After four full-lengths and a string of EPs of heaven-scraping pomp, Iceland's Sigur Rós give about half of their new LP over to a much-needed change of direction, offering plenty of moments where they sound more spirited, looser, almost playful.

Sigur Rós: Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

In the near-decade since their 1999 breakthrough Ágætis Byrjun, Iceland's Sigur Rós have made pathos their playground. For them, "little" is scarcely an option: Instead, they've built a career out of conjuring God-sized renderings of sorrow, fragility, and teary joy, rarely on a scale anything less than epic. They've done this instinctively and automatically, sometimes to the detriment of their compositions, leaving the impression that the songs are secondary vessels for spectacle. In the sense that they're less concerned with intellectual honesty than they are with the overall visceral impact of the thing they're creating, Sigur Rós are the Michael Bays of melodrama.
That, of course, is no bad thing-- especially not for a band that does spectacle so well-- but it does invite a problematic dynamic when it comes to the long haul, one wherein they run the very real risk of piling on ever-more ludicrously for the sake of justifying their existence. That's why, after four full-lengths and a string of EPs that saw them bloat their sensory cavalcade of strings, horns, cavernously reverberated guitars, and sweetly vocals to heaven-scraping levels of pomp, last month's single "Gobbledigook" came as a refreshing and shockingly grounded new direction. Gone were the celestial delays and cloud-parting refrains; in their place, a tangle of acoustic guitars, thumping percussion, and rabid vocals. Not only did it sound like Sigur Rós doing Animal Collective (!), it sounded like a way out.
And certainly, about half of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (translation: "With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly") constitutes a much-needed change of direction for Sigur Rós. Building on the gains made from 2005's transitional Takk, they deliver plenty of moments where they sound more spirited, looser, almost playful. The unifying element in these instances is brevity; from the tumbling, modest solo acoustic ballad "Illgresi" to the celebratory "Við spilum endalaust", some of the band's best songs come when they consciously confine themselves to the pop format. You get the feeling that, on a past album, they might have let "Góðan daginn"'s acoustic guitar arpeggios and chiming bell tones waft around interminably. Similarly, one of the album's highlights is a major key summer song called "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" which manages to squeeze some of the band's hallmarks (parading horns, glockenspiels, and a stunning teardown and subsequent buildup) into a positively economical four minutes. The compression generally serves them well, forcing them to make choices they might not otherwise confront when there's 10 minutes of real estate to occupy.
Með suð was produced by Flood (U2, PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails) and recorded, variously, in New York, London, Reykjavik, and Havana, a sure sign of a conscious attempt to shake up their methodology. If there's anything disappointing, it's that Sigur Rós weren't more militant about affecting that change. While the album's greatest triumph is its relative leanness, two songs still threaten the nine-minute mark. The first is the conflicting "Festival", which features singer Jonsi Birgisson doing his quavering choirboy routine over a churchly organ for an interminable four and a half minutes before swelling into an instrumental eruption on par with Sigur Rós' finest ever. It's so arresting and muscular on its own that it hardly needs the first bit to introduce it; that the band chose needlessly to build it into a beast feels a bit like old habits dying hard. Far more unforgivable is the comically overstuffed "Ára bátur", which is a bet-hedging and nerveless exercise that bridges another aimless solo piano movement with a culminating swell so over-the-top that Andrew Lloyd Webber himself would have deemed it a little much. That the album's official bio proudly touts the 90-strong recording (which boasts both the London Sinfonietta and the London Oratory Boys' Choir) as "the largest musical undertaking of the band's career"-- and that it's easily the worst thing on here-- speaks volumes of a different kind.
These safe, pandering choices otherwise mar what could have been a game-changing evolution. Instead, Með suð promisingly announces itself as a sunny, happy, easily digestible record before relapsing into old school, heavy-bloat, high-calorie Sigur Rós. Ultimately, there are too many wonderful moments here to deem it anything less than a beautiful record, but armchair producers might find themselves similarly wishing for less fat. How do you say "less is more" in Hopelandic? I worry we'll never know.


An intensely personal document, the Tennessee singer and guitarist’s third album examines the realities of being a Southern Black LGBTQ+ woman in songs both defiant and vulnerable.

Wary + Strange

Tennessee guitarist and singer Amythyst Kiah won’t be constrained by anyone’s expectations. “Don’t wanna hear your soapbox speech,” she declares on “Soapbox,” the opening song of her third album, Wary + Strange. “Don’t wanna hear how you would do it.” Kiah’s independent spirit, vast talent, and musical savvy yield dazzling results on this, her Rounder debut: Wary + Strange is a rock album that doesn’t play by anyone’s rules but her own.
Kiah, a guitarist with a powerful wail, marries country blues with widescreen production and unexpected touches—wheezing bass harmonica at the core of “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” spectral backing vocals hovering above “Sleeping Queen.” She steers the journey with her commanding bellow, which is only made stronger by her courage to express the doubt and longing lurking beneath.
Kiah closed her self-released 2013 debut, Dig, with a stripped-down cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” that showcased the range of her voice and tender playing. It was also a nod to the alt rock that helped inspire her to pick up the guitar as a teenager. She went on to study music at East Tennessee State University, immersing herself in that school’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies program. Eventually, her knowledge of vintage American music and dexterity on the guitar led her to become a member of Our Native Daughters, a string-band supergroup assembled by Rhiannon Giddens in 2018.
When Kiah met music industry lifer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, Aimee Mann’s Whatever), she had been working on the songs that would make up Wary + Strange for so long she’d recorded them twice. During a session in early 2020, Berg reimagined “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” adding a bass harmonica, as well as flute and Mellotron, to its country-blues framework. That led Kiah to plunge into recording the album once more, this time with Berg on hand as producer.
Kiah’s instincts proved correct, and Wary + Strange is a testament to her following them. The modern protest song “Black Myself” is already part of Kiah’s catalog; it was included on Our Native Daughters’ 2019 debut, Songs of Our Native Daughters, where it garnered a Grammy nomination. That recording was a swaying take on the song that spotlighted the quartet’s vocal harmonies, punctuated by an accordion solo. On Wary and Strange, “Black Myself” announces itself with pinging, shimmering guitar riffs; while both versions have fire, the new one possesses extra swagger. “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face/’Cause I’m Black myself,” sings Kiah defiantly, her voice soaring.
An intensely personal document, Wary + Strange examines the realities of being a Southern Black LGBTQ+ woman in songs that groove and tremble as they tell their stories. “Wild Turkey” mourns Kiah’s mother, who drowned in the Tennessee River when Kiah was a teenager, while also mourning Kiah’s emotional shutdown in the wake of the loss. It opens with fingerpicked guitar echoing the late-night thoughts that Kiah, now 34, keeps turning over; the music swells into a maelstrom of thundering drums and droning strings as her voice gains power and fire. When Kiah asks, “Oh Lord, will I ever feel right again?,” the song breaks open in a surfeit of complex emotions.
Wary + Strange flies by like a far-reaching conversation. Kiah displays a keen knowledge of how songs can electrify the air, and a talent for channeling murky emotions and regret-warped ruminations into succinct, pointed lyrics. “Ballad of Lost” stretches its heartbreak over five minutes, but the song’s spare arrangement and deliberate pacing convey all the shock of the split second when she glimpsed a lover with another woman. A slide guitar scatters teardrops over the landscape as she digs into her pain on the verses; “I am lost/Maybe I have always been,” she muses on the chorus, the sort of clarifying moment that only anguish can bring.
Wary + Strange ends by revisiting “Soapbox”; this new version possesses a slightly quicker pulse, just enough to kick up its sense of self-assurance. Now that Kiah has proven to listeners the full extent of what she can do, she’s here to remind them again that she doesn’t need anyone’s help. “My professional career has been a progression of me figuring myself out,” Kiah recently told Billboard. Wary + Strange proves just how revelatory that process has been, for Kiah and her listeners alike.

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On his breakthrough solo album, the Asheville songwriter and guitarist polishes his alt-country vignettes with disarming insight and an immersive, fuzz-stacked sound.

Boat Songs

When MJ Lenderman sings the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect” on Wednesday’s recent cover record, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up, he razes and rekindles the song with barely more than a slant in his voice. Billy Corgan tends to sing with electrified gravitas, as though life and death hung on every note. “Perfect” justifies the dramatics. It charts the distance between the glorified image of a relationship and the way two people actually move with each other through time. The grain of living weathers away the gloss. While taking lead on that cover—and in his solo work more broadly—the Asheville guitarist and singer-songwriter zeroes in on the fissures that appear in the weathering. His latest album, Boat Songs, holds up what he finds in the cracks, dusts it off, and lets it sparkle in the dusk light.
Boat Songs marks Lenderman's first solo album recorded in a professional studio after two homespun releases: a 2019 self-titled debut and last year’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. The shift to higher fidelity doesn't smooth out what makes his alt-country vignettes click. His loping, lackadaisical melodic phrasing, the way he ropes up guitar lines around tragicomic epigrams, and his repeated turns to bathos are all charged by the new punch of the production. He relays disarming insights into the fray of living with smiling, understated delivery; his songs often feel like a conversation with an old friend that suddenly goes deep, plunging down a level without losing any of its safety or warmth. By cranking up the luster around them, he highlights those minuscule faults where universes take root. Here’s an album where failure fertilizes the starting ground.
Across Boat Songs, Lenderman adopts the Gen X strategy of taking implements of power and exaggerating them to absurdity. His music bears the echoes of those 1990s songwriters who dragged amplification and distortion into the realm of sour comedy, who fuzzed out their guitars to near-static and played them with winking simplicity. In his fuzz-stacked sound, storied indie rock acts like Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill, and Sparklehorse mingle with alt-country fabulists like Songs: Ohia and Drive-By Truckers. He mixes Mark Linkous’ eye for beautiful minutiae with Jason Molina’s knack for mythological gravitas, and offsets them both with a warm, easy style that takes the bite out of the pain that rivets his songs. If throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the electric guitar served as a show of dominance and virtuosity in mainstream rock, that ’90s crop of indie musicians found a way to wield it with a sardonic edge: letting the riffs sag a little, turning them up until they sounded like shit, and drawling over the top. If your goal isn’t just to be the most impressive thing in the room, there’s more space to dig around for what you’d otherwise be drowning out.
Lenderman uses that pointed deflation to claw up moments of bliss and frailty. His grounded, flexible, and lucid songwriting nails repeated turns from the everyday to the sublime. He especially enjoys peering into the cracks of celebrity, that bizarre phenomenon where a person gets pulled apart from other people: gilded, televised, held aloft. “TLC Cage Match” has him pondering human fragility while watching WWE: “It’s hard to see you fall like that,” he sings to pro wrestlers bruising themselves inside the TV. “Dan Marino” sets its lens on the eponymous Dolphins quarterback as he drifts through the grocery store, glancing over Tom Brady’s picture on the same Wheaties boxes where his own face used to be. On “Hangover Game,” Lenderman smiles past the official excuses for Michael Jordan’s 1997 flu game to sympathize with the star, who was—by some accounts—hungover: “He looked so sick/It was all over the news/But it wasn’t a pizza and it wasn’t the flu/Yeah, I love drinking, too.” Even legends have their foibles.
The thing about loving your own frailties is that it deepens your ability to love the rest of it, too. Lenderman renders suffering and joy in the same gentle, unhurried deadpan, dragging all those heightened feelings back down to the ground where they can sprout. Right after he imagines Marino sighing through the cereal aisle, he sees actual dolphins from the back of a friend’s boat. “Jackass is funny like the earth is round,” he sings on “You Are Every Girl to Me.” What if our pleasures were natural facts? What if our failures were, too? Our feelings wouldn’t be rewards or punishments; there’d be no score to keep. Or, as Lenderman sings in the album’s final moments: “No one's counting your mistakes.” No one triumphs over the world, not even if they’re on TV, and no one fails the world, either. All we do is course through it and savor what we can.


