In light of David Bowie’s passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums. David Bowie’s third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs, is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”–a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration.

Diamond Dogs

After a 1977 performance that still ranks among the wildest, most manic musical performances to ever hit daytime TV, Iggy Pop chats with talk show host Dinah Shore, the top-charting female singer of the ’40s, with his collaborator pal David Bowie by his side; jazz vet Rosemary Clooney flanks Shore. Their interview is mutually respectful and endearingly sincere even as the host tries to navigate Pop’s nihilistic answers. Aiming to steer the conversation in a positive direction, she asks her guest if he’s influenced anybody, and the punk pioneer—much to everyone’s delight—nonchalantly replies, “I think I helped wipe out the ’60s.”
Great quote, but here’s the thing: Pop never sold enough to do that directly. Instead, it was Bowie, his most ambitious student, who revolutionized ’70s music and style by uncovering the discomfort and despair of urban life that hippie idealism denied. His third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs—Bowie’s first record of original material since killing off the Ziggy Stardust character that made him an instant superstar back home—remains rooted in his still-reigning glam scene that knocked most utopian ’60s rockers off the UK charts with glistening shards of pansexuality, sci-fi fantasy, and bespangled spectacle. His bleakest album until recent swan song Blackstar, Diamond Dogs is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”—a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. Whereas Ziggy features its titular messiah, Diamond Dogs has jackals that live on corpses the way Bowie fed off rotting urban culture and reckless rock’n’roll.
The last glam gasp of Bowie’s English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with “Rebel Rebel,” an Iggy Pop–like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal “peoploids” that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it.
As befitting a post-apocalyptic work, Dogs was born from the frustration of failed opportunities. Bowie initially endeavored to create a TV musical adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian milestone 1984—until the social critic’s widow refused permission. Around the same time, Rolling Stone’s London bureau arranged for Bowie and William S. Burroughs to interview each other, which introduced the singer to the author’s Nova Express. Immediately thereafter, Bowie began penning lyrical non sequiturs via that novel’s cut-up technique, and planned a Ziggy musical to be similarly shuffled each night. This, too, faltered, although it inspired new tunes. These two projects, sharing dystopian themes, fused together to form the mutant Dogs.
While all this was happening, Bowie shed the Spiders From Mars, who enabled his transformation from folky space oddity to eclectic, hard-rocking freak. The biggest break was with guitarist Mick Ronson, whose biting, formally schooled style and arrangements had redefined Bowie. Rather than replacing his sidekick, the singer handles most guitar parts himself, as well as contributing sax and electronic keyboards while solely producing this emphatically solo project. Tony Visconti—who oversaw 1970’s metallic The Man Who Sold the World while providing bass guitar—returns only to assist the final mix and fulfill the singer’s request for “Barry White strings” on “1984”; he’d later co-produce much of Bowie’s output. If you measure his albums by how much he calls the shots and actually plays, Diamond Dogs is the Bowie-est one of all.
He sets the scene with “Future Legend,” a spoken-word intro soundtracked by synths evoking dripping Dalí clocks, buzzing bee guitars quoting “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and other experimental studio scuzz. This slides into the bonking backward cowbell of the title track, which filters the Stones’ slam-bam boogie through a woozy mix. “As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent/You asked for the latest party,” it begins—a line Bowie later admitted as self-descriptive. Set in forthcoming years yet capturing the squalor of then-contemporary London, New York, and the Eastern Bloc nations through which Bowie recently passed, the lurid lyrics flash with gang violence: “The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees/Hunt you to the ground they will/Mannequins with kill appeal.” The vibe is celebratory despite the menace, if unstable—right down to the track’s note-bending central riff. Contemporary critics mourned Ronson’s absence, but Bowie’s guitar here and throughout the album is thrillingly off-kilter with unconventional chord fragments that the Edge, Sonic Youth, shoegazers, and dream-poppers alike would draw from for decades to come.
Because Bowie so convincingly portrayed decay, it went often unacknowledged how far he advanced his compositional and arrangement skills in just a few post–“Space Oddity” years. Their showcase, “Sweet Thing” / “Candidate” / “Sweet Thing (Reprise),” begins with Bowie growling at the bottom of his register, but even before the chorus hits, he’s wailing near the top of his tenor while Mike Garson’s tinkling jazz keys supply the sophistication Bowie’s squawking guitars deny. Topically shifting from a hustler turning tricks to a politician spewing empty promises to cocaine’s brain-freezing bliss, the suite’s interconnected segments assert that all three demand submission to all-conquering power—this concept album’s central theme. The tempo accelerates as his poetry gains density, then subsides again as the melody soars before surrendering to guitars that grind with metronomic precision until sputtering out on the root note of the opening chord on the album’s masterstroke.
As melodically constricted as that suite was expansive, “Rebel Rebel” is Bowie’s answer to all those deliciously dumb Sweet, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and T. Rex hits he indirectly enabled during glam’s peak. Androgyny is subtext to these acts, but the main man, per usual, pushes it to the forefront: “You’ve got yer mother in a whirl/She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl,” goes the opening line, but he never definitively assigns gender: Bowie’s dissident has torn [their] dress, but wants to “be there when they count up the dudes.” Yet there’s nothing ambiguous about that glorious guitar groove, the track’s stomping beat, the “hot tramp” pause between both, and their return. If Bowie often drifted above listeners’ heads, here he shoots straight at their solar plexus and scores with what ranks among the greatest, most insistent riffs of the ’70s. Rockers who’d dismissed Bowie as a dandy now gave the dude a pass.
Aside from a stray super-Bowie line about lizards crying in the heat, Side 2’s opening track, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” is even more forthright—a ballad of appreciation for his fans that provides reprieve from the sleaze and offers further proof that Bowie could belt. It’s stagey to be sure, but so is it sincere. “I’ve found the door that lets me out,” he positively roars; performance sets him free.
The album is queasy soul music signifying soullessness; on the Shaft-like tableau “1984,” he rewrites Orwell’s authoritarian state as a worldwide ghetto populated by junkies overseen by surgeon thugs who manipulate thoughts and misguide identities, all set to wah-wah guitars. The album culminates perversely, joyfully, as “Big Brother” segues into “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” a fuzzed-out danse macabre where irregular time signatures alternate every few measures and the percussion keeps changing accents; there’s no center, just brief, blissful release before a stuttering loop of Bowie yelping in distress fades as if to black.
All this hopelessness and annihilation would be suffocating if it weren’t for Bowie’s exuberance. He throws himself into Orwell’s draconian hell as if strutting around in Kansai Yamamoto’s Aladdin Sane–era bodysuit; it fits his skeletal contours. Determined to reaffirm his relevance in spite of his setbacks, the singer sparkled so brightly that he offset the darkness of his material. Just as Watergate was coming to a boil, singer-songwriters and prog-rockers were glutting the charts, and ’60s resistance was morphing into ’70s complacency, this sweet rebel (rebel) made revolution strangely sexy again. Glaring at you from Dogs’ cover with canine hindquarters and emaciated features like the circus sideshow Freaks he footnotes in the title cut, he served notice that rock’s outsiders remained more compelling than the softies who increasingly occupied its center, even as his ever-growing popularity chipped away at it. You can bet Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television sat up and took notes.


One of a handful of new artists making exquisitely crafted, ear-opening forays into drone collects his limited-run output onto a 2xCD set.

Rifts

Though it sometimes feels like drone music will be forever relegated to the fringes of the indie world, an impressive batch of bands and labels have sprung up recently to counter that idea. Alongside bigger acts such as Sunn O))) and Grouper (not true drone, but plenty drone-y), artists like Emeralds, Black to Comm, and Yellow Swans are each tugging the style into intriguing directions. Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never and shares a label with Emeralds, could plausibly be lumped into this group but also exists outside of it. Where others bring to bear a wide range of instrumentation in creating these glistening, open-ended sounds, Lopatin does so using only electronics (synthesizers and arpeggiators, primarily) and as a result, his music is arguably more distinctive and often more difficult to pin down.
Because he's worked outside the label structure and released albums on limited-run cassette and CD-R until now, Lopatin's music also hasn't been easy to find. But Rifts, a 2xCD collection of his material since 2003 (including all three Oneohtrix Point Never full-lengths-- Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), seeks to correct that by compiling just about everything he's recorded as OPN to date. At two and a half hours long, it's a dizzying amount of music and virtually impossible to absorb in one sitting but for anyone with a passing interest in drone or ambient music, it's worth setting aside the time.
Part of the reason Rifts feels like a crucial listen is that Lopatin's approach is so thoroughly his own, to the point that trying to attach it to one genre doesn't really work. At turns icy and serene, at others frenetic and twisted, it feels like a modern sci-fi remake of minimalism and kosmiche-- there are long, repetitious builds with big openings between notes that suggest vast space and long drift. Intricate synth arrangements unfurl over long stretches in tracks like "Immanence" and "Ships Without Meaning" to create a sense of endless glide. In this capacity, Lopatin proves he can reconstruct drone on his own terms, but on Rifts' more forceful, tech-y songs he shows that's not the only trick up his sleeve.
The three LPs joined together in Rifts were supposedly intended as a trilogy, and while they do work as a unified whole, it seems wisest to approach the record as a compilation. The sheer size of it is daunting and you don't lose much by listening to its separate movements individually. Within these smaller pieces, Lopatin oscillates between the long-form mechanized whir described above and shorter tracks that push the album forward and draw back your attention after lengthy drifts. More Blade Runner than 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Computer Vision" and "Betrayed in the Octagon" use chopped-up, rapid-fire synths for propulsion and quick tonal shifts to add color. This is precisely the kind of music some would criticize as robotic and unfeeling, but for such heavily computerized sounds, Lopatin also shows a way with mood-- a song like "A Pact Between Strangers" is dark and threatening, like walking into a strange home with all the lights off.
But maybe what's most impressive about Rifts is that Lopatin creates a singular kind of noise-- there just aren't many albums out there that sound like this-- and rides it for nearly three hours without repeating himself very often. In this sense, the recent LP it reminds me of is Dâm-Funk's Toeachizown, in that the vibe is inseparable from the artist, clearly the work of one person with a novel agenda and the chops to see it through to the finish. And like Dâm-Funk's, it's the type of music that doesn't knock you over the head at first, but sort of seeps into your pores over time, uncovering new pleasures when you inevitably come back for more.


This newly-reissued 1982 dub reggae album carries historical heft as one of the last times three of the form’s titans would work together. There’s a halcyon sweetness to its 10 mellow grooves.

