Bright Eyes: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning / Digital Ash in a Digital Urn

Conor Oberst sends shivers down my spine, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. The straight-from-the-diary lyrics, the sudden screams and that hiccuping vibrato-- the qualities that make him seem raw and, to some, risible-- are also striking and awesome. Oberst is a strange hybrid: He's undeniably a pop star, and also undeniably an indie rocker. On the pop side, he has what music journalist Simon Reynolds identified as the power to compel your gaze, and when he gets it, those wet, penetrating eyes stare straight back. I know it makes me uncomfortable; why can't he just look at his feet and fumble with his guitar and murmur his songs from a distance?
At the same time, where most of our pop stars spring fully formed from the heads of their handlers, Oberst remains a DI(mostly)Y, friends-over-money, fuck-the-man independent musician. He makes mistakes, indulges his excesses (oh, Lifted, how close you were to a home run), and even shouts his politics, inarticulately but without restraint, which is something that fewer and fewer musicians at his tier would have the guts to do their first time on Craig Kilborn.
As you've probably heard from the media blitz, tomorrow Oberst is releasing both a record of road-tested acoustic material and a new project of electronica-flavored pop. The specific triumph of his two new albums lies in how they deliver a new, more seasoned Oberst, retaining what's great in his talent while purging the rough edges.
Let's start with the album that's merely "decent." Oberst and producer Mike Mogis had talked about making a more rhythmic and electronic album since even before Lifted, and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn finally realizes that project, setting Oberst in front of a rock band, beats and strings. But where a Björk would have tackled this by flitting around the world to find the hottest club DJs and the coldest Inuit choirs, Oberst put the record together with a small crew of his buddies: While Jimmy Tamborello of the Postal Service co-produced the first single, "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" and the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Nick Zinner swings by for a few cameos, the producer that Oberst relies on most heavily is Mogis, who programs under the alias the Digital Audio Engine.
Digital Ash places Oberst's voice front and center, stripping away his guitar and impromptu vocalizations and tying him to each song like a good pop star; witness the way he takes "Devil in the Details" with the stance of a Bowie. And where the lyrics are self-centered, Oberst still projects himself more broadly and concisely than on Lifted, as he ruminates from up high on everything from the circle of life and death to admitting that he's a dick when he drinks.
But if Oberst picked up better posture, he's still learning where to take it. It's hard to pinpoint why Digital Ash is merely "okay." The songs are enjoyable, and if Tamborello chips in the most exciting beats, Mogis' are competitive, especially the bamboo-footed-tap-dancer rhythms of "Arc of Time (Time Code)" or the moody "nightmare" sequence that launches the record. But nothing else captures such a gripping mood. Digital Ash has the claustrophobic feel of a singer locked up with a computer, and it's distractingly chipper, like Rilo Kiley in their own Dntel homages; not every Bright Eyes record has to be an emotional epic, but Digital Ash feels like a practice run. Consider it version 1.0.
If Digital Ash sounds like indie kids breaking into pop, its sister disc, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, is a red-blooded folk album that's coincidentally built to be hugely, hugely popular. Oberst has been so close to Americana that I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning won't surprise anyone, and even Emmylou Harris' glorious cameos aren't a stamp of approval so much as a professional decision to bring in someone who can nail these harmonies-- a rare and totally warranted exception to the "friends-only" policy, because a twentysomething couldn't make pretty sound as weary as Harris on "Land Locked Blues".
I'm Wide Awake perfectly captures a place and time in Oberst's life. It chronicles his first memories of staying in New York City, and the metropolis rarely gets a folk singer to chronicle its streets this lucidly, at least since the hootenanny days; he frequents its parties and stumbles down its streets like a midwestern transplant instead of a jaded hipster, sings about chemical dependency and the endless pains of love, while capturing as a backdrop the build-up to a foreign war. I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve-- the songs that still give me chills every time, like "At the Bottom of Everything": "Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair/ We must stare, we must stare, we must stare."
This record was made to be loved, to be obsessed over by some but remembered by everybody, to get scratched and worn out through constant rotation in a sorority living room or your first studio apartment or your mom's old radio, to capture Conor Oberst for the first time with more polish than spit, but still getting him deeply under your skin. And he earns it so thoroughly that while "Poison Oak" would have been a fine, graceful closer, he propels us instead to the big Bright Eyes finale of "Road to Joy", where he justifies the joke of cadging Beethoven's most famous theme, drives the cascading horns and searing guitars, and finally, finally screams his head off. Give yourself to it and you'll understand that when Oberst's staring so piercingly from all those magazine covers, this is what he's looking at.


A new comp of charming, peculiar, and strangely timeless Australian DIY music released mostly on cassette-zines in the ‘80s amid the macho pub rock sound of the decade.

Various Artists: Oz Waves: Compiled by Steele Bonus

Oz Waves: Compiled by Steele Bonus

During the ’80s, the Australian pop culture exports seemed to be comprised of Mad Max, Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan, INXS, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, Yahoo Serious and of course, Jacko. It’s a motley group that speaks to the spiky strangeness inherent in the continent’s figures. But leave it to Michael Kucyk (host of Noise in My Head on NTS Radio) to unearth the sounds being made in Australia far off the radar. His Efficient Space label has already pulled out some blissful Australian house, weirdo new wave and last year’s stark but haunting Sky Girl compilation.
The ten tracks on Oz Waves might be their most peculiar set yet. Culled by a DJ who goes by the handle of Steele Bonus (he also has a series of thrilling Soundcloud mixes), he’s unearthed rare examples of Australian DIY rendered in the ’80s amid the macho pub rock sound of the decade. With most Aussie major labels wholly uninterested in such strange drum machine-laced sounds (though INXS did have a penchant for dub weirdness), most artists and short-lived bands opted instead to make artful cassette-zines instead. As the Oz Waves notes attest, many were dubbed in editions ranging from 5 to 100 copies.
Not that any of the acts had dreams of pop stardom when they plugged in their guitars, Groovebox drum machines, and primitive synths to make their lo-fi din. Bands bearing names like Ironing Music, He Dark Age and the Horse He's Sick don’t really have Top of the Pops in mind. These bands revel in freedom, knowing that with no major labels, no crowds to perform in front of and, for the most part, no drummer, they were free to document the strangest noises that sprung from their heads. It’s ostensibly punk rock, but 30 years on, time has a way of changing such meanings. The primitive beats and befuddling noises that bounce off the walls of each song make it come across as endearingly insular dance music.
Much like New Yorkers in the early ’80s who identified more as art collectives than bands, the acts here also dabbled in video art, painting, and visual design. Irena Xero was on the Brisbane punk scene in the late ’70s but also into cross-discipline arts. She sounds like a one-woman automaton on “Lady on the Train,” programming chilly handclaps and delivering lines with even less affect than Nico. Andy Rantzen’s “Will I Dream?” went unreleased in 1989, but it makes sense considering he soon moved from doing industrial-styled noise to making rave tracks. Deeming it the most dancefloor-friendly track in the set seems like a misnomer, as it’s a strange puddle of funky bass and peppy snare, flickering sinewaves, submarine alarms and mewling voices.
While Prod’s “Knife on Top” features a limber Can-like groove to it and Zerox Dreamflesh do woozy Augustus Pablo-esque dub on “Squids Can Fly,” most bands here prefer sputtering drum machines, which make for the set’s most charming moments. They provide the stitching underneath the flanged accordion and Urszula Dawkins’ plainspoken delivery on Software Seduction’s “New Collision” and the lo-fi sampledelica of “Jesus Krist Klap Rap (Orthodox Mix).” The Groovebox that Ironing Music utilized makes them sound like the Down Under version of Young Marble Giants on the sparkling bedroom murmur that is “Don’t Wish It Away.” A heavier beat gets sampled by the Horse He’s Sick, but rather than try to move a dance audience, it instead gets strung out to a crawl. It's these micro-moments, operating in the shadow of their more popular contemporaries of the era, that allow Oz Waves’ dusty charms to shine through four decades later.


The Sea and Cake leader returns with a very different kind of album from his two song-based solo LPs, releasing a contemplative, loose electronic record.

Old Punch Card

In January 2007 Sam Prekop talked to Pitchfork about an upcoming album by the Sea and Cake, the Chicago band he fronts. He also mentioned that someday he wanted to make an electronic record inspired in part by Plux Quba, an obscure late-1980s album by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro that got a second life when it was reissued a decade later by Jim O'Rourke's Mokai imprint. "That's the high-water mark, in my opinion, of electronic music," Prekop said. "It's a really delicate, beautiful, and really weird record." I can remember reading that quote and getting excited. Plux Quba is indeed a very special record that is also hard to pin down, and it's a good feeling when you find out that someone else hears what you were hearing in an album-- especially one that never really got around. A record inspired by Plux Quba was promising to say the least.
Three years later, Prekop returns with Old Punch Card, an instrumental album that's very different from his two song-based solo records. Whether or not this is the album Prekop was thinking about in early 2007, to my ears it shares a spirit with Plux Quba and brings with it some of the same slippery qualities. In describing the record, it's easier to begin with what it's not: It's almost all electronic, but it's not drone, not really ambient, and doesn't conform to the structures of pop. It's not cinematic, not minimal, and not focused on the sound of technology as an end in itself. It's an album that thrives in the gaps between established categories, with music that can come over as cool and cerebral or tinged with longing and melancholy, depending on what the listener brings to it.
Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting. At which point he sticks with it for a while to see what it does and what sort of feelings might be coaxed out of it. So the first three minutes of a track called "Array Wicket" consist of static and a warbly organ line that doesn't go anywhere in particular, and then in the last two a pulsing synthesizer line out of an early Tangerine Dream record comes marching through, conveying something sonically clear and direct in contrast to earlier ambiguity. These sharp movements from one sound to the next happen a lot on Old Punch Card, but the overall effect is soothing rather than jarring. There are passages of quiet noise, retro-sounding sequencers, indiscernible electronics that sound vaguely like broken music boxes, bits of guitar. A mood of thoughtful contemplation mixed with blurry flecks of sadness and joy is maintained throughout.
Since the music on Old Punch Card isn't trying to do anything in particular and the rules of composition are pretty loose, the guiding principle seems to be to maintain a careful sense of balance that reinforces the music's curious Zen-like character. Prekop is also a painter, and you can imagine these pieces being assembled like canvases-- this one needs a little color in this corner, maybe, and that one could use a little more prickly texture in the center. The subtle and seemingly simple music that comes from such an approach is easy to overlook, and it's not going to appeal to everyone. But it can also lead to records like Plux Quba, records you can return to for years and never get tired of, in part because you can never quite "solve" them. I'm hearing some of that open-ended mystery in Old Punch Card; we'll see what it grows into.


