Modeled after the NME’s scene-making C86 compilation, this 59-track collection captures the sound of British alternative rock in 1991, in all its glorious chaos.

C91

What was 1991 for alternative music? If you’re American, you may know it as the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind and R.E.M.’s Out of Time; if you’re British, it is perhaps better remembered for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless or Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. It was, by all accounts, a particularly potent year for people with guitars. But music has a cunning way of thwarting simple linear narratives, and C91—the latest in a line of compilations from UK indie label Cherry Red styled after the NME’s scene-making C86 compilation—perfectly captures the innate weirdness of one of the most fascinating years in UK alternative music, without leaning on any of those canonical works.
I had my own indie awakening in 1991: It was the year I first read NME, went to my first proper concert, and bought the first record that made my parents wince. I find it impossible to look upon 1991 with anything approaching a disinterested view. But even far more impartial critics could agree that 1991 at the very least constituted a provocative pivot point for alternative rock, as rival (and often ideologically opposed) shades of guitar music—baggy, shoegaze, grebo, and grunge—competed for attention.
All four subgenres are accounted for here. Baggy—the largely Manchester-based blend of guitars and dance beats—is represented notably by the floppily plink-plonk piano of the Charlatans’ sublime non-album single “Over Rising,” along with London thug weirdos Flowered Up’s expansively chaotic “I’ll Be Your Dog (Introducing Barry Mooncult).” They are joined by connoisseur’s choice second-tier baggy acts like Paris Angels and World of Twist, whose cheerily experimental natures and ravers’ instincts teeter between grunge’s nihilism and shoegaze’s beautiful forlornness.
Shoegaze, then very much in the ascendant as an antidote to the excesses of baggy, is represented by early singles from the likes of Catherine Wheel (the supremely moody “Black Metallic”), Lush (the yearning and utterly charming career highlight “For Love”), Slowdive (“Morningrise”), and Chapterhouse, whose nebulous “Pearl” is sandwiched—both awkwardly and appropriately—in a perfect indie-disco trio between Liverpudlian psychedelic also-rans Top and the exemplary London pop of Saint Etienne’s “Nothing Can Stop Us.” Lush, Slowdive, et al. may be familiar to shoegaze fans internationally, but the spattering of lesser-known acts like Revolver, Bang Bang Machine, and the Steamkings, in all their fuzzy, haphazard glory, gives a fascinating sense of what a grassroots movement shoegaze was in its early years.
Grebo, a short-lived but much-loved strain of indie that vacillated between punk, dance, psychedelia, and even hip-hop, is remembered by the bafflingly successful, dual-bass-guitar Midlands band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and their crying-into-your-long-sleeve-t-shirt near hit “Until You Find Out,” an awkward and overly sincere song that reminds us why no band since has been influenced by the Neds. Grunge, still largely an American thing in 1991, finds its echo in grunge-adjacent acts like Daisy Chainsaw (essentially Babes in Toyland meets Monty Python), Drop, and Wilmington, Delaware’s Smashing Orange, the rare American band among C91’s crooked-toothed Brit parade.
The quality of the 59 songs across C91’s three CDs is gob-smackingly varied, from (relatively) well-known local classics like the Manic Street Preachers’ incendiary “Stay Beautiful” and Saint Etienne’s “Nothing Can Stop Us” to a host of songs better left forgotten. (Sorry, Horse Latitudes’ “Northern Country Lie” and Raintree County’s “Here It Comes,” both of which appear on CD3, when the album’s jig is pretty much up.) No one will love all 59 songs here, but few open-minded alternative fans will go away without discovering (or re-discovering) something to cherish. I had entirely forgotten how much I liked both the Dylans’ spunkily kaleidoscopic indie chart hit “Godlike” and the scruffy Who-lite R&B of the Stairs’ “Weed Bus (Flower Shop Demo)” until I heard them again on C91.
More than simply a nostalgic power trip, C91 is frequently fascinating, a Nuggets for the UK’s early-’90s alternative bloom that shows the fluidity of musical lines and the beautiful chaos of musical evolution. Arch shoegazers Chapterhouse’s “Pearl” has a baggy dance beat, for example, while Bleach and Moose—shoegazers both, in theory—sound suspiciously close to proto-grunge. Then there are the bands who don’t fit in anywhere. Sultans of Ping F.C.’s “Where’s Me Jumper?” is a comedy glam-punk number about mislaying a favorite sweater; Sweet Jesus lay claim to operatic shoegaze; and Kingmaker are one of the quaintest groups to enjoy UK chart success in the early ’90s, their smart-assed and vaguely folky indie pop both utterly un-groundbreaking and not really like anyone else. As if to rub in the disorder, the Cranberries turn up among the ultra-indie hordes with “Them,” a dodgy and distorted song from their debut EP, Uncertain, that gives absolutely no indication of the globe-conquering band they will become once Dolores O’Riordan masters her microphone technique.
Out of Time, Nevermind, and Screamadelica were doubtlessly among the most important alternative albums of 1991. But they were outliers, one-off works of outstanding brilliance that even their authors struggled to recreate. This—the sprawling, wildly varied trolley dash of C91—is what indie music was actually like in 1991, at least in my corner of Eastern England. That makes it catnip for music fans of a certain age and a vital document for pop historians who want to go beyond the obvious hits; it’s like digging up a humble Roman insula after Nevermind’s opulent villa urbana. Rather than the winners, C91 is musical history written by the also-rans, kind-of-weres and might-have-beens. And it proves far more interesting that way.


After years on the DIY circuit, the Philly group condenses its freaky energy into 14 art-punk vignettes about Stevie Wonder, satanic snakes, a hallucinatory Virgin Mary.

Long Haired Locusts

The subtext of every favorable rock album review in 2020 is a wistful “Man, I bet this album would sound great live right now...,” but with Godcaster, the sentiment bears stating outright: Man, I bet this album would be incredibly fun live. In fact, I know as much. Godcaster, an eccentric weirdo-punk five-piece, has spent several years honing their raucous performances in the Philadelphia DIY scene, opening for bands like Of Montreal and Guerilla Toss, whose high-octane outbursts are a likely influence on this debut. When you watch pre-pandemic clips of the band playing, you can see them compress their energy into a semicircle, shrieking in unison and raising their fists and tambourines in the air, as though engaged in some strange fertility ritual.
Long Haired Locusts, the band’s recent album, condenses that freaky energy into 14 art-punk vignettes about Stevie Wonder, satanic snakes, a hallucinatory Virgin Mary, and a perilous journey to the deepest known spot of the ocean. It’s Godcaster’s first album, although the band’s prehistory dates back at least 15 years: The earliest iteration of the band formed when lead singer/guitarist Judson Kolk and bassist Bruce Ebersole were, respectively, eight and 11. Within a few years, the young musicians were recruiting school friends to participate in their Beach Boys-inspired racket. “We had a gang of about 12 banging on things and providing horns acquired through 8th grade music classes,” Kolk said in a recent interview with Melted Magazine. “At one point a propane tank was used as a kick drum.”
The band’s lineup has evolved considerably since then, arriving at its current form in 2017. But Long Haired Locusts retains that sense of communal wonder and chaotic glee. The briefest tracks are often the most packed with ideas. In less than two minutes, “Dirtbike Bike (Vaccine Girl)” shifts from a flute-driven staccato-funk groove to a comically sweet acoustic ode to a mysterious entity known as “vaccine girl.” (Oddly, the song was written well before vaccine distribution became a daily conversation topic.) “Sexy Heffer” lasts two minutes and contains just two words (the titular phrase), morphing from an agitated call-and-response vamp to a breakdown so outrageous you can actually hear one of the musicians howling with laughter.
Godcaster’s colorful imagination, evidenced by Kolk’s garish cover artwork and by the album’s steady supply of religious imagery, is key to the album’s appeal. The group’s songs veer in so many directions at once that you can sense influences popping in and out like Whac-A-Mole heads: the pulverizing stomp of band favorite Led Zeppelin (“Serpentine Carcass Crux Birth”), the sing-songy aggression of Deerhoof (“Christ In Capsule Form,” “The Skull!!!”), the insular jokes and chaotic stylistic shifts of Mr. Bungle (“Even Your Blood Is Electric,” “Escape From the Challenger Deep”). The group’s best track, “Don’t Make Stevie Wonder,” hinges on a quick-footed groove worthy of early ’90s Fugazi, but the song’s punny humor (“wonder” as in the verb—get it?) and cartoonish cascade of voices is pure Godcaster goofiness.
The band has a knack for teetering right on the edge of irredeemable obnoxiousness, daring you to resist their charm and lightning-fast musicianship. When a song doesn’t quite land—such as the hookless cacophony of “Apparition of The Virgin Mary In My Neighborhood” or the gratuitous “Outro”—it’s usually because it’s stuffed with too many ideas rather than too few. And even then, Godcaster’s tightness as a groove engine is enough to overcome occasional dips into silliness. Recorded live to tape in a basement in Philadelphia, Locusts is the kind of record a band makes when the musicians have been performing the songs for years and can simply feed off that live energy in the studio. And someday, by the grace of Vaccine Girl, they’ll get to bring it to a DIY basement other than their own.

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With their latest album, the Japanese band Heaven in Her Arms prove there’s still life in post-metal. They take a textured attack, mixing guitar guitar shimmer and aggression.