King Tubby & the Aggrovators: Dubbing in the Backyard

Dubbing in the Backyard

At this point, there are an exhaustive amount of dub reggae reissues on the market, though 1982’s Dubbing in the Backyard has a bit more historical significance. Featuring three titans of the form—producer Bunny “Striker” Lee, engineer Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, and mixer Lloyd “Prince Jammy” James—the trio had worked on numerous tracks throughout the 1970s. But soon after these sessions, Tubby would learn that his right hand man Jammy was using the famed studio to cut dubplates for other clients on the sly, and overnight he changed the locks on his doors. In 1989, Tubby would be murdered outside his home. This obscure album was one of the last occasions their names would all appear on the same sleeve.
Just don’t let the cover image of three gents in repose on a front lawn fool you. The photo was taken in England, not in Jamaica. And it doesn’t correspond to the disc’s main men, as only Bunny Lee appears in the photo, elbow on his briefcase. While the dubs were made at Tubbys studio, Jammy is the one turning the knobs. And rather than Lee’s house band the Aggrovators, most of the instrumentals here were laid down by the High Times Band, who had just a bit of overlap with the Aggrovators. But the photo is truthful in some way, in that this album indeed makes for ideal outdoor, sunstruck listening; there’s a halcyon sweetness to the 10 mellow yet sneaky grooves that comprise this set.
Three of the tracks are dubs from the corresponding ’82 Delroy Wilson album Go Away Dream (which the Pressure Sounds label includes as part of a two-disc set, though both albums are available separately on vinyl and digitally). And there are also dubs of tracks from the likes of Cornell Campbell, Jackie Edwards, and Johnny Clarke. Jammy keeps the rhythms crisp, striking the perfect balance between spaciness and proximity in the kit on “Adventure”; the snares crack an inch from your nose and then careen outwards towards deep space. The reverb and delay that opens “Hot Weather” piles up like a rockslide before Jammy spaces everything out to a more languid pace.
For most of the set, the instrumentals don’t flash their dub effects, and the sudden turns into abstraction are all the more thrilling for of it. Nod along to the loping pulse of “Relaxing Mood” and you might notice, nearly three minutes in, that strange bloops and whirrs spring around the track now. The tiny echo of keys at the start of “Natural Glow” suggests crickets (though with a vinyl transfer, there’s a fair amount of surface noise to be heard on the quieter parts here) before the bass gets to rumbling and a toy whistle whirls in the upper register. An organ lick ripples outwards, making the track feel like it might just drift away from the surface of the earth. “Hideaway” dribbles hand drum, plinky piano, and a gliding guitar figure across the rhythm, Jammy deftly yanking open chasms of space via the high pass filter of the board. As the notes tell it, soon after Tubby locked Jammy out, that high pass filter on Tubby’s board broke down and certain effects were never possible again.
In fact, this iteration of dub would soon vanish completely. Jammy might have been locked out of Tubby’s studio, but he soon set up shop for himself. Thanks to a demo presented to him by high tenor vocalist Wayne Smith, plunked out on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, Jammy slowed the cheap digital sound down to a more reggae-friendly pace. The track they ultimately released in 1985, “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” dropped like an atomic bomb, introducing the era of digital dancehall in Jamaica. Nearly overnight, it rendered dub reggae as fashioned by a real band obsolete. Much as the title suggests, Dubbing in the Backyard is a perfect dub showcase for soundtracking those temporal summer afternoons, before the season irrevocably shifts.


On his first solo album in four years, Will Oldham dispenses the wisdom of his life and the anxiety of his present into some of his most intimate and compelling musical settings.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You

Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You

Will Oldham, now 53, has not sounded young for a quarter-century. Perhaps he last did in the waning days of Palace Music, back when he sang about wanting to “fuck a mountain” with unmistakable élan or fretted about wasting his life beneath the dim bar light, back when he was “younger folk as we.” But at least since I See a Darkness, his career-affirming 1999 debut as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Oldham has suggested the shellshocked canary emerging from some Kentucky coal mine, sharing the news of what he’d seen down below—death and sex, love and rejection, doom and wonder—in a prematurely aged warble. As a singer, Oldham has always seemed an anachronism against our perennial advance. As a bandleader, however, he has long been dubious of conventions, bending the folk, country, and blues forms he understood so deeply into radical, intuitive shapes. There have been ginger acoustic exceptions, of course, but from his ramshackle start to the gilded surrealism of 2019’s I Made a Place, Oldham has sought new settings for his antediluvian tone.
Drummer-less and devoid of electric instruments, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You—as stinging as a switch, as soft as a parent’s embrace—feels as if Oldham is finally facing both his age and place, reconciling them through quiet songs that speak loudly. He is the longtime troubadour and relatively new father loading whatever insights, aggravations, and ambitions he has gathered into songs that are close to the marrow, mostly clear of sinew. These dozen songs move as if written at a kitchen table as his family sleeps nearby, with quiet dawns illuminating anthems of perseverance and joy and rustling darkness supplying moments of apocalyptic vision. They sound domestic, too, like some friends with fiddles and horns simply swung by on a Sunday afternoon to try out some new stuff in the living room. “Usually I can be found with my family,” Oldham sings at one point with measured warmth, “courageous and careful and loving our now, and wow.”
As ever, Oldham does not shy from darkness. Just seconds after he hits the one-minute mark of opener “Like It or Not,” where a jaunty jangle is a Trojan horse for certain oblivion, he reminds us that “everyone dies in the end, so there’s nothing to hide.” There are goodbyes and losses, acts of vengeance and moments of scorn. Hand upon hand, his family marches into slaughter, and, at some inevitable point, the “grueling death bell knells.”
But Oldham wields these facts not as lamentations but as tools for better living. By and large, these songs are emphatic instruction manuals for a more robust existence because we’re always in the shadows of all kinds of ends—divorce, death, annihilation, whatever. Where he once famously wrote of his drive to live and not let go, not having the option of eternity now empowers him. He sings of that death bell, for instance, during the delightful “Behold! Be Held!,” his guileless paean to making music, to rendering life’s lessons in songs we can share. “Bananas” continues the esteemed tradition of Oldham’s funny and sweet songs about sex, as he fills “every hole with something warmer than the dawn.” And though it is just Oldham and a carefully picked guitar, “Rise and Rule (She Was Born in Honolulu)” is an anthem of rising above, its protagonist building a world of which she can be proud against impossible odds. It’s so stirring you may feel like shouting along, even while Oldham almost whispers.
Meanwhile, the tender mid-album tandem, “Sing Them Down Together” and “Kentucky Is Water,” encourages us to discard what we think we know, or to remain open to the certainty that none of us actually know very much at all. “Never try to deny a wind its blowing,” he sings during the latter, a Buddha-informed lullaby for other parents or anyone open to more empathy and experience. “The moment you do, your heart will be lost to eternity.” These are Oldham’s little lectures on learning and loving, musically stripped of the need to be anything other than efficient and memorable. They just are.
Oldham’s real gifts come in songs about standing up not necessarily for yourself but for the things that give your world shape and meaning. It is clear in “Willow, Pine and Oak,” where he deploys arboreal observations to extol his dearest virtues, like the oak’s strength, patience, and usefulness. So canny and rich with folk knowledge, the beauty feels like some Seeger family standard. That sense is just as clear from its successor and seeming antagonist, “Trees of Hell,” a timorous and Tolkien-like scene where the peaceful organisms we’ve defiled for our every need finally have their revenge. “We saw inherent harmony, assumed it was our gift,” he sings over a strangling string drone and mandolin plucks that intimate the tick-tock of a doomsday clock. Early in the album, Oldham avers that the sight of justice makes us grin; however sinister this scenario may seem, then, there is a gratifying righteousness at its core.
Two years ago, I called Oldham to talk about Michael Hurley, the inveterate trickster and songwriter who has served as a sort of spiritual forebear for his music and mythology. He wanted to know if I’d seen the photograph of Hurley and Merle Haggard meeting in Ohio, the mischievous Snock extending his skinny hand to the outlaw country legend. “One of the greatest photographs—M.H. squared, my biggest heroes,” he said, still gobsmacked. “Seeing those two together is so much.” More than any other Oldham album, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You represents that unlikely nexus. The songs are homespun and simple and ineffably strange, like the best of Hurley. But they deliver the well-earned and incisive takeaways that was Haggard at his best, too. It is a rare combination from anyone, and Oldham is the vanishingly rare songwriter who has become both more emotionally generous and lyrically efficient as he’s aged. Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.


Despite a crowded field, Public Memory's Robert Toher mostly succeeds in creating a dark electronic landscape that is his own—and slightly claustrophobic at that.

