the output of labels like Timedance, Livity Sound, and Hessle Audio, the music marries the potent basslines and adventurous drum programming of the UK hardcore continuum to a more focused techno framework, resulting in a hybrid sound that’s remarkably potent.
Mother’s Finest Compilation is loaded with formidable club tracks. Hodge’s “Silo” is a particularly animated drum workout, while Nico’s “Common Drum” blends percussive acrobatics with delicate melodies and a more introspective mood. The North African palette and rambunctious spirit of Anunaku’s “Nascent” make it one of liveliest offerings, although it’s rivaled by the breakbeat-infused ghetto house of Nasty King Kurl’s “Complicated” and the booming basslines of Violet’s “Infinite Source,” which brilliantly captures the raucous, rave-ready vibe of ’90s jungle. Dynamo Dreesen’s hypnotic “From This Era” pursues a more linear path; wonky, off-kilter rhythms fuel the seasick glitch of Mosca’s “Swann Morton,” the serpentine groove of Batu’s “High Press,” and the alien stomp of Franklin De Costa’s “Rage.”
If there’s one drawback, it’s a lack of narrative. Mother’s Finest Compilation may be stuffed with top-shelf tunes, but its larger purpose is unclear. Most of the artists featured have played at Mother’s Finest before (some several times), so perhaps it works as a sort of overview of the party’s history, but only Hodge and De Costa are actually residents, and most of the producers don’t even live in Berlin. Without knowing the label’s future plans, it’s possible to see this compilation as a sort of public branding exercise—a practice that’s become common in the electronic music realm. Especially for a new label, it’s a lot easier to market and sell a record with 15 different artists, all of who have their own fan bases and social media channels, than it is to find an audience for an EP or album from a single act, particularly one that’s relatively unknown.
Fortunately, while many artists aren’t naturally inclined to offer up their best stuff for a random compilation, Mother’s Finest Compilation hardly feels inconsequential. It’s clear that De Costa and Hodge made sure to accept only high-quality material, and as first releases go, Mother’s Finest Compilation makes an impressive statement. Its storyline may not extend much beyond, “Here’s a bunch of tunes from artists we like,” but when the music is this good, perhaps that doesn’t matter.


On her debut album, the 24-year-old Tallahassee native briefly makes good on her instinct for mass-appeal pop anthems, but most of the 76-minute album dwells on roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.

Preacher’s Daughter

Ethel Cain’s relationship with pop is nearly as complicated as her relationship with God. Inspired by her restrictive upbringing in a rural Southern Baptist community, the songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, born in Tallahassee and now based in Alabama, introduced her stage persona on her breakout EP, 2021’s Inbred. In its songs, she presented herself as a kind of American gothic Lana Del Rey, with a flair for lurid prose about hateful sex and violent impulses. Split between dreamy, contemporary pop and brutalist, witchy dirges, the EP left uncertain whether Cain, then 23, was setting out for cult stardom or actual stardom. At times, like the opening single “Michelle Pfeiffer,” she seemed to be campaigning for total TikTok saturation; at others she sounded as if she might retreat permanently back into the woods.
Like Inbred, Preacher’s Daughter, Cain’s full-length debut, places its catchiest pop salvo up front. With its heartland-rock pomp and beaming guitars, “American Teenager” plays like something off Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, a taste of the kind of mass-appeal anthems Cain could make if she opted to commit to that route. The rest of the record, though, makes clear she has no interest in that. For the bulk of the album’s heady 76 minutes, she turns her back on pop in favor of roiling gloom and smoldering Americana. If “American Teenager” didn’t so efficiently introduce the album’s motifs—disenfranchised youth, hard living, and misplaced ideals—it’d be a complete fakeout.
Preacher’s Daughter softens some of Ethel Cain’s more subversive edges, humanizing a character that Anhedönia first envisioned as a cult leader. Here she’s more of a tragic heroine in a doomed romance. The torchy “Western Nights” vaguely outlines a narrative involving a woman and her Harley-riding boyfriend crossing state lines, on the run from their past and still bearing family traumas. Cain originally conceived the album as a screenplay; it’s likely the finished film would have had echoes of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. It all might sound a little fresher if Lana Del Rey hadn’t already mined these character archetypes exhaustively.
The record is paced like dripping candle wax, with most of its songs spilling over pop’s tidy running times. That leaves plenty of time to luxuriate in Cain’s remarkable voice. On the rootiest songs, “Hard Times” and “Thoroughfare,” her voice rings with the sterling clarity of Natalie Merchant. Just as often, though, it’s caked in soot or seething with disdain. On the industrial-shocked “Ptolemaea,” the record’s lone descent into nightmarish terror, she breaks open the song with an agonizing shriek any horror director would envy. Cain’s songs often threaten to erupt, but “Ptolemaea” is one of the few that truly does.

Preacher’s Daughter would benefit from a few more raw thrills; too often the haunted, churchy ambiance falls into a predictable stasis. There’s a disconnect between Cain’s provocative public image and the rigid composure of these songs, which rarely shock the way Inbred’s did. The album’s length works against it, too. Cain winnowed the record down from what she once planned to be a two-plus-hour epic, and at times she sounds like she’s writing to run out the clock. The album buckles under the weight of its many seven-minute songs, each of which dulls the impact of the next. As captivating as Cain’s mood-setting can be, Preacher’s Daughter is such a slow burn you periodically wonder if the flame is even still lit.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review calculated the album’s running time as 90 minutes, not 76.


This long-forgotten 1985 album is far from the legendary jazz trumpeter’s best work, but look past its awkwardness and dated sonics, and a certain charm reveals itself.

