Pieced together from four Merriweather Post Pavilion-era sets, this live album reinforces the weirdness of the band’s pop heyday.

Ballet Slippers

A decade since Merriweather Post Pavilion, the qualities that once made Animal Collective singular—their gleeful nitrous-oxide harmonies, their cascading drums, their interlocking hooks—are as familiar as Instagram filters. The success of “Peacebone” and “My Girls” has overshadowed their unruly previous decade to the point where it can be hard to remember just how wild and transgressive Animal Collective were for so long.
Those splendid eccentricities surface again on Ballet Slippers, a 12-song live mix culled from four shows a decade ago and sequenced into a simulacrum of a single concert. They begin with the hiccuping samples and strangled static of Merriweather opener “In the Flowers” and kill the sequences 90 minutes later after the tessellated jumble of Merriweather closer “Brother Sport,” wishing the crowd well. Between these bookends, things get weird, often subtly so. A tambourine and acoustic guitar meet so high in the mix of “Who Could Win a Rabbit” that it sounds like the microphones are being hit by snow chains. A noise collage erupting inside “Bleed” suggests a basement show circa 2003. And “Daily Routine” turns into a slow-motion tug of war between a fetching hook and surrounding chaos.
Throughout, Animal Collective split the difference between fidelity to the songs on Merriweather and nuanced improvisation. A Las Vegas crowd squeals as the kaleidoscopic sequences of “My Girls” rise from primordial goo, a pointed reminder of just how alien but magnetic that inescapable song felt in 2009. They give the hit its space, pushing the interweaving harmonies high above the drums to emphasize the basic humanity of Panda Bear’s early-Obama-years request—just to be a good person with a safe place to raise a family. Freed from studio safeguards, “Lion in a Coma” feels particularly frantic and urgent. Avey Tare’s vocals tunnel through cramped electronics, emphasizing the song’s existential agoraphobia.
At the other extreme, Animal Collective treat “Banshee Beat” like its own world, with an atmosphere of droning guitars that shift like summer winds and synthesizers that slip like sunlight through storm clouds. A month or so after the recordings that shape Ballet Slippers, Animal Collective made history by licensing the first-ever Grateful Dead sample. If that’s always felt like lip service, their extended sweep between “Lablakely Dress” and “Fireworks” provide the bona fides. The skipping drums, the shaky vocals, the woozy electronics: Over 20 minutes, a dozen tiny parts coalesce into a hero’s journey from one of the band’s early abstractions to one of their most radiant anthems. And if the idea of a heroic Animal Collective guitar solo feels absurd, it arrives halfway in, a circuit of trebly notes transmuted into ecstasy by sheer repetition.
Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you. And if you are already on board, Animal Collective’s ability to jam will come as no surprise; these takes will, instead, transport you to a past place and time, previously accessible through bootlegs or YouTube or your memory. But the best of this set serves as an essential reminder of how, on Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective successfully folded a decade of experimentation into 11 engrossing pop songs that sounded like little else—and then, on the road, let it spill back out for big crowds looking to party to “My Girls.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The young Atlanta rapper argues that he’s made it, but his pro forma trap debut suggests that he’s not quite there yet.

The World Is Yours

The current generation of rappers, particularly those coming out of the trap music bull market that’s housed in Atlanta, typically arrive onto the scene atop viral hits. Rich the Kid, a demonstrable talent with his own imprint (Rich Forever) rode into the mainstream on a wave of critical enthusiasm and industry interest atop “New Freezer.” That it includes the holy grail of features from Kendrick Lamar suggested that, yeah, Rich’s made it, but the album that came with the explosive single rarely shifts out of a default rap scheme.
While the Rich the Kid we meet on The World Is Yours clearly considers himself a big-leaguer, the album is short on the deftness and polish that was promised on “New Freezer.” He ably deploys the standard stop-and-go triplet flow across its 14 tracks, but does so without ever shifting from a self-limiting rap model, leaning heavily on concussive, bass-heavy beats and lyrical contributions from a bounty of veteran and trend-setting artists.
The title track is a comparatively honest introduction, lacking in the “yuhs” and “ayys” that soon begin to overwhelm and distract. “World Is Yours” lays out the devil-may-care posturing and slight bits of humor (“No Biggie but I used to trap in the Coogi”) that listeners should expect for the next 40-plus minutes. The clarity of the leadoff bleeds into the glut of trap motifs that is “New Freezer,” wherein Rich gladly ingratiates himself with the album’s talking points: money, women, cars, and big jewelry.
Rich shows off his lyrical styling, but even that remains far from revelatory. While his voice suffuses the album, it exhibits only a handful of emotional states. For Rich, who has noted that he does not write his bars down, but rather, “I just go in there and—boom,” his enthusiasm doesn’t make up for his lack of styles and flows. His insistence on rapping about “money, hoes, and clothes” as Biggie waxed 23 years ago puts Rich in a position to get consistently outshone by the many co-signs scattered across the album.
This is pointedly clear on “End of Discussion,”a dismissal of perceived haters that is piqued by a curious beeping sound and the noise of a money-counting machine at work. Lil Wayne does the heavy lifting here with a bodied rollout of well-paced, self-referential rhymes: “Pull of fast like a loose cheetah/One diamond ring on two fingers/Cheating on these hoes, call me Tune-cheater.” He sounds as if he were running a clinic on the song; a rap alum at homecoming mingling with the popular freshman. Meanwhile, Rich is somewhat adrift in his unremarkable feints. It makes the notable absence of female voices significant as woman contribute little to the album save as unnamed dalliances, anonymous tricks, and forget-me-nots.
The exception is “Too Gone,” a track with a metronomic xylophone trill produced by the Canadian beatmaker WondaGurl. Khalid levitates the song with his crooning, modest refrain about being too faded to connect with someone who wants your affection. Rich, though, continues to assail his doubters while suggesting just a bit of openness: “Really not used to you calling me/I’m in love with a coupe.” It’s the greatest concession to romance as we’ll get on the LP.
However, Rich appears in peak form on “Dead Friends,” widely regarded to be a Lil Uzi Vert diss track. The album’s finale has Rich channeling Meek Mill in the drill rap cadence familiar from his mixtape days. The caustic clap backs, even if muddled, are best in the chorus: “All them dead friends (dead), you a middleman (what)/You a little man (little, huh)/Your money getting shorter (shorter).” Given some direction, Rich’s best when he’s got a real target in his sights to slight.
In an album that touts a reputable lineup of producers and contributors, it smarts as Rap Caviar bait rather than as a collective trap triumph. Algorithms are the new inroads to platinum after all. Still, braggadocio is a trap rapper’s default setting, and the kid may be rich now, but The World Is Yours wants for all of its wealth-inspired imagery and allusions to amassed clout.


On his eighth album, the singer-songwriter connects his gentle, acerbic soul to his most politically charged, well-stated, and funniest songs.

Mangy Love

On the very first song on his very first record, Cass McCombs went to the hospital. There he received some troubling test results and found himself faced with an unanswerable question. “Is it dying that terrifies you,” he sang, in a gentle, boyish sigh that would earn him plenty of comparisons to Elliott Smith, “Or just being dead?” It was a heavy introduction, but, in its plainspoken intensity, it foretold the work to come. As McCombs’ music progressed from murky lo-fi to austere folk-rock, his on-record persona has evolved with it, becoming at once more fleshed-out and more mysterious. He’s in a strange position now of being a veteran songwriter who we’re just getting to know.
On his last record, 2013’s double-album Big Wheel and Others, McCombs tried to show us everything. While it was his most ambitious album—ranging from apocalyptic ballads to sunny, crooner pop, with enough room to include a faithful Thin Lizzy cover—it was also his most unwieldy, an album as road-trip that was exhilarating and exhausting. *Mangy Love *takes the opposite approach, refining a career’s worth of ideas into his most focussed work yet, accomplishing what *Big Wheel *set out to do in about half the time. As expected from McCombs, *Mangy Love *is a uniformly cloudy work, but it’s his most revealing album, his most political, and his funniest yet. Across its twelve songs, McCombs dabbles in his deadpan surrealism, throws in a few well-placed toilet jokes, and even shares some of his Twitter drafts. “Netflix and die,” he scowls late in the album, “Go on and cry.”
While McCombs’ career has been one of slow-building evolution (“Season of the slug/Crawling up the vine,” goes a line on “Medusa’s Outhouse”), Mangy Love’s first half feels something like a crash course through his last fifteen years of songwriting. The set opens with “Bum Bum Bum,” whose soulful, echoing guitars harken back to McCombs’ early work. But the lyrics express confusion and hopelessness in the current flashpoint of police brutality. “How long until this river of blood congeals,” McCombs asks repeatedly, punctuating each stanza with an exhausted “bum bum bum.” It’s one of the most powerful songs McCombs has ever written: a plea for peace, or maybe just to pay attention.
Other tracks follow suit, expanding on McCombs' discography with a wider scope and greater confidence. “Medusa’s Outhouse” floats like a psychedelic smoke ring through Wit’s End’s wine-stained piano ballads, and “Low Flyin’ Bird” hums with a folksy flutter, recalling McCombs’ jammy detour on this year’s Skifflin’*. *These songs highlight McCombs’ keen pop sensibility that informed breakthrough moments like “You Saved My Life” and “County Line,” without forsaking any of his idiosyncrasies. The juxtaposition of the two are made immediately apparent amid the ’90s-Van Morrison jazz-pop of “Laughter Is the Best Medicine.” Guest vocalist Rev. Goat Carson slurs along with McCombs in almost-unison, his timing perfect, so as not to spoil the punchlines. “Sugar and spice,” they sing together, “And everything… weird.”
It’s a classic McCombs trick, flipping cliches into his own weird vernacular. It’s also something of a mission statement for the album’s back half. Songs like “Run Sister Run” and “Switch” favor the groove over the hook, giving away their secrets in the first 60 seconds and mostly just riding those vibes before fading around the five-minute mark. While lacking the momentum and immediacy of the album’s first half, these songs showcase the dynamics of McCombs’ band and the impeccably smooth production from Elliott Smith-collaborator Rob Schnapf. Like Ariel Pink’s similarly expansive Pom Pom, *Mangy Love *is comfortable in its experimentation, maintaining a consistent, lived-in atmosphere throughout its separate halves.
Ever resistant to traditional structures, however, McCombs imbues each side of the record with a track that deliberately disrupts the flow. “Rancid Girl,” an outtake-quality oddball placed in the confrontational spot of track two, loops a gnarly, bluesy riff while McCombs berates a 17-year-old (“You’re bad/I mean, you *smell *bad.”) Think of it as a symbolic sister to Neil Young’s “Stupid Girl,” the kind of character experiment that one might have expected McCombs to have outgrown by this point (which is probably exactly why he kept it on the album). On the opposite end of the spectrum is “It,” a late-album stunner that begins like the world’s saddest air conditioner booting up and climaxes with a choir of harmonies behind McCombs’ vocals. The song bursts out the speakers. “All of its life, wandering/All of mine, wondering,” he sings, a simple turn of phrase that reads like a reflection on the work he’s created: an ever-shifting body, with a restless brain behind it. But even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection.