White Halo

It makes sense that Japanese post-hardcore/metal group Heaven in Her Arms named themselves after a song from Converge’s Jane Doe. There, Converge saw hardcore as a wider palette, and Heaven in Her Arms also have an expansive view. While there’s a constant use of post-metal in their works, they’ve shifted styles often—the common thread is a mix of 1990s emo influencing heavier elements. With White Halo, which is receiving a North American release through Translation Loss, they’ve ditched the doom metal that was the foundation for 2010’s Paraselene, instead building upon the spacious, more textured attack of their split 12” with COHOL.
After “Ray of Light at Dusk” brings the record in with delicate piano and tempered swells, “Abyss of the Moonbow” comes raging in with double bass and tremolo riffs. While the COHOL split hinted at this direction, it comes into the fore here, marking yet another transition for them in an affirmative fashion. They’ve taken up the mantle of Envy, their main contemporary, who pioneered a mix of post-hardcore and emo with post-rock’s sweeping gestures. You can hear the influence of Insomniac Doze, Envy’s influential 2006 record, all over Halo. It comes through in the hushed spoken word section of “Moonbow,” and in how—for all of the album’s changes in volume and tempo—the “hardcore” or “metal” is always more prevalent than the “post.” For as many shimmery guitar breaks as there are, Halo is constantly charging forward.
Closer “Turbid Fog” is where their experimental edge comes out, starting with dour synth strings obscuring a skittering IDM beat, which leads to their lush pummel delivered in a more hardcore fashion. There are stop-start breaks that sound like muffled breakdowns, slamming into foam instead of other bodies. It takes something direct and aggro and makes it welcoming without lessening its impact. “Entangled Torus” features a similar stuttering pattern in its latter half, but it’s not quite as stark as the one on “Fog.” That song isn’t without its peculiarities, though, as its intro comes in with a hooky Swedish death metal riff à la Tribulation, giving it a slight flamboyance that is rare in post-metal. “Glare of the End” also takes on this flair with its ending lead—as with the vast majority of exceptional heavy music of recent times, it’s not about breaking paradigms so much as it is twisting traditional forms in unexpected ways. With music as dense as this, sometimes you just don’t expect a sweet guitar solo.
A lot of Halo sounds like Deafheaven (they toured together in 2014) or another black metal-shoegaze fusion, but Heaven in Her Arms are not black metal. In fact, they and Envy existed for quite a while before Deafheaven formed and have been a strong influence on them. Envy’s most recent record, 2015’s Atheist’s Cornea, saw them toning down the longform post-rock and moving back towards post-hardcore; Halo is the opposite, with Heaven in Her Arms going in a more outwardly aggressive direction. It does sound like they’re aiming at Deafheaven’s audience, maintaining a strange balance of absorbing their sound and showing how they’ve influenced bands like them. They deserve the attention—while they and Envy have shown how fertile the cross-pollination between post-hardcore and metal is, neither have received enough credit for it. And with most post-metal bands of yore either breaking up or still trotting out the same Explosions in the Sky worship, Halo proves there’s still life in that form.


The drummer/producer blends personal mental-health struggles with the subjugation of black America in a many-voiced, trap-jazz singer-songwriter opus.

I Think I’m Good

We live in a golden age of storytelling, however chaotic it may feel. Despite social fractures, amoral media platforms, and historical blindness (willful and otherwise), more individuals are telling their stories—in audio, video, words, images, sounds, computer programs, and new combinations—than ever before. Challenging assumptions about who is empowered to tell these stories and how, a more thorough picture of the world emerges, including truths that long lay unacknowledged. With access to a growing range of narrative tools and methods of distribution, the floodgates of rumination have opened—algorithms, copyright restrictions, and genre quarantines be damned.
So it’s hard to imagine Kassa Overall’s I Think I’m Good as the product of any other age but this one, yet it’s also a timeless tale. A high-gloss, trap-jazz, Auto-Tuned singer-songwriter cycle about multiple consciousness, it’s a fragile diary of a young artist’s escape from the comforts of fear, aided by an incredible community of musicians who have his back. More broadly, it’s a kaleidoscopic cut’n’paste opus that bypasses prior, drier conversations about jazz and hip-hop sharing space—even Overall’s masterful 2019 debut, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz—to express something much more personal, yet also universally relatable.
Some of the greatness of I Think I’m Good comes in the blending of its design and function. The story that 36-year-old Kassa tells, integrating his own lifelong mental-health struggles with the incarceration and subjugation of black America, is in many ways completely novel; even more so is the way he tells it, in expansive song-rap compositions that have the intimacy of bedroom indie-folk murmurs. Until recently, Kassa’s rep rested on being a great young jazz drummer (with an overflow of credits—Geri Allen, Christian McBride, and Arto Lindsay, to name a few—and a stint in Jon Batiste’s band on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert). He also dabbled as a rapper and producer, including collaborations with Francis and the Lights and Das Racist. But his desire to synthesize collective improvisation, electronic production, and rap vocals has been the core of his recent live residencies at New York’s Zinc Bar and the Jazz Gallery, and Go Get Ice Cream approached the jazz/hip-hop discourse from this holistic live-playing-with-rapping-and-electronics direction. It also featured a great song called “Prison and Pharmaceuticals” (chorus: “What’s the best stocks?”) that is a direct thematic harbinger of I Think I’m Good.
Another key precursor was the series of panic attacks that Overall experienced as a young Oberlin Conservatory student in the mid-’00s—one led to his temporary institutionalization—and his subsequent overmedication that went from stabilizer to long-term crutch. I Think I’m Good soundtracks this quiet, numbing struggle in tones both unsettled and empathetic. Beyond simply documenting his own interior dialogues, the album connects them—lyrically, but also sonically—to those of black men’s realities in dealing with Amerikkka’s criminal-justice system. Kassa’s narrative takes the shape of a hallucinatory collage, an almost-old-school mega-mixtape where themes and visions—of personal memories and familiar melody lines, song and sound fragments, a list of confidants from his life and career—flow effortlessly into one another.
The blurring of his own medical experience with notions of incarceration begins with Kassa’s opening line: “I hope they let me go tonight,” he intones on “Visible Walls,” as Brandee Younger’s harp, Jay Gandhi’s bansuri flute, Courtney Bryan’s piano, and a chopped, hummed Auto-Tune melody set up an ominously hushed new-age mood. The childlike delivery of his opening plea in the follow-up (“Please don’t kill me in your sleep”) lands into the same unnerving atmosphere; Joel Ross’ vibraphone adds both melodic beauty and further textural destabilization, compounding Kassa’s chilling words that conflate the real and surreal (“Please don’t mind those chalk lines/They don’t know what’s inside of you and I”). Yet the songs also have musical escape hatches arranged into the claustrophobia. When Younger and Ross play short lead solo lines—the latter in a quick conversation with Theo Croker’s flugelhorn—the spaces unlock in ways that one can imagine growing expansive on stage, supporting evidence that, like the hesitant blues of the album title, Kassa doesn’t mean for it to be a completely dark ride.
One thing that makes such glimmers of hope feel so poignant is the work’s insistence on biography, which grounds it as proof that, despite the lures set by society and individual minds, solutions are also within our grasp. There’s a personal touch in the disassociated and affected voices that litter the album’s landscape, and on the trap production strategies that simultaneously communalize the experience and compound the theme of schizophrenia, whether they take the form of nightmarish asides, philosophical musings, or in-studio instructions to musicians. There’s also a kind of natural narrative flow between the parts of I Think I’m Good that really are diary entries (young Kassa’s cover portrait, or “Landline,” a poetic youthful reminiscence of a kid wondering about “normal,” featuring his brother Carlos on the tenor) and those that are out-and-out role-playing. “Show Me a Prison,” a cautionary tale of the prison industrial complex, features an inmate character named Kassa, a guest turn by activist Angela Davis, and one of the album’s key role-switching lyrics, “There but for fortune, may go you and I,” courtesy of Phil Ochs. In the final biographical projection, “Was She Happy (for Geri Allen),” Kassa and Vijay Iyer eulogize the late pianist, who passed away in 2018 and who collaborated with both men. It closes the album on a psychedelic note, a light drone guiding their Rhodes-drums duet, punctuated by the answer to the songtitle’s question: “Was she happy?” “She was on a quest!”
And what are quests but stories we construct ourselves, for ourselves, even if just by clicking “record” on a smartphone—or in Kassa’s words, on a “backpacker producer” setup he used to document a lion’s share of the raw materials here. It’s heartening that, even in what seems like a limited category, he’s hardly alone in doing this. It’s curious that I Think I’m Good is one of three extraordinarily ambitious recent albums by artists initially recognized as jazz drummers—alongside Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter and Jeremy Cunningham’s The Weather Up There—that combine internal monologues about their own lives with reflections on the social breakdowns happening all around them. In doing so, they have produced musical therapy sessions that chronicle the world as it actually is, and not as it is sold to us.

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Drummer and jazz legend Jack DeJohnette pairs up with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison, to spellbinding and haunting results.

Jack DeJohnette / Ravi Coltrane / Matthew Garrison: In Movement

In Movement

Jack DeJohnette knows how to turn traditions inside out. He can invest light-touch cymbal playing with the feel of pulsing funk. His freer patterns of blast can sound like some of the most refined avant-percussion you've ever heard. Though while DeJohnette is obviously an original, he's not bent on tearing down all the boundaries between jazz sub-genres. His engagement with various aspects of blues and swing flows from an evident reverence for each specific style. Even when pushing his own creative language to new places, DeJohnette manages to keep the inherited forms in view.
His half-century discography suggests how invaluable (and how rare) that philosophy of performance has been. DeJohnette played on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, was part of an acoustic trio led by pianist Bill Evans, and also collaborated with experimental visionaries from the Chicago scene, many of whom were active in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM). In decades since, he's worked with Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, while recording frequently as a leader for the ECM label.
DeJohnette's 2015 release on the imprint, Made in Chicago, referenced his deep relationships with various AACM musicians while staying mostly focused on recent compositions from that all-star group of players. The drummer's latest album follows a broadly similar path, by affording DeJohnette a chance to create some new pieces alongside two scions of jazz: the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and the bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison. The aura of history is inescapable on a project that includes them both, given that their fathers were members of the “classic” John Coltrane Quartet. And DeJohnette's new trio plunges right into the deepest of jazz-legacy waters by tackling one of the classic Coltrane quartet's most iconic tunes, at the very beginning of In Movement.
“Alabama” was the elder Coltrane's response to the 1963 white-supremacist terror bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The studio take is a piece that can stand with any work of tragic poetry, from any artistic discipline. When the climactic tenor line breaks through, there is an emotional transition—from a state of mourning to one of wrenching, cathartic protest. (Spike Lee used this portion of the song to shattering effect during 4 Little Girls, his documentary on the murders.) It's one of the great compositions and performances of music history. As a consequence, it's a risky thing for anyone else to touch.
Here, after a few seconds of cymbal work from DeJohnette, the trio's performance begins in earnest when Ravi Coltrane plays a closing portion of the song's main theme. This needle-drop, in media res choice conjures up the haunting suggestion of “Alabama” playing on an everlasting loop, as a mandated accompaniment for each and every occurrence of racially motivated violence. This sense of disquiet is also promoted by Garrison's electric bass playing. His clouds of fuzz-tone thicken noticeably when Coltrane moves up to the famous high-register cry. The purgatorial (or else eternally damned) quality of this “Alabama” feels even even grimmer than the original. There's no swinging, breakdown section (as in the originally issued album version). And even DeJohnette's rollicking percussive moments have a pensive air. Still, the liberties taken here feel well thought-out, while also keeping the performance from seeming backward looking.
The mood brightens considerably during the pair of lengthy (and jointly composed) original tunes that follow “Alabama.” “Two Jimmys” is a joint tribute to Garrison's father as well as Jimi Hendrix, and it has a variable-but-intense groove pitched somewhere between Sun Ship and Band of Gypsys. But the real stomper on In Movement is the trio's Earth, Wind and Fire cover, “Serpentine Fire,” which this trio stretches with abandon. Similarly refashioned is “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue**, which finds DeJohnette moving from behind his kit to offer some rich support on piano. Along with two lyrical ballads by DeJohnette, this cover also offers a respite after some of the album's noisier material.
The only cut on the 50-minute set that feels a little too beholden to the past is “Rashied,” a tribute to Coltrane's hookup with drummer Rashied Ali on the duo set Insterstellar Space. It's certainly an energetic performance—and both DeJohnette and Coltrane avoid sounding like they're directly copying the players this piece sets out to honor. But the duo-setup that animates this performance doesn't feel as freshly conceived as the trio's performance of “Alabama” does.
That may sound like a high critical bar, but it's one this group sets for itself. Despite the grand shadows cast by their forbears, In Movement shows how both Ravi and Matthew have emerged as distinct instrumentalists on the contemporary jazz scene. And they have skills that match up with DeJohnette's own. No one in this group has to run from history, or overly fetishize it, in order to sound like an individual—a shared skill that makes In Movement a frequently spellbinding experience.