Home Boy, Sister Out

Think of a trumpet player. A jazz musician. Think of someone who broke boundaries with ease, who innovated so effortlessly it’s hard to imagine music didn’t always sound that way, the way they played. Think about restless reinvention, relentless forward momentum. Think about making a stone classic in your youth and never pausing to revisit it. Think about a distinctive voice. Think about a squeak, a honk, a shimmering arc of tone, instantly recognizable, bursting atop a stripped-back quartet, an electric fusion combo, tape loops, a simple duet. Think about ditching that trumpet for whatever else is on hand, because why not? Think of a singular artist whose half century on the stage never stopped drawing on the most modern, cutting-edge forms available. Now don’t think of Miles Davis. Who’s left? Don Cherry, and that’s about it.
Cherry was active from the mid 1950s until his death in 1995. Each of his eras comes with its own devotees, but it’s rare to hear someone bring up his mid-1980s work. If Davis epitomized the tempestuous visionary, Cherry was the benevolent explorer, and he spent the Reagan years easing into smoother sounds and supporting his daughter Neneh in her post-punk collective Rip, Rig & Panic. Having so comprehensively innovated, he began to relax into the role of elder statesman, going wherever the party was. In 1985, that was in Paris where, alongside French artist and musician Ramuntcho Matta and a crew of arty downtown types, he recorded Home Boy, Sister Out. Reissued here by France’s Wewantsounds, the album emerges from the depths of obscurity: a warmly spotty mix of uneven digi disco, clunky rapping, and moments of fleeting beauty.
There’s no way around it—Home Boy is not great. The record attempts the kind of jazz/punk/hip-hop/reggae fusion that drew liberally from Talking Heads’ 1980 landmark Remain in Light. Surely it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the ultra-crisp production techniques and pop leanings do Cherry no favors. It’s a first, but being unfettered works against him. He raps about sweet potato salad, sings new-age ballads about his “butterfly friend,” and mumbles like a distracted karaoke patron after a few drinks too many. In its awkward overeagerness to get the party started, “Treat Your Lady Right” lands a little too close to Mr. T’s similarly titled paean to motherhood. “Alphabet City”’s anti-drug stance keeps the undercooked PSA vibe going, with Cherry wandering around the mic, ad-libbing the sounds of junkie euphoria where the verse should be, and leaning on the chorus a bit too hard. Album starter “Call Me” unfurls with some promising fanfare but quickly locks into an elevator-ready backing track, with Cherry pushing some choppy lyrics into the edges of his falsetto.
The loose arrangements might have come off if the sound of the album were more inviting. Cherry’s studio work in the 1970s was lush, utilizing trippy effects, tape saturation, and laid-back virtuosity to invoke a gooey spirituality. Home Boy sounds comparatively tinny. The contrast is highlighted by the recycled vocal bits from 1975’s Brown Rice, here drained of their vitality.
On the other hand, it’s a Don Cherry record. For all its flaws, Home Boy is a grower. Cherry’s magnetism remains, despite the chintzy production and slapdash approach. Not quite two minutes into “Bamako Love,” his trumpet swells for a breathtaking moment of sublimity that stops you in your tracks. Across the album his playing remains singular, although you wish he’d wedge it into some more challenging corners. But he doesn’t mind being the guest of honor and plays nice. It’s hard not to forgive him for having some fun.
One notable aspect is the undercurrent of drugs that winds through Home Boy. Cherry struggled with addiction and here takes the opportunity, at the dawn of the crack epidemic, to sing about this notably un-cosmic theme. He doesn’t come to any conclusions, but it gives the album an intriguingly dark edge. “Kick” and the aforementioned “Alphabet City” explicitly address drug users, while “I Walk” perhaps narrates the dazed inner life of an addict attempting equilibrium. “I better get to this program, though. I don’t want to be late today… Today I don’t exist in a definite way, I don’t know where I’m going.”
A year after Home Boy came out, Paul Simon would release his smash hit Graceland, bringing South African vocal harmonies and smooth funk into the homes of a generation. Now the children of the ’80s are getting deeper into their thirties, and suddenly world-funk albums like Home Boy sound like home. If the original release coincided with an aging boomer generation’s turn away from its counterculture roots, perhaps the allure of such a reissue lies in its familiarity. We all become our parents. In this regard, all of Home Boy’s weaknesses—its awkwardness, time-stamped sonics, and apparent disregard for self-editing—can be enjoyed as strengths. Home Boy is shoddy but sweet, ineffective but earnest. It’s one of Cherry’s weakest outings, but if you tune out and let it play, it kind of feels good—comforting and safe. Probably not what they intended, but history has its way of making even the most subversive artists into icons and the blandest work into lost treasures.


With his second album, Berlin’s TJ Hertz leaves techno behind in favor of hyperreal sound design charged with a narrative sensibility.