Wuthering Drum

Public Memory is the solo nom de plume of Robert Toher, a Brooklyn-based musician who formerly served time as a member of Eraas and Apse. While those projects blurred the edges of rambling space rock and synthy post-punk, Public Memory dives headlong down the electronic darkwave rabbit hole, exploring a Korg-constructed sonic palette that weaves together a variety of primitive beats, delicately employed samples (bells, chimes, the weeping of ghosts), and woozy electronics that sound as if they might have been recorded at the bottom of a lake. Created over the course of a year while Toher was temporarily decamped in Los Angeles, Wuthering Drum is a work of restrained gloom—a remarkably textured electronic record whose minimalist tendencies keep it from collapsing under the weight of its own moribund aesthetic.
One of the problems with making dark electronic music has to do with the fact that so much of it already exists. Music that is already so immediately in thrall to its influences often comes off as pale imitation, a weird facsimile of something we’ve heard again and again and again. It’s to Toher’s credit that Wuthering Drum largely avoids goth pastiche. The ten tracks offered here rarely stray too far past the three-minute mark, which means there isn’t much time for the songs to meander or overstay their welcome. While it’s easy to play spot the influences with the songs on Wuthering Drum—there are nods to krautrock, as well as songs that conjure the ghosts of Fad Gadget, Suspiria-era Goblin and early Cabaret Voltaire—Toher largely succeeds in creating an electronic landscape that is wholly his own.
Rather than provide a series of peaks and valleys, Wuthering Drum is mostly one sustained valley in which the predominant vibe is dirge. “Mirror” moves with all the percussive relentlessness of a chain gang—a chugging beat offset by the sound of shakers, tambourine and celestial bells. Elsewhere, “Ringleader” and “As You Wish” unspool in largely the same manner—somber, elegantly plodding, chorus-free–with Toher’s disembodied vocals floating throughout. It’s only in the album's second half that the inertia finally breaks. “Zig Zag” is the record’s closest flirtation with a pop moment (via a finger-snap of a drum beat and a spooky synth hook) while “Earwig” breaks the sustained tension by introducing just a hint of what sounds like sampled steel drums and the faintest crack of what could be the lazer beam sound effect from an old Atari game. It’s hard to know, actually, since these sounds flitter into and out of the songs so quickly and quietly that they sometimes barely register; it’s only after repeated listens that subtle layering in these compositions start to make sense.
If there’s a problem with Wuthering Drum it might just be a lack of dynamics. All the songs are definitely of a piece and the album provides no shortage of sustained atmosphere, but there is a stifling sameness to these songs that makes them hard to differentiate. Adding to that are Toher’s vocals—a kind of warbly falsetto that brings to mind the warped new wave of an old Blank Dogs record, or something like the sound of a very tremulous apparition anxiously singing to you from another room. As a result, the vocals hover at the edges of these songs with a kind of hopeless disaffection that eventually becomes numbing, you keep wishing for a howl or a yelp or a scream that might punctuate the airless, suffocating universe in which these songs seem to exist. That is not to say that the record is not often quite beautiful—in fact, the record sounds amazing—but you can’t help but wish that Toher might let his hair down a little more. Too often these songs pull back just when you want them to crack open—rather than build to some sort of satisfying conclusion, they simply end.
While lots of ostensibly “dark” music suffers lyrically from the cliché of sounding like tortured teenage poetry, the songs on Wuthering Drum eschew hackneyed doom-and-gloom in favor of near incomprehensibility. When Toher sings about “an alleged near disaster / long toothed man that runs” on album-opener “Heir” it’s all but impossible to know what/who he’s talking about, but ultimately that’s also part of the record’s charm. The evocative, fractured nature of Toher’s lyrics—paired with the austere sonic landscapes and willful ambiguity of these songs—is what sets Public Memory apart from so many other like-minded electronic acts mining similar territory. When the elements all come together in the right way—as they do on the record’s centerpiece, “Cul de Sac”–the results can be stunning. Over a funereal beat and a lilting piano melody that could serve as a long lost sonic cousin to Joy Division’s "The Eternal," Toher articulates the profound isolation at the album’s core: “I live in small room with all my things in place,” he sings, “I see no reason to pretend / lock the front door / shut the curtains / it’s a matter of dissent.” Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough.


The Cincinnati synth-punk trio dials up the energy on a zippy new album.

Half Eaten by Dogs

The Serfs’ 2020 debut, Sounds of Serfdom, seemed tailor-made to the tastes of the goth YouTube algorithm, where success scales with how '80s to-the-letter your band sounds—see the frictionless coldwave of Molchat Doma. The Cincinnati trio’s early releases scanned as little more than lo-fi imitations of their influences, nervy, bare-bones cartridges of minimal wave that played like Oppenheimer Analysis B-sides with less variation. But on their third album Half Eaten by Dogs, the Serfs up the ante, imbuing their once-pallid synth-punk with color and velocity.
Opener “Order Imposing Sentence” hurtles forward like a car on the brink of falling apart, stringing together clanking percussion, a spirited guitar riff, and shouted, Gun Club-style vocals. “Suspension Bridge Collapse” and “Cheap Chrome” have a similar liveliness. Like Sextile and Mandy, Indiana, the Serfs charge gritty post-punk with glitter of dance music, adding more gleam while retaining their own rough, spirited voice. “Club Deuce” is the serpentine gem at the album’s center: Bright, lucid synths pingpong across cavernous claps as keyboardist Andie Luman whispers cryptic nothings. The effect is intoxicating. While McCartney's vocals for The Serfs sometimes lend a soporific effect to the songs, distorted and flat, Luman’s ghostly presence elevates the intrigue.
Half Eaten by Dogs is noticeably frontloaded, slowing down in the back half. While these songs are mostly satisfying, they can start to feel like a drag. The dreamy glissade of “The Dice Man Will Become” lasts so long that it starts to feel immaterial; the closer “Mocking Laughter” peters into static, a disappointing ending to an album that’s so dynamic. But there’s still a strong spirit to the Serf’s songwriting, and they have stoked a remarkable fire beneath their sound, pushing themselves in a zippy and promising new direction.


Amsterdam label Music From Memory continues its revival of late-20th-century Mediterranean sounds with this collection of works by Spanish multi-instrumentalist Suso Sáiz's eclectic ’80s new age trio.

Orquesta De Las Nubes: The Order of Change

The Order of Change

It’s only in the past few years that the exquisite music that emanated from seemingly idyllic Mediterranean climes in the 1980s and ’90s has garnered appreciation beyond its native region and era. Thanks to timely reissues of albums by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro, Italians like Gigi Masin and Roberto Musci, and Spaniards Javier Bergia, Joan Bibiloni, Pep Llopis, and Suso Sáiz, these musicians’ graceful blending of new age, ambient, minimalism, jazz fusion, experimental, and world music have found resonance with a new generation. Amsterdam’s Music From Memory has been responsible for many of these reassessments—and the label continues to find novel dimensions in the work of multi-instrumentalist Sáiz, from its 2016 overview Odisea to last year’s moving new album, Rainworks.
The Order of Change finds Music From Memory revisiting Sáiz’s first group from the ’80s, Orquesta De Las Nubes, a rare new age ensemble. (In early 2019, the label will reissue Sáiz’s other revered project, Musica Esporádica.) These releases contain fascinating insight into post-Franco Spain. After four decades of an autocratic dictatorship that banned cultural products seen as non-Spanish and only ended with Franco’s death in 1975, the young Sáiz’s work evinces a hunger for new sounds from beyond his country’s borders. As he put it in one interview: “The end of the ’70s and the beginning of the ’80s was a time of great openness in every way. Spain and fundamentally Madrid became centers of curiosity, interest, and respect for difference and, therefore, a breeding ground for personal expressions.” With percussionist Pedro Estevan and soprano Mária Villa also captivated by the new music they were hearing from abroad, Sáiz’s trio ranged far and wide.
Sáiz is framed as a new age pioneer in Spain, but as this ten-track set plays, certain Western influences waft into view: Brian Eno’s ambient experiments; the crystalline, contemplative sound of ECM Records; the tribal-tinged improv of Art Ensemble of Chicago; the new age landscapes of future Sáiz collaborator Steve Roach. And Sáiz’s deep debt to Steve Reich’s minimalism is evident in the pulsing marimbas, guitar, and Villa’s wordless vocals that thrum across “El Orden del Azar.” The gravity-free serenity of “Tiempo de Espera” also gestures toward Reich, but with some new wrinkles that distance it from the likes of Music for 18 Musicians. As Villa’s airy “ahhhs” slide across the volume-pedal swells of Sáiz’s guitar and Estevan’s steadfast metallophone patterns for eight majestic minutes, the music exhibits a looseness, a shape-shifting openness, and a sense of collaborative interplay that Reich’s own work lacked. It’s a fitting approach for a band whose name translates as “Orchestra of Clouds.”
The Order of Change is not all amorphous floating, though. The album’s second half traces the trio’s evolution to tribal rhythms and sleeker ’80s electronics. Estevan’s African percussion and distant vocal chants nudge these gauzy sounds forward on “Cama Diarmónica,” and digital processing gnarls his drums to create the impression of an imminent thunderstorm on “Como Un Guante.” Only the closer, “Ella no Lleva Gafas,” feels out of place. Its whammy-bar fireworks do add a bit of rock to the mix, but not without rupturing the record’s spell. Eager as they were to incorporate new influences, Orquesta De Las Nubes excelled most when dissolving those sounds into their otherwise pleasant drift.


The former G-Unit rapper is not as dynamic or adventurous as many of his contemporaries, but his wisdom and skill make it hard not to get caught up in his second act.

Lloyd Banks: The Course of the Inevitable 2

The Course of the Inevitable 2

Not many rappers get second winds like Lloyd Banks. His come-up as a part of 50 Cent’s G-Unit is well-documented, and his punchline-heavy raps were once called “underrated” by Kanye West, a one-time rival of 50. On songs like G-Unit’s “Stunt 101” or Diddy’s “Victory 2004,” Banks’ clever wordplay and gruff monotone made him a sturdy foil for the more animated personalities of 50 and Young Buck. Eventually, his mix of gaudy flex raps and vivid storytelling led to his own solo albums and hits, peaking in the late 2000s, just before the era of swag rap took hold.
As he recently told GQ, creative “stagnation” after his 2010 album The Hunger for More 2 and the birth of his children in the mid-2010s led to an extended break from solo recording. Then, in 2021, he emerged with a new lease on hip-hop and The Course of the Inevitable, his first proper studio album in over a decade. Banks is an analog to roughneck workhorses like Roc Marciano and Griselda, so hearing him rap over that kind of production—with a new Beanie Sigel-esque grumble to his voice—was a full-circle moment for a strain of East Coast rap currently basking in the sun. Inevitable was a solid return to form, with Banks’ ice-cold reflections on street life slotting well into an era of Instagram stunting and renewed vigor for independent artists. The Course of the Inevitable 2, his latest project, is more of the same but without the extra benefit of his grand return to music. For better and for worse, he sinks deeper into his comfort zone.
Banks’ raps have always toed the line between the spoils he’s earned and the struggles it took to get them. He weaves between past and present—Louis Vuitton linens and close calls on the corner—so effortlessly his life comes across like an anthology series. Take the beginning of “No Reward,” where he wrings the drama out of his rags-to-riches story: “Too cerebral, off leader horses, the coupe’s medieval/Stayed to myself ’cause it’s hard for me to get used to people.” On “Menace,” he doesn’t just have thick skin—it’s “tough as Bacardi glass.” The whiplash of pain and pleasure continues to be his sweet spot, but it hits harder when he uses his years of experience for teachable moments. Standout track “Dead Roses” might as well be called “Free Game,” each line a terse nugget of wisdom (“Niggas gotta see your bloodstream to make your streams go up,” “Bangin’ on rumors, damn, I miss hanging up with my flip phone”). His role as a weathered rap veteran gives added weight to the Brazilian marble round tables and weed smoke blowing out of Ferraris he raps about on other songs.
While his writing can be vivid and compelling, the technical aspects of his bars aren’t as distinctive. Banks’ flows are as rigid and predictable as his subject matter, which adds a level of consistency but tends to make the 14-track project blur together. Only so many references to COVID and cancel culture can help make a song sound fresh. There are lyrical gems and occasional flow switches throughout songs like “Living Proof” and “Trapped,” but their production would barely pass muster on a “real hip-hop type beat 2022” YouTube search. In fact, most of the beats on Inevitable 2 skew generic, drawing from the same palette of muted drum patterns, piano stabs, and warbling synths. Producer Cartune, who handles eight songs, is particularly guilty, offering faceless boom-bap on “Menace” and “Traffic.” Attempts to switch things up lead to mixed results: Producer Mr. Authentic’s stagger-stepping beat on “Power Steering” give Banks’ words some room to breathe, but the hi-hats and warped sample of Fortnoxx’s “Fell in Love” sound like something Drake or Tyga would’ve rapped on four years ago. His stories are harder to invest in when the beats feel culled from discarded Elcamino or Estee Nack folders.
And that’s what’s most frustrating about The Course of the Inevitable 2—it works at a fundamental level but doesn’t leave an impression. Banks’ combination of above-it-all cool and rawness has inspired rappers from Griselda’s Benny the Butcher and Conway the Machine—both of whom appear on this project—to the madcap gonzo attitude of Papo2oo4. His influence is widespread, and his commitment to straight-edged bars is both a blessing and a curse, depending on the beat. He’s not as dynamic or adventurous as many of his contemporaries, but his wisdom and skill make it hard not to get caught up in his second act. “Mе and adversity cruise togethеr/Counted me out again? Yes, who do I owe the pleasure?” he raps on “Living Proof.” Banks is done proving himself—his only goal now is to stay the course.