On its angriest and heaviest record in years, the rock band restores its bluesy, primitive sound as Joshua Homme confronts his recent turmoil

Queens of the Stone Age: In Times New Roman...

In Times New Roman...

Like many of us, Joshua Homme has had a rough few years. Unlike most of us, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s troubles have been splattered across the music press. He’s been embroiled in an acrimonious custody dispute with ex-wife Brody Dalle; has filed restraining orders against Dalle (who has also filed restraining orders against him); has undergone surgery following a cancer diagnosis; and has grieved multiple close friends, including former bandmate Mark Lanegan. “This has been the darkest four years of my life,” Homme recently told Revolver, an admission that humanizes a rock star who has long played with cartoonishly villainous personas on record.
For a period, he couldn’t make music at all. Then music became an outlet for his grief, a treatment plan more therapeutic than all those drugs he name-checked in “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” The resulting album, In Times New Roman…, is the stoner-rock group’s heaviest, angriest work since 2007’s underrated Era Vulgaris. The seething indictments of “Paper Machete” set the tone early: Homme lashes out at an unnamed tormenter (OK, not so subtle: “I know you’d use anything, anyone, to make yourself look clean/In sickness, no vows mean anything”) over grinding power chords that thrash and blare like a Queens song is supposed to. And yet the song sounds somehow preliminary and underwhelming, like Homme needed to get this stuff off his chest and forgot to write a hook worthy of the vitriol.
Wholly self-produced, and absent any high-profile guests, In Times New Roman… is more hermetic than usual. Serving as the band’s only permanent member, Homme chips away the chrome-plated dance-rock machinations of 2017’s Mark Ronson-produced Villains and tries to restore the band to a bluesy primitivity: You can almost smell the tube amps overheating on “Time & Place.” But often the results are mixed. On “Obscenery,” a lukewarm groove of squelchy guitars serves as a canvas for some of the record’s clunkiest rhymes: “Voyeurism jism may cause blurry visions/Or a spoiled brat for an inner child.”
The most compelling tracks deepen the anger with flashes of humor and wry introspection. Borrowing a Silverchair pun, lead single “Emotion Sickness” alternates fluently between high-octane blasts of acid-damaged guitar and a chorus that luxuriates in the band’s melodic chops. “Baby don’t care for me,” goes the deceptively sun-kissed refrain. Like earlier tracks, the song alludes to Homme’s divorce (“See the sights/Holy Braille”), but there’s a playfulness, a thrilling push-and-pull between melody and attack, that recalls the band’s heights.
The best songs on In Times New Roman… are hiding in the back half, resulting in an unusually lopsided experience. Things perk up with track six, “Carnavoyeur,” an atmospheric lament with a slippery, soulful glint. It’s the first song here that brings a detached, almost zen sentiment to personal tragedy. Homme evokes a kind of letting go, a liberation from torment: “Every living thing will die/From the king of the jungle to butterfly/Only sin is waiting too long,” he croons over a groove that’s more Doors than Desert Sessions. The song bleeds out in a haze of strings, foreshadowing the intriguing post-“Kashmir” orchestral stomp of “Sicily.” It’s a seductive tune, not quite like anything in QOTSA’s catalog, that summons a thirst for romantic degradation.
QOTSA haven’t changed a whole lot since the second Bush term, but after a lengthy stretch of inactivity and personal strife, it’s heartening to hear them still making such an unholy racket. Apocalyptic imagery abounds on “Straight Jacket Fitting,” a thick, hulking workout of a finale; Homme rattles off a litany of evildoers (“the old guard, avant guard, technolojesus!”) and concludes: “The world/She don’t need saving.” In QOTSA’s early-2000s heyday, their slow-burners were explosive enough to sound like the world really was ending. On In Times New Roman…, QOTSA evoke the inexorable grief of feeling your own world collapsing, and in their most potent moments, they convey both the devastation and the long crawl back from hell.


**
\n\n\ One of the great, universal inspirations throughout the history of rock and roll\n\ has been the death ...

Under Rug Swept

[from April Fool's Edition, 2002]
One of the great, universal inspirations throughout the history of rock and roll has been the death of a relationship.\xA0 In 1972, Carly Simon scored a hit with "You're So Vain," a thinly-veiled sendoff to former beau Warren Beatty.\xA0 John Lennon, while separated from Yoko Ono, wrote some of his most harrowing songs, such as "Jealous Guy."\xA0 And at the core of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was the searing open wound of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks' messy breakup.
Throughout her career, Alanis Morissette has railed in a similar manner at an unnamed lover from her past, a mysterious figure described only as an older man from her days at Nickelodeon.\xA0 But now, on the promotional tour for Under Rug Swept, Morissette has bravely revealed the identity of her bitter muse: Dave Coulier! That's right, when Morissette had one hand in her pocket, the other hand was giving the finger to Uncle Joey on the 80s television hit "Full House."\xA0 It was like ray-eee-ain on your wedding day when her and Dave Coulier broke up. And yes, the person she went down on in a theater was... Dave Coulier. The man don't mess around.
Coulier's ghost continues to float over and around Morissette's music, perhaps while doing his famous Popeye impression and mugging wildly.\xA0 The Canadian confronts this secret relationship in her most direct manner yet on the first single from Under Rug Swept, "Hands Clean."\xA0 By assuming Coulier's voice and singing lecherous lines like, "Just make sure you don't tell on me, especially to the members of your family," and, "I might want to marry you one day if you'd watch that weight and keep your firm body," Morissette must be making Coulier very uncomfortable wherever he is today.
This fierce independence finds its way into every aspect of Under Rug Swept, her first album without the assistance of professionally licensed hitmaker Glen Ballard.\xA0 Morissette was obviously taking notes during their previous two collaborations, however, as these eleven songs retain the Jagged Little Pill formula of safely looped drums, angry guitar, and Alanis' trademark clenched-teeth yodel.\xA0 The immediacy is further amped by the fact that Morissette plays nearly all the instruments on the album, finally putting to rest the rumors that she's nothing more than a producer's puppet.
The most marked effect of breaking away from Ballard's input is the unmitigated and highly concentrated ferocity of her lyrical confessions.\xA0 It's no mistake that Under Rug Swept comes off like a 45-minute glimpse into her daily therapy session.\xA0 Morissette wants to put a little bit of her head inside of yours, riding on a catchy hook-- to give all of us a taste of what it feels like to be dumped by Dave Coulier. Because even though "it's been over a decade/ It smarts like four minutes ago."\xA0 Observe:
"Flinch": "How long can a girl be haunted by you?"
"That Particular Time": "I kept on ignoring the ambivalence you felt/ And in the meantime I lost myself."
"So Unsexy": "I'm 13 again/ And I'm 13 for life."
Obviously, the emotional pain persists, many, many long years after "You Can't Do That on Television."\xA0 All Alanis wants is for the world to dance and sing along with her catharsis.\xA0 Can you really hold it against her? Of course not! So don't think you can write Morissette off as doing nothing more than cataloging her relationship grievances.\xA0 On "21 Things I Want in a Lover," Alanis files an audio personal ad of what she's looking for in a man (note to fellas: be against capital punishment, and inventive in bed!), a move that could come off as self-indulgent, but in a personality as luminescent as Ms. Morissette, is nothing short of entrancing.\xA0 And on the somber "A Man," Morissette boldly composes lyrics from the perspective of... a man! Perhaps the target of one of her many incendiary diatribes: "Born of your bellies I yearn for the cord/ Years I have groveled repentance ignored." Dude, that begs for a Mustaine solo.
If Under Rug Swept has a weak point, it's in the lack of musical variety, with few tracks deviating from electric or acoustic versions of the above-stated formula.\xA0 These exceptions show a knack for appropriating the sonic vocabulary of other artists to fit Morissette's vision, such as the Elton John-inspired piano rocker "That Particular Time" ("This Train Don't Stop There Anymore," anyone?). Her skills at adaptation are most striking on "Narcissus," in which Alanis mines the familiar Liz Phair trademark of minor chords, swear words and attitude, and shows once and for all that, while Phair may have invented the modern angry-female act, Morissette perfected it.
Frankly, it's a small matter, since with lyrical messages this strong and profound, a little bit of stylistic homogeneity can be forgiven.\xA0 Even without the disturbing, sad, confusing, and (okay, I admit) mildly hilarious knowledge that her songs are directed at Uncle Joey, the emotional potency of Under Rug Swept's songs cannot be denied.\xA0 On "So Unsexy," Alanis admits that sometimes she "feels so boring for someone so interesting."\xA0 But with an album this compelling, she really needn't worry.


Young Dro is a humbly astonishing rapper. The DJ Burn One-curated Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of the Atlanta MC's strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best.