An icon of ’90s pop-dance crossover who produced Madonna’s Ray of Light, the UK musician returns with his first album in eight years, but the record’s endless-sunset vibes quickly turn cloying.

The Painter

From landing a Top 10 hit with an early dance classic to producing Madonna, London’s William Orbit was a low-key presence at some of electronic music’s most important crossover moments. “Fascinating Rhythm,” a 1990 single from his group Bass-o-matic, was a magically haunting bit of slow-motion house, while his Strange Cargo albums were landmark releases, mixing fourth-world electronics with dub basslines, ambient house trills, and new-age atmosphere. Later he worked on Madonna’s Ray of Light and Music and Blur’s 13, stopping only to invent classical trance with his hugely influential cover of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” before getting heavily into cocaine in the 2010s, doing what he describes as his “rock’n’roll excess thing,” and eventually being committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Orbit makes his re-entry with The Painter, his first album since 2014. His productions sound as opulent as ever, daubed with lavish string arrangements, sparkling guitars, and the most polished vocal effects that a lucrative production career can bring. On the opening “Duende,” luxuriously plucked guitar meets gorgeous string sweeps, guest singer Katie Melua’s effusively processed voice, and a slightly anodyne beat. A gilded balloon of ambient pop floating in a directionless waft of relaxation, this is music that doesn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry. “Gold Coast” is another indolent highlight, its plaintive guitar riff, twinkling piano, and electronic squiggles bubbling like hot oil in a lava lamp, while “I Paint What I Can See” (featuring longtime collaborator Beth Orton) makes excellent use of a bassline reminiscent of Orbit’s excursions into dub on Strange Cargo III.
It all sounds very nice, and it is—potentially too much so for The Painter’s overall good. What is, on paper, a tantalizing group of guest singers—including Colombian-Canadian Lido Pimienta and late Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose—succumbs to a honeyed stream of premium chill-out moods and expensive sunset feels. “Nuestra Situación,” featuring Pimienta, may be the most telling example: The reggaeton-lite beat nods to genuine musical progress in Orbit’s world, but sees its resistance washed away in identikit synth and piano vibes. Zawose’s sampled vocal on “Heshima kwa Hukwe” endures a similar fate, its edges drowned in Orbit’s ornate blurs.
This is an affliction that hits The Painter time and again, as singers as distinct as knitted-brow electro artist Polly Scattergood and house crooner Ali Love are lost to a Dido-ized soft focus. Orbit claims to focus on “melody, feeling, sonics and narrative” in his work, but it feels like he has gotten caught up in the scene-setting opening paragraphs of an idyllic travelog, rather than developing a story of dramatic depth. The exception to this is the dubbed-out “Epic” mix of “I Paint What I Can See,” a sprawling excursion into astral ambience that closes the album in a grandiloquent wave of distorted guitars and maternal low end, whose electrifying ebb-and-flow brings grit and drama to The Painter’s golden shores. Sadly, this obvious album highlight is only available on the vinyl edition of The Painter, a bizarre decision that only serves to bury Orbit’s best work.
“Epic” aside, The Painter serves up a pastel buffet of friction-free music that proves entirely pleasant in small doses. Over the length of an album, though, it feels like the day-lit nightmare of an interminable sunset, an infinity pool that literally never ends. It’s great that William Orbit is back after some difficult years, but you suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.


The Scots offer an album-length dub version of their latest album Tonight created by former Mad Professor apprentice Dan Carey.

Blood

Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos' vocals are often wry snapshots of hedonistic nights spent with mysterious, mercurial women. It's an example, perhaps, of a globetrotting pop star singing about what he knows (his food writing doesn't translate into three-minute singles quite as well). But the band isn't nearly as risky, uninhibited, and freewheeling when it comes to its own music. The group's sophomore album sounded like a heavyweight repressing from the same post-punk revival mold used to make its debut, and the recent Tonight came off as a tease, flirting with synthesizers and a few new directions, not to mention a rotating cast of producers. Though, to its credit, the band endured numerous false starts in an attempt to get it right-- the making-of saga even boasts a human bone-as-percussion studio story-- Tonight hinted at opportunity without fully seizing it.
Blood, an album-length dub version of Tonight, arrives as an experimental spin on the band's music at a time when they're already toying with their formula. Though it was previously included as part of a deluxe box set and released in limited quantities for Record Store Day, Blood isn't merely a collectible or curiosity. Described as "Franz through Dan's filter"-- a reference to producer Dan Carey, the former Mad Professor apprentice who was the last person to fill the producer's chair during the making of Tonight-- it's filled with relaxed recalibrations of the source material. While groups like Easy Star have made a cottage industry out of recording new dub covers, Blood goes the traditional route by rearranging and remixing elements of the original music.
Carey may have spent time recently working with Lily Allen and Kylie, but he hasn't lost his feel for reggae. "Feel the Envy", which unspools the slippery bass line and bubbling synths of "Send Him Away" and submerges the song in reverberations, and "Feeling Kind of Anxious", where Kapranos' words cycle and careen off the walls of an echo chamber, are prime examples. "Backwards on My Face", a slack remix of "Twilight Omens", wallows in a low groove, springy but crisp snare beats, and vocoded croaks that used to be Kapranos' lyrics. Many of the album's best moments recast parts of the original songs in ways that underline their melodic strength, especially the bass lines of Bob Hardy. "Katherine Hit Me", a reworking of "No You Girls", glides by on the original track's tight, funky bass line, a solid frame that stands up to the shift towards a half-time tempo and meandering effects. Carey's work calls to mind Echo Dek, Adrian Sherwood's deft reworking of the master tapes of Primal Scream's Vanishing Point, including the slightly darker, paranoid bent. Despite the album's anxiety-prone songs titles, Franz sound relaxed and just as cocksure on these remixes, rarely forced.
While the songs are well-constructed, Blood is intriguing to a certain point but lacking the jolt necessary to transcend the concept. Perhaps that's putting unfair expectation on what is a well-executed one-off exercise, but some tracks feel a bit winded-down as opposed to re-imagined. For every channel-shifting echo effect on the album, there are moments, like the pulsating synths on "Die on the Floor" or stretches where Kapranos' vocals are looped, that call to mind standard dance remixes, standard being the key word. It's arguable how "dub" a few of these tracks are-- much like Tonight, they don't fully commit. Franz's music is usually as crisp and tight as its constructivist cover art, and though reformatted, stretched out, and slowed down on Blood, it still maintains a strong pulse. Hopefully this playful detour leads to more easygoing experimentation when Franz Ferdinand start cracking skulls together for the next full length.


Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s first album of non-film music is moody and deliberate, folding Marc Ribot’s guitar and John Ashbery’s poetry into thick slabs of psych-rock drone.

Silver Haze

Music suffuses the films of Jim Jarmusch, sometimes not so much complementing as completing them. He has prominently cast Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, RZA, GZA, Meg White, John Lurie, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Briefly, he played no wave at peak CBGB. And he’s always looked the part of the art rocker, his dandelion dome of hair and Terminator shades still in place at 70. In the 2010s, as a softly growling guitarist, he conjured a razed Renaissance in several albums with the lutist Jozef van Wissem. And, working with instrumentalist and producer Carter Logan as SQÜRL, he began to score many of his own movies. A great new Jarmusch interview in The Guardian frames this turn toward music as a reaction to the sorry state of the film industry, which seems a bit like leaping from the Hindenburg and landing on the Titanic, but never mind.
Silver Haze is SQÜRL’s first album outside of cinema, yet it still feels tightly scripted, especially on “She Don’t Wanna Talk About It,” where Jarmusch and the British-German singer Anika talk past each other in a long, dark corridor of guitar. And the sets are well-dressed. “Berlin ’87” uses Super 8 footage from Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall to coat a standard mood-setter—overtone-capped drone rock in the manner of Boris and Earth, both prior collaborators of producer Randall Dunn—with Cold War-era grit. On “The End of the World,” the riff is a podium at which Jarmusch, in a pleasing baritone reminiscent of John Cale, recites a postapocalyptic short story about “an older man, approaching 70” who watches “feral teenagers” doing donuts and dancing to sad pop in the concrete plaza below the prison of his apartment. This leads into a guest-laden middle run that shows off Jarmusch’s knack for casting as the focus tightens on the romance of 20th-century New York.
It’s no slight to Jarmusch and Carter that the guitar playing gets considerably more interesting when Marc Ribot shows up, as he’s one of the most distinctive, widely traveled American guitarists of his generation. Ribot started by helping Tom Waits redefine himself as a clangorous visionary in the ’80s and has cut a vast swath across art and pop music since. On “Garden of Glass Flowers,” churning riffs finally break apart into dancing, dewy angles that gradually fill with light. Ribot also plays on “Il Deserto Rosso,” which seems less imaginative than the album’s highlights, simply pairing desert rock with the title of a 1964 film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t seen it.
But I have read the influential American poet who gets a wonderful tribute in “John Ashbery Takes a Walk,” which features actor and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg almost whispering his experimental but accessible verses, in her musical English-French accent, over a wide, glimmering groove that explodes in slow motion. The title also brings to mind Frank O’Hara’s “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” another beacon of the New York School of which Ashbery was an original part. Its urbane yet playful influence resonates not just here but throughout Jarmusch’s work.
It’s hard to think of Jarmusch’s musical trajectory without also thinking of David Lynch’s: two legends of American independent cinema since the 1980s who both leaned into music in their 60s. While Lynch’s bond with Angelo Badalamenti and unforgettable song scenes made his leap from film a short one, Jarmusch has perhaps an even stronger claim to be the most musical director of his cohort. In some ways, SQÜRL’s stacked delays and synths and strings are as in-the-lines as Lynch’s music is off the map. But something enriches even the most formulaic trudge-rock passages of Silver Haze. That something is Jarmusch, who brings a rich history to the proceedings, experimenting with passerelle bridges, cigar box guitars, and radio static. Just as in his films, he spins strange yet strangely familiar stories from everyday stuff.