Cohesive, focused, and flat-out fun, Guilty Simpson and Madlib have crafted one of the best hip-hop records of the year.

OJ Simpson

To be perfectly blunt, I was disappointed in Guilty Simpson's debut, Ode to the Ghetto. I mean, roughneck rhyming over J Dilla, Black Milk, and Oh No beats-- how could this fail? But for the most part, I felt like I stumbled upon an indie version of Memphis Bleek's M.A.D.E., where an embarrassment of production riches were squandered on someone who had no problem portraying himself as a token street soldier. A lot of people told me I'd underrated it, and listening to OJ Simpson, I'm inclined to go back and find out if they're right. Guilty Simpson's second record is so cohesive, so focused, and so flat-out fun, I'm amazed it's the work of the same guy.
What's at first striking is that two tracks of erratically paced skits and assorted chatter totaling about four minutes pass by before we actually hear Simpson rap. OJ Simpson is entirely produced by Madlib, so if that structure puts you in the mindset of either Madvillainy or Lord Quas, it's for good reason. Though it lacks the bottled-lightning brilliance and brevity of the former and the bugged-out demeanor of the latter, Madlib still tailors it to Simpson's individual talents. Through a haze of stand-up routines, half-remembered conversations, and fake news broadcasts, OJ feels like the work of someone equal parts class clown and playground bully, daydreaming about his next lay, next high, or, most often, next chance to knock some sucker out.
But while Madlib clearly plays a large role in determining the album's vision, it would be a mistake to overlook how Guilty Simpson rises to the occasion. While Simpson maintains his bullish, no-frills cadences, he's exponentially more playful and humane than he was on Ode to the Ghetto's gangsta to-do checklist. It's a pleasure to hear him spitball multi-layered rhymes that never call attention to their own ingenuity; you get something of a Simpson synopsis in a line like, "I go at your street with aggression/ The same way I go at a beat and wreck sessions/ Then shoot a load on your freak at Best Western."
But while OJ mostly stays within a zone of gunplay and battle rap, when Simpson delves into something other than his ability to hold his own on a mic or a barstool, he provides crucial insight to his surroundings. The rise-and-fall narrative of "Karma of a Kingpin" is a statement of the universality of the selectively scrupulous drug dealer that would justify his destructive trade by occasionally paying his customer's electric bill. Meanwhile, his J Dilla tribute "Cali Hills" reminds me of what Raekwon's "Ason Jones" did for Ol' Dirty Bastard, brave in its willingness to explore an occasional mundane humanity rather than legend or caricature. The only spot where OJ really falls flat is "Back on the Road Again", where Madlib's pitched-up sampling plays it a little too straight, and Simpson's wearied tour lament does the same.
But as highlights crop up throughout the sprawl-- Madlib's zombie funk on "Coroner's Music", the cyclical, effortless hooks of "Hood Sentence" and "New Heights"-- the temptation arises to strip OJ Simpson for parts. Yet, beyond providing important pivots for mood ("Something Bad" and "Something Good" in particular), a three-track run toward the end of the album that lacks any sort of interlude is strong, but a bit ordinary. If OJ Simpson really were just a quantum leap for Guilty Simpson as a rapper, it would already be one of the year's best surprises, but strange digressions and all, it's something that honors his legacy by sounding like it could hold its own within Stones Throw's impeccable mid-00s run.


The versatile Pittsburgh quartet polishes their scrappy, shoegaze-inspired indie rock on an album studded with references to local favorites and ’90s classics.

Somewhere Down Below

Gaadge’s cavernous sound and charismatic live performances in basements and bars have made them legends for a generation of Pittsburgh college students, and they’ve already served as mentors to another local breakout, feeble little horse. They won a cult following on the charm and warmth of DIY albums Gaadge and Yeah?, both full of addictive riffs and winning melodic hooks. On the quartet’s new album, Somewhere Down Below, Gaadge leave behind the noise of home recordings in favor of crisp production that opens the door to a wider audience.
Gaadge has been a project for vocalist and guitarist Mitch DeLong for nearly a decade, but the current lineup—drummer Ethan Oliva, guitarist Andy Yadeski, and bassist Nick Boston—solidified around the release of 2021’s Yeah?. Somewhere Down Below is the group’s third full-length, but it’s the first time this iteration of the project has entered a proper studio, working with engineer Matt Schimelfenig (Spirit of the Beehive, the War on Drugs) at the Bunk. Instead of bedroom fuzz, the clean, thoughtful production reveals the core of Gaadge’s songwriting: memorable hooks rooted in the tradition of ’90s indie rock, interspersed with shoegaze and punky rippers.
The adventurous terrain makes sense for a band whose members have been involved in a wide variety of projects. Members of Gaadge also perform with Oliva’s lo-fi rock band Ex Pilots, while Yadeski drums with hardcore punks Little Angels; Oliva and Yadeski also make psychedelic dream-pop in the group Sober Clones. The hard-hitting energy Olvia brings to the kit might have been honed while he played in the blistering punk act Living World. Beyond the internal reference points, Somewhere Down Below is full of nods to legends like Lilys and Swirlies, as well as the electronic-tinged post-punk of Autolux. The lo-fi blur of “Don’t Go There” not only feels like a love letter to Guided by Voices, but it also sounds like it could be an Ex Pilots song, suggesting a shared sensibility between all their disparate projects.
Gaadge synthesize these sounds into something charming and fresh thanks in large part to DeLong’s warm vocals. Departing from the casual delivery of Stephen Malkmus or the airy restraint of Swirlies’ Damon Tutunjian, DeLong takes on the melodic qualities of a self-assured Ben Gibbard. “I said you can’t go that way/You said in here I can’t stay,” he sings briskly against the frenetic guitar and crashing cymbal of “Nanty Glo.” Gaadge’s grasp on pop songwriting also helps distinguish their sound. This strength is especially evident in the sweet hook of “Candy-Coloured,” a standout track where high-energy group vocals carry a carefree melody that feels like running through the streets with sparklers in hand.
While songs like “Sputter” bridge the gap between Gaadge’s shiny new production tools and the DIY sound they’ve become known for, the most memorable songs show off an entirely new side of the band. On “No Go,” gated drums meet chiming, bending chords, and as DeLong’s voice dips into a lower range, the band reveals a sleek edge. The title track is the most compelling of these explorations, incorporating drum machines and shouted vocals. The moments of hero worship and cozy references give Somewhere Down Below a quiet familiarity, but the newfound clarity proves that Gaadge are far bigger than mere ’90s nostalgia.
Correction: Damon Tutunjian sang with Swirlies, not Lilys. This review has been updated.


Great though Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance is, we're not sure how many people were clamoring for two volumes of remixes from it. Still, here's the second one of the year, and it encouragingly features works from top-notch producers such as Dntel, the Russian Futurists, and Alexander Robotnick.

Remix Romance Vol. 2

Strike while the fire is hot. David Cook from American Idol had 11 singles in the Hot 100 shortly after his big win. Lil Wayne put up seven Hot 100 singles the week of Tha Carter III. On a much more intimate scale, Sally Shapiro-- the pseudonymous Swedish chanteuse whose Disco Romance debut LP has been bewitching audiences with its fragile mix of warm-hearted synth-pop and icy Italo disco since its original European release in 2006-- has now released her second remix album of 2008. Artistically if not commercially, it's a better idea than Wayne's godawful guest verse on the latest Mariah Carey remix.
Great though Disco Romance is, I'm not sure how many people were clamoring for two volumes of remixes from it. Of the people who might be inclined to check out Remix Romance Vol. 2, though, I can't imagine too many will feel their 10 bucks (or, sigh, torrent ratio) were completely wasted. Remix Romance Vol. 1 came as the famously reticent Shapiro was stepping out with her first interviews and DJ gigs, and its 10 tracks turned her shy bedroom disco into disco-disco, putting her wispy vocals and sugar-frosted melodies through the club-friendlier paces of top-notch remixers such as Lindstrøm, Junior Boys, and Juan MacLean. It was a surprisingly successful reconfiguration of the sound Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn conceived for Disco Romance, and Remix Romance Vol. 2 is, despite a slight overall drop in quality, refreshingly of a piece with its predecessor.
With so many versions of the same Shapiro material already floating around on the world's luckier hard drives, Remix Romance Vol. 2's best tracks tend to rework their originals rather dramatically. Much as Norway's Lindstrøm did "Time to Let Go" as epic psychedelic disco, Canada's the Russian Futurists make Shapiro's signature internet hit, "I'll Be By Your Side", into a Russian Futurists song. Considering the Russian Futurists are, like Shapiro, synth-pop romantics who tend to send critics scrambling for snowflake-flimsy metaphors, their "Side" keeps plenty of Shapiro's spirit even while adding bouncy lo-fi beats, thrumming guitar-like synths, and lead vocals by the group's Matthew Adam Hart. The Postal Service half Dntel puts sparse, glitchy beats reminiscent of his other group's "Against All Odds" cover behind "Find My Soul", with wobbly vocal effects that perhaps explain why the song has been retitled "Find My Ghost". An Italo disco original, Alexander Robotnick, shifts the Roger Gunnarsson-written "Anorak Christmas" from synth-driven twee carol to beat-heavier Eurovision contestant.
Newer artists also find plenty to say through Shapiro's songs. Montreal's CFCF-- whose remixing credits include Crystal Castles, HEALTH, the Teenagers, and Apache Beat-- kicks off the compilation with a version of "Time to Let Go" that sounds like Justice if their steez were 1980s adult-contemporary rather than heavy metal, as cheesed-out keyboards float across muscular bass lines and thumping beats. Closer to a proper Ed Banger banger is a remix of the same song by Spitzer, a buzzy French brother duo who also recently remixed Kylie Minogue; they chop up Shapiro's vocals and use them as wordless accompaniment for their aggressive filter-disco. Two contributions by fellow Frenchman Dyylan may be excessive, but his takes on "Hold Me So Tight" and U.S. Disco Romance bonus track "Jackie Jackie" could hardly be more different-- the first lush and upbeat, the second spaced-out and beatless, a pleasant-enough comedown to finish the album.
Remix Romance Vol. 2 isn't going to be anybody's favorite album of 2008, but it doesn't have to be. Aside from unnecessarily reprising Agebjörn's "Norwegian electrojazz" remix of "Find My Soul", which much of Shapiro's Web-savvy fanbase will probably have already heard from the original Swedish Disco Romance, the second compilation of Shapiro remixes continues to put enough new touches on Shapiro's slight if solid songbook to offer the diehards (for whom this release is presumably intended) a few fresh twinges of romance. New listeners should still head straight for the proper LP, but in a time when remixes have come to function more like blog-oriented marketing tools than something fans or DJs might actually spend money on, Remix Romance Vol 2. sounds less like a case of striking while the fire is hot than a breath of fresh air. And with global warming working its magic on my air-conditioning bills lately, even the slightest breeze is welcome.