A rare full length from Hyperdub, Ikonika's debut is an exciting extension of post-dubstep styles like wonky, funky, and chiptunes.

Contact, Love, Want, Have

Ikonika's debut full-length is a big deal in the dubstep community for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, it's seen as an exciting extension of the various styles that have been swirling around the genre for the past few years-- specifically wonky and funky. The record also arrives with some cachet: It's only the fifth long player to be released by Hyperdub, still the genre's standard-bearer and the source of some of its most essential music. Ikonika's (real name Sara Abdel-Hamid) record is also one of the first high-profile dubstep full-lengths produced by a woman, and though that's moot with regard to her actual music, it's at least encouraging for what has been a mostly male-dominated scene so far.
Ikonika isn't the most musical or technical producer out there, but she does have a way with melody. In an interview with Pitchfork columnist Martin Clark, she told us, "I don't really know how to play keys. So I just smack them until something nice comes out." Okay, probably not the best defense of one's own work, but it is important to understanding how she differs from other dubstep producers. Instead of the meticulous, heady style that we've come to expect from the genre, Ikonika's approach is more spontaneous and direct, concerned more with impact than process. Her productions aren't as dynamic or complex as others' are, but they're arguably fun in a way that a lot of dubstep-- especially the traditional murky, low-end variety-- is not.
In terms of sound, Ikonika isn't that different from producers Joker, Rustie, and Starkey. Like them, she uses dubstep as a base for a jumble of styles-- in this case the wobble of wonky, the insistent thud of funky, and chiptune videogame sounds. Her pitch-bent synths are usually the focus-- they sit upfront in the mix and are manipulated to match a song's mood. Sometimes the album can feel almost cloyingly upbeat (there's a lot of very ramped-up, tech-y sounds) but there's also a good deal of variety. "R.E.S.O.L." nearly makes you woozy with its heavy, wobbling bass and distorted 8-bit squiggle. Videogames are a running theme, and certain tracks like "They Are Losing the War" really play up this quality. Others, like "Millie" are more slow-moving and syrupy.
Because of these distinct moods, the record works nicely as a full length-- it holds your attention, and the songs never bleed together. For those not expecting progressive dubstep, it's a catchy, immediate pleasure. But others who desire something heavy on craft, depth, and movement might find it insufficient. The record lacks some of those critical elements, but ultimately it's neither a great crossover dubstep-pop LP nor some kind of crude flop. It's a solid record. If nothing else, Ikonika's desire to inject some playfulness into a genre that could use a lot more of it is a good and welcome thing.


The second album from Texas songwriter Hannah Read—the creative force at the heart of Lomelda—is alternately quiet and erupting, with immediately arresting melodies that long for closeness and wonder.

Thx

Highways crisscross Lomelda’s second album, and they are not the exciting, adventure-filled ones that star in movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or in books like On the Road. These are lonely highways heavy with the distance between the driver and her destination—or the driver and the people she’s trying to reach both physically and emotionally. Distance saturates Thx, the Texas band’s Double Double Whammy debut, and it makes sense when you look at a map: Hannah Read, the creative force at the center of Lomelda, grew up in Silsbee, Tx., where she still lives with her family, two hours from Houston and four hours from Austin. She’s swaddled in distance, and in her music, she paints those miles of empty highway she has to drive all the time with a profound longing for closeness and wonder.
Take “Interstate Vision,” which opens the album. “Interstates are not what I want,” Read sings, her voice multi-tracked and harmonizing with itself, as though she’s not driving alone across Texas’ flat expanses at night but driving with herself every other time she’s cut through that same strip of road. Then she’s seeing angels burst out of someone else’s headlights; then she’s sitting with “you” in a parking lot, asking, “Can you feel me now?/Do you know me yet?” As in: I am here sitting next to you in the same motionless car, but are we together? Do you see me?
Co-produced with Read’s brother Tommy, who also wrote the song on which the second track “Bam Sha Klam” is based, Thx wanders to the very borders of those questions. Read’s vocal melodies sweep her range, and they’re often overdubbed with harmonies to lend depth and space to her singing. Read also plays guitar and bass throughout the album; other than drums and a handful of string instruments, she’s the only one you hear, meaning she’s Lomelda the way Conor Oberst used to be Bright Eyes—not really an individual behind a pseudonymous solo project, but not really a band, either. The individuation allowed by that arrangement bolsters Read’s songwriting. She knows when to keep quiet, as on the acoustic title track, and when to erupt, as on the closing track “Only World” and at the coda to “Bam Sha Klam.”
That coda is where the album peaks, which is not to say that it’s over by track two. It’s just that you’re in for a long (and lovely) comedown after “Bam Sha Klam”’s triumphant finish. Part of its endurance comes from its setup; Read catches you off guard, singing, “Why are ya laughing?/Listen here/This is serious,” and then, as if all the miles she’s ever driven came pouring out of her voicebox all at once, “It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going from here on out.” It’s a coda to topple codas. File it next to Silver Jews’ “Federal Dust,” with which it shares its highway fetish and semantic simplicity, and Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” with which it shares its battering ram bassline and towering anxiety.
Read addresses one of her songwriting kin by name on the album: Elliott Smith, at the end of “Out There.” In an interview with NPR, she explained that her brother once told her he knew Smith personally, that the late songwriter had taught him how to smoke cigarettes after a show. She always knew Tommy had been lying to her, but she spent years trying to get her head around the fib, to make sense of the idea that someone could insinuate himself into your personal life through his music. “Elliott, what have you done to us?” she asks in one of her endless searching melodies. He’s a ghost at this point and yet no further away from Read and her brother than the time when Tommy told her that story. Smith’s still out there in the dark slipping past the car windows as Read drives; he’s still messing with their heads, crawling around in their sadnesses, putting words to moments that otherwise would have passed like shadows on asphalt.
Thx comes with its share of sadnesses, but they’re not the kind you necessarily notice on first listen. Unlike peers like Julien Baker or Told Slant, Read prioritizes immediately arresting melodies over immediately arresting lyrics. Her words tend toward the casual while her singing gravitates toward the adventurous, and so you might be too caught up with where her notes are going to pay attention to what she’s saying. But by the time her sentences ring clear on the third or fourth listen, Thx already has you in its hooks.


This 4xCD box draws on electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more, including key early tracks from the Human League, Throbbing Gristle, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Various Artists: Close To the Noise Floor - Formative UK Electronica 1975 - 1984