Cocoon Crush

Objekt’s Cocoon Crush opens on a lonely riff with a curious sonic character, part pan flute and part mandolin. Though likely electronic, it’s clearly meant to suggest the realm of acoustic instrumentation, where the quality of the tone produced depends upon things like fingertips, lips, and breaths. Pizzicato strings, wooden mallets, birdsongs, and gurgling water join, but it’s difficult to differentiate between the “real” and the synthetic. This enigmatic mixture is a shot across electronic music’s bow, one launched from a catapult deep in the uncanny valley. In the same way that the glistening ambient sketch “Agnes Revenge” announced the digital palette of the Berlin-based producer TJ Hertz’s debut album, Flatland, these exotic sounds, so strange in their familiarity, prime us for the acoustic inspirations of Cocoon Crush.
Flatland, which explored techno’s fringes, wasn’t entirely devoid of acoustic fingerprints, but the album concentrated on the imaginative possibilities of purely synthetic, non-mimetic sound design. Hertz once had a day job designing signal-processing algorithms for Native Instruments’ software synthesizers and effects, so he knows a thing or two about the expressiveness of 1s and 0s. On Cocoon Crush, the vacuum-sealed expanse of Flatland gives way to a multi-dimensional spectrum of physical objects pushing air.
Cocoon Crush is far from being Objekt’s Unplugged, though; there are hissing 808 hi-hats and warm ambient pads. But even amid his most obviously digital sounds, there’s a new emphasis on tactility and force. In “Dazzle Anew,” hammered strings recall Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal dulcimers, while chattering percussion suggests an insect flexing its spiky legs. The shape-shifting “Rest Yr Troubles Over Me” begins with a chiming grandfather clock, the decay just slightly too long to be real, before it’s strafed with the accelerating clicks of a spring doorstop and punctuated by what might be heavy slamming doors. The slow-motion electro tune “35” even indulges something akin to slap bass, conjuring visions of Autechre remixing the theme from “Seinfeld.”
Nothing on Cocoon Crush is a mere gee-whiz demonstration of Hertz’s programming chops; there’s a real narrative sensibility behind his sounds. These are some of the most meticulously arranged compositions that dance music has ever produced, even when their movements seem as arbitrary as those of tidal flotsam. In “Rest Yr Troubles Over Me,” an inky silence pierced by a high-pitched whine follows a whoomp that sounds like an airlock being sealed; it feels like a dramatization of John Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber, when the soundlessness of the space revealed to him, he believed, the buzz of his own nervous system. “Silica” is another largely arrhythmic piece that, along with “Rest Yr Troubles,” forms the gelatinous heart of the album. Hertz works his way through a chaotic thicket of clicks and chirps, only to introduce a single, milky chord during the final 17 seconds—perhaps the most evocative thing heard in the entire stretch, an afterthought that doubles as a revelation.
That narrative approach also plays out across the album, and the story is of Hertz’s own estrangement from dance music itself. Cocoon Crush begins in relatively familiar territory: “Lost and Found (Lost Mix)” is the kind of atmospheric ambient techno you can imagine a DJ slotting in a warmup set. But he spends the next few tracks exploring slower tempos and more elastic cadences, letting himself be led by the particularities of his sounds rather than by clubbers’ demands. Track five, “Deadlock,” is the album’s heaviest cut, but it’s also the slowest: a bare-knuckled hip-hop instrumental that sounds like classic Def Jux rendered in retina-burning high definition. Even on “Runaway,” the album’s only true club cut, he refuses to play it straight. In the middle, he removes the beat for nearly a minute, layering tentative piano chords and gurgling synths over the sounds of a children’s playground. When the beat finally returns, it’s stronger, as if recharged by a meditative walk around the block. It’s like a diagram of the creative process itself.
The closer, “Lost and Found (Found Mix),” is a rework of the intro, but it’s no mere coda. A more customary producer would have floated an ambient intro and then wrapped up with the dancefloor version, but Hertz takes the opposite approach: The closing is a seven-minute deconstruction of the opener that jettisons almost all trace of conventional beats. It’s no coincidence that the version subtitled “Found Mix” is the one that ventures furthest from the familiar: To find the essence of Objekt, Hertz has ventured well past techno’s borderlands. Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.


The Australian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s second album finds a home in the shadowy space between post-punk, trip-hop, and lo-fi folk.

Look Up Sharp

Autumn is the most charged of the seasons, and the most melancholy. As English novelist Kate Atkinson wrote in Human Croquet, the air can feel laden with “an aromatic shadow… the fragrance of last year’s apples and the smell of the insides of very old books with a base note of dead, wet rose-petals.” This same haze is conjured in almost everything recorded by London-via-Australia artist Carla dal Forno. A multi-instrumentalist and detail-obsessive, she records albums that, were they images, would be heavy with fog and sepia. She writes, generally, about the longing that precedes and follows relationships, the kind that casts a sillage of tension and want around the surrounding days.
Look Up Sharp, dal Forno’s second album and her first on her own Kallista Records, doesn’t depart from her past work so much as coalesce the haze into more of a shape. Dal Forno imprinted on post-punk, and she found a fitting home for her early records amid the doomy, dubby shadows of her former label, London-based Blackest Ever Black. But there’s an equally strong current of folk influence to her music, specifically the stark, lo-fi records of Virginia Astley and former labelmates Gareth Williams and Marie Currie. The midpoint of the genres is a shadowy space occupied by goth-folk singer-songwriters like Emma Ruth Rundle or Laura Sheeran, or the cello-and-violin mood pieces of former 4AD session musicians Martin and Kimberlee McCarrick. This is where dal Forno is at home, and newly assured.
The arrangements—starting with the first lead bass notes of “No Trace”—are more muscular. Her vocals move from foreground to background, though there are still moments where you might swear you’d heard the voice of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan: the soprano brushstrokes of “No Trace,” the trip-hop murmurs of “Push On,” or the austere, layered choral opening to “Don’t Follow Me.” Her lyrics are more direct, even pointed. Single “So Much Better” isn’t just direct for dal Forno; lines like “you were a disaster, I’m glad I caused you pain” would be blunt coming from anyone. (“I had to trick myself that it was a bit of a joke that I was writing these lyrics down,” she said of writing the track.) It’s a calm anger, though: The song moves slowly, with deliberately paced bass and measured, almost deadpan vocals, like a grudge held so long and rehearsed so often it’s become an internal rhythm. “I’m Conscious” is less conflicted: “I crave drama,” she sings, and the track she conjures delivers. It’s as if, seeing romantic disaster approaching like thunderheads, she’s decided to go storm chasing.
Dal Forno can afford such candor; her arrangements are flush with subtext as is. “Took a Long Time” and “Push On” bloom with “Teardrop”-esque percussion shudders. “Don’t Follow Me,” a lyrical nod to the Cure’s “A Forest,” suspends dal Forno’s vocals above a grotty low end like thick moss. And the instrumentals on Look Up Sharp are characteristically palpable: a string solo on “Heart of Hearts,” the most McCarricks-like track here; the late-night meditations of “Leaving for Japan” and “Creep Out of Bed,” one neon and one smoky; the stark foreground-background arrangement of “Hype Sleep,” where clock ticks, live-wire buzzes, and longing woodwind fade in and out around a heavy, perseverating lead bass line. It is, as they say, an extremely big mood, and dal Forno is by now an expert at setting them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson has worked with Björk, Damon Albarn, Sigur Rós, and many more. His new collection of long-form works feature emotional string arrangements in a digital setting.