With cosmos-filling drones and blazing noise, the third album from Madeline Johnston’s experimental pop project feels ambitious and communal.

Luminol

A silhouetted figure stares eyelessly on the cover of Luminol, Madeline Johnston’s third album as Midwife. It’s an old photograph of the artist’s mother in front of a body of water, her unique features erased, so that she becomes a shadow in the landscape, indiscernible from her daughter in the present day. This is the album’s first act of dissolution: the blending of mother and daughter, landscape and body.
Johnston has described her musical output, which includes the somber experimental pop of Midwife and the ambient drone project Sister Grotto, as “heaven metal,” a categorization that taps into her ability to wrench ecstasy from devastation, to make romance out of abject pain, and to transmute specific feelings into an ineffable longing. In 2015, while residing at Denver’s artist- and DIY-led venue Rhinoceropolis, she began channelling these ideas into Midwife, whose most obvious comparison can be found in Liz Harris’ work as Grouper. Now based in New Mexico, where she was raised by her mother, Johnston has enlisted Zachary Cole Smith and Colin Caulfield of DIIV and fellow Flenser signee Dan Barrett of Have a Nice Life for an extra padding of guitar and drums on her third record. The result puts a new focus on the “metal” in “heaven metal.”
Written and recorded during the pandemic, these songs have a new sense of universality, speaking to a year of civil unrest. Luminol is an extension of common themes in Midwife’s music: guilt and an internalized sense of incarceration, a perpetual search for home, a desire to self-obliterate. While the music further explores the magical loneliness at the heart of Johnston’s previous records, it also points outwards toward a wider community of pain. As her collaborators sing and play alongside her, the music feels larger than anything she has made before. This is the sound of Johnston’s world expanding beyond herself.
The compositions on Luminol are precarious balancing acts, perched somewhere between the locating sensation of pain and the dislocation of trauma. Often, their tension is wrought from a sense of fragility. The opening “God Is a Cop” begins with a hushed sense of urgency: tiny taps of piano that feel as though they could fall apart at any moment, like raindrops slowly disentangling the strings of a spiderweb. The gentleness is soon contrasted with dense waves of pressure and blazing guitar noise. It sounds strangely enervated.
This introduction is a moment of restraint before the ferocious outpourings in highlights like “2020” and “Promise Ring,” bolstered with cosmos-filling drones, distorted power chords, and anthemic slowcore riffs that grab you by the throat, letting go just as you start to turn blue. Instead of structuring her songs around hooks, Johnston gives equal weight to each passing moment; every press of the piano or stroke of the guitar seems to experience its own lifetime before decaying into her paroxysm of destruction.
As a songwriter, Johnston favors repetition, with lyrics and riffs that spin over and around themselves like whorls on a mollusk shell, until each movement is made to unwind and dissolve. It’s a motion that mirrors the self-diffusing impulse she describes in her lyrics. “My body is the police,” Johnston sings numbly on “Enemy,” a lyric specific enough for us to imagine her pain but sweeping enough for us to luxuriate in our own. The album is buttressed by this kind of negative affectivity. “Love will only break your heart,” she sings on “Promise Ring.” “Heaven is so far away,” goes a lyric in “2020.”
Despite the hopelessness in her lyrics, Johnston gives her music a kind of Dionysian ecstasy, a release from its unassailable longing. “Show me the way,” she sings with increasing desperation in “Caroline’s World,” the final track, which takes its title and inspiration from American pastoralist Andrew Wyeth’s most famous work: the image of a body, ensnared in pain, gazing toward home. Imagining herself the figure in the painting—“crawling up the hill, towards the house”—Johnston commits a final act of dissolution. She is a spirit without a host, longing to find a way back in, or to dissolve completely.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Highlighting a new corner of Michigan rap, this mixtape from the Grand Rapids rapper is a sustained rush of adrenaline that rarely loses steam.

Soul Controller

At the end of 2020, if someone asked you to explain to them what was so great about the Michigan rap scene, you could shoot them links to “Free Joe Exotic,” “Wack Jumper,” “Coochie,” and “Movie,” and they would have a pretty good idea. While the Michigan sound continues to trickle outside of its borders, things have splintered within, making the prospect of isolating specific sounds more difficult. However, there are now new scenes within the state that have made it exciting in a whole new way.
This is true of AK Bandamont, a rapper who does not reside in hotspots like Detroit or Flint; he is based in Grand Rapids, and patience is not in his vocabulary. He is a shit talker in a rush, stumbling over his words yet powering through anyway. He raps like he snuck into the recording studio, and he only has a couple of minutes to speak before security drags him out. It’s a freewheeling style that is reminiscent of instant Michigan rap classics like Teejayx6 and Kasher Quon’s “Dynamic Duo” and Rio Da Yung OG’s “Legendary,” except that Bandamont brings this energy every time he finds a working mic.
However, this ferocity can easily lead to burn out, and by the end of an AK Bandamont single, you might be bent over with your hands on your hips as if you just completed a 5K. This made his previous mixtapes so exhausting and one-note that they were hard to get through. However, his newest, Soul Controller, is a sustained rush of adrenaline. Produced by Enrgy, the 10 tracks here will make you sweatier than an ’80s action movie hero; the drums pound like heart palpitations and the incessantly ringing church bells seem calibrated to bring about headaches.
Backdropped by Enrgy’s pummeling 808s, Bandamont’s stories, which I take with a grain of salt, feel almost cinematic. According to him, life in Grand Rapids is a lot like a season of Narcos: Girlfriends smuggle drugs across state lines, dope deals end in shootouts, and there are extremely detailed heists. On “More Then Paper,” he runs through memories of doing business in the school hallways and going on the run from the cops. He chases a dude through the mall and comes up with about a dozen different ways to say he’s selling white on “Heat Out.” He’s funny, too. “My white boy say, ‘Bro your music hard I go fishing to it,’” he raps on “Heavy Metal,” and though that definitely never happened, the image of someone fishing to his music is hilarious.
When Bandamont’s energy takes a slight dip, the songs lose steam. This happens on “Gretzky,” which is a shame because it features a few of the mixtape’s most fun moments—he accuses this dude of only wearing an outfit once, and then returning it back to the store (maybe it just didn’t fit right.) Similarly, he sounds bored on “Stick Wit Me,” and it’s not helped by the uninteresting Enrgy beat. The only time slowing down the pace works is on “Tragic,” and that’s because the tone is more somber; as a string sample swells in the background, Bandamont strips away relentlessness of his tales, replacing the action movie intensity with a sense of desperation.
No song or mixtape is definitive of the year in Michigan rap, and any fan of the state’s street rap wave will likely point you in a different direction. AK Bandamont’s Soul Controller is not a snapshot of the moment nor is it indicative of the bigger picture. It’s a fun and messy mixtape from a rapper in his sweet spot.
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The veteran trip-hoppers once stood out by virtue of their idiosyncratic sound, but two decades later, they’ve resorted to playing things frustratingly straight.

The Secret of Letting Go

There is something so indelibly 1990s about Lamb that you half expect their new album to arrive via dial-up internet to the sound of Lance Ito summing up the OJ trial. The Manchester duo—bloke-ish beat maker Andy Barlow and folky singer songwriter Lou Rhodes—were, for a few months in 1996, the fanciest thing going for British beat heads, their modish sound pushing the trip-hop template into artfully twisted new places. That Lamb never really crossed over was perhaps to be expected. The band’s raison d’être—deviant beats that nodded to the fractured rhythms of ’90s drum’n’bass alongside awkwardly intense vocal delivery—proved their commercial Achilles’ heel.
The Secret of Letting Go is Lamb’s third studio album since reforming in 2009. You could argue that it arrives at a fortuitous time for the duo, with new albums from Billie Eilish and Karen O and Danger Mouse echoing the woozy trip-hop sound of 20 years ago, while the twisted breaks that they once used to spice their pot are all the rage in clubs. So it’s a pain to report that The Secret of Letting Go plays things frustratingly straight.
When Lamb first started out they sounded ever so slightly wrong: There was something gawky about the duo, as if their nerdish instincts couldn’t let a song go without messing it up a little. The Secret of Letting Go, on the other hand, is incredibly smooth, with the jagged edges that once made Lamb so interesting sacrificed for a buttery consistency. The second half of the album, especially, is dominated by gilded piano chords, softly rousing strings, and gently humming synths, which lay a lazy bed for Rhodes’ increasingly conventional vocals.
While there is nothing particularly distasteful about these frappuccino-y torch songs, the cumulative effect is soporific and slightly sickly, like cream on your ice cream at the end of a long dinner. “Silence Inbetween,” one of the worst offenders, is almost shockingly conventional in its approach, the muted piano loops, vibrato vocal and tasteful string bed slipping by with the ease of a feather duster on a waxed grand piano.
Things pick up when Lamb give rein to their more experimental tendencies. “Moonshine” has a swampy bass lurch and diwali-esque dancehall clap; “Armageddon Waits” uses an unconventional 7/4 rhythm and touches of creeping electronic menace; “Bulletproof” suggests a residual interest in dance-music trends, with its jittery dubstep beat and swooping synth line. Best of all is “The Secret of Letting Go,” which pairs a defiant, unwieldy vocal, reminiscent of the Lou Rhodes of old, with a series of angry electronic splotches that shouldn’t work together but do. But even here, the sound is still a shade too pastel to inspire genuine emotional release.
What’s frustrating is that modern audiences have proved themselves more open to the kind of pop experimentation and rhythmic handbrake turns that Lamb perfected on songs like 1996’s “Gold.” Billie Eilish’s recent No. 1 album took generic norms more as barriers to be hurdled than musical starting points, while Kanye West has hardly suffered from a tendency to assimilate avant-garde artistic trends. Lamb, sadly, seem to have lived their career in reverse: too awkwardly experimental when radio craved smoothness; too polished for a modern world that demands idiosyncrasy of our musical stars.
The seeds of a half-decent album are buried among The Secret of Letting Go’s more experimental tracks. But, in the immortal words of another extremely ’90s act, that don’t impress me much. Modern audiences with no notion of the band’s unusual history are unlikely to be moved by this album’s velvety shrug.