This set of rare and unreleased Dilla instrumentals spans many of his styles, but the flat sequencing doesn’t do justice to his history of deeply focused vibe-building.

Motor City

We’re not remotely likely to get another Donuts out of the J Dilla archives. But even with the one-a-year pace we’ve been getting posthumous releases—the floodgates opening in earnest around 2012, concurrent with the release of embattled mixtape Rebirth of Detroit—one can’t help but wonder if there’s something deeper hiding in his vaults. We keep getting new fragments of Dilla’s work, and we try to piece together a narrative that makes sense. Each collection adds another layer. The music might not tell us much, but it does provide a nice reminder of his impact and hopefully some funds to keep the bills paid for the Yancey family.
Through the seams of their after-the-fact assemblages, these releases cull styles from a decade or two ago, shaped into an approximation of the art Dilla was aiming for. On the all-instrumental Motor City, all 19 rare and unreleased tracks were picked by Dilla’s mother herself, with Ma Dukes including a letter to her son in the artwork. Still, for every fleshed-out beat that would make for the backbone of a solid deep hip-hop album cut, there’s a piece of scrap music that barely registers as an interstitial. For every track that points to a certain highlight of Dilla’s idiosyncratic griminess, there’s another that comes across like something he kept filed away because he didn’t feel it was ready for the public.
There’s a few highlights on Motor City, even if the untitled nature of the tracks and the individually-wrapped, flat sequencing don’t do much justice to Dilla’s history of focused vibe-building. “Motor City 13” glows with Dilla’s late-’90s clouds-of-bass warmth, and “Motor City 8” goes woozy with garage soul that feels at once delirious and peaceful. Some of the beats are audacious in their experimentation, even if the execution’s a little dicey. It takes some real razor-walking finesse to try and chop such an instantly recognizable piece of Creedence like he does on “Motor City 7,” turning the familiar swamp-trudge groove of 1970’s “Run Through the Jungle” into the jumbled rhythmic gait of someone trying to jog on ice.
As the tracks go on one after another, the jarring moments and back-to-the-drawing-board segments jump out as mood-breaking nuisances. Even though we get Dilla in most of his stylistic phases—from Detroit boom-bap to Soulquarian meditations to the choppy rawness of his final L.A. years—you can hear a couple dead ends. Some are not-quite-right precursors to more familiar tracks, like “Motor City 9,” a less-immediate alternate version of future Mos Def The Ecstatic beat “History.” Others seem directly at odds with his production personality, like the hokey “Motor City 12.” And as is the fate of a lot of stand-alone hip-hop instrumentals, some of the longer cuts—which is to say, ones more than 90 seconds—fall into a sort of simple-loop stasis. They feel intended for a particularly animated MC to complete them. The briefly stirring “Motor City 4” makes 1:40 feel like an hour and 40 minutes.
The best context for a collection of tracks like this does play out. James Yancey’s close friend J.Rocc—a World Famous Beat Junkies vet and Stones Throw labelmate—has built a strong history of Dilla dedication mixes, particularly the one he released three days after Dilla’s passing. And Motor City includes a worth-the-admission mix of the album’s material, sewing it all together into something that feels more profound. He drops sharp-timed vocals and classic rap verses into the fold to breathe deep life into the tracks, switching up and distorting beats just as you’re lulled into thinking you know where they’re going. So even if you don’t know what to do with the collection of cuts on Motor City, it’s at least a relief to know what Dilla’s family and friends are capable of doing with them.


The indie-pop duo Girlpool's debut LP, Before the World Was Big, brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. With it, Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker have created a quiet album of uncommon intensity.

Before the World Was Big

The tiniest notes, the biggest sentiments: Girlpool make songs that feel audaciously small, like an eyedropper pointed toward the heavens. The 10 songs on Before the World Was Big not only employ a bare minimum of chords (two, pretty much always) but a minimum of notes. If you’d never held a guitar, or even seen one, you could be gently coached to play "Ideal World", the album’s opening track, within three minutes of being handed one. The same is true of many others.
And yet, Before the World Was Big brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. Focusing on the clean bones of the songs only leads you to be astonished by how full they feel. This is music with no corners, no hidden places in the arrangements, and the emotions emerge with gratifying clarity. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker—who sing occasionally in harmony and occasionally in unison, but always together—seem to be singing in the center of an empty, well-lit room, staring directly at you. To listen to Before the World Was Big is to meet their gaze and feel slightly unnerved and exhilarated. It is a quiet album of uncommon intensity.
Tividad and Tucker formed Girlpool when they were 17 and 18, and they told anyone who asked them at the time that they were drawn to each other for their shared sense of purpose: "We wanted something that was honest and straightforward," Tucker said. "We both wanted to be super vulnerable…Because of the stripped down nature of our music, if one of us messes up, it’s incredibly noticeable. We’re not trying to hide." In part, it is this clarity of purpose that resounds from the empty spaces on their debut LP. Their EP was shouted, and in its hardy squall, you could hear two powerful voices honing in on some way they might make a dent in the universe. Sometimes, it felt like watching a kid run into a wall.
They sound calmer and infinitely more assured here. The final song’s title, "I Like That You Can See It", stands as a simple manifesto. The song is about harnessing nerves and vulnerability as sources of power, and it repeats the striking image: "Is it pouring out my body? My nervous aching?/ I like that you can see it." The arrangement performs the same act. There are two chords, played with two fingers, and yet the song feels bigger every time you listen to it.
Somewhere between their formation and now, Tividad and Tucker have divined the starry-eyed power of the purest indie-pop. It is a romanticism that thrives on potential energy, on the contemplation of things that haven't quite happened. Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space. "I feel safest in knowing that I am true/ When I look in your eyes, the idea of you," they sing with clarion force on "Ideal World". "I just miss how it felt standing next to you/ Wearing matching dresses before the world was big," they chant on the title track, a line that doubles into a round-robin singalong.
Tividad and Tucker’s voices are foregrounded, always. They sing about real-life friends, by their first names. They reference each other by first name in their lyrics. "I am still looking for sureness in the way I say my name," they sing on "Chinatown". Their twinned vocals gives the album a powerful and traceable through line—these are songs about two specific friends who have realized that the world is a less frightening place, that you feel surer and safer in it, with someone else by you.


It’s fitting that the Avett Brothers’ most disappointing record yet bears the title of True Sadness. Is this some kind of play for the Top 40, or just instrumental bloat and trite sentiment?

True Sadness

The Avett Brothers once seemed to hold an infinite amount of promise. They were a hardworking group of young men who traded in songs that were as poignant as they were ragged. The titular Avetts, the older Scott and younger Seth, wore their bleeding hearts on their sleeves, and they always came off as earnest, honest, regular fellas from North Carolina who were thoughtfully dedicated to their craft.
The band’s tide started to turn toward the big time in 2007 with the sparkling Emotionalism, and the subsequent I and Love and You found the band working with the famed Rick Rubin as their producer. But the band’s work with Rubin has yielded records scrubbed of the rawness and grit that made the band so compelling in its early years. It’s fitting, then, that The Avett Brothers’ most abysmal and disappointing record yet bears the title of True Sadness.
True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation. Several songs are smothered with baffling layers of synthesizers in what feels like a ploy to push the Avetts into clear Top 40 territory. They were never a bluegrass band, of course, and always existed in the interesting overlapping gray areas between folk, Americana, and rock circles. But the synths and electronic beats that burble up on “You Are Mine” and “Satan Pulls the Strings” don’t make sense for the band in any context. The shift isn’t even bold enough to warrant a “Dylan goes electric” comparison. Instead, it sounds like a half-baked bad idea that no one had the guts or sense to veto. The slathered-on saccharine arrangements sink to their most unfortunate low on closing track “May It Last,” which aims for elegance and intensity but instead comes through as a ham-fisted and embarrassing attempt at something serious.
Somewhere along the way, the Avetts lost a grip on their lyrical skills, too. True Sadness presents some astonishingly bad turns of phrase, as when Seth Avett sings about wishing to be “a tune you sang in your kitchen,” so that he “could float around your tongue and ease the tension.” Elsewhere, songs manage to be preachy and completely self-unaware, as the Avetts sing about being tempted by Satan, struggling with belief, and being victimized by the grand scheme of life itself. Losing love was once an occasion for collapsin’ and screamin’ at the moon, but the Avetts got all of that drama out of their system in 2008, it seems. Now, they offer the likes of the self-explanatory “Divorce Separation Blues,” which feels like a dopey “Oops, my bad” at best—goofy yodels don’t much help the song’s case for sympathy, either. Scott and Seth Avett sing about guilt and feeling bad, but these songs ring hollow. It’s as if the Avetts knew folks might expect heartfelt confessional material—especially in the wake of Seth’s slightly scandalous split from his wife—and wrote a clutch of songs that half-assedly check the box.
The band does find itself making one short breakthrough with “Fisher Road to Hollywood,” an intimate track that feels like being snapped from a bad dream. The song, buried on the back half of the record, is almost a sincere mea culpa, an admission of regret for the way that things went seriously wrong for the band as a unit and as individuals. The band returns to its early strong suit: Gentle acoustic strums, mournful cello, plaintive vocals. There’s the sense that all hope isn’t lost for the Avett Brothers, that maybe they could scrap all of the messy baggage they’ve acquired in their rise from grimy clubs to sold-out arenas and major label dealings. But then, those four-and-a-half minutes are over, and you’re forced to reckon with the empty misery of True Sadness once again.