Ralph Lauren Reefa

Young Dro is an unspectacularly spectacular rapper. He's humbly astonishing. How to explain this guy? He's more agile, more playful, and more confident than most; almost everything that comes out of his mouth sounds catchy, even when he's just ranting semi-incomprehensibly in skits about how fresh he is. The "should be famous" line is a tired one, so we'll just observe that he's definitely not famous, at least not nationally like his sometime-benefactor T.I. and his other Atlanta colleagues. He had one hit in 2006, ("Shoulder Lean"), but he is a rapper's rapper, a nerd's favorite who will probably be a local legend in his hometown for the rest of his life. His legacy is secure; his epitaph is written.
The Local Rapper Who Just Can't Get Over is everywhere, in every city-- here in NYC, we have Jadakiss, their grumpy-uncle patron saint, but you can find them in Philly (Young Chris, Peedi Crakk) to Chicago (Bump J) to L.A. (Kurupt, WC). Sometimes, these guys are their own worst enemies, smacking home runs when no one's looking and freezing up when the floodlights hit them. Some of them just seem content to work on a ground level, surrounded by familiar associates and making the music that retains their hometown flavor. That's Young Dro. "Freeze Me" was a classic of Atlanta hip hop in 2010, and did as much to push the style of street rap forward as Rick Ross' "B.M.F." from the same year. But you wouldn't know the song was a classic unless you lived in Atlanta or learned secondhand.
Rap's folk history is usually written by these sorts of guys as much as by the megastars they bump elbows with, and Dro has been playing the mascot role to the hilt for the past six years. He can be counted on to put out slightly overlong mixtapes once or twice a year, each one containing at least five or six breathtaking, pull-it-back-six-times scorchers. Ralph Lauren Reefa, which was made available a few weeks ago, is shorter and several notches more consistent than usual, partly thanks to the involvement of DJ Burn One, an Atlanta rap producer with an unwavering devotion to the heavier, humid end of Atlanta's heritage. The two previously collaborated on Future Legends, Vol. 2; with Burn One curating, Young Dro's occasional reliance on cheap-sounding beats disappears.
Dro can loop rings around any wide-open, Southern beat you give him: If you hand him an instrumental made up of just a few bleeps and an 808 clap, like "Smell That Pack" on RLR, he will make it feel like a piece of Silly Putty in seconds. If you sit him back in a plush piece of after-party VIP-room rap ("On Set"), he will pummel its surface ceaselessly.  His writing is packed tight with alliteration, colorful slang, and the occasional paper-cut-size confessional ("Momma get sicker, she need a liver") and his sense of rhythm is mind-boggling. When he flexes effortlessly into double-time, you can feel your hair blow back: It might take you six replays of "Check Me Out"'s first verse to fully hear it once.
When Young Dro gets soulful or quiet, he sounds a little less comfortable: "She Gone" is a slightly awkward remorseful-player song, "Dreamer" a slightly strained achiever's anthem. But when he just lets his mind and mouth fly, he's unstoppable. On "Laid Back", he sets up the line "supermodel bitches flying down from New Zealand" just so he can rack up a series of increasingly dazzling slant rhymes for  it: "my boo vegan" and "a pound of new tree, and" are two highlights. It's like watching someone pound you in Words With Friends while simultaneously cooking dinner and moonwalking. It seems unfair, somehow. All said, Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of his strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best.


Working once again with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, the Black Keys try for a moodier, more atmospheric record. Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones.

Turn Blue

This may be a weird statement to make about one of North America's most popular rock bands, but the Black Keys are survivors. The majority of the duo's colleagues from the early 2000s have since called it quits, but the workmanlike Akron boys Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney kept their heads down, dutifully churning out gutshot blues-pop mimicry that carried just enough of a punch to establish them as, at the least, a reliable stadium-act opening band.
Then: worldwide financial turmoil struck, the buying public went from purchasing few records to no records at all, dance music infiltrated pop's consciousness, and guitars were, prophetically, exchanged for turntables (or, in keeping with recent trends, MPCs). Banjo-players and Dave Grohl formed an unlikely alliance to establish "real music" as 2010s mainstream rock culture's slyly conservative ethos and just like that, the Black Keys emerged as the most popular guys making music that sounds like older music without getting all P.T. Barnum about it.
Brothers from 2010 (the first record made at Muscle Shoals in three decades, natch) was the Keys' most consciously bloated effort and, paradoxically, the one that placed them firmly in their current position of The Only Band Your Friend From High School Listens to These Days; writing their catchiest song to date, "Tighten Up", helped, as did soundtracking every goddamn car commercial and buddy-comedy movie trailer that didn't have breakdancing hamsters in it. Cementing their rep as canny opportunists, Carney and Auerbach returned a year later with El Camino, a sleazy, hook-laden album that switched between the basic thematic food groups of cars-and-women and cars-as-women with the horndog exuberance of a kid doing donuts on an ATV in an abandoned dirt lot.
El Camino was the best ZZ Top album that you can't stream on Spotify and, in an impressive feat for a band so 9-to-5 about their creative process that they once recorded an album in an actual factory, it also turned out to be their most distinctive work and arguably their best. The Black Keys' eighth album and first in three years isn't their worst effort—that distinction still belongs to 2006's Magic Potion, their paste-bland major-label debut—but after the relatively fresh approach on El Camino, it's dismaying how much of the inert, mid-tempo Turn Blue resembles elements of their previous albums: Brothers' stoner-friendly drift, Attack & Release's toy-xylophone psychedelia, Magic Potion's indifferent blare. After a decade-plus of pilfering musical history with all the subtlety of a brick through a windshield—for Christ's sake, last time around they basically plagiarized "Last Dance With Mary Jane"—the Black Keys' cultural cannibalism has finally turned inward.
Turn Blue finds the Black Keys getting deep with themselves in several ways; Auerbach recently told Rolling Stone that the band set out to make a singles-bereft "Headphone[s] record," and he's alluded elsewhere that his messy, allegation-laden divorce proceedings—which, in a this-joke-writes-itself touch, once was believed to include a lock of Bob Dylan's hair—lent the album a "melancholy" vibe. Appropriately, Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones that, for the most part, are indistinguishable.
Lyrically, the Black Keys' casual chauvinism has gone from "Girl, you look so good" to "Woman, you done me wrong," the shift in mindset undeniably affected by Auerbach's personal troubles. "Why you always wanna love the ones who hurt you," he sings over the sluggish bounce of "Year in Review", "Then break down when they go and deserve you." Allusions to rain, running, sickness, and the open road are predictably expressed, and Auerbach admits on the title track's disco-ball lilt: "In the dead of the night/ I start to lose control." The couplet speaks volumes, as the mushy gruel of Turn Blue represents the sound of a band going so deep into their own heads that they lose track of where the exit doors are located.
It's tempting once again to blame the dullness on Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, a sometimes-capable producer whose reputation in recent years has carried the weight of an "Out of Order" sign on a bathroom door. Indeed, Burton's reign of boredom continues here in typical fashion; his love for airlock-hatch atmospherics and stiff string-section motifs are intact, and even without the credits confirming it, you could probably guess that the orchestral touches of "Year in Review" were lifted from the score for an Italian 1970s sex comedy.
If Burton remains an easy scapegoat, this time it's harder to make the charges stick. Turn Blue is the second consecutive Black Keys album where he's credited as a contributing songwriter, and as the veritable third Black Key since Attack & Release, his presence has led to some of the band's most successful, purposefully forceful music. The Black Keys are, in fact, the one band this decade that Burton has collaborated with effectively, so the failures of Turn Blue come across mostly as a byproduct of an imbalance of power. While the suffocating weightlessness of the LP's first third is enough to give anyone who's listened to a Broken Bells record more than once a serious case of PTSD, Carney and Auerbach sound as if they're holding back in response, succumbing to bland choruses and muddy aimlessness despite the fact that their catalog dictates they're capable of much more than this. Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.
The Black Keys have never been known for innovation—we're talking about a band that covered the fucking Beatles on their first album—but Turn Blue's strongest moments happen when they explore new territory. At nearly seven minutes, opener "Weight of Love" is a moody epic that carries melodic hints of the pleasantly stretched-out "Bullet in the Brain", meandering to a searing guitar solo that, for those with heavy investment in searing guitar solos, should more than suffice. Lead single "Fever", meanwhile, is Turn Blue's Festival-Headliner Hit, its subtly catchy hook and farty keyboard sounds resembling what might happen if MGMT-circa-2014 tried to write something approaching "Electric Feel" in terms of weirded-out pop accessibility.
Turn Blue's most surprising moment arrives at the end: "Gotta Get Away", whose title alone suggests that the Black Keys are ready to move on from this uncharacteristically dour fog they're trapped in. Coming off as the strongest classic-rock beer-commercial jam since Kid Rock's cliché-tastic "All Summer Long", the cowboy-boots guitar riff and Auerbach's unchained vocal take pair perfectly to create the album's most energizing blast-in-a-glass cut, to the point where it's hard not to dream of an entire album of songs like this. The song sounds like summer; with the right sync, "Gotta Get Away" could make millionaires out of anyone who sells rubber tires and rope.
"For no one/ It's no fun, no fun/ With a one track mind," Auerbach sings on the tune, after name-checking Kalamazoo and wondering where all the "good women" have gone in typical dirtbag fashion; it's hard not to read his lyrical admission as anything but self-prescriptive. On a record where the Black Keys' try way too hard to be "weird," "Gotta Get Away" is the sole moment where they get out of their own heads and back into that beat-up van. You can't fault them for trying to get deep, but this is one band for which shallowness is a virtue.


Refining the gonzo pop-collages of his previous work, Ariel Pink crafts an immersive, intimate record, marked by solitude.