AMY was a compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live material, and it fails to capture the frightening intensity that Winehouse projected or to tell a new version of her story.

Amy Winehouse: AMY: The Original Soundtrack

AMY: The Original Soundtrack

There are several ways one might construct a soundtrack for AMY, the compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The obvious choice would be to make the soundtrack 100% Amy, whether through covers (the tactic of the soundtrack for the Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?) or through Winehouse's own voice. But in the AMY: The Original Soundtrack, Amy Winehouse is actually outnumbered: her 11 B-sides are broken up evenly by 11 snippets of film score, with the balance tipped by one exceedingly unnecessary trip-hop track, originally released in 1995.
This is not for lack of material. Winehouse began her public singing career at age 16 with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, performing and recording regularly for the next decade until her death. She's already had one posthumous compilation album (2011's poorly named, respectability-minded Lioness: Hidden Treasures), but if the tracks available on YouTube are any indication—let alone the unreleased professional recordings that her still-active fanbase lists and obsesses over on message boards—there are plenty of demos, live versions, and discarded mixes left. AMY: The Original Soundtrack, however, contains only one true "new" recording. "We're Still Friends", performed live at the Union Chapel in 2006, shows Winehouse on the cusp between her peak and downfall; the recording is precise and elegant, and she wears her strung-out voice like a crown.
The rest of the soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live recordings, compiled primarily as signposts for the documentary's plot. There is no raw audio on the soundtrack whatsoever; it's much glossier than the film itself, which heavily relies on rough footage and successfully illuminates Winehouse outside her press narrative as a result. In AMY, it's arresting to watch her so unguarded, putting her makeup on in a bar bathroom before a gig, giving a tour of her apartment in character as a haughty maid. Her talent flames into incandescence and out of it; her flesh shrinks into bone. She's frequently captured singing in the film, from "Happy Birthday" at a friend's house to that gruesome final show in Belgrade, where she was essentially walking dead. The collage is forceful, and in context you barely notice that the film is scored at all.
The soundtrack, then, serves as your reminder. Antonio Pinto, who wrote the music for both City of God and City of Men, even has the opening track. It's a minimal, mournful minute of piano. "This is sad, remember," the song says. "What's about to happen is very, very solemn." But could there be anything that requires saying less?
Presumably, the instrumental interludes are meant to give her tragic arc some breathing room, like asterisks that break up a story. But one of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural—invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one. Winehouse had an essential personal relentlessness, which her audience reflected back at her, and the soundtrack to a movie that climaxes at her death has no right to hide or diminish that.
Everyone already knew that Winehouse was a genius vocalist. To its credit, this collection highlights her sardonic writing, choosing songs where she translated her life cuttingly, always with a twist. She was happy to project her true self outward just enough to disguise it as a persona; she was stuck on the same themes of self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment, and she was almost supernaturally ahead of the story. As her pianist says in the documentary, she "needed music like a person, and would die for it"—and she was ready to, and did. "Rehab" was a distraction by way of being right on the nose; her many admissions ("It's not just my pride, it's just 'til these tears have dried") made us complicit. Back to Black uses depression as a euphemism for heroin in the title. Even "Tears Dry on Their Own", her black-swan sequel to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", contains a withdrawal metaphor.
The latter is reproduced in its original album version on AMY, which is fine, because what does a rarity mean in the age of YouTube, anyway? What could be new, in this context, when the star in question was hounded to death by demons so public we all saw her crack pipe and paparazzi so relentless that they slept outside her house? This soundtrack album doesn't even seem aware of those questions, and like any album bearing Amy Winehouse's name from 2011 onwards, it's a diminishment—this time severe.


The Minneapolis emo band broke through in 2017 with a giddy pop-punk sound; two albums later, they are taking bigger chances but falling flatter.

A Portrait of an Ugly Man

For an emo band, Remo Drive never got too hung up on the whole “emotions” thing. At a time when the scene’s prestige acts were leaning harder than ever into unflinching depictions of mental-health crises, the Minneapolis group kept things light on their 2017 debut Greatest Hits, reveling in giddy, smart-ass pop-punk that refused to take itself seriously. It's no wonder Epitaph signed them: Their Get Up Kids-worshipping hookiness made them a clear candidate for a crossover audience in a scene that hadn’t had much luck crossing over. Was the record all a little too easy, too obvious? Sure. But it ripped.
Three years later, Remo Drive hasn’t released anything that's given Greatest Hits a run for its money. Maybe it was the band’s decision to cut out drummer Sam Mathys, reducing the group to a duo of brothers Erik and Stephen Paulson, but the old alchemy has been disrupted. Subsequent releases have been more ambitious—less punk, more alternative, perhaps—but depleted of the mischief and buoyancy that made Greatest Hits such a kick. The difference was noticeable on last year’s Natural, Everyday Degradation, and it’s even more pronounced on their third full-length A Portrait of an Ugly Man, a record that takes bolder swings than its predecessor while falling even flatter.
At least nobody can accuse them of playing it safe anymore. Erik Paulson has retired his standard-issue emo whine in favor of a scenery-chewing bellow clearly indebted to Morrissey. He really goes for it—on “Dead Man,” his incensed wail reverberates off the rafters—but his showboating quickly wears thin. He's got the gumption to go loud but lacks the gravitas to carry the quieter moments. The guitars, meanwhile, channel the thunder-and-chime of late ’80s alternative bands capably but without dazzle, a Sam’s Club imitation of a name brand.
The bigger problem with Remo Drive’s The Queen is Dead makeover is that it leaves Erik Paulson’s lyrics front and center, which only spotlights the clunkers. And man, there are clunkers. “Honey, if you want to make me crumble at your touch, you’ll have to dress up like an apple and take me to the Genius Bar,” he sings on “True Romance Lives.” It’s a pun in search of a joke. Morrissey knew how to undersell his zingers, burying them so deep in melodrama that there was no distinction between his wry declarations and his earnest ones. Paulson, however, can’t resist patting himself on the back for every so-so turn of phrase. “I’ve heard the grass is so much greener/When strangers offer it to you,” he sings on “A Flower and a Weed.”
Remo Drive probably didn't do themselves any favors releasing A Portrait so quickly after the last one, while the disappointment of their sophomore flop was still fresh but too soon for their debut to carry any real nostalgic weight. After Natural, Everyday Degradation, it felt premature to tag the band as a one-album wonder. It sure doesn’t anymore.

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Haim’s glossy second album is slyly complex. The California sisters remain masters of rhythm and create spacious, hook-filled pop-rock full of heartbreak, longing, and betrayal.

Something to Tell You

Stevie Nicks told Haim to keep diaries. It was 2014, shortly before the three sisters from The Valley would begin writing their second album Something to Tell You, and at Nicks’ request, they were paying the Fleetwood Mac singer a visit at her mansion. When Nicks inquired, “Do you guys keep a journal?” the eldest Haim, bassist/singer Este, said she keeps notes on her phone. (Alana, Danielle, and Este all write lyrics.) But Nicks extolled the virtues of paper: On the right-hand page, you recount your day; on the left-hand page, you poeticize it.
The glossy and aching Something to Tell You—full of longing, betrayal, and the torment of feelings left unsaid—is at once poised and emo enough to suggest that Haim took Nicks’ advice, but drew from both sides of the diary. More to the point, this summit—a blessing from the high priestess of pop-rock heartbreak—was a testament to just how powerful Haim’s reverence of 1970s and ’80s soft-rock has become, proof that Haim are deeply admired within music’s pantheon and ever-closer to dominating the world at large. Collaborating with the trio recently, Bobby Gillespie called Haim “gospel singers” whose internal logic and virtuosic harmonizing comes from “this celestial telepathic thing.”
Something to Tell You—released exactly 10 years on from Haim’s first show together beyond their oldies family cover band Rockenhaim—does not radically depart from their taut and gleaming spark of a debut, 2013’s Days Are Gone. But there’s still nothing like Haim around. No other rock band in popular music (an anomalous statement already) has mixed styles so seamlessly—rattling and gliding from one hook to another—so as to garner a remix from Giorgio Moroder, a feature from A$AP Ferg, an onstage jam with Jenny Lewis, and an opening tour slot for Taylor Swift. Time collapses; Haim’s music is the distinct result of a band schooled by their parents on Motown and funk while TLC was on Top 40, fronted by Danielle, whose formative experiences included sneaking out to Rilo Kiley gigs.
Haim let in some new styles on Something to Tell You, but they crucially remain masters of rhythm. Though none of the sisters sit behind a kit at shows, and only Danielle handles drums in the studio, they were all drummers first, and Haim’s latticed arrangements and heavily percussive melodies make their music fly. There’s an unmistakable, crisply-strummed nod to George Michael’s “Faith” on “Ready for You.” “Little of Your Love” recalls the swaggering bubblegum notes of their former tour-mate, Swift. And “Kept Me Crying”—with its story of willfully, desperately hanging on the telephone for an ex-lover who hardly deserves it—yearns so irreducibly and with such a raw current of sadness that you could picture the Shangri-Las singing it, or a rhinestone cowgirl. “If you want me, I’m waiting for you,” Danielle sings. “You kept me crying for so long that my tears have dried.”
As ever, Haim’s dynamic songs are tricked out with plenty of studio magic, echoes, and shimmer; Ariel Rechtshaid returns to produce (“our fearless leader,” the credits read) along with touches from Rostam Batmanglij (“our biggest cheerleader”). Strange flourishes abound: pitch-shifted vocals all across the album; the blissfully perplexing likeness of a horse’s nay on “Want You Back”; the monotone mantra of “It’s obvious/Be honest” on “Nothing’s Wrong,” which nearly recalls UK post-punk band Au Pairs’ similarly robotic refrain. The emptied production and episodic structure of “Right Now” is also unusual, and this risk-taking makes it one of the best songs here. “Right Now” conveys the severe, almost nauseous feeling of love that goes frustratingly unresolved; the music has a wrongness about it and never quite settles. It just ends, and sometimes that’s all you get in life: the numb fadeout that lingers on until it turns into hard-earned wisdom. “Did you think this would be easy?” Danielle sings after the song crashes open. “Finally on the other side now/And I can see for miles.”
At the center of Something to Tell You is its peak, the Dev Hynes co-write “You Never Knew,” silver and incandescent, the disco ball beneath which the album grooves. Its mix of cascading, Rumours-like acoustic guitars with a deep, glitter-bomb beat makes it bob along gloriously, refracting all its romantic wreckage into heavy breaths and sparkles sharp enough to cut. In the lyrics, Danielle sorts through the mess of something that was too beautiful to last, of memories you can’t wrap your arm around. “Go on and say it,” she sings. “Was my love too much for you to take?/I guess you never knew what was good for you.” Her sisters slide into the mix with light-beam harmonies, like a finger-wagging girl gang behind her (“You couldn’t take it! You couldn’t take it!”). As with many Haim songs, there’s strength in their camaraderie; it makes even the most melancholy line sound doubly empowered.
“I need to hear you say it,” Danielle sings on “You Never Knew,” getting at the theme of this album and Haim generally: the exalted feeling of clarity. On their thrillingly disaffected Days Are Gone hit “The Wire,” Danielle sang, “I’m bad at communication/It’s the hardest thing for me to do.” Well, people dream of hearing things elucidated as plainly as some of the lyrics on Something to Tell You, like on the wild-hearted single “Want You Back.” Economical but often potent, the lyrics are about saying things straight—they sound like the very last words you’d arrive at in a difficult conversation when you want the truth. “Walking Away” is about as snappily-written a song as you could hope for about leaving someone in the dust. “Nothing’s Wrong” describes a love that is indeed so wrong it reminded me of the photographer Nan Goldin’s movingly distraught “Couple in Bed.” The downside of these broad lyrics, however, is that they can just as easily scan as dubiously pat or overly safe. But on the whole, Haim and their collaborators are remarkable architects of pop’s tightrope moments, suspended in air; they know exactly where to place a dash of overblown emotion, how to make a simple line take the air out of the room.
In 1997, Kathleen Hanna coined the phrase “Valley Girl Intelligentsia” to underscore how even a young person with an airy accent could be smart and capable. Haim—who have roots in a prefab mid-aughts major label band that was literally called Valli Girls—write songs so impeccably savvy and clear-headed that Something to Tell You feels like a sly pop-music manifestation of this idea. As on Days Are Gone, its sheen is current and its spirit out of step. Beat by beat, Haim are the classic sound of heartbreak alleviated, if only for a moment.