The Chicago band’s second album strikes a balance between the spartan chaos of noise rock and the soft melodicism of bedroom pop.

PITH

Melkbelly—the project of married couple Miranda and Bart Winters, plus Bart’s brother Liam on bass and non-relative James Wetzel on drums—is a noise rock band on its surface, but a pop act at heart. Miranda and Bart met through the Chicago DIY scene, eventually forming Coffin Ships, a pop-oriented group that showcased Miranda’s sweet but firm delivery. Meanwhile, Wetzel took inspiration from Providence noise weirdos like Daughters and Lightning Bolt—his own project Ree-Yees suggests a truckload of drums swerving through traffic. On PITH, their second full-length, Melkbelly strike a robust and surprisingly warm balance between the spartan chaos of noise rock and the soft melodicism of bedroom pop.
Melkbelly songs don’t so much expand the boundaries of these genres as shift between them. On “THC,” revving guitars and spoken-word vocals give way to circuitous chord progressions and honeyed sighs. It’s tempting to reduce these patterns to the “loud-quiet” dynamics that make grunge forebears like the Breeders so exhilarating. But where the Deal sisters delineate their modes with dramatic pauses and thick reverb, Melkbelly’s transitions are more freewheeling. When the guitars slow from a blitz to a meander, Miranda’s deadpan rasp fills the vacant space. By the time “THC” reaches the closest thing to a chorus, the band has traversed three time signatures. Miranda’s voice meets the challenge, sounding enraged and disaffected at once as her voice rises and falls to keep pace with the dense instrumentation.
As they did on 2017’s Nothing Valley, Melkbelly set up daring rhythmic changes and layers of sludge—massive, overdriven guitars, sudden shifts in tempo—that find improbable reconciliation in driving counter-melodies. It can feel like the band is battling itself, goading one instrument (the drums on “Mr. Coda,” or the rhythm guitar on “Take H20”) to take the reigns. At the climax of “LCR,” Miranda’s vocals and Wetzel’s manic drumming both rise to a crescendo, wordless screams and razor-sharp snares each gaining power from the other, like two converging storms. But unlike Nothing Valley, which often came dangerously close to derailing, PITH reigns in its song structure, replacing the previous record’s instrumental drum tracks with tightly wound melodies. The overdriven guitars and reverberating vocals of “Season of the Goose” would sound at home beside post-punk revivalists like Interpol or the Strokes.
Melkbelly expends so much energy ripping through verses, it can be easy to miss one of the band’s strongest assets: Miranda’s absurd and graphic lyrics, which address body horror and petty indie rock spats with equal ferocity. It’s her careful, almost precious delivery that keeps these topics—like food stuck between teeth and omelettes wedged under fingernails—from conjuring sheer disgust. On “Little Bug,” she sings the biography of an insect with the proudly precocious energy of an only child performing to an audience of dolls.
When Melkbelly take aim at human pests, they’re less effective. “Kissing Under Some Bats” scolds a scene-going groupie: “Stop introducing yourself as ‘just a girlfriend’/Because it’s twee/And unnecessary.” From a band whose lyrics are typically so removed from reality, it comes across as cruel and bizarrely personal. “Humid Heart” similarly frays at its seams, the vocal breaking as the song stutters to a halt on what is ostensibly a chorus. On an album shrouded in such graphic and fantastical imagery, the lackluster moments stand out.
But PITH always manages to regain traction. At its best, Miranda’s voice recalls the cutting dryness of fellow Chicagoan Liz Phair, sharing a wry intonation that lifts even the densest basslines to climactic peaks. When her performance matches the surrounding velocity, as on the pummeling “Stone Your Friends,” the militant intensity and drive resembles “Immigrant Song.” As an album, PITH begins to drag towards the end, closing with a track rightfully called “Flatness.” But as a series of singles, its meld of ’90s grunge and early-’00s noise is delightfully strange.

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The Cincinnati folk-rock quartet’s third album is artfully and interestingly composed, a snapshot of four people figuring out their identities both as individual humans and as a subtly defiant band.

Crocus

For a folk-rock quartet that doesn’t rely on electronics or lush production, the Ophelias are hard to pin down. They can sound like Painted Shut-era Hop Along, early 2000s folk, or John Darnielle’s string-heavy modern releases as the Mountain Goats. Even the band’s story eludes catchy signifiers: Initial press claimed the band was made up of former “token girls” in their Ohio bands. Now, the Ophelias return as two women, one newly-joined non-binary bassist, and one trans male drummer. On their third album, Crocus, the band reflects this fluidity; the tense “Spirit Sent” starts out like toned-down PJ Harvey before concluding with layered strings; “Sacrificial Lamb” has adult-alternative hooks inside a lo-fi frame. Frontwoman Spencer Peppet grounds her bandmates’ kinetic energy with introspection, revisiting toxic relationships and dealing with her own self-worth. Crocus is a snapshot of four people figuring out their identities both as individual humans and as a subtly defiant band.
With all the constant movement of the quartet, it is entirely possible to miss the thoughtful, calculated journey Peppet makes across 37 minutes. It’s not officially a concept album, but there is something of a loose narrative: The album follows a series of desperate attempts at closure, devaluing and ruminating about an ex only to wind up missing them even more. Peppet’s legato delivery often abruptly switches at the end of a line, like someone about to escalate a fight before meekly changing course. There are conventional barbs like, “Holding you feels like a bomb went off in my chest,” or, “I was happy with the you in my head,” but the most intriguing depictions of post-breakup grief are the most abstract. “Twilight Zone” stretches the “you’re everywhere to me” trope to low-key absurdity (“I walk down my street/And the trees look like you”), before reprising the theme. On “Spirit Sent,” the first chorus whimsically describes a man witnessing Peppet’s soul traveling through the sky to meet an ex-partner. The ending of “Twilight Zone” is the one time where Peppet doesn’t stop her voice short and plainly admits, after the previous half-hour of moving on, “I’d love to see you.”
Drummer Mic Adams takes greater prominence than previous records, with a roomier sound recorded in a converted Masonic Lodge. Slow-burners “Vapor” and “Vices” in particular benefit from his newfound intensity, his urgency lending more weight to Peppet’s vocals. The band’s approach to arrangements is most effective on highlight “Becoming a Nun,” where a complex beat complements Andrea Gutmann Fuentes’s violins and Jo Shaffer’s three-note bass line. The auxiliary musicians, mostly Cincinnati locals, also play an important role, whether it’s Kate Wakefield sending “Nun” spinning or Jake Kolesar’s ominous melodica over an affectionate, backmasked voicemail from Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad on “Mastermind.” There’s a feeling that anything can happen in a song, but nothing that would detract.
If anything detracts from that feeling, it’s the recording and mixing itself, which often undersells the band’s capabilities. The piercing cymbals and midrange-heavy violins tend to drown out Peppet’s soft spoken melodies. “Neil Young on High” borders on sensory overload with the addition of guest vocalist Julien Baker’s harmonies. To some extent, the production style lines up with the intention of revisiting their early music, but it’s at odds with Peppet and the band coming into their own at the record’s best. The chorus of the final song goes “I wanted to be the one that you would take home to your parents/You called me up at two a.m. when I had no other vices,” and especially after the self-loathing of “Sacrificial Lamb” (“At my best, I’m a second-rate plan”), that individuation from a toxic ex is a quiet, unassuming achievement. Forget becoming a nun, becoming a spirit, becoming respectable for somebody’s parents: There’s nothing like chucking those roles aside and presenting yourself as you are.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The UK producer’s first EP for XL is a throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. After all these years, Burial’s still got the touch.

Burial: Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above EP

Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above EP

Things we know Burial likes: video games and old-school rave; doleful R&B melodies twisted into strange new shapes; the warmly nostalgic sound of a needle plowing through a dusty groove. One thing he could take or leave, on the other hand: change.
That might sound counterintuitive. Since the ghostly UK garage of the Untrue era, Burial’s music has opened up to encompass trance chords, ’80s synth pop, anime soundtracks, Christian rock, and samples of British cultural touchstones like EastEnders and royal weddings. Following the beatless atmospheres of 2016’s “Nightmarket,” he has increasingly turned his hand to ambient music; his last two major releases, 2022’s Antidawn and Streetlands EPs, totaled 78 minutes of windswept atmospheres and eerie melancholy, abandoning dance music so completely that one wondered if he’d ever return. Yet no matter how he recalibrates his sound, Burial’s hallmarks—omnipresent vinyl crackle, melancholy synth pads, wistful spoken-word samples, and diegetic sound effects like crashing thunder and flicking lighters—remain so central that they make his stylistic shifts seem almost incidental.
After the minimalism of Antidawn and Streetlands, the new EP Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is maximalist in the extreme: a full-bore throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. The 26-minute two-tracker plays out like a pair of multipart suites—an epic night of raving distilled into two sides of vinyl. It’s not the first time he’s used that technique; many of his tracks, since at least 2013’s “Rival Dealer,” have carved a serpentine path through multiple tracks and fragments, with vinyl hiss and spectral samples holding it all together.
The time-stretched declaration that opens “Dreamfear”—“I am the high one/I am the lord of ecstasy,” lifted from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla—mimics the double-entendre drug references of rave’s golden era. Yet the voice of this dark lord is terrifying, a world away from the warm fuzzies that ecstasy’s proponents believe it inspires. Simon Reynolds has written at length about the period when, after a few years of heavy MDMA use in the UK, the drug’s rosy effects on nascent rave culture began to wear off, ushering in the mind-melting sounds of “darkside” hardcore and the jungle that would follow. “Dreamfear” plunges into that haunted history, pocked with riffs that scuttle like silvery insects in the gloom. The sound quality is thick and hissy, like a YouTube rip that’s been subjected to some occult enhancement. Parallel breakbeat juggernauts compete for attention, and every sound feels like it’s trying to save itself from asphyxiation.
Periodically the beats drop out, making way for moments of crackling near-silence interrupted by a murmured voice or shaken can of spray paint, but even with these pauses, the track is exhausting. As muscular as the grooves may be—in the peak-time tradition of many classic hardcore records on XL, the veteran UK label behind this EP—it feels more like a record about clubbing than for clubbing. Burial’s narrative instincts eclipse any interest in dancefloor functionality; he’s a storyteller who spins yarns partly with walloping sonics and partly with carefully selected vocal samples: “This love, like a drug”; “Only if you knew the things I’ve done”; “This is who I am”; “Once it gets inside of you it takes over the bloodstream”; “There was something else in the drugs.” One of the last sounds we hear is a low voice, digitally abraded almost to the point of unintelligibility, wheezing simply, “Death.”
“Boy Sent From Above” is sleeker and more hopeful, swapping the A-side’s pummeling breaks for the sidewinding syncopations of techno and electro. Like “Dreamfear,” this one wends through multiple tracks, like a clubber slipping from room to crowded room, but the bulk of its 13-minute running time is given over to a wistful freestyle synth arpeggio—in which you might hear an echo of Harold Faltermeyer’s theme to Beverly Hills Cop—paired with major-key chords stabs that glint like icicles in the sun. The mood is summed up by a plaintive scrap of a cappella that’s heard several times when the music pauses, joined by spray can rattle and ruminative synths: “We were running through the city/In the dark.” One of Burial’s chief fixations has long been nostalgia for a halcyon era of renegade freedom, and here, the image of a graffiti writer pining for wild youth feels like the epitome of the artist’s worldview.
Or is it becoming a shtick? It can be hard to say. If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.
But newness isn’t the point. Using not just the same tropes but even many of the same samples he’s used before, Burial seems to be pursuing his long-running project of world-building and self-mythology to increasingly hermetic ends, burrowing deeper into a state of déjà vu—as though if by recreating the memory from every possible angle, he could preserve it forever. Incidentally, it’s the more compelling track, “Dreamfear,” that pushes against the ease of nostalgia, even if it’s also harder to listen to. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is that Burial sounds almost as though he’s arguing with himself—lingering contentedly in a memory one moment, looking frantically for a way out in the next.