Dissonance

Thanks to his part in establishing the Bedroom Community label, Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson also doubles as a classical impresario. He has long worked closely with label co-founder Nico Muhly, collaborating on the occasional short opera and helping to produce a series of drone EPs. On his own albums for the imprint, Valgeir has put his stamp on contemporary electro-acoustic trends, with the chamber music programs Architecture of Loss and Draumalandið.
Already in 2017, Valgeir has contributed a pair of compelling pieces to an album by the group Nordic Affect. That pair of compositions gives a sense of his range. The propulsive electronic opus “Antigravity” would fit nicely on many of his prior solo sets, while on “Raindamage,” he foregrounds acoustic instruments while incorporating digital effects. For his own label, Valgeir now offers an ambitious program of long-form works that touch on the computer-edited acoustic approach of “Raindamage,” two of which come loaded with weighty concepts that reach back into classical music’s past.
The expansive title track makes a direct reference to Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, commonly called the “Dissonance” quartet (thanks to the overlapping, chromatic lines that are present during its opening). Valgeir’s intention was to stretch Mozart’s initial gambit into a much longer piece: “I took the bars and stretched the 40 seconds out to 23 minutes. The movement is the same as Mozart envisioned, only much slower.” As an experiment, this seems promising, but this particular adaptation robs Mozart’s progression of too much drama.
In the String Quartet No. 19, part of the wonderment is caused by the fact that the initial music is packed with so many clashing elements. Even as the music swoons slowly, this density quickly outstrips your ability to keep track of the overall direction, which gives the writing a dizzying power. During Valgeir’s “Dissonance,” which was multi-tracked in the studio and later modified digitally, a listener can become too well accustomed to each portion of the music, and the crucial sense of surprise is gone.
Other extended works on the album have more purchase on ingenuity. The title of “No Nights Dark Enough” references the lyrics to English Renaissance composer John Dowland’s iconic “Flow, My Tears.” Valgeir does honor to the source material; this Dowland-influenced music is still suffused with sorrow. But the sudden, downward-sliding tones in the first movement (“flow”) have a savagery that feels beholden to no past. The second movement (“infamy sings”) sets some fast-repeating piano lines against drawn-out brass and string exclamations, and the contrast feels like some elegantly shouted objection in the face of trauma. The glitchier third section (“fear and grief and pain”) treads on some production grounds Trent Reznor might recognize. This emerging sense of a bummed-out lineage—from Dowland to The Fragile to Valgeir—makes a strange, perfect form of sense.
The album’s final piece is the three-movement “1875.” Pitched as a reflection on an historic Icelandic settlement in Canada, it’s foremost an acoustic piece. And the composer’s ability to craft a journeying instrumental narrative is never in doubt. After a jarring beginning, it explores moods of unease—eventually closing in a hushed, chilling fashion. Valgeir surely has more electronic beats and drones to create, but purely symphonic writing remains well within his grasp.


Recorded in real time and released without further edits, the Hungarian musician’s dizzyingly unstable experiments in rhythm and timbre revel in the plasticity of sound.

Boundary Object

Sine waves are the blood and guts of music, and no one knows this better than electronic composers. Pioneers in the 1970s built the genre by subtracting: With a variety of analog tools, they removed waves from waveforms to forge eerie, pathbreaking sounds. Fifty years later, Hungarian producer Gábor Lázár does the opposite: He layers waves on top of each other, crafting uncharted timbres at the heart of harsh, serpentine, forward-thinking records.
Lázár is hardly the originator of this method, additive synthesis—it’s how the millennia-old pipe organ works, for example. But on his latest, Boundary Object, the 32-year-old producer manipulates his digital instruments with a demonic complexity, lavishing even more attention on tone color than he does on rhythm, and contorting each patch like a magician twisting balloons into different shapes. The album walks a fine line between precise and clinical, but it ultimately teaches us its own peculiar vocabulary: By the end of its 34 minutes, this glossary seems to have the far-flung possibility of an entire language.
Boundary Object marks a shift in Lázár’s style, technological and otherwise. The producer programmed his last couple of albums, 2018’s Unfold and 2020’s Source, using Logic, the ubiquitous software on which he cut his teeth as a young beat whiz frequenting Budapest clubs. Full of sinuous techno, these releases were deeply pleasurable and coyly nostalgic. Yet Lázár sought more control, so he produced his latest using the endlessly customizable software application Max. The album revels in the plasticity of sound, offering an unblinkingly serious technological immersion he hasn’t attempted since his early career. Newer fans may miss the propulsive grooves, but Boundary Object expands on many of Lázár’s strengths while pointing toward another kind of physical movement. The LP’s jerky tempos and frantic, arhythmic bass drum seem more modern dance accompaniment than soundtrack to a night out.
This might remind us of Jlin, who scored a piece for Company Wayne McGregor in 2018. But unlike the Indiana-based luminary (or another Planet Mu labelmate, RP Boo), Lázár’s low end lacks the malleability of liquid and the wobble of dub, and there are no vocal samples. His music is decidedly less luxurious; each of Boundary Object’s eight, eponymously titled tracks asks us to find our own handholds in the mix. The opener’s half-note kick drum feels like an anchor, but before we can learn how to move along with the composition’s thump, Lázár staggers his beat, introducing handclaps to undermine the song’s flow. On the second track, the midrange turns starchy and fuzzy with static, while the bass stumbles along like someone tapping nervously on a desk. There are flashes of danceability—on “Boundary Object III,” for example—but Lázár’s percussion constantly liberates itself from timekeeping duties, so we cling to almost-melodic squelches of noise, the way we might to a soloing saxophonist during a particularly dissonant free-jazz set.
Structurally, Boundary Object coheres thanks to symmetry. Handclaps from the opening track return, but this time in a catchy way, on “Boundary Object V,” and throughout Lázár introduces phrases and inverts them, all the while pacing his drum sounds with a sense of pressure mounting and releasing. The record’s inscrutability becomes a greater boon as it speeds along to its close. Lázár’s frenetic kick drum speaks directly with the rest of the elements, while he runs his patches through such deliberate, momentary changes that they resemble glissandos. We enter Boundary Object bewildered by its lexicon until we calmly parse each phoneme of sound. By the LP’s end, we’ve learned some idiomatic expressions from another world.
For Lázár, such an opaque language is innate: He performed each track in real time and then released the recordings unedited. His use of computer programs as an expressive tool conflicts with ordinary conversations about “naturalness” in the electronic realm—such a term usually refers to four-on-the-floor rhythms pounding like heartbeats, or digital timbres that feel acoustic. But what is naturalness, and how can music be unnatural when it’s just a collection of waves, moving periodically? Lázár’s sound is rawer in concept than his peers’, and manipulated with an implacable, impressive fussiness most producers would never attempt. But what truly sets him apart is something both universal in appeal and organic in spirit: He uses his art, in all its permutations, in order to be himself.