Sasami Ashworth’s debut union of synthesizer decay and guitar reverb that embodies shoegaze’s supernatural ability to conjure sadness from the void.

SASAMI

There is an indescribable melancholy to shoegaze coursing just beneath the surface. The music seems designed to overwhelm you with unnamable feelings: I am sad and I listen to Loveless Every Night is the name of a Facebook group, yes, but it’s also a lifestyle. Even the brightest songs by the Cocteau Twins carry an undertow of sorrow. Sasami Ashworth’s shoegaze invokes similar feelings; the Los Angeles-based polymath has made her name over the years as the synth player in Cherry Glazerr. Her debut record, SASAMI, is a union of synthesizer decay and guitar reverb that embodies shoegaze’s supernatural ability to conjure sadness from the void.
Ashworth has described her songwriting process as akin to drafting a long, angry text in the Notes section of an iPhone and then letting it simmer—although when listening to this record the first few times that’s not entirely clear. It’s easy to mistake SASAMI as a gentle, soothing album, but then the words begin to creep their way out of the ground, and Ashworth’s dark heart begins to reveal itself.  Take a song like “Not the Time”; on first blush, it seems a bit benign. Its smartly hemmed guitar parts glow like an Asobi Seksu track while Sasami sounds uncannily like Trish Keenan. But as you crawl further inside, the song reveals complexities: “Even though we tried to make it work, it doesn’t/Even though each time it only hurts for a moment,” she sings. The arrangement practically bleeds empty space—prismatic guitar work from Ashworth’s brother, JooJoo, stretches out into the far corners of the mix, while the percussion from Cameron Allen sounds as weightless as a moth fluttering around an attic.
There are moments when Ashworth seems too comfortable with a default prettiness. She is incredibly adept at writing lovely melodies and synth parts, but the most exciting moments come when she threatens to break loose. On “Free,” Ashworth’s vocals quiver, as if she’s containing herself in front of someone who has broken her heart. “The city held us as its own/We walked as far as we could go/We had to choose, so we took off our shoes,” she sings as her accompaniment grows noisier, moving into space-rock territory. The first single, “Callous,” burns with the cosmic energy of Souvlaki-era Slowdive. The cycle of memories she explores here are especially gutting: “I lost my callouses for you/And you didn’t even ask me how my day was.” Even the tracks that scan as crowd pleasers, like “Adult Contemporary,” which features an ensemble cast of musicians like Soko and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, are deeply personal.
Listening to Ashworth unpack her relationships can verge on voyeurism. Writing about sadness and suffering is difficult to do, especially in the space of a debut album, when you are still figuring out what to say and how to say it. But dig beneath the surface of her songs, and the bitter secrets she has buried there bloom. Sometimes Ashworth sounds like she’s yearning to startle her own music’s hypnotically pleasant surface, and there are times you wonder if the gauziness of shoegaze is doing her a disservice, hiding her in plain sight. But SASAMI is a powerful first effort, and Ashworth is a compelling presence. Shoegaze was named because its practitioners supposedly couldn’t meet your eye, but if you spend long enough with SASAMI you will find Ashworth staring right out at you.


Co-produced by Wye Oak, the singer-songwriter’s new album reckons with a past of self-doubt and a present of intense uncertainty in order to shape something like a satisfying future.

Sucker’s Lunch

For three albums, Madeline Kenney has poignantly and often playfully articulated the absurdities of modern adulthood. On her 2017 debut, the Toro y Moi-produced Night Night at First Landing, the Oakland baker, dancer, and singer-songwriter with the neuroscience degree sang post-grad mantras for herself, mid-20s reminders that tough times were inevitable but endurable. She got specific on 2018’s Perfect Shapes, reckoning with the burdensome workload of a creative class underfunded by a gig economy and the suspicion that existence itself is a deleterious process. And now, nearing 30 on Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney asks herself for permission to fall in love, or to reckon with a past of self-doubt and a present of intense uncertainty in order to shape something like a satisfying future.
Kenney seems to have found both a mentor and friend in Jenn Wasner, the Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes linchpin who produced Perfect Shapes. Their rapport shaped that album’s sense of discovery, illustrated by a crosswalk sample that became an unlikely and compulsory hook. For Sucker’s Lunch, though, Kenney worked not only with Wasner and a cast of her own past collaborators but also with Andy Stack, the other multi-instrumentalist half of Wye Oak. Aside from Wye Oak’s own records, it’s the first album the pair have produced together. They lend Kenney a righteous heft here, their experience fortifying songs that, in the past, might have felt wispy.
It’s tempting to hear Sucker’s Lunch as another extension of Wye Oak, a full-length collaboration with a novel singer rather than a joint production. Many of their chief hallmarks are here—the way the harmonies and keys pirouette over lumbering drums during “Sugar Sweat,” the emphatic rhythmic punctuation that ends “Tell You Everything,” the euphoric and arcing repetition of “Double Hearted.” If you landed on that last song without checking the title or the credits, you might assume Kenney is simply a Wye Oak acolyte—or that the band itself sounds different this time around.
But Sucker’s Lunch inverts Wye Oak’s general approach. Where Wye Oak’s songs often seem purposefully resilient, designed like body armor meant to safeguard the feelings they ferry, these 10 songs wear their feelings on the skin. The sighing organs and yearning guitars of “Jenny”  perfectly capture the bittersweet sting of remembering your past and hoping for a better future. Likewise, the surging and glorious “White Window Light” captures the uneasy excitement of committing to new love even if it might backfire, of “jumping in the water without plans.”
Despite all its lyrical prevarication, there’s a newfound directness to much of Sucker’s Lunch, a definitive step beyond the self-aware cleverness of Kenney’s earlier records. “Sucker,” for instance, surveys our modern malaise with prismatic snapshots of political fractures, mental fatigue, and endless worry. The band renders a wonderfully blue country shuffle beneath them, with luminous guitar harmonies that suggest Nels Cline and drums that feel like slumped shoulders. Kurt Wagner—for almost 30 years, the maestro of Lambchop’s own exquisite moodiness—deadpans the verses alongside Kenney, offering a cross-generational reminder that exasperation is a preexisting condition. And “Be That Man” springs from a gothic country creak into big, open-hearted rock, its chorus a perfect nugget of would-be AM Gold that needs no complications.
Such transmutation is the enduring lesson of Kenney’s small catalogue so far: Turn life’s impasses into empathetic rock songs, little anthems for overcoming self-renewing heartache and exhaustion and anxiety. On Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney gets closer to the core of that idea than ever before thanks to sharper writing, stronger hooks, a versatile voice, and a continued partnership with friends who allow her to try new approaches. These are the results, it would seem, of growing up—the same complicated process that gave Kenney the grist for these 10 songs about figuring out what’s next.

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Jim James' new solo album contains some of his most psychedelic music, as well as his most directly topical lyrics, offering new ways for him to wield his otherworldly voice.