Dedicated to Bobby Jameson

Bobby Jameson was a victim of hype. In the early 1960s, as the Beatles took over America, Jameson’s manager took a creative approach to promote the fledgling Los Angeles singer-songwriter. An increasingly ambitious series of ads appeared over several weeks in Billboard magazine. They began with a cryptic tease: a black-and-white silhouette of a man and a guitar, promising the “world’s next phenomenon.” When his face finally appeared, along with the announcement of his new record (“Bobby Jameson Says ‘I’m So Lonely,’” it read), he looked awkward, unprepared, frightened.
The song tanked and the world moved on. Jameson sunk into obscurity and depression. In 2003, he said he avoided returning to L.A. for fear that he’d “traded in [his] suicidal tendencies for homicidal tendencies.” He died 12 years later in San Luis Obispo, where he lived with his mother and chronicled the trajectory of his career on a blog, painstakingly, still trying to make sense of what went wrong.
Ariel Pink, who’s dedicated his new album to Bobby Jameson, has experienced his own dramatic evolution in the public eye. When we first met Ariel Rosenberg in the mid-2000s, he was an enigmatic outsider propped by Animal Collective’s in-house record label. The question circling his music was less “Who is this?” than “What is this?” Like Bobby Jameson—whose releases arrived under various guises to fool the public into thinking he was a new, emerging talent—Pink always distanced himself from his output. The pseudonym, then, worked in tandem with the constant stream of hazy, fogged-over records and the intentionally off-putting interviewee, all keeping the actual artist as far from the conversation as possible. “[T]here’s no such thing as Ariel Pink,” he recently told SPIN, “It’s kinda complicated but kinda not.”
Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is Ariel Pink’s most humble, most insular work in years. After the whirlwind collage of Pom Pom—filled with sound experiments, radio jingles, earnest balladry, and honest-to-god pop anthems—Bobby Jameson is a retreat. Its finest songs are cozier and more immediate: the gothy dream-pop of “Feels Like Heaven,” the hypnotic “Time to Live,” the jittery schmaltz of “I Wanna Be Young.” After spending a career composing music that felt siphoned from a hidden corner of your id, the reference points here are slightly more obvious. “Time to Live” swipes its refrain from the first video ever shown on MTV. “Another Weekend” bears a striking similarity to a classic rock song that compared falling in love to hearing a catchy melody. The closing solo of the title track sounds just like “Light My Fire.” Even the nod to Bobby Jameson in the title feels like a means of grounding the narrative and offering the songs some context and company in Pink’s slimy, mythologized vision of Hollywood.
While it walks a straighter line than Pink’s best albums, Bobby Jameson is equally immersive. He’s retained the higher-fidelity haze of his breakthrough studio albums on 4AD, but the atmosphere feels more like his self-recorded music from the early 2000s: dusty and haphazard, filled with subtle hooks and inside jokes. “I Wanna Be Young” actually dates back to those days. Its original version was distorted by a warping tape machine and falsetto harmonies that occasionally overpowered the cheap backdrop of keys and guitars. The novelty was in how ancient, how archaic the recording felt—the irony of a voice pining for youth as it audibly decayed. On Bobby Jameson, the cleaned-up sound brings us closer to a feeling of urgency, even regret. The older Pink’s gotten, the more his subliminal messages rise to the surface.
More than ever, Pink infuses these songs with bald stabs at wisdom. The shift suggests, if not a turn toward transparency, then at least a narrator with similar concerns to Ariel Rosenberg. In the wistful, mostly acoustic “Do Yourself a Favor,” he discusses the danger of falling into routine over music that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Rivers Cuomo’s demo collections. Many songs deal with the process of aging and cataloging memories: He repeatedly chants “Time to live” and “Time to die,” blurring the line between the two. Even the more upbeat moments seem more nuanced, like “Bubblegum Dreams,” where unnatural, echoing percussion deflates the party with lingering moments of silence. If Pom Pom was a full-stage production featuring all the gonzo characters from Pink’s catalog, Bobby Jameson is marked by solitude: one man, uninterrupted, following his thoughts wherever they wander. It’s a faded, shimmering sound, like FM radio reverberating through a quiet airport.
Bobby Jameson, of course, is no somber affair. He sings “Santa’s in the Closet” like a voice-over for a Halloween store commercial, and in “Dreamdate Narcissist,” he references Netflix, Uber, and chillwave within the first 20 seconds. But taken as a whole, the songs on Bobby Jameson play with a startling intimacy. These are among Pink’s simplest, sharpest compositions, sprawling with an intuitive charm. Its sense of ease harkens back to long ago, when Pink’s records mostly served to expand his strange universe with little outside influence. Maybe that’s what he sees in the record’s titular figure: a cautionary tale whose wasted potential loomed large until the bitter end. “Even now,” Jameson wrote, eight years before his death, “There is a part of me that still believes, ‘My name is Bobby Jameson and I am a star.’ I am also alone.”


Recorded in 1984, this live set offers a glimpse behind the fog of pot smoke and blur of whiskey when one of country music’s greatest-ever bands was performing at its peak.

Live at Budokan

Frank Sinatra opened for Willie Nelson once. In Las Vegas. It was the early 1980s, around the time Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Red-Headed Stranger teamed up to cut a PSA for the Space Foundation. “We don’t share the same tailor,” a spotlessly groomed Sinatra quipped. “But we do share the same feeling about space technology, don’t we?” In truth, neither cared all that much about the cosmos, either; they were both massively popular performers in their own right, breathing the same rarified air, and they had simply been asked to combine their equal star power. It was an unlikely development. Willie had been a cult hero and a popular singer, but now, thanks in part to the hit ballad “Always on My Mind” and the worldwide success of his duet with Julio Iglesias, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” he was a cultural sensation. It’s not at all surprising that, in keeping with one of the era’s greatest rock-star conventions, he cut a live album at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in 1984. Nor is it surprising how supple Willie’s vocals are, or how impressionistic his guitar playing. What is surprising is how long it’s taken to see the light of day.
Live at Budokan was released in Japan on LaserDisc later that year and was subsequently bootlegged onto video cassette, but it remained largely obscure for decades, and is only now seeing wide release. It’s not the first live album to capture the depth of Willie’s powers as a singer and guitarist, his ability to command a crowd, or the underappreciated versatility of his Family Band; Willie and Family Live, from 1978, is every bit as essential as any of his pristine mid-’70s run. But the clarity of Live at Budokan’s production and the relative sobriety of the setting shows what was happening behind the fog of pot smoke and blur of whiskey when one of country music’s greatest-ever bands was performing at its peak.
Willie has always approached country music with a jazz sensibility. It’s easy to imagine Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan taking “Crazy” or “Night Life” for a spin, and his own vocal phrasing drifts around the beat, accents often dropping a single pregnant moment after you’d expect. On stage in Tokyo, the Family is in communication with one another in a way that owes plenty to both the feisty interplay of bebop and the stately arrangements of Western swing. Throughout the 90-minute set, Paul English’s drumming provides the bedrock for the rest of the band. Jody Payne and Grady Martin swirl up a galaxy of phased-out guitar in “Good Hearted Woman,” while Willie’s pianist sister Bobbie Nelson punches up the gospel filigree of her solo with a bit of heavy barroom playing. They draw unusual depths out of the classic song here, as if they’re freshly aware of the tension between cutting it loose and keeping it clean in the song’s lyrics; when they goose the tempo and change keys, it feels less like they’re moving through a well-established composition and more like they’re collectively choosing to let the good times drown out any protest.
They flutter into the delicate “Mona Lisa,” English’s pitter-patter dressing the Somewhere Over the Rainbow ballad like a millefeuille after the shit-kicking opener of “Whiskey River.” On nearly every song, Mickey Raphael plays harmonica in chortles, stomps, guffaws, anything but a melody, his short wads of rhythm matching the gummy phrases Willie tags on to most of the lines he sings with his guitar.
Willie’s approach to his instrument has been rhapsodized to the point of cliché; it’s likely that there are more people who have heard that Willie plays like Django Reinhardt than there are people who have actually heard Django Reinhardt. Perhaps owing to the effects of what Texas Monthly has noted could have been the first show he’d ever played without marijuana, his playing is crisp without being stilted, fluid without losing definition, and expressive in a way that can feel almost showy. Over a 20-second span in Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” he flashes a Tejana riff, doubles down into some heavy strumming, then glides back into the verse as smooth and pacey as a well-built car on a freeway.
In the mid-set “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” another Kristofferson song, Willie picks up the motif from his “Whiskey River” solo, now treating it with a tenderness of touch that matches the lyric. It feels like a purer expression of the same romantic relationship he’d earlier begged the whiskey to wash away, which in turn makes the rowdiness of “Whiskey River” feel less like liberation and more like bittersweet heartache. Near the end of the night, he places “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” next to “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” two songs that suggest cowboys are incapable of love, despite the fact that he’s spent the last hour or so demonstrating otherwise—or at least showing that a life on the range does offer one the chance to artfully share their introspection.
Willie’s ability to dress up complexity in the guise of old standards, campfire songs, Austrian waltzes, and hard-drinking anthems is just as crucial to his success as his ability to nail the high vibrato in “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time.” In both the material he chooses and the way he presents it, he always comes off as a surprise; he’s the casual guy from around the way who turns out to be a hell of a musician. Like his pal Sinatra, he makes genius accessible, even quotidian. The Willie Nelson of Live at Budokan is an unlikely pop star—already over the age of 50, playing a distinctly regional style of music, with a voice that sounds like a drying saxophone reed—and it wouldn’t be long before he’d become an even more unlikely icon. But here, playing sad songs and waltzes with his Family Band on the other side of the world, he sounds relaxed and at ease, casual with himself and confident in his brilliance. Tokyo isn’t Texas, but in 1984, Willie kicked up stardust everywhere he went.


Spanning 35 tracks in nearly two hours, the Stereolab spinoff’s first foray into film soundtracks balances playful electronic mood pieces with drones and nameless dread.