Buy: Rough Trade


Now relocated to Los Angeles, the five-piece moves comfortably into breezy, slow-going, cosmic country as both an escape and a protest.

Out of Range

Gun Outfit singer-guitarist Dylan Sharp describes the sandstone butte, that archetypal desert platform as, “...the only stage on which our kind of puritanical decadence can successfully perform the irony of its existence.” On their newest work, he and co-founder Carrie Keith are willfully Out of Range—from cell service and pop culture frenzy, honoring instead the timelessness of Western expanse. Aligning your art with such iconography as a means of dismissing the digital sandstorms that sweep said art into consumer consciousness is a bold profession. It’s a mission statement at worst construed as pretentious and grandiose, and at best a bit naive.
The music Gun Outfit writes—breezy, slow-going, cosmic country tunes drenched in scholarly musings and West Coast vibes—live removed from the cultural vacuum of anxiety-inducing messaging on 24-hour blast. Laid back as they are, the songs protest the marketing frenzy of present-day, a dismissal of social media strategies in favor of the beauty and simplicity of emptiness. It’s an invocation of unplugged-ness, and an invitation to U-turn from all the mental traffic toward the vastness of desert sunsets over horizons accessorized with saguaros, Joshua trees, and sagebrush.
Out of Range acts as a sort of sonic Ayahuasca ceremony, Sharp and Keith the shamans inviting you to purge of your toxins in the only place left largely untouched by human constructs. For the anointed, it’s a communal celebration and exploration of consciousness. But for everyone else, it’s a just a bunch of longhairs puking in the desert. Recall your reaction to your friends’ Instagram transmissions from the empty confines of Joshua Tree: You either get the allure of the Integratron, or you smirk at all of the dummies who paid $30 to lie in a dome listening to a dude play crystal bowls in 102-degree temperatures. It can be hard to bring folks to your side when it comes to crunchy shit. Though they tread steadily in these waters, it’s something the band seems at least partially aware of.
”Pardon me for the hippie talk,” Sharp sings on “Slow Realization.” The apology is a disclaimer for the next lines: “I’m trying to tell you how the flow was blocked/Like a crisis in a dream/The patterns are unseen.” For a guy whose lyrical professions traverse German mathematicians, Waiting for Godot, and phrases like “psychic ghetto,” it’s a moment of unexpected self-consciousness. It’s also a track that best embodies the group’s current focus. The five-piece left their Olympia punk rock roots for the canyons of Los Angeles, and their music slowed down and lost its angular crunch in the process. But all good punks hold a torch for their past and it’s perhaps why at many junctures Out of Range recalls a coterie of great ’90s acts, like Pavement, Sonic Youth and the madman philosophies of Silver Jews. The album’s lyrics are steeped in scholarly ideas that either apply to or stand beside observations on the every-day, and it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between David Berman and Sharp’s vocal delivery.
Through their commixing of twang and affectation, Gun Outfit express the Southwestern panorama without being too on the nose about it and avoid becoming a parody of their tropes. It favors posi-vibes over cowboy clacking. Album opener “Ontological Intercourse” beams with sunny optimism, a traffic-free ride in a droptop, with Sharp as omniscient narrator splicing Greek mythology with tales of personal evolution over shiny cymbal taps, bass shimmies, and dual guitar texturing. “The 101” reads as a modern folktale as Keith recounts the trek from her home in Washington state to Los Angeles, Sharp’s banjo co-mingling sounds of past and present behind her mystic singing.
Multi-instrumentalist Henry Barnes recently joined the band full-time and his dulcimer, fiddle, lap slide and other contributions inject the tunes with an earthen appeal. His playing of traditional and homemade instruments give the songs an effortlessly timeless quality lacking in past efforts, and his presence marks another natural fit in a line of punk and folk hands in glove—Jason Molina’s long alliance with lap steel player Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner comes to mind.
The problem, though, with aligning yourself with such an immortal landscape as Monument Valley, and such an iconic sound as cosmic American music, or “western expanse music,” as Gun Outfit calls it, is that you risk falling short of its might. Despite some of the lyrical weight, overall Out of Range floats like a feather and relies too heavily on atmosphere, an intangible vibe. It doesn’t have the teeth that really gnaw into one’s consciousness, lacking the bleeding heart and pleading lyrical hooks of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Instead, Out of Range dishes out good feelings and Zen calm—more East than West. These days, we all need that sort of thing, regardless of your stance on sound baths.


Montreal musicians Ouri and Helena Deland recorded their debut album together in eight days; the album’s eight songs feel like the diary of a gradual mind meld.