Eternally Even

The idea of a Jim James solo career was slightly perplexing at first. My Morning Jacket is a band in a true, old-school sense—now with a fixed lineup, any character in which would be hard to replace—but Jim James is the sole songwriter, and it has always been his vision driving them. What, exactly, was he leaving out? Yet as 2013’s Regions of Light and Sound of God suggested and his new record Eternally Even confirms, there are other ways to wield his hardly-of-this-earth voice, other ways to meld genres within his idiosyncratic hybrid of American music—music that wouldn't quite fit in the MMJ framework, but which needs to exist nonetheless.
Eternally Even, logically enough, is more of a companion to James’ last solo LP than it is to My Morning Jacket’s stunning 2015 release The Waterfall, particularly in its deeper indulgence of James’ soul influences. But it takes those soul elements and submerges them in psychedelic textures, making for a head trip of an album. Regions was a strong record in its own right but felt less like a statement than a collection of songs—which, with material dating over the course of a few years, it sort of was. But Eternally Even sounds as if it was sequenced as one piece that requires front-to-back listening.
James goes all-in on a frayed, psychedelic-soul aesthetic—“True Nature” sounds like an old funk song dropped in an aquarium. Many of the songs are built off of small instrumental passages that weave the album together: The simmering, festering bed of synths, bass and guitar in opener “Hide in Plain Sight” recurs in “We Ain’t Getting Younger Pt. 1,” which in turn pairs with its Pt. 2 to create the monumental core of the record. Eternally Even has also been touted as his most directly political writing of his career—pointedly released just before Election Day. This is another thing that, at first glance, could go almost awry—a topical Jim James record almost sounds like an oxymoron. James is not a literal writer, or at least not at his best when he’s being literal. His lyrics don’t work that way; his voice very much does not work that way. James can be most evocative when you have no clue what the hell he’s talking about. Who knows the meaning behind “Steam Engine,” yet it’s one of the most powerful songs he's ever written; this is the guy who wrote a song literally called “Wordless Chorus” and has penned numerous catharses built on “oh-ah” refrains and guitar freak-outs rather than narrative journeys.
But he winds up succeeding, thanks to the haunting quality hanging over much of Eternally Even, reflecting the tensions of 2016. In fact, James only occasionally dips into concrete imagery you could associate with America’s political climate, with other songs only making oblique references. Sure, it’s clear where “Same Old Lie” is coming from, with lines like “If you don’t vote it’s on you not me” and “Is there any peace to be found in a lifetime?” Otherwise, it's one meditative note among many: There’s the rumination on mortality in “We Ain’t Getting Any Younger,”and then the more personal reckoning in “Eternally Even.”
The album’s impact is rooted in how, collectively, humanity searches for hope for the future. As the album draws to a close, that seems to be where James wants to lead us. After all the twists and ruptures across the album, we get the floating hymn of “Eternally Even”—a song with James in near-reverie, letting his voice glide over an instrumental that sounds like clouds parting. That’s where the James we always knew comes through: offering his trademark transcendence, that voice cutting through the haze and murk of the album, of this year. And it acts as a salve when we most need it.


The latest release from stalwart New York underground rap duo Armand Hammer, aka billy woods and Elucid, continues their hot streak. Even as they take on weighty societal issues, the pair maintain a light touch and a near-telepathic bond.

Paraffin

One summer in the mid-1990s, a young woman from Santa Cruz was renting an apartment in Harlem, off 139th Street. Earlier that same summer, she’d introduced her boyfriend—who had just finished his freshman year at a nearby college and who often stayed at the apartment with her—to a 16-year-old rapping prodigy who was evidently very into comic books. The two young men became fast friends. One day, burglars broke down the door to that apartment and stole, among other things, the young woman’s entire collection of CDs and tapes. The home invasion would be unremarkable if it hadn’t been recounted at the start of one of the pivotal records in underground rap, Cannibal Ox’s 2001 opus The Cold Vein. The rapping prodigy turned out to be Ox’s Vordul Mega. The older friend, who Vordul encouraged to rap, would kick around the fringes of the scenes in New York and D.C. for years after the fact. It wasn’t until 2012 that billy woods, armed with decades of trial-and-error and with many lifetimes’ worth of baggage, re-emerged with an album, History Will Absolve Me, that indicated he was finally, fully formed.
Since History, woods has dropped three distinct, excellent solo albums—two of which were produced by Blockhead who, years earlier, was as responsible for Def Jux’s sound as any producer not named El-P. But the work woods has done with the rapper and producer Elucid as Armand Hammer is even more daring. They’ve made four releases together, including last fall’s ROME, which dealt with the nature of power and the way digital and corporeal life pick at and morph one another. Their latest, Paraffin, is their most kinetic effort, the one that feels the most like it’s made of sinew and instinct.
Armand Hammer records are not unlike The Cold Vein: the writing is jam-packed with naturalist detail and esoteric asides, so dense that you can at times get lost in it, fully immersed, or let it wash over you and begin to miss things. But like Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, woods and Elucid are musically gifted enough to enmesh their vocals with the beats in a way that invites close attention but allows breathing room for those ebbs and flows of focus. They construct songs the way a good film editor will direct viewers’ eyes back and forth across the screen. Paraffin is extremely well-paced, on both micro and macro levels—see the way “ECOMOG” rises and falls, or the way the tension in the first three songs is paid off by the chanted release of “No Days Off.”
The verses return, time and time again, to the dark comedy of Western capitalism (“You don’t work, you don’t eat”), to the particulars of American racism (“I elect ‘Nature of the Threat’ as the new black national anthem”), to cutting words from relatives at tense wakes (“Still remember something foul my uncle said/Yeah, I’ma carry that to the end”). The production, from Willie Green, Kenny Segal, August Fanon, Messiah Musik, Ohbliv, and Elucid himself, skews distorted and dissonant, toward the black-and-white of the album cover.
Elucid, who in the past several years has issued his major, confrontational work in 2016’s Save Yourself, along with a series of shorter dispatches from Cape Town and East New York, opens the album alone. At first, his verse works on a mostly percussive level but ends with a missive for “the mamas locked behind the prison.” Few rappers working today are better at wringing substance from style; Elucid is comfortable sinking into the ether and rattling off a list of disconnected images, then synthesizing them into something thoughtful in the matter of a couple bars. His style is less outwardly conventional than woods’, but the two take turns tethering the other one back to the here and now. What makes their working relationship fascinating is that on a given song, their verses will have deep thematic connections, but little direct interplay, as if they exist on parallel planes. On “Hunter,” for instance, Elucid raps about bodies as moving targets in American killing fields, while woods writes about the way heroin dealers crane their necks to catch the ambient light.
Given the weight of some topics, it helps that both rappers are genuinely funny and brimming with personality. On “Black Garlic,” for instance, Elucid calls YouTube provocateur DJ Vlad the “big boss at the end of the internet”; on “VX,” woods raps, “The money imaginary—I’ll send it to your phone” then mocks the collections agent who’s badgering him: “wiping cappuccino foam out the beard like, ‘How do you reckon?’” And a thread that runs through not only Paraffin, but the rest of the Armand Hammer catalog, is the foolishness of anyone to cast himself as a wise old sage.
Paraffin will not bring about a sea change in rap the way The Cold Vein did; it is, by sensibility and by economic reality, something that needs to exist on the fringes. Regardless, both woods and Elucid find themselves with few peers in rap today, each in the midst of a five-plus year hot streak that shows no signs of cooling down. This is a record that’s uniquely attuned to the political, physical, and ethical realities of 2018 without being weighed down by its pop culture arcana or its attendant industry concerns.


Incorporating synths, ambient drift, and stark percussion, the Baltimore band, fronted by onetime folk eccentric Jana Hunter, widens its sonic palette and scope on this richly detailed sophomore LP.

Nootropics

There are bands who arrive fully formed and there are those who take a little while to find their footing. Sometimes all it takes is one song. In the case of Baltimore's Lower Dens, who are fronted by onetime folk eccentric Jana Hunter, that track was "Brains". Released in advance of this record, the single added krautrock and electronic touches to the group's signature guitar swirl and suggested a new dimension and a new confidence. Everything hit with more impact: the drumming was crisper, Hunter's singing was richer and more evocative, and there was an extra layer of prettiness, but also menace. The message seemed to be, "Here's a band you can't ignore anymore."
Nootropics strengthens that argument, building on the promise of "Brains" and vastly widening the band's sonic palette. Richly detailed, dark, and ethereal, the album is a feast for sound-first listeners drawn to expressive shifts in color and tone. To suggest that it's a creative step forward for Lower Dens is not to knock their 2010 debut, Twin-Hand Movement, which was a fine album but pretty specific in its appeal. (A moody nighttime listen, ideal for a 2 a.m. drive home by yourself or a late-night glass of whisky.) Nootropics is at once more inclusive and varied, though. And the band achieves this by pulling a clever trick: taking some of the most well-loved elements of the rock canon and making them their own.
"I listened to Radioactivity by Kraftwerk pretty much constantly while writing this record, and... we listened to a lot of Eno and Fripp and the Iggy Pop record that David Bowie produced," Hunter said in an interview. And you can certainly hear those influences at play. Robotic synths, ambient drift, stark percussion-- many of the touchstones of 1977 art rock are on display in tracks like "Lamb" and "Candy". It doesn't feel like by-the-numbers mixtape-ism, though, partly because Hunter's singing is too dynamic to allow for that. Her androgynous voice can be airy and lilting or times throaty and masculine, and it lends an eerie otherness to the songs. Even when backed by a simple motorik bassline, Hunter sounds beamed-in from somewhere else.
This is one of those albums that creates its own little sound world, and a lot of its appeal has to do with qualities like texture and atmosphere. These are terms so overused in music writing that they've nearly lost their meaning, but here they're important. Take for example the very tactile percussion of "Alphabet Song". Snares and cymbals click-click-click like someone with long, fake fingernails tapping on a car window. Or go back to "Brains", which does an excellent job of building tension and transferring energy with those outward-spinning guitars. For a while they kind of chime in place, but then right before the chorus hits, they step down an octave and there's an exhale. The mood changes and takes you along with it.
With so much attention on the sonics it can be easy to ignore the words, and actually I'd say the lyrical content is the record's least interesting aspect. In that same interview from above, Hunter discussed the subject matter, going into some heady stuff about Dada and transhumanism and "denying our animal selves." I'm not sure what she meant, and I'm not sure that it matters. This isn't an album about a specific narrative, it's about sounds and colors and the way a synth tone or cryptic string of words hits you and makes you feel something. When the guitars are chugging and the drums are crackling and Hunter sings, "When I finally let my guard down, I was in the middle of the sea and drowning," I don't know what she means exactly, but it gives me goosebumps. Every time.