In Fabric OST

If you consider it negligent that Stereolab have yet to apply their otherworldly ambience to a film soundtrack, then In Fabric should go some way towards salving the wound. Active since 2013, Cavern of Anti-Matter are the trio of Stereolab’s Tim Gane, original Stereolab drummer Joe Dilworth, and synth player Holger Zapf; In Fabric, their first album in two years, is the soundtrack to British director Peter Strickland’s 2018 horror comedy, and it draws deep on their sizeable reserves of drones, charm, and finesse.
Alongside singer Laetitia Sadier, Gane was Stereolab’s songwriting engine, and here, his eye for guileful chord changes is evident on songs like “Winter Rhombic” or “Mannequin Metric,” whose ornate, slightly unpredictable melodic patterns suggest the creepy elegance of a Victorian music box. He also has a real knack for sonic texture, using just the right elements—echoing harpsichord (“Inside Luckmoore”), scratchy drum machine (“Elektro-Agitator 2”), or bachelor-pad organ (“The Retail Idea”)—to pin down an unusual mood, be it nervous classicism, strained funk, or dreamy capitalist fantasy.
The big difference between this and Cavern of Anti-Matter’s previous work is that on In Fabric the band dials down the rapid tonal shifts and rhythmic urgency of 2018’s Hormone Lemonade in favor of teasing out one idea over the course of a song. Many tracks weigh in around the two-minute mark, making them more like melodic miniatures for keyboard and guitar than full-blown songs, while even the longer numbers tend to feature only a handful of ingredients. “Queue Nightfall” is particularly minimal: A droning synth runs the length of the song spreading nameless dread, with other electronic elements periodically dropping in to further test the frazzled nerves.
As an accompaniment to the film’s Lynchian legend of a haunted red dress, the soundtrack’s kitsch and occasionally playful textures work well, delivering the kind of gentlemanly chills that stand apart from the overt gore and guts of much modern horror. As a stand-alone listen, though, In Fabric can be testing: The 35-song soundtrack runs to nearly two hours, and the very elements that make it work as a score—the repeating melodic motifs and moments of lingering disquiet—make it a difficult listening experience. Much like the film’s demonic dress, it feels at times like In Fabric owns you, more than you own it.
Still, scattered throughout are numerous examples of the melodic dexterity, genre agnosticism, and rhythmic poise that made records like Hormone Lemonade and Emperor Tomato Ketchup such shape-shifting delights. “The Dress Perspective” has a melody of such Gallic finesse that it begs for Sadier to break out her trademark bah-bah-ing melodies over its gorgeous chord sequence, while “ZinZan’s Avec Moi” has the life-affirming, slightly wonky rush of the best Stereolab disco moments. “Speaks Machine” is even better, a techno-influenced aural illusion that seems to be permanently pushing its melody up to an unscalable peak, like a Sisyphean synth jam.
With Stereolab reforming in 2019 for live dates, the dream of the groop soundtracking an Italian horror, French New Wave, or Eastern European art-house flick remains at least nominally alive. In Fabric won’t quite banish those grand cinematic visions. But it certainly scratches the band’s optical itch.


Cavern of Anti-Matter is the new project of Stereolab founder Tim Gane. The songs here cover ground from techno to krautrock to electro and beyond. The unifying element is the loose, jammy feeling to everything: It's easy to imagine these pieces being worked out in the studio in just one or two takes, even with their many moving pieces. Bradford Cox guests on one of two tracks with vocals.

Cavern of Anti-Matter: Void Beats / Invocation Trex

Void Beats / Invocation Trex

Stereolab may have hung up their hats in 2009, but their motorik pulse and utopian spirit live on in founder Tim Gane's new project Cavern of Anti-Matter. The project also features original Stereolab drummer Joe Dilworth, who played on Peng!, and Holger Zapf, a synthesizer player whose resumé includes a stint in Jan Jelinek's Ursula Bogner ensemble. They released their debut album, the out-of-print Blood Drums, in 2013, but Void Beats / Invocation Trex feels in some ways like a proper debut, taking the tones and drones of that release and sculpting them into mesmerizing and thrilling pieces.
Stereolab's DNA is recognizable from the very first beat: The record's opening song, "Tardis Cymbals," begins with a ringing E chord that longtime fans may initially mistake for the opening notes of Mars Audiac Quintet's "Nihilist Assault Group" (or, for that matter, "Three-Dee Melodie" or "Transona Five" or "Anamorphose"—Gane clearly loves his E chords). Krautrock rhythms abound: In "Tardis Cymbals" it's a burbly pinging in a surprisingly natural-sounding 7/8 time, while "Melody in High Feedback Tones" slips into a brighter and more aerated groove, its clean-toned guitar strum and quicksilver pulse given extra shape by the faint squelch tugging at its edges. The distorted organs of "Insect Fear" lend it a garage-rock feel that flashes back to the Transient Random-Noise Bursts era, while the swinging "Echolalia" recalls Stereolab's '60s fascinations. And the album's period instruments—including Farfisa and Vox organs, Clavinet, and analog synths like the EMS VCS 3 and Korg MS20—contribute to the recurring sense of sonic déjà vu.
But those callbacks—natural enough, given the personnel—are just a small patch of the ground the trio covers here. "Blowing My Nose Under Close Observation" avails itself of electro's whipcrack syncopations. "Pantechnicon" plays winsome Kraftwerkian melodies against rolling, techno-inspired rhythms. The unifying element is the loose, jammy feeling to everything: It's easy to imagine these pieces, three of which extend beyond nine minutes, being worked out in the studio in just one or two takes, even with their many moving pieces and their counterintuitive dodges and feints.
Only one track doesn't fit the mold: Bradford Cox's raspy, rock'n'roll delivery gives "Liquid Gate" a Sonic Youth feeling. The only other vocal track, "Planetary Folklore," is in keeping with the album's overarching aesthetic: Here, Sonic Boom gravely recites a text inspired by Victor Vasarely's monologues on the plastic arts over a muted reprise of the "Tardis Cymbals" groove. The Hungarian artist sought an industrialized, universal, radically democratic art, whose cell-based constructions were a direct antecedent to Cavern of Anti-Matter's method of composition. It was sometimes unclear when Stereolab's mid-century references were meant as kitsch, but here, Gane & co.'s retro-futurist flashback feels optimistic, as though convinced that the key to fulfilling the promise of a new era were just one perfect rhythm away.


Listening to the remastered box set of Massive Attacks's debut album 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision.

Blue Lines

Listening to Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. Nearly every song offers a sound currently in use in music's taste-making leading edge. Robert "3D" Del Naja's chopped-up vocals on the album-opening "Safe From Harm" sound freakishly like the chorus to Kanye et al's "Mercy" (even if Ye actually lifted it from DJ Screw, who was developing his idiosyncratic style 5,000 miles away from Bristol, England at almost the exact same time Massive were recording Blue Lines). The chunky, palm-muted guitar riff on "One Love" is almost identical to the one on "Ahh Shit" from Jeremih's brilliant Late Nights with Jeremih. The subzero space-reggae beat to "Five Man Army" could easily be a highlight of any number of fashionable rappers' mixtapes.
When Del Najas, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles were recording Blue Lines, the sub-genre called trip-hop hadn't been invented. But at its heart, Blue Lines is a hip-hop record, although one marbled with streaks of soul, dub, dance music, and psychedelic rock. The fact that its primary audience in America was made up largely of ravers and alternative rockers doesn't change that. And their accomplishments stand out even further next to what was happening elsewhere in the hip-hop world at the time. Straight Outta Compton, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul's Boutique, and 3 Feet High and Rising were all still just a few of years old in 1991, and so was the idea of beatmaking as an art unto itself. The blocky rhythms and minimal arrangements that defined rap's identity in the 1980s were just starting to be replaced by the deep, organic textures that would define its 90s, and Blue Lines was at the forefront.
When Massive Attack first arrived, hip-hop in the UK was still figuring itself out. For years the scene there, such as it was, focused mainly on reproducing trends that had already fallen out of fashion by the time they made it across the Atlantic. That lack of identity was probably an asset for Massive Attack. They didn't have to compete against their contemporaries to see who could sample which Jimmy Castor Bunch break first, or worry about conforming to any outsider whose preconceptions about hip-hop authenticity might not include prog-rock samples or a lush chill-out anthem like "Unfinished Sympathy". Another asset was Neneh Cherry, whose Raw Like Sushi, which Del Naja and Vowles worked on, provided a genre-bending inspiration for Blue Lines, as well as a bankroll to record it. (Cherry even paid the group a salary and let them turn her kid's bedroom into an impromptu studio.)
In fact, those Raw Like Sushi credits (Vowles' for programming, Del Naja's for co-writing "Manchild") were the only real music-industry bona fides any of the principal contributors to Blue Lines had going into it, aside from vocalists Shara Nelson and roots reggae veteran Horace Andy. But somehow the group realized a remarkable and seamless sonic identity. That's clear from the arresting opener "Safe From Harm", which spins an aggressive drumbeat, Del Naja's rap, Nelson's soulful vocals, and a mist of sustained minor-key synths around an intimidatingly muscular bass loop. From that moment, every major part of the Massive Attack profile is already present, from the collaging of genres to the spacious, nocturnal sonic environment to the heavy dose of paranoia that permeates it all.
They spend the rest of the album exploring variations on these themes. "One Love," with Andy on vocals, has a digital dancehall feel, a creepy-funky electric piano riff, and a scratched sample of a blaring horn section that predates Pharoahe Monch's "Simon Says" by almost a decade. "Daydreaming", with its scratchy breakbeat drums, is more directly hip-hop than most of the rest of the album, but the layers of atmospheric synthesizers and Tricky's felonious near-whisper make it clear that Massive Attack was up to something entirely different from what every other rap producer at the time was doing.
Blue Lines brought producers around to its unique vision. By the time Massive released Protection three years later, the group's renegade approach had been copied enough times to become a full-on movement. They'd go on to produce their masterpiece, Mezzanine, a couple of years after, but by then the project had already started to splinter. Tricky split from the collective after Protection to follow his own solo vision, while the core trio behind it would eventually burn out acrimoniously, with Vowles and then Marshall leaving Del Naja to produce increasingly less rewarding music under the group's name. Meanwhile, trip-hop in general had its edges polished off by genteel musicians who transformed it into soundtracks for fashionable hotel lobbies.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that Blue Lines was a startling record when it came out, and it remains one now. For this reissue it received a new mix and a new mastering job straight from the original tapes. It's available as a CD, in digital form in standard and high fidelity formats, and as a set of two LPs and a DVD of high resolution audio files. There aren't any bonus tracks, and aside from a reproduction promo poster in the vinyl edition there aren't any add-ons either. Frankly they'd just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.


The rapper’s second full-length is intense and riotous, tapping into the anger at the heart of Black America for an eclectic and captivating record.