The evolutionary arc of the synthesizer has a completely different shape from the trajectory of the electric guitar. With a few exceptions, the guitar started out as a crude generator of exciting noise and dance energy—a fundamentally teenage sound. Then it gradually became an ever more subtle expressive implement, with a huge textural range. Synths, in contrast, started out prog: they cost a fortune and were challenging to operate, and this made them the preserve of established performers generally of virtuosic and artistically ambitious bent. Either that, or synthesizers belonged to institutions like universities and were accessible only to composers with equally lofty purposes in mind.
The primitivist phase of the synthesizer came after the sophisticated start. In the late 1970s, cheaper machines like the Wasp became available; they were also compact, portable, and relatively user-friendly compared with their bulky predecessors. This democratization of electronics happened to coincide with rock’s own self-conscious return to juvenile basics in the form of punk. All of a sudden, the synth was competing with the guitar to be the true instrument of do-it-yourself. For many, the synth won that contest handily—you didn’t even need to learn two chords, you could riff out abstract blurts of nasty noise or play one-finger melodies. Furthermore, synths and the rudimentary drum machines that were also newly available encouraged a “non-musical” (at least in rock terms) approach. Rather than jam your way to a song through the intuitive logic of groove and feel, tracks could be built up through addition and subtraction, using a hypnotic but uninflected machine-beat as a grid for the assembly process.
Close To the Noise Floor is a 4xCD survey of the excitingly messy birth of British electronica during the late '70s and early '80s. One of the maps for the set compiler Richard Anderson used is “Wild Planet,” a celebrated three-part feature written by Dave Henderson for the music weekly Sounds. The 1983 article spawned a regular Sounds column dedicated to the cassette underground of tiny labels like Flowmotion and Third Mind. Henderson contributes a short but vivid memoir-style introduction to this box set and also features in his musical guise as a member of Worldbackwards, a group whose ambition was to sound like “Throbbing Gristle on Tamla Motown.”
“Minimal synth” works as a shorthand tag for Close To the Noise Floor’s remit, although the scope of the trawl is actually wider and more disparate than what that term tends to signify, taking in electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more. Rather than use generic focus as an organizing principle, the anthology achieves coherence through sticking with a single country—Britain—when it could have easily have swept across the equally active European scene or harvested the scattered but significant American exponents like John Bender and Nervous Gender.
The national focus makes sense historically, in so far as the UK scene was catalyzed by half-a-dozen native outfits who released debut singles within a few months of each other in mid-1978: the Normal, Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Thomas Leer, and Robert Rental. The combined impact of these singles—respectively “T.V.O.D.,” “Being Boiled,” “United,” the Extended Play EP, “Private Plane,” and “Paralysis”—was as galvanizing as Buzzcocks’s “Spiral Scratch” had been for scrappy DIY guitar-groups a year earlier.
Noise Floor’s first disc concentrates on the children of Throbbing Gristle and “Warm Leatherette” (the more influential B-side to The Normal’s “T.V.O.D.”). No spacey ripples or groovy Moogy sensuality here: the synth is used aggressively and obnoxiously. One gem in this vein is Storm Bugs’ “Little Bob Minor," with its ear-itching drones whose texture resembles a comb-and-paper kazoo. Vocals, when they appear, are usually screams or creepy spoken-word soundbites, as with the cut-up voices from a radio interview with prostitutes that appear on We Be Echo’s “Sexuality.”
The stand-out track on the first disc, though, is a bit of an anomaly: Thomas Leer’s “Tight As a Drum,” from his fabulous EP 4 Movements. By 1981, Leer had left behind the gratingly foreboding ambiences of The Bridge, his collaborative album with Robert Rental, and absorbed the mutant disco influence of New York’s ZE label. 4 Movements also sounds like he’s letting back in some of the banished musicality of pre-punk rock, figures like Island Records folk-blues minstrel John Martyn. “Tight As a Drum” swings because although the percussion is electronic, Leer played it by hand on pads; the intricate weave of synth-melodies over the top sounds vaguely Middle Eastern in its ornamented filigree. The song seems to reach your ears through the heat-haze coming off a sun-baked road. A snapshot of a moment of tension so exquisitely taut it’s a kind of ecstasy, “Tight As a Drum” features the briefest of spoken-not-sung lyrics: a depiction of a young man stretching himself, silhouetted against the morning light streaming through a window.
Embracing mainstream ideas of melody and musicality doesn’t work so well on the second disc, which mostly features groups who reach towards pop but don’t get even as close as the Human League did on “Being Boiled” (included here). Performance art duo SchleImer K’s “Broken Vein” suggests Soft Cell sans the soaring voice and heart-swelling tunes; Native Europe’s “The Distance from Köln” is a lo-fi cousin to Berlin’s '80s radio staple “The Metro”; lyrically if not so much sonically, Cultural Amnesia’s 1981 anti-Thatcherism ditty “Materialistic Man” comes over like a dry run for Depeche Mode’s “Everything Counts." The better tunes come from those who actually managed to make it as pop stars. “A New Kind of Man,” an unreleased solo single by ex-Ultravox singer John Foxx, features a vocal that—typical for the emerging synthpop genre—sounds glacial and torrid at the same time, plus lyrics like scraps from an abandoned and torn-up screenplay: “An underwater kind of silence/Humming of electric pylons/Don’t forget me/Fits of static/Another scene began.” Heard in its superior 1980 album version rather than original incarnation, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Almost” sounds like a spindly North-of-England Kraftwerk—graph-paper rhythm, sobbing synth.
Livening up the second disc—otherwise a bit of slog—are specimens from the post-punk mini-genre of parody. The late '70s erupted with cover versions that swapped reverent reinterpretation for willfully goofy travesty—think Flying Lizards’ deadpan take on “Money,“ or the Dickies’s punked-up “Nights in White Satin.” The idea, I think, was to show just how much distance there was now between Old Wave and New Wave—or, if the cover was of a contemporary hit, how far from chart-pop convention you could push the song.
That’s the nature of the game with British Standard Unit’s deconstructive molesting of Rod Stewart’s “D’Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which became a John Peel radio show fave in 1979 with its grotesquely sped-up voices and anti-disco jerkiness. B.S.U. was just one of numerous guises worn by ex-Mott the Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher for a covers album project called Hybrid Kids - A Collection of Classic Mutants. “Gerry and the Holograms,” by the group of the same name, isn’t a cover but a lampoon of the emergent synthpop genre itself, wrought by two members of the cult band Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias (whose output consisted almost entirely of parodies such as their punk-mocking Snuff Rock EP). “Gerry and the Holograms” has been identified as the melodic source for New Order’s “Blue Monday,” but to these ears sounds more like The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” covered by BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In a word, awesome.
That pair of whimsies could equally have been squeezed onto the last disc of Close To the Noise Floor, which corrals an array of unclassifiable oddities. Although electronic in feel, more often than not the sounds here are achieved via conventional instruments subjected to heavy treatments. Here the forebears, if any exist, are the Residents and Cabaret Voltaire (who in their early days used effects-processed flute and guitar more than synths). Renaldo and the Loaf’s “Dying Inside” sounds ripe for sampling by Kanye West on Pablo II. Unable to afford synths, the duo used effects pedals to render their instruments and voices as inorganic and alien-sounding as possible. Alien Brains’ “Menial Disorders” has a great backstory (the project started in the physics lab at the group’s high school and mainly deployed a “Loopotron,” a self-cobbled tape-echo machine that used the erase head to alter the sound) which is matched by the sound itself : a cloud of mechanical gnats circling around your head, fizzing zig-zags of hi-hat, corrugated crumples of texture, rhythm like bed springs pinging inside a giant reverberant cistern.
Most of Noise Floor’s contents are shaped by twin prohibitions. First and foremost, the goal was to sound as un-rock’n’roll and un-American as possible (which is why the vocals, when they appear, are usually absurdly English—stiff-backed, groomed-sounding, somehow short-haired). But there was a secondary impulse at work too: to break with the conventions of synth-based music established in the first half of the ’70s by groups like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, who favored long-form compositions (often taking up an entire album side) and an atmosphere of celestial serenity.
Now you might have noticed that I jumped right past this box’s third disc. That’s because in some ways it’s the most intriguing of the four, precisely because it’s full of post-punk DIY that still took its bearings from the pre-punk electronic cosmonauts. Maximal Synth, you could call this stuff: operators like Sea of Wires, MFH, and Mark Shreeve, who, rather than ape “Warm Leatherette” or Cabaret Voltaire’s “Silent Command," parallel the billowing pulse-scapes being made at that same time by Manuel Gottsching on albums like 1978’s Blackouts. This sound—late period kosmische drifting towards New Age or proto-techno—has in recent years enjoyed a measure of renewed currency thanks to Emeralds and their ilk, but generally it’s been written right out of history.
One of the groups included on Disc 3 are actually a totally pre-punk proposition. Zorch took their battery of EMS Synthi As and light show to free festivals all across England, including the very first Stonehenge Festival in 1974. Hearing their “Adrenalin (Return of the Elohim Pt. 1)” made me wish for a time machine so I could experience its spaceship-landing whooshes panning around the megalithic columns and frazzling the minds of the gathered long-hairs. In a similar amorphous vein, Ron Berry’s “Sea of Tranquility” is an elegiac homage to the Moon Landing. But “Triptych” by EG Oblique Graph (Bryn Jones, later better known as Muslimgauze) is less beatific, recalling the sensory-deprivation aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler: insidiously hissing percussion and color-leached tones, like a wintry after-dark walk through a Berlin pedestrian underpass.
Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor. Time, perhaps, for a box set that does justice to major label synth-rock of the ’70s: figures like Tomita, pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, Michael Hoenig, Ralph Lundsten, even Jean Michel-Jarre. Rather than the underground, which enjoys a healthy complement of dedicated curators and salvage operators, it’s the mainstream of that era that is truly lost, that in a strange way seems even more exotic and remote in time.


As Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter inch toward the mainstream, their plaintive and gloomy* Three* feels less like an album and more like postcards from the eye of an emotional hurricane.

Three

You’ve got to hand it to Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter for their work ethic. In the past nine years, they’ve transformed their duo Phantogram from an indie trip-hop venture à la Dead Can Dance to the most monolithic, festival-ready pop project on Republic’s roster. They’ve refined the core sound of Barthel’s powerhouse alto vocals and Carter’s glitchy arrangements to a diamond tip and embraced a blossoming interest in collaboration: from Miley Cyrus to Skrillex to OutKast’s Big Boi (who tapped Phantogram for multiple tracks on his 2012 album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, and later recorded an EP with them under the name Big Grams). With their audience and creative network steadily expanding, the duo is bound for the mainstream–which, of course, means they’ve got to prove themselves all over again.
Phantogram’s latest album, Three, arrives under a pall. This past January, Barthel’s older sister (who was close friends with Carter as well) took her own life, a personal trauma that hovered over the sessions. Granted, the duo has always thrived in the shadows, having relied heavily on stark backbeats and gloomy synths for previous nocturnal anthems like 2009’s “Turn it Off” and 2014’s aptly-titled “Black Out Days.” But expressing such a deep loss through music takes finesse, something that Phantogram accomplish only unevenly on Three.
Between brooding, vulnerable cuts like “Barking Dog” and punchier offerings like “Run Run Blood,” Three often feels less like an album and more like postcards from the eye of an emotional hurricane. This is partly due to the album’s formidable supporting cast: R&B maestros the-Dream and Tricky Stewart and pop strongman Ricky Reed (Meghan Trainor, Jason Derulo) all show up in the credits. And yet, excepting Reed’s clearly visible fingerprints on the trunk-rattling tour-de-force “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore,” it’s hard to sort out these producers’ exact contributions on Three. Phantogram’s vaporous sound is as prevalent as ever, with Barthel’s airy runs and Carter’s turgid samples lending a weightless, fever-dream quality to “Answer” and “You’re Mine.”
However alluring their atmospherics, these mid-tempo cuts (of which Three contains far too many) pale in comparison to the aforementioned single, the album’s greatest draw and Phantogram’s finest song to date. Never before have the duo sounded so animated, self-assured, or synchronized. Barthel effortlessly alternates between half-rapped verses and cooed hooks, with Carter meeting every vocal pivot with a blast of bass (the funky, ad-lib on the second verse is a particularly nice touch), a frigid synth melody, or a distorted guitar riff.
The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good. Consider “Run Run Blood”—an unwieldy bricolage of dub grooves, breakbeats, plaintive guitars, ambient interludes, and ham-fisted lyrics about “falling into a swarm of bees” that give me The Wicker Man flashbacks every time I hear it. Shortly after delivering that howler, Barthel gestures to the big picture, literally: (“It’s bigger than life/It’s bigger than love/It’s bigger than us/Bigger than all”). She never specifies what it is, exactly, but the logical answer would be some kind of morbid sublimity that Phantogram strive for and, alas, fail to detail.


A year and a half after Purity Ring surfaced with the song "Ungirthed", the young Edmonton, Alberta, duo has released a proper debut, a compulsively listenable collection of dubbed-out retro-futuristic indie pop. Shrines is not about range, offering instead subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea.