Beach House remain masters of the indefinable and their seventh album is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding of their career.

7

Over six albums, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally of Beach House have offered the same enticement: There’s a place I want to take you; help me to name it. The implicit promise has always been that if you opened up entirely, gave enough of yourself, the nameless sensation they evoke would finally come into focus, and the shapes moving beneath the surface of their music would resolve. You would finally understand if you came closer, stayed longer, looked deeper.
You could sense the now-venerable Baltimore duo playing this game in advance of their seventh album, simply called 7. The first single, Scally noted slyly to Pitchfork, came out on February 14—2/14, or two plus one plus four equals seven. The album brought their catalog to 77 songs, and the record’s initial issue number was 777. What did all this mystical numerology amount to when you squinted at it? Nothing of course, except to set the stage, light the incense. It’s the magician’s pre-trick pantomime, where he turns up his palms and rolls up his sleeves, for no other purpose than to make you lean in closer and grin harder. “We spend a lot of time creatively making mountains out of nothingness,” Scally added.
Inducing indefinable yearnings, tracing patterns in the air—this is the essence of Beach House’s art. They usher us repeatedly into familiar territory and encourage us to notice the same things within it: the way a dim glow never surges or abates, how sensations burrow into the mind and color our memories. But with each album, they somehow render this terrain alien again, allowing us to run our hands over the same irregularities in fresh astonishment.
With 7, they’ve parted ways with longtime producer Chris Coady and teamed with Panda Bear and MGMT producer and former Spacemen 3 member Peter Kember, who goes by Sonic Boom. The result is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding album. It’s darker, thicker, set at a deeper spot in the woods. The gentle drum programming of earlier records has been swept aside for thunderous crashes: The drums on opener “Dark Spring” have the resounding weight of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow,” and the mix has a smeared, heat-sick quality that brings all of Loveless to mind. Low-end sounds, like the thrumming guitar that pierces “Dive” have real menace: The insistent thud inside “Drunk in LA” is like a hand tapping your solar plexus. This is the first Beach House record that, in headphones, will make you feel buffeted.
You are never quite sure about the size of the sounds on a Beach House song; intimate moments are massive, and vice versa. Most of the record feels recorded and mixed from a low spot gazing up, with sounds looming above, but then grass-blade details resolve themselves in the foreground. Legrand’s voice doubles on the chorus of “Pay No Mind,” transforming her from wisp to leviathan in an instant. On “Dive,” she sounds as imposing as the thumping drums, but a humming synth the size of a music box runs alongside her, confusing your sense of scale. On “L’Inconnue,” her vocal lines pan from left to right and pool in on themselves. Her breath fills every corner of space. When the track fills out—some guitars, resonant drums, a choral patch—they appear as if from inside her rib cage. She’s never sounded bigger, or less mortal, than she does here.
These perspective tricks are the tools of film-making as much as of music, and Beach House’s music is full of cuts, dissolves, fades, super-imposures. You enter their records the way you settle into a movie seat, asking to be subsumed and bathed in light. Even Legrand’s lyrics function like rapturous, lingering takes. “Rolling clouds over cement,” she sings on “Drunk in LA” Like Stevie Nicks, to whom she is often compared, or Orson Welles, to whom she is never compared, she grasps how readily we latch onto rich, intoning voices, how we can’t help but find ourselves believing in what they say. A voice like hers is its own kind of authority, and she luxuriates in the sound of words leaving her mouth.
Measuring Beach House albums against one another is tricky—how do you compare daydreams? But on a sensory level, you feel whether the spell is working, and how potent it remains. On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning. The secret at the heart of Beach House’s evocative music remains the same—there is no specific place Legrand wants to take you. But there will always be… someplace you’d rather be. Beach House will always help you dream of it.


Built from recordings of his 2013 tour as Mister Lies, Nick Zanca’s debut under his own name is sparse experimentation in clamor and free-form percussion.

Cacerolazo

What a trip it must have been to be Nick Zanca in 2013. One moment you’re a teen playing in punk bands; the next you’re Mister Lies, signed to the label responsible for one of the most catalyzing albums of the chillwave movement and shuttling across Europe to play gigs with other beat-scene upstarts like Slow Magic, XXYYXX, and Giraffage. The late 2000s through the early 2010s was a mythical time for Myspace strivers and bedroom producers, many of whom ended up on big labels and bigger tours with barely any material to show for it. The deadlines for Zanca’s first album, Mowgli, were set before the young producer even had a record’s worth of material on his hard drive, and in interviews at the time, Zanca barely seemed to know how to deal with his sudden rush of success.
Cacerolazo, Zanca’s first album under his birth name, is based on recordings of that European tour. But its two side-long pieces strip away any outward vestige of his past as a beatmaker, reintroducing him as part of a rising faction of young American avant-gardists who fold recordings of their lives into tender, diaristic, intensely personal music; L’Rain, Lucy Liyou, More Eaze, and claire rousay all receive thanks in the liner notes. Cacerolazo is devoted to sparse experimentation in clamor and free-form percussion, with long stretches devoted to field recordings and electroacoustic interference and only the occasional curlicue of harpsichord or guitar to make things pretty. Zanca hinted just slightly in this direction by threading environmental sounds into 2019’s Mister Lies, but Cacerolazo feels like he stuffed dynamite into the Mister Lies persona and held a microphone up to the smoldering remains.
The first side is devoted to the three-part title track, which climaxes with the “white whale” of Zanca’s European tour recordings: a cacerolazo, a form of protest in which participants bang pots and pans together en masse. Zanca found himself caught in one such event in Istanbul at the height of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, spurred when a sit-in protesting the removal of one of the city center’s last green spaces was dispersed by police with water cannons, plastic bullets, and tear gas. This would be a tipping point for unrest in Turkey in reaction to the rising authoritarianism of Prime Minister and soon-to-be-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But Zanca remembers the tour mostly as “an apolitical fog of train travel, hostel stays, and hedonism,” and he claims to have been only vaguely aware of Turkey’s political situation. Cacerolazo can be loosely described as a meditation on this dissociation.
“Cacerolazo” opens with the resonance of struck percussion instruments, then belatedly introduces their impacts, as if to exaggerate Zanca’s own experiential disconnect from the righteous clamor of the Istanbul protest. The second side, meanwhile, is occupied by “Boy Abroad,” which features hardly any music and is mostly a collage of moments from his time in Europe. It’s similar to fellow field-recordist Flora Yin-Wong’s “Loci” from last year’s Holy Palm, which likewise chronicled her jaunts around the world. But by incorporating Zanca’s own voice and those of his tourmates, “Boy Abroad” portrays travel as a reciprocal experience, a process of interacting with people and places but not always understanding them. At one point, a promoter describes his experience of being tear-gassed in painful detail. “Whoa,” the tourmates murmur, as if someone’s played them a sick beat.
Zanca and crew sound like a bunch of kids in way over their heads, and it takes guts to present your younger self on record in this way. But why he’s so eager to call his own bluff isn’t always clear. Zanca considers this record only “obliquely political,” but there’s still the fact that he named it after a form of protest, and it’s hard to determine whether he’s protesting authoritarianism or just his own hedonistic past. Cacerolazo juggles a lot of themes, thoughts, impulses, and sounds across just four tracks, but it’s less impressive as a statement than as a stylistic reinvention: proof that Zanca can work magic with field recordings, even if they don’t always speak louder than words.

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The soundtrack to the superstar boy band’s mobile app game is the most inessential BTS-affiliated project to date.

Various Artists: BTS World: Original Soundtrack

BTS World: Original Soundtrack

Early in the decade, Akon, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West all featured on woefully misguided K-pop songs, emblematic of how K-pop collaborations with Western artists weren’t always well thought through. There’s been marked improvement in the past couple years, and BTS have been crucial in making these cross-continental pairings—like their songs with Steve Aoki, Nicki Minaj, and Halsey—feel more sensible. Ahead of BTS WORLD, the group released a new collaboration every week. Those tracks are the most noteworthy ones here by a considerable margin.
Despite its title, BTS WORLD isn’t really a BTS album: It’s the soundtrack to a freemium mobile app game of the same name. Less than a third of the record’s 50-minute runtime is devoted to the boy band, and one would be hard-pressed to consider these four tracks among their best. Three collaborations only contain a few BTS members each, mixing and matching the group’s singers and rappers with suitable Western counterparts. While they aren’t as embarrassing as collaborations from K-pop’s yesteryear, they still fail to showcase the strengths of their respective artists.
On “Dream Glow,” Jin, Jimin, and Jungkook team up with Charli XCX for a diaphanous EDM song that’s in constant search of a satisfying climax. Its muted nature is intentional—the track is meant to serve as a mantra about following your dreams—but in the absence of any cathartic bombast, the vocal hook and lethargic production are a chore. At last, a song that embodies the tedious labor involved in reaching one’s goals.
The spacious and vaguely tropical “A Brand New Day,” featuring Zara Larsson, doesn’t fare much better. Producer Mura Masa throws in a daegeum—a Korean bamboo flute—but since it functions the same as any other flute loop we’ve heard in the past few years, it’s little more than a cute gesture. J-Hope’s shouted vocals are the only thing providing a semblance of personality. Juice WRLD exudes a fair amount of charm on “All Night,” ditching his lugubriousness for some slurred lines that pine for a girl. The relative sloppiness of his delivery proves a welcome contrast to RM and Suga’s prim rapping. Suga in particular is in prime form: He switches up his flow in meaningful ways, bringing to mind K-pop star Zico’s verse on “Oasis,” the very first time a Korean idol rapper adopted overtly ATL flows in a pop-rap single.
BTS WORLD’s main attraction is “Heartbeat,” the only song here to have a music video and all seven of the group’s members. It’s an emotive, stadium-ready ballad that recalls fan favorite single “Spring Day,” but its banal instrumentation renders it overwrought. With staid guitar strums, plodding drums, and a line like “My heart’s on fire for your love,” “Heartbeat” could easily be mistaken for Hillsong United’s tepid contemporary Christian music, albeit with a generous number of awkward percussive blips.
The rest of BTS World is wholly disposable. Seven instrumentals serve as theme music for the group’s different members, and while a few are charming—Jimin’s theme, the quaint “Cake Waltz,” could soundtrack a Disney film—every track unwisely exceeds three minutes, and each eventually reveals itself as uninspired stock music. A twee folk song from indie-pop duo Okdal and an overly dramatic ballad by Big Hit Entertainment label-mate Lee Hyun round out the soundtrack. They’re a good sampling of the music that gains traction in Korea but not among international fans. Unfortunately, they’re as innocuous and frustratingly nondescript as the seven themes that precede them.
If you spend any time with the BTS WORLD game, you’ll quickly notice that it’s meant for a particular subset of fans. Players simulate life as the band’s manager, and the visual novel-style gameplay and aesthetics feel a lot like BTS fan fiction. While it’s never outright erotic, it’s meant to elicit some, well, affectionate reactions: In the first few levels of the game, RM “glistens with sweat,” you “lock eyes with a radiantly smiling Seok Jin,” and you can “feel the warmth of Yunki’s hand on [your] wrist.” (The game refers to the player only with she/her pronouns.) Like the game, the accompanying soundtrack is for die-hards only. But wherever you land on the BTS fan spectrum, BTS WORLD is the most inessential BTS-affiliated project to date.