Hildegard

In the music of Montreal upstarts Ouri and Helena Deland, the mere idea of transformation can create a frisson of excitement. On the title track of her radiant album Someone New, Deland wondered whether the act of kissing someone new—or even imagining kissing someone new—could be enough to spark some transformation of the self. Ouri, meanwhile, has spent the past few years using ambient pop and rich, hot-blooded techno to interrogate the way experiences of emigration and falling in love reshape identity over time. Earlier this year, discussing her mobilegirl collaboration “Too Fast No Pain,” she described the heady feeling of “los[ing] your identity for the better”: Recalling her move to Montreal, she said, “I could be anything. I destroyed my sense of self for a moment.”
There’s limitless potential in this kind of “What if?” thinking, and that manifests in both Deland’s music, which traverses the static buzz of electronic and drone as well as indie folk, and Ouri’s, which draws on her background as a cellist and harpist as much as it does the conventions of viscerally embodied dance music. Hildegard, the pair’s first collaborative album, expands upon that potential, drawing inspiration from any number of “What if”s: What if we did it on the phone, and never had to touch? What if life alone could be as fulfilling and romantic as life with someone else? And, in the bones of the project itself: What if Hildegard were not a midway point between Deland’s art and Ouri’s, but an entirely separate entity, channeling impulses different from those in their respective solo work and producing an entirely different result?
It’s that final question that creates Hildegard’s most indelible moments. Like a slightly less austere twin to Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden’s Menneskekollektivet, released earlier this year, Hildegard feels like an opportunity for Deland and Ouri to consider the freedom that a musical union offers. Although Deland sings lead most often, Ouri’s voice is almost always present, and after a while, their voices melt into each other; by the arrival of “Jour 8,” the album’s steely, righteously pissed-off final track, Hildegard is her own person, calm and all powerful as, over a hazy, electronic thrum, she delivers parting words to a lover: “I don’t give a fuck who you dream of.” Hildegard’s eight tracks were recorded over eight days, and their sequencing implies a chronology, from “Jour 1” to “Jour 8”; you can track Deland and Ouri’s growing connection across the course of the album, with “Jour 8” representing something close to pure creative symbiosis.
On “Jour 3,” the album’s coy, lilting highlight, Deland and Ouri play id and ego, wrestling over how to interact with an object of desire. As Ouri vocalises unbridled impulse (“I just wanted to ask you, how was your day!,” she screams, as though giving voice to an exasperated text message, before muttering “Just waiting for you,” like another text sent a few hours and a few drinks later) Deland offers poetic sweet nothings: “I’ll speak to you/In the most sensitive words/And it will sound like a purr/Show you what I’m made of/Be better than making love.” Someone New took place in tense, fractured bedrooms, populated by antagonistic and narcissistic men. Here, Deland is given room to be amorous and mischievous, the fantastical elements of this one-sided courtship allowing her to adopt another guise for a night.
Ouri, too, seems liberated by the opportunity to inhabit a new creative outlet: On “Jour 4,” on which she sings lead, the core tenets of her solo music—strings, her vaporous voice, destabilizing sound design—appear in surprising formations. Where her classical training is often deployed to assist in ambient experiments, strings play a more traditional role here, providing pathos and cinematic pomp; in turn, her vocals are immediate and foregrounded. Hildegard is the first project that Ouri has mixed and mastered in its entirety, and that top-to-bottom involvement comes through in the music, which is filled with unique moving parts—harp, beats that sound like bare feet crunching on dry sand, the creak of a desk chair, speaker-destroying bass, a kick like a woodblock—but never feels busy or unfocused.
Although elements of Deland and Ouri’s solo practices undeniably come through on Hildegard, as a whole it feels like a remarkably realized whole, as opposed to some Frankenstein of styles and ideologies. By the time “Jour 8” has run its course, you’re left wondering what the collaboration might sound like had they pushed it to 10 days or 14 days. Still, as it stands, Hildegard is a satisfying and invigorating document—the mark of not just instinctual collaboration, but of complete transformation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After a series of records credited to Brave Captain, the former Boo Radleys leader releases his first LP under his given name.

Martin Carr: Ye Gods (And Little Fishes)

Ye Gods (And Little Fishes)

Martin Carr spent the 1990s writing songs and playing guitar for the Boo Radleys, one of the most idiosyncratic bands ever to be lumped in with the Britpop thing, a movement they really weren't a part of. Their Wake Up! LP scored them a couple of hits, but it's the previous record, Giant Steps that really showed Carr's incredible scope as a writer. He could do catchy blasts of sunshine, dub freakouts, noise opuses, straight-ahead rock, and intentional kitsch with equal aplomb.
His solo career after the band split in 1999, carried out primarily under the stage name Brave Captain, has embraced a similar eclecticism-- Carr's last album under that name, the 2006 free download Distractions, was loaded with electronic textures and even some decent rap courtesy of Akira the Don. His first album under his given name is more of a back-to-basics thing. It's as friendly as Wake Up! and the Boo's Kingsize, but also more stripped down and intimate. It could just be that Carr is writing these songs for himself to sing-- he wrote songs for Sice Rowbottom to sing with the Radleys, and though they have similar-sounding voices, Sice was more at home belting and yelping, while Carr prefers a very English sort of understatement.
Opener "The Dead of Winter" could be a leftover from Carr's mid-90s heyday-- it sounds familiar the second time you hear it, like it's been with you for years. It features a tumbling vocal melody, blasting horn theme, frantic drums and nasty guitar break that keeps you guessing which sides Carr is going to show on the rest of the record. Mostly, he shows his quiet side on brooding songs such as the dark, undulating "Tired, Broken, Black and Blue" and the slow crawl "Pontcanna Stone", where he gets in a haunting lead guitar part that drifts through the song as though some part of it were smoldering, giving off waves of heat. The album's six-minute centerpiece, "Goldrush '49", is built up from a few simple acoustic guitar phrases to a long, stretched-out chant of nothing but the word "California".
Carr can still deploy an easy melodicism seemingly at will, as the late-album duo "Orpheus Lament" and "Running" demonstrate. He gives one of the best songs to his wife, Mary, to sing. "Why You Gotta Bring Me All This Rain?" is one of those awesome, miserable British slow songs that inevitably makes you feel better about things after listening to it. Though it lacks the conscious ambition and open challenge of his best work, Ye Gods (And Little Fishes) is still a very pleasing album, and Carr is way past the point where he needs to open up a bag of tricks to make impressive music. If you and Carr last communicated when he was still a Boo Radley, this might be a good time to get re-acquainted, and if you've followed the Brave Captain through every stage of his voyage, you'll certainly want to take this opportunity to get to know him on a more personal level.


These South Korean devotees of the ’90s indie-rock canon make delicate, bruising music about indecision and loneliness (and lots of drinking).