Shrines

In early 2011 a song called "Ungirthed" by a group called Purity Ring started circulating online. There wasn't much information about them out there; they had a member that used to be in something called Gobble Gobble, which momentarily seemed notable. But everything you needed to know was contained in the song itself. It mixed the kind of ghostly pitch-shifted vocals, reminiscent of the Knife and Burial, that had spent the previous year haunting witch house; it had warped, surging, Dilla-derived synth chords that popular online remixers like Star Slinger were on the verge of turning into a cliché. And it had the stuttering start-stop drum machine patterns that highlighted how much the pulse of Southern rap had invaded indie music the last few years. But where these production touches were often held up as ends in themselves, "Ungirthed" was a well-constructed and fully realized pop song, with an infectious vocal hook and a melody that went places. This was novel. It was the kind of tune you took notice of immediately.
Eventually we learned that "Ungirthed" was the work of Megan James (vocals) and Corin Roddick (production), two young musicians from Edmonton, Alberta. Wisely, they didn't rush out an album, but other songs trickled out: "Belispeak" surfaced in the fall and "Obedear" emerged this spring. Along the way, Purity Ring polished up their live show, outfitting the stage with lanterns synchronized to the music, which Roddick triggered via MIDI using drumsticks. They built an audience with very little recorded music to share with it. And now, a year and a half later, they've issued their debut album, Shrines.
Since those early singles all mined such similar sounds, it was an open question how Purity Ring might mix things up over the course of an 11-song, 38-minute full-length. But Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point. "Ungirthed" is how you see it head on; "Fineshrine" is what it looks like from a low angle, with a bit of shadow from the overhang providing an extra touch of darkness; "Crawlersout", with its sharper percussive edges and extra portion of ghosted vocals, is the view from 90 degrees to the left; and then "Grandloves", with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won't stop talking on his cell. "Grandloves" is the one moment in which Purity Ring seem common, but that's one truly weak song out of 11. Not a bad ratio for a new band. And the consistent quality makes it easy to forgive the feeling that occasionally creeps in the first few times you hear the album straight through: "Didn't I just hear this one a couple of minutes ago?"
A quality that further elevates Shrines is the lyrics, and that's something that could be easily missed, since James' vocals are often heavily processed. They, too, offer variations on a theme. "Sea water's flowing from the middle of my thighs," are the first words we here on the opening track, "Crawlersout", and the focus on the body never lets up. From "Dig holes in me with wooden carved trowels," on "Grandloves" to "The crawling animals will seek all things warm all things moist, I will relentlessly shame myself," on "Saltkin", the words are impressionistic but always come back to sweat, skin, and bones. Fluids ooze in sympathy with the chords; hearts are given away by being ripped from ribcages. The lyrics are vivid and striking, even if it takes some work to parse them out. And the contrast between their bloody earthiness and music born of 1s and 0s gives the record an appealing push/pull and provides the album with some additional staying power. These songs, so instantly catchy, have more to offer over time.
The band that Purity Ring most reminds me of is High Places. The dubbed-out retro-futuristic approach to sound, the male/female duo, the connection to the earlier iterations of indie pop, the experiments with live spectacle. And High Places also emerged more or less fully formed, with the singles and EPs collected on 03/07 - 09/07 pulling together au courant influences into something that felt personal and new. But ever since, High Places have had some difficulty figuring out where to go next. Once you own a sound and make it your own, it's not always easy to leave it behind. We'll see how that plays out with Purity Ring. For now, the compulsively listenable Shrines stands quite well on its own. Most bands never manage a statement this forceful.


Somewhere in England, or maybe Iceland, Graham Coxon is crying. Blur recently\n\ announced that their hiatus will continue through ...

Gorillaz

Somewhere in England, or maybe Iceland, Graham Coxon is crying. Blur recently announced that their hiatus will continue through the year's end, due to Damon Albarn's collaboration with Norman Cook. To make matter worse, another Albarn side project, Gorillaz, has already hit stores on both sides of the Atlantic. The novelty group finds Albarn assuming the role of 2-D, the animated lead singer of a pack of four misfits, whose likeness was envisioned by Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett. The Automator-produced "act" is a smarmy, promotional gimmick. And it's the best Blur offshoot released to date.
As soon as the record begins, the cartoon façade fades. Even people who only know Blur as "that band who did 'Woo-Hoo'" will immediately detect Albarn's ever-so-Brit pipes. Early reports suggested that Albarn contributed to only a few songs, but he could rightfully be called the band's frontman; his croon can be heard on all but 4 of the album's 16 tracks. Dan "The Automator" Nakamura is similarly recognizable. There's no band (animated or otherwise) making this music; it's the Automator throwing down beats, manipulating samples, and letting Kid Koala's scratches interrupt his flow. And that, friends, is why Gorillaz is a conceptual failure.
But maybe this is for the best. Nakamura's refreshing production doesn't rely on today's hip-hop skitters and squiggles for its futurism. No, what we've got here is the same brooding backpacker hip-hop that elevated the similar Deltron 3030 LP to unforeseen heights. As a result, this record reveals itself as far less disposable than its cartoon cover art suggests.
Gorillaz's best tracks exploit the unlikely, but successful dynamic between Albarn and Nakamura. On "Man Research (Clapper)", Damon wails hysterically over Dan's relentless, echoing thump. "New Genious (Brother)" is gloomy trip-hop with orchestral flourishes that wrap around the flux of Albarn's falsetto. On "Clint Eastwood", Del tha Funkee Homosapien handles the song's verses, allowing Damon a small cameo in the looped chorus. And curiously, I can think of few other samples that would compliment Del's urgent delivery as effectively as Albarn's laconic vocal haze.
The album's foray into dub-lite, "Slow Country", is Gorillaz's charming peak. A light, Latin-tinged piano playfully slides over a sunny groove while Albarn exhibits "Tender"-like plaintiveness with lines like, "I can't stand your loneliness." Despite the fact that this track is unfamiliar territory for both Nakamura and Albarn, their charismatic playfulness makes for undeniable fun.
The small-scale experimentation, though, falls flat on the record's few rock tracks. The appropriately titled "Re-Hash" is such a generic marriage of acoustic pop and stock hip-hop beats that, were Albarn to come in chanting, "Come, m'lady, come, come m'lady," it would hardly strike as surprising. The Wire reject, "Punk", suffers from an asinine formula (play a sloppy riff, clap three times, add cockney vocals, repeat) that makes each of the track's 90 seconds harrowing.
That Gorillaz's closing number-- Ed Case's two-step-meets-raga remix of "Clint Eastwood"-- doesn't feel out of place could be taken as testament to how successfully eclectic the album is. But in actuality, it's a sign of the record's short-lasting, faddish appeal. Gorillaz is the definitive side-project: Even at its best, it's never more than a divergent one-off stint. Albarn may occasionally succeed on non-Blur outings, but as with Coxon and Alex James' solo affairs, they only further prove that Blur is equal to much more than the sum of its parts.
Keep ya head up, Graham.


The Dilated Peoples MC’s third solo album shows his continued faith in the eternal truths of boom-bap rap music.

Weather or Not

It’s been 11 years since Evidence’s solo debut, The Weatherman LP. The planet has continued warming, continents have drifted a little further apart and the universe has expanded; all the while, the Dilated Peoples rapper has kept forging the same knuckle-duster boom-bap music that’s been his trademark since day one. That’s no bad thing. Evidence is like a soccer player who finds space not by running, but by staying still while everyone around him runs. And as his latest solo LP shows, the raw, twisted style he’s always favored still feels fresh in 2018.
While the tracklist features production from several old-school-minded luminaries, among the most impressive songs on Weather or Not are a handful of collaborations with Evidence’s lifelong friend the Alchemist. Alc’s hard-angled instrumentals have acted as a potent backdrop for many gritty East Coast spitters over the years—Action Bronson, 50 Cent, and the sadly departed Prodigy among them—but he’s always had a special thing going with Evidence, from the signature songs he produced for Dilated Peoples starting in the late 1990s to Lord Steppington, the full-length LP that the pair released in 2014 under the name Step Brothers. Here, the two early-40s Los Angeles veterans continue to draw strength from the time-honored sounds of the Five Boroughs.
“I write to Alchemist ’cause others don’t inspire me,” Evidence says on “Throw It All Away,” a bitter ode to blowing money fast when you’ve not got many dollars to your name. The track’s unrushed, no-nonsense drums and chopped-up, echoing sample are easy pickings for the rapper’s bruising flow as he spits blunt one-liners on the “long, winding road” of his career with the thoughtful deliberation of an elder statesman. While that track is a fine exhibit of classic Alchemist orchestration, the producer also serves up the biggest oddity of the set in “Powder Cocaine.” With a post-punk-style hook courtesy of singer Catero, acidic guitar lines that wander in and out of the mix, and a vocal harmony loop that could have been salvaged from one of the Beatles’ magical mystery tours, it’s the clearest iteration of the album’s surly psychedelica. His flow as forceful as ever, Evidence strides confidently through the candy-colored landscape.
Elsewhere, subway-cold beats play well next to laid-back Cali grooves. The thick, nasty bassline that Nottz provides for “Jim Dean” recalls turn-of-the-century Dr. Dre; “To Make a Long Story Longer,” featuring an excellent assist from the low-toned Jonwayne, is built around a dusty jazz sample that could have scored a evening sipping Manhattans in 1950s Midtown. Amid the swirling analog keys of “10,000 Hours,” Brooklyn’s own DJ Premier cuts in snippets of Snoop and Dre’s iconic “Nuthin’ But a ’G’ Thang” verses, their voices scratched in like spirits from L.A. rap history.
Evidence is fully at home in this odyssey through time and space. He’s a bottomless lyricist, more interested in jabbing away with stiff punchlines than building narratives. “I take my chance and live between the checks of advances,” he raps on the title track, nodding to the economic struggles of a hip-hop lifer. “Love your fans and like your label/And I ain’t making shit for neither, lay that on the table.” Two decades after arriving on the scene with Dilated Peoples, Evidence remains blessedly devoted to the unflashy ideals that made him an underground hero.


Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys is nothing less than a tour of Southern bigotry and pride in the 20th century. It remains as shocking, pristine, and regrettably relevant as the day it was released.