Negro

In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs wrote about the psychological toll of the moment. “People bear all they can, and if required, bear even more. But if they are black in present-day America they have been asked to shoulder too much. They have had all they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with rage.”
The words come from Black Rage, a text that remains potent nearly five decades later. “If racist hostility is to subside, and if we are to avoid open conﬂict on a nationwide scale, information is the most desperately needed commodity of our time. And of the things that need knowing, none is more important than that all blacks are angry.” These are the pillars upon which Alabama-born musician Pink Siifu presents NEGRO. Originally titled To Be Angry, the album siphons the repressed ire of Black America. “U are allowed to be angry,” he wrote in a description on Bandcamp. It is a bracing record that is at once crushing and liberating.
NEGRO is about as bold a move as Pink Siifu could have made. It’s a dramatic sonic departure from his debut solo full-length, 2018’s lo-fi rap breakthrough ensley. The messages or politics won’t come as a shock to anyone who has paid close attention to his discography, but it is definitely gutsy to follow your most popular album with your most confrontational one. Siifu sounds nearly ready to explode. The album grabs from hardcore punk, free jazz, and noise music across songs that are fleeting and fervent; 14 of the 20 are under two minutes. In bursts, he performs in defense of looting, in opposition to police violence, and in support of black solidarity. Where ensley was nuanced and interior, NEGRO is intense and riotous.
In a manifesto on the website negro.life, Siifu outlines the influences of NEGRO, some directly sampled, others a phantom presence in the room: Malcolm X, the proto-punk band Death, the Afrofuturist high priest Sun Ra, along with others like writer and activist Amiri Baraka and yogi MC Gonjasufi. This swirling mass of influence is palpable throughout and divergent songs like “.ON FIRE, PRAY!” and “Nation Tyme.” illustrate the vast scope and eclecticism of the project.
Pink Siifu is a rapper, but there isn’t much “rapping” on NEGRO. (For anyone looking for that sort of thing, he released two projects at the end of 2019: Black Sand with Akai Solo and Bag Talk with Yungmorpheus.) Normally, Siifu raps like he’s trying to tell you something he doesn’t want anyone to overhear, but here, his mission is full guttural howling. On the Na-Kel Smith-assisted “Dirt,” he blurts out the verses as if through a megaphone, and “steal from the ENEMY” is a series of near-indecipherable grunts and squawks. NEGRO is best when Siifu’s fury is at its peak. The rumbling racket of “SMD” feels like hurtling toward a black hole. The heavy distortion of “homicide/genocide/ill die” scrubs away at you like a Brillo pad. The industrial rhythms of “bebe’s kids, APOLLO” feel like wandering into a rave at a Ford assembly plant. These songs attack the senses.
Much of the album’s anger is aimed specifically at the police. “run pig run” and “Chris Dorner” take “copwatching” to the next level with fantasies of bringing the fight to them. “You have to shoot a pig, before they shoot you/Pig shoot, we shoot,” he yells on the former; in the latter, he references someone who did just that—the rampaging black officer who declared “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” on the LAPD before dying in a standoff. As if to preempt anyone who might dismiss these songs as “extreme,” there’s “ameriKKKa, try no pork.,” which opens with news clips from several racially motivated police murders before being washed out by white noise and an echoing news story of police violence warped beyond recognition. For many of us, this endless succession of incidents incites feelings of helplessness; NEGRO taps into our irrepressible desire to see a reckoning.
The rage can be galvanizing, but it’s the expressions of tenderness between that have the most power—they are reminders that this frustration is merely a response to frequent injustice suffered at the hands of an oppressor, and that this is all in service of freeing a persecuted community. “we need mo color. Abundance” is hushed jazz with shimmering guitar in search of a less colorless world. The soulful “myheartHURT” is wedged between the most abrasive run of tracks like a reprieve. “Black Be Tha God, NEGRO. (wisdom.cipher),” which samples Eddie Kendricks’ enduring 1977 anthem “Intimate Friends,” is a dedication to the circle of family, friends, and collaborators from which Siifu draws his strength.
This album couldn’t have been made without that community. The intro is dedicated to the late Los Angeles producer Ras G, who introduced him to Sun Ra. The Los Angeles rapper Zeroh mastered the album. Siifu credits Slauson Malone’s influence for the help with sequencing. Jeremiah Jae extends beyond his typical range as a beatmaker on the record, but still adds some of his signature flourishes. Roper Williams produces some of the album’s fiercest moments. Trumpeter Chris Williams pops in the margins. Producer Ted Kamal, self-proclaimed witch rapper Moor Mother, and theOGM, one half of punk-rap duo Ho99o9, all lend their voices to the maelstrom. Though rage is the most present thing, it is not the most important thing. By the end of the album, it is clear that the point is not the wrath but the bond shared by those expressing it. All blacks are angry. On NEGRO, there is some comfort to be found in experiencing that together.


Controversy emerged in 1981 at a pivotal time not just for Prince, but for America. It's often regarded as a bridge between Dirty Mind and 1999, but it's fascinating record in its own right.

Controversy

On October 9, 1981, just five days before the release of his fourth studio album, Controversy, Prince walked onto the stage of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, faced a crowd of roughly 90,000 predominantly white people (what was then his biggest audience ever) and experienced the kind of vitriolic backlash that would become the stuff of rock legend.
Invited by the Rolling Stones to open for them on their Tattoo You American tour, Prince and his band came face-to-face with the kind of hate that he would dedicate his entire career to thoroughly and soundly vanquishing. “We went on when the sun was still up, I think we hit the stage around six or seven at night,” recalled bandmate Matt Fink in Touré’s book I Will Die 4 U. “We get on stage and within two minutes of the first song the audience, which was a hardcore hippie crowd, they took one look at Prince and went what the heck is this? And they started booing, flipping us the bird. […] And they’re throwing whatever they could get their hands on…a crumpled up Coca-Cola can. I saw a fifth of Jack Daniels whiz by Prince’s face….”
The scene brought back chilling memories of another turbulent, racially-charged moment in pop music culture from just two years before, when Chicago shock-jock Steve Dahl corralled tens of thousands of his listeners to pack Comiskey Park and channel their anti-queer, anti-people of color, anti-woman rage into Disco Demolition night during a White Sox evening doubleheader. The L.A. Coliseum crowd wasn’t having it and neither was Prince, who famously stormed off the stage and hopped a jet back to Minnesota, leaving his band to finish “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad” without him. Although Mick Jagger would coax him to return two days later, the ensuing shows were more of the same, and Prince and band dropped off of the tour before his new album hit stores.
Back in those days, he knew what he was up against. Prince knew that the sound and look of what he’d been crafting in the club scene back in Minnesota and further on record across three increasingly daring albums that fused slinky R&B with greasy funk rhythms, glam guitar, Afro new-wave synth, post-punk energy, and thrillingly androgynous vocals were reasons to sound the alarm that another kind of Sly riot was goin’ on. “I’m sure wearing underwear and a trench coat didn’t help matters…” he mused to Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times, “but if you throw trash at anybody, it’s because you weren’t trained right at home.”
Released on October 14, 1981, Controversy became a conveniently radical rejoinder to that incident, one of the most famous moments in early Prince history. If the L.A. Coliseum crowd’s violent repulsion of him brought to the surface the racism, sexism (because, don’t forget, longtime keyboardist Lisa Coleman was touring with him at that point, too), and homophobia coursing through rock culture, Controversy was another one of Prince’s defiant declarations that his revolution was not deterred, that it was still fully under way and on its way in spite of racist rock culture’s resistance to it.
Controversy is often thought of as the bridge between Prince’s pathbreaking Dirty Mind and the epic, new-world-making 1999. But it was released during one of the most consequential social, political, and cultural years of the U.S. 1980s for people living in the margins of America—people of color, women, queer folk, poor folk. And the fact that Prince, louder than most all of his peers, was continuing to call, on this record, for collective social and cultural revolt through and by way of his music makes it one of the most important album releases of 1981.
No one was combining the carnal with collective social resistance and political critique as overtly and as imaginatively and along the axes of race, gender, and sexuality as Prince all throughout his three-decade plus career, and especially on this record. As he had on his previous releases, he assumed the role of the pan-musician on Controversy, having a hand on nearly every instrument but also calling on Coleman for backing vocals (on the album’s title track, and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “Jack U Off”). Fellow future members of his band the Revolution, Dr. Fink and Bobby Z. would supply keyboards (as did Coleman) and drums, respectively on the closing track, “Jack U Off.”
A seven-minute dance epic unto itself, “Controversy” is comprised of many moving parts: oft-cited anti-confessional lyrics (“Am I black or white/ Am I straight or gay…”), vocals that swing between the spoken and the sung, an oscillation between concern for the “I,” the “you,” and the “we,” the Princely melding of the high spiritual (including a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer) and the suggestion of the profane (“I wish we all were nude…”), the dream of no boundaries (“I wish there were no black and white/ I wish there were no rules…”). It’s a song about a longing to be emancipated from our most wretched and oppressive inhibitions and biases, and as Prince climbs a register and takes us to the gripping bridge (“Some people want to die/ So they can be free”), we hear the suggestion of other places where we might go with him.
“Sexuality” represents the Utopia Prince has always pursued, a place that was for him often one and the same with heaven. “Let your body be free,” he implores on this throbbing manifesto, willing his listeners towards the queer future elsewhere. Prince makes liberal use of that signature vocal squeal—filthier and more sexually intimate than James Brown’s scream, filled with lust, mischief, orgasmic delight, gasps and exhalations. It is the sound of revelry in the body that gives way to a call to “stand up everybody” while he talks of “revolution” and a “new age revelation” that we “don’t need no race.” All we need is each other on the dancefloor and in the act of profoundly erotic coupling.
On the surface, Prince’s insistence on sexuality as the key to liberation seems about a decade late: post-free-love era, after the official timelines for the feminist and LGBT revolutions and the golden years of funk and disco. As much as critics were swooning over the fearless edge and hybrid genre and gender-bending he’d exhibited with abandon on Dirty Mind, most people considered the content of Prince’s message out of time and place, the cries of an oddball brother from the cold Midwest. But the intensity and urgency of this music put it in the here-and-now. Protest songs had gone out of fashion in the early '80s. In the moment right before the era of Band Aid, Amnesty International, and U.S.A. for Africa, pop protest was largely absent from the airwaves, and even if it had been in fashion, no one other than Prince would have been yoking together lyrics about the body with calls to have children avoid television "until they know how to read" (rather than just how to “cuss, fight and breed”).
What did it mean for Prince to seemingly be yelling into the wilderness about getting in formation? Who, in God’s name, was Prince addressing earlier that year when, during his "Saturday Night Live" debut, he closed out “Partyup” with that song’s blazing refrain, “You’re gonna have to fight your own damn war/ ‘cause we don’t want to fight no more!” before angrily leaping off the stage, storming into the audience and out of camera range?
Particularly in hindsight, there was much worth fighting against in 1981, especially if you were an African-American avant-garde, countercultural pop musician. It was the year Ronald Reagan took office, thus igniting a new repressive regime of economic, social, and cultural policies that would further oppress poor and working class communities and communities of color. It was the year of what was, at the time, thought to be the earliest reported cases of the AIDS virus. It was the year that African American loner Wayne Williams was brought into custody as a suspect in the Atlanta child murder cases, and it was the year of what is sometimes referred to as the last recorded lynching of an African-American by members of the KKK.
Controversy’s two opening tracks open fighting and dancing, demanding that we dance ourselves out of clothes, out of our constrictions as a way to fight the corrosive powers that be. It is the sound of a battle under way, and the doe-eyed beauty on its cover, the one in the diamond-studded purple jacket with white shirt and bolero tie, the one with the “Rude Boy” button that signaled his solidarity with black diasporic ska and punk insurgencies, the one  with his back against a wall strewn with Prince daily news headlines, is here on this record ready to play “Dr. Everything Will Be Alright” as well as apocalyptic prophet. The former persona rules over Side One, where we find him fighting the tyranny of alienation (life looked at “through a pocket camera,” as he sees it on track two) with the joy of copulation on the fight-the-power-through-funking track “Sexuality.”
Having remade the universe in his own image, the first side closes in the bedroom with one of Prince’s great sex ballads (of which there are dozens). On “Do Me, Baby,” Prince transitions genres yet again, moving into full soul falsetto to stage a scene of carnal supplication, a slow jam dripping with angst and wanting and sensual desperation. It’s a come-on song that’s all about the desire to be taken, a love song delivered by an impish sprite of a man who’s prone to wearing bikini briefs and constantly on the make. “Do Me, Baby” ends not with two-person consummation but with a staged scenario (characteristic of long form R&B and funk narratives) in which our hero takes matters into his own hands to reach ecstasy while his lover sits and watches. “I’m not gonna stop,” he declares, “until the war is over.”
The second half of Controversy is less cohesive as a narrative about sexual insurgency as protest and social reform, but it nonetheless repeatedly returns to these themes across four tracks that swing between hope and despair, the ecstatic and the horrific, the traumatic and the bawdy. If, on the first side, Prince asks us (almost incredulously), “Don’t you wanna play?,” on Side Two, he pushes the art of sexual play to Holy Revival heights on “Private Joy,” a song that marries soul-meets-rockabilly vocals with a Sunday morning, get happy, arrangement that spins us into the center of the church sanctuary and right out the door into the pagan after-hours club.
Still full of the surprises and still unsatisfied living in one sonic register, the Prince on “Private Joy” moves into a disco bassline breakdown towards the end of the track where that other well known voice—as in the lowdown, get-underneath-your-clothes-and-talk-dirty-to-you commanding Prince voice—emerges to announce that he’s defeated all competing suitors for your love: “Strangled Valentino/Been mine ever since/If anybody asks you/you belong to Prince…” A spiraling guitar solo closes “Private Joy” and burns with annihilating fire into the most pointedly political track on the album, “Ronnie Talk to Russia.”
Hell hath no fury like Prince delivering a no nukes message, even if this track’s literal bluntness lacks the lyrical poetry of Controversy’s sonic inventiveness. A hail of Hendrix “Machine Gun” guitar feedback and drum fills open the track and carry out the frenzy of Prince’s appeal for global diplomacy as a solution to the threat of mass catastrophe. It’s the shortest track on the album, more like a concise, high-voltage nightmare interlude where he chooses not to linger. Just as quickly as it’s started, the track is done, blown to bits and leaving Prince to get back to the hard labor of deep, gritty, gratifying movement on “Let’s Work,” an exquisite, mid-tempo dance track with a sinuously insistent bass line that fuels the electric slide togetherness of the party.
What often catches people off guard about Controversy is its dramatic mood swings, particularly in the final few songs of the record. From the celebratory heat of “Let’s Work,” the record careens towards the dark techno-goth-rock nadir on “Annie Christian,” a parable in which Prince, with overdubs, recites (rather than sings) the dizzying tragedy and persistent anxieties that come with fame in the age of early ‘80s celebrity assassination and assassination attempts. “Annie Christian/Annie Christ,” the obsessive fan figure circa 1980/1981, prowls the streets in the wake of John Lennon’s murder and the Jodie Foster-inspired shooting of Reagan (“She tried to kill Reagan/ Everybody say gun control…”). As the speaker resolves to “live” his “life in taxicabs” until this femme fatale is “crucified,” one hears the kind of haunting paranoia (laced with just a mild bit of sexist mythology) that surfaces several decades later on Kendrick Lamar’s albums during those moments when he does battle with “Lucy” (Lucifer) for his soul.
Prince, to the very end, though, is at heart an optimist and an artist who chooses to fight the demons of the world with his superhero virtuosity as a musician, as a man of deep (and sometimes shifting) faith, and as a champion of and protector of black culture as the bedrock of modern sound and salvation. He was also a humorist, a prankster, and a trickster, itself a supremely African-American expressive tradition used as a means to survival. And so Controversy, a dead serious album, ends with the sounds of high levity and inanity on “Jack U Off,” a bald-faced, high-tempo braggadocio track all awash in synths. To close this album, his highness turns to pornographic farce, fun and games in a song that at once invokes early rock’n’roll guitar and '80s pop. He gives us a blue Little Richard ditty for the Reagan era but minus the family-friendly innuendo and assures us that we’ll find pleasure together in these uncertain times.