A revered musician in Balochistan, Pakistan, Ustad Noor Bahksh debuts internationally with a twangy, enveloping collection of reinterpreted and original compositions for the benju.

Jingul

The benju is a twangy, droning keyed dulcimer that originated as a Japanese instrument called the taishōgoto. In the 1920s, Japanese sailors brought a toy version of the taishōgoto to Pakistan, where local musicians modified it, doubling its size and making it louder. Since then, the benju has become an integral part of the folk music from the Balochistan region of the country.
One of Pakistan’s most legendary benju players is Ustad Noor Bakhsh, who plays an electric version of the instrument on an amp powered by a car battery and a solar panel. He has long been regionally celebrated but only recently gained international acclaim when videos of his playing went viral earlier this year; in June, he performed live from Karachi for Boiler Room. Bakhsh’s debut album, Jingul, is a collection of four interpretations on Balochi poetry, shepherd’s tunes, and qawwali, plus one original composition. Throughout this electrifying project, the benju twists through sorrow, ecstasy, and epiphany, embroidering a vivid tapestry of emotion.
Much of the emotional impact of this music comes from its trance-like qualities. Bakhsh’s style of playing is frantic but also iterative: On “Bundar Nari,” his interpretation of a traditional flute song, he embellishes on one twinkling refrain over and over until it feels like a meditation. “Jingul,” an original composition inspired by the sounds of the birds in the jungle near his home, is similarly repetitive but more assertive: The benju spirals over a pounding backbone established by the damboora, the two-stringed lute that is the only other instrument on the album. Thanks to the vigor and confidence of his playing, listening to Bakhsh circle a few notes is an enveloping experience.
One of the album’s most melodious song is “Shahbaz Qalandar,” a shortened interpretation of a classic qawwali song, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar.” The instrument sounds incandescent here, like light refracting on fresh snow. As ruminative and heady as Bakhsh’s music often is, “Shahbaz Qalandar” shows that he’s just as compelling when his delivery is playful and exploratory.
Jingul was recorded live at sunset, and the poignant melancholy of dusk permeates the music. The metallic, plucky sound of the benju is distinct, as are the particularities of Bakhsh’s trills and cascading improvisations. But the ethos that guides these compositions—the unending pursuit of beauty, the simultaneous embrace of sorrow and transcendence—is familiar. You might find it in the astral harp music of Mary Lattimore, or the kaleidoscopic guitar playing of Mdou Moctar. It’s the kind of music that leaves you grasping for the spiritual and indefinable, that burrows into your soul and glows there.


Montreal band delivers an edgy, restless set of dark romanticism and muscular guitar.

The Besnard Lakes: Are the Roaring Night

Are the Roaring Night

You can only be the dark horse once. The Besnard Lakes may have been a (mostly) unknown quantity when they broke out to a wider audience in 2007, but they were also insiders of sorts-- guitarist/vocalist Jace Lasek had done production work with Montreal heavyweights Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Fitting of its title, Are the Dark Horse had a subtle, almost shy, quality-- on many songs, the group's quiet side slowly swelled into a symphony. On the follow-up, Are the Roaring Night, husband-and-wife duo Lasek and Olga Goreas map out a sonic landscape that follows the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but the terrain is more ragged.
New songs like "Glass Printer" sound more electrified and easily triggered from the outset. Marching forward with the inexorable, unforgiving pace the title implies, "And This Is What We Call Progress" pairs a steely two-drum pulse with a line of static suspended by an EBow. Even the slow, pretty interludes often exude more tension than the suspended-in-space, Spiritualized vibe of an older song like "For Agent 13". There's more unease in the band's bold space rock-- vocal harmonies mask that sense of menace on the two-part "Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent", which opens the album with oscillating notes and fluctuating guitar. After trading cloying choruses with Goreas, Lasek sings, "Deciphered your lines from the short wave/ It said 'Kill all the swine, young and old.'" Darkness and destruction are also central to "Land of Living Skies", made even more poignant after an opening segment of sinister radio transmissions.
Talk of scrambled signals and short-wave technology is fitting considering Lasek's production background (check out the online gear list for his Breakglass studio). An impressive array of crunchy guitar tones courses throughout the album, pushing forward two-part epics so the steady cycle of build and release doesn't become overwrought. Craftsmanship permeates the peels of reverb-laden melodies or the Loveless-like gyre of lead single "Albatross". Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn't rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band's songwriting and production skills. Outside of the twinkling, sub-orbital synths on the closer "The Lonely Moan", there isn't anything that would be considered a radical departure. But when you make the kind of entrance the Besnard Lakes did, there isn't much to fix.


On their third album for Stones Throw, the L.A. avant-pop practitioner juggles themes of identity and physicality with music that reclaims the eccentric aplomb of their early records.

Free Time

Jerry Paper’s syrupy sonic world comes straight from the pages of a tripped-out children’s book, where the secret to happiness is just being yourself. For the Los Angeles experimental pop practitioner, that’s always seemed to come naturally; since their early releases for labels like Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain, Paper has shown fearless individuality as they’ve built a peculiar toybox of multicolored MIDI funk and post-Mac DeMarco bedroom R&B, brought to life by their joyous, crooning live performances.
But as Paper’s profile has increased, some of what made the project so special has sadly gotten lost along the way. Since 2016’s Toon Time Raw!, Paper has slowly swapped out their uncanny-valley keyboards and tick-tocking drum machines for a more streamlined full-band setup, graduating to the Stones Throw roster in the process. Their first two records for the label, Like a Baby and Abracadabra, sounded like hi-def Jerry Paper, but those gains in fidelity came at the cost of originality: The excessively mellow songwriting didn’t sound terribly different from the lackadaisical chill-dude-core you’d hear from the likes of Homeshake or Mild High Club. For an artist who up until then had excelled at inventing their own rulebook, these records came across like an unfortunate case of just trying to fit in with the crowd.
Fortunately, Free Time spells out a fresh beginning. Paper’s first record since coming out as nonbinary in 2020, Free Time is the most dynamic they have sounded in years, with hilariously expressive grooves that feel like a great casting off of chains (there’s more than one way to read into its punny title). Juggling themes of identity and physicality with music that reclaims the eccentric aplomb of their early records, Paper expands their sound into wily new territory, wrangling together knotty garage rock and tripped-out dance music to serve as the backdrop for personal tales of self-discovery. It taps into that goofy magic that made Paper’s music so fascinating in the first place.
The concept of self-actualization is front and center throughout Free Time, from the second that “Kno Me” fires up the album with Paper’s most overtly glam-rocking song yet. With its Elvis Costello-ish snarl and chugging guitars, the song recounts the first time Paper decided to leave the house wearing a dress, its instantly hummable chorus capturing the anxious defiance that comes with having to worry whether the cashier at Ralph’s is going to make an uncomfortable comment about your nail polish or not. This charged-up energy manifests in myriad ways throughout Free Time. On “DREEMSCENES,” Paper delivers their tribute to house music—a genre that has long acted as a bastion of queer acceptance—in a cosmic-jazz workout complete with vocoder and an absurdly wailing saxophone solo.
Even the songs where Paper works in their usual style reflect a melodic and textural depth that fully capitalizes on their strengths as a singer/songwriter. With its elevator-music flutes and campy Marvin Gaye crooning, “Just Say Play” goes down smoother than a glass of lemonade on a balmy summer afternoon, complete with cartoonishly harmonized “why, why, why”s as earwormy as anything Paper has ever written. “Gracie III” moseys along on a softly yearning Steely Dan strum, while on “Duumb” Paper returns to their squishy Tim & Eric-style funk for an extended slow jam that culminates in a kooky sound collage (topped with screams straight out of Tom & Jerry). On all these moments, Paper is clearly in command of their element, fleshing out their bizarro universe with songs as cheeky as they are bracingly heartfelt.
If on previous records Paper has kept a lid on their wacky, oversized personality, Free Time feels like a huge leap toward a more liberated sound. Part of what’s always made Paper so compelling is their theatrical balance of silliness and sincerity; between all the clownish sound effects and drawled references to “shaking ass,” there’s a vulnerability to Paper’s songwriting that’s surprisingly moving, their jerky movements reflecting an awkward soul just screaming to be let out. As the album reaches its close with “Flower, a Square,” Paper confronts one of the saddest aspects of coming out: reckoning with all the time spent in the closet that you’ll never get back. “I’ve wasted hours, countless hours of my precious time/Calling a flower a square,” Paper weepingly intones as the song blossoms from its quiet intro into a warm, brass-laden R&B anthem. It’s a melancholy moment, but before long, Paper breaks it down into a funky, acoustic-guitar-riffing strut, shaking off the sadness to simply bask in the sun. It’s a delightful final flourish, one final wink so sweet you might miss the tear behind it.