Where We Were Together

Busan, South Korea’s Say Sue Me write songs about indecision, loneliness, and drinking—lots of drinking. The bar is the stage on the band’s second LP, Where We Were Together. Singer and lyricist Sumi Choi describes it as a crowded, noisy circus on “Let It Begin” and as a quiet, secret safe haven on “Funny and Cute.” When lead guitarist and principal songwriter Byungkyu Kim slurs the last couple syllables of a guitar phrase just a split second behind the beat, you can smell the place.
Don’t be shocked that this is such a prevalent theme on the follow-up to a 2014 debut entitled We’ve Sobered Up. For Choi, contradictions make for the best subject matter. “I’m full of things I hate/But I like you,” goes the chorus of one fuzz-covered highlight. “I just wanna leave here/But I wanna stay here,” she sings on the giddy lead single “Old Town.” Even the declaration of new beginnings that opens the album comes with an undercutting asterisk: “Let it all begin/Let it all begin again.”
Say Sue Me makes no effort to hide the bands that it takes after, each of whom is likely the subject of a 20th anniversary retrospective piece dropping somewhere soon and might or might not have been signed to Matador at some point. The band wears Painful and Terror Twilight on its sleeve, and Kim, in particular, seems to have internalized so much of the indie-rock canon that its approach to texture is second nature to him. His guitar warps, dilutes, and casts shadows over these songs, and his reverb placement reflects a well-versed ear.
Throughout this album, the band generally keeps within its sweet spot of familiar, wistful progressions complemented by Kim’s interior detailing. But that’s not to say it’s without brave moments. For starters, Choi sings just two of its eleven songs in her native Korean, even though she has said it makes her feel uncomfortably exposed and that she actually prefers English.
Halfway through the writing phase for this album, Say Sue Me drummer Kang Semin went into a coma after an accidental fall. The band eventually completed the album with a new drummer, but they were writing from a place of sadness. Four songs here address Semin’s absence, and two others also appeared on their Semin EP, released on Record Store Day 2017 to raise funds for him. “I’m afraid of making new memories without you,” Choi sings on “Funny and Cute,” offering to save his seat at the aforementioned bar. “I’m so tired and can’t dry my eyes.”
This makes Where We Were Together’s last impression sound that much stronger. King-size closer “Coming to an End,” written with Semin before his accident, is the band’s best work to date. Kim’s guitar starts as a flickering candle and erupts halfway through into a bonfire outro, a screaming, seizing solo that makes a single half-step down his guitar neck feel like a freefall into the Grand Canyon. It’s a convincing demolition of the argument that Say Sue Me can’t be anything other than gentle, and a persuasive case that they should be other things more often.


On its latest album, the obsession-inducing North Carolina garage band integrates the diversity that was found on its first two LPs into a charging, playful collection. Largely recorded in something of a party atmosphere, Shake My Head is a sad-eyed celebration record.

Shake My Head

People tend to obsess over North Carolina's Spider Bags, a nominally identified garage rock band that sputters into broken-down country and spirals into high-flying psychedelics from a firm base of petulant, propulsive, and fun three-minute rock tunes. To wit, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles used to perpetually call them the greatest band in the world. Some years ago, when a DJ friend who'd moved several states away returned to the Carolinas for a weekend, she learned that the Bags were performing at a nearby haunt and canceled all of her impending plans. In her mind, at least, the best local band ever-- the one with the shout-out-loud anthem called "Waking Up Drunk" and the frontman, Dan McGee, who sang about his demons with a conviction that made them the crowd's demons, too-- were playing, and she simply had to be there. And as colleague Marc Masters recently quipped online about the band's compulsive tunes, "And now to listen to Spider Bags & Apache Dropout constantly, even when I'm not listening to them." As their name implies, when Spider Bags hook into you, it's hard to shake the hold.
The first two Spider Bags full-lengths depended on diversity. 2007's A Celebration of Hunger creeped through country turns that had more to do with Townes Van Zandt than whatever Little Steven plays on his show ("Lonely Man" is the band's secret stunner) and occasionally climbed into the alt-country molds of Drive-By Truckers. The blistering rock'n'roll tracks were only part of the picture. They were more prominent on 2009's Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, but there was still much more to be heard than fuzzy, frenzied barnstormers-- banjo songs, Crazy Horse-sized epics, sad-eyed duets and baby-please pleas.
Shake My Head, the band's third album and their first for North Carolina imprint Odessa Records, is their most stylistically cohesive to date. Rolling through 10 tracks in less than 35 minutes, it delivers would-be rock hit after hit, shifting away from that template only for the record's closing third. That's not to say that Shake My Head is stylistically stripped at all; rather, those variations are woven into the charging songs rather than separated from them. "Shawn Cripps Boogie", for instance, is a xylophone-dotted instrumental played by a half-dozen guitarists, but its almost post-rock surge and otherwise playful countenance make it feel less like a departure or deviation than a great if wordless Spider Bags tune. With McGee's mix of don't-leave-me protestations and fuck-you-then imprecations, "I'll Go Crazy" is nothing if not a country song reworked for a rock band drunk on the idea of soul harmonies. "Friday Night" is surf music for the town's slouch, too wasted to go to the beach with his friends and too sad to go home with his memories. Spider Bags have finally fit all their interests and eccentricities into one tight, identifiable set. Shake My Head might not be their most surprising or inventive album to date, but it's certainly their most irrepressible, a record that seems suited and able to land its charms with a lot more people.
That's fitting, since Shake My Head is the product of a band at a curious crossroads in its own history: After two frustrating experiences with full-length release schedules and press cycles, McGee vowed to focus more on singles than albums. Spider Bags stuck to that, too, releasing a slew of unimpeachable 7"s but ultimately slowing the pace as an on-the-road, in-the-studio work force. Co-founder and bassist Gregg Levy headed back to New Jersey, committing to rejoin the band for tours while they recruited another bassist, Steve Oliva, to assume the role locally. When they headed west to Memphis to finally record Shake My Head, Levy flew down to split bass duties with Oliva. Perhaps in recognition of that strange lineup situation, Spider Bags used the Memphis sessions of Shake My Head-- and the long, guest-heavy overdub process that followed-- as an excuse to invite a horde of friends over to the studio and capture a party as they made a record. The jangling if jilted "Simona La Ramona" pairs fuzz bass from Memphis legend Jack Oblivian with the distant Theremin peal of Chapel Hill songwriter Billy Sugarfix, while opening blast "Keys to the City" hinges not only on multiple charging guitars but also backing vocals from, as the liner notes put it, "The City of Memphis." As you might expect, the space around these songs is often filled with laughter and false starts and chatter not necessarily intended for the microphone-- friends, hanging out, sharing the spirit of these songs and probably spirits, too. It's a sad-eyed celebration record.
That atmosphere fits McGee's songs. He is a writer, after all, who is best when extending empathy for the dispossessed, when he-- a married father at the helm of a great rock band-- writes about and for those who don't have it so good. Sure, there's nonsense written into these lyrics, too, but McGee's perfectly able to express misery in an economical phrase or two. "I'm a dog, baby, without an owner," he sings on "Simona La Ramona", bouncing into the rhyme with hope for the future. "I can't keep a phone/ And I can barely pay rent/ And the car I own/ I only really own the dents," he offers during the brilliant "Shape I Was In", a breezy, organ-backed tune that seems to treat despair like a necessity of life, not a reason for exasperation. Above sizzling guitar lines, boogie-woogie keys, and flickering tambourine, "Standing on a Curb" opens with what might seem to be a dismissive image of McGee "waiting on some girl." But as the song unfolds, we learn that the person he's waiting on doesn't matter as much as the general feeling of being specifically sad about loving someone who could care less what curb you're standing on, or if you're able to stand at all. The anxiety overruns any ambition he's ever had. "I don't have anything else to do," McGee admits. "I'm looking at a picture of you."
And then, of course, he beats the shit out of the photo. Hell, what else could he have done? And what else could you do, besides commiserate with and sing along to a record that turns problems into a party you'll wish you had attended.