Good Old Boys

Since his teenage days marketing demos to pop singers, Randy Newman has fancied himself a shirt-sleeves-rolled-up piano man in the classic mold more than a rock musician—a Laurel Canyon-era Hoagy Carmichael or Harold Arlen, if they wrote about young women being run over by beach cleaning trucks or lonely men with hat fetishes. Guitar leads and crisp grooves crop up across all of Newman’s studio albums, but live, he defaults to performing alone, interspersing his intimate, charmingly imperfect sets with self-deprecating banter and sarcastic qualifications.
His sense of humor, even outside of his caustically funny songs, can be polarizing. For one critic—Greil Marcus—a February ’75 Newman show proved toxic, threatening to overturn his reverent opinion of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter. With his stage banter and rave-up delivery, Marcus felt that Newman was lampooning the morally compromised but disenfranchised characters who populated his album of the previous year, Good Old Boys, which was written largely from the perspective of a bigoted Southern steel worker. “He made it clear that the song [“A Wedding in Cherokee County”] was a joke, that the people were jokes, that their predicament was something those smart enough to buy tickets to his concert could take as a sideshow staged for their personal amusement,” Marcus wrote in The Village Voice, excoriating the tittering, cocktail-sipping Manhattan crowd.
If Good Old Boys came out today, the nature of the criticism would, doubtless, be quite the opposite. Newman, who spent his childhood in New Orleans, would not have passed sufficient judgment on his racist, abusive subjects. He’d be criticized for assuming their detestable vocabulary, and for even dreaming up such a project in the first place. Any discussion of the album begins and probably ends with the fact that on its opening track, Newman — speaking as the steel worker, whom he named “Johnny Cutler” on early drafts for the album — says the “n”-word eight times, not including one use of “Negro.” Cutler is a gaping all-American nightmare in the vein of Mark Twain’s Pap. In the song, he seethes while watching Lester Maddox—the Klan-backed, segregationist governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971 — be jeered offstage on “The Dick Cavett Show” (by “some smart-ass New York Jew,” Newman sneers).
“Rednecks” was a few steps, or a parkour leap, beyond any grotesque character study Newman had previously attempted, even 12 Songs’ masterclass in voyeuristic white privilege “Yellow Man” (“Eating rice all day/While the children play/You see he believe in a family/Just like you and me”) and “Sail Away,” his slave-trader salesman pitch to a group of Africans (“Climb aboard, little wog/Sail away with me”). Cutler is so content to wear his ignorance like a badge of honor in “Rednecks” that it’s easy to mistake some lines for Newman’s own voice nervously interceding to denounce him. The surging, C&W-tinged chorus of “We’re rednecks, rednecks/We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” functions as both Greek-chorus commentary on the action and Cutler’s motto. (It’s harmonized immaculately by—yes—the Eagles, who would conveniently drop out before “and we’re keeping the n*ggers down.”)
To make things even thornier, Newman folds bits of salient criticism about the hypocrisy of holier-than-thou Northern white liberals—in denial about the institutionalized segregation of their own communities—into Cutler’s objectionable voice. “Now your Northern n*gger’s a Negro/You see he’s got his dignity,” Cutler sneers facetiously, before leading a whirlwind tour through the implicitly ghettoized North (“He’s free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City/He’s free to be put in a cage on the South Side of Chicago, and the West Side”) with revival-meeting-like gusto that forces him off the beat entirely. The orchestra, in turn, seizes up and derails beneath him before thudding to a sudden halt. It’s the first indication that this album is no simple character study, but a composite survey of the roots and institutionalization of Southern bigotry in the 20th century—in other words, the diciest and most formidable project Randy Newman had (and has) ever attempted.
Newman sells his pivots and double-meanings skillfully in “Rednecks,” the album’s microcosm, through both his character building and deceptively intricate music—peppered with gestures that could have been pulled from ragtime standards, brass-band chorales, and the mid-19th-century popular songs of Stephen Foster. Like most of Good Old Boys, the song was scored for piano, full orchestra (largely arranged and entirely conducted by Newman), and rock rhythm section (expert bass and drums from L.A. studio masters like Jim Keltner and Willie Weeks, inspired by Muscle Shoals productions).
Today, “Rednecks” might seem like a relic, or baiting, self-satisfied armchair-liberal-ism at cross-purposes with itself. What constructive function does this kind of “humor” serve? By any stretch of the imagination, does Newman have the right to invoke this language? It’s an open question, but Hilton Als’ measured defense of Flannery O’Connor’s non-biographical, darkly humorous, “n”-word-studded Southern fiction comes to mind, especially his praise of the Georgia-born author’s rare ability “to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order.” This, too, is Newman’s subject and methodology. His characters’ vocabulary pulls back the curtain on their self-hatred, so he doesn’t have to butt in and do it for them (O’Connor called this “mind[ing] your own bisnis”). He illuminates their fear of becoming marginal, their search for fundamental truth in all the wrong places, and the dead-end rituals of behavior and thought that anchor their communities. Newman’s narrators are the ones in his crosshairs; their unworthy targets are never dragged down with them—never roped into the songs’ action to ossify into caricatures and become punchlines. Lost in their demented reveries, and powerless to tell their imagined nemeses’ stories for them, Newman’s basket of deplorables are left to fall on their swords all by themselves. Jeff Chang deemed Newman’s approach, in defense of “Korean Parents” —another incendiary Newman song from 2008 —“the best kind of race humor… found by wedging open the wound long enough to stare at, and then sharing the joke in that. Of course, the trick is that you need to be the one who's bleeding.”
Newman felt that he needed to write “Birmingham” and “Marie,” to “explain ‘Rednecks’ better.” From there, Cutler became the necessary protagonist of his new album, which was to be called “Johnny Cutler’s Birthday.” “Birmingham” introduces Cutler’s family and home life with humorous banality; the darkness is left unspoken but you can feel it looming behind its jaunty string figures and horn oompahs. “Marie,” an emotional release for both Cutler and the listener, is a desperate paean by a blacked-out Cutler to his wife (for whom Newman also wrote a scrapped solo song and a duet), with a luxuriant string arrangement—an emotional release for both Cutler and the listener. There is something approaching honest self-reflection (“Guilty”), and then Cutler’s ultimate cop-out—a return to his escapist after-work routine (“Rollin’”). Across these songs, Newman expertly scales the depressive plateaus of the low-functioning alcoholic—the gentle, bluesy sensibility of the music feels appropriate, and makes for savage musical irony when the overlying scenes get dismal enough (they always do).
Newman also wrote interstitial songs for* Good Old Boys*—originally imagined as diegetic entertainment at Cutler’s 30th birthday party—which relayed tall tales, jokes, and fudged biographies of Cutler’s heroes. While sketching these, Newman would grow obsessed with the political career of Huey Long, the noted Great-Depression-era Louisiana governor, party-busting senator, short-lived presidential candidate, and megalomaniac. His research into the contradictory Long—part pseudo-socialist, part vindictive bigot—would force his pen away from Cutler, toward a broader-stroke compendium of Southern snapshots and lore.
“Louisiana 1927,” the first Long song and an apt musical sequel to “Sail Away,” examines the Great Mississippi Flood and the federal government’s mishandling of it, which stirred up class resentment, around which Long would build his candidacy for governor in the following year. “Every Man a King” is a barroom cover of an actual Long campaign song, espousing the rhetoric of his proposed (and completely untenable) “Share Our Wealth” program. Long promised to cap income and redistribute funds to make every American “a millionaire”—or at least, every bit as good as the highfalutin' ones calling the shots in Washington.
Long’s big production number, though—and arguably the album’s greatest musical triumph — is “Kingfish,” the best campaign speech in pop music history (though it’s unclear if it has any competition). It’s all glitzy, triumphant showmanship in the verse; even if we don’t know the history, we can sense the visceral allure (“Who took the Standard Oil men and whooped their ass?/Just like he’d promised he’d do?”) Discordant strings circle like buzzards in the would-be inspirational chorus (“Kingfish/Friend of the working man”), implying the proud, vengeful man hiding behind the catchphrases; here, the album’s resonances with America’s current political imbroglio become impossible to ignore. “Kingfish” is the Donald’s “I’ll fix it” platform stretched across three minutes of music. Long promises to make Louisiana great again by fashioning its government in his own convex self-image: that of the self-made man who is not afraid to speak truth to power, or rather, exalt xenophobia to a moral imperative and deride the proverbial Northern fatcats he was no better than. Long was often drunk during his fiery live appearances, and the spasmodic rhythms of the song mirror that live-wire energy: “I’m a cracker, you are too/Don’t I take good care of you?”
Good Old Boys creates a rich sense of time and place, contrasting interior and exterior settings, and his characters’ public and private selves, cinematically. “Marie” is a wee-hours argument in the kitchen; “Kingfish” is cavernous, roaring, the sound of an unruly political rally; “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” on the other hand, is intimate parlor music. The opening riff sounds like a turn-of-the-century pop song, played off some weathered, forgotten sheaf of sheet music found in the piano bench. But then, an ornery new character begins to describe the pitfalls of living with his mute fiancée in the backwoods of Alabama; in the waning moments of the song, he bemoans, in lofty euphemisms, his erectile dysfunction (“But though I try with all my might/She will laugh at my Mighty Sword”). A classic American tale, really.
Despite, or more likely, because of moments like this, Good Old Boys would be Newman’s first remotely successful release as a solo artist, providing some nagging perspective on the charts just as loud-and-proud Southern rock acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, and the Marshall Tucker Band were rising in popularity. The album was heralded by positive reviews and promotional literature that spread word of its controversial material, as well as an ambitious tour, including some dates with 80-plus-piece orchestras. It didn’t hurt that it was overstuffed with great pop melodies; its listenability seduced listeners into examining and reexamining its troubling themes. It became Newman’s first to clear the top 40—or even crack the double digits—on the album charts.
It also marked the moment at which Newman’s career turned a lonely new corner. These were not, like songs on his previous albums, ones that could be easily plucked from their context and marketed to other singers. Bonnie Raitt’s pre-existing, less skeletal version of “Guilty” would be a rare exception. There had been plenty of unlikely Newman interpreters (in one of the most head-scratching examples of master-imitating-disciple, Ray Charles covered “Sail Away”), but the image of a contemporary pop vocalist—Tom Jones or Donny Osmond, perhaps—delivering “Papa was a midget/Mama was a whore/Granddad was a newsboy till he was 84” was tough to conjure.
From that point forward, Newman would begin to become an island unto himself. He charted a couple of widely misunderstood, if brilliant, hits, before putting the better part of his energy toward film scoring. In 1977, “Short People”—absurdist, rock-ified, nursery-rhyme catchy — would go to No. 2 for mostly the wrong reasons; the uproar surrounding the song (another rumination on prejudice) would result in record-burning parties and Newman’s face on dartboard targets, and prompt him to give the audience a raspberry when he performed it on “SNL.” “I Love L.A.” would be played at Clippers games and receive heavy circulation on early music television; Maroon 5 would cover it with pride and the Kardashians would rewrite it, all despite the defining line “Look at that mountain, look at those trees/Look at that bum over there, man, he’s down on his knees!” Both were regarded as novelty songs—as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” now Newman’s biggest claim to fame, ultimately would be—and so Newman became, to non-acolytes, a novelty act.
Perhaps, in another universe, he might have remained more at the center of the pop songwriting world, whether or not he was singing on the records (his voice had always been a hard one to sell). But his compulsions forced him elsewhere. “I like to know what makes people tick, what their mothers and father were,” Newman told journalist Paul Zollo. “Why they talk the way they do, using this sort of word or that sort of word. What it all means.” Randy Newman, in that search for meaning, became the king of the unreliable narrator in American popular music, and one of rock’s greatest lyricists full-stop. But part of earning the distinction involved venturing into dark corners, and inhabiting them for a while; in his Good Old Boys review for Rolling Stone, Stephen Davis would use this logic to diagnose Newman as deeply “troubled.” It was a dirty job, and certainly, no one had to do it. It was usually thankless and almost always alienating. But it also yielded one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the 1970s, which remains as shocking, pristine, and regrettably relevant as the day it was released.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the album that made Rod Stewart a star, a rollicking and surprisingly grounded document of early ’70s folk-rock.