Second album from this Bay Area psychedelic pop duo-- which features Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson-- is an exercise in accessibility and concision.

Mazes

For artists from David Bowie to the Birthday Party to Liars, seeking refuge to record in Berlin has resulted in some very dark, very far-out releases. So when psychedelic pop twosome Moon Duo-- which features Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson on guitar and fellow San Franciscan Sanae Yamada on keyboards-- decided to head to the German capital to craft their second proper full-length, Mazes, one could reasonably expect the results to be a bit tortured or mysterious. Where their noticeably toothy debut, Escape, often threatened to slip backwards into the scuzz-laden heavy-psych of a Wooden Shjips record, Mazes is an exercise in accessibility and concision, using familiar, melodic pop templates to support their drone and krautrock tendencies.
Mazes operates very simply, with Yamada setting up the repetitive, unexpectedly hooky keyboard patterns (usually using a variation of organ sounds) and Johnson, displaying some of his best guitar work to date, dropping monstrous, zoned-out sounds over her backdrops. While there are plenty of gnarly effects pedals being stomped all over Mazes, Johnson for the most part refrains from using his guitar to blanket these songs in trance-inducing washes of noise. Moon Duo are still able to achieve awing levels of depth here, but it's made more impressive considering how easy these songs are to follow. Where some of their output (and the same can be said about Wooden Shjips) is about getting lost in the fog, the band helpfully lays a trail of breadcrumbs.
This is also a much more consciously rhythm-focused album that its predecessor, and when songs fall flat ("Scars") it's usually because Moon Duo haven't taken the time to make sure the groove is properly locked in place. The one you'll hold on to tightest is "When You Cut", a deranged sock-hop that rains a torrential boogie on Mazes with such force that it threatens to wash everything else out. Yamada and Johnson work with such precision and symbiotic rigor, going ape over the handclap-filled drum programming, it's a mystery as to why Johnson keeps singing, "I feel the walls closing in on me." Instead, it feels as if the doors have been flung wide open.


The Memphis rapper’s posthumous album honors his legacy by spotlighting his unmatched charisma, technical prowess, and storytelling flair.

Paper Route Frank

Young Dolph’s straight-faced authenticity was his calling card. “Remember used to rap about weed/he didn’t sell pies,” Gucci Mane reminisced on his 2021 tribute to the Memphis-raised artist. In a genre of Scarface-like fairytales, only Dolph could be celebrated for something as innocuous as selling weed. He rapped constantly about his enemies and defying death, but his car was actually riddled with 100 bullets in 2017, and four years later, he was murdered during a shooting in his hometown at the age of 36. Like 2Pac’s Makaveli persona or Drakeo the Ruler, Dolph was brash, paranoid, and confrontational in his shit-talking, already clear-eyed about the inevitable consequences of being outspoken and targeted for it. And like the murders of 2Pac and Drakeo, another generational voice was forcefully silenced.
Paper Route Frank is the first posthumous Dolph album, one that honors an enormous legacy in the best way possible: by sounding precisely like a project Dolph would have made when he was alive. The songs here reflect not just Dolph’s unflinching tenacity, but everything else that made him special: his charisma, deadpan humor, technical prowess, vulnerability, and unflappable dedication to the rules of the streets. In short, Paper Route Frank is a reminder of what a complicated, singular star Dolph was.
Dolph also had one of the best ears for beats in the game, knowing exactly what type of production would support a voice as lead-heavy and nimble as his. Here, he makes light work of everything he touches. Standout “Woah” sounds like something Pimp C would have produced for early 2000s UGK, thick with syrupy bass and horror-movie piano lines. Dolph switches flows with flair, always sneaking in a dose of humor (“In high school, I had more money than everybody, includin’ the faculty!” he spits). Longtime collaborator BandPlay provides many of the strongest beats, particularly the sitar-centered firecracker “Uh Uh” and the blown-out, violin-heavy “That’s How.” The latter is an effortless collaboration with Dolph’s cousin Key Glock that echoes their fantastic collaborative tapes from 2019 and 2021.
The few collaborations are just as fitting: There’s no opportunistic tack-ons, only friends. In addition to Glock and a posse cut with two protégés, Paper Route Frank features Gucci Mane (“Roster”) and 2 Chainz (“Beep Beep”), both of whom turn in some of their most memorable guest verses in recent memory. Gucci, who recorded two separate collaborative projects with Dolph, is almost in hardened pre-prison form on “Roster,” rapping with determined menace, like he’s swimming upstream. The best verses still belong to Dolph. If the songs themselves sound somewhat like retreads of past material, his rapping does more than enough to keep them gripping. He tells a remarkable story of turning down a deal with Roc Nation, but still having $2 million dollars to pay Jay-Z for a verse on “Hall of Fame,” and reiterates his commitment to street codes on “Always,” leading, per usual, by example: “I look my plug in the eye,” he raps somberly, “Then I hand him the bag.”
Dolph was guided by fierce emotion; his love of family in particular was always on the flipside of his bombast, and was further proof of the realness Gucci and so many others so admired. “I had my lil’ boy, that shit changed my whole world/A couple of years later now here come my lil’ girl,” Dolph remembers on “Old Ways” with heartbreaking earnestness. It makes the details of his murder—he was shot while buying cookies for his mother at a bakery in Memphis—all the more crushing. The focus on the raw facts of his reality is the only way a posthumous album could do right by an artist as beloved, independent, and layered as Dolph: the trash talker and storyteller, the devoted father of two, the martyred spokesman for a city, and a movement all on his own.


Though it sometimes follows rags-to-riches templates a little too closely, the Texas rapper’s debut is a compelling blend of theater and technical intricacy.

Amar

With his viscous, authoritative baritone, impenetrable Southern drawl, and hard-earned street smarts, BigXthaPlug’s trap tales possess candy-painted Texas cool. Most importantly, the Dallas rapper is a dramatist. He taps into his inner playwright on “Dream,” a cut from his debut album Amar, where he documents the everyday misfortune he experienced when he couldn’t afford Popeyes. His granular details evoke the type of desperation you can taste: “Was so fucking broke couldn’t even buy me a biscuit/Couldn’t clear out my throat, ’cause the drink was $2.50.”
As heartfelt as it is hyper-specific, the song captures the best of Amar, a new project named after BigX’s son. While it’s sometimes stifled by repetition and lapses in imagination, the album stands as a compelling exercise in cinematic street rap. Over 13 tracks, BigX swerves through solemn R&B and soul samples, dismissive boasts, and lucid memories, letting loose percussive flows and tightly coiled rhyme schemes—the kind that can only come from a true technician. Like some of the best writers, he can be convincingly charming, poignant, or irate.  Often, he’s all three at once.
On “Safehouse,” he slides across militaristic percussion and a foreboding piano loop, unloading menacing one-liners that would make Dirty Harry blush. Meanwhile, on “Bacc to the Basics,” he reflects on a trap survivor’s baser instincts before lamenting the roots of a fractured familial bond. With his penchant for piling writerly details and altering the velocity and intensity of his tonal inflections, BigX’s best songs bring an emotional immediacy that’s impossible to fake.
But between the death threats and daily struggles, he’s having fun here, too. On “Texas,” he coasts over Southern blues as he serves up a playful yet vivid glimpse at the sociology of his home state. It’s not as anthemic as Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” or Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris’ “Welcome to Atlanta,” but its easygoing sensibility reflects the parking lot pimpin’ of its inspiration. There’s a disarming warmth that makes you feel his sincere admiration for the place that raised him.
While BigX’s rhymes are usually sharp, sometimes, he inadvertently dulls them down by losing specificity. This renders some of his trench bars bland; they end up carrying the redundancy of countless other rags-to-riches platitudes, like the celebratory come-up of “Change.” (“Remember them days being a hood superstar/Now the whole city saying my name.”)
As his longest project yet—2020’s Bacc From the Dead and 2022’s Big Stepper were just six songs each—BigX sometimes struggles to carry the weight of the extra material. Some moments resemble generic versions of tracks other artists infused with more individuality, like “Thick,” which includes a drab hook that’s got all the originality of a Google search for “twerk song.” It’s even more glaring that Erica Banks, who’s featured on the track alongside Tay Money, already made a better rendition of the same thing last year.
There are some unexpected production flourishes here, but on the whole, Amar doesn’t do much to elevate the rapper it’s hosting. BigX is still figuring out how to help himself, too. Pairing a screenwriter’s knack for harnessing histrionics with a freestyler’s ability to stack intricate rhymes atop emphatic punchlines, he always knows how to deliver captivating individual verses. The next step is merging them with less predictable song structures and more memorable hooks (as is, they often feel like placeholders meant to bridge the gap between one verse and the next). But that’s fine; after all, he’s only dropped three projects. With his storytelling know-how and mic presence, BigXthaPlug is worth a re-up.