Joined by a wealth of collaborators, the house band for the venerable South London spoken-word night thrives on a nearly imperceptible blend of live improvisation and studio assemblage.

Speakers Corner Quartet: Further Out Than the Edge

Further Out Than the Edge

For more than 150 years, amateur orators have been clambering atop soapboxes in Speakers’ Corner—as the quadrant along the northeastern edge of London’s Hyde Park is known—to rant, declaim, and pontificate. Karl Marx and George Orwell each took a turn there; so have innumerable preachers, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. Since 2006, some four miles to the southeast, MCs and poets have been taking the stage at Speakers Corner—a hip-hop and spoken-word night at the city’s Brixton Jamm nightclub—to the accompaniment of the in-house band. Further Out From the Edge is that group’s debut album, and despite the range of guests—singers like Tirzah, Sampha, and Lafawndah; poets Kae Tempest and James Massiah; woodwind player Shabaka Hutchings, of Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming, and cellist Mica Levi—the record’s slow-burning hybrid of jazz, hip-hop, and dance music is a world away from the hoarse, anarchic tenor of the club night’s namesake. Channeling decades of UK soul, it’s elegant, reflective, and immaculately constructed.
The house band’s lineup has evolved over the years; these days, Speakers Corner Quartet consists of bassist Peter Bennie, drummer Kwake Bass, flutist Biscuit, and violinist Raven Bush. They honed their chops over innumerable improvisatory live sets, but Further Out From the Edge is the product of painstaking offstage labor. They began tracking the album’s raw material across four weekend-long jam sessions in 2016, and over the next seven years, Biscuit, the group’s de facto producer, gradually chopped and looped instrumental parts into their final shape, folding in additional sessions and guest contributions along the way. (Like Dilla, whose rhythmic signature influenced the group’s loping, cut-up grooves, Biscuit pieced together some of the album from his hospital bed during a lengthy convalescence.)
In many ways, it’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario. The quartet’s grooves lurch and roll with that deep-in-the-pocket funk of seasoned players vibing off each others’ energy; at the same time, a track like “Shabz Needs Sun,” featuring needling flute runs from Hutchings, simply wouldn’t sound the same played live. It thrives on the symmetry of the almost imperceptibly cut-up breakbeat, as well as the uncannily perfect repetition of Hutchings’ runs, suggesting something like Jean Paul Goude’s cover for Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, in which some deft razor-and-tape work turned the singer into an eerie, broken-mirror image of herself. All that time spent polishing sounds in Ableton makes for some striking details: The vibey “Wavelet” repeatedly zooms in on a captivating few milliseconds of snare flam, turning the offhanded accent into one of the song’s defining features.
If skeletal funk rhythms and a pervasive neo-soul melancholy tend to remain constant across the album, the group nonetheless pushes those influences in a variety of directions. The opening “On Grounds,” a wistful meditation on friendship and support networks sung by Coby Sey, begins with an ambient-jazz swirl reminiscent of Nala Sinephro and gradually builds into a chugging, house-adjacent four-on-the-floor. “Acute Truth” pairs a slow, swinging bass-and-drums groove with droning strings from Los Angeles cellist Kelsey Lu, suggesting an unexpected collision of London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre with New York minimalist temple Theater of Eternal Music. Occasionally, they come remarkably close to full-on pop. The sliding bass chords of “Soapbox Soliloquy,” featuring a gorgeously expressive turn from rising London singer LEILAH, sound almost like a riff on Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ ’90s folk-pop staple “What I Am,” while “Dreaded!” uses a similarly catchy guitar riff, along with the husky voice of French-Martiniquan singer Léa Sen, to fashion an unusually dulcet take on 4Hero-styled broken-beat soul.
While exactingly played and produced, Speakers Corner Quartet’s songs don’t always push forward stylistically; a few tracks, like “Can We Do This?,” built around Sampha’s familiar coo, feel like songs you’ve heard many times before. But there are moments of breathtaking originality. On “fix,” Tirzah sings softly—so softly that it sometimes seems as if she is singing into her own shoulder—over cut-up strands of acoustic bass, her voice almost imperceptibly multitracked, to add harmony and space. It’s not so much minimalist as miniature—an ink drawing on nubby paper that’s all the more captivating for its smallness.
Kae Tempest’s spoken-word poetry on “Geronimo Blues” is even more compelling. In elliptical verses, Tempest warily circles the contemporary condition, nodding at class warfare and self-medication in carefully delineated images and stream-of-consciousness rhymes (“How can a million blips with their silicone chips/And an Instagram twitch/Repair the deep cracks to the kingdom?”). Halfway through, the band falls briefly silent and then changes gear, mirroring a shift in the poem’s intensity as Tempest gathers energy and surges forward. The maneuver both reflects the group’s open-mic origins and testifies to the players’ sensitivity: For all the virtuosic energy they bring to the recording, they know when to let their featured vocalists shine.