Rod Stewart: Every Picture Tells a Story

Every Picture Tells a Story

1. “I sincerely thought I was so complete”

In 1971, at 26, Rod Stewart thought he was an old man. He’d been working as a musician since his late teens. In the preceding three and a half years, he sang on six albums alone and he hadn’t attained the success he craved. As Stewart mentions in Rod, his 2012 autobiography, no one intended for rock’n’roll to be a career; Paul McCartney said he’d give up music if he hadn’t hit big by 20. All around Stewart, his peers—the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—had become global icons. And 27 literally felt like death, because in the previous 18 months, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin had died at that age.
By almost anyone else’s standards, Stewart was doing very well. He had a solo record deal while singing for the Faces, the most hyped band in the UK. He owned a home in London and a brand-new Marcos GT two-seater. The unabating bacchanal of the rock’n’roll lifestyle suited his appetites. It wasn’t sufficient. He wanted to be a star.
Every Picture Tells a Story, Stewart’s third solo album, made him one. It’s the LP that launched him into a rarefied stratosphere of celebrity, the kind accompanied by wild rumors that sound like they were spread by the Marquis de Sade. But the opening six-minute title track doesn’t convey confidence, purpose, or craft—at least at first. Emphatic strums of G chords spangle up and down, in, through, and out the rich, hollow wood of a 12-string acoustic guitar. The winding melody lasts for a dozen seconds; the pluck of a string hangs there for a few more. Then the drums crash and a bold rasp shouts forth: “Spent some time feelin’ inferior, standin’ in front of my mirror.” Stewart sings the line declaratively, setting the scene and framing the perspective of an insecure young man. “Combed my hair in a thousand ways,” he continues, “but I came out looking just the same.”
The musicians—Ron Wood on bass, electric, and acoustic 12-string guitar; fellow Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan on organ; pianist Pete Sears; and drummer Mick Waller—seem as if they’re learning the song while they’re playing it. Nothing is in lockstep. Stewart foregrounds the acoustic guitar so that it punches through the speaker. “Every Picture Tells a Story” is in 4/4 time, but Waller bashes off-beat during the moments Stewart isn’t singing, a disorienting force that mirrors the inexperience and uncertainty of the narrator.
Our “hero” is a working-class lad whose father urges him to see the world. In three verses he sets off for Paris, Rome, and the “Peking ferry.” He gets arrested as a passerby at a protest in the first city, ends up a stinking vagabond in the second, and on his third sojourn has a magical night with a mysterious woman (more on that later).
It’s also fair to surmise that the narrator is Stewart. In the final verse, he presumably returns home while contemplating his adventures. In the first half, Stewart looks to the past, bemoaning his childishness and the women who spurned him. But in the second, he summarizes his state of mind, adopting a stance that will guide his future:
I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley, or Keats
'Cause it's all been said before
Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off
You didn't have to come here anyway
Rod Stewart has arrived. He’s no wordsmith, but he’s fluent in common sense and good cheer. He’s in love with tradition, but not reliant on it. He’s an imp and a carouser unruffled by judgment and self-pity, a sentimentalist suspicious of nostalgia. And there’s something funny about a singer-songwriter reflecting on the travails of his life, as if he’s viewing it all from the vantage point of a wizened elder, when he’s only 26 years old.
The band seems to eventually figure out the song. They merge into a steady rhythm while Maggie Bell and Stewart sing the refrain, a smirking rhetorical question, soon accompanied by a chorus of others: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
2. “Hard times are only the other side of good times”
It’s 1968 and Rod Stewart is 23 years old. As a teenager he was a talented soccer player who dropped out of school to go pro, but wasn’t quite talented enough to make the cut. He sought something more lucrative, so he opted for a career as a musician.
Even though he looked like, as Lester Bangs eloquently put it, “a horse with a rooster’s ratcombed haystack,” people in the UK music biz kept trying to make Stewart a success, to no avail. Between 1964 and 1967 Stewart was a member of, in order, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, Long John Baldry and the All Stars, Steampacket, and Shotgun Express with Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green, the last of which Stewart writes, “I don’t have especially happy memories of those months—and incredibly, there were at least eight of them.”
In all of these setups, Stewart was singing blues and R&B covers, just like he was in his fledgling solo career. His first single was for Decca, a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl,” and the label secured a performance on ITV’s musical variety show Ready Steady Go! It was awkward and unremarkable, so he headed to a pub in Soho to drink away his shame where a man approached him, sharing a striking physical and sartorial resemblance. They got sloshed and laughed about Stewart’s appearance on Ready Steady Go!, and thus began his lifelong friendship with Ron Wood, his most esteemed collaborator.
Flailing between projects, Stewart did have a minor brush with fame as the subject of a TV documentary about the mid-’60s mod scene, whereby he earned the title of “Rod the Mod.” Because he had public recognition and experience singing blues, he was a natural choice to become the frontman of a new group formed by Jeff Beck, one of the UK’s most famous guitarists, who’d recently been kicked out of the Yardbirds. Stewart persuaded Beck to hire Wood on bass and the first incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group was born. Credited to Beck only, their first album, Truth, came out in 1968.
Beck was a legendary guitarist in both the UK and U.S., so Truth reached No. 15 on the Billboard albums chart more or less automatically, and thanks to a successful stateside tour Stewart gained his first exposure to American audiences. Today, Truth is regarded as a progenitor of the supergroup stadium rock of the ’70s, where the length of solos and the heaviness of riffs and rhythms parallel the imperiousness and arrogance of the band. But crucially for Stewart, the album showcased his first songwriting efforts (alongside Beck) and provided a template for his earliest solo LPs: A few originals surrounded by covers.
Every Picture Tells a Story sticks to this formula—of its eight tracks, only three are originals. Stewart’s talent for interpretation is evident on “Seems Like a Long Time,” first written by Theodore Anderson for the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, whose construction leans on vocal harmonies and wah-wah guitar for a soft-rock, AM radio effect. Stewart slows the tempo to a crawl and transforms it into the bleary gospel song it always should have been.
“Seems Like a Long Time” is representative of something true of all Stewart’s output in the early ’70s—it sounds a lot like the Rolling Stones. And the equivalence is understandable, since no other outfit was compared to or pitted against the Stones more often than Stewart’s next band, the Faces.
3. “While I’m here I’ll have me a real good time”
In October of 1970, the Faces performed to an adoring audience of 3,500 people at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. As he wrote in his 1981 prankster quasi-fictional pop bio, Rod Stewart, Lester Bangs was at this show, which he praises as “a party.” At the end, the members wrapped their arms around each other and Stewart yelled into the microphone: “If you ask for one encore, you’re gonna have to take at least five!”
The Jeff Beck Group with Stewart and Wood lasted only 18 months, and once guitarist and lead songwriter Steve Marriott left the Small Faces, the band quickly pulled in Wood as a replacement. Stewart would sit upstairs in the rehearsal space listening to his friend’s new group, wondering when they would plead with him to join. For a while, the Small Faces weren’t interested, out of fear that a lead singer would overshadow them. But after a few jams with Stewart, everyone assented that his brambly crooning fit perfectly with their ramshackle approach.
The ’60s were over, and out of its ashes emerged indulgence, whether through the symphonic overtures of progressive rock, the narcissism of the singer-songwriter movement, or the lordly debauchery of hard rock. In each scenario, the connection between the artist and the fans grew distant.
The Faces were the earthbound corrective. Their live show had no pomp and circumstance, just five guys whose palpable joy exceeded everything but their bar tab. Night to night, the band were a sloppy mess, but if they weren’t overserved, they could turn an arena show into a packed basement. No group in the early ’70s was as endearing as the Faces, because the only approximation of the warmth they exuded is the sensation you get when you’re having a ball with your best friends.
From the time they coalesced in late 1969 until mid-1971, the band had put out four Faces or Faces-adjacent albums (two attributed to the group and two to Stewart). Because he’d inked a solo deal with Mercury separate from the Faces’ with Warners, Stewart always had a new release on shelves, meaning more income and more incentive to go out and promote it. In 1970 the band toured the US three times, building a following from word-of-mouth exaltations of their cheerfully unruly concerts. Stewart’s cover of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” is the one song on Every Picture Tells a Story that could be considered a throwaway, but it’s the closest the album verges on the insouciant abandon of the Faces, a rambunctious barroom rave-up.
4. “I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps”
Rod Stewart isn’t commonly associated with Bob Dylan, and that’s probably because Rod Stewart is like if Bob Dylan had decided to become a Vegas lounge singer. When Stewart was 17, he listened to Dylan’s self-titled debut and later described it as a “life-changing, direction-altering experience.” He heard America, “vastness and openness,” not just a horizon wider than what he could see in the UK, but a new horizon entirely.
Stewart doesn’t espouse any of American folk music’s political roots, to put it charitably, nor its humility. Yet there’s no question he favors some of its key attributes, in particular interpretation, history, and yearning. In between “That’s All Right” and Stewart’s take on Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time,” there’s a two-minute interlude where he sings “Amazing Grace,” backed by Sam Mitchell on a slide guitar. This inclusion bridges two tonally different songs, but it also signals Stewart’s unyielding love of Americana—all of Stewart’s covers on Every Picture Tells a Story are of American songwriters.
Part of the magic of Every Picture Tells a Story is its blend of British and American sensibilities. American folk music is often spartan in its presentation, whereas British folk, even predating psychedelia, is filled with filigree and ornamentation. Stewart’s version of “Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time” sounds less like a love letter to America than the vision of a British person who loves America. Wood’s pedal steel and Dick Powell’s violin don’t transport you to dusty highways or Midwest farmland, but to bogs and marshes and rolling verdant hills, into old inns where villagers drink mead and across vast estates where sheep roam.