Air France's No Way Down-- currently available either digitally or as a Swedish import-- conjures an idyllic world similar to the one on the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in sincerity and beauty.

No Way Down EP

Gothenburg, located on the west coast of Sweden, averages highs in the upper 60s in June; in recent years, however, the city has produced some of the sunniest music in the world. Tropical rhythms and warm-weather themes color releases by Jens Lekman, the Tough Alliance, Studio, and the Embassy-- all of whom have recorded for Gothenburg-based label Service. TTA and Studio have since founded their own labels, each with its own cryptic website. Signed to TTA's Sincerely Yours, Air France invited listeners to their "Beach Party" with last year's too-good-to-be-true On Trade Winds EP. Air France's latest, the 23-minute No Way Down EP, is better.
The seaside disco of the Gothenburg groups shares many traits with the DJ-ing style named after the Balearic archipelago, off the coast of Spain. Dreamed up on the Balearic island of Ibiza by Argentina-born DJ Alfredo Fiorito in the mid-1980s and soon brought to London, the sound spanned laid-back, groove-oriented music ranging from conga-accented Italo disco and the iridescent proto-techno of Manuel Göttsching's classic E2-E4 to hypnotic indie rock by the Woodentops and offbeat selections from soft-rock, prog, and global pop music. As a DJ-centered art, Balearic house was inherently based on manipulations of other people's music.
Balearic is far from the only musical perspective that can unite an eclectic variety of records without regard to genre or historical context. As the KLF observed in their book The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, "All records in the Top 10 (especially those that get to #1) have far more in common with each other than with whatever genre they have developed from or sprung out of." That's true from "Take Five" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit". What distinguishes the music of Air France and their Sincerely Yours colleagues from the more rock- and groove-oriented sounds of Studio or Norwegian cosmic disco DJs like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje is that they've taken to heart not only Balearic, but also the teachings of chart pop.
Air France use elements of both Balearic and pop to create their sumptuous, sincere fantasy world. In that respect, Air France's No Way Down-- currently import-only outside of Sweden except as 320 kbps mp3s-- is reminiscent of the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in silly stuff like truth, beauty, and fun, as well as Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala and the Tough Alliance's A New Chance. It imagines an impossibly idyllic place through sounds that probably could never have been performed that way in real life. Though it's been said, many times, many ways: Welcome to paradise.
Unlike Balearic disco contemporaries such as Studio or A Mountain of One, No Way Down does childlike joy, not hypnotized headiness. Typewriter-like clicks and John Williams-ready horn fanfares, complete with tympani, introduce the opener, "Maundy Thursday". This track soon settles into chilled-out synth washes and sober piano melodies, establishing a tone of sincerity without sacrificing lush outdoor beauty. The swooning string flourishes on finale "Windmill Wedding" aren't far off from the introduction to hip-hop producer Bangladesh's ubiqitous beat for Lil Wayne's "A Milli". Electric guitar and piano ripple across each other like waves, giving way to Spanish-tinged guitar, percussive human breaths, broken-up female vocals, church bells, and bird chirps. The coup de grâce: the whinnying of a horse. You can almost picture someone's gallant lover galloping across the surf.
Other tracks are more in the foamy wake of the group's breakout indie late-2006 track "Beach Party". "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" is gorgeously produced, stupidly catchy, and totally affecting, with an elegant dance groove and an infectious hook. The verses throw lyrics to the wind in favor of wildlife sounds, congas, and woodwinds, which bask in harp glissandos and Göttsching-esque guitar filigrees, plus some string and horn samples. "No more, no more, no more, no morals anymore/ Throw bottles, throw bottles, throw bottles at your door," a woman seems to be singing, followed by children's voices: "Sorta like a dream?" "No -- better." Nearly as perfect is "No Excuses", with handclaps and a yearning chorus: "No excuses left/ Waiting to fail, but not quite yet." It's like Saint Etienne for an endless summer.
As with many other gifted pop and Balearic artists, Air France also happen to be sticky-fingered. Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-existence. "Beach Party" lifted its hook from Lisa Stansfield. The No Way Down title track directly quotes the Happy Mondays. The melancholy intro that precedes Go! Team-esque horns and cheers on "June Evenings" is from late-1980s TV fantasy-romance "Beauty and the Beast", as are the children's voices on "Collapsing at Your Doorstep", describing both the show's fantastical underground world and the joy of being with someone you love. If No Way Down is about a place that doesn't exist, it's a place where fairy tales are true and where old pop culture ephemera can-- in Air France's fertile musical imagination, at least-- live happily ever after.


Emo hip-hop group displays a sense of hard-earned competency.

Atmosphere: You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having

You can't imagine how much fun I wasn't having listening to this album. Atmosphere's MC, Slug, he of the tortured romantic life, intriguing racial politics (half-white, half-black), and "aw-shucks, he's rapping, wait, stop shouting" rhyme style, is getting boring fast. Let us count the ways: Reverential past-peddling. Degenerative flow. Lame Mohawk. Weak follow-up to the breakthrough album. All the ducks, lined up in a row.
At the risk of sounding like one of those kids who watches "The O.C.", Atmosphere was always for those moments when a woman ripped your heart out, then punched you in the neck. I won't say "the hip-hop Death Cab," but you get the picture. Nothing wrong with the raw sadness and fury Slug conjured, but you weren't exactly throwin' your sets up for Minneapolis' finest. I always put that Lucy Ford record underneath the M.O.P. album in the crate. So the abandonment of that form here, that "guilty pleasure," hurts my feelings. Mr. Heartache, where you at? In its place, I guess, is the sap of another tree: Nostalgia.
Nothing can illuminate the pomp and circumstance of You Can't Imagine better than this couplet from "Watch Out": "When I was younger, I wanted to be LL Cool J/ But then he started makin' records for the girls and shit/ So I ripped up the Kangol and threw it away." Uh, what? Forgetting that's just a wack rhyme for a moment, anyone who's been to an Atmosphere concert surely knows the kind of estrogen jam they can be. Even worse than the desertion, though, is that this record lacks any growth or good humor. Which is a shame because their previous album, Seven's Travels, while flawed, started to find a balance (wink) between the political leanings that have crept into Slug's raps with his wounded-puppy raps.
This is not to say the album's a mess. Like Blackalicious' recent The Craft, it displays a real hard-earned competency, something a decade of recording together will get you. But the lyrics lack transcendence or resonance. Conversely, producer Ant's production is full and springy. His growth has never been in question, exploding with complicated chops and orchestrations on every album. Whether flipping operettas on "Say Hey There" or dropping pianos from five floors up on "Musical Chairs" he's got sundry abilities. The songs here are melded beautifully, making the eventual instrumental wax a must-cop. In all honesty, I never understood why Ant wasn't lacing dudes like Freeway and Young Buck years ago. He could do it.
There are exceptions as the album moves, like "Angelface" which quivers with panging guitars and (gasp) a politically snarky jab at Uncle Sam, masked as the kind of love letter this dude used to kill something lovely five years ago. "Pour Me Another" oozes barfly grease. And "Little Man" is pretty and loopy. On it Slug says "I'm over 30, can't maintain relations/ All these women wanna hurt me/ And I just don't have the patience." This is not something you hear much on a rap record. It's refreshing. Of course, if you want to be a dick about it, Juelz Santana murdered the same sample used on "Little Man" on the first Diplomats album back in 2003 without sacrificing his diary entry. Pity.
On their fifth proper, the attempts to merge Slug's emotionally aware, sneering theatrics with the sort of nostalgia-4-cheap malarkey that passes for "conscious" hip-hop these days is a crashing failure. Like Edan and Little Brother's reminiscent melancholy from this year, listening to Slug disregard hip-hop's sonic development is like stuffing a chloroform-soaked Shelltoe in your mouth. Don't you know we rockin' Bapes these days, mang?


All but unknown in the US, the adventurous trio Syrinx was among the first groups to embrace the Moog. RVNG has reissued their two albums along with a stunning live document.

Syrinx: Tumblers From the Vault (1970–1972)

Tumblers From The Vault (1970–1972)