In the 1980s, Jason Pierce distilled Dylan's methadone strumming, Roky Erickson's psychedelic circular breathing and LaMonte Young's ...

Amazing Grace

In the 1980s, Jason Pierce distilled Dylan's methadone strumming, Roky Erickson's psychedelic circular breathing and LaMonte Young's numbing minimalism, and sold the delirious result to us as Spacemen 3. In the 1990s, he continued his tasteful pilfering as the figurehead of Spiritualized-- on Pure Phase, he defined blissed-out noise-pop; on Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, he lifted murky hedonism from Jim Dickinson and voodoo rites from Dr. John (who even guested on the record), building towers of song on a 50-piece orchestral foundation. At its peak stood a full gospel choir, bellowing heartache and redemption.
This decade hasn't been quite as kind. 2001's Let It Come Down, the ridiculously anticipated follow-up to Ladies and Gentlemen which Pierce spent four years crafting, was at times musically and lyrically powerful, but rarely both at once. And Pierce's decision to double the size of the Spiritualized Philharmonic failed to up the impact of his by-then-familiar post-breakup moaning, religious conviction, and continuing struggles with drug addiction. Now, in 2003, it seems clear-- even to Pierce-- that a change is necessary, and with Amazing Grace, he heads back to that motherly womb of rock 'n' roll: the garage.
Unfortunately, there are problems from the beginning: As Pierce's voice bleats through blaring feedback on the opening track, "This Little Life of Mine", there's an unfillable void in his recklessly delivered lyrics where the song's emotional core should lie. His reconstituted band blazes, led by the bonfire-leads of guitarist Doggen (on loan from Brain Donor), but they also lurch in an almost sluggish manner that, push and pull as they might, never actually gets the lead out.
There are highlights: "She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)" (it owes to the similarly titled Spector-produced Crystals song in name only) is cut from the same patch of denim and black leather as "This Little Life of Mine", but more convincingly evokes the sneering garage aesthetic of The Troggs and early Kinks; "Cheapster", burning through a variation on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", brandishes switchblade-sharp chops; and "Never Goin' Back" proves Spiritualized can nail The Stooges shtick as well as any of the usurping mainstream garage rockers-- but no better. Here, he replicates the bottled, melting scowl of Iggy circa the primordial Funhouse, but his imitation, like the kids he schools, is stripped of the necessary blood/cum combo needed to carry the shot through to the heart.
Of course, rock was never what Pierce did best: it's the strung-out ballads and slow, unfurling of studio sounds that's always carried his wasted messages to beatific, almost narcotic effect-- as such, "Hold On" and "Lord Let It Rain on Me" serve as the linchpins of this record. For its entire opening flourish, the former tames itself into a soft strum as Pierce implores you to "hold on to those you hold dear." It's yet another demonstration of his ability to transcend limp Hallmark maxims through sheer will and conviction: he emotes no irony or bitterness, transforming simple truisms and cliches into heartbreaking revelations, much like Wayne Coyne observing that "the sun don't go down" in "Do You Realize??" And despite that the new has worn off this technique somewhat in the 20+ years Pierce has relied on it, in this moment it proves as effective as ever.
Amazing Grace also manages some mildly interesting jazz flourishes. "Rated X" does about a minute's worth of Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly" before Pierce's weightless astronaut murmuring sends the song into the beckoning orchestral stratosphere, and "The Power and the Glory" features the record's most forward-looking moment, as it builds to a massive, cacophonous swell, aided by a horn section that puts British improv legends Kenny Wheeler and Evan Parker in front of their largest audience yet.
After that intriguing instrumental fury, however, Pierce marches his poor, abused gospel choir back into place with the solemn tom thuds and plaintive guitar strum of "Lord Let It Rain on Me." Pieced together from at least four other Spiritualized songs, Pierce doles out more of his redemptive raindrops while "looking down the barrel of a gun," before finally unleashing another predictably bombastic endorphin downpour. Here, as with tracks like the banal "The Ballad of Richie Lee" and the repetitive, melodramatic closing lullaby "Lay It Down Easy", Pierce finally wears out his welcome, having utterly exhausted the possibilities of what can be accomplished within the limited constraints he's set for himself.
Pierce's ability to convey pain-- much like the recovering addict's ability to feel pleasure-- is all but lost among clusters of burnt-out receptors. Even in its most inspired moments, Amazing Grace lacks the fiery intensity of any of Pierce's previous outings (including Let It Come Down). Now, fervently praying to channel the uplift of true gospel and the Gnostic moments of the Nuggets era, J Spacemen is left, for the first time, sobbing at the pearly gates.


Bad Bunny’s second album is outstanding. It’s a big party record that pushes boundaries and pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future, all made by a swaggering star with absolutely nothing to prove.