The front of Every Picture Tells a Story is designed in the style of an early-20th-century art deco sheet music cover, and the back displays fictional sheet music covers with the song titles overlaid on them. Stewart has never articulated an overarching theme to Every Picture Tells a Story, but the artwork, paired with the mood and the musical arrangements, emanates the amber and auburn hues of an autumnal past. Yet the music isn’t pastiche or kitsch—it somehow exists throughout time, from the agrarian roots of the ancient past to the immediacy of the unceasing present.
5. “I’m as blind as a fool can be”
Picture this: It’s 1962 in London and a 16-year-old boy encounters a fortysomething woman whom he recognizes as a local prostitute. He seduces her with his blissful naivete and they have a night of clumsy yet affectionate sex—his first time. They carry on a brief romance, but their age gap is too extreme, so they part, but he remembers her always as he ventures into adulthood.
If this reads as the pitch deck for Hollywood schlock, it’s because this yarn, the story told in the lyrics of “Maggie May,” is one of the most repeated chestnuts in rock lore. That it’s actually about how Stewart lost his virginity is pure mythmaking—the event in question happened very unspectacularly at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival when he was 16. And as Tom Ewing points out, the core genius of “Maggie May” is not whether it’s true; at heart it’s a story about the genesis of “Rod Stewart” the persona.
It’s hard to ignore the song’s misogyny. Stewart complains about being used in “Maggie May,” but he uses a woman from his real life for creative expression without consulting her. He insults her (“The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age”) and recounts their tryst without granting her any agency. And this isn’t even the worst display of sexism on Every Picture Tells a Story, nor the most offensive moment—the fourth verse of the title track, when Stewart rides the Peking ferry, is a hideous and dated representation of Orientalism.
No amount of devil-may-care dismissiveness can excuse any of this—Bangs was so tortured about his enjoyment of “Maggie May,” he composed a 23-page short story centering Maggie and humanizing Stewart. But I’d argue that one reason people don’t cringe when they listen to either song is Stewart’s honesty and vulnerability. Within the severe Madonna-whore complex in “Maggie May,” Stewart expresses genuine affection for Maggie, his bitterness borne from self-loathing, offset by the elation of having known her. Whereas someone like Mick Jagger snarls about women with venom and spite, Stewart valorizes Maggie and renders her iconic.
Purely as music, “Maggie May” is stunning. Martin Quittenton, a proficient acoustic guitarist, crafted the central melody, which earned him a co-songwriting credit. There’s McLagan’s organ playing, which coats the song in a shimmering haze, accented by daubs of Sears’ celeste chords. And the whole song is a showcase of Wood’s musicianship, from the slyly busy basslines to the dancing coins of his 12-string to his wooly electric guitar solo. Stewart has often expressed surprise that “Maggie May” became such a huge hit since it has no chorus. Except it has a chorus: Ray Jackson’s soaring, hummable mandolin solo at 4:26. It clearly made no impression on Stewart, who cited Jackson as “the mandolin player in Lindisfarne” in the liner notes.
Looking back, the success of “Maggie May” is unsurprising, since it incorporates so much of what was popular in 1971. Like a lot of prog and AOR heavy rock, it has two memorable solos, one of which is from an instrument that doesn’t typically appear in a rock context. As with so much singer-songwriter music, it’s a personal story featuring a character who’s somewhat of a mystery. Most importantly, it’s a true fusion of folk and rock, acoustic instruments played with the energy of rock while retaining the warmth and coziness of folk music.
“Maggie May” reached No. 1 in both the U.S. and UK for five weeks, and its trajectory was so powerful that it propelled Every Picture Tells a Story into the top spot on both country’s album charts, simultaneously, for four consecutive weeks. To this day, Stewart is the only artist to have accomplished this. He’d finally done it. He was a star.
6. “Don’t have much, but what I got is yours”
There’s a story within the lyrics of “Mandolin Wind,” Stewart’s greatest song by a distance, but it’s secondary to the music’s emotional intensity. Quittenton and Wood provide dual acoustic guitar parts, and the latter also adds gorgeous flitters of pedal and slide guitar. The playing conjures a pastoral setting, a window-down drive through rangeless fields of wheat and corn canopied by cerulean sky.
A man and a woman live together in love, but something ominous befalls them. “When the rain came I thought you’d leave/‘Cause I knew how much you loved the sun,” Stewart sings, implying that what’s afflicted them isn’t bad weather but illness. They endure “the coldest winter in almost 14 years,” and the man realizes that someone who’d stand by him and tend to him in sickness is surely the love of his life. In the last verse, the man might be at death’s door:
I recall the night we knelt and prayed
Noticing your face was thin and pale
I found it hard to hide my tears
I felt ashamed, I felt I'd let you down
No mandolin wind couldn’t change a thing
Stewart has never said what a “mandolin wind” is—within the context of the song the explanation seems to be a euphemism for death. But remarkable things happen in the bookends of this verse to signify something more intricate. Beforehand, Jackson chimes in with a symphonic mandolin solo, simulating the characters’ profound love for each other; afterwards, “Mandolin Wind” becomes an exhausted dash, the man’s epiphanic acceptance that the love he lived through made his life worthwhile (“I love ya, yes indeed I love ya!” Stewart hoarsely bellows). I’d say “mandolin wind” isn’t the moment of death, it’s the constant awareness of life’s impermanence, maximizing your time so that it’s perpetually meaningful.
This is my wife’s favorite song, though she hears it with the roles reversed. In her view, a woman moves in with her beloved during a harsh winter she’s unaccustomed to, grows pneumatic, and dies. When Stewart sings “I felt I’d let you down,” it’s because she moved for him and it killed her. I can see it both ways, because the story can be about anyone. At heart, “Mandolin Wind” is an evocation of the fulfillment of having loved beyond lust and pleasure, into a space where a person is more important than your own self. It doesn’t matter which person inhabits which role.
There’s an apocryphal rumor, probably started by Faces bassist and singer-songwriter Ronnie Lane, that Lane is the song’s true author and Stewart nicked it from him. It’s natural to assume this, since Lane is recognized for his poignant, good-natured touch and Stewart, well, isn’t. But because of its juxtaposition with “Maggie May,” that seems unlikely. Ewing wrote that “Maggie May” demands an answer record. “Mandolin Wind” is the answer record. “Maggie May” is about a self-involved teenager whose idea of love is his own sexual gratification; “Mandolin Wind” is about actual, reciprocal, deep love.
7. “I fooled myself as long as I can”
On the cover of his 1978 album, Blondes Have More Fun, Rod Stewart appeared with his hand on the buttcheek of a woman wearing a tiger-print spandex bodysuit. This is the “Rod Stewart” of the public imagination, the “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod Stewart, a rascal and a bozo. It’s hard to believe the architect of the ineffably beautiful “Mandolin Wind” is the same person who devotes entire chapters in his autobiography to his cars and his hair. But through all the sleaze and cheesy cover songs and crass commercial gestures, Stewart’s never been guilty of taking himself too seriously. The joke’s always on him.
Such lightheartedness is a grotesque evolution of the camaraderie of the Faces. The band dominated 1971, riding high off the wave of adulation for Every Picture Tells a Story and two other albums. A Nod Is as Good as a Wink…to a Blind Horse, released a mere six months after Every Picture Tells a Story, is their zenith, a raucous 36 minutes where every member is in sync and out of their minds.
The Faces back Stewart on only one track on Every Picture Tells a Story, an extended workout of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” which teases the interlocking, energetic, and raggedy blues-rock they’d turn out on A Nod. It’s a phenomenal cover, enhanced by its placement on an otherwise melancholic and reflective second side. David Ruffin loved the Faces’ version so much, he joined them onstage to sing it with them at Cobo Arena in Detroit in December of 1971.
But you could also say that the song selection, about one person’s premonition of a romantic partnership falling apart, is a subconscious flash point coming after the triumph of “Maggie May” and “Mandolin Wind.” The other Faces were always worried that Stewart would one day supersede them, which is exactly what happened. On subsequent tours they’d frequently see “Rod Stewart and the Faces” on the marquee.
The band’s lifespan was brilliant, transient, formative, and unhygienic—like going to college. With an ever-expanding ego, Stewart trashed 1973’s excellent Ooh La La in a Melody Maker interview, and Lane, who’d lead the sessions and wrote half the songs, exited three months later. In 1975, the Rolling Stones made Wood an offer he couldn’t refuse: Spend the rest of your life cheering up Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for eye-popping amounts of money. His departure was the death knell, and the Faces were no more.
8. “I’d find a way just to leave the past behind”
The obvious reading of Every Picture Tells a Story isn’t necessarily the wrong one: A photograph, or a song, is more than a fragment of time. It’s a world. But another way of understanding Every Picture Tells a Story is that a person isn’t defined by one moment—they’re a confluence of incidents both mundane and acute that form personality. Rod Stewart isn’t primarily an ambitious singer, a teenage folkie, a horndog, a romantic, a poet, or a clown. He’s all of those things. What’s universal is every individual knows they’re more than a caricature and wants everyone else to know it too.
The contradictions and double meanings of Every Picture Tells a Story underlie Stewart’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “(Find a) Reason to Believe,” a perfect closer. Stewart and Wood arrange it as a hybrid of gospel and British folk, which makes it feel like an old English ballad. The refrain, “Still I look to find a reason to believe,” imparts perseverance in the face of life’s obstacles. In reality, the song is about someone who self-destructively keeps returning to a bad relationship. Stewart sings it sympathetically, as if to say that you shouldn’t judge someone by their weaknesses, you should focus on the strength they exhibit trying to overcome them.
At 2:40 the song drops out and you expect the album to be over. But Stewart, forever the showman, takes a few beats, then starts singing a capella. Seconds later, the band plays along for one more minute, as if they’re closing out a concert. The wings of the curtain crumple to the floor and the house lights come up. The singer-scamp forges ahead into the decadence he desired. Trailing him immortally, the staccato rippling of snickers and applause.