On the same freezing February day in 1968, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, and John Mills-Cockell all stopped by Robert Moog's studio to acquire his latest prototype, the Moog Modular synthesizer IIP. And with it, all three trail-blazed new paths for electronic music. Carlos went on to bring the strange synthesized sound into public consciousness with the epochal Switched-On Bach. Ciani went on to use her Moog and Buchla synthesizers in commercials, creating unimaginable sounds that slyly infiltrated the public's subconscious.
Mills-Cockell’s contribution to electronic music, though, was a bit harder to parse. That’s changed this year. The first person to have a Moog in Canada, Mills-Cockell used it to heighten the psychedelic weirdness of Intersystems, whose work was compiled earlier this year. A short-lived multimedia ensemble, Intersystems’ installations and be-ins melded abstract visuals, eerie spoken word and otherworldly electronics from Mills-Cockell in a manner that rivaled the sensory overload of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. (Mills-Cockell also provided synths for the likes of psych-pop outfit Kensington Market, Bruce Cockburn, and Anne Murray.)
Now comes a look at Mills-Cockell's adventurous trio Syrinx, which pitted his Moog against the drums and hand percussion of Alan Wells and the electric saxophone of Doug Pringle. Syrinx released only two albums in the early ’70s before disbanding. And while RVNG’s wont is to plunder and cull unreleased tapes, so singular are these two studio albums that with RVNG's handsome 3xLP set, the label reissued them intact, with a third disc given to unreleased takes and a stunning live document of the trio performing with the Toronto Repertory Ensemble. All but unknown in the US, Syrinx carved out a niche for themselves in Canada, sharing bills with the likes of Miles Davis and Ravi Shankar, while the brief cha-cha whirligig of “Tillicum” became the opening theme for a CTV Network documentary program, “Here Come the Seventies,” embedding its curious mélange of brass and circuitry into viewers’ ears.
If the small number of composers and academics who got their hands on the Moog synthesizer wound up defining the early electronic music cannon, even fewer of them integrated the unwieldy instrument in a band or pop music without being labeled a novelty act. Silver Apples and the United States of America might be Syrinx’s closest contemporaries, but there’s a nimbleness and grace to the group that gives the sense of the group dancing beyond the confines of genre. It’s there from their very first number, “Melina’s Torch,” which feels wistful rather than weird.
While electronics during this era were often deployed to mimic psychedelic mind states at their most intense and immersive, Mills-Cockell’s use of them instead suggests the contemplative comedown. There’s gentleness and elegance to numbers like “Journey Tree” and “Chant for Your Dragon King” that make for some of the most disarming experimental music of the era.
The buzzing sine waves snaking through the uptempo “Appaloosa-Pegasus” suggest that the band could also venture into stranger climes. By the time of 1971’s Long Lost Relatives, they had abandoned the pastoral airs of their debut for a more imposing sound. “Tumblers to the Vault” is an apt title, suggesting a precision and physical prowess you can hear in the songs: Mills-Cockell’s Moog is as luminescent as jumping jack firecrackers while Wells’ hand drums and shook bells do pinwheels around it, all of it capped by Pringle’s sax lines nailing perfect somersaults between the two.
The better part of Tumblers is given over to three versions of “December Angel,” a nearly ten-minute journey that appears in studio version, demo and live rendition with an orchestra. Weird squalls introduce the studio version, Mills-Cockell getting his Moog to chime like a celeste. The demo version of the song, on piano, lays bare the melody at the heart of the trio’s music. But the live performance might be the most surprising, with space that allows for violins and bells to swell and sparkle in the firmament. Midway through, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Syrinx wasn't a groundbreaking group using the newfangled Moog to make mutant pop, but rather forward-thinking scholars of Debussy. Beyond being merely Switched On, Syrinx envisioned where electronic music would go decades later, being a pliant thing that at once eluded and embraced other genres, making them into a singular, impressionistic sound.


After making a great album despite himself, the former Dr. Dre protégé has hardened his quirks into a likeably bizarre personal style and replicated the playfulness of his mixtapes on this, his sophomore LP.

Doctor's Advocate

Game's been busy ever since he released his gazillion-selling debut The Documentary early last year. After a very public falling out with his G-Unit crew, he's waged an endless quixotic war against 50 Cent, hitting the mixtape circuit and unleashing torrent after torrent of deeply entertaining disses. He played an arm-slicing villain named Big Meat in the horrendous ghetto-action Tyrese vehicle Waist Deep. He got a butterfly tattooed on his face and then covered it up. He reportedly got engaged and then un-engaged. He launched a line of sneakers that I see prominently advertised every time I ride the subway, even though I've never actually seen anyone wearing them. He dropped former mentor Dr. Dre's name more times than anyone could count, even though, by all indications, Dre isn't even returning his phone calls. He got bounced around record labels like a virus. And he learned how to rap.
There were a lot of great things about The Documentary, but most of the time Game wasn't one of them. With all the album's glimmering, widescreen big-budget beats and nagging singsong 50 Cent hooks, the rapping grandma from "America's Got Talent" could've at least gone gold. A ton of money went into The Documentary, which turned out to be one of last year's best rap albums despite the guy who actually rapped on all the songs. Game had a gruff, clumsy cadence, and he obsessively namedropped every rapper he could think of; it was embarrassing. But on mixtape tracks like the 15-minute freestyle "300 Bars N Running", Game discovered how much fun it could be to play around with words. On The Doctor’s Advocate, Game mostly just updates the hamfisted style of the first record, still obsessively dropping names and making ill-advised proclamations about how he's the West Coast Rakim or whatever. But those quirks have hardened into a likeably bizarre personal style, and he's added some of the playfulness of his mixtapes. His constant self-mythologizing feels a little more convincing now that he can bring a certain vividness: "From the first clap I hurt rap; now watch the earth crack/ Bring the hearse back and take a lyrical dirtnap."
He's also found a much more interesting context for himself. On The Documentary, he was that new West Coast G-Unit guy. On The Doctor's Advocate, he's the guy who sold millions his first time out but still found himself abandoned by all the people who brought him into the world. And so he's become an army of one, a perennial underdog with a big mouth and a lot to prove. He makes contradictory claims all over the album, dissing 50 Cent and saying that he has no beef with him on the same song. The album, after all, is named after the guy who refused to have anything to do with it. On some songs, Game talks about how down he is with Dre: "The protégé of the D.R.E./ Take a picture with him and you gotta fuck me." On others, he casts himself as a victim of forces out of his control: "I was the Aftermath remedy till friends turned enemies." And on the title track, he's drunk and on the verge of tears: "Dre, I ain't mean to turn my back on you/ But I'm a man, and sometimes a man do what he gotta do." To make things even weirder, fellow Dre beneficiary Busta Rhymes shows up on the track to cosign Game's pleas for attention: "You gave him something that could make or break a nigga; you should face it/ So big I don't even think he was ready to embrace it." It's an expensively produced track from two star rappers, but it's apparently intended for an audience of one, and listening to it feels like eavesdropping.
To make matters even more complicated, the actual sonics of the album feel like a further entreaty to Dre. There might not be any Dr. Dre tracks on The Doctor's Advocate, but it sounds more like a late-period Dre album than The Documentary did. Game enlists Dre imitators like Scott Storch and Jonathan "JR" Rotem to steal Dre's chilly guitar plucks and screaming organs and smeary synths. On "Compton", the Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am., of all people, pulls off a great little simulacra of Dre's chunky, menacing N.W.A beats. Even the video for "Let's Ride" is basically a remake of "Nothin' But a G Thang".
The whole album is like that; Game airs out his dirty laundry and hopelessly tries to work out all his issues with rap and fame and failed relationships, and we try to figure out what the hell is wrong with him. "Why You Hate the Game", the epic nine-minute closing track, has a sparkling piano-heavy Just Blaze track and a guest appearance from an on-fire Nas ("Pro-black, I don't pick cotton out of aspirin bottles"), and Game ends it all on a note of unresolved ambivalence: "I still think about my nigga from time to time/ Make me wanna call 50 and let him know what's on my mind/ But I just held back cuz we ain't beefing like that/ He ain't Big and I ain't Pac and we just eating off rap." As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better.


A 1985 album from two Ivory Coast musicians explores the sounds of 1970s country and folk; it amounts to a joyful vision of a world without borders.

Jess Sah Bi / Peter One: Our Garden Needs Its Flowers

Our Garden Needs Its Flowers

In 1985, Jess Sah Bi and Peter One’s debut album, Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, launched the two Ivory Coast musicians into regional stardom across greater West Africa. Like many recordings of its era and location, Our Garden eventually went out of print, available only to determined collectors and scavengers. Finally, reissue label Awesome Tapes From Africa has given Sah Bi and One’s folk masterpiece its first official re-release. Thirty-three years later, this unusual recording of Côte d’Ivoire country ballads still sounds like a work of pure joy.
There is an innate sense of travel in Our Garden; it is an album of journey music that gallops all the way from the Ivory Coast to the vast expanses of the American Southwest. In a way, Sah Bi and One’s bridging of musical genres and disparate continents foretold their own separate voyages to the United States: Today Peter works as a nurse in Nashville, while Jess teaches African music to children in San Francisco. Though Our Garden is heavily steeped in Americana, it retains sonic stamps of its original geography. Early song “Katin,” for instance, is more reminiscent of 1980s Afro-pop than it is 1970s country, and it is one of the record’s most buoyant offerings. Its muted scrapes of electric guitar and peppering of drum machine make for a cheerful rhythm that carries Sah Bi and One’s entwined vocals. Like most of the LP, “Katin” is sung in Gouro, a Mande language of the Ivory Coast; even without understanding that tongue, listeners will pick up on the music’s abundant bliss.
If songs like “Katin” and “Kango” successfully transmit a sense of celebration across language barriers, lullabies such as “Clipo Clipo” and the title track paint the album with rich scenery. The former glides to the pace of a slow-rolling car on a leisure cruise. Papery taps on tightly drawn drum skins hover overhead while Sah Bi and One’s harmonies sound like well-tuned, exquisite instruments of their own making. “Our Garden Needs Its Flowers,” meanwhile, is a steady amble through desert plains. Its rattling percussion sounds like spurs clicking across a dry stretch of earth, and a howling harmonica calls to mind Townes Van Zandt’s “Like a Summer Thursday.” Sung entirely in English, “Our Garden” is an entreaty for “peace on Earth,” using flowers as the metaphorical core of the song. It is a masterful rendition of languid country and western, brightened by Sah Bi and One’s synchronized, Simon & Garfunkel-like harmonies.
“Our Garden” isn’t the only song on the album that wraps political idealism in the silken fabric of Sah Bi and One’s vocals. The upbeat “Apartheid” calls for an end to the horrific racial segregation laws in South Africa, nine years before they were eventually abolished, while “African Chant,” and “Solution” (the latter sung in French) ponder notions of freedom and unity. Perhaps what’s most astonishing about Our Garden Needs Its Flowers is how well its songs have endured. The album has traveled a long way in the past three decades, and it arrives now like a delightful gift.


The Michigan electronic hip-hop producer returns to his best-known project after a decade-plus break. With Danny Brown, MF DOOM, and more.