Yes Lawd! is another accomplishment in Anderson .Paak’s continued rise, a beautiful beat tape made with the producer Knxwledge that nods to classic Stones Throw duos.

Yes Lawd!

Imagine it: You grew up in Oxnard, Calif. Your dad went to prison for beating your mom. You had a kid with your second wife. You lost your job, and a place to live. You were homeless.
Your friends looked out for you. You slowly picked yourself up. You changed your name: Breezy Lovejoy became Anderson .Paak. You gained some traction, partly by redoubling your focus on your vocals, leaving the beatmaking to producers you trusted. Some Soundcloud hits followed, some friendships with well-connected rappers, a sophomore album, Venice, on which your voice had gone from a blunt instrument to a swiss army knife, able to do 15 different things at once.
And then you got the call. From Aftermath, Dr. Dre’s label. A representative was checking to see if you were interested in the American dream, California rap edition—in working with an icon you’d been listening to since you were six years old. You made it.
Channel that experience, .Paak’s own recent past, into a single song, and you might come up with something like “Livvin,” the first proper song off Yes Lawd!, his new joint album with the beatmaker Knxwledge. “Livvin” is triumph incarnate, a new entry in the tradition of “ashy-to-classy” tracks like “Juicy” and “Touch the Sky.” .Paak preaches the gospel of success in between rolling drums, mellow horns, and a church choir. His voice’s inextricability from the music is a testament to his chemistry with a producer steeped in the tradition of the beat scene godheads, Dilla and Madlib. (.Paak and Knx, whose real name is Glen Boothe, have merged their names into NxWorries, an apparent nod to the definitive Stones Throw duos, Jaylib and Madvillain.)
.Paak’s sudden stardom, largely due to his work with Dre and to this year’s Malibu, his extraordinary third album, might tempt listeners to give him the credit for Yes Lawd!’s many successes. But the record, which includes tracks recorded between early 2015 and March 2016, is first and foremost a beat tape, stacked with beautiful little donuts, most of which don’t pass the three-minute mark. Knx was raised on church music, hip-hop radio, and J Dilla, and the rich instrumentals here are loaded with tributes to all three. “Sidepiece” offers .Paak a chance to sing the lyrics of “Won’t Do” from Dilla’s posthumous album The Shining: “One won’t do and two is not enough for me, no,” while “Can’t Stop” is a zoned-out moment of musical reverie that intimately recalls Jay Dee. The beats are the soul of the album, and .Paak serves as a faithful instrument, the organ at their core.
Producers have fallen hard for .Paak and here, he shows several reasons why his stock has risen so quickly. He’s uniquely aware of the flexibility of his voice as an instrument and is one of the more emotive rappers I can remember hearing, on a level with DMX or Young Thug. On “Best One,” even as he expresses gratitude for a woman who’s taken him in, you can hear urgency, and empathy, in his voice: “You know I could be leaving in a moment’s notice/You telling me to stay to the morning/You know a nigga homeless.” On “Lyk Dis,” he channels no one so much as Erykah Badu, riding the beat with gravelly, percussive verses delivered in short bursts.
In the past, Knxwledge has had trouble focusing on a particular sound for too long, but it’s his focus that holds the record together through 19 tracks, even as he shows off his range. On “What More Can I Say,” one of the prettiest songs here, mournful violin strings engage in a duet with a quiet bass rumble, and their interchange makes for some of the most moving music on the album, particularly when the horns arrive. (If you pride yourself on recognizing samples, this album will offer up a form of exquisite torture at least a couple of times, as you attempt to track down lovely little fragments.) The shuffling beat on “Link Up” is one of the more subtle offerings here, but its winding rhythms and muted sample make .Paak sound as if he’s singing from the middle of the dancefloor, appropriate for a song about nocturnal pursuits.
Many of .Paak’s songs are about going out, and particularly about women, and it’s in their lyrics that Yes Lawd! reveals one of its only issues, a lack of lyrical substance. While an artist like Drake comfortably straddles the line between rapper and R&B singer, .Paak is more of a crooner than a rhymer. There are too few moments like the clever little lyrical elaboration on “Best One”: “I could leave it at a drop of a fedora/But damn it girl I want you.”
And what we get instead can be ugly. On “Livvin,” .Paak sings about the feeling of ascending the ladder, but on some songs, it seems like he’s pulling it up behind him. The sentiment toward other strivers on “H.A.N.” is stingy, and .Paak’s portraits of his relationships are often shallow—a fact that the final track “Fkku” seems to acknowledge, giving a woman’s voice the record’s final kiss-off. The worrisome thing here is not that .Paak can be sexist. It’s that there’s nothing to counter or contextualize his attitude. On “Suede,” .Paak makes an explicit effort to justify the slurs he frequently uses: “If I call you a bitch/It’s cause you’re my bitch/And as long as no one else call you a bitch/Then there won’t be no problems.”
The records that .Paak and Boothe admire, the classic Stones Throw collaborations, found two artists working at the absolute height of their talents. Madvillainy, in particular, was a perfect match between an internal rhyme genius in Doom and a beatmaking savant in Madlib. That album, released in 2004, remains a high water mark in Stones Throw’s history. .Paak and Knx are both so talented that it seems fair to hold them to that standard. And what’s astonishing here is the way they manage to forge a sound nearly as rich and original as that of America’s most blunted. One of the few disappointing things about the largely terrific Yes Lawd! is the way that Knx outdoes .Paak, but the rapper/singer is at the beginning of a bright career in which he’s already demonstrated his ability to write rich lyrics—this record, which includes some of the most beautiful songs he’s made yet, has far more to be proud of than not. It’s another major accomplishment in .Paak’s continued rise.


The pseudonymous London producer’s new album is a radiant, elastic, nearly four-hour celebration of the transportive possibilities of dance music.

Destiny

Somewhere between a brain massage and a 1990s basement rave, a memory and a dream, lies the curious and sparkling realm of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. Since her 2017 debut Makin’ Magick, the prolific, pseudonymous London producer (who sometimes works with a collaborator, Salem) has built out a world of lush deep house that interweaves disco, synth funk, and Radio Disney pop with breakbeats, dialogue samples, and power-ballad vocals. At nearly four hours long, her new album Destiny is her most intricate project yet, a radiant and elastic celebration of the transportive possibilities of dance music.
DJ Sabrina’s name and much of her cheeky 64-bit promotional imagery draw from the comic-book-turned-’90s-sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which followed 16-year-old Sabrina Spellman’s earnest attempts to balance life as a powerful sorceress and a Britney Spears-loving high schooler. DJ Sabrina chose her namesake because she felt it conveyed a certain melancholy aesthetic, like a “warped TV movie that makes you cry in a way no mainstream movie would be able to,” she explained to Bandcamp in 2021. Her 2020 album, Charmed, won over pandemic-weary online fans, some of whom swore that Sabrina’s music had eased their depression. Porter Robinson, the similarly pop-minded American producer, started spinning her tracks between sets. In 2022, a demo that she’d sent to the 1975 became the basis for the band’s song “Happiness.”
Since then, Sabrina has remained semi-anonymous and cooking. She dropped two albums on the same day in 2021: the darker, more industrial The Other Realm, and a sequel to Makin’ Magick. 2022’s Bewitched, which sounds crafted by a plucky teen cyborg, further established her signature sound. Instead of taking wider attention as a cue to package her output for ease of mass consumption, Sabrina has pushed its limits: Why not dabble in witch house while also taking inspiration from The Marshall Mathers LP 2? Why not rerelease each new project in a “singles” edition—which presents individual tracks rather than a continuous mix—and encourage fans to exploit the structural and stylistic flexibility of playlisting?
That eagerness to experiment with form is abundantly evident in the vast medley of genres Sabrina incorporates into Destiny: smooth jazz, 2010s EDM, country, crunk. Standout “Invincible (Something to Hold on To)” blends clanging synths and vocoder samples into a dreamy, menacing club thumper that brings an electric tingle to Destiny’s sometimes impenetrable-seeming digital sheen. You like “In the Air Tonight”? Sabrina does too, and proudly alerts us by letting loose a waterfall of Phil Collins-inspired drums near the end of “Vibrations.” Even the bouncy rock-rap on “For Now and Forever” works, indicating the generous breadth of Sabrina’s internal playlist of raw material. In her universe, Prince and Barenaked Ladies are both permitted to rock.
The album’s various vocal samples are subplots of a story painted in the hues of all Sabrina’s favorite jams. Before these voices disappear into cascades of synth or saxophone, they serve up glimpses of bittersweet, often sanguine scenes that feel plucked from a ’00s weeknight slot on the late CW network: choosing to bet on long-distance love, pushing through “nights that end in heartache,” taking on the vulnerable work of “figuring it out.” Like conversations overheard outside the uncanny valley’s hottest club, personal dramas sharpen into view and then fade, a blurry but poignant cinema of everyday life.
The word “nostalgia” has often been used to pinpoint the effect of Sabrina’s evocative blends. But her varied influences—from the obvious (The Avalanches, Daft Punk, ABBA) to the less so (Bon Iver, Reba McEntire)—and surreal imagery don’t reflect a wistfulness exclusive to any particular decade or scene. Less than a sense of time, Sabrina’s nostalgia revels in the word’s emotional connotations: the ambient sense of sadness that is the grand condition of experiencing joy. She understands profoundly that sometimes the best party is just the first one in a while that’s truly fun.
This nostalgia associated with no one time or place is the fulcrum of Destiny, the achievement that earns the album its spot in the “crying on the dancefloor” bracket. In Sabrina’s amorphous, melodramatic world, compositions unfold like sunsets, vivid and impermanent—even a four-hour album doesn’t last forever. Daunting as its length may appear, Destiny is less an Odyssey than a “most romantic moments” YouTube compilation: easy to dip in and out of, because the payoffs just keep coming. Let it wash over you, and Destiny conjures a rare kind of immediate, cup-filling catharsis.