These reissues complete Rhino's ambitious treatment of the Replacements catalogue, with all eight of the legendary (a shopworn word in rock criticism, but these guys deserve it, for reasons good and bad) Minneapolis band's official releases in expanded and remastered deluxe editions. Rhino's decision to release the records in two flights-- the first covering the Twin/Tone years, the second their time on Sire-- cleaves their career into distinct halves, a division that seems sharper now than it did at the time. Yeah, everyone back then noticed *Tim*'s horrible record cover and weird production, but to those not tuned into major/indie

The Replacements: Tim / Pleased to Meet Me / Don't Tell a Soul / All Shook Down

These reissues complete Rhino's ambitious treatment of the Replacements catalogue, with all eight of the legendary (a shopworn word in rock criticism, but these guys deserve it, for reasons good and bad) Minneapolis band's official releases in expanded and remastered deluxe editions. Rhino's decision to release the records in two flights-- the first covering the Twin/Tone years, the second their time on Sire-- cleaves their career into distinct halves, a division that seems sharper now than it did at the time. Yeah, everyone back then noticed Tim's horrible record cover and weird production, but to those not tuned into major/indie politics, it just seemed like "The record after Let It Be," not a talking point for a discussion on what happens when underground bands sign with a major. But returning to these four records after a lengthy re-immersion in the Twin/Tone platters, one gets a sense of exactly what had changed. The run of 1981's Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash to 1984's Let It Be, for all the variety on display, feels of a piece, the work of a wildly creative and energetic band with a strong sense of exactly who they were. Each of the Sire albums, on the other hand, seems to begin with, "Well, I guess we can try this and see what happens." There's no sense of continuity, nothing builds from record to record. Every one seems to come from a band starting over.
Given its superior distribution and marketing push, Tim was the first Replacements album many people heard, which, as is so often the case, means that it's frequently mentioned as the favorite. And that's understandable. "Hold My Life", "Bastards of Young", and "Left of the Dial" are anthems, no doubt about it, real voice-of-a-generation kind of songs. But Tim also has range. The jazzy, midtempo "Swingin Party" is Westerberg with perfect emotional pitch-- funny ("Bring your own lampshade, somewhere there's a party") and also vulnerable (the narrator admits to being ignorant, weak, and terrified, but if he can find someone in the same situation to hang out with, he'll live). "Kiss Me on the Bus" is light, melodic, and charming guitar pop, another new wrinkle.
Great songs abound, but Tim has its share of issues. Something that had changed markedly-- and whether it was erratic lead guitarist Bob Stinson's rapidly diminishing role in the band or self-consciousness, I can't say-- is that the Replacements would never again sound convincing on a dumb rocker the way they had so many times over on those first four records. You take "Run It" from Hootenanny or "Customer" from Sorry Ma and place them alongside "Dose of Thunder" or "Lay It Down Clown", and the latter seem downright anemic. The Replacements were having a harder time with "silly," something that was as natural as breathing in the early days, but they kept trying all the way until the end.
Tim's other big problem is the sound. The remastering on all of these discs is done well, but problems with Tim go much deeper. Originally produced by Tommy Erdelyi of the Ramones, Tim comes over as thin, limp, and weirdly distant, hitting with less than half the force of the Let It Be. Ironically, since Erdelyi is a drummer, Chris Mars' percussion is especially feeble. The six bonus tracks included throw the production shortcomings into relief. The demo of "Kiss Me on the Bus"-- recorded with Erdelyi, but it sounds live in studio-- is raw and direct. The two outtakes of "Can't Hardly Wait"-- a song that wouldn't be officially released until Pleased to Meet Me, one acoustic and one electric-- both suggest a sonic road not taken in addition to highlighting how much Westerberg refined songs over time.
Pleased to Meet Me could be heard as an overcompensation for Tim's failings. Much was made of it being a digital recording, which in 1987 was seen as extravagant, the kind of thing Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits indulged in. "Look ma, no hiss!" read a review discussing the moment of silence between the horn hits in "Can't Hardly Wait" (the fact that there were horns to hit-- not to mention strings-- was also shocking) and Pleased to Meet Me was presented as the Replacements finally ready for the big time. The reality, though, is that the record was all over the place, too schizophrenic for the band to be easily grasped, kind of like Hootenanny with fleshed-out ideas, more confidence, and way better songs. Here the Replacements were tacking cocktail jazz ("Nightclub Jitters"), wholly acoustic ballads (the gorgeous "Skyway"), gritty proto-grunge ("The Ledge"), and paying tribute to their Memphis surroundings-- local hero Jim Dickinson produced-- on buoyant, Big Star-channeling power-pop ("Can't Hardly Wait" and "Alex Chilton").
Perhaps with Bob Stinson now out of the band (he died of drug-related causes a decade later), Westerberg felt freer to experiment, to try genres that would have been given an ironic reading a few years earlier. The obligatory burners ("Shooting Dirty Pool" and "Red Red Wine") once again feel forced, but Westerberg more than made up with that with three of the best rock songs he ever wrote: "I.O.U.", "Never Mind", and "Valentine". More personal and specific than their counterparts on Tim, this trio is littered with lines that bands since have built an entire identity on. Songs like "Birthday Gal" and "Photo", which didn't make the record and are now included as bonuses, suggest that Westerberg was on a songwriting roll, and alternate versions of "Alex Chilton" and "Can't Hardly Wait" are welcome.
And then the bottom dropped out. Or, so the story goes, anyway. For many, Don't Tell a Soul, with its slick production-- saxophones and violins were one thing, but synths?-- and generally muted tone spelled the end of the Replacements as we knew them, and the only point to debate is whether this record or All Shook Down was their career nadir. "End of the Replacements as we knew them" I can agree with, but then, they were pretty much a new band with each of their two previous records as well. Don't Tell a Soul was met with plenty of derision at the time, but an even larger reason for its bad rep since likely has to do with the fact that this is the sound emulated by the Replacements worshipers that took the band's somewhere bigger, your Goo Goo Dolls and Ryan Adams types. Not to mention that you can hear echoes of Westerberg's lackluster 90s solo output throughout, and "I Won't" is possibly the most unconvincing rocker they ever recorded, with its wailing harmonica and a mix that sounds like four guys recorded their parts on different continents.
But I submit that the softer, more careful, and certainly more polished band on display here-- one clearly hoping to straddle the gulf between college rock and MTV's "120 Minutes" and pop radio-- succeeds on its own terms. "Asking Me Lies" and "Talent Show" are damn catchy pop songs, and the latter is both bravely dorky ("It's the biggest thing in my life, I guess/ Look at us, we're nervous wrecks/ Hey, we go on next") and, as especially revealed in the superior studio demo included as a bonus, has a great riff. Ballads "Achin' to Be" and "They're Blind" are a little on-the-nose lyrically, but they capture that "I want the world to know that I'm special, but I also want to hide in a closet" feeling endemic to being a teenager as well as anything this side of Morrissey. And "I'll Be You" completely transcends its production and could fight for a spot in an all-time Replacements top 10. The bonus tracks here also might be the strongest of this whole batch, with the fine country-ish "Portland" (its "Too late to turn back, here we go" chorus was cannibalized for "Talent Show"), straightforward studio demos that show the hearts of good songs beating beneath the plastic exterior ("Talent Show" and "We'll Inherit the Earth"), and an appealingly weird studio goof with Tom Waits that's almost as good as that sounds (B-side "Date to Church").
All Shook Down, originally envisioned as Westerberg's solo debut, really does feel like the end, and it's not a happy one. The acoustic guitars are out in full force, singing is hushed, and Westerberg made much of the record with studio musicians, with only a couple of tracks featuring contributions from Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars, and Slim Dunlap, (the latter replaced Bob Stinson on Don't Tell a Soul). There are some pretty good songs-- "Merry Go Round", "When It Began"-- but the overall mood is sleepy, fatigued, and some of the songwriting feels rote ("Bent Out of Shape", "Attitude") with melodies and chords plugged in in a predictable way. Westerberg still had a way with a heart-tugging ballad ("Sadly Beautiful") but even then, that fine line between the affectingly melancholy and self-pityingly morose is crossed with some regularity. The bonus material here, appropriately enough, is by far the least interesting of the eight records, consisting mostly of warbly lo-fi demos. When Westerberg emerged with two underwritten, slight, but ultimately fun solo tunes on the Singles soundtrack two years later, it was like a breath of fresh air. All Shook Down is depressing in ways only partly intended.
The Replacements may never have figured out what kind of band they wanted to be or how they wanted to sound after leaving Twin/Tone, but there's still a clear thread binding almost all of their work together, and that was the worldview of Paul Westerberg. He didn't just tell stories with his songs, though he could do that too; he offered a way of looking at things that seemed both disarmingly familiar and previously unarticulated. Westerberg's POV also dovetailed perfectly with his band's career arc in a way that in retrospect seems uncanny. He celebrated people with talent who were scared of growth, those ready to upset the natural order of things not out of careful consideration of power relationships-- as was the case with politically oriented punk-- but because they were either hopelessly bored, had a childlike curiosity, or were just plain afraid. The outlook he tapped into was more universal than he could have imagined, and had been underrepresented in rock music until he came along. Now, of course, they're indie rock staples. The Replacements' influence on the alt-rock explosion of the 90s has been overstated, but their approach has continued to resonate in smaller scenes, where you feel like you're experiencing music up close, less mediated by rock star iconography. Their songs touch on some heavy shit, the kind of feelings best expressed in a more intimate space, but there's also plenty of room in there for some laughs. That kind of mixed-up place is right where the Replacements belong.


Pared back to a duo, the storied Austin band sounds unexpectedly winsome on their revelatory tenth album.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: X: The Godless Void and Other Stories