Three/Three

Tadd Mullinix wasn’t sure if he’d ever make another Dabrye record. A decade ago, after the deaths of his mother and his major inspiration and one-time collaborator J Dilla contributed to a feeling of writer’s block, the Ann Arbor producer put his electronic hip-hop project on ice. He didn’t quit music entirely—he’s since made leftfield techno, house, and jungle under aliases, and formed his own label, Bopside—but diehard fans of 2001’s One/Three and 2006’s Two/Three were left holding out hope for a follow-up. Now he’s delivered with this sprawling collection of 19 tracks, a notably looser and more organic listen than its predecessors.
In a world where dance beats have been thoroughly embraced by mainstream rappers and Jay Dee acolytes run labels and headline stadiums, the question that looms over Three/Three is whether Mullinix’s once-futuristic productions still sound innovative. “Never affected by new sellers,” gruff-voiced Stones Throw mainstay Guilty Simpson vows on opening track “Tunnel Vision,” an affirmation that could easily double as Dabrye’s own mission statement. Instead of bowing to current trends, he burrows further into gritty ’90s boom-bap and proto-electronic influences (you can hear traces of Daphne Oram, Mort Garson, and Morton Subotnick), weaving internationally-sourced samples into his intricately layered compositions.
Three/Three is stacked with features from Detroit area MCs (Danny Brown, Clear Soul Forces) and heavy-hitting veterans (MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah), but only a handful of his guests truly rise to the occasion. On “Pretty,” Los Angeles journeyman Jonwayne effortlessly delivers tongue-in-cheek punchlines overtop muffled horns and jazzy keys. Elsewhere, the eerie, Sunday morning cartoon-sampling “Lil Mufukuz” reunites the producer and DOOM, who gleefully schools SoundCloud stars and “snotty-nosed club rats.” Less successful are the relatively unknown trio of Kadence, Intricate Dialect, and Silas Green, whose clunky socio-political musings on “Culture Shuffle” will make listeners wish somebody had gotten Mullinix a landline to Jay Electronica instead.
What’s frustrating about the amount of mic time ceded to lesser talents over the record’s 57 minutes is that the producer clearly knows how to self-edit: Look no further than “Electrocutor,” his Motor City take on the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s experimental electronic scores from the ’60s and ’70s. Most vocalists would get bowled over by the track’s industral clangs and hard-driving percussion, but Dabrye knows better than to touch a sparking live wire.
The album’s highest peaks, directly contrasting the frequent hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn sentiments and cliché battle raps that bog down its second half, come courtesy of Mullinix’s collaborations with younger Michiganders. It’s not hard to hear his DNA in the music of artists like the jazz-trained producer Shigeto—especially on last year’s adventurous ZGTO project A Piece of the Geto with Bruiser Brigade rapper ZeelooperZ—and Brown, whose 2016 record Atrocity Exhibition fit in well with its labelmates on Warp Records. When the latter MC bats cleanup after Roc Marciano and Quelle Chris on “The Appetite,” his ecstatic yelps perfectly complement the song’s ominous, video-game-synth-loaded beat. Shigeto, meanwhile, shines on the languid, cut-up funk instrumental “Sunset,” which deftly juxtaposes shimmering piano loops with staticky Jamaican soundclash echoes.
In a recent interview with the Detroit Metro Times, the 39-year-old producer said that while he has no plans to retire the Dabrye moniker again, 2018 will also see the release of music under his new alias X-Altera. (The name is a reference to techno luminaries Robert Hood and Jeff Mills’ Underground Resistance projects X-102 and X-103.) Three/Three might be the conclusion of one trilogy, but its strongest ideas suggest that Mullinix’s next round of spinoffs will be well worth the price of admission.


Nigerian drummer's highly influential 1959 debut is remastered and packaged with its 1966 companion piece and well-chosen extras on this 2xCD reissue.

Drums of Passion

Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji enjoyed a rich musical legacy during his lifetime. He is credited as being one of the first musicians to bring genuine African music to Western ears en masse, having burst on the scene in 1959 with his debut, Drums of Passion. It was the first known album of traditional West African drumming and chants to be recorded in the United States (Olatunji moved to Atlanta in 1950 before relocating permanently to New York City), and was released during a high tide of political and cultural change-- including appearing alongside epochal jazz recordings by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. As listeners were exposed to different styles and the collective interest in world music and jazz continued to grow in popularity, Olatunji helped turn people's attention away from the corny melodies that dominated the exotica genre fad by offering authentic, captivating songs from his native homeland.
Six years after Olatunji's death at age 75, and 50 years after its original release, Drums of Passion has received the deluxe treatment as a beautifully packaged 2xCD containing its companion album More Drums of Passion (1966) and a well-chosen smattering of jazz-influenced bonus tracks, some of which were previously unreleased in the U.S. It also benefits from considerate remastering: the sound snaps with color, defining the rhythmic fabric with greater clarity while illuminating the integrity and magnetic intensity of Olatunji's arrangements. In some ways, the impact of this sonic resuscitation feels even more vital on a recording that is structured primarily by multiple tiers of voice and percussion, as the distinction between them were often tricky to capture, particularly in studios with comparatively limited equipment.
Olatunji frequently drafted a vivacious, disparate ensemble of musicians and vocalists to contribute to his recordings, and many of these people drifted in and out of the studio unknown and unaccredited. By its very nature, his music is designed to be performed by large groups-- it is this communal input that gives Drums of Passion its infectious vitality and relentlessly entertaining energy. The elated female and male chants on "Odun De! Odun De! (Happy New Year)" glide over a knot of polyrhythms, while the call and response vocals on "Baba Jinde (Flirtation Dance)" are injected with so many whoops and jeers that the song ends up sounding like a pack of copulating hyenas, pinned down by a surge of ecstatic Afro-Cuban rhythms.
"The spirit of the drum is something that you feel but cannot put your hands on," Olatunji once explained to an interviewer. "It does something to you from the inside out. It hits people in so many different ways, but the feeling is one that is satisfying and joyful." This zeal lay at the root of Olatunji's music, and is arguably felt more ferociously on Drums of Passion than any other of his many recordings. It may not be as immediately accessible as some of his later work, but in terms of improvisational liveliness and the sheer animation of his rhythmic phrasing and arrangements, it’s hard to beat. Over the last several decades, fans of world music have had access to a plethora of material from all over the globe. But it's worth retracing the steps to this virtuoso, who not only brought genuine West African music to popular attention but also influenced musicians such as Quincy Jones, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. Olatunji was a remarkable entertainer, whose impression on world music is as enjoyable and significant now as it was in the early 1960s. He has achieved a gold standard in music: Timelessness, and an ardor that does not simply simmer but glows fiercely, and joyfully, from within.


On the Vein.fm side project’s full-length debut, these hardcore musicians melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of alt-rock classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants.

We’re Not Here to Be Loved

We’re suddenly in a world where every hardcore band can emulate the styles and sounds that only the most privileged of their 1990s forebears could afford: the Butch Vig crunch, the Ross Robinson bite, the Flood/Alan Moulder atmosphere. Former scrappy upstarts Turnstile and Code Orange have garnered Grammy nominations for their populist alt-rock and glitchy metalcore, respectively. And while Vein.fm maintain a caustic quality that excludes them from the heights of their former tourmates, their nü-metal-tinged sound has found an audience among DIY crowds that might’ve once disparaged that maligned genre’s flashy signifiers.
Less than two years after the Massachusetts group’s 2018 breakout, Errorzone, they unceremoniously dumped a demo by a side project called Fleshwater onto their social media accounts. Compared to their primary project, these three rough-hewn but impressive songs were sexier, more melodic, and choosier about flashing their hardcore credentials in service of brutal beatdowns. The methodical back half of Vein’s pandemic-delayed 2022 follow-up, This World Is Going to Ruin You, suggested spillover between the projects. But even after the Fleshwater demo and Vein’s recent album, the sleek beast that is We’re Not Here to Be Loved shatters expectations.
The demo definitely had songs—hooky, kinetic compositions that went far beyond snoozy “hardcore band goes shoegaze” stereotypes—but it lacked the crisp precision that the style demands. For We’re Not Here to Be Loved, the group enlisted Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou to record and mix. Fleshwater—which consists of Vein members Anthony DiDio, Jeremy Martin, and Matt Wood alongside singer/guitarist Marisa Shirar—prove themselves capable of mimicking eclectic ‘90s influences at a mile a minute. Paired with Ballou, they form a too-big-to-fail braintrust among a sea of likeminded hardcore castoffs.
Play a random five-second clip of We’re Not Here to Be Loved and you can spot the touchstones. Opener “Baldpate Driver” immediately shoves Hum and Deftones’ hi-sheen shoegaze down your throat. “The Razor’s Apple” is a mini-symphony of anthemic riffs that recall both Thrice and “Everlong.” The one demo holdover, “Linda Claire,” boasts a grungy strut that sounds impossible to play without a bass slung as low as Krist Novoselic’s. Every young rock band apes the ‘90s now. Yawn. Fleshwater melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants.
With their basements-to-breakbeats trajectory, Vein have made it clear they are uninterested in the boundaries of bygone scenes. That mindset carries over to We’re Not Here to Be Loved, rendering it an alt-rock playground where rock-radio power chords leech momentum from squeals of feedback, blastbeats punctuate the half-time choruses, and a bold cover of Post’s “Enjoy” bolsters the theory that Björk could’ve been the queen of nü-metal, had she wanted to. The range of influences might be limited to a specific era, and Fleshwater are anything but “genre-mashers,” but they’re such exacting synthesists that their innate hardcore energy wrings new life out of these dated-but-trendy sounds.
Where other revivalists’ strengths come from carving a niche, Fleshwater’s execution is more quicksilver. Matt Wood, already one of hardcore’s most dizzying drummers, is their slithering backbone, guiding grooves that are thicker than Vein’s but constantly peppered with nimble flashes of his standard breakdowns and blastbeats. And while We’re Not Here to Be Loved doesn’t quite reach its influences’ big-budget collage of guitar tones, DiDio and Shirar explore the fertile territory between gnarled distortion and digitized glassiness with Ballou ensuring that all of it explodes out of the speakers.
If there’s one thing that sets the album apart, it’s the uninhibited vocal approach. DiDio is a solid supporting actor, his close-mic’d mumbles providing the moody songs with a necessary glumness, but he’s really here to complement Shirar. She flat-out goes for it in a way that’s rare among modern grunge and shoegaze bands. Try to imagine how the gripping first line of the song “Closet”—“I’m sorry for the things I can’t undo”—would sound with someone half-assedly moaning it. On the album’s most anthemic cuts, like “The Razor’s Apple” and “Kiss the Ladder,” she wails like Diary-era Jeremy Enigk, sharing the Sunny Day Real Estate frontman’s fondness for fragile, descending melodies and his ability to imbue them with pain and passion. On the songs where DiDio takes center stage, Shirar opts for more of a sun-coming-through-the-trees shoegaze keen, which she also nails, but Fleshwater are never more invigorating than when she’s in the spotlight.
We’re Not Here to Be Loved is a great reminder that ‘90s bands’ success usually had more to do with their frontperson than their producer. Now that the playing field between four-track recorders and million-dollar soundboards has been considerably leveled, the gap between contemporaries more often concerns charisma. With a deft ability to blend influences, a formidable roster of hardcore-trained musicians, and a singer who doesn’t fade into the background, Fleshwater bound ahead of their peers by making the familiar exciting again.