Mixing a deep knowledge of regional folk traditions with a delight in modern composition, the banjo player and his exploratory new trio are delightfully suspended between earth and outer space

Plainly Mistaken

The daring banjo player and singer Nathan Bowles opens his fourth album with a cover of “Now If You Remember,” written by the seven-year-old Jessica Constable and first recorded 40 years ago by popstar-turned-folkie Julie Tippetts. It’s an interlude on Tippetts’ Sunset Glow, but for Bowles, it is an overture, almost like a last-week-on recap that runs before your favorite TV show. “Now if you remember, we were talking about God and you,” Bowles sings in a hushed monotone, his words buttressed by a prismatic riff split by piano and banjo. The cover slyly summarizes his first three albums in order to prepare us for Plainly Mistaken’s departure while reframing his catalog (and maybe even a century of American roots music?): God and you might just be the true subjects of every folk song that Bowles or anyone else has ever played.
Though Plainly Mistaken is rooted in specific musical traditions, these nine songs are deeply irreverent toward those traditions, too. As a banjo player, Bowles eschews the rocket-fueled runs of bluegrass players like Earl Scruggs in favor of a modified clawhammer technique that stylistically and spiritually pulls from the likes of John Fahey and Billy Faier. Rather than pluck and strum, Bowles hammers and pounds. The banjo is “a drum with strings on it. I tend to play everything percussively,” as he told Bandcamp. (Bowles has long played drums for Steve Gunn.) That’s most evident on romps like “Elk River Blues” (originally by West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter) and the Bowles original “Fresh & Fairly So,” both of which move with the loping energy of a walk down a deserted gravel road.
That’s due in part to the rhythm section of Bowles’ new trio, featuring drummer Rex McMurry of Cave and bassist Casey Toll of Mount Moriah. Loose and versatile, more interested in breaking the songs down rather than keeping time, they constantly reshape and reshade Bowles’ banjo themes. They lend a rambling fervor to the winding “The Road Reversed,” as though the point of the trip were to get lost. Similarly, they infuse the bluegrass staple “Ruby” with loopy abandon, pushing Bowles to sing and play at an ever-faster gait. Based closely on the Silver Apples’ 1969 rendering of the tune, this performance sounds like it might disintegrate at any moment. Bowles seems to relish in the danger, that sense he might faceplant on his own record.
As that moment makes clear, Bowles draws just as much inspiration from avant-garde composers like Harry Partch and Terry Riley as he does from folk artists. He favors the natural drone of the banjo, the sustain of the notes over that drumhead, which he supplements with bowed cymbal and bowed bass. (Bowles also plays in the Black Twig Pickers and Pelt, bands that respectively honor old-time music and then smear it into infinite acoustic drone.)  “In Kind II” sets those various hums against each other in a kind of narcotic dissonance. “Umbra” begins with Bowles slowly picking a stargazing banjo theme, then doubling and tripling it with peculiar mutations—one steady in its repetition, another that bends the notes as though Bowles were playing a sitar. The effect is quietly meditative, a bit of calm between two upbeat tracks, but there’s something slightly mysterious under the surface, as though you’re watching him astral-project.
Bowles is not the first to bridge the traditions of folk and avant garde; in fact, bridging them has become its own tradition, especially among fellow North Carolina musicians like House and Land, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and the late Megafaun. But there is something thrilling about the way Bowles lays them side by side, approaching regional folk idioms with the same curiosity he applies to contemporary composition. That pursuit allows Bowles to wring an array of sounds from his banjo, to use it as a means of getting closer to God and you. The result is his best album to date—his most mystical and earthbound, all at once.


The sophomore album from indie-rock traditionalists Speedy Ortiz is more ferocious and visceral than their debut, with leader Sadie Dupuis honing her talent for turning her sour experiences into anthems about clawing your way out of self-doubt.

Foil Deer

On Speedy Ortiz’s 2013 debut Major Arcana, Sadie Dupuis crafted her barbed-wire wordplay into wounded callouts of those who had hurt her. Now, she's wielding it like a weapon. Foil Deer, the Massachusetts indie rock traditionalists' sophomore full-length, opens with Dupuis noting on "Good Neck" that she's good with a knife and she knows when to use it. She takes a lap around the block to cool down—like all good bosses should—before coming back with a world-beating declaration of autonomy on “Raising the Skate”: “I'm chief, not the overthrown/ Captain, not a crony/So if you wanna row, you better have an awfully big boat.”
With Foil Deer, Dupuis doesn't scold; she warns. The album is ferocious and visceral, the lyrics gleaming with threats involving sharp blades both literal and figurative ("Don't ever touch my blade, you fool/ You'll be cursed for a lifetime," she taunts knowingly on "Dot X"). As Dupuis grows more self-possessed, she and her bandmates veer into their most ambitious compositions to date. Knotty melodies shift gears in an instant, giving Foil Deer a jumpy, enthralling energy. God bless ‘em, Speedy believe that every song ideally should have three or four musical ideas.
For its first 47 seconds, "Zig" scans like vintage folk-pop until the song abruptly steers into a thorny chunk of dissonance led by Dupuis’ contrasting falsetto. A minute passes and it sounds like yet another song—a much more melodic thing this time—before a nightmarish jumble of riffs and cymbals grinds the pace to a halt. A defeated Dupuis wonders aloud "How many laps does it take to decide you’re back at the start?" as she and her bandmates double back on the the song’s original theme. It’s a clever construction, representing just how much thought went into crafting each of these songs.
In Speedy Ortiz, both the music and lyrics work overtime, bringing a surplus of conflicting ideas to the table that they somehow manage to cram into tight spaces. The magic is that they never sound overworked, and in fact when they go more straighforward—"Puffer", for instance, in which they try the pleather sleaze of '90s industrial rock on for size—it feels like not quite enough by comparison. Despite its clever kiss-offs ("Take me off your list or elect a lobotomy"), the chipper pop-punk of "Swell Content" would have sufficed on last year’s Real Hair EP, but here it feels like filler. It goes to show that the members of Speedy Ortiz can barely keep up with their own progress.
Dupuis, a recent MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst, is among the most talented lyricists of her musical class. She writes vivid-yet-mysterious scenes that require interpretive work on the listeners' behalf—such as "My Dead Girl", a cryptic tale about living fast and risking becoming a missing face on a milk carton. But Dupuis’ greatest strength as a lyricist is her ability to turn her sour experiences into anthems about clawing back from self-doubt. On Foil Deer, Dupuis makes standing up for yourself—in the face of double standards, struggles with addiction, and the general carelessness of youth—sound like a no-brainer, but she also never tries to hide how complicated everything can be. As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.


With pianist Johan Lindvall and cellist Judith Hamann, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette presents hushed, repetitive meditations unbounded by the pressures of time.

Drifting

In the eight years since her debut album, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette has kept busy: She’s held residencies at Southbank Centre and Edvard Munch’s Ekely, performed at the opening night of the Berlin Jazz Festival, been commissioned by the Oslo Philharmonic and Cikada, and collaborated with conceptual artist Marina Abramović. Now, with her second LP, Drifting, the Sámi-Norwegian musician introduces a new degree of subtlety and serendipity to her work.
Henriette’s debut was expansive, spanning 35 tracks with the help of a 13-person ensemble. Drifting is also structured around short vignettes interspersed with longer pieces, but this time there are just 15 songs, and the lineup has shrunk to a trio. Stripping down her approach imparts a greater sense of intimacy. Each musician in this group—Johan Lindvall on piano, Judith Hamann on cello, and Henriette herself on saxophone—seems to have a distinct purpose, yet their playing is uniformly soft, lyrical, and emotionally resonant. Recorded at the Munch Museum in Oslo and produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher, Drifting feels self-contained, yet unbounded by the pressures of time.
A grounded, meditative air pervades the music, despite its improvisatory character. Lindvall’s playing is central to this temperament: In most tracks, he lays down a simple repeated motif, either melodic or rhythmic, which Henriette and Hamann punctuate with saxophone and cello. His stable anchor provides the security that allows the other two players to wander. In “Across the Floor,” Lindvall’s chords establish a slow, somber waltz as Hamann bows longing strokes and Henriette’s saxophone twirls capriciously. The piece conjures an image of two bodies swaying together—one with deliberate movements, the other with whimsy—to the pulse of a piano sitting in the corner of a dusty dance studio.
Henriette continues to show an interest in pushing instruments past their usual roles, using extended techniques to add unexpected sounds and textures. In the barren interlude “0°,” she manipulates the air of the saxophone to create the effect of a cool, hollow wind, as though she had recorded in a walk-in freezer. This palette carries over into “Solsnu,” which adds ornaments of crackling wood from the cello, complemented by grave, patient piano figures that go in and out of unison with the sax, as though the two were passing trains.
Drifting invites the curious sense that time has paused. But there are instances in which repetition threatens to become monotonous, and music feels stuck in its own cyclicality. For over half of the six-plus minutes of “Oversoar,” dissonant piano reiterates hiccupping outbursts over droning cello; the whirling piano figures of “I villvind” are reminiscent of passages in Debussy’s “Voiles,” but their relentlessness grows tiresome. Even in the album’s comparatively stagnant moments, though, Henriette’s musical curiosity remains evident. There is a certain comfort to be found in the passive energy of the album, which subtly unfolds according to its own timekeeping. It’s clear that Henriette’s pieces ask not for attention—merely patience and an open mind.