YHLQMDLG

Not many parties start with someone contemplating suicide. Yet that’s how Bad Bunny chose to begin the video for “Si Veo a Tu Mamá,” the opening track of his second album, YHLQMDLG. We see a close-up of a despondent young man, standing on a stool and staring through a noose, ready to hang himself as a party buzzes around him. He’s saved by an empathetic little boy who understands his pain, and introduces him to the cure: Listening to Bad Bunny.
It’s a macabre choice for a dance record, a collection of distinctly Puerto Rican party beats that pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future. And on its surface, the song, built atop a morose, Casiotoned version of the “Girl From Ipanema” bossa nova melody, might seem more suited for the elevator of a Florida nursing home than the club. But it’s also firmly aligned with the somewhat paradoxical ethos of YHLQMDLG (an acronym for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, or “I do whatever I want”). Bad Bunny might know what it feels like to be sad, but he also knows the path to salvation is believing in himself, and with that, he can do whatever he wants—and pull it off with swagger.
Bad Bunny rose to stardom riding the Latin trap wave, crooning over beats constructed with 808 drums, bleeding synth bass, and narcotized atmospherics. It all borrowed heavily from the sounds of late-’00s Southern hip-hop, adding the idiosyncrasies of the flow en Español and a Caribbean POV. For YHLQMDLG, he reaches back even further to the glory days of reggaetón, sidelining Anglo guest stars for OGs like Daddy Yankee, Yaviah, Ñengo Flow, and Jowell y Randy.
YHLQMDLG plays like a mixtape for a San Juan marquesina—the underground garage parties Bad Bunny referenced on X 100PRE’s “Cuando Perriabas.” He curates a playlist of diverse perreo jams with a singular, unwavering focus: having fun. Where X 100PRE felt like a tightly sequenced statement of identity, YHLQMDLG is both looser and freer, a party record made by a young star with nothing to prove. The highlights are plentiful; early singles “Vete” and “Ignorantes” occupy the suave sadboi lane he’s best known for, but “Yo Perreo Sola” and “Bichiyal” rock raw, stripped-down reggaetón beats evocative of the genre’s “Gasolina” era. And he doesn’t completely abandon the sounds of the trap, either: The Anuel AA collab “Está Cabrón Ser Yo” could just have easily found itself on the Migos’ Culture III.
From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette. Bad Bunny leans heavily on the production duo Subelo NEO, but also taps former Luny Tunes protege Tainy for a handful of songs. And even his dabbles in rock are expertly engineered—the emocore breakdown on “Hablamos Mañana” is so epic one might forget the tinny production that almost ruined X 100PRE’s otherwise catchy pop-punk foray, “Tenemos Que Hablar.” The mood is joyful throughout YHLQMDLG, updating some of early reggaetón’s darker, grittier textures with a bright tropical sheen better suited to Bad Bunny’s personality. The sequencing is a bit scattershot, but rather than distract, it keeps the classic reggaetón riddim sounding fresh across the album’s sprawling 20-song tracklist.
A perfect example is the album’s centerpiece, “Safaera,” a self-contained microcosm of YHLQMDLG’s collage aesthetic. More suite than song, the five-minute reggaetón symphony changes tempos eight times and features a new beat nearly every verse. It seamlessly integrates recognizable hits—Alexis y Fido and Baby Ranks’ “El Tiburón” and Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” among others—without ever sounding stale. To find anything remotely like it you’d have to dig up one of DJ Playero’s mixtapes from The Noise era of reggaetón, which blended dancehall, reggae, and rap en Español into a sound that would ultimately coalesce into the reggaetón we know today. That these shadows of the genre’s history—from a time when it was so underground it was literally criminalized—have such a prominent place on one of the most anticipated pop records of the year is nothing short of remarkable.
His ability to push reggaetón forward while paying homage to its past is commendable, but the way he uses visuals is of equal importance to his evolution into a pop star. On its surface, “La Difícil” is about a hard-to-get video vixen, a girl who knows that everyone wants her and uses it to her advantage. Yet the video itself feels infinitely more empathetic, giving a backstory to the women typically used as one-dimensional scenery in nearly every urbano video—in this case, a single mom who’s doing her best for her daughter. This is no aberration; as Bad Bunny’s budgets have swollen and his creative control solidified, he’s used the medium to flip the script on tropes that have made urbano feel stale, offering visibility to the underrepresented, or placing himself firmly in opposition to misogyny and homophobia. Genesis “Nesi” Rios’ missing performance credit on “Yo Perreo Sola”—a song defined by her hook—proves he still has some work to do. But even if he makes some of the same mistakes as his reggaetón forebears, he’s still doing more than most to bring progressive politics into the Latin mainstream.
And when urbano’s brightest young star wears a skirt and nail polish on the Tonight Show, silently demanding we put respect on a murdered woman’s name, it brings us one step closer to a new standard of inclusion, and encourages marginalized people to live their truth in the face of oppression. Musically, one need look no farther than J Balvin’s post-2016 work for evidence of Bad Bunny’s influence on his peers, and while he looks up to his senior contemporary, he left a significantly larger impression on their collaborative LP Oasis. So even if he follows through on his threat from the album’s closing track “<3” —(“Y en nueve meses vuelvo y saco otro/Pa' retirarme tranquilo como Miguel Cotto” or “And in nine months I’ll return and drop one more/Then I’ll quietly retire like Miguel Cotto”)—not only will he have left behind a career’s worth of hits in just four short years, he’ll have reshaped urbano in his own image.

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On her moody eighth album, the Boston singer-songwriter examines the icy terrain of marital strife through the lens of her habitual gothic folk.

For My Crimes

For many years, Marissa Nadler wrote songs in the manner of someone rummaging through a box of antique photos. From the dusty depths of memory, she plucked characters at random—some real, some fictional—and spun them into cobwebbed stories of love, longing, and loss. Over the course of her career, the dramatis personae of Nadler’s songs shifted to the periphery; she actively pursued more approachable subjects, and her own voice grew stronger and more centered in her writing. Though still most comfortable in the sparing, spooky goth-folk cabin she built with her very first album, on For My Crimes, her eighth, Nadler is confessional and direct.
The opener and title track of For My Crimes is a microcosm of Nadler’s evolution. It began as a challenge set forth by her husband to write in the voice of a person on death row. The role-playing enabled Nadler to access her own feelings of guilt, and while the fictitious parameters of the song are outlined in its lyrics (“When they take me down the corridor/And secure my wrists with ties,” Nadler sings in its opening lines), they ultimately feel more introspective than narrative. On a record that is largely an examination of marital strife, Nadler begins with an admission of wrongdoing.
The songs that follow range in scope from atmospheric brooding on “Blue Vapor” to hyper-specific autobiography on “Said Goodbye to That Car.” Throughout, Nadler deftly documents what she describes as the space between love and breakup—the liminal zone plagued by skirmishes and strain and all sorts of relationship hangnails, those small aggravations that stay sore far longer than you expect them to. Nothing matches the opener for macabre, but the tone is certainly moody. “Moonlit skies upon us,” Nadler sings on “You’re Only Harmless When You Sleep,” teeing up a storybook picture of romance, then smashing it to icy bits with what follows: “There’s a freeze over our sheets.” Similarly biting is the setup on “Interlocking,” a somber tune bearing the fingerprints of Nadler’s country influences. On it, she borrows a term that typically litters love songs—describing gazes, hands, and hearts—and flips it to describe feeling tethered to a relationship.
The closest For My Crimes comes to a climax is on “Blue Vapor,” a little less than halfway through. Nadler’s words here describe personal erosion; around her, strings plummet, woodwinds snarl, and thudding percussion (contributed by Hole’s Patty Schemel) adds considerable weight. It’s an instrumental moment whose intensity is never quite matched lyrically, beyond the melodrama of the opener. Nadler exposes fissures, not faults, on this album. She articulates her pain points subtly, as on “I Can’t Listen to Gene Clark Anymore,” where she examines the threat of separation through the corollary, but objectively lesser, threat of bitter memories tarnishing once-shared favorite songs. On “All Out of Catastrophes,” Nadler characterizes a fight via its least hurtful spar: her partner naming another woman in his sleep. The understatedness of it all almost scans as complacence—a shrugging, this is just the way things are attitude—until a faint hope for healing surfaces in the record’s final minutes. The penultimate track, “Flamethrower,” cites the possibility for new growth on scorched earth. On closer “Said Goodbye to That Car,” Nadler’s car crapping out marks the end of an era and implies a fresh start to follow.
Nadler is, in fact, optimistic. She recently indicated that, after For My Crimes, she would be done with her “saddest records” for a while. It’s hard to imagine what an upbeat Marissa Nadler album might sound like, but her willingness to move in a new, brighter direction after finding such success in gothic reverie is admirable and likely for the best. Though her albums to date have each shown growth and subtle variation, 14 years into her career, Nadler still has plenty of terrain left to explore. The trouble with being an artist known for consistency is that, at some point, consistency can begin to look a lot like predictability.


After pre-dating the rise of artists like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Arp's drone gets a shot of songcraft and traditional instrumentation.

The Soft Wave

It's not like you're going to see Kevin Drumm hitting the Billboard Heatseekers charts or anything, but artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, Sam Goldberg, Etienne Jaumet, and Gavin Russom have certainly done their part to give arpeggiated drone a higher profile in 2010. This is due mostly to the fact that the music being made is fairly melodic and often pretty-- but it's also disorienting and doesn't always provide the easiest listening experience. There's lots of blissed-out stuff out there, but it's couched in enough static and noise to create a distance between mainstream listeners and the art itself.
The Soft Wave, Alexis Georgopoulos' sophomore effort as Arp, serves to close that gap a little. Arp's 2007 debut, In Light, was a few years ahead of its time in embracing a full-on synth-heavy arpeggio assault, and here he pushes things forward as well, with a record that's the polar opposite of In Light's smeared, near-psychedelic sound: light and clean, with plenty of negative space. You don't have to find a "way in" to this music; its construction practically leaves a door open for you, with more than enough room to wander around once you're there.
There's still a fair amount of oscillating drone and trance-inducing patterns here, but their components are more organic than before. While In Light leaned heavily on synthesizers, The Soft Wave noticeably uses more electric guitar and bass, which mixes with the structural void to create an almost three-dimensional texture. Thick-stringed patterns create reverberating foundations throughout, while guitar licks frequently dance lightly in the foreground. The resulting sound is simultaneously fleet-footed and humid, which lends the album a distinctly tropical vibe.
With more conventional instrumentation comes more straightforward "songs." Yes, The Soft Wave does open with "Pastoral Symphony", a nine-minute-plus, two-part odyssey filled with jettisoning synth lines and skyward tones, but there's also "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea", a stately piece featuring Georgopoulos' warm vocals that recall the more ethereal moments of Brian Eno's "vocal" albums.
There's a catch, though: just as Oneohtrix Point Never opened this year's stunning Returnal with the ear-shattering, Burning Star Core-recalling noise of "Nil Admirari", Georgopoulos closes this record out with the uneasy rustling static of "Silver Clouds". The effect is something of a sonic swarm, akin to black ink leaking over parchment and spreading quickly over its surface. Overwhelming, yes, but beauty needs to be tempered with noise sometimes.