The R&B star’s latest ode to the power of love bursts with positive energy, but there’s an emptiness beneath.

Bigger Love

It’s a pretty good time to be John Legend. Since his last album, he scored the Emmy to secure his EGOT, had a second child with model Chrissy Teigen, was awarded an honorary doctorate at Berklee College of Music, and was named Sexiest Man Alive. The album he recorded amid all the success, Bigger Love, is correspondingly upbeat and joyous. He describes it as “vintage sounds with a modern sensibility,” in keeping with a longstanding personal mandate, using love songs as a bridge between the old and new. With this incredibly on-the-nose title, he reminds us both of his devotion to his muse and his limitations: Love might be fathomless, but Legend’s appreciation of it is pretty shallow.
Legend believes in the power of love the way some believe in Christmas spirit—as a transmissible, irresistible force that extinguishes all negativity. Fittingly, the album reunites him with producer Raphael Saadiq, who was behind his 2018 Christmas album. Legend is pegging his new album, which was recorded primarily in 2019, as a sort of balm for the times. “A lot was going on, but I still felt like people need some uplifting music,” he told Oprah Magazine. “Hopefully it can help them get through what’s been a tough spring, and hopefully this music will help them have a better summer.” Bigger Love is rife with this feel-good energy, buoyed by his stately voice and easygoing charm, but beneath its positive exterior is an emptiness that’s hard to ignore.
His last album, 2016’s Blake Mills-produced Darkness and Light, had a personality and intimacy that eluded him on previous albums. He was inhabiting songs as a person and not just a dutiful soul man treating the piano bench like a cubicle. They never quite conjured a “What’s Going On,” as they hoped, but Mills brought character to his music. The everymanisms of Love in the Future were replaced with personal reflections, confessions of a “FaceTime abuser,” and the politically minded expressiveness of a man clinging to hope in a darkening world; Legend’s songs were suddenly richer and more textured.
Bigger Love reverts to a vacant pantomime and a less robust R&B palette courtesy of producers like Oak, Ryan Tedder, and Ricky Reed. His 2019 protest song, “Preach,” is curiously absent here; so, too, is the effortless tonal blend of the album’s predecessor. This marriage of vintage and modern goes awry, as Bigger Love opens with a trap take on doo-wop and closes with a Mr. Hudson ballad. Following the lead of his Oscar partner Common, Bigger Love is risk-averse and platitudinous. There’s a derivative YOLO song called “One Life” and the hook couldn’t be more uninspired: “We’ve got one life/I won’t waste it, one life/I’m gon’ taste the joy in every minute/Beginning’ ‘til the finish,” he sings. Not even Anderson .Paak’s smooth funk can save it. If the album’s tacky acoustic lead single, “Conversations in the Dark,” sounds like a not-so-subtle sync for a tear-jerker network drama, that’s because it pretty much is.
No song here is transcendent enough to join “All of Me” in wedding-first-dance canon, nor is there a moment as touching and emotionally honest as “Right By You (for Luna),” the song he wrote for his newborn daughter on Darkness and Light, where he wonders aloud how she’ll receive and be received by the world, the quiver in his tone carrying a father’s anxiety. “Actions” fails to live up to its brazen “The Edge” sample, so clearly repurposed to call to mind Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” that its appeal is lost to sense memory, and the song’s core directive (“actions speak louder than love songs”) goes largely unheeded.
Even working within the confines of his safe space, though, John Legend can remind you why Kanye built a label around him, and Bigger Love is sustained by such moments. He works well in collaboration with bluesman Gary Clark Jr. (“Wild”), psychedelic R&B singer Jhené Aiko (“U Move, I Move”), rap technician Rapsody (“Remember Us”), and reggae artist Koffee (“Don’t Walk Away”) on tracks that stretch his songcraft in different directions—anthemic pop rock, alt-R&B, neo soul, and dancehall lite. The attempts are bold by his standards, and he slots into each one confidently. “Favorite Place” is the kind of sexy-time jam befitting a new dad. He plays to his strengths on “Slow Cooker,” a quirky little song that likens brimming sensuality to the simmer of a crock-pot, letting the resonance of his timbre give shape to his phrases. On the understated “Focused,” the confusion produced by a noisy outside world falls away when under his wife’s thrall. Plain and folksy, it has the characteristics of a Bill Withers song: The simplicity of the lyrics mirrors how uncomplicated things are in her company. Suddenly, the uplifting power he’s been preaching about is in full effect.


The 1984 film The Terminator's vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence was backed up by a Brad Fiedel score that not just dramatized but echoed that sense of a machine army in the ascendant. This remastered reissue is lavishly presented across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl.

The Terminator OST

Synthesizer music was hardly a new phenomenon in 1984, the year of The Terminator’s release, but the movie theater proved a remarkably successful means of injecting experimental electronic sounds direct into the mainstream consciousness. Not that anyone out there expected The Terminator to find such a broad audience. Made for a lean $6.4 million by James Cameron, then a rookie screenwriter and special effects designer with just one directorial credit—1981’s best-forgotten Piranha II: The Spawning—to his name, even the film’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially cool to it. “Some shit movie I’m doing, take a couple of weeks,” he explained while on the set of Conan The Barbarian. But The Terminator made Schwarzenegger a star and set the tenor for the next decade of sci-fi cinema, its vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence backed up by a score that not just dramatized but echoed the sense of a machine army in the ascendant.
This freshly remastered reissue of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score comes as part of the Milan Records’ Nicolas Winding Refn Presents series, and is lavishly presented, its 69 minutes of music spread across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl and housed in reflective UV wrap. Such quality production values mean that it’s easy to forget scores like this were often ad hoc, the result of budgetary expediency and on-the-fly invention. Neither a celebrated soundtrack maestro or analogue synthesizer guru, Fiedel’s CV was about as square as it gets: he began his career signed to Paul Simon’s music publishing company and spent six months playing live keyboards for the soft rock duo Hall and Oates before making the leap into TV scoring. The Terminator was his first feature film, and after an intermittent film career that culminated with Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies, he retreated from Hollywood to pursue his real love, musicals. In an interview recorded for Japanese TV, now available to view on YouTube, you get a glimpse of Fiedel’s sensibility: sat at an electric piano, he tinkles away at The Terminator’s main theme as if auditioning for some Broadway revue.
Still, if the soundtrack still feels special, perhaps it’s because of this unlikely collision: an intermingling of theatric sensibility and emergent technology. The tools Fiedel used were cutting-edge for the period—a Prophet 10, an Oberheim, a drum machine and a sequencer—but still primitive in their workings. This was, just, a pre-MIDI age, so he would synch up his instruments by hand, and you can hear the occasional sense of slip and slide. The film’s majestically dark “Main Title” is a perfect mix of haunting melody and remorseless, mechanical rhythm, the latter in part the result of human error. While looping his Prophet 10, Fiedel missed the complete measure by a split second, but liking the result, kept it. Seth Stevenson’s 2014 article for Slate pins it to the unusual time signature of 13/16, which lends the track an eerie, unheimlich quality: the heartbeat of a machine.
The Terminator was a pulp film with depth, one that critics have gone lengths to decode. In 1995’s Projecting The Shadow: The Cyborg Hero In American Film, Janice H Rushing and Thomas S Frentz read it as a sort of Christian parable, writing that “John Conner, a modern day J.C. born of an ‘ordinary’ mother, is the warrior-king who is prophesied to reconstitute the world, to avert the apocalypse through a fight with a cyborgian devil.” Whether Fiedel recognized it or not, his music echoes something of this eschatological struggle: the implacable rhythms and cold choral swells of “Terminator Arrival – Reese Chased – Sarah on Motorbike” gesture to both the ruthless march of an automated future and the cold solemnity of the Catholic mass.
Elsewhere, Fiedel weaves around to capture the film’s sense of cat-and-mouse pursuit, shifting beats between simmering tension, lurching pursuit, and brief but precious glimpses of redemption. There are moments when the limited sound palette dates it—see the gurgling, acidic arpeggios of “Matt & Ginger Killed – Sarah Calls Detectives” and “Tunnel Chase.” Elsewhere, though, it feels eerily timeless: the dark ambient investigations of “Arm & Eye Surgery”; or “Reese Dreams Of Future War,” which with its racing synth progressions, harsh stabs and rumbling martial percussion might have slotted seamlessly onto Prurient’s Frozen Niagra Falls.
Perhaps the root of Fiedel’s success here, though, is the way his score holds close to the main theme’s central melodic and rhythmic motifs, remaking and remolding them to keep a sense of narrative continuity even as he shifts around sound and tone. From the metallic march of “‘I’ll Be Back' – Police Station & Escape” to the yearning piano of “Love Scene,” a firm backbone runs throughout, and when the end credits ushers in a cold dawn, Fiedel holds back on fireworks or tidy emotional resolution. As Sarah Connor loads up the Land Rover and disappears into the desert here is no salvation here; just a cold dread for what is to come.