X: The Godless Void and Other Stories

Even by ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead’s notoriously grandiose standards, X: The Godless Void and Other Stories is one hell of a proggy album title. Likewise, the accompanying cover painting—of demon-eyed lions and dragons flanking a mysterious woman wearing psychedelic armor that looks like melting flesh—is catnip for those who prefer their albums partitioned into roman-numeraled suites and their dice to come with 20 sides. But for a band so enamored with dramatic flourishes that they named their new album’s opening crescendo “The Opening Crescendo,” the boldest thing about X: The Godless Void and Other Stories is its relative humility and grace.
For all the musical and personnel changes this band has undergone over the years, it’s easy to forget Trail of Dead began as a two-piece featuring revolving singers/guitarists/drummers Conrad Keely and Jason Reece—and now, a quarter century into their existence, that’s where they find themselves once again. But The Godless Void is less a scrappy back-to-basics move than a full-circle summation of where this band has been and a glimpse into where its principals could be headed as they approach their 50s. Sure, this album features all the churning noise, machine-gunned drum rolls, and regal piano interludes you’d expect from a Trail of Dead record, and the towering centerpiece track “Children of the Sky” has the sweep and swagger of a Source Tags & Codes standard. But while Trail of Dead have always been driven by a fearless, go-for-broke sense of conviction, The Godless Void taps into a more sobering and introspective vein as they grapple with the aging artist’s eternal lament: How do you find your passion and purpose when your heart’s just not in it?
After six years of living in Cambodia, Keely returned to the band’s home base of Austin in 2018, and not by choice. As a UK native who had lived in America on a green card, Keely was forced to come back to the U.S. to retain his residency status. Keely’s Cambodia retreat was, by his account, a relaxing experience spent playing with local country bands and putting together his playfully eclectic solo album. By contrast, his Stateside reunion with Reece occurred at a time when it felt like America was coming apart at the seams. That sense of displacement and disappointment is all-consuming on The Godless Void. The album’s first proper song, “All Who Wander,” is the sound of feeling frustrated but too defeated to fight, with Keely cataloging his ennui (“When you wanna breathe/ But no air can be found”) over a muscular, wah-wah-slathered groove imbued with struggle and strain.
He usually pushes his voice to the breaking point in order to compete with the band’s crashing arrangements, but Keely is surprisingly subdued here, not so much seizing the spotlight as haunting the shadows. The acoustic melancholy of “Something Like This” is less dream-pop than insomnia-pop, a bleary-eyed Keely teetering on existential crisis as he tries to reacquaint himself with his fretboard: “I’m sure the chords went something like this/I don’t know if I can sing them like I did before/Or if I can feel them anymore.” That desire to reconnect with his muse is amplified by echoes of the group’s past: the looped band-name chant that opens that record evokes their 1999 masterwork Madonna, while “Gravity” repurposes lyrics from So Divided’s cheeky travelogue “Eight Day Hell” into a sorrowful expression of romantic longing. In the album’s most affecting turn, “Don’t Look Down,” he bids adieu to the one he left behind over an urgent jangle-pop sprint. Trail of Dead have covered The Replacements in the past, but this is the first tune of theirs that could be credibly covered by Paul Westerberg.
While Trail of Dead have plenty of melodic songs in their canon, never before have they sounded so wistful and wounded. However, where Reece has often served as the aggro counterpoint to Keely’s vulnerable moments, here he provides borderline-joyful catharsis, turning the alt-metal wallop of the title track into a heroic mantra and forging the middle ground between Beatlesque psychedelia and ’80s heartland arena-rock on “Blade of Wind.” Of course, it wouldn’t be a Trail of Dead record without the occasional tip of the scales into pure bombast—see the doomy eco-parable “Who Haunts the Haunter”—but it feels out of place on a record that thrives in more intimate, personal spaces. Elaborate but rarely ostentatious, The Godless Void is a true revelation from a band 25 years into the game—the rare Trail of Dead record that lets Keely’s shell-shocked performances chart the necessary emotional peaks without needing the music to follow suit.


T.I.’s eleventh album is more concerned with sprinting alongside Atlanta’s new generation than with cementing his legacy or exploring his politics.

T.I.: The L.I.B.R.A. (The Legend Is Back Running Atlanta)

On 2018’s “Ye vs. the People,” T.I. gave Kanye West an earful about publicly supporting Donald Trump. He played devil’s advocate to West’s MAGA-hat musings, and in the process, found a way to bring his characteristically thoughtful, loud, and direct public commentary to music. T.I. dropped his tenth album, Dime Trap, soon after, picking up where “Ye vs. the People” left off with a loving sendoff to the trap music subgenre he’d ushered into existence 15 years earlier. Dime Trap positioned T.I. as a veteran on the cusp of a major career turn—ready to tackle the tensions that his politics bring to his music. Two years later, T.I.’s eleventh studio album The L.I.B.R.A. (The Legend Is Back Running Atlanta) represents the first taste of what promised to be a new era. But though it arrives during the world’s worst modern pandemic and widespread social unrest (topics that T.I. has engaged publicly), it has nearly nothing to say about the moment at hand. The L.I.B.R.A. is more concerned with sprinting alongside Atlanta’s new generation than with cementing his legacy or exploring his politics.
In 2020, T.I. has seemingly tried harder than ever to become the spokesperson of Black America. The L.I.B.R.A. looks past this, leaving his passionate speeches on the internet. Opening track “The L.I.B.R.A. Introduction” sets the tone with a mythologization of the rapper’s story, courtesy of comedian Ms. Pat. “Do you know how hard it is to have to flip the script and odds into your favor?” she asks, calling the rapper the “baddest motherfucker in Atlanta” and noting that, 20 years in, he still doesn’t have any grey hair in his beard. That seemingly meaningless observation sticks in your brain as The L.I.B.R.A. goes on, a reminder of what the album is really focused on: proving that T.I. is just as capable of being rap’s “it” guy as anyone half his age.
Plenty of rappers pine for the attention of younger generations, but it’s especially grating given T.I.’s propensity to speak about topics that actually define our times. “Pardon,” with its use-once-and-toss instrumental, is primarily a means of attempting to rap like guest star Lil Baby. “Hit Dogs Holla,” an ominous, bass-knocking brag fest featuring Florida rapper and Grand Hustle signee Tokyo Jetz, is the kind of high-energy missile that any current Atlanta rapper would sound at home over. These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.
L.I.B.R.A. leaves the heavy thematic lifting to interludes featuring Black women, but even those are a mixed bag because half of them are focused on T.I. Ms. Pat’s adoring opening is nearly identical to Rapsody’s “Air & Water Interlude,” a wasted opportunity for one of hip-hop’s most talented women, who uses her wondrous poetic dexterity to explain that “Without T.I.P., the world might tip.” By the time a message of substance arrives, the album’s already halfway complete. On “Fire & Earth Interlude,” actress Ernestine Johnson Morrison delivers a poignant spoken-word piece about the Black community. But, weirdly, it features a hypocritical moment where Johnson says, “I dare you to rap about anything but your pussy/Or how good you suck his—/How good you look and how tight your Fashion Nova fit/I remember when rap queens really used to spit.” You want to cringe at the audacity, then roll your eyes when you realize that nearly the entire album up until that point is about how good T.I. looks and acts.
The most memorable moments on L.I.B.R.A. come when T.I. introduces the real young people he keeps up with: his children. On standout “Family Connect,” T.I. brings in his son Domani Harris to express how it feels to live in his father’s shadow. Domani handles the topic with dexterity: “I’m most definitely my daddy’s son, it’s no denyin’/I used to run from my last name/I was mortified of being that nigga that live off a nigga at 25.” T.I. feigns curiosity in his response, but you can tell he’s a little hurt. “Ridin’ round in a Vanquish, tryna stop for complainants/’Cause my kids won’t let me help ’em and I just can’t ascertain it,” he says. The closer, which features T.I.’s daughter Deyjah Harris speaking about her Black experience, doesn’t make up for the album’s lack of a political voice, but it offers a bit of soul—something there should have been more of altogether.
For the duration of his career, T.I. has been obsessed with respect, to the point of proclaiming that he would die to have it put on his name. With that in mind, The L.I.B.R.A. looks like death by a thousand cuts—an album so obsessed with claiming respect, and with fitting in, that it doesn’t truly need to exist. In searching for the respect that he’s already earned over the course of his career, T.I. suddenly appears to occupy a position where people might fail to acknowledge it at all.

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Despite its title, Joseph O’Connell’s second release for Western Vinyl is his most distinctive release to date, an elegant study of life’s circularity set against a backdrop of slowcore folk and woozy rock.

Genericana

On his umpteenth album as Elephant Micah, Joseph O’Connell transforms his comfortable Midwestern folk into something harder to define. The compact six-song cycle—only his second record on Western Vinyl, after many years of self-releasing—begins and ends with the sound of staticky waves crashing through stereo channels. These are the most pronounced of many subtle concentric circles that ripple through the album’s lyrics and structure. 2015’s Where in Our Woods was a pretty good Will Oldham record, but it was more deserving of the hilarious title Genericana than the slowcore folk and woozy rock, colored with analog electronics and vocal delays, that composes O’Connell’s most distinctive release to date. If Arthur Russell had been a product of the Elephant 6 collective rather than downtown New York art music, he might have written songs like this. But there’s more to Genericana than that.
The change in Elephant Micah’s music feels at least partly related to a change in scenery. A former resident of Indiana, where he worked as a folklorist, O’Connell now lives in North Carolina, a couple of hours from the coast. If his old music had something familiar, landlocked, and level about it, Genericana is shaped by both the stranger’s fresh perspective on new terrain and the ambient call of the sea. There’s also a new toy in play: Working with his brother Matt, who is a former Moog employee, and Jason Evans Groth of Magnolia Electric Co., O’Connell built an analog synth he calls the Mutant. A small console with (of course) a woodgrain finish, its wet, spongy, gentle timbre endows O’Connell’s sparse, low-slung percussion and spindrift guitar licks with oceanic depth and weight.
I just segued sharply from nature to technology, it’s true—but that’s because O’Connell does it, too. Genericana is discreetly meta, conflating the natural world and the mechanical medium that captures it. This juxtaposition and O’Connell’s fixation on circles whorl together most elegantly on opener “Surf A.” The bass thumps as slowly and evenly as O’Connell’s lonesome voice does, while the Mutant burps and moans forlornly. “If I were a taper, I’d magnetize this tone, press rewind at the end,” he sings. At one point, with vocal delays, he adds, “Go around on the track. I’d circle and come back.” The song churns with wheels within wheels, O’Connell’s voice wrapping around itself like the album does, and like the sea, and like magnetic tape, and like, if we follow the line to its logical conclusion, life itself. The simple, longing strains conceal a thorny philosophical question: Eternal recurrence, anyone?
Just one hissing cymbal serves as the song’s muted climax. O’Connell isn’t given to grand, impulsive gestures; he prefers patient development and sculpting. “Surf A” bears such careful scrutiny because it funds the rest of the album with its circular motifs. They go underground in “Fire A,” a trad palate cleanser with lazy, sweet tangles of electric guitar and peaceful vocal refrains, and “Life B,” a minimalist dream pastoral that wills itself into motion with stoical slowness. Then they resurface in two songs—“Fire B,” which gives the Mutant’s wobbly trills an interlaced workout, and “Surf B,” a crashing rock finale—where the opener’s rhetorical structure and vocal melody recombine, like the solution to an equation.
It would come as no surprise if there were an arcane mathematical structure behind Genericana’s deliberate permutations of words, melodies, and textures. But you don’t need to know what it is. You feel it as a force, a sort of inward spiral—a circle shrinking to a point, a pinhole through which the circle bursts back into fullness. “We start all over again. Let it turn into dust. It’s gone, whatever it was,” O’Connell concludes, but nothing’s gone. We’re cycled back to the rolling waves where we began, the same words and gestures snapping into their preordained places again.